Joel Webbin and Dr. Stephen Wolf dissect Christian nationalism, arguing nations are natural institutions existing before the Fall due to human finitude rather than sin alone. They explore preserving diverse cultural traditions like those in Uganda or Hungary within a gospel-perfected community, rejecting impractical homogeneity for cohesive societies sharing ancestry and location. The hosts debate immigration policy, concluding biblical mandates require political prudence and natural law to prioritize existing citizens' common good while offering hospitality with surplus resources. Ultimately, this view distinguishes their approach from strict theonomism by insisting reason must deliberate specific policies within scriptural bounds. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: CohereLabs/cohere-transcribe-03-2026, WAV2VEC2_ASR_BASE_960H, sat-12l-sm, script v26.04.01, and large-v3-turbo
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Distinct Nations and Common Good00:14:19
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All right, here we are.
This is episode five.
I'm Joel Webbin, and I am here with Dr. Stephen Wolf.
And it's an honor and a privilege.
We're on episode five.
We've been recording all day.
So, this is our last episode for today.
And tomorrow, Lord willing, we're going to record the next five episodes.
So, you are tuning in with episode five of a 10 part series talking about Christian nationalism.
And the last two episodes, I think, were bangers, if I do say so myself.
Yeah, I think we'll get on Right Wing Watch a couple of times.
Definitely.
Yeah, I think we gave him.
Plenty of content, those ladies over there.
We talked about the juice.
Some males over there, too, right?
Not just J O I C E, juice.
We talked about that in our last episode Israel and propositional nationhood and where this kind of came from, this idea and problems with that.
And we didn't, you know, we were hinged, but just spicy enough, I think.
And so, anyways, the last two episodes, we talked about what is a nation.
First two episodes, we talked about defining Christian nationalism.
But So, we defined Christian nationalism and nationalism in the first two episodes.
We tried to define nationhood.
What is a nation in episode three and four?
Episode five now, we're going to talk about not so much Christian nationalism, but what is a Christian nation?
Yeah.
What is a Christian nation?
Yeah.
Yeah.
There is a good question in this.
And there's a reason why I start off with in the book talking about the nation, because I don't think, you know, the I think that grace does not destroy nature.
So, if there is this thing called nation that is a natural thing and its components are fundamentally natural, then the question is, how does grace relate to that nation?
And I think it's a really, really important question because the tendency today among Christians is to think that in order to form a political community that you call Christian, all you need to be is Christian.
That's it.
But to my mind, that is grace destroying nature.
It is, it's running against something that is fundamental to us as human beings.
And so when I would say that just as grace perfects and completes nature, the gospel completes and perfects the nation, but without destroying it.
Right.
And so in that, we're getting into would nations exist in a prelapsarian world?
If Adam and Eve had ever fallen, would we still have nations?
Would there still be governments?
Would there still be laws, even if there was no sin?
And you would say, yes.
Yeah, yeah, I guess we didn't get into that in past episodes.
Yeah, that would be a good question.
Yeah, sure.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So, I think, and there's precedent for this in the reform.
I don't know enough to say if it's the majority view.
A lot of guys don't actually address this question.
The guys who do address the question tend to say that there will be political communities, that there will actually be not only nations, but there'll be civil government over these nations.
So, you find that in Samuel Willard.
You find it in Samuel Willard, who was a New England Puritan, died in 1707, I believe.
And then you have Lambert Deniou, I think is how you say his name, who died in 1696, another reformed philosopher.
So, they would affirm that there is civil government in a state of integrity.
So, if Adam had not fallen, there would be political communities and they would all have civil magistrates.
Now, why would that be the case?
Well, because when you reflect on A political community, you have diverse vocations, you have diverse interests, you have a corporate entity that is the people, and those people would need some kind of coordinating, directing effort.
So, like, we're coordinated in our mobility when we get on the road and drive the car.
And there's rules to the road, and that facilitates our various interests.
The car going this way stays on that side, doesn't run into you because he's following the rules, we're following the rules.
So, the same thing would be in a complex society.
You would need not to restrain sin or anything like that, but you would need to direct those people in the sort of common good.
Each individual could have the best interest for the community at large.
But there's not enough knowledge in each individual to know how to coordinate all these people, everyone individually.
And this is true for, I mean, you think of like chess clubs, have some director who runs it.
You have corporations where you have a CEO.
And they don't have a director because everybody would cheat.
Right.
But they have a director because even if everybody has integrity and will play the game fairly, there's still rules to the game and things have to be organized and things have to be scheduled.
Yeah, right.
Like it's very natural to us to say if you're going to start something, start an entity in which there's going to be several or maybe hundreds of people there.
All these people could wish the best for that entity, whatever it is, but you'd need to coordinate those efforts and you'd have a committee or you have some individual doing the directing.
So, the same thing, it would I mean, think of the numerous vocations and interests that each that we have in a political society, even in like a pre modern one, there's just a lot.
And so, each the blacksmith could want the best for his neighbor, the carpenter, the farmer, but in their relations, you'd have some kind of overseer that would then direct.
Them and their common life together.
Can we say it like this that nations and by consequence, governments are not merely necessary by virtue of our fallenness, but by virtue of our finitude?
The fact that we're creaturely.
Yeah.
You know, that even if we had never fallen in a prelapsarian world, we would still never be infinite.
We wouldn't be omniscient.
We wouldn't be omnipresent.
We wouldn't be any of those things.
We would still be creaturely.
So even if unfallen, still finite.
And it's by virtue of our finitude that we require an organizing.
Yeah, that's on civil government.
The other idea is that there would be distinct nations with their various customs and ways in life.
And I think this follows from if you imagine man spreading across the earth, not every spot is habitable, and there'd be distinct city states or peoples that would coalesce around maybe the water, like the ocean, or maybe lakes, or in forests, or whatever.
And even though they would have a connection to the root of Adam, there would still be a geographic separation, and there'd be a separation of time.
These people live on the other side of the mountain.
Yeah.
And like you said, we have limitations of not being able to communicate directly.
Now we can do internet and all that, but ordinarily you wouldn't know what's happening a few miles or hundreds of miles away from you.
And so these people would then develop their own music and dress and their own dances and their own festivals.
And even though there wouldn't be sin, there wouldn't be like there would be hospitality if you went from here to there, there would be an experience of foreignness.
Like I said in a previous episode, You become a spectator rather than a participant, and there's nothing wrong in itself with that.
There's nothing wrong with this nation doing it this way and you doing that way.
I think it shows like the fact that God has designed us that we can have a cultural diversity.
It is a sort of a painting of mixed colors that when you take nations as a whole, if you put them together, it shows the wisdom of God in creating man such that they can have diverse ways of life, and those ways of life, though different, can be sinless and can be good.
And so that's how I'm thinking.
I also think, like, if you believe that everyone would be the same, like, what faculty of man would make that happen?
Are we omniscient?
Do we know what's happening?
Is all the culture established by Adam in the beginning then mandated through all the peoples who spread the earth?
So it just seems very obvious to me, given how we understand ourselves in like our non sinful nature and the nature as created by God, that there would be these distinct nations.
And so when we look around the world today, we can see nations that contain sinful elements, everything from sinful liturgies and pagan sacrifice, all these things that are bad.
But the diversity in itself, And the differences that we find among different peoples that we don't think consider sinless, the different ways of dressing and dancing and music, and we don't find that stuff bad, but it does show that people, as they move apart from one another, will develop these unique ways of life.
So I think that's natural to us.
And if that's natural to us, that means nationhood itself, its distinctness is natural to us.
And that should be affirmed.
And because it's natural and naturally good for us, then grace does not destroy it.
So that's the logic I go to.
That's good.
I like that.
And like people push back a lot against that.
I don't need to go too far into that critique, but I think if you just reflect like two things again, reflect on we enjoy diversity, like in a way, like we enjoy going to a foreign country and experiencing difference.
And we sometimes marvel at the different ways people act and we consider that good.
When we imagine, like, you know, as you see like a missionary board where they have like, here's the different countries and here's the like, you know, it's all kind of silly and stereotypical, but you have like the different dress and ways of all, and you can think, pray for the peoples of the world.
Well, in that way, it's kind of cool to see how people are different.
Right.
And they do things differently and they have different names and names for things.
And anyway, I won't keep dwelling on that.
But so when we get to Christian Nation.
I remember like the Ugandan choir, the kids' choir.
Oh, okay.
Yeah.
Would come and visit, you know, Baptist churches, you know, growing up.
And they would come and raise money for Uganda and they would bring, you know, on their visit, like 20, 30, 40 kids who were part of like a program that was being supported by, you know, American churches.
Where they would preach the gospel and those kinds of things, but they would also have schools and they would bring the kids and choir and they wouldn't come and sing, you know, Amazing Grace.
They would come and sing Ugandan songs.
Yeah.
You know, that were Christian, but still Ugandan with different, you know, drums and instruments and syncopation and different melodies that were distinct to their people.
And if they came and sang without any accent, perfect English, you know, Amazing Grace with a symphony, Like, we might say, Well, this is really cool how these Ugandan kids, you know, are, you know, have learned Western culture, but we'd probably be a little bit disappointed because we're expecting Ugandan culture, you know, and so, yeah, right, we get that.
And I think that my argument would be more obvious to people in a pre modern era.
But nowadays, we have a homogenizing tendency.
Like, we kind of, even though we like diversity, we also think that everything should kind of be the same.
McDonald's in every corner, I suppose.
People don't like that.
Well, you know, that's one of the weird things too, is you don't like, You know, you don't like going to the Colosseum in Rome and across the streets at McDonald's.
You think it spoils something.
But at the same time, we kind of want everything to be the same.
It doesn't make any sense.
But I think in a pre modern world, that would make more sense to people.
But then if we move to Christian nation, what this means then is that you can have Christian nations that are different than one another culturally and yet still be just as Christian.
So you can have different ecclesial traditions.
I know Presbyterians like their regulative principle.
But sorry, that's Scottish.
I mean, there is something to say for the regular principle, and I actually affirm it in a moderate way.
But there would be different peoples in different places doing different things in church.
And ordinarily, and especially most Christians would be okay with that.
And even when OPC ministers go to Uganda, they have to, and there's a mission in Uganda for the OPC, they have to accommodate that difference of culture in their ecclesial practices.
Even if they don't want to, they do.
But there is that Presbyterian thing.
Anyway, so you'd have Christian nations all across the world in the post-millennial hope, but each one would be different.
They'd identify through their ancestors and the great events that they'd honor.
Let's say they were pagan and they became Christian.
Well, they would honor that missionary who came to them to preach the gospel.
When I was in Hungary, there was a statue to a missionary who was martyred by the Hungarians when they were pagans.
And he was from Italy.
So he came from Italy to Hungary.
And he preached the gospel and he was killed, he was martyred.
And so now that Hungarians is a historically Christian nation, they honor that person who came to preach the gospel, despite the fact that they rejected it.
It is something they've now, as a sort of national repentance, and now honor of the guy who came, even though he's Italian.
So, but that's uniquely Hungarian.
Like I can see that and say, that's great, but it's not mine.
Like that's different than when I think of my ancestors, I think of Mayflower, I think of.
Massachusetts Bay Colony, Salem, Massachusetts.
I think of that because that's where my people come from.
They're the ones who Christianized this land, made the trek, and I honor them because I'm connected to them.
But that's me as an American.
Christian Society and Ancestry00:03:47
So, yeah, so the Christianity element doesn't eradicate that, it doesn't remove it, it doesn't take it away, the cultural elements of your society.
It perfects it, it corrects it.
So, the analogy, I've used this in a previous episode, but the analogy is with the family.
So, natural family, You like board games, you like hiking, you might like taking a Saturday drive on the country road or whatever you like doing as a family.
If you became a Christian, you don't have to get rid of that.
I knew a guy who unfortunately was really into road biking and he became a Christian and he thought that he should get rid of that.
Eventually he came back to it and all that.
Now, if it was like an excessive thing, it's corrected.
You should still like being on the bike and ride around in the streets.
But so that's okay.
It affirms what you like.
It's just like an individual who becomes Christian.
Does not lose his personality.
Like, I have a personality, you have your personality, all these people have their personalities.
And I didn't lose that when I became a Christian.
You didn't lose yours.
Your kids aren't going to lose theirs.
And so, yeah, same thing with a nation.
You retain that.
But then there's a question of, well, what if, can it just be Christians?
Like, can everyone just be a Christian in a nation?
Can we all compose, just pluck, like, let's say we pluck all these Christians from different parts of the world?
And put them in a place, and we all suddenly say, We're going to be a political community now.
We're going to be a Christian society.
Well, would that work?
And I would say it would not work.
You don't speak the same language.
You don't have the same political ideals.
You don't have, like, we, an Anglo Protestant tradition, we like limited government.
The Nordic countries don't like that.
China doesn't like that.
Other countries, yeah, most countries don't like that.
And so you bring them all together and you're like, I think there should be high taxation so that we can all provide ourselves and love ourselves through taxation such that we can have single-payer health care.
But then the Moscow, Idaho crowd comes along and they say, that's socialism.
That's theft.
It's just not going to work because we have different ideas of politics.
Now, if you were to go, let's say you're a theonomist, Baptist, post millennial, and you agree on everything, and you were to go to Germany and meet a guy who's exactly that, who also speaks English, you know who I'm talking about.
And you're like, we're just the same.
We could form a political community.
Well, of course you could.
You agree on everything.
You're probably also all libertarians as well.
And so, yeah, but if you go to a Lutheran church among the few faithful left in Norway, they probably are not going to agree with you that taxation is theft.
They're going to think, actually, my tax dollars go such that I can love my community through social welfare or socialized medicine, right?
So, anyway, yeah, anyway, it's not going to work.
You still need a cohesive people with a people in a place with ancestry in a place that is then Christian.
So, that's my monologue.
I love it.
That's great.
I think the.
The whiskey is letting me just go on long rants like you do all the time.
Yeah, I do that a lot.
No, that makes a lot of sense.
I agree.
Only pushback I would give, because I'm with you probably 90%, only pushback is I do see how it can be tempting or leave the door open to basically what you have to distinguish between is what are true cultural distinctions that are permissible by scripture.
Natural Law vs Special Revelation00:03:20
And then, what, you know, there are some, because if you're not careful, you can give off the impression that basically there's no transcendent morals.
There's, you know, very, or at least very few.
There's, you know, very few.
Like, God does have his law word, it is transcendent, it is immutable.
There are certain things that a people can even collectively decide, we like this.
And God can decide, too bad.
You like it, but.
It's bad.
It's wrong.
This is the wrong way of doing things.
And so that would be probably the only pushback that I would offer is that there has to be something to temper preference.
There has to be, you know, like for me, you know, I've come to the point where it's like, I would say I'm, you know, I'm not a reconstructionist, but I'm a general equity theonomy guy with the way I word it is with strong sympathies to natural law, is how I would say it.
You're almost there.
You're close.
I'm in the arc.
But I would, you know, part of what makes me strong in my sympathies to natural law is I recognize that although I think the general equity of the civil laws and then the summary law and the Decalogue gets you pretty far, you know, let's go with special revelation as far as it'll go, right?
Special, you know, like God's written two books.
Natural Revelation is God's book as well, he's speaking.
But one of those books is, I think, the perspicuity of special revelation is higher.
Than the perspicuity of natural revelation.
And it's not just in terms of clarity, but also the fact that with special revelation, the canon is closed.
Whereas providentially, throughout history, like nature in terms of the cosmos and the stars and constellations and the skies, you know, Psalm 19, pour out speech, these things are timeless.
But there's also a sense within natural revelation, there is some place for providence and history and how things unfold.
And whereas special revelation, the canon is closed.
So, it's, I would say, two aspects heightened clarity and then also completion.
And in that sense, there's a superiority given to special revelation.
I don't think you would disagree with me.
You would say, yeah, wherever the Bible speaks, yeah, let's go with the Bible.
Yeah.
The problem is not that the Bible is unclear and not that the Bible isn't finished, complete, the canon being closed, but the Bible is not exhaustive, meaning that there are still multiple different studies and practices and fields.
Uh, where the Bible just doesn't speak exhaustively to those things, wherever the Bible speaks, it speaks clearly, and the central message of the Bible is a completed whole message.
Um, but when it comes to mathematics and all these things, like it is true that ultimately it's grounded in the fact that you know, like, why does two plus two equal four?
Because, uh, because Jesus is Lord, and I can say that, and that's and that is true.
Um, but I also, in order to understand trigonometry and you know, and all these different quantum mechanics, you know, like, um, I'm appealing to nature.
I'm relying upon God, but as He speaks through nature.
Familial Obligations and Interest00:15:48
And so, all that being said, this is the big thing that kind of got me out of the tight theonomic position immigration.
So, the theonomist would say, well, immigration could be drastically mitigated.
And I think they're right to a point.
And then, actually, I think it shifts and they become terribly wrong.
And this is part of what changed my opinion.
So, they would say, I think, you know, it's three or four or five different mechanisms that would mitigate immigration.
One, If you had an ideal theonomic society, so let's say America is the theonomic nation of America, and post millennialism, it all panned out, it worked, and we're rocking and rolling.
Okay, you need to make a public profession of Christ, to the Christian faith, the triune God, if you want to live in America.
So you need to be a Christian.
You need to go through legal avenues.
You can't be an illegal immigrant, you have to come legally.
Also, no welfare.
In this system, and that's something that you know you would we've talked about, and but from a theonomic perspective, um, no wealth welfare that belongs to the household in terms of sphere sovereignty and not to the state.
Um, so there is generosity, but it's not compelled, it's not compulsory, um, and so therefore, it's not through taxation.
So, no welfare, so that removes an incentive and works as a mitigation to immigration.
You're not coming for a handout, you're coming for opportunity, sure.
Um, but but you're going to have to work, you're not going to get free cash.
Um, and then uh, you have to do it legally, you have to make a Christian profession.
And then let's say, even to add an extra thing, there's a sense of, like Ruth, your people will be my people, your God will be my God.
And we could argue from that, I think, from maybe not a necessary inference, but by way of implication, we can argue from the text, your people are going to be my people.
Part of that means your history, your customs, those kinds of things.
I'm coming to work.
I'm coming as a Christian.
I'm coming legally.
And I am coming to be an American.
I'm going to assimilate.
Okay, so there's four things.
However, In terms of theory, theoretically, what's possible?
Well, let's say postmillennialism is true, and I am postmillennial, and let's say theonomy is true for ethics and law and government.
What happens if, in the great postmillennial hope, America is Christianized 5,000 years before all the other nations?
Well, you don't get welfare, you don't get a handout, but let's say all the other nations, like, is free money the only incentive?
What if all the other nations are torn by war?
What you would get in a theonomic Christian nation is not a handout, but you get safety.
No cartel, no tribalistic wars, no, it's not North Korea.
I mean, just for safety alone, much less economic opportunity, because we would think that Christian laws would lend towards blessing, you know, material blessing, all these kinds of things.
So, you're going to get economic opportunity.
You're going to get personal and physical safety for you, your children, your family, and freedom of worship.
Let's say you live in another nation and Christianity is illegal.
You know, you have to do underground house churches and things like that.
And so, freedom of public worship and the Christian God being the public, you know, publicly recognized Christian faith.
In other words, On one hand, it mitigates, I think, in the short run, there'd be kind of like a bell curve.
In the short run, it would mitigate immigration.
A bunch of people right now would say, Well, I'm not coming if I don't get free money.
But in the long run, if the other nations continue to rebel against Christ and become worse and worse hellholes, and America becomes this incredibly prosperous, safe, moral, virtuous place, well, that's incentive enough in itself.
And so then what do you do?
Theoretically, you have all these mitigations put in place.
You got to be a Christian.
You got to do it legally.
You got to work hard and you got to assimilate.
Got it.
What if, even with those things, it's feasible, it's possible.
What if 4 billion people want to come to America legally to work, to become American, assimilate, and all make a Christian profession?
Theonomy has no other means, no other mechanism to mitigate that.
And that's why one word, prudence, became really important to me.
I was like, I don't know what you call that theologically.
If that's natural law, then I'm a natural law person because there's got to be something in the Christian political theology to stop 4 billion people from coming to the United States.
So that's where, for me, I started.
You know what I mean?
Yeah.
Yeah.
What do you think?
Yeah, you'd have to have some principle of discrimination by which you'd have to be like, not in a bad way, but in a way where some people are in, some people are out.
That's not necessarily moral.
And that's my whole point I think there's a universal, transcendent, immutable law of God.
And in that sense, all the nations that they're Christianized will have similarities because there is such a thing as transcendent truth.
And it's across the board.
It doesn't matter if you're Chinese or American or whatever, truth is truth.
But it's not all moral, it's not all transcendent truth.
There is something for prudence, reason, and even preference to simply say, hey, we love you.
We wish you no ill will.
We'll send missionaries.
We might even be charitable.
And help as you seek to build your nation, but you need to stay there.
We're not allowing you to come.
We're saying no.
And I don't think that's immoral.
Yeah, if you don't have a mechanism, I mean, that's kind of the state the West is in, in a way, right now, is that there's no, I mean, we have quotas, but yeah, I guess the theonomist would have the potential problem there.
Yes.
But I do think it would be a good thing to answer that for me.
And I pose the question to a lot.
Oh, really?
Yeah.
I'd be interested in how they try to.
I'm sure they try.
I would say the decision, though, is moral in the sense that you have a people that are already here and you should prefer them because that preference itself is actually for your good and their good.
It's just like it's good for you.
Like an order of morals.
It's just, it is moral because it's love for neighbor and there's a triage of neighbors.
Yeah, and that's not some like abstract thing where it's like, you know, like when we talk about, yeah, the Ordo Morris, we're not talking about some sort of arbitrary order of loves.
It actually, when you think it through, it makes sense.
It's better that we don't have like a community of children which no one's a parent and we all love the same, all the love the children equally.
Like there's a reason why, given our nature, that we should prefer our children and your next door neighbor should prefer their children.
It's actually for their good that you would give your undivided attention to these particular people.
So it's not just like a bare divine command.
It's actually a command that works for the sort of being we are.
And so the same thing with the nation is that if you prefer your own nation, you prefer it because those are the people whom you can communicate with and work with and develop a common project in society and all that.
Well, historically, with nationhood, though, like the further argument in my perspective with the Order of Morris is.
These are the people I can communicate with.
These are the people that I can work with, I can collaborate with towards our national good and heavenly good, as well as earthly good.
All those things are true.
But also, it would be an argument from relations in terms of family, familial relations.
Part of the reason I would have an added obligation is because I'm more closely related to these people.
So, in the same way that, like, you know, and we know this from scripture, you know, certainly as it pertains to the immediate family, you know, Titus.
You're worse than an unbeliever and have denied the faith.
Even if you're charitable and providing clothing and food for all the kids in the village, but if you neglect to provide for your own children, your own wife, your own family and household, then you're worse than an unbeliever and denied the faith.
And so I feel like it would be an argument by way of implication, rippling out from there and saying, okay, so my immediate family is my highest obligation.
And that I have explicitly in scripture.
But I think implicitly from that command of scripture, that I can say, okay, I have my wife comes before all the other women in my neighborhood.
But then I could argue beyond that my parents.
Then I can argue my wife's parents.
Then I can look at aunts and uncles and brothers in law and sisters in law and cousins.
And then if you just keep arguing out from that.
Well, even more, too, that the people that.
All those people worked with.
So let's say that your grandfather had a partner in business with this other guy.
There is a sense in which you feel an obligation to his children as well.
His grandfather worked with my grandfather in their business.
And even though you might be very distant in terms of genetics, there still is that connection through them.
So now that his grandchildren, you feel a certain affection for them because the affection flows through your grandfather.
Through that other guy, who then so, and that's just daily experience.
Like when someone says, Oh, I know this guy, or I worked with your father back in there, or I was in the Navy with your dad back, like there's that instant, like, Oh, I feel like I have a sort of obligation with that guy.
And that's how the love of your natural relations can filter out into the broader community where you feel a sense of kinship, even with people who are not kin genetically, who may ancestrally be very different than you.
But that's even the avenue of appeal when it comes to.
To need and charity.
Like we've seen movies and we've all had personal experiences with this where a guy is down on his luck, so to speak.
And what does he appeal to?
He makes that exact argument.
He says, Well, I was in the Navy with your dad, right?
He's going to appeal to some kind of tie, commonality, relationship.
He doesn't come, well, these days it's kind of shifted, but historically, that's the appeal, even not that long ago when I was a kid.
That's the avenue that someone would take, right?
Is would you help me because I know you, or I know someone that you know, or I had a shared experience with one of your family members, or something like that?
That would be the appeal.
It's not a natural appeal to say, I'm down with my luck, and you have an added moral obligation to help me because I'm a stranger.
You don't know me from Adam.
And why should you help me?
Because you don't know me.
Yeah, things have been inverted.
They have.
And now contrary to what I've been saying.
That's become the appeal.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And that's, yeah, that's, I, I, people don't like that, but people don't act like that.
Right.
I mean, the left, well, I should say, There is that heat thing with the leftists who love rocks more than their own family members.
Right.
That graph, dude, that's gold.
Yeah, that is, that's where, like, in the tradition, you have these guys talk about how there is a, like, eventually people become, like, lose their humanity.
And that's, like, that's a graph where people literally lose their humanity, where they love, like, you know, like birds more than they love their own mother or father.
Right.
But I think most people, I think the majority of people watching, This eventually will say, Yeah, I do sense that a guy I don't know from Adam, but who knows who was like in a foxhole with my father in Vietnam.
Like, this guy, I feel I have a sense of obligation.
My dad, you know, my dad would want me to help this buddy out.
Right.
You know, like, so there is that.
Yeah.
And so going back to like that's that's why I think like that's actually a very good definition way to think about the nation.
Yeah.
It's like interconnected relationships.
That flow from your actual kin group out into the broader population that then kind of gives you a natural feeling of obligation for not just generosity, but just fellowship.
Right.
Like you can have fellowship with a guy that you know who doesn't want anything from you except just the fellowship of conversation.
Like you're sitting at a bar and you realize, hey, man, this guy lived in the same town.
He grew.
Like this happened to me several times where I'm like, hey, I'm from Napa, California.
It's like, oh, I'm from Santa Rosa or I'm from Sonoma or I spent time in.
The Monterey Military Institute, whatever it's called in Monterey, is like, oh, really?
So we talk like there's like you have this, yeah, this natural bond of just arising from that common experiences.
And that creates, it generates a sense of obligation and generosity for those people.
Right.
The willingness to sacrifice.
I mean, I think the willingness to die for your people is not that you know everyone that is your people, but there's some way you can imagine, not an imaginary, but the way you can imagine the fact.
That we're a oneness of them, that you can die for a collective group in sacrifice for in a war or something like that.
Right.
Yeah.
And to, you know, I feel like the counter would be, you know, but what about all the verses that specifically talk about how the obligation that Israel had to love the stranger, the alien, the foreigner, you know?
And I think all I would say to that is that that is a uniquely Christian obligation that exists.
And we're not denying that.
But I don't look at any of those verses and see.
Commandment from God to love the stranger at the expense of your fellow brothers.
In fact, if you look beyond just the verses that talk about the sojourner, when it comes to certain things like interest, charging interest on loans, God, this is God's idea, not just Israel, but God himself says, you can give out loans and charge interest to the foreigner, but you can't do it with your brother.
Yeah.
You know, or commands even with like indentured servanthood.
There are more compassionate obligations if you had a servant who was a fellow Israelite.
And the text even goes and explicitly names it and says, because he is your brother.
Yeah.
Because he's your kin.
And so, therefore, so my point is, it's not to deny, we're not denying that that is a uniquely Christian element that we derive directly from the scripture that Christians care for strangers.
Well, and that's.
But nowhere in the Bible does it say caring for strangers more than your people or at the cost of your people.
That's the point that I'm making.
Right.
Right.
I mean, and even the notion of hospitality is a common notion among pagans.
So you can, the theme of hospitality is like central to the Odyssey, for example.
Maximizing Community Good00:12:22
So it's like, and throughout the pagan world, I listen to the Odyssey on 2X speed.
The idea of receiving the stranger is kind of a universal obligation.
But yeah, but it's always a matter of.
The generosity you can have towards people is a matter of the surplus.
So you have a household, you provide for the needs of your people in your household, and then you have a surplus.
Which Paul literally says, let the thief steal no longer, but work with his hands so that he might have something to give.
Right.
So it's, but it's, he only has something to give if he's productive and is able to meet his own needs and the needs of his household and has a surplus.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So you use that surplus is your opportunity for generosity.
And so I think that's the basis of.
Hospitality in the household, but then hospitality at the national level works the same way.
You have an obligation to your nation.
Yeah, so there's a national hospitality.
You have an obligation to your nation given the sort of surplus that your nation has.
And as you fulfill that obligation first and well, so first love your own.
And as you love your own, and if you do that by the grace of God well, that's what gives you the fodder to then be able to go beyond your nation in an overflow.
And have the surplus of generosity towards the stranger.
Yeah.
And the same thing holds for your household.
If you're being so generous that it's harming your ability to acquire wealth or even acquire the, if you're so generous that you lose the ability to even have a surplus, then you're losing your ability to be hospitable.
It's like a military leader and they hammer us into us.
They're like, yeah, you're in charge.
You lead from the front.
It's a harder job than what most other guys have to face, but you have to take care of yourself.
They don't want the lieutenant who got two hours of sleep last night because he was staring at a map for 10 hours.
Like they want the lieutenant well rested so he can make a decision that saves lives.
Right.
Right.
If you are more dangerous if you don't care for yourself, you don't take time for yourself.
The same thing with the family.
If you don't take care of your own family, you can't be hospitable.
Same with the nation with a common, you have a common wealth.
That wealth can then be used in hospitable ways, but you can't overdo it.
If you, I think a lot of Christians have this idea of like radical hospitality or radical this and radical that.
Yeah, David Platt sucks.
I agree.
Yeah, they treat the nation as this thing that you can destroy with your generosity.
And that's precisely what, like people like Russell Moore and others, they want.
It is a type of Christian nationalism where they're like, our Christian duty is to treat the nation as a way to fulfill our Christian duties.
Well, it's like our politicians, except instead of politicians treating the nation as a tax farm, it's pastors who treat their churches as a tithe farm, but it's all for somebody else.
Yeah, yeah.
And so, yeah, so you destroy the surplus, you destroy the wealth, you destroy the nation, you treat your own people as second.
To someone else, to others.
Yeah.
And yeah.
So, and I don't think that's my point going back to like 20 minutes ago was that that is a moral thing.
It is moral for you to consider your people first because they are like you can do good for those people.
If you're overly generous with your nation, you can actually do harm to your immediate neighbor.
So, it is moral.
What I hear you saying is, There is a mechanism for mitigating mass immigration, even if they all profess Christ and come through legal means and plan to work and plan to assimilate.
There's still, that's great, but that in itself is not sufficient.
If 4 billion people are all willing to do those things simultaneously, you can still say no.
And the reason you can say no is not arbitrary or merely preference.
It is preference, but it's preference based on morals.
But what I hear you saying, it's morals, but it's not biblicist morals with chapter and verse, it's morals derived from nature.
Well, it's, I mean, not yet.
It is morals derived from nature, but it's also political wisdom of assessing the state of your country and determining whether or not including these people or this number of people will have a detrimental effect on the people you're most obligated to.
Right.
So you could say it's a natural, I mean, I think it is a natural principle, but it really comes down to the wisdom and prudence.
So prudence is.
Prudence is just the word saying you assess the situation, you have these goods in mind, and you make a decision to maximize the good.
And sometimes that means there's cost to it.
Like you say, well, the cost is the $4 billion and have no place to go.
You only take in $200,000 or whatever the number is because you're trying to maximize a good given your order of obligation and the sort of good.
Just like you would aid your children.
Over some other child who's in the same situation.
Right.
Like that's your obligation.
That's what you do as a family.
And you feel you can have benevolence, like goodwill for that person, but you simply don't have the resources as a household to then supply the good to that other person.
Right.
Yeah.
And that's pretty much where I've landed I think that the summary law of God that I think is transcendent and timeless, found in the Decalogue, that between that, Coupled with the ceremonial law being abrogated, but the civil codes, the general equity being extracted, which I think in pretty much every case can track back to summary law.
It's an extension, a particular application of one of the Ten Commandments.
But the civil, you know, general equity of the civil law and then the summary law in the Decalogue, that this is what's clear.
And then that becomes the starting place and sets the bounds.
But I guess where I've arrived in my theology is that that sets the bounds and it, It does a lot of the heavy lifting.
It gets us, I think it gets us a lot of the way.
It's not nothing, not even close to nothing.
But there's still decisions then within those bounds.
It sets the boundaries and puts up the buffers.
But then there's still decisions by way of reason and prudence and the light of nature within those bounds that still need to be made.
Yeah.
It doesn't have, I mean, you don't have to just appeal to the light of nature.
You can apply scripture, but I think if you're in the political context, you have to first understand what's the end of.
Politics?
What are you doing when you do politics?
And you have the end being the common good of the people who are within that political community.
That's what politics is.
It's seeking after maximizing the good given the circumstances of that community.
And so you have then available means.
The means could be law, policy.
I mean, through civil governments, usually, it would be law.
And then, in order to decide upon which means or which policy you're going to enact, You have to again consider the end, which is the good.
And the definition of the good can be derived from reason, experience, and scripture.
But then you have to then you say, well, what policy is going to achieve that end of governance, the maximal good of the people who's under this political order?
And that can be a consideration of scripture experience and reason.
And if it's scripture alone, that's fine.
If it's, well, most countries do it this way and it worked for them to do it this way, so we're going to follow experience.
And then there's also reason as well.
So, yeah, I think that's like the big thing that I think is different from me and Theonomus, some hardcore Theonomus, is I treat politics as a political thing, I guess.
Instead of seeing that we have this ready made blueprint for law, and that's a function of politics to enact these laws, it's a matter of what's the end of politics, what are the means to achieving that.
And then deliberating and deciding through prudence and wisdom on how to achieve that.
So it's, and then making a decision.
Whereas theonomists tend to approach political life as more of, and correct me if I'm wrong, but many tend to think there's a non legislative function and you just have this law book already set.
This is the law of the land.
And then you just adjudicate based upon that.
That's some non legislative, not all think that in large part.
But yeah, but I think it's a matter of like, what is politics?
Yeah.
And, and, and, Acknowledge, like, well, we don't have balconies on the roof today because we're not hanging out on the roof.
But we do have seatbelts and we do have.
So they are doing that.
This is where I think someone like yourself and myself can actually have a lot of unity on this.
Yes.
Because I might be more open.
I don't know.
I might be more open to.
I don't even know.
I would be more open to taking the collective experience of pagan authors and that sort of thing and seeing how they handle this issue and all that stuff.
But if we agree on what we're trying to do when we enact a law that is for the common good of people, we're trying to make sure people don't die.
Okay.
Yeah.
It's like, yeah, we want to ban murder.
And then there's also, I mean, the positive element is promoting life, which you could probably do a lot with that.
But yeah, you can.
But I think there's a lot of commonality there.
So one side would want to say scripture alone for the devising, for deliberation upon the means.
I would say, yes, scripture, but also let's consider these other things as well.
So I think there's a lot of, so yeah, we could, I think if we were like the dual dictators or something like that, you and I could get along and, uh, I think so.
Or if we're part of the lesson.
The only difference of what you just espoused and where I would be at is you would say, yeah, well, scripture, of course, but scripture plus reason.
And what I would, the only added clarification that I would give from my personal position that is I would say, yep, scripture and reason, but scripture first, then reason.
So what I would say is, as far as we can get with scripture and its clarity applied to this particular situation.
And then the moment that we've exhausted scripture, then now reason.
And I'll be the first to acknowledge we're going to need some reason here, very likely.
But for me, it's not scripture and reason.
And we'll do some reason, then we'll do some scripture, then some more scripture, then some more reason.
For me, it'd be like the old analogy of if you have pebbles, sand, and water, and you're trying to fill a glass, you need to put the pebbles in first, and then the sand, and then the water.
And so for me, the reason would be the water, and scripture would be the pebbles.
You put the scripture in first.
But we're going to need some water too.
The pebbles will not fill every cubic inch of the glass.
It'll cover a lot of surface area, you know, but there's still going to be room for some water to fill in the gaps.
Scripture Pebbles and Water00:00:46
So, all right, cool.
We're in agreement then.
So we can end today on agreement.
There you go.
Great.
Okay.
Well, thank you guys so much for tuning in.
This was episode five in a 10 part series with myself and Dr. Wolf talking all things Christian nationalism.
I really encourage you, if this is your first one to tune into, This was a good episode.
Definitely not bad.
But episode three and four, I'm telling you, like those, episode three and four, if you're like, oh man, you know, if you're like, ah, yeah, but it wasn't that spite, this was, you know, this was like, this was more, more, more, yeah, this was, yeah, normal tastes here.
Yeah, I thought you guys were extremists.
I came to be offended.
Then watch episode four and you will be sufficiently offended.