Against the Antichrist

0:37 Welcome to the Stone Choir Podcast. I am Corey J. Mahler. And I'm Wo. Today's episode of Stone Choir is going to be discussing something that was produced by the president of the Missouri Synod uh several weeks ago. President Matt Harrison put out a press release that originally began as an email that was sent to district presidents uh leaked online on Facebook and then subsequently sent out to the world. Up front I want to say two things just to clarify something we've said in previous episodes. We don't want this to become an inside baseball podcast about Lutheranism, let alone the N L CMS. I know we have a lot of listeners who are in other denominations and we don't want to bore you. Uh the reason they were talking about this particular letter is that

1:22 this letter was literally written against the Stone Choir podcast. This was written expressly against Corey and against me. So we're going to go through it because it is directly relevant to the state of the church uh in the West, not simply our denomination, not simply Protestantism, uh but really the whole church is is facing similar issues. So I hope you'll bear with us and we're gonna be going through a letter once again line by line. I know we did that last week. I promise we won't do that again for a while. Uh it's not something we want to make a habit, but in this particular case, there's so much error and so much evil in this thing, and the fact that it's directly related to a podcast

2:02 that's only been around for twenty episodes. I I think that it's worth our time to discuss it and certainly to respond to it. And hopefully you'll find that it's worth your time listening to it. So I I hope you'll bear with us as we do one more episode that's a bit inside baseball, but again, not too much. Um we're gonna rely pretty heavily on some previous episodes that we've done. Uh it's been, I think, no coincidence at this point that every time we manage to lay down an episode within a couple of weeks, it becomes a seminal aspect of what is going on in the world That's you know, we talked a little about in the IQ episode. We can see where the ball is going so we know some of these things are coming before they actually explode in public.

2:43 So we're gonna begin this by uh we're gonna take turns reading paragraphs and discussing them. I want to begin by pointing out something from the framing episode that we did a few months back, where we discussed how the nature in which someone frames the discussion fundamentally bounds how you can think about it if you're just going to acquiesce to their frame. If you will fight back, if you'll sort of disregard their frame, then you can escape it and you have your own thoughts. But if you go along with what they're trying to say, you get end up in a situation where they can absolutely control what you're thinking, simply by the way they frame it. So the title of this press release was President Harrison Denounces Disturbing

3:25 Ideologies. Now I'll just briefly unpack those five words because there's a whole lot going on, even right there. President Harrison, okay, great, that's his title. It's also asserting a degree of authority. So this is the president of the Missouri Senate. He's speaking with authority. He's on the LCMS webpage, he's coming to the whole world saying something's going on. What does he do? He denounces. That's perfectly reasonable. Uh we're doing this podcast to denounce what he's saying. So there's nothing wrong inherently with that. But it's a very strong word to use. It's not a comment, it's not an observation, it's not concern. He denounces. And in the book of Concord, this would be the equivalent of

4:03 we reject and condemn. So for him to say denounces is pretty much the strongest possible word that he could use to sort of frame what it is he wants to tell us about. Next word he uses is disturbing. That's a very emotionally laden word. When you say something is disturbing, it sort of primes whoever's reading to think, Oh, what's gonna happen next? Like I'm I'm already a little bit concerned, I'm a little bit frightened, I'm gonna be exposed to something terrible. So that's a very emotionally manipulative word to use. It was very deliberately chosen. And then the last word he used is probably the the piste resistance of what he's done here. President Harrison denounces disturbing ideologies.

4:43 Now that's interesting because as we've talked in past episodes, there's the doctrine of the kingdom of the left hand of Christ and the kingdom of the right hand of Christ, where the left hand is sort of the the civil, the secular, for lack of a better term, the world where the church isn't necessarily directly involved, and then you have the right hand kingdom where the church is talking. So when Harrison says ideologies, he's implicitly shoving what he's about to tell you about into the left hand kingdom. He's saying this has nothing to do with church. This is an ideology. This is something that does not come from scripture. It's not godly. It's something that's just from somewhere else. And I'm President Harrison of the Missouri Synod.

5:23 I'm gonna tell you what's wrong with it. So just in five words, he's really conducted a master class in framing to ensure that what you receive next is gonna be something that you're gonna be ready to be scared about and you're going to be ready to think, yeah, this is definitely not Christian. And then he goes on with the uh the title, The Statement of Recent Online Unchristian Teachings. Which again, that's sort of doubling down. It's it was online, so you know it's kind of fringe automatically. Anything online isn't real. Like it's not published. It's just it's out there in the the Twitter sphere or whatever. And unchristian makes clear that you know, again, that ideology thing. We're not talking about doctrine, we're not talking about scripture, we're talking

6:01 about non-Christian things being done somewhere related to the church. And then teachings. So as president of the Missouri Synod, he is now framing it in terms of there are competing teachers out there opposed to the church. So just in the first two lines, before he even even gets to his dear friends in Christ, he's already set this up as the church versus evil men from outside the church. And maybe that's true, maybe that's false. that's like framing is not inherently impermissible or duplicitous, but it is very powerful when someone's not paying attention to it. Because if you see to the frame without thinking about it, if it's unconscious, just you absorb it and you're like, okay, I'm gonna

6:42 go along with this for now. And that's very typical when you're dealing with, you know, the president of the Missouri Senate. This is a pastor, he's ordained, he has a caller, he's well respected by people who are themselves well well respected. So you know, you're gonna tend to believe him. You certainly wouldn't think he was a liar. You wouldn't think he was going to be doing something evil. And so when he tells you unchristian and these other things, you gonna tend to believe 'em. So this first paragraph is is just five lines, but it's gonna be where we spend, I think, the bulk of this episode simply because there's there's so much to unpack here Matt begins. Dear friends in Christ, the Lutheran Church Missouri Synod, its president, vice

7:26 presidents, and all 35 district presidents, along with its ministerium and congregations, categorically reject the horrible and racist teachings of the so called alt-right in Toto, including white supremacy, Nazism, pro-slavery, anti-interracial marriage, women as property, fascism, death for homosexuals, even genocide. So that was one paragraph. That was the very beginning of this thing. Uh there are two things to point out there and we'll we're gonna spend most time talking about the second, but the first is that he says this is the president All six vice presidents and all thirty-five district presidents. I want to name for you the vice presidents up front because what he is saying and what they are saying by their silence

8:08 and acquiescing to this letter that was published in their name is that they all agree with this. So we are not picking on Matt Harris. This is, according to him, the unanimous voice of the entire Missouri Synod speaking against these things that are to follow. So the vice presidents are Peter Lang, John Wool Robby Jr., Scott Murray, Nabil Noor, Chris Escott, and Ben Ball. Those six men are all equally responsible for what we say. So when we say Matt, you can hear all their names, you can hear the names of all thirty-five district presidents. Every man in synod who's in one of these positions is guilty of everything that is said in this letter. So that's the first part of it. And then uh the LCMS categorily rejects the horrible and racist teachings of the so

8:52 called alt right. So I think we'll begin with the term alt right itself because it's something I think most people probably don't know what it is. You actually probably don't hear it much anymore, and there's a reason for that. So the term alt right came to prominence a number of years ago. About twenty sixteen. We have a graph in the show notes that illustrates the searches for the term which roughly corresponds with when the term was in use. And of course it just means alternative right. There were some on the right who were pushing the use of this term and some on the left using it as a pejorative, but as a way to distinguish those on the right who weren't establishment right. The term did not catch on, fell out of favor, and basically

9:34 is not used today. So it's first off ridiculous the term would be resurrected to be used in this letter. And second, this isn't a term that anyone uses to describe himself today. I have never called myself altright. I've had many discussions with people about the ridiculousness of the term. I hate the term for a number of reasons. This isn't really the place for the discussion of that though. But there's no one who has critiqued the catechism, who has critiqued the leadership of the LCMS, any of these things, who describes himself as alt right. This is a term that to day is used as a propaganda term, largely by the mainstream media, to attack anyone who is a little further right than you're allowed to be or just happens to

10:22 hold views that the media don't like. And that's how Harrison is using it here. He's using it as a term to say these are evil people who are outside the bounds of what is acceptable to believe today, and so he wants you to condemn all of these things in this letter on the basis of this term, on the basis of what he has labelled those who are critiquing what he has been doing in the name of Synod, on behalf of Synod, and what others in Synod have been doing, particularly with the large catechism, which is sort of what kicked this off for the Synodical leadership. Yeah, I also don't think I've ever called myself all right. I've used other terms, but like it's this is a boomer term that was stuck in there basically to scare boomers.

11:07 If you say alt-right, somebody doesn't know what it is, they remember reading something about a few years ago, it sounds scary. So what does it do? It triggers fear in the mind of the reader, just as the disturbing ideologies headline was designed to trigger fear. So this is emotional manipulation bundling all bundling up all of these things together as one package, ascribing it to a few people, and then singling them out and saying, You cannot listen to anything those men say. And that's the whole purpose of that intro paragraph. he put this up front for very specific reason. And it's not really gonna get into the parenthetical of the including white supremacy, etcetera. Begin with the first one, including white supremacy.

11:50 Well, we just did a five episode series on race, concluding with the last episode that was specifically on the made up sin of racism, in which we went through basically line by line the twenty nineteen scen Sononical resolution that the Missouri Senate passed against the fake sin of racism. And I think we for my purposes, I think we demonstrated categorically that it's nonsense. It's it it's ham fisted nonsense. And so if you agreed with anything that we said, even if you only agreed with part of one of the episodes, maybe the episode on crime stats you thought was interesting. But then when we talked about IQs, you're like, well, maybe I can see violence correlating with race, but not IQ. I don't buy that.

12:34 Or vice versa. Like if you agreed with any of the things we said in any of those IP five episodes, you are, by Matt Harrison's definition, by the definition of the Missouri Senate, a white A white supremacist. Because that's fundamentally what we were talking about, that there are races, that they exist, that they exist distinctly, and that they have different characteristics. As we said a hundred times, probably nearly every episode, not before God, but relative to each other, we behave in different waves. We have different properties. And to say that out loud is quote unquote white supremacy. Uh just this past week there's something in the news um a law professor, uh one of the major law law programs, is being

13:18 expelled and losing tenure because she said that black students are not as smart. Now, that's a horrible white racist white supremacist thing to say if it's not true. But if it's true, what do you do? Do you let the label stick even though the fact is verifiable? Or do you say that labels and categorizations based on morality are more important than telling the truth? So that's really where all of this is. When white supremacy is used as a scare tactic and as a label, it's fundamentally designed to shut down your brain. Just like the thing talking about these uh these disturbing ideologies is there to shut down your ability to think rationally. Because if you think rationally, you'll think about crime stats and IQ

14:04 and all the other things that we talked about. And you'll think about the fact that maybe there's subsubstance to some of it. Even if you disagree with the conclusions, even just thinking that the thing exists is itself white supremacy. So a warning for anyone who's a podcast subscriber to Stone Choir, you are a white supremacist by the definition of this church simply by listening. Doesn't even matter if you disagree with us. The very fact that you would tolerate our voices in your ears makes you evil according to these people. Now that's it's a term from the from the mainstream. These talking just like MSN. And uh we'll be doing a a talk coming up here soon about the fallout from this letter and the subsequent activities from within

14:47 the Missouri Synod. There's a great deal of this that's been going on behind the scenes in secret, or so they think, and we'll be exposing all that. We're gonna not gonna discuss it today, but suffice it to say that the Missouri Senate has been acting in concert with pagans, with atheists, with evil people, for the sake of these terms for the sake of upholding the morality of the dark world that does not serve God. And so that's just the first term there. Yeah, the second one is Nazism. What does that even mean? Are you can there people who Well they never define any of these terms. Yeah, of course. I mean they did they didn't define white supremacy because they want you to take the term white supremacy and just think that really

15:31 any positive statement about whites is white supremacy. That was what the whole point of the it's okay to be white campaign was. The point is the reaction of people to saying that. None of us would object to someone saying it's okay to be Asian, it's okay to be African, it's okay to be whatever you want to insert. Fine. God made the races. You want to wear that shirt? Fine. The whole point is the reaction, and the goal here is to make the white supremacy term it's a kill word. As was m as you mentioned, they don't want people to think when they hear the term, but they also want you to associate anything that is positive with regard to whites as being white supremacy. And that's one of the reasons they don't define it, because if

16:14 they actually defined it, you might start going, Well, what these men are saying doesn't match up with the way this term is being defined, this accusation Don't fit. But these men don't care about the eighth commandment at all. That's why they never define these things. That's why it's always vague accusations. That's why they don't want to have the actual discussion of what it is they're saying, what it is we're saying. They just want you not to listen, not to think about it, obey the ministerium, and shut up. The LCMS itself, by the world standards, is a white supremacist church simply by virtue of the fact that 96% of the souls in the Missouri Synod are white. That itself is white supremacy.

17:01 It is a categorical imperative of the world that if you find an overwhelming majority of white people anywhere, even if it's in places that they built themselves for themselves, if they still have that thing that they built, that is white supremacy. Period. There's no way around that. And if you as a normal human being and a Christian recoil from that and say, well, that's absurd. That's obscene. Yes, it is. That is the point. The term itself is, as Corey said, a killing word. It is designed to kill your ability to respond because who wants to be a white supremacist? that's evil, obviously. But you can't discuss it. You can't talk about what it is. You just have to accept and move on. Same with Nazi.

17:42 The national Socialist German Workers Party vanished in nineteen forty-five. There have been no Nazis since nineteen forty-five, because that was a political party for a country that was killed. That was killed by the West in the name of all of these things. It was d it was done by communists and it was done by godless Americans. And so for them to try to lump that in is again it's just another scare tactic because what is more evil in the universe than Nazism? If you've watched movies in the last 30 years, you know that there's nothing. There's nothing you could possibly do that could be more than evil than Nazi. So they throw the word out there to scare you. I'm not a Nazi, because I'm not that old.

18:23 I don't particularly care about politics from the German people in the thirties and forties. I I don't find it interesting. I think there are aspects of every period that you can learn something from, good and bad, but to discuss things honestly is not to be an unthinking subscriber, which is again what they want. They just lump, they categorize, they smear, and then they move on, having labeled morally anything that they don't like with a term that you are programmed by an entire lifetime of propaganda to recoil from in horror. So these disturbing ideologies, they're telling you what they are. The disturbance is the racism, it's the Nazis and the next one is pro slavery. Well scripture is not anti slavery.

19:08 We're going to be doing an episode soon pr probably at some point pretty soon here, specifically about slavery, and about the fact that scripture does not condemn it. That is not to to say that, to say something that is a verifiable scriptural fact is not the same as being pro-slavery. I've literally mentioned on Stone Choir episode a few episodes ago, I'd rather be a slave than own slaves because I've been an employer. I've signed paychecks. I know what it's like to not to own someone, but to have an employee and the prospect of Yeah, well not in my own depending on the employees in the the business, yeah. Yeah, sir. Yeah, but Jeff Bezos is is pretty close to a slave owner. Um but even then he sends them home with virtually nothing.

19:52 He sends he sends them home crippled. hi their their their health care, their welfare, their lives are not his problem because he doesn't own them. He just doesn't even give them bathroom breaks. I'm pretty sure no slave owners were that bad. Yeah. So So the the the notion that any men, and including both of us, both Corey and I, do not think that slavery is a sin. This is something that the entire history of the faith agrees with until the last hundred and fifty years. Now, it's interesting for the Missouri Synod to choose pro-slavery as an explicit attack on moral grounds and again as a smear, like again they w they didn't provide any proof that anyone was pro slavery. They didn't pre provide any definition for what that is.

20:38 But we'll link in the show notes what the founder of the Missouri Synod, CFW Walther, said about slavery during the time that prohibition was rising. They were atheists. The men who were pushing prohibition were among the most evil men in the United States at the time. They were not Christians primarily. And the ones who were putative Christians were degenerate. They were not anything that Lutherans would recognize remotely as Christian. They were so far off in the weeds because they were obsessed with the quality. They were obsessed with the follow-on to the French Revolution. And one of the amazing points that Walther makes in I can't remember what year it was like eighteen fifty nine roughly.

21:24 Um he specifically ties the abolitionist movement to feminism, which didn't even exist yet. You know, feminism was something that came later. Because what did you have first? First you freed the slaves, and then you freed the women. You had women's liberation. And so he saw well before that ball began rolling, that it was gonna start, and he saw that it was all part of the same thing. So to get back to the headline of this thing, when Harrison calls these disturbing ideologies, he's trying to make you think that these are completely beyond any possible scriptural discussion, that there's no moral grounding for anyone who might disagree with him when in fact virtually the entire history of the church agrees with us, which we will be

22:10 the first to admit doesn't prove that we're right. We would never point to the history of the church, say, look, everybody was doing it, it must be right. What do we do? We point to scripture. So when we do the episode on slavery not being a sin, we will spend a lot of time in scripture because it's everywhere and it's never condemned in scripture. Even Philemon is not an anti-slavery book. So this is worldly. This the fact that he's spouting these twenty-first century sentimental CNN talking points as condemnation and saying, Oh, there's no theology here. They're just fundamentally dishonest. And also just as a purely factual matter, I don't think I've seen a single person on our side argue for slavery.

22:56 We've argued that slavery is not a sin because slavery is in Scripture not condemned by Scripture. If we're described as slaves of Christ, that makes Christ a slave owner. If you want to say that slavery is sin, you're calling Christ a sinner, good luck with that on judgment day. But I don't think a single one of us has ever said we want to reinstitute slavery. So So pro-slavery is just actually wrong on its face. Because we recognize the horrible consequences of slavery for the nation and the hassle that it was and would be certainly if it were reinstituted, and there's no reason for it. So no one is arguing we should bring back slavery. no one is making that argument. We still have slavery technically because the thirteenth Amendment doesn't actually bar

23:45 slavery, it bars slavery except as punishment, and so prisoners are slaves in many ways. But no one is arguing to bring it back. Yep. And even if they were, that is a political matter. It is not a moral matter. And that's fundamentally what's a policy decision, exactly. It's perfectly within the power of the state, the rightful power of the state, to practice slavery or not practice slavery. And as a political matter, I am looking back over history, absolutely fundamentally opposed to the slavery and the importation of Africans into North America. I think it's the single worst thing this country has ever done for entirely opposite reasons than those like Harrison who call it the original sin of the United States.

24:31 I think that it was evil because it brought people someplace they didn't want to be and they didn't belong. And then when we emancipated them, we just left them here. They were dumped on their own. Now you want to talk about pro slavery. If you go look back at many of the slaves who were so called emancipated, many of them wished that they could return to slavery, because their lives as slaves were easier than their lives were when they were on their own, forced to fend for themselves. That was a raw deal. They were put someplace that they hadn't intended to be, they didn't want to be, they didn't have support systems, and they're just left. And it was terrible for them, just as it was terrible for

25:07 them to have been brought here. I am not pro African slavery. I wish that the Africans who had kidnapped them in Africa had not done so. I wish that the Jews who had brought them here on their slave ships had not done so. I wish that the plantation owners, who were predominantly Jewish in the south, who had purchased them, had not done so. And I wish that when they were finally emancipated through violence that was itself evil, that when that occurred, for by whatever means, I wish that they had been returned home, as many of them would have wanted. And I think to this day when you have on the far left, so called in the far right, agreeing Africans shouldn't be here. I don't I don't think anyone finds that controversial.

25:47 And it's not hateful. So see, Cory and I will speak of these things in these terms in And when you actually hear us out, maybe you disagree, but it doesn't sound as terrible as these guys want to make it sound. And that's the whole point. They want to make everything that is in opposition to anything they believe just sound so unspeakably terrible that you can't even go near it. Maybe you think it's great for Africans to be here and they should be kept here even if it's against their will. Personally, I think that they should go back to Africa. That's not hateful. I think that that was where God put them. I think that's where they were until they were plucked away against their will. And I think that if being surrounded by people who are not

26:26 like them is bad for them, then returning to a place where people are like them would naturally be good for them. I don't think that saying they should go back to Africa is a matter of hate. I think it's what is the best possible thing for these people. That's my personal belief. That's a policy belief. That's a political belief. Is it a religious belief? Well, it's only religio religious in the sense that I have a duty to my neighbor and to my kin, and I have a duty to them insofar as they are my neighbors, and I think personally that what would be best for them would be to be back where God put them. You can disagree. And it's okay for people to disagree about these things without saying that if you don't agree with me, you're going to hell.

27:07 I don't think if someone wants to keep Africans here, they're going to hell. I think they're wrong. I think it's worth discussion, but like this is what normal human beings can talk about when they stop damning each other and calling each other all these names that are fundamentally categorically el eliminators of any discussion, which is why this letter was written. It was written to end discussion. Well too bad for Harrison and too bad for the Missouri Synod. We're here to discuss. The next point in the list is anti-interracial marriage. Well again, here we we have a a moral point that's trying to be made. Interracial marriage was literally illegal in the United States until within living

27:47 memory, and it was illegal for centuries, and it was fundamentally something that everyone thought was unnatural. I mean, there's a great video from uh Muhammad Ali when he he was interviewed by some British guy specifically talking about interracial marriage. And the British guy, you know, was very enlightened and was was trying to browbeat him into it. And Ollie said, you know, some effect the butterflies breed with butterflies and bluebirds breed with bluebirds. And if bluebirds stop breeding with bluebirds they stop being blue and he says that his black skin is beautiful and why wouldn't he want his kids to look just white like him? I find that to be completely respectable. And when he says it because he's a black guy and because

28:29 he converted Islam and because he's famous, well no one's gonna give him too much grief, although you really upset that that uh interviewer. But it's not a fringe belief. Even if you disagree, again, it's not a matter of damnation. And when it was illegal until within living memory, that fundamentally makes it a matter of policy and not a matter of morality. The Missouri Senate itself not only didn't conduct interracial marriages until until about 1959, 1960 or so, the Missouri Senate itself was segregated until within living memory. So these guys want you to ignore history, to damn everyone in history up until the 60s and then pretend like that's perfectly normal. And if anyone disagrees with that, they're going to hell.

29:15 We're going to hell. Corey and I are going to hell for saying, hey, what the church did in nineteen sixty, whether it was a good policy or not, you can argue that it wasn't damnable. And if you don't if you think it was damnable, you're condemning everyone who handed you the faith that you pretend to carry today. This particular point was a direct response to a tweet that I made that happened to gain traction, as the winds of Twitter sometimes dictate, and that the tweet was very simple. If your children are different colors, then you were unfit for the office of pastor. And I actually did go ahead and explain this. I explained it two different times, once in a reply to someone who asked me about it, once in another tweet explaining what I

30:00 had meant, and it's very simple. If you have children who are different colors, there are only two ways you achieve that. One, multiple wives. Not allowed if you're a pastor, because a pastor has to be a man of one woman. Two, if you adopt foreign children, and I argue that is demonstrating a lack of judgment, and under current circumstances it is most certainly demonstrating a lack of judgment and a lack of judgment is disqualifying for the office of pastor. And of course that completely set them off to some degree because they took it to be a per se blanket condemnation of interracial marriage. Which is a point that I've never taken and an argument I've never made. Because marrying outside your race is not per se sinful.

30:51 It can be sinful if your intent is sinful. It can be sinful if it's due to a lack of judgment, if you don't take into account all of the things that flow from that. For instance, your children will probably not be able to get an organ transplant, a bone marrow donation, any of a number of other things. We discussed some of this stuff in previous episodes. But it's worth repeating. It is not per se sinful to marry outside your race. It can be due to other factors. It's the equivalent of there are different kinds of defamation. There's defamation per se, which is a statement that on its face is defamatory. So for instance, if you're speaking about someone and you say that he lacks a certain attribute that is necessary for his profession,

31:42 that is per se defamatory because you're saying he's unfit. There's also per quod, which is defamation per quote, which means it relies on facts. It is facts-specific analysis. And so if you said something about someone that was defamatory, but only if you understood the context in which it was stated, that's per quote. And so marrying outside your race can be per quote according to the outside factors, according to the situation, the circumstances, sinful, but not per se. And so that's part of why this is included in his list of alt right things that are condemned. And it's also included because both of his sons have married outside their race, something he's very proud about. Yes, he very much has a personal stake as it

32:30 were. Yep. And so does Justin Panzer, one of the district presidents of the Missouri Senate who on the LCMS racism page that we cited last week, he's one of the featured highlights where he has a story about the African kid that he adopted. They've raised as his own son. There's nothing wrong with adoption, per se. Like Jesus was adopted by Joseph. We get that. We're not arguing against that. And adopting the fatherless, the the parentless, is an act of love. The specifics still matter. And over and over again, in virtually every case, when you have a a kid from one race raised by parents of another, they almost invariably grow up to resent them. Period. And being raised in a Christian household does not change that.

33:18 And frankly, it's even worse in the cases where there you have interracial marriages where you have, for example, a white father or vice versa and a black mother vice versa. When a child doesn't know what culture they belong to, doesn't know what nation they belong to, they're inherently alienated. When we did the first episode on race itself in the episode previously on election and the Nash Christian nationalism one, we talked about the fact that you have a people. My people personally are predominantly English and secondarily German. I'm almost entirely English and variants and German and variants. Those are my people. Do I identify with them directly? I d identify as American because three quarters of my family was

34:06 here by sixteen fifty. I don't I'm not eligible for a passport anywhere else. America is my home and American is what I am. I am a product of those r nations mixing in this place. But when the English and the Germans mixed, it was not the same as the English and the Zambezian mixing, because they share a common culture, they shared common religion, they shared common DNA until fairly recently. And the differences were minuscule. So am I conflicted internally by being part English and German? No. I can tell sometimes which parts are which just in my personality, but there's no inherent conflict there. That is not the case when you have a child who's a product of a disparate interracial marriage.

34:52 Colin Kaepernick is a prime example of this. He was adopted by white parents. Obama's another example. He's half black. You know, everyone calls Obama the first black president. Well, his grandparents were Irish. His mom was white. So it's kind of an erasure to even deny that he had white family. He was mixed race. And he chose to identify as African American because, you know, he looked black. He looked like a light skinned black guy. He looked much lighter than his father. And that's usually how it works out. And so the problem inherent to disparate interracial marriage is not that you have necessarily done something evil, but what sort of burdens are you causing your children to inherit?

35:41 Now, we're not going to make this an episode about that, and we're not making a defense of our positions one way or another. We're illustrating simply by talking about it for a few minutes that these are discussions worth having. Maybe you disagree and you think no it's fine. Whatever. The point is that this is not impermissible for the Christian to discuss. And so for the Missouri Synod to categorically say, this is damned, which is what they're doing here. we'll get to that in a minute. But obviously the way it was well, he said we categorically reject the horrible and racist teachings, including anti interracial marriage. Well, if it's a question of something that was you could go to prison for until Georgia, Alabama would be loving.

36:21 Loving v. Virginia. Loving v. Virginia, thank you. Um it was illegal in most states until living memory. If that is not suitable for public discussion, I don't know what is. And that's why we're talking about this. There's no situation in which a church can say that thing that was normal a hundred years ago, today you go to hell if you even talk about it. That's not how Christianity works. That's not how Christian brotherhood works. I would never say to someone who disagrees with my views on these things, you're going to hell if you don't agree with me. Even if I make a scriptural case for my position, I understand that we all live in such a propagandized world that even if someone's going to agree with me, it's gonna probably take them a

37:10 while. And that's particularly the case with interracial marriage, which by the way, virtually never happens. It's extremely rare. It's still, I think, well under five percent, even today, with all of the pro-interracial marriage propaganda that you see everywhere, you cannot buy stock photos or anything else. You can't see an ad or a TV show where you don't see an interracial couple. And if you think that's organic, if you think that's just it just happened naturally because that was part of the character development of the plot, I'm sorry, but you're a fool. That is deliberate propaganda that's being put in your face to make you think something that has never existed and has never been seen

37:50 as normal is now normal. Now is normal equivalent with moral? No, I wouldn't make that case. I think that often morality lines up with normality, but it's not a Christian case to be made for it. It's an open question for Christians to discuss. And it's impermissible for a Christian to say you're going to hell if you don't agree with me. Next one on this list is something we're going to may discuss in a future episode, but women is property. Well, what does that mean? It means that one property is basically the same as slavery. A slave is a particular term for a human being owning another human being. If you own a creature, if you own a pig or a goat, that is your property that you can dispose of as you

38:37 see fit. Because it's an animal, it has no protections beyond you know the very most basic protections of law. To own a human is fundamentally what parenthood is. When you give birth as a mother to a new child and hand that child to the father and he cradles the child in his arm for the first time, that is his child, that is her child, that is their property. Is that is that defamatory? Is that something that degrades the child. No, that child is a treasure. That child, especially the firstborn child, is the most precious treasure in the lives of those parents. To have that child as their own is the most incredible gift and responsibility that they will ever receive. And so we don't think about that in terms of property, but

39:25 that's absolutely what it is. And in fact that's something the the state is actively seeking to encroach on today to say that, well, if your child at three years wants to if your boy wants to put on a tutu, we're gonna take him away from you if you don't let 'em get put on hormone replacement therapy, so that he becomes a girl, quote unquote. There's no such thing. But you can absolutely mutilate and destroy a child. So the idea that a child belongs to his parents is perfectly normal to us. It's something libertarians kind of have a problem with, but that's part of why we're having these problems today is that there's so much libertarian thought that's pervading everything in in Western culture.

40:08 Well except maybe Rothbard, but for different reasons. Yeah. When slaves are owned, that means that there's a master and there's a slave. The master purchases a human being and owns them. and is responsible for them, twenty four seven, for clothing, for feeding, for their health, for everything. And scripture is clear that slave owners are not to mistreat their slaves. They are to be kind masters, they're to take care of all their needs. We're not going to talk about the policies, but simply the fact that someone would be owned by someone else isn't foreign to Christianity. So So the question of women as property is is another one where they're trying to m say something that's completely anti-feminist.

40:57 You know, Walther said that feminism was coming if we go down the road of abolitionism. He was absolutely right. What do you do? You have you have anti-slavery, you have abolitionism, and then what comes next? Women's liberation. Well, liberation from what? Women were liberated from men. They were liberated from patriarchy. Because prior to that movement that caused legal changes in the twentieth century in America and other countries, a woman was in the custody of her husband or of her father. And we see this even to this day in the forum of Western marriages, where although it's now considered pro forma and kind of, you know, if it's done, maybe it's trad, but it doesn't serve any real purpose.

41:43 But it used to be a very significant thing for a suitor to approach the father and ask his permission for his daughter's hand in marriage. And the hand in marriage thing is important too because when the wedding ceremony takes place, even today it's the norm for the father of the bride to walk her up the aisle and then to hand her hand to her groom. Now, today we just sort of see these as kind of cute traditions, but historically and legally, that was a transfer of title. That was that was an actual legal transaction. Now, it's not like someone selling his infant to someone else, it's about a father saying, I was the head of this girl. I am transferring headship to this man who will now be her

42:36 husband, and who will be her head in my stead and in God's stead. And the husband becomes the primary head of the woman. And scripture talks a great length about the manner in which the husband of a wife is her head, not to be domineering, but to be a head, to be that who dis the one who decides, who protects, who defends, and if necessary who will sacrifice for her. So the notion of title being transferred doesn't imply something disposable. We're not talking about a goat. You know, when I used that that example earlier, it wasn't to compare children or wives or daughters to livestock, but it's to say that the custody and the care of someone is fundamentally Christian in the very most basic way.

43:24 And so for a church to say women as property is evil flies in the face of virtually all of human history. And I think that's something we need to be concerned about. Of course it also ignores the tenth commandment, in which women are listed along with other property. And it's worth highlighting something here that sometimes comes up. It's in relation to both this point and the slavery point. At some point, someone decided it was a good argument to say that southern slavery and some others is worthy of particular condemnation, was particularly evil because it was chattel slavery. And I won't go so far as to say that's a completely ridiculous term, but it is almost always a completely ridiculous term.

44:15 And the reason for that is simple. In property law, there are two kinds of property. We're going to ignore intellectual property, see previous episode for why. There's real property, which is land, basically, and things that are very attached to the land more or less. And then there's chattel property. Chattel property is anything that isn't real property. So the pen I'm holding, my chattel property, the microphone I'm using, chattel property, slaves, chattel property. That's just what they are. And so the only time where you could use chattel slavery to actually have meaning would be if you are differentiating it from, say, the practice of some of the Greek city-states, Sparta, particularly, where the

45:00 state owned all the slaves. And so they were more state property, but they're still chattel property, they're just chattel property of the state instead of personal chattel property. And so when someone uses that term he is attempting to mislead you, he probably doesn't realize he's doing it because he probably doesn't Don't know what the term means. And so if you're talking about chattels, it's just a term for personal property. That's all it means. It's a legal term of art. It's not a significant ideological argument when someone says, oh, it was chattel slavery in the South, and so then it was evil because of that. No, that's just someone who doesn't know what terms mean. But again, to return to the point that women are listed in

45:44 the tenth commandment, along with other property, because the second table is dealing largely in property rights, if we want to go so far as to say your life is a property interest and therefore the fifth commandment is also Is also a property matter. But the second table is dealing with property. And so to say that someone is property is not to denigrate the person, is not to insult the person, is not to demean or call the person less than human. That's not what is being said. Owning another person does not fundamentally change the nature of that person. It changes that person's relation to you, the person's relation to the laws, to the state, perhaps, but it doesn't change the fact that he is a human being, and at least insofar as he's a

46:33 Christian, he is in the image of God, that image being restored and regeneration. And so the whole point of this argument is to make you just think, oh, calling someone property is a horrible, wicked thing, and they want to use and abuse them. And really that reveals something about the nature and the disposition, the personality of the person making the argument. I don't abuse my property. I don't beat my dog. I don't I don't even I don't abuse any of my property. I don't abuse my animals. I treat them quite nicely, I give them treats, my chickens get treats all the time. I go out of my way not to walk on patches of clover because I like to keep the flowers alive for the bees. That's just the kind of person I am, and so to me

47:18 the idea that property means something that you would destroy is absurd. I wouldn't do that. But it sort of reveals something about the kind of person who would make that argument. Saying that a woman is property is a recognition of the proper relationship of her father to her or her husband to her. It's not saying anything about her value or what she is or should be. And of course, part of the reason, as mentioned that this is included here, is that it flies in the face of feminism, and feminism is one of the modern idols, one of the modern religions of our world. We will put a link in the show notes to the Wikipedia article on coverture, which was the English common law doctrine related to

48:04 the manner in which a woman was the property of either her husband or her father. This is not it's not a matter of dispute. So if if it's a moral matter, then the church is saying that either morality changed or everyone before the late nineteenth century was immoral. And if you push these men, that's what they'll say. They'll say everybody was evil in virtually all of human history until us. We are the enlightened generation. We are freed from the shackles of these evil. That's really what this whole press release is about. It's an announcement of a new religion. And we'll get to that towards the end, but this is fundament this is a religion that they're describing. Like we're not we're when they're saying that these things are doctrinal

48:48 and we're saying that they're not, we're not disputing that they're not religious doctrines. We're disputing that they're Christian doctrine because they're not. Nothing in here has any nexus to Christianity. It is, however, a satanic religion that is being placed over the church to this way. Like this press release wouldn't exist if there were not demons controlling what the Missouri Senate is doing. The next name that they give is fascism, you know, which is obviously one of the biggest, most terrifying, scary words you can use. If you see someone online using the word fascist They're almost always a pedophile, uh communist, uh sodomite, you know, all three is very common as well. Those are the people who are freaking out about fascists.

49:38 Oh, and also a lot of Christians now are freaking out about fascists. Why do you think that is? Regardless of what the term is, if even if you don't know what it means, if you know nothing about it or its history or what might be embodied by any notion of some sort of ideology and this is one that's actually an ideology, so I'll give him credit for the headline saying ideologies. If all of your bedmates are the very most worst evil reprehensible human beings on the planet, are you gonna join hand in hand with them and saying, yeah, I get those fascists, we gotta kill them. Well, the Missouri Senate is. The Missouri Senate is actively coordinating with and promoting Antifa, literal anti-fascist

50:20 communists against us personally. They've coordinating a doxing campaign. They're seeking our physical destruction. Again, for the Stone Choir podcast. We'll talk about that more in the future elsewhere, but I think it's important that when Harrison and all the VPs and all the DPs of Senate say that they condemn hat fascism, they're aligning with the world, regardless of what the word means. I don't even care what the word means. The fact that they would attack it in lockstep is fundamentally in alignment with the spirit of this age. I think it's worth mentioning quickly a little more about just exactly what Antifa is. Because some listeners and particularly older listeners are not going to have

51:03 a great idea about Antifa. You're going to have a mental image of someone clad in black protesting against, you know, capital Capitalism, most likely, you're going to have that sort of view. Possibly some violence, probably throwing Molotovs, things like that. That's part of the way there. What Antifa actually is, it started off in Germany, and it started off as the militant wing of the Communist Party. It's antifascistic action, anti fascist action, which basically just means they are the street thugs who beat up people, kill people in the streets because that was definitely happening quite frequently in Germany in that era, they were the street level violence against anyone who opposed the Marxist

51:56 revolution. And that's the same thing they are today. They are the point of the spear, the tip of the spear, as it were. They are the individuals who go out and agitate in the street and attack people and attempt to bring about the Marxist revolution. That is their role, that is what they're doing. The actual people organizing the revolution and such are elsewhere. They don't do the street level violence on the left side typically. But that's what Antifa is. It is a wicked, evil, communist, atheist, anti Christian organization. In particular in Germany, they like to target the clergy. And undoubtedly they will start doing that more actively here, unless of course the clergy continue to support them, in which case they'll wait

52:46 a little while. They'll get around to it because they always do. You don't survive the revolution by bending the knee to it, as history makes very clear. But that's what we're dealing with when we talk about Antifa. And that is what is in view here when so called fascism is condemned. Not one of the men who uses this as a pejorative would be able to actually define what fascism is, and part of that is that fascism is an umbrella term. Fascism really just means authoritarian right wing. So not libertarian right wing, but authoritarian right wing. I have an article on this, I will link it in the show notes. If you're listening to this podcast, you are definitionally a fascist. You may not know it, but you are, because you support things

53:36 that are authoritarian and right wing, like marriage being between one man and one woman, like controlling hard drugs, like outlawing prostitution, like banning pornography. These are all fascist positions. And so when the term fascism is used, what they want you to do Is blanket condemn all of these authoritarian right-wing positions. So what they're getting you to do is condemn yourself without knowing that's what you're doing. And that's all fascism means. Fascism, it's not used in the technical sense anymore of being an authoritarian right-wing Italian movement in the 30s, well, 20s and 30s. No one means that anymore. It just means authoritarian right-wing. It's that entire upper right quadrant of the political grid.

54:29 And so that is what's being done here. The goal is to get you to agree with it and condemn yourself and condemn all of your ancestors and everything the church has stood for throughout time without realizing it. Except you should realize it because you're agreeing with the Marxists when you do it. And if you knew nothing else, that would be sufficient. That's one of the points we've made over and over again. What's the genealogy of the idea that you are subscribing to? The reason we did that as one of the very first episodes is it's such a seminal feature of confronting evil in the world. Cause evil in the world first begins with arguments and then begins with actions. And when the arguments are being made by men like Harrison here,

55:14 they're being made in terms that are designed to scare you and to box you into a corner and to condemn yourself, as Corey said. And then they have you. Then you've bent the knee and you've offered the pinch of incense in the new religion that you're suddenly finding yourself subscribing to puts what you thought you wanted to believe in the rearview mirror, but you bent the knee, so how do you how do you get back up off your knees to go find the true God to kneel before him? Most Most men aren't equipped for it. They will just go down the path and not even look back because the the psychic cost, the personal cost of s realizing I have made a mistake and who I've made my my stable mates here is is more than most men can bear.

55:56 They'd rather dance with the one that brought them. The second last item in this list of uh horrible racist teachings that Harrison condemns is I think probably the most important because is a direct condemnation of God. It is a literal damnation of the God of Scripture. Harrison says we categorically reject the horrible and racist teachings of the so called alt right, including death for homosexuals. Now, I've never said that anywhere online because I know that I would get banned. I don't think it. I personally it's not something that I would pursue. And when we talk about the left hand and the right hand kingdom, that's what we're talking about. When we as individuals prescribe any sort of policy, we're not saying

56:47 we're going to go do this, because that would be illegitimate. It is for the godly prince to uphold godly laws. So when Harrison says death for homosexuals is fundamentally evil, he's not talking about the God of the Bible. Here's what the God of the Bible says If a man lies with a male as with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination, they shall surely be put to death. Their blood is upon them. That's God. That is the triune God. Now, the trick that these Marcionites will play, like Harrison and the rest of the LCMS, he'll say, Oh, that was the God of the Old Testament, the God of the New Testament doesn't do that. Oh, so God changes. God was the same yesterday, but today he's different.

57:36 Is he going to be different tomorrow? Is that the God that is described in scripture? Absolutely not. For Harrison to say that anyone, regardless of saying that we did it, which we didn't, it would be stupid to say it and we don't think it, but even the the mere fact that he would condemn this as evil demonstrates that Matt Harrison is not a Christian and that this religion that he is describing is an anti Christ religion. I guess it is worth pointing out that there's just an additional little layer of ridiculousness in the arguments he's making here, because the ideologies that are being condemned, the ideologies of the so called are alt right, are described as horrible and racist. Last I checked homosexual's not a race.

58:27 But apparently he needs an editor. He needs more than that. He also needs a historian because uh once again, you know, we've you you'll notice this is a recurring theme where we'll have a church saying something with absolute moral authority, d declaring up and down you'll go to hell if you don't believe this thing. And if you look and say, well, did they believe that a hundred years ago, two hundred years ago? It all falls apart. They will try to point to proof text in scripture, ignoring the ones that repudiate their own views, and they'll ignore the entirety of the Christian church history. In fifteen thirty three, King Henry VIII passed what was called the Buggery Act. It was the country's first civil sodomy law, such offences having previously

59:13 been dealt with by the ecclesiastical courts. Buggery in England remained a capital offense until eighteen sixty one. So what that means is that for hundreds and in fact thousands of years, it was common for homosexuals, which is a novel term itself, sodomite is really the more appropriate term, homosexual is a psychological term that was adopted basically as part of moving from sodomite to homosexual to gay. Now it's just, you know, someone has a different sexuality. That's, you know, that's their own personal business. That was a very deliberate transition. That trajectory was framing. It was it was taking the frame of sodomite, turning into the frame of homosexual where it's a psychological thing, and it's gay.

59:58 We're all it's a lifestyle. And suddenly well you're boxed in as a Christian because how can you possibly think that a godly prince would execute sodomites when godly princes have been doing it for thousands of years and God himself commanded it to his own people. Now Corey and I are not returning to we're not arguing for a return to Levitical Law. The narrow point to be accepted here is that when a man like Matt Harrison says the death for sodomites is itself sin, and God says you shall put them to death. Harrison is antichrist. He is not speaking about God. He is speaking against God in God's stead. And we'll get to some of the places where he makes it very explicit that he's speaking in God's stead when he damns God

1:00:48 for what God said. And the history of of the sodomy laws goes on. Once again, uh the history of these laws pops up just changing during the French Revolution. In 1791, the National Constituent Assembly abolished the laws against homosexuality as part of adopting a new legal code without the influence of Christianity. Well, that's what the LCMS is today. It is a church without the influence of Christianity. When the the president and every vice president and every district president signs this press release that condemns those who would say that as a matter of policy it is acceptable for a godly prince to execute sodomites, they are standing in opposition to God and to his church and to his throne.

1:01:37 Additionally, we have a comment from Luther that I want to read here about the issue of sodomy, homosexuality, just to highlight how society felt about the issue in his time. And this is from Luther's commentary on Genesis, in particular Genesis nineteen nineteen, of course dealing with Sodom and Gomorrah, I for my part do not enjoy dealing with this passage, because so far the ears of the Germans are innocent and uncontaminated by this monstrous depravity, for even though disgrace, like other sins, has crept in through an ungodly soldier and a lewd merchant, still the rest of the people are unaware of what is being done in secret. The Carthusian monks deserve to be hated because they were the first

1:02:24 to bring this terrible pollution into Germany from the monasteries of Italy. And so in Luther's day, this was so unknown that he didn't even want to discuss Genesis 19 because of how reprehensible the behavior in it is. And now today basically our entire society has accepted it, and now we have Matt Harrison advancing this very same agenda in the very same way it was advanced in our society generally. I want to read a a couple more brief clips from uh Wikipedia just to give you a sense of historical frame of how not only anti-Christian Harrison's claims are, but how fundamentally at odds with American history they are. Documented executions for sodomy began in sixteen twenty four. The Massachusetts Bay General Court was the first to officially outlaw sodomy

1:03:16 in 1631. The first documented conviction for lesbian behavior in America took place in 1649 with the arrest and execution of Sarah Norman and Mary Hammond. In seventeen fourteen, sodomy laws were established across the early colonies in any colonial militia. The laws were not abolished until nineteen twenty five. And in fact, prior to nineteen sixty two, sodomy was a felony in every state punished by a lengthy term of imprisonment and or hard labor. So look again. You have the French Revolution and you have nineteen sixty two. How often does the French Revolution in the nineteen sixties pop up in our episodes. We should really have a little counter with each episode for w when those come up, 'cause it's nearly all of them.

1:04:03 So I guess it might be redundant. But these things that we're battling in the church today, and this is not this is not an LCMS problem, this is the whole church. Because it's Satan's culture is informing our morality. And that's fundamentally what's going on here. Harrison has morals. He has very deeply held moral convictions. They are Satan's morality. These are teachings of demons. Because what does Harrison and the LCMS want you to believe as a Christian? He wants you to believe that if something is a sin, a sin against God, that it can't be illegal. how does that work? As a civil society in the in the left-hand kingdom, how does it work when the church starts declaring that sins, serious sins, are

1:04:53 not to be considered criminal matters? What that is what is happening is Satan is cutting off Christ's left hand, or he's trying to tie it behind his back. And Matt Harrison, the Antichrist and the LCMS is trying to help him by saying, Oh no, these these sins are that's just a speck in your neighbor's eye. don't look there. That's something that we just we have to we have to love them back to Christ and they're never gonna change. 'Cause that's what it says in in the large cataclysm with the annotations, that these people will never be sanctified from this evil nature. And you certainly can't punish them because you could try to love them to Jesus. Well, once again, these are moral matters and they're policy matters.

1:05:36 Even if you disagree with us, even if you think the sodomy should not return to being illegal as it has always been, you cannot contend that someone who believes that is committing a sin. You simply can't. It must necessarily be a disagreement. It must be a matter of opinion. I think is a moral matter that it is in fact sin to say that things that are sinful can never can't be illegal, but I'm not gonna say you go to hell if you disagree with me. I just think it's wrong. I think it's a dangerous and potentially deadly error, as we're seeing here. Because this is this is all about the slippery slope. This is Harrison and the LCMS saying, We're just gonna keep chipping away at God's law until there's nothing left, until all we have

1:06:25 is the gospel, all we have is love. Well, they had love in the 60s too. They didn't need Jesus to have love. And that's that's where Harrison is taking the church. It's where the LCMS and all of its DPs and all of its VPs are taking the church to say that, you know what, as long as we love these people, we'll try to get around to the Jesus stuff labor. It's not gonna work. This is also for Lutherans directly against our confessions. In multiple places in the confessions, we affirm, and the princes who signed our confessions affirmed, that it is the duty of those who rule in the left hand kingdom to ensure that right doctrine is taught in their lands. That is throughout the Book of Concord, that is the confession of

1:07:10 Lutherans. And so as Lutherans we are bound by this. There are others who may disagree because their confession doesn't include this. But for our part, for Lutherans, we are bound to hold that it is the duty of the godly prince to see that right doctrine is taught in his lands and that God's word is upheld. And just for instance, in the preface to the Book of Concord, it is In regard to these matters, as we have mentioned above, it has always been our purpose that in our lands, dominions, schools, and churches, no other doctrine be proclaimed, and accurately set forth, than that which is founded upon the Word of God, and contained in the Augsburg Confession and the Apology, and that too, when understood properly

1:07:56 in its genuine sense, and that opinions conflicting with these be not admitted, and indeed, with this design, this formula of agreement was begun and completed. That's from the preface to the Book of Concord, and we have electors, princes, and others who signed these documents and put their lives very much on the line to uphold this, that is the position of Lutherans down through the centuries, except apparently the LCMS today. So to round out the the first paragraph here, we're gonna go a lot quicker through the rest as we promised. The very last thing that Harrison's LCMS condemns is even genocide, which honest face is a bald face lie. Neither of us have ever said anything about genocide.

1:08:41 Nobody that I've ever seen anywhere in our sphere, which is again fundamentally what he's talking about. Like, see, these guys are too chicken to name names. And part of that is they don't want to face a libel suit for what would be actionable. But they're absolutely talking about us, and we'll we'll demonstrate that in when we get to the rest of this. But for them to condemn genocide is also an explicit condemnation of scripture. Genocide is the slaughter of a people, of a nation. Geno, like genome. It's the same root that we talked about in the nations episode. It's talking about a race. It's talking about the extermination of a race, which is interesting because they also simultaneously say that race doesn't exist, but I guess race

1:09:25 can exist if someone's trying to exterminate one. I'm not sure how you figure out what a race is if they're not real, but anyway, he's explicitly condemning scripture yet again. Here's what Samuel fifteen says. Thus says the Lord of Hosts, I have noted what Amalek did to Israel in opposing them on the way when they came up out of Egypt. Now go and strike Amalek and devote to destruction all that they have, do not spare them, but kill both man and woman, child and infant, ox and sheep, camel and donkey. And in Joshua ten, so this is this is a separate incident, so Joshua struck the whole land, the hill country and the Negr Negeb, and the lowland and the slopes, and all their kings, he left none remaining, but devoted to destruction, all the breathed, just as

1:10:12 the Lord God of Israel commanded. Now these aren't the only two only two places what what today the UN would call genocide occurred in Scripture. It was routine that when God condemned a nation, he would send its enemies to slaughter them wholesale. That was God's will. So on one hand, neither Cory nor I know any nor anyone I've ever seen has ever advocated for the genocide of anyone. But separately, even if that were done, it cannot be condemned morally. God did it. And see this is one of the tricks that they'll play yet again. These Marcionites who will deny that the God of the Old Testament is the God of the New Testament, they will say, Well, that was Old Testament, and so that was the wrath God, but

1:10:59 then Jesus was born and now we have the love God. And they worship the love God. And that's true. they do worship a love god, but it is not the triune God, because the God of the Old Testament is the eternal God. If you had only one, you would have all of them because God is unchanging. And this God who said when there are evil people, my people, I will command them to wipe them out, while God isn't giving Christian nations today sucks directives to say categorically that that is per se sin accused Accuses God of sin. There's no way to get around that. Matt Harrison is an antichrist who accuses God of sin repeatedly throughout the Old Testament. And the only out that he has is to say, well, that

1:11:42 was the Old Testament God. Good luck with that on judgment day, because it's the unified Trinity who is going to be judging him. And the unified Trinity who commanded genocide and commanded the execution of sodomites will judge him for speaking falsely in his name. God actually went further than just commanding genocide. God personally committed genocide. According to the modern international law definition of genocide, what God did to Egypt was genocide. God himself committed genocide in the pages of scripture. And so a blanket condemnation of genocide is a condemnation and rejection of God. It is something Christians cannot do. Christians cannot do it. And yet the Missouri Synod is doing it.

1:12:31 Cannot be Christian if this statement stands. And the statement will stand. We will see we'll we'll get to it in a minute, but this will be agreed and amplified by the convention that's coming up this summer and things will will get even worse. And we're gonna move on quickly to the some of the rest of the paragraphs because there's there's some meat and bits and pieces here. Harrison continues. The synoctic explanation of Luther's small catechism teaches that the fifth commandment, you shall not murder, includes the prohibition of quote hating, despising, or slandering other groups of people, parentheses, prejudice, racism, and so forth. The scriptures agree. Everyone who hates his brother is a murderer, and you know that

1:13:13 no murderer has eternal life abiding in him. Every human being is precious to God and as valuable as the very blood of Jesus Christ shed for all, for God so loved the world that he gave his only Son. Now the meat and I think in this paragraph is they correctly admit the synocal explanation. I think we should start off by reading what the the small catechism says. Because of course for the the Lutheran audience we all memorize that as children, but for those who are listening and not Lutheran, in the actual small catechism of doctor Martin Luther under the fifth commandment, thou shalt not kill. What does this mean? We should fear and love God, that we may not hurt nor harm our neighbor in his body, but help and befriend him in

1:13:59 every bodily need. That's it. That's what is said in the small catechism about the fifth commandment. You may notice that what is quoted here by Matt Harrison is not there. There's a reason for that. And this synocal explanation, which I'm glad that they admitted, but we'll get to why it's not really an admission, it's actually them asserting even greater authority. The small catechism has been updated a number of times. Uh when I was catechized, we used the 1943 version, which I think was the last one that used King James. Maybe the 1991 had King James as well. In 2008, they added some additional explanations on top of the earlier ones. And but it didn't include this. It wasn't until twenty seventeen that Harrison's own small catechism, with Harrison's

1:14:49 newly edited annotated explanations of what Luther wrote, added Hating, despising, or slandering other groups of people, prejudice, racism, and so forth. That's brand new doctrine in 2017 that didn't exist for 500 years. Now, this is highly important because what kicked all this off and what we'll get into in a minute briefly is that the large catechism with annotations is why we are talking about this today. Because Harrison, after he finished adding these new doctrines to the small catechism, he immediately moved on to the large catechism, which is an equally important document for teaching the faith in different parts of the church, to fathers, to husbands, to pastors, to any layman who wants

1:15:35 to learn more in depth about what the Christian faith means. Luther's large catechism has many outstanding useful things that are enumerating an amplification of what is said in the small catechism about the Lord's Supper, about baptism, about the confession of sins, about the Lord's Prayer, and so forth. So when Harrison inserted new doctrine in twenty seventeen, and then in twenty twenty three he cites it as authoritative. That's the game that we are fighting against. The reason that we objected to the large catechism having those essays appended to it. See, what they're saying today is oh those essays are just it's ancillary, it's not it's not something you have to subscribe to. Well, do you have to subscribe to this?

1:16:21 Because the the synod, on behalf of every member of Synod, which is every single pastor, says you must hold to what Harrison wrote in 2017, or you're damned. See, this is papism. This is new doctrines being introduced by the magisterium and being imposed unilaterally by a pope, by whatever name he goes, over against Scripture, against its church, against God's church. This church doesn't belong to me, it doesn't belong to Harrison. It belongs to God. So yeah, it is a synonical explanation. It's not a Christian explanation, and it's certainly not a Lutheran explanation. The reason that we object to these things being added and annotated and appended is that when erroneous, foolish, and in this case, demonically

1:17:10 possessed men begin to introduce false doctrines, we're stuck with them. Like those books went out, they were printed. John Pless, one of the editors, immediately hopped on an airplane to Africa to pass them out in Africa. I guess you know, sticking them with with false doctrine. I don't how to even do the math on that one. But that's what we're dealing with. The these additions of new doctrines are specifically incremental subversions of an institution. Because every Lutheran knows, oh, the large catechism, the small catechism, those are a big deal. Those are important foundational confessional documents. Every Lutheran subscribes to them, every church bylaw and constitution says that it upholds them without equivocation.

1:17:56 So when these men introduce these things in the margins and in the periphery, they can deliberately confuse people by saying that these new teachings that we made up five years ago or five months ago, those are binding on your conscience too. This is an act of pure malevolence, and this is why every document that is produced by a church body must be ruthlessly pruned of anything that could possibly be used for deception down the road. So the the last bit of this particular paragraph that's worth mentioning is that the quote of course from first John three, everyone who hates his brother is a murderer. We've gone over at length previously the difference between brother and neighbor. One, no one on our side is advocating hating your neighbor.

1:18:46 And two certainly no one is advocating hating his brother, so this accusation is just completely false. But that is, of course, in keeping with the MO for pretty much everything Harrison seems to write these days. But moving on to the next paragraph, we were shocked to learn recently that a few members of LCMS congregations have been propagating radical and unchristian quote alt right unquote views via Twitter and other social media. They are causing local disruption and consternation for their pastors, congregations and district presidents. They have publicly stated that they seek the destruction of the LCA LCMS leadership. They have made serious online threats to individuals and scandalously attacked several

1:19:33 faithful LCMS members. Through these social media posts, even our wonderful deaconesses have been threatened and attacked. May as well read the next line as well. This is evil we condemn it in the name of Christ. There's a lot in this particular paragraph that's just false on its face and ridiculous. We'll start with perhaps the most trivial accusation, I guess. The comment about deaconesses is because we brought up the issue of women teaching in the church and producing materials intended for the instruction of pastors. And in fact there was fairly extensive interaction with some individuals on our side and deaconesses and some who have even produced these materials that are being used to instruct pastors and others in the church.

1:20:22 All of it was respectful. No one flung insults, there was no denigration, none of that, no threats, no attacks. This is just an outright lie. And this started off very early, and it's just been continuously repeated and amplified, but there is no evidence. They will offer no evidence because there is no evidence. It's all publicly searchable because much of this was conducted on Twitter. The archive, the history is there. You can go back and look for it yourself. So this is just a lie. On the deaconess point, we we have well I have certainly said that I don't think the deaconesses should exist. I don't think that program should exist. It's clear to everyone who's actually paying attention that this is backdoor

1:21:02 women's ordination. They have a uniform. You anytime you see a picture of an LCMS deaconess, they won't be facing you. They're going to be facing their right with their left shoulder facing you. The reason for that is that there's a deaconess uniform. See they won't put on a collar. So what they do? They put a special cross patch on their special jackets, on their left shoulder so that you know that they're a deaconess. Show so when they show up, you know that you're dealing with a very special church lady who has very special theological training and you better listen to her. And that's exactly what's going on. Now some of them are nice ladies, I'm sure that they're believing how the program was sold.

1:21:42 Nevertheless, when they graduate, they're all given the pastoral care companion. They're all given things and said, You're gonna go out and you're gonna do pastoral care. But it's not pastor stuff, it's private. You're not gonna commune anyone, you're just gonna pray with them and you're gonna guide them, etc. And it's it's backdoor women's ordination, and they know it. They know that they are empowering women. That's what it's about. It's about female empowerment. It's not about serving the body of Christ. When we did the the episodes at the very beginning or we talked about this very controversy, we pointed out that during that controversy, not one of them talked about Titus V, not one of them

1:22:22 talked about what God says women should be teaching. They should the older women should be teaching the younger women to obey their husbands and to work in their homes. And what does the Deaconess program do? This the seminaries are actually trying to poach wives, young wives of men in our churches to say that the the women should go off to the deaconess program to move to one of our seminaries to disrupt their families to do these things. That is evil on its face. That is evil on its face. Never mind the deaconess thing. But the fact that such evil is going on is a reason that we fundamentally oppose the existence of the program or the existence of what is frankly a made up title. You can go back to the very first episode of this Stone

1:23:07 choir the the entire podcast to hear us talk about that at length. But this is where we're when we said at the beginning, and this was at this podcast, this is the proof. A few members of LCMS congregations have been propagating radical and unchristian all-right views on Twitter and other social media. That's us. That's whoever they're talking about. No, the accusation is a lie, but they specifically mean Corey and they mean me. No, the next sentence has another lie. They're causing local disruption and consternation for their pastors. That is a categorical lie. The men who have been specifically targeted, and we'll get into what the targeting was in a minute, have never had any issues in their congregations, with the exception of Corey, who's spoken previously about three

1:23:55 godless pastors, so called, who sent ridiculous false accusations to his pastor, which he reviewed last June. And what did his pastor do? His pastor said, I find no fault here. And he continued to commune Corey. Corey was never put under church discipline. There was never any problem. Yes, the pastor spoke to him due to slander, due to other pastors lying about him. Is that Cory causing problems? Or is that liars causing problems? The liars cause the problem for Corey's pastor. So this is false on its face. They are causing local disruption absolutely not. There's not been another single congregation besides his that had any disruption of any sort until the subsequent lies that followed on from this demonic male continued.

1:24:42 I'm also not sure that anyone rational would really characterize a meeting as a disruption. Perhaps consternation, yes, because having to field false charges by false shepherds is undoubtedly annoying for a pastor, but it is part of the job. And so we'll move on to one of the last two. They have publicly stated that they seek the destruction of the LCMS leadership. And so there are probably a handful of tweets they're thinking of. I have two of them here that I will read on january twentieth, I tweeted, these interlopers and subverters will be removed, these men in single quotes, have no claim to the historical Lutheran Church, and they have no connection to the men who came before them. As for me and many others, we will continue attending Opa's church.

1:25:35 I'm of course referring to Valter there. And the second of the two. The entire LCMS leadership is apostate or derelict. They must all be removed and forever barred, no exceptions. That was also January twentieth. This letter dated February 21st. So in other words, I just presage things by a month. More or less, because with this letter and the fact that the entirety of the leadership of the LCMS, and not just the leadership, but it Harrison also claims to be speaking for the ministerium and for the congregations. He claims to be speaking for the entirety of the LCMS. And so what I said is entirely accurate, as we are proving by going through this letter. He is apostate. Some of the others are apostate.

1:26:28 Every last one of them who is not apostate is derelict. I absolutely meant what I said, and I reiterate it now because it is true. It was true then, it's even more true now. I want to say something specific about the timing of these tweets because january twentieth, when you tweeted the L the entire LCMS leadership is apostate or derelict and they must be forever removed or barred. That was in direct response to the publication of the large cataclysm. We had it in hand. We had been reviewing those specific essays. We were digging through them. We were finding these demonic errors that Matt Harrison was propagating in the name of Marxism, in the name of his new religion, and masquerading his Lutheranism.

1:27:11 We knew at that point something that we had known for a couple years. Corey and I have known how evil Matt was. We weren't able to publicly prove it, which is why we weren't saying it until this year. The reason that we have begun to say these things these things publicly is with the publication of the large cataclysm, Harrison has gone fully mask off. he confessed a false God by what he published in that demonic book. And it was clear's day. It was clear's day to us. The reason we did the IQ episode in part was to say there are men who can see clearly what's gonna happen that you can't see clearly. So when Corey said the entire LCMS leadership, and as Corey just mentioned, they all signed this this email.

1:27:56 They all signed this press release damning Christian doctrine. Now, did Corey jump the gun? Did Corey speak out of turn? Or did he simply know something for a fact that it took other people a little while longer to catch up to. It's the latter. We can see things sometimes clearly that other people can't. And like I said, we didn't say these things in twenty twenty when we knew it, because we couldn't make a demonstrable case. Today we can make that case, which is why I have no reservations about saying that Matt Harrison is antichrist. This letter is antichrist. The large cataclysm is an affront to God. And so yes, absolutely we have stated that we seek not the destruction, we seek the removal, which is a hilarious part of this.

1:28:44 Is as you were saying in prep, like the idea that these would be threats of any sort of personal violence or anything, not only is utterly false, not only is it a direct violation of the eighth commandment, which calls on every Christian to put the kindest possible light on how we explain what our brothers in Christ say. But it would be stupid. Like no harm befalling Harrison or any of the other men would change anything about the doctrine of the church. The church will continue regardless of any of us. The reason that the doctrines matter is that the doctrines perpetuate themselves because men will come along and point to them. So when you said removed and forever barred, it was th from theology. Harrison must be removed from his post, along with every other

1:29:32 VP. Lang and Woolrobby and Murray and Noor and Esket and Bell must all be removed and forever barred. Why? Because they are guilty of the large cataclysm and they signed this letter and they continue to be guilty for all of these evil things. Not one of them has spoken up and said, not in my name. I don't believe any of that. And it doesn't matter if they're going through back channels. And we'll get to why that's such a pivotal part of this. Because fundamentally, this whole thing is about back channels and the fact that podcasts like Stone Choir are not a back channel. What these men fundamentally do not want is for layman to speak about theology in a way that makes them look bad. Full stop.

1:30:13 This entire thing is about Matt Harrison's Maui vacation getting screwed up and him looking like a jackass because he pulled it, he pulled the large cataclysm, and then he shipped it again nine or ten days later because all of his buddies said, No, it's fine, those are Nazis. He you know Vogel and Kilcrees and all the other flying monkeys of the CTCR who were directly responsible for pedophilia advocacy and all the other evil in the large cataclysm went through our timelines and they said, These men are Nazis, you don't need to listen to them. And Harrison was like, Oh man, Nazis, that's terrifying. And so he went full bore. And this letter is a direct response to the things that we have been saying and specifically to other to us, calling them on

1:30:56 the carpet for lying. Lying in God's name, which is a damn above almost all others. And that accusation of supposed threats made is the fourth point from this paragraph that's worth highlighting. And just to read that line again, they have made serious online threats to individuals and scandalously attacked several faithful LCMS members. Notice what Harrison is attempting to do there. Pay careful attention. Serious online threats and then attacked. Well attacked just means critiqued in this case. It means that we've said things about their false positions, the false comments they've made, their false doctrine, and that that is supposedly here an attack. It's not an attack, it's a critique. If you want to call it an attack on false doctrine, fine

1:31:46 in so far as that is true, it is to some degree. There have been no threats, no serious online threats, no online threats of any kind. We are in a position to know the people who had access to this information who were involved in discussing it, looking at it, critiquing it. No one made any threats. No one would make any threats. Why would anyone make any threats? It doesn't make any sense to do that. It would be extremely dumb to do so. And so no one has done that. Even I can tell you I can tell you which tweet they're talking about. So the next day on the twenty first. the next day on the 21st, when Ryan Turnipseed had posted his thread that included all the things that he and others had found

1:32:34 in the patechism, I was in that thread uh at some point and someone replied to me. They've since deleted their account, so I'm sure what they said to me, but it I think it was something in the effect of I I hope you stay in the fight because this is bad news. And my reply on the 21st was, oh, we're not going anywhere. We are going to hunt these people down and bring them to justice. Now if you want to be hysterical and think that someone is trying to kill you, you might hallucinate and think that that was what that tweet was about. As Corey just said, that would be stupid. I I'm not a violent person, and I'm not a stupid person. An intelligent man, if you were going to do something harmful to

1:33:17 someone, would not announce it on Twitter. That's not typically how smart criminals work. You don't broadcast to the entire world where it gets swept up in a police dragnet. Undoubtedly, I'm certain that this tweet in particular was sent to the FBI because I know for a fact that some other tweets have been sent to the FBI. It was sent to them to say, look, this man is making violent threats against us. What did I say? We are going to hunt these people down. Well, hunt, what does that mean? The typical case is not going to be in it well for one thing, this is rhetoric. When one of the techniques in hunting, and I'm not a hunter, my father's a hunter, but I I went once or twice like squirrel and rabbit hunting.

1:33:57 I didn't like it. I like going out in the woods, but I don't want to kill anything. Like I'm the same as Cory, like I wa I walk around clover too because I want to see the bees eating it. I'm not a violent man. Against beast or against man. So when I said I want to hunt that we will hunt these people down, well, one of the aspects of hunting is using calls. You can use like a duck call, or you can use a call that simulates a doe that's rutting to draw a buck. Because when it hears certain sounds, the animal will think, oh, one of my friends is over there. I'm gonna go over and, you know, meet up with the group or I'm going to have sex or whatever it is. So one aspect of hunting is calling. When I said that, I specify when I said hunt these people

1:34:41 down, I specifically meant calling them out. Again, not to shoot them. You know, photographers do the same thing. They will also use calls and they'll use bait because they want to get their target to where they can take a picture of them. That's a form of hunting too. It's not called hunting because they're not using a gun, but it's effectively the same thing. It's drawing the target out to expose itself publicly, which is absolutely my desire. And you know what? Mission accomplished. This letter is the culmination of the hunt that I described. I don't need to go anywhere. I have no desire, no intention, I don't have the capacity to go harm people. I wouldn't do that, because it would be fruitless, it would be

1:35:22 evil, I would answer to God for it, and these evil men would just be replaced by others. What I seek is institutional change. That doesn't happen through violence, not in the case of a church. That happens through them being removed. And so when I say bring them to justice, well bring them to justice if you think in terms of vigilanteism, which is of of course what they would want you to think, you think some man like doing something by himself, like some some sort of individual act of vengeance. I have said repeatedly on this podcast series that we are opposed to individual acts of vengeance. Scripture condemns that. God condemns that. I'm not going to say one thing that God says and then go out and do the opposite because I don't like someone online.

1:36:11 So what does bring to justice mean? Well, in this case justice is not the civil courts. It's not there's no there's no earthly justice for these demonic lies these men are telling. The only justice that I can bring them to in this life is to bring them before the church, to tell it to the church, to tell to the church publicly, incidentally, as scripture commands, to bring the evil of men among you before the church, which is what Harrison thinks he's doing with this email, what he has actually done, as he has brought himself out of hiding as an antichrist, and he has exposed himself to the justice of the church. I don't need to do anything else at this point. Like mission accomplished, this tweet that I made on January 21st is

1:36:54 fulfilled by his email and by the subsequent events that we'll go into later. I had I never had any ill or violent intent because I have none in my heart. I wanted the evil of this man that I knew was there for years to be exposed and it's been drawn out. So I thank God for this this letter that you published, this wicked press release signed by the entire Missouri Synod for the evil and the slander and the libel that's in it, because there's not much le else for me to say at this point. If men today see this and they don't see evil, they're not going to believe anything else I say. So like I wouldn't bother. I I truly mean that. Like we'll continue occasionally to to to detail as these things occur,

1:37:38 but I wanted the thing that I knew years ago to be known by the average man who wasn't paying much attention. I wanted to hunt these people down and bring them to justice. That has been done. That was it it's done. It was done in on February twenty first when Harrison published this letter. One would think they would know the subsidiary secondary meaning of hunt, which is just a search for and the same as when I say remove, it means from office. But of course they're that's not their goal. Their goal is to destroy anyone who objects to what they're doing to the church. And that's why they have involved the FBI. That's not an idle comment. That is something we know as a fact has been done. That is the level of the wickedness of these men that Christians

1:38:23 are told not to go to the civil courts against each other. These men would prefer to lynch us, quite frankly, is what they would prefer to see done if they could manage it. And so obviously, there are concerns over swatting and things like that. These things are being handled as best we can, but that is the reality of the situation in which we find ourselves today because of the evil of the men who wrote and signed this letter and those who pushed for it. And that's why we're covering it, because this is what is happening in the church today. These are the men who are attempting to kill the church once and for all, to destroy what is left of the actual church in the US, in the West, in the world.

1:39:08 And so moving on to the next paragraph, these quote alt right, unquote individuals were at the genesis of a recent controversy surrounding essays accompanying a new publication of Luther's large catechism. This group used that opportunity to produce not only scandalous attacks and widespread falsehoods, but also to promote their own absolutist ideologies. Again we have the idiotic term alt right. We've mentioned that already. It's quite frankly an insult to Luther that they call this Luther's large catechism because it's not. It contains the text of the large catechism, but the rest of it is poison, except for a handful of things that were thrown in there to distract people from how bad it is on balance.

1:39:56 And so the the main charge of this, of course, is that this group used that opportunity to produce not only scandalous attacks and widespread falsehoods, but also to promote their own absolutist ideology. There are a number of problems with this. One, widespread falsehoods is the core of this, that's the the linchpin of this particular paragraph, because if what we said is true, then the attacks aren't scandalous. And if we use it to s supposedly promote our ideologies, if what we're saying is in line with the truth, then there's nothing wrong with promoting what is in line with the truth. And so the question is where Were our critiques false? Did we wrongly characterize the annotated large catechism?

1:40:46 And the answer is no. It's published now. It can be found online. The PDF can be found online in various places. People can read the material and see that what we quoted is exactly what's there. What we said is what's there. The critique is sound. You can go watch the stream. I will again put that in the show notes. We were highlighting things in there. Yes, some of it we're going to see, and others may have trouble sussing it out because we understand the Marxism, the ideology that is underlying it. And so when you understand the underlying ideology, you can pick out key terms. You can see why the author used this word instead of that word. But the critique that we leveled against the annotated large catechism

1:41:35 is entirely sound. And in fact, we didn't go anywhere near as hard as we could have gone. We were raising the alarm. We wanted to point out there were serious flaws in this. Synod is lying in the name of every member of the LCMS, every member of an LCMS congregation, and ultimately in the name of God. And that's why we highlighted these errors. And so the attacks, so called, against the authors and the annotated large catechism are not in fact scandalous, because they are accurate. We were critiquing false doctrine. We were pointing out what is being done in the name of the church. We are pointing out this corruption that is seeping into the church that if we do not get rid of it now will destroy

1:42:18 the church in our lifetime. And And this bit about absolutist ideologies is vague to the point you can't even respond to it. I guess you could hearken back to the parenthetical listing the supposed ideologies. But also, I want to highlight the word absolutist. Well, you know what absolutist is? An absolutist ideology? Well that's Christianity. Because those who aren't in Christ go to hell. Black and white. It's a yes or no. When you stand before the throne, it's either well done, good and faithful servant, or depart from me I never knew you. That's absolutist. Christianity is an absolutist ideology. Christianity is not universalist. Christianity is you get it right or wrong, and you go to heaven or hell depending on that one thing.

1:43:10 Yes, there's more to the Christian life than simply believing in Christ, but if you get that part wrong, that absolute question, that yes or no, you go to hell. And so condemning absolutism is again a condemnation of Christianity. It is a condemnation of Scripture. It is a condemnation of God. It is a condemnation of everything for which the church and Christians are supposed to stand. A Christian cannot write this paragraph, cannot write this line. And this paragraph is also the absolute proof that this entire essay or this this press release is directed at Corey and me personally, and two other men. We will link in the show notes once again the turnip stream that was done by Ryan Turnipseed, by Corey, myself, and by one

1:44:00 other man who spoke for about three hours going point by point all the things that Ryan had highlighted in his Twitter thread that went so viral that it was caught up in not quite mainstream but but subsidiary media as Marxism encroaching in the Lutheran church. It gave the Lutheran Church Missouri Senate a black eye. Did it do it because we said things that were scandalous or false? No. It's because we told the truth. The LCMS got a black eye because the LCMS is apostatizing. As Corey said, we like if you go when you listen to the stream, I would encourage you to do so. That stream will prove to be one of the most important moments in LCMS history. I know that sounds incredibly self-aggrandizing, but the four men on that

1:44:44 stream, each of them have been targeted specifically by the president of the Missouri Synod for excommunication if we do not repudiate everything that we said on that stream. Was it because we said anything particularly on that stream that was false? And also each other. No. Yes, and also each other. we must disavow the entire person of every other man on that stream, or we will be declared to go to hell by the LCMS. This is a fact. Now as I said up front, we're gonna be doing a separate uh event at some point where we're gonna talk in detail. We're gonna give everything that has been in secret about what has happened since this letter, but it is an absolute fact that the president of the Missouri Senate marked four layman for excommunication, for doxing,

1:45:28 and for destruction at the hands of the world because we disagreed with his doctrine. Matt Harrison is antichrist. He is He is demonically possessed. He is a fundamentally evil man. He is a threat to everyone who listens to a word he says. And he says the same about me. So you gotta pick. I know that most people are gonna pick him because he's got a collar, he's got the big mustache, he has the enormous comically sized pectoral crucifix that makes him look like a buffoon. Not that the crucifix is, but like how how much Jesus do you have to hide behind for people to believe your bull? I'm anonymous, I'm pseudonymous. No one knows my name until the Missouri Senate succeeds in doxing me. You listen to me if what I say sounds like what

1:46:12 God is saying. This guy won't go anywhere near Scripture. This is a guy who quotes the Declaration of Independence and quotes other garbage like that instead of quoting Scripture, and when he does touch Scripture, it's horribly mangled. That's not the product of the Holy Spirit. So this this paragraph is the absolute proof that we are the men he's talking about, which is why we're saying that this is about us, and it's why we're doing this episode. And you're right about the absolutist thing. Like that's it's a s it's a scare word, but it's also a word that shows that they are universalists. Matt Harrison has friends who are universalists in the Missouri Senate. I've mentioned on a previous episode there's a pastor named Rick McCafferty

1:46:52 who's a pastor in the LCMS in the Northwest District, who's literally an open universalist? He says he's a universalist on a Vimeo page hosted by his district. He is a member in good standing who says that his Pacific Northwest Indian ancestors all went to heaven because they worshipped the great spirit. They already knew God before the white man came. And what is Rick concerned about? He's concerned that white men are coming with their racism and telling his people how they should worship God. They want to have sunrise ceremonies when the the white Lutherans who are coming to those people are saying, let's tell you about Jesus and let's go inside and stop beating drums and stop doing pagan

1:47:37 things and let's start doing Christian things. Rick McCaffrey says, no, my people already had God. He's a universalist and he's in good standing. Matt Harrison wants us to be excommunicated. Is that the product of a Christian body? You know what we think. You can decide for yourself. The next paragraph here anyone trying to sully the reputation of the LCMS based on comments from a small number of online provocateurs does not know the loving, faithful and generous, kind and welcoming synod that I have met all across the nation are Our people are delighted to gather with sinners of every stripe to receive free and full forgiveness from our crucified Savior, and are not represented by these few

1:48:18 men with their sinful agenda. Well this is the Jesus butter they talk about. He they these guys love to sprinkle the Jesus dust on who can object to a man who speaks in the name of God? Well, this podcast apparently has a sinful agenda. What is our sinful agenda? Saying believe God and obey him, and confess your sins, and read your Bible, and attend a faithful church, if God help you can find one anymore. And when your pastor is faithful, seek to support him. When your pastor is confused about things, try to support him. Don't be confrontational. We've never in public or private once told anyone to confront his pastor and to be a pain in the butt. We have always said you can tell when a pastor can learn

1:49:00 and you can tell when a pastor is hard hearted. And when you have a pastor who can learn, you should be learning from him because he should be the expert from whom most things will be flowing. If there's something that you happen to know better than him, speak to him privately. We've never gone beyond that because we don't believe anything beyond that. And that's the only approach that we have ever taken in private. So for Harrison to say that we have a sinful agenda, again, it's just scaremongering. You know, it's it's fascism, it's Nazism, it's racism, it's all the isms that you get on MSN. And you should be scared and you should flee from us. You should delete your subscription to Stone Choir and you should repent.

1:49:36 Because if you tell your pastor that you've listened to this, I guarantee you at some point you will fall under church discipline in the LCMS. That's how serious this is. I I've warned people in public and in private. You need to be careful about your pastor knowing that you talked to us. Now I'm not ashamed. I'm not saying you should be ashamed. I'm saying you should be as wise as a serpent. You should be as innocent as a dove. You shouldn't be concealing anything, but you should understand if you talk about the things that we talk about, and if you say that you have ever heard of us and you don't hate us, you will also be called to repent, or you will face excommunication. That's a fact. It's going to happen.

1:50:14 the vows that we take at baptism and at confirmation say that we reject everything of the devil. We renounce the devil in all his works and all his ways. Well today, who d who are the Lutherans demanded to renounce? They're demanded to renounce renounce Cory Mahler. And my name will be in there too if they know my name. so far they're just trying to personalize it to him, but it's absolutely both of us. And the other two men on the stream, as I said, have also been targeted for destruction by the Synod. They've been told that unless they disavow us, they'll be excommunicated. The they will be told that they are damned to hell for eternity. They will never be permitted to commune again. Uh they may well be the cops may be called.

1:50:54 They may be told they can't come to into their churches anymore, as it happened to Corey. And it was that as would absolutely happen to me if these men t knew my name. So if you remember we did an episode talking about a man with no name, or a man whose name no man knows, we talked about pseudonymity and its advantages. The advantage is I haven't had to face the cops outside my church yet because Matt doesn't know my name. Matt knows Corey's name, so Pat Matt sent the cops to drag Corey out of church and to say that he's not allowed to enter again. That's a kind of evil we're dealing with. So when you hear all these guys saying, Oh, if you're if you really believe in what you say, you'll use your real name,

1:51:32 they're vipers. They want to ensure that if you disagree with them, you can face the same sort of destruction that all four of us are facing. Just as Just as a sort of side note, I can definitely tell these men have read through several of the things on my site because some of the things they highlight in this particular letter and others, they're straight out of my article about testing the orthodoxy of your pastor, I can link to that in the show notes. There's sixteen questions there really four big categories, sixteen questions total, and they hit the highlights because the things that I mentioned were rank heresy, they don't really touch on that because that's things like just straight up rejecting scripture, which

1:52:16 they do here. They don't touch on the issue because they want to get that in by the back door. They want to sort of hide that. But the main categories that I have in that article are the reality of the sexes, the ontological difference between men and women. Well, they touch on that with the denial of the nature of woman and the relationship of a woman to her head, whether that is her father or her husband. Then there's the issue of the reality of the human races, that's of course throughout this letter. And then the last was just the verbal inspiration of scripture, which again they deny by saying that slavery is sinful. Because if you say slavery is sinful, you are denying the plenary verbal inspiration of Scripture.

1:53:01 You're giving into Marcionism. But to move on to the next paragraph in this letter, I am not speaking about the individuals who may have expressed theological concerns about the essays published alongside the catechism. I am talking about a small number of men who base their opposition upon racist and supremacist ideologies. The former are welcome, the latter we condemn. The problem, of course, with this is that we expressed theological concerns about the essays, and so how does this Venn diagram get parsed by Harrison and others? Well, we know the answer. Anyone who expresses theological concerns, but who can be painted with the brush of being a racist or a supremacist does Well, they're going

1:53:49 to focus on that and get you out of the church because that way they can continue to import this false doctrine into the church unopposed. Because that's of course their ultimate goal, because that is the goal of the master they are serving. And they always want to make it a small number of men. It's a small number of men, a small number of men believe this. One there was a time when the church was twelve men, give or take. So small number of men, not a very good excuse for saying, oh well, it's a small number of men, you can just ignore it. And actually, there was a time when the church was smaller. There was a time when there were four men in the church, or one if we go all the way back to Adam.

1:54:35 So that the number of men is irrelevant, but of course it's not a small number of men. We know that from the statistics for this podcast, we know that from the interaction we get, we know that from all of the email and comments that we receive constantly. It's not a small number of men, as much as Harrison and others may wish. There are more faithful men left than most would like to believe those on Harrison's side anyway. And again we're just back to the accusation of racism and supremacism. The supremacism argument I may as well comment it on now since I didn't comment on it earlier in the parenthetical section. That's not the point. It's never been the point. It never will be the point for us.

1:55:18 The issue isn't whether or not a certain group of people is better than another group of people generally or specifically with regard to something small. That's not it. You love your people because they're your people. And that's why one of the first thing, in fact, that I linked in my article with regard the one that is about the ongoing apostasy of Missouri. I can link that one as well. The show notes are getting long for this episode, but the first thing that I linked was a poem by Kipling, The Stranger. Anyone who's familiar with the poem should immediately bring to mind what I intended with that. Because the point is not that I believe my people are better. The point is not that I believe some other people are worse

1:56:06 or inferior. That's not it. Again, they are my people. That's why it matters. It's the same reason you love your family. They're your family. It's the same reason you love your cousins. They're your family. It's the same reason you love your nation. It's your nation. God has placed you into these groups and you love them because they are yours. And so I'll just read one stanza from this, I'll link the poem for those who want to read the whole of it. The men of my own stock, they may do ill or well, but they tell the lies I am wanted to, and they are used to the lies I tell, and we do not need interpreters when we go to buy and sell. And that's the point. The men of your own nation, the men of your own blood,

1:56:49 it's not that they're better, it's not that they're worse. It's that they're yours. And so you you have the same outlook, you have the same culture, you have the same practices, you understand each other, you get along at the pub and in the marketplace and all of these things. Because God has made human beings, has made men to be social creatures, and you have a social network that it radiates outward from you through others to the entirety of your nation. That's the point. And so the accusation of supremacy or supremist ideologies just falls flat in the face of reality. No one is advocating that. Yes, there are some who are going to say, well, you did the IQ episode, and you're saying that the point of that is

1:57:33 not that one group is better than another. The point of that is that there is a biological reality that we must recognize and deal with it accordingly, in light of how it affects our civilization, our culture, our societies, and the church. It's a matter of fact. And similarly, the same sort of thing holds for the accusation of racism. As we mentioned in the last episode, go back and listen to it again. Racism is a not a sin. It's a false sin, it's made up. It has existed for not very long. It's a lie. It is a modern nonsense supposed sin that Satan made up in order to subvert the church, in order to subvert Christian nations and destroy those who sustain the church, to s destroy the next generation

1:58:25 of every nation that has ever been Christian. That's his goal, and he's succeeding. He's doing quite a good job of it, because of men like Harrison who put out letters like this. And men like Harrison put out letters and statements and have views like this in pretty much every modern church body, which is why this is fundamentally a problem for every Everyone who's listening, it you don't have to be Lutheran to have these problems because your churches most are probably further down this path, some maybe not quite as far, but you're all headed the same way because it's the same playbook that's being run everywhere. And that's the reason that we did the episode before we started the race series, specifically on Satan's playbook.

1:59:06 The entire synopsis of this paragraph and the preceding two, beginning with the one about these alt right individuals, is literally Alinsky. Pick a target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it. And that's precisely what has been done here. Harrison is using Alinsky's rules against against us. He's cutting us out of the herd. He's saying that we have a sinful agenda for saying these things the scripture says, for saying that the church 50 and 100 and 200 years ago didn't believe what he believes, but we have a sinful agenda if we tell you that. You can decide for yourself if that's true based on what we say. He doesn't want you to hear us. He doesn't want anyone to hear us. Which is why this campaign of personal and physical destruction has been

1:59:51 undertaken as is at his command and payrolled by the Missouri Senate. They're actually paying people money to try to destroy destroy a layman for speaking out against their false doctrine. And that Alinsky tactic is exactly why you now see a number of the synod connected accounts on Twitter and elsewhere pushing the term Mollerite. they want to lump everyone under my umbrella. They want to make it seem like I'm the leader of some cult and you are all just parroting the things I say. Which is obviously not true because no one is parroting all of the things I say. Say, but that is their goal, and so they want to use the term Mollerite because it is the exact same playbook that Rome used against Lutherans.

2:00:37 That's why we're called Lutherans today. We are called Lutherans because Rome used it as a pejorative in an attempt to attack and discredit those who were reforming the church who were returning it to right doctrine. And so what Lutherans did at the time was say, fine, we're Lutheran, because we agree with what he's saying because what he's saying is true. And so of course that backfired against Rome. But it's the same playbook because it's the same animating intelligence. That is why you see them attempting to brand all of us as Mawlerites, because it's the same thing every century, Satan subverts and then attacks those who try to push back against the subversion. The next two paragraphs, which are very nearly the end, really go

2:01:27 mask off on what's fundamentally happening here with the Missouri Synod versus Christians who are still in its pews. This paragraph reads: The LCMS is a robust Christian community under the absolute authority of the inerrant scriptures as the very word of God and bound together in subscription to our Lutheran confessions. Theological dialogue is good. We have clear processes for registering concerns over published materials, and we encourage such theological critique. The biblical confession of the LCMS on doctrine and life is true and unchangeable. Now this is two giveaways. One, they say under the absolute authority in in air scripture, except for Leviticus, and except for Joshua and except for First Samuel, because

2:02:14 we don't believe the stuff about sodomites, we don't believe the stuff about genocide, we don't believe the stuff about girls, we don't believe the stuff about la slavery, but other than that, yeah, we this Bible stuff, we were we're pretty solid with it. Bull. See, this is what happens. You will have people who will give a general confession and a specific confession, and they'll be at odds with each other. And it's done to confuse people because the general confession is always gonna be good. It's always gonna be the Jesus dust. It's always gonna be v something that you can't argue with, not if you're a Christian. And then they'll give the specific confession. And the specific confession is contrary to the very general confession that

2:02:54 they've just made. So in this case, the general confession is we love scripture. And the specific confession is but not slavery, but not patriarchy, none of that stuff. That's cringe. That's evil. We can reject and condemn that in the strongest possible terms. Well, which is their true confession? It's not the Jesus dust. This is pro forma boilerplate. This is stuff that Christians say when they don't have anything to say to make sure you remember they're Christian. The specifics that they gave, the lies, the libel, the venom, those are their true confession. And forget whether or not they said something mean about us. They're defying and despising God's word. That's why we're concerned. I'm not concerned about the pact fact that some fat buffoon in

2:03:37 St. Louis doesn't like me. I'm concerned about the fact that the president of the Missouri Synod is openly saying that scripture is wrong while saying it's right, because that creates cognitive dissness in the in the listener's mind who's gonna believe him 'cause he's got a collar and he's got a reputation and he's got a title. And so what he must be what he's saying must be true. And he says it's in scripture, so I gotta believe it. When a pastor lies, he binds consciences. When a pastor lies, he sends people to hell who don't know any better. This is why Corey and I focus so much on teachers because if you have a good teacher and you're an idiot, you're going to be just fine, because as long as you believe his faithful

2:04:20 teaching, you will be received with welcome arms in the kingdom of God because you're going to take a faithful confession to your grave. If you have a wolf like these men who tells you, Oh, that's not the true God. The God of the Old Testament isn't the true God. We have the God of love now. That's the God of God you want to worship. That's the God you want to focus on. And his name is Jesus. Well, at some point you have to start wondering if we're even talking about the same Jesus at all. Because the Jesus who cleansed the temple of the money changers is not the Jesus that these guys want to worship. And we don't bring that up to try to make Jesus to be some wrathful thing when there's peace.

2:04:58 God is all those things at once. It's why we did the episode on perfect hatred. Like this is this is a tapestry. All these episodes fit together because they're all pieces of the same whole. So when he says, Oh yeah, I like scripture, but not that part, you need to listen to the not that part and you need to disregard when he claims to like scripture because he simply doesn't. And the other part here I want to highlight is theological dialogue is good. We have clear processes for registering concerns. Now this is fundamentally authoritarian. This is fundamentally top-down. To say, oh, you don't like something the Synod did, you don't like something they published in their materials. There's a process for that.

2:05:40 What's the process? It's not pod podcasting. It's not tweeting. Don't you dare do that. Now what's omitted from this paragraph in the next paragraph is something we've talked about several times. In twenty sixteen and in 2019, the Missouri Synod amended its own bylaws to prohibit pastors from publicly disagreeing with synodical statements or each other. They locked every member of Synod, which is something that he refers to in the previous thing, we talked about uh these members of synod being attacked. That doesn't mean parishioners, that means pastors. I'm not a member of synod. I'm a member of a congregation that's a member of synod. Member of Synod, when Harrison says it, is a term of art

2:06:24 that refers to his collar buddies. It refers to the other pastors. Pastors are not permitted to speak against other pastors publicly, period. You can't disagree theologically. It's barred by the bylaws, which are corporate bylaws that govern whether or not they may continue to be members in good standing of the corporation. Now, if you're not a member in good standing of the corporation of the LCMS, what happens? You cannot be called to another Missouri Synod church, and you're no longer eligible to be in a call in your own church. So what that means functionally is if a pastor disagrees with the pedochism, with the large cataclysm, that pastor can only do it in private or he will face being expelled from the corporation.

2:07:06 We don't have those shackles. Corey is not a member of Senate, I am not a member of Senate. We are not bound by what the Missouri Senate bylaws say. Harrison has no control over us, and they've realized in the last six months that that is a threat to the demonic evil that they are spreading. Because the lies that they're putting in these books that they're then saying, oh, it's a published material from the church, you can't question it, these lies, layman spoke up and it caused a fur, a righteous fur from pastors too. Pastors temporarily disregarded those bylaws and said, I don't care about the bylaws. I care that we have things in a in a publication from synod that contradicts scripture. And as a faithful shepherd, I must speak against that.

2:07:51 Now they've pretty much vanished at this point because the memo met out went out. remember who you serve. And it's not Jesus. it's bylaw one point eight point two of the Missouri Syndication Constitution. That's what they serve. They cannot disagree publicly or they'll be drummed out Aaron Powell And it is worth mentioning that if they get drummed out, that also in endangers their health insurance and their pension. In most cases, or at least in many cases, I don't know exactly the percentage on that, but there is a very real tangible concern for the members of synod if they go against synontical leadership. Of course, there should also be the theological concern of are you choosing the world over God?

2:08:36 And so any pastors, teachers, others listening to this, you should think long and hard about which side you are going to take in this conflict. Personally I think the sides are very clear, and I don't see how anyone could think otherwise, but you have to make that decision for yourself. But I also found it ironic that they say we have clear processes. Sure. Sure you do. The process that they will always tell you is that you are supposed to, if for instance, a pastor does something Does something truly heinous, like dressing in drag to consecrate a new piano. You know, just a example picked at random out of my mind, certainly not something that would happen in a conservative church like the LCMS.

2:09:26 But if a pastor does that, you are supposed to complain to his district president, who will then wave you off and do absolutely nothing about it except for tell you to be silent because obviously we wouldn't want to embarrass the church by speaking about it. And so we know how these processes work, which is to say they don't. For instance, this is not the first damnable thing that Harrison has published. Another great example would be his published and still up response to Floyd's suicide. He He high-handedly, flagrantly violated as many of the commandments as he possibly could in that piece, perhaps not all of them, but he certainly became an active idolater, murderer, and slanderer, because he called racism

2:10:19 the original sin of the United States, which is quite the claim for a man who is supposedly a pastor and a leader of a church body, but that's still up. And the reason I bring up that particular piece, letter, what article, whatever you want to call it, he was called to repentance by many pastors privately, of course, because if they done it publicly they would have been expelled. I wrote him a letter, I copied all of the VPs on my letter, I sent an electronic copy. I included a little gift with the letter just as a sign of good will toward the Pricidium. I didn't get a response. Basically no one got a response. A few pastors got responses, but nothing was done. The letter is still up. That is still damnable false doctrine on, if not the homepage, then

2:11:16 one level under the home page of the LCMS site. That is still lying in God's name and lying in the name of every single Lutheran in the LCMS. And so this we have clear processes mean means nothing because the processes don't do anything because the leadership of synod is apostate or derelict. So moving on to the next paragraph LCMS congregations agree to uphold our biblical standards. We are not a top-down institution. That said, I will work together with our pastors and district presidents to address this matter wherever it arises among us and reject it. We issue the cry of Jesus, repent for the kingdom of heaven is at hand two. We are confident that the same law and gospel that broke the hard heart of Saint Paul, himself a murderer and blasphemer, can

2:12:13 and will do the same today. We are all called to repentance daily. The blood of Jesus His Son cleanses us from all sin, John one seven. Where that call to repentance is not heeded, there must be excommunication. And of course the point of the this paragraph is twofold. It's to advance the well, not exactly a lie, but increasingly so. We are not a top down institution, because he of course subverts that exact statement with the very next sentence saying that he will work together with pastors and district presidents to address the matter, which is saying that Synod is going to give marching orders to the district presidents who will give marching orders to the pastors who will then do whatever Synod commanded.

2:12:59 And I'm not just saying that we've seen that happening behind the scenes and we will comment on that soon enough. But then of course, the second point is that last sentence. Where that call to repentance is not heeded, there must be excommunication, and that of course is their goal, is to excommunicate anyone who disagrees with anything they're doing, whether it's the annotated large catechism, the comments on racism, the letter about Floyd's suicide, all of these things. That is their goal. Their goal is to drive every faithful man willing to stand up and oppose this evil out of the churches. Because the goal of Satan, and he is their master, he is the animating intelligence in this, he is the one they are serving.

2:13:43 His goal is the destruction of the church. Because the LCMS, for many years, for decades, was one of the most faithful church bodies on the face of the planet, and Satan hates that, and he will not forget. And so his goal is to utterly destroy the LCMS to make us at least as bad as Elka, if not worse. We are quite frankly trending toward being worse than Elka with the way this letter and other things are heading. As we said earlier, all four men who were on the turnip stream specifically highlighting the theological issues with the large cataclysm were specifically targeted for excommunication if they did not repent and disavow each other. So he's followed through with that. And that's again further proof that this letter is specifically about us

2:14:35 and about the Stone Choir podcast. One more thing about this paragraph before we move on, because some are not going to notice what was said here. When Harrison chooses his words in this paragraph, when he chooses Saint Paul as his example, and then says that Saint Paul was a murderer and blasphemer, he is leveling the accusation of being a murderer and blasphemer against me, against Wo, against Ryan Turnipseed, against the other man who was on that stream, against anyone who stands up and opposes this false doctrine. That is what is being said there. And so if you disagree with what is being done if you're a Lutheran in your name, if you are a Christian in another tradition, what is undoubtedly being

2:15:19 done by other men in your name or will be soon enough, then according to Matt Harrison, you are a murderer and a blasphemer. Yep. You're absolutely right. So this last paragraph that we're gonna read, it's not the last paragraph, but the last few are just fluff. You c we'll link it so you can read the full thing yourself. Harrison concludes in his own words Of all the things I've seen as LCMS president, this is the most bizarre. I am informed that other conservative denominations are experiencing similar challenges. This horrid attack of the devil drives us to be firm in our confession. Our message of Christ the Savior for all, our local and global mission that serves the entire human race with forgiveness and joy stands

2:16:04 firmly opposed to Satan and all evil. Our steadfast message of love and biblical fidelity on all the cultural issues of marriage, sexuality, race, and life is an assault on the devil and his minions to no end. Our steadfast witness and assistance to our global Lutheran friends has the devil fuming. Now notice how much he focuses on the LCMS preaching overseas. We've mentioned some of the stats previously, but I I saw some stats I think just in the last week that the actual attendance in the in the LCMS last year was about four hundred and eighty thousand souls. That means a a tiny fraction of the United States population is in LCMS churches. And the overwhelming majority, even of Christians, have never heard of us.

2:16:51 And if they know anything, they probably know that we're the conservative, you know, Lutherans that kind of stay off by ourselves, but no more than that. One of the things that has Matt Howling is that we have exposed through his words and deeds that the Missouri Senate is not in fact the conservative so called denomination that has been made out to be, one that it was historically. You know, if you go back to the poll results from nineteen sixty five, you'll find the Missouri Senate at the very top of everything on inerrancy and every sound Christian doctrine compared to other denominations, we stood head and shoulders above the rest. He gets something right, that there are other conservative denominations that are

2:17:35 experiencing similar challenges. Now the challenge is not that there are faithful laymen who are speaking against evil. That is of course God's hand working in the world. The challenge is that there are faithful laymen in other non Lutheran denominations, quite a few of whom listen to this podcast. I wouldn't be surprised at all if the majority of our probably twelve hundred plus subscribers so far are not Lutheran, and I'm very thankful for that. Because regardless of what is going on in our particular denomination, Corey and I are never going to waver on our belief that Lutheran doctrine as it was inherited from centuries ago is sound doctrine. The issue that we take today is with the very men, the

2:18:20 wolves who masquerade as shepherds, who are seeking to subvert and destroy that doctrine. So The fact that other churches are going through the same problems, yeah, that's no surprise at all. And some of the men who in the layman who are subjected to similar persecution and other denominations, I hope will find each other as as listeners of this show. And I think increasingly we're we are and will continue to find each other online. And as I've said on Twitter recently, as Lutherans we're never going to capitulate on the sacraments in particular because we believe that we have correct sacramental theology. That's not negotiable for a Lutheran. However, there is so much of what I see from many reformed

2:19:02 and similar Christians that is much closer to the sort of Christianity that I find in the Bible than I'm finding even from pastors that I've been told are confessional. Because it turns out when when the Lutheran confessions run out of things to say, these guys just get stuck in a loop. All they can do is talk about the Book of Concord, which is four hundred and forty years old. It doesn't help. There are things that it doesn't talk about and so And so there are other bodies who are continuing to face doctrinal issues in the world head on. And I wish that they were coming at them from Lutheran perspectives, because I think that the foundation theologically and philosophically that we have. Personally I prefer it, but I can't argue with the results that

2:19:48 these men who are in other traditions are coming to the results that Corey and I have alone. And Corey and I are pretty much the only ones saying these things. And it's not because we're not good Lutherans. It's because we're largely alone as Lutherans. And I don't know what the future is going to be for Protestantism in in North America. Uh Uh I have my private opinions and you know, if I said 'em now there'd be a prophecy of some sort, but I'll save it. I don't need credit for being right later because it's frankly not very good news. But I will say this the church is not going to go away. Church with a capital C because we have the Word of God. And even if every man who's listening to this and every man

2:20:29 who has any faith in his heart is arrested and thrown out of his congregation, they will still be Christians. They will still be baptized members of Christ's body and we cannot be plucked from God's hand, no matter what the wolves and the antichrist do among us. So all the nonsense that you're hearing in your churches and you're hearing us talk about in our churches should not be it should be a cause from concern, but it should not be a cause for despair. As I've as I've said before, if you just you know read through the New Testament every two months, you will see these events described over and over where men are thrown out of synagogues, where Jesus says that that will happen, where Jesus says that they will

2:21:09 kill you in my name and they will think that they are serving me. But when we have the we have the Missouri Synod swatting members of Missouri Synod congregations, I don't know how much closer you can get without having a lion pit. And that's that's the future that I think maybe we face as Christians. And I don't think that's bleak. I mean, as as stupid as that may sound. I think that if if we are blessed to be in a time of persecution where we are hated for Christ's sake, we should have confidence in the God who gave us our faith because there's nothing that we can do on our own to change any of this. All we can do is proclaim Christ and proclaim his word faithfully, all of it. Proclaim Leviticus and first In first Samuel, and wherever you find the

2:21:56 word of God that's relevant to today, don't be ashamed of it, even if your church body is, and if your church body is ashamed of the word of God, find out why that is. Find out if it's a new recent thing, as this is in the Missouri Synod. Like this is this is fairly new for us to be this radically hateful towards scripture. It's been decades that this is coming, I think really since seminac, since the sixties, that this began to emerge. But we are still at the cusp of something new, which is why I said earlier I think that the turn ups stream that we did on the large cataclysm will be a turning point. But the 'cause the fact that the Missouri Synod has specifically targeted four laymen for destruction for saying these things that are faithful to

2:22:42 scripture is the biggest scandal in the history of Lutheranism. Once you know, once you bet get past the drama of the very first few decades, nothing this bad has happened to Lutheranism from within Lutheranism by the men who claim to be Lutheran. We bet we faced assaults from without and we've faced different types of betrayal, but this sort of subversion from a literal antichrist figure who stands in the stead of Christ and lies in his name and contradicts scripture is truly unprecedented. And again, it's this isn't just a Lutheran problem. Every denomination is facing similar issues. So Harrison did tell the truth here that other conservative denominations are indeed experiencing similar challenges because Satan has a playbook and our leaders

2:23:28 are running that playbook. They're using Alinsky's rules. They're targeting faithful men. Because Satan knows who the Christians are. Just as God knows, God wrote our name in the book of life from before eternity. Satan knows who the ones with faith are, 'cause he knows who he needs to destroy, and he knows he needs to destroy stone choir. He needs to keep anyone from hearing what we say because they threat to men who will lie in God's name. This terror that you're seeing is because none of the apparatus within the Missouri Synod edifice can account for laymen speaking faithfully without permission from their pastors. They don't have any rules for this. So what do they do? They go straight to excommunication and doxing and threats of the most

2:24:10 horrible kinds. And slander the will and can destroy many. Most men can't stand up to this sort of slander, especially when it comes from your own pastor. So these are very real and consequential matters, but if the demons of the Saint Louis and the demons and all your other denominations think that they're going to dissuade faithful men by being demons. They don't understand their nature and they don't understand our nature. We will do what God commands us to do because we are faithful creatures. We are slaves to Christ, and we will continue to obey him. Because as Peter said to Christ, Lord to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life. That should be every Christian's confession.

2:24:50 Where else are you going to go? And if our churches won't be faithful, it doesn't change the fact that God is faithful to us. And that's something we all need to keep in our hearts in mind. To some degree, I'm glad that we're the ones being targeted, because as you said, we're able to stand up under this assault, and God knows that, and so undoubtedly that would be the reason he has permitted us to be this part of his plan. And I do believe that good will come of this. We are Not done with the hard part yet. the hard part is coming, but it is certainly begun. I just wanted to highlight that as you pointed out, he focuses so much on foreign misses in this, and that's because that is the only concern of men like

2:25:43 Harrison, because that is what gets him praise from the culture. He doesn't care about the church, he doesn't care about the gospel, he doesn't care about Christianity. If he cared about those things, he would be attempting to fix the problems we have at home, as was mentioned. On an average Sunday we have four hundred some thousand in our pews across this country. For those who aren't very fond of math, that's about fourteen one hundredth of one percent of the US population. That's a rounding error. And instead of attempting to get our confirmed young adults to stay Lutheran instead of getting women to have children, instead of pursuing a so called career outside the home and therefore solving our demographic issues,

2:26:40 instead of addressing the desperation of young men who look at a culture that hates them and hear the exact same thing being repeated from St. Louis, and who can't find wives because they're being told to go become deaconesses instead of being wives and mothers, which is actually what Scripture commands them to do, instead of doing any of a hundred other things that would actually help the church at home Harrison is sending false doctrine off with pless to Africa and otherwise focusing everywhere but on his own people. and we described some of the reason for that earlier in this episode. But it comes down to the fact that Harrison has taken up the mantle of Antichrist. He stands against Christ, against his church, and is actively seeking to

2:27:34 subvert and destroy what little remains of the Lutheran Church in the United States. And now, of course, attempting to subvert the Lutheran Church even in Africa. So whatever faithfulness there may be in Africa, and go back and listen to our series on race if you want to see how that will go, whatever is currently there, this sort of false doctrine is being spread there as well, so that's not going to survive. These men are false teachers here, they are false teachers there, they are poison wherever they go. And to comment specifically on this line, our global Lutheran friends. I don't deny that we have Lutherans, good Lutherans even, in many places around the world, and I am grateful for that.

2:28:21 I wish we had more of them. I wish we had more nations that had as many Lutherans as Madagascar. I wish Madagascar had more. I wish they had better teachers, I wish they could get a hold of their syncretism problem. But it is good that we have these Lutherans elsewhere. But that is not our primary calling. Our primary calling is to our brother and to our neighbor. The Lutherans in Madagascar are not my neighbor. The Lutherans in Madagascar are not my brothers. My calling is to my brothers by blood, to my neighbors who are here. That is what it means to be a Christian, that is what a Christian is supposed to do To do, and I don't see a single faithful Christian body in the West focusing on those things,

2:29:10 focusing on the things that Christians are supposed to do. And I don't want to take that position because I am not anti-clerical by nature. But at this point, what I am not in theory, I have to be in practice, because I've seen what the clergy are doing to the church. And we have vanishingly few faithful men. We do have faithful men, I know many of them, I talk to many of them frequently, and I am glad that we have them, and I hope that we will have more of them in the future. Of course, with the way Harrison and others are attempting to subvert the seminaries, that is going to be quite the challenge. But there are models for that. Maybe we'll do a an episode of on that in the future. But if you happen to find a faithful pastor, do everything you

2:30:00 can to support that man. He is worth his weight in gold because there are so few of them these days. If you find a pastor who's weak on some issues, but by and large faithful, help him to work through those issues. If he is willing to learn, he is again worth his weight in gold because there are so few men today who are willing to learn, willing to hear that they may have been wrong to correct their errors. But again it is worth mentioning Christ will preserve his church. We are promised that in Scripture, God does not lie. God cannot lie. And so it is true that the church will persevere through this, even if there are undoubtedly some hard times ahead. There are good men, there are good Christians left in this country,

2:30:46 there are good congregations led by faithful pastors. And so I'd like to end with another stanza of the poem I read earlier, because it ties into this exact point, and some who know the poem well may have wondered why I didn't read this one earlier, well this is why I wanted to end with it. The men of my own stock, bitter bad they may be, but at least they hear the things I hear, and see the things I see, and whatever I think of them and their likes, they think of the likes of me.