The NXR Podcast - THE CONFERENCE - The Rise Of The Christian Prince - Stephen Wolfe

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00:00:03.800 I get it. It's annoying. Everybody asks, but I'm going to tell you why.

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00:00:16.280 You and I both know that this ministry is willing to talk about things that most ministries aren't.

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00:00:26.800 well thank you for for being here i i didn't know there'd be so many people here for to listen to a

00:00:34.560 guy who believes in natural law so uh it's a rare thing but uh hopefully you know david and i can

00:00:40.720 have a good discussion and hopefully you'll you'll you know come to the conclusion that we're not

00:00:45.260 actually so far apart but um so thank you to joel for this and the invitation uh this is a really

00:00:50.520 great conference and it's an honor it's definitely an honor to be here um among great men

00:00:56.300 and women. So I'm talking about the prince and or the prince as great men.

00:01:05.040 So our world hates great men. Why do they hate great men? They hate great men because such men

00:01:14.580 transcend the rules and the moralistic norms of the age. And by force of vision and by personality,

00:01:24.480 they gain a devoted and loyal and inspired following.

00:01:30.560 And that great man leads them into hardship for the good of themselves and their posterity.

00:01:37.940 But why do liberals, why do liberals fawn over the ice cream devouring Joe Biden?

00:01:45.760 Why did Obama, Mr. Smooth and Mild, cause young women and men of the aspiring class 0.90

00:01:53.200 to swoon at his rallies. Do you guys remember that? Literally people would collapse in his

00:01:58.380 presence. That's, that's power. I'll give them that. But, uh, but what, why is that? Because at

00:02:03.960 heart, the liberal has a weak soul is animated by bureaucratic sameness and management. Everything

00:02:13.340 is a process of fairness, fairness through, uh, through procedure, through box checking and

00:02:20.500 oftentimes cooked evaluations. For them, power is diffused. It's implicit. It is soft. That is,

00:02:29.000 it is long housed. The great man in such an order is obsolete, so they think. To them,

00:02:36.440 he is destructive to the system. Now, the conservatives, for their part, in our day,

00:02:43.780 seemed to love some great men. They loved Lincoln, Churchill, and Ronald Reagan. But notice that the

00:02:51.220 conservative loved such great men for their universal ideas. Lincoln completed the aspirations

00:02:58.280 of the founding by enacting universal natural rights, and Churchill defeated a threat to

00:03:06.120 universal democracy while losing his empire, and Reagan led a liberal world to triumph over the

00:03:15.480 evils of communism. So all these men, all these men in their own way, made the world safe for

00:03:22.860 democracy. So in the early 2000s, the conservatives looked up, took up this theme, took up this theme

00:03:31.500 of universality and they had a bust of Churchill staring at them in the Oval Office. And what did

00:03:37.580 they do? They invaded the sovereign nation of Iraq. And to do what? They did it to spread 0.63

00:03:43.520 democracy. Universal democracy is in the heart of every single man is a liberal Democrat waiting

00:03:50.440 to come out. So each of these men, and certainly you can admire these men, but for the conservative,

00:03:56.520 they're cherished for their contribution to humanity. Just listen to example to Reagan's

00:04:03.520 celebrated farewell address, which I recommend you do, as he cast the pilgrims of Plymouth Rock

00:04:09.980 as freedom lovers, just freedom lovers seeking freedom, and he renders the American as simply

00:04:16.360 any human who wants to work hard. He renders him into the universal economic man. Now the new right

00:04:24.180 today, the new riot of which we're a part, likes to question whether we actually won World War II.

00:04:31.300 But that's not because of some love for the Third Reich or Hitler or anyone like that,

00:04:35.440 but because the aftermath of our victory led to the lifting up of humanity to the degradation 0.87

00:04:42.720 of the victors' own historical peoples. That is why we question whether we actually won World War

00:04:50.640 too. And the conservatives since then, the conservatives and the liberals, have been

00:04:55.060 united on this general program, which is to invade the world and to invite the world.

00:05:02.260 Why did the old guard conservatives hate the slogan, Make America Great Again? It's because

00:05:08.860 it spoke of American greatness, not aspirations for international liberalism. So the liberal and

00:05:17.600 the conservative in our day, for related reasons, despised the idea of the great man, one whose

00:05:23.540 vision is for national greatness, driven by concerns for a particular people. And thus,

00:05:31.040 David and Solomon were for the Israelites, and Solon was for the Athenians. Lycurgus was for 0.98

00:05:37.880 the Spartans. Cincinnatus for the Romans. Alfred the Great for the Anglo-Saxons. William the

00:05:43.540 silent for the Dutch, Edmund Burke for the British, George Washington for the Americans,

00:05:48.980 Napoleon for the French, and Robert E. Lee for the American South.

00:05:59.020 So great men, great men are not bound by the chattering commentary class, nor the literati, 0.93

00:06:06.740 those who in our day are so ideologically bound by procedural norms that they prefer a slow,

00:06:13.120 decline to necessary action. They have endless words and few deeds. They fear presence, gravitas,

00:06:21.940 vitality. They fear the yearn for life, the yearning that distracts the average man from

00:06:28.420 expending his life force on meaningless labor and consumption. The nation for such people is not a

00:06:35.880 collective entity with a collective purpose, a way of life, shared loves, but a huddled mass

00:06:42.600 of disparate individuals contributing to GDP and an internationalist ideology.

00:06:50.140 The great man rejects such people. He transcends the moral pieties of the age, which bound men

00:06:56.080 to weakness, to being slaves, or at best, lovers of warmth and small comforts. He crosses the

00:07:04.660 Rubicon. He awakens men from slumber and sloth, just as Xenophon aroused the 10,000 to action

00:07:12.820 and adventure, as Themistocles, as Athens burned, united the Greeks to defeat the Persians at 0.80

00:07:20.200 Salamis, as the exiled El Cid led his followers against Muslim-held Spain, and as Washington

00:07:27.380 rallied the Continental Army at Valley Forge. These were great men who, in conditions of crisis,

00:07:34.660 inspired their fellow men to embrace hardship and to strive with united purpose.

00:07:42.700 So one thing that distinguishes the political right from the political left is its conception of power.

00:07:50.900 For the right, power is preferably open, it is explicit, and is more personal.

00:07:57.220 It typically has its figurehead, a true identifiable object of praise or blame.

00:08:04.020 Think, for example, about the old paintings of kings who are wearing swords.

00:08:09.560 So I'm not speaking about absolute power.

00:08:12.080 This power should be constitutionally curtailed and limited and directed,

00:08:17.220 nor does this require a centralization of power.

00:08:20.800 But power for the right should be identifiable and personified.

00:08:26.940 That is, in some way, embodied in a person.

00:08:29.620 but today in our time can we identify who specifically is responsible for say the spread

00:08:37.900 of transgender ideology well maybe some of you can but i won't go there so but in our in our time

00:08:47.060 in our time power is diffused through a network composed of professional associations such as

00:08:54.640 the American Medical Association, the media, academia, foundations, and government agencies.

00:09:00.760 Power in liberalism, especially in modern liberalism, is implicit. With a few exceptions,

00:09:08.360 no one mandates by law what you must think or care about. And yet, all of a sudden,

00:09:14.300 the new current thing is presented to us, and we, by a strange social pressure,

00:09:21.220 feel compelled to have an opinion, to talk about it.

00:09:25.860 They tell us which person or country we must stop and hate for a couple of minutes.

00:09:31.740 There are many things that we could stop and think about,

00:09:35.620 but our mind is captured by this thing presented to us.

00:09:38.900 The nation is repeatedly swept up in unthinking thought.

00:09:44.700 So as Christians are being slaughtered,

00:09:46.900 been slaughtered in Africa, in Syria, and other places, as freedom of speech is crushed even in

00:09:52.920 places in the West, what are we talking about instead? We're talking about Israel and Ukraine. 0.63

00:09:59.720 But again, power in liberalism is unidentifiable, or at least it is irreducible.

00:10:05.420 As Biden was incapacitated for four years, who was running the federal government?

00:10:11.920 Who was making the decisions? Again, some of you guys might know, but who was making the decisions?

00:10:16.900 As for radical social change, its source is often indiscernible and is easy for them to simply dismiss any theory as conspiratorial, outlandish, or evil, or due to, you know, ethnic jealousy or something.

00:10:34.700 But change just simply happens suddenly.

00:10:38.040 It is like the wind, you know, not where it comes from, nor where it is going.

00:10:41.380 It is that the secular spirit moves, and suddenly we must celebrate the man in a dress.

00:10:49.100 Now, perhaps this is due to liberal managerialism, where individuals bounce between governments,

00:10:55.580 corporations, NGOs, foundations, media, academic jobs, everyone moving up the academic ladder,

00:11:01.860 playing the same game, operating according to the same rules of this brand network.

00:11:06.640 And each organization has its talking head, all of them saying the same exact thing.

00:11:11.380 And so the devilish spirit moves and the aspiring class conforms. But of course, this is mere theory

00:11:18.500 and it's me trying to discern a diffused implicit power. Now, everything conforms to this very

00:11:25.560 implicit power, the sort of thing that tugs at our hearts and gets us at the psychological level.

00:11:32.760 And thus, even rhetoric itself has become passive-aggressive. The HR lady with a smile

00:11:38.580 one day says you're fired without cause. Threats to your livelihood are concealed under language of

00:11:46.520 concern. That should sound familiar. We've experienced a lot of concern from fellow

00:11:53.020 Christians, and this is what I call wolf's law. So I made my own law. Thank you. Some of you know it, 1.00

00:12:00.720 but among Christians, the more they talk about loving your enemies, the more willing they are 1.00

00:12:07.700 to wield the left-wing mob to get you fired, to render you a social outcast, and to see you 0.54

00:12:14.360 financially ruined. So now you can remember Wolf's Law now. But the moral rhetoric, especially among

00:12:20.660 Christians, is a veiled threat. But the right still holds on to this ideal, that our rhetoric 0.72

00:12:28.980 should be assertive and direct, and that power should be open and it should be explicit. Now

00:12:35.400 Donald Trump, for all his fault, more than anyone in my lifetime has embodied this ideal. It's kind

00:12:40.940 of, I call him the most ironic great man of history. He embodies, you know, he's embodied

00:12:47.420 this ideal imperfectly. That is, and one reason why he's so hated, he's shown that you can just

00:12:52.680 do things, that you can just say it, that all those promises of the Republican Party that I

00:12:58.080 heard for decades, you can, they can just happen. You can actually achieve it when there is a will

00:13:04.460 to do it. So it is for these reasons that I think people are so angsty about the title

00:13:11.060 Christian Prince, which is a term, by the way, that is nearly ubiquitous in the Christian

00:13:18.160 tradition. So it's kind of bizarre. But it suggests a title of a man who does not ask

00:13:25.580 the ladies for permission. It is a man whose ethics is good and evil, not safe and scary.

00:13:32.520 so the christian prince as i described him in the case for christian nationalism is a great

00:13:38.960 man he is no surprises here a prince he is a distinguished man of his particular people

00:13:46.420 excelling in virtue the christian qualifier does not make him a man of humanity nor a man of all

00:13:54.600 christians he is a christian prince for his particular christian people so some people

00:14:01.880 have suggested that this prince of mine is a man of absolute power, unhindered in action. But this

00:14:09.200 is really what I'd call a universalist projection, stated by those who lack any conception of a

00:14:15.840 particular people with their own political tradition and constitution. The prince is a man

00:14:22.140 of a people for those people. He is bound by a way of life. So I'm not calling for a return to

00:14:31.160 monarchy, nor to some ancient conception of dictatorship, nor to a 16th century Geneva.

00:14:39.220 I know some of you might want some of that, but that's not what I'm saying. So every people has

00:14:43.820 a constitution. Every people has a constitution. It's either written or it's unwritten. And that

00:14:49.560 is, it is a political architecture that limits and directs absolute power or abstract power,

00:14:56.780 excuse me. It limits and directs power in the abstract. So in ordinary circumstances,

00:15:01.680 this prince that I've described is bound by his way of life, or I should say the people bind him

00:15:09.820 to it. See, the point of the prince, among other things, is that political rule must return to

00:15:16.420 great men who lead their people to greatness, who can inspire a sense of we across generations

00:15:25.460 who remind the living of their ancestors and of those yet to be born.

00:15:32.260 That is, they are temporal leaders of what Edmund Burke called the eternal society,

00:15:36.760 as he said in his own words, that it is a partnership between those who are living,

00:15:42.380 those who are dead, and those who are to be born.

00:15:46.440 So the prince is a man in whatever capacity or whatever title we want to give him in our political system

00:15:51.680 who reminds us that we live in a society gifted to us from the dead, and we labor now for our

00:15:59.820 progeny. We work with and we work for an inheritance. Every generation is both the

00:16:08.980 given and the givers of a way of life. So, of course, there are different types of civil

00:16:14.800 leaders. 16th, 17th centuries, we hear of kings and princes, civil magistrates, governors.

00:16:20.940 Today we have presidents, congressmen, prime ministers, members of parliament, all those.

00:16:25.740 And, of course, many countries today have a separation of powers

00:16:29.320 so that the legislative, executive, judicial powers are in different branches of government.

00:16:35.200 That's not always how it's been in the history.

00:16:39.000 So, but Prince, I do not refer to any specific type of ruler.

00:16:42.100 It's more of a ruler in general, emphasizing the personal nature of leadership,

00:16:47.600 his virtue, gravitas, and piety.

00:16:50.180 And I cannot conceive of a renewal of Christian commonwealths without great men leading their

00:16:58.360 people to it. Nor can we expect a revival of national will by the leadership of policy wonks 0.77

00:17:05.480 and mere regulators. That is why I prefer the word prince. In a way, he's the sort of mediator

00:17:12.900 of the nation's will for itself. It denotes both an executive power and a personal eminence

00:17:19.040 in relation to the people. The prince is the first of his people,

00:17:23.640 the one whom you can look upon as the father or protectorate of your country.

00:17:30.340 The prince is a world shaker of our time, who brings a Christian people 0.99

00:17:36.960 back to a self-consciousness and who restores the will for their good. 1.00

00:17:43.960 That is what I think we are lacking in America in particular. I think it's a will,

00:17:48.560 a collective will for our good. And I think that a prince can actually restore that, someone that

00:17:54.920 sort of great men can restore that. So prince is a fitting title for a man of dignity and greatness

00:18:01.840 who will lead a people to liberty, virtue, and godliness. So the prince holds an office

00:18:09.180 on behalf of God as creator. Francis Turretin, my favorite theologian, writes that the principal

00:18:16.120 and supreme end of the civil magistrate as such is the glory of God, the creator conservator of

00:18:23.800 the human race and the ruler of the world. It is a natural office that is required by the nature

00:18:32.860 of man whose function is the right ordering of civil society for righteous and pious living.

00:18:40.040 Now, this civil power that he possesses, it originates from God.

00:18:45.580 And so in this way, the prince mediates God's divine civil rule.

00:18:50.660 He is not a mere steward or a simple administrator of laws as if he simply issues a divinely prescribed code.

00:18:58.580 He is magisterial, not ministerial.

00:19:02.260 He makes public judgments in application of God's moral law, effectively creating law.

00:19:10.040 though derivative of natural law, and he has the power to bring about what he commands.

00:19:16.780 Thus, the prince holds the most excellent office, exceeding even that of the church minister,

00:19:23.060 for he is most like God in that office. The prince, unlike the church minister,

00:19:31.920 is a mediator. He's a vicar of God in outward civil affairs. As John Calvin said,

00:19:38.460 civil rulers represent the person of God as whose substitutes they in a manner act.

00:19:47.180 So for this reason, the prince is called a god in scripture, Psalm 82.6. He has, as Calvin said,

00:19:53.460 a sacred character and title. In a sense, we see God in the magistrate. Samuel Rutherford says,

00:20:02.020 for example, that the king hath a political resemblance of the king of heavens, being a

00:20:07.800 little God, and so he is above any one man. Calvin says that when good magistrates rule,

00:20:14.900 we see God, as it were, near us and governing us by means of those whom he hath appointed.

00:20:22.700 Elsewhere, Calvin writes that the image of God shines forth in them when they execute judgment

00:20:27.820 and justice. So the dignity of civil rulers for John Calvin is so great that he says, quote,

00:20:34.980 the palaces of princes ought to resemble a sanctuary, for they occupy the dwelling place

00:20:43.240 of God, which ought to be sacred to all. So a lot of these quotes are kind of shocking,

00:20:49.560 but this is a very traditional position on the nature of the office of the civil magistrate.

00:20:56.060 That's jarring to modern ears, and I think we should listen to it with humility.

00:21:00.520 so calvin demonstrates the divine magnitude of the princely office especially in terms of presence

00:21:10.600 in relation to the people so having the highest office on earth the good prince resembles god

00:21:17.620 of the people indeed if i'd be so bold to say he is the closest image of god on earth

00:21:22.940 so this divine presence through the prince which is very common in the reformed tradition

00:21:29.400 speaks to his role beyond civil administration.

00:21:33.480 The prince personifies their national spirit,

00:21:36.880 unifies them under a mission,

00:21:39.040 and inspires an intergenerational will to live.

00:21:44.400 He directs men in fulfilling the dominion mandate

00:21:47.180 to fulfill man's nature.

00:21:49.180 He inspires noble action, sacrifice, common affection,

00:21:52.460 and he casts a vision for national greatness.

00:21:56.360 As Thomas Carlyle once said,

00:21:58.400 we all love great men. Ah, does not every true man feel that he is himself made higher by doing

00:22:06.100 reverence to what is really above him? So the prince promotes national self-love, that is

00:22:12.540 loving our nation, and a manly moral liberty. He recognizes national sins but swiftly resolves them

00:22:21.120 and leaves no license for exploitation or room for lingering self-doubt and the lack of

00:22:28.380 national confidence, which is what ails us today. He encourages and challenges the boldness and

00:22:36.140 spirit of youth while elevating the old and venerating the dead. He silences the social 0.87

00:22:44.440 mammies and he countenances the Spartan bootstrapper. He loves and enacts justice with

00:22:51.460 martial virtue and resolve and thumos. He fights the foreign aggressors, sacrificing himself

00:22:58.140 for his people's good and he establishes peace with other nations. He worships God and calls

00:23:05.120 for his people to do the same. In a word, the prince ought to be a great man, the hero of the

00:23:13.700 people. And as such, his death only solidifies the nation, creating a heroic past. So as Ernst

00:23:22.260 Renan said, great men, glory, he writes, this is the capital stock upon which one bases a national

00:23:30.360 idea. So it goes without saying that the prince cannot mediate salvific grace. So I've elevated

00:23:37.420 the prince high, but he's not that high. No earthly office has that power, and Christ alone is the

00:23:42.640 mediator of grace unto eternal life. Nevertheless, the prince, as God's deacon, is an instrument for

00:23:51.680 eternal life by his law-making authority and personal piety, an example. Now, of course,

00:23:58.300 I'm speaking not only of a prince, but a Christian prince. The Christian prince is not a separate

00:24:04.120 species of ruler. Rather, he is the prince completed or perfected. He seeks not only that

00:24:11.500 we animals get our mash, but also that we seek the highest things, those of eternal life.

00:24:18.860 He brings the consciousness that we are a Christian people with a Christian homeland.

00:24:25.740 And in that light, our way of life must be Christian.

00:24:29.380 Our customs and laws ought to be Christian, all pointing to a homeland beyond.

00:24:36.320 Now, this is crucial.

00:24:37.460 See, the whole point of Christian nations is not to transform earth into heaven, nor is it to bring the kingdom in by violence.

00:24:47.860 Rather, it is to point our earthly life to the divine promise of something greater. 0.51

00:24:54.080 The nation is great only when it knows itself to be small compared to the glories of the new Jerusalem.

00:25:04.000 So Anne Bradstreet, a poet of Puritan New England, she described that heavenly city.

00:25:10.940 So let me read this.

00:25:12.200 the city where i hope to dwell there's none on earth can parallel the stately walls both high

00:25:23.140 and strong are made of precious jasper stone the gates of pearl both rich and clear and angels are

00:25:30.520 for porters there the streets thereof transparent gold such as no eye did e'er behold

00:25:37.040 A crystal river there doth run, which doth proceed from the Lamb's throne.

00:25:43.760 Of life there are the waters sure, which shall remain forever pure.

00:25:49.240 Nor sun nor moon they have no need, for glory doth from God proceed.

00:25:54.220 No candle there, nor yet torchlight, for there shall be no darksome night.

00:26:01.280 From sickness and infirmity forever they shall be free.

00:26:05.040 nor withering age shall e'er come there, but beauty shall be bright and clear.

00:26:10.660 This city pure is not for thee, for things unclean there shall not be.

00:26:17.260 If I of heaven may have my fill, take thou the world and all that will.

00:26:25.240 Now, the greatest of great Christian nations, they do not parallel the city to come. 0.71

00:26:33.000 so let us always be mindful of that. But Anne Bradstreet, the adored wife of Simon Bradstreet,

00:26:41.500 a man committed to public religious orthodoxy in Puritan, New England, was not denouncing

00:26:47.580 Christian nations on earth with that poem. Her message is a pious reflection on comparison.

00:26:54.520 We labor for a virtuous, pious, and beautiful nation, knowing that success makes us only smaller

00:27:03.720 and smaller relative to our nation's lodestar. Thus, the Christian prince, as a leader of the

00:27:12.020 nation, has that delicate work of making us great by submitting our way of life to something far

00:27:19.060 greater. But he does not achieve this by making us, by earthly standards, weak and helpless,

00:27:26.160 but rather strong, virtuous, and pious. That is, he reminds us to act like men.

00:27:36.740 All right, so Americans get uncomfortable with this idea of all this Prince talk,

00:27:41.860 so let me calm your fears. Well, not you, but the people watching this later on.

00:27:46.360 But as I said, the prince follows the people's way of life.

00:27:51.980 So an American Christian prince will be an American.

00:27:56.360 He'll be an American.

00:27:57.700 He will follow the American tradition and the American ways,

00:28:02.500 and he will serve the American heritage.

00:28:06.620 The people who denounce me as a nationalist

00:28:09.240 strangely also claim that I want some old-world medieval political order.

00:28:16.360 but I am an American nationalist. I want an American Christian nationalist, and that means

00:28:22.960 something. If the American actually has content, it means something. I've said many times that

00:28:27.780 George Washington is a good example for us. He's a man who knew how to win, and he had the

00:28:35.980 prominence and personality to become the American monarch. In fact, some people suggested that to

00:28:41.440 But he didn't want it. He had the magnanimity and the prudence to keep and maintain a republic

00:28:48.620 So considering him I'm just think of this guy considering him the father of their country

00:28:54.740 Americans throughout the 19th century kept his image on their mantles

00:28:59.420 symbolizing virtue order and sacrifice

00:29:03.060 Washington is I think the quintessential American great man

00:29:07.260 And I hope, and we should hope, for a new Washington to arise among us.

00:29:15.040 All right, so most ages, most ages only have one great man, which I'll call the one.

00:29:24.100 But still, we can strive to be great men among the few.

00:29:29.440 So there's the one, and then there's the few.

00:29:31.520 So the greatness of the few is like Gilgamesh's Enkidu.

00:29:36.980 Some of you classical students will know this stuff.

00:29:40.020 Gilgamesh's Enkidu, David's Jonathan, Achilles' Patroclus,

00:29:47.140 Alexander the Great's Hephaestion, Calvin's Beza,

00:29:51.760 Napoleon's Berthier, and Lee's Stonewall Jackson.

00:29:56.180 These are the great men among the few.

00:29:58.980 but most of us will not be great in the ways that i've described

00:30:04.440 but we but each of us uh but we can each be great in our own small way as great fathers

00:30:12.800 as great mothers we can be great in our vocations in our civic associations our businesses and in

00:30:20.520 our churches we can be great according to the laws of christ greatness is not limited to the

00:30:26.060 one or to the few. There is greatness among the many. But although our names will be forgotten

00:30:33.620 in time, our greatness can live on in the great actions of groups. So we do not know all the

00:30:43.920 names of David's mighty men, but their deeds are recorded for us in scripture. We do not know all

00:30:51.280 the names of the Spartan 300 who died at Thermopylae, defending Greek civilization from the

00:30:57.180 Persian invasion, but we tell of their sacrifice to this day. We do not know all the names of

00:31:04.620 Xenophon's 10,000 Greeks who made their trek home, being hounded by the barbarians seeking their

00:31:11.580 destruction, but they continue to inspire us. We do not know all the names of those who fought

00:31:18.740 and died for this country's independence, but we celebrate their victory. And in all these cases,

00:31:28.080 those forgotten names were part of something that achieved great things,

00:31:36.380 great things that live on, inspiring those who came after them, even inspiring the one,

00:31:43.340 the great ones, and the great few. So by forming a we and acting as one, we live on and we shape

00:31:53.460 this world. We can all be great by participating in one common struggle for our good and for the

00:32:01.080 good of our posterity. Now we, all of us, all of us want our children to be great. Great Christian

00:32:08.920 men and women. Our chief goal is that they are great Christians, for we know that the kingdom

00:32:14.980 of heaven and the kingdom of heaven even the least are the greatest. In that heavenly order,

00:32:20.540 the least known on earth can be first in God's heavenly kingdom. But in this temporal perishing

00:32:26.980 world, however, we distinguish. Humility and submission before God is foremost, but this does

00:32:34.600 not destroy magnificence, eminence, and princely strength and resolve. Rather, it perfects it.

00:32:44.680 Our earthly callings, according to the demands of this temporal world, are not dissolved by grace,

00:32:51.140 but completed by it, made whole, set in order for the goods of this world and for the next.

00:32:57.920 Now, the conflation of nature and grace and the things of heaven and earth, which is practiced

00:33:03.560 across respectable evangelicalism has led to passive aggression, victimolity, emotional

00:33:11.360 sabotage, and the baptizing of second-wave feminism. In short, it's the fusion of the 0.52

00:33:18.800 faith with political liberalism and the sort of implicit soft power I spoke of earlier.

00:33:26.400 But in Scripture and the Christian political tradition, civil and social power are

00:33:33.000 explicit, they are direct, it is confrontational, agonistic, and active. And while it's true that

00:33:42.580 earthly power is weak and it is dependent before God, that is not the case before fellow men,

00:33:51.660 and especially not before those who would do evil or seek the church's destruction.

00:33:56.280 So let me end by saying that we have a lot of work to do, a lot of work to do.

00:34:03.580 We are currently in a state of recovery from years of fusing Christian theology with prevailing social dogma.

00:34:15.080 And all of this must be critiqued and trashed.

00:34:19.140 We need stronger institutions.

00:34:22.200 We need elite formation.

00:34:23.940 We need elites.

00:34:24.560 we need the recovery of the arts of architecture academics we need poets we definitely we desperately

00:34:34.020 need poets and novelists we need novelists and we need of course statesmen we need strong families

00:34:40.440 and churches and a strong albeit small state so let us as individuals be faithful to god for the

00:34:49.260 good gifts he has given us. And with those gifts, let us pursue the height of excellence that they

00:34:57.220 afford us. Let's not forget that all of our powers, our bodily health, our minds, our reason,

00:35:05.040 our station in life, they are gifts of God for use. They're gifts of God for development

00:35:12.400 and for action. They show us in part the telos, the end of man. So let us use them to glorify God

00:35:23.100 and to enjoy him forever. Thank you.

The NXR Podcast - May 24, 2025

THE CONFERENCE - The Rise Of The Christian Prince - Stephen Wolfe

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