NXR Podcast - THEOLOGY APPLIED - 5 Doctrines Stunting The Church’s Maturity
Aired: 2022-05-31
Duration: 01:27:06


=== Welcome to Theology Applied (03:23) ===

[00:00:00]  Hey guys, real quick before we get started, I have a small request.
[00:00:03]  If you've been blessed by our content and you like this show, would you take just a brief moment and leave us a five star review?
[00:00:09]  This is quite possibly the most effective thing that you can do to ensure that this content gets out to as many people as possible.
[00:00:17]  Thanks.
[00:00:18]  All right, you're listening to another episode of Theology Applied.
[00:00:20]  I'm your host, Pastor Joel Webbin with Right Response Ministries.
[00:00:23]  I was privileged in this episode to have some of the guys who a lot of people may not know these names, right?
[00:00:29]  So they're not the biggest, you know, named guys in the world, but.
[00:00:33]  I have personally been benefiting by listening to these guys and their podcast, The King's Hall.
[00:00:39]  I've been benefiting by listening to them over these last couple months, recently, almost more than any other content that I follow.
[00:00:46]  And so I'm pleased and privileged to have Brian Sauvay and Dan, I forget his last name, so he's going to introduce himself, and then Eric Kahn.
[00:00:57]  Eric Kahn, some of you guys know him, I've had him before.
[00:00:58]  He also is a part of a podcast called The Hard Man Podcast.
[00:01:02]  But the three of these guys combined, they're all a part of the same church in Utah.
[00:01:06]  And they all co host the three of them, the King's Hall podcast.
[00:01:09]  If you have not listened to the King's Hall podcast, you've got to listen to it.
[00:01:14]  We talk about their mission, what they're trying to do, and specifically what we get to in this episode is five key doctrines that are not full blown heresy.
[00:01:23]  They fall under the banner of Christian orthodoxy, but five key doctrines that are orthodox, but yet wrong, unbiblical, and that we think are most dangerous, most responsible for stunting the maturity of the church today in America.
[00:01:38]  All right.
[00:01:39]  Thanks for tuning in.
[00:01:40]  Applying God's Word to every aspect of life.
[00:01:44]  This is Theology Applied.
[00:01:51]  All right, welcome to another episode of Theology Applied.
[00:01:53]  I am your host, Pastor Joel Webman with Right Response Ministries.
[00:01:56]  And today I'm very privileged to have a special guest, three guests.
[00:02:01]  They are the host, the co host of the King's Hall podcast.
[00:02:05]  We've got Brian Sauve.
[00:02:06]  You want to say Sauve or Suave, or just Suave, but I've been told that it is Sauve.
[00:02:12]  So we've got Brian Sauve.
[00:02:13]  We've got.
[00:02:14]  Dan, give me your last name, Dan.
[00:02:16]  How do you say it?
[00:02:18]  Burkholder.
[00:02:18]  Burkholder.
[00:02:19]  Dan Burkholder.
[00:02:20]  And then we have Eric Kahn, who is also the host of the Hard Man podcast.
[00:02:25]  And so me and Eric have, we've kind of, you know, combined forces a few times now.
[00:02:30]  And so I'm glad to have you back on the show.
[00:02:32]  So you guys tell us a little bit about yourselves and especially the Kings Hall podcast.
[00:02:39]  Wow.
[00:02:40]  That Brian Sylvain moment.
[00:02:43]  I know.
[00:02:43]  This is a test of who's Thinks they're the alpha of the King's Hall.
[00:02:47]  No, It's just that you do most of the talking, so we just defer to you.
[00:02:51]  Well, my name is Brian Sauvay, as Joel said, and you nailed the pronunciation, by the way.
[00:02:57]  I pastor Refuge Church in Ogden, Utah, where we all serve together here in Mormon land.
[00:03:05]  I've got five kids and my wife, Lexi.
[00:03:07]  We are working hard and staying up late with all of those wonderful duties the Lord's given us.
[00:03:14]  But yeah, we have a good time with the King's Hall.
[00:03:17]  This season, we're Primarily addressing the question of what would it take to build a new Christendom?

=== Why Premillennialism Is Dangerous (15:33) ===

[00:03:24]  What would need to go and what would need to be established if we were to build a durable, reformed, Protestant, robustly Christian Christendom that could last for a thousand years or more?
[00:03:36]  And so it sounds like we're thinking about a lot of the same things as you think about here on this show.
[00:03:42]  And we do appreciate you having us.
[00:03:44]  Thanks for the invite.
[00:03:45]  Absolutely.
[00:03:45]  So Christendom is bad, right?
[00:03:47]  The Spanish Crusades.
[00:03:48]  How would you respond?
[00:03:51]  What do you think about that?
[00:03:53]  Well, you know, we're probably not necessarily telling people that we're going to go retake Constantinople.
[00:03:59]  Is that what it is?
[00:04:01]  I think so.
[00:04:04]  So, surely, certainly there are some errors in the old Christendom, but we would say that the current thing that we have now is even worse than that.
[00:04:13]  So, yeah, we're not necessarily just uncritically trying to replicate the old Christendom, but even reform and understand some of the ways that.
[00:04:25]  Failure might have been built into the foundation stones of aspects of the first Christendom and build one that would continually improve and be reformed according to the scriptures and, you know, bear fruit.
[00:04:38]  Amen.
[00:04:39]  Might even be better.
[00:04:40]  Yep.
[00:04:40]  Amen.
[00:04:40]  Some of the things that I've really benefited from Kings Hall podcast in terms of Christendom, rebuilding Christendom, and those kinds of things is just, you know, thinking in terms of, you know, culture, cultus is the Latin word, it means worship.
[00:04:51]  It's not so the Rushduni kind of thing, it's not whether, but which.
[00:04:54]  Everybody's worshiping.
[00:04:55]  Secularism is not science, it's a religion.
[00:04:59]  Modernity, secularism, and all its nasty offspring of feminism and all these androgyny, everything that's come out of it.
[00:05:07]  It is worship.
[00:05:07]  It has, therefore, an orthodoxy.
[00:05:10]  It has convictions.
[00:05:11]  It has beliefs, dogma.
[00:05:12]  Everything outside of that is blasphemy.
[00:05:14]  And so there are blasphemy laws, right?
[00:05:16]  That's cancel culture, things that you can't say.
[00:05:18]  There are sacraments that go along with their worship.
[00:05:21]  I think it was Gehardis Voss that talks about the Asherah poles and compares them.
[00:05:25]  It reminds me of the two towers and tearing down the trees of Isengard.
[00:05:30]  Because they represent life and fruitfulness.
[00:05:32]  And an asheropole is a tree that's been stripped of all its limbs, all its branches.
[00:05:37]  It's unable to bear fruit.
[00:05:38]  And you think of chopping off a boy's manhood and transgenderism, and especially as that pertains to transing children and making them fruitless.
[00:05:48]  And so there you have the asheropole.
[00:05:50]  And then, of course, you have the sacrament of abortion and the false god of Molech and these kinds of things.
[00:05:56]  So it is a religion.
[00:05:57]  It's not whether but which.
[00:05:59]  And you guys do a really good job pointing that out.
[00:06:01]  And in terms of, Christendom, it's the same as the founding of America, at least in principle, that there are bugs and there are features.
[00:06:09]  We would say that race based slavery was a bug, and the founding and our constitution and our ideals as we lived up to them is precisely why that bug was worked out.
[00:06:21]  So the solution is not anti Christendom.
[00:06:23]  The solution is, as Doug Wilson would say, Christendom 2.0.
[00:06:27]  And let's see if we can do it better.
[00:06:29]  So, all right, we'll go ahead and dive in.
[00:06:32]  Any response, though, on my little Christendom spill?
[00:06:36]  Did I get it right?
[00:06:39]  Nailed it.
[00:06:39]  Yeah, absolutely.
[00:06:40]  Yeah, that was great.
[00:06:40]  Okay, great.
[00:06:42]  All right, so this is what we want to do in the show.
[00:06:43]  We want to talk about as we're trying to restore and rebuild, build back better, but actually, actually, build back better.
[00:06:51]  Wow, yeah.
[00:06:52]  Actually better, not build back worse.
[00:06:55]  But as we want to usher in Christendom, we re usher that back in and do it better.
[00:07:03]  And do it out of one of the reasons we can do it better is not because we're better men, but we're standing on the shoulders of giants and those wonderful men who came before us.
[00:07:11]  And so, you know, one of the ways that God, you know, whether it be a nation and empires or Christendom or whatever it might be, is that God uses those failed empires, all that was good in it, right?
[00:07:24]  You know, removing the sin, but all that was good in it, it functions as the manure.
[00:07:28]  Toby Sumter talks about this, you know, that makes the ground more fertile in order to produce something better the next time.
[00:07:34]  And so, as we're seeking to do that, we want to look at things that went wrong and we want to look at things that need to be revised.
[00:07:40]  How can we do this better?
[00:07:42]  And so, my.
[00:07:43]  Thesis I want to frame up the show like this.
[00:07:45]  My thesis is I feel like over the past 20 to 30 years in the evangelical world, there's been a reformed resurgence, right?
[00:07:54]  You know, a lot of guys became Calvinists.
[00:07:56]  Now, a lot of them never really became Calvinists.
[00:07:58]  Like, you know, R.C. Sproul says, What do you call a four point Calvinist?
[00:08:01]  An Arminian, you know, and so, so guys like Mark Driscoll never really became reformed, you know, but, but some guys actually did.
[00:08:09]  And then, you know, God has just over the last few years taken his winnowing fork and, and just Separating the wheat and the chaff.
[00:08:14]  And so some guys went from, you know, young reformed restless to full blown apostasy.
[00:08:20]  And then other guys have gone to a full orbed confessional reformed position, not just Calvinistic, you know, Baptist, you know, but actually really embracing, you know, whether it be Sabbatarianism or patriarchy or like a general equity theonomy, you know, or post millennialism, like more of a full orbed mature reformed theology.
[00:08:41]  So God took this Calvinistic resurgence.
[00:08:45]  And half of it went apostate, and the other half of it is maturing and growing up, and not just boys, but men.
[00:08:52]  And so we thank God for that.
[00:08:53]  And I think that what the Lord has done, I'm thinking of not just the young reformed and restless, but thinking of just the reformed movement over the last 30 years combined.
[00:09:01]  Ligonier, Grace to You, think of like Paul Washer, all these different guys, Vodi Bakum.
[00:09:06]  It seems like what the Lord used these men to do in our own lives, and we're exceedingly grateful for it, is really expose heresy.
[00:09:15]  So you can have a false doctrine.
[00:09:17]  That's unbiblical but orthodox, meaning it's wrong.
[00:09:21]  We're not relativists, right?
[00:09:22]  So it's like, all right, it's not heresy, but it's still wrong.
[00:09:24]  It's still unbiblical.
[00:09:24]  And then you can have doctrines that they're not merely unbiblical, but they're outside of the realm of orthodoxy.
[00:09:29]  And it seems like the last 20, 30 years, the Lord has used reformed guys primarily, but other guys as well, to expose some of these things that are straight up heresy, that will damn you to hell.
[00:09:40]  Things like the prosperity gospel, things like Roman Catholicism, things like, you know, that would deny the gospel.
[00:09:47]  And, you know, so all these different things prosperity gospel.
[00:09:49]  I feel like every conference for the last 30 years was, you know, it's like half of the speakers would say, This is why Catholicism is bad.
[00:09:57]  This is why charismatics are bad.
[00:09:59]  This is why Catholicism is bad.
[00:10:01]  And this is why charismatics are bad.
[00:10:02]  And so it's like, great.
[00:10:03]  We appreciate that.
[00:10:05]  You know, American Gospel, the documentary they put out, I appreciate it.
[00:10:08]  Thank you.
[00:10:09]  But we want to press on to maturity.
[00:10:12]  And so basically, for this episode, what I want to do is list some doctrines that aren't Necessarily prosperity gospel, they're not necessarily heresy, but I think they're still unbiblical.
[00:10:22]  I'm going to give my list in order of what I think is most dangerous, stunting the maturity of the church to least dangerous, but all five being what I would consider orthodox, but again, wrong, unbiblical, and unhelpful, stunting the church's growth.
[00:10:41]  And then I want to see if you guys agree with my list, if you want to add something to the list, take something off the list, what would be your list of the top five?
[00:10:48]  And then at minimum, I think you guys would disagree maybe with.
[00:10:51]  The order of my list.
[00:10:52]  So here's my list, without further ado.
[00:10:54]  Number one, radical two kingdom theology.
[00:10:57]  And in parentheses, I'm putting there pietism, an idea that it's just the home and the church, the home and the church, the home and the church.
[00:11:05]  And so, you know, there's not a single square inch of all of creation that Christ doesn't cry out, mind.
[00:11:12]  This would be, you know, anti Kuiper, the all of Christ for all of life.
[00:11:16]  They want some of Christ for some of life.
[00:11:19]  So a radical two kingdom theology, I think, is.
[00:11:21]  Number one, I think it's the worst.
[00:11:23]  Second, dispensationalism, anti covenant theology.
[00:11:27]  I think dispensationalism, that's second on my list of most dangerous.
[00:11:31]  Then I put complementarianism in that, yeah, sure, you know, egalitarianism, you know, but complementarianism, it seeks to make roles, God assigning roles to men and women arbitrary, in my assessment.
[00:11:43]  And so it lends towards sexual androgyny, that men and women are really the same, but for whatever reason, God's just determined that we have different roles.
[00:11:51]  And I think that's led to a lot of sexual chaos.
[00:11:55]  Number four, all millennialism.
[00:11:58]  I think that that's worse, in my assessment, in terms of stunting the growth.
[00:12:02]  Of the church than premillennialism.
[00:12:03]  And so premillennialism is number five.
[00:12:06]  My last one the reason why I'm putting all millennialism as more dangerous than premillennialism is I found, I don't know if it's your experience, but I found that there are more dispensational premillennial guys, especially the historic guys, but even dispensational pre mill guys who are willing to actually fight in the culture war, that actually want to see all of Christ for all of life, that actually think basic things like Christians should vote.
[00:12:32]  And whereas all millennials, I always say, you know, all millennialism and post millennialism, we agree on the timing of the millennium, but pre mill and post mill agree on the nature.
[00:12:44]  And I feel like the timing is important, but the nature seems to be more important.
[00:12:48]  Pre mill guys actually think that Jesus reigning has an effect on earth, even if he's not reigning yet.
[00:12:55]  Whereas it seems like some of the all mill guys, not all of them, but a decent amount, the reign of Christ is in terms of earthly, tangible, physical.
[00:13:04]  Effects is inconsequential.
[00:13:06]  And I think that that's a bigger problem.
[00:13:07]  So, number one, radical two kingdom theology.
[00:13:10]  Number two, dispensationalism.
[00:13:11]  Number three, complementarianism.
[00:13:14]  Add androgyny, egalitarianism in there.
[00:13:16]  Number four, all millennialism, which I think can be another form of pietism.
[00:13:21]  And then number five, premillennialism, which is just the eschatological pessimism.
[00:13:26]  What do you guys think?
[00:13:30]  Yeah, well, I was going to say, Joel, overall, I think a good list.
[00:13:33]  Like any good Presbyterian, you know, we always take our exceptions.
[00:13:39]  It's what struck me is first of all, there should be a picture somewhere on here of Tim Keller.
[00:13:45]  You know, he's been in the news lately, been on Twitter.
[00:13:49]  What I would say about his stuff is sort of I don't know what exactly you call it, but sort of the middle way ism.
[00:13:56]  I would definitely put that on this list.
[00:13:58]  That's a good one.
[00:13:59]  It's interesting too because, sort of, in my mind, the two flavors that run through everything on the list are sort of like Gnosticism and Pietism.
[00:14:07]  And so, like, maybe it shows up in eschatology, maybe it shows up in You know, your sexual theology, complementarianism, for example.
[00:14:16]  But fundamentally, it's kind of these two undergirding things of pietism and Gnosticism that sort of plague everything.
[00:14:22]  You know, we don't think that physical bodies and physical realities really matter.
[00:14:27]  And so these two things tend to downplay all of them.
[00:14:31]  I don't really have a disagreement, I think, on any of these.
[00:14:35]  You know, we recently did a podcast on our top books, and we had about 50 picks for the top five.
[00:14:42]  So that was my fault.
[00:14:44]  I'm very indecisive as these other men were.
[00:14:47]  Eric all of a sudden is like, and my number four cluster is.
[00:14:50]  And we're like, number four cluster.
[00:14:52]  They're not even connected.
[00:14:54]  They're not even connected.
[00:14:56]  It was sneaky.
[00:14:57]  But then we all were like, okay, if that's what we're doing, that's funny.
[00:15:01]  Yeah.
[00:15:02]  Okay.
[00:15:02]  So what do you guys think?
[00:15:03]  Brian, Dan?
[00:15:04]  You know, I would agree with your list in everything that's on there.
[00:15:09]  I would find similar issues.
[00:15:11]  I think that the way that you framed the ones that I think people might have the most issue with who are closer to us would be amillennialism and complementarianism, where they might agree with a lot of the other stuff, but maybe not see what's happening in the amillennial instinct that we would object to and say, from the foundations, you are making yourself impotent.
[00:15:34]  And it is pietism.
[00:15:35]  It's this instinct where I agree the premillennialist actually takes these texts more seriously.
[00:15:43]  And they just say, well, we don't think that's happening now, but we do think it's going to happen.
[00:15:47]  You know, like Christ reigning from sea to sea, from the river to the ends of the earth.
[00:15:52]  Well, that's the spiritual kingdom, the amillennialist would say.
[00:15:56]  And so I do have a lot of respect for those who are, you know, I'm a premillennialist, historic premillennialist, they might say, but it's because I take these texts so seriously.
[00:16:07]  Right.
[00:16:07]  So I agree with that.
[00:16:09]  I think complementarianism on the list, again, what we're talking about and the reason that, We need to object to it is because we're basically removing, we're making it arbitrary by removing the reason for which men ought to rule in the home and the church.
[00:16:28]  And we're just saying it was a coin flip instead of, no, God actually made something in the nature of maleness and in the nature of femaleness that will show up everywhere in every sphere of the world.
[00:16:44]  And when you lose that principle, you've lost.
[00:16:48]  You've really lost, I mean, everything in principle, and you're going to end up egalitarian eventually.
[00:16:53]  I always tell people with a home in the church, you know, because it limits it to the home in the church.
[00:16:57]  I always tell people, you know, an amazing thing happened the other day.
[00:17:00]  It was the Lord's Day, and my wife and I were leaving church, and we, you know, we pulled out of the parking lot, and she still had breasts.
[00:17:07]  It blew my mind.
[00:17:09]  It was unbelievable.
[00:17:11]  And I, for one, you know, when I looked over at my wife in the seat, I was happy.
[00:17:15]  Yeah.
[00:17:16]  I was pleased.
[00:17:18]  Praise God.
[00:17:18]  I praised, I sang the doxology again.
[00:17:20]  We weren't even in the sanctuary.
[00:17:23]  Save it for your other podcast, bro.
[00:17:25]  You're welcome.
[00:17:27]  One thing I would add to the list, and I don't think you actually missed it.
[00:17:32]  I think you included it in your things we've dealt with in like the prosperity gospel and charismania.
[00:17:38]  But I would still add some kind of instinct of revivalism where the church is conflating emotional response to spiritual things with spiritual maturity.
[00:17:53]  And you would add to that like the decisionism, right?
[00:17:55]  Like decisionism.
[00:17:56]  Yeah, revivalism, decisionism.
[00:17:59]  And I think that while we've probably in a lot of reform circles dealt with the formal issues of prosperity gospel and hyper charismania, I don't think that we've properly or adequately dealt with the instinct that would say, well, how's your quiet time?
[00:18:16]  And what they mean is like, how are your emotions?
[00:18:20]  Rather than where a more mature Christian instinct, which would be to say, My faith is in the objectivity of God's work and his promises to me.
[00:18:31]  I'm going to believe them and do my duties before God with as cheerful a heart as I can muster today by the grace of God.
[00:18:38]  And I'm going to tell my emotions, kneel to King Jesus.
[00:18:42]  So I still think that's part of it, it's all wrapped up in effeminacy, this kind of like designing of the church service around emotionalistic responses.
[00:18:51]  So there's a lot of these that the threads are interwoven.
[00:18:56]  And I would definitely add that.

=== Fighting Emotionalistic Responses (11:59) ===

[00:18:58]  And with that, you know, I always think of federal vision and Doug Wilson, so I don't prescribe to federal vision, but I think that was the heart behind it, you know.
[00:19:06]  And Doug Wilson, you know, in his defense, I think good intentions, and I think he's backed off.
[00:19:11]  And I think there's also a spectrum within the federal vision camp.
[00:19:14]  And there are guys who are much more hardcore than Doug would be.
[00:19:17]  So, all that being said, all the disclaimers, you know, out there, I think the heart behind it, the intent was working against the revivalism and decisionism of all these people wrestling with assurance of salvation.
[00:19:30]  Myself, for several years, being one of them, like, I'm probably not saved.
[00:19:33]  I'm probably not saved.
[00:19:34]  I'm probably like every day having to re decide to be a Christian, you know, having to, you know, Feel something and work something up.
[00:19:41]  And I think Doug was just a lot of different aspects, but I really think that that was like the core intention of the federal vision movement was just to try to provide some kind of clear, tangible, you know, fruits, evidence, proof of like this is in, this is out.
[00:19:58]  Yeah.
[00:19:58]  This is in.
[00:19:58]  Living faith.
[00:20:00]  Yeah.
[00:20:00]  Objectivity of the covenant.
[00:20:01]  Right.
[00:20:02]  And, you know, Joel, after you said that, I'm wondering maybe you should get baptized again.
[00:20:06]  Sounds like you've maybe sinned since we were baptized.
[00:20:09]  So I don't know.
[00:20:10]  Maybe you should consider that.
[00:20:11]  Yeah, you're right.
[00:20:12]  I don't think it's by accident that we saw a rise in dispensationalism and denying the covenants, you know, along with revivalism.
[00:20:23]  And so that emotionalism and the denying of the objectivity of the covenant, like Brian said, have gone hand in hand.
[00:20:30]  And so you're positionally always unsure because you don't have this framework of God's covenants working.
[00:20:37]  But God has actually declared over you because you are responsible then for your standing essentially.
[00:20:44]  You know, apart from these covenants.
[00:20:46]  Right.
[00:20:46]  And so, you know, that's not really a surprise.
[00:20:49]  Right.
[00:20:49]  And that becomes the motivation.
[00:20:50]  The motivation is fear based rather than confidence in Christ.
[00:20:56]  And it makes sense that pre mill, you know, would go right there with dispensationalism.
[00:21:00]  It's like every day I need to make, you know, so it's a diluting of the covenantal promises and a removal of the objective reality of being in Christ.
[00:21:11]  And it becomes more of a subjective, personal, individual feeling.
[00:21:15]  And a decision that needs to be made and remade and remade.
[00:21:18]  And so there's the fear there, fear incentive.
[00:21:21]  And then on top of it, Jesus could come back tomorrow, and things are going to get worse and worse until he does.
[00:21:29]  So you better be resolute, you better be standing strong.
[00:21:32]  But it really feels like fear based.
[00:21:35]  Yeah, and I think another thing that could be on the list would be denying legacy, which is a fruit.
[00:21:41]  It's not exactly a category in itself, but it's definitely a fruit of all of these because Brian said this is impotent.
[00:21:49]  Uh, theology, and this morning I was thinking through this list, and I was like, This is really castrated Christianity.
[00:21:55]  This is fruitless Christianity.
[00:21:57]  If it was a house, it would be like issues with the foundation, with the roof, and the HVAC.
[00:22:02]  That's what all of these are.
[00:22:04]  And you're not thinking, Oh man, I'm you know, I better tend this so that I can pass it on to the next generation.
[00:22:10]  You're like, Man, I hope this thing doesn't fall apart in the next 15 minutes, right?
[00:22:13]  Yeah, you know, and that's kind of um, so so all of these theologies are not looking past themselves.
[00:22:21]  In a lot of ways, you're not going to be passing this on to the next generation, like a robust covenant theology, post mill, you know, Calvinistic theology, you know, passing it on to the next generations.
[00:22:34]  It really does deny your legacy.
[00:22:36]  And so, just looking through your list, I was ready to disagree with you.
[00:22:41]  I really wanted to pick a fight somewhere.
[00:22:44]  And I was talking to Brian.
[00:22:45]  I'm like, I think complementarianism should be number one.
[00:22:47]  It's not necessarily like my least favorite.
[00:22:50]  Like, if I. R2K theology, Radical Two Kingdoms.
[00:22:53]  Man, I loathe that theology.
[00:22:55]  Me too.
[00:22:56]  I absolutely loathe it.
[00:22:58]  And I was making an argument to Brian about complementarianism being so dangerous because there's so much gravity in our culture towards sexual androgyny, you know, towards this like grayness of gray blob humanity, you know, denying the image bearingness of God into self definition of the person, you know.
[00:23:22]  And he said, well, that's really kind of the same thing that R2K theology does.
[00:23:26]  It's just another category of it.
[00:23:28]  They're so connected.
[00:23:29]  But this.
[00:23:30]  Uh, you know, and tying it all together within pietism, you know, the roots of pietism.
[00:23:36]  Another reason why I would say it's castrated is because pietism, in its essence, was this pietist movement founded because of how tired they were of fighting this Lutheran pietistic movement.
[00:23:49]  They didn't want to fight anymore.
[00:23:50]  And a Christianity that does not fight will ultimately lose, they will be swallowed up.
[00:23:56]  It won't produce fruit.
[00:23:58]  Um, I mean, the Bible, the scriptures are.
[00:24:01]  Just chock full of language of fighting, you know, in this cosmic battle.
[00:24:07]  And so it really does this list.
[00:24:10]  I think I would put it in the same order you did, even all mill over pre mill, because we've found the same thing is that we will gladly link arms with pre mill brothers because they're willing, even if our eschatologies are radically different, our motivations, you know, you say like, hey, we should go fight, we should go take that hill.
[00:24:31]  And they're like, Okay, yeah, let's do it.
[00:24:33]  Yeah, you know, whereas the Awe Mill guy is like, Well, that's a spiritual hill.
[00:24:36]  It's like, No, actually, the hill's right there.
[00:24:38]  It's real.
[00:24:39]  We should go take it.
[00:24:39]  We can take it.
[00:24:40]  We should go take it.
[00:24:41]  No, we should have taken it.
[00:24:42]  You're like Jesus is Lord of all, but spiritually over the spiritual hills.
[00:24:46]  Right.
[00:24:47]  He owns the spiritual cattle.
[00:24:49]  No, they spiritualized Jesus right out of his lordship for sure.
[00:24:53]  And Jesus becomes sequestered.
[00:24:55]  His kingship becomes sequestered in quarantine to the heart, right?
[00:25:00]  We used to say Jesus is Lord of all.
[00:25:01]  Now we say Jesus is Lord of my sweet little heart.
[00:25:03]  And And so it's a confinement of his lordship.
[00:25:07]  So I think that's great, Dan.
[00:25:08]  So, real quick, can you do this, Dan?
[00:25:10]  I think we need to define some of our terms because otherwise, people are going to just think that we're egotistical.
[00:25:16]  You're just spouting all these things.
[00:25:17]  We don't actually know what they mean.
[00:25:19]  And for me, the guiding force of ministry is always what people think.
[00:25:22]  So it shows.
[00:25:26]  So I want everybody to like me.
[00:25:27]  So let's define our terms and try not to be presumptuous.
[00:25:32]  So, Dan, can you take pietism?
[00:25:34]  What is pietism?
[00:25:37]  Yeah, sure.
[00:25:38]  I can give you some of the historic roots of pietism and then, you know, kind of define it.
[00:25:42]  So, really, the roots of pietism came out of the 17th century.
[00:25:47]  There were folks that were sick of this infighting within Protestantism and with the Catholics.
[00:25:55]  You know, so the Protestant Catholic fighting was pretty intense.
[00:25:59]  I mean, like, you know, there's a reason that Bloody Mary got her name that way because she killed Protestants.
[00:26:05]  I mean, so within this debating doctrine and And desire to hammer out truth and to figure out, like, you know, what is this Reformation?
[00:26:15]  What are we reforming?
[00:26:16]  What did the past say?
[00:26:18]  This pietistic movement, the roots of the pietists, they grew sick of this fighting.
[00:26:23]  And so this led to some movements that is distinct from Lutheranism.
[00:26:28]  It came out of Lutheranism, but it's not necessarily the doctrines of Lutheran, you know, conservative, reformed Lutheran theology today.
[00:26:36]  But it's really a distinction between the head and the heart.
[00:26:41]  And so it became, they have this really strong distinction between head and heart of emotion, how you feel, and this somewhat disdain for theology proper.
[00:26:56]  And so this led to, for example, in Bible studies, became very introspective.
[00:27:03]  Instead of what is true, the question is asked, how does this make you feel?
[00:27:07]  Or what does this mean to you?
[00:27:09]  And so that's how I would describe some of the roots of pietism.
[00:27:14]  And so you can see that, you know, the megachurch TED Talk sermon is all about how does this make you feel?
[00:27:24]  That is really one of the root questions.
[00:27:25]  So even you joke, like you care what people think.
[00:27:29]  That's a pietistic question.
[00:27:32]  You know, as far as emotions being very important in that movement.
[00:27:37]  Right.
[00:27:38]  Yeah, no, I completely agree.
[00:27:39]  I would add to that, like, I, you know, if I could just do a two word definition, I say pietism is privatized lordship.
[00:27:45]  Like, Jesus is just, it's just this personal.
[00:27:48]  And so it's this emphasis on quiet time, right?
[00:27:50]  So, how do I know I'm doing well in the Christian faith?
[00:27:53]  Well, I have a quiet time every single day.
[00:27:55]  I've been doing it for 40 years.
[00:27:56]  It's great, great, awesome.
[00:27:58]  So, what's the fruit of your quiet time?
[00:28:01]  Well, my children have gone apostate, and, you know, and we have this and that, you know.
[00:28:06]  And so it's like, yeah, okay, well, faith without works is dead.
[00:28:09]  Like, what there should be, there should be some fruit of this 40 year quiet time.
[00:28:14]  Yeah.
[00:28:14]  So thank you.
[00:28:15]  Yeah, it ends up being like Christianity is a cesspool instead of as a stream.
[00:28:20]  Yeah.
[00:28:20]  You know, and so everything gets dammed up and it becomes rotten instead of having an outflow.
[00:28:25]  I like your definition better than mine.
[00:28:27]  No, no, no.
[00:28:28]  Yeah, it was short.
[00:28:28]  It was short.
[00:28:29]  But, okay.
[00:28:30]  So, Brian, and then I'll go to you, Eric.
[00:28:32]  I want you to do complementarianism.
[00:28:33]  Like, what, like, You know, because people are like complimenting it.
[00:28:36]  Why is that bad?
[00:28:36]  But, Brian, first, can you do radical two kingdom theology?
[00:28:41]  Explain a little bit of that.
[00:28:43]  Yeah, radical two kingdom theology, very briefly, would at the heart, it's making a division between the common kingdom and the spiritual kingdom.
[00:28:52]  So, that's really the sine qua non of radical two kingdom theology.
[00:28:56]  It's saying there's this kingdom that Christ rules over, it's his spiritual kingdom, it's his church.
[00:29:01]  And so, whenever they look at passages of scripture about the spread of the kingdom, You know, like the mustard seed, Daniel and the stone and the mountain.
[00:29:10]  They're saying, yes, we believe that the church is going to spread through the whole world.
[00:29:14]  We absolutely believe that.
[00:29:16]  But then they divorce that from the effect of leaven being present everywhere in the world.
[00:29:22]  Right.
[00:29:23]  And they say, well, there's this other kingdom.
[00:29:25]  It's called the common kingdom.
[00:29:26]  It's ruled, it was established in the Noahic covenant, Genesis 9.
[00:29:30]  And it basically is just ruled through natural law and, you know, human reason.
[00:29:37]  What it sounds pretty straightforward.
[00:29:39]  You're like, oh, that doesn't sound too bad as long as you believe Christ is going to rule over the church, the spiritual kingdom through the whole world.
[00:29:44]  The problem is that as soon as you take that common kingdom and say it's not ruled by scripture and Christians aren't necessarily, therefore, going to have a leavening effect on any of it, you've actually just divorced the transformational effect of Christianity from everything outside of the four walls of the church.
[00:30:05]  And that's why what you described in complementarianism with your wife still having breasts when she drove out of the church parking lot.
[00:30:11]  Really, you can see that it's the same instinct.
[00:30:15]  That's what Dan was talking about.
[00:30:16]  It's the reason that I would agree to put Radical Two Kingdom at the top is because what's bad about complementarianism is just an outworking of the principles of Radical Two Kingdom theology.
[00:30:29]  So, you know, you'll hear people say like those, there's this neutral politics, this neutral common kingdom sort of issue.
[00:30:37]  You can read, I think Brian Mattson and another guy wrote a book on this where they were talking about how, you know, Two Kingdoms guys will say, Yeah, so how does the Bible affect how you'd make a stir fry?
[00:30:50]  And that's like their point of trying to say, see, there are all these neutral things the Bible has nothing to do with.
[00:30:55]  And their rejoinder was like, really?

=== Radical Two Kingdom Culture (03:10) ===

[00:30:57]  Have you tried making dinner in India where they worship cows?
[00:31:02]  Right.
[00:31:03]  Does your Christianity affect the food there?
[00:31:05]  Food is deeply religious.
[00:31:07]  Yeah.
[00:31:07]  Go ahead.
[00:31:08]  Islam.
[00:31:09]  Yeah.
[00:31:09]  All of Christ for all of life rather than what you said earlier.
[00:31:13]  Again, great, pithy summary.
[00:31:14]  Some of Christ for some of life.
[00:31:16]  Right.
[00:31:16]  That's how I would describe radical two kingdom culture.
[00:31:19]  I completely agree.
[00:31:20]  And it's everything.
[00:31:21]  I think of art.
[00:31:22]  So, like, I think it's Pollock.
[00:31:23]  Is his name the guy who just splatters paint, you know?
[00:31:26]  And yeah, Jackson Pollock, right?
[00:31:28]  Exactly, yeah, Jackson Pollock.
[00:31:29]  And it's kind of you know, you think of like the you know, uh, the emperor has no clothes, right?
[00:31:34]  The little boy's like the only one who actually has the audacity to say he's naked, you know?
[00:31:38]  And uh, and and and I feel like that happens, like you know, you go into an art museum and it's the little kids who actually have like the gravity to be able to say, um, I could do this painting, this is stupid, you know?
[00:31:49]  And I think what's your favorite painting?
[00:31:51]  The storm on the sea of Galilee, like, look at all the colors and the people on the boat, and they look at this like.
[00:31:56]  Reader response splattering, and they're like, but that came from that secular sacred divide, and everything in the secular realm became subjective.
[00:32:05]  And so, art was secular, and then it became subjective.
[00:32:09]  And then you have, you know, we get expressions like beauty is in the eye of the beholder, right?
[00:32:13]  And then you see that even with, you know, pertaining to complementarianism and sexual ethics, you know.
[00:32:18]  So now it's like we got to get the fattest chick we can find on the cover of a beauty magazine to say this is right, because there is no objective standards of physical beauty.
[00:32:27]  And so Like, I think, you know, from a post millennial framework, I think that we're going to have Jason Pollock paintings in museums hundreds of years from now.
[00:32:35]  Maybe it'll be a couple thousand years from now.
[00:32:38]  But they'll be there so that society can go and kids will go on field trips and stuff like that from their classical Christian schools.
[00:32:44]  And they'll go and the point will be to go and laugh and make fun of Jason.
[00:32:49]  And it'll be this glorious, God glorified thing.
[00:32:52]  Like, we'll go and we'll laugh and say, isn't that stupid?
[00:32:54]  Like, this is what happens when we reject Christ.
[00:32:57]  That, you know, that like we actually, there were people who actually thought that this was a good painting, and the kids will laugh and Pat each other on the backs.
[00:33:03]  We'll all have a good time, eat a hot dog and go home and laugh at Jason Pollock and it'll be a beautiful thing.
[00:33:08]  And we'll laugh at the fat girls on the covers of beauty magazines and all those kinds of things.
[00:33:13]  And not saying that we're making fun of people who are fat, but what we're doing is we're saying we're making fun of the culture that tried to force us to say that this is beautiful, that said beauty is completely subjective.
[00:33:25]  No, it's not.
[00:33:26]  Yes, there's some measure of personal preference, but there is a guiding, universal, transcendent standard of.
[00:33:33]  What is beautiful?
[00:33:35]  In the same way that, you know, so it's like engineering, right?
[00:33:37]  It's not like a free for all.
[00:33:38]  Well, I think that, you know, the foundation should be built like, no, it's like there are things at work, right?
[00:33:44]  There are standards and rules for building a suspension bridge.
[00:33:47]  And likewise, with art, there is a universal standard to be able to say, yeah, this guy is artistic.
[00:33:54]  This guy is talented.
[00:33:55]  This guy, music, right?
[00:33:57]  That guy can't sing.
[00:33:58]  That guy can sing, you know?
[00:34:00]  And so, and we continue as a culture to gravitate away from that because ultimately we're gravitating away from transcendent standards.

=== Beyond Church and State Divide (05:15) ===

[00:34:08]  What I would say with the two kingdom thing, so that was super helpful, Brian.
[00:34:11]  I like to say, and maybe you guys will disagree with it, I think you'll agree, but I like to say just to make it real short three spheres, two kingdoms, one king.
[00:34:20]  Three spheres, two kingdoms, one king.
[00:34:22]  And because what's been helped, so the Lutheran perspective, like Martin Luther himself, kind of made the kingdoms, relegated them to the church and the state.
[00:34:32]  And then you have, a long time before him, Augustine, right?
[00:34:35]  The city of God and city of man.
[00:34:38]  But it seems as though that.
[00:34:39]  You know, Joe Boot, I think, is really helpful on this his mission of God and the work that he's done.
[00:34:43]  But we do, all four of us, just for the record, for the listener, we believe that there are two kingdoms.
[00:34:49]  The question is, what's the dividing line?
[00:34:51]  What's the distinction?
[00:34:52]  And so we would say it's not two kingdoms as church and state.
[00:34:55]  I would use sovereign sphere language for that and say, okay, there's the home, the church, and the state.
[00:35:01]  These are spheres.
[00:35:02]  The kingdoms is not church and state, and it's not secular and sacred or sacred in common.
[00:35:08]  So it's not a secular sacred divide.
[00:35:11]  It's not church and state divide.
[00:35:12]  That's a sphere thing, not a kingdom thing.
[00:35:15]  It's light and dark.
[00:35:17]  And the thing that blows people's minds that really blew my mind in the last couple of years as I've been studying these things.
[00:35:23]  Is that there is the kingdom of light within the civil magistrate.
[00:35:29]  And there's most certainly the kingdom of darkness within the church.
[00:35:33]  What do you call false teachers will arise from among you, right?
[00:35:37]  What do you call apostates?
[00:35:39]  What do you call that's the kingdom of darkness in the church?
[00:35:44]  And what do you call Constantine, right?
[00:35:46]  Or what do you call a Christian governor or mayor?
[00:35:49]  Or what do you call the overturning of Roe?
[00:35:52]  And there's obviously a lot more work to be done.
[00:35:54]  We should have been functioning as Roe.
[00:35:57]  Never existed in the first place, right?
[00:35:58]  Why are they desperately trying to codify it and not just codify Roe, but way beyond that, all the way to the moment of birth, blah, blah, blah.
[00:36:04]  But, you know, it was never law.
[00:36:05]  But the point is, if Roe is overturned, and I think it will be, that is a win.
[00:36:11]  There's a lot more wins that we need, but that is a win in terms of outside of the church, in the civil sphere, the kingdom of light breaking through.
[00:36:20]  If we cure cancer, right?
[00:36:23]  If, you know, all these things is pushing back the kingdom of darkness.
[00:36:27]  But it's not just because someone got saved.
[00:36:30]  And so Joe Boots says that the church and the kingdom are not synonymous.
[00:36:34]  There's massive overlap, but they're not a one to one ratio synonymous.
[00:36:38]  The church only numerically grows one way conversion.
[00:36:42]  But the kingdom of God grows every time the good, the true, and the beautiful, those things which align with the law of God and the gospel of God, are furthered and pressed forward in any sphere of human society.
[00:36:57]  And so nobody could get saved.
[00:36:59]  Now, I believe it would lend towards salvation, but initially no one could actually get saved.
[00:37:04]  So the church did not numerically grow, but a good law was passed.
[00:37:09]  The kingdom is advancing.
[00:37:12]  And the kingdom advancing in these other spheres in all of life, it lends towards the advancement of the church.
[00:37:20]  And to be fair, to play the devil's advocate, the blood of the martyrs is also the seedbed of the church.
[00:37:24]  So the church grows under persecution, but we act as though that's the only way.
[00:37:29]  We do these self fulfilling prophecies where we rig the game to make us lose because we think that that's going to be what's the church grows when it's persecuted.
[00:37:38]  But the church also does really great, really great when you have Christian rulers put in place.
[00:37:45]  It explodes that way too.
[00:37:46]  So, any thoughts on that?
[00:37:48]  Briefly, look at the growth of the Christian church through the Roman Empire.
[00:37:53]  And I think we were under 5% at about 300, under 10% for sure, within a century of Constantine.
[00:38:02]  That number had grown to over 50%.
[00:38:04]  Wow.
[00:38:05]  So the results of Christian governance, or in even, you can argue about Constantine's genuineness or whatever, but the fact remains objectively, Constantine was claiming Christ and giving freedom and decriminalizing Christianity.
[00:38:22]  And the result was explosive growth.
[00:38:24]  So, I mean, you can't, a lot of the time, people want to universalize that, like you said, that principle of winning by losing.
[00:38:30]  Well, yeah, death, burial, and resurrection is true.
[00:38:33]  But on the other side of resurrection, there's 30, 60, 100 fold growth.
[00:38:39]  And that's from the seed going into the ground and dying, which is going to happen in families and nations.
[00:38:44]  In God's story, it's going to happen over and over.
[00:38:47]  But the result, they want to take away the actual results of the seed being planted, dying, and coming up.
[00:38:53]  You're like, well, what about the 30, 60, and 100 fold?
[00:38:55]  Right.
[00:38:56]  They want to die a million times between now and the return of Christ, but only resurrect once.
[00:39:01]  And we see it as, no, we're going to die and resurrect and die and resurrect.
[00:39:05]  They want to die over and over again, but only resurrect once.
[00:39:07]  And we want to die and resurrect again and again and again as individuals, as families, as households, as nations, all those kinds of things.
[00:39:14]  So, yeah, I 100% agree with you.
[00:39:16]  And I think, you know, I.
[00:39:20]  I forgot what I was going to say.

=== The Danger of Antinomianism (04:16) ===

[00:39:23]  One of the things with the civil magistrate operating by divine law, moral law, and personally, this might be another thing that we might disagree on, but I see natural law and divine law as synonymous.
[00:39:35]  So I think that the combination of natural revelation in Romans 1 and natural law in Romans 2, A plus B equals the Ten Commandments.
[00:39:42]  I think we can get all Ten Commandments, including the Sabbath, from natural revelation, right?
[00:39:46]  That people who are pagans with agriculture really, oh, well, if we break the land in a one in seven year pattern, then.
[00:39:53]  You can grow crops better, you know, these kinds.
[00:39:56]  And, you know, natural revelation, you know, there's a God in heaven.
[00:39:58]  Therefore, I think you can naturally and logically conclude that He alone is worthy of worship.
[00:40:02]  There's the first commandment that He's the invisible God.
[00:40:05]  So we shouldn't worship the creature, make His image, you know, engraven.
[00:40:08]  So there's the second commandment.
[00:40:10]  Obviously, we should worship Him with sincerity and truth and not make it vain and trivial and trite.
[00:40:15]  There's the third commandment, the Sabbath.
[00:40:16]  I've already talked about that, just seasons and patterns and day and night and these kinds of things.
[00:40:21]  And then, certainly, the second table of the law, how we love our neighbor, commandment five through 10.
[00:40:26]  I think it certainly comes from natural law written on the hearts of men, the Gentiles without any special revelation.
[00:40:31]  You know, Paul says you're a law unto yourself.
[00:40:33]  Your consciences bear witness against you.
[00:40:35]  You're guilty of murder because you know that you shouldn't have murdered, even though you've never had a preacher.
[00:40:39]  So, personally, I would say moral law and natural law, divine law, are synonymous.
[00:40:46]  And that's why every single pagan, every unbeliever is held accountable.
[00:40:50]  They are without an excuse, not just without an excuse to know that the mere existence of God, but without an excuse to know that this.
[00:40:57]  God who exists is also a holy God, and that He's written His law on tablets of human hearts, and therefore they're accountable to obey these things.
[00:41:05]  But all that being said, when the civil magistrate does a good job, when it's influenced and discipled, when the church is discipling the civil magistrate, the state, and then the state begins to actually produce justice and make good laws, that flows back into the church.
[00:41:20]  One of the reasons why the state is antinomian is because the church is antinomian.
[00:41:26]  And one of the reasons that the church is antinomian is because the state is anti.
[00:41:30]  If you live in a society with a State that is actually upholding justice according to God's justice, God's law, theonomy, then it makes the church's job easier, in a sense, to preach the gospel, right?
[00:41:45]  Because people instinctively, so people are like, you don't need to tell people that they're sinners.
[00:41:49]  They already know.
[00:41:49]  I would say, no, they did know.
[00:41:52]  They did know.
[00:41:52]  I think there was a time in America where, you know, if somebody was a drunk, you didn't need to tell them that it was bad.
[00:41:58]  I think you still should have, but there was less of a need to tell them this is bad.
[00:42:03]  But today, one of the unique things, right, is when you call evil good and good evil.
[00:42:07]  Well, I think one of the unique things as we've pulled back the blessing of God, as it's been pulled back on our nation and we've lent towards this antinomianism, now it's not just preaching what God says about sin and the free grace that's found in Christ alone, but we actually have to make arguments for sin being sin because people do instinctively know, but there is a progressive.
[00:42:34]  Denial or progressive deception that comes by suppressing the truth and deeds of unrighteousness.
[00:42:38]  And I think culturally, where we're at as a society as a whole is there are people who are legitimately saying, no, abortion is not sin.
[00:42:47]  And I don't think they, at an individual level, I don't think they actually believe that.
[00:42:52]  But that's whereas I would say the church has to preach sin more than ever before because, in part, my point is because the civil magistrate has not been doing its job, because the church has failed to disciple the civil magistrate.
[00:43:03]  So as the state becomes more and more lawless, the church has to pick up the slack and preach more and more law.
[00:43:09]  And my point is there is overlap and they function in.
[00:43:13]  In tandem, in some sense, the state does matter, it should be Christian and it has a benefit to the church when it is so, you know, Joel.
[00:43:20]  That's a really good point.
[00:43:20]  And I, uh, we saw a microcosm of that example of the state passing a righteous law or threatening to pass a righteous law and overturning Roe versus Wade, and then the reaction to it producing actually righteousness on social media, where there are a bunch of women that are like, fine, if I can't kill my baby, then I'm going on a sex strike, right?

=== Hierarchy in the Trinity (15:17) ===

[00:43:40]  Right?
[00:43:40]  You're right, no more fornication, it's like, great.
[00:43:43]  So, righteous laws actually produce righteousness.
[00:43:47]  Even amongst the unrighteous, you know, but that's what righteous laws are supposed to do to produce righteousness, to restrain evil.
[00:43:55]  And so we even saw that just recently.
[00:43:58]  You're right.
[00:43:58]  You're right.
[00:43:59]  Eric, complementarianism, what do you think?
[00:44:01]  You like it?
[00:44:01]  You love it?
[00:44:03]  Love it.
[00:44:03]  Let's do it.
[00:44:05]  Let's just have it everywhere.
[00:44:06]  Yeah, no, I think, you know, it's interesting as you guys were breaking these down, I think whether you're talking radical two kingdoms, whatever it is, to your point, Joel, what Joe Boot has said, it's really about churchianity.
[00:44:19]  Right, we want to keep the churchy things in the church, and we want to keep you know the so called secular or pagan things out there.
[00:44:27]  I think, really, what complementarian is, complementarianism with the is first of all, is really hard to pronounce, which is why it's a terrible theology.
[00:44:36]  It's also hard to spell, it is, it is.
[00:44:40]  So, it really comes out of the late 1980s, and you're getting a response to feminism and uh egalitarianism.
[00:44:48]  Um, so really, just feminism, and so you get.
[00:44:52]  A lot of evangelical thinkers, Wayne Grudem and John Piper, Mary Cassian, some people like this, they get together.
[00:44:58]  They say, How do we combat the feminism that's going on?
[00:45:04]  And really, what they do is they say, Well, let's really what we want to stress is that men and women complement each other.
[00:45:11]  So, this is a couple of things.
[00:45:14]  Number one, it's a downplaying of hierarchical order as found in like Ephesians 5 and 6.
[00:45:20]  They're trying to stress, Hey, look, you guys are, you know, You're different, but you complement each other.
[00:45:26]  And they really typically are going to want to downplay the fact that there's, you know, a wife has to submit, a husband is Lord, he is the authority.
[00:45:35]  And so even Mary Castian has written on the Gospel Coalition.
[00:45:40]  She's explained this.
[00:45:40]  She said, We intentionally chose anti hierarchical language.
[00:45:46]  And really, she comes out and says it.
[00:45:49]  It was a lot of the like Marxist thought that was influencing that decision.
[00:45:54]  John Piper will say the same thing.
[00:45:56]  Him and Grudem will say the same thing in their book, Recovering Biblical Womanhood and Manhood.
[00:46:01]  So, how does it play out today?
[00:46:03]  Generally, you have a few camps of complementarianism.
[00:46:06]  You've got soft and harder.
[00:46:08]  And typically, though, what you're going to end up with is men and women, yeah, they kind of have some roles, but it's mostly relegated to family and the church.
[00:46:21]  Some, they've been kind of picked on, but the John Pipers of the world, he would be harder.
[00:46:28]  In this camp, where he's saying, Look, I, and he won't even, honestly, he won't even really be that hard in my view.
[00:46:33]  He won't just come out and say, Look, absolutely not.
[00:46:36]  Women should not be serving in law enforcement.
[00:46:38]  Women should not be serving in these like combat roles, police officers.
[00:46:44]  John will say, Yeah, that's probably maybe not the best idea.
[00:46:47]  Let's talk.
[00:46:48]  And then you get, you know, the Amy Bird, Carl Truman camp.
[00:46:52]  And they were actually ridiculing John Piper for this.
[00:46:55]  So I think fundamentally what's happening here, it's a war on biblical sexuality.
[00:47:00]  And I think this one is particularly dangerous.
[00:47:02]  I've gone after it a lot because it is such a Trojan horse.
[00:47:07]  It looks like, and many times is, faithful.
[00:47:10]  Reformed ish guys who are saying, Yeah, I'm complementarianism.
[00:47:15]  You know, I'm complementarian.
[00:47:17]  And for a long time, I would have said that too.
[00:47:19]  I thought, Well, I thought that was the conservative position because really nobody at the time, so like late 90s, early 2000s, nobody was really defending patriarchy.
[00:47:30]  It was like, Well, this is horrible.
[00:47:32]  Except for Russell Moore.
[00:47:33]  Obviously.
[00:47:34]  Yeah, except for Russell Moore.
[00:47:35]  Yeah.
[00:47:36]  God bless him.
[00:47:37]  Yeah.
[00:47:38]  That's right.
[00:47:39]  So I think really it's a war on patriarchy.
[00:47:43]  All of sexuality, we have to recognize it as such.
[00:47:47]  It's a war against women as well.
[00:47:49]  It's not doing women any favors.
[00:47:51]  And we can also look at the fruit of complementarianism.
[00:47:53]  It's been really bad for the church.
[00:47:56]  Most of the people who've defended it have given ground pretty quickly to the left and to false sexual ideology.
[00:48:04]  Yeah, I completely agree.
[00:48:06]  What would you say to somebody who says, but we find complementarian principles within the Trinity, right?
[00:48:11]  There's a hierarchy in the Trinity.
[00:48:13]  So I think of like, Eternal subordination of the Son.
[00:48:17]  So I'm, you know, spoiler it, I would adhere to classical theism.
[00:48:21]  But for those who would say, all right, well, you know, the Father and the Son are equal in terms of the divine essence, nature, that the Son is fully God, not partly God of the same substance, not just a similar substance, but the same substance.
[00:48:36]  So their essence and nature is equal, equally worthy of worship and honor.
[00:48:42]  And yet the Son plays a role of submission to the Father.
[00:48:45]  And then they would argue, and this continues beyond just His.
[00:48:49]  His earthly ministry, but that he is still subjected to the Father in terms of role, but equal to the Father in terms of nature.
[00:48:56]  And if we can see that within the Trinity, then we can do that within gender roles with men and women.
[00:49:02]  Yeah, I would say part of the issue here.
[00:49:05]  So, you know, like Bruce Ware, I've had him as a professor, you know, friends with Owen Strand, a lot of the ESS debate.
[00:49:14]  The way that I look at it is like, why do we even have to go there?
[00:49:17]  God said there's authority structures.
[00:49:19]  There's hierarchy.
[00:49:21]  It's very plain and very clear from scripture.
[00:49:24]  Let's base our arguments on the things that we know and are clear and not on the things that are like conjecture about some hypothetical.
[00:49:32]  You know, it's a tough area when you're like, well, how exactly does the, you know, certain structure.
[00:49:39]  And I think that's typically what's going to happen when you spend most of your time studying and researching the doctrine of God.
[00:49:45]  Not that it's not important, but I think sometimes you can miss the obvious.
[00:49:50]  Like just read Ephesians 5.
[00:49:52]  And it is hyper crystal clear.
[00:49:54]  You can read Genesis 1 and 2, and you see that.
[00:49:57]  I mean, pretty much any honest Old Testament scholar will tell you the act of naming, which God delegates to Adam, is de facto authority.
[00:50:08]  And who does he name?
[00:50:10]  The woman.
[00:50:11]  He clearly has authority over her.
[00:50:13]  You know, submission and obedience.
[00:50:15]  I mean, these.
[00:50:16]  So that's what I would say.
[00:50:17]  Just go to what's clear, and it is crystal clear, and let's deal with that.
[00:50:21]  No, that's super helpful.
[00:50:22]  Just saying you don't have to be a master on the Trinity to be obedient in your marriage.
[00:50:27]  Yes.
[00:50:28]  The Trinity matters.
[00:50:29]  But yeah, I didn't even.
[00:50:31]  I mean, that's super simple, but I never thought of it that way in the sense that, like, the subliminal statement that's being made is you have to master one of the most difficult doctrines that we have, doctrine of God, theology proper, in order to have a position on the nature of men and women.
[00:50:49]  When it's like, well, the secret things belong to God.
[00:50:52]  Let's do Trinitarian work, but some of these things are secret things.
[00:50:57]  But the things He's revealed to us belong to us and our children forever.
[00:51:00]  And yeah.
[00:51:01]  That's really good.
[00:51:03]  Any thoughts from Dan, Brian on complementarianism or two kingdoms or any of these things?
[00:51:11]  I do think the urge in the complementarian world to eliminate the language of hierarchy is just another example of that egalitarian spirit that runs through everything.
[00:51:26]  We're an atomistic, individualistic society where we really want to make every man his own pope, every man his own God.
[00:51:33]  So And what that means is that nobody can be an authority external to me.
[00:51:38]  So then you're stealing from the woman what makes her a person if you put her under any kind of hierarchical authority in this, if you buy that presupposition.
[00:51:50]  Where scripture says, no, everybody is in hierarchical relationships with superiors and inferiors.
[00:51:56]  And that doesn't, that language itself we would object to.
[00:51:58]  But historically, that's just normal language of if you're in a military unit, you have a superior.
[00:52:06]  We're not talking about your.
[00:52:08]  Ontology.
[00:52:09]  We're not talking about your, you know, that you're less of an image bearer of God.
[00:52:14]  We're saying you're in authority and that authority is real and therefore it's a hierarchy.
[00:52:18]  Like this just terror at the language of hierarchy is completely the result of rationalistic, individualistic modernism, not biblical covenantal thinking.
[00:52:32]  So, another grounds that I would just say interrogate your presuppositions, modern man, and understand.
[00:52:40]  That your framework is already from the beginning flawed in the foundations.
[00:52:45]  So, your instincts as you build doctrines on top of it are going to be flawed.
[00:52:49]  You need to go back to a covenantal, hierarchical type of thinking.
[00:52:54]  Yep.
[00:52:55]  I think the other thing there, Brian, it's a fantastic point.
[00:52:58]  But the other thing is when you create a theology because you want to soften the word of God or appease the culture, even if it's just an instinct, like, well, how do we make this thing that's been around forever hierarchy and marriage more palatable?
[00:53:14]  I think whenever you start there, you've already lost.
[00:53:16]  It may take 20 years to get to the full fruit of it, but you already lost the game.
[00:53:21]  Yep.
[00:53:22]  Yep.
[00:53:22]  Yeah.
[00:53:23]  What I would say so you're right.
[00:53:24]  It's this obsession with egalitarianism.
[00:53:28]  And when egalitarianism is the goal, androgyny is the result.
[00:53:34]  Because the only way that you can really say that we're equal is it's not enough to say we're equal.
[00:53:40]  It has to be sameness.
[00:53:41]  We have to be the same, right?
[00:53:42]  So that's like for women to actually be equal with men.
[00:53:45]  Well, men can't get pregnant.
[00:53:46]  You know, so I mean, that's a part of egalitarianism.
[00:53:49]  Feminism was, you know, women allegedly, right?
[00:53:52]  Allegedly, right?
[00:53:54]  Birthing persons, yeah, exactly.
[00:53:56]  But, but that's when you think, like, where does this come from?
[00:53:58]  It comes from feminism and it comes from, you know, feminism wanting to be equal, but realizing we will never be equal unless we're the same.
[00:54:06]  But the reality is, like, God created the world with divisions and distinctions, and he did so on purpose.
[00:54:12]  So, we live in a world that is designed with a hierarchical structure, and so it's this desire for.
[00:54:21]  Egalitarianism leads to the fruit of androgyny, and what it's opposing is hierarchy.
[00:54:27]  You're absolutely right.
[00:54:29]  And the opposition of hierarchy really is an opposition of authority.
[00:54:32]  So it's a hatred of authority, a desire for anarchy.
[00:54:36]  And that can be applied to a million different things.
[00:54:38]  So we're just applying it right now to the sexual ethic, but that can be applied to economics, right?
[00:54:43]  So what do you see happening?
[00:54:44]  You see a hatred of patriarchy.
[00:54:45]  Oh, but you also see a hatred of capitalism, right?
[00:54:48]  You want socialism, which is, you know, and that.
[00:54:50]  So the goal of egalitarianism produces the fruit of androgyny.
[00:54:53]  Well, the goal of socialism produces the fruit of communism, you know?
[00:54:57]  And so, in all these different levels, and And then you see that like in the church, I would argue that this hatred of hierarchy and these kinds of things, I think that's even been applied to sin, right?
[00:55:05]  All sin is equal.
[00:55:07]  Nope.
[00:55:07]  Oh, right.
[00:55:08]  No, it's not.
[00:55:09]  No, it's not.
[00:55:09]  Right.
[00:55:10]  All sin is equal in the sense that all sin, even the smallest sin, whatever a small sin would be, is fully capable of separating you from God and placing you under his eternal wrath forever.
[00:55:20]  So all sin is equal in that sense.
[00:55:22]  But Jesus pronounces woes on certain cities, saying, it will be worse for you than it was for Sodom and Gomorrah.
[00:55:32]  Woe to you, this.
[00:55:33]  Israelite city, you know, and this is a, and why?
[00:55:36]  Well, I would say there's two things.
[00:55:38]  One, so Jesus says, so talk about hierarchy.
[00:55:40]  There's a hierarchy on earth and the world that God made, but there's also a hierarchy in hell, according to Jesus.
[00:55:45]  And I would argue, along with Jonathan Edwards and guys, for a hierarchy in heaven.
[00:55:49]  I think it'll be unlike any earthly hierarchy that we're aware of.
[00:55:53]  But I do think that in heaven, there are seats of honor, right?
[00:55:56]  Like when the sons of Zebedee, you know, who granted to us, Lord, to sit at your right?
[00:56:00]  Jesus doesn't say, well, that's not a thing.
[00:56:02]  That's not his response.
[00:56:04]  He's like, can you Can you drink the cup?
[00:56:07]  So he's like, that is a thing, is what he's implying.
[00:56:09]  That is a thing, but I don't know if you'll make the cut because I don't know if you're good enough, right?
[00:56:14]  Yeah.
[00:56:16]  Which is a profound thing.
[00:56:17]  So with hell, you know, Jesus even says, but, you know, to one will be given a light beating, to the other will be given a severe beating.
[00:56:24]  And that's based on, in my exegesis, it's based on two things.
[00:56:27]  Him pronouncing greater woes on the Israelite cities is, in one sense, because they were given greater revelation.
[00:56:35]  I think he says that.
[00:56:35]  Explicitly, right?
[00:56:36]  If the signs, if the miracles performed by me in these towns were performed in Sodom and Gomorrah, they would have repented a long time ago.
[00:56:44]  So, one thing that makes their sin worse is their sin in the midst of a higher degree of God's grace.
[00:56:50]  If there's more grace in revelation from God and sin persists versus another scenario where there's less grace and sin persists, well, the sin that persists in the greater context of grace is a greater sin.
[00:57:04]  And then I think you can talk about so one is degrees of revelation.
[00:57:08]  And then the others is just degrees of sin.
[00:57:10]  There are some, and we know this from just the law of God, and there being varying penalties, varying penalties on earth for different sins.
[00:57:19]  I, I, like God has proportional justice, right?
[00:57:22]  Eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth, life for a life.
[00:57:25]  So, you know, so my point is different degrees of sin, also different degrees of grace, particularly in the form of revelation, creates a hierarchy of sin.
[00:57:33]  All sin, again, capable, apart from saving salvation by grace alone, through faith alone, and Christ alone, apart from that, all sin is.
[00:57:41]  Equal in the sense that it'll get you to hell.
[00:57:44]  But even in hell, it seems as though there are worse torments in hell than others, according to Jesus.
[00:57:53]  So there's a hierarchy of sin, hierarchy of hell, hierarchy of heaven, heavenly rewards, right?
[00:57:57]  That's another thing that you notice in the last 30 years, guys pushing back on like there are no heavenly rewards, you know, because we gotta all be the same.
[00:58:04]  We all gotta be equal.
[00:58:06]  And I would disagree with that.
[00:58:08]  Like we're not saved by our works, we are saved by works, but the works of Christ.
[00:58:13]  But it does seem as though our works do receive varying degrees of reward.
[00:58:18]  So it's faith alone that gets us eternity with God.
[00:58:23]  But it seems like they're based off of the fruit in our lives that there will be varying degrees of reward in heaven.
[00:58:31]  And so, anyway, but we're just anti hierarchy.
[00:58:34]  And I think it's because we're anti authority.
[00:58:36]  And so it can be applied to the sexual ethic, it can be applied to heaven, your view of heaven, your view of hell, your view of sin, your view of economics.
[00:58:43]  Like at every single level, part of why we're falling apart is because we're so committed to have egalitarianism across the board, which seeks to do androgyny across the board, which Always works against God's design because God's design contains distinctions.

=== God Creates Order by Division (04:51) ===

[00:58:58]  So, yeah, that's right, Joel.
[00:58:59]  And I think when you look at creation, creation, what is God doing?
[00:59:04]  He's creating order by division.
[00:59:07]  And then that division is crowned with the hierarchy of man.
[00:59:10]  And then that's the crowning glory where God says that is the hierarchical glory.
[00:59:16]  And then I think you look at androgyny, as you're saying, it's bringing about through uncreation, this great act of uncreation, tearing down the divisions.
[00:59:25]  And now we're bringing chaos back into the world.
[00:59:27]  So I think that's actually, you know, you might put this as one of the top ones on the list, just that this is where the two kingdoms are colliding.
[00:59:36]  Yeah.
[00:59:36]  You know, one saying division is good and beautiful and glorious.
[00:59:39]  This is the way God made the world versus, you know, what's our culture trying to do?
[00:59:43]  Tear down every division.
[00:59:46]  And what you get is this chaotic hellhole, this hellscape.
[00:59:50]  Right.
[00:59:50]  Because all it can ever do is bring it down to the lowest common denominator.
[00:59:53]  Like socialism can succeed in making everybody have the same amount of wealth.
[00:59:58]  By making everybody dirt poor.
[01:00:00]  But that's all it can do.
[01:00:03]  Because against all of that, God made a world where there is Tom Brady and you.
[01:00:10]  And God made a world where there is.
[01:00:13]  What are you trying to say?
[01:00:15]  When you said you, are you talking about Mickey?
[01:00:18]  I'm talking to a Chinese man named you over here.
[01:00:20]  Oh, gotcha, gotcha.
[01:00:21]  He's literally not you.
[01:00:22]  Not you guys.
[01:00:24]  Yeah, I know you.
[01:00:24]  He's a great guy.
[01:00:27]  No Tom Brady.
[01:00:28]  No Tom Brady.
[01:00:29]  Tom and I are close.
[01:00:31]  He made a world where he gives one talent and five talents and 10 talents.
[01:00:35]  He made a world where he made some people with 180 IQ and some people with 75 IQ.
[01:00:42]  And he calls them all to faithfulness with the measure of faith and gifting he's given them.
[01:00:47]  Egalitarianism hates that because it rejects the authority of God in giving his gifts.
[01:00:52]  It wants a world that's fair, meaning equal.
[01:00:55]  And the thing is, God did not make a fair world.
[01:00:58]  Jesus even said that to those who have little, even what little they have will be taken and given to the one who has much.
[01:01:04]  And he's talking specifically about this issue that we're describing.
[01:01:09]  I would say Arminianism has a very similar error where it wants to say that God can't make from one lump vessels for honorable use and dishonorable use, but that everyone has to have equal opportunity to respond, that provenient grace must go out and make everybody equally able to respond and have the same opportunity.
[01:01:29]  And it's like, no, God judges, as you demonstrated, God judges individuals differently.
[01:01:35]  Based on the light of revelation that they had.
[01:01:38]  I think that's beyond dispute in scripture.
[01:01:41]  Which that right there assumes that God doesn't reveal himself equally to everyone.
[01:01:45]  Exactly.
[01:01:46]  That doesn't sound fair.
[01:01:47]  You can't say that my son had the exact same opportunity to bend the knee to Christ as Lord as the son of some Muslim kid in, you know, some Muslim guy in Saudi Arabia.
[01:02:00]  They didn't.
[01:02:01]  And Christians that try to argue and like come up with elaborate gymnastics to make it seem as if that's the case through natural revelation or whatnot.
[01:02:10]  We're all responsible because of that, absolutely.
[01:02:12]  But it's just not the world God made.
[01:02:15]  God made a world that wherein one of the glories would be this massive differentiation.
[01:02:22]  And it's like, it is far more glorious that Tom Brady exists.
[01:02:27]  This sounds really gay now that I say it.
[01:02:30]  It's Mista.
[01:02:31]  But it is.
[01:02:32]  Should I call you Mista?
[01:02:33]  It's far more glorious.
[01:02:33]  Should I call you Mista?
[01:02:36]  Why are you gay?
[01:02:37]  No.
[01:02:38]  It's true, though.
[01:02:39]  I mean, the fact that there are people that can sit down and can intuitively understand engineering and design.
[01:02:48]  And build things like, you know, guys working on quantum computing right now.
[01:02:53]  I don't even understand the terms that you need to understand to get even the concept.
[01:02:59]  And there are people that God made and He gave them minds that they do what is the glory of kings, which is to search out the mysteries that God has hidden in the world.
[01:03:09]  And so it's like egalitarianism just wants to make this big gray homogenous lump out of everything.
[01:03:16]  And the prop, one argument against it isn't just theological, it's just, well, that's boring.
[01:03:21]  It's the argument from boringness.
[01:03:24]  And God didn't make a boring world.
[01:03:26]  God made it because God himself is interesting.
[01:03:29]  God made an interesting world.
[01:03:30]  Yeah.
[01:03:30]  And he, the creator, maintains the rights, like the master of a house, the owner, he maintains the rights to be generous with what he has and to give it to one.
[01:03:41]  And I always, you know, the parable, like you said, that, you know, the one talent, two talents, five, you know, and the two talent guy doubles to four and the five doubles to 10.

=== Rejecting Boring Egalitarianism (03:46) ===

[01:03:49]  And, you know, but the one, he buries it, you know, in the sand, he hides it.
[01:03:53]  And, you know, I.
[01:03:55]  I always thought, I think a lot of Christians think that that's an expression of what's coming across is he's fearful.
[01:04:01]  He was driven by fear, and that's why he buried it.
[01:04:04]  Whereas I would say that he was driven by hatred of the master because he didn't think the master was fair.
[01:04:09]  So, because ultimately, so when he says the master returns and he's like, What have you done?
[01:04:14]  What fruit have you produced?
[01:04:16]  And he says, Well, I hid the talent that you gave me because, and what he's ultimately saying, what he's implying is because you gave me so little.
[01:04:25]  You gave me such a small investment that if I was to try to invest this in the markets and do this and that, it was so little that I probably would have lost it.
[01:04:35]  That's what he's saying.
[01:04:37]  But beyond that, he says, I knew you to be a hard master, reaping where you did not sow.
[01:04:44]  And the master responds by saying, If you knew me to be like that, this is what you would have done.
[01:04:50]  You would have at least, so you're saying it's not hatred, it's just fear, and it's really my fault because I gave you too little.
[01:04:57]  And I'm also not only was I stingy and gave you too little, but I'm also unjust.
[01:05:02]  I try to reap where I don't sow.
[01:05:05]  And so, what the way he's responding is he's saying, okay, I'll accept your premise and I'm going to prove that you're a liar.
[01:05:14]  If your premise was true, this is how somebody who actually believes that would have behaved.
[01:05:20]  You would have at least invested with the bankers so that I might receive interest.
[01:05:24]  So, you buried my talent not because you were afraid.
[01:05:29]  Because I gave you too little.
[01:05:30]  You buried my talent because you didn't want me to get a single dime of return because you hate me.
[01:05:35]  And you hate me because your two peers over here, I gave them more.
[01:05:40]  And you didn't like that.
[01:05:42]  And so I think that's what, because it's like you knew me to be, we look at the master's response.
[01:05:47]  Well, if you knew me to be a man like this, then this is what, and we look at it almost like if we don't read carefully, we look at it as like Jesus is actually affirming his view of the master.
[01:05:57]  And that's not what's happening because his view is you reap where you do not sow.
[01:06:01]  And we know that.
[01:06:02]  God doesn't affirm that view because where has God not sown?
[01:06:05]  God never reaps where he doesn't sow.
[01:06:07]  God sowed everything.
[01:06:08]  He created everything that exists, it is his doing.
[01:06:11]  And so he has rights.
[01:06:14]  He has king rights to reap from anywhere and anyone at any time because it's all his doing.
[01:06:22]  It all came from him.
[01:06:24]  Every good and perfect gift comes from him.
[01:06:25]  He created Ex nihilo.
[01:06:26]  So, even when all we ever do is we cultivate, we steward, and we multiply resources.
[01:06:32]  And in that sense, we are creators and the lowercase c kind of is it.
[01:06:35]  But God's the one who provides all the materials, God's the one who created the cosmos and the world that we.
[01:06:42]  Live in.
[01:06:42]  And so, in that sense, he is the original investor.
[01:06:46]  He has rights to reap from everyone.
[01:06:51]  And so, anyway, so even with that, and the last thing I'll say on that, a talent, part of it is we don't understand the culture and how much a talent was.
[01:06:58]  It doesn't say if it was a talent of silver or bronze or gold, but if it was a talent of gold, it would be in our dollars, I think the equivalent of about two plus billion dollars if it was a talent of gold.
[01:07:12]  Even if it was silver, it still would be, you know, like $50 million.
[01:07:17]  And so, you know, the point is like he gave him, it was massive.
[01:07:22]  It was a lot of resources.
[01:07:24]  And so that reading of the text saying, oh, he was just, he was given so little, you know, and he was fearful, he didn't want to make a bet, like it's just not an accurate reading of the text.
[01:07:33]  So, all right.
[01:07:35]  Any other thoughts you guys got?

=== Understanding Dispensational Discontinuity (11:50) ===

[01:07:36]  If not, can somebody, I think the last one that I'd really like to do is can one of you guys just describe, define dispensationalism?
[01:07:45]  I hate to interrupt.
[01:07:46]  I've got to jump off for the next meeting.
[01:07:49]  That's fine.
[01:07:49]  You guys are more than good to go on, Joel.
[01:07:52]  We'll take it.
[01:07:53]  Thank you much.
[01:07:54]  Thanks, Eric.
[01:07:54]  We'll roll.
[01:07:55]  See you, Eric.
[01:07:56]  Yeah, Brian or Dan, you want to just knock out dispensationalism?
[01:07:59]  We'll talk about that and then call it a day.
[01:08:01]  You know, I think I'll let Brian define dispensationalism.
[01:08:04]  I mean, he taught a college class on dispensationalism.
[01:08:08]  So I think he's the preeminent expert on this subject.
[01:08:12]  That was when I was a dispensationalist as well.
[01:08:15]  When I, you know, obviously, like many of us, I grew up.
[01:08:18]  In a dispensationalist assumed environment, you know, I read all the Walverd commentaries on Daniel and Revelation and, you know, the whole nine yards.
[01:08:29]  So, dispensationalism, some of the core tenets, or I guess the first thing to understand about dispensationalism is it's a whole Bible theology.
[01:08:39]  It's a way of attempting to understand how the whole story of the scriptures fits together.
[01:08:44]  How do Israel, the promises, the land relate to Christ, relate to the church?
[01:08:49]  It's like covenant theology.
[01:08:51]  Or New Covenant theology, or some of these other systems.
[01:08:55]  It's trying to establish this meta narrative or this great, grand, coherent understanding of all of Scripture.
[01:09:03]  And so it basically answers that question.
[01:09:06]  First, it's very recent, it finds its roots in the 19th century.
[01:09:10]  So, very, very recent.
[01:09:12]  But it essentially tries to answer that question by dividing God's story that he's telling into different dispensations.
[01:09:20]  And there's no real agreement on how many or Where the delineations are.
[01:09:25]  But the way that I heard, like, for example, David Guzik of Calvary Chapel describe it is that each of these dispensations was essentially God governing his household in a certain way.
[01:09:38]  And that each dispensation was governed differently.
[01:09:42]  So you have the Age of Innocence, you have different ages that go through.
[01:09:46]  And then what that gives you is a story of a lot of discontinuity.
[01:09:51]  So dispensationalism is marked by discontinuity, where God changes how he's governing his household.
[01:09:56]  At different steps.
[01:09:57]  He has different rules for different people.
[01:10:00]  Israel are his special people that he's made special promises to, that he's given them the land.
[01:10:06]  A lot of dispensational premillennialism is founded on the idea that those promises were not fulfilled in the Old Testament period.
[01:10:15]  The land promises even weren't fulfilled.
[01:10:18]  And so those are waiting for a future fulfillment because when Christ came, the idea is that Israel rejected their king.
[01:10:26]  And so what God did is he hit pause on the fulfillment of all of his promises and he turned aside for a time to a different people and a different plan.
[01:10:36]  And that's the Gentiles and the church.
[01:10:38]  So the church are a different people.
[01:10:40]  From Israel.
[01:10:41]  They have different promises.
[01:10:43]  They have a whole lot of different managing of the household, and that's the age we live in.
[01:10:49]  But that at the end, God is going to restart his plan for Israel.
[01:10:55]  He's going to return to his plan for Israel.
[01:10:57]  There'll be a great tribulation, a rapture of the church, remove the church from the world before that so that he can turn back to Israel.
[01:11:04]  He'll save a lot of Israel through this tribulation period.
[01:11:07]  Then Christ will return physically to the earth and he will establish the Davidic kingdom again.
[01:11:14]  And he will physically rule from Israel from Mount Zion for a thousand, literally a thousand years.
[01:11:19]  And that's when he will fulfill all of these great Old Testament promises before there's a final rebellion and an end period in which Christ will make a final end of evil, cast Satan into hell.
[01:11:31]  He'd been bound during this thousand year period and he'll return.
[01:11:35]  He'll then, you know, usher in the new heavens and the new earth, the eternal state and the great white throne judgment.
[01:11:42]  The dead will be raised.
[01:11:43]  That's when death will die.
[01:11:45]  So, You know, a lot of the differences between that reading of scripture and, for example, a covenant theological reading of scripture, whether baptistic or pedo baptistic, would really come down to that difference of continuity, discontinuity.
[01:12:01]  And, you know, so a lot of the differences that you'll find when you're talking to dispensationalists will be things like, you know, do you believe that the promises to Israel are given to the church in some meaningful way?
[01:12:15]  The promises and patterns of blessing and cursing and a lot of these things.
[01:12:18]  Dispensationalists have to say no.
[01:12:21]  Those aren't for you in the same way.
[01:12:23]  Those are for Israel.
[01:12:24]  Because they're expecting at any time for this cataclysmic great tribulation to happen, they don't really believe that the church age is the age where we're going to see the fulfillment of these promises in any sense.
[01:12:39]  Christ reigning from sea to sea to the rivers to the end of the earth.
[01:12:42]  They don't see that as being about this time in history.
[01:12:46]  So if you go to a dispensationalist and you say, Christ is reigning as king over all of the earth, they'll say, not yet.
[01:12:53]  You know, not yet.
[01:12:53]  He will.
[01:12:54]  And he's reigning in heaven right now.
[01:12:56]  And they might even say something similar to the amillennial.
[01:12:59]  He has spiritual authority, but he's not aiming to fulfill those promises right now.
[01:13:03]  That's happening in the future.
[01:13:05]  So that discontinuity does introduce quite a few problems.
[01:13:09]  I'm trying to be charitable to the dispensationalists and not just dunk on them, but it does lead to a lot of issues with legacy, with building, expecting long futures still to happen.
[01:13:20]  There's a lot of expectation of the rapture of the church at any moment.
[01:13:24]  So you have a lot of newspaper exegesis associated.
[01:13:27]  Over the last 50 years with dispensationalism, there's a handbasket of problems that really come back to that discontinuity idea, I think.
[01:13:35]  Yep, I completely, that was super helpful.
[01:13:36]  Thank you.
[01:13:36]  I completely agree.
[01:13:38]  It seems like the pre, you know, a dispensational premillennial would say, like, so we would say already not yet.
[01:13:45]  We would agree with that.
[01:13:47]  Something is happening.
[01:13:48]  The leaven is actually in the dough, it's doing something.
[01:13:50]  It's, you know, the mustard seed is planted and it's growing.
[01:13:55]  Something is happening.
[01:13:55]  And so the mountain is growing, you know, all these different things.
[01:13:58]  And we would look at, you know, part of what I would reject, Kenneth Gentry talks about this, but, you know, with the dispensational premillennial, you know, secret rapture, right?
[01:14:06]  There's nothing that talks about a secret rapture.
[01:14:09]  But, you know, the secret rapture that the world, the whole world somehow misses, but all the Christians see it.
[01:14:15]  It's cataclysmic.
[01:14:17]  It's, I think he uses the word, it's catastrophic and sudden, sudden and catastrophic, rather than what we see as kind of a common theme and pattern throughout scripture is gradualistic.
[01:14:29]  That God, you know, so when you think of, Even creation, right?
[01:14:33]  I would hold to six literal days, you know, because I'm not a heretic, but, you know, so I would hold to, you know, young earth in six literal days, but still, like, God could have done it all at once, but he does it gradually over six days.
[01:14:46]  So, creation, sanctification, right?
[01:14:48]  God is, it's a process, right?
[01:14:50]  And so, like, it's gradual.
[01:14:52]  Revelation.
[01:14:53]  I mean, we have this, you know, this progression of revealing the Messiah.
[01:14:58]  Adam and Eve knew him as the snake crusher, you know, Abraham knows him as the seed.
[01:15:01]  You know, and just further and further, you know, David knows him as a king, you know, of the increase of his government, there'll be no end.
[01:15:07]  So now we see that, you know, the, and then, you know, but then we know him with greater clarity.
[01:15:11]  And God has only saved a people for himself in one way Old Testament saints and New Testament saints, the new covenant being, you know, well, we might disagree there, but, you know, whether it be one covenant of grace, one in substance with two administrations, you know, or whether it be the new covenant, you know, being the only saving covenant, covenant synonymous with the covenant of grace is where I would be at retroactively applied.
[01:15:28]  But the point is that God has only ever saved people one way, but there is a distinction in a sense, That we have greater revelation.
[01:15:34]  Us on this side of the cross, we know Christ to a much fuller degree than David knew Christ.
[01:15:42]  But we were both saved by faith in the same person in Christ.
[01:15:46]  And so all that is gradual, right?
[01:15:48]  But the pre mill dispensation, it's sudden and catastrophic, you know.
[01:15:53]  Whereas post millennialism, it's keeping in the pattern of what God did in the Old Testament, what God did in creation, what God does individually in sanctification.
[01:16:02]  It's keeping with this gradualistic.
[01:16:06]  It's small.
[01:16:07]  It starts small.
[01:16:08]  It grows slowly, but it becomes significant.
[01:16:11]  It's dominant.
[01:16:11]  Yeah.
[01:16:12]  You can see this in Daniel with Nebuchadnezzar's statue representing kingdoms that will be destroyed by a small stone that then grows into a mountain that swallows a whole earth.
[01:16:22]  Yeah.
[01:16:23]  Jesus' kingdom parables.
[01:16:25]  You know, yeast is not exactly like a speedster, you know, and a mustard seed that is a small seed and it grows to be the biggest tree where birds nest in it and it overshadows everything.
[01:16:35]  So that's even a theme throughout these pictures that God gives us.
[01:16:39]  Of the dominion of Christ over the whole world.
[01:16:41]  So I would agree with that.
[01:16:43]  Yeah.
[01:16:44]  And I think some of the, because a dispensationalist, they hear us talking about this and they say, but there is cataclysmic, immediate, huge judgment language.
[01:16:53]  And we would say, look, the error that's being made, that was fundamentally made in Darby's writings and expanded in the 19th and 20th century with some of these ideas of the future seven year great tribulation, that Daniel's 70th week is, we're still waiting for it.
[01:17:10]  A lot of these ideas.
[01:17:12]  Really, it comes from a failure to read the text literally.
[01:17:15]  Right.
[01:17:16]  Which is funny when you think about it because that's the essence of the dispensationalist hermeneutic a literalistic, historical, grammatical approach, is what they're saying.
[01:17:27]  But the problem is take the Olivet discourse or take the book of Revelation.
[01:17:33]  Both of those sections that deal with this great tribulation coming language are emphatically clear that it is coming upon this generation of Israel that is living at the time that those works were given.
[01:17:47]  I mean, emphatically clear.
[01:17:48]  It is the most clearly literal part of all of those passages.
[01:17:51]  Jesus is on you, Kyagatha's high priest.
[01:17:54]  You will see, right, on you, and you will see the Son of Man coming on the clouds and clouds being judged.
[01:18:00]  And when you see Daniel and you understand that the Son of Man being presented to the Ancient of Days in the heavens as a sign of his judgment, coming judgment upon Israel, when you see that the book of Revelation was not sealed up because these things were soon to take place, and yet the prophecies of Daniel and Daniel 12 were sealed up because they weren't going to happen for 700 years.
[01:18:24]  Well, why would Daniel be sealed up because the time wasn't near?
[01:18:28]  In 700 years, and then Revelation not sealed up because they're near.
[01:18:31]  If we've already had 2,000 years of church history after that, well, it's because they were near.
[01:18:37]  God was going to judge apostate Israel for her covenant breaking, which happened in 70 AD, just as Christ said it would, that not one stone would be left standing on the temple, that the end would come with a flood.
[01:18:51]  In Daniel, that essentially God would come and he would judge his house, he would knock it down because he was building a house no longer of stone.
[01:19:00]  He was building a house of living stones, and no longer would he call the nations to worship at this physical temple.
[01:19:06]  He would send his temple to the nations, the living stones, and he would build a temple that swallows the world out of those living stones.
[01:19:14]  So, I mean, you just have a lot of a failure to read the Bible biblically, to read it apostolically, to read it in its types and shadows and its language and its prophetic imagery.

=== John MacArthur on Pre-Millennialism (06:39) ===

[01:19:27]  You have a failure to take literally what ought to be taken literally in those passages and then take it.
[01:19:32]  And the errors compound on top of that.
[01:19:35]  So, you know, dispensationalism, I love dispensationalist brothers.
[01:19:39]  Again, premillennialists, we've found to be great partners in a lot of work.
[01:19:44]  And not all premill are dispensationalists, but it is an error.
[01:19:49]  And it's an error with compounding implications.
[01:19:52]  Agreed.
[01:19:52]  Yeah, it's a serious error.
[01:19:53]  But same with me.
[01:19:55]  I've found my premill brothers are more willing to fight together and link arms than the all mill.
[01:20:01]  So I would say, like this, you know, the already and not yet that you were mentioning, I would say the Pre-mill, especially the dispensational pre-mill, is they would be not yet, but not yet.
[01:20:11]  No, really, not yet.
[01:20:13]  So they're like not yet, not yet.
[01:20:15]  We're already not yet.
[01:20:16]  And then the all-mill, and especially the two kingdom, radical two kingdom all-mill guys would be already, but not really.
[01:20:23]  So it's like, so you have not yet, not yet, already, and not really, you know, and then we are already and not yet.
[01:20:31]  And that was eye-opening for me.
[01:20:33]  And I want my listeners to hear that post-millennialism, ironically, I think the covenantal rather than dispensational, post millennial rather than pre mill or all mill, that position is, and this is kind of out of character for me because I usually take, you know, the quote unquote extreme position, also known as, you know, the biblically faithful position.
[01:20:52]  But in the case of post millennialism, it's funny that I would say it's the middle position.
[01:20:58]  We think like pre mill, all mill, post mill.
[01:21:00]  But I think more accurately, it's pre mill, all mill, post mill.
[01:21:04]  Post mill is actually, I think, the moderate position.
[01:21:06]  What I mean by that is post mill, A pre-mill and all-mill have nothing in common.
[01:21:11]  So the pre-mill and the all-mill disagree about the nature of Christ's reign.
[01:21:15]  Yeah.
[01:21:15]  Right?
[01:21:15]  One says it's ethereal.
[01:21:17]  All-mill, just ethereal.
[01:21:18]  It's just, you know, magical, mystical, you know, whatever.
[01:21:21]  You know, it's all the pietism kind of stuff.
[01:21:23]  And then the pre-mill is like, no, no, no.
[01:21:24]  This is a kingdom.
[01:21:25]  It's real.
[01:21:25]  It's going to happen.
[01:21:26]  Jesus is actually king.
[01:21:27]  Right?
[01:21:27]  So they disagree over the nature of the kingdom and they disagree over the timing.
[01:21:32]  Right?
[01:21:33]  So the all-mill is like, it's happening right now and don't you worry.
[01:21:37]  It is absolutely impotent.
[01:21:39]  And then, you know, and then do absolutely nothing.
[01:21:42]  Yeah, it does absolutely nothing.
[01:21:44]  It is in full force right now doing nothing.
[01:21:48]  So it's already, but not really.
[01:21:50]  And then the pre mill is, it is serious, but we're in this parenthetical moment of dispensationalism with the church age.
[01:21:58]  And so it's completely on pause.
[01:22:00]  But as soon as God hits play, and it'll probably be, you know, before we finish this episode, it could be any second.
[01:22:05]  Any second.
[01:22:06]  Boom, it's going to be serious.
[01:22:07]  Right?
[01:22:08]  Stuff will happen.
[01:22:09]  Exactly.
[01:22:09]  So they disagree on the nature of the kingdom and the timing of the kingdom.
[01:22:12]  Nature and timing.
[01:22:13]  Post mill is the moderate middle position.
[01:22:15]  We agree with the pre mill in terms of the nature of the kingdom.
[01:22:17]  We're like, yeah, it's real, it's physical, it has practical implications.
[01:22:21]  Jesus is actually king.
[01:22:22]  It's not just a spiritual kingship.
[01:22:24]  It's real.
[01:22:25]  And we agree with the all mill on the timing of the kingdom.
[01:22:29]  Post mill, if you want to be a moderate, be a post mill.
[01:22:32]  Yeah.
[01:22:32]  If you want to be a middle way, middle of the road, not offending anything, just join us in our post millennial moderatism.
[01:22:40]  The post mill folks are really known for being like a moderate, gentle, winsome, nuanced.
[01:22:47]  I think we're winsome.
[01:22:48]  They've won me.
[01:22:49]  Yeah.
[01:22:50]  I think it's the most attractive position.
[01:22:52]  It should be called win none instead of win none.
[01:22:56]  We want to win all.
[01:22:57]  All right.
[01:22:57]  Anyway, so yeah, so I think that that's, you know, so the covenants and, you know, versus dispensationalism and post millennialism versus all mill and pre mill, it matters in the sense of the pietism thing that we were talking about earlier.
[01:23:12]  But what I found, and it sounds like you guys have found the same, that the pre mill guys, even though they're like, okay, we're waiting on God to push play again, what I've noticed is even though they're like, we're not in the kingdom, maybe it's because of that grammatical, historical, literal hermeneutic.
[01:23:27]  They just take the Bible seriously.
[01:23:29]  So they're like, Yeah, the Bible affects how I should vote.
[01:23:32]  The Bible affects, you know, how, you know.
[01:23:35]  So they actually, the pre mill guy, even though they think that in the big picture we're on pause, in their individual lives, they actually believe in practical obedience, practical obedience beyond just the home of the church, but that the Bible actually speaks to other aspects of life with real, tangible, practical obedience.
[01:23:54]  And they just don't think that obedience will be effective.
[01:23:56]  They don't think that it'll be successful, but they still do think that we should obey and Christ calls us to do things.
[01:24:03]  And then the all mill is like, we're in the kingdom.
[01:24:07]  But the all mill is, I think, the bigger problem.
[01:24:09]  Not all of them.
[01:24:10]  I know there's a spectrum of differences in pre mill, all mill, post mill.
[01:24:14]  But, you know, I was in San Diego for a long time.
[01:24:16]  And so I'm right next to Escondido, you know, Westminster and stuff.
[01:24:19]  And that all millennial, two kingdom, radical, two kingdom kind of mindset is just, I think that's the one that's more dangerous.
[01:24:27]  That's the one that lends more towards pietism than like John MacArthur.
[01:24:30]  John MacArthur will do something.
[01:24:32]  Now, I mean, I, you know, he'll especially do something when it affects him personally, right?
[01:24:36]  So, like, 52 years on record that America shouldn't exist because it wasn't submitting to the civil magistrates in England.
[01:24:43]  But then, as soon as his church got closed down, boom, he became a theonomist.
[01:24:46]  So, if I had the gif of the black kids running across the camera like that, that's what I'd play.
[01:24:56]  But my point is John MacArthur, when it came to his front doorstep, this insane tyranny, John MacArthur fought.
[01:25:08]  And he's fought other things for 50 years, to be fair.
[01:25:11]  Because of that little, and in his defense, just like I said, you know, tried to say, I think this is the intention behind Doug Wilson's federal vision.
[01:25:18]  Well, here's the intention, I think, behind John MacArthur's leaky dispensational premillennialism.
[01:25:24]  Give him the benefit of the doubt.
[01:25:25]  I think his intention is 50 years of watching liberal theology ravage the church with sexual ethics and gay mirage and all these kind of things.
[01:25:33]  And he's like, no analytical, typological hermeneutic whatsoever.
[01:25:38]  We just can't open the door.
[01:25:40]  And that I, you know, so to give him the benefit of the doubt, I think that's where his heart is just give me the Bible.
[01:25:45]  And so, but that guy who's just give me the Bible and let's practically obey and do what it says, I got way more in common with him than the other guy who has the analogical, typological, Christological piece in their hermeneutic and can read certain portions of Isaiah actually speaking of Christ without an apostolic New Testament author explicitly saying so, but doesn't want to do anything.

=== Final Thoughts and Closing (00:59) ===

[01:26:06]  That's so true.
[01:26:07]  So, anyways, all right, any final thoughts?
[01:26:10]  I hear my kids are about to come in as a wrecking ball, but any final thoughts?
[01:26:15]  Thanks for having us on.
[01:26:16]  That was great conversation.
[01:26:16]  I learned a lot.
[01:26:17]  I learned a lot.
[01:26:19]  Me too, guys.
[01:26:20]  I've learned a lot of what I'm doing is repeating back to you things that I've learned by listening to.
[01:26:25]  I've listened to some of the episodes.
[01:26:26]  I rarely do this, but I've listened to some of the episodes twice on the Kings Hall podcast.
[01:26:31]  Wow.
[01:26:31]  Thank you.
[01:26:31]  It's fantastic.
[01:26:32]  We're on it.
[01:26:33]  What you guys are doing is awesome.
[01:26:34]  So one of these days, I'd love to get you guys to come out here and maybe we could do a conference together or something like that.
[01:26:39]  Oh, man.
[01:26:40]  What a weekend that would be.
[01:26:42]  That'd be fun.
[01:26:43]  All right.
[01:26:43]  Thank you guys so much.
[01:26:44]  And I hope you guys are listening.
[01:26:45]  We're blessed.
[01:26:47]  Tune in next week for another episode of Theology Apply.
[01:26:49]  Thanks so much for listening.
[01:26:50]  But, real quick, before you go, do us a small favor take a moment and leave us a five star review if you enjoyed the show.
[01:26:58]  This is undoubtedly the best way that you can help us get this biblically faithful content to as many people as possible.
[01:27:05]  Thanks so much.