Darwin and Idolatry | Doug Wilson and James White | Sweater Vest Dialogues

[Music] well greetings and welcome to the sweater vest dialogues my name is james white and we are joined of course by the man that i expect you know i i figured because you know idaho is degrees of latitude north of phoenix arizona where it's already 101 degrees it could be 116 degrees the next two days here in phoenix that if i was dedicated enough to uh our traditions to uh be wearing a sweater vest in july in phoenix that we could expect something of that from from our friends in moscow but i'm sort of figuring that you've just been so um overwhelmed with your battle with the the the principalities and powers of moscow uh that uh you just you just couldn't even remember a sweater vest is that sort of what's going on i didn't forget it i thought about it but it's just so blazing hot up here you guys don't know what heat is yeah we don't we we have no earthly idea 116 in the shade uh you know honestly this this i don't mean if you live in it look if you live in a place that's 116 in the shade and you still live there then i don't trust anything you say [Laughter] i've lived here for over 40 years so yes i'm i'm well aware of what people think but look new year's day uh it's 72 for a high and 42 for a low so it all it all evens out eventually but but honestly here in phoenix one of the big things during the summer is they actually have public service announcements to remember your children in the car because every year we lose kids because it takes maybe 15 minutes and they're gone if you leave them inside a car um it's it's amazing you know car seats and stuff like that you know we've had big families that have you know 15 kids and somebody forgets and it's literally happened and i've gotten into a car at 178 degrees inside the inside the vehicle so it's uh it's intense but it's uh it's our desert and we love it so yes but anyway so your sympathies go out to me as to why i would not want to wear a sweater vest because of the nice weather no i have no no sorry uh i have i i hoped to get a a taste of of what moscow was like a few weeks ago but we'll we'll maybe that'll happen again someday i don't know i'm sorry i'm personally concerned about such things as um uh travel visas as far as health visas and medical visas and stuff like that just get on just get on planes it's ridiculous it is absolutely insane but anyway um there are foundational issues underneath all of this stuff um obviously a lot of people have been listening to what both of us have been saying on these particular subjects and underneath all of that is a fundamental conflict with it almost seems like we hit a tipping point recently with our society uh between people who still at least functioned with some momentum of a belief in a creator and that this world has some meaning outside of what could be assigned by charles darwin or uh or dawkins which is basically nothing um and it's almost like that all that just shifted right and and it seems to explain a lot of what is is is happening in our in our world today we live you and i live in a world with a creator who can speak and who can assign meaning and makes the sun rise this morning that we had here in phoenix absolutely beautiful and gorgeous right rather than in a world where the sunrise in phoenix this morning was nothing more than a certain spectrum of light reflected off of a cloud layer right um and that makes all the difference in the world um what do you think about that absolutely so uh what we're what you're touching on what you're pointing to is what uh cornelius van till referred to as epistemological self-consciousness uh a lot of people talk about the polarization that's happening in america right now which is a good term for it but i think there are christians on one end who are epistemologically self-conscious they know who they are they know who their god is they know why they function the way they function and then they're at on the atheistic secular left they too are the the leadership the people who are driving this thing are also epistemologically self-conscious and if there is no god in heaven imagine there's no heaven above us uh then there is absolutely no reason not to live like jeffrey epstein did right there's absolutely and and there are people at the top who fall who follow that logic and who who are doing so and then you've got the the people in the middle uh there are some people who are sort of on um they've got an institutional memory of the way things used to be when there was a christian consensus and we are discovering what happens when that group of people gets yelled at by by the people on the far left extreme they don't have answers they they were able to run on memory institutional memory and did so for decades but when someone starts yelling at them and screaming at them and demanding that they crawl demanding they tear down their statues demanding that they put on a mask that they do all these things they know that there's something wrong with it but they don't know how to articulate they don't don't know how to articulate what's wrong with it because they've not had a worldview education they've not had a christian education they're not epistemologically self-conscious in in a christian sense so the uh the alleged conservatives uh have been m.i.a in this whole thing they've been hiding in their closets they don't know what in the world to say they like you said they they feel there's something wrong about this they recognize it's different than the way it used to be but they don't have a leg to stand on to be able to shout back in essence and say no you are wrong and here is why you are wrong because they abandon any type of meaningful well they all became episcopalians a long time ago that's that's basically what the problem is there yeah and and when you when you have at the at the the national cathedral when you have trees walking in yeah um wearing homosexual banners and stuff like that yeah that's not really going to provide you much in the way of a solid foundation for being able to push back against what is taking place right now there there are pockets and you know so just recently just a few days ago here in idaho uh there was the the republican state convention where all the republicans got together and we have a republican governor brad little who ordered us into lockdown um in sort of the typical soft center-right kind he's a center-right kind of governor but he ordered us into lockdown and um and the republican party meeting in their convention just condemned that and so i thought whoa but but here's the problem um they're not they they can say that doesn't make sense man um and because because my business or because of this it's a common sense argument but we are we're past the level of common sense we are down to we're down to first principles and it's either christ or chaos it's that's uh those are our basic options christ or chaos i don't know if you saw the news story about the teacher i think in the state of washington saying that two plus two equals four was a colonial concept yes yes uh her name was brittany and uh we all tried to make britney very famous even though britney was not the first one to say that it's been said for quite some time but yes uh i i put out a a challenge sort of before it went viral to anyone uh to all my woke friends would you get on a plane designed by brittany is the question that i asked i didn't get anybody offering that they would do that no i don't know what's what is what do two wings mean when you come right down to it right and why do they have to be on opposite sides anyway i mean yeah yeah on the left side we want two left two left wings is pretty much how everybody's flying these days anyways okay so all right so right now it's really easy in light of the fact that um unless you're living in a lead mind a lead-lined room um you are well aware of what's going on and and you know i try to look for silver linings i suppose in some ways what has happened over the past six months seven months now has forced a lot of christians to at least realize that if our faith doesn't address issues like this why do we have it what what i mean the people who have had this totally disconnected uh i've got my religious life and i've got my life out in the world perspective are starting to realize not even the world's gonna allow that that that's that's not gonna that's not gonna happen and so many opportunities of addressing these issues you we have to be thinking these things through it's been very uncomfortable for a lot of people to think these things through uh part of the reason i'm optimistic despite the the the rampaging stupid part of the reason i i'm optimistic is in the long run stupid is not a strategy stupidity doesn't work um and things this is a this is an intellectual moral theological frenzy and like just like crying fits or or other sorts of seizures they can't go on and on and on and on but conservatives uh rahm emanuel famously said never let a crisis go to waste well he's not the only one who can uh articulate or take that good advice what's happening now i think is is quite possibly going to destroy academia in north america that's right right and what what we wouldn't get together and vote out it looks like god is nuking from space and nooking from orbit just to make sure just to make sure and and so and they're all doing it to themselves right uh colleges there are numerous colleges that were marginal it was a higher education boom to begin with and a lot of colleges were already marginal and uh dependent on federal money that's not going to keep coming and then if they try to open in person in the fall and they only get half their students or a third of their students that they're not going to be able to function i think i think we're going to be looking at the collapse of a lot of colleges that they did to themselves and a conservative conspiracy can't be blamed for this is right this is a mass suicide this is um jehoshaphat going out to battle with the the choir out in front when we get there all the all the colleges jumped off a cliff and the colleges are the ones that are pumping this insanity right into the broader culture right but the okay so let's let's take the most post-millennial perspective possible here and say uh we we see a a huge decline in in the secular uh university attendance etc etc and and i've seen a number of articles i'd like to believe that they're true a huge increase in homeschooling yes uh parents all sudden going man these these offspring of mine are really sort of cool and uh my goodness they behave differently when they're around me all day rather than around all the rest of the rugrats and and so on so forth and and so let's say all of that uh happens yet there has to be a formed functional meaningful christian world view amongst all these christians to be able to make things go the right direction and one of the biggest problems in my opinion is that quote-unquote evangelicalism whatever in the world that means uh in the united states has so compromised on foundational issues and especially the issue of god as creator that it concerns me because we've we've been we've been hobbling along on a semi biblical world view that's missing the foundation right i mean i cannot think honestly of any element of the christian worldview that does not eventually find its its underpinning in the reality of god as creator yeah i mean that is just foundational yeah the apostles creed i believe in god the father almighty maker of heaven and earth start start there and everything follows um and the i think your job my job and the job of unfortunately so far a relative handful of others is in this time of the the raging floods of panic and commotion and manipulation and control i think our job is to be the levy that doesn't break okay so uh we need to stand firm hold you know hold hold steady don't let you know the don't let the people who say man you're being a little extreme here and um well no god is the creator he's not going to let us he's not going to let us destroy the planet this way that's not the way the planet's going out um culture human cultures go out this way yep right uh civilizations go out this way but uh mother earth does not go out this way um so the the thing that is im important for us to i guess realize is that if we if we stand firm if we trust in the god whose mo is to shake things up so as it says in hebrews so that what cannot be shaken may remain and we christians are receiving a kingdom that cannot be shaken so if we are preaching the kingdom if we're preaching the death burial and resurrection of christ if we're preaching that god is our creator and we owe everything to him if we are declaring the word unambiguously it doesn't matter how many shakeable things collapse that message cannot collapse that gospel cannot collapse and i've seen this it's only been six months of this or less i have seen a massive reaction on the part of many christians who have been getting anemic anemic preaching and teaching pablum from pablum from the pulpit and and they're saying this i'm sorry friend this just isn't going to cut it we need the whole council of god yeah people are seeing that and the the question really is going to be uh i mean you're you're dealing with students there you're dealing with uh with the millennial and south uh generations um they've been given so much um you're calling it pablum but but so much empty vacuous type of worldview teaching and even in their churches but secularly even more so that really the question that comes up is how do we present the old time reality of god as purposeful sovereign maker and sustainer of all things to a society that is steeped in the religion of darwinism and to a church that has in many ways capitulated to darwin when it comes to mankind's you know they may still say we bear the imago dei they may say we have the image of god but how that can be true in light of what they really believe about darwin and darwin's essential correctness they've never been able to figure that out and once the world starts pushing on that it all collapses anyways absolutely and and so consequently the foundation uh it's not for nothing that god gave us a bible that starts with genesis 1 and 2. those those are the footings though everything builds off of that god created the heavens and the earth and then in the new testament it reiterates that that christ was the the executive of this god created all things through him and apart from him nothing was made that was made and that means creation from nothing on the one hand i said earlier christ or chaos creation from nothing with christ as the executive of the father who does that work for him and the spirit hovers over the face of the deep or on the other it's just endless time and chance acting on matter right it's it's chaos it's like 10 tons of confetti dumped into an f5 tornado um that's what the world is and i just recently back in when when this first came out when francis schaefer wrote a book called the christian manifesto back in the early 80s and i just i read it back then and i just listened to it again i just went through it again and this is what 40 years almost 40 years ago right right and it is remarkable how prescient that book is basically it's not that we weren't warned no no no we know we don't we were warned and yeah yeah yeah but america will still go on you know things are going to remain rock-solid steady and it's as though everybody's got amnesia that comes in two-week increments right they come for the confederate statues and you say hey listen it's not just confederate statues it's going to be other statues in a minute you're you're crazy you're a madman you're babbling what are you talking about and then two weeks later right they're taking after washington and frederick douglass right yes it's not just frederick douglass it's not just washington it's frederick douglass and abolitionists and ulysses grant for crying out loud yeah i think somebody somebody is failing to grasp the concept or more more to the point we're the ones not grasping the concept right because they're going after memory they're not going after confederates yeah they're they're going and they're and george orwell is next he george orwell himself is going to go down the memory hole because everything must go down the memory hole so that their socialist paradise um you know venezuela that sort of thing their socialist paradise is going to be the only thing on the menu and it's always been this good they're going to tell us it's always been this good and the chocolate rations have always been right where they are now right right yeah yeah no i that's what's coming we the the thing that's frustrating is you can see it um the question is what you do about it and that's what we're trying to do i think the only way to really address it is to seek god's face and to seek i i don't like necessarily the term uh revival uh in light of some of the uses of that term in the past but certainly a grand move of the spirit of god in uh bringing a conviction of understanding of who we are as human beings that's that's another thing that is is absolutely central here is if you don't have a creator god then we ourselves are as you described it in your uh we i'm not sure if you're aware of this we've both debated dan barker oh and in fact i i i debated dan on a local radio station a number of times with a shock jock by the name of tom lycus back in the 80s and then we've done two formal debates uh since then and uh so in your debate with dan barker you utilized if i recall correctly the the phraseology of of uh fizzing chemicals uh you know one one fanta and one one seven up and they're just fizzing and that's that's that's really all we are we're stardust we're molecules bumping against one another there's no way to ground any meaning uh why should we care about the memory of our nation why should we care about um how we fought during the civil war and who did what and who was brave when all those things are being wiped out because of the political desire to wipe out all memory all connection to the past you can create a new a new a new uh culture but why should we care about why men did things the way they did because they were just fizzing bottles of pop like we're fizzing bottles of pop it doesn't there is no meaning to it's the end of history it is completely the end of any meaningful history and so orwell can describe that as the ministry of truth and re-editing all the newspapers which could be a whole lot easier to do now than it was in orwell's day that's for sure you couldn't have foreseen how easy it is to do things now but that also results in the destruction of humanity itself as having any my life does not matter because my life might get wiped out tomorrow by a change in how the state wants to do history then you're left having absolutely zero meaning it seems to me that if we can connect the fact that this one creator god has revealed himself there is an empty tomb that shows that he has revealed himself in this world that he is he is very very concerned about what takes place here he's invaded his own creation together with what that means about us as human beings that is a message that we need to be getting out to everybody with more fervor than i think we've ever thought we would need to communicate with you yeah absolutely and and um as c.s you use the phrase destruction of humanity uh c.s lewis's wonderful book the abolition of man touches on this you one once you've destroyed every trace of obligation from outside of us which is what a creator necessitates a creator means i've got obligations to him once you eradicate that and you've completely submitted to a darwinian atheistic worldview once you've done that all obligation vanishes but the phrase i want remains right so the the people who are grabbing for power and that's what it is is a it's a hungry avaricious greedy power grab um that's consistent with their world view right they they they um they have no obligation outside themselves and there's nothing that they need obey except their own desires and if their desires are to dominate us to rule over us to dictate to us then that's what they're going to do and so we need mental infra we need a mental infrastructure we need a world view a framework for answering these things to respond to the challenge and we need peop men pastors who are able when the demands of uh this kind of secularism ardent secularism come our way we need men with backbone who have the the ammo the resources to stand up and say something like let me think about it no [Laughter] let me burn a couch on that one well but when we say okay right now we can still say no we still we still have that freedom um i'm i'm looking toward november and well okay january and really wondering how quickly could the movement come our direction to try to shut everything down as far as communication because we know we know the other side cannot engage in debate right both of us have done lots of debates uh watching watching you interacting with the students uh in those uh debates a few years ago bloomington and just and just and by the way when when you when you said to that one young lady um that you frequently have thoughts that require more than one sentence to express them how did you keep a straight face i mean i mean seriously that was that was one of the most that was classic i i i don't think i've ever had a chance to tell you how classic that was but that was fun thank you because that's what i wanted to say to so many people but you can get away with it i really you know your uncle dougie i'm i'm just the mean oh yeah right i'm the nice one i see i have that how did that happen is that why i'm i'm hanging out with you is to make me look good exactly right you're you're looking like the nice calm sane one uh that's exactly what this is all about somebody's gonna say james james and douglas need to get a firmer grip on the good cop bad cop routine very much so but but no but but the way that they responded to you when when and and look i'm i'm confessing a really deep um and it's a serious character flaw and you're you're much better at this than i am you uh when i encounter someone who plainly detests rationality detests logic and lives completely in an emotional rollerco roller coaster realm i struggle to deal with that kind of person i really really do i find it disrespectful to themselves i find it disrespectful to me to the people around us the world around us because we're created by god to think his thoughts after him and here's somebody who in their rebellion is doing everything they possibly can to do the exact opposite of that i i really honestly struggle in that situation i really really do now i've i've obviously navigated it more than once in public situations but it requires a supernatural effort there's no question about it but that but how do we we can't get the other side right now to actually engage us so we have to sort of turn our our direction our our attention to the people in the middle that are wondering what in the world is going on and explain to them this is why they can't debate this is why they won't debate and this is why you need to stand against them right i i had a i think of a verse near the end of jude where it says snatch people from the fire detesting the you know uh even the clothing that's stained by the the sin there has to be a balance of loving the sinner and and really genuinely detesting the the things they're all tangled up in um and and and as lewis again points out there's one person there's one person we've been doing that for our entire lives and that's ourselves um we know how to distinguish the sinner and the sin and we want what's best for us and say this sin has got to go well there are some people who have not yet gotten to that point of enlightenment that the prodigal son came to when he was when he was staring at the pig food and and when you encounter that that person uh what what you have to do is say lord give me that that vision that is expressed there at the end of jude i have a a friend i had a friend years ago who when he was a little boy his father not his father wasn't doing this from a christian framework but his father wanted to keep him away from substance abuse so his father took him on a tour of skid row and just his father walked him through skid row to see all the winos lying in the alleys um and saying this is what happens when you start when you start going down this row this road this is this is where men wind up i've often thought that we ought to do something similar intellectually by walking people through philosophy departments or english english departments because what we're dealing what we're dealing with is intellectual wreckage um and the people the these people who can't uh keep a a coherent thought in their heads um are rootless they're uprooted rootless children who've been abandoned by their teachers by their pastors by their parents and not they've not been protected they're they're like sheep without a shepherd we we had an incident at our our second church service last sunday where someone came to disrupt the service and the cops were called and and um you still have cops yeah yeah we do and these guys these cops were good guys uh the our our security team got the guy outside and then a couple of cops came and talked to him and then after the service was over i went out and talked to him for 20 minutes or half an hour and he was just a troubled badly educated jumble of thoughts and um and i think this is of of course at the end of the day you and i both know that god judges every individual and every individual will answer to god for his own sin at the same time we know that one sinner can work another center over and and really do some damage and and this is uh we are dealing with the fruits of a generation long experiment in ardent secularism in our school system this is this is what happens yep all right and and that you can't be a little bit pregnant you can't be just a little bit of a denier of god either it's going to it's going to be a gresham's law sort of thing bad um bad money drives out good um bad thinking drives out good thinking if you talk if you tolerate it it's going to swallow swallow up everything yeah well that's what we're seeing there's no question about it and i just i did not on on new year's day 2020. i did not see what 2020 was going to look like everybody everybody was sitting around going okay there's a national election it's going to get pretty weird sure it's going to be an interesting year et cetera et cetera but i had no way nobody had any way of of knowing that that the strange coalescence of things would reveal hearts quite as quickly as hearts indeed have been been revealed yeah had we known we wouldn't have come but it stayed in 2019 that was a pretty good year right now it's looking like the golden age right now no toys about it but nothing we could do about it here we are um and yet you know you were just talking about these these these people are jumble of emotions and again there seems we seem to have institutionalized infancy at the highest levels of our government and our educational institutions i mean when you can't when you have to find a safe space when you just encounter another way of thinking that is not no society can survive that right you that that cannot long endure right but but the question is uh what how do we in the most effective manner call people first our own people and then the people who claim to be our own people in other words churches that you know right now or are playing ftse with the social justice movement and everything else call call anyone who claims to have fidelity to christ and then call the whole culture as a whole to recognize that living as an emotional being without discipline right is self-destructive and the reason it's self-destructive is you were not made that way right you have a creator right how do you emphasize that in a way that catches the attention of the person who honestly thinks that they're emoting is deep thought there are two things in a generation dominated by emotions like you said but dominated by the feels right um if that's your reality that if you feel that way then it's true for you um this is the basically it's the coherence school of thought as opposed to the correspondence view of truth correspondence view of truth says if i say the door is closed that proposition is true if it corresponds to a door over there being actually in fact closed that's correspondence coherence means as long as it is as long as it's your story and you're able to make it cohere within its own frame of reference then it's then that's true for you well we have we have given ourselves over to that and the thing this is really telling this is part of the thing that illustrates to me why i think there are uh deeper forces at work in all of this in this moment when we are starting to circle the drain because we're given over to the fields the cry goes up in evangelical circles what we clearly need in this moment dominated by emotion and feelings is women pastors and you say now notice i i bet i i bet you ten dollars that there are people watching this who would say well i'm a complimentarian and i i believe that uh the the uh pastorate is limited to men because paul says you know and i agree but why'd you have to say that you know why did you have to associate women with feeling right um well because that's stereotyping that's generalizing that's illegal that's illegal isn't it right well it is it is or it's going to be in the new world you're trying to create right and and so the thing that that i found really helpful on this emotional thing the illustration i found helpful is emotions are like children um and some people have children and they're out of control other people have children and they're well disciplined and they obey when you tell them to come and they you know they're they're well disciplined well-loved children and the people with emotions out of control think that the people with well-disciplined children don't have children right uh if someone is self-controlled uh if they are self-governed if they are able to uh uh submit heart soul gut thoughts to christ and all of that submitted to christ then the person whose kids are running around like banshees turns to you and says well you you just don't have emotions well no i have look yeah no we all have emotions we're just supposed to be obedient to christ with them and the people who have emotions out of control the only time they uh enjoy their children is when the children are asleep right and people people you know they can go in and look at how cute they are and then right and then at 6 30 a.m the next morning the reign of terror begins again that's right and people who have children that are cared for washed clothed educated disciplined uh enjoy their children all the time right right right right i i don't think people understand that for example going back to that one comment you made to a questioner during the the debate at the university where she kept interrupting you and you you finally said uh you know i i do often have thoughts that take more than one sentence to express um there was that was actually an expression of your emotion yes you just controlled it and channeled it into the one of the most classic zings of all time but it was still there right it's not that you're an automaton uh you just disciplined it and controlled it and utilized it to make it to make a point all of us have those emotions but i i've i remember the day doug i remember exactly where i was i've told the story before on the dividing line where i was riding a bike in the front yard of my family's house at 301 st marks road in camp hill pennsylvania and um a friend a playmate insulted me and my first reaction was to get off my bike and do what a lot of six-year-olds do and that is run inside the house and tell my mommy to get him in trouble i stopped my bike and then all of a sudden the thought crossed my mind you know it's a long ways to go in there and tell her and who really cares and i i remember this to this day when allison i realized you know what i don't have to be controlled by others and i don't have to react that way this is sort of cool and that was when i reached an important level of maturity which it seems in our society is now considered to be a bad thing and not only a level of maturity but a level of liberation oh yes right oh yes um because as soon as you as and and this is you can tell when a church is starting to go liberal when they're starting to project what others might say if you say this then somebody might react somebody might be hurt or some what if somebody with an abusive background comes is is here this sunday and what if an alcoholic is there what what if what if what and they generate all these things um saying that i've got to be under the tyranny of every hypothetical situation i can think up and then if you what you've experienced there was liberation from an actual situation you didn't have to react with the feels you could just say oh right and carry on and do the right thing if you're if you're constantly monitoring what the rest of the world thinks you're you're seeding the you're giving the bullies the microphone right when when you if if you had run in to tell your mom then the bully the boy who taunted you would have gotten exactly what he wanted right right and if i stay off of certain topics in the pulpit because of who might walk in then the moderates and the squishes and and then the intoleristas on the far left have gotten they've gotten they've maneuvered me they've steered me into the place where they want me to be that would be a real problem if we didn't have as we talked about in our last dialogue an objective consistent revelation from god uh that when we when we open it when we handle it honestly when we handle it consistently when we especially reign in our fields and not project our feels into its words so that our feels become the word of god so in other words we really do meaningful exegesis and handle the word properly and and and proclaim the whole counsel of god we can with paul say i'm i'm innocent of the blood of any man right because i've i've i've delivered the whole council of god that let's just be honest a large number of well i would say a majority of denominations churches people who call themselves christians in the united states don't really believe that we have the word of god any longer they don't believe that it's a consistent revelation they don't believe that we have to proclaim that whole council because there really isn't a whole council to proclaim so i get why they can't go there but those of us who make that profession have a tremendous blessing and boon in being able to have a clear conscience and saying i've proclaimed the whole council of god and i did so without i did everything i could i literally prayed before god take me out of the way let this be your word your message and as a result um we can trust that that word will minister because we have a creator who made it to do that he knows us he knows we're made in his image he's provided us everything we need for life and godliness man that takes a lot of pressure off uh abs absolutely the his word will not return void this is his appointed instrument for doing what he wants to do in the world and and so one of the things that evangelicals have to shake loose of is the idea that a profession of in inerrancy is sufficient no we believe in an inerrant bible an infallible bible but we also believe in a sufficient bible and we believe in an in an authoritative bible so we've got to get from inspired infallible inerrant sufficient down to authoritative um so uh something my dad taught me i forget when but a long long time ago he he taught me that we are to have a priori no problem passages right so um once the exegesis is done i can have a i can have a problem with regard to a passage when i don't know what it means yet when i haven't done the work yet i might have a problem uh understanding why why is why does it say this here and that there but once the exegesis is done and i know what the word says my dad taught me at that point no problems no apologies no backing down if if this is the word of god then you stand with it you you don't apologize for it you don't waffle or noodle with it you don't uh skip over it when this is one of the reasons why expository preaching is so good is it keeps you from riding your own hobby horses right you know if you're going to preach through this book you're going to have to you can't just can't just skip over chapter 9 right why would you say chapter nine i have no idea yeah no but that also exposes our traditions that means we have to we have to examine our traditions and the light of scripture that's where semper reformanda comes from right it's it's so vitally important but let me let me ask you i'd be interested in in in your estimation here because i i give mine all the time but if you looked at uh let's just go with all of protestant christianity in the united states all the denominations churches and associated educational institutions right what percentage of those would you think actually believes in an inspired inerrant sufficient authoritative revelation that is consistent with itself in communicating to the church everything we need for life and godliness okay obviously this is a ballpark right i'm oh yeah i know i want it down to a tenth of a percent yeah um i would say uh 10 to 15 yeah okay okay you're actually a little bit more generous than i am but yeah okay and part of this is and i've seen this actually happen where there there are people who are compromised and going the wrong direction they're they're in the process of going over to the other side and they're going to collapse the first chance they get right they're going to surrender to the enemy because they were actually saboteurs on our side they were you know there there's there are people denominations and seminaries and magazines and they're in the process of going the wrong way then there are the people the the the true bluers the you know um puddle glum uh puddle glum presbyterian you know uh where they're they're rock solid and they're not compromising in there and and there's a small group there then there's a the reason i get to 10 15 is i've often times seen people who don't see the problems early on but when it gets to a certain order of magnitude the lights come on and they say oh the those faithful guys who tried to warn me so many times they were onto something right so um i i think that uh that we're probably talking about 10 to 15 institutions that will either be found to be standing faithfully or will revert to faithfulness when the pressure comes so imagine yourself um landing in the middle of a battle you know or some chaotic situation and you have to decide which direction you're going to run to get take refuge where are you going to run to the secularists or are you going to run to the the epistemologically self-conscious christians the the christians who believe that that our father in heaven is almighty and he made heaven and earth so uh we're getting toward the end of our time together um one of the things i had suggested when when the correspondence was going back and forth as to what topics would be looking at is one of the lines that i remember writing in the email something along the lines of it's um who do you want to live next door to um and one of the one of the thoughts was really how you and your neighbor view yourselves as to whether you are cosmic accidents or whether you are created by god seems to me to be fundamental to what a culture is going to be like and how it's how it's going to treat its citizens uh the levels of liberty and freedom that are going to be available uh all of these things yeah and so this issue of you know i i know i grew up uh battling the whole creation thing i was the only i was literally the only creationist in the biology department at my christian college when i was a i was a double major bible and biology a minor in greek and uh i was the only creationist in my christian college biology department right and so i've this has been an issue in the scientific realm for me for a very very long time i'm i'm good friends with jason lyle not sure if you know who jason lyle is but he's uh he's the smartest man i've ever met and uh i mean i i've had the joy of going out and uh uh stargazing with him and i was gonna be able to do that in august we had to call that off because of all the madness up in colorado but um that the man can can just sit there in the dark and point the stuff and go that's that and that's that and it's this far away and this is how many moons are around that thing over there it's just it's just astonishing uh but he's also a great presuppositionalist too he's just he's just a just a wonderful brother but so i the scientific aspect of it okay we've had conferences and and debates for decades it just seems to me though that there has been a fundamental thought chasm even between even amongst those who who will say oh no i i see that god god is the god created all things and this is really important there seems to be a thought chasm between that and what that means in theology and what that means therefore in morals ethics law and the whole christian worldview it's like there's just this this dropout yeah like it can it can stand over there by itself and it's a truth by itself but we don't seem to live in light of it we don't seem to make application of it is it be do you think it's just because of the of the influence of all the darwinism around us or is it just because we're never pushed to really be coherent in our theology well i would say that we're not pushed in a particular direction so that let's say you're talking about a christian yeah i believe in creation and i believe all this stuff but they don't they don't seem to understand why the house is on fire um and and this is this is why i think um christians basically a lot of christians take the things you the things you were just saying and which i would affirm as well the atheism and secularism and there is no god that has downstream ramifications and they take that and they say okay i'm willing to check that off i agree with that but they live next door to an atheist and when they go on vacation they wouldn't mind asking this atheist who seems like a nice guy to take their mail in and to watch their dog and you know things like that they they don't believe that as soon as their camper is around the corner that the atheist is going to run over and burn down their house because atheism right they they say that's just ridiculous i lived next to an atheist i know him he's a nice guy right but the problem is they're not getting an adequate sample size there are atheists who live in the middle of christian societies who are propped up by those christian societies who are their cultural and societal expectations that hold them in there's never been an atheistic society that wasn't a hell hole every every atheistic society where the governing authorities said there is no god above us and we're all just the end product you know just think north korea you you think of places like that so when when the uh the theology or the anti-theology works its way out to the corporate level what you get is totalitarianism absolutism chaos anarchy you get what you get is a total mess put another way what you get is what we're getting now all right we're starting to see the the formation of the chaos merchants the the chaos merchants want everything to be torn down and this is because there's a fundamental ancient pagan faith that believes that orders spring spontaneous spontaneously out of chaos and if if the civilization order that you despise is getting in your way what you do is you blow the whole thing up in the faith that something magnificent will replace it right because darwin because darwin that's right that's right well we have a um we have a sure word in in these words uh for by him we're all things made whether the heavens the earth visible or invisible the thrones or lordships or rulers or authorities all things were made through him and for him and i love the last verse 17 of colossians 1 he is before all things and him all things sunesteken soonest again they hold together they cohere they have they have their substance he is the ordering principle he is the one that holds all these things together and my hope and prayer is that as everything comes apart and flies apart that the spirit of god will utilize his his true followers his true followers of jesus to be a bright light and a and proclaimers of the message that if you want to find order you have to find it in the one who gives us order and the wonderful beautiful thing about the christian faith is he's not far from any one of us and in fact he has entered into his own creation and has provided perfect redemption in his own work and there is an empty tomb that proves all of this and that's a message that we need to be bold in our proclamation but man i'll tell you let's hope this shaking will shake a lot of the things that have been standing in the way of that message right out of the way so that we can see a a true fundamental change but one that is uh toward uh recognition of christ's kingdom and his lordship amen amen stand on your two feet and preach christ that's what we need to be doing well doug again uh i'm i just want you to know that uh despite um your uh temperature um irregularities and if i had a sweater on in this room i would be dead by now it's probably cooler in here than it is in your room so i'll give you that but come december it'll be it'll be a little bit different but uh but i appreciate once again the opportunity of uh talking with you i hope that uh these times that we share together are encouraging to others and especially at this time we really want to be encouraging many to stand in the gap because uh these are um extraordinary times they are extraordinary times they really truly are so thank you brother for uh for this time and i look forward to the next time god bless all right god bless

Channel: Canon Press

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Keywords: evolution, creationism, creation, human evolution, facts about evolution, evolution for kids, darwin, darwinism, theology, christian, christianity and evolution, bible, evolution debate, creationism debate, evolution vs creationsim, God, canon press, doug wilson, douglas wilson, james white, dr james white, james white evolution, doug wilson evolution, sweater vest, sweater vest dialogue, sweater vest dialogues, sweatervest dialogues

Id: gaAPO9eE4a0

Length: 56min 37sec (3397 seconds)

Published: Sat Jul 18 2020