NXR Podcast - THE LIVESTREAM - The State Must Correct The Church
Aired: 2025-03-25
Duration: 01:57:18


=== Why We Ask for Five Star Reviews (14:07) ===

[00:00:00]  Leave us a five star review on your favorite podcast platform.
[00:00:04]  I get it.
[00:00:04]  It's annoying.
[00:00:05]  Everybody asks, but I'm going to tell you why.
[00:00:07]  When you give us a positive review, what that does is it triggers the algorithm so that our podcast shows up on more people's news feeds.
[00:00:16]  You and I both know that this ministry is willing to talk about things that most ministries aren't.
[00:00:21]  We need this content for the glory of God to reach more people's ears.
[00:00:30]  In AD 324, the controversy over Arianism was dividing Emperor Constantine's recently unified Roman Empire.
[00:00:39]  Constantine had converted a mere decade previously and achieved spectacular success on the battlefield over his rival Licinius.
[00:00:48]  But he was dismayed to return and find that the religion and church that he had come to love was so torn apart with squabbling, division, and dissensions.
[00:00:58]  So, what happened?
[00:01:00]  Did the church realize their need for clarity on the divinity of the sun?
[00:01:04]  And come together at Nicaea because they knew that they had to hammer out these doctrines?
[00:01:10]  Did Alexander and Arius sit down willingly for the good of the church?
[00:01:15]  Nope.
[00:01:17]  Instead, believe it or not, it was Emperor Constantine who issued an imperial summons to the warring bishops of the East and West demanding that they convene at Nicaea.
[00:01:29]  The result of that month long council was the Nicene Creed.
[00:01:34]  A creed that has stood the test of time and is the foundational confession of practically all Christian traditions 1700 years later.
[00:01:45]  Now, this happened again under Emperor Theodosius I and II at Constantinople and Ephesus, under Marcion at Chalcedon, under Justinian again at Constantinople, and on and on it goes.
[00:02:02]  This pattern plays out again and again.
[00:02:05]  The church wars, Divides, errs, and even apostatizes.
[00:02:11]  And the means of correction that God uses is often the state.
[00:02:17]  Now, this causes us Americans in particular to bristle in protest, but it is undeniable that the bulk of church reform has been initiated, carried out, and completed at the hand of the sovereign.
[00:02:32]  Perhaps for all of our spirituality and airtight systematic theology, we have forgotten the ordinary, Practical means that God uses to save, purify, and protect His church.
[00:02:45]  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.
[00:02:56]  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.
[00:03:10]  Today, we're going to defend the forgotten and controversial historical pattern that God uses the state to correct his often erring bride.
[00:03:20]  So tune in now.
[00:03:36]  Welcome back.
[00:03:37]  Good Monday afternoon.
[00:03:38]  Good Monday.
[00:03:39]  The market is doing the best that it's done in a long time.
[00:03:43]  I don't want to get too hopeful.
[00:03:44]  Yeah, we'll see.
[00:03:44]  But it's good afternoon.
[00:03:46]  Good to be back.
[00:03:47]  The title, it's probably in our top 10 most controversial The State Must Correct the Church.
[00:03:53]  And I'm the one who chose it.
[00:03:54]  I wrote this episode.
[00:03:55]  And my only ask would be if you're listening to this and you've already said, ah, you might have jumped the shark on this one.
[00:04:00]  This is a little bit too far.
[00:04:02]  I like to do my best to at least make the case from history, not that this must necessarily always be the case, that the state will always be the agent.
[00:04:10]  That reforms and corrects and bolsters up the church.
[00:04:14]  It doesn't have to always be that way.
[00:04:15]  But my argument would be that to this point, we're coming up on, I mean, 2033.
[00:04:21]  So that's what, about eight years?
[00:04:23]  We'll have 2,000 years since the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus.
[00:04:26]  And so in these first 2,000 years, almost undeniably, the pattern has been, as I'm going to do my best to show you, that the ordinary means God has used to care for his bride, to sustain her, to purify her, even, has been the ordinary means of.
[00:04:41]  The state and its authority and its power.
[00:04:44]  And so, my only ask would be to reserve judgment for the two hours here.
[00:04:47]  Allow me to make my case.
[00:04:48]  And if you're convinced by scripture, by church history, and by reason, that would be the goal.
[00:04:54]  So, let's go ahead and dive right in.
[00:04:57]  Wes, before you do that, we just got a $300 super chat.
[00:05:01]  Wow.
[00:05:01]  Oh, my goodness.
[00:05:02]  And it's not surprising who it's from because this guy has been so consistent and faithful and encouraging.
[00:05:07]  Thank you, Ben Huffstedler.
[00:05:10]  Thank you, Ben.
[00:05:11]  He said, hit the like button, boys.
[00:05:13]  Stay strong.
[00:05:15]  We need more testosterone in the world, more men, men that are men of God as a foundation.
[00:05:20]  Second, a husband.
[00:05:21]  And third, a father.
[00:05:23]  Thank you, Ben.
[00:05:23]  We appreciate your support.
[00:05:25]  Ben, let us know in the chat if you're coming to the conference.
[00:05:27]  We'd love to meet you.
[00:05:27]  Yeah, if you're coming to the Christ conference.
[00:05:29]  Whether it's ours or even in Ogden, it'd be great.
[00:05:31]  Great to talk.
[00:05:31]  Really appreciate the support.
[00:05:33]  All right.
[00:05:33]  So, to lay the foundation, I want to get into the three spheres of authority that God has instituted.
[00:05:38]  So, whether you hold to a classical two kingdoms kind of framework for the church and the state, the church and the state, the left and the right hand of Christ, he governs over both of them.
[00:05:46]  But governs in different ways, or a theonomic approach, that the Mosaic law and its general equity is what's to be used in society.
[00:05:54]  So, whether you're classical two kingdoms or whether you're theonomic, I think both would agree that it seems that God has instituted three spheres that have similarities in their authority, their structure, and their power.
[00:06:04]  So, Nate, you can go ahead and show this graph.
[00:06:05]  We'll leave it on the screen for a little while because there's a lot of text in there.
[00:06:09]  But I think this is the most helpful way to kind of look at it.
[00:06:12]  So, you have God at the top, all authority, be it in the state, be it in the home, or be it in the church.
[00:06:18]  Comes from God.
[00:06:19]  It's given, it's lent, it's bestowed upon a father, upon a magistrate, or upon an elder.
[00:06:24]  So God is the ultimate authority.
[00:06:26]  I think of even in the family.
[00:06:27]  Children obey your parents, and whatever they say, no, children obey your parents in the Lord, because even a parent's authority comes first from God.
[00:06:34]  And so God is the highest authority.
[00:06:37]  And He's instituted three spheres the state, the family, and the church.
[00:06:41]  Each of these spheres are led by men.
[00:06:43]  The state should ordinarily be led by male magistrates, emperors, kings, presidents, senators.
[00:06:50]  The church is led by pastors.
[00:06:52]  The only individual qualified to be a pastor are first and foremost.
[00:06:55]  All of these are male led.
[00:06:57]  They're all male led.
[00:06:58]  Families led by fathers.
[00:06:59]  He gives also tools of enforcement.
[00:07:01]  So the state carries a physical sword, and Paul even emphasizes he doesn't carry it in vain.
[00:07:06]  It's not for show, it's not ceremonial.
[00:07:08]  The state has a sword for the evildoer, it's a physical sword, real physical punishment.
[00:07:13]  The church has a spiritual sword.
[00:07:15]  The church can, wielding the sword, cut out from the kingdom, divide, cut through error and falsehood.
[00:07:23]  In the family, the father has the rod of correction.
[00:07:25]  So you have male leadership in all of these spheres, and you have rod and correction and instruction metered out by those leaders.
[00:07:34]  Now, you can see that the state, primarily with these arrows, is providing physical protection.
[00:07:40]  It protects the family.
[00:07:42]  It is the state's job to make sure criminals and evildoers are off the streets and you can sleep, stay safe at night.
[00:07:47]  Now, certainly at the local level, some of that belongs to the father.
[00:07:50]  But in the same way, too, it protects the church.
[00:07:52]  It protects the church from terrorism.
[00:07:54]  It procures for it the ordinary context in which it does its ministry.
[00:08:00]  Now, the church doesn't physically protect, but it spiritually protects.
[00:08:04]  The church is the spiritual guard of the family.
[00:08:07]  If a father was to go off the rails spiritually in sin but not crime, it would be the church that corrects him.
[00:08:15]  I don't like that that church symbol looks like a mosque.
[00:08:19]  I was gonna mention, I think we could have done a little bit better in Microsoft PowerPoint.
[00:08:23]  There is no church icon.
[00:08:25]  Ah, it's that is an Orthodox church.
[00:08:28]  It looks like something out of Aladdin, like it's led by a sultan, or even worse, something out of the well, that is Eastern, but I was gonna say, or Eastern Orthodox.
[00:08:36]  So you have the home, the church, and the state.
[00:08:39]  When it comes to the state's role, right here, right, this is what we're talking about.
[00:08:43]  There's a difference between formal and informal authority.
[00:08:47]  Nate, you can go to the next slide.
[00:08:49]  This is important to grasp.
[00:08:50]  So, we talk a lot, as is right, I think, on this show, about biblical patriarchy, the rule of the husband in the home.
[00:08:56]  And it is rule, and the husband has real formal authority.
[00:08:59]  You can see here I've delineated in his formal authority, the husband has the authority of command.
[00:09:06]  He can command his wife and children to do things provided they are not sin.
[00:09:10]  The state, likewise, can command its citizens to do things that are not sin.
[00:09:14]  The state is given the physical sword for force.
[00:09:16]  That's not necessarily given to the husband.
[00:09:18]  The husband's authority is over everything.
[00:09:20]  Wives, be subject to your husband and everything.
[00:09:22]  The point is strong authority from the top down.
[00:09:25]  But there is also an informal authority that those that would be, in the biblical kind of pairing, superiors and inferiors, those that are under authority have on those above them.
[00:09:34]  One of them would be counsel.
[00:09:36]  So whether it's citizens, whether it's a wife, they still counsel.
[00:09:40]  Exhort, pray, appeal, encourage.
[00:09:44]  So it's not as though when we talk about the state reforming and correcting the church, we're talking about a one way street.
[00:09:50]  That only coming down from the state are its reforms, its corrections, all these different things.
[00:09:55]  And never at any point does the church have an influence vertically above on the state.
[00:10:00]  This informal authority, in the same way, the church is going to be profoundly influential on the realm of the state.
[00:10:07]  It's going to pray for it, it's going to rebuke it.
[00:10:10]  I think of John Knox and Queen Mary and council.
[00:10:14]  It's going to command, even say, You must do this.
[00:10:17]  Now, the church itself, as an institution, doesn't pick up physical swords and go to war with the state.
[00:10:22]  But even in the strongest authority we have out there husband, wife, the state over those that are to be subject to it there is still an insistence that those that are under authority, those that are the inferiors, have towards those above them.
[00:10:37]  Right.
[00:10:38]  It's like John the Baptist, you know, to Herod, you know, where he rebukes him.
[00:10:41]  You know, John the Baptist is a minister of sorts, he's a prophet, you know, preparing the way of the Lord, and Herod is the civil magistrate, and he says, He's not in it, John the Baptist isn't in a position of the civil magistrate, and yet he looks to the civil magistrate and he says, It is not lawful.
[00:10:55]  And he's not speaking of Herod's law, he's speaking of the eternal and immutable law of God.
[00:11:00]  He's saying, I don't care what you think, this is what's right.
[00:11:03]  It's not lawful for you to have your brother's wife, and he calls him to account.
[00:11:07]  And so, and what we're talking about here is ideally by the grace of God, we're talking about the ideal situation of a Christian nation.
[00:11:15]  So, when you know, because I could hear people, you know, listening to what you're saying, Wes, and being tempted to say, Yeah, so the church has an informal authority, you know, to rebuke the state, but that won't mean anything.
[00:11:26]  No, the church's informal authority of impressing upon Constantine the things of God had a massive effect.
[00:11:35]  In a Christian nation, what you can, and under that context and those circumstances, then what you're expecting is that the state is made up, at least maybe not exclusively, but there are bona fide, genuine Christians that make the state up and who listen to the church and will be convicted by the church.
[00:11:55]  And so they'll hear the church knowing that the church doesn't have the sword and it can't.
[00:11:58]  Through coercion and force.
[00:12:00]  It's, you know, in the edict.
[00:12:02]  And yet they'll still hear the voice of the church and say, in a sense, so long as they're speaking truthfully, the voice of the church is the voice of God.
[00:12:10]  Absolutely.
[00:12:10]  Well, and on top of that, the church, in a largely Christianized society especially, has a strong power to, in times of normal conduct, to exhort the Christians to obey the state.
[00:12:26]  But they also will be the ones to say, Congregants, church, this is the line and the state has crossed it.
[00:12:34]  And from this point on, civil disobedience is what is in order.
[00:12:37]  And that power to inform the populace of when the king or the government has gone against the law of God, as you say, is significant.
[00:12:48]  It should be used sparingly, only when it's actually been crossed.
[00:12:52]  But it is significant, especially if it's such that a majority of the people trust the voice of the church.
[00:12:57]  Right.
[00:12:58]  I'll never forget.
[00:12:59]  Like, I remember watching.
[00:13:01]  We were actually, I think when I saw the clip, my wife and our kids and I were in Ogden visiting all the new Christendom guys and spending family time, you know, building snowmen and things like that.
[00:13:14]  But I remember that's when the clip went where Trump and Vance were in that cathedral, that church, and there was a female bishop who was like preaching this atrocious sermon, you know, about, I don't know, against.
[00:13:33]  People like Trump being a tyrant and toxic masculinity, and how we need to let a bunch of more immigrants into the country and third worlders, an invasion, and all this kind of stuff.
[00:13:45]  And I remember Vance did kind of like his notorious, where he looked over, I think he looked at Trump or he looked at.
[00:13:54]  And I remember thinking, you know what?
[00:13:57]  I would have no problem.
[00:13:58]  I adhere to sphere sovereignty and all those kinds of things, but I would have no problem if in that moment, in the promise of God, if Trump and Vance stood up and said, you're done.
[00:14:07]  Yeah.

=== Trump, Vance, and Toxic Masculinity (14:48) ===

[00:14:08]  Sermon's over.
[00:14:09]  President and Vice President of the United States, you're a heretic.
[00:14:12]  Take her out.
[00:14:15]  I'm here for it.
[00:14:16]  Yeah.
[00:14:17]  Yep.
[00:14:17]  We'll get into some of that in a later segment.
[00:14:19]  We got a $50 super chat.
[00:14:21]  Super encouraging.
[00:14:21]  Let's just hit it quick.
[00:14:23]  Sundress supremacy.
[00:14:24]  Honestly, that could be a man or a woman.
[00:14:27]  I would 50 50.
[00:14:28]  I think, can I just say, I don't want to take credit that doesn't belong to me, so I won't say it definitively, but I'm going to say it with a fairly high degree of confidence.
[00:14:37]  I am almost positive that this YouTube handle.
[00:14:41]  Was inspired by us.
[00:14:43]  Probably.
[00:14:43]  I'm pretty sure.
[00:14:45]  What did I say?
[00:14:46]  Oh, Sundresses and Sourdough.
[00:14:47]  Yeah.
[00:14:48]  I think I've seen a handle like that Sundresses and Sourdough.
[00:14:50]  That sounds like a great startup.
[00:14:53]  $50 super chat.
[00:14:54]  Thank you so much, ma'am, sir.
[00:14:57]  They said this Your critics have no sympathy for the young men and women who have been cut off from the wisdom of our ancestors, institutions hollowed out, generational wisdom squandered.
[00:15:06]  Thank you for teaching biblical wisdom our elders forgot.
[00:15:09]  See you at the conference.
[00:15:10]  Thanks so much.
[00:15:11]  Thank you.
[00:15:11]  And we'll look forward to meeting you.
[00:15:13]  Whoever you are.
[00:15:14]  So let's actually go back.
[00:15:16]  One of the things I think we've lost is the understanding of Christianity.
[00:15:19]  Oh, it's a woman.
[00:15:20]  She said, I have my husband's permission to spend his money.
[00:15:24]  Perfect.
[00:15:24]  Well, we'll look forward to seeing both of you at the conference.
[00:15:27]  But going all the way back, even as mentioned right there, how did Christianity get its start?
[00:15:32]  For the first 200 years, not quite 200 years, Christianity was persecuted.
[00:15:36]  So if you remember Jerusalem, it falls in AD 70.
[00:15:39]  That was the end, obviously, of Christianity centered on just Jerusalem.
[00:15:42]  And it spreads out.
[00:15:43]  Obviously, Paul carried it first with his missionary journeys.
[00:15:46]  But the loss of Jerusalem as an epicenter meant that Christianity spread throughout the Roman Empire.
[00:15:51]  And it was persecuted severely.
[00:15:53]  The stories of the martyrs in the early, not just 10, 20 years of the church.
[00:15:57]  But almost 150 years, especially through Diocletian, was incredible.
[00:16:02]  The church had no institution.
[00:16:04]  She had no building that you could attend to.
[00:16:06]  The church was hunted down.
[00:16:09]  They were meeting in catacombs.
[00:16:10]  They were meeting in catacombs.
[00:16:11]  They were meeting underground.
[00:16:12]  They had no luxury whatsoever.
[00:16:15]  And it's really an incredible story.
[00:16:16]  And I love telling it because it's awesome and it also shows how God works.
[00:16:21]  Christianity is still the vast minority.
[00:16:24]  After Diocletian leaves the throne, the persecution tamps down, but it's still not an official recognized religion.
[00:16:29]  It has no status, it has no relation to the public square.
[00:16:32]  And so Constantine, who is an up and coming son of a general, who's not necessarily the heir to the throne, but is challenging Maxentius.
[00:16:39]  Rome had gotten so big at that point they couldn't even have one emperor, it had been divided into a tetrad of three of them.
[00:16:44]  But Constantine is the emperor who had achieved great success in the battlefield in the north, and he was challenging Maxentius for control of Rome.
[00:16:51]  He wanted to rule the Roman Empire.
[00:16:53]  And so it's this incredible battle the battle of that Millivan Bridge, where he deposes Maxentius, kills him, and essentially conquers Rome.
[00:17:00]  And then 10 years later, he does so with Licentius.
[00:17:02]  And he conquers all of Rome and essentially unites the whole empire once again.
[00:17:07]  But it's the night before, this is in 312, before that fateful battle at the bridge, that he receives a vision or a dream.
[00:17:13]  And literally, this vision or dream changes the course of the West and of Christianity.
[00:17:19]  Because the night before, he has a dream and he says he sees in the sky the resurrected Christ appearing to him and his sign.
[00:17:25]  So, the word Christos in Greek, the first two letters of it are chai and ro.
[00:17:29]  And brought together, they form a symbol that's been associated with Christianity.
[00:17:33]  Since Constantine's time.
[00:17:34]  And so he sees it.
[00:17:35]  He relates this to Eusebius, the church father.
[00:17:37]  And he sees this sign in the sky of the Chiro.
[00:17:40]  And he hears the voice of Christ telling him, by this sign, conquer.
[00:17:45]  Which, how awesome is that?
[00:17:47]  The resurrected Christ at the right time.
[00:17:49]  The church is persecuted.
[00:17:50]  She's battered.
[00:17:51]  She's a minority.
[00:17:52]  She's been fighting for hundreds of years just to even exist and survive.
[00:17:56]  And then God comes to the ascendant emperor, shows him a sign in the sky, and says, by this sign, and not even the sign of God, like I, God the Father, I, the God of the Israelites, but by the sign of Christ.
[00:18:08]  Go and conquer.
[00:18:09]  And it's the next year that the Edict of Milan is issued.
[00:18:11]  And the Edict of Milan, again, changes the West in its entirety because it doesn't make Christianity the official state religion, but Constantine converts and he then allows Christian worship.
[00:18:22]  And very quickly, in the space of 10 years, instead of pagan priests or just pagans in general, it's Christian bishops that are ascendant to their counseling on dioceses, their serving positions of political office.
[00:18:34]  And Christianity becomes greatly favored in the nation to the point where now the emperor, he attends in, I think it's 320.
[00:18:40]  He attends the Hagia Sophia.
[00:18:42]  The emperor of Rome enters a Christian church just 200 years, not even quite 200 years from the death of Christ, the ministry of the apostles.
[00:18:52]  And then it's all the way up to that point.
[00:18:54]  So it's kind of, we were talking about before the show how typical is it of the church?
[00:19:00]  So she's free now to practice.
[00:19:02]  She can actually establish churches.
[00:19:04]  Now her bishops are ascendant in political office.
[00:19:06]  She can hold and be in the army.
[00:19:08]  Less than 10 years in, and the church is squabbling.
[00:19:12]  Non stop.
[00:19:13]  Yep.
[00:19:14]  So that sounds like a church.
[00:19:16]  So, you're telling me that God, in his mercy and providence, secures their freedom and liberty, that they're experiencing unprecedented peace and prosperity, and all these things.
[00:19:29]  And the church says, you know what?
[00:19:31]  We should fight each other.
[00:19:34]  That sounds right.
[00:19:35]  And they weren't fighting over something obscure.
[00:19:37]  So, it wasn't over baptism, believe it or not.
[00:19:40]  It was whether Jesus is God.
[00:19:41]  I love how you didn't even crack a smile, but you straight up just called baptism.
[00:19:47]  Baptism.
[00:19:48]  It wasn't something obscure like baptism.
[00:19:50]  It wasn't, yeah, it wasn't something minor.
[00:19:52]  Baptism, we all agree, baptism is primary.
[00:19:54]  What's obscure, or at least secondary, and we would argue maybe, you know, arguably even tertiary, is the mode of baptism.
[00:20:00]  Right.
[00:20:00]  Like that argument comes up again and again and again.
[00:20:03]  And like, here's the deal, guys.
[00:20:07]  Well, it's kind of like what we're talking about right now, but they're transing kids and murdering babies.
[00:20:12]  You got to destroy the leftist before you argue about whether or not that Presbyterian who's been a faithful Christian for 50 years.
[00:20:20]  But who was sprinkled as a baby is allowed to take the Lord's Supper in your Baptist church.
[00:20:23]  And it does matter.
[00:20:24]  But here's the deal: it matters.
[00:20:25]  Both sides are valid, is the point.
[00:20:28]  Whether you're baptized by immersion, which is the minority of the world, or baptized as a baby, like that is about 85% of the Christian world right now.
[00:20:36]  So whether it's one or the other, we would say both are valid baptisms, provided they're done in a Christian church in the name of the triune God.
[00:20:42]  So it matters.
[00:20:44]  But on both sides, you have Christians.
[00:20:46]  When it comes to Arianism, is Jesus Christ God?
[00:20:50]  That's what they were arguing about.
[00:20:51]  And so Constantine writes a letter in 324.
[00:20:54]  Before he even calls the council, he writes a letter and he says, Please, Alexander and Arius were the two bishops that were warring.
[00:20:59]  He says, I'm trying just to go to church, and it's rivaled with bickering and back and forth.
[00:21:04]  And there's questions about when to celebrate Easter.
[00:21:06]  There's questions over, pretty surprisingly, whether ministers that charged usury would be allowed.
[00:21:11]  Nicaea actually said no, that any minister that charged usury were to be deposed of their office.
[00:21:15]  But they're fighting for the icons too.
[00:21:18]  What?
[00:21:18]  Icons?
[00:21:19]  Icons don't really come into later in the iconoclasm of the seventh and the eighth centuries.
[00:21:23]  But all that being said, all of this happens and they don't come together of their own, like we mentioned in the Cold Open.
[00:21:28]  But it's the emperor under the pain of the sword who says, You're going to get together.
[00:21:33]  And here's what he didn't do they didn't come in and then he gave his opinions and argued for which side.
[00:21:39]  He reigned over it.
[00:21:40]  He saw the proceedings, but he said, Bishops, I'm the magistrate.
[00:21:44]  I'm the emperor.
[00:21:45]  I'm not a theologian.
[00:21:46]  He wasn't even baptized at the time.
[00:21:47]  He was only baptized a couple weeks before his death because they thought that baptism was intended to kind of clear all the sins that you had.
[00:21:53]  So he's not even baptized.
[00:21:55]  But he doesn't come in as a theologian, but he says, listen, church, you are split up with division.
[00:22:00]  I think at one point, over 50% of the Roman Empire was Arian.
[00:22:03]  Like, this was not just like 5% of people in this remote little island.
[00:22:07]  Like, half of the empire.
[00:22:09]  Because it was a political battle as much as anything else.
[00:22:12]  Exactly.
[00:22:12]  The church was already dividing East and West.
[00:22:14]  Yep.
[00:22:14]  But your point, Wes, is you're saying he doesn't come in and render from on high a theological conclusion.
[00:22:20]  He doesn't say, I, as emperor, am going to tell you what the theological truth of the matter is.
[00:22:25]  But instead, he says, No, I recognize that this theological determination belongs to the church, but you guys aren't getting together to sort it out.
[00:22:33]  And so, what he does force is not a conclusion, but he forces them to actually have the discussion.
[00:22:38]  I'm going to put you in a room until this gets solved.
[00:22:41]  Under threat of death.
[00:22:41]  Under threat of death.
[00:22:43]  Imperial order.
[00:22:44]  He put his finger on the scale.
[00:22:45]  I mean, it would be like a 50 50 tie and the vice president coming in and casting a vote.
[00:22:50]  Hosius of Cordoba, it was a bishop who Constantine just.
[00:22:56]  Really admired, and he was an older bishop at this point.
[00:23:00]  Hosius had his ear, and he was whispering to him through the whole proceedings um, homoousion versus homoousios, right?
[00:23:09]  Right, and same substance or like substance, yes.
[00:23:13]  And Hoshius' position is what Constantine ended up supporting.
[00:23:19]  It's not that he made the decision, but he did, I would say, kind of put his thumb on the spiel a little bit.
[00:23:25]  And he had the right bias.
[00:23:26]  Yeah.
[00:23:26]  He had the right bias.
[00:23:27]  But the biggest thing is he made them duke it out.
[00:23:30]  It would be as though the civil magistrate came to all these churches that are fighting about Christ as king and anti Semitism and said, look, here, guys, we're not going to make the final decision for you, but we all know that there are problems in Israel, and you're going to sort it out.
[00:23:42]  You're going to get locked in a room until it gets figured out.
[00:23:45]  Yep.
[00:23:45]  Let's pull up this quote, Nathan, from Thomas Watson.
[00:23:47]  This is really good.
[00:23:48]  This is Thomas Watson, the great Puritan, who were no fans of Roman Catholicism or anything like that.
[00:23:54]  But listen to what he says.
[00:23:55]  So, this is Thomas Watson.
[00:23:58]  There we go.
[00:23:59]  So, he's commentating on the fifth commandment, which is honoring fathers.
[00:24:02]  Fathers are not just your biological father or grandfather, but there are different types of fathers.
[00:24:06]  And one of those is the political father.
[00:24:07]  So, I'm going to read this quickly.
[00:24:09]  Thomas Watson says this The political father, the magistrate, is the father of his country.
[00:24:13]  He is to be an encourager of virtue, a punisher of vice, a father to the widow and orphan.
[00:24:17]  Such a father was Job.
[00:24:19]  I was a father to the poor, the cause which I knew not, I searched out.
[00:24:22]  As magistrates are fathers, so especially the king, who is the head of magistrates, is a political father.
[00:24:27]  He is placed as the sun among the lesser stars.
[00:24:29]  The scripture calls kings fathers.
[00:24:31]  Kings shall be your nursing fathers, Isaiah 49.
[00:24:34]  They are to train up the subjects in piety, by good edicts and example, and nurse them up in peace and piety.
[00:24:40]  Such nursing fathers were David, Hezekiah, Josiah, Constantine, and Theodosius.
[00:24:45]  I love that.
[00:24:46]  I remember doing an episode with Eric Conn a while back where I had turned him on to, uh, Thomas Watson's Ten Commandments book because I had just read it myself.
[00:24:54]  And I was like, dude, you got to check out this passage where Thomas Watson just throws it out there, doesn't even blink an eye.
[00:25:03]  He's like, yeah, great civil fathers such as Constantine, such as Theodosius.
[00:25:08]  And I think this is a Puritan, a Puritan who they literally, I mean, you're talking about people who escaped tyranny from the state in Great Britain, casting edicts over the church.
[00:25:21]  But here's the thing that's very different than what we're describing with Constantine.
[00:25:25]  What was going on with the English Puritans is the king was just trying to tick them off.
[00:25:34]  He was making them read from the sports almanac on a Sunday morning.
[00:25:38]  Yeah, on a Sunday morning in church.
[00:25:40]  So he was saying, yeah, after you administer the sacraments and preach the word and these kinds of things, you also, in church, on the Lord's Day, on the Christian Sabbath, you need to read the scores from the New England Vikings versus whatever.
[00:25:54]  Or a Patriots, you know, verse it, my bad.
[00:25:56]  I'm not a sports guy.
[00:25:57]  Because you don't have to read it on Sunday morning.
[00:25:59]  Right, yeah, exactly.
[00:26:00]  Yeah, but my point is, he was just rubbing it in their faces.
[00:26:03]  He was blaspheming the Sabbath, you know, and doing these kinds of things.
[00:26:06]  It wasn't, Constantine's not doing that.
[00:26:08]  Constantine's saying, yeah, it probably matters whether or not Jesus is God.
[00:26:11]  Yep, exactly.
[00:26:12]  That's different.
[00:26:13]  Let's pull up Table 1 Nate.
[00:26:14]  So this isn't just one time at one place, the very beginning, an emperor or the sovereign steps in.
[00:26:21]  So these are the seven ecumenical councils of the church prior to the Great Schism in 1054 between the East and the West.
[00:26:28]  All seven of these councils were called by emperors.
[00:26:31]  The Nicene Creed, the second Council of Nicaea, Constantinople, one, two, and three.
[00:26:37]  This is where they're defending against Nestorianism.
[00:26:40]  This is where they're affirming the divinity of the Holy Spirit.
[00:26:43]  This is where they're hammering out the nature, the essence, the deity of Christ.
[00:26:48]  These are foundational documents for the first thousand years of Christendom.
[00:26:51]  And if we're not even at two thousand years, that means at the very least, you may disagree with my final thesis, the first thousand years, the church was guarded, corralled, Helped, stewarded by, not at the individual level.
[00:27:06]  Kicked in the pants.
[00:27:07]  Kicked in the pants.
[00:27:08]  Not by the emperor coming in on Sunday morning and saying, My goodness, these curtains, the color's off, you got to fix them.
[00:27:14]  But by and large, the church is an institution in the West.
[00:27:17]  You have emperor, emperor, emperor, emperor, calling councils, instructing them to get together.
[00:27:23]  And that is, it's undeniable, that is the means that God used for the first thousand years.
[00:27:27]  Real quick, I want to address this question from Neville.
[00:27:29]  He said, Would you prefer Roman Catholic Christian nationalism over what we have now in the United States?
[00:27:35]  For me, it's a resounding yes.
[00:27:37]  Yep.
[00:27:38]  Catholic Christian nationalism is called integralism, and it would typically have a monarch, and that monarch would be reigning over both the civil and the ecclesiastical.
[00:27:47]  Still be better than what we have here?
[00:27:49]  It'd be better than what we have.
[00:27:50]  We're not saying that's the ideal.
[00:27:51]  We are Protestants.
[00:27:52]  Yep.
[00:27:55]  But we often do not fully grasp how bad things really are.
[00:27:59]  Yeah.
[00:27:59]  Anything else to add, gentlemen, in this first section before we get into the reformers?
[00:28:04]  It goes beyond just the seat in Rome, because Charlemagne did something similar.
[00:28:11]  And he actually.
[00:28:13]  Lobbied in favor of adopting the filioque term.
[00:28:17]  He did quite a bit of reform.
[00:28:19]  He himself reformed the monastic orders and he did correct, put his thumb on the scale pretty strongly to correct some of the theological aberrances that were going on.
[00:28:31]  So this moved even across into Western Europe as France and the rest of Christianity was spreading through Western Europe.
[00:28:40]  This was not just a product of Rome or of Constantinople.
[00:28:45]  This tradition carried on as the church and Christendom continued to move west.
[00:28:51]  Absolutely.
[00:28:52]  All right.
[00:28:52]  So I want to get into it because, like, well, it was the first thousand years, but since then that stopped.

=== Popes Assuming Civic Responsibility (02:37) ===

[00:28:56]  We'll answer those objections here in our second segment.
[00:28:58]  But first, we'll go to our first commercial break.
[00:29:02]  Our sponsor, Private Family Banking, wants to help you with one money move that'll implicate itself in multi generational wealth building starting the first day.
[00:29:11]  They help you to avoid taxation and to draw compound interest to your money.
[00:29:17]  Now, if you're a high net worth individual, someone who has maybe even $10 million in net worth, then they can help you even more.
[00:29:25]  W 2 workers, contract workers, business owners, it's all about cash flow and making tax deferred gains on all your money for the rest of your life.
[00:29:36]  Don't avoid this.
[00:29:37]  It's a big move, but it's a great time to make it.
[00:29:40]  Click the link below and you can get on Chuck de La Torrante's calendar and he'll go over your background and what you want to accomplish.
[00:29:47]  And he's going to help model a program that exactly fits your needs.
[00:29:52]  So go ahead and send an email to Chuck at Private Family Banking.com.
[00:29:57]  Again, that's Chuck at Private Family Banking.com.
[00:30:01]  Or you can click the link below.
[00:30:03]  Make a free discovery call now.
[00:30:05]  Private Family Banking invites you to join their email list right now to enter into a drawing to win two free admission tickets to our Christ is King How to Defeat Trash World conference that's taking place April 3rd, 4th, and 5th.
[00:30:22]  Of the Year of Our Lord 2025.
[00:30:24]  Now you can enter to win by simply sending an email to banking at privatefamilybanking.com.
[00:30:33]  Again, send an email to banking at privatefamilybanking.com with the subject line that says April ticket giveaway.
[00:30:44]  Okay, then provide simply your full name and your phone contact information, and you'll be entered into the contest to win not one but two free tickets for our conference.
[00:30:57]  America is a country that was founded for the purpose of allowing Christians to do their duty before God and not to have their consciences ruled by the doctrines and commandments of men.
[00:31:04]  Reese Fund exists in order to see the Ten Commandments properly applied, not just as a plaque on the wall, but to actually be used in business as though they're commandments from God that we're supposed to obey.
[00:31:15]  Our goal is to find businesses and to buy them and to build them up.
[00:31:20]  We want to find manufacturing businesses and use them to make sure that we can maintain our capacity to do things here.
[00:31:27]  Reese Fund, Christian Capital, boldly deployed.

=== State Power to Halt Religious Confusion (14:57) ===

[00:31:33]  All right, well, welcome back.
[00:31:34]  So we established the first thousand years, that's the means that God used.
[00:31:38]  But what about leading into the Reformation?
[00:31:39]  So, the Middle Ages, into the medieval time period.
[00:31:42]  One could argue that a number of the councils, so an emperor has not called an ecumenical council in a very long time.
[00:31:47]  And the councils that have been called since the Great Schism have been largely called by the popes.
[00:31:51]  And you could say, well, there was a time where maybe the state stewarded the church, but now it's the church that governs her own affairs, whether you're Catholic or whether you're Protestant, or maybe we just don't need these things.
[00:32:00]  But what I want to kind of show is that what happened coming out of the Middle Ages was that the pope actually began to assume a type of civic responsibility.
[00:32:08]  Now, you can pull up quote number two here, or quote number one.
[00:32:12]  So, this is from Pope Boniface VIII.
[00:32:15]  He's writing in 1302.
[00:32:16]  He's not necessarily speaking ex cathedra here.
[00:32:19]  So, ex cathedra in Roman Catholicism, when the Pope occupies the seat of Peter in Rome and speaks, he speaks infallibly.
[00:32:26]  And so, some Protestants, they may get to say, like, well, if the Pope orders a hamburger and fries, then that's infallible.
[00:32:32]  That's not exactly the case.
[00:32:33]  And that's not exactly the case here.
[00:32:35]  But this is a papal bull, Unum Sanctum, 1302.
[00:32:38]  And listen to what he says, and especially pay attention at the end.
[00:32:40]  So, I'm going to go quick here.
[00:32:41]  He says, For according to the blessed Dionysus, it is a law of divinity that the lowest things reach the highest place by intermediaries.
[00:32:47]  Then, according to the order of the universe, all things are not led back to order equally and immediately, but the lowest by the intermediary and the inferior by the superior.
[00:32:55]  So, what he's about to do, he's about to make an argument that since spiritual things are good, are better than the material, that the spiritual realm rules over the physical realm.
[00:33:04]  Hence, we must recognize the more clearly that spiritual power surpasses in dignity and nobility any temporal power whatever, as spiritual things surpass the temporal.
[00:33:15]  This we see very clearly also by the payment, benediction, and consecration of the tithes.
[00:33:19]  But by the acceptance of power itself, by the government, even of things.
[00:33:22]  Pay attention to this part.
[00:33:23]  For with the truth as our witness, it belongs to spiritual power to establish the terrestrial power.
[00:33:29]  That's earthly power, state power, and to pass judgment if it has not been good.
[00:33:36]  And so, what Pope Boniface VIII is arguing here is that because, especially in Roman Catholicism, nature is something that's inherently flawed, needs to be surpassed and elevated above by infusions of grace, that so too, then in the state, in Christendom, in Catholicism, It would be the Pope established above.
[00:33:54]  And he's the one sitting over this state and saying, This is good.
[00:33:57]  This is not.
[00:33:58]  Excommunication from the Catholic Church would oftentimes mean excommunication from the territory.
[00:34:04]  And so, even still, up through the Reformation, I would still make the argument that it was a type of civil magistrate and state that continued to exercise influence, reform, and what ultimately happened, of course, as we know, they faltered greatly.
[00:34:18]  The 1300s, the 1400s, the 1500s, leading up to the Reformation, it was the failure of the Pope, but not just as a spiritual figure.
[00:34:26]  But as a state civil leader, it was a failure across those lines that led to the need for the Protestant Reformation.
[00:34:33]  Right.
[00:34:33]  Anything to add to that?
[00:34:35]  No, that's well said.
[00:34:36]  I always think about, you know, with the Protestant Reformation, I'm reformed, but I always think like it is a shame.
[00:34:43]  Like it's a shame that councils weren't called.
[00:34:45]  It's a shame that Luther was on the run for his life, that he wasn't, you know, given a fair hearing.
[00:34:51]  Like Luther didn't want to abandon the Catholic Church.
[00:34:54]  Like he wanted to reform the Catholic Church.
[00:34:57]  And there's so many things, like, you know, we quote Luther all the time, but there's so many things that, like, Protestants at this point, where, like, Luther would be probably just as upset with us as he would be with, you know, Roman Catholicism.
[00:35:10]  Like, I mean, Luther, his view of the supper, you know, like a real presence, his view of the perpetual virginity of Mary, his view, like, there are so many things where, like, Luther would look at us and he'd be like, I didn't say any of that.
[00:35:23]  Right.
[00:35:24]  You know.
[00:35:24]  Yeah.
[00:35:25]  So let's get to speaking of like to the church.
[00:35:27]  So, John Calvin, if you have certain editions of the Institutes, they're written actually to the King of France, Francis I.
[00:35:34]  And you can pull up, this will actually be at the end, quote number six.
[00:35:37]  And so, Calvin writes to him and he writes incredibly respectfully and he begs the prince.
[00:35:41]  He's not writing to the Pope laying out the Christian religion and the fathers and all of that, but he's writing to the king.
[00:35:47]  He says, Your duty, most serene prince, is not to shut either your ears or your mind against a cause involving such mighty interests as these.
[00:35:55]  Of the glory of God is to be maintained in the earth and violet, of the truth of God is to preserve its dignity, of the kingdom of Christ is to continue among its compact and secure.
[00:36:03]  This cause is worthy of your ear, worthy of your investigation, and worthy of your throne.
[00:36:08]  Calvin's appealing to the king.
[00:36:10]  He's saying, King, please.
[00:36:12]  The king was Roman Catholic.
[00:36:13]  Francis I was Roman Catholic.
[00:36:15]  He's saying, Roman Catholic king, you have a duty to care for the glory of God, the stewardship of the faith, the health of the church.
[00:36:23]  And so please kindly lend your ear to me.
[00:36:26]  Listen to what I'm about to say to you and please be convinced of it.
[00:36:29]  Yeah.
[00:36:31]  Go ahead.
[00:36:32]  Well, I was going to read.
[00:36:33]  Is now a good time for confessions or do you have more quotes?
[00:36:36]  Let me add Francis Turreton.
[00:36:38]  You guys need to be Francis Turreton maxing.
[00:36:40]  Sproul said it was Calvin, Edwards, and Turreton were his three favorite guys.
[00:36:44]  So I have all of Turreton's institutes.
[00:36:46]  They're excellent.
[00:36:47]  And he writes at length about the intersection of power.
[00:36:50]  So he tackles exactly this question How does the state relate to the church?
[00:36:54]  And this is during, I would say, one of the periods of the high watermark of the Reformation.
[00:36:57]  So this is during the Period of high orthodoxy, the magisterial reformers.
[00:37:01]  And I'm just going to read a couple selections of quotes from Turriton.
[00:37:04]  I'm going to go slow and explain them.
[00:37:06]  And I want you to see that this is what they all understood.
[00:37:09]  We've got the church here, it's in need.
[00:37:12]  And there is an incumbent duty upon the state to preserve, care, teach, train, and protect it.
[00:37:18]  Yep.
[00:37:19]  Nate will go ahead and go with quote number three.
[00:37:25]  So he says this Turriton, affirmatively, there are many things which belong to the magistrate in reference to sacred things.
[00:37:30]  He ought to establish the sacred doctrine and the pure worship of God in the state according to the prescription of the divine word, faithfully to conserve it when established, or even to restore and reform it when declining.
[00:37:43]  So he says there are many things given to the state, and one of them is to restore and reform worship when it is declining.
[00:37:49]  He ought to protect the church according to his ability, to restrain heretics and disturbers of ecclesiastical peace, to promote the glory of God, to defend and propagate true religion, and to hinder the confusion of religions.
[00:38:02]  One of the duties of the sovereign, of the magistrate, of the king, according to Francis Turton here, is to halt and avoid the confusion of religions.
[00:38:11]  Well, we have religious pluralism or freedom of religion.
[00:38:15]  The role of the state is literally to say, no, there is one true religion, the Christian religion.
[00:38:21]  He says his third role to provide for the ministry of the word and the sacraments rightly according to the word of God, where it does not exist, to treat it reverently and honestly.
[00:38:32]  Cherish and defend it where it does exist, open and encourage schools as well as seedbeds, seminaries of the state and the church in which the youth may be instructed and trained.
[00:38:42]  Now, Turton is not necessarily saying for all time the gospel age is 50,000 years before Christ comes back.
[00:38:48]  All the way until that time, the state will always be establishing schools and always instructing and training.
[00:38:52]  But you can see they're a baseline expectation and anticipation of, yeah, it's the state's role to come in.
[00:38:59]  It's the state's to reform, the state to correct, the state to protect.
[00:39:04]  Let's go now to quote, this will be quote four, actually.
[00:39:09]  Nate.
[00:39:10]  So, Turton continues on.
[00:39:11]  He says this as he's saying about the civil magistrate, they sin in defect.
[00:39:16]  So, civil magistrates sin in the negative when they don't do.
[00:39:19]  Those who remove him, that is the magistrate, from all cares of ecclesiastical things, So that he does not care what each one worships and allows free power to anyone of doing and saying whatever he wishes in the cause of religion.
[00:39:32]  He's saying he sins in the negative.
[00:39:33]  He has failed to live up to a duty if he permits anyone to say, I serve this God, I serve that God, God allowed me to do this.
[00:39:44]  He continues and says, or who, so they continue to sin, if they ascribe to him the care of nourishing and defending the church, so he may kindly cherish and powerfully defend it, but still leaves nothing of the recognition and nothing of judgment concerning religion.
[00:39:58]  Save the execution alone to him.
[00:40:00]  So, what he's saying there is if you leave up some matters to him, but you don't allow him to weigh in recognition and judgment, even there, the civil father, the magistrate, is not living up to his role as God commands him.
[00:40:13]  I have one more caution against what he actually shouldn't do, but Michael, I would say let's get into some of what the confessions say.
[00:40:18]  So, some people might say, well, yeah, that's just Turriton.
[00:40:20]  I mean, that's just Turriton.
[00:40:22]  But this actually was quite broadly understood in the confessions as well, which were kind of the encapsulation of the perspective of.
[00:40:32]  Right and good doctrine and the various emerging denominations coming out of the Reformation.
[00:40:36]  Various groups got together and wrote confessions, and it's interesting that a lot of the confessions, I have three of them here, specifically touch on this issue.
[00:40:45]  And it's kind of based to say, well, I'm confessional now and I'm Reformed Baptist or Presbyterian.
[00:40:53]  We go back to the Westminster.
[00:40:54]  We go back to the Baptist faith messages of 2000.
[00:40:56]  That's right.
[00:40:57]  Not quite that one.
[00:40:58]  I'm going to go in order.
[00:41:01]  The oldest one that I have is the Belgian Confession of 1561.
[00:41:05]  So this is Article 36.
[00:41:06]  It says, of the magistrates, it says, and their office, I don't have this on the screen.
[00:41:11]  Sorry, guys.
[00:41:11]  So just listen, I'll read clearly.
[00:41:14]  And their office, that is the magistrate.
[00:41:15]  The magistrate's office is not only to have regard unto and watch for the welfare of the civil state, but also that they protect the sacred ministry and thus may remove and prevent all idolatry and false worship, that the kingdom of Antichrist may be thus destroyed and the kingdom of Christ promoted.
[00:41:36]  They must therefore, again, the magistrate must therefore countenance the preaching of the word of the gospel everywhere, that God may be honored and worshiped by everyone as he has commanded in his word.
[00:41:48]  He says the magistrate is entrusted with promoting the kingdom of Christ and destroying the kingdom of Antichrist.
[00:41:58]  That's remarkable because we separate those two things in our time now.
[00:42:02]  Well, those are two different things.
[00:42:03]  There's a spiritual kingdom.
[00:42:04]  Well, no, the Belgian Confession says the civil magistrate.
[00:42:09]  Oversees and promotes the destruction of the spiritual enemies of Christ.
[00:42:14]  Pretty remarkable.
[00:42:15]  That's 1561.
[00:42:17]  Here's 1566.
[00:42:19]  This is the second Helvetic Confession, chapter 3 of the magistracy.
[00:42:24]  He says that they say the duty of the magistrate, the chief duty of the magistrate is to secure and preserve peace and public tranquility.
[00:42:32]  Good.
[00:42:33]  Amen.
[00:42:34]  Doubtless, he will never do this more successfully than when he is truly God-fearing and religious.
[00:42:39]  That is to say, when according to the example of the most holy kings and princes of the people of the Lord, he promotes the preaching of the truth and sincere faith, roots out lies and all superstition, together with all impiety and idolatry, and defends the church of God.
[00:42:57]  We certainly teach that the care of religion belongs especially to the holy magistrate.
[00:43:03]  That's rough for the uh, wow, roots out all superstition.
[00:43:07]  Yeah, it sounds tough.
[00:43:08]  Hardest hit, hardest hit.
[00:43:10]  Uh, no, that's a good quote.
[00:43:11]  I want to read Westminster because this is probably the one that most people will be familiar with, right?
[00:43:15]  And the Baptist Confession, I think, excises these parts.
[00:43:18]  It does, it does.
[00:43:19]  So, just this is a Presbyterian W here, it is, and a classic Baptist L. Many such cases.
[00:43:25]  So many cases.
[00:43:26]  This is, um, section 23, paragraph 3 of the Westminster Confession.
[00:43:32]  Um, it says, the civil magistrate may not assume to himself the administration of the word and sacraments.
[00:43:38]  Amen.
[00:43:39]  He may not do that.
[00:43:40]  Or the power of the keys of the kingdom of heaven.
[00:43:43]  Good.
[00:43:44]  Yet he hath authority, and it is his duty to take order that unity and peace be preserved in the church, that the truth of God be kept pure and entire, that all blasphemies and heresies be suppressed,
[00:44:00]  All corruptions and abuses in worship and discipline prevented or reformed, and all the ordinances of God duly settled, administered, and observed for the better effecting whereof he hath call, has the power to call synods to be present at them and to provide that whatsoever is transacted in them be according to the mind of God.
[00:44:24]  I don't know if it could be any more clear one.
[00:44:27]  Your meme, Joel Corporate, needs to tell you that the difference between the two Westminster Confession confession, what Constantine actually did right right yeah, same picture.
[00:44:38]  Yes, it's the same picture, and praise god for it.
[00:44:40]  Yeah I, I would love if, maybe later towards the end of the episode, maybe in our third segment, I know we want to deal with the chat and any questions that people have, but I don't want to cut you off, Wes, because I know you've prepared a lot.
[00:44:51]  So I'm going to hand it right back to you in just a moment.
[00:44:53]  But I would love to, like, I feel like one of the things that I'm, you know, decently good at is practically saying, like, okay, so, you know, how would we accomplish this from where we are today here in America?
[00:45:06]  Like, how could we get here?
[00:45:07]  What would the church do?
[00:45:08]  You know, because suppressing blasphemy, see, that's part of the problem, is it's.
[00:45:13]  It's clear when it's Arius, denying the divinity of Christ.
[00:45:17]  It's like, okay, well, that's blasphemy.
[00:45:20]  But it wasn't clear at the time.
[00:45:21]  No, it wasn't.
[00:45:22]  It wasn't clear at the time.
[00:45:23]  But what I mean by that is we have our own little cultural context and what's been going on just in the last 10, 15 years.
[00:45:30]  You've got Woke Wars 1, and then you've got Woke Wars 2.
[00:45:34]  My point is, a lot of it is the culture war stuff and not as much.
[00:45:38]  It is doctrine, it has theological implications, but it's not primary doctrine.
[00:45:42]  It's not doctrine of God, theology.
[00:45:44]  Proper, it's not that you know the hypostatic union, it's not soteriology, it's not those kinds of things.
[00:45:49]  That like our nation is being torn apart by the Bible being used to welcome the sojourner, and that means you know 500,000 Haitians.
[00:45:58]  Or, on the flip side, you know, it's like, well, that's not what the Bible means, and it actually means this, you know.
[00:46:03]  And then you got Neil Shinvie, well, you just woke right, you know, or James Lindsay, like you just woke right, you know.
[00:46:08]  And but my point is, like, what I'd love to get into practically, like, what are the solutions?
[00:46:12]  Does the state, the question would be, does the state step in on those issues which are not actually?
[00:46:18]  Then they don't actually rise to the level of doctrinal heresy.
[00:46:22]  Or would the state maybe even make like some kind of pronunciation that the church's word and sacrament needs to stay in its lane?

=== Does the State Step In on Heresy (06:46) ===

[00:46:31]  I feel like that's actually more likely.
[00:46:33]  Right.
[00:46:33]  You know, and then guys like us, you know, we're like, okay, fair enough.
[00:46:38]  And then we just podcast or something, you know.
[00:46:43]  Right, right.
[00:46:43]  But like, cause that's been, I think, a lot of what Stephen Wolf has been trying to get across.
[00:46:48]  That's why he says, I, you know, all of his stuff about a worldview.
[00:46:51]  There's a lot of guys, you know, James White and others who have been struggling with what Stephen Wolf has been talking about, you know, Christian worldview.
[00:46:58]  But what Stephen means by that, just for the record, real quick, and then I'll give it back to you, Wes.
[00:47:02]  But you remember the, um, The old commercials for Holiday Inn Express, they used to run these commercials and it would basically be like this was one of the setups.
[00:47:12]  I remember it distinctly in my mind because I just thought it was funny.
[00:47:15]  But it was like a hospital room, like a surgery room.
[00:47:17]  And somebody's under, you know, and they're laying on the table, you know, the cloth is over their body.
[00:47:23]  And they're about to cut open their head, their skull, and perform brain surgery.
[00:47:28]  And all the nurses are in the room and they're prepping the patient, all this kind of stuff.
[00:47:32]  And then this guy walks in, you know, and he's decked out in his doctor gear.
[00:47:36]  And people are like, You're not the doctor.
[00:47:38]  Like, who are you?
[00:47:38]  And he's like, Oh, my name's so and so.
[00:47:40]  And they're like, What are you here for?
[00:47:43]  To perform brain surgery.
[00:47:44]  Like, Well, what are your credentials?
[00:47:45]  Are you even a doctor?
[00:47:48]  He's like, Well, I'm not a doctor, but I did stay in a holiday inn last night.
[00:47:52]  And that's what Stephen Wolf is just to clear that up.
[00:47:54]  I feel it's the best way I can explain it.
[00:47:55]  That's what Stephen Wolf is talking about when he's pushing back.
[00:47:59]  Because at first, you know, like, at first glance, you're like, Why are you pushing back against a Christian worldview?
[00:48:03]  Aren't there, I mean, of all the things to fight against, why are we fighting?
[00:48:06]  Like, isn't that a good thing?
[00:48:08]  Why would we fight against.
[00:48:09]  A Christian worldview.
[00:48:10]  But what he's getting at is kind of like Al Moeller, you know, the beginning of every briefing is like, you know, news and current events from a Christian worldview.
[00:48:18]  And then with his Christian worldview, he sided with Dr. Fauci for months and months and months, you know, telling the church that it should be shut down and that we should wear four masks and all, you know.
[00:48:28]  And what Stephen's trying to say is, you know what, your Christian worldview doesn't make you an epidemiologist.
[00:48:33]  Your Christian worldview doesn't make you a rocket scientist or an economist, you know, and that's true for all of us.
[00:48:40]  And I'm talking to myself right now because I don't want people to think that I'm.
[00:48:43]  It's like, really?
[00:48:44]  Like, has he not looked in the mirror?
[00:48:46]  I'm perfectly aware that this applies to me, especially me.
[00:48:49]  But the point is, by virtue of being a Christian or a pastor or having a Christian worldview, does not make it, does not, that is not the equivalent of having a PhD in political philosophy.
[00:49:00]  Right.
[00:49:00]  It's not.
[00:49:01]  And so, what Stephen Wolfe is getting at, and we'll get to it later in the episode, like I already said, but in terms of like practically where do we go from here and how could we fix, you know, make some of these things happen in America?
[00:49:10]  Well, because it's not a clear, my point is, because it's not a clear blasphemy or a clear heresy.
[00:49:15]  Like the doctrine of God, theology proper, doctrine of the sun, those kinds of things.
[00:49:19]  It may not be that the state comes in and says, Well, the church must be culturally right leaning, politically right leaning.
[00:49:27]  It may, that might not actually be the best way to go about it.
[00:49:29]  It may be that the state says, The church must simply stay in its lane and simply word and sacrament and leave these matters to political philosophers and to this and to that.
[00:49:42]  Like, that actually, could the state do that and say, Hey, you're no more sermons.
[00:49:48]  About the least of these and why we need more immigrants.
[00:49:51]  That text from Matthew cannot be preached for five years.
[00:49:53]  Yeah, yeah, right.
[00:49:54]  No more of those, exactly.
[00:49:56]  No more of those sermons.
[00:49:56]  That'd be a little extreme, but I mean.
[00:49:58]  No more of those sermons because you literally, pastors have ruined the country.
[00:50:02]  Liberal, God's will.
[00:50:03]  Galatians 3 28, you need a 10 year freeze for preaching Galatians 3 28.
[00:50:06]  Yeah, there's neither male nor female.
[00:50:08]  I'm sorry, you guys have improperly exegeted this text for decades and decades, and so you're not allowed to touch it.
[00:50:16]  But my point is, not so much, we're being facetious there, so not so much like a text is off limits.
[00:50:21]  But in terms of application, saying you are to preach to spiritual matters for the foreseeable future.
[00:50:28]  And when it comes to cultural and political matters, if you get too cultural or political in either direction, left or right, then there are going to be penalties.
[00:50:39]  Right.
[00:50:41]  Because you, by virtue of being clergy or whatever it is, or virtue of being Christian, having your Christian worldview, does not make you a political philosopher.
[00:50:51]  Listen to Turreton on this.
[00:50:52]  So, Nate, this is quote number three.
[00:50:54]  Although it is not lawful, so Turton takes it as an assumption, although it is not lawful for bishops to engage in politics or to plead in court, still it is lawful and incumbent upon them to adminish and to exhort magistrates to do their duty.
[00:51:06]  And if they at any time fail it, they are to rebuke and denounce the judgment of God against them.
[00:51:10]  So one of his a priori assumptions right there, he's like, it's not lawful, we all know, for bishops to do politics or to plead in court.
[00:51:17]  They're restricted to the spiritual matters.
[00:51:19]  And then he in turn says this of the magistrates.
[00:51:21]  So in turn, although the preaching of the word does not pertain to magistrates, so the magistrate, the prince, does not come in and preach on Sunday morning.
[00:51:29]  To be clear, that is not his prerogative, that on any Sunday morning he can get up at the pulpit for two hours at a time.
[00:51:33]  He doesn't administer the sacraments.
[00:51:35]  Nope.
[00:51:35]  So he says, although the preaching of the word does not contain it.
[00:51:38]  Although it would be funny to watch Trump administer the Lord's Supper.
[00:51:42]  I don't know about that.
[00:51:43]  I'm not saying it would be good, but it'd be interesting to watch.
[00:51:47]  Two Corinthians.
[00:51:49]  He says, Still it is lawful for them that is the silver magistrates to admonish and rebuke bishops and pastors, neglecting or wandering from their office, nay also to bring to order transgressors and to take care that the ministry be not corrupted and religion suffer no harm.
[00:52:03]  And we'll end this segment with one more guard against what we're clearly not saying that the prince should do.
[00:52:08]  So, we're not saying in all of this, like he just takes it over.
[00:52:11]  He picks the color of the carpet, the hymnals, the version they're going to preach from.
[00:52:15]  He can be present at any church on Sunday morning.
[00:52:17]  He can't do those things.
[00:52:18]  This is the last quote, Stephen Wolfe.
[00:52:20]  He should procure what is necessary, that is, the Christian prince, what is necessary for pure worship of God, but not lead worship or institute new articles of faith or sacred ceremonies.
[00:52:31]  He can't do new things.
[00:52:33]  He is not free to invent.
[00:52:35]  He's not free to take the almanac and say, You're going to read this on Sunday morning.
[00:52:38]  That's right.
[00:52:38]  If the ministry degrades, this is Wolf saying it, he should reform it.
[00:52:41]  He should correct the lazy and erring pastor, but not perform the duties of pastor.
[00:52:45]  He should protect the church from heretics and disturbers of ecclesiastical peace, ensuring tranquil spiritual administration.
[00:52:51]  I know this has gone wrong before, and Baptists have certainly been on the receiving end of it.
[00:52:56]  Roman Catholicism has done its fair share of it.
[00:52:58]  But just because the system's flawed, just because there's bad husbands, or just because there's this side or the other, it still doesn't mean that what we've now kind of demonstrated, I would say, 1700 years, That the ordinary means that God has used for 1700 years can't still be used at all.
[00:53:12]  Well, there's been some excesses, been some deficiencies, been some abuses.
[00:53:16]  Throw it out the window.

=== One Thousand Attendees at Right Response (08:52) ===

[00:53:17]  No more marriage.
[00:53:17]  Right, right.
[00:53:18]  Baptist faith and message from here on out.
[00:53:21]  No.
[00:53:21]  Right.
[00:53:22]  That's just not what you have to take away from.
[00:53:24]  That's really bad because we are Baptist and we're picking on Baptist, you know, but I mean, it is silly when you're talking about the largest denomination in these United States of America that are historically confessional all the way back to the year of our Lord 2000.
[00:53:41]  And then we're like looking at our country and we're like, yeah, we're a joke.
[00:53:46]  We're kind of a joke.
[00:53:47]  Yeah.
[00:53:48]  Let's head to our last commercial break and then we'll come back.
[00:53:50]  We'll talk practicals.
[00:53:51]  Yep.
[00:53:51]  All right.
[00:53:52]  The clock is running out.
[00:53:53]  You need to go and register now for our Christ is King How to Defeat Trash World Conference.
[00:53:59]  It's happening the year of our Lord 2025, April 3rd, 4th, and 5th.
[00:54:04]  That's a Thursday, Friday, and Saturday.
[00:54:07]  And by God's grace, we're able to provide for you an all star lineup.
[00:54:11]  We've got Steve Dace, Calvin Robinson, Orrin McIntyre.
[00:54:15]  Dr. Stephen Wolf, Eric Kahn, David Reese, Andrew Isker, John Harris, AD Robles, Dan Burkholder, Dusty Devers, Ben Garrett, CJ Engel, and yours truly, Pastor Joel Webbin.
[00:54:28]  Come on out, join us April 3rd, 4th, and 5th, 2025, Thursday through a Saturday.
[00:54:34]  Go to RightResponseConference.com to register today.
[00:54:39]  Again, that's RightResponseConference.com.
[00:54:43]  Listen, guys, you probably listen to Right Response Ministries because You take the dominion mandate offered to us in scripture seriously.
[00:54:52]  Well, unsurprisingly, so does Dominion Wealth Strategist.
[00:54:56]  As the only distinctly reformed financial consulting firm, they help Calvinistic, covenantal, and confessional Christians to steward their resources faithfully in a way that actually aligns with God's word.
[00:55:10]  Dominion Wealth leverages all corners of the financial service industry as independent brokerage agents.
[00:55:17]  Matching you with suitable products and services from dozens of top industry providers.
[00:55:23]  Their mission is to equip believers to secure their family's future and build a legacy that glorifies God by building holistic financial strategies that include budgeting, insurance, debt management, retirement planning, estate planning, and more.
[00:55:42]  In order to make wealth Christian again with a portfolio that might even put King Solomon to shame, Go and take dominion over your finances today by visiting www.reformed.money and book an introductory overview right now.
[00:56:00]  All of Christ for all of life and all of finance for Christendom.
[00:56:06]  Okay, real quick, Nathan just walked in here and informed me during the commercial break that we do need to remind you guys a couple more times because we've got less than two weeks.
[00:56:16]  It's kind of crazy.
[00:56:17]  When Michael and Wes walked into the studio, they're like, Yeah, so the conference is next week.
[00:56:22]  And I was like, what next week?
[00:56:25]  Yeah, um, so yeah, it's next week, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, April, uh, 3rd, 4th, and 5th.
[00:56:30]  And pretty, I'm assuming at this point, like everybody who's gonna come physically has signed up.
[00:56:37]  Um, but it's not too late, um, simply not, and just for the record, because all the haters are gonna say they're still advertising their conference because they only have like four people going.
[00:56:45]  Nathan just gave us the most recent numbers is about 950 people, and we'd love to hit a thousand.
[00:56:51]  So if 50 more people want to come, that's great, but no, we're not saying this because nobody's coming to the conference.
[00:56:56]  But we just got a venue that just happened to be the most affordable and also was fairly large.
[00:57:02]  It could seat like 2,000 people.
[00:57:04]  And so there is still room, even though we're a week and a half away.
[00:57:08]  So if you want to come in person, we would love that.
[00:57:11]  Go to rightresponseconference.com, not rightresponse ministries, but rightresponseconference.com, and you can register today.
[00:57:19]  Nathan, let's give them a promo code for anybody who needs some help.
[00:57:24]  Do we still have King or Christ is King?
[00:57:27]  What is it?
[00:57:30]  I think, yeah, you could type in anti Semitism, Christ is King.
[00:57:34]  No, wait.
[00:57:36]  You can use Christ is King, all caps, no spaces, or just the word King, all caps, and get a, I believe it's a 25% discount.
[00:57:46]  Is that right, Nate?
[00:57:48]  25% off, which would put you at 150 bucks for an adult, 75 for a teenager, and kids are free.
[00:57:55]  10 and under are free.
[00:57:56]  So we'd love for you to come in person, but what I was going to say, Is at this point, I imagine, I assume that most people are pretty much settled on whether, if you're not registered now, you probably just can't come.
[00:58:07]  But a lot of people have been asking about if they can watch digitally.
[00:58:11]  And so we are going to live stream it.
[00:58:13]  And what you need to do if you want the live stream is we're going to do that.
[00:58:16]  It's not going to be on YouTube.
[00:58:17]  It's not going to be on X.
[00:58:18]  It's not going to be on our website or anything like that.
[00:58:21]  We are exclusively live streaming it only for our Patreon members and only for, because I don't want you to sign up on Patreon and be like, what?
[00:58:29]  I didn't get access.
[00:58:30]  So hear me, only for our gold Patreon members.
[00:58:33]  Okay, so if you go to patreon.com forward slash right response ministries, patreon.com forward slash right response ministries.
[00:58:44]  And sign up for the gold tier, which is $10 a month.
[00:58:48]  And little life hack, you know, I always say it, it doesn't really serve us because people will take me up on it and we'll get less money, but that's okay.
[00:58:55]  I'm not trying to, you know, to rip anybody off.
[00:58:57]  I don't want you to have to sell your shirt in order to watch this content.
[00:59:00]  But here's the life hack for you you actually can cancel.
[00:59:04]  I know it's unbelievable because I myself have fallen prey to it, you know, having 47 different subscriptions, you know, and I'm only aware of five of them, you know, and I'm like, where'd that $1,000 go, you know, and, but you actually can.
[00:59:16]  Cancel a subscription.
[00:59:18]  You really can.
[00:59:18]  So you could sign up just today because it's literally a week and a half away.
[00:59:23]  And if before 30 days, you know, it's monthly, if within 30 days you cancel your subscription, then you will have been able to live stream all seven sessions, all three panels, get every ounce of content from the conference, and spend a grand total of $10.
[00:59:39]  There are a lot of different guys, a lot of different Christian ministries and Christian conferences that live stream their conference for $50, $70, $80, $100.
[00:59:48]  We are live streaming the conference.
[00:59:50]  For ten dollars, and we're not even trying, like, believe it or not.
[00:59:54]  Um, our goal is simply to stay afloat, right?
[00:59:59]  It's no secret that we have plenty of enemies, and when we're just trying to financially be viable, so that we continue to be able to continue to provide the content that we do, we're not trying to make some massive profit on this, but we do need to be able to stay afloat.
[01:00:13]  And with this conference, I have no one to blame but myself.
[01:00:16]  But I invited like 150 speakers to this conference, and uh, turns out, uh, when Nathan gave me you know the books, he was like, uh, Joel.
[01:00:25]  This is rather expensive, it turns out, that having this many speakers and you get a show, you get a podcast, you get a speaker.
[01:00:33]  Yeah, exactly.
[01:00:33]  So it's like, I mean, like when you get, like, I kid you not, we 150, you know, obviously hyperbole, but we have like 15 speakers.
[01:00:40]  And when you do that, the airfare, an honorary, we're trying to give them all a generous honorarium, their, you know, their hotel, their per diem, you know, paying for their meals while they're here.
[01:00:51]  So just the speakers alone, we are well over 50 grand just on the speakers.
[01:00:57]  And this is not a conference of, you know, it's fairly large.
[01:01:00]  It looks like we're going to come in about 1,000 people, but it's not a 10,000 person conference.
[01:01:05]  And so you can do the math on that.
[01:01:06]  And with those 1,000 people, a lot of them we've given free tickets, a ton of different promo codes and discounts.
[01:01:12]  So it's not like, well, 1,000 people and all of them are $200 a piece.
[01:01:16]  No, we didn't even start the $200 price until very recently.
[01:01:20]  So we had much lower price.
[01:01:21]  And even with those, we're offering promo codes and discounts.
[01:01:25]  With that $950, I think at least 100 of them are completely free.
[01:01:30]  Pro bono, and I'm not just talking about the kids who are for sure free.
[01:01:33]  So, we are not trying to rip anybody off with this, but we are also trying to avoid having to take a second mortgage on my house to pay for it.
[01:01:43]  So, that's what we're trying to do.
[01:01:44]  We're trying to at least break even, and we do have some more space, but that's why we decided that we are going to charge for the live stream.
[01:01:51]  So, all that to the live stream, we're not trying to rip you off, but ten dollars just so that we can stay afloat and that this conference wouldn't put us in the hole.
[01:02:01]  But we're super excited.
[01:02:02]  And guys, it's like 10, 11 days away.
[01:02:05]  It is coming up fast.
[01:02:07]  All right.
[01:02:08]  It's going to be a great time.
[01:02:09]  Nate, let's show table two.

=== Bob Jones University and Public Signs (15:54) ===

[01:02:10]  So you can say, well, in our American context, the state, the church, there's a wall between them, right?
[01:02:15]  Like the state doesn't influence the church, all that, the other.
[01:02:19]  You could try as much as you want to say, no, these two are separate.
[01:02:23]  Here's the deal morality, worship, all of these things, they're forever entangled with the state.
[01:02:28]  So these are three Supreme Court decisions.
[01:02:30]  There has been certainly less influence.
[01:02:32]  You do not have the president of the United States calling the Baptists together, calling the Presbyterians together.
[01:02:37]  But I want to show three ways in which you had.
[01:02:40]  Obstensively Christian in the case of Mormon, a pagan religion, and then Christians, Bob Jones University, fundamentalists.
[01:02:46]  How you still had the state coming in and saying, yes, you can do this, no, you cannot do this.
[01:02:50]  So, for anyone listening, Reynolds versus United States, this is 1878.
[01:02:54]  Supreme Court ruled that religious freedom does not extend to actions like polygamy that violate criminal law.
[01:02:59]  Mormons hardest hit.
[01:03:01]  Bob Jones University versus United States, this is 1983.
[01:03:05]  This is 40 years ago, maybe less.
[01:03:09]  The IRS revoked the tax exempt status of Bob Jones University, a fundamentalist Christian school, for its racially discriminatory admissions policy.
[01:03:17]  Supreme Court upheld this, ruling that tax exemptions require compliance with public policy against discrimination, indirectly correcting church affiliated behavior.
[01:03:27]  And finally, Michael, do you want to try to pronounce this?
[01:03:29]  The Church of Lakumi Babalu.
[01:03:33]  So, this is a pagan ritualistic church that was in a small Florida city, and they passed ordinances, the city banning animal sacrifice.
[01:03:41]  Sounds Jewish to me.
[01:03:43]  It honestly sounds Hawaiian to me.
[01:03:45]  It sounds Hawaiian to me.
[01:03:47]  Which would be kind of based if it was like old school Hawaii, theonomic.
[01:03:51]  Not quite.
[01:03:52]  So they targeted the city, passed ordinances targeting their animal sacrifice rituals.
[01:03:57]  The Supreme Court overturned the laws, finding they violated religious freedom by singling out a specific practice.
[01:04:02]  So even in our American context, with a firewall attempted to be built, you still have the state and the judiciary coming in and saying, Nope, church, you can't do that.
[01:04:12]  Nope, you can't do that.
[01:04:13]  And sometimes, good.
[01:04:15]  In the case of Mormons, hey, biblically it's impermissible and it's the law of the land, and your religion doesn't exempt that from you.
[01:04:21]  You can't do polygamy, but other times bad.
[01:04:24]  No, you must not, you basically denying Bob Jones freedom of association.
[01:04:29]  Saying to pagan religions.
[01:04:30]  With Bob Jones, they were saying you are receiving tax exemptions.
[01:04:34]  Right.
[01:04:35]  And so if you're going to receive, like, you're not going to pay taxes to the state because you're a religious institution, well, if you're going to take the state benefits, financial state benefits, Then you're going to have to pay for it.
[01:04:47]  Well, even tax exemption, it's okay, you take in $20 million.
[01:04:51]  You're not taxed on that right now.
[01:04:52]  But if you don't play how we want you to play, we'll tax you on that.
[01:04:56]  And they could retroactively back tax you on all these past previous years and all that kind of stuff.
[01:05:01]  But I think the Mormon example, to me, that one really stands out.
[01:05:03]  And I think it's a great example where the state comes in and they're like, hey, this is our religion.
[01:05:09]  And to be fair, to lie and lie, steal man, the Mormon position, it's like, This is our position, and a bunch of dudes in the Bible did it.
[01:05:20]  Right.
[01:05:21]  Good dudes.
[01:05:22]  Abraham's a good guy.
[01:05:24]  Right?
[01:05:24]  It's not like Abraham is a deadbeat.
[01:05:27]  He's a good guy.
[01:05:27]  Charlemagne had like close to 20 wives.
[01:05:29]  Yep.
[01:05:29]  And, you know, Solomon had quite a few.
[01:05:32]  Now, granted, for Solomon, it was a downfall.
[01:05:34]  That didn't work out for him.
[01:05:34]  For Abraham, it didn't work out super well.
[01:05:36]  And for Jacob, it didn't work out.
[01:05:38]  And for David.
[01:05:39]  Yeah.
[01:05:39]  So, yeah.
[01:05:39]  So, a lot of guys, you know, like, you know, you get my point.
[01:05:43]  But the point is that you could point to scripture.
[01:05:46]  And just for the record, I, you know, I'm.
[01:05:48]  I think that polygamy is wrong.
[01:05:50]  But I do know the arguments because some guys have asked me offline, like, yeah, but have you looked to the arguments of like that fidelity, you know, is what the wife is providing for the husband, but it's provision and protection that the husband is actually obligated to provide for the wife?
[01:06:03]  Like, we've gone down that rabbit hole.
[01:06:05]  Like, we're aware, we're swimming in those manosphere waters to where we know what the guys would say, and we disagree.
[01:06:15]  We think that it's wrong, that it's not a picture of the gospel, that it's one husband, it's one wife, and that it's fidelity on both sides.
[01:06:20]  We believe that that is the New Testament model that's been given to us, and that that ultimately is the ideal, even from the Old Testament, that marriage was always meant to be from the beginning.
[01:06:30]  From the beginning, it was not so.
[01:06:31]  It was one man, it was one woman.
[01:06:33]  So, that is our view on marriage.
[01:06:34]  But the point is this.
[01:06:36]  The Mormons could have, you know, at least maybe not prescriptively, but descriptively argued from scripture itself, not just the Book of Mormon, but the Holy Bible.
[01:06:45]  And the state comes in and says, nah, sorry, but this is our religious conviction.
[01:06:50]  Don't care.
[01:06:50]  Yep.
[01:06:51]  But then the state airs in 1995.
[01:06:54]  You have a pagan demon worship cult that is sacrificing animals in Florida, which is, I mean, that's an average day in Florida.
[01:07:01]  But on the religious side.
[01:07:02]  What is it with you in Florida?
[01:07:04]  Florida, well.
[01:07:06]  And like Turritine says, like, well, the state should be suppressing false religion and confusion.
[01:07:10]  Yeah.
[01:07:10]  And the state declines to do that.
[01:07:11]  It says, no, you're free to do that.
[01:07:13]  And so you will always have the state and the church back and forth rendering the verdicts on morality, and the state either correcting, righteously or unrighteously, or abandoning, abdicating its duty.
[01:07:25]  You can't escape the dichotomy.
[01:07:27]  All right, to bring it to present day, this is actually Philip Derrida.
[01:07:30]  He's made this point, and it's a good one.
[01:07:32]  He's a good guy.
[01:07:33]  What do you do about the main lines?
[01:07:34]  Yep.
[01:07:36]  There are 50.
[01:07:37]  I love this.
[01:07:38]  Go ahead, Wes.
[01:07:38]  So Wes has been, all right, Wes deserves all the credit.
[01:07:42]  We try to, if we can, We try to, you know, do something like a hangout, you know, once every couple weeks or so.
[01:07:48]  And a lot of times, you know, if there's something decent, we'll go watch a movie or something.
[01:07:51]  And this is a reoccurring conversation that's come up with Michael and Wes and myself on multiple occasions.
[01:07:58]  And because we, you know, that's just the burning question of the hour is like, you know, redeem Zoomer, for instance, like God bless him, you know, like it's a worthy endeavor, it's a noble cause.
[01:08:07]  I know what he's trying to do in saving the PC USA, you know, because the buildings are pretty and those kinds of things.
[01:08:13]  And there's a treasury of.
[01:08:14]  Back in the day, there was actually some good theology to go along with those buildings, yes.
[01:08:20]  And he's like, man, you Christian nationalists, you're talking about heritage and you're talking about history and you're talking about tradition, and you just give it all away.
[01:08:27]  You're never going to win if the only tool in your toolkit is to lose, run, and start something new.
[01:08:35]  Right.
[01:08:36]  And I understand his point.
[01:08:39]  But to be fair, and Wes deserves credit because he's the first guy who mentioned it.
[01:08:43]  But as soon as he mentioned it, I was like, You know, like the Jack Nicholson meme, like, yes, yes.
[01:08:49]  But he was like, what if, Joel, hear me out?
[01:08:51]  What if, guys, the way to whip the mainline Protestant denominations into shape was the state?
[01:09:00]  The state.
[01:09:01]  Listen to these statistics.
[01:09:02]  So, between the seven mainline denominations United Methodist Church of Christ, Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, the Episcopal Church, the Presbyterian Church USA, so the PC USA, not the Presbyterian Church of America, the PC USA, American Baptist Churches USA, ABC USA, The United Church of Christ and Christian Church, the Disciples of Christ.
[01:09:21]  So, between those seven mainline denominations, we are talking about 57,000 individual churches in the United States.
[01:09:28]  Now, as I understand it, there are some churches in there, especially the Church of Christ.
[01:09:32]  There could be certainly individual congregations in them that are full of faithful, blue collar, you know, rural Texas folk that love Jesus.
[01:09:40]  So, that is not a condemnation that every single one of those 57,000 churches is for sure apostate, for sure a false church.
[01:09:46]  However, the majority are.
[01:09:49]  And you can map it out like, all right, we got 57,000.
[01:09:53]  Buildings to take over within those 50,000, 7,000, millions of people to convince, tons of ministers.
[01:09:58]  Like, that's, I mean, that's decades of work.
[01:10:01]  Or, hear me out.
[01:10:03]  I love it.
[01:10:03]  Hear me out.
[01:10:04]  I'm ready.
[01:10:05]  The president, the sovereign, the magistrate, Barron Trump, he comes out and he says, The king.
[01:10:09]  I've taken the task force.
[01:10:10]  We've gone through every website.
[01:10:11]  We've driven by every building.
[01:10:13]  And we have logged thousands of churches with pride flags out front, women on the clergy.
[01:10:18]  And there are soldiers on the street now.
[01:10:19]  We are taking their property and we are giving it to the faithful churches in town.
[01:10:23]  Amen.
[01:10:24]  Love it.
[01:10:24]  That is completely, historically, within the realm of the magistrate.
[01:10:29]  He can do that.
[01:10:30]  You are an apostate, wicked church.
[01:10:34]  And you're building your land, your heritage.
[01:10:37]  Is taken from you.
[01:10:38]  That's what I'm saying.
[01:10:39]  And it is given to those that will bear the fruits of it.
[01:10:40]  That's why I'm saying, I know it sounds crazy, but when Trump and Vance were sitting there on the second row in that pew, and Vance's wife is sitting next to him, and she's like, What?
[01:10:49]  Like, this is Christianity.
[01:10:50]  And I'm really sympathetic.
[01:10:51]  I was like, No wonder she's a Hindu.
[01:10:53]  That's correct.
[01:10:53]  You might become one too.
[01:10:55]  I think I might become one too.
[01:10:56]  But in her defense, just real quick disclaimer, I think that she's coming along.
[01:11:00]  And he has, Vance has explicitly said that the kids are being raised Catholic and not Hindu.
[01:11:05]  But anyways, but like, you know, he's looking over at his doting wife who adores her husband and is following his lead.
[01:11:10]  And looking over at President Trump, you know, and meanwhile, this hackling hen, this short haired, you know, Episcopal female priestess is arguing about, you know, diversity is our strength and we're mean and we're tyrannical.
[01:11:26]  We need more immigrants, you know, from the third world to be dropped on our doorstep to come like locusts and eat everything that Americans have built over the last, you know, two and a half centuries.
[01:11:38]  And they're looking at each other and I, like, everything in me, I remember thinking distinctly that, like, my first instinct when I watched it.
[01:11:44]  Despite being a Baptist, despite being a Protestant, despite my views of separation of church and state and all these things, I remember sitting there thinking Trump and Vance should stand up and say, Silly woman, Trump says so well, be quiet, silence, liberal heretic.
[01:12:02]  The magistrate is here and he pronounces that this is not of God.
[01:12:08]  Sit down.
[01:12:09]  Amen.
[01:12:09]  It would have been awesome.
[01:12:10]  Yeah.
[01:12:11]  Nate, I just sent you an image.
[01:12:12]  So I went to school for two years at Penn State University, so it's in State College, Pennsylvania, small college town.
[01:12:17]  And I took this picture when I first arrived on campus.
[01:12:20]  This is right in the main street.
[01:12:21]  So, right across from the street is the campus.
[01:12:24]  And then, this is the church right across from there.
[01:12:25]  This is in 2017.
[01:12:27]  This is not 2022.
[01:12:29]  2017, I took this picture.
[01:12:31]  This is a pride flag out front of a beautiful stone church that's hundreds of years old.
[01:12:36]  And it's a pride flag that says, God is still speaking.
[01:12:38]  And, okay, that's bad.
[01:12:40]  All right, so there's, and literally, there's 15 people in there, a woman pastor.
[01:12:44]  Okay, there's 15 people that are going to hell if they don't repent of their sins.
[01:12:48]  But hang on, that is downtown.
[01:12:50]  How many students go to Penn State?
[01:12:51]  20, 30, 40,000?
[01:12:53]  And every single day walk by that blasphemous sign and are lied to by that church.
[01:13:00]  That you can allow that, that God is still speaking, that individuals in this lifestyle are welcome.
[01:13:05]  That's why you have to shut it down.
[01:13:07]  And real quick, when they say God is still speaking, you need to understand theologically what's meant by that.
[01:13:12]  What they mean is that God is still evolving, that God is changing.
[01:13:16]  The scripture that explicitly says, Behold, I am the Lord, I changeth not.
[01:13:21]  I'm the same yesterday, today, and forever.
[01:13:23]  When they say God is still speaking, what they mean is not that God is reaffirming special revelation and those things that are immutable, unchanging, and eternal and true that are already written down in Holy Scripture.
[01:13:37]  No, they're saying God is speaking something new.
[01:13:39]  God is developing.
[01:13:40]  He's evolving.
[01:13:41]  He's changing his mind.
[01:13:43]  When the Bible literally says God is not a man, that he should change his mind.
[01:13:47]  Right.
[01:13:48]  And so that actually is a heresy.
[01:13:52]  That is actually a heresy.
[01:13:53]  You're saying that the Lord.
[01:13:54]  It's process theology.
[01:13:57]  It's open theism, process theology.
[01:13:59]  So now we actually are getting into theology proper, doctrine of God, into the essence of God, the mind of God, the nature of God.
[01:14:08]  And you're saying that the Godhead over time is evolving and in process.
[01:14:13]  He is changing.
[01:14:15]  And not just that he's still speaking, but he's speaking new things that directly contradict those things which have been inscripturated.
[01:14:23]  And for the civil magistrate, even in our American system, to say, your property is seized.
[01:14:29]  And you're out on the street would be glorious.
[01:14:31]  And that's kindness.
[01:14:32]  You're out on the street taking your property out.
[01:14:34]  Is the moderate, soft position.
[01:14:38]  And that is the United Church of the Christ, by the way.
[01:14:40]  You can see it right there on the corner of it.
[01:14:42]  That is a mainline denomination, and hundreds of thousands of impressionable college students leaving home to walk by that sign every single day and got that impression.
[01:14:51]  They are doing more with that sign out front.
[01:14:54]  And it's the same here in Georgetown, right across from Southwestern.
[01:14:59]  It's always across from the university.
[01:15:00]  There's two or three churches that are right on the same street, and they're all just emblazoned.
[01:15:04]  I mean, that was just one there.
[01:15:06]  Now we've gotten to the point where they've got it out on the lawn, they've got it on the building.
[01:15:09]  Well, there's worse.
[01:15:10]  It's just like, there is no such thing, no human being is illegal.
[01:15:12]  Abortion.
[01:15:13]  I think it literally says, like, abortion is health care.
[01:15:15]  It's the Unitarian Universalist.
[01:15:17]  But that is a proclamation of a doctrinal position.
[01:15:21]  Yes.
[01:15:21]  Just the signage out in front is a doctrinal position.
[01:15:25]  And they are doing way more with that on the street than they are to the people who are going in on a Sunday morning.
[01:15:31]  Right.
[01:15:31]  It's not just a doctrinal position with your 15.
[01:15:33]  That's right.
[01:15:34]  That's right.
[01:15:35]  And it is 15.
[01:15:36]  Yeah.
[01:15:37]  No kids.
[01:15:37]  But here's the thing that you have to realize.
[01:15:39]  So, everybody's, you know, this is another getting, so now getting economic and fiscal, practical in that regard for just a moment.
[01:15:47]  This is big, though.
[01:15:48]  This is huge because people say, like, people have been saying for, you have to realize what I'm about to articulate.
[01:15:55]  This isn't something that you and the boys, you know, on a cigar night, you just came up with two years ago.
[01:16:01]  The thing that you just realized two years ago has been said for 20 years, 30 years, 40 years.
[01:16:06]  By your dad and his boys, and your grandfather and his boys, ever since the church has been apostatizing and drifting liberal, drifting left.
[01:16:12]  This has been said for decades that, oh, well, these churches, okay, so here it is, these churches are dying.
[01:16:18]  They're dying out.
[01:16:19]  No, guys, you don't understand.
[01:16:20]  The church is exempt from property taxes.
[01:16:24]  It's exempt from property taxes.
[01:16:26]  These churches have decades old trust funds.
[01:16:30]  Simply by the interest of certain investments and trust funds, and by virtue of having zero overhead with property taxes, they can pay.
[01:16:40]  That 65 year old short haired, blue haired female priestess, they can pay her $9,000 a month forever.
[01:16:50]  Forever.
[01:16:51]  There is no mortgage.
[01:16:52]  There is no property taxes.
[01:16:54]  There's a trust fund accruing interest, and they're able to keep the grounds, pay her salary, fix the furnace when it breaks, and they can have three parishioners, and it will never end.
[01:17:06]  And yet, just simply because of time, because that building was built by faithful people at the cost of Of their work, their sweat, their tears by faithful Christians who built it, but they built it early, 100 years prior, 200 years prior, whatever it may be.
[01:17:22]  That piece of property is right there in the city square, in the most prominent public places.
[01:17:29]  And so they may be preaching to three people.
[01:17:31]  It's like, well, they're on their way out.
[01:17:32]  No, they're not.
[01:17:33]  They can literally preach to three people forever.
[01:17:36]  Financially, they are forever viable and they can preach to three people, but by virtue of the prominence of the real estate, because it was a building constructed in the You know, a long time ago in the formation of that city, of that town, it's right there on the square, it's central to the populace.
[01:17:55]  So, they're preaching to three people in perpetuity inside the church.
[01:17:59]  They're preaching to thousands of people what Michael's saying through their signs and through their godless messages outside the church.

=== Preaching to Three People Forever (11:25) ===

[01:18:05]  Just to people assuming, like, oh, there's tons of Christian denominations.
[01:18:08]  Well, there's universalists.
[01:18:09]  There's like it, even just by virtue of it existing, people think, like, oh, that's part of the Christian repertoire.
[01:18:14]  And then even young men think of Christianity, but they drive by a church with a sign like that.
[01:18:19]  Young men who could be persuaded, as Felix tells Paul, I could be persuaded, they drive by that and they're like, I can't do it.
[01:18:27]  Every church, not every, but here's the point.
[01:18:30]  37,000.
[01:18:31]  The majority of churches, 57,000.
[01:18:34]  57,000.
[01:18:34]  The majority of churches that are geographically in the center of the town and that look like churches with that old traditional aesthetic and architecture and all that kind of stuff.
[01:18:48]  Because your faithful churches, your faithful little Reformed Baptist church, is meeting in a bowling alley.
[01:18:54]  Right.
[01:18:54]  Yep.
[01:18:55]  Or some.
[01:18:56]  Podunk, you know, Western dance hall like we are, you know, like, and I'm not putting those people down because we're, we're, we are those people.
[01:19:04]  Yeah.
[01:19:04]  And we acknowledge that because you gotta, you know, you gotta LARP before you can fly, you know, you gotta, you gotta start somewhere.
[01:19:10]  But the point is, you're, Wes is absolutely right that most people, when they think of church, they think of that brick building or that stone building on the square downtown with a tall steeple.
[01:19:22]  Yep.
[01:19:22]  And, and most of those are gay.
[01:19:26]  Yep.
[01:19:26]  And so, so people literally think this is the church.
[01:19:29]  This is the church.
[01:19:31]  And so the civil magistrate doesn't just have a vested interest.
[01:19:35]  I believe he has a moral obligation under God to ensure that these wicked churches are not deceitfully communicating that the church in America at large affirms sodomy, abortion, all these kinds of things.
[01:19:55]  And even, like we said a second ago, primary theology, doctrine of God.
[01:19:59]  That God is in process, process theology, open theism, that God is changing, that his nature is in flux somehow.
[01:20:08]  Yeah, the civil magistrate has a vested interest in this.
[01:20:10]  What is he for if not to protect?
[01:20:13]  Like a nursing father, it's a little bit of a conflation and bringing together of terms, but it's a term God uses.
[01:20:18]  If not a nursing father, to protect the little ones, to guard them, to shield them, to vanquish enemies.
[01:20:25]  What is he given the sword for?
[01:20:28]  Decoration?
[01:20:29]  Like jaywalking, and he's given the sword for many things the murderer, the gang, this side or the other, theft, and but also matters of the blasphemy, yeah, false worship, especially like we saw to set the conditions, the optimal condition.
[01:20:43]  He can't convert, the gospel does that, right?
[01:20:46]  He can't convert, but what he can do is he can, in his temporal realm, set the optimal conditions for heavenly good, absolutely, yeah, and he must, yeah, yep, yep.
[01:20:57]  We got some great questions.
[01:21:00]  Nathan called this out to us.
[01:21:01]  So, the first question is, what why are you the way that you are?
[01:21:05]  We don't have that one.
[01:21:06]  The second question is, what gives you the right?
[01:21:10]  Seriously, how awesome would that be, though, to come to our town, which has a number of apostate churches downtown?
[01:21:15]  You're done.
[01:21:15]  Clear out.
[01:21:16]  And I found the five most faithful churches in Georgetown.
[01:21:19]  And you will enjoy the blessings of these churches.
[01:21:21]  And you will be not a beacon of darkness, but of light in this city.
[01:21:25]  That is a biblical question.
[01:21:27]  There's that, I forget where it is.
[01:21:28]  If you guys remember where it is, let me know.
[01:21:30]  But there's that part about.
[01:21:31]  I'm sorry.
[01:21:33]  I don't understand.
[01:21:34]  Uh oh.
[01:21:34]  Um.
[01:21:36]  There's that verse about how God says that, like, even the, the, he's speaking to his people and he says, you will, it's not the promise going into Canaan, but it's similar to that where you will live in houses that you didn't build.
[01:21:50]  But there's another one in the prophets that's very, very similar to that.
[01:21:54]  It's like you'll reap the spoils of those who went off to war.
[01:21:57]  Yeah, yeah, exactly.
[01:21:58]  Absolutely.
[01:21:59]  That first one you're talking about, I think, is indicative of like Joshua and the conquest of Canaan and Ta'en.
[01:22:04]  It was.
[01:22:05]  Because a lot of these cities, like Jerusalem, actually was a city that was actually a pagan city that they conquered.
[01:22:12]  And of course, they refortified and built new structures and rearranged.
[01:22:16]  But Jerusalem was not just an open field from the bottom up, from scratch.
[01:22:21]  It was actually a pagan city.
[01:22:23]  And that's what got the point is.
[01:22:25]  That's what God often does.
[01:22:26]  He doesn't, you know, redeem Zumer in that sense is right.
[01:22:29]  God's MO is at least, he does it sometimes, but it's not exhaustive.
[01:22:33]  It's not exclusive.
[01:22:34]  God does not exclusively do his work from scratch.
[01:22:41]  A lot of his work is redemptive work, which means what that assumes and implies is that there's something already there that is redeemed and restored.
[01:22:52]  So instead of just ex nihilo, God works that way too.
[01:22:55]  We know that.
[01:22:56]  His creation, of course, is ex nihilo out of nothing.
[01:22:59]  But he also works by redeeming things that already are, but are contrary to his will, and then redeeming, restoring, and changing them.
[01:23:10]  And for God to do that on a mass scale in a country with its apostate churches sounds like a goddamn thing.
[01:23:17]  It's not that we don't think that God could bring the kind of spiritual revival that would be required to turn those 57,000 mainline churches back to the Lord.
[01:23:27]  He certainly can do that.
[01:23:30]  But Wes's point.
[01:23:32]  And it's not that we are saying, oh, there's no possibility.
[01:23:35]  We better find a better hammer, right?
[01:23:38]  Oh, we, you know, the church, the church, it's just a matter of time.
[01:23:41]  God is impotent.
[01:23:42]  Yeah.
[01:23:42]  We got to find something better.
[01:23:43]  We're going to get the sword of the government.
[01:23:45]  Wes's case is that this actually is what God has done many times throughout history.
[01:23:51]  And maybe it's time we pray, Lord, that he would do it again.
[01:23:54]  I was last thing I'll say before we jump into the comments, the super chats.
[01:23:57]  I was talking with Joel right before the episode.
[01:24:00]  And I said, the only thing here is.
[01:24:02]  Either God has to work through a pagan king like Darius, but he was quite removed.
[01:24:09]  I think that was part of the deal, right?
[01:24:11]  Like he was pretty far away from Jerusalem when he was ordering the rebuilding of the temple and all of those things.
[01:24:17]  Or you have to have a king who is at least somewhat godly and spiritually inclined, who is wise enough to either give the authority to make the decisions or himself adjudicate some of the lines that are being drawn.
[01:24:30]  Right.
[01:24:31]  Amen.
[01:24:32]  But what's so hopeful about that is that, number one, And we've never said otherwise, not once.
[01:24:38]  But number one, God could literally send a true, bona fide spiritual revival that changes the hearts of many.
[01:24:45]  But number two, God can change the face of a country also by saving a minority, but then raising them up to power.
[01:24:54]  Yeah, like a descendant Roman emperor or something.
[01:24:58]  Yeah, and I know you're being sarcastic, but God has done that so many times where it's not just preaching throughout the land.
[01:25:09]  Traveling circuit preachers, you know, and one by one, it's just, you know, regenerate hearts, truly regenerate, and it's 50% of the population plus one.
[01:25:17]  And so now you have a simple majority with regenerate Christians, and they're going to Sunday school and being educated, and then they vote in, you know, through a democratic, you know, system, better, you know, civil magistrates.
[01:25:28]  That's actually the minority report in terms of God, you know, historically and the way that He conducts change.
[01:25:33]  What God ordinarily seems to do is He saves miraculously and powerfully a few.
[01:25:40]  And then in Providence, he causes them to ascend to high places and he keeps them, holds them, sustains them, and then guides the heart of kings like water.
[01:25:54]  And then it's not actually bottom up revival, it's top down revival.
[01:26:00]  It's Josiah.
[01:26:01]  I was about to say, we have biblical examples of this biblical and church history.
[01:26:05]  So we have it, you know, pre Christ in the Old Testament for Israel, but then we also have it post Christ for the last 2,000 years of church history.
[01:26:13]  For Christians, like God has done it again and again and again, where He uses someone at the top, they make reforms, and then the law begins to function as a tutor and sets the more conducive context and environment for genuine gospel preachers where people hear the good news and they're actually convicted of sin and born again.
[01:26:35]  God has done this countless times.
[01:26:37]  And for us to think, I just think it's foolish.
[01:26:40]  God can do whatever He wants.
[01:26:42]  I'm not saying one way or the other, it will be this way.
[01:26:44]  But But statistically speaking, if we're leaning to one side or the other, we should, statistically speaking, historically, looking back, we should be more expectant that God would do it top down than bottom up.
[01:26:59]  Yep.
[01:27:00]  That's how power works.
[01:27:01]  Okay, here we go.
[01:27:02]  This is some super chats.
[01:27:03]  We want to start with those and honor the guys who are being so kind and generous.
[01:27:07]  This is producer JT Studios.
[01:27:10]  Producer JT, JT Studios.
[01:27:12]  He gave us $100.
[01:27:14]  That's incredibly kind.
[01:27:15]  Thank you, JT Studios.
[01:27:17]  We appreciate it.
[01:27:18]  He says, looking forward to the conference.
[01:27:20]  Well, my friend, we're looking forward to seeing you too.
[01:27:24]  Nathan is giving me a little bit of a heads up here.
[01:27:27]  He said, say thank you to JT Super Chat and his help with equipment for the conference.
[01:27:33]  Okay, so not only did he give us a Super Chat for $100, but this individual is also, I guess, lending us sound equipment, Nathan?
[01:27:41]  Wow.
[01:27:41]  He's lending us his own personal sound equipment for the conference to help cut our costs and help us to put on equipment.
[01:27:49]  A great event.
[01:27:50]  Thank you so much.
[01:27:51]  If you're at XJT, message me for an exclusive invite.
[01:27:55]  Yes, no, seriously.
[01:27:56]  Message Wes, DM me.
[01:27:58]  Wesley Todd.
[01:28:00]  Because there are various things happening at the conference, and there'll be a few kind of behind the scenes get togethers, and Wes can bring you in.
[01:28:08]  Yep.
[01:28:09]  Okay.
[01:28:09]  A couple other super chats here.
[01:28:11]  Mrs. Ingram, thank you very much.
[01:28:12]  $4.99 super chat.
[01:28:14]  Very kind of you.
[01:28:15]  Appreciate that.
[01:28:16]  Says promoting the notion of the magistrate shutting down churches.
[01:28:20]  With women leaders and pastors, deserves another super chat.
[01:28:24]  Amen.
[01:28:24]  Thank you.
[01:28:26]  This is a super chat kind of episode.
[01:28:28]  Yeah.
[01:28:28]  It's a good kind of topic.
[01:28:29]  All right.
[01:28:30]  Here's one Renee Dean.
[01:28:32]  Renee Dean gave us 10 bucks.
[01:28:34]  Thank you, Renee.
[01:28:34]  That's very kind.
[01:28:36]  We assume you had your husband's permission to do so.
[01:28:39]  If not, we'll reimburse you the 10 bucks.
[01:28:41]  But she says, just want to say that I feel awful about recent attacks against you all.
[01:28:47]  Please keep being strong, godly, and faithful men.
[01:28:51]  There are many women like myself that are rooting for you.
[01:28:54]  Very kind.
[01:28:54]  Thank you.
[01:28:55]  Means a lot.
[01:28:56]  Okay, any other ones?
[01:28:57]  Dakota McMillan, question.
[01:28:59]  You may get to it, but what would be the focus of a council today?
[01:29:02]  We need one, but what question or problem would it address?
[01:29:06]  We can't solve our current problem in one fell swoop, so what's first?
[01:29:11]  I think my take, anthropology has to be on there.
[01:29:14]  I really think that what, like, as far as a high tier issue, all the doctrines that fall under anthropology, some of them are secondary and tertiary doctrines, but really the core of anthropology, what is a human?
[01:29:27]  What is a man?
[01:29:28]  What is a woman?
[01:29:28]  What is the nature of the sinful nature?

=== My Unique Opinion on God's Providence (03:59) ===

[01:29:30]  All of those things.
[01:29:31]  That really, like, no one is really running around saying God is not three in one anymore, right?
[01:29:36]  They're not really denying the divinity.
[01:29:38]  I mean, there are some, you know, if you're a Mormon or a Job, yes, of course.
[01:29:43]  But the practical error of our time in our high or fundamental theology, in my opinion, is one of anthropology.
[01:29:51]  And that's why I still tend to be kind of a long view post millennial guy.
[01:29:57]  Now, but what I detest is any long view post millennial guy who maybe doesn't say it out loud, but is pretty much using that as an excuse to.
[01:30:08]  You know, to not get busy, to not get to work.
[01:30:10]  Again, that's one of the things that, you know, Stephen Wolf, you know, I remember, you know, one of the first times I spoke to him, you know, a couple of years ago, I guess two and a half years or so, maybe three years now.
[01:30:19]  But I just assumed he was post mail because he wrote a book on Christian nationalism, you know.
[01:30:24]  And at the time, the only reference I even had for that phrase, Christian nationalism, you know, in the Christian world, there was Marjorie Taylor Greene and people like that, but was Wilson and Wilson's post mail.
[01:30:33]  So I just assumed and he was like, no, I'm not post mail because I want to do something.
[01:30:36]  And I was like, what do you mean?
[01:30:37]  Post mail guys are doing stuff.
[01:30:39]  Come on.
[01:30:39]  Like, we do stuff, you know, and he's like, He's like, no, he's like, you do, but you know, you start your classical education schools, which even that is kind of ironic.
[01:30:53]  Like, does everybody need to know Plutarch?
[01:30:57]  Like, some people.
[01:31:02]  Born to rule.
[01:31:04]  No, here's the deal.
[01:31:05]  And everybody assumes, let me just get this straight.
[01:31:07]  Everybody assumes I'm talking about myself.
[01:31:09]  I'm not talking about myself.
[01:31:12]  Wes is smarter than me, Michael is smarter than me.
[01:31:15]  I have some unique gifts and the Lord has blessed it.
[01:31:18]  One of my gifts is to be able to identify people who are smart, smarter than me, and then to utilize them to supplement my weaknesses and all these kinds of things, and to think strategically.
[01:31:28]  I'm good with application and connecting dots and these kinds of things.
[01:31:33]  Drawing correlations.
[01:31:34]  Wes calls me, you know, it's funny.
[01:31:35]  He's like, You're a concluder, Joel.
[01:31:37]  And he even has this little chart.
[01:31:40]  I didn't make it someone else made it.
[01:31:41]  Yeah, but the concluder is.
[01:31:42]  Wes has a chart?
[01:31:44]  Believe it or not.
[01:31:45]  He's like, The concluder, you know, he basically is like a doc holiday.
[01:31:47]  He shoots from the hip and he's like, Yep, this is right, this is true.
[01:31:51]  And then gut instinct hasn't even researched it, has no clue.
[01:31:55]  And then everybody fact checks him, looks it up on Google.
[01:31:58]  Two weeks later, he's right.
[01:31:59]  He's right.
[01:32:00]  Yep.
[01:32:00]  And then the concluder also, sometimes, it's more rare than often, but sometimes also just by his sheer number of times of trying to conclude.
[01:32:10]  A clue.
[01:32:11]  His sheer repertoire of concluding, frequency of concluding, he gets it wrong.
[01:32:16]  And it's so funny on this chart.
[01:32:18]  And when he gets it wrong, he says, yeah, my bad, got it wrong.
[01:32:21]  Yep.
[01:32:22]  It's a strong opinion, loosely held.
[01:32:23]  Yeah, strong opinions.
[01:32:25]  I was wrong.
[01:32:26]  Anyways, it's a really good description.
[01:32:28]  Like, as soon as he showed me that, I was like, oh my gosh, that's me.
[01:32:31]  But here's my point people think that I'm talking about myself when I say what I'm about to say, and I'm not.
[01:32:37]  I'm actually not.
[01:32:39]  But not everybody is, we're not egalitarian.
[01:32:46]  God did not create a homogenous world where everybody's the same.
[01:32:50]  It's not just that equity, you know, like, Equal outcomes is Marxist and communist and wrong, but in terms of even equality of opportunity, that is a myth.
[01:33:00]  The sooner you come to terms with this, here's the deal it's not crushing, it's freeing.
[01:33:05]  And I think I'm unique in this.
[01:33:07]  A lot of people struggle with this, but I just think God and His providence from my upbringing, you guys know I've talked about it a few times, but I was adopted, both of my brothers, and I was the oldest because my parents couldn't conceive.
[01:33:18]  So they adopted me, and then whatever, you know, God sent, this is kind of a common story, but whatever was broke with my adoptive mother's womb got fixed.
[01:33:26]  And so I, you know, Have two brothers and a sister, but they're all biological.

=== Some Are Fit to Rule Than Others (02:09) ===

[01:33:30]  I'm the only one who's adopted, and I'm the oldest.
[01:33:32]  Well, both of my brothers, and mind you, like I just said, my younger brothers are national merit scholars.
[01:33:38]  Argue at borderline genius.
[01:33:41]  And not just saying that, but taking several legitimate IQ tests, been tested in a facility, those kinds of things.
[01:33:50]  Borderline genius.
[01:33:52]  Unquestionably smarter than me.
[01:33:54]  But here's the deal from my youngest years of memory, my parents, my adoptive parents, who adopted me as a baby, they're the only parents I've ever known, and they've been.
[01:34:04]  Incredible parents, incredible.
[01:34:06]  But one of the incredible things that my dad, especially, did from a young age was he had a different standard for me than my two brothers.
[01:34:15]  I had to make A's and B's.
[01:34:17]  My brothers would get in big trouble if they made a B. Wow.
[01:34:21]  A's only because he knew that they were capable of it.
[01:34:25]  And you were captain of the football team, right?
[01:34:27]  No.
[01:34:27]  I made up for it by.
[01:34:29]  I was captain of.
[01:34:30]  There wasn't a team, this doesn't exist, but if a tree climbing team existed, I would have been captain of that.
[01:34:37]  If a double backflip on the trampoline team existed, I would be captain of that.
[01:34:42]  I definitely would have been captain of the getting kids in the neighborhood to borrow their parents' tools and build things and trees that weren't ours and get in trouble.
[01:34:55]  I was captain of that team for sure.
[01:34:56]  But, anyways, here's the point I had to settle with this, and a lot of people haven't because they've been given their participation trophies.
[01:35:03]  Millennials have a hard time with this, but they've been given their participation trophies and they've been told, you can be anything when you grow up.
[01:35:10]  No, you can't.
[01:35:11]  No, you can't.
[01:35:13]  Like, I had to settle at a very young age within my own household, my own family.
[01:35:20]  My brothers are capable of things that I'm not capable of.
[01:35:23]  You mean people that DoorDash and finance sushi, as Aaron McIntyre said over the weekend?
[01:35:29]  You mean these people are not fit to be president?
[01:35:31]  You never will be?
[01:35:31]  That was banger tweet of the month when he said, like, you guys are all bothered by Aristotle saying that some people are born to be ruled.

=== Praise God for Better Men Around Us (02:48) ===

[01:35:39]  And yet, here we have a.
[01:35:41]  And then you'll turn around.
[01:35:42]  An economic financing plan for Tory Dash.
[01:35:46]  And you're going to use it to enslave people.
[01:35:49]  You're going to finance pizza and then turn around.
[01:35:51]  How dare you say that not everyone's fit to rule?
[01:35:53]  Right.
[01:35:53]  And so, anyway, so the point is this yeah, not everybody's the same.
[01:35:59]  And not everybody is capable of everything.
[01:36:01]  Some people are fit to rule in a way that many people, including myself, are not.
[01:36:07]  Yep.
[01:36:08]  And that's what we see in church history.
[01:36:09]  Like Constantine, brilliant military general.
[01:36:12]  Yep.
[01:36:12]  Brilliant.
[01:36:13]  Brilliant tactician and had the maturity to call a council but not get too involved with it.
[01:36:17]  He was bred and built to rule at the end of the day, and he did an incredible job.
[01:36:22]  He'll probably be ahead of me in heaven, and that's God's good pleasure to do that for him to give me the gifts that I have to give that to someone else because the clay gets to stay.
[01:36:31]  He's still blessing you, yes.
[01:36:33]  All these hundreds of years later, his contribution is still a blessing to us to this day.
[01:36:38]  Incredible.
[01:36:38]  So, like, praise God for making a man better than us.
[01:36:44]  Who the blessings achieved by God, but through that man, that vessel, would trickle all the way down, not just to people in terms of the breadth of the scope, but through the ages, through the centuries, to where a great man is still blessing me to this day.
[01:36:58]  Thank God for David, who's better than me.
[01:37:00]  Thank God for Constantine, who's better than me.
[01:37:02]  Thank God for Paul and Calvin and Turretin, who are better than me.
[01:37:06]  My ancestors were probably converted on the Anglo, my English side, by Charlemagne, who came in and forced professions at the sword.
[01:37:14]  Like, literally, the reason my family, tracing back the 1200s in England, We were probably Christian and converted, was because there was a point he said, I'm going to go to Britain and I'm going to make everyone Christian.
[01:37:25]  Right.
[01:37:25]  Based.
[01:37:26]  Yep.
[01:37:27]  And there's a time and place for everything, but a real man came in and spread the gospel, and I'm benefiting from that today.
[01:37:33]  I'm a Christian by God's grace.
[01:37:34]  My children are Christians by God's grace.
[01:37:36]  Now, I will say this, all right?
[01:37:39]  So I made it clear my deficiencies, of which there are many.
[01:37:45]  And every single one of them you will be publicly notified about on the World Wide Web every week by my detractors.
[01:37:52]  But I will say this I think, and Wes, you and Michael, you correct me if you think I'm wrong, but I.
[01:37:58]  I remember talking to Stephen Wolf about this somewhat recently.
[01:38:01]  But I do think in the political sphere that there are a lot of great men, you know, the great man, you know, whatever.
[01:38:08]  Like, there are a lot of great men who weren't necessarily the highest IQ.
[01:38:14]  Like, they had contemporaries surrounding them, counselors, and this guy, like, all these guys who are actually smart.
[01:38:19]  Yes, Trump.
[01:38:20]  But exactly.
[01:38:21]  But what they had was something that can't really be taught it's this raw concluder intuition.

=== Pastors Should Be Generalists Sometimes (14:25) ===

[01:38:28]  And they just.
[01:38:28]  Boom, boom.
[01:38:29]  So, anyways.
[01:38:30]  Right, because IQ is only one, like in any given individual.
[01:38:33]  They're not a number.
[01:38:34]  So, you can never take, we talk about IQ, but like, it's never just a number of like, this person summed up like this.
[01:38:39]  It's actually a midwit thing to like just boil every individual down.
[01:38:42]  There's mathematical, quantitative, musical, artistic ability.
[01:38:46]  They're all subsets of general intelligence, but it's so much more.
[01:38:49]  Empathy level, as we learned last week.
[01:38:52]  Our empathy level, all three of our empathy levels combined, would still put us in the psychopath category.
[01:38:59]  Which is a massive achievement.
[01:39:01]  I'm like, that's like probably our greatest accomplishment is low empathy scores.
[01:39:06]  Wow.
[01:39:07]  All right.
[01:39:09]  Continue.
[01:39:10]  Okay.
[01:39:11]  So that was a great answer to that question, to Dakota's question.
[01:39:13]  What should the council be on?
[01:39:14]  One more time.
[01:39:14]  I just want to be reminded.
[01:39:16]  Oh, it was what would a council focus on?
[01:39:18]  Oh, what would a council focus on?
[01:39:20]  That's what I would say.
[01:39:21]  Yeah.
[01:39:21]  I wanted to add one thing to that.
[01:39:22]  So it would be what is humanity?
[01:39:24]  What is man?
[01:39:25]  Yeah.
[01:39:26]  And you should, honestly, if we're going to get off to the right track, let's not say humanity.
[01:39:32]  Say, what is man?
[01:39:32]  Yeah, uh, God created mankind, male and female.
[01:39:35]  He created them.
[01:39:36]  So, when I say man, it stands in for both male and female, and just in like traditional English language, if it's talking about the singular subject, it's he.
[01:39:45]  Yep, and it could be, uh, and it's and it's a subject that hasn't been identified yet, so it could be male or female, but he that's just the proper way to speak.
[01:39:53]  So, what is man, mankind?
[01:39:55]  Uh, and then what is male?
[01:39:56]  What is female?
[01:39:57]  Uh, what is their substance?
[01:40:00]  Uh, their uh, what is their telos?
[01:40:01]  Their purpose?
[01:40:03]  Uh, but then beyond that, we really do have to answer the question.
[01:40:07]  What is a nation?
[01:40:08]  Yep.
[01:40:09]  What is a nation?
[01:40:09]  What is, so what is a woman?
[01:40:12]  Matt Wallster.
[01:40:12]  By the way, I'll be selling copies of that book at the conference.
[01:40:15]  Michael Bell.
[01:40:16]  It is in the mail, the author copy.
[01:40:18]  So as soon as I get it, it'll be on that table.
[01:40:20]  We're going to put it right here on the table and it will literally dwarf my pamphlet over here, my little pamphlet.
[01:40:27]  That's all right.
[01:40:28]  That'll be okay.
[01:40:29]  It's just, you'll just have to go back and watch this clip.
[01:40:32]  Remember when he talked about how both of his brothers are national marriage scholars and he wasn't?
[01:40:38]  But, yeah, so we're going to have it on, but we're also going to sell it at the conference, is what I was going to say.
[01:40:42]  And Michael will be signing copies.
[01:40:44]  As I can get back to the table, yeah.
[01:40:45]  As much as he can.
[01:40:47]  He'll be helping us a lot with the conference, so he'll be very busy, but he'll do his best to sign copies.
[01:40:51]  And you can just find him and carry your copy around once you buy.
[01:40:54]  And, real quick, how many copies did you order?
[01:40:57]  I ordered 60 softcover and 25 hardcover.
[01:41:00]  Guys, let's make sure he sells out.
[01:41:03]  It's 85 books.
[01:41:04]  Come to the conference, and I expect to see you there with cash.
[01:41:08]  No, no, no.
[01:41:09]  We'll take card two.
[01:41:10]  Okay, we'll take card two, yeah.
[01:41:12]  And buy Michael's book.
[01:41:13]  It's going to be great.
[01:41:14]  His book will be great.
[01:41:14]  No, he's done a lot of research for it.
[01:41:15]  I helped read early drafts, and they were great.
[01:41:18]  BJJ wins again.
[01:41:19]  Great brother.
[01:41:20]  Suggestions for convincing my local independent Baptist pastor that Baptist tradition on government is kind of gay.
[01:41:29]  It is.
[01:41:30]  You might not.
[01:41:31]  Yeah.
[01:41:33]  You might just, like, here, this is what I would say with these kinds of things, guys.
[01:41:36]  It's kind of what we were getting at earlier in terms of, like, well, I'm not a brain surgeon, but I did stay in a holiday inn last night, right?
[01:41:44]  That's what Stephen Wolfe means when he says your Christian worldview card is not a claim to universal expertise.
[01:41:54]  That's what he's trying to get at.
[01:41:55]  And he's right.
[01:41:56]  He's right.
[01:41:58]  And for us to say Stephen's right about that, please hear me.
[01:42:00]  There is a massive sliding scale.
[01:42:03]  There's a lot of room on that scale between Christian worldview doesn't give you universal expertise in every realm versus you're denying the sufficiency of Scripture.
[01:42:14]  No, This is not an either or.
[01:42:16]  It's not a pass fail system.
[01:42:18]  There's a lot of room between the Bible is sufficient for what the Bible says it's sufficient for.
[01:42:25]  Because here's the thing.
[01:42:26]  If you're affirming the sufficiency of Scripture, then you also must affirm what the Scripture itself testifies to being sufficient for.
[01:42:34]  The Scripture is not sufficient for every single minutiae of engineering or quantum physics.
[01:42:41]  But the Scripture does tell us that the world is not an accident, that it was created in six days by an intelligent design, and therefore there are systems and rhyme and reason and laws and principles at work in the world, so that we, and all that absolutely is the foundation for engineering.
[01:42:59]  But then you still have to appeal to nature and observation, all these other things to build a plane.
[01:43:04]  So that's what, you know, go back to that question real quick, Nate.
[01:43:09]  But that's what Stephen Wolf's getting at with this whole, you know, Christian worldview.
[01:43:13]  So my point is what I was saying earlier in the episode is the pastor, I think, should be a generalist at some level.
[01:43:22]  But a generalist, we have to be honest about that.
[01:43:24]  A generalist is not an exhaustive expert, the generalist knows a little bit about everything.
[01:43:30]  But he knows everything about little, if anything.
[01:43:36]  So he's really not an expert in any field.
[01:43:39]  So here's my point Your Baptist pastor, is he preaching Christ?
[01:43:46]  Is he preaching that we're saved by grace, the faith in Christ, the life, death, resurrection?
[01:43:52]  Does he administer the.
[01:43:54]  Like what I would say, like, okay, the conversation that you need to have with your Baptist pastor is is it six months in between each time you take the supper?
[01:44:04]  Is it grape juice?
[01:44:05]  Right.
[01:44:05]  Is it grape juice?
[01:44:06]  Like, that would be top of my list.
[01:44:08]  Yeah.
[01:44:09]  Because that's what he's there for word and sacrament.
[01:44:12]  And he's literally two things.
[01:44:14]  You had two jobs, you know?
[01:44:17]  And one of them you're only doing twice a year, you know?
[01:44:20]  Or seriously, like a lot of Baptists do it quarterly, once a quarter.
[01:44:25]  And even then, they only give half the sacrament by giving grape juice, you know?
[01:44:30]  Or maybe at best we can be charitable and say they give, you know, half of, Half of the grape juice counts for half, so it's, you know, and the bread counts, so it's 75% of the sacrament, and they're doing it four times a year.
[01:44:41]  So, what I would say is with your Baptist pastor, is he preaching Christ?
[01:44:45]  Is he preaching expositionally through the scripture?
[01:44:47]  And is he administering the sacraments, baptism, and the Lord's Supper faithfully?
[01:44:52]  Okay, if so, but he has your typical Baptist view of politics, then honestly, this is where we would need to defer to Steve Wolf.
[01:45:03]  And in a nut, Steven is actually, people think he's mean.
[01:45:06]  He's He's nice.
[01:45:07]  He's probably nicer than I am.
[01:45:09]  This is what Stephen's getting at.
[01:45:12]  He hasn't said the quiet part quite out loud, but I'm going to.
[01:45:16]  He's basically saying easier to take Baptists out of politics than to teach Baptist ministers how to do politics.
[01:45:23]  That's kind of what he's actually pushing towards, and he's right.
[01:45:26]  So, what I guess what I'm saying is an answer to your question is just encourage your pastor to keep being a pastor and not to run for local office.
[01:45:35]  Yeah.
[01:45:36]  And to just kind of stay out of it because he doesn't know what he's talking about.
[01:45:39]  And that's okay.
[01:45:40]  All right.
[01:45:41]  Good answer.
[01:45:42]  One more from Neville.
[01:45:43]  Does the church have the authority to not just bar a heretical Christian prince from the Lord's table?
[01:45:47]  Table, but to also depose him of his position in office.
[01:45:51]  It does have the authority to block him from the Lord's table, but the church, as the church, does not possess the authority to depose him.
[01:45:58]  Christians, not as churchmen, but as citizens, do.
[01:46:02]  The doctrines are lesser magic.
[01:46:03]  So the attendee that goes to the church.
[01:46:04]  So the church, in terms of the institution, the ecclesia, the gathering, no.
[01:46:08]  The church, insofar as it represents the people, the who of the church, the saints, outside of the church institute, Monday through Saturday, as citizens, they absolutely can run him out of town.
[01:46:20]  Yep.
[01:46:20]  Which happened, what was it, King Henry VIII?
[01:46:24]  Was it the 8th or maybe 16th?
[01:46:26]  I don't know.
[01:46:27]  But he got the one who got ran off and then they replaced him with Cromwell.
[01:46:32]  Oh, yeah.
[01:46:33]  I think that was the 8th.
[01:46:34]  I think so.
[01:46:35]  And then, you know, and then Cromwell was great, but then his son, you know, that apple fell far from the tree.
[01:46:41]  And then they're like, all right, let's go get him back.
[01:46:44]  We need him back.
[01:46:45]  But the people did that.
[01:46:46]  Yep.
[01:46:47]  But the pastor can, literally, on his profession of faith, which the church as an institute judges, The profession and the life can bar the prince if he was an Aryan or a modalist.
[01:46:58]  Should.
[01:46:58]  Yeah, not just can, should.
[01:47:00]  You can't partake of this.
[01:47:01]  You're saying that the Catholic Church should ban politicians who are openly promoting abortion from.
[01:47:10]  And that's what we're doing here.
[01:47:12]  And see, that's the problem to all of our RC bros.
[01:47:16]  We love you.
[01:47:17]  We have a lot of Catholic friends.
[01:47:19]  John Doyle, he's coming to the conference.
[01:47:21]  He's not even speaking, he's just coming to hang out.
[01:47:23]  You know, he's Catholic and he's great.
[01:47:25]  I love John Doyle.
[01:47:27]  But, like, we, and, you know, and let's be honest, Calvin Robinson is an Anglo Catholic, but the Catholic, that tail is wagging the dog.
[01:47:39]  He might as well get it.
[01:47:40]  He looked like an Anglican, right?
[01:47:41]  I remember you saying he looked like an Anglican.
[01:47:42]  I remember when I first talked to him, like, because, you know, we got a lot of flack for that decision.
[01:47:46]  And I remember when I first talked to him, I was like, you're an Anglo Catholic, you know, Anglican.
[01:47:50]  Yeah, like John Stott, right?
[01:47:51]  And he was like, yeah, like John Stott.
[01:47:55]  Martin Lloyd Jones, right?
[01:47:56]  He said, yeah.
[01:47:56]  I was like, Martin Lloyd Jones and John Stott.
[01:47:58]  Yeah, you're my guy.
[01:47:59]  I love those guys.
[01:48:00]  Yeah, Anglican's fine.
[01:48:01]  And he was like, Yeah, I, yeah, basically like that.
[01:48:04]  And then, you know, literally like the next day, you know, because we're Mary posting on there.
[01:48:09]  James White kind of like started poking him, and that's how it happened.
[01:48:12]  You know, that was a sequence of events because nobody cared when he went out to Moscow.
[01:48:16]  They cared when all of a sudden, you know, I announced that he's going to be at my conference.
[01:48:20]  If it's Doug Wilson, it's fine.
[01:48:21]  But if it's Joel, crush him.
[01:48:23]  So as soon as we announced that he was going to be at the conference, then James White, who didn't say a word when he was in Moscow, started saying a word and poked the bear.
[01:48:30]  And this is what I love about Calvin.
[01:48:32]  I don't love that he's a little bit more Catholic than I'm comfortable with.
[01:48:36]  But what I do love about him is if you push Calvin, he pushes back.
[01:48:42]  For better or for worse.
[01:48:44]  Yep.
[01:48:46]  If you tell him he can't do something, you're going to get a Roman salute from the stage at an anti abortion conference.
[01:48:53]  And so, anyways, but then it was so funny because he's like, yeah, I'm like John Stott on the phone.
[01:48:59]  And then I kid you not, like 48 hours later, he's like, Our mother Mary, I trample where I please over America.
[01:49:07]  So it wasn't even just a Catholic over policy thing.
[01:49:09]  It was also like, dude, you just got here from Great Britain.
[01:49:14]  And you're like, because that meme in particular was not just Mary over Protestants.
[01:49:18]  It was a political meme.
[01:49:19]  It was America.
[01:49:20]  And I was like, oh, Calvin, I love you, man.
[01:49:22]  But like, could have done without that.
[01:49:24]  We're going to beat the left.
[01:49:25]  And then Catholics and Protestants as brothers, we're going to have to beat each other up.
[01:49:28]  Yeah.
[01:49:29]  Exactly.
[01:49:29]  But that's the thing.
[01:49:30]  We beat the left.
[01:49:30]  Within 10 years.
[01:49:31]  But that's the thing.
[01:49:31]  Yes.
[01:49:32]  Yeah.
[01:49:32]  And then we beat each other.
[01:49:33]  But what you're saying, like, we're all saying it tongue in cheek, but we do mean it.
[01:49:37]  Guys, the orcs are on the front doorstep.
[01:49:40]  It's like, why'd you invite Steve Dace?
[01:49:43]  Don't you know that Steve Dace is a raging Zionist?
[01:49:46]  Kind of.
[01:49:48]  I don't think that's exactly fair, but yeah.
[01:49:50]  You'll find out tomorrow.
[01:49:51]  The dude, yeah, I'm going on Steve Dace tomorrow.
[01:49:53]  But I won't deny for a second does Steve Dace love himself some Israel?
[01:50:00]  He does.
[01:50:01]  That dude loves himself some Israel.
[01:50:03]  But so does Trump, and I voted for him.
[01:50:05]  Right.
[01:50:06]  And I don't regret it for a second.
[01:50:08]  And here's the thing about Steve Dace he's a fighter.
[01:50:11]  And let me also say this Steve Dace is more of a Zionist.
[01:50:16]  Than Moscow, Apologia, and Ezra Institute.
[01:50:22]  But you know how Steve Dace responded when everybody said you should drop our conference because Joel is an anti Semite?
[01:50:30]  He said, Joel, why don't you come on the show and I want to give you a fair hearing and just ask you some questions.
[01:50:37]  God bless.
[01:50:38]  The reform guys in our camp, they didn't do that.
[01:50:40]  Right.
[01:50:41]  So, yeah, so I'll invite this.
[01:50:43]  You want to know what the common denominator is for, like, why Calvin Robinson?
[01:50:46]  Why Steve Dace?
[01:50:47]  Like, here's the common denominator there's two of them.
[01:50:50]  One, fighters who are willing to fight the orcs and not just have dwarfs and elves and men fight each other.
[01:51:00]  That's number one.
[01:51:01]  Number two, these are reasonable men.
[01:51:06]  There are serious disagreements between us, but they're reasonable men.
[01:51:12]  And like even, you know, we did something on the Daily Wire recently, you know, Jeremy Boring, that's what it was, you know, him getting ousted or whatever, like resigning, but it does also seem like push, maybe, and who knows.
[01:51:22]  But.
[01:51:23]  We talked briefly about Michael Knowles and Matt Walsh.
[01:51:27]  And I've kind of been watching them more.
[01:51:29]  I listened to them in 2020 fairly regularly and then kind of stopped listening and found guys who are more based, whatever.
[01:51:38]  But I started just out of a thought experiment, just picking up.
[01:51:44]  Lord knows, I can't listen to Andrew Clavin.
[01:51:46]  I can't listen to Ben Shapiro.
[01:51:47]  But listening to Walsh and Knowles a little bit more, not every day, but from time to time, checking in.
[01:51:54]  How often do those guys punch right?
[01:51:58]  Right.
[01:51:59]  For anyone listening, zero.
[01:52:02]  At least in the last two to three years, certainly 2018, 2019.
[01:52:05]  And it's not because they're blind.
[01:52:06]  Do you think Michael Knowles and Matt Walsh are just completely unaware that there are guys in the current discourse to their right?
[01:52:14]  I don't think they're aware at all.
[01:52:16]  They're completely aware.
[01:52:18]  And I guarantee you, Knowles and Walsh would both have, with some of those guys to their right, some profound disagreements.
[01:52:27]  Like, straight up, like, dude, you're making us look bad.
[01:52:30]  Dude, you're a useful idiot.
[01:52:32]  Dude, you think you're helping, you're hurting, you're a liability, you're a detriment.
[01:52:38]  And yet, despite, I guarantee you, perfect awareness, acute awareness, and profound disagreement, and even anger and frustration, probably, their public persona, they don't.
[01:52:51]  Tucker Carlson, too?
[01:52:52]  They don't shoot their own.

=== Christians Making Profound Disagreements Public (02:52) ===

[01:52:53]  Zero.
[01:52:54]  And how much progress have we made in the last six months to a year without a bunch of friendly fire?
[01:52:59]  That's right.
[01:53:00]  From Tucker Carlson, Jason Whitlock, Aaron McIntyre.
[01:53:02]  Aaron doesn't punch right either.
[01:53:04]  Like mentioned earlier.
[01:53:05]  And just for the record, these guys are Christians.
[01:53:07]  We're talking about Orrin, you know, he's Southern Baptist.
[01:53:09]  We're talking about Calvin Robinson, he's Anglo Catholic.
[01:53:12]  We're talking about Walsh and Michael Knowles, who are both Catholics.
[01:53:14]  So we're not talking about guys on the right, like, you know, who are barely on the right, like Joe Rogan.
[01:53:18]  We're not talking about that.
[01:53:19]  We're talking about within the larger Christian sphere, okay?
[01:53:24]  But my point in bringing this up is in my experience, the Reformed tradition, it'll always be my home.
[01:53:30]  I'm persuaded of it theologically, it's my theological home.
[01:53:34]  The Reformed tradition, the Reformed community, the Reformed camp, Is the most vicious place I've ever known.
[01:53:43]  I just want you to know, I've told, I've talked to some of the people in the business world in our church, and they've said, that's cute, Joel.
[01:53:49]  That's cute, what?
[01:53:50]  Like in the business world, there's more vicious guys?
[01:53:52]  Yes, yes.
[01:53:54]  So you can take it up with them, but just being.
[01:53:57]  Maybe.
[01:54:00]  Maybe.
[01:54:01]  But do they.
[01:54:03]  I don't know.
[01:54:04]  Antonio?
[01:54:06]  Nolan?
[01:54:07]  Yeah, Nolan, Antonio.
[01:54:09]  I'll have a conversation.
[01:54:10]  We'll have a pastor.
[01:54:11]  We'll be.
[01:54:11]  Speaking, yeah, we'll be speaking.
[01:54:13]  I'll say, hey guys, the keys of the kingdom are coming out.
[01:54:15]  You think that the business world is cutthroat and that reformers are just squeaky clean and really kind, okay?
[01:54:20]  They wouldn't say that the next time these reform guys come, like they did for the other member in our church, I won't protect you.
[01:54:28]  I'll just go ahead and let you be excommunicated and then we'll have a conversation later.
[01:54:34]  So, all right, any were there any other questions?
[01:54:36]  Did we get to a moment?
[01:54:37]  Sure, we got it.
[01:54:39]  Oh, next week.
[01:54:40]  So, again, yeah, please, guys, sign up for Patreon Gold.
[01:54:45]  So, our silver tier, what you'll get is you'll get all the ad free content.
[01:54:49]  That's for sure what you get our live stream and our Friday specials, all ad free.
[01:54:54]  In addition, you also get early access.
[01:54:56]  So, the silver tier, it's five bucks a month.
[01:54:58]  You get ad free and you also get early access.
[01:55:01]  And so, in terms of early access, right now, what that would include is a 10 part series, all ad free, with myself and Dr. Stephen Wolf on Christian nationalism and getting to some of the things that we talked about today.
[01:55:14]  The state.
[01:55:15]  The church, how to implement Christian nationalism in these United States.
[01:55:19]  What's step one?
[01:55:20]  What's step two?
[01:55:21]  What's step three?
[01:55:22]  What can we do now?
[01:55:23]  Not just theory, but also practice.
[01:55:26]  And so that's what you'll get with a silver tier, five bucks a month.
[01:55:30]  Go to patreon.com forward slash right response ministries.
[01:55:33]  You get ad free, early access.
[01:55:36]  But the gold member, that's what you've got to do if you want to live stream the conference.
[01:55:40]  And guys, I'm telling you, you want to live stream this conference.

=== Pay Ten Dollars to Stop Slander (01:32) ===

[01:55:46]  Don't wait.
[01:55:47]  For the haters to post a 37 second clip out of context, they will.
[01:55:53]  My goodness, well, here, you know what?
[01:55:55]  Actually, this is actually a good moment here.
[01:55:58]  Um, because we've had you know, uh, over the years, not over this weekend with the most recent controversy, but over the years, we have had uh, donors and supporters drop us because of our opponents and and kind of rallying up scandals and um, and a lot of them being simply content and not past things in my personal life, but content taken out of context, and so we have lost.
[01:56:23]  Some revenue.
[01:56:24]  And here's a chance to make it up.
[01:56:26]  Haters who are listening, you have to pay $10 for our cool membership on our Patreon so that you can.
[01:56:35]  Because here's the deal you're going to be taking me and everybody else out of context and painting us as anti Semites two months too late.
[01:56:44]  You want to be able to lie and slander about us immediately, don't you?
[01:56:49]  You can be right there on the scene.
[01:56:50]  Dude, all it costs for $10, you can slander till the cows come home.
[01:56:56]  You can literally have a slander party, get together, you know, and stay up late and cut out video.
[01:57:02]  And if you are cutting us out of context with Blake Collins and other guys two months after the fact, what a loser.
[01:57:09]  Come on.
[01:57:09]  A true slanderer, a true accuser of the brethren.
[01:57:12]  He'll pay that $10 for that gold Patriot Papers.
[01:57:14]  I think we go to the zoo this weekend.
[01:57:15]  We'll get right away.
[01:57:16]  I got plans.
[01:57:17]  I got plans?
[01:57:18]  We've got plans.