00:05:47.520We hope that you'll make it your life's work to take up whatever tools the Lord has given
00:05:51.820you in whatever place the Lord has called you and to throw yourself into the work of
00:05:57.560this cathedral with your whole self and whole life.
00:06:01.020So to do that in this season, we've had to begin with some demolition work, clearing the job site of our cathedral, of all of the debris that's been in its way.
00:06:09.980And since, of course, judgment begins with the household of God, so have we.
00:06:13.880So we've been aiming our sledgehammer so far, mainly at those models and doctrinal systems and cheesy Jesus junk that will need to go if we're to see the cathedral grow up.
00:06:23.980the big, fast, and famous of megachurchianity, the high-octane emotionalism of revivalism,
00:06:29.780the pessimism of dispensational Darbyism, and more. And though there is more that we could say
00:06:36.540on the household of faith side of things, it's time for us to take up our axes in the spirit of
00:06:43.180our great forefather Boniface and stride up to the green groves and sacred trees and high places
00:06:49.160of pagan worship that have also infested the land.
00:07:17.360So when you understand what we've been talking about for the last few episodes, that our task, the mission of God, is to disciple the nations, you immediately recognize that you're being confronted with this fact that the nations need to be converted.
00:07:31.260If we're going to disciple them, they need to be converted.
00:07:35.900And so in the next few episodes, we'll be identifying some of the demonic ideologies that undergird the demonic secular humanism and religion that the West is given over to right now, and especially the demonic ideology that undergirds much of probably what's under your feet in your neighborhoods and that you see on TV and on the Internet.
00:07:59.980And this was alluded to really in that passage from Nietzsche, that the idea that God is dead,
00:08:04.700but more that we killed him and that we decided that his absence was a job opening and now we
00:08:10.800are God. And so the idol that we think we're worshiping is actually ourselves.
00:08:15.080So to begin in this episode, we're going to do a flyover of that pagan and idolatrous landscape
00:08:21.540and ask questions like which idols need to be knocked down? What do the people of the land
00:08:25.860believe, where are they enslaved and how, what has brought them to that slavery, what has brought
00:08:31.000them to worship these gods in these ways. And so our goal today is to lay out a creed of their
00:08:37.220high places or like their confession of faith. And so we have seven entries in this confession
00:08:43.760of faith, what they believe, what these green groves and high places are dedicated to that we
00:08:49.120need to go into with our acts in the spirit of Boniface and chop down in the name of the living
00:08:53.920God, to free people from this slavery. In the first century in this confession of faith, guys,
00:08:59.080that I'd like to discuss, the belief that man is good, inherently in his nature, that man is good.
00:09:06.140And a lot of this comes back to the thought of a despicable man by the name of Jean-Jacques Rousseau,
00:09:12.200who lived in 1712 to 1778 was his lifespan. He was an intellectual and a writer. And you could
00:09:20.180hear, if you'd like to hear more about this guy, and I think the more you hear about him,
00:09:24.160the more you'll hate him. You can hear a good biographical sketch of him from a book called
00:09:29.760Intellectuals by Paul Johnson. He has a pretty good entry in the sad tale of Rousseau's life.
00:09:35.720But Rousseau's essential idea was that man is basically good and that what makes man go wrong
00:09:40.580isn't any kind of inward sin nature or corruption, but it was actually the contaminating
00:09:46.540forces of civilization and society. He affirmed a lot of the ideas of John Locke, tabula rasa,
00:09:53.660that man is a blank slate, that society writes on. He famously said, man is born free, but
00:09:59.160everywhere is everywhere in chains. Basically, that mankind in this state of nature is free
00:10:04.960and unfettered, but that society corrupts him in flames, unnatural desires in him. He was part of
00:11:20.360Like, a lot of people are going to probably hear this and say,
00:11:22.300yeah, but I've never heard of Rousseau.
00:11:23.700Yeah, right, who's this Rousseau character?
00:11:25.120What are you talking about? I don't know him.
00:11:26.580Yeah, but we see it a lot in pop culture.
00:11:28.860It's been something that has dominated.
00:11:31.140The other thing I think that's interesting here is we're talking about idols.
00:11:33.840So I'll set this up and then kick it over to Dan because that's my job here.
00:11:36.900The psalms tell us especially that we become like the idols we make.
00:11:40.460And so when you look at our culture, do you see a vibrant, thriving, living organism that you would say, this is good, we want to emulate?
00:11:46.160Now, it depends who you ask that question.
00:11:48.140But even people in the mainstream are noticing now, like, I've seen a lot of articles lately, like Western America, Western civilization is in its death throes.
00:25:44.100Another area where Rousseau has had an incredible amount of influence, not many people appreciate, I think, is in the world of education.
00:25:53.200Because he wrote Emil, one of his books was all about education.
00:25:56.600And this is hilarious. I'll let Dan talk about his fatherhood a little bit.
00:26:01.600But you look at – out of his educational theory, you get things like Montessori education, where the kids are like, oh, they just self-educate.
00:26:19.560Their environment, like my garage, where they pull my wood saws out of my toolbox, and then they start using their scooters down the middle of the road while swinging saws at one another.
00:26:38.400So you get these ideas, and you start thinking about how powerful of an influence is it in an entire educational system.
00:26:43.820If you believe that children are basically good in their nature and that their desires, if left to themselves, would be basically good desires, how does that affect how you approach curriculum or how you approach the philosophy of education?
00:27:01.240Over against that, it's something like St. Brandon's Classical Christian Academy that we founded.
00:27:05.180One of our abiding ideas is that people love badness.
00:27:13.080They don't know what the good, the true, and the beautiful is, and so what you actually have to do is train them in virtue, which virtue comes from the Latin word vir, which is man, the ideal man.
00:27:21.400You're saying you are not the ideal man.
00:27:24.380If left alone, you will prefer twaddle, you will prefer Disney board books that are absolute garbage over the Chronicles of Narnia, like if you're left alone.
00:27:36.000If I leave my kids alone in the house, they do not naturally read Plutarch.
00:28:04.800There's some things that are really good about that phase of life.
00:28:08.320But yeah, to your point, they're not going to ascend to this greater learning or character or virtue without really intentional instruction.
00:28:18.740Yeah, that's right. They have to be trained. And actually, again, a radical Christian idea
00:28:24.540that man is a good thing that was corrupted by sin, and that the restoration and salvation of
00:28:31.360man and sanctification and glorification of man comes from the restoring or the resurrection of
00:28:37.880the seat of their desire. That the problem with man is that they want bad things. They want to sin,
00:28:45.460and so they sin. So to fix that, the Christian gospel says, what you actually need is to give
00:28:51.760them a new heart with the law of God written on it and the spirit in them so that they'll
00:28:56.640walk in his ways, their desires will be renewed. So let me ask you guys this question, because
00:29:03.620some people have listening, they're probably recognizing the influence of a book by Carl
00:29:06.660Truman called The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self, Cultural Amnesia, Expressive Individualism,
00:29:11.500and the Road to Sexual Revolution, which is honestly a very solid book, even though I have
00:29:16.700my qualms, I have my quibbles with Carl Truman and the biggest quibbles name is Amy Bird.
00:29:22.280But this book is actually a tremendous book. He called the idea that resulted from Rousseau
00:29:27.920and company, the psychological self, the psychological self. So what do you guys think
00:29:33.500of that term? What does that call the mind? You think it's accurate? You think it's a helpful
00:29:37.980term the psych man as the psychological self reading truman on this is helpful as well because
00:29:44.340part of the problem is you know really i would say like 1960s and onward we really became
00:29:51.420dominated in our american culture by psychological therapeutic language yeah um so this is even
00:29:58.060something that you have to be really careful with books like wild at heart by john eldridge
00:30:03.020People don't realize it, but like Robert Bly, who he got his stuff from.
00:30:07.620I mean, through and through, a bizarre, crazy Jungian psychologist.
00:30:12.120And there's some really good stuff there, but there's also a lot of stuff that is just pagan nonsense.
00:30:17.580Then you go back to things like Freud.
00:30:21.180We don't realize how much psychology has invaded the pulpit.
00:30:25.380One of the things David Powelson was so great about, I took a few courses with him, the late David Powelson now.
00:30:31.240Brilliant man, but he began his career in psychotherapy and then became a Christian counselor.
00:30:38.220Well, so he had been exposed to kind of everything.
00:30:40.620And so one of the things in the biblical counseling course at Southern Seminary that he kind of opened our eyes to see,
00:30:46.820he was like, you guys know what Freud said?
00:30:49.940And so he'd read quotes, and Freud would say things like,
00:30:52.400I would replace every church in Europe with a psychological clinic.
00:30:57.700Yeah. I mean, this guy was, as we'll talk about, he was bathed in sexual sin.
00:31:02.800Yep. And we're going to talk about, you're going to, oh, you're going to hear some things about
00:31:05.940Freud, but that guy was a perv, I think is the technical term for it.
00:31:12.080I think it is a technical term. So one of the ways that I, I mean, I'm thinking through this
00:31:17.720question, the psychological self, how it's invaded the church and most of our society
00:31:24.120seems kind of innocent, but like personality tests.
00:34:46.660And I would say the other thing here that's that's interesting is when you're actually reading these authors that are popularizing this, it reminds me of something.
00:34:54.900There's an old quote, but Michael Foster brought this up the other day, right?
00:34:57.580When he said, you know, you can have all the intellectuals of the land.
00:35:29.640Well, then in the 18 and 1900s, you have poets like Wordsworth and Shelley and Blake and a whole company of poets that came along.
00:35:39.180They were steeped in this intellectual culture of Rousseauian romanticism and all this stuff.
00:35:45.220And then they took those ideas and actually they had this fundamental worldview that it was the poets who would change anything.
00:35:51.320You couldn't change anything without the poets because the poets had to take the ideas and put them in a way that all of the natural men would understand and get before the whole culture, right?
00:36:04.180Like you can't actually change the thinking of an entire people unless you can get the intellectual highfalutin ideas down into the blue collar everyday culture.
00:36:15.780And that's how, I mean, that's how the poets worked.
00:36:19.040So today it's like, you guys, what do you think about this?
00:36:21.640Does the modern media of our day serve a similar function as like the priesthood of this pagan confession?
00:36:40.940A Frenchman named Brian Sauve at Brian Sauve.
00:36:44.280Anyway, it was on Netflix and essentially that Netflix is a liturgy.
00:36:48.020It is training you in righteousness as the world sees, as the priests who are curating these resources and entertainment is distilling it so that people can consume it and be conformed by it.
00:37:02.660You're being indoctrinated and conformed to something.
00:37:05.380And so you can see that, I mean, if you guys have interacted at all with anything that Christ Church does or Doug Wilson, you'll know that if there's this cosmic battle going on, essentially, where Christ is putting all of his enemies under his feet, Christ hovers over all of human existence and every square inch says mine.
00:37:22.780and there are counter battles going on with the enemy and demon gods. And we're interacting with
00:37:29.580some of these high places right now. They have their own priests. They have their own blasphemy
00:37:33.260laws. They have their own liturgies. They have their own doctrines. And so the way that they're
00:37:38.360operating right now is to shove that stuff down your throat. And it's becoming more and more
00:37:42.640obvious, such as Disney saying, you know what, we're actually going to make a whole bunch of
00:37:47.060our stuff really gay and have a lot of trans stuff in there so that your kids become indoctrinated,
00:37:51.940especially since you won't let us teach him this at school at a really really young age
00:37:56.340this conversation actually bleeds over into many other conversations that we're going to have
00:38:01.680later on but that's that's what i would say as far as you know that the liturgy and the
00:38:05.640priests of our day i don't know what you think about that eric yeah i think it's exactly right
00:38:09.600and i think it's not necessarily new when you look at things like plato right plato said and
00:38:13.900i'm quoting here those who tell the stories rule society so that's why he wrote so much about
00:38:18.120telling stories to youth in the republic and other places paul auster is another one and he said this
00:38:23.180quote stories shape reality and those stories therefore shape human beings so i think um you
00:38:28.840know somebody that i learned this a lot from is uh lee habib lee is i think a president at salem
00:38:34.200radio but he said one of the failures of conservatives is that they let the left tell
00:38:38.800the story of america so true and it's been cultural suicide and lee was really good about
00:38:42.960this he's like why why are people on the left so much better at telling stories whereas like
00:38:47.620You know, Republicans and conservatives, even people in our camp,
00:38:51.420a lot of times we're like data number systematic theology guys.
00:39:19.080But I'm saying now take the person who says Harry Potter or Lord of the Rings or the Chronicles of Narnia.
00:39:24.560Like, Lord of the Rings does something to your heart that makes you love truth.
00:39:29.640And so what I would say in all of this is the conservatives, Christians especially, we just need to get so much better at understanding how stories and narrative works.
00:53:41.940So anyway, the reason I say that I agree that I think a majority of people would believe this is because of the Christians, because you get a good barometer based on social pressures, because of the new atheists, they're not intellectually honest.
00:53:57.000And so their main goal is to attack through ad hominem attacks to make people feel like idiots.
00:54:04.020And so Christians being somewhat naive at times because they don't know the playbook of the enemy being they're going to make you play by their own rules, they tend to be more agreeable.
00:54:16.120And so this is one of the areas where they try to find common ground, I believe, is because they look at certain geological structures and they see the layers and it's right there.
00:54:27.000And somebody says, yeah, that's, you know, there's billions of years in evidence here, all the layers, we're going to identify them.
00:54:32.880you'd have to be an absolute idiot and a sucker you know are do you do the do you have a season
00:54:38.580pass for the ark tour ken ham is that your thing you know like that's the kind of and that's the
00:54:43.100rhetoric they use yeah and so it becomes invaded you know it invades the christian community the
00:54:49.900christian faith and they try to compatibilize it yeah and and the the on the practical level how
00:54:55.400did they how did we get here well because they hijacked the public education system oh right
00:55:25.840He wrote an article, I think, I might get this wrong, stuffed on my head.
00:55:28.240I think he wrote an article called Evolution as an Uncommonly Silly Idea, where basically Doug goes, look, you guys, evolution is wrong, right?
00:55:39.440And we can give some – like we could go Stephen Myers.
00:55:41.880Stephen Myers is an evolutionary biologist, Christian, has written some absolutely devastating critiques of Darwinism from an internal critique, meaning that he adopts their whole timeline.
00:55:53.440I think he actually believes that, you know, he believes all of the timeline stuff, the billions of years, whatever.
00:56:53.440And you look at this and you're like, it is the most intricate, it is magnitudes, orders of magnitude more complex than the most complex microchip that we've ever made.
00:57:05.840And you look at that and you're saying that that came about because a long, long time ago, some lightning struck some water and then some stuff happened.
00:57:16.640And then, boom, we came out of the goo.
00:58:28.860You know, or the Rousseauian idea is that it allows you to shed,
00:58:35.420attempt to shed the creator who made you
00:58:37.840and your responsibilities to him and to worship him.
00:58:40.460I think the difference is like Nietzsche and even Freud,
00:58:43.800like they were more honest about that than maybe people are today.
00:58:47.900So you read them and they're like, yeah, we want to replace God.
00:58:50.320Right. Okay, actually, I want to pause here. This is going to be two episodes, by the way. There's no way we're going to get through this in a reasonable amount of time. And we'll continue to flesh out a strategy for chopping down those high places and seeing those enslaved to these demonic ideologies, free to sonship and citizenship in God's good kingdom.
00:59:08.660And before we go, since I have the mic, let me encourage you to check out another podcast in our network, Bright Hearth, in which my wife and I are actually aiming to equip Christians to recover the lost arts of homemaking in the productive Christian household.
00:59:23.180This one is going to be, it's for men and women.
00:59:25.940It's especially helpful, I think, to the ladies.
00:59:29.020I think it's a good companion, a good blue-collar practical companion to the work of this show in our aim here.