C.Jay Engel and Andrew Isker debate whether Scripture suffices for politics, arguing that while the Bible guides salvation, it lacks specific directives for modern governance, requiring human prudence alongside secular wisdom like Aristotle or the US Constitution. They critique rigid biblicism in parenting and immigration policy, noting the irony of some theonomists aligning with globalist views contrary to Rush Dooney's stance on national integrity. Ultimately, the hosts conclude that effective political action demands balancing divine revelation with historical tradition and natural reason, prompting an announcement for a new nine-part series on Christianity, Judaism, and Israel. [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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Why We Leave Five Star Reviews00:15:23
Leave us a five star review on your favorite podcast platform.
I get it.
It's annoying.
Everybody asks, but I'm going to tell you why.
When you give us a positive review, what that does is it triggers the algorithm so that our podcast shows up on more people's news feeds.
You and I both know that this ministry is willing to talk about things that most ministries aren't.
We need this content for the glory of God to reach more people's ears.
well-known and beloved moderate centrist, C.J. Engel, ruffled feathers yesterday when he posted the following.
Scripture is sufficient to understand the gospel and be saved and to inform righteous living.
It is not sufficient to resolve political problems, create a sustainable culture, give a people a united social vision, or provide practical guidance for living in the material world.
This episode is brought to you by our premier sponsors, Armored Republic and Reese Fund, as well as our Patreon members and donors.
You can join our Patreon at patreon.com forward slash right response ministries, or you can donate at right response ministries.com forward slash donate.
So today, join us with my co host, Wesley Todd and Michael Belch, and in addition, special guest Andrew Isker and the troublemaker himself.
CJ Engel, who will be coming on the show to discuss his recent post, The Sufficiency of Scripture, and All of Christ for All of Life.
All right.
We all got the green memo today.
That's right.
I texted it out at 9 a.m.
We all coordinated and aligned.
Wes would text something like that out, but he would be immediately ridiculed by both Michael and I.
And so he doesn't.
So I restrained myself.
We'll bring you talking about that post, talk with the man himself who posted it.
Let's go ahead and just start off with what the New Testament says about itself.
It can almost feel like a bit of a fresh rune because in the 80s and the 90s and 2000s, it was the battle for the inerrancy.
The infallibility and the sufficiency in many ways of Scripture.
There was a lot of higher criticism of theological liberalism that was really coming in and saying, like, but is the Bible really infallible?
Is the Bible really inerrant?
Does it really apply to all of these things?
I mean, for decades, you listened to Sproul talk about this.
I was listening to some of his lectures today, to Rush Dooney.
That was the battle they're fighting.
Scripture is reliable, it is inerrant, it is infallible, direct, plenary, verbal inspiration, inspired in every word by God.
So that was the battle.
But then, so to hear kind of some of those that, you know, still remember that, and we're still living with that emphasis that the teachers of kind of a generation past put on it, to hear someone from our camp kind of come and say, and hey, here's some practical areas where you said that scripture isn't sufficient.
Like, hang on, didn't we just have this battle?
Then we just fight for it being perfect and the word of God and applicable and all of these things.
So let's just start off, let's read what the New Testament says about itself and then talk about that intersection of life and living and how God's word applies to it.
So, this is a classic, and I love it.
I love how Paul's exhorting Timothy here.
2 Timothy 3 17, all scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for, notice kind of the categories he lays out teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, that the man of God may be complete, equipped for every good work.
So, Paul's writing to Timothy, he's exhorting him to study and labor in the scriptures.
And he says it's for teaching and for reproof and for correction and training in righteousness, to the end result that the man of God is equipped.
For every good work.
Second Peter 1 3.
Sometimes this is kind of merged together and blurred together with scripture.
In the broader context, it seems that Peter's more saying the Christian is equipped by God for everything he needs in life.
He says this, Second Peter 1 3.
His divine power, that is God's, has given us everything required for life and godliness through the knowledge of him who called us by his own glory and goodness.
And so, just to be kind of technical there, Peter's speaking more broadly that through the knowledge of God, the man of God, Is equipped for every good work.
He's equipped for life.
He's equipped for godliness.
But specifically, Peter there is not speaking of Paul's writings or the Old Testament scripture as he does in other places.
First Peter, he starts off with that.
Later in Second Peter, he talks about Paul's writings, which are difficult to understand.
In Second Peter 1, though, that's not what's directly in scope.
And then lastly, Hebrews 4 12, for the word of God, there's dual application here, certainly of the scripture, but also of Christ as the word of God, is living and active, sharper than any two edged sword, piercing to the division of soul and spirit, of joints and of marrow.
And discerning the thoughts and intentions of the heart.
That's Hebrews 4 12.
And that's where scripture in the New Testament specifically speaks most directly and self reflectively about itself.
Good.
Yeah, a lot of it with this topic and other topics as well, but particularly this topic, a lot of it comes down to the framing of the debate.
So you can lose the argument before the argument even begins, depending on who gets to frame the debate, who gets to set the terms, the rules for the match.
So, if you have somebody who's moderating this kind of debate and they say, in one corner, standing six feet tall, weighing 185 pounds, ripped and shredded to the max, we have the sufficiency of the infallible word of God.
On the other side, we have somebody who hates the word of God and trusts the reason of man more.
Like, all right, you're done.
And I want to be clear here.
I think this is one of the reasons why people.
Absolutely hate me and our podcast and my ministry, public ministry.
And at the same time, for those who are perhaps a little bit more good faith and have been following along for a few years now and haven't just tuned in, you know, 15 minutes ago, this is why I think they like me.
Because I'll be the first to admit that I am a work in progress, that I am learning in real time.
And whenever I change a position, which is not all the time, I don't change a position every week, but I have changed a position.
Within a year, which is still relatively a short period of time, not a major position like justification.
I've been a Calvinist and holding to the five solas and the tulip and those kinds of things in terms of soteriology since 2007 now at this point.
So for a minute.
But there are other things where I'm still in development.
But what I like to do that I think the good faith actors appreciate rather than despising and using as an opportunity for a cheap shot below the belt is when I change a position, I'll actually say out loud that I changed a position.
I'll actually admit it.
There are other guys who change positions too, but they often will change positions and pretend as though it's the position they held all along.
I think that's one of the key differences.
I'm a little biased, but I think that's one of the key differences.
So that said, about two years ago, a year and a half to two years ago, I would have framed the debate the way that I just said facetiously a moment ago.
I would have said, in one corner, we have the sufficiency of the word of God, in the other corner, we have Um, the reason of man and uh, this arrogant person who thinks that it's superior to God's word.
Um, today I would frame it differently.
Um, one of the ways that I would frame it is, um, I would kind of gravitate a little bit over towards the regular principle of worship.
I'm a regular principle of worship kind of guy.
We have a fairly, you know, it's it's somebody could walk in and they wouldn't be lost on our Sunday morning Lord's Day uh, worship gathering, but um.
But in as far as Baptists go in the Baptist world, it's relatively high church for Baptists, um, which isn't saying a whole lot, I acknowledge.
But like we have a covenant renewal liturgy, um, we call you know, uh, the sacraments sacraments and instead of just uh, ordinances and things like that.
And so it's it's relatively, yeah, the Apostles' Creed every single week.
That's you know, in our confession of faith, which comes after you know, the assurance of pardon, which comes after the uh, a corporate confession of sin, and you know, there's a call to worship, a prayer of ascendancy, and And then towards the end, you know, we take the Lord's Supper every week, not just once a quarter.
I appreciate Welches in my personal life with my children who are very young from time to time, but we are Welches disrespectors on the Lord's Day.
We use wine, you know, so we're taking the Lord's Supper.
It's all culminating into communing with the Triune God.
John Owen, he talked about how justification is the heart of the gospel, but not the end of the gospel, that the end of the gospel is actually eternal and perfect.
Communion with the triune God.
So, it's not just rehashing over and over the means of salvation, but actually enjoying what that salvation produced for us, which is reconciliation with God, communing with Him in eternal bliss and joy and peace forever.
And so, our service reflects that the gospel is preached in the liturgy always.
It is often preached in the sermon, depending on the text.
And I do believe the gospel is in every text in a large sense, not necessarily every verse, but as Spurgeon would have said, maybe not every verse, but every chapter.
And then that culminates in the Lord's Supper, which is a part of our liturgy.
And that's the bellying up, and you have the gospel there, but more than just the gospel in terms of the heart of the gospel, justification, but you also have the end of the gospel, communion.
We're actually sharing a meal with one another and with the Lord.
And so, all these things, my point is that the regular principle of worship matters.
The regular principle of worship, just to flash that out for our listeners, it doesn't mean regular, think regulated.
The regulative principle of worship means that.
That you're only going to do in corporate worship on the Lord's day that which the Bible, God's word, clearly prescribes.
The opposite position or the alternate position is the normative principle of worship, which would assert that it's free game to do whatever the Bible does not explicitly forbid.
So, as long as it's not forbidden, right, there's no verse that says, Thou shalt not use smoke machines.
So, smoke machines are back on the menu, you know.
And so we can do anything and everything, and we will from, you know, Cables that bring in Santa Claus for Sunday right before Christmas, hanging from the chandelier, whatever.
We're going to do all those things as long as the Bible doesn't strictly forbid it, whereas that's normative.
Whereas the regular principle is the Bible regulates strictly what is permissible in Lord's Day worship.
And it's not just that we avoid that which is forbidden, but we only do that which is prescribed.
So here's my point The regular principle of worship, which we adhere to, I do not believe that the regular principle of worship applies 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
I think it applies to our Lord's Day worship, certainly.
When we gather as the church, the ecclesia, the gathering of the excellent ones in all the earth, the saints, to preach the word publicly, pray the word publicly, sing the word publicly in hymns and psalms and spiritual songs, and see the word publicly in the only two images that the Lord Jesus himself has actually prescribed as lawful for us in our worship that being.
Baptism, the Lord's Supper.
So, in that context, church, then I'm a regular principle guy through and through.
The Bible regulates.
It's not just avoiding what is forbidden, but it's only doing that which is prescribed.
The regular principle of worship does not apply, not in any meaningful way within the Reformed tradition to a Monday afternoon.
The Bible doesn't talk about car mechanics because there weren't cars at the writing of the Bible.
And yet, it is permissible, even though I don't have an explicit command in scripture to change the oil in my car.
It is absolutely permissible, and we would argue even necessary and prudent to go and get the oil changed from your car or do it yourself.
And so that's how I would frame the debate now.
I want to say in one corner, we have an actual Christian who is determined not to go to hell, who believes in the sufficiency of scripture.
And in the other corner, we have a rank heretic who hates Christ, who thinks the reason of man is superior.
Just a couple of years ago, I obviously wouldn't have said it that.
You know, that ridiculously, you know, that hyperbolically, but that's how I would have framed it.
And that would have been dishonest framing.
In my case, I can say it would have been ignorant framing.
But I think others who do know better do it dishonestly.
Whereas now I would say, no, no, no, no.
The Bible, I don't think the Bible ever claims to be.
The Bible is sufficient, but the Bible doesn't claim to be exhaustive in every single detail of human society and life.
The Bible doesn't tell me about car maintenance or plumbing.
And that's okay.
That's okay.
And so when it comes to political life, My position is that I think the Bible does offer to us major principles.
This also gets into not just the sufficiency of Scripture, but also the perspicuity.
Perspicuity is just a really unclear word that means clarity, ironically.
All Scripture, we believe in the perspicuity of Scripture.
That's a well held Protestant belief.
But we don't believe that all Scripture is equally clear.
We believe that the Bible is particularly clear on matters of salvation, but perhaps less clear in other matters.
Areas, which is why Christians can debate for centuries over more secondary and tertiary issues, whereas there should be, apart from, in this case, rank heresy, there should be uniformity and agreement on major primary issues, especially things like doctrine of God and soteriology.
So we think that all scripture is clear, but there's a sliding scale.
There are degrees of clarity.
And so I think both in the realm of sufficiency and certainly in the realm of perspicuity, Clarity, the Bible's level of exhaustive sufficiency and its degree of particular clarity on a topic like politics, I think, is less than a topic like soteriology, salvation.
Degrees of Biblical Clarity00:15:30
And so I think the Bible gives us the macro, it gives us the big principles.
Like the Bible does provide for us equal weights and measures in terms of what is just, what is justice.
But then, how exactly to execute that justice depends on people, place, time, right?
So, I think justice, there's just in the macro, there's the virtue of justice.
But then, in the micro, laws that reflect justice, God's standard of justice, not man's, that's set for us, but laws that accurately and helpfully reflect God's system of justice for driving on the highway.
That had to be determined with prudence by people and not in all times and all places, but particularly at the time that cars actually were invented in the places that had cars.
I don't think that's a crazy thought.
So, do you guys have anything to say before we get ready to go to our first commercial?
Yeah, one thing is it kind of dovetails together with what you were saying about cars.
1 Corinthians 10 31 says, Whether you eat or drink, do all to the glory of God.
I've heard from different people.
I've heard one person say, there is no Christian perspective on food.
You boil water, you make your mac and cheese, whatever.
And then I've heard other people say, there is a Christian perspective on food because we don't eat our neighbors anymore.
Right.
And so there has to be, in my mind, at least an overarching way that Christians do all things for God's glory.
Now, to go with what you were saying about the car, Joel, it's a practical.
Truth that if I take care of my car, that I change the oil, that I do the maintenance according to the maintenance schedule of the manufacturer, the car is going to last longer and that's going to cost me less money over time.
And maybe I can sell it for more.
And that's better stewardship.
But that's my point.
And stewardship is talked about.
That's my point.
I, as a Christian, want to add to that financial benefit the tangible, not the tangible, the spiritual benefit of caring for my car in a way that pleases God.
The natural man can take care of his car, steward his car, reap a financial benefit, sell it at a higher cost down the road, but he doesn't get the additional benefit of having that done as an obedience to the Lord.
I want to take care of the things that you've given me.
Romans 14, it wasn't done in faith.
Correct.
Only a Christian can do something in faith.
I've always defined that like not faith in general definition, but to do something, an action in faith, I've always defined as simply as I can.
To do something in faith is to do it for the glory of God.
With a reliance on his grace.
Yep.
To do it for God's glory, relying on God's grace.
Go ahead.
So, the question then, and we've been talking about categories, or will be talking about categories, comes down to this.
And this is a question I'm still thinking through.
But what is right then for a Christian nation if we're aspiring to be, again, a Christian nation?
Well, to me, part of it is that the leaders and the people who actually are charged by God to think through these issues help the people.
Think about how the things that they do that are maybe derived by natural revelation, common sense, logic, but how do those reflect the fact that we're a Christian nation?
And how do they reap not just temporal good, but spiritual good as well by becoming ways of actually obeying and appreciating the design, the structure, the character of the world that God has built?
So that when we take care of our car, it's not just, oh, I get more money.
It's also, isn't it amazing how God set up the world?
He wants me to be faithful with this.
This is a chance to be responsible, to be a good steward.
And to carry out my mandate in a small way of taking dominion and stewarding the earth.
Amen.
Wes, any thoughts?
Gehardis Voss, he had a good series of lectures on natural theology, and he pinpoints that through the church age.
So it's easy to say, like, well, I'd go with the word of God, right?
But the Reformed tradition, certainly, and even the Catholic, lowercase c Catholic tradition prior, from Augustine through to Turriton, they definitely conceived of reality and nature and scripture as two books.
So God wrote the Bible.
But then in the beginning, God said, Spoke, let there be light.
The world, the universe is upheld by the word of God's power.
So God's word, it is right here in the Bible, his written word that is infallible.
And this tree, this set, me and you were sustained by the spoken word of God.
And that word speaks and reveals things to us.
So it's not as though we have the Bible and God's word, and then everything else is simply discerned and appropriated.
And I'm aware of the argument of the reliability of sense data.
But if we assume the reliability of it, that we can perceive things as they are, When we're actually saying, how do I solve this political issue?
And I could look to scripture and examples and analogs, try to bring them across and apply, or I could look to history and read Aristotle.
We're not competing.
Do we take what God says for it or man?
We're actually saying, in what way and manner has God spoken about this?
A couple of years ago, Michael, you remember, my son actually got to the point where discipline and parenting mattered.
First couple of months, it's you survive, they eat, they sleep.
There's not a lot of technique.
But I was getting to the point where it was time for discipline, and I'd come up on all the classic.
Christian parenting books, Shepherding a Child's Heart.
And I felt it should be pretty simple, right?
You've got your verses, discipline.
But then I realized the Bible is shockingly lacking in particulars.
Number of spankings.
What age do you start?
What material?
Do you always do the hand if they reach out or they disobey you?
Do you do all those particulars?
The Bible says a rod.
Okay, that's fine.
Right.
What kind of rod?
Wooden?
Switch.
Yeah, what's made up?
How big is it?
And then how many spankings?
Exactly.
Is it two, three, 40?
And you're absolutely right.
Bible loving believers who love the word and know it well.
That's one of the most common questions I've gotten as a pastor, is because they'll recognize, like, you know, rebellion is bound up in the heart of the child and the rod removes it far from them.
And these are people who love their children and love the Lord and love his word.
These are not abusive people.
I want to make that clear.
Right.
And yet they've come to me and said, like, man, like we just had this all out, you know, battle, like battle royale, you know, like it was like a war, you know, like, you know, my wife was, you know, she was ducking behind the island, you know, wearing like a pot on her head for protection.
Like, like our toddler.
You know, it was just raging, and you know, and the Bible says that if we discipline them, then that's going to fix it, you know.
But, um, but it didn't fix anything.
We actually tried to discipline them.
Uh, we've got voices on here, Nate, if you can take care of that.
Uh, but we tried to discipline them, and it didn't work, right?
Um, and and they were still rebelling, and because they were still rebelling, well, we knew like we have to win this battle, we can't just, you know, what would that communicate to our child that if you, you know, if you just keep rebelling, then eventually you get what you want.
And so, some of the practical wisdom that I was able to offer them as someone who had more children and older children and been parenting longer was I told them, you know, we do it like a boxing match in rounds.
So, by God's grace, our children have learned, and this would be a very rare occurrence now because our children are very well behaved children.
But when they were younger, there were, you know, with a couple of our kids, there were occasions where there's discipline, there's not any repentance.
There's defiance, and actually, the child is now further stirred up and even in more rebellion towards us.
And if you keep applying discipline in that moment, and the only ultimatum, the only way that you'll be willing to relent is if the child submits, and that child in that moment is one, a particularly young child that doesn't have a lot of wisdom, and maybe a child who's particularly strong willed, and they just then, if your mindset, if what you think pleases the Lord,
Is I won't stop disciplining until the child stops sinning.
Then you're going to discipline that child to death.
They're not going to stop.
There are times.
So, that little thing, practical advice, has been one of the most common pieces of advice that I've given to parents I say, treat it like rounds.
You box and then you go to your corner.
So, we would do two squats.
Oh, you're not responding well.
You're yelling.
You're still angry.
You're arching your back.
You're still in defiance.
You're not coming into fellowship.
You're not submitting.
Okay, I'm going to leave you in your room.
Instead of immediately going to that next spanking, we would do, no, I'm going to leave you in your room and I'm going to give you a chance to calm down.
And we would pray, Dear Jesus, please help so and so to calm down and to repent of their sin.
I'm going to leave you in your room and I will come back and check on you.
And you better have calmed down and be ready to apologize when I come back.
I come back, it gives them a minute, not just dealing with their fallenness, the sin nature.
But their finitude, the fact that it's a two year old, it's a two year old.
They're extremely finite, extremely fallen, don't get me wrong, but also extremely finite.
And so it's giving them a moment to collect themselves and you're rooting for them.
You're not against them, you're for them.
You want them to calm down.
You want to aid them, want to help them.
And so you give it two minutes.
They still haven't calmed down.
Maybe you stand behind the door and listen a little longer, hoping and praying, God, please help my little child to calm down.
And then you come back in.
Are you ready to apologize?
You're ready to be back in fellowship?
You're ready to have a good attitude?
And let's say, you know, a lot of times it's yes, but sometimes, no, they see you come in the door, they say, all right, now, so we went to our stools, like a boxing metaphor.
Now it's round two, pop, pop, you know, and then, okay.
And right after the pops, they're not, now they're the least calmed down, right?
So, but we're going back to our stools, we're going back to our corners, give you another chance.
That little piece of counsel has been a lifesaver.
I've had more than almost any counsel I've ever given.
I've had parents say, This is so helpful.
I like no parenting book ever said this, and the Bible doesn't explicitly say this.
I had no idea.
I thought that I was going to that ultimately I was being disobedient to God in His Word if I ever let up, right?
And so, like, and and that, like, but here's the deal.
Um, yeah, the Bible is sufficient for parenting.
I believe that in the macro principles.
Um, but that little big picture, big picture, but that little micro particular.
The Bible is sufficient in principles and certainly principles of eternal matters like salvation.
The Bible is not necessarily exhaustively sufficient in not principles, but particularities, especially particularities in categories outside of the eternal, things outside of merely salvation.
And if you don't get that, you are in danger of being a biblicist, which sounds like a good thing, but it is not.
And a biblicist parent, if they were being consistent, Would have to sit there and spank their child until they got quiet.
And that might be 40 spankings in a row.
And you better hope that your neighbors don't hear because you will lose your child.
I was about to say, is you didn't say, Well, I tried the Bible's way.
I couldn't get this child to calm down.
And so I'm taking off the Bible's discipline, the Bible's principles, and I'm stepping into, Well, I'm going to leverage my reason and my logic to go ahead and figure out how to solve the solution.
And what you did is you discerned that human psychology, as God made it, is such that we need space.
To calm down when people are backed into a corner, what do we call them?
Like a caged animal, a trapped animal.
People get defensive.
And so you recognize that God has made the world such that people typically don't, in a 30 second span, back down from their position.
And so discerning that that's how God made the world with the macro overarching biblical principle of discipline and obedience and play, you said, I'm going to step back from this.
I'm going to give it time.
And the point is, none of that is you saying, the Bible's not enough.
We tried the Bible's parenting way.
Right.
Got to to toss it to the side.
You're the same thing.
You're looking at God's word.
He made the world this way.
This is how people are.
This is how sin works.
And this is how I'm going to do about it and actually navigate it.
Amen.
Because in the final analysis, in the ultimate macro again sense, God's word, what did it prove in the final analysis?
Well, it proved to be true.
Rebellion really is bound up in the heart of a child.
And the rod really does remove it.
Right.
So none of what I just offered is in contradiction to the truthfulness and helpfulness of God's word.
It's just particularities in the practical realm.
Coming alongside the principles in the spiritual realm.
But if you don't have those categories, right, that's going to be one of our episodes a couple of weeks from now is on categories, thinking in categories.
But a lot of Christians cannot chew gum and walk at the same time.
But by golly, by the grace of God, we're going to need to learn to.
All right, do me a favor.
Like this video.
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When you do that, it's not just trying to grow our ministry.
Yeah, I won't lie to you.
I would like to see the ministry grow.
You know why?
Because that means more numbers.
Well, why do you care about numbers?
Because they represent people.
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We want to help people.
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Yeah, I'm online a lot.
You don't have a fancy hat?
I'm online a lot, but I can't hold a candle, and it wouldn't need to be a candle to the EO guys.
A candle with a particular kind of incense.
And I always, I'm fond of saying, it's not appreciated though.
I don't get why, but I'm always fond of saying that Eastern Orthodoxy is essential oils for men.
So that's my, you know, what I posted today was I was like, I reject Eastern Orthodoxy on two accounts.
One, biblical faithfulness.
The Permanently Online Denomination00:04:09
And this is an order of priority, of course.
Biblical faithfulness.
Number two, I'm an American.
The American tradition is, It is specifically Protestant.
It is a Protestant and then Protestant, Western, and then Protestant.
I don't like Roman Catholicism either at all.
I hate Trent.
Trent literally anathematized the gospel.
So I don't like that.
But I will be the first to admit, although I think there are massive problems with Rome, Roman Catholicism, which is not uniquely American, it still would be more compatible in America than Eastern Orthodoxy simply by virtue of it being Western.
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So, that you can follow all of our videos go live on X, and you can get the free bonus of Joel, you know, making people mad in between videos.
You're welcome.
So, this is what we're going to do.
We're going to have Andrew Isker and CJ Engel.
They're going to hop on the show right after this first commercial break.
All right, the clock is running out.
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Okay, here we are.
We're going to have Pastor Andrew and CJ Engel joining us to talk about our friend and well known, beloved, moderate centrist CJ Engel with a milquetoast, boring take that should have offended no one.
And yet it offended everyone.
So you probably can hear them right now.
I'm just talking unfazed, but they obviously cannot hear me.
So we're going to keep working on it for a second as they get their audio figured out.
They're working on it.
There we go.
Can you hear us?
All right.
We've got the Tennessee boys, the Tennessee Titans.
Is that still a thing?
It's a football team.
Yeah, I know.
They're really, really bad, though.
Oh, they're doing bad.
Okay.
I didn't even know if it was still a team.
I'm not a sports ball guy.
Andrew's a sports ball guy.
Are you, CJ?
No.
What is sports ball?
Yeah, I don't really.
I forced him to watch a Vikings game with me last week.
It was funny.
I got to see him prostrate on the ground on his.
I was about to say that game did not go well.
That was the wrong game to show them.
That's funny.
No, that was amazing.
I got some live footage for premium subscribers.
Nice.
This is a $50 tier.
This is a fantastic idea, Wes.
Yeah.
CJ, this is how I introduced you at the beginning of our episode.
I said that we wanted to use a tweet from a well known and beloved moderate centrist.
It's a milquetoast.
Middle of the road tweet that should have offended no one, and then we read it.
So, do you want to read the tweet out loud and then tell us what you were thinking?
What was going through your mind?
So, like, yeah, I mean, first of all, I don't tweet after thinking, I think about it after I tweet it.
The best way to tweet, by the way, find it.
Yeah, go ahead.
Wes just said it's the best way to tweet.
It is the best way to tweet.
Go ahead and find it.
If you can't, Nathan can pull it up.
No, I got it here.
So it says, Scripture is sufficient to understand the gospel and to be saved and to inform righteous living.
Best Way to Tweet About Scripture00:16:02
And then the kicker is that it is not sufficient to resolve political problems, create a sustainable culture, give a people a united social vision, or provide practical guidance for living in the material world.
That's it.
That's the tweet.
All right.
What do you think about it, CJ?
Give us your thoughts.
Yeah.
So what do you think about the responses to it?
Whatever.
So there's a variety of different responses.
You know, like the people I look up to supported it.
The people I look down on hated it.
So that was good.
I think overall, what I was trying to get at was there's this tendency.
It's funny because, like, the thing that came up was the very theonomic approach to politics, obviously, was one group of people that opposed it.
The other group of people was actually the ones that I was trying to challenge, which is the people that.
That try to ask us to proof text every time we're using a secular source, right?
So, like if we use Aristotle, if we use other people that we're not supposed to mention, like Carl Schmitt, other people that I've actually learned from, James Buchanan, James Buchanan, James Burnham, Pat Buchanan, others that are not derived from scripture, is that an appropriate use of information, of knowledge, of contributions to political and sociological theory?
Is that an appropriate appeal?
Can I make that appeal to them?
But also, more generally, When we're crafting our approach to politics, can we use things like common law, the Magna Carta, the US Constitution, Lockean political dynamics?
Like, are these things appropriate for use for the Christian in building a case for political action?
And when I use the word sufficient, what I had in mind is this definition of it's the only thing that we should use.
That's what I mean by sufficient.
So the Westminster Confession refers to the fact that the Bible is sufficient for being saved.
Like, you don't need, in the context of the Reformation, they were making a claim against Rome.
The Bible itself is actually the only thing that.
A would be believer needs in order to inform, to be informed about what is required for salvation.
I don't think they ever intended to expand that understanding of sufficiency to things like economics, political dynamics, historical analysis, things like that.
I think that it was a bounded rationale, and that's what they were trying to do with that word sufficiency.
Though I use the word sufficiency very specifically.
Necessary, I could have used authoritatively, but I didn't because I think the scripture is necessary.
I think it is.
I noticed that, yeah.
I think it's and I think it's authoritative in all of these things in all areas of life.
I just don't think it's the only thing, therefore, I denied that it was sufficient.
Amen.
And I thought the exact same the moment that I read it, I thought, yeah, I agree, I know what he's saying.
Um, and part of that is uh, because Carl Schmidt remains undefeated.
Um, CJ is my friend, and so and I don't mean because he's my friend, he gets a pass no matter what he says.
Uh, but what I do mean is that uh, because he's my friend.
I'm going to read with the deck not already being stacked against you from the get go.
I'm going to read it more charitably and more in good faith and those kind of things.
But that was my first initial thought I was like, if CJ had said necessary, then I might have sent you a text and said, hey, what are you saying?
But you didn't.
You didn't say, because if it was the Bible is not necessary for political life, like at all, I'd be like, wait a second.
But that's not what you said.
And so I took you to mean sufficiency in the sense of exhaustive.
All encompassing, the only, the exclusive, exclusivity, the only source required.
Whereas I'm thinking, like, yeah, you can't do politics with less than the Bible, but you need more.
You need more than the Bible.
I mean, the other thing, too, and it's not even about just like political theory or whatever.
It's like, you know, what does it mean to have a tranquil social order?
What does it mean?
What does it mean to have a culture?
Like, there's other elements of a culture, there's language, there's corporate myths.
There's shared memories.
There's, you know, like patterns.
There's, there's like the overcoming of struggles together.
There's the clothes that we wear, the aesthetics that we're all pleased by.
These are all things that make up a culture.
The architecture that we agree is beautiful.
Beauty itself is part of a culture.
And you can't just derive these things from logically deducing in propositional form from the Bible.
Like there's more to it.
There's more to this is actually gets into like C.S. Lewis's Men Without Chests.
You know, you're going to undermine the very nature, the robust and completed nature of man, if you deny him all of these other elements of good living.
So, like, there's an element of wisdom, there's an element of learning from history, and all of these things are actually required, including the Bible as the very foundation and an infallible source of authority that we have.
All these things are important to us.
And I think that a lot of times these deracinated American Western Evangelical Christians can fall into this trap of refusing to look outside the Bible.
And they only do this, you know, they only do this selectively.
Like, they'll only, like, a good example of this is actually, like, in Stephen Wolfe's book, when so many people were frustrated with him because he didn't list a proof text.
And every, you know, every step down the path, he didn't list a proof text.
And that would, they, they criticized him for appealing to a small party outside of the city.
Right.
Same as the Antioch Declaration.
No, no proof text.
Let's do this.
That's all that's really well said, CJ.
I want to hear more from you, but also give Isker a second.
But real quick for the chat.
Here, those of you who are watching us live, go ahead, please, and start right now writing in questions for both CJ and Isker, because I'd love to be able to engage, especially since it's Friday.
I feel like Feedback Friday just has a good ring to it.
You might say, Well, isn't that a Steve Dace thing?
And I would say, It was.
Who do you get it from?
It's my thing now.
Anything I like is now mine.
So I'm appropriating Steve Dace's thing.
But Feedback Friday, let's make it a thing.
So in the chat, write your thoughts or Help us put it in question form.
If you put it in question form, Nathan will go ahead and take those comments and separate that into a category, and I'll be able to read off questions for CJ and Isker.
So, Isker, what do you think?
Yeah, I think some of what CJ is saying too, like it applies to so many of the hot button cultural things that are afflicting the church today.
So, even topics like patriarchy and male and female relations or Or are men and women different?
Right.
How do you address the trans issue?
Right.
I mean, there's plenty of Bible that said, well, God created man, male and female, he created them.
But there's a lot about the differences between men and women that is simply assumed by the Bible, right?
That we all intuitively understand when you're a child, right?
That men are bigger than women, they're stronger than women, and they feel different emotions at the exact same thing.
Than men and women do differently.
And so we know all of those things.
They're not spelled out for us in scripture.
But so you look at the complementarian debate from 20 or 30 years ago.
And what they wanted to do was be as reductionistic as possible.
What is the bare amount that the Bible says about a husband's authority over the wife and so forth?
And to be as minimalistic as possible and say, All right, well, yeah, I guess technically husbands have authority over their wives, so we got to do that.
And technically, for reasons that are a total mystery to us, God says that men have to be pastors and women can't.
Um, and and then that's it, right?
And they even do things like I don't know if you guys talked about um one of CJ's interlocutors, uh, Owen Strahan, but I'll bring him up.
Uh, and uh, right, he uh he's you know, uh, losing it at CJ on Twitter and.
That doesn't sound like going.
That surprises me.
He's never done that.
He's never done that to me.
Well, and it's so funny, though, to exactly or me either.
But it's so funny because, right, he was involved in that debate.
And instead of looking to what so many, I mean, just Protestant, Reformed writers have said about the distinctions between men and women and their roles in society and so forth.
I mean, all of this heritage we have.
Because it relies on not just the Bible, it relies on common experience, it relies on naturally deduced things.
So that's all thrown out.
So, what are we going to do instead?
We're going to fiddle with the Trinity to try to come up with some explanation for why wives should submit to their husbands.
Well, we'll just say that Jesus is functionally subordinate to you.
They'll do that instead.
I mean, something insane to mess with the Trinity because you got to have a proof text.
And you need even stronger proof text than the proof text, right?
That's the concept.
And so it's not a coincidence that, like, Owen Strahan freaked out on CJ over this because this is how people like that operate.
You have to have a proof text to justify whatever it is you already believed.
So they wanted to be the bare minimum faithful to the Bible.
Yes, we're going to be complementarian.
And we can't say the reasons why everyone did patriarchy for all of human history.
So, we're going to mess with the Trinity.
And so, the same thing with anything political, right?
They'll do that as well.
They'll be like, oh, can a nation have borders and have an immigration policy?
Well, I mean, there's a couple of verses here and there about that, but then they'll say, like, Galatians 3 28, right?
There's no Jew nor Greek.
So, we should have a multicultural society where, you know, I mean, if we want to have millions of Muslims running around raping girls in England, that's just Part of it because there's no male, there's no rather, there's no um uh Jew nor Greek, so all how dare you, Andrew?
Millions of Asian men, yes, it's Asian men, Asian men, yes, Japan.
Didn't you know that a bunch of Japanese people are currently in England?
You know, it's it's the Japanese anybody, really, yeah, it could be anybody, billions of possibilities, but yeah, and and so yeah, it's it's so like all of these things, it's it all it's always a post hoc justification.
Using the Bible to arrive at acceptable contemporary politics, right?
That's what these people always do.
That is what they always do.
You're right.
And I love how you use the complementarian example and saying, like, well, we have to find some kind of example in the Trinity.
And if you're unfamiliar with that to the listener, the short version is this Is Jesus, you know, it goes like this Is the Son equally divine to the Father, you know, and equal in terms of meriting worship and honor and praise and all this?
And the answer, of course, is yes.
And then what they would argue is, yeah, but the Son still plays while being.
Equal to the Father in terms of divinity, he still plays a role of submission.
But then, of course, the counter is going to be yeah, but that's because he took upon himself a second nature, namely the human nature, and he was submissive to the Father because he was fulfilling all righteousness and fulfillment of everything that was said about him before the foundations of the world were laid.
And so he did that in his earthly life.
And that's a pretty good counter.
So then, the counter to the counter that you have to do with the ESF group, you know, or EFS, yeah, FS, the eternal functional subordination of the Son.
Is they're going to say, well, actually, he's eternally, even now, even in heaven, while seated at the right hand of the Father, he's still in a role of submission.
While, you know, ontologically, he's equal to the Father in terms of divinity and majesty, but he's still in terms of role, you know, the economic trinity, he is playing a.
And, you know, long story short, one, that's bad Trinitarian doctrine.
And two, I do think, in large part, if you're trying to find a source of what would possess a man, you know, what madness would drive him there, you know, to the mines of Moria, you know, like.
Well, the madness of feminism and a weak man's desperate attempt to prove that he's not a misogynist.
So well said.
Can I read some questions for both you and CJ, Michael and Wes, also, if you guys got a thought here?
But let's start.
Scroll up just a little bit, Nathan.
There's some really good ones here.
Okay, this is a quick one.
This is from Michael.
He says, What do you think are the best five non Christian sources to use to promote a Christian governing order?
Non Christian sources.
That's a good question.
Well, like, so the framing is interesting because.
Like, I don't, I don't, I wouldn't approach it.
I wouldn't approach it in that way.
Like, when I'm dealing with politics, you know, I'm dealing with very practical problems.
And I think one of the things that I continue to emphasize is that politics is not about blueprinting the ideal.
And if you approach politics in terms of it's about coming to the table, drawing out the way that a society should be structured, and then going out into the world and, you know, scolding people or whatever, you know, coming up with like means of like, you know, attributing or, you know, obtaining.
Being this ideal, you're missing the point of politics.
The politics is very much about dealing with the fact that we live in a world of conflict and there's scarce resources and there's groups with a variety of different interests.
And we have to work on protecting our own and confronting those that have a completely different vision of the world.
And you have to use power to do that.
Like politics is the theater of power dynamics.
And so I would disagree with the framing.
I wouldn't use a non Christian source to come up with a Christian.
Blueprint of how government should be.
That's not what I would, that's not the function of the non Christian contributor to theory.
Yeah, let me rephrase the question because it, yeah, like the question is, instead of trying to arrive at a universal principle, when you're saying that politics is particularist, right?
It's dealing with a particular situation.
So if I were going to rephrase the listener's question to be, all right, what five books would you say would be the best from non Christians?
To deal with the problems confronting Christians in the United States of America today, right?
That would be a better question, I think, right?
Yeah.
I mean, so then, but then there's the question of like, are you talking about like how to, like, what non Christian authors could I use in training myself about how to think about political problems, right?
That's one thing.
I would refer to people like Edinburgh, I would refer to people like Russell Kirk or, I mean, both those men were Christians, but they're not Christian authors.
Psychology vs Natural Revelation00:12:20
But in that sense, Carl Schmidt is a Christian.
Yeah, I mean, technically.
So they don't have a theological methodology about them.
Yeah, yeah.
It's not, they're not theological books.
Yeah, they're not theological books.
In fact, the funny thing is that I'm thinking as more of a classical thinker, like all of these people are.
Yeah, I mean, I would tell people to read Alinsky's Rules for Radical, not as a framework of what.
But understanding the present situation.
But understanding the is.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And so the concept of the political is a short book, too.
Say it again, Wes.
The concept of the political is on YouTube for free.
It's a short book.
Great read.
Who's it by?
Carl Schmidt.
Okay.
Yeah.
I mean, I'm sort of like a Paul Gottfried Stan.
So, like, I think that if you really want to understand the present situation, I would read things like his multiculturalism and the politics of guilt.
Mm hmm.
I can't believe you're recommending a Jew while sitting next to Andrew Isker.
You know what I mean?
I've been told by every major reformed leader that Isker and I wouldn't even tolerate such a thing.
I know, right?
But turns out they're wrong.
You're crazy.
That's never happened before.
One of Paul's greatest contributions is his dogmatic insistence that America is a Protestant country.
It's actually funny because, in traditionalist conservative circles, everyone's returning to Rome.
That's the thing to do.
I don't know if you saw the Twitter spat that broke out.
Maybe you guys didn't see it when it was on the air, but Jay Dyer wants to fight all of us.
Yeah.
Well, that's because of my tweet.
Did you see my tweet today?
Yeah, yeah.
That was a good one, huh?
I'm like, I need to get Joel a better picture of me.
So, like, Jason, I don't call me fat.
Or don't, because there's no better motivation to shed a few pounds than the entire public world on the internet calling you fat.
I know, right?
That's just powerfully motivated.
You have no idea how much, how hungry I am right now.
Don't say that.
You said something about how it was Feed Me Friday, and it got me going.
Feed me Friday.
Feed me Friday.
Okay, let's do this.
There's a couple more questions I want to get to.
Nathan, go back up for a moment.
That's all the questions.
Okay.
So, one of them that I wanted to address was so this is Matt Baruch.
I don't know.
Does that sound right?
That sounds good.
All right, good enough.
Matt Baruch, he says, when it comes to psychology or counseling, would you go outside the Bible for principles or techniques?
I'm going to take that one real quick.
What I would say is, I land.
On biblical counseling as my position pastorally for people in our church who are looking for counsel.
Marriage counseling is usually 90% of what pastoral counseling is about, or counseling for parenting, those kinds of things, family related.
The reason why I reject, I would not look to modern psychologists for help is because all truth is God's truth.
The problem with the modern psychologists is they don't have any of God's truth.
They actually, modern psychologists actually, for the most part, Hate God.
And so psychology, literally, even within, you know, God's written two books, special revelation, 66 books of the Bible, the canon, but also natural revelation.
The problem is that the psychologist hates both of those books.
He hates natural revelation just as much as he hates special revelation.
The psychologist, at least pop modern day psychologist, you know, for us as Christians, we're saying, well, Jesus is the ideal man.
He's the perfect man, the God man.
So that's what we're trying to shape people into.
That's the process of sanctification being formed more and more into the image of the Son.
And so here's the end.
The end game, and then also, uh, there has to be good not just theology but anthropology.
Um, who are we currently?
What is man, you know, and and and what are my problems?
And so, if this is Jesus, Jesus is over here, he looks like this, and this is man, um, you know, apart from Jesus, and and he looks like this, and now I know that my A and Z and which direction to go.
Well, psychology misses both of those, it misses who Jesus is, and it also has bad anthropology, misses who man is.
Psychology is literally the opposite of what the Bible says, you know, it's it's um.
You know, for us as biblical Christians, we would say on the outside, the exterior, man can do incredible things suspension bridges and trigonometry and rockets and all these different things because he's made in the image of God.
So, on the outside, man is not a parasite or a mere consumer, but a lowercase c creator in the image of God Himself.
But on the inside, He's totally depraved.
Well, pop psychology is basically there's really no difference in worldview from Disney.
It's the exact opposite.
So, they would say on the outside, man is just consumers, and that's why we need to abort babies and have less people because we'll be overpopulated.
People produce less than they consume.
Man is parasitical externally, but internally, there's a precious dream in his heart, and he's actually beautiful and wonderful.
And so that's why I wouldn't go to psychology.
But the bigger principle that I garnered from this question, when it comes to psychology or counseling, would you go outside the Bible?
There's one more question on this, too, for the pastors.
Okay, scroll down, Nathan.
Oh, sorry.
Here it is.
And so he follows it up and says, Question to Andrew and Joel as pastors, when it comes to counseling, would you go outside the Bible to external psychology?
So that's what I'm That's basically what I'm answering right now.
No, I wouldn't because, not, but it's not because the psychologist relies too heavily on natural revelation and doesn't give enough proof text, you know, chapter and verse.
It's because the psychologist hates natural revelation as much as he hates special revelation.
That's why.
Andrew, I have an answer to that.
I mean, I mostly agree with you, Joel.
There is, I mean, there is like one field of psychology that I find really interesting and has a lot of insights, and that's.
Like family systems therapy.
So there's a really good book, and this is a theme here today by a man named Edwin Friedman, who is, I believe, he was a rabbi.
But he was drawing on the psychology of another Jewish psychologist.
Shut it down.
Shut it down.
He's going to be interviewing Clavin next for a family community.
Yeah, that's right.
But no, no, like the, like, so one of his books that I think is really good.
Because it's way outside the mainstream of psychology.
That's part of it.
So, like, when I say I agree in principle, like, yeah, the majority of psychology is just garbage.
You're right.
And so, what his book, like, generation to generation, like, it looks at all sorts of different problems as they occur in families, typically, from one generation to the next, why certain things tend to happen within families and are passed on from father to son and mother to daughter and so forth.
And it looks at individuals, not merely as individuals, but part of an organic whole.
So it's, you know, the theonomists are going to love when I say, but it looks at the world covenantally, right?
Like that you aren't merely an individual.
You are an individual, but you aren't merely one, right?
You're connected to other people, and other people have an effect on how you feel inside, on your behavior, and so forth.
And, you know, I think that book does a really good job.
I mean, there are.
Because it's not Christian, there are things that I think he gets wrong, and you have to read it with wisdom, right?
You can't just take it and copy and paste it into your brain and think that this is just perfect.
But there's wisdom there that can be applied.
And so I think that this author and the people that he was influenced by noticed something about God's world and the structure of God's world.
And I think it's really useful.
So I wouldn't reject it categorically, but I mean, I mostly would and would say there's a few exceptions.
But yeah, so there are things to be gleaned, but there's not very many of them.
Not very many.
So my perspective on this, first of all, is I think modern psychology is bunk.
But I think the more important lesson here.
Like Tom Cruise knows more about modern psychology.
That's a good example.
It's like, okay, there's a non Christian that we can draw upon.
Like Tom Cruise being interviewed by Matt Lauer, right?
Two non Christians having an argument about psychology.
I'll go with Tom Cruise, the crazy Scientologist, right?
But anyway, sorry, I interrupted you.
No, I mean, that's a typical thing that happens.
But I agree with that for sure.
I think the broader question is the Bible came from a certain metaphysical background and it assumed a certain nature of man and his relation to the world and history.
I think that's much healthier.
So, In general, it's because of the soil in which the Bible was written, and God set up this metaphysic and history that produced something like the Bible.
And so, therefore, the Bible I mean, not therefore, the Bible is good, but that the Bible is good in the same way that other texts can be helpful.
Yeah, the Bible, of course, is the foundation of all of these counseling problems, and you have to get into the realm of sin and you have to get into the brokenness that comes from spiritual decay.
And the Bible, of course, is the foundation of all of those things, but.
At the same time, I think we are living in a way that's at odds with the created order.
And I think that a lot of classical authors understood the created order just naturally and organically much better than we do today and all of our expertise and credentialism.
Yeah, they lived in a world that was real, right?
They lived in the world that God had created.
They didn't live in a trash world.
And so everything in our world is totally inverted.
And so if you're drawing on sources today, They believe men could become women and so forth.
They believe insane things.
So, how could you trust this stuff?
You could glean some very important wisdom from the lessons of the Greek tragedies.
There's a lot there that speaks to the despair that modern man feels today.
And so, that's what I mean by the fact that the Bible was born into this soil of rich, Classical thought, and I think that all these things are important.
Um, so I don't like as on principle, I don't say I never look outside the Bible, but the Bible itself is the preeminent solution.
Yes, it you know, it's the preeminent expression of God's mind in a way that pop psychology just doesn't have the presuppositions to hold a candle to.
It can't even approach it at all.
Yeah, let's go to the top real quick, Nathan.
Scroll up, that's good, guys.
I appreciate that.
Uh, there's one more question I want to get to, and then we need to do our last commercial break, and we'll come back for some, uh, maybe a couple more questions and some concluding thoughts.
This is from Truddle.
He says, How do we stop?
Nathan already had the cursor right there because we've been working together.
Nathan is my cousin.
We're literally related.
So we've been working together technically in the technical sense for 36 years.
It's like 36 years.
What were you working on?
Well, originally we were working on things like Donkey Kong, you know, or building a tent, you know, in a fort in the backyard.
But in some capacity, one way or another, we have been working together for a long time.
So he knew what question I was going to.
Truddle, he writes this How do we stop, mask up, stay safe if anything is on the table?
Pop Psychology Cannot Approach God's Mind00:03:27
Right.
That's what I hear you saying, CJ.
I hear a Jordan Peterson esque view of the Bible from you.
If anything's on the table, CJ, wasn't COVID wrong because it violated?
No, let me finish the question.
I'm being facetious, but wasn't COVID wrong because it violated the regular principle of politics?
Right.
It's a good question.
I appreciate, Truddle.
Thank you.
I appreciate you putting it in, but I would actually have a strong no to that.
But I want to hear, go ahead, CJ, you go first.
But let me repeat it one more time.
How do we stop things like mask up and stay safe in 2020?
If anything is on the table, Wasn't COVID wrong precisely because it violated the regular principle of politics?
And Truddle agrees with us.
He's on our side.
He might be kind of like pointing out just like, how do we kind of answer the objection?
Right.
If it's all up in the air.
Right.
Exactly.
He's been a good term, but he's, yeah, asking a good question.
What do you think, CJ?
Yeah.
Like, I've never held a position that anything goes.
Like, the state can do whatever it wants.
I mean, there's a strong sense of like, you know, the state against history.
And like, so this is one of the things that I think, you know, maybe I stress more than a lot of other people is what I call the sanctification of history and the fact that we have these historical norms.
That I think are authoritative, that history actually is authoritative in terms of delineating what is right and what is wrong for a state to do.
And if, you know, like we can appeal to the scripture and there's warnings against tyranny and the sufferings of man that come from that.
But I also think at the same time that heritage can be an argument in and of itself.
And I think that our heritage is one of these types of medical freedoms.
And I think that that in itself is a justification for things.
My argument was never that.
The state can do whatever it wants, but rather there's a clash of group interests at play, and these things are harmful to the expression of Western man in fulfilling the way of living that we've inherited.
And so, that I think is a justification for itself.
I think that history provides its own justification.
Our freedoms are particular to us, and we have a duty to uphold them as recipients of what our ancestors carved out for us.
Yeah, yeah, I think that's a good point.
I would just add to it that history, tradition, everything else, these are authorities, right?
They aren't the final authority.
You're not making the argument that they're the final.
The Bible is the final authority.
But when you reject that lesser authority and you say all we have is the Bible, right, then you're left with the legions of evangelicals who just say, well, Romans 13, right?
Romans 13, you got to obey them, you got to do what they say.
Right.
When it's like, no, you have like this history and tradition of American freedoms that our ancestors left us and preserved for us over generations that we're drawing upon.
That no, you can't do this.
Yeah.
Right.
You're not allowed to do this because we are Americans.
Yeah.
Like that's a valid argument.
It is a valid argument.
That's a valid argument.
Right.
We don't do that.
I know it's a great argument.
I remember, Andrew, you talking to me about a hotel in your small town when you were in.
Minnesota, Michigan, or where were you?
I was in Minnesota.
Obeying Government When Sick00:08:39
Yeah.
Minnesota.
I've been in Michigan one time.
Yeah.
And the bottom floor, like the foyer, kind of was turned into like a flea market.
And you're like, it's a perfectly valid argument to make to say, simply to go to the owner and do so respectfully and politely say, we don't do that here.
This is America.
Yeah.
And so let me take a crack at it.
And then I'm going to give it to Michael and Wes and make sure that they get a chance to speak.
And then we'll go to our commercial.
We'll come right back.
But that same question.
So, how do we stop the mask up, stay safe kind of rhetoric, things like that, overreach, tyranny from the government, if anything is on the table?
Wasn't COVID wrong?
Wasn't our mechanism as Christians, you know, to say, well, you know, it's the Bible, it's wrong because the Bible says that the state's job is, you know, to bear the sword against the evildoer.
And the state, in this particular instance, is overstepping its jurisdiction.
And so that's why it's wrong.
And so we're going to worship, anyways.
My answer would be that that would be a lot of my rhetoric back in 2020.
Four years ago now.
That would have been a lot of my rhetoric.
Is it four years or five years?
It'd be four.
Four.
Five.
Oh my goodness gracious.
Coming up on five.
Almost five years.
Yeah, that would have been a lot of my rhetoric.
Is I would have said, stay in your lane, stay, you know, hashtag libertarianism, Ron Swanson, you know, whatever.
But now I like, here's it.
So here's the thing.
So let's just play it out for a second.
So is it always a sin to miss church?
Like, is it ever permissible in the sight of God for a Christian who's a member of a visible church, local church, to miss church when they're sick?
Right?
And like, can you miss church when you're sick?
If you're burning up, you have 103 fever, you know, you've got the flu, this, that, and the other, is it permissible for you to stay home?
And I would say, yes, it is.
But then the next thing that this is what we're all, we just assume this.
It's inescapable.
What you're having to interpret is two books, not one.
You're looking at special revelation and all, you know, so the Hebrews passages, you know, do not forsake the gathering, you know, and especially all the more as, you know, you see the day drawing near.
Yes and amen, a million times.
But the second book, Natural Revelation, is I need to be able to say, well, am I sick?
Am I contagious?
Am I going to subject everybody else to being sick?
In other words, the pushback on COVID, the church wasn't prepared for it.
So half of the church just, you know, just, they're like, give me another jab, govern me harder.
I love it.
And then, you know, and then the other half, you know, it was way more than half.
Way more.
You're right.
Way more.
So 80%, 90%.
And then the good guys still, like, we were, you know, we were, Top Tards in the Lord's army.
Meaning, we took the right position, but we got there.
We weren't very brilliant, is the point.
Myself, the chief of Tards.
And so I landed on the right position, but it wasn't well fleshed out.
Because now what I would say is no, we resisted COVID, one, because we're not going to miss a year and a half of church because of what the scripture says, but also because it's not a real thing.
COVID's not real.
Like, yes, it is a cold, it is like it's a sniffly nose.
If I miss, Church right now, as a father of five from ages zero to seven, young children, if I missed church every time a member of my family had a sniffly nose, I would never be in church.
I would have to miss the next 20 years of church.
You will.
I can vouch for it.
Right.
And so, well, here's the deal that's COVID.
That's COVID.
If you're 400 pounds, you've already had triple bypass surgery, and you're 90 years old, then yes, you're in trouble and you can shelter yourself.
For everybody else, you were fine.
You really were fine.
And so, my point is, but here's the thing.
How did we conclude that?
Not exclusively from scripture.
We concluded that by observation in the natural world.
We concluded that by eventually we were able to get our own hands on the medical data and the studies.
And eventually, each of us probably contracted COVID ourselves and we were able to experience the symptoms and this and that.
And so, over time, we were able, it's not just like over time we did more and more Bible studies.
And then, as our Bible studies became more potent, then we know it was also not just God's first book, a special revelation, the scripture, but also the second book.
The reason why we should have told the government to pound sand and take a hike on that particular issue is on both grounds, not merely one.
It's not just because Hebrews tells me in chapter 10 not to forsake the gathering of the saints, but it's also because the government is telling me to forsake the gathering of the saints for a dumb reason, for a dumb natural reason.
Because here's the deal if you just make it ideological, In a biblicist mode, well, if you apply that consistently, then you can't ever miss church for anything.
So, if you have 103 fever, like a lot of the guys, if they were beat, and I'm talking about the 10% that did good on COVID, the good church guys who still gathered, those guys, myself again included, I'm putting myself in there.
But if we were perfectly consistent with the rhetoric and the type of arguments we were using to defy the civil magistrate to continue gathering as a church, if we were perfectly consistent with those arguments, then we would have to never miss church.
If we were perfectly consistent.
If I'm sick, I better go to church if I'm going to be consistent with what I was saying in 2020.
So, Michael, thoughts from you, Wes, thoughts, and then we've got to do a commercial.
I'm going to reserve mine because one of the questions mirrors something I wanted to bring up.
So, I'm going to, as they say in Congress, I'm going to reserve my time and I'll pass it to Wes and I'll make mine after the break.
All I would say is this is why politics is tough, is because there's no retreat of a certain ideology that fixes everything.
Like, this is why smart people that could dedicate just about all of their time.
That were like had land and children, like that's why they typically did politics in the ancient world because there is no one size fits all universal system that will protect against excesses like COVID and restrain freedom and all of that.
And so, it's a great question, and it gets to why politics actually has to be done in a careful, labored, precise way by men that are intelligent enough to do it because there is nothing, no law on the books, and no system, even theonomy, that would perfectly insulate you from something like that without running into a ditch somewhere else on the other side.
Amen.
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We are back.
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This is a question that's specifically for CJ.
Let's just make sure that we still got them.
Do we still have Iskar and CJ?
No.
Yep.
We've got them.
Hello.
They're here.
Andrew changed.
All right.
Can you guys hear us?
Can you hear us, Andrew?
CJ?
Okay.
They can hear us.
All right.
Founders and Moral People00:05:03
So here we go.
This is a question specifically for CJ.
It is from Matthew Owens.
And then there's one more, Michael, that you wanted to address, right?
So Owen says, CJ, what are your thoughts on James Buchanan and others like Gordon Tulloch in the public choice school?
That's a tough one.
I haven't done my economics in a long time.
I don't have a fully prepared answer for that.
Like, in the context of what I was studying, public choice theory, I was very much like a Misesian, like a methodological individualist.
So, I actually haven't gone back and redone my thinking on economics.
So, I can't give an informed opinion on that right now.
Okay.
All right.
And then here's the other question.
And, Michael, do you want to ask?
Yeah.
And then you have thoughts on it also.
Because I'll ask the question, but to preface it, CJ, you said something interesting earlier about the fact that the art of politics is not about pursuing the ideal necessarily or about laying down a blueprint, the perfect blueprint.
It's about dealing with reality and achieving goals.
So I think one of the things that comes up is people look at the writing around the Constitution, the Declaration of Independence.
And I know even then there were political compromises, even the Bill of Rights was a political compromise.
Nevertheless, it seems like that was a time where the founders were.
Perhaps uniquely in history, being able to say what kind of system do we want.
And so I think a lot of modern Christian thinkers look at the founding of America and they say that's normative politics, where they were shooting for a particular ideal, who we are as a people, who we are as a society.
And so my question, and then I'm going to read the question that's related to this, is that a disconnect?
Is that a wrong way?
Like, should we not look at the founding of America and conclude political things?
Were they doing something different?
And then Easy Mack asks, in conjunction to that, what's an example of something the Bible does not address specifically?
But then he says, the principles that the founders followed could, to my mind, always trace back to patterns in the Bible.
I think one of the cool things about history is you see this unfolding of different ways that particular people have resolved their particular struggles in ways that relate to each other.
And so, like, one of the things about the Constitution that's interesting is like, The great debate was is monarchy preferable?
Should we give power to, you know, should we have something like popular sovereignty?
And so there are all these, you know, there were all these particular interests coming to the table.
You know, you had these agrarians, you had these, you know, people that were much more interested in appealing to like the demos, the people, you know, the people at large.
Those were the popular sovereigntists.
Then you had much more of the elitists who were worried about the fact that if you give too much power to the people, they would, in a corrupt fashion, undermine.
The traditional institutions of stability.
And so I think the Constitution is brilliant in the sense that it really was an attempt to check and balance all of these different influences and all of these different power impulses.
And they recognized, actually, uniquely in history, maybe, that people like Alexander Hamilton realized that politics actually was this balance of powers at all times.
And you always have to be aware of which.
Which power block was threatening to undermine other blocks of power?
And so it really wasn't this ideal at all.
I think it came about because they were recognizing the fact that if any one faction was getting too much power, it really was this compromise, very particularistic government.
I'm also not one that says that we need to go back to monarchy, but at the same time, we can't idolize the constitutional republic.
These things are always particularistic, they're always situationalist.
I think at the time, the constitutional structure.
Was a good way of dealing with the particular threats and claims to power that different constituencies had.
And so I think that all of politics was this way.
And I think that Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, even Thomas Jefferson, although he's much more ideological, I think a lot of them saw this great tradition in classical European politics that very much was a compromise.
It really was this.
This tentative settling of different political dynamics.
Like Roger Scruton talks about this all the time that one of the essences of politics is tentative compromise, where everything is always, you don't set in stone for all time a single system.
I think the Constitution was good for what it was, but as John Adams said, it was only meant for a moral people.
And so, therefore, when you lose the morality of the people, what are the ramifications of that?
Legal Avenues for Public Profession00:15:12
So, we always need to be rethinking what are the exceptions?
The Constitution was never meant to cover.
All people for all times.
It came in the soil of a certain circumstance, a certain historical situation, and it was good for that situation.
But I don't think it's an ideal that has to be applied to every single people group in every single context of the world.
For instance, the Constitution doesn't actually speak to our, you know, like it doesn't actually speak to the fact that NGOs are basically sponsoring the replacement of Western peoples.
Like it doesn't have any dynamics to deal with that.
And so you have to come up with states of exception and deal with that.
That's politics.
Politics is dealing with the state of the exception at all times.
You always have to be determining when the law applies, when the Constitution applies.
These are very dangerous things we're talking about, for sure.
But the consequences of ignoring them may actually be greater.
That's well said.
Let me take a crack at this one real quick.
And then I got something I want to tell Andrew.
So this was Easy Mac 308.
You already read the question, right, Michael?
I'll read it one more time just for guys who are hopping in right now live.
What is an example of something the Bible does not address sufficiently?
When it comes to political life, I would say immigration is.
This was one of the big ones that the Lord, I think, providentially used for me to open my eyes, to move me from a capital T theonomist to a general equity, lowercase T theonomist, emphasis on general equity, aka just the 1689 or Westminster Confession, just being confessionally reformed.
And here's how I thought about it because I talked to many notable theonomists about it and I asked them.
So I gave it.
A fair shake.
And I said, you know, so what is the theonomic position?
What is the, you know, the chapter and verse presuppositional, you know, bulwark that's going to protect Americans from losing every single one of their jobs to a bunch of Hindus?
I would like to know.
I think that seems like, you know, like if we're saying the Bible is all sufficient, and when we say sufficient, we mean exhaustive and exclusive.
For every single thing under the sun, then I would like to know, like, I just haven't found that chapter and verse.
And so, could you point it out to me?
And basically, this was the answer that I got uniformly from every theonomist I talked to.
They said, well, there's four mechanisms, things that are explicit in scripture.
One, you can't be an illegal immigrant, the sojourner, the stranger, the alien.
These aren't people who climbed over a wall.
They still came legally.
So, one, only legal immigrants.
So, you have to go through the legal avenues.
Number two, Well, we would want America to be a Christian nation, and so we would only take Christians.
It needs to be a public profession of distinctly Christian faith.
So, Christian, you come legally.
Number three, getting rid of the welfare state.
And so you're not coming for free money.
You're going to come and you have to adopt the Protestant work ethic.
You're going to have to work.
You're going to have to pay your own way.
It's not going to come at the expense of the citizens, taxpayers.
And then number four, you also have to be a law abiding citizen.
So come in legally, but then also obey the law.
And otherwise, you're gone.
So you need to be a Christian.
You need to come legally.
You need to obey the law while you're here, and you need to work.
And I thought about that, and it took me about, and I'm not the sharpest tool in the shed, so this is saying something.
It took me about 15 seconds to think, okay, well, wait a second.
This isn't even like some far fetched hypothetical.
What I'm about to use as an example is something that has literally already happened.
What if America is a Christian nation and two thirds of the world is not?
So, what if we achieve it?
What if Christian nationalism, or whatever you want to call it, the new Christian right, what if it works?
What if we win by the grace of God?
And we win in our lifetimes.
And America is a Christian nation.
But most of Europe still sucks.
And even that looks like heaven by comparison to the third world.
And all these third worlders, they know that if they come to America, they're not going to get free money.
They know they're going to have to obey the rules and not break any laws.
They know they're going to have to speak English, learn the language.
They know that they have to make a public profession of faith, right?
When they're trying to immigrate, they're going to be.
Tested, you know, they're going to have to memorize a Nicene Creed or whatever, I don't know, whatever it is, and they're going to have to profess faith in the Lord Jesus Christ and they're going to have to come through legal avenues.
What that assumes, that theonomic position, it assumes that the only motivation for people to come to our country is free money.
What it neglects to account for is that there are a ton of other incentives for people to want to come to the United States, especially if it's a Christian nation.
Already there's enough, but if you're saying America as it is now, but even better, it's even more God glorifying, Christ exalting.
So, then what are some of the things that would come with that?
Well, you don't get free money anymore, but you know what you do get?
You don't get your country that's torn by war.
You don't get drug cartels.
You don't get crime.
So, I don't get free cash, but you're telling me I get economic opportunity.
I'm not stricken by poverty and my kids won't get raped.
Right?
You know how many people that'll appeal to?
Approximately, I don't know, maybe four to six billion.
So, what do you do if four to six billion people?
Who aren't even necessarily regenerate, but we don't have election goggles.
We can't discern that.
They make an external, outward, public profession of faith in the Lord Jesus Christ, and they say, We'll come through the legal avenues.
And I asked the theonomists this verbatim, like explicitly.
I asked them, Is there any theonomic mechanism for telling those who say they're Christians?
So they do make that public profession of faith.
They say they'll work hard, they're not asking for free money.
They want to come through a legal avenue, and they want to be law abiding citizens.
Is there any mechanism to still say no?
And the theonomist's answer was uniformly no, you have to take them.
Because there's not a Bible verse that allows a nation to what they would consider arbitrarily put a cap on the number of immigrants.
And so theoretically, and it's not that far fetched theoretically, it is entirely possible, especially if you're post millennial and you think that the post millennial doesn't believe all the nations become Christian at the same time.
So it's entirely possible.
That America becomes Christian a thousand years before two thirds of the world, and all of a sudden you've got a billion Indians saying that they believe in Jesus simply because their country is, you know, they're using cow dung instead of cow, and they want to come here, and you can't tell them no.
And I thought, well, I think you can.
I think you can just say that's too many.
And well, how do you decide that?
What chapter and verse?
Well, I decided it in the light of nature.
I decided it because America is currently.
A country of a population of 330 to 350 million people, and a nation that size cannot take in one calendar year three times its total population in immigrants all at the same time because it will collapse.
So, the strict theonomist would have to give himself over to the destruction of his own country.
So, to answer the question, my answer to the question would be: you asked for, is there any example of something that you don't track back?
Um, explicitly or directly to scripture that's political, and I say, Yeah, immigration is a great example.
That's and that's why I referred to the NGOs.
You know, like, the thing is, the question is, do the English people have a right as the English people to preserve the English integrity of the land that they inherited from their fathers?
Like, is that a legitimate thing that a people, which is basically a derivative of a family, can say about themselves that we want to maintain the Englishness of our family?
Is that a legitimate thing?
Claim Do they have the right to say that?
And I say, Yes, they do.
And so, therefore, but the theonomists, there's no mechanism within scriptural deduction that allows them this claim for their country.
And I would say at the same time that the American people are a people, that we have a history and that we have the right as a people to maintain the integrity of the thing that has been handed to us by our forefathers.
That is a legitimate claim.
And I don't think I need to have a chapter and verse to deny.
The NGOs the right to do this, but just the fact that this is an extension of my duty and obligation to honor my ancestors and act as a catalyst between those ancestors and my descendants to maintain the integrity of the nation that I have been handed.
That is a good thing.
And I think that is a natural, ordered love situation.
And it doesn't need to be, you know, deduced from scriptural exegesis.
Andrew, any thoughts?
Yeah, I mean, like it's a similar.
It's a similar circumstance like we were talking about with COVID, right?
Where they, like, if you have just bare minimum, right?
The only thing that we can use to address what the state is doing to us during that situation is the Bible.
Well, then you're just left with Romans 13, and that's all you got, right?
It's the same dynamic, right?
Where, no, we have other authorities where the Bible is silent on the particulars.
That we can draw upon, right?
The Bible is authoritative over those lesser authorities, but they still are authoritative.
And I mean, and like instinctively, people like this is what your question is, Jewel is one out of instinct, right?
That you like, you know, something smells funny.
Like, this is not right that we could just import a third of the population of India into America and say, cool, that's great.
We don't have any laws against it.
They all, Right.
Even within that scenario, like they all profess Christ and they're not getting welfare.
So I guess it's okay.
Right.
No, no, it's not.
And everyone knows that it's not.
They might not be able to articulate exactly why, but they know there's something wrong with that.
And to say that, well, the Bible is totally sufficient for all of these questions is to say that you can't object to something that's totally wrong.
Like if the state said, okay, well, now they need to be part of your family, right?
Like if that's the scenario, right?
They're mandating foreign adoptions into your family.
Like you're going to take two kids from Senegal into your family and you have to raise them as your children, right?
That would be monstrous.
But there's, There's not a Bible verse that says they can't do that, right?
Romans 13, right?
You have to submit to the authorities, right?
Well, we would have all sorts of arguments why that's wrong, why you can't do that.
And so all of these questions are such that, right, everyone knows the answer to them.
But when we adopt this ideology where it's a regulative principle of political action, where we have to have a Bible verse giving us permission to do X, Y, or Z, Then it actually restricts evangelicals, evangelical Christians from acting on their correct political instincts.
I mean, you saw this all the time with Trump, too, with Christians supporting Trump, right?
Instinctively, they knew this is right, right?
He's not a good guy or whatever.
But his policies are good for our country, are good for our people.
And we want to pursue that over and against any objections contrary from evangelical leaders.
Right, that's the instinct that I think we have to tap into.
That Christians have to, the few leaders that we do have that are going to tell the truth about these things, we're not going to play this little shell game of proof texts anymore.
Right, it has to stop.
Right, we have to be able to say, Yes, we 100% believe that the Bible is totally authoritative over everything, but it doesn't speak to every particular situation, and we must.
Use wisdom, we must use tradition, we must use the things that have been handed to us in order to act politically.
Well said, uh, Nathan, scroll up real quick because there's one more question that I have a short answer to and it's going to hurt, but it needs to be said.
Keep going up, maybe not on the questions list, yeah, on the just on the comments.
Yep, um, go up, slow down, slow down.
Here we go, there we go.
Uh, this is from Knocked Loose.
He said, Um, are these people talking about uh, Isker and uh, CJ and me, uh, Michael and Wes?
Are these people seriously arguing that theonomy leads to propositional nationhood?
This is going to hurt, but yes, yes, that's exactly what I'm saying.
What I'm saying is that I don't think that it inherently has to, but for whatever reason in the providence of God, it has.
I won't say that for every theonomist because I don't even personally know every theonomist, but I think it's a fair statement for me to say that many, if not most, and I would lean towards most, Modern theonomists today, their conception of theonomy is perfectly compatible and pretty much a synonym with propositional nationhood.
And then, real quick, one more Truddle.
Go up to Truddle.
It's the Grover.
There it is.
Truddle said, I regret to inform you that theonomists today are libertarians and not like Rush Dooney.
Well said.
Rush Dooney was definitely against immigration.
He thought very highly of the American stock market.
That's right.
We cannot allow that.
And that was the whole thing.
You know, I'm saying this to you guys because I love you.
Knock loose.
I love you.
I know it's hard to hear.
It hurt my heart as well.
It hit me deep in the chest when I was sitting and reading and came to that realization that the average modern theonomist today is a libertarian propositional nationhood defending globalist.
It broke my heart.
It really did.
But it's the cold hard truth.
And I'm going to give you the cold hard truth.
And Truddle is absolutely right.
I still love Rushduni.
But the apples have fallen very far from the tree.
Cold Hard Truth About Theonomy00:03:04
And we have to just come to terms with that.
When we talk about Theonomous today, when you listen or read, I'll just say it.
If you're watching Andrew Sandlin, and then you pick up, you know, biblical law institutes by Rush Dooney, and you can't discern a difference between the two, then you're in trouble.
Those two things are not the same.
This is the announcement that I wanted to give real quick.
So, Iskar, I decided, you know, we're live right now.
Everybody's watching.
So, but I'll put you on the spot.
So, I have decided, unless you have a strong objection, it is, you know, it's already geared up and ready to go to take our series, our nine part series that we did on Israel, and just go ahead and make that bad boy live.
Because I feel like all the pushback, like at this point, it's like I was trying to spare you and I a little bit of the controversy, thinking, you know, if I put it behind the paywall, then maybe we'll get a little less grief.
I don't feel like I got any less grief.
Do you?
I think we've probably gotten more grief.
Yeah.
I feel like not everybody can.
Yeah.
I feel at this point, at this point, I feel like what it'll do, this is my prediction.
Some people clip it up and, you know, and the usual suspects will give us a hard time.
However, I think that like a lot of people have already levied their accusations.
And I think a full, robust nine part series on your book that's going to be coming out.
I think, if anything, it'll actually serve as a defense.
I don't think it'll get us in more trouble.
I think it'll actually provide the further clarifications for the things that people have slandered us with, that it'll actually be harder for them to defend their slander.
What do you think?
Yeah, I think so.
I mean, looking back on it, it's like we just talked about the Bible and the New Testament and what the New Testament says about the difference between the church and Israel.
Right.
Like it wasn't anything too crazy.
You know, I mean, maybe you got more hate than I did, but a lot of the time.
I definitely got more hate than you did for sure.
You always did.
But I mean, I got way more hate for people who are like, why didn't they say anything about this or that?
Like people from like, you know, further to the right and things like that, you know, online.
Like, why didn't you talk about this?
You know, why don't you talk about the USS Liberty or whatever?
Name the thing.
And it's like, because we wanted to talk about the Bible.
And like, that's the need of the hour is to understand what the New Testament says on the relationship between Christianity and Judaism and Jews and so forth.
So it's like, yeah, I don't know, man.
Like, people can watch it.
And I hope they do because I hope they did too.
Good stuff there.
Upcoming Series on Christian Nationalism00:06:32
Yeah.
I think it was super tame, very hinged.
Like, very huge.
I mean, maybe for, you know, From time to time, a few synagogue of Satan kind of things might have just slipped off the tongue.
But other than that, I think it was a.
Let me be clear.
You know, like, I mean, yeah, we think Judaism is a demonic false religion.
But most of it really was, I think, exegetical and just, all right, here's Galatians, here's Ephesians, here's Acts, here's Hebrews, here's Romans 11.
You know, that was the big one.
And so I think it'll be really helpful for people.
So, all right, there you have it.
We've gotten Andrew's official permission.
So we're good to go.
So that starts tonight, ladies and gentlemen.
So tonight at 8 p.m. Central, that's our Friday special for the next nine weeks.
It'll be live on X. It'll be live on YouTube.
It'll be on rightresponseministries.com, our website.
It'll be on our app.
It'll be on your favorite listening platform, Apple, Spotify, XYZ.
So, on all the things, Fridays at 8 p.m. Central Time, for the next nine weeks, because it's a nine part series, you'll have the series on all things Israel and Judaism and the Jews and all that kind of stuff and how Christians should be thinking about this biblically and properly and politically today.
That'll be for the next nine weeks.
So, that's Q1.
Friday special.
That's going to get us through January, February, and a little bit into March.
And then Q2, starting the first Friday of April, you're going to have a 10 part series on Fridays, one per week on Fridays for 10 weeks at 8 p.m. Central Time of a 10 part series on Christian nationalism with myself and Dr. Stephen Wolf.
But here's the deal if you don't want to wait for the slow drip, you want to get the whole series with me and Isker right now and be able to binge watch all nine episodes completely ad free.
And you certainly don't want to wait a whole quarter all the way till April.
For a one-per-week episode to drop with me and Stephen Wolf on all things Christian nationalism, I had very good news for you.
You can get the entire nine-part series with Isker and the entire 10-part series with me and Dr. Wolf on Christian nationalism.
Both of those series, a total of 19 episodes, all ad-free, is actually available in total today, but exclusively for our Patreon members.
At the lowest tier, five bucks a month, costs you a cup of coffee.
You can binge it in a month and cancel your subscription if you have to.
Out of the goodness of your heart, I ask you not to, but you could theoretically cancel your subscription.
All you have to do is go on over to patreon.com forward slash right response ministries.
Again, one more time, that's patreon.com forward slash right response ministries.
All right, let me turn it back to Andrew and CJ.
Any final thoughts for today?
Guys, thank you so much for coming on.
Anything you want to leave us with?
How can people follow you?
At least give us that for sure.
Yeah, you can follow me on Twitter at Contra Mordor.
And, you know, you can subscribe to our podcast, Contra Mundum.
And it's on YouTube and, you know, all the major podcasters.
And we got some cool stuff lined up from 2025.
We don't have a nine part series on the relationship between Israel and Christianity, but we do have some cool stuff coming up, too.
So check us out on YouTube and Twitter.
And I think, Andrew, are you on Twitter?
I am.
I am at BonifaceOption.
And you can find me there.
Oh, snap.
Docs.
We got them.
It's me the whole time.
We got them.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So, yeah, find me there and on the podcast with CJ.
And yeah, we've got cool things.
We might do some series in 2025.
We've got a series, just not that one.
Well, yeah.
Yeah.
Just not that one.
Not that one.
And speaking of series, I've already told CJ this and Andrew.
I had the distinct pleasure of speaking to both of you on the phone in the last couple of days.
But we want to have you guys come out, both of you.
So I've done something now twice with Andrew, but I'd love to do it with you as well, CJ.
And so, If we can, we would like to get you guys to fly out and have you in person in the studio and do some kind of multiple part series.
We've got Q1 and Q2 already ramped up and ready to go.
But we've got two more quarters in the year.
And I didn't know what it should be.
So something that anywhere between, I would say anywhere between eight and 12 episodes.
But I would love to do something like that.
And then I'll plug this for Andrew, but definitely check out his books.
He's got two books already published and a third that's on the way.
But you've got Christian Nationalism with you and Torva.
And then you also have your most recent book that was.
I mean, didn't you sell like 20,000 copies?
I mean, it was, it did well, right?
Yeah, it's done really well.
I think it's just around there total.
Praise God.
I don't, yeah, I don't know the exact number.
What's it called and where can people get it?
The Boniface option and Amazon is the best place to get that.
So, yeah, you'll want to check that out too.
Awesome.
And then, of course, CJ, last thing is that CJ and Andrew will be joining Michael and Wes and I at our conference April 3rd, 4th, and 5th.
That's a Thursday, Friday, Saturday.
Coming up in less than three months at this point.
So, April 3rd, 4th, and 5th, the title of the conference is Christ is King, subtitle How to Defeat Trash World.
And we used Trash World, which is kind of a term that Andrew coined, you know, similar to Clown World and other things that were already kind of in the mix.
But, you know, I loved Boniface Options so much that I used a little bit of its jargon that Andrew provided for us.
And so, Andrew's going to be doing one of the main sessions.
Both Andrew and CJ are going to be on a panel with us.
And that's going to be a great time.
We hope that you guys can come out and make that.
Go to Right Response Conference, not ministries, but Right Response Conference.com if you want to register for the conference.
I think that's about it.
Michael and Wes, you guys have anything you want to say?
Pretty much it.
Yep.
Okay.
One last time, subscribe to our channel on YouTube and click the bell if you want to be notified with all of our content that we put out on not just a weekly, but almost daily basis.
And then also go ahead and follow us on X at Right Response M. At Right Response M. Andrew and CJ, thanks again so much for coming on the show.