C.R. Wiley and Pastor Joel Weber analyze why children of believers abandon the faith, linking apostasy to a lack of gospel saturation and criticizing celebrity pastors like Abraham Piper for hypocrisy. They argue biblical masculinity requires physical labor to ground men in reality, rejecting progressive ideologies that ignore costs. The discussion highlights the necessity for young ministers to mentor outside traditional structures and warns against risk-averse "LARPing" men who lack actual assets. Ultimately, they contend that true manhood involves calculated financial risks to provide for families, contrasting this with superficial edginess prevalent in modern manosphere culture. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: CohereLabs/cohere-transcribe-03-2026, WAV2VEC2_ASR_BASE_960H, sat-12l-sm, script v26.04.01, and large-v3-turbo
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Working Hands Build Spiritual Maturity00:02:33
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Why do so many Christians today have grown children who have gone apostate, who have left the church, who have abandoned the Christian faith?
This is one of the questions that I address with my special guest, C.R. Wiley, on today's episode of Theology Applied.
We deal with a host of other questions, but all of them fall under the banner of one primary subject, and that is.
Biblical masculinity and Christian fatherhood.
If that's your interest, then tune in now.
Applying God's Word to every aspect of life.
This is Theology Applied.
All right, so welcome to another episode of Theology Applied.
I'm your host, Pastor Joel Weber with Right Response Ministries.
And in this episode, I'm very privileged to have as a special guest, CR Wiley, or Chris Wiley, returning now, I believe, for the second time.
We talked about His book on Tom Bombadil from the Lord of the Rings series.
The first time he came on, today we're going to be talking about biblical manhood, households, fatherhood, young men in pastoral ministry, the whole nine yards.
So, Chris, welcome to the show.
Well, thanks for having me back, Joel.
It's great to be with you.
Absolutely.
All right.
Well, let's go ahead and dive right in.
The first question that I wanted to ask you is you know, you and I are both mutual friends of Michael Foster.
And so I talked to him briefly before we recorded and said, hey, if I have Chris Wiley for an hour, you know, what are some You know, top five questions that would be great to ask him that he's really good on.
And he said as his first suggestion that I should ask you about how working with your hands produces spiritual maturity in men.
Can you draw a correlation for us?
How does working with your hands, physical labor, draw out spiritual maturity or form spiritual maturity in men?
Yeah, that's a favorite topic of mine.
Why Blue Collar Workers Are Conservative00:04:51
So I think to put this in a kind of New Testament framework, it's important for us to remember that the Apostle Paul.
worked with his hands.
So he was a tent maker and it was perfect trade for him if you consider life on the road.
I imagine that he arrived at a tent city outside of some metropolis like Ephesus or Philippi and set up his tent and then he had his wares with him and did business.
And I've often sort of playfully speculated about Paul's negotiating skills because I think a lot of Christians are uncomfortable. with the old sort of barter and approach to doing business.
I imagine Paul was good.
First of all, he was Jewish.
The old joke about how Jews are good at that.
But did he just pay asking price?
I doubt it.
I imagine he made an offer and there was a back and forth like you normally see in that kind of thing, like when you're buying a car or whatever.
But I also think he, because he worked with his hands, he could identify with a lot of guys who did work with their hands.
Furthermore, he was a world-class intellectual.
So that's an interesting combination of things that we don't normally see today, but you saw Paul.
Paul could hold it all together.
He could relate to the blue-collar guy because he worked with his hands.
He could relate to the intellectuals because he worked with his mind.
He spanned the divide.
But when you work with your hands, you're sort of interacting with not just a set of ideas, but a physical reality that in certain ways shapes the way you think about the world.
you realize that the world doesn't just do what you think it should.
You're interacting with something that provides you with some resistance, and then that resistance becomes the means by which your own sort of inner resources are developed and strengthened.
So there is wisdom that is developed when you're working with the physical world, and that wisdom is informed by, okay, there's a structure here that's kind of embedded into the nature of things.
Generally speaking, blue-collar guys don't do stupid stuff like we see today on social media with transitioning and all that kind of nice.
Because they deal with the physical world and they know that there are just some givens.
The world is the way it is.
But when you work just with words and with ideas, you can fall into the trap of thinking that the world is made of Play-Doh and it can just be shaped into any form that you decide you would like to see it take.
So there's that part of it.
But there's also, as you're developing, you know, this appreciation for the world as it is, the resources that you bring to it, sometimes, you know, what's called for is just more practice, more discipline, more self-control, particularly when maybe things don't go your way and you, you know, smash your finger and lose a fingernail.
That happened to me one time.
I was in the middle of the woods working on a cabin.
I was building for somebody.
And, you know, when you're out there all by yourself and that sort of thing happens, you know, you're like wow, that hurt.
And there is nobody around to help me.
But there are those sorts of things.
But I think when you master a set of skills, it gives you a kind of quiet confidence.
So there's a marvelous author that I've enjoyed over the years.
His name is Matthew B. Crawford.
He wrote a book entitled Shop Classes Soulcraft.
And when he wrote that book, I don't think he was a believer, but I've been told that he is one now.
So over the course of his professional life, He's gone from, I think, probably just a kind of, well, not atheism, but maybe agnosticism to an actual Christian confession.
But when he wrote that book, he was reflecting upon his childhood as a kind of a child of hippies.
Both his parents taught at Berkeley in California.
And he kind of quips, you know, how do you rebel when your parents are hippies?
He says, what you do is you subscribe to Soldier or Fortune magazine and you start working with your hands.
And that's what he did.
But what he notes is that when you have mastered some sort of trade skills, you don't need to brag.
You just have a kind of quiet, easygoing confidence.
Finding Mentors Who Understand Life00:03:53
You can do things.
He was an electrician as well as a motorcycle mechanic.
When you wire the room and you flip the switch, the lights on.
You don't need to brag.
You just did something that very few people can do.
And because you can do things that other people value, your confidence has a basis.
And I'm not talking about pride.
I'm just talking about the kind of confidence that we would want to see any man possess.
You've got a quiet confidence that makes you, you know, puts you in a position where you don't need to brag.
You can just do stuff.
And it also increases your value in the eyes of others.
So people say, well, we can bring over Joel.
He knows that.
Do that he can take care of that problem, that kind of thing.
So I think, for those reasons, working with your hands is valuable for your spiritual development, right?
Yeah, that makes a lot of sense.
It also makes sense why I think so many blue collar you know individuals who do work with their hands are conservative and not, you know, and not progressive in the sense that conservatives think in terms of, you know, cost and liberties.
They think in terms well, they're just, they're realist, whereas a lot of Liberals these days, you know, progressive liberals tend to be ideologues.
They think, you know, only in terms of solutions, you know, hey, there's poverty, and so we should do universal income, universal housing, universal this.
You know, that's all great.
That's like me saying there's cancer, we should cure it.
You know, great, great idea.
Nobody's ever thought of that, you know, but the question is how, how in the world, the real world that we actually live in, that God designed and that God set up the framework and rules for, how is that actually accomplished?
How is it accomplished efficiently?
Cost effectively, ethically, you know, all those different things.
That was the same kind of idealism that we saw during COVID, where, you know, very early on, you could see who the ideologues were, the progressives, that saying, you know, any cost is worth it just to save one life.
And it's like, well, you know, your car in your driveway exposes your hypocrisy.
I mean, if that's really our standard, then let's get rid of roads, let's get rid of cars, let's get, you know, because.
We have, I think it's, I forget the exact statistic, but I think it's 30 or 35,000 deaths that occur in America annually because of motorized vehicles.
And in that case, it's not just the potential of killing yourself, but every time you get on the street, you have, behind the wheel, you have the potential of killing someone else.
And so, yeah, so that's just not the way that we think.
And that's not just an American novelty, but all of humanity has always thought in the terms of.
Costs and benefits and liberties.
Is it worth having millions of people's straws dissolve in their drink at a restaurant in order to fight the sun monster, to lower the temperature one degree over the course of the next 10,000 years?
You have to think about those things.
And so, anyways, all that being said, it seems like people who work with their hands have to work in God's world the way that He made it.
They can't afford to be ideologues.
They have to be realist, which seems to draw the connection, the correlation to why, when it comes to their politics and political civil expressions of their worldview, it tends to be more conservative because conservatives think in terms of cost.
So, all that being said, I wanted to move on and deal with, well, let's talk about pastors for a little bit.
Family Worship Avoids Shaming Dad00:07:00
So, I'm a young minister.
I'm 36 years old, pastoring my second church now.
I pastored in Southern California for a while, I handed it over, I moved to Texas.
This is where I was born and raised.
My family was here, my parents, and then also my wife's family.
She was born and raised in Southern California, but eight years before we made the move, her parents made the move to Texas.
And so now we've got both sides of the family, all within actually about 15 miles, which is awesome for our children to have both sets of grandparents.
So it's been a huge blessing.
And so now I'm planting another church by God's grace called Covenant Bible Church north of Austin, Texas, in Georgetown, Texas.
And it's been great, but there are plenty of lessons that I'm sure I still have to learn.
I've been able to avoid plenty of pitfalls that I made.
In my first rodeo, and by God's grace, this second endeavor, there haven't been, at least yet, many pitfalls.
But here's the question for me and for any other young man who's thinking about going into ministry or perhaps already is in formal vocational ministry what are some of the biggest deficiencies that you see both in young men and young ministers?
Well, I think we've already touched on it a little bit.
A lot of young guys have been.
Shaped in terms of their expectations for ministry by either very, I guess, high profile ministers who've published lots of books, etc., or their seminary professors who have not, you know,
personally been involved in the ministry in most cases, and those who have.
It was years ago.
So there's a lack of sort of connection I think a lot of these guys have with some really great people that would be helpful to them in terms of their growth and development and an ability to appreciate and connect with men in particular.
So I think that's one of the reasons why some of the young guys find it difficult to relate to say, for example, blue collar guys we just had a little, you know, talk a little bit about that but also guys who are just actually entrepreneurs, maybe business guys there.
These guys these, a lot of these young guys seem to be most comfortable with kind of mid-level management types in corporate America and that's because they have grown up in highly structured environments or developed in ministry in highly structured environments, and those folks are in highly structured environments and when you're in those highly structured environments You don't take risks the way that, say, other people do.
You don't deal with trade-offs like we just talked about in terms of, okay, if we do this, we can't do that.
If we pursue that course of action, that means that we're not going to be able to maybe pull off some other things we'd like to do.
So I guess just in terms of the practical aspects of life and ministry, and being able to relate to guys, they're at a loss.
So let me give you an example of a guy who was really helpful to me early in my ministry, who was a mentor to me.
He was a former Fortune 500 executive, but he was also an entrepreneur that had started a high-tech firm in Massachusetts.
And he was probably the most, I think, capable person I've ever met when it came to working with people and organizations.
He was a bureaucracy buster.
I mean, he was the sort of guy that was able to get things done and really remarkable things in situations where most folks would just throw up their hands and say, well, you just have to kind of live with that.
Let me give you an example.
So his name was John Bowen.
He's still alive.
He's getting up there in years.
But when I was with him, he was dealing with an insurance claim.
So this was a personal matter.
And he was having a hard time getting what he wanted from prudential insurance.
What he did is he wrote a letter, and on the letter, he addressed it to the person authorized to open this.
Now, what do you think happened when that letter arrived at Prudential Insurance?
It got pushed up the chain of command all the way to the top.
And when the guy opened the letter, he called my friend John, and he was laughing.
This was a senior vice president at Prudential Insurance.
He says, you got me.
What do you want?
Now, what did John know and what did he teach me in that moment?
John understood that fear is the primary motivator in any bureaucracy.
Basically, people don't want to take, you know, sort of stick out, stand out, make a stupid mistake and be punished for it.
So if you're going to get things done when you're working in a bureaucracy, you need to know, okay, there are a lot of people here who are just showing up every day and want to keep their heads down.
You're not going to get much help from those folks.
What you want is somebody with the kind of confidence that can make a call and has the authority to get things done.
So how do you find that person?
And sometimes that person is not where you think.
Maybe that person is at the top, maybe not.
But that kind of savvy, that kind of organizational savvy is the sort of thing that I was able to see in John.
And that had nothing to do with, you know, the sort of the high profile ministry of a person or with, you know, seminary professors, that kind of thing.
He understood how life works, he understood how people work.
Yep, that was it.
So, what I think a lot of young guys need to do is they need to find mentors who are good at that stuff because that's going to make a huge difference in your ministry if you understand how life works, how people think, that kind of stuff.
What do you think about a young pastor being mentored?
Because it sounds like what you're saying, and It doesn't sound like a bad idea, but just being mentored by an older man who's not actually in vocational ministry and perhaps never was, but who's godly and strong in the faith.
Leaving Denominations That Go Down Wrong Roads00:14:26
But he's a businessman, maybe he owns his own business.
Or, you know, because I there are people that I've thought, you know, one of the biggest credentials that I look for these days, I've finally gotten to the point where, you know, I'm like, man, I feel like that this and this kind of leads into another question I want to ask you, but I feel like one of the strongest credentials that I see in a man.
Is if he has grown children who haven't apostatized and left the faith.
Because a lot of the guys that you were describing, we didn't name any, but a lot of the guys that you were describing as high profile Christian celebrity pastors who have published many books or have large churches, who love the seats of honor and the Christian conference circuits, and those kinds of things.
I mean, it's a remarkable statistic of how many of them have at least one, if not more, apostate grown children.
Who have abandoned the faith are not even a member in a local church, do not attend a local church, and some of them to the point where they are publicly antagonistic against the Christian faith on social media or in some public capacity.
And this has gotten to the point where I don't even think we really blush at it any longer.
We've come to expect it.
It's like so and so is a great pastor, and of course, two of his five children hate Christ.
But, you know, what you gonna do?
Right.
And so, anyways, I say all that to say, I feel like Doug Wilson is probably the guy that I heard this from, but he said, you know, the strongest credentials that you have in terms of accolades are the laughter around your dinner table.
You know, like that there's actually warmth and love and intimacy, love for the family, honor for the father, the head of the household, but most importantly, devotion and love for Christ with every member of the household.
Those children, if you have five children, if you have 10 children, Your wife loving you and being happy.
I think of Solomon, right?
That's like one of the things that the Queen of Sheba is like, it's not just the gardens and the temple and the palace and all the gold and the treasures, but it's she marvels at the fact that the lowest in his kingdom, in the hierarchy, the servants are happy.
Happy are your servants.
And when a man has a happy wife and happy children, and they're happy with their dad and they're happy also in the Lord, then if that guy's not a pastor, he's never published a book, I just feel like the He's got some secret sauce, and I'd like to know what's going on there.
Yeah, yeah, I think that's a great observation.
And I know Doug, I've been at his table, I know his kids, I know his grandkids, and he's the real deal.
I mean, the laughter he references there, I've heard it.
Right.
So, but, and I'm blessed in that regard as well.
I have three grown kids, they're all believers, doing really well.
I think, Yeah, and I've been in the homes of high-profile ministers whose kids are not where we'd like to see them.
And I've sensed the kind of the strain and the awkwardness of that.
I've seen that firsthand.
So anyway, to your point, what is the secret sauce?
I think it's one of those things where there are a number of ingredients.
Kind of delineating all of those is not something I've done at this to this point, but there are a few things that come come to mind.
I think it's really important for a father in particular to have, as you noted, a really good relationship with his wife.
That goes a long way in terms of how the kids are raised.
There obviously needs to be a lot of agreement on, you know, the kind of nuts and bolts of raising the kids.
There has to be wisdom in terms of how a father Works with his wife and how a father or a husband maybe corrects his wife.
So, for example, in our household, there were times where I thought maybe my wife's approach to a particular thing was not the best approach.
I didn't say it at that moment in front of the kids.
That was a conversation that occurred later at night when we were laying next to each other in bed and talking about the day.
In other words, you don't make your wife look bad in front of the kids, and your wife doesn't make you look bad in front of the kids.
There's a sense in which there's a kind of an agreement that you've got to share that, you know, we're here to reinforce each other's authority and support each other.
That's huge.
But I also think there has to be a good and open relationship with your kids as well as you can develop.
So in my case, I would take the kids out for one-on-ones at least once a month for breakfast.
It was just the time for that child and me to talk about everything.
And over the years, the conversations became deeper and more significant.
When the kids are small, You know, it's just like, how do you like your pancakes?
That kind of stuff.
You know, it's just about having, enjoying, you know, being in each other's presence and maybe, you know, maybe asking, you know, how things are going and learning a little bit about, you know, the child's perspective on things.
But then, you know, as time passes, you're getting into some pretty heavy stuff, you know, vocational choices, what to look for in a spouse, those kinds of things.
And, you know, even talking about perspective.
Uh, you know, mates and so forth.
Uh, I have.
I i'm of the conviction that it's a father's responsibility not only to order his own household but to help his children establish theirs.
So, you know really, you know, in the middle teen years, I would uh spend a lot of time when we when I was driving them around or just, you know, with these monthly get-togethers, or even at the dinner table talk about this stuff and uh.
So consequently, that my kids had a lot of coaching with regard to what to look forward to mating, but also what to what they would need to be so that they could be a good husband or wife themselves as their homes were established.
And when you have that kind of openness with your kids to talk about the full range of things that they're engaged in in life, you want to get at the real, what's really on their minds.
And there are ways to go about doing that.
But if you have that kind of relationship with your kids, then I think it goes a long way toward connecting faith and life, because obviously this is also a big part of the conversation.
What does the lord think, what are the standards?
We see in scripture, that kind of stuff, and of course then you know you're the onus is on you to live up to it, and I think this is another thing to also keep in mind.
Sometimes I see guys um, who seem to operate with the with the notion that they can never admit when they're wrong because it'll undermine their authority.
Actually, that's one of the quickest ways to undermine your authority.
If everybody in the room knows you're wrong and you're pretending you're not and you're requiring them to go along with you, that actually undermines your authority.
But if you're quick to say, hey, in that particular instance, I made a bad call, please forgive me, what that demonstrates to your kids is that there's a higher standard than dad and that dad is trying to live up to that.
Now, if you make a habit of doing stupid things, then of course that will harm you in the long run.
But if your kids see that you're applying yourself and you're working hard to live up to the standard that you are promoting with them, then they'll respect that.
Yeah, that's really good.
Yeah, demonstrating, you know, my wife and I have talked about it in terms of the example we want to set for our children.
We want to demonstrate righteousness.
And when we fail to do that, we want to demonstrate repentance.
Right.
And actually, I'm a big fan of repentance, you know, being in word and deed, mere course correction in deed, in the realm of action, where, you know, you're doing something in terms of, you know, The outflow of your position, your conviction, your theological position.
It's like, I believe this, I'm doing this.
So, in the realm of actions, I'm doing one thing.
And then, in God's providence, some kind of circumstance occurs to where that prior theological conviction is pressed and tested, and you realize it actually doesn't hold up.
This is not a full orbed, robust, it's not biblical.
It doesn't work.
And it only appeared to work for a short time because of these circumstantial elements, but it's actually not objectively true.
And so, then you do something else.
And that's good.
You should change courses.
But sometimes, you know, guys will change courses and it's so obvious.
Like what you said, everybody in the room knows you're wrong, but you're requiring them to go along with the, you know, the latest narrative.
Right, exactly.
You're just, it's a show and you're requiring them to go along with the show, even though everybody knows it's a show.
And so being able to add, you know, repentance in word, To our repentance, indeed, to actually be able to say, Dad was wrong.
I got this one wrong.
And I feel like there's been a lot of opportunities with that outside of just households, but on the public stage for the evangelical church, especially in the last three years, because it's not like just for three years now we've had people being progressive and people who are compromising on our truth.
That's been going on for a very long time.
But it did seem as though it got.
expedited, right?
There was a catalyst in the equation and apostasy and compromise and those kinds of things, you know, seemed to heat up rapidly.
And in God's, you know, mercy, that kind of ripped back the veil.
We were able to see some things as they really were.
And it's like all of us were given this option in the mercy of God of whether or not we're going to repent, you know, and all of us needed to repent for different things and all of us in different degrees because not everybody was equally wrong.
But for me, there were a lot of things that I just had never considered before.
That all of a sudden, okay, I've got to actually think about what is my political theology?
What is God's role for the civil magistrate?
What is his role?
Is Caesar autonomous?
Or is he a deacon of God?
Is Romans 13 prescriptive for Christians to submit to Caesar no matter what he says?
Or is it descriptive about what the proper Caesar should look like?
And that actually, Has just as much, if not more, to say about Caesar's submission to the authority above him, namely God, than just our submission to it.
And a lot of guys doubled down in their foolish prior views.
And then some guys course corrected and did something in terms of the realm of action that directly contradicted with their actions 15 minutes prior, but never said in terms of repentance in word, oh, hey, just so that you guys don't all feel like I'm treating you like you're stupid.
It might be valuable to point out.
So I said this and was doing this, and that was like last Thursday.
And now, you know, I'm doing this, which is directly opposite.
And I just want to go ahead and go on the record, not just in course correcting in the realm of actions, but also repentance in the realm of words and say, yeah, this directly contradicts that.
And the reason for this change is because I was wrong, which is not that crazy, you know, especially for older ministers who have been right.
For decades, about so many things.
You can afford, like what you're saying, if you're wrong every other week about something significant, then yeah, you're going to lose credibility.
But for a guy who's in a position of authority with longevity from time to time, just a few times to publicly admit that he's wrong, that doesn't soil his perfect record.
That adds, if anything, it bolsters and strengthens his credibility with those who are following him.
So anyways, all that being said, I think, yeah, modeling righteousness for our children and when we fail, modeling repentance.
I have one other thought, but do you have anything that you wanted to respond with to that?
Well, I think that was great.
I liked your comments.
I agree with you completely.
Cool.
The only other thought that I had, and this, you know, I've done a video on this, so it's not like I'm not dropping a bomb that I haven't dropped before.
And so I am going to actually say the name here.
And I've said the name before, but I, you know, I think about Abraham Piper and John Piper.
And Abraham Piper, you know, grown son, he's not under John Piper's roof.
I think he's like, I think he's in his 40s at this point.
So it's not even that he's 22 years old, you know, or.
He's been out of John Piper's home for quite a while.
But it's not just that he's gone apostate and that he's left the church, as you know, and pretty much all of our listeners.
I think he's got like 800,000 or something, hundreds of thousands of followers on TikTok and other social media, but I think that's a big one is TikTok.
And a lot of his videos, not all of them, but a lot of them are just blatantly blaspheming Christ.
So it's not just I left the faith and that's what dad did and mom did and I don't do that.
And you kind of keep your head down, you're quiet about it because you don't want to.
Bring shame to your father, right?
You don't love Jesus, you don't believe in Jesus, but you still love dad and you don't want to shame dad.
Abraham doesn't care about that.
He's fine shaming dad, shaming Christ.
Asking for Reviews and Support00:10:54
And so go ahead, go ahead.
No, yeah, and there's another element to this, and I think Abraham is dishonest because he's built his following on being the son of John Piper.
100%.
So it's not as though he's this brilliant guy who's got just tremendous insights that no one else has.
It's because he is apostate and a disappointment to his father and a rebuke in a sense that other people who, for whatever reason, have decided to apostatize, or maybe they're just people who follow him because it's kind of the drama of it.
But yeah, I don't respect that and I don't respect him.
He owes his father a great deal, and this is how he has.
This is the nature of his return for what he owes his father and his mother.
And it's contemptible.
Yep, I agree.
It's shameful.
But in addition to that, and this is where you and I would differ some, and it matters.
But you're Westminster.
I'm 1689, would be my reformed confession that I would hold to.
But I get in trouble with my 1689 friends all the time because they say I'm too Presbyterian.
You know, and so I would have some different ways of expressing covenant theology.
But I believe, you know, so I would hold as much as a Baptist can, I would hold to covenant succession.
I do believe that Christians should have an eager expectation that their children would succeed them in the faith by covenant, not nature, but covenant nurture.
And because unconditional election, which you and I both hold to, is not synonymous with arbitrary election.
God works through means, and God's predestinated ends are never severed from those predestinated means.
And so, if a child grows up in a home with a faithful mother and father who are saturating that child in the truths of God's word, both law and gospel, and then bringing that child to a true biblical evangelical church that also is going to submerse them in the ordinary means of grace, Lord's day after Lord's day after Lord's day, that kind of faithful parenting doesn't work the God of the universe into our debt to where he owes us the salvation of our children.
And so that it's not a 100% guarantee, but we can get a good idea, not a definitive idea, but a good idea of what God's predestinated ends might be by looking at the same grace that brings about salvation.
That grace is present in the means by which the salvation comes about.
And so if God is day after day, year after year, decade after decade, supplying the necessary grace for me and my wife to raise our children in the fear and admonition of the Lord.
And that's from their education and what school they go to, the whole nine yards.
And God supplies that grace daily for 18 years.
I'm expecting, even as a Baptist, I'm saying, yeah, my kid's going to be saved.
Not because God owes it to me, because it was all grace, but because God's not schizophrenic, because God's not arbitrary.
Because, yes, there are some people who hear the gospel again and again and again, and God sends out his word, it never returns void.
Sometimes God sends out his word and submerses someone in his word only to further justify him to the praise of his glorious justice.
Not always grace, Ephesians 1, but to the praise of his glorious justice that God might be further justified, as it were, in his just condemnation of that individual who hardened their heart not one time but thousands.
And so that is possible, but I don't see that within church history.
I don't see that within even scripture as the normative pattern.
And when Christ says, You know, I haven't come to bring peace but a sword to divide.
From now on, a household of five, two against three, three against two.
I don't look at that as Jesus giving a prophetic prediction, prescriptive text for what Christian households will look like for all of Christendom until his final return.
But rather, I see that as a descriptive text that absolutely was true of first century Jews when the gospel, and I think still to this day, when the gospel comes into a culture that is not previously Christianized and it's a first generation Christian family.
You're going to see a lot of division.
But on the heels of 500 years of Christendom or 1,000 in the West from King Alfred, I don't think that the pattern that we should be expecting that God would save half of our families.
And again, all this within, I feel like I can affirm within a 1689 framework, even more so, Westminster.
And so my point is this I think when kids go apostate, and a lot of them seem like they are right now, a lot of grown children are apostatizing.
And I think Baptists and probably Presbyterians too, but I'll speak for the Baptists, they like to say, well, You know, there's that unconditional election.
You know, he has mercy on whom he has mercy and hardens who.
And I want to say, yeah, but don't you think, I mean, don't you think, call me a conspiracy theorist, but don't you think some of this might have to do with the fact that over the last 30 to 50 years, Christians have been sending their kids to public schools in the name of a missionary narrative?
My seven-year-old's a missionary, right?
Like, I mean, don't we take our seven-year-olds and give them swords and shields and send them overseas into battles, right?
That's what you do with the seven-year-olds.
So, you sent your kid to a godless atheistic school that teaches public atheism, and then they never went to church.
They went to a separate building or a separate room at church, but they weren't in church.
They weren't there with the Lord's Supper being served, with the preaching, praying, singing, and seeing the sacraments of the Lord's Supper and baptism, the only two images prescribed by the Lord.
And so they went to a public school, they went to a children's daycare, but not church.
And your family worship was spotty at best, if there at all.
But the Lord, He hardens whom He hardens.
No, I want to say you failed.
Now, that being said, that's the difficulty.
Well, what about John Piper?
And so I say all that to say that I wonder there is faithfulness in the home being saturated in the gospel and biblical truths and homeschooling your kids or putting them in a classical Christian school, whatever it might be.
There's all those things.
Family integrated worship, I think, is key.
I think that's important.
There's all these different things.
Repenting, like what you were saying.
So, all the things we've talked about so far, but I can't help but think with back to full circle to Doug Wilson for a second and the secret sauce.
I can't help but think that what you were describing, what you did with your kids on your monthly daddy daughter date, it's talking about life.
And in talking about life as a Christian man, you're therefore applying scripture to all of it's the all of Christ for all of life.
I keep thinking about Abraham Kuyper, and Kuyper can be wrong about some things, but.
But just the quintessential, not one square inch, right?
Like all of Christ for all of life.
And I can't help but think that part of the reason Nate Wilson is doing so well is because his dad probably never made him feel like he needed to be in ministry, probably never made him feel like he had to be a pastor, probably made him feel like if he wants to write about dragons and dungeons and soldiers and knights for his whole life, that would be valuable and that Christ is there in it.
And it's, you know what I mean?
Like that truly reformed.
Sense of bringing, you know, it's not just the clergy, but it's, you know, it's the person behind the plow.
And I'm not, I don't have enough to say John Piper didn't do that.
But I look at guys who seem, at least visually, they seem less spiritual than John Piper.
But some of the guys who seem less spiritual than the conference circuit Christian big names, they seem less spiritual.
They're very practical, they're down to earth, they're blue collar.
Their kids seem to be doing better.
Is there a correlation there?
Well, I think so.
I don't know John Piper personally, so I can't reflect on anything that occurred in that household.
But I think when it comes to the situations that I am aware of, yeah, the big differences are the ones you noted.
I think, you know, if we think about, say, for example, high profile guys, often their churches function like corporations.
They're dealing with thousands of people.
that they're managing staffs that are sometimes, you know, tens of people, dozens, maybe even hundreds of people.
And everything seems to be designed to kind of provide a kind of an image of efficiency and high, I guess, high quality, so to speak.
Very often, the places where I've seen the best results are in smaller groups and with less opulence and less professionalism, but more genuine interaction between the generations.
So, I think all of your observations are right on the money.
I just think in that particular situation that I'm aware of, that people are at least familiar with, who we're talking about when we talk about Doug and Nate.
And the others in that family.
Yeah, so let me give you an example of how this maybe is counterintuitive.
So, when I'm with the Wilsons in a family gathering, you know who the person who speaks the least often is?
Probably Doug.
He's just kind of sitting there with a bemused expression on his face and listening in on the arguments between his kids and his grandchildren.
Risk Averse Men and Larping00:13:06
And these are lighthearted, fun kinds of arguments, not bitter, you know.
It's things, but there's just a lot of fun in the room.
And it's not as though I think that people, when they think about Doug, they think about a guy who's got to always be the center of attention, who's always got to be right.
I've been in conversations with Doug, and I'll reference a book, and Doug will pull out his phone, not because he's distracted, but because he's ordering the book I just mentioned.
That kind of thing.
He's listening.
He's learning.
He cares about what people think.
And yeah, he's got the serrated edge.
He's kind of a cross between an Abraham Kuyper and a G.K. Chesterton.
Right, right.
That kind of thing.
And he's willing to mix it up.
But a lot of times it's with a kind of a twinkle in the eye.
And I don't think people see the twinkle.
They just are more concerned about maybe the thing that was said that made them sort of uncomfortable.
Right.
But anyway.
So, I can say I probably know the Wilsons about as well as a person who doesn't live in Moscow can.
I'm there four times a year interacting with a lot of folks.
I know his brothers.
I even know his estranged brother, Evan.
So, all this kind of stuff.
Is that the guy?
He's a universalist?
Well, yeah.
Evan's an interesting guy.
I've been in his house.
We spend an evening smoking cigars and talking about fantasy art because he's really into.
to Barry Windsor Smith, who is an artist that he appreciates and I appreciate.
So we spent all night talking about that and C.S. Lewis.
So he's a cool guy.
But he just disagrees with Doug about a number of things.
But anyway, I guess long story short is I haven't found the skeleton in the closet.
I've known these people four years, and I'm there a lot.
And I hear them accused of all sorts of things.
What you've just accused these people of, I don't see any evidence for on the ground at any of these.
In fact, when I first met Doug and he was trying to get me to be involved with a few things, he said, I got to let you know I've got cooties.
And I said, Yeah, I've heard about those cooties.
And then he said, Here is a website where everything I've been accused of is looking for.
I've been on that website.
Exactly.
Here's all the big scams, whether it be.
Steven Sittler, you know, and if you just, but nobody reads his defenses.
Nobody cares.
But if you just read the defenses, you're like, oh, well, that makes a lot of sense.
Or, oh, that's a huge piece of the puzzle that wasn't included by your accuser.
And so.
And the fact that he directed me to that was, I just said, Doug, that's all you need to say.
I know, I knew about all that stuff.
The fact that you're not trying to.
And then he's never tried to control anything I've ever said or anything.
You know, he's just kind of like.
We've got a nice, congenial relationship.
Right.
Yep.
No, I, yeah, I appreciate that too.
You know, Gabriel Wrench with Cross Politic, he's on our board with Right Response.
And, you know, when they had their infamous episode where they said that, you know, Baptist, what was Jason?
Oh, yeah.
Jason Farley who said it, but Baptist, you know, caused transgenderism, which I just laughed.
You know, I wasn't bothered by.
For me, you know, I wanted to have the guys on the show and I did some follow ups, but I wasn't able to get all of them on the show.
But I wanted to get them on the show and just say, what I love about that episode is I think too many evangelicals, What they're not willing to admit is that the theology of the church has real world implications, right?
It's that worship is warfare kind of sentiment.
Like, do we actually believe that our theology impacts the world in which we live?
Or are we just this radical two kingdom kind of where everything's chopped up and segregated?
So I love that.
And so what I want to say is yeah, from your perspective, the credo Baptist position.
Is at least a cause for transgenderism.
And from my position, the Pado Baptist position is the cause for that lib mom who is dressing her son as though he's a girl, calling him what he actually isn't.
So you could go either way with that.
The question is just which position is true?
That's what it comes down to is Credo Baptist true?
Is Pado Baptist true?
But the idea that whoever is wrong, because we both can't be right, But the idea that one of us is wrong and whoever's wrong, there are actually implications in the world, at least at some level, of being wrong about God's word.
Yeah.
Yeah, that's important to deal with.
Of course.
But I say all that to say, you know, but Doug on the issue, it's like, yeah, Doug didn't sit the cross-politic guys down.
As far as I'm aware, you know, I've talked to him about it.
It's like, he didn't, like, all right, you guys are getting me in trouble.
Like, half of Doug's trouble isn't caused by Doug at this, I feel like, in this day and age, at this point of his.
His ministry, half of the trouble is caused by somebody else who's, you know, somehow associated with Doug.
And instead of him trying to batten down all the hatches and, you know, be authoritarian and say, I'm sorry, guys, like, you, you know, you can't do this show or you need to run your content by me first or what, it's just like, yeah, you know, people are going to hate me.
What are you going to do?
You know, and he just lets them do it.
So, anyway, all, but all that being said, you know, I think the all of Christ for all of life, like when you have children, and I'm in the beginning stages, but when you have children in hearing their dreams and hearing their aspirations, And not giving the sense of like, well, that's insignificant.
That is it.
Like, God, Jesus doesn't care about your fantasy novels that you're working on.
Like, you know what I mean?
When Jesus does care about that immensely.
And so.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And Nate's had a remarkable, I think, range of influence because of that stuff.
And Nate has paid a real price.
I mean, he's pretty much been blackballed in the kind of secular publishing world because he's, you know, owned a number of things that people wanted him to disown.
Mm hmm.
Right.
Yep.
You're absolutely right.
Well, any other thoughts on just biblical manhood, men avoiding, you know, some of the deficiencies that we see in young men today?
And then the last part of the conversation that we were having in terms of doing our best.
God ultimately is sovereign, but doing our best as far as it depends on us by God's grace to ensure that our children stay in the faith.
Any final thoughts for us?
Well, as we talked about, I think before we started recording, I've been thinking a lot about the subject of risk.
Oh, yes.
So I think that a lot of guys have, through their actions, demonstrated that they're risk averse.
And I don't think you're going to develop as you should as a man by avoiding risk.
So it doesn't mean every risk is a good one.
You need to be.
Judicious prudential in terms of how you approach these matters.
But I think you run the risks that you should run for the sake of some really important good that you're trying to achieve.
So, in the case of, just to give you an example, in my own case, I've gotten involved in real estate at a pretty significant level in terms of commercial real estate, both as an investor but someone also that helps other people with it.
And what prompted that wasn't just simply an interest in having resources for their own sake, but because I was in a denomination at the time that I could see was going down a road I didn't want to go down.
I'm no longer part of that denomination, but I knew I needed to create an exit for myself.
And at the time, I had children the ages of yours right now.
And my wife was homeschooling them full time.
She was utterly dependent upon what I was.
Bringing in.
Kids were too.
And so I knew that in order for me to make the move that I was going to make that I could see was going to be inevitable with regard to that denomination, I needed to take some risks before that time that would put me in a position in which I could make that risky move in a safer way.
So, in other words, the risk made things safer when the next risk came.
And I think that's one of the things to kind of keep in mind.
So, when I eventually Did leave that denomination.
I had 18 tenants.
I owned property in three states.
I had a couple of people who worked for me, and I was still a full time pastor, even so, even when that was going on.
But it wasn't just, like I said, because I had this drive to own stuff.
That played into it a bit, but the main objective was I need to run these risks so that I can provide the security that my wife and kids need.
That's the paradox.
And By the way, there's a marvelous book entitled The Millionaire Next Door.
I don't know if you're familiar with the title, but in that book, it's basically a couple of sociologists who actually studied self made millionaires.
And what they discovered is not only are 95% of those self-made millionaires men, those men are family men with three or more children and a traditional wife.
And that's one of the things that comes out.
And so they don't dig into this.
But as I was reading the book, I said, I think I know why.
Because when you have the pressure to provide, and you know that you're not going to do it with the nine to five, you need to do some other things.
Then it forces you to do some things that maybe you wouldn't do if it was just you living in your mother's basement playing call of duty.
Right, because then there is no risk.
Yeah.
There's, you know, nothing's on the line.
There's no, because there's no responsibility, there's no duty.
That, yeah, that's really.
Yeah, so when you pile on the responsibilities with regard to wife, kids, et cetera, what that actually does is it forces you to take some risks in order to make certain that you're in a position to provide for them.
And I think that's what's lost in a lot of young guys today.
Yeah, that's a great last word.
Yeah, that men, I think, and you know, and you said this, I think, I think before we were recording, I think you said this, but men don't take risks.
And then some of those men who don't take risks, they do, they will make it look like they're taking risks.
Yeah.
But they're not.
Yeah, they're LARPing.
Yeah, yeah.
Yeah, they're LARPing.
Give an example of a guy who's not taking real risk, but he's making it look like he's risky and edgy and LARPing.
Well, you know, I'm a gun owner.
I own several.
I have semi automatic weapons.
I've got all that kind of stuff.
But I've seen a lot of guys who present themselves as sort of like the edgy dude with the guns.
And they're not really taking significant risks in their life.
They just are passing themselves off in this way.
And that's just one example.
But I think it was just one example.
Having a bunch of guns, but you don't have the real estate.
To back it up, you've got a gun to say, get off my land, but the problem is you don't own any land.
That's a good way to put it.
Which none of us do because of property taxes.
We all rent our land from the government.
Right, right, right.
That's a great point.
And I think that gives you also an order of things.
You've got to have something to protect in order to justify the weapon.
That's right.
By the way, just because you've got the weapon doesn't mean that maybe the wisest approach is to employ the weapon.
There might be some other.
Much more effective approach that doesn't have that LARPing element but just gets the job done.
Right.
Finding LARPing Men on Twitter00:03:12
Do you think that if anybody wanted to find more examples of a LARPing man, that they could find some LARPing men on Twitter?
Would that be a good place to look?
Oh, yeah.
I think that's definitely a place.
And, you know, the manosphere is full of those guys.
Yes.
Yep.
Yep.
All right.
Well, Chris, thanks so much for coming on the show.
We really appreciate it.
How can our listeners follow you?
Well, I mean, I do have a website, crwiley.com, but I almost never put anything on it.
Okay.
That's just where I put occasionally some book reviews, and there are links for people to find the books that I've written.
But I'm on Facebook, I'm on Twitter.
I don't cultivate it in a way to get a big sort of following.
But occasionally I'll post some things just to see how people respond because I'm working on an idea or something like that.
And what are, real quick, just at least two or three of your books so that if people want to go and check those out.
Well, we just talked about one early on when you referred to our last conversation.
That's in the House of Tom Bombadil.
And probably the book that is the most popular is a book entitled The Household and the Word for the Cosmos.
That's gotten a lot of positive feedback, and I've appreciated that.
Well, those are a couple of books.
My assistant, Nathan, and I, we've both read Household and the War for the Cosmos and then also Man of the House.
Oh, yeah.
And we both feel like Man of the House is better.
Oh, good.
No, no, no.
I'm glad you do.
That's great.
Okay.
Well, great.
Well, thanks so much for coming on the show.
We appreciate it.
God bless.
Yeah, thank you, Joel, and God bless you.
Can I be frank with you for just a second, right here at the end?
Look, some of you guys, you're financially supporting this ministry, and from the bottom of my heart, I say thank you.
I cannot thank you enough.
However, some of you, you just can't afford it.
In fact, some of you, you shouldn't afford it.
Let's be honest.
I mean, we're living in Joe Biden's ridiculous economy.
Our nation and our totalitarian political elites.
Lost their minds over the last three years due to COVID.
We have written checks that we simply cannot cash.
It doesn't matter if people change the definition of a recession.
We are living in a recession right now, regardless.
Some of you are struggling to afford a carton of eggs at the grocery store.
You cannot support financially this ministry at this time, nor should you, but you could still help us tremendously.
I am asking you, please, if you're willing to do so, Take one minute of your time.
Leave us a five star review on your favorite podcast platform iTunes, Spotify, whatever that might be.
This is the way the system works.
We want to be innocent as doves, but shrewd as vipers.
We need to be strategic.
You leave us a five star review, and our podcast shows up for more people.
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