In this episode, Pastor Joel Webin talks about his upcoming conference, Blueprints for Chrysidom 2.0, as well as the Ezra Institute's upcoming spring conference, and what it means to be a Christian in the 21st century.
00:08:28.420He said, gentlemen, this is a football. And I think if Western Christians are going to have any hope again of shaping our society with the truth, the freedom, the beauty of the gospel, we need to get back to basics.
00:08:49.640We need to get back to some fundamentals.
00:08:53.380And the challenge is that we are not here for a game, but for a cosmic-sized conflict.
00:09:02.400The kingdom of light, as Joel mentioned, versus the kingdom of darkness.
00:09:06.780And so we have to be prepared to root ourselves in that calling.
00:09:11.680and there may need to be in some of our lives but in the life of the church in the west there
00:09:18.260does need to be some reorientation of our ministries accordingly because the western
00:09:24.140church is facing an existential crisis there's no question about that and this is in part because
00:09:33.560there is an infectious thread that runs through the Western tradition that has never really been
00:09:42.000properly rooted out. It was Joel that gave me the title poisonous pietism it's one of his sort of0.99
00:09:49.740punchy titles so I'm going to call that an infectious thread that has never really been0.99
00:09:55.960removed. It's actually not controversial now to assert that the church for the most part is no
00:10:03.320longer a formative influence in the affairs of Western civilization. To a certain degree,
00:10:10.360it's still more true in certain states in America. It's certainly not true really in Europe anymore.
00:10:19.060If you were up early and watched any of the coronation this morning, actually quite fascinated
00:10:24.580how interested American media is in the coronation. You're seeing there some of the
00:10:31.260cultural vestiges of Christianity. It's not completely evacuated of its meaning. It's been
00:10:36.160radically feminized. You saw female bishops there, some of whom are liberals.0.81
00:10:42.520So there's an element of pantomime, but there is still an element of substance to what's going on,
00:10:49.700and that's actually thanks to the substance that's within the liturgy, and that fundamentally was not
00:10:57.220altered. But it's a declining situation. There's less than a million members left in the Church
00:11:04.760of England, and that declined a further 25% during the COVID era. The Canadian Christian
00:11:11.980philosopher Calvin Sieveld has put it this way. He says, a foreign dynamic and the neo-pagan spirit
00:11:21.400of the renaissance is shaping the culture of the world at the moment but because god and the church0.90
00:11:28.800are dead to the world there is inevitably come an all-encompassing frustrating loss of order
00:11:35.720certainty and security in the world and that is disturbing even to those who suppress the truth
00:11:43.840in unrighteousness we've almost reached a point where even the non-believing community is starting
00:11:50.960to say, hang on a second, are men really women? What's going, there's something seriously
00:11:59.200adrift here. Slowly, Christians are beginning to wake up to the fact that there's a pressing0.88
00:12:05.520question that we have to ask afresh, and that is, what is the nature of the relationship
00:12:12.560of the gospel of Jesus Christ to the society in which we live? What is the relationship
00:12:20.360of God's word revelation to the Christian's life in the world.
00:12:27.440Now, for many centuries, one answer to that question has been the attempt to divide reality
00:12:40.300One part subject to Jesus Christ and his word revelation, and the other, that is to operate
00:12:49.140more or less independent of Christ and his word under a very general idea of human reason
00:12:57.180and if you're a Christian a general conception of providence. Broadly we might call these domains
00:13:05.500as the two kingdoms theorists call them the redemptive kingdom and a common kingdom
00:13:13.780which corresponds essentially to the church and culture, the church and our life in God's creation.
00:13:24.960And that would include culture, would include politics, law, education, sciences, the arts, etc., etc.
00:13:34.580And there have been variations over the centuries in the West on this theme theologically.
00:13:41.960theologically. There's a Roman Catholic version of this. There is an Anabaptist version.
00:13:49.520There is a Lutheran version. There is an evangelical pietistic version. There's even
00:13:56.140a reformed version, ostensibly, that you heard Joel talk about. So for simplicity, I'm not going
00:14:05.340to talk about all of those. We'd be here all day. So for simplicity, we'll use the term
00:14:11.200two kingdoms and pietism as umbrella expressions to cover the essential idea
00:14:19.120of a fundamental division running right through God's creation.
00:14:25.080A fundamental division running right through God's creation. Because what I want to do in
00:14:31.160this session is deal with the formative ideas that undergird all forms of this pietistic
00:14:40.480two kingdoms thinking, because we certainly haven't got time to digress into all the various
00:14:46.260versions. So we'll talk about the fundamentals. Now, before I do that, just a clarifying word
00:14:52.800about pietism. The word piety is an important word.
00:15:03.680piety is an important quality in the Christian life personal piety it just denotes reverence
00:15:14.280for God sincere devotion toward God but if you put an ism on the end of there like a lot of isms
00:15:22.600you have a problem pietism is the tendency to restrict the meaning of the Christian life
00:15:30.400to personal devotional disciplines, which of course are important, and your personal spiritual
00:15:38.260growth. And that tendency to restrict the meaning of Christianity to that began in German
00:15:47.400Lutheranism that had theological foundations in scholastic medieval thought. It made its way into
00:15:54.740the English-speaking world and became part of modern evangelicalism. And pietists, generally
00:16:03.040speaking, tend to see sort of biblical orthodoxy and especially the idea of Christendom as a sort
00:16:09.560of dead religion. And they boasted more of a spiritual faith focused on the new birth and
00:16:17.040their spiritual exercises. An emphasis gets laid on emotion and feeling and especially doctrine
00:16:23.840becomes something considered more dry, more intellectual. So that's probably ringing a few
00:16:28.400bells for you about the way some people tend to conceive of the Christian life. The cultural
00:16:34.460effect, though, of pietism was the weakening of the church and the strengthening of the state.
00:16:41.560It's a retreat inward, pietism. It wasn't able to combat the power of the Enlightenment,
00:16:51.040just as Lutheranism was not able to deal with the rise of the Third Reich.0.62
00:16:57.440The Enlightenment perspective saw the state, not the kingdom of God,
00:17:04.680as the truly universal concept under which we organize our lives.
00:17:10.640The church then was regarded as an area of private faith.
00:17:15.800The state was the realm of public reason.
00:17:18.140private faith public reason and so the state would become the new arbiter of societal order
00:17:29.640and this primary concern of pietism for the spiritual life then didn't contest the claims
00:17:38.400of the enlightenment with regard to man's reason and with regard to the state and the same is true
00:17:46.360of modern evangelical pietism, it's basically allowed the state to move in and control most of
00:17:52.020life. And we've given up that ground pretty much uncontested by steadily retreating from all of it.0.83
00:17:59.720On the one hand, emphasizing the church and the spiritual life,
00:18:05.120or ostensibly emphasizing the church, the church has actually steadily made a peripheral
00:18:10.440all, an irrelevant institution. I think we saw that actually during the whole COVID era
00:18:16.420and the lockdown of the church and the way in which much of the church responded to that.
00:18:24.240In Canada, for example, the church was actually viewed by the state as not even,
00:18:29.760it was less than a non-essential service. The non-essential services were opened first,
00:18:35.060so-called and later the church that was after the second lockdown we challenged the first one
00:18:43.140had some success and then because the most of the churches didn't stand with us the state realized
00:18:49.120this is all bluster uh they're not going to stand up to us and then they rode roughshod over the
00:18:55.720church in canada so the salvation of individuals from hell is seen as the preeminent concern of
00:19:03.660the pietist not the glory the justice and the kingdom rule of God and pietism as well tended
00:19:10.540to be antinomian didn't really have a place for God's law in society and yet it's amazing how
00:19:18.900legalistic pietism is because actually if you want to the most the most liberated Christians
00:19:27.220that I know are the ones that take the law of God seriously the most bound up Christians I know are
00:19:33.100the ones that don't, and they replace man's human tradition with the law of God. And so
00:19:37.360pietistic denominations and communions are all ready to condemn each other for not being spiritual
00:19:42.500or holy enough or too charismatic or too reformed or too doctrinal or too this or too that, rather
00:19:48.760than focusing on bringing every area of life into captivity to Christ. So the church ends up at war
00:19:56.260with itself rather than dealing with the actual core conflict. Now that's in stark contrast to
00:20:03.660the early church that engaged the pagan world. They quickly launched hospitals, care homes for0.81
00:20:13.160abandoned children, schools, homes for the elderly without families. They created courts of arbitration.
00:20:22.360It wasn't a church in retreat from the world, but an organic body that was living out the life of the kingdom of God, teaching, discipling the nations in terms of what God had commanded.
00:20:33.520And that was before the church could even own its own buildings to worship in.
00:21:39.760now that's the essence of pietism so when we criticize pietism we're not criticizing personal
00:21:48.080piety prayer the reading of scripture faithfulness to god in our membership in the life of the church
00:21:56.640but a worldview that restricts the relevance of the gospel to those spiritual exercises
00:22:02.440the fundamental question though that i want to address in this lecture is why what accounts for
00:22:08.940the difference between the transformationalist attitude of the early church and, well, a church
00:22:18.100that really revolutionized culture and this weak, pietized two kingdoms Christianity in the modern
00:22:25.680West that has presided over the de-Christianization of our culture. We have some accountability for0.65
00:22:35.320that. Because it's on our watch. So let's talk about the philosophical root of two kingdoms
00:22:44.740thinking. And it does get a little bit challenging here. Okay, but just try and stick with me.
00:22:51.800Maybe you'll find it easy and I'm just imagining the problem. But lying beneath this dualistic
00:22:56.920perspective is actually a non-Christian philosophy of life. That's the problem.
00:23:05.320What makes the Christian perspective unique is a creational worldview.
00:23:12.260But the Greco-Roman cradle of Western civilization did not have a concept of a free creation by an infinite personal God as revealed in the Bible.
00:23:25.120And that's because the Greek understanding of nature, as it is expressed especially in Aristotle, was ruled by a dualistic idea, a dualistic religious idea of form and matter.
00:23:47.120And this regarded reality, creation, as we call it creation, but it regarded reality what is as uncreated, an uncreated, amorphous, chaotic matter, which by a forming activity from an impersonal divine principle achieves a kind of coherence of form and matter.
00:24:17.120So there's no free creation out of nothing by a personal God.
00:24:23.680There's an impersonal principle, divine principle of form, and there is uncreated chaotic matter.
00:24:31.840And that had the effect of dividing reality into two realms, the sensory and the super sensory.
00:24:40.400The sensory is that that you can experience with your senses, the super sensory, that which you can't.
00:24:46.820But they thought you could know what you didn't experience with your senses by a kind of intellectual contemplation.
00:24:54.720So they thought of human beings as having rational souls that by contemplation could meditate on the forms, on the divine principles.
00:25:05.360Now, that might sound very abstract. It is quite abstract.
00:25:09.460But the impact of that understanding on what it means to be human was profound.
00:25:16.820Human beings came to be seen as assembled, stick with me, of two components, distinct in principle, a mortal material body and an immortal rational soul.
00:25:35.320Plato thought of the soul substance of the human being as primary the body was a kind of tool
00:25:45.680like the way you drive a car so the soul substance sits in this material thing like you sit in a car
00:25:54.120for Aristotle it's slightly more complicated form was the divine higher principle that's
00:26:01.740embedded in the non-divine chaotic matter providing its unity and that unity the substantial unity
00:26:10.020that's made up of that the rational soul is the essential form in other words it gives matter
00:26:20.340its form its its distinction its identity now that view is a departure from the biblical
00:26:27.220revelation which says there are no uncreated independent substances over against the all
00:26:34.740creating word of god and human beings in biblical creation are a unity of an we can talk about the
00:26:45.320bible talks about an inner and outer man but the inner and outer are a unity if divisible only
00:26:53.300divisible to God we have the breath of God and the the man made from dust becomes a living being
00:27:02.880a unity in the incarnation of the Lord Jesus Christ we have the unity of the human person
00:27:09.220and the resurrection of Jesus is not the resurrection of a disembodied immortal soul
00:30:06.820and that's conceived as a shell for the noblest part of man the noblest part being
00:30:15.040the immortal soul which escapes the corruptible material flesh at death
00:30:19.280the rational soul is the is conceived of as a sort of spiritual complex of thinking feeling
00:30:28.000willing it's natural reason spirituality the body is implicitly or explicitly denigrated
00:30:34.860in terms of lower desires carnal appetites and so on and so sin's root is located in these lower
00:30:43.820fleshly desires and actually some of the church fathers made this mistake because of the influence
00:30:51.860of Greek philosophy some of them rejected marriage rejected sex the sexual relationship within
00:30:57.400marriage Augustine accepts marriage but he says it's better if you can be married and not engage
00:31:03.080in conjugal relations and so this is the effect of the the Greek philosophical worldview on
00:31:12.740Christian thinking now that teaching entails a very problematic idea
00:31:17.860that God creates and then inserts sinful souls into each new body
00:31:24.800so there was a sense of a need to shift the seat of the root of sin
00:31:32.060from the soul to the body's lower capacities allegedly. Now that unequal yoking of creation
00:31:40.240with pagan thought helps account for the medieval ascetic ideal of a monastic life
00:31:47.760that if you really wanted to serve God you withdrew from marriage, you withdrew from family life,
00:31:54.260You withdrew from culture and you lived in an isolated monastery and you basically punish your body as the root of sin so that your soul can be purified in contemplation of God.
00:32:14.220Now, the religious superstructure that then gets built up around that starts to divide all of life into two domains, the natural and the supernatural, the spiritual.
00:32:23.420and that got expressed in in medieval and scholastic theology and sadly in all two
00:32:28.720kingdoms theology really as nature and grace nature is conceived in the medieval thought
00:32:36.640there as form and matter and grace supernatural faith is that additional gift that brings the
00:32:44.440immortal soul to perfection that was the roman catholic view still is
00:32:48.020though our rational soul they said is wounded by sin it's deprived of the gift of faith it is not
00:32:59.360seen as radically perverted and radically depraved by the fall there's no sense of a total depravity
00:33:07.700the fall really just robbed us of a supernatural gift of grace i.e true faith that's restored
00:33:16.760through Christ and specifically the church, because the church is the one supernatural
00:33:22.860institution of grace. So that's medieval Roman Catholic thought. And so this synthesis of these
00:33:33.900incompatible views led to the emergence of the idea that will be very familiar to you,
00:33:39.640a secular and a sacred realm, a secular and a sacred realm. The one, the secular, is ruled by
00:33:49.420reason and natural law, the other by grace and special revelation. Now, the medieval church
00:33:57.380saw its role as a mediator of salvation in the sacred realm, but because of the concept of
00:34:07.820Christendom, they tried to maintain a connection between the supernatural realm of grace, the
00:34:14.500sacred and the secular. They kind of acted as chaplain to the secular government. Secular
00:34:20.440government was running, yes, in terms of the dictates of reason, but the supernatural realm
00:34:24.960was constantly sprinkling its pixie dust on the natural realm, an ecclesiasticizing life,
00:34:34.420at times nature and grace or emperor and pope battled it out for supremacy who would anoint whom
00:34:45.000fast forward into the reformation you've got martin luther and the reformed calvinistic view
00:34:53.540of the relationship of gospel and culture and creation and redemption and the mission of god's
00:34:57.860people, and they move in two different directions. The Lutheran view, because Luther was educated
00:35:04.000under William of Ockham when he was at Urfa Monastery, and he continued this very sharp
00:35:12.400division of Ockham between the natural life and the supernatural Christian life. What Ockham did
00:35:16.660is he said, this connection that medieval Christendom has maintained between nature and
00:35:22.320grace we need to sever that there's no connection so luther begins to express a strong law gospel
00:35:30.340opposition which is a persistent error the christian has nothing to do with the law for
00:35:37.620the law is for the sin nature and it's in an antithetical relationship to grace whereas
00:35:43.260actually the bible says that it's grace and wrath that are in opposition to each other not grace and
00:35:48.900law. The law is stripped by Luther of its creational function and redemption is seen as the death of
00:35:57.800nature rather than its renewal, rather than its restoration, its rebirth. And he thought of secular0.74
00:36:08.380government and social order as belonging to the domain of reason, not revelation. And so the
00:36:13.780result is that the divide runs right through the center of reality for Lutheranism. Human culture
00:36:18.620politics they belong to the realm of nature and law and so there's this constant inattention
00:36:23.800between the gospel of love that belongs to the higher supernatural realm and your earthly life
00:36:31.760and most christians who've grown up in the west feel this when you go to church you're told to
00:36:37.320be holy be nice to your wife be nice to your children be nice to your colleagues at work
00:36:45.000But the notion that there's a connection between the word of God, Christ's lordship, and your vocational life, your civic life, your cultural life, that's foreign to most Christians.
00:36:57.720This false tension remains then entrenched, the opposition of law and gospel.
00:37:05.760Secular life is religiously neutral, governed by principles other than the word of God.
00:37:10.500creation itself is consistently viewed by most christians as something to be escaped
00:37:18.400and not just you know hal lindsey and uh the and tim la hay and let's get out of here but
00:37:26.220i mean even some within the reform tradition where you barely get out with a resurrected body
00:37:31.520because creation is a devalued realm destined to be only destroyed
00:37:38.080and so attention runs through the lives of most modern evangelicals between a sacred call to
00:37:46.560holiness given by the church and their life everywhere else in other words creation and
00:37:51.300redemption are cut off from each other redemption is for your soul so that you can go to heaven
00:37:58.140you know the bible doesn't actually say you're going to heaven it says that
00:38:03.180the new Jerusalem comes down out of heaven into the earth and we pray your kingdom come your will
00:38:10.080be done on earth as it is in heaven and so this is indicative of modern evangelicalism's similar
00:38:21.500denial of the totality of God's revelation being relevant to each area of life and so for most
00:38:28.600there's no such thing as a Christian view of education or a Christian view of law or art or
00:38:34.300politics or economics or scholarship or boiling eggs. I think that's Michael Horton sort of
00:38:41.360mocking this perspective. There's no such thing as a way to, a Christian way to boil an egg. Well,
00:38:47.360actually, I beg to differ, right? Because diet and food is something that the Bible has a lot to say
00:38:54.680about. In fact, it was actually Charles Darwin who was doing his, in one of his diaries as he's
00:39:01.220traveling around the Pacific Islands, he actually criticizes the explorers who are critical of
00:39:07.420Christian missionaries in those areas. Because he says, if you are an explorer and you're shipwrecked,
00:39:12.420you get washed up on one of those islands. He says, you pray to God it's one of the islands
00:39:17.760that's already learned the lesson of the missionary, otherwise you will end up in the stir-fry.
00:46:19.300When you walk out of a church, you are now under a whole new different set of rules and principles and laws to govern your reality on that view.
00:46:27.600So we have revelation, we're told, can't be applied to culture and society.0.63
00:46:32.120If you Christianize culture, you're mixing the upper and lower story, nature and grace, nature and supernature.
00:51:10.560Well, actually, I would say Jesus is king.
00:51:12.300He doesn't need a queen. All the human disciplines and sciences are under Christ the king and his word.
00:51:23.900Finally, culture kingdom. The kingdom of God is spiritual, invisible reality that does not manifest itself outside the heart and a supernatural institution of grace called the church.