00:11:05.800But for those of our listeners that have children around the age of 9 or 10, say, maybe could you explain what that thesis means to them in a language that they might understand for our listeners and not for me?
00:11:21.000Yeah, so in the words of O. Palmer Robertson, a covenant is a bond in blood sovereignly administered.
00:11:28.100And I think all the 9- and 10-year-olds can agree with that, right?
00:12:03.420Gravitas. Yes, it goes, it stands with him when he approached the microphone in his old age. So, yeah, when we're talking about the covenantal nature of the civil magistrate and of civil rule, we're saying essentially that civil rule ought to have an explicitly covenantal nature that would involve God, recognized as God, the people that are being governed, and the king, congressman, senator,
00:12:33.420or ruler and that the king senator ruler ought to be understanding his role as being covenantal
00:12:42.900so i'm confused brian why are you trying to force your religion on me i actually believe in forcing
00:12:48.320my religion on others no but it really is one of my religious beliefs that i want to force on others
00:12:54.660is that you should yes it really is interesting though so we had roe v wade big decision this
00:12:59.800week yeah one of the things that was talked about from the crying karens on the left was why is it
00:13:06.960well all of a sudden these conservative judges are trying to force quote-unquote force their
00:13:10.940religion on us and there's kind of a couple things here number one is the assumption that
00:13:21.480there's a neutral sphere that there's like the state is somehow not covenantally because i think
00:13:27.060that's the other side of the argument. People, even in the Christian camp, would say the civil
00:13:30.940magistrate is not in covenant with God. And you're saying the opposite. Yeah, I'm even saying that we
00:13:37.460see prophesied in places like Isaiah chapter 19, verse 21, speaking about the Egyptians, for example,
00:13:44.180that the Egyptians in the era of the new covenant would know the Lord and they would vow a vow unto
00:13:49.780the Lord, we're even told, and shall perform it. So when we look at the Old Testament vision for
00:13:55.300what's going to be taking place under the era in which Christ is reigning on his throne,
00:14:01.400where Christ has been established on his throne. As for me, I've set my king on Zion, on my holy
00:14:06.900hill. As God says, that one of the implications is that not just individual human beings floating
00:14:13.700around like isolated atoms, but even families and peoples and nations would turn to the Lord.
00:14:22.440And we can see this even in places like, for example, Psalm 22 is another place.
00:14:27.920Let me see if I can pull up some of my references here.
00:14:31.520We're told that all the ends of the earth will remember and turn to the Lord,
00:14:35.460that all of the kindreds of the nations would worship before God
00:14:39.700because the kingdom is the Lord's and he is the governor among the nations.
00:14:44.800We're told in Isaiah 9 that of the increase of his government of peace,
00:15:08.100We look at the Westminster Shorter Catechism,
00:15:11.540where we see even a category for national covenant being established there.
00:15:17.100There, for example, we see question 62 here in, I believe this is Fisher's Catechism, which was an exposition of the Westminster Shorter Catechism.
00:15:29.320He includes this question, when doth such a social vow commonly get the name of a national covenant?
00:15:37.940He says, answer, when the representatives of a nation or the better part of them concur in a covenant of duties as ingrafted upon the covenant of grace.
00:15:47.560And he quotes Jeremiah chapter 50, where it says, the children of Israel shall come, they and the children of Judah together, saying, come, let us join ourselves to the Lord in a perpetual covenant that shall not be forgotten.
00:16:01.020And then he goes on in Fisher's Catechism to talk about some of these passages like Isaiah 19, 21, 2 Chronicles 15, Nehemiah 9, and talk about these duties where peoples and nations and the leaders of those nations explicitly rule with the awareness of their office being given to them by God and not a generic God.
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00:18:13.920So I think it's a phenomenal point, Brian, but Dan, it brings up the question for me.
00:18:18.100If city fathers are supposed to be explicitly aware of the covenantal nature of their office, who would be the ones in society reminding them, making them aware that that is a covenantal duty?
00:18:32.660Well, yeah, I think you have multiple fronts on that.
00:18:34.880First, you have the fathers of families in our representative republic who are representing them, and also the church is to inform the state as to what is the law of God that they're supposed to uphold.
00:18:52.760When I read this thesis, the thing that I read was godly city fathers must fear the Lord. They must fear the Lord, and especially in positions of authority. On a different project that Eric and I are doing, Wilderness Warrior, we're going through the story of endurance with Ernest Shackleton, where there's a shipwreck crew.
00:19:18.180And at one point, the captain, Ernest Shackleton, he has to leave his men in this crazy journey across the sea, the most dangerous sea in the world in a 22-foot boat.
00:19:32.280And he has all of his men left behind, most of his men left behind on an island that are depending on him to go get help.
00:19:40.660and he knows that if he fails, if he dies, he is going to be a curse to those men. They're
00:19:47.520never going to be found. Nobody will know that they're alive. They're going to die.
00:19:52.940In the same way, city fathers should have the awareness of the fear of the Lord because there
00:19:59.540are people that are depending on them that God will either bless through their work and the fear
00:20:05.640of the Lord, or will curse his people through his disobedience to the Lord. And so we talked
00:20:13.580earlier about how a good government operating well, it's like freshly mown grass that the dew
00:20:19.760descends. That's blessing, right? There's peace. But the same could be said about a civil government
00:20:25.220that does not fear the Lord and does not obey him as the deacon or the servant of the Lord.
00:20:31.580He will actually bring covenantal cursing upon his people.
00:20:36.600Well, and this is why I think covenant lawsuit is so important in the prophetic writings,
00:20:41.100which basically are all in the Old Testament, they're all pointing back to Deuteronomy.
00:22:18.860And the thing is, even if they did do that, they ought to be able to recognize that, like what Paul does in Romans 1 through 3, that they stand condemned before God and need, which is a covenant, that's a covenantal conclusion.
00:22:32.240Basically, I would need, because of my condemnation before a holy God,
00:22:35.780which I know based on the light of reason, the light of conscience,
00:22:38.760even the light in nature, God's revelation that is clearly seen by all,
00:22:42.960that God is, even on the basis of that,
00:22:45.880the nations ought to be able to understand that their only hope
00:22:49.520is to sue God for grace and for mercy, is basically to petition God.
00:22:54.560So the scriptures do talk like this in the Old Testament and in the New Testament.
00:22:59.680I read the Revelation passage that the kingdoms of men have become the kingdoms of our Lord Jesus
00:23:04.100Christ. We see things like, think about Psalm 2. What is the heritage or the inheritance of Christ,
00:23:12.020of the Son? It's the nations. Ask of me and I will make the nations your heritage. Well,
00:23:17.920what if we keep reading in the Psalter and we get to Psalm 9? Well, we'll see that the wicked,
00:23:22.560not only will the wicked be turned to hell, but all the nations that forget God. Nations as nations
00:23:28.920will be consigned to covenantal curses if they forget God. Okay, well, what about the nation
00:23:35.980and kingdom that will not serve the people of God? Well, they will perish. Yea, the nations
00:23:40.860shall be utterly wasted, Isaiah chapter 60, verse 12. So over and over, this is a relentless theme
00:23:45.860of the Old Testament, that nations as nations who do not turn and worship to God, and especially
00:23:52.260in prophecy, in the era after this very key pivotal event has happened, which is the event
00:23:58.380wherein Christ tears down the dividing wall of hostility between the Jew and the Greek.
00:24:04.440In the Old Testament, Israel was the covenantal nation in a special, unique way amongst the
00:24:10.800nations. And yet one of the features and the glories of the new covenant is that Christ in
00:24:17.280his body has torn down the wall of hostility. And now, because he has died and has been buried and
00:24:24.320has been raised and has been enthroned, the Son of God from the right hand of the Father is
00:24:28.240asking his father, give me the nations as my heritage. And now that wall of hostility is
00:24:33.720demolished. And so our duty is what? Matthew 28. It's to go and disciple the nations and baptize
00:24:41.160the nations and teach the nations to obey Christ. Sounds like nationalism.
00:24:47.660Yeah. Nationalism is good, actually. One of the questions I want to ask Brian is,
00:24:52.100so I read a book. It's James Davidson Hunter, How to Change the World or to Change the World.
00:24:58.240It really expounds the Tim Keller view on this.
00:26:46.160See, what we have today is a state of affairs in which secularism as a religious ideology is countenanced and supported by the state and what we ought to not only aim for, but actually expect to happen in the fullness of time because of the promises of God in places like Isaiah and Jeremiah in the Old Testament, as well as in the New Testament.
00:27:08.360And I mean, just the Psalms. Time would fail to talk about all the places in Psalms. We should actually expect for the state to actually be expected, expected to privilege the Christian faith explicitly and be, as we quoted in the last episode, nursing fathers to the church.
00:27:30.260Which is interesting, because when you look at even the founding of our country, what so often gets peddled as separation of church and state, it's clear that what they didn't mean is what we have in mind with secularism today.
00:27:46.040And you can see that in the fact that the Establishment Clause is forbidding a federal or on the national level establishing of a state church or of a federal national church.
00:27:57.100but there were many years during the early founding when states actually had state churches
00:28:02.460where they had established state churches and they were like yeah here in uh here in uh what's
00:28:08.080pennsylvania we're this and it was a christian church it is interesting too because luther
00:28:12.920being two kingdom i think he was also in favor of a uh some form of state church as well which
00:28:19.440is interesting when you go when you understand like a classic protestant political theology
00:28:50.720and you're in danger anytime I say something
00:28:52.620like that of, I'm painting with a broad brush. You're going to find exceptions. But generally,
00:28:57.580it seems like the view that came out of much of this stream of theology is basically that
00:29:04.540the church is an institution instituted by God that has a specific sphere of authority and duties
00:29:10.660to which it's obligated to discharge, and that also the state is a sphere of authority that
00:29:17.080was instituted by God, and it has its own lane. Essentially, this is the 12th thesis that it's
00:29:22.000supposed to stay in its lane, but that they're both instituted by God, and they both actually
00:29:27.000have obligations to obey the God of Scripture, right? And I think that that's just kind of lost
00:29:33.220in a lot of our modern—we've been so washed in secularism, in these concepts of political
00:29:40.320neutrality that are just absolutely farcical. You cannot have political neutrality.
00:29:45.920Well, and I think there was a time where political neutrality seemed plausible or possible
00:29:51.740if you're talking about like the five years after enlightenment interrupted christian thinking
00:29:57.400and so there was still enough peace and order left in society that you're like okay maybe it
00:30:01.660won't be so bad yeah correct me if i'm wrong i feel like roe v wade a lot that's going on in
00:30:06.660the culture i feel like the script is getting flipped here and people are going you know you've
00:30:12.860heard a lot of people complain oh society is so polarized i actually think it's a really good
00:30:18.640thing that society has polarized. You had the whole boomer middle for 50 years who were
00:30:23.540milquetoast, neutral, you know, just what are you? What do you believe? I believe whatever's
00:30:29.780not going to get me in conflict. So now, I don't know, correct me if I'm wrong, but it seems like
00:30:35.180people are saying, I think I could be with this covenantal nature of the civil magistrate office.
00:30:41.000And yes, our Supreme Court justices should be legislating Christian morality.
00:30:45.860do i think that that's the case right now i think there's a growing movement that's what i'm saying
00:30:51.460here's what i to i know this is not exactly the direction of our outline so it could be
00:30:56.700could be my fault but i i think we would be remiss to not bring this up we brought up the duties of
00:31:03.460the civil magistrate to fear god because of covenant blessings and curses and they're standing
00:31:08.840before god and you asked earlier eric whose responsibility is that to remind them yeah and
00:31:14.280And then you brought up examples of how the church is actually not just failing or neglecting the duty, but actively discouraging Christians and the church to correct the magistrates.
00:31:27.960And so what happens to those churches if the civil government, if the state is under the judgment of God for neglecting the covenant, then how much more the church?
00:32:31.220And there's no like, but if you repent, it'll be all good.
00:32:34.200No, he's just heaping curses on this leadership.
00:32:38.180So I think that's a parallel in a picture for what's coming for those in leadership who do not repent and who don't fulfill this role.
00:32:48.140You're supposed to call the magistrates to faith and to obey the law of God, and they're doing the exact opposite.
00:32:54.840When we understand the nature of God's working in history as being fundamentally covenantal, we begin to see, because again, O. Palmer Robertson talks about a covenant as a bond in blood sovereignly administered, and you could add to that that it comes with attendant blessings and curses for obedience and disobedience to the covenant to God.
00:33:16.540So that goes all the way up and all the way down. I mean, that's true of an individual's life. If you, by grace and through faith, again, we're not talking about mere human effort autonomous from God. No, but if by grace and through faith you obey God and you read the Proverbs and you take to heart all that Christ commanded and you've been faithfully shepherded by pastors who take seriously the command of Matthew 28 to teach all that Christ commanded.
00:33:44.460Well, you're going to, as you increasingly see the light of God's revelation unfold in
00:33:50.280your darkened heart, you're going to see God's blessing.
00:38:12.960So when we talk about, this is even, I think we have listeners
00:38:15.480who are probably unfamiliar with how to thread the needle on these things.
00:38:18.580They know that we're Reformed and Protestant, Presbyterian, but it's like, okay, how do we think about this?
00:38:24.720Well, the Reformation doctrine of sola scriptura affirms that the scriptures are the only infallible rule of authority for life and doctrine.
00:38:32.540It doesn't say that tradition or that those things that are spoken are not an authority at all.
00:38:37.620They're just not an infallible authority.
00:38:39.480So we judge their rulings against the light of scripture, but we don't dishonor our father and mother and just throw them out.
00:38:46.960Yeah, and that's been one of, I think, one of the errors is that we tend to look at Catholicism, and you can want to throw the baby out with the bathwater, or just say that everything that they did was bad, we're going to do the opposite, whatever it was.
00:38:58.320A lot of things they did were fine and good, and one of the things, too, is church authority.
00:39:03.920I think one of the things we definitely are missing in Protestantism, and you see this with the SBC, you see it with the PCA, I see it with pastors who are struggling in churches, and church discipline between them and their elders, they don't know what to do.
00:39:16.020And it's like, this is why you need a broader church.
00:39:19.480We shouldn't all just be dislocated individuals.
00:39:22.840And so I would even say on issues like this, the reason we're trying to bring people together on these core doctrines is because we're hoping for the day when the church is one.
00:39:36.240So when we come into this next point, we're now starting to talk about some of the overlap in relationship between this body politic or between this civil magistrate, the state political authority that God has established, and he's given certain duties to that political authority, and he's given the church, and the church has certain duties.
00:39:57.420But there is this question where there's some overlap.
00:39:59.880There's going to be some overlap, and there are going to be some areas since the church is made up of individuals,
00:40:04.560family authorities made up of individuals, the nation's made up of people with churches in it, and all sorts of questions.
00:40:10.000So it's like, how should the state relate to the sphere of the church?
00:40:16.020And we're saying in the ninth thesis that godly city fathers, that godly political authority is to actually be nursing father.
00:40:24.460it's to be a defender of the Christian cultists, that essentially it is supposed to establish a
00:40:32.740state of affairs of cooperation with the Christian religion in a deliberate sort of choice to support
00:40:42.040and help maintain the Christian religion. Yeah, and you can even see this in places like Nehemiah,
00:40:48.080Ezra, where the king has sent the people, Nehemiah and Ezra, and other people as well,
00:40:54.180to go rebuild the temple to restore worship, cultists, et cetera.
00:41:00.480And let me read from Calvin here, because I think people hear that and they're like,
00:41:04.120this is where it starts to sound really foreign.
00:41:07.740People are like, what about the separation of church and state?
00:41:14.400Well, John Calvin in the Institutes wrote that civil government prevents idolatry, sacrilege against God's name, blasphemies against his truth, and other public offenses against religion from arising and spreading amongst the people.
00:41:30.960It prevents the public peace from being disturbed. It provides that each man may keep his property safe and sound, that men may carry on blameless intercourse among themselves, that honesty and modesty be preserved among men.
00:41:42.460in short, he says, it provides that a public manifestation of religion may exist among
00:41:47.820Christians and that humanity may be maintained among men. Law of God forbids killing, but that
00:41:52.560murderers may not go unpunished. The lawgiver himself puts into the hand of the ministers
00:41:56.860a sword to be drawn against all murderers. So you see where Calvin is essentially in that list
00:42:04.500in a way that would probably make 99% of modern Christians highly uncomfortable.
00:42:09.800he just mingles together like what we would consider normal political duties with like oh
00:42:14.860yeah and preventing blasphemies well the thing is with the previous theses that we've gone through
00:42:21.260we've established that the civil magistrate should be uh informed by the law of god and they should
00:42:29.600enforce it as a deacon of the lord amongst all the other things that we've said in previous episodes
00:42:34.600that i'm not recalling off the top of my head but essentially that you see that the the state is
00:42:39.400going to function this way anyway, right? The state functions this way anyway. Look out in
00:42:45.020front of most city halls in America in the month of June. And I wouldn't be surprised if most of
00:42:52.680them have some sort of gay flag waving out in front of city hall. Well, yeah, Dan, and something0.97
00:43:00.860you talk about a lot in this show and elsewhere, but every culture has blasphemy laws. The reason1.00
00:43:07.620that we have you know i think was iowa a few years back somebody burned a gay flag on a church and
00:43:13.140they got like 25 years in prison or something crazy for hate speech yeah yeah so you know that
00:43:19.000hate speech hate crime is really it is this category of blasphemy law so even when we think
00:43:25.860we're escaping it through secularism we're really not and i think correct me if i'm wrong that's
00:43:30.600what you're driving yeah that's what i'm saying even today i had read an article it was called
00:43:34.240uh, rainbow washing, I believe is what it was called. Yeah. And it was essentially a group,
00:43:40.380uh, in the LGBTQ, whatever community that was, uh, taking issue and lobbying, uh, for the fact
00:43:49.520that a lot of companies use the rainbow flag to, for their brand to perpetuate their brand for
00:43:56.340image and things like that. But they actually don't have any metrics to measure how many
00:44:01.220homosexuals and transgender folks that they're hiring and that they aren't donating money to0.99
00:44:06.880those causes so they should not be allowed to use the rainbow flag in their marketing1.00
00:44:12.000when you said folks i'm assuming you are that's the word spelled f-o-l-x right0.99
00:44:17.200i'm sorry transgender folks why are you gay are you assuming i'm i just want to make sure because
00:44:23.280otherwise i didn't i'm just making sure that you're speaking in a a way that's um nuanced
00:44:28.820properly. You ugly. Well, and following our blasphemy. I can barely speak English,0.99
00:44:33.020much less nuanced English. So I mean, the point is that there are priests in our society,
00:44:39.740they're lobbying the government to enforce their blasphemy laws. That's what I'm saying.0.99
00:44:44.600Yeah. And I would actually argue even further, Dan, and I think what you're saying is absolutely
00:44:49.080true. So look at the Ten Commandments. Every single thing in our culture, LGBT, wokeness,
00:44:55.280whatever, has an equivalent of the Ten Commandments.
00:46:18.620Come be a part of Christendom Bible College.
00:46:21.380Visit us on the web at ChristendomBibleCollege.org to learn more.
00:46:26.440While there, be sure to sign up for our email updates and receive your free three-chapter excerpt of our very own Dr. Frank J. Smith's new book, Race, Church, and Society.
00:46:37.120so think about this even in in that religion the leftist lgbt religion they're claiming something0.55
00:46:47.720about the fifth commandment in terms of how worship should impact parenting even right so
00:46:53.680like yeah the point is you can't escape religion no no and so the choice is we keep coming back to
00:47:00.440this and everything what we're doing is it's not uh whether but which exactly right you're going
00:47:05.480the state is going to support some religion the question is which one and and that is the key
00:47:10.340point to understand when you start getting into this area where people are uncomfortable with the
00:47:14.620idea of the the state serving as a nursing father to the church and establishing and promoting the
00:47:20.240Christian religion in some way and what we don't mean by that necessarily is that the church is
00:47:24.780or that the state ought to establish some hyper specific denomination there's a there's a spectrum
00:47:31.880of ideas, and there's a whole debate under this. You could read, there's a bunch of good stuff on
00:47:36.140purelypresbyterian.com, on the establishment principle, national covenanting, and they go
00:47:41.280into all sorts of resources that you can really get granular on this stuff. But what we should
00:47:46.800all understand is that it is a not whether but which, where this is just a feature of authority,
00:47:53.360is that you are going to promote some standard of good and wrong, of blasphemy. For example,
00:48:01.000For example, there's a systematic theology written by John Brown of Haddington, and he said this.
00:48:07.380He said, as heads of families ought to promote sound principles and holy practices in their families, magistrates ought to promote and establish the reformation of doctrine, worship, discipline in the government and government of the church and their dominions as a means of promoting their happiness.
00:48:22.520and for this end may call synods of church offices for officers for settling and governing
00:48:29.520her affairs according to the word of God. Like in the cold open that Dan was describing at the
00:48:35.880beginning of this episode with Constantine and Arius and the Nicene Creed and where we got that,
00:48:42.580we see this was mainstream in reform doctrine. The Westminster Confession of Faith in chapter 23,
00:48:50.340especially paragraphs three and four, it talks about the civil magistrate. It's not allowed to
00:48:56.440assume to itself the administration of the word or sacraments, the things that are given to the
00:49:00.400church, but it says the civil magistrate has authority and it is his duty to take order that
00:49:05.860unity and peace be preserved in the church, that the truth of God be kept pure and entire,
00:49:10.740that all blasphemies and heresies are suppressed, all corruption and abuses in worship and discipline
00:49:15.060prevented or reformed, and all the ordinances of God duly settled, administered, and observed
00:49:19.540for the better affecting whereof he hath the power to call synods and to be present at them
00:49:25.560and provide that whatsoever is transacted in them be according to the mind of god
00:49:32.140could you imagine joe biden joe biden saying hey church everybody denominations protestant
00:49:39.640denominations you guys need to get together and figure out this lady pastors thing and i'm gonna
00:49:43.400sit and i'm gonna watch but you have to come to washington yep and and figure this out yeah we're
00:49:48.200going to call the heads of the, we're going to call a synod. We're going to figure out this
00:49:51.880eternal functional subordination question. We're going to figure out this lady pastor thing. I0.92
00:49:56.240want you guys to come together here six months, clear your schedule. And the thing is, how far
00:50:02.860have, but back to the point before I move on, back to the point. I really like this subject,
00:50:07.360so there's a lot of thoughts in my head, but that is inescapable. That is inescapable.
00:50:13.700authorities that are authorities ordained by god fathers pastors civil magistrates
00:50:20.560like you've been saying eric and dan you can't get away from the establishment or promotion of some
00:50:28.560moral vision which is in in inescapably religious you just can't get away from that so you see that
00:50:37.160with Roe. Yeah. Exposed right now. Exactly. Yeah. I mean, and I think that's one reason why the
00:50:44.160really this sexuality cult, a lot of false religion, idolatry throughout the ages has had
00:50:50.200some connected sex cult. Yeah. And that's really what we're seeing with LGBT. And also just look0.92
00:50:55.900at the way that people approach it. Right. It's not in the 90s. They kind of feigned this with
00:51:01.280like, you know, don't ask, don't tell was a military principle, meaning you can practice
00:51:06.380homosexuality just don't talk about it and so that really was you know coming in the side door
00:51:12.240i think yeah and they said no no no no no you know we just want to do our thing you do your thing
00:51:16.760and then once it kind of became acceptable you had the will and grace culture but but where we are
00:51:22.320now is no like it's in the curriculum you will be taught this if you don't believe this we will take
00:51:28.340your kids um and and definitely we're saying it's not even enough to just accept it you have to
00:51:33.300celebrate it. Yeah, you have to be glad about it. You have to worship it. Yeah, that's right. You
00:51:37.200have to pinch of incense. Yeah, and so that's where we're at, but I think it's more out in
00:51:43.220the open that you can see this is being approached with religious fervor, because it's a religion.
00:51:48.960Yes. And really, obviously, again, I have claimed that we're going to make it through,
00:51:54.300so we're going to keep moving to number 10 here in a moment, but to sum up what we just said,
00:51:58.180what we're saying is that the civil magistrate, a godly city father, would seek to establish
00:52:06.080a state of affairs where, in his realm, the Christian faith was privileged. Where he was
00:52:12.360saying, without reservation, this is a Christian people, we worship the true and living God,
00:52:18.260where they say, our laws are going to be based on the unchanging character of God,
00:52:26.080So our positive and our negative moral laws are going to be based on the equity of God's law.
00:52:30.620We're going to say, here's the principle of the Ten Commandments.
00:57:29.660One of you was talking about that before, right, where if like a church existed of another like faith, synagogue, something like that, like where you didn't have to promote its upkeep, but you didn't necessarily like close it down.0.76
00:57:43.060Yeah, that's actually a Muslim law that they would say that people of the books, so Jews or Christians, are allowed to worship in their land in very limited ways.
00:57:51.560They're not allowed to evangelize publicly.
00:57:54.160They're not allowed to – it's actually a capital crime to convert from Islam to Christianity to another faith.0.95
00:58:00.860And then you can keep – like you can keep worshiping in a lot of places in the church, but you're not allowed to upkeep it.1.00
00:58:06.800So essentially over time it's supposed to fall into disrepair and the Muslims are supposed to win.1.00
00:58:11.420I don't think that I'm ready to go to all of the levels of detail of saying like here's exactly how we would thread the needle on all of these down-the-road questions.1.00
00:58:21.560and I think that these sorts of things, again,
00:58:24.500are like an episode or nothing kind of questions.
00:58:26.820I would see a state of affairs where you would have.
01:08:06.300and and so Planned Parenthood was asking for a stay like for a suspension so that they could
01:08:12.240sue the state anyway but it's a lower level court the judge said okay yeah we'll we'll stop the
01:08:19.640trigger law we'll stop the trigger law and one of the reasons he gave is that it doesn't matter
01:08:25.940anyway because it's going to be pushed up to higher courts oh really because there's0.96
01:08:31.320Mr. Should I call you Mr. Why are you gay?0.78
01:08:34.880And so I think what you see, this goes along with the downfall of masculinity, the lack of courage that men have in order to stand up in the face of oppression.0.97
01:08:47.780And this idea of like a huge centralized entity and not subsidiarity, not taking responsibility.0.65
01:08:55.960You see men like this that are essentially just cowards that just try to get out of the way.0.66
01:09:01.320Yeah. Well, they push it up the chain. They've been trained because they live in a bureaucracy.0.99
01:09:05.340Yeah. They live in a centralized job of the state environment.
01:09:09.620So I think the thing is, like in 1900, you had men working on farms, fathers training sons, ministers training those who went to college.
01:09:17.900Yeah. In everything we've been talking about in these 12 points.
01:09:21.540OK, so in that era, like you had daily habitual training on how to be a man, how to be courageous, how to take responsibility.
01:09:28.940now like cradle to grave people are trained in how to do whatever the guy above you says no
01:09:34.900matter what don't think about it just do it you won't get in trouble for pushing it up the chain
01:09:39.880you might get in trouble for making a concrete decision you might get in trouble for actually
01:09:44.160taking responsibility for something maybe you'll do it wrong so instead we've been trained by the
01:09:49.240vast bloated bureaucracy to push responsibility up the chain and that's why you have managers
01:09:54.420and almost in everything from government to business,
01:09:56.980whose whole job is just to make all of the decisions
01:09:59.940that people three steps down the chain
01:12:39.540Well, so imagine the frustrations of people that live in states like Illinois or California or Washington or Oregon or other places that have vast, vast parts of the state are conservative.0.91
01:12:55.440They're Christian and they're controlled by one central entity in the city.0.60
01:13:03.320And all of this is, like, where this really meets the road is that when you have the 11th, this is a super smooth transition I'm about to do, when you have a people who are actually living out our 11th thesis that Christians should live truly political lives, as the Greeks defined it, which is a life enmesh in the affairs of the polis in a way that contributes to the good of his neighbor, not lives of barbarism.
01:13:26.460when you have a people who are living truly political lives, which are lives lived for
01:13:31.860the good of their neighbor and the neighbors that they know, not this faceless global neighbor,
01:13:35.680they have no idea who it is, but the people who are actually near them and in their sphere of
01:13:40.280influence. When you have people living political lives like that, and then someone comes in from
01:13:46.000outside and they steal away your authority, they steal away your authority. Well, you know what
01:13:52.580that is, that's violence. Like they're doing violence to your lives and they're actually
01:13:58.160undermining your point. And here's the thing, boys. I know that I said we're going to get
01:14:02.780through all of them because we are. Number 12, the 12 theses about the fathers knowing their
01:14:06.900sphere of authority and what's not in it. We've talked about that quite a bit already through
01:14:10.620this. So I want to land the plane here and get your last thoughts here. When we say political
01:14:15.040lives that aren't lives of barbarism, what are we talking about there? And why is this what it
01:14:22.220looks like to live out this principle of subsidiarity for men and fathers and mothers to
01:14:27.860take responsibility for their communities, their churches, their families, their lives.
01:14:33.640What does this look like, and why are we contrasting it with barbarism?
01:14:38.420Yeah, man, what a great question. I think it goes back to something that we talked about
01:14:41.760in the episodes, Carl Truman's book, Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self. Part of the problem
01:14:48.300is that we even have this conception of self apart from household or godliness and piety
01:14:54.300apart from a household. For you to think in a Paulus way, you have to be so connected to your
01:15:00.720local people and place, meaning not only that you have this cute hipster interest in their lives
01:15:06.980every Saturday morning at the farmer's market, but it means that you actually have a real need
01:15:12.800for each other? Yes. Like you have real dependences, intergenerational local dependences
01:15:18.440on one another. If Dan doesn't provide the milk, our family doesn't have milk. If Kevin doesn't
01:15:26.080show up and fix my plumbing, it won't get fixed. We have real dependence on one another in the
01:15:32.440local church community as well. And so as we start to have that, then we're engaged locally.
01:15:38.620This is taking subsidiarity and then driving it and walking it out on a daily basis.
01:15:45.260And here's actually the crazy thing I think about.
01:15:48.220You hear all the cuckold conservatives complaining and crying and all the spilt milk over the global government.
01:15:56.820The global government starts to fall apart the moment you take responsibility for your own existence.
01:16:02.660Because we actually – here's what's crazy.
01:16:04.760people like, well, the state, the state educates my kids and there's nothing I can do. And I just
01:16:10.060throw the BS flag. That's absolute cop out. There are things that you can do. You can start educating
01:16:15.720your children locally. You can start taking responsibility for your children, homeschool
01:16:20.480them, go to Ogden, Utah, put them in St. Brennan's Academy. We will help you educate your children
01:16:26.600in a way that is Christ honoring. But I think that's what it means is we've got to take
01:16:31.340responsibility at the local levels. Our church took responsibility with schooling. You can do
01:16:37.060that. You can, you know, as bad as things were during the, you know, shamdemic, there's a lot1.00
01:16:43.520of people who are not vaccinated, right? There's a lot of people who said, yeah, I'm not doing that.
01:16:49.440You know, we refuse to play this game. Well, if you had a country of people doing that at a million
01:16:55.040local levels across the United States. Yes. Global homo dies. You know, I had this crazy idea
01:17:02.480that I pitched to a gentleman that's involved, a member of our church. He's involved in politics
01:17:08.260in the state of Utah, especially at the county level. And I said to this man, I said, you know,
01:17:13.560it would be a radical idea is you should propose abolishing property taxes in Weber County.
01:17:20.000Absolutely. You should abolish. And let me tell you why. And I think this is a good
01:17:24.860example it's a it is a crazy example in our time of loving your neighbor because i want to be able
01:17:31.800to have the the bundersons next door to where i live actually own their property yeah that's right
01:17:38.960they're not just renting from the state yeah i want them to be able to stay there i want the
01:17:44.340sove family to have their house and to actually be able to own it and not have to be plundered
01:18:18.880and they're not stealing from you anymore.
01:18:21.020rent money or taxes. Can you imagine what would happen though? Like we talk about burning the
01:18:25.380boats and staying in a place, investing locally. Can you imagine what would happen if you didn't
01:18:30.060have property tax just in one county in America? Do you know what would happen to people wanting
01:18:34.640to own land here? It would be the most valuable county in the US. Our values would go up 20%
01:18:41.240overnight. Even if a standard home costs $800,000 in that world where there's no property tax,
01:18:48.440you would still have people investing in it because they say yeah but once i pay this off
01:18:52.680i own it i own it outright forever it's actually a way that inflation property taxes are a way
01:18:59.340to continue to enslave people uh and not and not be able to avoid the shackle of inflation
01:19:06.500that's right sorry that was just it just came to mind because inflation is a tax that gets
01:19:12.220it the expense of it goes up over time so your property value goes up with inflation because
01:19:19.560it doesn't go as far either and so your taxes go up correct yeah everything ends up getting
01:19:24.700more expensive even the amount of taxes that they're pulling pulling from you that they're
01:19:29.020stealing from you uh doesn't go as far so they need to continue to raise taxes or to inflate
01:19:34.020money which is just another tax but anyway the point is if it thinking locally like that that
01:19:40.380would just be a, a radical example. And there are many, many, I love the community example that Eric
01:19:45.860gave about just depending on one another. And you only get that if you're rooted in a place.
01:19:50.740Well, and I think cultivating the mindset, um, so you can check out a hard men podcast episodes I did
01:19:55.640on Aeneas, uh, Pietas, Gravitas and Octoritas talks a lot about this and the polis, but really
01:20:03.080when you think about wanting to win glory and win distinction for your people, like your local
01:20:09.780people. Your people. When we think about the work that we do, whether it's pastoring, whether it's
01:20:15.080business, whatever it is, we want to bring glory to our people. Yeah, we want to serve them.
01:20:21.140But we have this, I mean, Brian brought this up, and I know I've mentioned this before, but in
01:20:25.560the Lord's Prayer, it's our. It's not my. That's right. And so when I pray, Lord, give us our
01:20:32.220daily bread. Every time I pray that, I should be thinking about the men in the church who need
01:20:36.800work. I should be thinking about the single mothers. I should be thinking about the people1.00
01:20:41.160who are going through a tough work experience. I should be praying for us. And if we become so
01:20:47.100rooted in that us, in our people, in a brotherhood, in a gang, then I think, yeah, you're going to
01:20:52.800have a very different, over time, perspective about the polis versus, yeah, there's just this
01:20:58.420some giant state. I don't really know them. They don't know me and they take all my money.
01:21:03.240And your goal is, our goal as Christians should be to establish cities and towns.
01:21:10.120And even if it's just free markets, first households, I mean, let's start there, households and then churches and then towns and then cities and then counties.
01:21:17.420And then maybe, Lord willing, someday states and then maybe someday, Lord willing, a nation that would say we are going to be the kind of people who actually try to give the power, the authority to the people who have taken the responsibility so that the people who are living truly political lives, who have a vested ownership interest in a people, they are the ones who are shaping the polis.
01:21:43.380They're the ones who are shaping the political life of that community. So this is a reason why people make fun of this. But in earlier, before we got secular modernism, it was things like landed people who were allowed to vote, people who owned land, people who had a vested interest.
01:21:59.480And there are ways in which that has been perverted in oppressive ways.
01:23:40.460They don't know their right hand from their left hand.0.99
01:23:42.700And we don't want societies that are ruled like that by animalian appetites.
01:23:47.480We want societies that are ruled by people who are truly political.
01:23:52.400They have a vested, bought-in, costly stake in the community.
01:23:58.480And it's when you get that when people actually do band together and they say no to the judge at the state level that's trying to take their authority from them.
01:24:29.620And by the way, if you try to operate, it is illegal and we'll punish to the full extent of the law.
01:24:34.720And if you have the capital in a place where you've actually done the work over generations and you own that township and they try to bring it in and quote some federal laws at you, that's the point where you can actually say.
01:24:47.480No, you don't understand. If you try to open this business in our township, the men of this town will be at the front door barring the way, and you will not get in. It won't happen. And that's what happens when men take responsibility and women take responsibility for their own local people, their own local place. And they say, as for me and my house, as for me and my place, we'll serve the Lord.
01:25:13.360So in closing, I just want to anticipate an objection to this project that we did.
01:25:20.440What about the people that say, oh, you just have this utopian ideal.
01:25:25.280You're just trying to force heaven onto earth.
01:26:15.420But I think what we are saying is this is, again, a witch-weather question.
01:26:21.860Everybody has a view of what they think the ideal society should look like.0.98
01:26:26.580The secular humanists are trying to get there through the green energy and bug meat and killing all your babies.0.58
01:26:32.860And really, they're even trying to get there at the point of the sword of the big government, of machine guns and tanks and predator drones and the surveillance state.0.94
01:26:43.260And now using the corporate to control people.
01:26:45.800They're advancing their religion at the point of the bullet.
01:26:49.520Yeah, and I would even say some of that has shifted, right, where it's like at the point of not so much a bullet anymore, but of corporate America, your livelihood, which may actually be more lethal.
01:27:00.500Like, we're just going to take away your livelihood.
01:27:02.480If you don't think the group think like us, then we're going to take your job away.
01:27:07.340Is it going to be execution at 1,100 feet per second or over 70 years?
01:27:15.580So I think fundamentally there's always a view of utopia.
01:27:20.320Sort of like Francis Schaeffer always did this.
01:27:22.000He said every religion has a view of creation, fall, redemption.
01:27:26.080The question is what is it and what does it look like?
01:27:28.340And as Christians, what we're saying is that all of this stuff is bottom-up, grassroots, leaven, and yes, the civil magistrate has authority to, at the point of the sword, do certain things that are actually not aimed first at changing hearts as a primary.
01:28:55.400So when we say that we're Christians, what we're saying is that we're bent on world domination.
01:29:01.700I mean, this is something that Christians need to recover.
01:29:04.320When we say we're Christians, what we should understand that to mean is that we're bent on world domination, not through the point of the sword.
01:29:13.000The weapons of our warfare are not of the flesh, but they have a divine power to tear down strongholds and every lofty opinion raised against the knowledge of God.
01:29:18.280So we are aiming for world domination, not through M16s and tanks.
01:29:23.740we're aiming to wage spiritual war that would capture the hearts of humanity.