NXR Podcast - THE LIVESTREAM - The Idol of Third-Way-ism | Rick Warren, Tim Keller, & Gavin Ortlund
Aired: 2025-03-03
Duration: 01:58:19


=== The Third Way Explained (04:51) ===

[00:00:00]  Leave us a five star review on your favorite podcast platform.
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[00:00:21]  We need this content for the glory of God to reach more people's ears.
[00:00:29]  A picture of Christ on the cross, two thieves.
[00:00:33]  One on his left and the other on his right.
[00:00:37]  A moment of cosmic significance, God incarnate, atoning for the sins of the world.
[00:00:44]  And yet, according to Rick Warren, this is also a metaphor for political moderation.
[00:00:52]  Now, that post, which was recent in February, now deleted, tried to argue that Jesus died in the middle as a sign that Christians should reject both the political left and the right in modern politics.
[00:01:08]  But that's not theology.
[00:01:10]  That's a desperate attempt to baptize political fence sitting.
[00:01:15]  And it's part of a broader trend known as evangelical third wayism, a concept that was pushed by figures like Timothy Keller and more recently Gavin Ortland.
[00:01:27]  The idea is simple Christians should neither align themselves with the political right or the left, but instead carve out a distinctly biblical third way.
[00:01:38]  Now, it may sound noble, perhaps even wise, but in practice, it functions as a convenient excuse for cowardice and simply coddling political progressives while selectively condemning the right.
[00:01:54]  Figures such as Stephen Wolfe have called this out as nothing more than sharpshooting that is, strategically engaging with culture to present a morally palatable image to coastal elites while never actually challenging the underlying liberalism.
[00:02:09]  That dominates our current institutions.
[00:02:13]  He's right.
[00:02:14]  If politics is war by other means, then third wayism is merely an attempt to negotiate a ceasefire while one side keeps advancing.
[00:02:26]  Which side?
[00:02:27]  Always the left.
[00:02:29]  This episode is brought to you by our premier sponsors, Armored Republic and Reese Fund, as well as our Patreon members and our faithful donors.
[00:02:40]  You can join our Patreon by going to Patreon.com forward slash right response ministries, or you can donate by going to right response ministries.com forward slash donate.
[00:02:54]  Now, at the end of the day, third wayism is not simply a bad take, it's a bad strategy, and it is distinctly unchristian.
[00:03:05]  Tune in now as we explain.
[00:03:17]  All right, all right.
[00:03:18]  Here we are.
[00:03:19]  GA.
[00:03:22]  Good afternoon.
[00:03:22]  Welcome back to Right Response Ministries.
[00:03:24]  Nate, the speaker's on.
[00:03:26]  There we go.
[00:03:26]  There we go.
[00:03:27]  Speaker's fixed, we're good to go, here we are.
[00:03:29]  So, for those of you who are tuning in for the first time, our schedule is as follows Monday, Wednesday, Friday, 3 p.m. live central time.
[00:03:37]  Monday, Wednesday, Friday, 3 p.m. live central time.
[00:03:39]  We also have the Friday special that drops every Friday, as you would expect, at 8 p.m. central time.
[00:03:44]  And we have one more episode this Friday.
[00:03:46]  It is the ninth and final episode of the series on Israel with myself.
[00:03:51]  And Pastor Andrew Isker.
[00:03:53]  Starting in April, Lord willing, we will kick off season two, which follows each quarter.
[00:03:58]  So there's four seasons in a year.
[00:04:00]  Season two of the Friday special, which will be All Things Christian Nationalism with myself and the one and only Dr. Stephen Wolf.
[00:04:07]  Today we are talking about Third Gayism, or also known as Third Wayism.
[00:04:12]  You know, I've heard it both ways tomato, tomato.
[00:04:14]  You know, the pronunciation, there's a little bit of a creative license that can be taken with this Third Wayism, Third Gayism.
[00:04:20]  It's a shibboleth.
[00:04:21]  Yeah, exactly.
[00:04:22]  I mean, it's the same thing.
[00:04:24]  This is something that honestly is a topic that I didn't think we would address because I thought that we buried it, you know, a good, I don't know, eight years ago.
[00:04:34]  I know.
[00:04:34]  Or two years ago.
[00:04:36]  Yeah, so it was literally buried with the passing of Timothy Keller, which is sad and a tragedy.
[00:04:43]  But it was metaphorically and principally buried, you know, about eight years ago when we said, no, no more of that.

=== Political Centrist Trap (15:41) ===

[00:04:52]  That's just a carve out for compromise.
[00:04:53]  That's all it ever was.
[00:04:55]  And, you know, if you're wondering what's Third way is, I mean, here's you know, in a nutshell, here's a great example.
[00:05:01]  Um, it's almost always applied to culture and politics, usually political, and it would be the example of saying, Well, you know, on the right, uh, they're pro life, you know, the political right, Republicans, you know, or at least they used to be, you know, but uh, Republicans are pro life,
[00:05:16]  at least pro life ish, and on the left, you know, they're uh, they you know, they're not pro life, but they care about uh, the immigrant and the foreigner, you know, and and they care about life after birth, you know, not just the you know, the unborn child, but life after birth, and it's like, What do you mean by that?
[00:05:33]  You know, and if you dig a little bit, they're talking about porous borders.
[00:05:37]  They're talking about, you know, letting in rape gains to destroy the country.
[00:05:41]  They're talking about welfare, where your tax money is going to, yeah, universal health care.
[00:05:47]  So it's like, well, you know, there's a pro life on the left side after birth, and there's pro life, you know, on the right, political right side, you know, before birth.
[00:05:56]  And Jesus is neither these positions.
[00:05:58]  He's right in between, or the other way that you word it, that's a little bit safer, but it's, Just as feckless and just as much cowardice and just as much compromise is you say, Well, Jesus isn't so much in between the left and the right, but he stands above it all.
[00:06:13]  He's above it all.
[00:06:14]  And that's exactly what Rick Warren did with his infamous tweet that he got.
[00:06:18]  We have that.
[00:06:18]  You want to show it right now?
[00:06:19]  Let's go ahead and just pull up the tweet.
[00:06:20]  So this is from Rick Warren less than a month ago in February.
[00:06:24]  And he has since deleted the tweet.
[00:06:26]  Praise God.
[00:06:28]  And he didn't do it out of the goodness of his heart.
[00:06:30]  He did it because, you know, faithful, God fearing patriots such as yourself.
[00:06:36]  Uh, mocked him relentlessly and dragged him on the internet until he, you know, in just utter shame couldn't do anything but take it down, and that's good, that's that's a win.
[00:06:46]  We're happy that that happened.
[00:06:48]  Uh, but here's the tweet, I can't quite read it, Nathan.
[00:06:50]  I don't know if there's a way that you can get up on the screen.
[00:06:52]  Let's go ahead and just make it full screen if you can.
[00:06:57]  All right, I'm gonna read it from all right.
[00:06:59]  I've got it, I've got it.
[00:07:00]  Uh, so this is what Rick Warren said.
[00:07:02]  Um, he posted an image of Christ on the cross between the two thieves, a painting.
[00:07:08]  And then he says, John 19, 18.
[00:07:10]  They crucified Jesus with two others, one on each side, and Jesus in the middle.
[00:07:15]  The guys on both sides were thieves.
[00:07:17]  If you're looking for the hashtag real Jesus, not a caricature disfigured by partisan motivations, you'll find him in the middle, not on either side.
[00:07:27]  Terrible.
[00:07:28]  Absolutely.
[00:07:29]  So God, in his providence, decided for Jesus to be crucified in between two thieves, one to his left and one to his right, because God was trying to set for all time, or not even for all time, but for our time, 2,000 years later, it would become a politically relevant metaphor.
[00:07:47]  For us to understand that Republicans are just as bad as Democrats.
[00:07:51]  That's basically what Rick Warren is asserting, which is.
[00:07:55]  The reason we pick on Rick Warren is because, I mean, you think about Protestant popes.
[00:07:58]  MacArthur's up there.
[00:08:00]  Rick Warren is a millions and millions of books, a speaker.
[00:08:03]  Like, this guy is.
[00:08:04]  He has a nice library.
[00:08:06]  He does have a nice library.
[00:08:07]  Well, didn't he even do, like, the.
[00:08:11]  For Obama, I think, when he was sworn in, he did the prayer.
[00:08:15]  Like, he's a big time evangelical figure.
[00:08:18]  This is not Pastor in Alabama.
[00:08:21]  This is not somebody with 37 followers that we're picking on.
[00:08:26]  It matters.
[00:08:27]  I mean, a lot of people are persuaded by Rick Warren and what he writes and what he says.
[00:08:33]  And so he came in, and Michael just read the tweet and said that basically, if you're going to follow the way of Jesus, then you're going to be a political centrist.
[00:08:45]  That the timeless principles of the Bible just so happen to align with Western liberal democracy.
[00:08:54]  In the year of our Lord 2025, and not even just that in a general sense, but specifically right in the middle of the Overton window where it happens to be this second.
[00:09:06]  Or you're a feckless coward.
[00:09:10]  There's the alternative option.
[00:09:12]  No, this is not a metaphor from our triune God and the incarnate Son dying on the cross to tell us that we should be somewhere in between Republicans and Democrats.
[00:09:24]  In America in 2025.
[00:09:26]  And so when he took it down, he retweeted.
[00:09:28]  And this is my point of the two scenarios.
[00:09:30]  So, third way is, and being, you know, well, you should be in the center, right in between.
[00:09:34]  Or, you know, the other option is it wasn't really, you know, a genuine repentance or anything like that.
[00:09:39]  He wasn't like, oh, you know what, I really messed up, you know, by saying this very stupid thing.
[00:09:45]  Instead, he came back, instead of apologizing, you know, it was this fake facade of an apology where he says, I shouldn't have lowered.
[00:09:55]  You know, the death of our savior to, you know, being a political centrist.
[00:10:02]  Instead, the truth is Jesus stands far above it all.
[00:10:06]  Right.
[00:10:06]  Right.
[00:10:07]  So then it's like, so he goes from, you should politically situate yourself right in the center in between Republicans and Democrats in 2025.
[00:10:16]  He goes from that statement to then saying, you basically should be apolitical.
[00:10:22]  If you really, you know, my bad, I messed up.
[00:10:24]  If you really want to be like Jesus, then you're apolitical and you just.
[00:10:28]  Don't really have a position at all.
[00:10:29]  So, at first, he's saying you should be in the middle, and then second, he's saying you should be agnostic, politically agnostic.
[00:10:35]  And the reality is that both of those things are false.
[00:10:39]  Now, does that mean that if Jesus was alive today, that he would be wearing a MAGA hat and that he would be a Republican at the convention?
[00:10:46]  No, I don't think so.
[00:10:48]  But here's the deal when we say, well, Jesus is neither Republican or Democrat, fair.
[00:10:55]  But what you're insinuating, what most bad faith guys who ascribe to this third wayism, what they're insinuating, Is when they say, Well, Jesus isn't a Republican or a Democrat.
[00:11:05]  What they're trying to say is that both the Republican Party and the Democrat Party are equally distanced from Jesus.
[00:11:11]  He's neither and he's equally neither, meaning that you could.
[00:11:15]  And so, what's the takeaway?
[00:11:16]  What's the application?
[00:11:17]  You can go either way.
[00:11:18]  When it comes to voting, you could either not vote at all.
[00:11:21]  That's what John Piper did right before the 2020 election he wrote an article that he knew he didn't have a leg to stand on to say, Joe Biden is a good Christian man and he deserves your vote.
[00:11:33]  But what he did instead is he said, Well, yeah, Biden is for killing millions of babies, but Trump is arrogant and has mean tweets.
[00:11:41]  I'm paraphrasing, but this is virtually what he said.
[00:11:43]  And then he said, you know, but if we were to calculate, you know, all of the negative consequences nationwide from these two sins, the sin of murder of the unborn and the sin of arrogance on social media, who's to say that one is really worse than the other?
[00:12:00]  And then he begins to carve out his, you know, explanation for why arrogant Twitter posts might be equally sinful to abortion.
[00:12:11]  And so then the takeaway is, you know, in, True John Piper fashion, he would be more of a Jesus stands above it all.
[00:12:18]  So, not in the middle, you can vote either way, but up above, you probably shouldn't vote at all.
[00:12:24]  And who's to know?
[00:12:25]  I mean, it was razor thin margins in seven different swing states.
[00:12:30]  Four of them, if they had gone for Trump, Arizona, Wisconsin, I think Utah was one of them.
[00:12:37]  But there were four key swing states that, in total, in those four swing states, that had they gone for Trump instead of Biden in the electoral vote, Trump would have been the president.
[00:12:47]  Now, God is Sovereign over all of it, and Trump's doing, you know, he's doing some things that we disagree with, but he's doing a lot of things that we do agree with.
[00:12:54]  We're grateful for how things have shaken out.
[00:12:56]  But the point is, there's 13 service members that died in Afghanistan.
[00:13:00]  There's all, all, I mean, all the COVID madness and the lockdowns, and, um, and you know, printing money, billions and billions of dollars, yeah, trillions, yeah, trillions of dollars, uh, inflating our economy, all these different things, um, that happened because Biden was elected president, uh, even with Ukraine and Russia and all those kinds of things, Russia invading, you know, Ukraine and all like.
[00:13:24]  You know, peace through strength is Trump's MO.
[00:13:26]  And he's been very successful with that.
[00:13:28]  So during that, it basically said to the world, you've got a four year window to cause trouble.
[00:13:34]  And that's what the world did for four years.
[00:13:36]  And my point is that if you collect all the votes from these four key out of the seven swing states that were contested in the 2020 election, if just four of them had gone the other way and gone for Trump, Trump would have been president and things would have been radically different.
[00:13:52]  And the collective vote within those four, I believe it was.
[00:13:56]  It was, I think it was 48,000.
[00:13:58]  At most, it would have been in the 70,000s.
[00:14:00]  So, like 76,000 or something like that.
[00:14:03]  In other words, John Piper's article, who he has a massive influence, John Piper's article, who's to say that that didn't actually swing an election?
[00:14:14]  And then someone with an even bigger platform, like Rick Warren, these ideas have consequences.
[00:14:20]  And ideas that affect elections certainly have consequences.
[00:14:24]  And so, it matters.
[00:14:25]  It's worth bringing up.
[00:14:27]  I thought that third wayism was good and dead and buried six feet under, but it has apparently risen from the dead, or at least a few guys are trying to make it rise from the dead and rear its ugly head once again.
[00:14:38]  And so we would like to go ahead and, as a kindness to our nation and as a kindness to the Church of Jesus Christ here in America, we would like to go ahead and bury it once more.
[00:14:51]  The question is why at this moment is third wayism?
[00:14:57]  Being talked about again by some of these evangelicals.
[00:15:01]  Why wasn't it last summer when Biden was just kicked out without any democratic process?
[00:15:09]  Common law was installed.
[00:15:11]  Why is it that once Trump is in, and we're not going to say everything that Trump is doing is good, but on the whole, it's been a great push in a more conservative direction and allowing opportunity, I think, in the long run for the church to be more effective, more free, more vocal about its policies?
[00:15:31]  On issues like Ukraine, Trump is too.
[00:15:34]  I mean, you just have to come to terms with this for a second.
[00:15:38]  Our president and vice president are currently to the right of the evangelical church in America.
[00:15:42]  That's right.
[00:15:43]  Nine out of 10 issues.
[00:15:46]  And not sparking up World War III happens to be one of those issues that our president, who I believe is probably unregenerate, I don't believe that Trump is a Christian.
[00:15:57]  I'm grateful for a lot of his Christian rhetoric.
[00:15:59]  He may be a Christian.
[00:16:00]  If so, he's probably a baby Christian, for lack of a better phrase, or an immature Christian who's probably going to stay immature because he's chosen to surround himself by Christian influences such as Paula White, which certainly doesn't help.
[00:16:12]  But even the Paula White situation, it's like, well, why is she in the White House?
[00:16:15]  Why isn't it evangelicals got their chance?
[00:16:18]  Yep.
[00:16:19]  Mike Pence.
[00:16:20]  We had an evangelical in the White House.
[00:16:22]  Yep.
[00:16:22]  Remember that?
[00:16:23]  Remember how that went?
[00:16:24]  I didn't want to.
[00:16:26]  We had our chance.
[00:16:27]  All right.
[00:16:28]  It's like, well, JD Vance is a Catholic.
[00:16:31]  Uh huh.
[00:16:32]  Yep.
[00:16:33]  And in Trump's first turn, we had an evangelical.
[00:16:37]  Right.
[00:16:37]  And I'll take Vance every single day of the week and twice on Sunday over Mike Pence.
[00:16:41]  Yep.
[00:16:43]  So we had our chance.
[00:16:44]  We had it.
[00:16:45]  So why is Paula White, you know, because loyalty?
[00:16:48]  Yeah.
[00:16:48]  That's why.
[00:16:49]  I don't think she's, I think there's a terrible, I think it's an absolutely terrible decision.
[00:16:55]  But if you're surprised by it, then you've got another thing coming.
[00:17:00]  You shouldn't be surprised.
[00:17:01]  You can be disappointed, sure, but you shouldn't be surprised by that selection.
[00:17:06]  Why did Trump pick Paula White?
[00:17:08]  Oh, I don't know, because the entire world turned against him and she didn't.
[00:17:13]  Yep.
[00:17:14]  Imagine that.
[00:17:15]  Right?
[00:17:15]  Well, why don't evangelicals have a seat at the table?
[00:17:19]  Because all the good things that Trump does, We have this leftist drivel rhetoric that condemns them as though they're bad, even when they're good.
[00:17:29]  And then the good thing, you know, the bad things that Trump does, we highlight those at the expense of any encouragement.
[00:17:36]  Right.
[00:17:37]  So that's a big part of why evangelicals don't have a seat at the table.
[00:17:42]  So, all that being said, my point is, I think with that question, why is the third way coming back out?
[00:17:47]  Well, you don't really need the third way when you've already won.
[00:17:50]  That's right.
[00:17:51]  That's what someone just said.
[00:17:52]  Rob said they didn't need it when they were in power.
[00:17:54]  That's 100% right.
[00:17:55]  You don't need the third way when the actual way, the evil way that you're rooting for, has already won.
[00:18:03]  The third way is just a detour to wickedness.
[00:18:07]  I'll say that again.
[00:18:08]  This is what you need to understand.
[00:18:09]  There's righteousness and wickedness.
[00:18:11]  The third way is just a detour, a longer path to wickedness.
[00:18:15]  Let's pull that chart right up just so you can see.
[00:18:18]  Watch the very last image.
[00:18:20]  We can pull that.
[00:18:20]  We are trying to relax in every episode.
[00:18:22]  We are trying to relax in every episode.
[00:18:23]  I didn't even make this one.
[00:18:24]  This was someone great on Twitter who made it.
[00:18:25]  So you kind of have this idea your first way and then your second way.
[00:18:29]  And cut truth on one side and lies on the other.
[00:18:31]  And then you have this third way, and it's like, well, we can split the difference, right?
[00:18:35]  There's truth, there's lies, but there's also grace.
[00:18:38]  Typically, this is exactly how it goes.
[00:18:40]  Your third way, you then turn around to punch right because the truth is inconvenient, which leads to a type of soft progressivism.
[00:18:47]  And ultimately, progressivism, what it always leads to in denominations, look across 100 years, they ordain women pastors, they get soft on marriage.
[00:18:55]  You deconstruct, and you've arrived at the same side of the lies, the deconstruction, the progressivism.
[00:19:01]  That you intended a shortcut in the first place.
[00:19:03]  This is how it goes.
[00:19:04]  Yep.
[00:19:04]  So the two ways is a choice.
[00:19:06]  One is truth or righteousness.
[00:19:08]  One is lies and wickedness.
[00:19:10]  The third way is just a longer route to lies and wickedness.
[00:19:13]  Yep.
[00:19:13]  And so you only need the third way if you're a truly sinister, bad actor, a nefarious person who is on the side of lies and wickedness.
[00:19:22]  You only need the third way if you can't convince enough people to take the short path to wickedness.
[00:19:27]  Then you say, well, could I interest you in the scenic route to debauchery and wickedness?
[00:19:31]  I think it's a little actually more subtle than that, Joel.
[00:19:33]  I think it's a lot of evangelicals, and I'm speculating here, so take that.
[00:19:38]  You know, caveat here at the beginning a lot of evangelicals know they can't go exactly from the middle to the lies, right?
[00:19:45]  They know that they can't, maybe even on a moral level, certainly on an image level.
[00:19:50]  And so, I think that the third way is as much a lie to convince others as it is to convince themselves to get to where they were going to get eventually.
[00:19:59]  Yeah, yeah, I think you're probably right.
[00:20:01]  So that I can choose sin but still be able to sleep at night, assuage my conscience, you know, or slowly dole my constant conscience instead of doing it all at once.
[00:20:09]  Yeah, um, yeah, so that's so.
[00:20:11]  Long story short, somebody in the chat put it and it was well said, insightful comment.
[00:20:16]  But why is the third way rearing its ugly head after we thought it was sufficiently killed and buried?
[00:20:24]  Because it's needed again.
[00:20:26]  You don't need the scenic route to wickedness when enough people in the country are willing to take the short route to wickedness.

=== Why Third Way Fails (14:55) ===

[00:20:33]  But when the majority, when the Overton window shifts and the majority of the people in the country are not willing to take the short path to wickedness, and so it's given only two options short path to wickedness or path to righteousness.
[00:20:46]  If they're going to choose the path to righteousness over the short path to wickedness, then you need that alternative.
[00:20:50]  You need that third path of, oh, well, there's also this other path that's, you know, it's neither this nor that.
[00:20:56]  Oh, JK, gotcha.
[00:20:57]  Boom, wickedness and lies.
[00:20:59]  And so I think that's why it's making a comeback.
[00:21:01]  I legitimately remember during Trump's first term, the church we were at, not a great church, was in a college town where me and my wife were going to school.
[00:21:07]  Pastor, it's been like 2018, 2019.
[00:21:10]  He's up there in a members' meeting.
[00:21:12]  I hope we have members that vote straight Republican and straight Democrat.
[00:21:16]  And I remember that rhetoric lasting through.
[00:21:18]  Till 2021.
[00:21:19]  Yeah.
[00:21:19]  Literally, like I remember, like those types of kellerisms and aphorisms and pithy little sayings that were thrown out all the way up through, right till about the stage where, oh, we don't need these anymore.
[00:21:29]  And they've come back now.
[00:21:30]  It was a little bit before the election.
[00:21:32]  Ray Ortland, he kind of did one of those jukes.
[00:21:35]  And that's Gavin.
[00:21:36]  And now it's back.
[00:21:36]  So we're going to show a tweet by Gavin.
[00:21:39]  Okay.
[00:21:39]  But before we do, Ray Ortland, real quick.
[00:21:42]  So this is Gavin's father and his tweet during the election cycle.
[00:21:47]  This last time.
[00:21:48]  This last time in 2024.
[00:21:50]  He said, Never Trump.
[00:21:52]  There's three little sentences.
[00:21:53]  Never Trump, this time Harris, always Jesus.
[00:21:58]  Let me say that again because I mean, it's so dumb.
[00:22:02]  It almost knocks you over.
[00:22:03]  But so sit down, sit down, stabilize yourself.
[00:22:06]  Never Trump, this time Harris, always Jesus.
[00:22:12]  Retweeted and commented by David French, of course, who said, David French, I think, did the Mandalorian and he did it ironically.
[00:22:21]  He was serious.
[00:22:22]  This is the way.
[00:22:24]  So, all the usual suspects, your Russell Moore types and David French types, they came out of the woodwork to say, oh, yeah, Ray Orton, this is great.
[00:22:31]  So now this is his son.
[00:22:33]  Go ahead.
[00:22:34]  So, when Rick Warren put his post out a while ago, I thought about should we bring it up in a podcast, and we didn't.
[00:22:43]  But Gavin kind of pushed the issue a little further.
[00:22:46]  So, this is what he tweeted on February 28th.
[00:22:49]  So, just a few days ago, he says this there is real evil and sickness on the right.
[00:22:56]  Christians should speak openly against it as against evil on the left.
[00:23:00]  We are in a time in which third wayism, properly understood, is increasingly needed.
[00:23:08]  Nope.
[00:23:08]  Increasingly needed.
[00:23:10]  So, for the record, Gavin does good work on his apologetics, his discussions about Catholicism, even Eastern Orthodoxy.
[00:23:19]  He is doing good work out there.
[00:23:21]  You know, we say that, Michael.
[00:23:23]  We say he does good work.
[00:23:24]  But when you see tweets like this, then I have to be honest.
[00:23:28]  I'm like, We just did that whole episode and got dragged for it by all the EO boys.
[00:23:34]  And man, if we're sitting here saying Gavin Newsom, Gavin Newsom, Gavin, same difference, you know, it's not the same.
[00:23:43]  It's not the same.
[00:23:43]  Clean shaven white guy.
[00:23:44]  But if we think, you know, Gavin Ortland is doing a great job on his apologetics against Eastern Orthodoxy and Roman Catholicism, and then we see tweets like this, I'm like, man, like, is it time for me just to check out a Protestantism altogether?
[00:24:00]  John Doyle just said he's coming to our conference.
[00:24:02]  Oh, fantastic.
[00:24:03]  Which is great.
[00:24:04]  I didn't see that.
[00:24:04]  It's great.
[00:24:05]  Yeah, John Doyle, he said, I said, Is it true that, you know, Comrade Doyle is coming to our conference?
[00:24:11]  And he said something about, like, it's a Coachella for bigots.
[00:24:17]  I wouldn't miss it for the world, you know.
[00:24:19]  And then I commented with a picture from Dune of the guy, you know, it said, In accordance with the prophecy, he's coming.
[00:24:27]  So, I mean, we've got, you know, we've got John Doyle is going to come to the conference.
[00:24:31]  We've got.
[00:24:33]  Calvin Robinson coming to the conference.
[00:24:35]  I asked Charles Haywood if he would come, and he said he would love to, but he probably won't be able to because he's, I don't know, he's going to be buying and selling soap or something.
[00:24:44]  I don't know.
[00:24:45]  Anyway, just doing warlord things.
[00:24:46]  But these, I mean, these are great guys who we love, friends of our ministry, and they do great work on the political and cultural war.
[00:24:54]  But they give us a hard time for our stance of being Protestants.
[00:24:57]  And I'll be honest, I'm still a Protestant.
[00:24:59]  I was being facetious, but I'll be honest, like, yeah, like when you look at the Protestant church in America, it's gay.
[00:25:07]  It's effeminate.
[00:25:08]  It's feminized.
[00:25:10]  It's weak.
[00:25:11]  It's politically constantly carving out some kind of caveat for why we shouldn't have borders and why we should be overrun by foreigners and why this and why that.
[00:25:23]  And yeah, it makes it tough.
[00:25:25]  That's all I got to say.
[00:25:27]  Here's the silver lining, the white pill, though.
[00:25:30]  The fact that this is coming out now from evangelical leaders means that there is positive direction in the right direction or positive movement in the right direction.
[00:25:42]  If Trump was a disaster, or if the right wasn't surging right now, if MAGA wasn't making so much headway, and if younger Christian men were not being so loud and so outspoken about the new way of seeing things, then there would be still no need for this sort of language from Gavin Ortland and from Rick Warren.
[00:26:10]  Yeah.
[00:26:11]  No, you're right.
[00:26:11]  It's like the animal that's on its last leg and it's barely alive.
[00:26:15]  It's been.
[00:26:15]  Cornered and it's lashing out.
[00:26:18]  You're absolutely right.
[00:26:20]  The resurgence, if we could call that, is a pretty weak resurgence, praise God.
[00:26:24]  But the half attempted resurgence of third gayism, third wayism, is in many ways a sign that the right is winning by a landslide.
[00:26:38]  And what I wanted to at least kind of wind down this section with is the observation that.
[00:26:47]  Ultimately, why we're talking about this issue is that still a lot of evangelicals, because of the way they've been trained for decades, share this perspective.
[00:26:56]  They share the idea that Christianity and Christ and Christians really have nothing to do in the public square.
[00:27:02]  And if they do, it can only be to open the public square to egalitarianism, to be nice, to be polite, to be kind.
[00:27:12]  And the reality is, even though there hasn't been, you know, like back, we're going to.
[00:27:17]  We're going to read some quotes from Keller.
[00:27:19]  But when he was writing about third wayism, it was everywhere.
[00:27:23]  The fact that it's not everywhere doesn't mean it's not deeply embedded.
[00:27:27]  Right.
[00:27:27]  And most Christians in your average evangelical church would hear this idea that, yeah, we shouldn't be too far to the right.
[00:27:34]  We shouldn't be too far to the left.
[00:27:36]  The truth is probably somewhere in the middle.
[00:27:38]  And they're going to kind of instinctively say, that's how I would have instinctively heard it five years ago.
[00:27:45]  Yeah, that's really spiritual.
[00:27:47]  Right.
[00:27:47]  Don't take hard stances.
[00:27:48]  The only hard stance we can take is for the gospel.
[00:27:51]  And the gospel, of course, demands that we either have no political influence or that our political influence be to open up our nation to wickedness and make it the swap meat for the world, as it were.
[00:28:08]  It's funny because the irony is that, in some sense, you could say third wayism is true.
[00:28:13]  If what you mean by that is that there's the left that is 100% opposite.
[00:28:19]  Of what Jesus commands in his law word of scripture, and then there's the right that's like 80% compromise from what you know, and then there's the truth like that.
[00:28:29]  There is a third way, but it's not in the middle, it's not in the middle, it's not in the middle.
[00:28:33]  It's you know, we have two primary parties in our political system in our country, they are both wrong.
[00:28:39]  Here's my big point though, they are not both equally wrong, right?
[00:28:42]  They're not both equally wrong.
[00:28:44]  Um, and the way of Jesus or the way of scripture, what God commands to us in his words, um, would have Contradictions with both the Democrat and the Republican Party.
[00:28:57]  So then the question is, which one is closer?
[00:28:59]  And the way of Jesus is not in between, it's not in the middle.
[00:29:03]  You have the left, then you have the right that is only right up and in comparison to the left, it's only right of the left.
[00:29:11]  And then on the far, far, far right, you have God's word and the way that Christians, and for that matter, even pagans and non Christians, have thought in virtually every time and every place all around the world since the beginning of humanity.
[00:29:24]  Until about the 1940s.
[00:29:28]  Right.
[00:29:29]  Two great examples because I remember being a midwit like 10 years ago.
[00:29:32]  And for example, like egalitarianism, patriarchy, and complementarianism.
[00:29:37]  That's a perfect example where it'll be very easy.
[00:29:39]  Well, actually, egalitarianism fails here and patriarchy fails here.
[00:29:44]  And complementarianism is the perfect balance of all of them.
[00:29:47]  But as I grew up, I realized wait, no, both of them there's egalitarianism and then there's egalitarianism light, aka complementarianism.
[00:29:53]  And the true one is, To the right, there are bastardizations of it, there's its misuse, of course.
[00:29:59]  That's still the true position.
[00:30:00]  Same thing, globalism and nationalism.
[00:30:02]  I don't really know what you kind of describe the middle of, but you could say, like, well, true, full, complete globalism that's bad, but nationalism is bad too.
[00:30:10]  So, we take the middle, which is also just globalism.
[00:30:13]  There's a lot of issues where if you lay out them and it kind of seems like, oh, the middle, now that seems nuanced and careful and cultured.
[00:30:19]  Like, no, that's the same thing as the bad one.
[00:30:21]  You got to go all the way to the right, you got to go all the way to the one that seems extreme to actually get to what the true position is patriarchy, nationalism.
[00:30:30]  Right wing policies over progressive policies.
[00:30:33]  Those are where the truth lies.
[00:30:34]  When you find yourself as a pastor exegeting Goldilocks and the Three Bears instead of the Bible, then I think that should be your sign.
[00:30:43]  Like somewhere along the way.
[00:30:44]  I mean, that's literally what it is with Tim Keller.
[00:30:46]  That was every sermon, it was just a retelling of the story of Goldilocks and the three bears with a little bit of Christian veneer.
[00:30:56]  Once upon a time, there was a young Christian and he walked into a house and there were three bowls of porridge and one was too hot and one was too cold.
[00:31:06]  But the next one, Baby Bear Jesus, his porridge was just right.
[00:31:11]  Like that.
[00:31:11]  I mean, that was pretty much every sermon for.
[00:31:15]  Good 20 years.
[00:31:17]  Sprinkles some Foucault in there.
[00:31:18]  The latter half of Keller's preaching ministry.
[00:31:22]  And I mean, literally, it's a, it is a, it's, I know it sounds silly, but it is a children's story.
[00:31:29]  It's literally a children's story.
[00:31:30]  Right.
[00:31:32]  And then we're trying to make it seem like it's insightful and wise and profound.
[00:31:37]  And also, turns out Goldilocks and the Three Little Bears happens to be, you know, really just the summation of the 66 books of the Bible.
[00:31:48]  I feel like that should be your sign.
[00:31:49]  Like, okay, something's wrong here.
[00:31:52]  Well, the other thing that's implicit in the third way critique is John Harris pointed this out.
[00:31:59]  So it was from an older video that I was listening to.
[00:32:04]  But he said it might be true that the poor should be better taken care of in a community.
[00:32:11]  But Jesus says it's because you're not being neighborly that your neighbor is starving to death or dying on the street.
[00:32:19]  What third wayism does is it levels criticisms against the right, not from Jesus' command to personal charity and kindness, but from the perspective of the left and progressivism.
[00:32:33]  And then it says, because Jesus may have critiqued that rich man for not caring for Lazarus, who was in front of his house, probably, therefore, our critique of the rich man from a progressive point of view or from the leftist perspective is the same as Jesus's critique.
[00:32:50]  And so positioning yourself in the middle.
[00:32:53]  Then, when you punch right, you are punching still from a progressive mentality, which is why what we said at the beginning third wayism is inherently slow progressivism.
[00:33:04]  That's the posture and the perspective that they're adopting to punch right rather than a call to personal care for your neighbor, which is not the same thing as tax the rich.
[00:33:14]  Right.
[00:33:15]  Leftists are incredibly generous with other people's money.
[00:33:20]  I'll say it again.
[00:33:20]  Leftists are very generous with other people's money.
[00:33:23]  And also, one more disclaimer that's worth mentioning.
[00:33:26]  Nobody in America is starving to death.
[00:33:28]  Right.
[00:33:30]  Like when you think of first century Palestine and the poor in that environment, that if they were not cared for, then they quite literally would die.
[00:33:42]  They would just be left for dead.
[00:33:43]  They would starve and die.
[00:33:46]  That's not the environment that we are living in today because, in many ways, in light of Christendom.
[00:33:53]  And there's also a difference in the poor being what does the Bible, you know, Focus on.
[00:33:58]  Primarily, it focuses on not just the poor in a general sense, but a particular subset of the poor, the widow and the orphan, meaning the helpless poor.
[00:34:08]  It's not just the poor.
[00:34:10]  Anybody can be poor, but it doesn't mean that you're actually helpless and poor.
[00:34:14]  You could also be poor just because you're lazy or because you've made terrible decisions.
[00:34:20]  There are plenty of families in America that are poor because somebody's either lazy or because a father has abdicated his responsibility and abandoned his.
[00:34:30]  His family.
[00:34:31]  It's like, well, my children are poor.
[00:34:34]  Well, then maybe you shouldn't be in jail.
[00:34:37]  Maybe, you know, let the thief no longer steal, but work hard with his hands so that he might have something to give.
[00:34:43]  The Bible talks about that.
[00:34:44]  Or if any man does not provide for the members of his household, he is worse than an unbeliever.
[00:34:50]  He's denied the faith and is worse than an unbeliever.
[00:34:53]  The backstop for dealing with poverty, we need to remember this, is like, well, maybe the state wouldn't be doing welfare if the church would step up, you know, and fulfill its role.
[00:35:02]  No, the Bible does not say that it's the church's role.
[00:35:05]  The church can come into the equation and is commanded to come into the equation.
[00:35:10]  In specific scenarios.
[00:35:11]  So, 1 Timothy chapter 5, when does the church help financially with those who are poor?
[00:35:17]  When it's widows and orphans, not just anyone, not full, able bodied 20 something year old men, no, widows and orphans, and it gives requirements.

=== Biblical Care for Widows (03:09) ===

[00:35:29]  There are stipulations.
[00:35:30]  She must be 65 years of age or older.
[00:35:34]  So, not a 30 year old widow who could marry again.
[00:35:36]  Paul even says if you're a younger widow, don't make a vow to singleness, but instead you should remarry.
[00:35:42]  So, she's a widow.
[00:35:44]  Her husband has died.
[00:35:46]  She's elderly, 65 years or older.
[00:35:49]  She has no sons, no brothers, no uncle or somebody else who can provide for her, even a daughter.
[00:35:55]  And this is Paul, who is patriarchal in first century Palestine, where for the most part women were not working outside of the home and generating wealth.
[00:36:03]  And he even says before she's added on the roster of the church and becomes a financial burden to the church, and the church having a moral responsibility to care for her, even if she has a daughter, not just a son, But even if she has a daughter who could do something in order to alleviate that burden, she could somehow, just like what Ruth did for Naomi.
[00:36:24]  Ruth was a daughter in law who went out to the threshing floor and gathered wheat that was left on the sidelines in order to provide for her mother.
[00:36:34]  And the Apostle Paul would have had that example in mind as he's writing this.
[00:36:39]  And he would actually commend that as a good and godly thing.
[00:36:42]  He's not saying it's the ideal.
[00:36:43]  The ideal is that the woman's husband doesn't die, or if he does die, that he's left an inheritance for her and their children.
[00:36:49]  But in a not ideal scenario, but in a worst case scenario, the Apostle Paul is thinking, well, there's other members of her household besides just the husband that's passed away.
[00:36:58]  And so, surely there's a son or there's a brother, or God forbid, in a worst case scenario, there's a daughter even who could take up this financial burden to care for her mother, or in the case of Ruth, a mother in law.
[00:37:09]  And then the last line, not the first, but the last line of defense is if she has no members of her household that can care for her, if she's a widow, right, not a 20 something year old able bodied man, but a woman, Who is a widow whose husband has died, who's elderly, over 65, and here's the next part and she belongs to the church.
[00:37:29]  She's a faithful member, a Christian member of the church.
[00:37:33]  She's washed the feet of the saints.
[00:37:35]  So he gives all the practical conditions.
[00:37:38]  Then he gives spiritual requirements.
[00:37:40]  She also needs to have been faithful.
[00:37:41]  She needs this.
[00:37:42]  And then, and only then, only then, the church can take responsibility.
[00:37:48]  And you know who never takes responsibility?
[00:37:50]  The state.
[00:37:51]  So the first line of defense for poverty.
[00:37:53]  Is not the church, and it sure as heck isn't the state.
[00:37:56]  It's the family.
[00:37:58]  It's the family.
[00:37:59]  Why are people poor in America?
[00:38:01]  Because of families.
[00:38:03]  Well, we could get rid of welfare if the church would step up.
[00:38:06]  No, we could get rid of welfare if fathers would step up, if women would marry their baby daddies and not trade them in for Uncle Sam, and if fathers would marry their baby mamas and work hard and not get arrested and provide for those children.
[00:38:28]  Then you wouldn't need welfare at a state level, and the church would still have to come in in some rare cases where a father dies in those kinds of situations.
[00:38:35]  But we have that outline description, we would know exactly what to do.

=== Escaping Christian Tribalism (14:13) ===

[00:38:38]  Yep.
[00:38:38]  Good.
[00:38:39]  I just want to briefly mention, we'll go to our first commercial break.
[00:38:41]  It'll be quick.
[00:38:42]  Aristotle in ethics does talk about a golden mean.
[00:38:44]  So he mentions different virtues, and there could be deficiencies and excesses.
[00:38:47]  So, for example, humility.
[00:38:49]  A deficiency of humility would be pride, but then an excess of humility would be degradation.
[00:38:54]  Same thing with work ethic.
[00:38:55]  A lack of it would be sloth, an excess of it would be something like workaholism.
[00:38:59]  And I think actually it's pretty insightful.
[00:39:01]  Just all of these virtues have a balance to them.
[00:39:04]  But the point is, those are personal ethics and virtues.
[00:39:08]  Not entire political paradigms.
[00:39:10]  So I love what Aristotle said there, and that's definitely applicable to the Christian life that the Christian should be balancing these different things.
[00:39:16]  He shouldn't be a workaholic.
[00:39:17]  He shouldn't be proud, but at the same time, not overcorrect, if you could use that terminology, into laziness or overcorrect into sloth.
[00:39:24]  He should hold and live out what is actually true and virtuous.
[00:39:28]  But that paradigm does not work when you go out to a political party of 100 million people with thousands of politicians that all kind of caucus under one banner.
[00:39:37]  Well said, that being said, I'm glad that we're.
[00:39:41]  Ready for our first commercial break because it'll give us all about 90 to 120 seconds to mourn the fact that our dear friend Wesley Todd is going to hell because he just said he likes something that Aristotle said.
[00:39:53]  So let's go to our commercial break.
[00:39:54]  Let's mourn for Wesley Todd because he likes Aristotle and we know that that means that he's not a Christian.
[00:40:00]  Let's go.
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[00:41:07]  Reese Fund, Christian Capital, boldly deployed.
[00:41:14]  We are going to, I saw a comment earlier.
[00:41:17]  Saying something to the effect of, I watched the video and it's clear you guys didn't.
[00:41:21]  So we are going to get into some of the clips from the video that Gavin Orland put out.
[00:41:25]  Before then, I just wanted to take a second to read through some of the foundations.
[00:41:30]  We've talked about how it popularized in the mid 2000s, but I did want to read a couple of Keller quotes just to kind of lay the groundwork for what we're going to hear from Gavin Orland.
[00:41:42]  So, Nate, this is going to be the next image here.
[00:41:45]  It's the longer block of text.
[00:41:47]  This is from an article, the one before that, Nate, I think.
[00:41:52]  This is from an article that Tim Keller wrote in the New York Times of all places, an opinion article in 2018.
[00:41:59]  He says this Christians are pushed to two main options.
[00:42:04]  By the way, the title of the article was How Do Christians Fit into a Two Party System?
[00:42:09]  He says Christians are pushed towards two main options.
[00:42:11]  One is to withdraw and try to be apolitical, the second is to assimilate and fully adopt one party's whole package in order to have your place at the table.
[00:42:20]  Neither one of these options is valid.
[00:42:22]  And the Good Samaritan parable told in the Gospel of Luke.
[00:42:26]  Jesus points us to a man risking his life to give material help to someone of a different race and religion.
[00:42:31]  Jesus forbids us to withhold help from our neighbors, and this will inevitably require that we participate in political processes.
[00:42:39]  If we experience exclusion and even persecution for doing so, we are assured that God is with us, Matthew 5, 10 through 11, and that some will still see our good deeds and glorify God.
[00:42:53]  He concludes that article by saying, How do Christians fit into the two-party system?
[00:42:57]  They don't.
[00:42:57]  They have to rise above it.
[00:42:59]  They can't be involved in it.
[00:43:01]  Right.
[00:43:02]  Which, for the record, Going back again about 10 years or so, we went to a church, and the lead pastor, his dad, was a close friend of Timothy Keller.
[00:43:10]  And it took me a little bit to catch it, but that kind of third way ism of, I hope there's people that vote straight Democrat, vote straight Republican.
[00:43:16]  How convenient is that for a church planner that wants a $150,000 salary in a relatively liberal college town?
[00:43:23]  Like, you look at it and, like, oh, is it sophistication and like this new method of hermeneutics and all this great political theology?
[00:43:29]  Oh, nope, nope, nope.
[00:43:30]  He just wants a good paycheck.
[00:43:31]  And at the end of the day, more people helps your church.
[00:43:35]  Afford more, have a bigger building.
[00:43:36]  So, if you want more people, you should be less offensive and less offensive to people of one or the other political party.
[00:43:42]  Like a lot of it at the end of the day, it was to put butts in seats.
[00:43:46]  We're going to take this middle position because that allows us then to keep people from both sides of the political aisle happy with us.
[00:43:52]  Right.
[00:43:53]  And those days, praise God, are rapidly ending.
[00:44:00]  It's like people are like, oh, beware of tribalism, beware of tribalism.
[00:44:03]  America is becoming much more.
[00:44:06]  Tribalistic and the church evangelicalism is becoming more tribal.
[00:44:11]  Um, in many ways, you see, um, well, you just see that you know, like, like some guys, I'm you know, we'll leave them alone.
[00:44:19]  I've named these guys enough, but uh, beware the balkanization of the church, the balkanization of America.
[00:44:26]  Um, yeah, I would like if everyone could just get along, but the reality is, you can't share a country with people who.
[00:44:37]  Who are voting for policies that endanger your children?
[00:44:42]  And it's really hard to share a local church with people who they may not feel it in their heart.
[00:44:48]  They might just be stupid, right?
[00:44:50]  It's not always malice, it could just be stupidity.
[00:44:52]  That's a real possibility.
[00:44:54]  But in terms of their actions and what they're working towards, what they're voting towards, the decisions that they're making, you're sharing a church with someone who, in terms of political action, hates your kids.
[00:45:09]  That's really tough.
[00:45:10]  And so we're finally coming to a point at this juncture in these United States where, both in the church and the nation at large, I think people are starting to realize wait a second, there actually are agnosticism is a lie.
[00:45:24]  There actually are right and wrong answers to many of these questions.
[00:45:29]  And now people are sorting accordingly, right?
[00:45:33]  They're doing this geographically in terms of where people are choosing to live, they're doing this in their employment in terms of which companies they're willing to work.
[00:45:42]  For.
[00:45:42]  They're doing this in their churches.
[00:45:44]  2020 was the great sorting of America in many ways, in terms of where people live, who they work for, what church they go to.
[00:45:55]  And I think that, yeah, it makes things heated.
[00:45:58]  Yes, you feel tensions rising.
[00:46:04]  But I think that on the whole, it is a vast improvement.
[00:46:10]  Better to realize that you're a part of a remnant.
[00:46:14]  That's righteous than a part of the whole, but that's wholly compromised.
[00:46:24]  And so, yeah, I think that this is a positive development.
[00:46:28]  It's like, well, we don't know which side's going to win.
[00:46:31]  Yeah, that's true.
[00:46:34]  But at least now we're in the fight.
[00:46:36]  At least now we've been woken up.
[00:46:41]  It's interesting that you mentioned tribalism.
[00:46:43]  And, Nate, I think we're going to skip the next Keller quote because tribalism actually is the central issue that at least Gavin Ortland talked about on Twitter, on X. You know, you're of a certain age if you continue to call it Twitter.
[00:46:58]  So I'm just going to put that out there.
[00:47:02]  But he didn't mention as many of the things that Keller was mentioning about, well, abortion, but also welfare.
[00:47:10]  He specifically mentioned on X tribalism and that that is the concern for the nation and for the church.
[00:47:16]  And so he said that we need third wayism specifically because we can't allow ourselves to devolve into tribalism, which is now seems to be the greatest evil that is going to be lobbed at the right and at conservative Christians.
[00:47:33]  So.
[00:47:33]  That is, they're using the same term, third wayism, but the third way is tribalism versus what's the opposite?
[00:47:41]  Well, of course, globalism, right?
[00:47:43]  So we're going to jump into some of his clips.
[00:47:45]  And for those of you watching, Joel and Wes have not seen these yet.
[00:47:50]  I've seen them.
[00:47:51]  So we're just going to get there unhinged, unfiltered, completely off the cuff takes.
[00:47:57]  You're in trouble now here.
[00:47:58]  I'm ready.
[00:47:59]  All right, Nate, let's do clip number one.
[00:48:02]  All of this raises a question that I've been wrestling with a great deal, and I think we all need to wrestle with.
[00:48:07]  Those of you who are following my channel who are followers of Christ, you know, what does it look like to be a Christian right now?
[00:48:13]  Because we are in a very unstable and rapidly polarizing world.
[00:48:19]  And there are real evils on both the right and the left.
[00:48:23]  And our modern world is increasingly pressuring us into one of those two directions.
[00:48:28]  The trajectories are powerful, they're powerful currents.
[00:48:31]  And social media accelerates it.
[00:48:33]  And the reality is, faithfulness to Jesus requires us to resist.
[00:48:38]  Things on both sides.
[00:48:39]  And what I find very challenging about talking about this is that, especially for us in the United States, if we express concerns about problems on the right, people accuse us of being a leftist.
[00:48:51]  If you criticize the Republicans, you must be a Democrat.
[00:48:53]  If you criticize President Trump, you must be for Kamala Harris, this kind of thing.
[00:48:57]  People said this about me, even though it's not true.
[00:48:59]  I don't support the Democrats.
[00:49:01]  I don't support Kamala Harris.
[00:49:02]  I just have concerns about Donald Trump.
[00:49:04]  And this is the challenge that in the sort of increasing binaries of the world, The right versus the left.
[00:49:11]  If you criticize one side, then you're often perceived to be joining the other.
[00:49:16]  And the problem is, following Jesus doesn't fit neatly into these categories that the world has given us.
[00:49:23]  And Christians need to be able to call sin sin.
[00:49:28]  And that's going to mean we're swimming against the current in multiple directions and we're fighting on multiple fronts and so on and so forth.
[00:49:34]  That's what I believe.
[00:49:35]  So, why would people accuse Gavin?
[00:49:41]  Of being on the left or being a Democrat.
[00:49:43]  Your dad literally publicly said, never Trump, this time Harris, always Jesus.
[00:49:51]  In addition to that, Nathan, feel free to fact check me on this.
[00:49:55]  I don't want to just say something that's not right, but isn't he on staff with Russell Moore at his local church?
[00:50:03]  They're both theologians in residence at Emmanuel, it's in Nashville or up in that area in Tennessee with Russell Moore.
[00:50:10]  Russell Moore is a Democrat.
[00:50:14]  You're on staff with him.
[00:50:16]  It's not just you're in the same denomination.
[00:50:18]  You're in the same local church.
[00:50:20]  You're both on staff together.
[00:50:22]  And I'm pretty sure Ray Wartlin, your father, is the senior pastor of this church.
[00:50:26]  And he tweeted, This time Harris.
[00:50:28]  So it wasn't just, I have problems with Trump, but I also have problems with Harris.
[00:50:32]  I'm sure Ray Ortland does have problems with Harris, but not enough problems, apparently, to not vote for her and to influence a mass amount of people publicly to think that that might be a permissible Christian position to take.
[00:50:50]  So why do people think that I'm a leftist?
[00:50:52]  Bro, because you're a leftist.
[00:50:56]  And if you're not, same thing, pushing a climate change agenda.
[00:50:59]  Young Earth, same thing.
[00:51:01]  Like, if you're not, and here's the tragedy.
[00:51:03]  I mean, honestly, I feel sorry for you.
[00:51:05]  If you're not, then that's a real bummer because, I mean, honestly, you should be getting paid something.
[00:51:11]  Like, the laborer, you know, the worker is worth the wages.
[00:51:15]  I mean, if your father is influencing thousands of people to vote for Harris, you're on staff with Russell Moore, who is a Democrat shill, you're, you know, pushing climate change, denying young Earth, and then doing Third way is in the year of our Lord 2025.
[00:51:32]  You may not be a Democrat, but the Democrats should be giving you some kind of stipend, something.
[00:51:38]  The worker's worth his wages, and I've got to hand it to you.
[00:51:41]  I mean, you're working overtime.
[00:51:44]  You should be getting paid.
[00:51:45]  Yeah.
[00:51:46]  That's my hot take.
[00:51:46]  That's my, I hadn't seen that clip before, but that's how I feel.
[00:51:50]  Yep.
[00:51:51]  Absolutely.
[00:51:52]  And not everyone has to make politics their identity.
[00:51:54]  So say he's doing great Catholic and Eastern Orthodox stuff.
[00:51:57]  Keep on keeping on.
[00:51:58]  And when you veer into politics, Guys, this stuff is evil.
[00:52:01]  Let's get it out of the way.
[00:52:03]  And maybe someday we'll deal with these other problems.
[00:52:05]  Like, that's all that required.
[00:52:06]  Like, we're not, none of us are asking.
[00:52:08]  Like, the ideal situation would be he hangs up the apologetics, he hangs up this, hangs up the debates, and he comes out and it's 24-7 live streams about what contracts Doge is canceling tomorrow.
[00:52:17]  But if you're going to commentate on politics, be clear and say, we've been clear about the areas where we disagree with Trump, but also clear, much better option.
[00:52:25]  Like, this just isn't hard.
[00:52:26]  It isn't hard to be like, oh, this is who I support.
[00:52:29]  It's a little awkward, especially if you've curated.
[00:52:32]  An image of the nice guy and the soft guy and the nuance.
[00:52:36]  It's hard if you've done that.
[00:52:38]  Like, it's really not all that hard.
[00:52:39]  I've had people serving me food and stuff like that, and they hate Trump.
[00:52:42]  And I'm like, well, I hope he wins, and I hope he's the dictator that you think he's going to be.
[00:52:47]  You know, that's my question.
[00:52:48]  Have a little bit of courage in it.
[00:52:48]  Lord, please make Trump the man that my enemies think he is.

=== Shared Sins on Both Sides (13:30) ===

[00:52:52]  Absolutely.
[00:52:52]  He's not.
[00:52:53]  He's not even close, but a guy can hope.
[00:52:56]  You know, we can hope and pray.
[00:52:57]  The other thing that I thought with the clip, the last thing was, you know, Gavin was saying, well, there are evils on the left and evils on the right.
[00:53:02]  And if he was sitting here, I would just want to ask the question.
[00:53:05]  What are the evils that you see on the right?
[00:53:08]  Right.
[00:53:09]  Because I see evils on the right too.
[00:53:10]  He mentioned Andrew Tate earlier in the day.
[00:53:12]  The evils that I see on the right are IVF, federally funded, abortion, still not abolished, not even close, no fault divorce, being completely uncontested, just fine, bunch of coddled.
[00:53:33]  Yeah, gay marriage is coddled and even.
[00:53:36]  At some degree, celebrated as long as they're not like the right wants to get rid of the gay voice.
[00:53:43]  Right, right.
[00:53:43]  That's about it.
[00:53:44]  They're fine with, you know, as long as he doesn't speak in a high pitched voice, then he can marry another man and adopt a child.
[00:53:51]  And adopted a child, and we will come out and celebrate Dave Rubin and whoever else, Sam Altman, you know, and all these guys adopting babies who always happen to be baby boys.
[00:54:02]  Have you noticed that?
[00:54:05]  I mean, let's just be honest.
[00:54:05]  Like, why do two gay dudes?
[00:54:09]  Tend to adopt boys.
[00:54:13]  This stuff is banned in a lot of Europe too, for the record.
[00:54:15]  Like, we are not just like, oh, all the world does this.
[00:54:17]  No, China has banned gay couples from adopting.
[00:54:19]  Italy doesn't.
[00:54:20]  You're talking about liberal Europe.
[00:54:23]  And even they, they're like, gosh, America, that's kind of like, I mean, like, goodness gracious, did no one teach you shame?
[00:54:30]  Have a little dignity, you know?
[00:54:32]  So when liberal Europe is more conservative on a particular issue.
[00:54:36]  So, anyways, back to, you know, I would just pose it as a question.
[00:54:39]  So there's evils on the right and evils on the left.
[00:54:41]  And I would say, yes, not equal, not equal, but yes, there are evils on the right.
[00:54:47]  But what do you perceive as those evils on the right?
[00:54:50]  Because for me, the evils that I perceive on the right are what I just listed.
[00:54:54]  Gay marriage, gay adoption, no fault divorce, federally funded IVF, and without any restrictions.
[00:55:05]  So you're freezing 30 embryos in order to have one or two of them, and the rest are now incarcerated without just trial.
[00:55:13]  You have frozen children, and many of them will eventually be discarded.
[00:55:17]  That means that they were imprisoned before they ever saw the light of day without a trial and eventually will be executed.
[00:55:23]  Federally funded IVF.
[00:55:25]  That's what that does on taxpayers' dime.
[00:55:27]  So now you have to pay.
[00:55:29]  For the wrongful imprisonment and execution of human beings made in the image of God.
[00:55:33]  So there's that.
[00:55:34]  And then, of course, all the lack of restrictions and certainly the lack of abolition of abortion.
[00:55:41]  Those are evils on the right.
[00:55:42]  I'm with you.
[00:55:43]  Here's the deal all those evils are on the left to a higher degree, plus a whole other set, a whole other category of evils in terms of global affairs, World War III, billions of dollars to Ukraine.
[00:55:59]  Um, it's like, well, the right does that too.
[00:56:01]  Yes, the left will give billions to Israel and then billions to Ukraine, and the right will give billions to Israel.
[00:56:09]  They're both bad, not great.
[00:56:11]  One is worse, right?
[00:56:12]  One is worse.
[00:56:13]  It's like, well, uh, the right, they're a bunch of Zionists, my brother in Christ.
[00:56:17]  It is the year of our Lord 2025.
[00:56:19]  There is no viable political option in these United States after 150 years of dispensationalism that is not Zionist.
[00:56:27]  I don't like Zionism.
[00:56:28]  I did a whole nine part series on it.
[00:56:30]  You can watch the final episode that'll be airing this Friday at 8 p.m. Central Time.
[00:56:34]  Okay.
[00:56:34]  I'm with you.
[00:56:35]  Here's the deal.
[00:56:37]  There is no viable option, right?
[00:56:39]  And I know guys who say, I wrote in Joel Webbin.
[00:56:42]  I wish you didn't.
[00:56:42]  I'm flattered.
[00:56:44]  I appreciate the sentiment, but I am not a viable option.
[00:56:47]  Not at this juncture.
[00:56:48]  One day, maybe.
[00:56:49]  Who knows?
[00:56:49]  But I'll say, Thomas Massey may very well be a viable anti Zionist candidate in the near future.
[00:56:54]  That's right.
[00:56:55]  So good things are happening.
[00:56:56]  But he was not going to win president in 2024.
[00:57:00]  But he might win senator next cycle.
[00:57:02]  Right.
[00:57:02]  Amen.
[00:57:03]  Amen.
[00:57:03]  Which is amazing.
[00:57:04]  It's incredible what the Lord's doing.
[00:57:05]  And it's It is marvelous in our sight.
[00:57:08]  We are extremely grateful and very optimistic and bullish and hopeful for the future, especially when you look at the decline of Christianity in America and all of a sudden it's starting to turn.
[00:57:19]  And who's it turning with?
[00:57:21]  Gen Z, males, young men.
[00:57:24]  I mean, that's predominantly young white men.
[00:57:26]  It's like, why are they becoming conservative?
[00:57:28]  I don't know.
[00:57:29]  Maybe because they've been hated from the womb their entire lives and they can read statistics and they're like, wait a second, I'd like to live.
[00:57:36]  I'd like to not commit suicide.
[00:57:38]  What does that mean?
[00:57:39]  Oh, well, I guess it means that I'm.
[00:57:41]  Politically on the right.
[00:57:42]  That's my only chance of survival.
[00:57:44]  And so, and with that comes, well, what other things are on the right?
[00:57:46]  Oh, Christianity.
[00:57:47]  Well, I'm going to go explore my heritage, my religious heritage in this country and all these kinds of things.
[00:57:53]  So, we are optimistic.
[00:57:55]  We are hopeful for the future, not just 50,000 years from now, but the near future in our lifetime and certainly our children and grandchildren.
[00:58:03]  But as it currently rests, when I say viable option, what I'm saying is yes, there are sins on the right.
[00:58:10]  And if we're looking at viable options for President of the United States, then there is no option, there is no candidate that could be elected that doesn't have gross, I don't want to minimize them, gross, egregious sins in his person, in his position, his campaign, his policy.
[00:58:31]  There are gross sins.
[00:58:32]  But here's the deal all the sins on the right, those same sins, same category, but to an exponentially higher degree are found on the left.
[00:58:41]  And then there's whole swaths of other categories where the right is doing well or at least decent, where the left is absolutely sinister, like trying to welcome in millions and millions and millions of foreigners into our country to cripple our economy, to endanger our wives, our children.
[00:59:01]  And so that's so again, when he says, well, there's sins on both sides, I don't have a problem with that statement.
[00:59:08]  But that statement has been used with third ways over and over and over.
[00:59:12]  To there's the statement, and then there's the unspoken meaning.
[00:59:16]  And the unspoken fine print of that statement is there are sins on both sides, and those sins are it's pretty much a wash.
[00:59:25]  They're pretty much, you know, they're morally equivalent.
[00:59:27]  And so, what does that mean?
[00:59:29]  Well, it means you could go either way.
[00:59:32]  No, there are sins on the right, but the sins on the right are the exact sins of the left, except the left is worse.
[00:59:39]  And then the left has a whole other category, categories of sins where the right is actually much better on.
[00:59:47]  Trump is much better on foreign policy than Kamala Harris would have been.
[00:59:50]  We would be in World War III at some point during these four years if Kamala had been elected president.
[00:59:56]  Which people are asking about that.
[00:59:57]  We are talking about that on Wednesday.
[00:59:59]  That's the plan.
[01:00:00]  Yeah, but instead we get to see Zelensky, we get to see Trump and Vance do a John MacArthur with Beth Moore with Zelensky and say, go home.
[01:00:08]  Go.
[01:00:09]  And it was beautiful.
[01:00:10]  Oh my God.
[01:00:10]  Absolutely beautiful.
[01:00:12]  Send him home.
[01:00:14]  Get out of our country.
[01:00:15]  So that, I mean, that is a huge win.
[01:00:17]  But here's my point.
[01:00:18]  When Gavin says there's sins on the right, this is what all the third wave, maybe he's the first guy ever, which would require him to be an apple that fell pretty far from the tree.
[01:00:28]  Because his dad, again, literally months ago, said, This time, Harris, I'm voting for Harris, and I'm saying it publicly because I'd like for you to do it too.
[01:00:37]  And he's on staff with Russell Moore.
[01:00:40]  Okay, so I don't feel like I'm just, you know, just, you know, you're Charlie, and it's always grasping in the wind here.
[01:00:46]  So I think it's connected.
[01:00:47]  This is pretty, these dots are real close together.
[01:00:49]  It doesn't take a rocket surgeon, you know, to figure this one out.
[01:00:52]  So, when he uses third wayism because of that context, his dad, Russell Moore, these kinds of things, and his climate change stuff, all that, I'm pretty sure that he's probably using third wayism the same way that all the other guys used to.
[01:01:05]  The way Rick Warren did recently, as recent as February, and the way that Tim Keller was notorious as kind of the pioneer of third wayism used to use it.
[01:01:16]  And the way that it's been used historically and the way that I think it's being used now is not just to say Republicans are not sinless.
[01:01:25]  Because if that's what you mean, then say that.
[01:01:27]  Am I agree?
[01:01:28]  Right.
[01:01:28]  But does that need to, I mean, does that even need to, like, I want to meet the guy who says, you know what?
[01:01:34]  I've been looking at the Trump party and his administration and all their policies, and I'm looking at that, and then I'm looking at Leviticus, and I'm like, you know, corporate needs you to tell the difference between these two pictures.
[01:01:48]  I'm like, it's the same picture.
[01:01:49]  Like, I think this is literally verbatim, word for word, the Holy Spirit inspired text of scripture.
[01:01:57]  I've just, I haven't met that guy.
[01:01:59]  I've not, I've yet to meet the guy.
[01:02:01]  Who needs to be informed that he's currently in the dark and unaware that there is sin on the political right?
[01:02:09]  So, if you're just saying, hey, you know what, the political right is not sinless and there is actually evil there and sins there, then say that.
[01:02:15]  But when you say there's sins on both sides, typically what you mean is you mean there are equal, morally equal sins on each side, but in different categories.
[01:02:27]  And so, what you're actually saying is you're not saying there's sin on the Republican side because they also.
[01:02:33]  Are light on heterosexual marriage, light on the dignity and sanctity of unborn life, light on this, light on.
[01:02:41]  No, you're not saying sins on both sides because they actually share in the same sins, yet to a slightly lesser degree in the same categories as the left.
[01:02:49]  No, what you typically mean is that there are sins on both sides, the degrees are morally equivalent, and the sins on the right are just in a different category, a different arena, and that those sins are just as bad.
[01:03:03]  Is the murder of the unborn, of sodomy, and all these other things.
[01:03:07]  And so that guarantee if you pressed him, he'd probably say, Well, there's racism or there's that's what he'll be saying.
[01:03:13]  And so that's a long way of saying, if I asked what are the sins, he would for sure, he would say, Truth serum, private room.
[01:03:18]  Yep, that's what he'd say.
[01:03:19]  Yep, he would say, Racism, misogyny, misogyny.
[01:03:23]  He's talking about Tate.
[01:03:24]  That's what he would say.
[01:03:25]  Yeah, that's those are the sins he's talking about.
[01:03:27]  Yeah, the last thing I'll say about this.
[01:03:29]  Well, first of all, a clarification someone in the comments pointed out, uh, you are right, Ray Orland is not the lead pastor of, um, Emmanuel.
[01:03:39]  Yeah, he's a pastor of pastors.
[01:03:41]  No, he retired.
[01:03:43]  He retired and he's now the president of Renewal Ministries, which is an organization that his father started.
[01:03:49]  Okay.
[01:03:49]  All right.
[01:03:51]  The other thing is I'm pretty sure he's a part of the church, though.
[01:03:54]  Yeah, he might attend it.
[01:03:56]  Yeah, absolutely.
[01:03:57]  The other thing is many Christians have been told that their only identity is in Christ.
[01:04:06]  And so I found it really interesting when he said, Well, I don't like it when they call me a Democrat.
[01:04:11]  Or a Republican.
[01:04:13]  And like, we don't like it when people call us names either, but we are also okay taking labels onto ourselves, like Christian nationalist, that are not strictly my eternal part of the family of God.
[01:04:25]  Like, that is our primary identity and it influences everything.
[01:04:30]  But it is time for Christians to be okay with some earthly identities.
[01:04:35]  And then when people call you that thing, say, Yeah, I am that.
[01:04:39]  I am a Christian nationalist.
[01:04:40]  Or I am.
[01:04:41]  A conservative is as meaningless as that term is anymore.
[01:04:45]  But we are multifaceted creatures.
[01:04:48]  And so to push away or to say, well, I don't like the label, I don't like being put in a box, I don't even like being labeled in that way.
[01:04:56]  Well, if you're labeled wrongly in a slanderous way, then you have the option of choosing to defend yourself or not.
[01:05:02]  But having a label, having an earthly label, a political label, you know, anything like that, that's not bad.
[01:05:11]  In fact, we probably need to be okay.
[01:05:13]  Taking some of those labels as Christians that we have not been okay doing for the past 30, 40 years.
[01:05:18]  That's why two and a half years ago, whatever it was, three years ago, when Christian nationalism was making waves and all that kind of stuff, and a lot of guys were hesitant and they're still hesitant.
[01:05:26]  They never took the label, and that's fine.
[01:05:28]  I don't think it was wrong not to.
[01:05:30]  But I remember making the calculus and thinking, you know what?
[01:05:34]  I'm a Christian and I'm a nationalist.
[01:05:37]  So I'm, yeah, I'm going to go ahead and take this label.
[01:05:40]  I think that it's a good label, we can work with it.
[01:05:44]  And I knew that it was, I mean, it was invented by the left as a slur, you know, a pejorative for Christians who were politically conservative.
[01:05:52]  But I was like, no, yeah, but that is what I am.
[01:05:56]  And I'm going to work with it because it's not a bad word.
[01:06:01]  Being a nationalist is a good thing.
[01:06:03]  Being a Christian is certainly a good thing.
[01:06:05]  And so I know you mean this as an insult, but the real insult is that you think it's an insult.
[01:06:12]  No, this is a good thing.
[01:06:13]  So, yeah, I think as much as we can, trying to realize that we are, yeah, we're finite earthly creatures.
[01:06:21]  We have.
[01:06:21]  It puts you on a team.

=== Owning the Nationalist Label (15:49) ===

[01:06:22]  Yeah, exactly.
[01:06:23]  And we have an immortal soul that will never die.
[01:06:26]  We will live forever.
[01:06:27]  But.
[01:06:28]  In this life, we're here, we're now, this is where God places us.
[01:06:31]  I'm an American and I'm a proud American.
[01:06:34]  I'm a Protestant.
[01:06:35]  I'm a proud Protestant, sometimes an embarrassed Protestant, you know, but not, you know, just because Protestants these days are really gay.
[01:06:42]  But when I look at, you know, Protestants of yesteryear, I'm like, yeah, Protestants built the country.
[01:06:47]  Catholics did not build the country.
[01:06:49]  Eastern Orthodox did not build the country.
[01:06:51]  Protestant Christians did.
[01:06:53]  And I'm proud of that heritage and I belong to it.
[01:06:57]  That is, that's my tribe.
[01:07:00]  That's my tribe, and that's a good thing.
[01:07:02]  And you get to define your terms too.
[01:07:03]  So you could say, I'm a Republican, and not then say, I'm a Republican, just like Dennis Prager and Dave Rubin and Ben Shapiro.
[01:07:10]  You can say, Yeah, I'm a Republican, like Thomas Massey, Dusty Devers, John Shriver, Brent Money.
[01:07:16]  Well, yeah, of course, those guys that are awesome, they would agree with us on a lot of things.
[01:07:20]  That's what I am.
[01:07:21]  What are you talking about?
[01:07:23]  And the crazy thing about, and this is why people are like, Well, yeah, but Republicans, they're so gay.
[01:07:27]  And it's like, in the literal sense, they are.
[01:07:28]  That's true.
[01:07:30]  I mean, there were queers at Trump's.
[01:07:34]  The RNC, you know, all these different things.
[01:07:35]  And he appointed one to his cabinet.
[01:07:36]  There you go.
[01:07:37]  Yeah.
[01:07:37]  So, yeah, like, well, Republicans are gay.
[01:07:40]  Yes, that is true.
[01:07:41]  But here's the deal Politics is the realm of the possible.
[01:07:46]  We're pushing the ball further and further down the court.
[01:07:49]  Now, that doesn't mean that you just shill for someone, right?
[01:07:51]  Like, I did a whole post where I tagged our president, I tagged Donald J. Trump and VP Vance and pleaded with them do not make this decision.
[01:08:05]  To federally fund IVF.
[01:08:07]  And I told them exactly why it's immoral and why it's a shame.
[01:08:11]  And that if they went through with it, they would have blood on their hands and be responsible for bringing greater degrees of judgment upon our nation.
[01:08:20]  So supporting someone doesn't mean that you can't also hold them accountable.
[01:08:24]  In fact, when you're supportive, turns out people might actually listen a little bit more when they know, okay, this guy's not just an antagonist who's always against me.
[01:08:35]  I can do no right.
[01:08:36]  I take a drink of water and they're like, You know, why are you doing that?
[01:08:39]  And that's, you know, and like I sit down and why are you not standing and I stand up?
[01:08:42]  Why are you not sitting?
[01:08:43]  You know, like I'm not going to listen to that.
[01:08:45]  Like the people who troll me online, it doesn't matter what I say.
[01:08:49]  They've, you know, it's confirmation bias.
[01:08:51]  They've already decided that they hate me.
[01:08:53]  And so even if they actually ever had a good criticism, which I don't know if they ever have, because I've, it just goes to, you know, to make my point for me, but I've tuned them out because they may actually have a good criticism, but I'm not going to hear it.
[01:09:08]  Not from them because they have proven time and time again that.
[01:09:12]  They're completely biased and that they're not listening to me in good faith.
[01:09:17]  They don't desire anything for my good.
[01:09:20]  They're not for me.
[01:09:21]  And so, anyways, my point with the Republican Party is a problem.
[01:09:25]  You can be a Republican and own that label.
[01:09:28]  You can be a Republican and support, like Trump's running for office and you support him, you vote for him, you're outspoken, encouraging others to do likewise.
[01:09:39]  You can do all that kind of stuff.
[01:09:40]  And still, from that position of support, Still be honest and have critiques and hold them accountable.
[01:09:46]  Critiques, and as a Christian, especially for me in my case, as a Christian minister, not just critiques but actual rebukes.
[01:09:53]  At times, you actually, I love you.
[01:09:55]  I'm praying for you.
[01:09:56]  I've voted for you, proud to have voted for you.
[01:10:00]  Also, I rebuke you in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ.
[01:10:03]  You are incurring judgment upon our land.
[01:10:06]  You need to repent of your sin and turn to Christ and stop doing this wicked thing.
[01:10:12]  So, you could do all of that.
[01:10:14]  But here's my point you got the queers at the RNC, you got the Hare Krishna or whatever, Hindu this and Hindu that.
[01:10:21]  And you got all that.
[01:10:24]  But you also do have Thomas Massey's and Dusty Devers and Brent.
[01:10:27]  Like, find me a Dusty Devers who's a Democrat, right?
[01:10:34]  Find me one.
[01:10:36]  And that's the crazy thing.
[01:10:37]  In 2025, as godless as we are as a nation, and it's bad, it's pretty godless, as godless as we are as a nation, as far off the rails as we've gotten from our founding,
[01:10:53]  A genuine, and I'm not talking about like limp wristed Mike Pence, but I mean like you can be a full throated, masculine, Bible loving, Bible preaching Christian and win an election as a running as a Republican candidate.
[01:11:12]  Right?
[01:11:12]  Yep.
[01:11:14]  That's incredible.
[01:11:15]  You cannot do that as a Democrat.
[01:11:16]  Right.
[01:11:16]  You cannot.
[01:11:17]  Josh Shriver from Michigan, a state representative, literally just like tweeting out put in a resolution.
[01:11:23]  We are going to acknowledge Christ as King of Michigan.
[01:11:27]  This state needs to acknowledge formally in its documents that Christ is the King of Michigan.
[01:11:31]  We have allegiance to him.
[01:11:33]  And he's like a sitting, not a candidate, not I want to run.
[01:11:36]  He's a sitting representative, I think been elected twice.
[01:11:39]  Democrat?
[01:11:41]  Libertarian.
[01:11:43]  No, he's not.
[01:11:43]  Republican.
[01:11:44]  Exactly.
[01:11:45]  Yeah.
[01:11:46]  It's pretty amazing.
[01:11:47]  And that's why this whole third way is and well, there's Republicans and they have sin and there's Democrats and they have sin.
[01:11:52]  No, duh, Sherlock.
[01:11:53]  Of course.
[01:11:55]  But what you're doing with statements like that is you are insinuating the fine print is you're.
[01:12:01]  You're convincing people to use another Kellerism.
[01:12:04]  It's not what you said.
[01:12:05]  It's what your speech does.
[01:12:06]  It's what it does.
[01:12:08]  Well, what it does in this case is it convinces people that both are equally immoral, equally immoral.
[01:12:17]  And that is not true.
[01:12:19]  It's simply not true.
[01:12:22]  Before we go to our break, there's a second clip, and I don't think we need to say a whole lot about it.
[01:12:27]  He gives a couple of caveats where he's a little bit different from Keller.
[01:12:31]  So, to be fair, I just want to allow him to say his caveats about.
[01:12:35]  His version of third wayism.
[01:12:37]  So we'll play it.
[01:12:38]  We'll let him get that out there.
[01:12:39]  When we come back, we'll play our third clip, which we'll again talk about because that's where he now says, well, this is why we need to be third way in this day.
[01:12:46]  So, Nate, let's do clip number two.
[01:12:47]  If you guys have a quick comment about it afterwards, we can make it.
[01:12:50]  But I'm just putting it here.
[01:12:51]  I want to hear a couple comments quickly.
[01:12:53]  Yeah.
[01:12:53]  And I'm just putting it here just to make sure that we're fair to what he said.
[01:12:56]  Yeah.
[01:12:56]  No, that's good, Michael.
[01:12:58]  Amidst the swirling forces of evil around us, what does it look like to be a faithful Christian right now?
[01:13:04]  I believe that third wayism is something.
[01:13:06]  We really need to consider more now than ever before because of the polarization.
[01:13:13]  And I just want to put that out there and hope this sparks conversations and reflection about this.
[01:13:17]  Let me start by clarifying two things that third wayism isn't.
[01:13:22]  Third wayism is not detached aloofness.
[01:13:25]  Third wayism does not mean that we should never commit to a particular political party or identify with a particular side in a culture war or a particular political ideology or vote for a particular political candidate.
[01:13:40]  You could literally be a political candidate and still be committed to third wayism.
[01:13:45]  I'll explain that more in a second.
[01:13:47]  Second, third wayism is not splitting the difference between the bifurcations of the modern world.
[01:13:53]  The truth does not always lie between two extremes.
[01:13:57]  Third wayism does not mean that the truth is in the middle of each dispute.
[01:14:00]  In fact, rarely will it mean that.
[01:14:02]  It'd be an unbelievable coincidence if the truth happens to be 50 50 in the middle.
[01:14:08]  There we go.
[01:14:08]  I appreciate that.
[01:14:09]  And I'll say just briefly, I do agree.
[01:14:10]  He said, you know, for a moment, he said, in fact, you could be a political candidate, not just that you could vote for a political candidate, but you could be that political candidate.
[01:14:19]  And still practice a third wayism.
[01:14:21]  And I was like, yes, the Republican Party until Trump, my entire life.
[01:14:26]  Like, you are literally, you might as well just say, you could, in fact, you could be Mitt Romney.
[01:14:32]  You could be Jeb Bush.
[01:14:33]  You could be Mike Pence.
[01:14:34]  You could be George Bush.
[01:14:35]  You could be, like, yes, we are well aware, Gavin, who I do believe just for the right, I almost said Brother Gavin, and that would be, I think he is a brother in Christ.
[01:14:45]  And so, Brother Gavin, yes, we are well aware, the Republican Party has proven time and time again for decades.
[01:14:51]  That you absolutely can be a squishy moderate centrist and be a political candidate on the right.
[01:15:00]  You can't do it on the left, though.
[01:15:02]  On the left, see, this is where the right is changing.
[01:15:05]  And I think for the better, because on the left, the left actually has standards.
[01:15:09]  Right.
[01:15:10]  They say, no, no, you can't be squishy.
[01:15:12]  You must be fully committed to evil.
[01:15:14]  They kicked out one of the Democrats in the House from the party who wanted to be a pro life Democrat.
[01:15:19]  Right.
[01:15:20]  Nope.
[01:15:20]  No way.
[01:15:21]  Yeah.
[01:15:21]  So the left actually has standards.
[01:15:23]  They're like, wait a second, you're telling me.
[01:15:25]  You're telling me that you could go either way, like you could gouge the American people for trillions of dollars of tax money, or you also would be okay with not doing that?
[01:15:36]  Then the Democrat Party's not for you.
[01:15:38]  I mean, think about this.
[01:15:39]  Kamala Harris, remember somebody was saying, Christ is king, Jesus is Lord at one of her rallies.
[01:15:44]  And she said, You friend, you must not know where you are.
[01:15:47]  Yep.
[01:15:48]  Not at this rally.
[01:15:50]  So the left actually, so I think Gavin is right.
[01:15:53]  And I'll say this, and this is the beauty he has been right.
[01:15:57]  That statement has historically, in my lifetime, been right until now.
[01:16:03]  And that's the beauty.
[01:16:04]  He's right.
[01:16:05]  You could actually not only vote for a particular political candidate as a third wayist, but you could run as a political candidate as a third wayist, never as a Democrat.
[01:16:15]  They expect you to choose this day whom you will serve.
[01:16:20]  If you're not committed to serving Satan and drinking the blood of unborn infants and celebrating, Gay butt sex publicly in the streets in front of young children, then no, you have no place with us.
[01:16:36]  So you can't be a third wayist and be a political candidate as a Democrat.
[01:16:41]  But my whole lifetime, Gavin's right.
[01:16:44]  You could actually not just vote for a political party, you could run as a candidate, but only with one party as a third wayist, as a squishy, moderate, centrist.
[01:16:54]  And that was the Republican Party.
[01:16:56]  And the only thing that's different now is for the first time in my lifetime, You actually have to make up your mind for both parties, finally.
[01:17:07]  You always had to be committed to wickedness to be a Democrat politician, always, always.
[01:17:15]  And now you have to be committed to some categories of wickedness, but also some categories that, by biblical definitions, would actually be considered righteousness to be a Republican candidate.
[01:17:31]  And, you know, I take that back.
[01:17:34]  Depending on the position, maybe not president of the United States, but if you're a state senator, for instance, of a deep red state like Oklahoma, you actually can be committed to righteousness in some categories and not have to commit to wickedness in these other categories.
[01:17:50]  You could literally be a Christian nationalist.
[01:17:53]  Right.
[01:17:54]  The Texas party platform, if you look at the planks, it's chosen by the grassroots.
[01:17:57]  It's incredible.
[01:17:58]  It's wildly right wing.
[01:17:59]  It's against abortion, it's against unnatural marriages, so it's pro the family, against taxes.
[01:18:04]  Like it is.
[01:18:06]  And there's nothing in it that's like, oh, and we want the log cabin Republicans, the gay Republicans, to be fully included.
[01:18:11]  Like, no, the grassroots of Texas, the planks of the Republican Party that these different individuals caucus with are all of them great.
[01:18:18]  Their policies, their planks, their priorities, they're all great.
[01:18:22]  Now, they're squishy people again, the third way.
[01:18:25]  Sure.
[01:18:25]  They don't necessarily uphold them, but on paper, it's a great party.
[01:18:28]  But now we have, yeah.
[01:18:29]  And now we have the Ten Commandments in public school.
[01:18:31]  Yep.
[01:18:32]  Like, that's one of the planks.
[01:18:33]  We are going to display in classrooms the Ten Commandments.
[01:18:36]  That's not the only thing we need, certainly.
[01:18:38]  But that's awesome.
[01:18:39]  There's guys talking about abolishing property taxes.
[01:18:42]  Yeah, there's a bill filed for it.
[01:18:43]  You got Trump coming out with the $100,000 for high caliber people to come over and to get their green card.
[01:18:50]  No, it's more than that.
[01:18:51]  I think it's like $100,000 a person.
[01:18:55]  And if we had like $5 million.
[01:18:56]  No, it's $5 million per person.
[01:18:57]  No, it's $5 million a pop.
[01:18:58]  $5 million per person for a green card or citizenship?
[01:19:01]  It's a gold card.
[01:19:02]  Gold card.
[01:19:03]  It's a green card that you buy.
[01:19:05]  Yeah.
[01:19:06]  And they could pay off the national debt.
[01:19:08]  So, anyway, but the point is, which I actually think is a pretty good policy, and get rid of all your H 1B.
[01:19:13]  And I know that I liked it at first, but I just get rid of everybody else.
[01:19:18]  If you're like, if we're going to open up the doors, my goodness, could we get paid?
[01:19:22]  Right.
[01:19:23]  You know, like, and then open up all these people for free.
[01:19:25]  Exactly.
[01:19:26]  And then open up the doors to people who are vetted and blah, blah, blah.
[01:19:29]  And still, on the whole, go from 3 million, you know, immigration to 200,000.
[01:19:37]  Yeah.
[01:19:38]  And in, I don't know the math.
[01:19:39]  But over the course of a couple decades, pay off the national debt while you're at it.
[01:19:42]  That'd be pretty nice.
[01:19:43]  But the point is here's the point.
[01:19:47]  You can be a third wayist with the Republican political party, but you can't with the Democrat party.
[01:19:53]  That's what I wanted to point out the Democrat party has always demanded loyalty, they've always demanded conviction, spine.
[01:20:02]  It's all in the wrong direction, it's all bent towards evil.
[01:20:05]  But they actually expect that you're not going to be a squish, that you're going to.
[01:20:11]  Have conviction, and what is your conviction?
[01:20:13]  Your conviction is to incur the judgment of God for these United States of America.
[01:20:18]  Right?
[01:20:19]  It's only the Republican Party that has ever allowed for this kind of language, this third way type of language.
[01:20:25]  And Gavin is very concerned because he sees on the horizon that maybe we won't anymore.
[01:20:30]  Yep.
[01:20:30]  And I'm sitting here as a Christian minister and I'm saying, Who, what, what Christian man looks at that on the horizon and thinks, Oh no, this is a bad thing?
[01:20:41]  Yep.
[01:20:42]  I'm like, Like you're telling me that there'll be, you're telling me that we're entering into a season where you might not be able to, um, to have, uh, have light, have fellowship with darkness, where you might not be able to, um,
[01:20:58]  to lean on that splintered reed, Egypt, where you might not be able to, uh, to grasp hands with Baal or the Asherah poles, where you might actually have to make a choice, good or evil, God or Satan, that like.
[01:21:14]  And you want me to be worried about this.
[01:21:18]  You want me to hear this speech and think, oh no.
[01:21:23]  I feel like it's the meme, it's like, oh no.
[01:21:25]  Anyways, this is great.
[01:21:29]  Far right revolution?
[01:21:29]  It'll feed our families.
[01:21:31]  Yeah, the only problem I have with it is that it's the same thing that I would say to the Democrat.
[01:21:36]  I would say to Gavin, my only problem is that it's actually not true and we're not quite there yet.
[01:21:44]  I see hope on the horizon.
[01:21:45]  I think by God's grace we could be there.
[01:21:47]  But as of now, I would say the same thing to Gavin that I would say to everybody during the election cycle that we're screaming into the void and shrieking of Trump being literally Hitler and blah, blah, blah.
[01:22:01]  What I would say is, God, please make what Gavin is concerned about, please make half of his fears come true.

=== Dominion Over Finances (02:32) ===

[01:22:11]  That's my prayer.
[01:22:11]  Yeah.
[01:22:12]  Good.
[01:22:13]  All right.
[01:22:13]  We're going to get our next commercial break, and then we're going to do one more clip, and then we'll close things down.
[01:22:19]  So we'll hit those super chats that came in.
[01:22:21]  And if you definitely want something answered, you know, putting in the super chat is a great way to have that happen.
[01:22:28]  All right.
[01:22:28]  The clock is running out.
[01:22:29]  You need to go and register now for our Christ is King How to Defeat Trash World conference.
[01:22:36]  It's happening the year of our Lord 2025, April 3rd, 4th, and 5th.
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[01:22:48]  We've got Steve Dace, Calvin Robinson, Orrin McIntyre, Dr. Stephen Wolfe, Eric Kahn, David Reese, Andrew Isker, John Harris, A.D. Robles, Dan Burkholder, Dusty Devers, Ben Garrett, C.J. Engel, and yours truly, Pastor Joel Webbin.
[01:23:05]  Come on out, join us April 3rd, 4th, and 5th, 2025.
[01:23:10]  Thursday through a Saturday, go to rightresponseconference.com to register today.
[01:23:16]  Again, that's rightresponseconference.com.
[01:23:19]  Listen, guys, you probably listen to Right Response Ministries because you take the Dominion mandate offered to us in Scripture seriously.
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=== Letting the Bible Set Its Table (05:15) ===

[01:24:44]  All right.
[01:24:44]  So now that we allowed him to make his two caveats, we're going to jump into our last clip and we're going to listen to what Gavin Orland is saying, what his idea of third wayism actually is.
[01:24:56]  So, Nate, we'll roll clip number three.
[01:24:59]  This one's about a minute longer than the last two.
[01:25:01]  So listen carefully and we'll discuss it on the other side.
[01:25:06]  However, there is an old saying that abuse does not take away proper use.
[01:25:11]  Okay.
[01:25:11]  And the times in which we live are so crazy that I feel compelled to speak out and encourage us to consider third wayism a little bit here.
[01:25:18]  Because of these evils on the right and the ways that sometimes we can just, we're only looking in one direction.
[01:25:26]  So, at its best, what is third wayism?
[01:25:30]  Let's again, I'm going to try to be real simple here in my thinking.
[01:25:35]  Hopefully, not simple minded, but clear and brief.
[01:25:38]  The best way I think about it is this the kingdom of God does not fit neatly into the categories of the modern world.
[01:25:47]  Western modernity is characterized by these various bifurcations, and we're frequently pressured into a choice between two alternatives when following Jesus calls us something totally different than either alternative.
[01:26:01]  That doesn't mean it's going to be right in the middle of the two.
[01:26:04]  And because the gospel is our ultimate allegiance, our citizenship is in heaven, that's our primary home and allegiance.
[01:26:13]  We will not fit well into this world.
[01:26:15]  We will feel like exiles and we'll be swimming upstream in multiple directions.
[01:26:20]  Now, my thoughts here have been shaped by Christopher Watkins' great book, Biblical Critical Theory.
[01:26:25]  In the introduction to that book, by the way, he deals with these concerns.
[01:26:28]  He gives a good response.
[01:26:29]  Though don't impute any of my clumsiness in my thinking about this onto him.
[01:26:35]  He's much better at this than I am.
[01:26:37]  But I'm going to link to his YouTube channel and also a helpful article he's written on this.
[01:26:40]  Here's what he says Rather than crudely splitting the difference in this way, third way thinking is about letting the Bible set its own table, unfold its own categories, and tell its own story in its own way, rather than squeezing it in awkwardly between existing ideologies at a table set by others.
[01:26:57]  Only when the Bible has first been allowed to speak in its own terms can we bring it into meaningful conversation with secular ideologies.
[01:27:05]  At the end of the day, I think.
[01:27:07]  Let's make it really, really simple.
[01:27:09]  At the end of the day, it means simply following our conscience.
[01:27:14]  I mean, this is where these conversations between people who have different leanings and different postures in the culture wars and in politics and all this are so hard to talk these things through.
[01:27:23]  Sometimes we're suspicious of each other.
[01:27:25]  Can I just share my heart, put it out on the table, and say some of us are third way and are speaking out about the concerns with what's going on on the far right?
[01:27:38]  Truly, because we are trying to follow our conscience and we see real evil over here, and we're saying no.
[01:27:43]  Thank you to all of you that endured.
[01:27:46]  You're still here with us, you're holding on to the ballast.
[01:27:49]  You say any longer that I couldn't have done it.
[01:27:50]  But one of the biggest things that you'll see guys like this do with the third way is they posit a framework.
[01:27:56]  So, what they're proposing is a framework where grace destroys nature, where grace takes an individual and it raises them above and outside of all of these natural categories that they have.
[01:28:08]  Aristotle, man is a political animal.
[01:28:10]  Well, generally speaking, as man has to interface with man or social animal, man has to interface with man and form political systems.
[01:28:16]  Grace is not destroying that.
[01:28:17]  Like when Peter says, You are a holy nation, a holy people, you're set apart.
[01:28:21]  What Peter's not saying is everything else that you were before man, woman, American, politician, magistrate, business owner all those things are done away.
[01:28:29]  And now you have this just new category where it's all just spiritual, all just grace, all just only singularly belonging to this holy nation.
[01:28:36]  And so, what these guys like Gavin do is they say, Look, you've just been given this new identity, and how perfect.
[01:28:42]  It doesn't fit in any of these.
[01:28:43]  No, what grace does instead of just removing all of it is say, All right, you're still going to be right wing and conservative, and what you're going to be is a wrecking ball in the Republican Party to get it to obey Christ.
[01:28:54]  That grace perfects natural political categories.
[01:28:57]  So instead of again, it removing you, ripping it out of it, it's like, Well, now none of these fit our Bible, none of these make sense with us.
[01:29:03]  No, grace comes in and says, You're still going to occupy this space, and then you're going to be like a good magistrate, like the ones that we've already mentioned, and do a great job inside of them, taking the existing system and changing it.
[01:29:14]  Trump remade.
[01:29:16]  The Republican Party in eight years.
[01:29:18]  You, Christian, with the Holy Spirit and God's word, can remake your local county, Republican party, Republican group.
[01:29:25]  You can remake it too.
[01:29:27]  That's what grace is doing.
[01:29:28]  Instead of just getting you, what it does is it gets you off the hook.
[01:29:30]  Well, at the end of the day, I just, I belong to a different people.
[01:29:33]  And so America's going to hell in the hands basket, but I have my inheritance.
[01:29:36]  I have my hope and it's way out there.
[01:29:38]  And really, it kind of like, I'm not really responsible.
[01:29:41]  No, you are responsible, and grace has the power to change these categories that you already belong to.
[01:29:46]  Yeah.
[01:29:48]  He mentioned, I remember hearing a story once of Stephen Hawking who was going to give a lecture on whether or not we are free or bound.

=== Following Your Conscience (02:05) ===

[01:29:59]  Like, what does the universe say about whether man has free will or not?
[01:30:04]  And Stephen Hawking gave his whole lecture explaining all these theories and philosophies and ideas.
[01:30:10]  And then at the end of it, he said, Man is free.
[01:30:18]  But the universe behaves in such a way that he might as well not be.
[01:30:22]  And I remember the person who told this story said there was just this collective groan from the audience.
[01:30:27]  They're like, we just listened to this hour long lecture for you to say, I don't know.
[01:30:34]  For me, not something quite as big, but Gavin's conclusion was so all that to say, third wayism is about, wait for it, follow your conscience.
[01:30:46]  Yeah.
[01:30:46]  And it's like, really?
[01:30:49]  Well, first of all, a couple of questions.
[01:30:51]  What informs our conscience?
[01:30:53]  Is it possible for our conscience to be seared on an individual level?
[01:30:57]  Is it possible for our conscience to be misguided on a cultural level?
[01:31:01]  100%, absolutely.
[01:31:03]  And so, to say to Christians who live in a wicked pagan society that we as the evangelical church have largely helped contribute to in a lot of ways, certainly by not speaking out against it, to say to Christians who have been very happy being the frog boiled in the pot of water.
[01:31:22]  Follow your conscience.
[01:31:24]  It's going to steer you straight.
[01:31:26]  No, it is not.
[01:31:26]  Like, one of the things that's happened to all of us over the last couple of years is that our conscience has been sharpened to actually value and love the things of God and the world as He has created it.
[01:31:37]  And so to say, follow your conscience is without then saying, and by the way, this is how your conscience is wrong on a national level, is to just continue to invite people to continue in the apathy and the apostasy that they've been engaging in.
[01:31:54]  Well said.
[01:31:55]  What was the name of that book?
[01:31:56]  I almost blacked out when it came on the screen.
[01:31:58]  Biblical Christian Theory or Critical Theory or Christian Critical Theory.

=== Post-Roe Political Reality (04:49) ===

[01:32:04]  Yeah, yeah.
[01:32:05]  And Christopher Watkins, he's actually good on postmodernism, specifically Derrida, but he's Australian.
[01:32:11]  So, not a good start there.
[01:32:16]  You start with that and you're like, oh.
[01:32:18]  All right.
[01:32:19]  Well, there you have it.
[01:32:22]  Third Wayism or Third Gayism.
[01:32:25]  I've heard it pronounced both ways.
[01:32:27]  I don't want to sit here in a seat of judgment and say that it has to be pronounced one way or the other tomato, tomato.
[01:32:32]  It's up to you.
[01:32:34]  Not a good idea.
[01:32:35]  Okay, let's go ahead and deal with the chat.
[01:32:37]  We've got some super chats today, so we want to honor those.
[01:32:39]  We've got one from Michael.
[01:32:41]  We have two from Michael.
[01:32:42]  Oh, two from Michael.
[01:32:43]  He says, first one is third wayism equals Democrats LARPing as Christian.
[01:32:51]  Amen.
[01:32:51]  Yeah, yeah, sounds good.
[01:32:54]  Another one from Michael.
[01:32:54]  He says, Mike Pence or JD Vance, who is a better Christian?
[01:32:59]  Yeah, it's a good question.
[01:33:00]  We would say JD Vance.
[01:33:02]  We recognize that he's Catholic.
[01:33:04]  We'd like to see him be Protestant.
[01:33:06]  But there's no question in my mind that he has done far more good for the kingdom of Christ and for biblical ethics so far in what four or five weeks of serving as vice president than Mike Pence did in four years.
[01:33:24]  Mike Pence was your typical evangelical who had good rhetoric in many regards, conservative, you know, good on the way that, you know, in terms of what he said, his rhetoric was good on the issue of life for the most part, you know, these kinds of things.
[01:33:41]  But you also have to take into account that the game has changed, right?
[01:33:44]  That with the removal of Roe, with the removal of Roe, you no longer have the cover fire afforded to allegedly conservative politicians on the right, you know, squishy kind of Mitt Romney, you know, whatever.
[01:34:02]  These kind of Jeb Bush, you know, or Mike Pence, they were able to parrot conservative language.
[01:34:10]  That seemingly would speak up for the dignity and sanctity of life for the unborn.
[01:34:17]  But you just have to keep in mind in terms of, okay, but what did they do?
[01:34:22]  And the reality is that over the course of my lifetime, none of these guys did anything.
[01:34:29]  All that happened throughout all these Republican presidencies over the course of my life is that abortion was, it just everything continued.
[01:34:41]  And if anything, we lost ground and lost ground and lost ground.
[01:34:46]  Well, now we're in a situation largely because of Trump and his appointments to the Supreme Court and their decision where Roe has now been removed.
[01:34:59]  Dobbs is, by a biblical standard, Dobbs is not a righteous decision.
[01:35:04]  It ultimately should be banned both at the federal level and the state level.
[01:35:08]  Could states go against the federal?
[01:35:10]  Of course.
[01:35:11]  The states could war on this issue at the Federal level, they could say abortion is abolished because it is an abomination in the sight of God on the basis of the 14th Amendment and all these different things.
[01:35:24]  You know, we are abolishing abortion at the federal level, and then California, you could throw a fit and they could keep doing what they're doing, and that could become its own mess and you know, have to get sorted out and figure out how to deal with that.
[01:35:35]  But the righteous decision would have been further than Dobbs, not just the removal of Roe and returning it to states, but it would have been to say at the federal level that abortion is a heinous crime and a sin and it brings judgment from God and.
[01:35:48]  And so we are outlawing it.
[01:35:49]  And then one by one, the battle would be with the states.
[01:35:52]  Now, with Roe being removed, we're still in that position.
[01:35:56]  One by one, it's a state battle.
[01:35:58]  But my point is that now, because, you know, they are conservative, allegedly conservative politicians can't hide behind Roe, now you get to see how serious they actually are about life.
[01:36:10]  And the reality is that very few of them are.
[01:36:13]  And that's just the reality that we're having to come to terms with, is that there's.
[01:36:18]  There's a lot of work to be done, a lot of work to be done.
[01:36:21]  And so, could JD Vance be stronger in his rhetoric?
[01:36:25]  Yes, absolutely.
[01:36:27]  Does he need to be supportive of IVF?
[01:36:29]  Absolutely not.
[01:36:31]  But on the whole, if we're comparing, we're not comparing JD Vance to Jesus Christ, we're comparing him, like the question, to Mike Pence, who is a better Christian?
[01:36:41]  As far as I'm concerned, JD Vance by light years is a step in the right direction.
[01:36:48]  Okay, Wes, you want to read the next one?
[01:36:50]  Yep.
[01:36:51]  Joe Petruzzi, $5 super chat.

=== Biblical Manhood and Leadership (03:23) ===

[01:36:54]  Thanks, Joe.
[01:36:54]  He said, Is it okay to feel more safe, you put that in quotation marks, with conservative leadership being in power as Christians rather than liberal leadership?
[01:37:02]  Because I do.
[01:37:03]  And I would say, yeah, absolutely.
[01:37:05]  Like, there is a.
[01:37:06]  You are safer.
[01:37:07]  You are safer.
[01:37:07]  And Romans 13, like, a good magistrate, which, yeah, more conservatives objectively than Democrats or progressives are good civil magistrates, which means they wield the sword and rule of law, which is a terror to the evildoer.
[01:37:19]  And they have greater incentive not to be wicked.
[01:37:22]  So, objectively, your town, your state, especially at the state level, it probably is somewhat safer.
[01:37:27]  There's a greater sense of, like, if I mess up, I could get deported or bail would not be posted.
[01:37:33]  So, absolutely.
[01:37:36]  Permissible, good, okay, to say, yeah, I feel safer this last month than I felt maybe the couple of years prior.
[01:37:42]  I've heard several comments from guys saying it feels like I can plan, like I'm not constantly on guard, not having to constantly have my go bag ready or whatever it is.
[01:37:52]  I saw so many people try to start businesses, for example, 2021, 22, 23, 24, nothing as far as traction.
[01:38:00]  Now is the time, though, where I think guys are going to build a lot of things that last.
[01:38:04]  Real quick, Miss Ingham, she said, thank you for making the playlist.
[01:38:08]  On biblical manhood and womanhood.
[01:38:10]  You are welcome.
[01:38:11]  I think it was probably you and a few others.
[01:38:13]  We got that comment a couple of times where people asked if, just for the sake of convenience, if we could categorize on YouTube all of our episodes that deal with biblical manhood and biblical womanhood.
[01:38:23]  And so we have taken that feedback and done precisely that.
[01:38:30]  So now if you scroll down, I think the first thing that you'll see is like YouTube has like a curated for you.
[01:38:35]  And then underneath that, you'll have the live stream.
[01:38:37]  This is if you're like on your computer.
[01:38:41]  And then underneath, The live stream, then you'll have season one and season two, season three, season four, or actually the opposite.
[01:38:50]  I think it goes backwards.
[01:38:51]  So, four, three, two, one of the Friday special.
[01:38:53]  And then underneath that, if you just keep scrolling down, you'll be able to find a whole playlist of everything that we've done up to date that is in regards to biblical womanhood and biblical manhood.
[01:39:05]  While we're on that topic, go ahead and do us a favor and subscribe.
[01:39:11]  If you're watching on YouTube right now, if you could subscribe and hit the bell.
[01:39:15]  That way, you'll be notified every time we do new content.
[01:39:19]  And then, with this video, just to help us out with the algorithm, if you could, please give a thumbs up, like the video, share the video.
[01:39:26]  All that triggers the algorithm to get it out to more people.
[01:39:29]  Michael, could you do that last super chat?
[01:39:31]  Yep.
[01:39:31]  It's from Tyler Page.
[01:39:32]  Thanks very much, Tyler, $4.99.
[01:39:34]  Appreciate it very much.
[01:39:35]  He says, What had more influence on third wayism, feminism or USAID?
[01:39:41]  Looking forward to the conference.
[01:39:42]  Looking forward to seeing you there, Tyler.
[01:39:45]  That question, I think history is going to be.
[01:39:48]  unraveling quite a bit.
[01:39:49]  I think more and more we're seeing, if not directly through USAID, all sorts of left-leaning progressive organizations in the church and outside the church have been propped up by tax money, government money, grants, things like that.
[01:40:06]  And there is a vested interest in promoting what the man says to say if you are getting money from that man.
[01:40:15]  So I don't know.

=== Women, Sports, and Childbearing (14:48) ===

[01:40:17]  It's tough to say.
[01:40:17]  Feminism has been around for longer.
[01:40:19]  So it's more.
[01:40:19]  I would say third-wayism is very feminine-coded too in that.
[01:40:22]  It's not offensive.
[01:40:23]  It's not harsh to women.
[01:40:25]  It doesn't take sides.
[01:40:26]  It's definitely a result of a politically correct culture, a feminized culture that values inoffensiveness, to not be offensive, to not offend, et cetera.
[01:40:36]  I'll hit this last question.
[01:40:39]  I should be able to do it quick.
[01:40:40]  So, Kobe Howard said, Question What are y'all's thoughts on young women playing sports, given the fact most, not all, tends towards defying a woman's quiet and gentle spirit?
[01:40:49]  I would say there's two categories of sports there's volleyball with the family on a beautiful, sunny Tuesday night, and then there's College D1 athlete rowing and lacrosse.
[01:40:57]  So, sports could just truly be like, are we just literally like playing and play, competition, all of those things, especially informally, they're just very good for people.
[01:41:07]  It's great to get outside.
[01:41:09]  It's great to break a sweat for men and women.
[01:41:10]  It's good to be active.
[01:41:12]  So, in that sense, recreational, maybe some level of minor competition, if you're talking in like high school, Christian school, not a big deal.
[01:41:20]  Sports are awesome.
[01:41:21]  If he's asking the college atmosphere, even the professional and what it takes to get to a college level athlete, even before that in high school and middle school.
[01:41:30]  Exactly.
[01:41:31]  So, those, no, they would lead towards a competitive male spirit.
[01:41:35]  That's why men love sports so much.
[01:41:37]  It's masculine.
[01:41:38]  It's masculine.
[01:41:38]  It's competition.
[01:41:39]  It's ambition.
[01:41:40]  My girls are young, you know, like seven and five and four.
[01:41:43]  And then, you know, we have a girl who's, you know, three months old.
[01:41:47]  But for, you know, the seven and five and four year old, they play soccer.
[01:41:52]  Yeah.
[01:41:53]  Like we, you know, we sign them up for a league at the Y. Dad is usually their coach because none of the other deadbeat dads want to do it.
[01:42:01]  I don't know what I'm doing.
[01:42:03]  But, you know, they're.
[01:42:04]  They're, you know, five year olds.
[01:42:05]  And so it's, you know, at that age, it's mob ball.
[01:42:07]  You know, it's just like this little crowd of kids, you know, running around chasing the ball.
[01:42:12]  And every now and then, like a ball that's not even in play, you know, just kind of finds its way onto the.
[01:42:16]  And then, you know, two or three of them will find that ball, you know, and kick it into the wrong goal.
[01:42:21]  And that's soccer.
[01:42:22]  And you guys know my opinion on soccer.
[01:42:24]  Hey, hey, hey.
[01:42:26]  Soccer is a joke of a sport.
[01:42:27]  I'm sorry.
[01:42:29]  Soccer is a lame excuse to try to get grown men to run.
[01:42:33]  That's all it is.
[01:42:34]  It's just, it's just like.
[01:42:36]  I know that you want to talk about the Jews.
[01:42:40]  I think there's probably a group of Jewish guys behind the scenes twiddling their fingers, thinking, how can we make the size of the soccer field even larger to just tire out these men so that they're not productive in society?
[01:42:53]  I'm going to need my final paycheck.
[01:42:56]  Soccer is not my favorite sport, obviously.
[01:42:58]  Tell us how you really feel.
[01:43:00]  But my point is playing for fun and playing on a team because it's one, the exercise is good.
[01:43:06]  Two, Getting to interact with other children and being a part of a team sport and not just something in isolation.
[01:43:14]  I think there are benefits with all that, especially for boys.
[01:43:18]  I think more so for boys, but also at some level for girls.
[01:43:21]  But there's a dynamic difference between a girl playing soccer or playing volleyball or this or that, even an organized team sport at a young age or even as a 12 year old middle schooler or even high school.
[01:43:34]  That's different than this is my life.
[01:43:39]  To me, it's now there's physical components that come in as well, but take that out, remove that, put it to the side for just a moment.
[01:43:46]  It's the same as I don't want, when my girls are older, I don't want my 17 year old daughter entirely obsessed with a singular focus on a career outside of the home.
[01:43:58]  I want her predominant ambition to be motherhood, that she would get married, that she would fall in love, that she would find a good Christian man that she loves and submits to.
[01:44:11]  And that, like the women of old, you are truly her daughter, Sarah, a holy woman that you're following in those holy footsteps.
[01:44:17]  If you submit to your husbands and even call them, as Sarah called her husband, Lord.
[01:44:24]  So, like lowercase l, not blasphemy, not the Lord Jesus Christ, not deified, but a term of respect, a real submission.
[01:44:32]  I respect my husband.
[01:44:34]  I love my husband.
[01:44:35]  I trust my husband.
[01:44:37]  That's what I want for my girls.
[01:44:39]  So, there's a difference in my seven year old girl playing soccer.
[01:44:43]  Two months out of the year on a Saturday morning with her father as her coach at the YMCA with some other kids her age.
[01:44:50]  And then 10 years from now, my daughter wanting to be a professional soccer player and all of her weekends and all of her extra time, like we don't, our family worship has gone to the wayside, you know, like all, like because all of our evenings and all of our weekends and all of our time is her practicing to be the very best so that she can get in at college and then practicing so she can be the very best so eventually she can go pro and make, you know,
[01:45:20]  $30,000 a year and be watched by no one.
[01:45:23]  That's true.
[01:45:24]  What is the point?
[01:45:25]  I mean, this isn't even like, oh, well, Joel's a misogynist.
[01:45:27]  He's patriarchal Christian.
[01:45:28]  No, pagan non Christians in our country, they even think that professional female sports is a joke.
[01:45:37]  I don't think this is a hot take.
[01:45:39]  I don't think that, like, as JD Vance would say, I don't want that man in my country.
[01:45:44]  And I think most of America agrees with me.
[01:45:47]  Literally, most of pagan America agrees with me that women devoting their lives, and here's the thing.
[01:45:54]  So, now I'll bring in the physical component.
[01:45:56]  A woman is different than a man in the sense, one, that she's geared towards a domestic feminine virtue and place in the home and nurturing.
[01:46:06]  And so, having a competitive spirit and that being a defining characteristic of her in her adult years, and not just as a child, and her younger adult years, I do think pushes against the grain of 1 Peter 3, that imperishable beauty that's beautiful in the sight of God is the beauty of the heart, which is defined by a gentle and quiet spirit.
[01:46:30]  So it's not feminine.
[01:46:31]  But in addition to that, at the physical and biological level, a woman in her adult years, her young adult years, those are her prime childbearing years.
[01:46:43]  And so I wouldn't necessarily want her going to school for seven, eight, nine years with trying to take the MCATs and doing a residency and all these things to be a doctor just strictly because of focus and time.
[01:46:58]  But if you add the sports, It's the focus, it's the time, it's the direction being misordered, but it's also the physical component.
[01:47:07]  She is putting on her body a physical, biological strain that's right, um, that is counterintuitive, um, to one of her chief purposes and telos, which is to bear children.
[01:47:22]  Oh my goodness, I can't believe you said what about women who can't bear children.
[01:47:24]  My mom couldn't bear children, which is why they adopted me.
[01:47:28]  Okay, so of course, there are exceptions.
[01:47:30]  I'm not talking about the exceptions, that's the whole point.
[01:47:32]  Problem with our country, that's the whole problem with the church is that we make the exception the headline and we make the headline the main point, what applies to the norm, we make that the footnote, right?
[01:47:43]  We make the major the minor, the minor the major.
[01:47:46]  I'm talking about the major right now.
[01:47:48]  Of course, there are minors, there are exceptions, but I'm saying in a general sense, in a general sense, a woman, a young woman, postponing marriage and childbearing just in terms of time and focus, and in addition to that, putting the highest professional levels of strain on.
[01:48:05]  On her body that was designed by God to bring forth life into the world to nurture and birth children, um, and she's getting injuries and she's putting wear and tear.
[01:48:17]  Well, that strain often women lose their cycles, so high levels of CrossFit, tennis, other sports.
[01:48:22]  What'll happen is there's so much stress going on that her body will end its cycle, which means it's literally saying, I'm not going to release eggs that can be fertilized because there's too much strain, there's too much stress.
[01:48:32]  It shuts down what women are supposed to do, yeah, and that is.
[01:48:37]  People say, you know, it tells purpose, chief end.
[01:48:40]  Well, the chief end of man, you know, man and woman, is to glorify God and enjoy Him forever.
[01:48:45]  No, duh.
[01:48:47]  My gosh, it's so annoying.
[01:48:50]  Yes, the chief end of all human beings created in the image of God, whether they be male or female, is to glorify God and enjoy Him forever.
[01:48:58]  Okay, now can we ask the obvious necessary question that immediately arises after making that statement, which is how?
[01:49:08]  How?
[01:49:09]  Men and women are both supposed to glorify God and enjoy Him forever.
[01:49:12]  Yes, but not in the same way.
[01:49:16]  The question is how does a man?
[01:49:18]  Glorify God and enjoy Him forever.
[01:49:20]  How does a woman glorify God and enjoy Him forever?
[01:49:24]  And this is where verses that people don't like, but it's in the Bible, it's true, it's timeless, it's immutable.
[01:49:30]  Verses like 1 Timothy 2, verse 15.
[01:49:33]  It says, But women will be saved.
[01:49:36]  Women will be saved through childbearing.
[01:49:37]  And I'm perfectly aware that one interpretation of that is the idea of going all the way back to Eve and then also, in a very real sense, to the Messiah going to Mary, that woman was saved by that it was.
[01:49:52]  Through a woman that the snake crusher, the serpent crusher, Jesus Christ, was born and ultimately goes all the way back and saves Eve, right?
[01:50:01]  Your offspring.
[01:50:02]  There will be enmity between the serpent and your offspring.
[01:50:05]  But he, through childbearing, you will give birth to a son down the line and eventually he's going to redeem you.
[01:50:12]  He's going to atone for your sin and crush the worker of iniquity.
[01:50:17]  He's going to crush the serpent that will bruise his heel, but he will crush his head.
[01:50:21]  And so, all the way from Eve and then all the way to Mary, in a sense, being like a second Eve.
[01:50:27]  That through that childbearing, giving birth to Jesus, the Savior of the world, that women and men for that matter are saved.
[01:50:36]  However, if that was the chief interpretation, or certainly if it was the exclusive or sole interpretation, I don't think that it perfectly holds up because he says, but woman will be saved through childbearing.
[01:50:51]  If it's the childbearing of Mary giving birth to the Messiah, well, that doesn't just save women, that saves men as well.
[01:50:57]  That would be humanity will be saved.
[01:50:59]  Or it could say man, man being a placeholder for both man and woman, just like Genesis, you know, where it says, you know, that he created man in his image, male and female.
[01:51:10]  So man, there's standing in for both male and female, mankind.
[01:51:15]  But here he doesn't say, but man will be saved or mankind will be saved, humanity, but woman will be saved.
[01:51:21]  So if it's speaking of mankind, both men and women alike, being saved through childbearing, and that childbearing being a reference to the Messiah being born through Mary, that would make sense if it's mankind, but it's specific to woman.
[01:51:34]  And so the way that I read that is, I read it very, very much, and I posted about this on X not too long ago, and the usual suspects were screeching into the void.
[01:51:44]  But what I said is, I think it's reminiscent.
[01:51:47]  It's just a particular female application of the general, larger principle that's provided for us in the epistle of James.
[01:51:55]  So James says that faith without works is dead.
[01:51:59]  So what does James mean?
[01:52:00]  James means that ultimately you have to work for your salvation.
[01:52:03]  No, he's not saying that we're saved by works.
[01:52:07]  We're saved by faith alone, but faith that saves is never alone.
[01:52:11]  I'll say it again.
[01:52:12]  We are saved by faith alone, but true saving faith, if it really is true faith that saves, it's never alone.
[01:52:19]  It's the faith alone that saves, but that saving faith will always be accompanied by good works.
[01:52:24]  And in the case of woman, one of those predominant chief good works is motherhood.
[01:52:31]  It is motherhood.
[01:52:32]  But woman will be saved through childbearing if she continues with faith, right?
[01:52:36]  So faith is inescapable.
[01:52:38]  Hope and propriety, or faith and love and hope, depending on your translation.
[01:52:43]  So, woman will be saved by the same way men are saved.
[01:52:46]  We're all saved one way by grace alone, through faith alone, in Christ alone, not by works so that no man may boast.
[01:52:52]  It is the gift of God, Ephesians 2.
[01:52:55]  So, woman is saved just like man by faith in Jesus.
[01:52:58]  She's saved by faith alone.
[01:53:00]  But if it's true saving faith, it will never be alone.
[01:53:03]  It'll be accompanied by good works.
[01:53:05]  And good works, in the case of a Christian woman, one of those good works, one of the predominant good works, will be Christian motherhood, it will be bearing children.
[01:53:14]  Are there caveats?
[01:53:16]  Are there exceptions?
[01:53:17]  Yes, some women cannot conceive.
[01:53:19]  But there's a difference between the woman who cannot bear children versus the woman who knowingly and deliberately foregoes childbearing because of feminist sensibilities.
[01:53:29]  That woman, I would say, is actually in danger not of losing her salvation, but by her bad works in the absence of good works, proving that she never has salvation or true saving faith to begin with.
[01:53:42]  So, should we train our daughters?
[01:53:46]  As they get older and older and ready to leave and cleave and move out of our homes, and that's a whole other situation.
[01:53:52]  Should they move out if it's not for marriage?
[01:53:54]  For this reason, a man shall leave his father and mother and cling close to his wife.
[01:53:58]  Should we have this prolonged intermediate period that stretches for many people a decade or a decade and a half where they've left father and mother but have not clinged yet to a spouse?
[01:54:09]  They've left one household without starting another.
[01:54:12]  I would say, no, that's not a good idea for men.
[01:54:13]  It wasn't a good idea for me.
[01:54:15]  It's, I think, an even worse idea for women.
[01:54:18]  Table that today, we don't have time to get into that.
[01:54:21]  But here's the point Should we train our young daughters as they're getting into their teenage years, about to leave the home?
[01:54:28]  Should we be directing them towards spending four years, five years, six years, maybe a decade of focusing on something besides marriage and family, a career, and a career that not only takes away some of the most pivotal years?
[01:54:51]  Of being fertile and childbearing, but also puts an added physical and biological strain on their body to where, yeah, some women are still able to conceive when they're 35 years old, 37, 38, even 40.

=== Roasting Third Wayism (03:13) ===

[01:55:05]  That's true.
[01:55:08]  But if we're training our daughters to be professional athletes or semi professional, collegiate athletes and putting that much strain to where they're not even going to get married until they're 27, 28, 29, 30 years old, they're not going to be having children until they're 30 plus.
[01:55:23]  That 30 plus, not only is it their older years where they're less fertile, but it's also coming after a decade of hours and hours every single day for years and years and years of warring against their own physical body through physical competition at the highest levels that messes with their ovulation cycle and all these things.
[01:55:46]  Is that a conservative, patriarchal, biblical Christian position for fathers to take?
[01:55:52]  So the answer to the question is no, no, I don't think so.
[01:55:57]  Anything on that?
[01:55:58]  No, that's great.
[01:55:59]  I don't think that's unhinged.
[01:56:01]  I think that that, by the way, the reason why, especially at the collegiate level, it has to be offered is Title IX through the Civil Rights Act.
[01:56:09]  And what common Civil Rights Act, though.
[01:56:12]  Yep.
[01:56:13]  Yeah.
[01:56:14]  All right.
[01:56:14]  Well, thank you guys for the super chats.
[01:56:16]  Thank you for your questions.
[01:56:17]  Thank you for your support.
[01:56:18]  Thank you, especially for those who took the time to like the video.
[01:56:22]  If you haven't done that, please, right here at the end, one more time, like the video, share the video, subscribe to our YouTube channel.
[01:56:29]  Click the bell so you'll be notified when we come out with new content.
[01:56:32]  And go ahead and follow us on X also.
[01:56:35]  We post all of our videos on X as well.
[01:56:37]  We usually live stream simultaneously, both on YouTube and X, except sometimes X is a little fidgety.
[01:56:45]  Today happened to be one of those times.
[01:56:49]  He got the call, he shut it down.
[01:56:51]  But Lord willing, as soon as we finish the stream here on YouTube, we'll take the file and we'll upload it on X as well.
[01:56:57]  So if you don't follow us on X, I would encourage you to do that because you don't get any less than YouTube.
[01:57:03]  If anything, you get more.
[01:57:04]  You'll get all the full length videos, you'll get every clip that we would post on YouTube, it will also be posted on X.
[01:57:10]  And you'll get my delightful, charming little hot takes where I enrage the internet on a, you know, almost hourly basis, at least daily basis.
[01:57:19]  So go over to X. Our handle is at rightresponseM.
[01:57:23]  Nathan, if you can put the handles up, you can also follow Wesley Todd and Michael.
[01:57:27]  You should be able to see them on the screen here in a moment.
[01:57:29]  But for myself, it's at rightresponseM.
[01:57:35]  At rightresponseM.
[01:57:37]  For Wesley Todd, we have, what is it?
[01:57:40]  Wesley underscore Todd underscore.
[01:57:42]  All caps.
[01:57:43]  So at Wesley underscore Todd underscore.
[01:57:46]  And then for Michael, we have at M Belch.
[01:57:49]  Yep.
[01:57:50]  At M Belch, B E L C H. By far the least active of the three men represented.
[01:57:55]  He's the least active, but with a little bit of patronizing, a little bit of mockery, we can do this.
[01:58:00]  A little bit of roasting once the camera shut down.
[01:58:02]  A little bit of roasting.
[01:58:04]  We can get Michael to be.
[01:58:07]  And get him in trouble like us.
[01:58:08]  You know, posting on X on an hourly basis.
[01:58:10]  All right.
[01:58:11]  Well, thank you guys so much for tuning in.
[01:58:12]  God bless.
[01:58:13]  And Lord willing, we will see you this Wednesday at 3 p.m. Central Time.
[01:58:19]  Thank you.