Christendom 2.0--Could It Work? | Doug Wilson & James White

as a as a former Baptist yourself okay um how do we avoid the conversion of Christendom 2.0 into sacralism 2.0 and okay so um help a Baptist out is what you're saying [Laughter] so you just had to go together didn't you know my son is gay and I hope that Jesus forgives him just like he does the rest of us [Music] Daily News the question that confronts us is what does it mean in a disobedient culture to be prophetic there'll be a place for safe sex couples uh no no marriage even though it's the law of the land in the United States uh just like Roe used to be we want to turn the world upside down and you don't turn the world upside down by being nice I believe that we are in in this polytheistic pluralistic moment and the desperate need of the hour is for our Christian leadership to say Jesus is lord and there is no other foreign [Music] I thought I was on a Christian program I thought this was you just you just made my point for me that was exactly one of the points I was gonna go for actually what I was gonna say was Jake forgot to give you the note that we're gonna be doing this in German right um partly because as soon as we're done here I'm actually teaching church history for the brethren in Frankfurt you know Tobias Raymond Schneider and uh there um so I'll be doing that but actually there was a reason why I started off that way um first of all talking about this subject in German doesn't help folks relax and set aside their prejudices I mean it's not like the Germans have never shown some level of interest in world domination in the past um but the first most important point is most evangelicals for most evangelicals a discussion of mere Christendom pretty much sounds like we're speaking in a foreign language uh unfamiliar terms unfamiliar Concepts and hence there's immediate I'm just going to put this aside I'm not even gonna I'm not even gonna play with this I'm not even gonna I'm not even gonna think about this and as I listened to uh your book uh last weekend and is it is it available already right now or or is it coming out soon or what the it's coming out soon okay coming out soon yeah so I have a pre-publication copy here and if anyone's wondering how in the world I listened to it I always convert everything via PDF to MP3 so I can I listen to it on a 40 mile bike ride uh last weekend actually and um as I as I listened to the book first of all I recognized if you want to comment on this I recognized a number of the blog and may blog articles that I had listened to uh in years earlier uh that you put together to form the book um but at the same time I just couldn't help but thinking how many of the concepts that you're attempting to communicate just they it's it's hard for someone and you and I sort of have a similar background as far as when we were younger so you you probably understand this um it sounds like you're speaking a foreign language to an Evangelical Baptist okay yes it really really does so let's start there when you're talking about mere Christendom uh for without using German um right what what what exactly do you mean so uh first a comment on the foreign language thing uh if if this book had come out 20 years ago uh we would have had the uh language barrier in almost in in an almost perfect State like total total gibberish uh the peop the people would not recognize what I was even trying to get at the the reason there's an opening I think now for an articulation of this is because uh we live in clown world everything has fallen apart over the last few years so everybody's having to speak a foreign language all the time and it's a foreign language that is apparently satanic or demonic everybody's lost their minds and so uh I'm presenting a foreign alien way of speaking very different from what uh people of my generation grew up with in the 50s and 60s very you know totally different but I think that there may be a receptivity to it because people are now seeing that we're going to be speaking a foreign language one way or the other uh maybe we should be speaking the one that is friends with God as opposed to the one as opposed to the foreign language that is at war with God right so what I mean what I mean by mere Christendom is uh I believe secularism is bankrupt secularism is a failed experiment uh you cannot have a naked Public Square for long if you remove all the vestiges of the former Christendom from the Public Square you don't get a neutral Public Square you get a room swept and garnished ready for this the seven demons worse than uh worse than the one that was cast out to come flooding back in and that's precisely the moment we're in how is it how is it that the Public Square is filling up with demonism and people don't have a First Amendment separation church and state problem with that they they don't if it's the Church of Satan they don't have they don't have the same problems and so I I'm wanting to tell Christians you are being played a con is being run and we are now at stage two of this strategy where they're it's a bait and switch sort of thing where they're told hey let's just have a neutral Public Square uh the government is officially agnostic they just call balls and Strikes that's all they're going to do and everybody gets to operate on the same Level Playing Field well we've seen what a farce that is that's simply not true and so consequently I'm I'm wanting to push back and say well let's go back to fundamental principles let's go back to the basic uh bottom line issue and that is uh as as Dylan put it you got to serve somebody it may be the devil or it may be the Lord but you've got to serve somebody and and we've tried to pretend for many years that we we don't have to serve anybody and it's simply not true okay um now that argument's being made um and in fact at some point if I forget because once you get past a certain point in age as we both know things just go flitting off into the sunset uh if I forget we need to have some discussion of how mere Christendom and Christian nationalism interface um as well as from my perspective how to distinguish between medieval and reformational sacralism and Mir Christendom as you are presenting it in your book I think those are those are both really important issues but uh I think for most people though um especially from our background um Christendom has a negative connotation to it that's immediately connected with some form of Catholicism uh more more specifically Roman Catholicism um I know that's how I heard it being used as as I was in independent fundamentalist Baptist circles as a as a as a young person it was never really used in a positive way you're using it in a positive way and in fact you're talking about Christendom 2.0 so that leads that opening lots of doors there what was Christendom 1.0 and what makes 2.0 better than 1.0 all right wonderful question so Christendom 1.0 I would say uh would date from the conversion of Constantine and his um and his at the point where he makes the Christian faith the religion of the Empire um down down through uh the uh near the end of the 19th century even the beginning of the 20th century um there was a there was a Supreme Court decision in 1892 um a wonderfully named court case called Holy Trinity versus the United States okay but in this in this Supreme Court decision in 1892 the Supreme Court of the United States decided definitively that we are a Christian Nation okay that they just said slam dunk everybody knows this uh it's not it's beyond dispute this is our laws our customs our history everything we're a Christian Nation and that was in 1892 and the thing was just to set this up there there was a law Congress had passed a law Banning the importation of um low-skilled workers and big corporations were paying the passage of these low-skilled workers to get them to work on their projects and then they would just turn them loose in the country having uh come over this way Congress passed a law against that well then there was a Church Holy Trinity Church that called a British Minister and they paid his passage to come over to to take the uh the position and technically violated the law so the Supreme Court in this decision uh weighed the that particular case on the merits and did a good job a lot of common sense not what you expect to see in a Supreme Court decision but lots of common sense but it was 1892 but then the Supreme Court in this majority opinion said and while we're on the subject let us tell you how ridiculous this whole thing is because we are a Christian Nation and they go back to the Mayflower Compact they go back to the original charters of the colonies they go back to the Fundamental Orders of Connecticut and stoutly affirm that the United States is a Christian Nation now in 1893 or 1894 right after that it wasn't the handmaid's tale it wasn't a theophascist dictatorship in 1894 after they they determined we were a Christian Nation so I would say down through the bulk of the 19th century even though secularist currents were were operating from the enlightenment on that's that's when uh I would say Christendom was a thing and I think Christendom as a living reality was probably obliterated by the first world war that a lot of people were disillusioned and so forth so that's the first Christendom and a lot of what you mentioned these this the sacramentalism and the the uh the superstitions and problems with Roman Catholicism we're all woven into the texture of this but the Reformation happened while Christendom was still a an ongoing thing and the reformers uh were many of them establishmentarians where they they believed in an established state Church the Puritans were the ones who wanted to purify the state Church of all of its popish influences so um one of the one of the things that is important for people and uh to understand and talking to folks like me is if you ask me where was my church before the Reformation okay where was my church before the Reformation if I'm talking debating with the Roman Catholic I would say well where was your face before you washed it okay so Christendom 1.0 had a lot of problems in it okay lots of problems let's just take a glaring uh the worst one would be it's probably the Spanish Inquisition that's a glaring problem in Christendom 1.0 but with all the problems Christendom 1.0 was way better than what was going before paganism 3.0 uh so it was not a bad thing that Constantine uh put a halt to all the public Pagan sacrifices that wasn't a bad thing that was a good thing it wasn't a bad thing that they stopped throwing Christians to the lions that wasn't a bad thing but there's a good better best issue here there were a lot of mistakes that Christendom 1.0 made and I would want Christendom 2.0 to acknowledge those mistakes and repent of the sins that were involved and make it make adjustments in Corrections so that Christendom 2.0 doesn't fall into the same uh doesn't won't fall into the same abuses okay so Christendom 2.0 uh if I'm reading the book correctly and understanding listening to you for a number of years um there's a there has to be some kind of objective definition so that you know what Christendom is um but one of the problems obviously with Christendom 1.0 is that you had very you had a real wide variety of dogmas and beliefs that had to be confessed or you could end up uh lighting up the night sky with your own fire uh type of situation happened a lot um so you speak of the Apostles Creed or something along those lines as a uh a baseline of what would be required to define or to participate in or what what language would you use uh to uh to make the differentiation between 1.0 and 2.0 at that point yeah so um one of the problems with 1.0 is that uh people would you when they got a hold of the apparatus of the state they would um they would impose what we would call denominational distinctives so uh in Europe after the Reformation you had Lutheran States and you had reformed States and you had Roman Catholic States so uh that it would be like um it would be like Massachusetts being congregational and Virginia being Anglican which when the Constitution was adopted nine of the 13 colonies had an official relationship with some denomination or other now I believe that a and this is a place where we have to be precise because I believe that there needs to be a separation of church and state because the church and the state are separate institutions they're separate governments and I think that they need to be kept distinct and not blurred um in the Roman Catholic system this the church was over the state in the erastian systems the state was over the church in the kyperion system which is what I'm advocating you have distinct spheres of authority established directly by God that have to relate to each other in some way they've got to be able to talk to each other but one's not in charge of the other the state's not in charge of word and Sacrament and the church is not in charge of declaring war all right they've got they've got distinct responsibilities so uh the the main problem uh in Christendom 1.0 is that people saw political power as the way of imposing their distinctive doctrinal views down to the 10th decimal point right and and instead of uh saying as the West as the original as the American Westminster Confession of faith says adopted in 1789 is that uh this the magistrate should make no distinction between churches of our common Lord okay that's the uh that's the way they approach it they say that the state will stay out of denominational differences now at some point someone's going to say so is Islam a denominational difference or a different religion and that's why and this shows you that the state cannot be religiously neutral but they can be religiously neutral when it comes to Baptists and Presbyterians and anglicans they can't they can stay out of that sort of thing or Mormons that gets even a little bit more um into that into that area so okay uh by the way uh church history professor over here just you know wants to point out that it was theodosius about 60 years after Constantine that made it official that the Roman Empire was a Christian uh place I've had to argue that before so I don't want anyone writing in and saying hey you let Doug get away with that is it okay no just stop um people I come on your I come on this program in order to get away with things oh thanks a lot now you've just started another bunch of conspiracy theories oh good grief we just can't stop it let me let me tag on you're exactly right Constantine made it okay to be a Christian right right right and and lectantius the early Church Father who was the tutor to Constantine's children wanted to keep it that way right he he wanted to uh he wanted religious toleration not a not a religious imposition of religion okay now there has to be a religious imposition of law but that's different than a religious imposition of Thou shalt worship at this Temple right right yeah and that ended up let's let's be honest I I think if we if we look down through history constantinianism as it became known um it doesn't seem to me to be honest with you just for a church just for a few church history moments here for a second it almost would appear to me given the perspective that you've presented about Christendom 1.0 is that it started without an owner's manual um yeah in other words you go from because I mean it's there's only 12 years between Constantine ending the persecution against the church in 313 uh with the Edict of Toleration and Council Nicene 325. I mean that's Whiplash fast history wise it's not Whiplash fast for us today I mean I mean two weeks is enough for for the current generation to go oh let's get rid of that stuff we believe two weeks ago uh but in history that was really really fast which means there was there was nobody I mean 303 to 313 is the period of the greatest persecution against the church and it's empire-wide it's Kill Em All wipe it out no one at that time is sitting there going well hey you know once we take over how are we going to run things you know what what's gonna how what's this even gonna look like they're not even thinking along those lines and so correct it gets there's some issues at the beginning um that I think end up having a lot of reverberations down through through history and and the same thing happened I think this happened two great periods in history one was uh where Christians found themselves running the show before they were even a little bit prepared right to to do so they were just sort of thrown in the deep end of the pool the era of Constantine and following was one such era and the Puritan Revolution in England was another and so what what happened the Puritans found themselves with the keys to the castle uh long before they had all the details worked out how how are we going to govern but even so right even so even though that we weren't ready for prime time either time we enjoy many great blessings today because of those uh revolutions because of those um those great episodes the conversion of the Empire and then the Puritan Revolution and the establishment of the magisterial Reformation as a model for our laws and customs and and so on the other thing I want to say is that if you take the worst excesses of Christendom 1.0 something like the Spanish Inquisition which over the course of a few centuries executed a few thousand people okay really bad uh bad look bad practice evil bet nothing uh nothing good about it right um so you you look at that and you say okay that death toll is Planned Parenthood on a slow afternoon oh okay so what are we comparing it to so when we say are we getting is are things progressing are we getting better or getting worse I I would submit that we are getting worse it used to be uh it used to be in the ant Antebellum South you could buy and sell blacks okay today you can buy and sell blacks provided you've chopped them up into pieces first right and congress subsidizes the people are doing that and the person who revealed that they are doing that is the one currently today being prosecuted okay and I I believe in the Judgment the slave owners the slave traders of Old Charleston will rise up and condemn us because not only do we do that not only are we far worse than they are but we do it with a sense of high virtue we we think that we're being constitutional enlightened and secular and Progressive look you're chopping up black babies and selling the pieces just justify that right right exactly okay there's so many there's so many uh questions and issues that that need to be dealt with and so little time but let me uh let me introduce a term that is not normally a part of this but again um in 2017 I had just the awesome opportunity about a month before the 500th anniversary of the beginning of the Reformation to lead a tour uh in Germany where we visited ice Laban and Frankfurt and Weimar and all these various places and of course Wittenberg and everything else in fact uh I don't know if I've even mentioned ever mentioned this to you I had the opportunity of preaching in the castle Church in Wittenberg from Luther's pulpin and um I only know of a few evangelicals that have been allowed to do that so I decided I needed to actually preach a sermon uh for and during which I actually quoted Martin Luther now I had to because if you've ever been there you know Luther is buried directly underneath where that Pulpit is in fact uh we had a little bit of a uh sound in the sound system when I first started preaching and I said after I got done I said that was Luther spinning in his grave because a Baptist was preaching from his Pulpit um but uh but uh I actually quoted Luther and that made a lot of the people who were walking through the back of the church visitors uh tourists stop and sit down listen because they were hearing English most of them understand English but then someone trying to do German at the same time did attract people and it's on it's on uh YouTube I'll send you the link if you'd ever be interested in seeing uh what it did because it was it was a lifetime that's a that's a bucket list type thing anyways we we got the chance to go there and one of the the first night when we were in Berlin I mentioned to my group I said now I realize that many of these these men would not extend the right-handed Fellowship to me May the men we're going to be talking about would actually have had me uh kicked out of their towns territories or Worse possibly even uh tied to a rope and drowned in a river in Zurich um type of type of situation and a lot of people were shocked in fact the people who ran the tour sort of stopped me afterwards and they said we've had a lot of people do these tours and big names in church history with big big Ministries they said no one has ever talked about that before I'm like if you don't talk about that you're giving a caricature of the Reformation not the reality of the Reformation correct and so all through the trip I was talking about sacralism now I understand sacralism I would Define sacralism as the blurring or the getting rid of that recognition of the different spheres of sovereignty between the church and the state now as you well know when the when the church would turn a heretic over to the state they would sort of like wash their hands like that's all we're doing we're not we're not doing anything more though kind of like pilot yeah exactly but everybody knew what that was going to result in so it was a there was almost a tacit recognition even upon the church's part of that time that there needed to be that distinction but it was gone it it was no longer there and of course that then led into the reality of the fact that Luther and zwingli are still sacralists and Calvin inherits that though he begins to disassemble it maybe not purposefully in the institutes he's still a part of that at that very early Point um when we talk about sacralism um I don't know if you've ever seen it but I had the opportunity we went to the uh to the Weimar castle where of course juncker yard and the translation of the of the New Testament and the German and and all the rest of that stuff and it's an incredible place to visit it was it was really wonderful but while we were there we visited the cell in which Fritz erba an anabaptist was kept and it's it's in one of the towers um I've got a four minute video and and I'll send you a link to that one too we recorded a four minute video in this tiny little room you can only get about a dozen people in there and we're looking down through the the hole could not have been any bigger than this just barely get a person through it you would be tied up and dropped into this 40-foot hole there are no windows there are no doors down there there's no light you are completely alone in the middle of this Tower and Fritz Arbor was imprisoned there for seven years now at first they would have Lutheran pastors come because he wouldn't have his children baptized and because he read Luther's new testament which Luther translated less than 100 meters away and so there he is and you'd have Lutheran pastors sit at the at the hole up there where the food came down and so on and so forth and preached to him about baptism not highly effective but that's that's what they did right he was down there for seven years before he died seven years there's there's no heat there's no cooling there's there's there's nothing you're in you're in Blackness it's I I don't know how anyone and I said at the time how many of us would maintain our our position on baptism for more than a week down there let alone seven years okay now Luther knew he was there Luther knew he was in a hole less than 100 meters from where he translated the New Testament but Luther was so afraid of Anarchy and so afraid of Christendom that was a term used um breaking down that he supported the imprisonment of fritzerba now this was a Lutheran state and as you I'm sure you know um well maybe you were Southern Baptist right initially yeah okay and a lot of Baptists don't know much about their own Baptist murderology the martyrs that have were killed for example in 1611 a Baptist was burned in in uh in London which I've always really thought was funny in light of King James onlyism but anyway uh there were lots of Baptist Martyrs in reformed countries in the Netherlands for example um one famous story of a man who they they put a tongue clip on his tongue so he could not witness as he was burned and they they pulled the tongue clip out of the ashes and has been passed down through families ever ever since then so there's sacralism led to um a lot a lot of Bloodshed and imprisonment and and things like that so help a as a as a former Baptist yourself okay um how do we avoid the conversion of Christendom 2.0 into sacralism 2.0 and okay so um help a Baptist out is what you're saying so you just had to didn't you so uh let me give you two things I'd refer back to my earlier question uh where was your church before the Reformation I would answer where was your face before you washed it and an Evangelical Baptist would say where was your church before uh the Reformation he would say hiding from you guys mostly yeah you know yeah yeah in caves and in forests and so so it's the trail of the trail of blood that goes uh that goes back kind of kind of uh yeah because you're you're moving into an area where there's not a lot of documents you know uh so the that fellow Down in the Hole in the castle was not writing uh history he was right so he's not in a position to do that but there there is there are two different views of where your church was before the reformation and I believe that both have something have both have substance both have Merit okay now the second part of the the a question just how do you reassure someone who's nervous about church State church and state becoming too cozy because that becomes a a an aid or an excuse for this kind of persecution well I would say here's this here's a simple way to analyze it uh when we look at this thing with Martin Luther was aware that that guy was down in the hole okay and we say what was Luther thinking what was he what did he think about it so I would say let's go higher let's say what did Jesus think about it okay what is Jesus what does Jesus think about that sort of thing and whatever Jesus thinks that's what we ought to do if Jesus wants us to pull him out of the hole then we should pull him out of the hole if we say that Jesus doesn't care because separation church and state remember we don't we don't want people appealing to what Jesus wants right because we believe in separation in church and state well then leave them in the hole there's nothing wrong with leaving if Jesus doesn't care if we leave him down in that dungeon then why should we care if Jesus cares whether or not we leave him down in that hole for be for this because of his religious conviction on baptism if Jesus has an opinion we should find out what that is and implement it but as soon as you're implementing anything because of what Jesus thinks you're in a theocracy that that's true but Luther was convinced that people like you know when the zwick out prophets first came to Wittenberg he's sort of open to them uh but eventually yeah no no way and as far as Irma is concerned he sees Fritz erba as a tremendous threat to Christendom because he was he was he was imprisoned elsewhere at first and he had a cell window and he would preach out of his cell window to the people the town he was getting converts and so that's why he was dragged up to the castle and chucked in that hole but Luther is convinced that Jesus wants Fritz erba in the hole because Christendom is Jesus's Christendom and Fritz Urban destroys Jesus's Christendom then he's hurting Jesus right I I you're exactly right Luther once said of the zwick out prophets that he didn't care if they'd swallowed the Holy Ghost feathers and all you know so uh Luther was kind of that kind of pithy uh guy but when we're looking at this when Luther says well I'm doing what Jesus wants me to do we are faced with we are faced with a Monumental choice we can't say oh well as long as follow your heart Luther what we have to do is say no that's right or no that's wrong yes that's right or no that's wrong if we say no you're wrong Luther we have to be good students of Luther and appeal to the word in order to make our case okay this kind of thing displeases Christ right this sort of thing just pleases Christ now here here's the the tricky part is that you've got uh some of these Martyrs you're talking about on the Baptist side are what we would call conscientious Evangelical Baptists they're they're just good Christian folks some of them like in Munster IN were were demented yeah they were just they were off the CH they were off the chain the most fascinating story in all of church history there is nothing that it can even come close to it and I don't know why there has not been a major motion picture made of the story of Munster because they wouldn't have to make anything up to make it the most people sitting there going no that could not have happened oh yes it did Poison shirts yep it happened it was there um so I'm saying I say to how about Canon or Laura or somebody like that I we need a monster movie that's just not a monster movie a monster movie yeah so when so one of the things that we have to recognize is because and this is one of the vulnerabilities of Christendom is that uh because you've got an established relationship between church and state and you've got these things uh worked out there are occasions where a doctrinal Innovation is not just something that might cause you to plant a new church on the other side of town a doctrinal Innovation can be plausibly accused of fomenting sedition right right so that's what happened with Ann Hutchinson um here in the colonies so in Hutchinson is starting to teach certain uh doctrines that could plausibly get the Massachusetts Bay Charter revoked by the king and then you really are in a a mess so are you if you're this if you're the sheriff and someone says hey uh so-and-so is leading a Bible study he's got a Godly family God Lee home and he's persuading people that infant baptism is not the way that's one situation and then another situation you're the sheriff and and someone tells you hey the anabaptists are running naked through Safeway again um um if if he if he goes and rounds those guys up that's not religious persecution pers you know and so you've got lots of blurry lines a bunch of this is like a watercolor left out in the rain but the bottom line is we can't make more if if basically if Christ has no opinions about what we do politically then it doesn't matter what we do politically if he does have opinions we should find out what those are and do them so so but in finding out how what those are let's use the most glaring example that we neither one of us have touched on yet because we're tired of having to deal with it when um servedis escape the imposition goes to Geneva makes a beeline for Geneva uh he wants take on Calvin um when the council determined that he had to be executed um right they sent letters to the other Swiss cantons and those other cantons then talked with Geneva as to what needed to be done and they recognize hey if their own Catholics were about to burn this guy and we don't this does not look good at all so the point is here you had multiple ministers multiple cities um where the word of God was had been being preached with Clarity and force for at least 20 years now um maybe someplace 15 but it's it's not like it's a brand new thing and yet there was complete agreement um he needs to be uh roasted alive and so you you have those situations where it's not we're not talking about ignorant people we're not talking about people who don't have access to the word of God and yet they came to conclusions that we today would go oh oh bad bad move and people look at us and go yeah well you're trying to start the whole thing all over again aren't you um except but here's the difference it's sort of like uh what you what do you get when you cross a Unitarian with a Jehovah's Witness well someone who knocks on your door for no particular reason what do you the the problem that we have that ties in with this trust me we I'm looking forward to seeing how it does I'm I really am we have people in service's position now but what we people now are being persecuted because of the arbitrary whims of a secular state okay and it's just arbitrary no particular re no particular reason now when cervinus was executed that was a brief ecumenical moment all over Europe Catholics lutherans reformed all cheered okay finally okay finally we dealt with this Pest and I believe that the devil knew what he was doing this was this was a trap okay we um it was cerve it is going to Cal going to Geneva in a I'm in a triple dog dare you to do something about this and um I'll I'll say two things I think that the burning of cervitas the execution of service was given the circumstances understandable but I believe that they had a responsibility to figure out a way to not step into that trap okay that uh and and that trap basically how how often do you have to have a discussion about politics in Christ before the Salem Witch Trials or the or servitus uh you know uh is they're hauled out oh yeah well it's called it's hauled out wrapped around our neck and what they're doing is just saying we don't have because servitus was burned and because of the Salem Witch Trials we don't have to do what God says in politics and I would say let's step back and listen to yourself if if God doesn't care what we do politically there's nothing wrong with burning Cerritos if God doesn't care what we do politically there's nothing wrong with burning witches or accused witches there's nothing if if there if Christ doesn't care about due process if he doesn't care about spectral evidence if he doesn't care about blasphemy uh laws if if Christ has nothing to do with this then the breaks are out and you're at the top of the grade you're this is this is not going to end uh nicely and so consequently we have this peculiar blind spot where we tell and this is shows you the effectiveness of catechism um the Crusades and the Spanish Inquisition and the burning of servitus and this Salem Witch Trials nobody ever brings up Stalin nobody ever brings up Mao nobody brings up Pol Pot a hundred million victims a hundred million victims in the 20th century for victims of your vaunted secularism and yet you still have people Christians feeling bad about servitus right if it is true and this is um I can feel bad about servitus because I'm a Christian and I believe that God's law should govern how we how we behave politically right I believe that but if if I accepted their position where God God has nothing to do with this then I'd say okay great you just let Calvin off the hook sure right well now obviously one's eschatology massive massive impact on all of this as we yes as we had the huge um explosion on Christian nationalism at the beginning of the week um it just struck me how many people were reacting com not so much as to what was being said or what the issues were but out of Defense of a traditional eschatological understanding and and a lot of us just don't recognize the impact that that has on our theology as a whole and so when I when I think about situations like what we saw this week one of the things I said to people was you know um from my perspective we're not and this is sort of what and and correct me if I'm wrong because I really this is how I understood our last conversation where we talked well I'm not sure it was last one but when we talked about the Christian nationalism book I thought one of the things that that we agreed on was that all of this any discussion of of all this actually coming into um existence in reality in the United States or in Western culture as a whole would require that major fulfillment of the promises of God in Isaiah 42 and Psalm 2 and First Corinthians 15 and this outpouring of the spirit of God and this third Great Awakening fourth grade whatever to where there is a a massive changing of hearts and Minds um so that you have a large portion of the population desirous of following after Christ in the first place and it seems to me honestly I don't I ain't seeing that right now in fact I'm seeing doubling down on hatred of God's creation and God's order and everything else all around us so it seems to me that we we need to have conversations yeah but are we really even at the point where we can discuss details as to how things are going to work out because we're not in a situation where we have this huge outpouring of the spirit of God I would think that would not only result in tremendous amounts of conversions but I would you agree with me that if the spirit's doing that there's going to be a narrowing um in the church we're gonna there's gonna be more Harmony there's going to be more there's gonna be a whole lot less stupidity out there and much more focus upon what really defines things and maybe we'd be in a better position than to get to the details but it sounds like a lot of people are arguing about the details right now when we're not even close enough to even think about getting there right and part of the reason we need to argue about the details is we have to have some sort of framework for what we say no to now it's not like we're not like we're shuttled off to an academic seminar where we can have a discussion uh and and pursue the argument wherever it leads we're doing this in a moment where the government is locking us down and demanding that we take the vaccine and demand you know there are all sorts of things that are happening and objects whizzing by our heads and people are saying I want to say no but I need a framework for saying no I I need to understand the map and I need an x on the map that says you are here and this is where we want to go now I I do believe that we when we talk about Christian nationalism which is the unit Nation by Nation tribe by tribe or mere Christendom is what happens when you get a cluster of them right so if you have one Christian Nation you've got a Christian Nation and Christian nationalism when you get 10 of them what is the relationship of these to one another that would be mere Christendom so basically so nationalism is a one by one thing uh Christendom is zoom out zoom out and look at the relationship between these nations I need to know that that's where I'm going 700 years from now so I know how to behave now but the danger of all eschatological positions and the post Mill guys are not excluded from this is that of an over-realized eschatology where you have certain eschatological convictions and you think that it's all coming down in the next six months so if you're pre-mill you think that the Rapture is going to happen if you're Amil you think things just fall apart all by themselves all the time if you're post Mill you think everything is going to come to a head in your lifetime well it may not we future school children may look back on us as part of the early church right and and and as part of the early church uh it's part of the it's the immature Church so I would say that the the Reformation was a glorious reformation and movement of God and they got so many things right the baby was born healthy but the baby was still a baby all right there still there was still immature there were still immaturities there were things they had to work through things they had to work out and uh the same thing I I think happened with the Christian Church during the era of Constantine as well we it was this was good altogether good way better than what went before but still we need to grow up oh yeah and we we need to grow up in our Doctrine we need to pursue the ramifications we need to study church history and see how that was a mistake let's not do that again that we need we need Church historians to help us view the game film so that we don't make the same mistakes next time yeah and when I was talking about details I'm talking more about uh I've I've seen people raising questions about well what are you going to do about um you know and it even came up in the book Baptists and Presbyterians and stuff like that and and and I'm I'm just sort of like look those are those are the details that we can get to as we get closer but it's the big picture it's the how do you lay the foundations now for what's going to be 700 years down the road and there's honestly um I do know how technically my all Millennial my positive Millennial friends could think about 700 years down the road but honestly in my experience the only people thinking 700 years down the road are post-millennials um because I I think that's just the only framework that really makes any sense to even be thinking in that kind of of time frame and it just seems to me that if there is going to be uh if the sun's gonna ask for the Nations as his inheritance and God the father has the power to do that and brings it about that it would seem like when we get to the point of dealing with all those difficult challenging details that there's gonna be a whole lot more unanimity uh and a whole lot more Unity of Faith at that point right now we can't we can't have a meaningful discussion on Twitter without everybody getting angry and starting to throw feds it doesn't seem to me like we're quite in the position to be able to be uh making those final decisions yes maturity is the word that does not come to mind no sadly um I I love Twitter because I've been able to communicate with people and communicate things to a wider audience that I could in almost any other context but even yesterday I did a dividing line yesterday where I talked about transgenderism and after we posted it on YouTube I sort of looked at Rich I'm sort of like you posted that to YouTube do you want us to get uh you know we've already got one strike uh you know all right and we pulled it we eventually pulled it we put it on our we we use Odyssey as our our primary spot right now but we pulled it because they are trying to silence us and we all know they're trying to silence us that's where we are right now that's the situation we're facing it's more important to be investing into our grandchildren our great grandchildren our great great grandchildren to keep going the right direction that is to be answering a lot of the questions that are are really just hidden objections and we're not really in a position to be answering them right now anyways right and I the thing I want to keep coming back to and encouraging Christians to Think Through is neutrality is a myth neutrality is a lie you you can't have it so if you see something bad and you in the Public Square and you think that Jesus thinks it's bad and you can prove from the Bible that you think Jesus thinks it's bad then you should be willing to go there and say thus saith the Lord this is this is bad um and if you if you don't say that if you don't appeal to the the word of God you as a Christian have nowhere to stand you you're just a you're just another pressure group you're and this is why evangelicals have turned into a lobbying group you know that we have a lot of votes you should listen to us but that puts us on the same level as big tobacco or the NRA or the environmentalists I don't want the church to speak as a lobbying group no no I want the church to speak as the very Oracles of God I want John the Baptist to be able to say to Herod it's not lawful for you to have her right right okay now if if uh and I actually saw back in the day uh famous this is decades ago but a famous pre-millennial teacher saying that John the Baptist got out of his Lane when he rebuked Herod like that and and it was a he cut a promising Ministry short because he got involved in politics yeah something tell us it really does help to believe there's something called the decree of God and uh that he's he's actually accomplishing his purposes so well I appreciate all that Doug and I hope everybody else does too um it's uh it's going to be challenging for people to to to read Mira Christendom um now just really briefly because we really are out of time um you uh mentioned at the beginning that you had you had some help with this book didn't you yes I had some help with this book so over the years I I wrote lots of blog posts on mere Christendom and a theme started to take place it takes shape and so I asked my grandson uh Knox Merkel to go through this slag heap of words and pull out um usable pieces and arrange them in a recognizable order and he did a fine job of of that well uh I know my my oldest grandchild was only 13 so we're not quite to that point yet but I know that uh if any of my grandchildren were involved in helping me to get something published I would want to uh very uh proudly uh make that known so I wanted to give you that opportunity to do that so it is it is wonderful to see that I I was out I'll go ahead and I have a awesome picture of uh my uh two granddaughters two my granddaughters we were out at the Mormon Easter pageant uh passing out tracks and witnessing to people and last year I had seen a picture of my daughter Clement my granddaughter Clementine witnessing to a police officer out there and I was up in Utah actually doing Ministry amongst the Mormons when I saw this and I ran the numbers and Doug you'll appreciate this I ran the numbers and realized she was only 12 years younger than I was the first time I did that that's how long we've been going out there and ministering to to the Mormons and to see that faithfulness going generation to generation is um is really exciting it's uh it's beautiful that's why it should it's glorious it is it is it really is yeah all right sir well thank you very very much for that conversation uh I'm the book will probably be out within a would you imagine a couple weeks okay a couple weeks and uh it's called miracendum Douglas Wilson can impress thank you sir next time in German right yeah uh uh maybe Anglo-Saxon I can get by Anglo-Saxon is what German would sound like if German sounded good Alvin [Music] foreign foreign

Channel: Canon Press

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Length: 56min 22sec (3382 seconds)

Published: Tue May 02 2023