The King's Hall - Theological Maximalism, Legacy-Minded Cultural Maximalism, & Reformed Catholicity

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00:00:43.440 In 2001, Elon Musk was involved in a non-profit called the Mars Society.

00:00:50.000 He was interested in raising plants in a growth chamber on the surface of Mars.

00:00:54.040 It was a crazy idea, but that had not stopped him before.

00:00:58.220 The problem was he needed a rocket to carry the payload to Mars.

00:01:02.700 He began looking, where any reasonable person would look, to Russia for refurbished intercontinental ballistic missiles.

00:01:11.740 The Russians viewed Musk as a space novice and didn't take him seriously.

00:01:17.000 They were so insulted by his confidence and bravado that one Russian chief engineer spat on him.

00:01:22.960 After returning to Russia on another attempt to purchase an ICBM,

00:01:27.500 he was offered a rocket for $8 million.

00:01:30.520 Musk decided the Russians were not serious about doing business with him.

00:01:34.540 He stormed out of the meeting.

00:01:36.260 On the flight home, his team was having a drink to celebrate the fact they made it out of Russia,

00:01:41.360 but Musk was busy typing on his computer.

00:01:44.640 Suddenly, he looked up and said,

00:01:46.660 I think we can build this rocket ourselves.

00:01:49.360 It was then he decided he would not be subject to outside sources.

00:01:53.400 He would have control of his product through vertical integration.

00:01:56.940 He started a company known as SpaceX, and he built his own rockets.

00:02:02.260 It was such a risky endeavor, he wouldn't even let his friends invest in the company

00:02:05.880 because he said everyone would lose their money.

00:02:08.220 He put $100 million of his own money on the line.

00:02:13.040 Musk could not attract engineers with the right expertise to this project

00:02:17.200 because of the risks involved.

00:02:19.620 He said that there was no point in hiring bad engineers,

00:02:22.700 so he became the chief engineer,

00:02:24.580 even though he only had bachelor's degrees

00:02:26.520 in economics and physics.

00:02:29.080 After three failed launches,

00:02:31.080 they were almost out of money and materials.

00:02:33.900 For the final launch that would determine success or failure,

00:02:37.340 they were using scraps and simple physics

00:02:39.980 in hopes this would work.

00:02:42.920 Their fourth try was a success.

00:02:45.820 Since that time, SpaceX has had 395 successful launches.

00:02:52.220 Elon Musk believed he could do this better than anyone.

00:02:55.600 He used all of his money, time, and intelligence to build an amazing company.

00:03:01.280 He has built some of the most successful businesses in the world that actually solve problems.

00:03:06.180 And he has done it by simply caring more than anyone else about his own business.

00:03:12.260 The King's Hall exists to make self-ruled men who rule well and win the world.

00:03:25.280 Well, welcome back to the King's Hall podcast.

00:03:28.140 I'm Brian Sauve, and here again, as usual, with Dan Burkholder and Eric Kahn.

00:03:33.400 How are you guys doing today?

00:03:34.780 Doing fabulous.

00:03:35.640 Love hearing the Elon Musk stories.

00:03:37.500 That guy is just brilliant.

00:03:39.260 He's nuts.

00:03:39.560 Yes, he is.

00:03:40.040 The guy's crazy.

00:03:41.120 Unreal. I was telling Eric beforehand, like every time that I'm reading about Elon Musk and he's

00:03:46.060 going to make a decision, I would make the opposite one. Right. And he is the wealthiest

00:03:50.600 African-American in the world. He is indeed. Actually, he's just the wealthiest man in the

00:03:56.740 world. That's true. That's true. That's a good point. Well, as you all know, in this season of

00:04:03.160 the King's Hall podcast, we're essentially asking, how can we build this cathedral of the next

00:04:09.920 Christendom. And we've been going through and critiquing various shanty towns of models like

00:04:16.100 mega churchianity, a big fast and famous that are on our job site that we need to clear so we can

00:04:21.800 send this cathedral up to the sky, this great cathedral of Christendom. Last week, we talked

00:04:27.660 about theological minimalism, cultural syncretism, and antinomianism. This three-pronged demon that

00:04:36.540 we're going to need to exercise from our job site. Wow, that's really mixing the metaphors

00:04:40.700 there at this point, if we are going to build our cathedral here. And our thesis was that

00:04:47.560 essentially this model of Christianity, theological minimalism, cultural syncretism,

00:04:54.020 this kind of Christianity that responded to the assaults of modernism and liberalism with

00:04:58.700 basically retreat and then a reduction of the Christian faith to its handful of core doctrines.

00:05:04.140 And even though this wasn't intentional in the last episode, we showed that this reduction in order to defend the faith ended up becoming a permanent feature of lots of the Christianity that came out of this point.

00:05:16.980 And so rather than having a full-orbed Christianity that really gave Christians a model for how

00:05:24.240 to be Christians in every single corner of their life, they ended up giving Christians

00:05:30.320 a reduced, reductionistic, minimalistic picture of the faith.

00:05:36.560 And so the reason that we shared that story about Elon Musk at the beginning is because

00:05:40.380 as you're looking at some of the things that he's done, and we're not like Elon Musk fanboys,

00:05:45.140 I'm sure someone's going to write us in and be like, Elon Musk is not a Christian.

00:05:48.340 I kind of like him.

00:05:48.920 Elon Musk is federal vision.

00:05:51.700 Elon Musk is federal vision.

00:05:53.840 Oh, my word.

00:05:54.820 Okay.

00:05:56.160 Wow.

00:05:56.640 Wouldn't that be a turn of events?

00:05:58.500 It really would.

00:06:00.980 No, the reason we shared that is because one of the things that really marks everything

00:06:05.960 that he puts his hand to is that here's a guy you could say who is obsessively cared

00:06:10.780 about every aspect of his companies, his ideas, the products that they make. He's a guy who's

00:06:17.300 obsessed with vertical integration. So you see the way that, for example, Tesla has gone about

00:06:22.660 their manufacturing. They said, we're going to make an electric car. And most people that do

00:06:26.340 this sort of thing, they say, okay, well, we'll manufacture certain components ourself, the frame

00:06:31.280 of the car, et cetera. We'll assemble it, but we're going to buy parts. We're going to buy

00:06:34.900 batteries from Samsung and we're going to buy, you know, doors from this company. And Elon Musk is

00:06:40.620 like, no, you know what we're going to do? We're actually going to invent new battery technology

00:06:45.260 and then start the biggest battery manufacturing company in the entire world. So he's wanting to

00:06:51.700 start a car and along the way, an electric car, and along the way, he creates this, the greatest

00:06:58.000 battery company in the history of mankind, basically. And you can look at everything the

00:07:02.840 guy's done and this sort of obsessive care marks all of it. So, I mean, I think Elon Musk is a

00:07:10.420 good example of the opposite of our cold open last week of the landed gentry who slowly crippled

00:07:17.120 those great British estates by selling off land until they just had this magnificent house on a

00:07:22.360 little island of land surrounded by property that no longer was owned by them and they couldn't

00:07:26.860 support the land anymore. Elon Musk is the opposite. He would have been out if he was in

00:07:31.180 charge of that estate, he would have known every square inch. He would have been out patrolling the

00:07:35.360 borders, defending his land, seeing how he could buy more. He's a guy who just cared about it to

00:07:40.880 the edges. And the model of Christianity that we believe must be assembled in place of theological

00:07:47.960 minimalism and all of the results, antinomianism and cultural syncretism, is a model of Christianity

00:07:55.340 that we're calling theological maximalism, legacy-minded cultural maximalism, and those

00:08:01.920 two things swimming in this great river of reformed Catholicity. So we're rejecting theological

00:08:09.180 minimalism and its attendant cultural syncretism. And in place of that on our job site, we'd like

00:08:14.820 to build a model of Christianity. We believe this model of Christianity must be built to see the new

00:08:19.620 Christendom cathedral go up. And it is a model of Christianity that loves the scriptures to the

00:08:27.160 edges, that demonstrates and teaches that Christians should be in the business of applying

00:08:33.360 all of Scripture to all of life, the whole of Scripture to the whole domain of human existence

00:08:39.720 with the expectation that this will actually work, that as we do this, it will actually

00:08:45.540 bear fruit in every domain, and that building the next Christendom will take men and women

00:08:50.360 marked by this totalizing kind of thinking, men and women who take their faith out to

00:08:54.780 the edges of life, who are interested in the world that God made and ready to roll up their

00:09:00.180 sleeves and get to work in taming wilds, building cathedrals, starting businesses, raising families,

00:09:06.000 being human beings who are Christian in every aspect of their humanity. And so first, let's

00:09:11.800 start to do some definition work and get into this first big heading of today's show, which is

00:09:17.380 theological maximalism. We're saying that our Christianity should be able to have a label on

00:09:23.140 it. It's marked theological maximalism. So Eric, what do we mean by that? Why don't you take the

00:09:27.840 reins here and lead us through this topic? Yeah, absolutely. So I think the first thing that I did,

00:09:32.800 because we've used that term quite a bit actually in this show, it made me kind of

00:09:36.780 wonder where that came from. So I don't know if actually you know where you first got the term,

00:09:40.860 but I looked it up on Google and there's actually some like very specific things about the doctrine

00:09:45.800 of God that like there's a theological maximal argument. That's not what we're talking about.

00:09:51.100 No, I, I, here's, here's where I got it.

00:09:54.360 I made it up.

00:09:55.100 I made it up.

00:09:56.280 So this one comes from the mind of Brian.

00:09:58.560 So, so Brian, you'll have to help me with this one.

00:10:00.780 The life of Brian.

00:10:01.760 Now we got the mind of Brian.

00:10:03.160 Oh boy.

00:10:03.640 There's a lot of Brian in this show.

00:10:05.020 Dan's shaking his head.

00:10:05.860 He's, he's disappointed.

00:10:06.940 There's a lot of Brian in life, Dan.

00:10:08.460 That's the way it is.

00:10:09.060 He's already got so much Brian in his life.

00:10:10.720 So I'm going to, I'm going to try and define theological maximalism.

00:10:14.480 And Brian, you can tell me if this is what you were thinking when you made it up.

00:10:17.520 I think we're at least close.

00:10:21.100 Hopefully. So first of all, when we use the term theological maximalism, we are referring to the

00:10:26.840 process of studying, understanding, and applying everything the scripture teaches to every sphere

00:10:32.520 of life and really believing that Christ is Lord over all of it. So I got to know, first of all,

00:10:38.280 Brian, how'd I do? Not only did you nail it, you improved on it. Well, that's, I mean, that's

00:10:43.080 winning. When they write the Wikipedia article about it, they're going to say Eric Kahn's

00:10:47.640 definition of theological maximalism. So, so coming from the mind of Brian, I remember when

00:10:53.220 this term was coined, I mean, for our use, obviously it's existed before. Yeah. This is

00:10:58.960 actually, so what we're talking about building the new Christendom, this isn't in the ether,

00:11:03.900 like some sort of ideal that doesn't exist. What we're doing in this podcast is explaining to you

00:11:10.720 what we're trying to do in our own church. Yeah. So these terms, theological and cultural maximalism,

00:11:16.260 legacy and reformed Catholicity. Those things are actually our values as a church. So when I sat

00:11:23.340 down with Brian and I'm like, what's the mission, vision, values for our church? What do we hope to

00:11:28.980 produce? What is like built into the DNA of who we are? And he's like, oh yeah, theological

00:11:34.460 maximalism. Theological maximalism, meaning in contrast to theological minimalism, instead of

00:11:42.000 saying like what's the the reduction of christianity what's the least someone would need to know to be

00:11:46.920 a christian it's like what what should you know about god to every like like elon musk and his

00:11:53.700 business no i'm just kidding uh to the to the ed very edges what is god like what does he think

00:11:58.580 how does he think what does he think is important what about his character what about good and evil

00:12:04.180 and the true and the beautiful like that's theological maximalism is knowing god deeply

00:12:10.920 and having a robust Christianity where you know different viewpoints

00:12:16.620 and you take a stand, essentially, on those viewpoints.

00:12:19.480 Yeah, I think that's great.

00:12:20.620 And one of the things, we've obviously talked about it,

00:12:22.740 you guys have talked about it early in the show,

00:12:24.220 but I do want to contrast this, just a succinct definition now

00:12:27.360 of theological minimalism, which is the mistaken tendency

00:12:31.860 to isolate certain key doctrines to the exclusion of all others.

00:12:36.040 So not necessarily bad that we say, hey, this is a really central thing,

00:12:39.100 but it is bad when you say this is central and the other things aren't that's right so and then

00:12:44.280 what happens to these other things we relegate them to the non-central elements again we categorize

00:12:49.840 them as unimportant one of the things gentlemen as i was thinking about this doing a lot of reading

00:12:54.440 happened to be reading ken gentry we'll unpack that in just a moment um he shall have dominion

00:12:59.880 so this is on post-mill theology but he was talking about eschatology and he said the problem

00:13:05.620 he was talking about this very thing of reducing it to just a core and then saying, of course,

00:13:09.900 eschatology is not important. Yeah. The issue, though, that he brought up is he said,

00:13:14.580 reformed theology in its nature is comprehensive. So when we say that we're reformed,

00:13:20.020 fundamental to the history of reformed theology and doctrine, dogma, was this understanding that

00:13:25.820 we want to know everything about all of history, all of Christ, all of life, soteriology,

00:13:30.820 anthropology, Christology, you name it. We want to know about all of it. And the reason that we

00:13:36.120 have a system like Reformed Theology is because it's an attempt to understand all of it

00:13:42.500 comprehensively. So the word I would use is comprehensive. One of the best products that

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00:15:23.240 um as we think about that though dan as we think about theological maximalism as you think about

00:15:31.200 the reformers and the really great ones you know our heroes in the faith one of the words that dan

00:15:35.940 has used a lot um that i think these guys all had was range yeah so you the problem is we live in an

00:15:42.600 age of specialists and so if you're really going to be a practitioner of theological maximalism

00:15:48.420 you have to have range you can't just be a knee surgeon so Dan I want to ask you what do you mean

00:15:54.580 I know we talked about a lot what do you mean by this word range and how do you think is connected

00:15:58.880 to maximalism yeah that's a really good question and it brings me to a conversation that Brian and

00:16:06.500 I were having about what makes up a man you know the five aspects of masculinity and maybe you know

00:16:13.820 season two of the King's Hall talking about self-ruled men.

00:16:18.760 Yeah.

00:16:19.260 What makes a man,

00:16:20.340 but essentially some of the aspects of masculinity involve the mind,

00:16:25.960 physical ability,

00:16:27.160 wisdom,

00:16:28.380 things like,

00:16:28.840 so the five aspects of masculinity,

00:16:31.360 Lords,

00:16:31.740 husbandmen,

00:16:32.520 saviors,

00:16:33.580 sages,

00:16:34.140 and glory bearers,

00:16:34.980 which is Dan's referencing Friar Bill Mauser.

00:16:37.740 I think the late Bill Mauser at this point.

00:16:39.680 Yeah.

00:16:39.940 Who coined these.

00:16:40.660 Thank you.

00:16:41.000 Thank you for listing them.

00:16:41.960 Cause I usually get through four of them and I'm like,

00:16:43.680 there's one more. What's that last one again? And there's one more. Ruffian troublemaker.

00:16:47.660 That's Eric's sixth aspect of masculinity. Ruffian and troublemaker. I love it. So when

00:16:53.520 you're looking at husband men, which is pastoral in nature versus a sage, which is intellectual

00:16:59.440 in nature, you have a man that as you're striving for all these aspects of masculinity, which I'm

00:17:06.720 getting off on a tangent, I'll bring it back. It means you have range. If you look at men like

00:17:11.900 Martin Luther. Martin Luther, crazy smart guy, right? Yeah. Intelligent, very intelligent. He

00:17:17.680 wrote the music of Christendom at the time of the Reformation. Yeah. I mean, we sing some of those

00:17:24.260 songs today, like a mighty fortress is our God. You know what you should do is cut me out and put

00:17:33.020 in the music. That'd be really good. So anyway, that was a guy who had range. He thought about

00:17:53.220 the family sphere as well. I mean, reinstituting marriage in the clergy, you know, and thinking

00:17:59.960 about how to, how you raise children. And, and so the worship of the church and the church's

00:18:06.740 worship of God, I should say, and of theology, those guys had range because they didn't think

00:18:12.420 in just like an egghead here. I'm going to discuss the finer points of theology of, and in reform

00:18:19.800 theology, typically we think of soteriology, but I'm glad you included that it's a totality of

00:18:26.480 theological thought. And so when I say that men have range, just summarizing it, I mean that they

00:18:33.720 think of all aspects of life. They're good at a lot of it. Yeah. And they, they, they are good

00:18:39.260 at a lot of it because, and what makes a man good at a lot of different things is knowing the

00:18:44.480 foundation, what is true. If you know what is true about the way the world works, about the way that

00:18:52.120 God works about the way that people work, then you're going to, you're going to be better at

00:18:56.980 things naturally. Yeah. Naturally speaking. Yeah. And even, even distinguishing our, our two,

00:19:02.380 cause we have theological maximalism and cultural maximalism. What we're talking about right now

00:19:05.780 really encompasses both. Yeah. But if you think about the foundation that a man or a woman of

00:19:13.040 God would need in order to live a godly life out to the edges, it's so important that, that you're

00:19:19.840 actually interested, right? Like the work of theology is done by interested people. And I

00:19:25.280 didn't say interesting people, I said interested people. People are actually, yeah. Interesting

00:19:31.140 people are interested people. I was going to get there. I mean, I was about to make this brilliant

00:19:35.880 set up, bring the conclusion in, and then Dan Burton, I'm just kidding. We'll just edit that

00:19:40.760 out. That's good. Interested people though, if you look at the Bible and you just read it cover

00:19:45.820 to cover, like a new Christian reads a Bible cover to cover, would they conclude that the

00:19:50.100 inerrancy of scripture, the resurrection of Jesus, those five fundamentals are like what this is

00:19:55.260 about? Yeah. And that's, you know, maybe part of it, but they would, they'd be like, wow, this is

00:20:00.760 this book, this book has range. Yeah. And I think that's, um, when, when you think of great pieces

00:20:06.500 of literature, you happen to be reading Lord of the Rings, but I think, wow, this is a book with

00:20:11.020 range because this is you know tolkien is not a one-trick pony um it just encompasses all of life

00:20:16.940 from warfare to art to beauty to you think about the the jewels and the gold of the dwarves and

00:20:23.760 i mean there's so much in there and so like you couldn't it would not be easy to systematize

00:20:28.800 yeah like the pastoral scenes of the shire yes the comfort of food and table and farm and field

00:20:35.260 and then the high, high culture of the elves.

00:20:38.220 That's right.

00:20:38.680 Singing and poetry and storytelling

00:20:40.880 and the, you know, the horse culture of,

00:20:43.100 I mean, that's got range.

00:20:44.820 Yeah.

00:20:44.960 And I think fundamentally as I was unpacking

00:20:47.260 and thinking about this

00:20:48.240 and reading some guys like Bavinck and Berkoff,

00:20:51.820 it really struck me that the real issue

00:20:53.800 is that God is infinite.

00:20:55.280 Our worship is a reflection of him.

00:20:57.180 Therefore, our culture is a reflection of God

00:20:59.340 and God being infinite.

00:21:01.520 Like there's no limit to his range.

00:21:03.820 Yeah.

00:21:04.260 in the way that we're using that term.

00:21:07.020 And so we've got to be people,

00:21:08.280 fundamentally, as we're thinking about theology and culture,

00:21:11.200 we're going to be thinking about,

00:21:13.060 you know, you have to take these finite creatures

00:21:15.360 and you have to expand their minds,

00:21:16.800 you have to expand their hearts,

00:21:18.200 and that's never going to stop.

00:21:19.800 And I think the people who are good at building this are,

00:21:22.280 yeah, they have a lot of range.

00:21:24.360 One of the things I want to do too in this section

00:21:26.120 is also ground our theological maximalism in scripture.

00:21:30.520 I know a lot of people will be asking,

00:21:32.060 as I have asked in the past,

00:21:33.060 It's like, where's the scriptural argument for this?

00:21:35.500 So I want to provide a couple things and then get your take on some of them

00:21:39.420 and then maybe what you think as well.

00:21:40.880 The first that I thought about was really Solomon.

00:21:43.300 So Solomon is, in the Old Testament, in much of scripture,

00:21:46.940 kind of the personification, the historical personification of wisdom,

00:21:52.340 kingly wisdom.

00:21:54.040 And then, of course, he's going to point to Christ.

00:21:57.080 But Solomon is unique because we look at him, he prayed for wisdom,

00:22:00.020 he received it, and Solomon is building gardens.

00:22:03.060 he's building temples he's building houses he's mastering people at work he's creating great art

00:22:09.180 gold economy there's really nothing and i think it's a picture of the kingdom of christ there's

00:22:14.500 nothing that his kingdom doesn't touch yeah and when the queen of sheba comes what does she say

00:22:20.340 of solomon she says there's no limit there's no limit to your knowledge and wisdom there's nothing

00:22:26.620 that i could ask you that you didn't know oh yeah that's a good point so i think about here's a guy

00:22:31.360 with practicing theological maximalism.

00:22:34.500 Yeah.

00:22:34.880 This Solomonic kingly picture.

00:22:37.120 So, you know, we're in the King's Hall.

00:22:39.380 Dan, I think that we're after the King's wisdom,

00:22:41.360 the King's theological maximalism.

00:22:43.420 And, you know, here we have Solomon.

00:22:45.720 He's a king, he's a poet, he's a biologist,

00:22:47.920 he's a diplomat, he's a warrior.

00:22:50.540 This is what kingly wisdom is about.

00:22:52.660 So I want to jump into the next one

00:22:54.040 because there's a lot here.

00:22:56.480 This is 2 Timothy 3.

00:22:58.820 All scripture, not some scripture,

00:23:00.900 But all scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, for training and righteousness, that the man of God may be complete and equipped for every good work.

00:23:11.200 So as we're talking about theological maximalism, it's theological in that it's grounded in scripture.

00:23:16.700 This is even the aim of scripture, Brian, correct me if I'm wrong.

00:23:19.900 The aim of scripture is to bring all of life under the rule of Christ, every good work.

00:23:25.140 Yeah, absolutely.

00:23:26.440 Like when you talk about Solomon as this prototypical wise king in the line of David,

00:23:32.880 he's obviously pointing to Christ who is the, so Solomon is like, you could see the penultimate

00:23:38.620 picture.

00:23:39.280 Right.

00:23:39.580 Christ is the ultimate picture of the Davidic king.

00:23:43.080 And in Christ we see are hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge.

00:23:48.020 All of them.

00:23:48.520 Meaning that if something is true, knowledge, that point of knowledge exists and is true

00:23:54.080 because of Christ's lordship.

00:23:55.400 by him all things were created for him all things and all wisdom you know knowledge is like knowing

00:24:01.800 all the things wisdom is like knowing what to do about all of the things yeah and both of those

00:24:06.200 are hidden in christ so he's the perfect example of the one who you know when solomon said that

00:24:11.260 it's the glory of god to conceal things and it's the wisdom of kings to to search them out like

00:24:18.100 christ is both the concealer and the revealer he's the concealer and he's the one who finds

00:24:23.220 these things, these points of wisdom, and they consist in him. So this is one of the reasons

00:24:30.380 why theological minimalism is such a, just an impoverishment of the Christian thought life,

00:24:37.580 this rich intellectual theological tradition that ought to be cultivated in the soil of Christ. Why?

00:24:45.600 Because if something is true, it's true because of Christ. It's all encompassing. It's totalizing.

00:24:51.780 The whole scriptures are about Christ. The whole world is about Christ. So you can't, if you're

00:24:56.080 curious and interested in the, in, in the world, or if you're a Christian, you ought to be curious

00:25:01.540 and interested in the world and in every word of scripture and in every, you know, philosophical

00:25:06.640 thought that you might chase down because all of them are going to find, you're either going to

00:25:11.740 find, wow, that, that little philosophical rabbit trail was not true because it does not consist in

00:25:17.120 Christ. Or you're going to find, wow, that glorious truth that God hid was just waiting

00:25:23.640 for someone to come along and think this thought because it was part of Christ. Like when we talk

00:25:28.640 about men with range, Christ is the ultimate man with range. He's the God man. He has all range,

00:25:35.380 right? He's totally interesting. And so, you know, theological minimalism, I think one of the

00:25:40.200 reasons it impoverishes us is because it just makes us like kids in a house full of toys who

00:25:46.360 were like, I'm bored. You know, like the world is like this. The Bible is like this. We shouldn't

00:25:51.560 be bored. There's no reason to be bored. And we shouldn't stop with like some little elementary

00:25:55.820 knowledge. You should press on. I got a question. Maybe you guys could help me with because what

00:26:00.700 you're explaining with your definition of theological minimalism in this example,

00:26:04.940 it's to me rings true with even reformed churches that I've been a part of,

00:26:11.500 that there's a small range of acceptable topics in which to debate.

00:26:17.500 Has that been your experience?

00:26:19.280 Well, I was going to say, yeah, the exact same thing I was thinking of, Dan,

00:26:22.940 especially with the gospel-centered movement.

00:26:25.760 It was weird for a long time because to me it's like,

00:26:28.600 well, why wouldn't you be centered on the gospel?

00:26:30.860 But the fundamental issue becomes how do you define the gospel?

00:26:34.920 And most of the Reformed churches that I spent time in the last 10 years,

00:26:38.560 they're reducing this is the minimalism they're reducing the gospel to soteriology so like a john

00:26:47.080 macarthur is a good example he's reformed-ish in his soteriology and almost nothing else

00:26:52.800 so his ecclesiology is not reformed his worship is not really reformed um and and i think you know

00:27:00.360 not all i'm not saying all of that is bad but i am saying that over time what happens is it becomes

00:27:05.360 very limited. So I noticed when I started talking about say like masculinity, people could immediately

00:27:10.500 identify in those churches, well, that's not a gospel issue. And what they mean is that's not

00:27:15.160 one of the acceptable topics that Mark Dever, CJ Mahaney, whoever else has said, this is important.

00:27:21.080 It's not penal substitutionary atonement. That's right. Even the reduction, like it's even,

00:27:27.360 it is a reduction of the gospel to salvation. And it's actually a reduction of the gospel to a

00:27:33.260 subset of the doctrine of salvation. That's only one part of it. Yeah. Because the doctrine of

00:27:38.260 salvation, think about what it encompasses. I think you can, you can consider the doctrine

00:27:41.820 of salvation, the gospel, as if it were basically the entire doctrine of who saves, who saves whom,

00:27:49.540 how, and to what end, right? It was just, so God saves whom his people to what end. And this is

00:27:55.280 where it gets really important. He saves them so that they can actually be brought to glory in

00:28:00.780 Christ so that he can establish a new humanity in the image of Christ. So, so part of the doctrine

00:28:05.640 of salvation is sanctification, part of it's glorification. And so even in the, even in their

00:28:11.760 minimalism, there's minimalism where it's like, man, how many times have you had, I can't, I can't

00:28:20.160 tell you the number of times when we'll be like as a church, one of the things we really aim to do

00:28:25.760 is try to like recapture the whole Christian life together. And so you're like, Hey, let's figure

00:28:31.180 out how to just be friends together. Let's figure out how to recover the household. And so a lot of

00:28:34.340 the things we do at church are not like all a Bible study or a book study. It's like, Hey,

00:28:39.400 do you guys want to come play Frisbee with the kids and hang out at the park? Do you want to,

00:28:42.820 you know, whatever it is, play chess. And people will be like, well, those are great pastor.

00:28:47.340 Where's, uh, we need another Bible study though, or we need another like study of this theological

00:28:52.100 book. And it's like, you get these theological eggheads who think that everything should be a

00:28:58.040 Bible study. Every conversation should be about Calvinism. And it ends up being to the detriment

00:29:03.220 of like a thick human culture friendship. And also even to the detriment of having theological

00:29:10.720 range where it's like, if all you're interested in discussing theologically is like, let's say

00:29:18.580 calvinism and penal substitution or even worse like whatever the hot topic is on twitter

00:29:24.920 yep that is not a rich theological intellectual life no and i would say a lot of times what

00:29:31.520 happens is that's what makes these groups so susceptible to say like critical race theory

00:29:36.080 is because they don't have the range um people who you know i like to think you know the people

00:29:42.900 in the past somebody like rush duney okay but go back further to somebody like bb warfield

00:29:47.340 he's probably not getting taken in by critical race theory no because he knows he has so much

00:29:53.280 range across his theology yeah um it brings up a really interesting point brian you talked about

00:29:57.600 the eggheads and like being culturally um really just impotent one of the things i was thinking of

00:30:03.400 and i mentioned this earlier reading ken gentry's book as he's talking about this comprehensive

00:30:08.580 exhaustive nature the very nature of reformed theology is this way one of the things he does

00:30:13.060 is he quotes somebody we talked about last episode,

00:30:15.260 which was Carl Henry, Carl F.H. Henry.

00:30:18.140 And Henry makes the point that reformed theology by nature

00:30:21.420 is a totalizing understanding of theology,

00:30:24.520 history, philosophy, et cetera.

00:30:26.920 And then I want to read this quote.

00:30:29.360 He says, Christian revelation has nurtured

00:30:31.320 a universal conviction that no theology or philosophy

00:30:34.260 can be comprehensive, that's what he's after,

00:30:36.980 comprehensive theology,

00:30:38.280 unless it deals with the direction of history

00:30:40.060 and the goal of the universe

00:30:41.140 with the matter of man's ultimate destiny and the problem of death.

00:30:44.840 So immediately what I thought of is,

00:30:47.720 well, that's going to take a lot of theological heavy lifting.

00:30:50.940 Like if you want to answer the questions of the goal of the universe,

00:30:54.760 the matter of man's ultimate destiny and the problem of death,

00:30:58.120 you cannot have microwavable theology.

00:31:00.760 That's right.

00:31:01.880 Yeah, absolutely not.

00:31:02.920 I think of another quote from Carl F.H. Henry in page 62 of his book.

00:31:06.260 He said, quote, if Protestant orthodoxy holds itself aloof from the present world predicament, it is doomed to a much reduced role.

00:31:14.920 And then he says some other things, but continues.

00:31:17.540 If the evangelical answer is in terms of religious escapism, then the salt has lost its savor.

00:31:23.640 And I think that so much of the problem with this theological minimalism and even this theological eggheadism is that so often it does theology.

00:31:33.840 And you know what? I'm sorry to do this, but I actually think that Mark Driscoll's illustration

00:31:39.040 is one of the best of all time on this topic. So don't take this as an endorsement of everything

00:31:44.940 Mark Driscoll ever did or his current theological vision for sure. But he talked about theological

00:31:50.280 gun collectors, right? Who they had this room full of doctrines and they were like, oh, look,

00:31:56.800 you know, they take down their, this is the Springfield rifle. It was used at this time

00:32:00.700 of the civil war and you know they go through all their rifles and then you take them to the

00:32:04.100 range one day you thinking that they're into guns and they're like you i don't know how to shoot the

00:32:08.780 gun i just like to look i just look at them i collect them and and i think what bb warfield

00:32:15.420 is getting at here is like not only is it a limiting of of the the scope of theological

00:32:20.640 inquiry but it's also a refusal to let it live in the world to apply the doctrine right like we just

00:32:29.280 want to talk about Calvinism, but we don't want to think like, what would a Calvinist actually

00:32:34.500 do here in this situation in my marriage or my vocation or in, you know, maybe Christians don't

00:32:42.340 just know things and think thoughts. Maybe Christians actually do the things that those

00:32:47.600 thoughts ought to lead them to do. Well, and I think a good way to look at it, Brian, you've

00:32:52.160 challenged me on this before. We talked about two kingdoms theology and you get a lot of the radical

00:32:57.140 two kingdom stuff. Now this is a theology, but like the result in their action is okay. So

00:33:02.400 basically stand by and watch while the world burns. They claim to be Lutheran in their two

00:33:07.100 kingdoms theology, like the traditional two kingdom theology. But the whole point is you

00:33:11.520 look back at the two kingdoms theology of the reformed crowd and they were like building

00:33:16.220 culture, Christendom. They were not doing the things that people today are doing. So I want

00:33:22.680 to connect this Dan to, to something you've talked a lot about, which is the Westminster

00:33:25.900 confession. You've been reading it. You've been working through catechism stuff. We're doing that

00:33:31.220 as a church. We've done it in our family as well. My question is, you look at the Puritans, you look

00:33:36.680 at the people who were engaging in writing the Westminster confession and everything that came

00:33:42.940 out of it, including much of what is today or, you know, what was then, but we have the remnants

00:33:47.440 of it in American culture, politics, et cetera. Westminster Puritans come to America, shape a

00:33:53.020 whole nation i'm not saying that still exists today but this is a long question by the way i'm

00:33:57.260 trying to track with you track my question you look at the westminster confession do you see a

00:34:03.940 people that were thinking in theologically minimal ways and that produced a theologically minimal

00:34:09.740 world no next tell me no i mean seriously no so i've got i've got a four-year-old and a three-year-old

00:34:17.960 that every night I'm doing

00:34:19.660 the Westminster Shorter Catechism with, okay?

00:34:22.660 The very reason that a catechism exists

00:34:25.000 is to prepare children,

00:34:28.340 well, people,

00:34:29.720 but in my case,

00:34:30.960 it's preparing me as well

00:34:32.480 because I'm learning it now for the first time.

00:34:35.580 It's preparing my children

00:34:36.980 for the way that they think.

00:34:39.680 It's building a worldview,

00:34:41.720 which is really important.

00:34:43.080 It's funny because we're trying to make a distinction

00:34:45.860 between theological maximalism

00:34:47.680 and cultural maximalism, but what you find, and as I talk about cultural maximalism, is it's

00:34:54.280 realized theology. Because you don't just live theology in a separate sphere. Like here's a

00:35:01.640 silo. That's where my thinking about the world and God and everything that exists, that's where

00:35:07.440 that is. And then I live differently. It's actually cohesive. So you'll see people that

00:35:12.600 have a theological minimalist belief will also live in accordance with that theological

00:35:18.720 minimalist belief. That's why you get the ideal of Christendom as warehouses with light shows

00:35:27.580 and empty sermons. That's why you get that. So back to catechism, when I'm teaching my boys,

00:35:33.900 and Brian's actually just started working on a project that he'll announce at some point with

00:35:38.480 the catechism. Yeah. That's actually really exciting. When I asked my boys, how many gods

00:35:43.760 are there? Are there more than, is there more than one God? And they look at me and they're

00:35:47.880 a little three-year-old, four-year-old way. And they go one and they put their finger up

00:35:52.620 and then they go the living and true God. And I'm like, boys, you are based. That is so based

00:36:00.680 because what's, what that, what's that doing? That theology, that worldview that's being

00:36:07.000 developed they're going to go out into the world and they're going to encounter ideas that say

00:36:10.240 there's a different god there's another way to christ there's another way to god or you're your

00:36:16.200 own god yeah more or whatever yeah i mean there's many gods there's a pantheon of all kinds of gods

00:36:21.080 and they can look them in the eyes and go there's one true and living god and so i don't remember

00:36:27.900 what your original question was yeah the westminster confession is not a theologically

00:36:32.340 minimalist doctrine and what's funny is they don't the framers of the theology of the westminster

00:36:37.960 confession they didn't think that they were they were describing the totality of theology

00:36:43.660 like this was their big picture that's their like version of the gospel track and you go read it and

00:36:50.780 you're like this is their this is their snapshot it's the shorter catechism you gotta be kidding

00:36:56.420 me right like today if you look at we've even had to go you like new city catechism or whatever

00:37:01.420 that then boils it down even further, like, wow, 107 questions, that's too many. Let's do 52.

00:37:06.100 Wow, too many big words, let's boil it down. Like when you look at previous generations' idea of

00:37:11.160 even crystallizing the faith, it just shows how impoverished we are today. It shows how

00:37:15.460 theologically minimalist we actually are. Yeah, and I think that what I'm driving at, Dan,

00:37:19.600 to ask a simple question for your simple mind. Thank you. Thank you. You're welcome. Yes.

00:37:25.260 Where does the culture come from? So if you have theological minimalism, what kind of culture does

00:37:29.320 it produce. The Puritan culture shaped America, Puritan work ethic. It shapes so much of what our

00:37:34.600 country in its best form was. And it all came because they were theologically maximal. So we're

00:37:40.540 going to dovetail now into really Dan's section, which is on cultural maximalism. But as we do that,

00:37:46.140 I want to ask a question about reformed churches. I think that the ultimate litmus test of what's

00:37:52.980 going on in a church is actually the culture it produces and not necessarily the confessional

00:37:57.240 statement on its website. One of the things that I've noticed, and I've been to, I counted this up

00:38:02.860 for the show. I think in the last 12 years, we've been a part of 15 different churches.

00:38:08.280 I think members at seven. Now, a lot of that is job moving. A lot of that is in seminary. You're

00:38:14.200 naturally like, I go here and I do this internship. And so, so this isn't like leaving churches in

00:38:19.560 bad form or anything like that. But one of the things that has struck me about it, I can think

00:38:25.040 of two churches that i've been to where i have said i want this culture um one is moscow and

00:38:32.480 the other is here moscow russia like yes putin eastern orthodox oh okay no you were oh you were

00:38:40.180 talking about the other moscow dang it yeah so okay moscow idaho and and the reason i would say

00:38:46.000 that is because it's not like um you know you look at the totality of their culture and you say this

00:38:51.380 is really beautiful and grand. And everybody that I've kind of talked to has said sort of the same

00:38:55.580 things. So my question is, why do you think, I think this, but why do you think we have a culture

00:39:01.520 creating problem in reformed circles? We have reformed doctrine. Why don't we have 30 cultures

00:39:08.540 in 30 churches or more across America where people go, man, I'm living and breathing the

00:39:14.360 new kingdom of Jesus here. I'm so glad you're asking this question, Eric, because it's such

00:39:19.360 a perfect segue between theological maximalism and cultural maximalism. I think that so much

00:39:26.440 of the problem that we've seen is on the one hand, I think that there's been a certain kind

00:39:33.320 of gospel centrality movement. Yeah. This has gone through the church in many different places.

00:39:39.660 I mean, you see it in Acts 29, you see it, but I think you also see it in confessional reform

00:39:42.960 churches where some of the, the, the applicational theology that's been in the air, that's been

00:39:48.800 shaping everything from how pastors are being taught to preach sermons to how theological

00:39:54.700 books have been written to, you know, even all the way down to like how the model for

00:40:00.760 things like family worship and vocational theology is done is it connects to this gospel

00:40:08.220 centrality movement that I think has a similar arc to the fundamentalism that we saw where

00:40:14.500 they were trying to respond, the fundamentalism was trying to respond to theological liberalism,

00:40:18.980 like turn of the century theological liberalism, which was like high octane theological liberalism.

00:40:23.280 I think the gospel center movement was also started from a good hearted place of responding

00:40:29.760 to the big, fast and famous megachurch movement, where they saw instead of application being

00:40:36.840 preached from the scriptures to Christians to shape the Christian life, they saw pragmatism

00:40:42.180 where the megachurches were basically using

00:40:44.880 applicational theology as like a hook

00:40:47.540 to get non-Christians to come,

00:40:48.980 where they were like,

00:40:49.480 well, non-Christians have marriage problems,

00:40:51.600 so let's preach a pragmatist sermon

00:40:53.340 on marriage problems and money problems

00:40:55.200 and all this kind of stuff

00:40:56.040 to get the non-believers in.

00:40:57.920 And so the gospel center movement

00:41:00.100 probably started with saying like,

00:41:01.600 no, you can't just give non-believers moral teaching

00:41:06.820 and change anything.

00:41:08.940 You can't do that.

00:41:10.060 But what happened similarly to fundamentalism and theological minimalism, man, what happened

00:41:15.840 is that all of a sudden, the only sermon you were allowed to preach when it came to moral

00:41:21.140 application was like, okay, Paul says to put off envy. Man, well, Jesus never envied. We're thankful

00:41:28.320 that Jesus never envied. You know, I know that all of you envy every day and you're full of envy

00:41:33.740 and you're a totally envious people, all you Christians, but just have faith that Christ

00:41:37.800 never envied for you. His record of righteousness is counted to you by faith. Good, glorious. I'm

00:41:43.680 so glad that people say I say glorious a lot in this podcast because I do. You do. And it's okay.

00:41:49.760 They never go on and say, and because of his credited righteousness to you and because of

00:41:54.880 your new birth and because of your new heart and because of the spirit in you now go and obey and

00:41:59.260 here, let me explain to you practically how not to envy anymore. And I just think this,

00:42:02.860 this gospel centrality has worked itself through so much of the church.

00:42:07.720 Mark Driscoll's a reason why,

00:42:09.440 like you go back to the young wrestlers reformed.

00:42:11.380 It was kind of the neck,

00:42:12.620 the genesis of a lot of the popularity of gospel centrality as a movement.

00:42:16.440 And you see goes through like Jared C.

00:42:19.300 Wilson's books.

00:42:20.000 And you know,

00:42:20.820 a lot of,

00:42:21.140 a lot of this kind of like what was influential in Calvinist Christianity

00:42:25.580 became the doorway for a lot of non-Calvinists who became Calvinist.

00:42:30.560 And so a lot of young people became reformed in the young restless and reformed movement,

00:42:33.680 but they became reformed in a way that was disconnected from multi-generational confessional

00:42:39.760 reformed Christianity. And so they were basically Baptists who were Calvinists

00:42:44.240 and gospel centered. And so you just saw this, like all of the popular culture level

00:42:51.120 reformed quote unquote Christianity was coming from this stream. And that stream

00:42:57.340 was functionally antinomian. It was functionally antinomian. It was theologically minimalist.

00:43:03.700 And what's funny is nobody would have thought it was theologically minimalist because they were

00:43:08.320 like, we're Cal, you know, we're nerd, we're theology nerds. We read Calvin. We, but they

00:43:12.100 were reading all of that through the lens of their gospel centrality. And so instead of actually

00:43:17.760 noticing things like, wow, Calvin's Geneva was based, they seem to really believe that,

00:43:24.400 I don't know the gospel, the scriptures had something to say about the political sphere

00:43:27.800 and the ecclesial sphere and all the, you know, the home sphere, marriage. And it was like,

00:43:32.840 so when I, when I think about that question, I really, I see a repetition of the fundamentalist

00:43:40.320 error in a reductionist Christianity being repeated in gospel centrality, creating a people

00:43:46.560 who think that they're not theologically minimalist, but actually end up becoming

00:43:51.100 doctrinal gun collectors who don't know how to apply the scriptures do you think dan i'll ask

00:43:56.640 you this question do you think we have a culture problem in much of christendom in america yeah

00:44:02.360 and i think it's really interesting that and it wasn't by accident brian brought up the sin of

00:44:06.380 envy because i think what had happened is that in response to the big fast famous megachurch model

00:44:14.100 there were some with good intentions that said no it has to be the gospel centered

00:44:18.820 you know this gospel centered thing because the gospel is good and we want it at the center

00:44:24.660 because there's a whole bunch of non-believers in the pews at these mega churches but there

00:44:32.020 were others who were envious of those who had the big platforms yeah and so what is the new

00:44:38.780 mega church it's the gospel centered it's the gospel centered x29 model mega church that's

00:44:45.420 right. Yeah. And then you, you've got another ditch that it's produced that we've encountered.

00:44:50.900 And this might be more fringe. I don't know. I would be curious to get your thoughts is essentially

00:44:56.860 a soft Gnosticism to where the gospel is treated as a magic set of words that if you believe this,

00:45:03.460 this particular set of knowledge that, that is, you know, from your guru, that, that is the way

00:45:09.960 to ascend into heaven.

00:45:11.720 You also have, with antinomianism,

00:45:13.800 which again is defined as a formal dismissal

00:45:17.920 of the third use of the law,

00:45:19.260 which is an application for life,

00:45:22.420 it's also Gnostic

00:45:23.880 because it treats the spiritual world

00:45:27.440 as this higher world

00:45:29.240 and disdains the physical.

00:45:32.180 And so it just,

00:45:33.060 it strikes a little close to Gnosticism for me.

00:45:36.200 Gnostic, meaning Gnosis,

00:45:39.260 which is knowledge, having a special knowledge,

00:45:42.820 and then also disdain for the physical and the spiritual being higher.

00:45:47.200 So you have those hallmarks.

00:45:48.560 I don't know if you guys have seen that,

00:45:49.840 if I'm being crazy or uncharitable in that assessment.

00:45:53.740 Yeah, I think that it's a good way of thinking about the same kind of topic

00:45:57.980 because what it does, what Gnosticism tends to do is it,

00:46:01.400 it of course shears or snips the connection,

00:46:06.300 the vital connection between theological knowledge and the physical life embodied Christianity.

00:46:13.020 Because of course, if, if the flesh is bad, if, and I'm not saying, I don't think gospel

00:46:18.760 centered people or a lot of people with this era are formally Gnostic. I think what you're saying

00:46:23.080 is that they're, they're making an error that ends up producing fruit in the same category.

00:46:28.840 Yeah, absolutely. And you see this in different ways and it gets even more extreme when you're

00:46:32.520 like in the ascetic movement or like despise the poverty gospel is something that we talked about

00:46:38.680 is another thing. Like you look at the ascetics of old and they're like, we're, we're not going

00:46:43.640 to experience pleasure at all. We're going to eat paste and not have sex and not look at anything

00:46:49.940 beautiful because it might cause us to sin. And I don't think that's happening, but you can see

00:46:54.700 how these echoes through church history are kind of coming to the forefront. You're like, well,

00:46:59.000 kind of, it kind of looks like a little bit like Gnosticism. They rearrange this. That's why I

00:47:03.200 think it's interesting. You know, you don't see anything new. The gospel centered errors are

00:47:07.260 similar to the areas of fundamentalism. You know, Gnosticism is similar. History doesn't

00:47:12.360 necessarily repeat, but it does rhyme. Yeah. I think Mark Twain said, so it's like you get these,

00:47:16.720 these echoes that will show up in different costumes throughout history. It's the same,

00:47:21.840 same dog, different hair as my grandpa would say. Yeah. And then, you know, fundamentally we asked

00:47:26.040 to connect the, you know, theology to culture here. But the cultural issue for me is I'm looking

00:47:33.000 at these churches and they're not building Christendom. Yep. They're not changing the

00:47:36.620 world. They're not even trying. They don't want to. They're not even building their own families.

00:47:41.060 Quote unquote Calvinist. Yeah. But, but not building your own family. So I think just in

00:47:46.160 my own mind, at least I'm tying it all together in the sense of, well, you have to have this,

00:47:49.500 a certain kind of theology and a theological approach that it produces a certain kind of

00:47:55.940 culture that then shapes a certain kind of world. Yeah. And this really brings us to the second

00:48:02.540 heading, which is that, so first we're saying that instead of theological minimalism, we need

00:48:07.760 to pursue theological maximalism. To sum up, what we're saying with theological maximalism

00:48:12.020 is that we do not believe that it's adequate to identify the lowest common denominator of

00:48:19.140 theological doctrine someone could believe to become a Christian, though that can be a useful

00:48:23.160 exercise in apologetics or evangelism, but that you must go on to disciple Christians

00:48:30.840 to understand all of scripture and how it applies to all of life. Even though no single person is

00:48:39.200 going to finish that project in their single life. But the church as a whole body ought to

00:48:45.520 be pursuing a maximalist form of theological inquiry because we ought to be interested in

00:48:50.680 God in the world that he's made, if he's good and glorious and awesome and holy, we ought to be

00:48:55.360 interested in him, in the words that he's given us and not just these minimalist formulas. But as

00:49:00.740 we often say, ripping off Douglas Wilson, shamelessly, theology is not really believed

00:49:08.620 until it comes out of your fingertips. And so we've got one, we've got the hand of theological

00:49:14.940 maximalism and the glove of cultural maximalism and legacy minded cultural maximalism. So Dan,

00:49:19.860 take take us away here i would have said the hand in the plow but that's better you know that's

00:49:23.900 better let's edit a hand in the plow the hand in the plow that's right we don't have to edit that

00:49:28.280 that's fine i want i want people to know that i corrected you and there's something that you

00:49:31.920 admitted was you know what we're gonna do we're gonna make the volume on that section twice as

00:49:35.920 high so yeah i think you did a really good job of defining this cultural maximalism and i want i

00:49:44.160 want to also preface that this is going to be not just cultural maximalism, but legacy minded

00:49:50.580 cultural maximalism. So you're going to get a flavor of both in this definition, in this part

00:49:56.180 of the discussion, but time and time again, we keep bumping into, you know, theology and culture

00:50:01.520 in our, in our discussion already. And, and let me just define what I mean by cultural maximalism.

00:50:08.940 So culture, if I can be allowed to define it, I think I've already done this on the show,

00:50:14.060 before, but at its root is the Latin word cultus, which means worship, means worship. So the culture,

00:50:22.440 you should be able to look at any culture, any group of people, what they do, what they find

00:50:27.300 to be important, what they find distasteful, social norms, family structures, and figure out

00:50:33.600 what they worship. There was one, I think it was a British politician. He said that there is the

00:50:39.740 self-made man and he worshiped his creator. I thought that was kind of funny. It was supposed

00:50:45.380 to be an insult. Self-made man. He's a self-made man and he worshiped his creator. Yeah, yeah,

00:50:50.500 yeah. Pretty funny. Anyway, that really didn't have anything to do with what I was talking about.

00:50:53.760 But it was a good joke. But yeah, I thought it was okay. It was a good pun. It was okay. So at

00:50:57.120 the core of any people, you should be able to look at what they do and figure out what they worship.

00:51:01.680 It's just going back upstream and like, where's the headwaters? What are the headwaters of these

00:51:06.600 people so doing a case study you should be able to look at the world around us look at the news

00:51:11.040 what what are the blasphemy laws of today yeah what aren't you allowed to say what are you

00:51:16.440 i apparently brian you're not allowed to to say what women can and cannot wear let me tell you

00:51:23.080 about that no you are not well i think too uh dan as you're talking about this

00:51:36.580 So I looked up Merriam-Webster's definition of culture, and the first two meanings, the number one meaning the customary beliefs, social forms, material traits of a racial, religious, or social group.

00:51:48.560 So their characteristics, their features, and the components of their everyday existence.

00:51:54.040 That's definition number one, and it includes shared attitudes, values, goals, practices that characterize them.

00:52:00.700 Okay, so that's number one.

00:52:01.640 And number two, enlightenment and excellence of taste acquired by intellectual and aesthetic training.

00:52:08.000 Interesting.

00:52:08.760 Liturgy.

00:52:09.900 Or acquaintance with and taste in fine arts, humanities, broad aspects of science as distinguished from vocational and technical skills.

00:52:17.740 So it's really interesting.

00:52:18.920 On the one side, you have like arts, humanities, entertainment.

00:52:22.900 They admit that you have to be trained in these.

00:52:25.420 Yeah.

00:52:25.820 So this is where we get phrases like high culture.

00:52:28.400 Yeah.

00:52:28.880 You have to be trained to love the good things.

00:52:30.620 Yeah, like you're cultured versus not cultured.

00:52:32.940 Yes.

00:52:33.680 So that's the second definition.

00:52:35.180 But the first is kind of the fundamental of worship.

00:52:37.860 It fundamentally is what you believe, how you practice life together as a community.

00:52:42.780 All of that is culture.

00:52:44.700 So even in the definition, it seems like, wow, this is a really maximalist term even.

00:52:49.560 Yes.

00:52:50.440 It produces a people.

00:52:52.120 Yes, that's right.

00:52:52.620 People are necessary to produce culture.

00:52:55.060 Yeah.

00:52:55.220 And so, I mean, we could go into the roots of like, why have we ended up where we are?

00:53:00.620 with the enlightenment, perhaps the pursuit of happiness is the highest in a man instead of the

00:53:04.840 pursuit of truth. But I would say this model of Christendom that we're seeking to build at its

00:53:14.020 core, the core belief, obviously, you're a Christian, you believe the gospel, the totality

00:53:19.580 of scripture, all these fundamental things, but the character, the character trait that you can

00:53:24.940 look out among the people, you can see is a love of neighbor. I think that is one of the hallmark

00:53:32.820 things that you can see in this new Christendom is a love of neighbor, that we are defined by

00:53:40.180 our love of neighbor. Usually in churchianity, that's like, oh, they had a great culture.

00:53:45.300 Mask up.

00:53:45.600 Oh, they're really friendly.

00:53:46.600 Love your neighbor. Wear a mask.

00:53:48.480 Why'd you have to take it that way?

00:53:50.080 you know there there was a there was a a youtube video i was watching i i'm in gardening season

00:53:58.400 like planting and such and there's this homesteading family and they had put out a i thought it was

00:54:06.080 clickbait it said like we've lost everything what are we going to do and so i i look at the video

00:54:11.820 because it's only four minutes long and i can watch it at 2x speed and it starts with a tornado

00:54:16.780 It's an F4 tornado, and it's heading right towards their house.

00:54:20.460 Okay?

00:54:21.200 I mean, it's in the daylight, so you can see it.

00:54:23.600 Cue the sound effects.

00:54:24.800 It's coming.

00:54:25.400 Seriously.

00:54:26.340 It's coming right at their house, and then it turns off,

00:54:30.340 and the next scene you see is their entire farm destroyed.

00:54:35.000 It didn't touch their house, thankfully,

00:54:37.340 but you look and the trees are uprooted.

00:54:39.300 These huge trees that had to be 50, 100 years old are uprooted and fallen over,

00:54:44.460 And the younger trees that were able to flex in the wind had like weed barrier and garbage and lumber from their barn and feed sacks and things like that stuck up in the trees.

00:54:56.720 And they literally like they lost everything except their thankfully their home.

00:55:01.060 but then they had a community. They had, it appeared to be hundreds of people come to their

00:55:08.800 farm and they had heavy equipment and they're moving, you know, these big pieces of like

00:55:13.700 debris and garbage that had, you know, blown off of their barns and everything like that

00:55:18.340 with skid steers and stuff. And in an afternoon, this community had come around them and had

00:55:23.200 cleaned up their entire farm. And I looked at that and I'm like, Oh man, I want to be that guy.

00:55:30.500 that when i get in trouble a tornado hits my home thankfully i'm in utah so it's probably going to

00:55:36.260 be like a a flattening earthquake there was a tornado the week i moved to utah really there

00:55:42.180 was a tornado in riverdale what three years ago something like that being from the midwest that's

00:55:46.480 like oh yeah tuesday yeah it was tuesday there was a tornado anyway uh the point is if disaster hits

00:55:52.660 if a health issue if i die because i think about this a lot if i die what's going to happen with

00:55:59.360 my wife and kids. You know, I've tried to live wise and leave an inheritance for my kids and

00:56:04.600 enough to take care of my wife, but I'm still, I'm in my thirties. I'm still in my working years.

00:56:08.900 Like I'm still trying to pile on, you know, into investments and assets so I can take care of them.

00:56:13.640 Is there going to be a community around them? And I think that's one of the hallmarks that we

00:56:18.040 should be able to look around at our community and see is that these people are defined by the

00:56:25.120 love of their neighbor that is one of the defining characteristics of these people and i think if you

00:56:31.040 look in the world around us you would see that that the opposite is actually true self-definition

00:56:36.380 is very important for people that's why they can't figure out who they are because they're trying to

00:56:40.360 define themselves recreate themselves i think this is actually uh one of the reasons people

00:56:45.700 have pointed to like the lgbtq rs tv community and i don't know where it stops w x y z yeah just

00:56:54.500 finish it and a dollar sign. And, um, you look at that community and they say, one of the reasons

00:57:00.200 they're good at stealing our kids is because you have this close knit, we care for you. It's a lie.

00:57:04.620 Of course, there's sort of a close knit community. One of the things that I've experienced in my

00:57:08.960 time in the church is that most churches have less requirements and less, oh, value to my soul

00:57:17.160 than like a book club. Um, they don't require much of you. You don't get much out of them.

00:57:22.020 you don't really do anything with the people that you go there with preaching might be great yeah

00:57:27.260 never see him during the week aren't working on mission together aren't doing anything meaningful

00:57:31.000 together this plays into culture so i'm just wondering what is producing that yeah because

00:57:37.840 that's a fruit of something yeah and and i think what we're talking about is like hand in glove

00:57:43.540 again where you talk about theological minimalism leads to cultural minimalism because if you think

00:57:49.400 about something like a radical two kingdom view. Radical two kingdom view would say that there's

00:57:54.440 this spiritual kingdom that, and I'm really trying not to straw man this. I want to represent it in

00:57:59.020 a way that someone who actually holds a view would say, yeah, that's what we believe. They would say

00:58:02.380 that you have the scriptures that generally govern the special revelation, governs this special

00:58:08.280 community of the church, regulates its worship and life and obedience to Christ as the people of God,

00:58:13.360 the kingdom of God, which is a spiritual kingdom. And then you have the common kingdom, which is

00:58:18.180 governed mainly through natural law established all the way back in Genesis nine common grace

00:58:23.260 after the flood yeah governed through I think the NL2K is the the the way that I remember it

00:58:29.460 natural law to kingdom okay right natural law to kingdom view and you can you can read a book by

00:58:33.540 Henry O'Neill I think O'Neill can't remember how to say it that talks about this this view and they

00:58:39.380 trace a lot of this from Noah onward where Noah has established God establishes the the death

00:58:45.920 penalty, sort of like the basis of human natural law. And so you have this common kingdom that's

00:58:51.280 governed by natural revelation, natural law. Then you have this special spiritual kingdom that's

00:58:56.100 governed by the scriptures. And so what ends up happening is that in like, say, Michael Horton's

00:59:03.340 view, you would end up with basically a view of Christianity where a lot of what Christians do

00:59:09.940 throughout the week is not actually governed primarily by the scriptures. And so sort of like

00:59:16.180 tends to not matter. It seems like I'm not, I'm sure they wouldn't say that. They wouldn't say

00:59:20.120 it doesn't matter. They would say it matters in a different way. They would say that it matters

00:59:23.840 in a, like a passing or ephemeral way that this world is passing away. Don't cling to it. They

00:59:29.580 would criticize like us as dominionists who are all about like redeeming and transforming the

00:59:34.440 culture. And you're just fighting a culture war and you're doing all this. Like you're just

00:59:37.820 obsessed with basically rearranging the common kingdom, but the common kingdom is not the

00:59:42.340 spiritual kingdom. So, so you see this kind of like these views that are in opposition. And

00:59:47.140 obviously we are not NL2K, what we call radical two kingdoms sort of guys. We're post-millennial

00:59:54.180 and applicational. And we believe that like we've said on this show that we believe the kingdom of

00:59:59.180 God is invading, conquering, colonizing, and transforming the world. So clearly we have a

01:00:06.140 in this fight, right? Or in this disagreement. But think about what that view would produce in

01:00:12.060 the world in terms of culture. Which view? The NL2K view. If you're a, you know, if you come

01:00:18.000 to your pastor and you say like, how should I vote? They're going to tell you something totally

01:00:24.200 different, right? They're going to be like, well, you know, this is the view that allowed that ends

01:00:30.020 up being like, you can vote for Democrats and you can vote for, because political life is like,

01:00:34.960 we shouldn't be talking about Bible verses so much as we should be talking about natural

01:00:38.200 revelation. And you, and the thing about natural revelation is that it's pretty elastic.

01:00:43.140 Like you can make, you can make almost anything sound like argue to it from natural revelation.

01:00:48.900 I think. Do you think dispensationalism would, would kind of go into similar camp here, right?

01:00:54.880 Two kingdom theology, the radical two kingdoms. I'm using that term because I thought that's

01:00:59.260 what it was called. I don't know if I'm radical. No, they wouldn't like that. So they would say

01:01:02.940 r2k stands for reformed two kingdoms would be r2k so i've seen both modern two kingdoms i think

01:01:09.240 yeah that's probably equally as a dig but to blow your mind like i don't even mind if someone

01:01:13.780 calls my view of a species of two kingdoms provided i get to define what they mean like

01:01:18.580 i think kyperian sphere sovereignty is a species of two kingdoms where we're saying that there's

01:01:23.640 that god has given different like he's given authority structures hierarchy standards and

01:01:29.500 governance within different spheres of human life. Like the state is the diaconess of God,

01:01:34.960 a servant of God. Exactly. So you take, you'd say like the family has the rod of discipline and

01:01:40.740 the church has the keys of the kingdom and the state has the sword of justice and you have these

01:01:45.960 different spheres and they are governed by different instructions, but they're all, I would

01:01:52.020 say, where we part ways is that they're all governed by the special revelation and they're

01:01:57.000 all expected to obey christ and and the thing is like nl2k guys would say yeah we believe the same

01:02:04.400 thing we just think that christ is saying to the natural sphere to the common kingdom

01:02:08.140 obey natural law not special revelation so this was a long excursus to say i think that that

01:02:16.440 remind me of your question i'm trying to remember where i think the original question

01:02:20.520 was just do we have a culture problem yes yes so i think part of the roots of our culture problem

01:02:26.220 is that. Where instead of saying, we're going to push our Christian faith out to the edges,

01:02:32.140 like the two kingdoms folks, they actually mock the idea. Like they say, is there a Christian way

01:02:38.140 of cooking? Sir fry was one example that Brian Madison in their book. Yeah. What was their book

01:02:43.940 called? Do you remember? I can't remember. It was short. It was really good. It was a series of

01:02:48.940 lectures that he gave, I think. Yeah. And it was like a little booklet, Brian Madison and another

01:02:52.940 Matheson Madison and another co-author wrote, and they were talking about how two kingdoms guys

01:02:58.280 will literally say like, is there a Christian way of cooking stir fry? And their point was, no,

01:03:03.380 you just, you know, you cook stir fry excellently. And a Christian should basically go to the stir

01:03:08.620 fry restaurant. That's the best, whether it's a Christian or a Muslim or a Hindu. And, and then

01:03:12.800 they responded in criticism and critique of the two kingdoms view, like absolutely there's a

01:03:19.360 Christian way of cooking stir fry. Have you been, have you tried cooking beef in India where

01:03:25.140 Hinduism is dominant? What about pork in the Middle East? Have you ever tried that? Obviously

01:03:31.460 food is religious. Obviously food is highly religious subject. And their point is that

01:03:37.160 you cannot find an aspect of life that is not religious, that is not moored ultimately to

01:03:43.140 religious standards. This is the whole cultist culture connection. Yeah. And the whole, even

01:03:47.200 Merriam-Webster, their definition of culture, basically everything you do from the clothes you

01:03:52.380 wear, right? It's religion externalized. Henry Van Til, culture is religion externalized. Yeah,

01:03:58.960 same. It's when we're talking about the, basically cultures are the outflow of people's worship.

01:04:07.500 And then that culture though, like there's an interplay where the culture, the people create

01:04:13.120 the culture out of their worship, but then the culture also makes the people. So as you talk

01:04:17.960 about cultural transmission, this is where one of the failures, the cultural minimalism, I would

01:04:24.060 call like R2K theology has led to cultural minimalism that has led to a failure of trans

01:04:29.200 culture transmission where you have generational disjunctiveness where, you know, parents are

01:04:36.240 failing to pass on their, a full orbed Christian faith to their children, which is why lots of

01:04:42.240 christian denominations human reform denominations will be apostate liberal or done within the next

01:04:47.000 20 years or 50 years because they're not transmitting their culture it's interesting

01:04:52.840 too so that's the final definition of culture here is the integrated pattern of human knowledge

01:04:57.500 belief and behavior that depends upon the capacity for transmission of knowledge to succeeding

01:05:02.480 generations yeah that's right so when we're talking about culture like embedded in that

01:05:06.400 definition is you have to pass it on yeah so eric that's why it exists why so do you think there's

01:05:11.480 actually a culture war going on then are we at war is i mean this is what the r2k people accuse

01:05:18.480 us of is like all those culture warriors culture warriors you're a culture warrior you're just

01:05:23.260 yeah what do you think what is that criticism and and and how should we think about it well i do

01:05:28.840 think part of it is is there are definitely first of all i would say are we in a culture war yes

01:05:33.620 but then i would want to define what that war is what are we fighting over yeah and then i would

01:05:39.340 also wanted to find there's a lot of people who like this is doug wilson's i don't remember all

01:05:44.260 the things but like co co-combatants co-belligerents yeah and then just enemies there's actually a lot

01:05:49.960 of people who are fighting in the quote culture war where i would say like we're not fighting the

01:05:54.900 same culture war yeah you know a mormon in salt lake might say yeah we're fighting the culture

01:05:58.980 war yeah my my mormon neighbors are always liking my stuff on facebook and they're like yeah man and

01:06:05.800 we talk and I, and I love them. They're, they're great neighbors, but they're, they're, we're not,

01:06:10.480 we're not actually fighting for the same end. Yeah. And, and so I would say in my lifetime,

01:06:14.660 one of the mistakes of the quote unquote culture war is, you know, not to pick on them. They've

01:06:20.280 done a lot of great work, but I think of like the James Dobson focus on the family, like we're going

01:06:24.960 to go to Hollywood and we're going to shame them or not. And I think a lot of what they did was

01:06:28.820 good. You know, we're going to tell them that what they're making is lewd, which it is. I don't

01:06:32.580 disagree with any of that but my point would be that culture cultists to dan's point culture wars

01:06:39.000 begin by building a culture which begins by worship so if you really want to build a culture

01:06:46.040 you should probably get jeff myers book on covenant renewal the lord's service you should

01:06:51.540 really think about the way your people are worshiping and you should think about first

01:06:56.000 and foremost this is sort of the like get your household in order like go get your church in

01:07:00.300 order. Yeah. Again, to go back to that, if you want to fight a culture war, you have to have a

01:07:04.180 culture. And this is why I get, it's a concern of mine because I look at the reformed church and I

01:07:09.540 say, you have a lot of the right theology, but I just don't see good cultures being produced.

01:07:15.220 Well, a lot of the, um, a lot of, like we've even had criticism of the show where they're like,

01:07:19.020 you guys are way too, too hard on dispensationalism or pre-millennialism and way too heavy on the

01:07:23.360 post-mill stuff. But think about it when you're actually transmitting the culture and applying

01:07:29.020 the theology, you're doing so towards your definition of the Missio Dei. Like what is

01:07:34.780 the mission of God for all of this whole project, but also like what is the Missio Dei as it applies

01:07:40.640 to an individual human life, family, local church, et cetera. And we would say, like I would say we

01:07:48.500 have a very thick view of that where we say the Missio Dei, because the Missio Dei is to make

01:07:54.900 disciples of the nations, to disciple the nations, baptize them in the triune name, and then to teach

01:08:00.820 them all that Christ commanded. I think that third category teaches them like, and especially when

01:08:05.480 you factor in second Timothy three, 16 and 17, that all scriptures God breathed and profitable

01:08:10.200 to equip the man of good of God for every good work. And we've said every political good work,

01:08:15.240 every sexual good work, every familial good work, every sociocultural good work, every economic

01:08:19.200 good work every, like you could go on. It's like that category of discipling human beings to me

01:08:26.720 means that the Moscow, Idaho phrase, all of Christ for all of life is the correct view of

01:08:32.760 the Missio Dei for an individual Christian life and human life. And so when you're, when you're

01:08:37.940 actually taking your theology from a systematic view of like, what did the scriptures teach about

01:08:44.460 all these different topics, and then you're landing them in how then shall we live, it really

01:08:50.040 deeply matters how you answer the question of what actually is the Missio Dei. If the Missio Dei

01:08:55.580 is actually not to successfully disciple the nations in the end,

01:09:00.440 that's going to have big implications for how you live. Yeah. Or if you don't think it's going

01:09:05.940 to be successful, it's going to have big implications for how you live. If you believe

01:09:10.560 that there's this common kingdom that actually encompasses most of human life, to be honest,

01:09:15.580 that is governed by natural law that we shouldn't be going into and saying, God says in Leviticus

01:09:20.540 or God says in Galatians, that's going to really deeply impact how you land your theology in your

01:09:28.740 culture. So I think that's why you do have a lot of even reformed churches that produce cultures of

01:09:34.580 of, um, uh, unfruitful theological eggheads because they, they know a lot of theological

01:09:42.800 data, but they don't know what to do with it.

01:09:46.720 They don't actually know what to do with it.

01:09:48.600 And, and actually the opposite should be true.

01:09:51.240 We should be practitioners.

01:09:52.920 You don't actually know something until you know how to obey it in your life.

01:09:57.240 And that's fundamentally, I mean, when you get down to the nuts and bolts, what is cultural

01:10:02.300 creation?

01:10:03.580 Cultural creation is leading your family in family worship,

01:10:06.300 but it's also changing diapers and disciplining, you know,

01:10:10.560 bringing the board of education to the seat of knowledge, as Doug would say,

01:10:14.120 disciplining your kids on a daily basis.

01:10:16.340 When you're doing those things, you're creating a culture.

01:10:19.040 When you rejoice over a meal, when you go gladly to psalm sing,

01:10:23.420 when you rejoice over reading Plutarch and learning the Christian perspective on it,

01:10:27.920 that's all cultural formation too.

01:10:30.760 even when you think about like okay so you're you're looking at culture formation and you say

01:10:36.500 and this is where i think the the two kingdom guys the especially more modern two kingdom guys

01:10:41.800 criticize and try to dunk on us us you know whatever you want to call us they call us one

01:10:46.020 kingdom guys so much for having a two kingdoms episode man yeah we might do that in the future

01:10:50.600 yeah but uh yeah we're kind of in there we're we're in the weeds now of the two kingdom stuff

01:10:55.580 I think one of the things that they tend to say and make fun of is like, well, you Christians, like you, you post mill people, you're always talking about politics and jobs and businesses and economics and all this sort of stuff. And, and I'm like, yes, because a big part of the cultural engine is I'm like, we should actually be talking about the Christian view of supply chains, the Christian view of agriculture.

01:11:21.980 Because at the core of it, it's loving of neighbor.

01:11:24.740 That's back to my original point, because the systems of taxes that we have right now

01:11:29.200 is fundamentally not loving your neighbor.

01:11:32.460 Yeah, it's fundamentally.

01:11:33.100 Pay your fair share, billionaires.

01:11:35.060 We're going to just steal like 80% of your income.

01:11:38.300 Well, the other thing about this, though, and this, you know, you could go on a thousand

01:11:41.760 tangents, but I think this is why, as I've focused a lot on masculinity, part of the

01:11:47.520 issue here is, I think this is why so many men are turned off by the church is because

01:11:50.980 the only realm that matters you're told in a lot of the two kingdom theology is like your quiet

01:11:56.020 time life with jesus yeah so all the stuff brian you talked about like culture economics business

01:12:02.000 this is how men are hardwired to be outward facing toward the culture and to want to

01:12:05.960 impact those things solomon did yeah but then when you tell that guy well our church it's only about

01:12:11.580 you know how you read psalms and you know your quiet time with jesus yeah your devotions your

01:12:17.280 prayer time with your wife yeah i think that's why a lot of guys actually check out because

01:12:21.760 they're like well that's a pretty gay version of christian totally you're telling the men like

01:12:25.980 most of the normally masculine things aren't christian yeah in a peculiar way that's part

01:12:32.620 of the common kingdom so they're like okay like yeah if my vocation if like me being a plumber

01:12:37.500 or a politician or a cop or whatever it is has nothing to do or very little to do like yeah

01:12:41.960 don't steal. Okay, sure. Like, yeah. But if you can't actually tell me like, okay, I'm a farmer.

01:12:49.840 How should I actually, is there a Christian way to farm that's beyond just don't steal?

01:12:56.860 Well, in here, this is, I think it's actually crazy that these guys think that they have a

01:13:01.620 corner on natural law because when I go, is there a Christian way to farm? I'm like,

01:13:05.340 you should actually look at the way that regenerative farming relates to the way that

01:13:09.940 God made soil to be built up and the way that God, like this is theology. This is a applied

01:13:16.100 theology. When you're saying, what are all of the sermons? There are probably a hundred sermons.

01:13:22.200 There's way more than that in just how, in just the way that God made soil to be developed,

01:13:27.940 the interplay between insects, grazing animals, pasture land, and soil development.

01:13:32.720 Not only that, but then if you put in, if you have a dispensational mindset or just a loser

01:13:39.600 eschatology yeah then so what what about regenerative soils so you might produce a

01:13:46.200 little bit more corn or whatever it is in the long run what would it actually matter if you

01:13:49.960 have a legacy mind where you're like no we're actually just the slow inevitable march to

01:13:55.300 victory as christ is putting all of his enemies under his feet yeah and there's a chance that

01:13:59.960 my 40 acres of land that i'm farming will be here for my fifth generation yeah what sort of things

01:14:05.660 can I plant now? What sort of things can I do to my soil now that will make things better to them

01:14:11.660 for them in a generation? And so obviously it goes beyond just farming. Like the way I manage

01:14:16.920 my finances for my family, I have enough money to buy, I don't know, a new car, but you know what?

01:14:23.600 I'm driving a very old truck that has engine problems. I've toured the engine apart multiple

01:14:28.600 times. It's not because I'm some sort of great man. It's because I know the stuff isn't for me.

01:14:33.780 Well, it's interesting, Dan.

01:14:35.020 You're absolutely right.

01:14:36.060 Brian, you're talking about soil.

01:14:37.460 Dan, you're talking about cultivation.

01:14:39.340 So final definition that I'm drawing out from Miriam Webster,

01:14:42.560 because you guys, you're not even looking at this.

01:14:44.500 No, we're not.

01:14:45.080 We didn't plan this.

01:14:46.160 I don't look to Miriam for her definition.

01:14:48.880 Miriam.

01:14:49.700 Miriam.

01:14:51.520 Wow.

01:14:52.580 So the final definition, Miriam Webster, for culture is the form of cultivation or tillage.

01:14:59.300 and so it's referring to the soil the act or process of cultivating living materials such

01:15:06.380 as bacteria viruses soil plants yeah nutrients etc uh prepared in such form of cultivation as

01:15:13.440 a farmer etc etc requires this culture this form of culture requires expert care and training

01:15:19.900 so really again we're talking about culture cultivation yeah people soil it's all interconnected

01:15:26.680 in god's organic design yeah and if if you look at the the the fields that we're tilling like to

01:15:32.780 to put it in a metaphorical term not an actual soil and dirt if we're a legacy minded the slow

01:15:39.640 inevitable march to victory through the ages what sort of things should be be cultivating as in like

01:15:47.460 tilling the soil of our our people to look to produce in the long run what what do you guys

01:15:53.940 think, should this culture produce? What should we be aiming to produce if that's true? If all of

01:16:01.040 these things that we've talked about with theology are true, and if the mission, the Missio Dei that

01:16:06.980 you've talked about is true, and the Great Commission is true, what sort of things should

01:16:12.400 be the outflow from that people? Here's what I would say, and this really distinguishes us,

01:16:17.920 I think, in what we're putting forward from these other common popular models that might be summed

01:16:23.340 up in gospel centrality, modern two kingdoms, a lot of those sorts of things, is that what we're

01:16:27.760 saying is there is such thing as a Christian view of everything. There is such thing as a Christian

01:16:32.600 view of everything. Why? Because what we're fundamentally preaching when we preach the

01:16:37.700 good news of Christ Jesus and his kingdom is that the king has ransomed us from the futile ways of

01:16:43.760 sin and death, which infect every aspect of what it means to be human, so that we, everywhere we

01:16:49.700 go, we bring death. We bring death vocationally. We bring death economically. We bring death

01:16:53.720 sexually. Everywhere we go, we bring death. Well, because the king has come, not only has he

01:16:59.140 forgiven our sin, not only is penal substitutionary atonement true, but actually so is new birth and

01:17:04.740 new creation. And he's making a new humanity that's conformed to the image of the God, man,

01:17:10.280 Christ. And so he's actually redeeming and transforming every aspect of what it means

01:17:14.700 to be a human being. Like this is the difference is that we're not just waiting for a future

01:17:22.160 hope that is completely future where we basically just get by here and hope to change people's

01:17:29.520 minds on the doctrine of justification, like get them to confess that they're sinners.

01:17:33.260 We actually want to see them become new humans and form new human ways and cultures in every

01:17:39.320 aspect of what it means to be human. So that's it. I think we're saying that there is such thing as

01:17:43.960 Christian economics. There is such thing as Christian sexuality. There is such thing as

01:17:48.180 Christian music. There's such thing as Christian painting, Christian cooking, Christian architecture,

01:17:53.860 Christian, literally fill in the blank. And the glorious, amazing, good news, I just said

01:17:59.620 glorious again. The glorious thing about that is that what it does is it makes it so your entire

01:18:06.560 life can be meaningful, interesting, and you can tell, like you can literally say there is so much

01:18:11.540 left to be done, you guys. When we're discipling the world, we're not actually just converting the

01:18:17.320 world. We're discipling the world. That's the task. So we should actually expect to be able

01:18:23.040 to tell someone like, man, like for example, in our community, I really, really deeply hope

01:18:27.820 that at some point, either somebody takes up the interest, one of our children, or we see somebody

01:18:32.720 saved who's a classical oil painter so that we can reclaim Christian oil painting from gay modern

01:18:39.180 art. And we can just see like a glorious culture of oil painting and beauty reclaimed from the

01:18:46.960 gayness of modern art. And that's a Christian endeavor. It's a Christian endeavor. That's not

01:18:53.280 just a neutral common kingdom sphere thing. Putting paint on a canvas can be done Christianly

01:18:59.400 and it can be done demonically. So that's really good. Thank you. A lot of it still though is kind

01:19:06.740 of in the ether these are really good ideas and they have direct applications obviously like

01:19:11.280 there's a christian way of doing everything but where do where do you start eric what

01:19:15.500 if you were starting new if you're a pastor of a church say you're a pastor of a church

01:19:22.000 hearing this and you're like yes i want that i want that vision of beauty you can look back at

01:19:28.760 the old christendom in europe and they're like they built some of the most beautiful things

01:19:33.580 painted some of the most beautiful things,

01:19:35.240 composed some of the most beautiful things,

01:19:37.200 and you're like, yes.

01:19:38.300 Where do you start as a pastor, I think,

01:19:41.160 of a church or as a father of a family?

01:19:43.500 What does that look like right now?

01:19:45.660 Yeah, I think the reason, Dan,

01:19:47.020 it's such a tough question,

01:19:48.000 and my earlier questions, I think,

01:19:49.320 are getting at this.

01:19:50.160 What is in the secret special sauce?

01:19:52.460 So I can look to certain communities and say,

01:19:54.880 I like that, I want that.

01:19:56.940 But it is really actually hard to identify

01:19:59.560 what it is about certain cultures.

01:20:01.160 Yeah. So, for example, there's something about Doug's people and it's not just Doug, but I'm, you know, Doug's people, the people in Moscow, there's something about their culture, whether it's the joy, the robust theology, the post mill, the education.

01:20:16.900 I don't know. There's something going on there. You come here, there's something going on.

01:20:22.620 I think the problem in asking that question is like, how do you as a pastor change it?

01:20:26.860 Well, I was pastoring a church of about 50 people and I couldn't change it.

01:20:30.120 yeah and i can't i i would say i could i was not possible for me to fully create a culture just

01:20:36.980 with me and my household either yeah and one of the reasons i bring this up is because i think

01:20:42.460 one of the answers to this question if you want to create christian them and you want to create

01:20:47.580 christian culture you got to find a geneva you got to find a mix of other guys it's almost like

01:20:54.960 charcoal. I've always used that analogy, but like, I can't start a charcoal fire, a charcoal fire

01:21:01.020 with one brick. I got to have like a couple. Yeah. And then I look at the gospels and I'm like,

01:21:07.180 well, Jesus fundamentally is making Christian culture and he gets 12 guys and really he's

01:21:12.820 getting 12 guys plus their families. So that's actually a lot of people. Yeah. And their

01:21:15.860 connections. And their connections. So he is not just saying like, you know, just you. And I think

01:21:22.940 that's the problem for a lot of us is we i meet guys on twitter all the time and it's like yeah

01:21:28.020 there's one pastor in his church and maybe he has kind of one guy who kind of supports him

01:21:32.440 is that enough to build christian culture for that guy's sake i hope so there are very few men

01:21:39.160 on planet earth in the history of the world and i know that's a big statement there are very few

01:21:43.900 people ever who could single-handedly do that who could single-handedly do much worth doing i think

01:21:50.180 Doug Wilson. I think of a

01:21:52.620 Cotton Mather. Some

01:21:54.640 pretty rare giftedness. Yeah, people that

01:21:56.400 started things that they

01:21:58.580 had the tenacity and the range

01:22:00.520 and the commitment.

01:22:02.760 Think of Doug. Like my wife was telling me this the

01:22:04.560 other day. I think it was

01:22:06.400 Becca. Becca needed to go to college, and

01:22:08.560 Doug didn't know where to send her, so he started

01:22:10.180 in college. So he started the NSA.

01:22:11.540 Elon Musked it.

01:22:13.560 Yeah, and the thing is, a lot

01:22:15.580 of these guys... Most of us are not going to be able to do that.

01:22:17.160 I think there are key lessons, though, that we can take

01:22:19.460 away because, you know, a lot of these examples that you're bringing up, the common factor is

01:22:26.340 that they were willing to go for it before they were ready. Before they had mastery,

01:22:32.560 they went for it. That's how you gain mastery, by the way, is you do things before you have

01:22:35.820 mastery and then you gain it over time. So when I'm thinking about this question, I think one

01:22:42.480 key element that is worth noting about like, what do you do practically is you actually have to start

01:22:46.820 with the worship because there is, you know, I got a guy on Facebook today. He was, I had listed

01:22:52.700 like, Hey, do you want to fight ancient malevolent spirits? And do you want to pursue, you know,

01:22:57.240 take one more step towards wild glory and do all these things. Well, then here's what you should

01:23:03.280 do. You should love your wife. You should raise your kids. And one of the things I said is you

01:23:06.180 should go to church. And he was like, what is paying to have somebody read the Bible out loud

01:23:10.260 to me to have to do with anything? Well, if that's your understanding of worship,

01:23:13.480 Yeah, I was like, first of all, you're an arrogant jerk, and I'm not even going to answer you.

01:23:17.840 I'm going to act like you don't exist, because you're not teachable, clearly.

01:23:21.060 But I think what that sort of asinine, arrogant statement reveals is that you have no idea how anything changes ever,

01:23:27.740 which is that it always changes from the worship on outward.

01:23:32.460 Yeah, and that's the picture we get, right?

01:23:34.440 The temple.

01:23:35.080 The temple.

01:23:35.800 The garden of Eden.

01:23:36.820 The water's flowing out.

01:23:38.120 You have to start by it.

01:23:39.380 So this is why we tell guys all the time.

01:23:41.360 I think we've all told people this.

01:23:43.480 is that you can't just by yourself do this.

01:23:46.320 One of the reasons is because like,

01:23:47.580 let's say that you're not the pastor of the church,

01:23:49.080 you're at a church, you can't reform their worship.

01:23:52.340 You can't by yourself.

01:23:53.800 If you've been there for 15 years waiting for reform

01:23:55.900 and asking the pastor like,

01:23:57.880 hey, can we stop singing Hillsong?

01:23:59.660 Can we stop being pragmatists?

01:24:01.180 Can we like reform our worship?

01:24:02.460 And they're like, you know, we'll think about it.

01:24:04.260 We'll read your book,

01:24:04.820 but they're not really gonna do anything.

01:24:06.340 It's like, sometimes you actually do have to go

01:24:08.000 and join another community.

01:24:09.940 Well, and I was even reading a book recently

01:24:11.680 and they said, you know, worship is central. It's important. Would agree with most of the

01:24:15.600 stuff in this show. Probably the author would. Yeah. But, and then it said like, if you don't

01:24:20.160 have a good church near you, you're called to start one. And I was like, no, that is fundamentally

01:24:24.600 flawed. No, there's too many guys. In fact, we've had people even show up at our church and Utah's

01:24:29.520 a church planting graveyard. So people come there be like, I'm here to plant a church in Utah. Can

01:24:33.220 you help us out? And a lot of the time we tell them, don't do it. We're like, you're not sent.

01:24:37.300 You're not ordained. You're not, you don't know what you're doing. And even the way that I became

01:24:41.600 a pastor that this, you know, the story of our church happened. It's God's grace that this church

01:24:46.120 still exists because it wasn't done the way that we would do it in wisdom now, I think.

01:24:52.100 But it's like, if you want to reform, you have to start with gang of men who are all aiming in the

01:24:58.740 same direction. You have to get the gang of men and you have to reform the worship. So you actually

01:25:03.140 have to have a church at the center. The church is at the center. And I think practically, and this

01:25:09.200 is you know roundabout i didn't answer your question directly dan but actually you did

01:25:12.560 that's what i was looking for the fundamental answer for me was i had to make sacrifices

01:25:18.400 uh utah was not my first pick geographically it isn't it's expensive um it was you know it's

01:25:26.720 costly to move all those things it's a hassle whatever inconvenient place to live it's yeah

01:25:30.740 it's very highly but i think it's fundamental that guys understand like i was reading post

01:25:37.600 mill books. And I saw a lot of guys who agree with those books that, but then like, they're

01:25:43.420 not living any of it. And then I said to myself, like, I'm just going to have to make some really

01:25:47.960 crazy, quote unquote, crazy decisions. Yeah. Like we're packing our bags and moving. Yeah.

01:25:54.240 Because we love Christendom and I want to see that my generations, you know, to a thousand of

01:26:00.660 them, I pray, you know, pray for that every night that God would extend to a thousand generations

01:26:05.300 through my children. But if I want that, it starts with where do I go worship with God's people?

01:26:11.200 Yeah. Do they hold that vision? So that was what I would ask guys is like, okay, they're like,

01:26:14.980 oh yeah, our vision is for Christendom. And, and, and, you know, but then I say your church,

01:26:19.240 does your church even want that? Do your elders even want that? Because, you know, so often it's

01:26:23.960 like the people that you claim to be pursuing this vision with, they don't even believe in

01:26:27.800 that vision. Yeah. Yeah. And one of the dishes that we can fall into is people that mentally

01:26:32.000 assent to these. Yeah. Everything you say, amen. Yeah, that's great. And then they rail on whatever

01:26:37.320 the social issue is at the time, whether it's CRT or race stuff or whatever it is at the moment.

01:26:44.000 And then you, you ask, you ask the question, which you asked, what are you building? Yeah.

01:26:49.420 What are you doing to actually build? You know, like the, the old saying is, uh, is that, uh,

01:26:55.780 you can look at a healthy culture and there exists old men that plant trees. They will never feel

01:27:00.980 the shade of yeah you know and so what are you doing to actually build instead of just talk about

01:27:06.000 it what's the fruit it's like people actually visit ogden occasionally to try and move here

01:27:10.720 and some of them are kind of thrown off because they think that they're going to come here and

01:27:14.320 find that what we're doing all the time is talking about calvinism post-millennialism critical race

01:27:18.560 theory or feminism and like a lot of the time what we're actually doing is like we're playing frisbee

01:27:22.940 we're joking around together we're hanging out we're grilling we're making meat we're starting

01:27:27.320 businesses. We're talking with Ben Garrett about Boniface woodworking and product ideas and like

01:27:32.520 how we can, you know, what we're doing is most of the time, like those are enemies. Those are

01:27:37.200 wolves and foxes that we're going to keep out. We're going to, we're going to identify them well,

01:27:40.680 teach well in our theological times. But a lot of our life is actually like the theological and

01:27:45.800 cultural life of the church isn't built around just being culture warriors against the enemies

01:27:50.700 of the day. It's actually about being Christians in the vocations where that God has given us.

01:27:57.440 And we're all busy guys. We're busy. Like that's the thing where people come over, you know,

01:28:02.740 they visit the church and it's like, come over for dinner. Let's hang out. Let's talk about what

01:28:06.240 are you doing? Like what, what skills do you have? Like, are you an engineer? Are you, what are you

01:28:10.380 good at? Like, you know what? You could, you could really meet a human need. Like that's what

01:28:14.580 vocation is. That's what the economic sphere really is, is you loving your neighbor, meeting

01:28:19.020 a real human need, solving a real human problem, being the workers worthy of his wage, being

01:28:24.860 properly compensated for it. And everybody is blessed by your economic activity because people

01:28:30.100 are a resource, not a resource sucker. So it's like people come here and they expect sometimes

01:28:35.120 for us to be all obsessed about theology all the time. I think people visit Moscow and they think

01:28:40.180 the same thing. And then they go there and it's like, what are they doing? Dinner. They're doing

01:28:45.740 like they're doing really good dinner. They're being really good friends. Like they're just

01:28:51.260 being human beings the way that God made humanity to function because they're Christians. So

01:28:58.640 we're pretty deep into this episode at this point. And let me tie it up like this, I think,

01:29:07.040 because we've, at the beginning of this show, we said that this theological maximalism

01:29:13.620 and legacy-minded cultural maximalism lives and swims in the stream of reformed Catholicity.

01:29:23.220 So what I'm going to do is just give you an idea of what we mean by that. We've talked about it a

01:29:26.680 little bit in the last show, but we really deeply believe that the things we're describing are fruit

01:29:32.060 that grows on a certain kind of tree and nowhere else, and that that tree is reformed Catholicity.

01:29:39.580 So what we mean by that, I'll give you three things and we'll end it here,

01:29:43.400 is that Reformed Catholics are Protestant, meaning we're not Roman Catholic.

01:29:47.780 We believe that there are errors in the Roman Catholic Church.

01:29:50.220 We're Protestants, okay?

01:29:51.300 We believe that the Christendom that we're talking about is going to be a Protestant Christendom,

01:29:55.860 right?

01:29:56.100 It's going to be built on that, in fact, all of the fruit that we're talking about

01:29:59.920 grows best on a Puritan, Reformed, Catholic sort of tree, right?

01:30:07.720 So we're Protestants.

01:30:09.660 Reformed Catholics are historically rooted,

01:30:12.580 meaning that we actually see ourselves

01:30:14.580 as part of the great stream of church history,

01:30:16.700 not atomistic individuals.

01:30:18.880 So when we say Catholic, we mean that.

01:30:20.520 We're part of the universal church.

01:30:22.720 Like the reformers, we're not aiming to start a new thing.

01:30:26.140 We're actually aiming to just go back to the old ways.

01:30:29.780 And the only reason there is a reformed church

01:30:31.980 is because the Roman Catholic Church

01:30:33.300 refused to submit to scripture, right?

01:30:35.120 They said no.

01:30:36.300 So we are historically rooted.

01:30:39.100 And finally, Reformed Catholics are not schismatics.

01:30:42.740 And this is very important for the cultural vision that we're building.

01:30:45.940 Because what we're saying is that we can partner, build, fellowship, feast, and fight side by side with lots of brothers and sisters in this great stream of Reformed Christendom across all sorts of disagreement.

01:30:59.520 so there's going to be like in this new christendom that we believe the lord will build

01:31:03.940 and that we're aiming to to put up a few bricks in ourselves is a reform catholic catholicism

01:31:10.100 that's going to be built up of lots of different types of bricks there's going to be reform baptists

01:31:15.540 in there there's going to be presbyterians of all sorts of stripe some of them are going to be e

01:31:19.680 peers you know side-eyeing everybody singing a hymn some of them are going to be like yeah no

01:31:24.800 we're okay with hymns some of them are going to be you know some anglican leaning sort of people

01:31:28.860 Some of them are going to be like, yeah, we're a little Theopolitan. We like that James Jordan

01:31:34.000 vibe. Some of them are going to be like, James, that's crazy stuff. I don't know. I read his

01:31:37.840 books and I think he was on a trip of some sort. And what we're saying is that if we're to build

01:31:43.300 a new Christendom, reformed Christians across lots of different streams are going to have to

01:31:49.780 link arms, break bread across tables and say, we confess the Lord Jesus Christ is Lord of all,

01:31:55.740 right? We're going to have to link arms. And so we really believe that the theological and cultural

01:32:01.540 maximalism that will, in a legacy-minded way, produce this new Christendom is going to swim

01:32:07.040 in the stream of and be the outflow of this great river of reformed Catholicity. So thanks for

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The King's Hall - April 08, 2022

Theological Maximalism, Legacy-Minded Cultural Maximalism, & Reformed Catholicity

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