Welcome to the Stone Choir Podcast.
I am Cory J.
Mahler. And
I'm still Woe.
On today's episode of Stone Choir, we're going to be discussing the
famous twentieth century theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer.
It's interesting when you call Dietrich von Hoffer famous because he wasn't
really famous as a theologian until the twenty first century.
That's something we'll get into a little bit, but it's just this
is one of the episodes that we're doing because yet again, he
is a sacred cow.
He's really, in fact, a golden calf of twentieth century global religion.
And And it is consistent with many of the themes that we've
hit in the past year.
A couple brief notes up front before we get into this particular
subject. One, this is a continuation of a number of previous episodes,
so if you happen to be listening to Stonequire for the very
first time with this particular episode, we would actually recommend that you
go back to a couple of earlier ones.
Um in particular, the Martin Luther King R Cheritech episode, part one
of two about MLK, is really part one of this episode as
well. Uh one of the points that we're going to be making
in this episode is that MLK and Bonhoeffer effectively had the same
spiritual fathers, they had the same teachers, the same readings, and they
had the same message.
The difference between them was really just about 50 IQ points.
So the things that MLK was too stupid not to say out
loud, Bon Offer was perfectly content to say them.
The difference is that Bonhoffer would say him in a subtle way
that so that if you already think he's a decent Christian guy,
you're gonna be able to baptize what it is he says without
too much trouble.
Another episode that this ties into is one of the early ones
on the clarity of scripture and some of the World War II
stuff. We're not really going to get into it beyond just a
couple superficial details, but the But the context of it is in
view of the three-part episode that we or three-part series that we
recently concluded on the Jews.
So we're going to assume that you have listened to those as
we're talking about this.
All our episodes stand alone, but this one in particular, one of
the things that's concerned Corey and myself as we've been looking to
tackle this subject is that because Bonhoeffer was really smart and he
was really subtle.
It's tough to make the case that he was evil, because you
can superficially read some of the things that he says out of
context and say, oh yeah, I can I can agree with that.
I can believe that.
In fact it's interesting there were a number of things that when
I was reading, particularly in some of his letters from prison from
nineteen forty three and forty four after he was under arrest for
treason. A number of the things that he said, the Bonhoeffer was
saying at the end of his life sounded sounded very much like
some of the things that Corey and I say on Stone Choir.
There's some of the things that are really a big part of
what we try to get across on this podcast series.
The reason that's so fascinating is that the men, the pastors, who
hate us the most
love Bon Offer.
So I just found it interesting I was reading some of those
quotes, like, why wouldn't they hear his voice in the things that
we're saying?
And the reason is we're coming from completely opposite directions as we
talk about those things.
So we'll get into a few of those in a bit, but
it's just I found it very interesting that we have completely different
spirits and yet in some cases have very similar specific words for
things, specific concerns about things.
We have very different solutions because we have very different origins for
the the concerns themselves.
So as we get into this, I want to
tie back into the historical context of the man.
As I said, he's considered to be a 20th century preeminent theologian
that almost nobody knew about in the 20th century.
I did a search on Google N grams as I often do
and we've mentioned a number of times in the past.
You can do a search for a word and see how frequently
it pops up in literature and in magazines and other things.
Bonhoeffer's name didn't appear really until the early sixties.
Basically, you can plot the curve of Vatican II and the plot
of Bonhoeffer, and in the 60s they take off on identical curves.
And I firmly believe that that was the birth of a new
world religion.
One of the striking things when you're reading about the history of
Bonhoeffer introspection by other theologians is how widely he's viewed as a
man for all denominations, a man that the liberals love and the
conservatives love.
And that's really weird because that's not really how Christian theology usually
works. Like when f when sound doctrine is paramount in the discussion
in the church, usually you have people that are on opposing sides
because some of them just don't believe the Bible.
And so the fact that the ultra-libs and people who think they're
conservative both see this man as their saint is very interesting.
And then the timing of Vatican II, I was just it made
me laugh, like, well yeah, of course that would happen.
And then it sort of died off the interest in Bonhoeffer until
this century.
It was until the beginning of the twenty first century that he
really became very popular.
And so just to begin, I'm going to give a couple brief
quotes. These are from Christian News, uh, which was a publication from
a Lutheran pastor
that it was around for decades.
Uh, he was a man who long went after some of these
subjects when the rest of the world was kind of ignoring them.
This is a description that I'm gonna read, and I'm gonna read
uh a brief description of an event that took place at our
one of our seminaries in two thousand six.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer was one of the authentic heroes of World War II,
a German Protestant theologian who spoke out furiously against Hitler and participated
in an assassination plot against him.
Bonhoeffer was hanged on Hitler's orders three weeks before the Nazi dictator
committed suicide on the eve of Germany's surrender in April 1945.
I think it's probably the bulk of what most people know about
the man.
He was a German pastor, he fought Hitler, he was hanged for
attempting to kill him.
And then he wrote some stuff.
Yeah, it's pretty much all people know.
The reason I wanted to begin there is that it's the new
World War II thing.
It's subtly he doesn't it's not mentioned here, but it's about the
Jews. The third episode that we did in the series on the
Jews is part of this.
So again, that's why I said that this episode is it it's
kind of a final quiz for a lot of what Stone Choir
has done previously.
I hope that we succeed today because as I said, this is
it's a hard case to make once you get into the really
subtle things he says.
So just consider this the framing.
This is the man who fought the Nazis and fought Hitler and
he was martyred for it.
In two thousand six there was a Bonhoeff conference at the Concordia
Saint Louis Seminary of the LCMS began july nineteenth through the twenty
first. Quote Dietrich Bonhoeffer may well be the most widely admired and
respected Christian theologian among Christian pastors and theologians in the USA.
The scope of his appeal is exceptionally broad, spanning across virtually all
Christian denominations and across perspectives ranging from the traditional to the liberal.
His centennial offers a unique opportunity for activities that highlight the many
remarkable aspects of his theology and life.
This conference features nationally and internationally recognized experts on Bonhoeffer.
These include Lutherans and members of other church bodies.
There will be emphasis on confessional Lutheran aspects of Bonhoeffer's thought, and
at the same time presentations from other Christian perspectives.
It's a unique opportunity for Lutherans to highlight perhaps the most important
Lutheran theologian since Martin Luther, and to converse about the contributions Bonhoeffer
can make to the life of the 21st century church.
Now that's remarkable 'cause I said, like, in the twentieth century he
wasn't really discussed.
He was he was a footnote.
He was one guy, didn't do anything that significant.
He was notable because he was one of the few people in
the church who committed treason against the German government and was executed
for it.
So the reason we're talking about him today, the reason that you've
ever heard the name is because of that, because he fought Hitler
and because everybody loves him, whether they're libs or conservatives.
In fact the reason I mentioned Vatican two, the reason I searched
for that, was that even Roman Catholics really loved Bonhoeffer in the
sixties. That's crazy.
if here's this Lutheran pastor, this Lutheran theologian from the liberal wing
in German theology, and Roman Catholics like, yeah, that's our guy.
Something's going on here.
And then when you have the most conservative Lutherans saying the same
thing Something really weird is happening.
This is not what normally happens in the church.
So we're going to begin looking at some of the things that
he wrote in the past to see who was this man.
If this is a great theologian, a great contributor to the Christian
tradition, let's see what he had to say about the Christian faith.
I
guess before we move into some of the quotes properly and going
over some of the things that he wrote, it really is almost
amazing, really, that they would call him the most important Lutheran theologian
since Martin Luther.
That's really a true slight to Chemnitz.
For those who don't know, Martin Chemnitz is often called the second
Martin, and one of the sayings about him I won't use the
Latin because there's no reason is essentially Luther the first Martin would
not have survived if not for Chemnitz II Martin, that's how important
he was as a theologian to the church.
And yet we're supposed to believe that Bonhoeffer is
more important than Chemnitz who basically saved the Reformation and is the
one who responded to the Council of Trent at length.
Even in living memory, I think men like Kurt Marquart, certainly in
terms of their their theological output far outstrips Bonhoeffer's contributions, whether his
theology was good or bad.
Like it's just uh one of the points that that I hope
we can get across today is that
We're being told that this man was so important, not because he
was important, but because he is a martyr in the new religion.
As I mentioned, the MLK Arch heretic episode is part one of
this as well, just as it was part one of MLK in
theology and then MLK in politics.
Same thing played out in Bonhoeffer's life a few decades prior.
His theology was the same as MLK's, his politics were the same
as MLK's in in a number of ways that are very important.
And so today, yeah, both of those men were killed at age
thirty-nine. They're both considered today to be martyrs.
They're absolutely martyrs in their religion.
And as I said at the beginning, that's the context through which
I think it's necessary to view all takes on Bonhoeffer, whether it's
favorable or unfavorable, the man is a martyr to his faith.
I highlight his faith because that's the problem here.
Is his faith the Christian faith?
As we're told.
That yeah, that you know that's what almost every pastor will say.
Yes, he's a you know he's a stalwart of the Christian faith.
He went back to Germany to fight Hitler, to kill Hitler, to
save the Jews.
Hero. And then he died for it.
Like that's basically Jesus 2.0 for a lot of these guys.
That's it's a blasphemous thing to say.
And I God forgive me for saying it, but that's really what's
going on here.
And the reason that this this this narrative only emerged in the
last few decades?
Is it the narrative of the 20th century only emerged in the
last few decades?
Well things that I didn't mention in the Holocaust episode, if you
do the same Ngram search on Google for Holocaust, it also emerges
in the 60s.
There was no Holocaust described in the 40s or the 50s.
Now, some of the things that are claimed to have happened then
were reported at that time, but the narrative of the so called
Holocaust emerged in the sixties, around the same time as Bonhoffer, around
the same time as Vatican II, and they've all been on a
trajectory upwards ever since then.
This is and it's not an artifact of you know the corpus
that Google searching.
It's actually a function of how often those subjects are coming up.
It's how often those subjects are in people's minds and in their
mouths. If it's what people are talking about, it's going to show
up more frequently.
So those graphs sometimes are extremely telling.
And Bonhoeffer in particular, even over against MLK is a vital martyr
to the Holocaust faith.
Full stop.
He is important in the world religion of the 21st century because
he died fighting Hitler.
So it's part of the reason that we did that three-part episode,
and particularly the last episode on the history of the Jews in
the 20th century.
If everything that you've been told is true about those events, then
yeah, you know, obviously regardless of some of Bonhoeffer's you know maybe
theological quibbles, the man was clearly a hero because he went and
fought the ontological evil of the Nazis.
If on the other hand, what we have been told about
twenties twentieth century German politics is not in fact true, and that
those stories that began to emerge in the story arc that appeared
in the nineteen sixties wasn't actually the case at the time, then
then you have to view the s the execution of men like
Bonhoeffer and their acts that led up to the execution in a
different light.
One of the tough things about tackling these subjects is that in
one of the reasons that we talk about timelines, which is tough
to do in a podcast because you can't see them, I will
cut we'll put a couple of those screenshots in the show notes
so you can visually look at them.
We're talking in current year about events in the past, but it's
crucial to consider them as they were occurring, to consider what they
knew at the time and then what's happened since then to bring
them to our attention.
Because Bonafer died eighty years ago, and a whole bunch of stuff
has sent happened since then.
And he wasn't very important, and then he became important.
We're here to tell you today that the reason he became important
was that the new world religion requires new martyrs to to uphold
the tenets of the new faith.
And that's what he accomplished.
And as we go through the material in this episode, and this
was already mentioned, but it is worth repeating this to emphasize it,
it is important to recognize a simple but vitally important
philosophical fact.
There is a difference between
the term used to reference a thing and the thing itself.
So, for instance, the thing that we in English call a dog
Is not called a dog in French or Latin or German.
They're different words in those languages.
The term refers to the thing, the thing is distinct from the
term. The same thing can occur in philosophy or theology, and that
is what we have throughout Bonhoeffer's writings.
He uses terms that sound Christian.
If you're a Lutheran in particular, there are some things you're going
to read it and go, I recognize all of these words.
This sounds vaguely Christian.
But you have to understand the way in which he is using
the terms, and you have to have
really a better overhead, a 30,000-foot view of what he is doing,
how he believes these things, what he thinks they mean.
And so he'll say, resurrection, and you'll think, okay, that's a that's
a Christian term.
Well he denies the resurrection.
He'll say crucifixion.
You'll say, okay, that's a Christian term.
Well he calls it a myth.
And that happens with all of these terms.
So you may hear a term from him that makes you think,
yes, that's a term a Christian would use, but it's not a
Christian term when he's using it.
Satan can use these terms too, and he does all the time.
Don't forget that when Satan confronted and attempted to tempt Christ, he
used Scripture.
He used God's own words.
It is possible to twist the things of God and make them
no longer reference what they are meant to reference, no longer reference
the actual Christian faith.
It is vitally important to bear that in mind as we go
through. We will, of course, highlight how he's using these terms, misusing
these terms, really.
But keep that in mind.
Just because you hear a word that you recognize as being related
to the Christian faith does not mean that it is being used
in this context in a Christian way.
And if you've taken our advice and have recently listened to or
re-listened to the to the MLKR character episode.
All that sounds incredibly familiar, because that's precisely what King did.
As I said, the difference between King's approach and Bonhoeffer's approach is
that King was stupid.
he wasn't intelligent, but his handlers made him understand that there were
things that he couldn't say in public.
So although the things that Bonhoeffer wrote about publicly as a theologian
are are exactly the same things that King was saying decades later
because they got them from the same teachers.
King was instructed don't say this in public, don't say the stuff
in the pulpit because you're not going to be able to get
away with it.
Bonhoeffer was able to wrap it up in enough Jesus dust that
he was able to get away with it because he was a
much smarter, much slipperier man.
But the basics of what they believed were identical.
As Corey said, like write down the list of things in the
in the creeds that every Christian confesses are the things that Bonhoeffer
denies. And the reason that's important when you're talking about someone who's
presenting Christian theology is that it's one thing for someone to have
a bad take on a per particular subject.
It's another thing entirely if all of their takes, whether they're good
or bad, are built on a foundation of overt denial of the
tenets of the faith.
And that's what we have with Bonhoff.
We have a man who overtly denied the foundations of the Christian
faith. And then he said stuff after that that sounded sorta Christian.
That is the nightmare scenario for someone who's not smart enough to
see through it.
So just as a first example, this um a few of the
quotes we're gonna do earlier on are from a book called Christ
the Center.
This is described as Bonhoeff's kind of Christological Magnum opus.
The important thing to note with this is that he didn't write
this himself.
Christ the Center is effectively table talks from his teaching in around
1933. So the authors of that book compiled all the notes from
as many of the students as they could get a hold of
and resynthesized his talks and presentations on thing.
Now in the beginning of the book, and obviously is something that
we as Lutherans will point to clearly, Tishrain or Table Talks are
notoriously unreliable sources of information because you know it's it's it's hearsay.
Someone said something and then someone else wrote it down and then
they're giving it to another person saying, yeah, he said this.
It's potentially reliable or unreliable, you can't necessarily weigh it.
The reason that I give full credence to the spirit of the
words that are presented here, and you may disregard them, I'm disclosing
this up front, that we're dealing with something that he did not
expressly pen by his own hand.
The reason I believe it fully is that
Bonhoeffer was a disciple of Carl Barth.
B-A-R-T-H. I I call him Barth.
Like John Candy's character from Space Balls, because he d he makes
me puke.
So much evil is downstream from Barf that I'm just gonna call
him that.
If you think that's child, just deal with it.
Corey's gonna call him Bart 'cause he's good at at other languages.
I don't care.
The dude's name is Barf.
Bonhoeffer was an acolyte and a disciple of Barf.
he literally learned at his feet.
They studied he studied from him.
He discussed with him.
The things that he's aro about to say here in Christ the
Center in these Table Talks are exactly the same the things that
Barth was saying.
And incidentally, they're the very same things that MLK picked up a
couple decades later.
So this is a perfect description of the beliefs of that day
coming from this part of the so called Christian theological discourse.
No, to us, you know, this is what MLK called this was
the liberal tradition.
What it is is a full-on assault on Christianity.
So just to disclose, he did not write these by his own
hand, these are accounts secondhand by witnesses.
They're entirely consistent with his teacher, and they're consistent with these things
he said later on.
So I'm gonna read this just know that it's not necessarily exactly
verbatim what he said, but personally I have no reason to doubt
that this is not faithful, because it's entirely consistent with the man,
with his teacher, with his time, and with his beliefs for the
rest of his life.
So Christ in the center writes, Strictly speaking, we should not talk
of the Incarnation, but of the Incarnate One.
The former interest arises out of the question how.
The question how, for example, underlies the hypothesis of the virgin birth.
Both historically and dogmatically it can be questioned.
The bit of biblical witness is ambiguous.
If the biblical witness gave clear evidence of the fact, then the
dogmatic obscurity might not have been so important.
The doctrine of the virgin birth is meant to express the incarnation
of God, not only the fact of the incarnate one.
But does it not fail at the decisive point of the incarnation,
namely that in it Jesus has not become man just like us.
The question remains open as and because it is already open in
the Bible.
So
this is consistent with m what MLK said the Virgin birth is
a myth.
He he'll go on in some of these later quotes to talk
expressly about myths.
That was something that he got from Baldman, another one of King's
inspirations and teachers.
Baldman was very big on mythologizing scripture.
You know, in the episode we did early on that I mentioned
previously about the clarity of scripture, is it true or is it
factual? Is it real?
Is it you know people play these word games in order to
tie you in knots.
So that you don't will is it the incarnate Jesus or is
it the incarnation?
Like what does that even mean?
What he does when he he says these things is a he's
flatly denying the virgin birth.
He's saying it's not in the Bible, which is a lie.
It is a demonstrable lie that the virgin birth is not in
the Bible, but this is what they were doing already.
They were just tearing down scripture.
And then on top of it, they say, Oh, but it doesn't
even matter if it's real, because we have the incarnate one.
Well, if you deny the virgin birth and yin you have something
left over that you call the incarnate one, that's not the Messiah.
that's what we're dealing with through all these quotes.
They will take something, they will strip away the actual truthfulness of
what's in scripture, and then leave something that as Corey said, still
they're using some of the same names that we Christians use for
things, but they use them for other purposes.
And so that's why I said this is tricky and it's dangerously
deceptive how these men speak, because if you're not paying paying incredibly
close critical attention, he'll just gloss right over and say, that's fine.
Jesus the incarnate one, Jesus was the incarnation.
Yeah, that's I I believe that.
That's in the creed somewhere.
It's only when you're critically looking at this stuff, just assuming that
it's false and then trying to prove yourself wrong, that you realize
you can't prove yourself wrong.
It's false.
He's denying, he's denying scripture.
He's denying the virgin birth.
And that itself, all by itself, isn't denial of Christianity, full stop.
So if if this quote were true and it was the only
thing, that'd be the end of the story.
The man is not Christian.
Part of the reason we're beginning here is that this is one
of the more crystal clear examples of Barth's theology coming through in
his mouth and then him continuing it on ultimately to treason and
attempted murder.
That's the trajectory of a man who incidentally at the end of
his life, as we'll get to it, he stopped reading the Bible.
He was he was effectively apostate and he more or less acknowledged
it. But it began here with these denials of the creed.
You never you never go immediately from getting one fact of the
Christian faith wrong to apostasy, there's always a trajectory.
So today we're gonna make the case for him having gone through
that trajectory, regardless of where he began, because as we see here,
he's beginning with denial of the faith.
For
the record, I do think that calling him barf is fair.
Particularly considering there's there's a sort of contagion to vomiting for certain
people where one person will vomit and another one will.
That's kind of how it works with that theology.
There's another linguistic point to make here, and I know it seems
like we're going to make some hypertechnical points in this episode, but
it's important.
The word myth is not univocal.
The word myth does not have one meaning.
The word myth can be used in a good or a bad
way with regard to theology.
You can call Christianity a mythos
and still be an actual Christian.
Now, most theologians, most philosophers who are sound Christians will not do
that. That is a specific, specialized technical sense of the term, myth
or mythos, whichever one you want to use, those are interchangeable.
That is not what Bonhoeffer is doing.
Because he in other places in his writing explicitly contrasts myth and
history. He does not identify them, he does not consider them as
overlapping, he considers them distinct things, and he considers myth to be
unreliable, to be untrue, to be made up.
One of the examples he uses is the partly former, partly still,
Japanese belief that the Tenno, otherwise known as the Emperor of Japan,
was descended directly from a goddess.
He uses that as an example of myth and contrasts that sort
of Eastern belief in the descent of their kings, their emperors from
gods, as myth from Western history.
So when he says myth, he means it didn't happen.
So the word myth in his mouth, coming from his pen, is
calling whatever is a myth untrue, saying it is not historical fact,
it is not empirical, and elsewhere in his writing he constantly make
claims about Christianity not being empirical truth.
And this is again from Bart, in large part, because he makes
a distinction between the empirical and the religious, and says that the
religious doesn't necessarily correspond to the empirical, and calls the Old Testament
a series of religious truths, of religious claims, and in so claiming
he says that they are not empirical.
And this is one of the ways that we wind up with
a rejection of apologetics from men like Bart and Bernhofer and others,
because
they don't believe that religious truth corresponds to empirical truth, and apologetics
relies on that.
But we also see here, just at the outset, the first real
chunk of his writing with which we're dealing, not even a very
big one, his rejection of dogma and doctrine.
And this is throughout his writing.
He basically says that Christianity is not a series of dogmas or
doctrinal claims, which it is.
Let's be clear here.
Christianity makes truth claims.
Christianity is a series of truth claims.
If those claims are false, Christianity is false.
He's saying that doesn't matter.
Doctrine doesn't matter, dogma doesn't matter.
I have a a quote here.
Before we started recording, we're discussing potentially using a generated
voice to read some of this, because to some degree, I don't
even want these things in my own voice.
And I'm sure Wo feels the same way because of the evil
of some of the things we're going to read in this episode.
But I guess in an age of AI it hardly matters.
Matters there's enough of my voice out there that someone could synthesize
it if he were so inclined.
But on the topic of dogma or doctrine, this is a quote
from
this one is from an outline for a book that he sent
in one of his letters.
Jesus's being for others is the experience of transcendence.
Only through this liberation from self, through this being for others unto
death, do omnipotence, omniscience, and omnipresence come into being.
Faith is participating in this being of Jesus, becoming human, cross resurrection.
Our relationship to God is no religious relationship to some highest, most
powerful, and best being imaginable.
That is no genuine transcendence.
Instead our relationship to God is a new life in being there
for others, through participation in the being of Jesus.
The transcendent is not the infinite, unattainable task, but the neighbor within
reach in any given situation
What do we really believe?
I mean believe in such a way that our lives depend on
it. The problem of the Apostles' Creed, written as a question What
must I believe?
Wrong question, outdated controversies, especially the interconfessional ones, the differences between Lutheran
and Reformed, and to some extent Roman Catholic, are no longer real.
Of course they can be revived with passion at any time, but
they are no longer convincing.
There is no proof for this.
One must simply be bold enough to start from this.
The only thing we can prove is that the Christian biblical faith
does not live or depend on such differences.
Conclusions The Church is church only when it is there for others.
As a first step, it must give away all its property to
those in need.
There is such a collection of problems with this, and I didn't
even read the whole passage because it's a couple full pages.
It's difficult even to go through or summarize them in a quick
fashion, but note how he starts off it's almost Buddhist Liberation from
self. That's not what Christianity is.
God created you to be the person you are.
Yes, you are currently in a fallen state, and as a Christian,
you will be perfected in the resurrection, but that is becoming more
yourself. It is not becoming less yourself.
God did not make you wrong.
You are what God wants you to be.
Again, yes, fallen state, imperfect currently.
Christianity is not a giving up of self.
It is not in the Buddhist Eastern sense a denial of self.
It is a denial of self in the sense of take up
your cross and follow me.
But that's not what he's speaking about here.
This is liberation from self.
This is Eastern philosophy being imported into Christianity, and we see this
constantly in men from this era who are of the liberal school
because there was an infatuation with Eastern philosophy, and he was very
familiar with philosophy.
We see that throughout his writing, mostly continental, but also Eastern.
But the next part I actually find more interesting, when he says
that it's only through this being for others that omnipotence, omniscience, and
omnipresence come into being.
This is a blunt denial of the nature of God, which is
if as we have highlighted in previous episodes, a denial of the
nature of God, a denial of the attributes of God, is a
denial of God, because God is his nature, his attributes are his
nature, these are interchangeable.
We speak of them as if they were parts because we're human
and it's one of our limitations limitations.
He's denying God here.
He is simply outright rejecting the reality of God.
A Christian cannot write this, at least not and remain Christian.
Which isn't surprising because as was mentioned, his trajectory was downward, was
hellward at the end of his life.
He stopped reading scripture, he stopped believing in some of the bits
of Christianity in which he believed
at some point in the past, he became more and more apostate
as he went on.
And you see that where he calls the apostles' creed a problem.
Literally words it is a question mark, the problem of the apostles
Creed. Christians don't view the creeds as a problem.
Christians view the Creeds as a summary statement of our faith.
And as someone who claimed to be Lutheran, he was bound to
believe that every word of the creeds is true.
It's part of our confession, not that the confession of course meant
anything to this man.
And then it's in that same paragraph where we see this denial,
outright, blunt denial, of the importance of dogma and doctrine, of the
importance of truth.
Because that is what is actually at stake when you deny that
doctrine is important.
If you say that the differences between the Lutherans and the Reformed
don't matter, or between the Reformed and
the Romanists, or the East, and Lutherans.
Whatever groups you happen to pick, if you say that those differences
don't matter, you're saying truth doesn't matter.
Because there are only three options.
If Lutherine's claim A, the reformed claim B
then
if A is right, B is wrong.
If B is right, A is wrong, and of course the third
option is both are wrong and there's a third option C.
But you cannot have these differences not matter because these are about
eternal things.
This is about truth, and the truth matters because the truth is
one of the attributes of God, it is part of his nature.
But of course, elsewhere, in many places, Bonhoeffer denies that truth matters.
The truth is even a transcendent thing, and he full well knew
what he was saying, because he was familiar with the philosophy that
deals with the transcendentals.
He repeatedly, in his writing, denies God.
That is not something that a Christian can do.
It is not something that a man who claims to be Christian
can do and remain Christian.
This was one of those passages that I found interesting because
small pieces of it echo, as I said, things that you and
I say on Stone Choir.
And I think this is where the origins of those beliefs come
from diametrically opposed places.
When MLK and Bonhoeffer are saying forget forget this doctrinal stuff, we
just need to focus on neighbor and focus on you know the
the liberation theology version of best life now.
Basically it's it's basically a manifestation of Tikanolam, which we talked about
I think in the second episode of the three part on Jews.
When Cory and I specifically talk about care for neighbor, love of
ma neighbor, love of family, respect and love and preservation of nation,
that is race, it is not
self-referential. It's obedience to God.
It is looking up and looking at scripture.
It's looking to see what God has revealed to us, what He's
telling us to do as our creator, and then following through, because
we acknowledge that we are creatures.
The distinction between the approach that we take, which is a Christian
approach of living a Christian life in view of heaven, of God's
promises and of God's commands, versus the Barf and MLK and Bonhoeffer
view is that they basically say God is going to be whatever
we feel He is.
We know we have this feeling that God is this good stuff.
Let's make the good stuff happen now.
And so is we're going to get to in in some of
the quotes here in a little bit, he eventually gets to the
point that he's like
We don't need God anymore in theology in order to have Christianity.
And we don't need to call it Christianity anymore because Christ is
gone, but we still have all the stuff that God wanted for
us. That's the exact opposite of what Corey and I believe.
That's exact opposite of what Christianity teaches.
Like it's not that's not stone Choir theology versus Bonhoeffer theology.
It's literally Christianity versus the satanic destruction of things that were good
for the sake of creating a world where nothing good can ever
again exist.
So it it struck me that again, this is one of those
things that it sounds a bit like us if you're not paying
attention to the sources, but it's it's very clear that we're on
exactly opposite sides of these questions.
There's another quote here that's also from Christ in the center from
nineteen thirty three, where he flat out denies that Jesus was perfect.
He says here it is necessary to understand what the likeness of
flesh can mean?
What is meant in the real image of human flesh?
His flesh is our flesh.
It is of the very nature of our flesh that we are
tempted to sin and self will.
Christ has taken upon himself all that flesh is heir to, but
to what extent does he differ from us?
First not at all.
He is man as we are, he is tempted in all points,
like we are, yet much more dangerously than we are.
Also in his flesh was the law which is contrary to God's
will. He was not the perfect good.
At all times he stood in conflict.
He did things which at least from outside looked like sin.
He became angry, he was harsh to his mother, he escaped from
his enemies, he broke the law of his people, he stirred up
revolt against the rulers and religious men of his country.
He must have appeared a sinner in the eyes of men.
Beyond recognition, he stepped into man's sinful way of existence.
Simply stating the sinlessness of Jesus fails if it is based upon
the observable acts of Jesus.
His acts take place in the likeness of flesh.
They are not sinless but ambiguous.
One can and should see both good and failure in them.
When a person wishes to be incognito, one wrongs him by saying
I have both seen you and seen through you, Kierkegaard.
We should not therefore deduce the sinlessness of Jesus out of his
deeds. The assertion of the sinlessness of Jesus in his deeds is
not an evident moral judgment, but an assertion of faith that it
is he who performs these ambiguous actions, he it is who is
eternally without sin.
Faith confesses that the one who is tempted is the victor, the
one who struggles is perfected, the one unrighteous one is righteous, the
one who is rejected is the holy one.
Even the sinlessness of Jesus is a co incognito.
Blessed is he who is not offended in me, for Matthew eleven
six. So this is a tremendously dangerous quote because
he's accusing Jesus of personal sin, which is something that we find
in modern scholars today, saying that Jesus actually sinned, but then just
sort of brushing it away and saying, well, because he was God,
you know, wasn't really sin and we can't understand.
he gives a list of Jesus' sins in his life and says,
well, yeah, I'm sure he had to do that because he became
sin for us, which is a quote from scripture.
The problem is that again, this goes back to one of the
rank heresies we find even among Lutheran theologians today, which is that
when Jesus was tempted to sin, that was an internal temptation, that
he really wanted to sin, but because he didn't actually do it,
he didn't sin.
That's blasphemy.
When Jesus was tempted, it was external.
We've talked about this before.
When I want to do something bad that is a part of
my nature, the temptation is internal, because my evil self, the the
unregenerate self, desires to do that which con' is contrary to my
regenerate nature.
I see something, I want to do it, I'm tempted to do
it. My regenerate nature gives me the power to resist that temptation
and not to follow through with the sin.
But the point to be made is that the desire to sin
is itself sin.
That is internal temptation.
There are also external temptations.
There are some things where you know a fleeting thought pops into
my head and I'm like, where did that come from?
Yeah, tempting me to do something.
And it's the exact opposite of anything that's it in my interest.
Yeah, we we all have these fleeting thoughts where something just pops
in your head and you're like, why would I think that?
that's horrible.
That is external temptation.
That is the devil messing with us.
It doesn't happen constantly.
It shouldn't.
If it is happening to you constantly, you need to pray for
help and for protection from the Lord and for forgiveness from a
life that is putting you in a position where there are constant
external temptations, but the internal temptation is according to our sinful nature.
The external temptation, as Jesus faced with Satan in the wilderness, where
he's saying, Eat, jump, worship.
Those were external temptations.
Jesus was tempted because Satan tempted him.
Jesus was not tempted to do what Satan wanted, there wasn't there
was never any possibility that Jesus was going to bow down before
Satan. It wasn't like he considered it for a fleeting moment and
then decided better of it.
That would be the sort of internal temptation that you or I
might face.
Even with resolute faith, if Satan appeared to one of us and
said, I'll give you the whole world, all you have to do
is bow down before me, we would have to consider it.
No matter how fleetingly, there would still be a consideration in our
minds because that would be not only Satan tempting us, but us
being tempted by it internally.
Like that sounds like a pretty good deal.
I would like the whole world.
That's something that a pa appeals to
to our vanity, appeals to our covetousness.
Satan could not do that to Jesus because Jesus did not have
personal sin.
He did not have original sin.
When he took our sins on on the cross, it was something
external that he took into himself.
It's not the same as him struggling with sin, which is exactly
what Bonhoeffer is accusing him of here.
This is blasphemy.
This is denying that God is God.
This is saying that Jesus could sin, that Jesus did sin.
If Bonhoeffer's Jesus sinned, then Bonhoeffer's Jesus isn't God.
In
Lutheran theology and probably also in some others, this is the distinction
between the old Adam, which is inherited sin, original sin, you can
use either term, and the new man in Christ
Now just so we have
something read in this episode that is actually sound and good instead
of what we'll be reading for most of the episode, I'd like
to read
just the end of Romans seven, which highlights exactly this point.
This is the point we're making.
For we know that the law is spiritual, but I am of
the flesh, sold under sin, for I do not understand my own
actions, for I do not do what I want, but I do
the very thing I hate.
Now if I do what I do not want, I agree with
the law that it is good, so now it is no longer
I who do it, but sin that dwells within me, for I
know that nothing good dwells in me, that is in my flesh,
for I have the desire to do what is right, but not
the ability to carry it out, for I do not do the
good I want, but the evil I do not want is what
I keep on doing.
Now if I do what I do not want, it is no
longer I who do it, but sin that dwells within me.
So I find it to be a law that when I want
to do right, evil lies close at hand.
For I delight in the law of God in my inner being,
but I see in my members another law waging war against the
law of my mind, and making me captive to the law of
sin that dwells in my members.
Wretched man that I am, who will deliver me from this body
of death?
Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord.
So then I myself serve the law of God with my mind,
but with my flesh I serve the law of sin.
This is summarized in Reformation theology as the symbol.
We are simultaneously saint and sinner, sanctified and sinful.
Because as long as we live in this world, we will continue
to be beset by original sin, which leads to those internal temptations,
not just external.
Christ again, had only the external temptation, only Satan standing there tempting
him. No internal temptation, that is something we have because we are
fallen. And so that is why Paul here speaking, yes, regenerate Paul
speaking, says that he continues to struggle with original sin because he
was still a fallen human being living in this world.
That's not something that you eventually reach a point in this life
where original sin just disappears, you no longer have it.
Yes, through the process of sanctification, some of these temptations will be
put to death, which is good, daily dying, as it were, and
coming alive again in your baptism as a Christian.
But it will not all disappear in this life.
That is, for the next life, that is something that happens in
the resurrection.
The last quotation I want to read from those table talks is
a rejection of the resurrection.
Bonhoffer says Between humiliation and exaltation lies oppressively the
stark historical fact of the empty tomb.
What is the meaning of the news of the empty tomb before
the news of the resurrection?
Is it the deciding fact of Christology?
Was it really empty?
Is it the visible evidence penetrating the incognito of the sonship of
Jesus open to everyone, and therefore making faith superfluous.
If it was not empty, it is then Christ not risen and
our faith futile.
If it was not empty, is then Christ not risen and our
faith futile.
It looks as though our faith in the resurrection were bound up
with the news of the empty tomb.
Is our faith then ultimately only faith in the empty tomb?
This is and remains a final stumbling block, which the believer in
Christ must learn to live with in one way or another.
Empty or not empty, it remains a stumbling block.
We cannot be sure of its historicity.
The Bible itself shows this stumbling block when it makes clear how
hard it was to prove that the disciples had not stolen the
body. Even here we cannot ex escape the realm of ambiguity.
We cannot find a way around it.
Even in the testimony of Scripture, Jesus enters in a form which
is a stumbling block.
Even as the risen one he does not lift his incognito, he
will lift it only when he returns in glory.
Then the incarnate one will no longer be the humiliated one.
Then the decision over faith or unbelief is already taken.
Then the humanity of God is really, and now only the glorifying
of God.
So again, you know, he's playing these word games that we've warned
against, this big brained garbage where these guys will come along and
they'll just vomit word salad at you and you're not sure what
happened, but your faith is undermined as a result result of it.
That's the the uncertainty and the ambiguity, which is a word he
directly used.
He says it's ambiguous.
Did Jesus rise from the grave?
There's no we can't be sure if it's historicity.
Another direct denial of the creeds, another direct denial of scripture.
I don't know if Jesus rose from the dead.
Who knows where his body wound?
That's not the important part.
And this is why Bonhoeffer is able to talk about these things
when King had to avoid them.
Because King wasn't smart enough to say, well, it doesn't really matter.
The virgin birth doesn't really matter.
The resurrection of the dead doesn't really matter.
He denied them in his papers because that's what he had gotten
from Barf and Baltman and these other demons.
But he didn't know how to provide the end then.
So when he went to his audience and in preaching, so called,
he just left this stuff out because he didn't have the chops.
Bonhoeffer is dangerous because he basically says, Did Jesus rise from the
grid? I don't know.
It doesn't matter.
He's coming back on the last day anyway, so you why worry
about the historicity of this Bible stuff?
that's the whole shooting match.
if you can get someone to deny the creed and say, oh,
but it doesn't matter.
Jesus is coming back anyway.
That last part is true.
Jesus is coming back anyway.
And when he returns to judge the quick and the dead, he
will find you guilty of all of your sins because you've rejected
the God who sacrificed on the cross to forgive them in the
first place.
The reconciliation provided on the cross to all men is not given
to those then who deny it.
The price was paid, but if you say, I don't want that
credit, I'm gonna do it myself.
When Jesus come back, he's like, Okay, here's the bill.
And you're gonna spend eternity paying it in hell.
So this this tricky stuff where it it sounds kind of confusing,
like we said, he's a smart guy.
He's writing this stuff in a manner and the speaking in a
manner that will confuse most people.
As Corey was saying earlier, as we've warned, when it's it's a
reason that I've that we've been using the phrase all along, Jesus
dust and Jesus butter.
These guys will slather on the things that sound Christian to you
and then say, Oh, but we can't be sure of the historicity
of the resurrection.
Because you swallowed their bait and went down the path with them
that they're actually talking about the one true God.
By the time they get to the point to say, I don't
know if the tomb was empty or not, I don't know where
the body went, but don't worry, it doesn't matter.
Your brain is just gonna skip over the the tomb wasn't empty,
or they stole the body and hid it.
And just say, Well, he's talking about Jesus, and he says Jesus
is coming back on the last day.
So the rest must be Christian, and I'm just not going to
worry too much about it because I'm not really sure what the
guy said.
That is a trap for your soul.
And that's why these guys are so deadly.
And that's why some of the worst men in religion today love
Bonhoffer. Because he provides an excuse for them to deny anything they
want. It's not that he's it's not that Bonhoeffer's theology is providing
a script for a separate religion.
He's acting as a solvent against the very foundations of the Christian
faith, and then leaving this goo behind that can be reshaped by
whoever comes along to form whatever new religion they want.
And the thing that they're going to have in common is it's
going to be loving and it's going to be neighborly, and there
will only be nice noises, and there will only be clean words,
and no one will ever be unhappy because they've achieved perfection in
this life, because that's what God would have wanted.
that's what always happens with all these guys.
And whenever they talk about Jesus, incidentally, it no longer can be
the Jesus of the creeds and confessions, because that Jesus has very
particular facts in history God was born a man, God died a
man, God was resurrected a man, God ascended into heaven a man.
All of those are true.
And if you doubt or deny any of them, you no longer
have the true God.
And anything else you do from that point on is meaningless noise.
So these quotes are tricky and they're subtle.
It's worth going back and listening to 'em or not.
I mean, you know, I Corey and I've spent a couple weeks
now reading through this crap and it's vile.
And it's partly vile because
you have to have your guard up to such an extensive degree
to see the trick that's being played.
And it's not that we're being unfair.
It's then when we look at the rest of the things that
men like this guy say in the context of these confessions, denying
the virgin birth, denying that Jesus was sinless, and therefore God, denying
that he was bodily resurrected.
When you strip away all those things, you're left with a false
religion, but it still looks and sounds in some places like the
one that we claim to hold.
And that's where the destruction of our faith is is coming into
play.
I
have to say Jesus butter really sounds like something I should be
able to go into a restaurant here in the south and order.
And I'm a little disappointed.
I'm a little disappointed that I have never seen it on a
menu, but at the same time I feel I could be a
little sacrilegious, so maybe we shouldn't do that.
But Bonhoeffer in that quote that you read really admits perhaps a
little more than he intends, or perhaps he was intentionally letting the
mask slip for the attentive reader.
Because when you hear what he said there you should think of
several verses in Scripture, one of which is a verse from first
Corinthians, for Jews demand signs and Greeks seek wisdom, but we preach
Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews, and folly to Greeks, but
to those who are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power
of God and the wisdom of God.
If he is saying that Christ, as he appears in Scripture,
is a stumbling block for him, which is what he's saying.
He's saying that Christ is a stumbling block for the kind of
quote Christian unquote that he is Well he's saying he's not a
Christian. Because Scripture speaks of Christ being a stumbling block for the
unbeliever. Christ is not a stumbling block for the believer.
Christ is your Lord and Savior.
He's not a stumbling block.
He doesn't cause you to trip and fall.
That is how He is described for those who refuse to believe,
and that's why he is a stumbling block to the Jews.
So he's admitting here again, as he does frequently, he is not
a Christian.
He is something else entirely.
We'll close this particular section of this episode with a short quote
from him which almost doesn't need explanation because it's so egregious, but
here it is in its entirety.
The New Testament contains no ethical precept which we may or even
can adopt literally.
This appears many times in his writing in his writings in various
forms, where he outright denies that there are actual principles or ethical
rules in Scripture, and in other places he says that God is
arbitrary Because he says that the ethical principles that we see in
Scripture aren't universal, aren't eternal, they are simply tools in God's hands,
his words, that he will use and then abandon when he is
done with them.
Which again is a denial of the nature of God.
It's saying that God is changing, that God is mutable, it's saying
that God isn't truth.
You cannot be a Christian and say these sorts of things Of
things. And Scripture is, for the record, full of ethical precepts that
you can in fact adopt literally.
Scripture is very clear about what they are, and that they are
eternal. We've gone over this before the different kinds of law in
Scripture. There's the moral law, which is binding for all men at
all places, all times.
There is the civil law, which was binding on Old Testament Israel
and is at least persuasive for us today, because it is God
saying, This is permissible to do in reaction to this other thing.
And so that is the scope of what is permissible given by
God in the civil law.
And then there's the ceremonial law, which does not apply to modern
Christians. That was for Old Testament Israel to set them apart from
their apart from their neighbors, and so yes you're allowed to eat
shellfish or wear clothing with multiple kinds of cloth, etcetera.
Those things those gotchas that internet atheists so love are complete nonsense
if you actually understand the nature of what is uppercase law, uppercase
L law, or lowercase L law in the Old Testament.
So go ahead and wrap your shrimp in bacon, go wild, have
fun.
Just don't wear polyester underwear because that kills your T levels.
That's actually the one we should keep.
We should uh just have a a sort of a modern version
for Christians of the multiple types of cloth one.
It's don't wear synthetics because they're horrible for you.
At least don't wear them around sensitive parts of the body that
absorb them.
Yeah, no no seed oils.
we need a new set of Levitical laws.
So the next set of quotes that we want to get into
most of them are going to come from Bonofer's letters from prison.
He had been imprisoned at this point as part of a plot
to murder the Chancellor of Germany.
We should
note though before we mention that he at this point well it
depends on which point in the letters because initially he was in
prison because
he was well he wasn't really suspected it was known that he
was engaging in corruption with regard to his military office, which that
is worth noting.
He was working in the military intelligence of National Socialist Germany.
He got into that by another gentleman, I don't think I'll bother
with his name because he's not really relevant to this episode.
N also not a good man, but he was part of the
resistance movement, and he got Bonhoeff to be involved in that, and
so he wound up basically running messages, helping with communication, including across
enemy lines to the Allies, later on, and
so he was using his government office to directly oppose the government.
Perhaps not quite rising to the level of treason until he started
communicating with belligerents, of course, then it was treason, and then he
compounded it by becoming involved in an assassination plot.
So initially he was only held in basically a standard prison in
Tegel in Berlin.
I believe yes, in Berlin.
I've actually seen the one of the locations, but he was then
later on moved to one of the concentration camps when it became
clear that he was involved in the assassination plot.
And so many of the letters we see initially, because he was
just allowed to write freely Write freely while he was in the
normal prison.
He could receive visitors, his fiance came and met with him, his
parents came and met with him, he received packages, he was given,
obviously, plenty of ink and paper, and so you have to bear
in mind just a little bit of the timeline and that background
information that he was actually involved in the military intelligence at the
time. And so he was effectively acting as a spy and became
a traitor.
And
that's why the intro that we did relating this episode to the
prior episodes in the history of World War Two.
If you believe the current historic narrative, then sure.
I mean, every Christian obviously would betray Germany because betraying Germany was
service to God.
That that's literally what we're told today.
The only good Germans were the ones who betrayed the government because
the government was evil.
So that's the dividing line.
That's the that's the moral line that exists and it's a lens
through which everything that we read about in these periods must be
read, must be viewed.
You cannot understand anything without looking
in one direction or the other through that lens.
Either the German government in 1943 was evil or it was rightful.
And if it was evil, then there's one set of rules.
And if it was the rightful government, then there's another set of
rules. So we're not going to revisit what we said a few
weeks ago about the Holocaust, but the reason that he is held
up as a hero today is because we are told to believe
that the Germans were evil.
So you you gotta you gotta pick one of those before you
can have an opinion about a man being locked up in prison
for spying on his government.
Here's one of the things that he had to say while he
was sitting there in prison.
Bonhoffer writes, What keeps gnawing at me is the question what is
Christianity or who is Christ actually for us today?
The age when we could tell people with the words, whether the
theological or with pious words, is past, as is the age of
inwardness and of conscience, and that means the age of religion altogether.
We are approaching a completely religionless age.
People as they are now simply cannot be religious anymore.
Even those who honestly describe themselves as religious aren't really practicing at
all. They're presumably means something quite different by quote unquote religious, but
our entire nineteen hundred years of Christian preaching and theology are built
on the religious a priority in human beings.
Christianity has always been a form, perhaps the per
sorry to laugh in the middle of this, but I'm just I'm
staggered by how evil this is.
Quote unquote Christianity has always been a form, parentheses, perhaps the true
form of quote unquote religion.
Yet if it becomes the obvious one day that this is a
priority does not exist, then it has been a historically conditioned and
transitory form of human expression.
Then people really will become radically religionless, and I believe that is
already more or less the case.
Why, for example, doesn't this war provoke a religious reaction, like all
the previous ones?
What does that then mean for quote unquote Christianity?
The foundations are being pulled out from under all that quote unquote
Christianity has previously been for us, and the only people among whom
we might end up in terms of quote unquote religion are the
last of the knights, or a few intellectually dishonest people.
Are these supposed to be the chosen few?
Are we supposed to fall all over preciously this dubious lot of
people in our zeal or our disappointment?
Or woe and try to peddle our wares to them?
Or should we do we jump on a few unfortunates in their
hour of weakness and commit, so to speak, religious rape?
If we are unwilling to do any of that, then we eventually
must judge that even the Western form of Christianity to be only
a preliminary stage of a complete absence of religion?
What kind of situation emerges for us for the church?
How can Christ become Lord of the religionless as well?
Is there such a thing as a religionless Christian?
If religion is only the garb in which Christianity is clothed, and
this garb has looked very different in different ages, what then is
religionless Christianity?
Barf, who is the one to have begun thinking along these lines,
nevertheless did not pursue these thoughts all the way, did not think
them through, but ended up with a positivism of revelation, which in
the end essentially remained a restoration.
For the working person or any person who is without religion, nothing
decisive has been gained here.
The questions to be answered would be what does a church or
congregation, a sermon, a liturgy, a Christian life mean in a religionless
world? How do we talk about God without religion, that is, without
the temporally conditioned presuppositions of metaphysics, the inner life and so on?
How do we speak or perhaps how can we no longer speak
the way we used to in a worldly way about quote unquote
God? So So this again is consistent with something that King had
talked about as well.
And frankly, it's also consistent with something that Corey and I talk
about today.
But again, in completely opposite directions.
When we on Stone Choir talk about the world today being a
religionless one, one in which God is not visible in life in
a in a godly fashion, we certainly see God's actions in everything's
everything every day.
We do not see the will of God typically being acted out
by people in the world.
That's one of our chief complaints on this podcast.
The difference in our response to Barf's response and to Bonhoeffer's response
is that they say, okay, well, I guess God's dead, so what
do we do now?
If there's no religion, if there's no thought of any religion at
all, and again, when he's putting religion and quotes in Christianity in
quotes, that goes back to something we've talked about in another previous
episode where we have we have this notion that religion itself is
a manifestation of human will, that all religions are man-made.
Remember that was in that was in some of King's papers.
That was one of King's very clear predicates, that all religions are
man-made, and that the various forms of quote unquote religion are downstream
from some inherent wellspring of the human nature.
And so sometimes you have a religion that's better, sometimes you have
a religion that's worse, but they're all fundamentally humanist at their heart.
That's antithetical to Christianity.
Christianity comes from God.
Christianity is found in Scripture, it's delivered us through the church by
faithful teachers in Scripture.
When he tears all those things away and say, Well, we have
this godless world now, so how do we talk about doing good
things without talking about God?
That gets back to what we were saying earlier.
He doesn't want to talk about Christ anymore.
he wants to still do the good things, to solve whatever wisdom,
whatever love, without actually having it rooted in obedience to God, in
immediate obedience, which is what we talk about all the time.
When I talk about obeying God, there's an immediacy to my knowledge
that what I am trying to do is from Scripture.
It's what God's telling me.
And I'm doing it because God told me to do it.
Or I'm failing to do it in spite of what God told
me to do.
That's the law.
And the gospel is that I'm forgiven even for having failed.
Because God has revealed that in spite of our failings he loves
us and gave us a physical Christ in history two thousand years
ago who died and was raised from the dead and walked out
of the tomb, so that our sins would be forgiven and we
would know that it was true.
These men want a religion where none of that is necessary.
They want to just strip out the religion and strip out the
metaphysics and strip out all the spiritual stuff and say, you know
what, let's just have the humanist thing because in you know after
1900 years of the church, we're now to the point where we've
sort of perfected it.
We can, we can strip away those mythologies and that embarrassing antiquated
stuff and just have the raw humanist form of this thing.
that's what plays out in all these things, and it's the undercurrent
of all of his comments.
And so near the end of his life, just two years before
he's gonna be executed, he's basically he's saying that same thing Nietzsche
says he's saying God is dead.
What now?
And there's a there's a positive way you could read some of
this as I said, like these are some of our concerns and
in bits and pieces too.
But his ultimate concern is
without God we still need to cope going with some sort of
religious project.
So what's the new religious project gonna look like?
That's the exact opposite of Christianity.
The next quote we have is also from his letters while he
was in prison written to Aberhard Bethka.
He wrote many of the particularly wicked things he wrote to this
younger gentleman.
A few more words about religionlessness.
You probably remember Boltman's essay on demythologizing the New Testament
My opinion of it today would be that he went not too
far, as most people thought, but rather not far enough.
It's not only mythol it's not only mythological concepts like miracles, ascension,
and so on, which in principle can't be separated from concepts of
God, faith, etcetera exclamation point, that are problematic, but religious concepts as
such. You can't separate God from the miracles, as Boltman thinks.
Instead, you must be able to interpret and proclaim them both non
religiously. Boltmann's approach is still basically liberal, that is, it cuts the
gospel short.
Whereas I'm trying to think theologically.
What then does it mean to interpret religiously?
It means, in my opinion, to speak metaphysically, on the one hand,
and on the other hand, individualistically, neither way is appropriate, either for
the biblical message or for people to day.
Hasn't the individualistic question of saving our personal souls almost faded away
for most of us Isn't it our impression that there are really
more important things than this question?
Perhaps not more important than this matter, but certainly more important than
the question exclamation point question mark question mark.
I know it sounds outrageous to say that, but after all, isn't
it fundamentally biblical?
Does the question of saving one's soul even come up in the
Old Testament?
Isn't God's righteousness and kingdom on earth the center of everything?
And isn't Romans three, verse twenty four and following, the culmination of
the view that God alone is righteous, rather than an individualistic doctrine
of salvation?
What matters is not the beyond but this world, how it is
created and preserved, is given laws, reconciled and renewed.
What is beyond this world is meant in the gospel to be
there for this world, not in the anthropocentric sense of liberal, mystical,
pietistic ethical theology, but in the biblical sense of the creation and
the incarnation, crucifixion, and resurrection of Jesus Christ.
Bart was the first theologian, to his great and lasting credit, to
begin the critique of religion.
But he then put in its place a positivist doctrine of revelation
that says, in effect, like it or lump it, whether it's the
virgin birth, the Trinity, or anything else, all are equally significant and
necessary parts of the whole, which must be swallowed whole or not
at all.
That's not biblical.
There are degrees of cognition and degrees of significance.
That means an arcane discipline must be re-established through which the mysteries
of the Christian faith are sheltered against profanation.
The positivism of revelation is too easygoing, since in the end, it
sets up a law of faith and tears up what is, through
Christ's becoming flesh, exclamation point, a gift for us.
Now the church stands in the place of religion, that in itself
is biblical.
But the world is left to its own devices, as it were
to rely on itself.
That is the error.
At the moment I am thinking about how the concepts of repentance,
faith, justification, rebirth, and sanctification should be reinterpreted in a worldly way,
in the old testament sense, and in the sense of John 14,
I'll write you more about it.
This is really just a doubling down on things that we have
seen in some of the previous quotes from Bonhoeffer.
He rejects the Christian religion piece by piece in this quote.
He is constructing an alternate religion.
He is not dealing with Christianity, he is not dealing with theology
in the proper sense of dealing with God, because theology properly references
the one true God.
Because he doesn't believe it.
He thinks that these things are pure myth, they are mythology, it
doesn't matter if they're true or false, he doesn't care at all.
He's not dealing with the empirical.
Christianity makes empirical claims.
Christianity says that God became incarnate.
Christianity says that God died in the cross.
Christianity says that God rose again on the third day.
Those are empirical claims.
If those are false, Christianity is false.
He is He is saying here that those don't matter.
These things don't matter.
That's not what Christianity is.
That's not what his Christianity is.
His Christianity is something totally alien to Scripture, something totally alien
to the Christian faith.
And he attributes it to the very men we've mentioned previously.
These men are all of one mind Because they all have one
animating intelligence, as we have pointed out many times before.
This stuff comes from the pit of hell.
And as mentioned at the beginning, The problem here is that I
rattled off many words that undoubtedly sounded Christian to you.
Because they are words that are used in Christianity, they are words
that relate to the Christian faith, but they are not Christian when
they are coming from this man's pen, because they are not Christian
in this man's mind, because he's not a Christian.
And so just because someone tells you crucified, crucifixion, resurrection, salvation, justification,
just because someone uses these words does not mean that he is
a Christian, because again, Satan can quote Scripture.
Satan quoting scripture doesn't mean that he believes it.
Now, of course, he believes it in quite frankly, a more real
sense than Bonhoeffer did.
Does, well, perhaps he believes it now.
But Satan knows it's true.
Satan doesn't trust it.
It's that the difference between Notitia, Ascensus, and Fiducia, as we've gone
over at least once before in a previous episode.
These are the levels of knowledge, because again, Christian doctrine, Christianity, is
a matter of truth claims.
I
want to reread just a small bit of this because it's I
think it's really the heart of how evil this letter is.
Bonhoeffer writes, hasn't the individualistic question of saving our personal souls almost
faded away for most of us?
Isn't our impression that there are really more important things than this
question, perhaps not more important than this matter, but certainly more important
than this question?
I know it sounds a bit outrageous to say that, but after
all, isn't it fundamentally biblical?
Does the question of saving one's soul even come up in the
Old Testament?
Well, one of the books that Corey and I point to quite
often, I think has the perfect response to this whole paragraph.
Job nineteen twenty-seven twenty-five through twenty-seven, Job says, For I know that
my redeemer lives, and that at last he will stand upon the
earth, and after my skin has thus been destroyed, yet in my
flesh I shall see God, whom I shall see for myself, and
my eyes shall behold and not another, my heart faints within me.
So this is Job, in what is almost certainly the oldest book
in the Old Testament, saying quite clearly he knows that his Redeemer
lives, he knows that his flesh which will die will be resurrected,
and that is his joy.
Bonoffer knew this.
Christians know this.
One of the most beautiful hymns that we have is I know
that my redeemer lives.
It is
the confession of the Christian faith.
And it's a direct repudiation of a man who says, Is that
even in the Old Testament?
That was the sincere question of all of this.
And so at the end, when he gets again to denying the
Trinity and the virgin birth and all these other things, I think
the question of particular knowledge of specific doctrinal facts, as Corey just
highlighted, is important.
When I was on Myth of the Twentieth Century, I was discussing
forgiveness with Adam, the thief on the cross came up, and I
pointed out Adam was asking about forgiveness.
can someone on death row really receive forgiveness?
I said, Well Well, good news, the Bible actually has a passage
about Jesus in that precise situation to highlight that there are certain
principles at play that come into salvation as Corey said, and is
frankly to be to be clear, as Bonhoeffer also says, it is
not intellectual ascent that saves us.
However, the thief on the cross, although he could not have explained
the Trinity, had Jesus explained the Trinity to him in whatever manner
he saw fit, the thief on the cross would have said, Yes,
that is my God, you are my God.
The thief on the cross would not have heard the apostles' creed
and say this is crap.
I don't I don't believe any of this.
This isn't my God.
That is the difference between us as Christians and Bonhoeffer.
When Bonhoeffer sees the virgin birth and the resurrection of the dead
in hope and salvation, he's like, that's not my God, that's not
my religion.
That is his true confession.
So in all these passages, the truth of what he believes will
creep through in these questions that are merely decides, does it really
say in the Old Testament the individual salvation it matters?
Is that even in there?
Yes, it's throughout all of it.
And so this is why this stuff is subversive.
That was all that was a long passage.
And he says some things that you can potentially agree with.
A Christian can come along and baptize some of his words, reincorporating
them in a way that is actually Christian, just as you could
you could do a Bible study where you did nothing but quote
Satan from scripture and teach a good Bible study.
You would have to disagree with what Satan was trying to achieve,
but Satan was quoting God in Scripture.
Is as Corey said, like when Satan comes at us, when he
comes at Christians at believers, he's gonna use God's word to do
it. Now, sometimes he'll come with other temptations completely outside.
there's something that'll get anyone because we're weak in the flesh and
we each have our own personal vulnerabilities.
There's a tailor-made path to damnation for every one of us.
And Satan puts all his cards down every day to try to
get us there.
God gives us faith, He gives us forgiveness of sins, He promises
us salvation, and all we have to do is not reject it.
And the gift of not rejecting it is itself a gift.
God gives us everything that we need for salvation is never us
doing it.
And that is our ultimate comfort.
It's the reason for the Lutheran focus on sacramental theology.
It's the stuff that we can point to God doing in our
lives and say, God did this, I trust his promises.
And even the trust in those promises is God giving me something.
The doubt that's sown by men like Bonhoeffer undermining the tenets of
the faith, and then saying, oh, but really, there's still there's some
sort of Jesus and there's some sort of incarnation and there's some
sort of last day, and it's going to be great.
If you're not scrupulously dissecting where this stuff is coming from, if
you're not looking at the genealogy of the ideas, you're gonna potentially
give it a pass.
That's why Barf is so deadly.
Barf and Baltman and Tilich and there's this this string of men
throughout the 20th century that were destroying the Christian faith piece by
piece and guys love them because it lets midwits sound intelligent as
they're talking to you and giving you things that are a corruption
of the faith and you're like, oh well that's interesting.
I've never heard that before.
We want to make sure that when we're talking about this stuff
on So Inquire, if you've never heard it before, we can just
point you to scripture like, here it is.
You know Bon offers, I don't know, is there anything in there
about the individual be having his soul saved?
Job says yes.
Many places say yes.
We don't need to doubt these things because if we trust in
scripture, we have the answers.
Again, I pointed at the beginning to the perspicuity of scripture, the
clarity of scripture episode we did.
Specifically, we front loaded that.
It's one of the first, I think, like five or eight episodes
we did, in large part, because the attacks that come on the
faith from all these other directions, whether it's making up new sins
or it's casting doubt on old creeds, they're all predicated on you
ceasing to believe what God has told us all.
God hasn't told me anything different than he's telling you.
It's in Scripture.
And if someone comes along and preaches you a word different than
that which is given from Scripture, God promises that all the curses
will be poured out on that man.
And they're being poured out on Bonhoeffer today.
And they're going to be poured out on his acolytes, because the
men who hate some of the most important things in the world
today are men who love Bonhoeffer.
They love MLK.
These guys are saints in the New World Religion.
We're doing this episode as a warning that when you see this
man being held up, and whatever good things you read, you know,
like I said, there's stuff in here that some of it sounds
a little bit like us.
And the reason for is that we're going on opposites directions on
the same street, so we're covering some of the same ground, but
he's trying to undo the very things that we're trying to do.
And so when we cross paths and we sound similar, it's not
shared givens, is that we're operating in the sphere of Christianity.
The difference is that we're trying to uphold it and be faithful
to it, and men like Bonhoeffer and his acolytes today are trying
to tear it down.
Now there are men who like Bonhoeffer who are Christian.
they're fools.
I I use that in the scriptural sense.
It is foolishness to like this man.
If you're if you're lapping up the things that this guy is
teaching, you're endangering your soul and the souls of others.
Cause as we've laid out just briefly here today, you know, in
thirty-three, when he was saying stuff about denying the virgin birth and
the resurrection of the dead, he had not yet despaired.
He was actually he just had his some sort of conversion experience.
He would never describe anyone in thirty-one.
And so in this period, he was really into reading the Bible.
And then by the end in 43, 44, 45, he says in
some of these other letters, he doesn't read the Bible anymore.
He, whatever faith he had, if if he ever did, by the
time he started denying the tenets of the faith, the foundations, the
creeds. Later on he had nothing left but despair.
And so as he's talking about this religionless world and he's lamenting
what else do we do, he doesn't realize it.
It's his very teachings that created the world that he is now
despairing in.
And his despair was in part of his own creation.
We don't want that for anyone.
There's a real thread that runs throughout all of his writings
that really comes to a head in some of the later letters
while he was in prison, and that is there is an immense
hypocrisy
underlying so much of what Bonhoeff wrote.
Now for some hypocrisy is not going to matter and for others
it should matter a great deal.
In politics hypocrisy is one thing.
In religion, in Christianity particularly, hypocrisy is something else entirely.
You, as a Christian, must not be a hypocrite with regard to
your faith
that doesn't mean that you can't be a Christian and a hypocrite
in the fullest sense of cannot.
Because of course you are going to say you should not do
X when speaking to someone else, and then later on you may
very well do that very thing.
Does that make you a hypocrite to some degree, of course?
Does it make you wrong for saying you should not do X
no? So long as you are repeating a truth about the Christian
faith. If any man says you should not lust after a woman
who is not your wife, odds are pretty good that at some
point in his life he is going to have done that and
will probably do it again.
That is just one of the realities of the fallen flesh.
But we see in the writings of Bonhoeffer something Different with regard
to hypocrisy.
Because he writes about this deep sense of caring for others that
you are supposed to have as a Christian.
And then in so many of his interactions interactions
he does not show it, and then he becomes a traitor to
his own people.
He abandons in the process his fiancee, notably, he was set to
be married
shortly after he was arrested.
I think it was I think he was either three months after
he got engaged or three months until the wedding, I don't remember
which one it was.
But this is his fiancee who had just lost her military commander
father and her brother on the Eastern Front.
He mentions that in one of his letters.
He's just an immense and unsettling hypocrite in so many ways, but
there's also another thread that runs throughout his writings where he is
very clearly seeking to justify himself.
And there are places where he speaks explicitly of self justification.
We didn't get to those, and we won't deal with those in
this episode because we don't want to run for four hours dealing
with this man and his bad theology.
But there is one more quote that I want to read that's
related to this issue.
There is clearly no historically significant action that does not trespass ever
again against the limits set by those laws, he's speaking here of
the moral law.
But it makes a decisive difference whether such trespasses against the established
limit are viewed as their abolishment in principle and hence And hence
presented as a law of its own kind, or whether one is
conscious that such trespassing is perhaps an unavoidable, guilty, that has its
justification only in that law and limit being reinstated and honored as
quickly as possible.
Obviously there's one word there that was translated a little awkwardly, but
the point nevertheless comes through.
And for those of us with the advantage of hindsight, we can
look at this and see
he's trying to justify what he did, what he was doing, his
involvement in a plot to assassinate the rightfully elected leader of his
people. Now that is not something that a Christian can do, certainly,
but it is
very certainly, and much more so something in which clergy should not
be involved.
There are limits to what clergy can and cannot do.
And there are some other quotes of his that are just rank
clericalism we didn't get to those either, but at one point he
says that scriptures belong to the clergy and not to the congregation,
which is directly opposed to everything written in Reformation theology, particularly by
Lutherans who focus the priestho focus on the priesthood of all believers
and very strongly encourage the reading of Scripture.
This is one of the major points of contention between Protestants and
the pre Reformation sects, which is to say both Rome and the
East. But in this quote and elsewhere he's justifying his wicked transgression
of the law by saying, Well, it's fine, as long as it's
transitory. That's not Christian, that's sub Christian in thought.
You do not get to justify yourself, particularly when it comes to
violating the fifth commandment because that is what he did.
He was engaged in attempted murder.
And people did die as a result, so actually murder, he's guilty
of murder.
Of course you're guilty of murder if you attempt murder, but that's
an issue for philosophy and theology for another time.
The real takeaway from this episode, what we want you to get
out of this is not just that this particular man was a
wicked man and he has been held up as a martyr in
a new religion.
That's true.
That's an important takeaway.
But more than that, we want you to understand that you need
to be careful when engaging with materials, particularly materials for
men like this, or an unknown quantity.
Because it may be that the materials will use terms that sound
Christian to you, that sound good, that sound like something that a
Christian can affirm
but that may not be the case, because as we have said
repeatedly, Satan too can quote Scripture.
There is a difference between the Christian knowledge, that is saving knowledge,
that we call faith, which is fiducia, in the three levels of
knowledge. Because the first is you take notice of the thing, you
recognize the thing as a thing, the second is you assent to
the truth the truth of the thing, and the third is that
you trust in it.
And it is that trust that we call faith.
That is what saves.
Satan has notitia and ascensus.
Satan knows that Scripture is true.
Satan as sense to the fact that Scripture is true.
Satan cannot trust in it.
Satan has no faith.
Neither do his acolytes.
Men like this will sometimes
at least pay lip service to scripture.
Sometimes they'll even assent to the truth of scripture.
But then they go off the rails.
In the case of Bonhoeffer and some of the others, some of
the more egregious examples, they simply outright deny scripture.
They reject the fundamentals of the Christian faith because he rejected time
and again, the inspiration of Scripture.
He didn't even go as far as some of the others and
say, well, Scripture contains the Word of God, which you have to
be careful for that.
If someone says contains the Word of God, that is that is
meant to deny that it is the word of God.
Very different things.
The Christian position is that the Scriptures are the Word of God.
Bonhoeffer just denied that the Scriptures really contain anything.
Religion is some other human constructed thing which he compares at one
point to Buddhism as another potential path to God, another human constructed
path to God.
Different, but that But not so fundamentally different that it's not a
path to God.
you engage with materials, Particularly those that the world is telling you
are great or important or this person is a giant of the
church. Engage your critical faculties.
Compare them to scripture.
Do these men say the things of God in the same words
as God used, because that's another important matter.
One thing you will see in these men, just to throw in
a point here right at the end.
One thing you will see in these men is that they will
speak of Christ as an example, the example of Christ.
We have to follow the example of Christ.
What does Scripture actually say?
It's a subtle difference, but it matters.
It's not always a definitive
conclusion that if the person says example of Christ he is a
false teacher, but the false teachers tend to use example of Christ
or Christ as example or some wording like that, instead of what
Paul says become imitators of Christ.
So someone feels a need to to change the words of Scripture,
there's probably a reason.
So compare what these men say to what God says in his
word, if they do not match up.
Get rid of the former.
We spent a fair amount of time slogging through this material, reading
these books, essays, letters, etc.
Because we had a very specific purpose in mind, we had a
reason to do it, we are not recommending that anyone read these
materials. Life is short.
If you are going to read theology, read good theology.
Don't read these wicked men.
That's not because we're saying, oh well you can't read and understand
this and no, it's not that.
It's don't waste your time.
Read scripture, read good theology.
Don't spend your time reading men who are now in hell.
Because if you read the materials by those who are now in
hell, you're not decreasing the odds certainly of joining them.
Most likely.
Now again, if you're doing it for a critical reason, perhaps that's
fine. But these materials are dangerous.
Wicked writings, evil materials are themselves, in themselves, dangerous.
Look at what happened in Scripture.
When those who had previously practiced the dark arts had practiced magic,
converted to Christianity, they burned their evil materials, worth enormous
sums of money, to day, and certainly, of course, then.
Because that is the Christian response.
Sometimes the Christian response is a book burning.
And I know that doesn't sound very winsome, as it were, to
modern ears, because we're supposed to believe in some sort of absolute
freedom of speech in the press, but that is not the Christian
position. Some things are evil in and of themselves, and it is
best for the Christian to avoid
them. So the best advice we can give you is for men
like Bonhoeffer or Bart or any of a number of others, just
avoid their writings.
There is no reason to read this material.
It's good to have
the sort of cursory information provided in this episode, because now you
have a response when someone comes up to you, and unfortunately it
may very well be your pastor, but when someone comes up to
you and says, This man was a great Christian, a great theologian,
he stood up for the church, he opposed those evil Nazis, whatever
it is he says, it'll most likely be something along those lines.
Now you have some sort of response.
You can ask some questions.
You can say
Is it good for a Christian to deny the virgin birth?
Like your pastor or whomever will say no.
Well Bonhoeffer did it.
Is it good to deny the plenary verbal inspiration of Scripture?
Well no.
Bonhoeffer did.
A dozen other things.
The Christian response When other Christians, brothers in error, bring up evil
men like this and say they were greats, is to rebuke them.
Because if you believe that this man was a great of the
church, you are endangering your own soul, and you are endangering every
soul entrusted to your care, and unfortunately today, many of those who
believe this wicked man was a great man of the church, are
in charge of many souls, because they are pastors, they are shepherds
of flocks.
And that's why we did this episode.
Because Bonhoeffer was an evil man and he is burning in hell.
I
want to conclude just briefly by reiterating the quote that I used
from the very beginning from the LCMS Concordia Seminary in St.
Louis in two thousand six, because it's probably the most true quote
that we have read to you today.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer may well be the most widely admired and respected Christian
theologian among Christian pastors and theologians in the USA.
The scope of his appeal is exceptionally broad, spanning across virtually all
Christian denominations and across perspectives ranging from the traditional to the liberal.
That's absolutely true.
And as Corey just said, that is deadly.
That is the state of our church today.
A state of free fall apostasy where a man who literally denies
the creeds as a predicate for all of his other teachings is
upheld as a great theologian of the 20th century.
Why? Because he didn't like Nazis.
That's the religion.
The religion of this age, the New World religion, is one where
Nazis bad.
I'm sorry to have to keep bing bringing that crap up because
it's boring and it's tedious, but it is the religion.
Men are damned for being Nazis, not for being sinners.
That is the sin.
And so when Concordia Saint Louis says he is a most widely
admired and respected Christian theologian among so called Christian pastors.
Yeah, that's probably true.
And that's exactly the problem that we're hoping we can make some
small contribution to solving, because Christianity will not survive in an environment
where men like King and Bonhoeff are seen as Christian martyrs.
These men were destroyers of souls and they are paying the eternal
price for it.
We don't want anyone to join them in the And the surest
path to joining them is to agree with them, to uphold them,
to believe what they say, and then to evangelize those beliefs to
others. That is the world religion.
It's the popular religion.
You will fit in if you love Bonhoeffer.
And the more you talk about him, the more friends you're gonna
have. Scripture has a lot to say about the popularity of scripture.
True doctrine is usually not popular, at least not for very long.
Unpopularity doesn't mean it's right, but popularity certainly doesn't mean it's wrong.
This man, like King, like Barf, these men were destroyers of the
Christian faith.
And today we have so many men in pulpits and in positions
of authority and power that literally can't tell the difference.
This is a crisis for the entire church.
This is a crisis for every Christian.
Because even if you don't have the aptitude to delve into these
matters, most of you probably don't, and that's not meant as an
insult. God God dispenses his gifts unequally.
There are men who are capable of seeing through these lies.
Those men should have your support and your protection because they're outnumbered.
And the men who are seeking to leave the world where there's
no gospel left, where there's no promise of Job nineteen, where he
knows that he redeem his Redeemer lives.
And he knows that he will see him with his own eyes
on the last day.
We know that too.
That is the Christian promise.
It is not the promise of the faith of these men.
Those who deny the resurrection, who deny the true Christ, will meet
him and the worst possible way, we want for every listener and
for all of your families and all of your communities to meet
Christ on the last day, covered in the white robes, washed white
in the blood of the Lamb.
The forgiveness of sins
is the purpose of Scripture.
It's why it's given to us.
Everything that we ever do wrong in our lives, everything that Bonhoeffer
ever did wrong in his life, everything your pastor's ever done wrong
in his life, getting some of this stuff wrong.
Jesus paid the price for that.
When we deny that that price was paid, when we deny that
these things are sins, that these things are lies, we take it
back on ourselves.
And on the last day God will say, Okay, if you say
that's your sin, I believe you.
That is not what we wish for anyone, because the eternal punishment
is infinite.
Just as the eternal reward is infinite for all the wonderful things
that God has prepared for us, it's it's literally either or and
it's not our doing.
But when we tolerate evil teaching, when we all tolerate evil teachers,
we ensure that there's no room left in the world for Christian
teaching. The last thing that we want is to see Christian teaching
die out.
I long for a day when stone Choir is no longer necessary.
Doing these episodes is unpleasant.
we put this off for a while because it stinks so much
to read this crap.
It's painful.
But the fact that it's harming people is one of the reasons
we did.
We had a lot of requests for this episode.
If in some small way anything that we do or you do
can help to turn the tide against these evil teachings, we would
like to see the entire church get that back to the point
that our pulpits and our seminaries and wherever men are faithfully raised
up to spread the word of God, they all see these things
that are contrary to scripture and say, Yeah, I I'm of a
different spirit.