The NXR Podcast - THE LIVESTREAM - Traducianism： The Fascinating Idea That Explains So Much w⧸Ben Garrett of Haunted Cosmos

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00:00:26.820 time memorializes place embodied memory and places generates a connection between the past

00:00:34.280 present and future our activity with loved ones elevates sites to place of intergenerational love

00:00:41.840 such that through them we experience these places as deposits of familial affection a trace of love

00:00:49.980 remains. Stephen Wolfe, The Case for Christian Nationalism, from the chapter Loving Your Nation.

00:00:57.500 In recovering honor for our fathers and a sense of national identity, one of the most important

00:01:03.460 things will be to forge a connection to our past. We often speak of this connection in terms of

00:01:10.300 knowledge, values, and history. It is something objective and measurable. But what if we are

00:01:16.920 bound together to our family, our home, and our country in even deeper ways. Traducianism is a

00:01:25.140 historic Christian belief that has been a minority view throughout church history, although it was

00:01:30.580 held by some notable church fathers like Tertullian and reformers like Luther. Traducianism

00:01:37.840 is the belief that the souls of children are inherited from their parents, like two candles

00:01:43.960 coming together to light another candle. In this view, parents give not just their genetics to

00:01:50.900 their children, but pass on a unique personal spiritual component as well. In this way,

00:01:57.400 memories, affections, vitality, and other spiritual qualities are passed down through

00:02:02.880 the families and time, shaping each family and nation into a distinct ethnos with its own unique

00:02:10.520 spiritual properties even myths and archetypes that we know so well in the west live on in our

00:02:18.200 deepest memories their details lost to time but their form continually re-presented in our stories

00:02:26.120 ideas and even dreams traducianism is a compelling framework that offers a biblical and enchanted view

00:02:34.920 of the world where families, homes, and history are not merely material matter, but have a

00:02:41.780 spiritual connection to everything that came before and are an essential part of our hope

00:02:48.080 for the future. This episode is brought to you by our premier sponsors, Armored Republic and

00:02:54.940 Reese Fund, as well as our Patreon members and our faithful donors. You can join our Patreon by

00:03:01.340 going to patreon.com forward slash right response ministries or you can donate by going to right

00:03:09.460 response ministries.com forward slash donate coming on now to discuss traducianism is ben

00:03:17.200 garrett from haunted cosmos tune in now for a discussion that you won't want to miss

00:03:22.180 all right all right all right ga title this episode it's a blood memory there it is all

00:03:39.760 right west you kick it off and then uh and then let's go ahead and get ben all right so we got

00:03:43.920 ben garrett with us we're going to be talking about an idea uh i've known about it for a while

00:03:48.480 I remember reading, it was actually Gerhardus Voss, his reformed argmatics, and he could

00:03:52.700 contrast this view with creationism.

00:03:55.120 And it was funny at the time, because Voss doesn't actually believe in traducionism,

00:03:58.180 so he argued for the creationist view.

00:04:00.260 But he had this image, and he said, one of the ways that traducionism is described is

00:04:04.320 it's like a flame being carried on.

00:04:06.420 And in a sense, there is a new flame, but it's also a continuance, a likeness to the

00:04:11.260 old.

00:04:11.820 So you think about generation, you think about the continuance of it.

00:04:14.920 And so I remember that image always stuck with me, and it's been in the last six months that the two smartest people I know, Ben Garrett and C.J. Engel, have both said, yeah, we're kind of traditionists.

00:04:24.680 And I said, well, that's enough proof for me.

00:04:27.160 So I really like this view.

00:04:28.620 I think it explains a lot and doesn't just have theological import, theological importance, but I think practically.

00:04:34.980 I talked about legacy.

00:04:36.280 We talked about history and even here at America and here in the West.

00:04:39.300 What does it mean to be American?

00:04:40.420 And well, of course, there's history and all the different things that we could point to objectively that we could put in a textbook.

00:04:46.840 But I think being American is something deeper than that.

00:04:49.360 And even more so, not just to make it about race as if it's just only about genetic lineage, but a spiritual lineage as well.

00:04:56.060 And so to talk about all of this, to give us the details, we have Ben Garrett.

00:04:59.380 Ben, thanks for coming on the show.

00:05:01.280 Hey, thanks for having me.

00:05:02.620 And thank you for that high praise.

00:05:04.640 CJ is very smart.

00:05:05.800 And so are all of you.

00:05:06.880 So, yeah, I feel like I'm in good company.

00:05:10.420 Awesome. Well, Ben, I'll hand it over to you. I've done a lot of the reading on this,

00:05:14.840 but I would love for you to explain in your own words, traducianism, how it contrasts with

00:05:19.120 creationism, and even historically, how the thought along that has fallen. I know Augustine

00:05:24.580 was back and forth on it, but one of the big advantages of it is as it relates to original

00:05:28.980 sin. So I'll kick it to you. Yeah, thanks. So traducianism is definitely the minority report

00:05:34.320 among the reformers, the reformed Orthodox, and then even up into the American Presbyterians,

00:05:40.100 as far as I can tell. I think among the medieval Christians as well and the scholastics, it was

00:05:45.900 a minority position, sort of a split bag. But that doesn't mean it's unorthodox. It is actually

00:05:52.080 a perfectly orthodox position that you can defend from scripture. Now, creationism, maybe I'll start

00:05:57.900 there. Creationism is this view of the generation of the soul that says that at the time of

00:06:03.760 conception or sometime soon thereafter, depending on who you read, God creates a unique soul for

00:06:10.260 that created person, ex nihilo, in time, it's brand new. It comes from nothing, God makes it.

00:06:18.440 Now, the Traducian point of view is a little bit different. It says, no, we actually don't want to

00:06:23.680 get into that because it presents some problems that we can talk about in a little bit. And

00:06:27.320 Instead, what we should see is that man as a species, as a kind, is an embodied soul.

00:06:34.300 And so in order to reproduce after its own kind, it has to be able to reproduce not only

00:06:38.940 the body, but the soul that it has as well.

00:06:41.500 Otherwise, it stops being an embodied soul as a species.

00:06:44.860 And so Traducianism says that, just like how you said, just like how a baby gets its genetic

00:06:50.120 code from its parents, it also gets the soul as an inheritance from its parents at the

00:06:55.920 time of conception.

00:06:57.320 got it that's kind of the elevator pitch absolutely i remember this would have been a couple years

00:07:03.300 ago but joe biden for example like well where practically does this matter i remember joe

00:07:07.580 biden talking about abortion and he talked about how thomas aquinas viewed in soulment that is the

00:07:12.280 impartation of the soul to the body he viewed in soulment as something that happened 45 days

00:07:17.640 after conception so joe biden literally made the case well hey i'm a catholic and one of our

00:07:22.560 greatest catholic scholars he says well the soul isn't there necessarily early on so we're not

00:07:26.600 actually ending a life and so practically speaking i mean that's a great argument against abortion

00:07:31.800 that there's no not even a millisecond from that moment of conception the egg and the sperm meeting

00:07:37.300 and forming that fertilized egg there's not even a moment it's lacking a soul that we're not talking

00:07:42.080 about a five minute wait time or 45 days as aquinas maybe argued till god puts the soul in

00:07:47.480 there and it's that full human being i want to turn it to original sin ben uh how would this

00:07:52.260 also affect because this has been difficult for the creationists how do you account for original

00:07:56.880 sin when what god creates ex nihilo would theoretically be a soul that's untainted by

00:08:02.140 sin it comes from him it's generated from him i mean couldn't that soul theoretically be made

00:08:06.580 unfallen and without sin yeah why is god why is god making sinful souls right yeah i think that's

00:08:13.740 actually the bigger thing is it's really hard to reason your way to a position where god would

00:08:18.300 create ex nihilo, totally original, something that is already corrupted and tainted and depraved.

00:08:24.720 And so from my understanding, I think the creationists would answer, they wouldn't try

00:08:30.320 to avoid original sin, but they would try to say something like, well, that is something that we

00:08:34.380 don't understand. That's a portion of the soul's generation that we actually aren't privy to,

00:08:39.860 but they're unwilling to accept the inheritance and the propagation of some unseen life force

00:08:47.160 that you inherit from parents instead of from god and so i but the thing that tradition does really

00:08:53.880 well is it provides for original sin almost like from jump street as just organically yeah where

00:09:01.560 it says well if you're you know you only start sinning sometime after you're born or after you're

00:09:07.620 conceived in fact there's a whole period of nine months where a human being exists and as far as

00:09:13.000 we can tell, they're not sinning. They have no opportunities to sin or the faculties thereof.

00:09:17.980 And yet they still have a sinful nature. Everyone would confess that. And so how do we account for

00:09:22.340 that? Well, the tradition has a very simple answer. It's because the child inherited a soul

00:09:26.960 and that soul was already tainted with sin and a sinful nature from its parents. And so that's how

00:09:32.780 we're able to maintain the doctrine from the moment of conception and of birth, especially

00:09:37.420 of someone who is born in sin and who is therefore guilty of adam's fall but who has not yet sinned

00:09:44.100 himself yep it also makes sense of um the incarnation in the case of christ that because

00:09:50.760 he didn't have an earthly biological father but rather was conceived by the holy spirit

00:09:55.320 um that this sin nature uh not only in terms of his body but even his soul

00:10:01.520 was not passed down, and that the Holy Spirit even was not only able to provide, you know,

00:10:11.080 this soul that's untainted, but also purifying even his body to where, you know, Christ was

00:10:17.820 conceived without a sin nature. Yeah. Well, what does the view do, Ben, with the idea of

00:10:24.720 federal headship which we are sinners in adam um versus the idea that the soul is is the combination

00:10:32.740 of the soul of the mother and the father i mean i hear what you're saying joel but also i could

00:10:37.360 see that being an argument actually that if mary was a sinner which she was um part of her sin

00:10:43.440 would have been passed through in some way so what ben have you have you looked into or are you

00:10:48.200 familiar with what the tradition view unless it does with that issue pardon me unless it's through

00:10:52.660 the Father. Well, that would have to be the view, probably. Yeah. I think that there's two views.

00:10:58.300 One of them is that it is through the Father. The other one, though, is that Christ's incarnation

00:11:04.380 was sort of like a recapitulation and an inversion in some way of the creation of Eve. So when Eve

00:11:11.240 is created, Adam is put to sleep. And this is after Adam's been raised from the dust and the

00:11:16.260 Lord breathes the breath of life into him. He's put to sleep. A rib is taken from his side. And

00:11:21.100 from that rib, we receive the total Eve. We're not told that once Eve's body was made, God breathed

00:11:27.420 the breath of life into her again. And yet she's a full human being. She's an embodied soul.

00:11:34.260 So that tells us in the first pages of scripture that within man's body is all the constituent

00:11:39.880 parts necessary to make a total person, an embodied soul. And so the other view of Christ,

00:11:45.420 apart from it being purely an inheritance of the father, although I think that's compelling,

00:11:49.940 is also that since Christ was an inversion of Eve and a betterment of Eve, Mary was sort of the

00:11:58.840 vessel in that situation. She's put to sleep, so to speak, and the Holy Spirit forms a full person

00:12:06.640 in Mary with a human soul, human mind, all these things, and yet also the divine nature as well.

00:12:13.020 And so I think that the other view has been that Christ was kept miraculously safe from

00:12:19.680 the inheritance of a corrupted soul, despite gaining a fully human soul.

00:12:24.420 And of course, he had one.

00:12:26.600 Yeah, absolutely.

00:12:27.580 One of the things we talked about, and I think it's compelling as well, C.S.

00:12:31.100 Lewis, The Great Divorce.

00:12:32.500 I love his descriptions.

00:12:34.040 And obviously, he gets a little bit funny with these things, but he's an author and

00:12:36.920 he's telling stories.

00:12:38.180 But he describes, obviously, that first stage of the book where, if you haven't read it,

00:12:41.600 the author wakes up and he's in this gray languid dark kind of place and it's not terrible and it's

00:12:48.280 not awful but it's a place that's empty for the most part and what happens to the people there

00:12:53.020 is that they spread out it's an infinite regression i think it's napoleon you mentioned ben the people

00:12:58.400 look out and all they can see is just a tiny little light as he recedes from all everything

00:13:03.880 that could possibly be heaven all other people all the other places he just leaves it and he

00:13:08.580 infinitely regresses into the darkness there but then as we see with the author he takes the bus

00:13:14.000 up and he ascends to what would be as he has Lewis's view a type of purgatory obviously we

00:13:19.100 would in our framework we just have heaven and hell no intermediate state but then he ascends

00:13:23.440 to what would be the first stages of heaven but it's not static so his soul does not have the

00:13:28.300 option of residing in one place like I could stay at one home or I could stay at the other but every

00:13:34.300 soul is in a type of process and so for the soul that from creation from conception generated by

00:13:40.760 the parents is uh fallen is sinful that what that soul does short of repentance short of the new

00:13:49.780 life short of rebirth through the holy spirit he infinitely continually regresses into darkness he

00:13:56.740 denies the light of god he denies righteousness but for the believer what has happened is the

00:14:02.380 Holy Spirit has come and it's made them alive, but then they're too also not static. Think of Lewis

00:14:07.320 again, further up and further in. At the very end of great divorce, it's not like he arrives, I'm

00:14:12.100 here, I've made it, we've done it. No, he's looking at the mountains of the mysteries of God there is

00:14:16.120 to further press in and press out, press into, and in that way too you have an organic sense that

00:14:20.920 every soul has the choice. Will I indulge in, revert, go back to, and disappear into the nothingness

00:14:28.160 that is hell or will I press into that which is real and concrete and so every soul has that

00:14:33.440 choice in front of them and their stories ultimately which one they will choose obviously

00:14:37.860 aided by Christ who comes and makes us new creations in Christ Jesus but that is what's

00:14:42.520 kind of laid before and I love how organically it thinks of the options in front of us and what we

00:14:47.100 become that we never become what we don't want to be we never become something it's like well I

00:14:51.700 really really want to love God I really want to love people and I really want to love the light

00:14:55.400 well if you would you would press into that and love it and enjoy it however you don't you've

00:15:00.420 retreated from all of that what are some of your thoughts on that yeah no i i think i think that

00:15:04.760 it's in the great divorce where lewis has that great quip where one of the uh heavenly spirits

00:15:10.300 is talking to the visitor and and he says at the end of all things it will either you will either

00:15:16.840 say to god thy will be done or god will say to you thy will be done and so the corral will get

00:15:22.500 exactly what it wants, which is just more and more and more corruption. But I think one of the

00:15:27.700 pitfalls that we can fall into, and I'm glad you brought that up, Wesley, is because we're

00:15:31.480 emphasizing the fact that, yes, we inherit this soul from our parents, but it's still our own soul.

00:15:37.740 Like, you know, society isn't made up of individuals. It's made up of households, but

00:15:42.160 households do contain individuals. And so it's important that we remember that within the

00:15:48.060 tradition framework we're not denying the individuality of each and every soul uh and so

00:15:54.320 so what we're not saying is that it's just an amalgamation of two and if you do uh if you do

00:16:01.360 enough of a like differential equation you'll eventually be able to get to a brute determinism

00:16:05.220 even at the level of the soul no like it's spirit it is individual and so it can always

00:16:10.980 be its own it can break away from the memories and and the mythos and the ethos of the ones

00:16:17.740 that came before it. It's just that that's done through the power of the gospel. And so even

00:16:23.240 there, in traditionalism, I think, you get a far more potent view of how powerful the gospel is

00:16:29.760 when it works in someone's heart. And that not only is it changing that individual soul that

00:16:35.400 was just created ex nihilo a few years back into this new uncorrupted thing, it's actually

00:16:41.740 changing entire lines of people i even think it's in uh it's very telling that in the pentateuch

00:16:49.360 god says things like you know to the to the righteous i will i will bless them to the

00:16:53.620 thousandth generation but the wicked will visit the sins of the wicked on the third and fourth

00:16:58.160 generation right and then we also see in leviticus this language of blood being the life of a thing

00:17:03.080 and so we can think in in a conceptual framework at least of blood being this representation of

00:17:10.220 the soul. It's this life force. It's this embodiment of this unseen thing that actually

00:17:14.700 keeps us going. And so when you get blood connections with people, it tends to be that

00:17:21.620 the faults of the blood and the virtues of that blood compound with the generations. So if you

00:17:27.600 have a father who's a drunkard, you would expect the son to at least be tempted with that same

00:17:33.520 kind of sin, both because what God said is true, that he visits the iniquities of the father to

00:17:38.200 the third and fourth generation, but also because there's a mechanic in creation behind that,

00:17:42.960 that is the transfer of blood. And in the transfer of blood, you get the transfer of

00:17:47.820 the soul as well. And so even at a soul level, there's a predisposition to certain vices and

00:17:54.000 virtues. Right. Because spiritual properties are not necessarily, we couldn't speak of them

00:18:00.840 purely mechanicalistically. We talked about genetics a while ago. We talked about oxytocin,

00:18:05.420 which is bonding and monogamy and all those things we've talked about impulse control

00:18:08.960 predisposition to diabetes but it would be brute materialism like you just mentioned ben

00:18:14.020 it'd be pretty crude to try to break all that down and people have done this well what's the

00:18:18.200 gene that predisposes to violence or what's the the you know this passed on or what's the line

00:18:23.620 what's the race you could do all of that and you end up with a very mechanical mathematical world

00:18:29.940 and god didn't make that world he didn't make a world of statistics he made a world of of people

00:18:34.600 but what those people have, what makes them people, like we can make things that move around

00:18:38.900 and interact with the environment. They have no personality to them. They're not interesting.

00:18:42.820 What makes people people, what makes the world enchanted is the spirit that brings it all to life.

00:18:49.760 Yeah. I think actually Carl Jung has, he doesn't have really like good insights into this,

00:18:56.260 but he's really good at noticing this in nature. And so his, his, his works on mythology are really

00:19:01.700 helpful here because he's essentially noticing what what we're saying that uh that a man many

00:19:08.220 many generations removed from those that came before him has the side of these kind of unconscious

00:19:13.960 memories or images of the things that his great great great great great forefathers were concerned

00:19:20.680 with and dealt with now to him he tries to make it brutally materialistic and so what he says is

00:19:26.700 uh that i mean i don't know actually how jung gets away from like a pre-existence of the soul

00:19:32.120 but he's essentially saying that all of the collective unconscious of all mankind

00:19:37.100 is in one primordial soup and every once in a while the the brain in a type of recreation from

00:19:44.780 normal everyday life will either daydream or nightdream diving back into that primordial soup

00:19:50.920 and recovering images of a, he wouldn't call it this, but of the soul that actually helped

00:19:56.420 ancient man develop mythologies that explained the world that we live in at an enchanted level.

00:20:03.260 Now, his thesis that we've actually graduated beyond that, he doesn't necessarily say that's

00:20:09.300 a good thing, but he says that we've graduated beyond that into hyper-rationalism. But in so

00:20:14.380 doing, we have lost something that makes us human. Now, we would say we've denied the fact

00:20:20.900 that man is an embodied soul. At least that's part of the problem. And Jung might say something

00:20:24.800 different. But I thought it was so fascinating that he was picking up on that kind of trope

00:20:29.080 that you can have like a great-great-grandson who goes back to the place where his great-great

00:20:37.700 grandfather lived. And his family hasn't lived there for generations. But he goes back and he

00:20:43.040 feels an incredible sense of belonging that transcends his ability to rationally explain

00:20:49.160 where you go back to this farm or this city or whatever and this this man knows that somehow

00:20:55.980 somewhere along the line he belongs there that place formed him and the reason he thinks

00:21:02.180 well to me not to young he would go off on this but the reason he thinks that to me is because

00:21:09.980 that place helped form the soul of his great, great, great, great grandfather into what it was

00:21:15.880 when he had his great, great, great grandfather and then his great, great grandfather. And so

00:21:20.720 he's receiving these kind of lingering memories at a soul level and a blood level of the place

00:21:28.520 that helped form his forefather into the man that he became for better or for worse. And so I think

00:21:34.140 that it really gives us great explanatory power for some of the things that we both see and all

00:21:39.140 experience in nature ubiquitously which is reading stories or going to places or even hearing songs

00:21:45.620 that for whatever reason have a profound effect on us that far exceeds our ability to explain

00:21:51.460 with purely materialistic tools and this would also help to explain why families and by way of

00:21:58.740 consequence extended families nations ethnos um are different why they have different inclinations

00:22:08.100 different gifts different strengths different weaknesses because that's all a nation really is

00:22:14.520 it's just an extension of families and and one particular nation it's you know entirely plausible

00:22:21.640 and historically you know it bears out that some individual nations are made up of you know

00:22:26.860 multiple families you know that there were you know italians and there were also you know there

00:22:31.340 were multiple different families present but there's still there's still an extension of of

00:22:36.440 one group of people shaped by um by tradition by rituals by certainly by religion by worship

00:22:45.100 liturgy but then also by the land itself that you know different you know even the way that god

00:22:50.420 designed sovereignly you know the the the world geographically that um that a particular people

00:22:56.820 who have lived in a particular place for centuries or even millennia um that they would be shaped by

00:23:03.780 that. Are they a seafaring people? Are they a mountainous people? Are they people of a desert

00:23:08.560 or a plain? Are they people from the north where it's cold or the equator where it's hot? And so

00:23:13.860 even the land itself, in addition, of course, to liturgy and worship, do they, you know, for 0.96

00:23:19.320 millennial worship demons? Or are they coming off of the heels of a thousand years of Christendom?

00:23:24.840 You know, all these kinds of things. But all that shapes the people, ancestors, passed down

00:23:30.060 generation to generation to generation and eventually that that gets down to you and it

00:23:35.600 affects you and to pretend i think it's arrogant i'll just say it i think it's an arrogant presumption

00:23:42.940 to assume that that i'm just this unique little snowflake made from the ether you know that that

00:23:50.940 has that that all my lineage has no bearing and no shaping force on me whatsoever that i'm

00:23:58.920 completely individual completely unique uh that i'm the master of my own destiny 100 percent um

00:24:06.920 that i'm just the the summation of of the individual um choices that i made in a vacuum

00:24:15.200 without any presuppositions or biases whatsoever that just to me that that seems silly and and

00:24:24.780 it's and it's nice because everything that i just articulated there um gives an explanation for

00:24:30.720 nations and distinctions between peoples um that that it's it's not less than things like race which

00:24:39.200 are controversial and genetics um but it at least articulates that it's more that there's a spiritual

00:24:46.040 component so genetics are real so it is there's a biological element but there's not only a

00:24:52.840 biological element. There's a spiritual element as well, and there's actually theological language

00:24:57.760 that God provides for us in order to explain these things. Let's go to our first commercial

00:25:02.780 break, and then we'll come back, and I know, Ben, you'll want to respond to what I just said.

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00:26:10.540 America is a country that was founded 1.00

00:26:11.880 for the purpose of allowing Christians

00:26:13.260 to do their duty before God

00:26:14.580 not to have their consciences ruled by the doctrines and commandments of men.

00:26:18.360 Rees Fund exists in order to see the Ten Commandments properly applied,

00:26:22.040 not just as a plaque on the wall, but to actually be used in business

00:26:25.360 as though they're commandments from God that we're supposed to obey.

00:26:29.100 Our goal is to find businesses and to buy them and to build them up.

00:26:33.920 We want to find manufacturing businesses and use them

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00:26:40.600 Rees Fund, Christian Capital, boldly deployed.

00:26:44.580 so ben i would love if you could respond to what i just said but then as soon as you're done and

00:26:51.280 we'll keep it you know as short as possible i want to give it to uh to michael because he i think has

00:26:56.820 um as we were just talking together brainstorming a little bit during the commercial break he's got

00:27:01.060 some insightful questions that he'd like to be able to ask you yeah no i was actually going to

00:27:06.820 say i think that michael could talk to this a lot because i think that traditionism like it's not a

00:27:12.160 it's not this like donut hole that fits perfectly within the the hole of the donut that suddenly

00:27:17.220 makes everything make sense there are still things that uh we can't explain and that we should look

00:27:21.800 for but i think that traditionism helps us recognize that propositional nations are absurd

00:27:28.980 um and and that's because an that's because an ethnos like like similar to what you said joel

00:27:36.680 an ethnos because you're racist ben that's why i know but go ahead continue

00:27:40.940 just kidding the uh like an ethnos is formed it is formed by things like

00:27:46.920 external practices and shared experiences and shared stories and in genetics these things that

00:27:53.760 are material uh to varying degrees internally to externally but it is also formed by uh the way

00:28:02.060 that the i believe the way that the souls of the people have developed in that land over time and

00:28:06.640 So I do think that land exerts an influence,

00:28:09.980 not only over the body, but also over the soul.

00:28:13.520 And I promise I'll keep this quick.

00:28:15.700 Just one thing, one example that I think is helpful here

00:28:19.880 is that when you start to say 0.99

00:28:21.460 that propositional nationhood is stupid, 1.00

00:28:25.020 one rebuttal might be, well, how do we do that anymore? 1.00

00:28:28.040 Like in this highly connected world,

00:28:30.640 in this global quote unquote world,

00:28:33.520 how do we see that when different people groups

00:28:36.200 almost always are living in the same place. It's very rare that that's not true, in the first world

00:28:41.540 at least, that we don't have different people groups living in the same place. And I would say

00:28:45.900 you can actually look to the founding of America and see that different people groups founded the

00:28:51.340 same place. They were formed not only by a shared experience and shared history and a shared

00:28:56.860 mythos that formed by the founding of the country, but then they also lived with each other for long

00:29:03.000 enough to the point where some of those distinctions started to get less sharp, started to get less

00:29:08.700 clear. And yet what they didn't lose is their unwavering commitment to the nation that their

00:29:14.640 fathers had founded. And they began even to appreciate some of the ways in which other

00:29:20.260 fathers helped their fathers find the nation. And I think that that's done by the soul passed down

00:29:27.480 through generations, given time to mature in a single place with the shared history, the shared

00:29:32.680 religion the shared experience and all that we speak of the old world and the new world there's

00:29:37.600 old world wines old world flavors old world architecture and then there's new world go ahead

00:29:43.220 michael um ben i think one of the things that would be helpful is uh to define what we mean by soul

00:29:49.780 because and maybe this is what you do mean but um what i hear being said is there is the the soul

00:29:58.860 part of a human that can be directly like like traducianism as i understand it is the idea that

00:30:07.120 the soul is is created by the union of the mother and the father um okay that's all well and good

00:30:14.920 but when we now start saying that the land that a people live in now directly come to bear on the

00:30:24.660 soul and and the my question is it sounds like what we're saying is even the caliber of the soul

00:30:30.260 like we could have resilient or we could have you know just less less resilient and adventurous

00:30:37.040 exploring all of those things seafaring people but but when i hear that i think okay so what

00:30:43.800 we're saying is depending on where someone's ancestors are determines where whether they

00:30:49.900 have a the japanese have the idea of the those with a shriveled soul a hollow soul um and

00:30:56.800 so what what is it like are we talking the immortal redeemable soul and if so is there no

00:31:03.900 like like does redemption change that because one of the lines that we use in our movement a lot is

00:31:10.600 um uh grace doesn't destroy destroy nature it it elevates it it renews it um what we're saying

00:31:18.540 kind of is people are just stuck with the soul that they have, because it's inherited through

00:31:22.800 land, through people. So what is the soul that we're talking about? What is the role of grace

00:31:27.860 and redemption? And I guess that's where I'll leave it for now.

00:31:34.280 Yeah, no, I think that's a really good question. Of course, it's not brute determinism.

00:31:41.480 So just because you are born in a certain place with certain fathers and forefathers

00:31:46.520 doesn't mean that your soul is now stuck in this immovable place where it can't go,

00:31:52.920 it can't ever be in flux. The soul is always in flux in the same way that the body is always in

00:31:57.200 flux. You're born with a certain genetic code, but that genetic code alters over time with

00:32:02.800 environmental factors, with nutrition, with fitness, with things like that. You actually do

00:32:08.100 change slightly over time. The same is true of the soul. I like to think of the relationship

00:32:13.240 between the body and the soul, like the body being an instrument, like a viola or a piano or

00:32:18.840 something. And then the soul is the one that plays it. And so if you have a, maybe you have a,

00:32:26.220 actually, this is how we've thought through mental illness and like mental retardation before. 0.98

00:32:31.900 If you have a body that's broken, whether that's in the brain or in the limbs or whatever, 0.96

00:32:37.060 it's like a piano that's missing some of the keys or something like that.

00:32:40.260 now the player of the piano is still responsible to play the piano as best as he can but it's going

00:32:47.040 to be more difficult for that uh soul or that player because of the missing pieces i think

00:32:53.060 i i don't know if i would use terms like more difficult um because no one is saved by their

00:32:58.260 own effort but i do think that there are factors of the soul uh where where like if a to joel to

00:33:05.080 something that Joel said. If someone is born in a society that has been worshiping demons for

00:33:10.300 centuries, they will be at a soul level more disposed to that in terms of what we should

00:33:17.020 expect. Now, grace not only perfects nature, but it also is exalted over nature. And so it is more

00:33:22.440 powerful. And so there's always redemption. The Lord can do what he wills. And in fact, he does.

00:33:27.440 And he often saves people who, if it were left up to a man who's betting like on a horse race,

00:33:32.960 may not have bet on that man being saved. So there's always that category. But I think what

00:33:38.780 I'm talking more about is like how, and I'm taking it a little bit further than traducianism. Like

00:33:44.080 you're right, traducianism is simply the idea that the soul is passed via the mother and father

00:33:49.420 at conception to the child, to the new person. But the point that I'm making or kind of the

00:33:54.400 thesis that I'm positing is that since that's true, and because I believe this other thing is

00:34:00.620 true, that history and land and story affect not only the body, but also the soul. That means that

00:34:07.320 where you live can affect, even if it's just at the level of affections, the souls that come after

00:34:13.360 you. The way that I've illustrated it before is, and this is like, I was writing a dusty tome,

00:34:20.720 so it was totally spitballing and I didn't think about it at all after, but I'll stand by it for

00:34:24.840 now is one time when I was in college, I went on a trip with my dad and we were mountain biking in

00:34:32.080 North Carolina and we had done it for years. We used to go to North Carolina to ride mountain

00:34:36.100 bikes all the time. And on that one trip, it was the first time that I had ever actually

00:34:41.780 beaten my dad in a downhill race. He was always like full throttle. I mean, I really admired how

00:34:48.740 fearless he was on a mountain bike going down a mountain. And it was the first time I'd ever

00:34:52.720 beaten him. And he comes down and we get back to the parking lot. And he's just so proud of me.

00:34:58.620 He like, he's like, man, that was, that was so impressive. Like, I'm so proud of you.

00:35:02.980 I know it's this small thing, but like, you're my son and you just beat me at something. And

00:35:07.260 what father wouldn't want that? And that moment has always stuck with me, even so much so that

00:35:14.060 I feel like I do have a connection to those mountains in North Carolina, to DuPont State

00:35:19.660 Forest and Pisgah National Forest because a part of me was formed there. I had this incredible

00:35:25.160 experience with my father at that place. And it wasn't just that it was my father that was

00:35:30.240 important and that mattered. It was also that it was at that place that was important and that

00:35:34.620 mattered. Another illustration that is more abstract is let's say you have an oak tree

00:35:41.380 and you think of the oak tree like a soul. And it's this old oak tree. It's very beautiful. And

00:35:47.100 it's chopped down by loggers. And let's say the loggers are like the land, okay? And the loggers,

00:35:53.220 they chop down the tree, they cut off all of its branches, they send it to the lumberyard where

00:35:57.680 it's processed and it's dried and all this stuff, okay? And the lumberyard is also the land. It's

00:36:02.620 having an effect on the oak tree. And then some carpenter comes in and he buys every single piece

00:36:08.600 of wood that came from that oak tree, which would never happen, but let's just say that it would for

00:36:12.700 the sake of the argument that carpenter is also like the land it's buying all of the oak tree

00:36:17.840 it's taking all of that soul and it's doing something with it now let's say further that

00:36:23.040 that carpenter makes that oak tree that has been chopped down that the branches have been lopped

00:36:28.860 off it's been pruned so to speak and prepared for something and the carpenter then makes it into a

00:36:34.440 bunch of beautiful you know a shaker style furniture for this home that's going to house

00:36:41.560 a wonderful family. And the home is going to be beautified by this oak tree. That oak tree

00:36:48.260 has lost itself in one sense. It has lost branches. It's lost leaves. It's lost its

00:36:55.760 reproductive capability. And we don't need to take this too far, but just the point is it's changed.

00:37:00.700 But in being changed, it actually became what it was supposed to be. It became this beautiful

00:37:06.540 furniture this glorified version of that though cut and though diminished quantitatively has

00:37:12.780 actually increased qualitatively i think that land exerts a similar effect on mankind not only

00:37:19.720 at the level of the body of course it does that but also at the level of the soul and the reason

00:37:24.360 i think that is because i think that the metaphor of the instrument and the player is actually

00:37:28.560 incomplete i think that the soul and the body are more connected than that uh such that they're

00:37:33.720 like a tapestry that is, you know, they're weaved together so that when you tug on the one,

00:37:39.200 the other is pulled as well. And that's what makes death such a tragedy. It's the sundering

00:37:43.880 of the body and soul. And so it's not just the player getting up and walking away from the

00:37:48.900 instrument. It's the instrument being destroyed because it was made for that player. And now the

00:37:55.420 player is gone from it. And so the instrument has no reason to exist anymore. And so I think that

00:38:01.740 That's why they exert major influences on one another, such that when land affects the

00:38:06.700 body, it also affects the soul, and vice versa.

00:38:09.200 You can have a soul that is very virtuous, whether it's by the grace of God or whether

00:38:13.320 it's a civic virtue that just comes from the society in which you're in, that also

00:38:17.400 exerts a visible effect on the land that that soul lives upon.

00:38:22.040 Yeah.

00:38:22.480 Michael?

00:38:22.740 do you do you are you using soul similarly to personality or like moral fiber or uh because

00:38:31.880 to me that's where um i think i just think the definition needs to be careful because usually

00:38:38.660 when we talk about soul we i think of it as the part of the the man that is um you know when we

00:38:46.440 think about for instance what paul says like our our souls in a sense right now are the only part

00:38:51.260 of us that have been redeemed um and our bodies we have the old man the old flesh um but i think

00:38:59.400 you're using the the word soul more broadly when you are talking about the things that i think i'm

00:39:06.960 not even sure where i stand on this but i think some people would say well personality um things

00:39:11.940 of that nature are are more products of the physical body than of the soulish spiritual part

00:39:17.280 of the body. So are you using the term soul pretty broadly, Ben? Yeah, yeah. My understanding

00:39:25.300 of the soul is fairly broad, partly because of my conviction that they are so closely intertwined.

00:39:32.460 So I certainly think that there are elements of genetics that help us explain personality traits,

00:39:39.380 of course, like sicknesses and strength and things like that. But I also think that the soul

00:39:44.320 is more personal than merely a life force i think that the soul um i think that my soul

00:39:51.720 would be discernible from yours you know if we could see them i think that and part of why i

00:39:56.880 think that is is because of first samuel when uh saul gets the witch of endor to summon up samuel's

00:40:02.720 ghost so you know presumably that's samuel's soul made visible by god's providential working

00:40:09.460 and he's able to discern, that's Samuel. And so I think that I do adhere to a more broad

00:40:17.480 definition of soul than merely like a life force and things like that. I think that

00:40:22.740 it is personal to the body that it's contained within. Yeah. On relating too to environment and

00:40:29.140 place affecting the person, Calvin talks about this is one of the reasons the Lord's Supper

00:40:33.280 is not just spiritual. It's not simply a moment of silence. It's not prayer. He gives us literal

00:40:38.020 physical things because we are embodied soul. We're not just abstract and the body has an impact

00:40:44.380 that the body can shape the soul. And so God gives to us two means of grace. He gives to us

00:40:49.200 the Lord's Supper, which we physically literally consume something. It symbolizes, it communicates

00:40:54.580 the reality of Christ given for us and the same thing for baptism. We speak of those as means of

00:40:59.580 grace, meaning that they have some level of spiritual import and yet still they're provided

00:41:05.640 to us practically. Ben, I want to get to nations and myth and stories, but one thing I do have to

00:41:10.600 say that I also appreciate about this view is it helps us make sense of the great man. I think of

00:41:16.080 men, you've heard the saying, you know, larger than life, that there's just some characters and

00:41:20.420 there's something about them that they are just, they're big. They have energy, they have joy,

00:41:25.180 they have life, they have all of that. There's just something about them that we couldn't break

00:41:28.500 down. We couldn't say, well, to be like Steve, you know, the guy that would witness to everybody

00:41:32.500 at the gas station and the guy who would only sleep four hours you know you had to do his

00:41:36.460 morning regimen or you have to work out like him it helps us to say that there's something about a

00:41:40.800 person that we can't put our finger on that we can't just break down to a diet or we can't just

00:41:45.600 break down to habit that there's actually something spiritual about them and it's funny because

00:41:49.720 there's people some of them literally their body gives out there's so much exuberance so much joy

00:41:54.480 so much love for life that they're 50 they're 60 and their body just gives out or it helps to keep

00:41:59.520 them going for a long time. You know, you read those stories about people that smoked a pack a

00:42:03.440 day, drank excessively, and they lived till 96. Well, they just loved life. They weren't alone.

00:42:08.960 They weren't just sitting in their room. They weren't just doing nothing. They weren't just

00:42:12.120 meditating. They were alive. They were vibrant. And we're not saying that that's only a spiritual

00:42:16.760 component, that only the spiritual component makes the man. If you're not this, at the beginning,

00:42:21.300 there's nothing you can do. Same thing with living longer. Most certainly is a taking care

00:42:25.100 of the body that matters but we are saying is in addition to that and on top of it it's a spiritual

00:42:30.200 component I mean think about couples where they both pass away within days of each other that

00:42:34.920 their lives have become intertwined and even spiritually when their spouse passed they said

00:42:39.520 I've lost a reason and a will to live and will to live is not a mechanical materialistic thing

00:42:45.460 any thoughts on that before we go to nation story myth yeah yeah no thing I think uh and maybe this

00:42:51.500 will help answer Michael a little bit better. I'm using soul in a more broad scope, and I'm also

00:42:59.840 using really concrete terms that we would normally use for material things like genetics and stuff

00:43:04.860 like that. But I'm fully assuming this whole time, the soul is a very abstract thing that we can't

00:43:11.320 measure and quantify and really put our finger on. It's more so just using words that I'm familiar

00:43:17.400 enough with to describe similar effects and causes that I'm seeing or that I think I'm seeing

00:43:22.900 at a soul level. I think one of the ways that maybe this can be explained is, I've said before,

00:43:32.020 we live in Utah. Y'all don't, but we do. We live in Utah. It's only ever been a pagan place. It

00:43:37.760 has never, ever, ever been Christian. Even now, it's like less than 2% Protestant or something

00:43:43.160 like that. And Catholics, I think they're like another 2%. And so one of the things that I tell

00:43:47.880 people, and I genuinely believe this, is that when Utah is a Christian place, when it proclaims

00:43:53.680 the true Christ is Lord, the state will get better. Like not just its policies, but like

00:44:00.340 the actual land will be better. The sky will be bluer. The water will be cleaner. The air will

00:44:07.200 have less smog. The crop will yield better. I think that'll be more fruitful. And part of why

00:44:14.820 I believe that is because I think that C.S. Lewis, until we have faces, when he's drawing this very

00:44:19.920 sharp parallel between someone who is beautiful, having a beautiful soul, and Orwell who has an

00:44:26.000 ugly soul, obviously he's taking it very, very far. And I'm not saying that he took it that far

00:44:31.660 because that's the way it is but it is reflecting something true like the more pure the more redeemed

00:44:37.940 the soul is in a place the soul of the individual and the people that that are around it the more

00:44:44.020 beautiful that place will be so the the redemption of the soul through the vehicle of the body will

00:44:49.980 have a visible tangible effect on the beautification of the place okay so that i'll this will be my

00:44:57.400 last question then that helps clarify quite a bit so one of the things that we've been wrestling

00:45:02.240 and i even have a chapter or two in my book about civic good right and how how modern christianity

00:45:10.980 has really dropped the ball on the idea that there could be civic good but it sounds like you're

00:45:18.340 making the connection or the the step that there can be soulish good that is not a product of grace

00:45:27.360 but merely a product of time, place, inheritance, things like that.

00:45:31.960 And I think that's going to be, that's the thing I'm thinking through.

00:45:34.420 And I think that's going to be the thing that some people are going to have to think through

00:45:38.320 with what you're saying.

00:45:39.740 Like, are we saying that there are actual, because when I think of soulish good, I think

00:45:46.080 of the intangible actual moral good that comes about through really exclusively through the work

00:45:58.340 of grace in our life. Like all our righteous acts are as filthy rags. Okay, that doesn't mean that

00:46:02.720 we can't do good for our nation. It just is not a good that necessarily pleases the Lord in a

00:46:07.400 salvific sense. So are you saying that there would be souls because they can be affected by genetics,

00:46:14.500 land place things like that that can have a sort of intrinsic good that is not ultimate good um

00:46:21.300 that that pleases the lord that actually now that you said that is really my the core of my question

00:46:27.060 that i've been trying to to articulate to you yeah no and and i would say yes so long as we understand

00:46:34.120 that good uh for the unredeemed is only it only ever reaches the pinnacle of civic good it cannot

00:46:41.900 appeal in pure goodness to God. I don't think that there's such a thing as a soul that is born 0.99

00:46:49.980 and that is a Christian without being regenerated. Total depravity is very real. 1.00

00:46:56.540 But I do think that within, and let's just look at pagan societies, I think that within pagan

00:47:01.600 societies, you see differing levels of civic good. Some of them are extremely barbaric, 0.80

00:47:09.420 like the Muslims, or even the Carthaginians. The Carthaginians, extremely barbaric people, 1.00

00:47:16.220 and they were pagans. And then you look at the Romans, especially before Christ, 0.95

00:47:20.220 they were also pagans, but they were less barbaric. Even in their paganism, it was less

00:47:25.320 barbaric. There was less human sacrifice, less blood. There was still a lot of blood. There

00:47:29.140 was still some human sacrifice, but less. There was more beauty, even in the civic objective

00:47:35.840 sense of architecture and things like that than you got in Carthage. So I think, yeah, as long as

00:47:41.380 I'm not trying, I don't want to get myself in any, I'm not saying that there's divine good

00:47:46.700 in the natural soul, not at all. But I think that even in the unregenerate people groups of the

00:47:52.500 world and in the unregenerate soul, there can be a type of civic good that has been

00:47:58.740 like inherited by the history of the civic good of a people. And they have an equal and opposite

00:48:04.840 effect on each other. So the more civic good that even a pagan society pursues, you have reason to 0.98

00:48:13.460 believe that that civic good would continue, or it would fall under just incredible judgment, 0.96

00:48:20.000 and that judgment would either crush them into repentance, which would lead to true civic good

00:48:24.560 and divine good, or it would crush them into basically nothingness, and they would cease to

00:48:30.180 exist. Well said. Let's go ahead and go to our last commercial break, and then we're going to

00:48:34.500 come back and as quickly as possible, give some concluding thoughts. And then I want to make sure

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00:49:33.340 slash right response to claim your first free bag of coffee today all right welcome back so ben one

00:49:41.840 thing i alluded to we talked about it a good bit so if you have souls and then in the process and

00:49:46.940 their expansion and everything and they're in one place and not the other necessarily the western

00:49:51.500 the spirit of the west you could say in one way in a totalizing sense would be different than the

00:49:55.940 spirit of the east the spirit of america as new as we are is different than the spirit of europe

00:49:59.760 and the spirit of africa and the spirit of india but one of the things that that you you hit on

00:50:04.220 and it's true and i'm trying to do it to connect is that there's stories that shaped us and there's

00:50:10.700 a purpose and a meaning to getting back to them so to look at the odyssey and to look at that not

00:50:16.240 even just necessarily the characters and the involvement of it but what is it if not the epic

00:50:20.320 story of the sun that leaves home and goes on a great journey and faces great peril.

00:50:25.720 These are stories that shaped us if we're going to have a future of the West, that if

00:50:29.360 the West is going to look in a way that we would recognize and would have the same characters

00:50:33.840 and the same art and aesthetics and values, if it's going to look in the future like that,

00:50:38.820 then that also means in a sense of spiritual connection to what came before.

00:50:42.000 Can you elaborate on that?

00:50:43.480 Yeah, this is really where I'll start to probably get confusing.

00:50:48.280 So apologies. I just need to work these more. But so this is where I really break from just the

00:50:54.580 root definition of Traducianism. And I'm running with this idea that is undergirded by Traducianism.

00:51:02.520 And it is that if what I've said so far is true, that the soul is inherited from the father and

00:51:10.120 mother, and it includes, it's not just an item that has nothing already on it, but it includes

00:51:15.420 some kind of soulish memory, then that means that within people groups, you have shared memories

00:51:23.560 that become myth. And so this is why I say that myth is a type of history.

00:51:32.820 And what you're getting in myth, like if you read like Dostoevsky, for example,

00:51:36.700 and you read Crime and Punishment, great book, everyone should read it.

00:51:39.340 you're getting the ethos of Dostoevsky. He is giving you a piece of his own soul, so to speak,

00:51:46.960 a piece of himself in the fullness of that word. He's pouring his pathos, ethos, telos out on the

00:51:53.780 page, but it's just Dostoevsky. If you read the Iliad, if you read Theogony by Hesiod,

00:52:00.820 if you read Virgil's Eklogues, and if you read the Aeneid, all these things, you're not just

00:52:07.140 getting the ethos of that author. You're getting the ethos of people. So Homer is writing down

00:52:15.200 the myth that he received from the Greeks, all the Greeks up to his day. Hesiod's doing the same

00:52:21.800 thing. They're not inventing this whole cloth. These are stories maybe mixed with real memories

00:52:28.660 and real historical events that are then passed down from generation to generation, not just in

00:52:34.620 the Greek lands, it transcends that and goes to all the West that give us an abstract foothold

00:52:44.340 in the virtues and the vices of the West and why we are what we are. This is why Western 0.60

00:52:51.540 civilization classes don't just study the history of Western civilization, the brute history, but

00:52:57.420 also the mytho history of Western civilization. Because these myths had the ability to form

00:53:04.160 people, even at a level of affections in the soul. And so that's why I think that in order to

00:53:11.920 reclaim and save Western civilization, we have to resurrect the Western ethos.

00:53:19.380 And that means that we have to reclaim, re-appreciate, and re-embody in our own time

00:53:27.180 as redeemed Christians, the virtues of the Western canon. So we have to read the ill,

00:53:32.420 not just entertainment. We have to read the Odyssey, the Aeneid. We have to read Beowulf.

00:53:38.140 These things are not just literature. They are glimpses into the ethos of the people that made

00:53:45.560 us who we are. And by reading those things and letting them get into our bones, we will, I think,

00:53:53.620 do the good work of not just becoming a Christian nation again. That's, of course, like we have to 0.95

00:54:00.960 do that, but a Western Christian nation. It's not enough that we are just Christians. We are

00:54:07.400 Western Christians. And that means something different than it does to an Indian Christian 0.80

00:54:12.040 or an Eastern Christian, like Eastern Orthodox, or like a Russian Orthodox Christian. These are

00:54:17.380 all different things. And so in order to become a Western Christian again, first you have to be a 0.98

00:54:21.940 Christian. So everyone repent and believe, but then also you have to be a Westerner. Now, how do 0.94

00:54:26.840 you become a Westerner? Well, it's by eating the same food that our forefathers gave us that they

00:54:31.800 also ate. And that's the Western myth. C.S. Lewis has this great quote, and I'm going to butcher it,

00:54:37.380 but it's something like, man is torn between two ways of thinking. We can either ponder the

00:54:45.020 abstract. Like we can say, what is the nature of pain? You know, what is pain? Or we can experience

00:54:52.920 the concrete and react to it. So, ow, that hurt. But when you're getting your finger chopped off,

00:54:59.420 you're not thinking, wow, what is pain? What is this philosophical phenomenon of pain? You can

00:55:04.580 only do that when you're separated from the concrete experience. Myth is different. The

00:55:08.820 reason that I say all, you know, it's been said before, all art aspires to the condition of music.

00:55:14.860 And I've said all music aspires to the condition of myth. The reason that I say that is because

00:55:19.580 myth is the only place where we get the bridge between the abstract and the concrete such that

00:55:25.340 when you get to the end of the iliad even if you haven't understood a lot of what's happened and

00:55:29.820 you're overwhelmed with names and things like that you'll read the last line thus ended hector

00:55:35.740 breaker of horses and you are a westerner it will affect you it will affect you the reason for that

00:55:42.540 is because in consuming the myth,

00:55:45.060 you've consumed the concrete in the form of the abstract.

00:55:50.000 And if you're a Westerner,

00:55:51.540 that will almost elicit a kind of memory in you.

00:55:56.220 This is why I encourage people to read Paradise Lost

00:55:58.480 if they're Christians, Western, Eastern, whatever.

00:56:00.980 Because in reading Paradise Lost,

00:56:02.800 when you get to the end,

00:56:04.560 Adam has seen the vision up to Christ.

00:56:06.520 That in itself is powerful enough.

00:56:08.560 But then when they're expelled from the garden

00:56:10.400 and they're finally going into the wilderness,

00:56:12.540 you, and it's not just because Milton is a good writer, you experience a profound sense of loss.

00:56:19.540 You start thinking to yourself, like, look at what I did. Look at what I left behind. I feel like I

00:56:26.040 remember that place and I miss it. And I want to go back to it. The reason for that is because

00:56:32.240 you have drank from the pool of myth. In that case, it's the true myth of Christianity.

00:56:40.400 like the bible is given to us in a mythic form it's all true it all really happened but it's

00:56:45.500 also mythical and the great uh triumph of myth is the incarnation god made man myth became fact

00:56:52.900 the abstract was the concrete and it changed everything and so now i i do think that uh just

00:56:59.620 to just to reiterate what i already said i think that myth has um because of what i said about the

00:57:04.480 soul. I think that myth has the power to transfer abstract ethos of an entire people group in the

00:57:12.220 form of a concrete story that then helps shape our own ethos such that if used rightly, we can

00:57:18.240 not only be a Christian nation again, but we can be a Western Christian nation. We can be Western

00:57:22.780 Christians. That's great. All right. We're short on time today, so we're going to do our best to

00:57:27.980 get to at least all the super chats. So Nathan, if you could go ahead and organize all those for us.

00:57:33.920 right here's the first one this is from daniel woodard he gave us five dollars thank you daniel

00:57:38.000 he said it was awesome to meet you guys in person at the conference the crisis king conference that

00:57:42.660 we just had a couple weeks ago one question if adam was not born with a sin nature how did he

00:57:49.920 end up sinning i'll take a crack at that we believe that adam and eve were created in a state

00:57:56.260 of integrity or a state of innocence so that they could not sin but they also could sin

00:58:03.300 that both options were actually available to them

00:58:05.580 in the sense of the human agency.

00:58:07.640 We also believe, in line with the Westminster Catechism,

00:58:11.740 that says that everything that takes place

00:58:14.340 is that which God has ordained him.

00:58:17.460 And so we believe that God did, in fact,

00:58:20.460 ordain that sin would enter the world.

00:58:22.940 And he did so because the final result

00:58:24.900 would be better, not worse,

00:58:26.560 that he's actually shaping and orchestrating all things

00:58:29.340 to the praise of his glorious grace

00:58:31.220 and also to the maximum eternal happiness

00:58:35.060 and joy and good for his image-bearing creatures

00:58:38.900 that eons and eons into eternity,

00:58:42.320 that we would be able to look back and say,

00:58:44.160 I wouldn't have changed a thing.

00:58:45.700 I thank God that things were planned in this way

00:58:49.420 because angels even long to look

00:58:52.160 into the mysteries of the gospel,

00:58:53.900 but they look as outsiders.

00:58:56.020 They don't experience it.

00:58:57.920 It's abstract, like what Ben was saying,

00:58:59.700 but it's not concrete.

00:59:00.860 but we are actual recipients. Those of us who are Christians, human beings who have been saved and

00:59:07.400 redeemed, we're actual recipients of God's grace. So we believe that the fall was something that

00:59:12.140 God actually ordained, and we believe that Adam and Eve were made and created in a state of

00:59:18.880 integrity so that they were able to sin. They were also able not to sin, but they were not created

00:59:24.300 in a state of immutable integrity. And I believe, you know, now speaking for myself, I don't know

00:59:30.700 what the other guys would say but um i believe that uh that this state of integrity that adam

00:59:35.240 and eve were created in um that adam and eve they also had their own eschaton uh something that god

00:59:41.740 according to his ordination he he knew that it wouldn't take place in this way but um but

00:59:46.740 theoretically there was um an eschatology that adam had had he not sinned um that he would have

00:59:52.800 eventually entered into um not only a state of integrity which he was already in but a state of

00:59:58.160 immutable integrity that he would have been as the angels are now uh which is unable to fall

01:00:04.060 and that he would would have eventually entered into that because when you think

01:00:08.620 um you know the tree of life like what was the tree of life for um why why why would there even

01:00:14.520 be an incentive to um to somehow attain to being able to eat and being granted you know um access

01:00:21.980 to the tree of life because Adam already had a means of not dying, of forever life, namely by

01:00:29.000 simply not sinning. You know, God said the day that you eat of it, the tree of the knowledge of

01:00:34.140 good and evil, by eating of that tree, that he would surely die. So Adam already had a pathway

01:00:40.780 to life, a pathway to forever life, not dying. And he didn't have to eat from the tree of life

01:00:46.560 to not die. He just had to abstain from eating of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.

01:00:51.000 all he had to do is avoid sin. In other words, if Adam had avoided sin, then he would have lived

01:00:56.000 forever and death would have never entered the world. But what I believe is that there was a

01:01:01.260 probationary period and that that's meant to be implied and that Adam probably had a sense of

01:01:06.520 that and that if he had resisted evil and done what God set him up to do to keep and work the

01:01:11.960 ground, expanding and working and cultivating, but also protecting and defending and keeping the

01:01:17.080 ground, which would include keeping the serpent out of the garden and standing guard, that if

01:01:21.480 Adam had done this well after a prolonged period of time that God had set, that eventually he would

01:01:27.760 have been able to eat of the tree of life. And although, again, he already would have had forever

01:01:33.540 life simply by avoiding sin, that the tree of life would have actually brought him into not

01:01:38.140 just forever life, but eternal life, a state of immutable integrity to where now not only would

01:01:44.040 be in a state of integrity, but he would be permanently placed into that state of integrity

01:01:48.120 and never able to fall. So that's my view of Adam and Eve. No, they did not have a sin nature. They

01:01:55.860 were made in a state of integrity. There was no sin nature, but in that state of integrity was

01:02:00.940 not an immutable state, and they were able to fall, and God also ordained it. Anything to add

01:02:07.720 to that question nope nope okay uh let's keep going uh michael can you read the next one

01:02:15.480 yep here we go uh this is from josiah cooper uh josiah says uh thank you for the ten dollars

01:02:21.040 josiah asking a prayer request my wife and i are pregnant and our first ultrasound came back

01:02:25.780 empty hormone levels say we are pregnant uh we are praying for god's favor with our fourth child

01:02:31.560 christ is king okay let's uh let's just go ahead and pray real quick uh father we thank you for

01:02:36.580 Josiah and his wife. And Lord, we pray that if there is a baby in her womb, that you would

01:02:46.020 protect the life of that baby and that maybe the tests were just inaccurate. And in a couple weeks

01:02:51.160 and giving it a little bit more time that the baby and its heartbeat and its life would be

01:02:55.540 detected and that the baby would be healthy. And if there's not any baby, Lord, I pray for just peace

01:03:01.420 and encouragement and hopefulness

01:03:04.560 that you would guard and protect

01:03:05.800 against disappointment and discouragement

01:03:07.740 and those kinds of things.

01:03:09.500 We pray this in the name of Jesus.

01:03:11.220 Amen.

01:03:11.720 Amen.

01:03:12.380 Wes, you want to do the next one?

01:03:13.940 All right.

01:03:14.440 So Victory in Christ emailed you.

01:03:16.840 $5 Super Chat.

01:03:17.780 Thank you.

01:03:18.580 Emailed you on Full Preterism Conversation.

01:03:20.360 This is a follow-up from Monday.

01:03:21.520 Thanks for the consideration.

01:03:22.980 Hopefully that last video is getting some traction.

01:03:25.100 These guys don't mess around.

01:03:26.740 Ben, do you know much about Full Preterism?

01:03:28.640 Are we going to have to have you on in a couple weeks?

01:03:30.820 I know it like adjacently, yeah.

01:03:34.360 Adjacently?

01:03:35.600 I'm not like very well versed on it now.

01:03:38.960 Fair enough, fair enough.

01:03:40.840 Joel, I'll pass it back to you, SoCal Preston.

01:03:42.800 SoCal's got a few.

01:03:43.460 SoCal Preston, he's got a bunch of super chats.

01:03:46.120 Thank you for the super chats.

01:03:47.260 Yeah, thank you, SoCal Preston.

01:03:48.420 We appreciate it.

01:03:49.020 So he said, when are you going to debate me on dispensationalism?

01:03:52.980 His next one says, I need the arrow to move.

01:03:56.580 You guys misrepresent dispensationalism.

01:03:59.720 The third one says, no one was regenerated in the Old Testament.

01:04:04.900 Are there any more, Nathan?

01:04:06.880 Nope.

01:04:07.540 Yep, so I would just, my response is, wrong, wrong, wrong.

01:04:10.420 Dispensationalism ruined the world, and I will not give any press time to ideologies

01:04:15.480 that have caused as much damage as dispensationalism.

01:04:18.220 God bless, and we'll see you later.

01:04:20.400 All right, next one.

01:04:21.360 Alex Fick, just $5.

01:04:23.080 Super Chat, thanks for the support, Alex.

01:04:25.340 Jeff Halfley, I love this.

01:04:26.600 This was a thread I didn't get to pick up on earlier, but Super Chat, 499, one of our greatest supporters, Jeff.

01:04:32.580 He said, I went to New England, my ancestors, after were there for 300 years and felt at home in an eerie way that is hard to describe.

01:04:40.640 And absolutely, because, I mean, I have my background in neuroscience, so memories have a real place.

01:04:45.620 Like, they're a real structure.

01:04:46.780 You could damage someone's memory.

01:04:48.680 There's also short-term memory, long-term memory.

01:04:51.200 So people are able to form short-term memories, but in impairments, they can't form long-term.

01:04:55.060 the point is we know that there are certainly memories that are biological but but just talking

01:04:59.840 not just about a memory about an episode not just a memory about knowledge but but a feeling and a

01:05:05.900 sensation and um and that's real the places that we've done life and we're familiar we think i think

01:05:11.040 ben and i talked about this that they do feel home in a way that's hard to articulate that's hard to

01:05:16.080 describe that you can't pin down to just well it feels like home because x y and z ben anything to

01:05:22.280 to that yeah i mean in in the same way that i think i think if we could all go back and and

01:05:28.440 walk in the garden of eden for a day we would feel at home uh and it would be a very profound

01:05:34.440 sense of sorrow that we lost it yeah tolkien talks about that that we're we're soaked in exile even

01:05:41.320 in our best days we know we're still missing something we're not where we should be all right

01:05:47.080 let's give uh is it okay if i say one more thing it's all right yeah yeah no it's even going back

01:05:53.580 to what belt brought up like um what role does redemption have to play in this i think you can

01:05:59.300 even say the same about certain places in scripture that are not the garden of eden like

01:06:03.300 why do i feel a draw to the holy land uh well it's because that's where my lord died and that's

01:06:09.340 where he saved me so in a sense like a major the better part of my soul lives there um and so i

01:06:16.100 want it to be filled with christian singing and to be fair ben your ancestors probably hacked 0.93

01:06:21.960 apart infidels in the holy lands for hundreds of years on end right more likely than not there's 0.96

01:06:27.140 also some other memories there yep uh let's go ahead and give this uh last question uh i'll give

01:06:33.140 it to michael to you first and um and then maybe ben can um can give a final thought so this is

01:06:39.420 from alex fick michael do you want to read that alex says any indication of how this might apply

01:06:45.160 to language someone of german ancestry not having spoken for three generations but they could pick

01:06:52.000 up the language more naturally i don't know i know from um talking to some um people who studied

01:07:00.720 language learning at a phd level um that the at least when i talked to this guy the the theory

01:07:07.280 was that the brain forms a new neural net with every language learned it's kind of net on top

01:07:14.620 of net um this is not really going to support the thesis i'm just throwing it out there

01:07:20.240 anecdotally my grandfather study stuttered terribly growing up he thought it was because

01:07:25.420 he was left-handed and when he was born that was a taboo thing they forced him to write

01:07:29.660 this or sorry yeah with his right hand um when he learned a second language which in this case

01:07:35.800 happened to be spanish it fixed his stuttering in his english language and he didn't stutter

01:07:40.560 stutter in spanish i don't know um there might be something there i just know as a linguist and as

01:07:47.120 someone who's traveled around the world um progressively learning languages makes it easier

01:07:51.880 um language is so much a product as someone who teaches it of just like types of intelligence

01:07:58.420 um so i don't know i don't i have never uh considered language in that point of view so

01:08:05.760 i'm not saying it's not possible i just i i have never looked into that connection at all so

01:08:10.340 i'm not saying it's not there i don't know ben any thoughts yeah i i am not a philologist or

01:08:16.860 nor a linguist i speak english and that's actually it i'm terrible but uh but i have heard um at

01:08:24.240 least anecdotally that when people uh go and they do like the immersive learning like they go to

01:08:29.580 italy and they learn it and just by living there they uh they eventually start to think in that

01:08:34.720 language when they're there and then when they go back to where they're from they switch back

01:08:40.060 into thinking in their native tongue um which i i don't know if that has any bearing whatsoever

01:08:45.000 on the question but i do think it's really fascinating yep all right wes any uh final

01:08:51.400 thought for today not really this is definitely something um i think that i'm new to you'll

01:08:56.840 notice with this episode we didn't come out and say guys guys you just gotta you gotta replace

01:09:00.340 everything we've got the view it explains it all but this is definitely something to think about

01:09:04.460 and the reason i chose it is because we're losing a sense of place and a sense of home right a condo

01:09:09.580 500 feet above the ground in suburbia like that's not really home that's not land that's not soil

01:09:16.200 you're not actually taming the ground and so in a time where we've lost so much of a sense of place

01:09:20.680 so much of our connection to our to our soil so much of where we live it's good to remember who

01:09:26.620 we are where we came from and the importance of as the mission was given to Adam to toil to labor

01:09:33.600 and to put everything under dominion and subdue it. And so, Ben, could you tell us where to find

01:09:39.020 you? And also, if you plan on saying any more, speaking any more on this topic in the future?

01:09:46.300 Yeah, you can follow me on Twitter at Tom Pondbidil. I tweet maybe once a month,

01:09:53.220 and it's usually pretty disappointing. That makes me so happy because that's about my tweet rate as

01:09:58.340 well yeah yeah uh yeah at time it's like tom bombadil but pawn instead of bomb um and then

01:10:06.000 uh you can of course listen to haunted cosmos which is the show that brian suvey and i do

01:10:11.500 and it's a bi-weekly show we try to just explore the the very strange world that god made with the

01:10:17.580 with the truth of knowing that the world is not just stuff um i am hoping to uh write a book

01:10:23.920 called The Constellation of Mythology that will, at least in the early chapters, touch heavily on

01:10:28.720 this idea and then go into explaining motifs in Western myth that helped shaped us as Western

01:10:37.500 Christians so that people can hopefully go and read those for themselves and kind of reclaim

01:10:41.940 the virtues of a Western man. I hope to write that and finish a manuscript this year, but

01:10:47.920 who knows? Who knows? It may be a while. And no, I don't plan on speaking anywhere anytime soon.

01:10:53.920 but, uh, I certainly would be open to it. Um, and then we, we will be having our new Christian

01:10:58.980 and press conference in June of this year, safety third, recovering the American will to greatness.

01:11:04.660 Uh, and I'll be emceeing that. So if you just can't get enough of me, you know, uh, you can,

01:11:09.520 you can hear me introduce speakers at that conference. Awesome. Love it. Well, Ben,

01:11:14.660 there is a way to preach announcements. It can be done. That's true. I've seen it done.

01:11:21.420 i've seen it done i've seen it done yeah yeah it's like oh i'm just tasked with the announcements

01:11:26.440 you know i don't really get to say anything or do you you can find a way yep all right well thanks

01:11:32.120 for coming on the show ben and thank you to the listeners um we appreciate and um yeah we're just

01:11:36.920 really grateful for everybody who follows the channel and supports the ministry and lord

01:11:41.100 willing we will see you guys again on friday

01:11:51.420 You

The NXR Podcast - April 16, 2025

THE LIVESTREAM - Traducianism： The Fascinating Idea That Explains So Much w⧸Ben Garrett of Haunted Cosmos

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