Amongst the Ashes

0:37 Welcome to the Stone Choir Podcast. I am Corey J. Mahler. And I'm Wo. Today we are talking about the fact that we are living in the ashes of Christendom. We're living in an age where Where we had part of an inheritance that came from those before us that used to be Christian, and some of us are still Christian, but the structures underneath the the foundational aspects of what gave us the world that was inherited have really gone away. And so today's episode is about the fact that different people from different groups as they look at the state of the world as you like you you turn on the news or you hear reports of what's have going on in your community or in other communities or just nationally or globally globally, it's not just that it's bad

1:32 news, and it's not just that the news seems to be getting worse. It's that the news seems to be horrific. And it's becoming horrific in a way that's almost impossible for some people to categorize. And so as a result, there's been a real movement, especially online, it's visible because you can sort of find all sorts of communities there. There's been a movement to sort of return to tradition. Yeah, it's a meme you've probably heard. And everybody wants to sort of pick their own tradition. they think that there's a a period in time that's going to work great. For some of the Zoomers, it's the eighties. You know, they look at uh Vaporwave and think that must have been, you know, kind of the peak human experience.

2:16 Some folks look to the fifties and look at, you know, sort of the June Cleaver uh suburban post-World War II neighborhood as the ideal. If you're a southerner, you may look to the antebellum south as sort of peak civilization. Some people go back to the Renaissance, uh, and some people, particularly if they're not Christians, will prefer to point back to ancient Greece and ancient Rome, or even you know Phoenicia or the Etruscans. Because if you go back far enough and you cherry pick what it is you're looking at, you can sign find something that seems good and beautiful and certainly seems like an improvement over what we have today. But what we want to talk about is why those things were good and why they seemed good and whether or not we can

3:04 just return, whether you can reboot the eighties or the fifties or the eighteen fifties or uh there there's something that uh Dr. Koontz on the uh brief history of power podcast mentioned it last year, I think, talking about the the pernicious notion of nostalgia that's kinda popped up where where we have these affections for periods without understanding what was good about them. And we think that we can just go backwards and get it. And so I want to begin today briefly with a story. It's something that I just serendipitously read this morning. Uh twenty one years ago over the Atlantic Ocean, in the middle of the night there was an Airbus A three hundred thirty that was flying at six and a half miles up.

3:53 And unbeknownst to the flight crew or to the passengers, a few days before the maintenance crew had made some mistakes when they were replacing one of the engines. And so when those mistakes started causing problems during the flight, the pilot and co-pilot also made mistakes as they were processing the inputs they were getting from their lights that were flashing. And basically the problem was that they had a fuel leak. One of the engines had burst a fuel line directly to the engine, and so it was just pumping fuel overboard in addition to some of the fuel getting into the engine so it was still running. And I'll put the link in the show notes in case you're interested in the sort of the process of how they figured it out.

4:38 The reason I'm mentioning this story now is I think it's a really good example of what it is that we're doing as we look at the state of the world. Because what happened at six and a half miles up at like four in the morning, the V the jet lost and exhausted the last of its fuel. And so one second, the jet was traveling like 400 knots, it had 34 and a half thousand feet. The lights were on, the people knew something was wrong, but you know, it was still flying. It was a jet and it was flying to its destination. When the last of the fuel was exhausted and the engine flamed out, they were plunged into darkness, and there was total silence on that plane, except for the sound of their screaming, because that was

5:25 obviously terrifying. Now, from their perspective on the jet, they knew that they were in real trouble because the lights were out and you know it's obviously this was bad and it wasn't going to get any better. But as an external observer, I want you to think about the fact that ten seconds before the jet engine went out, it was at six and a half miles up, it was going at four hundred knots, everything seemed fine, it was flying. When the fuel ran out, five seconds after that, it was still going at four hundred knots, and it was still at six and a half miles up. So as you're measuring it kind of from a distance, it seems like everything's okay. It still has the momentum it had before the fuel was exhausted.

6:07 And if you took a measurement a minute later, they're probably going about thirty knots slower. They were down about two thousand feet. Um the good news in this case is that the pilot, although he had misdiagnosed the failures, uh he was a former Bush pilot and he was actually a former narco trafficker. So he'd been on some sketchy planes before. And he was able to fly this plane with no power, just he wasn't really flying it. It was a glider at that point. He managed to get it 75 miles to the Azores, because again, they were over the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. He found the nearest airport where they could land that thing and he successfully got everyone there. There were a few minor injuries from the landing, but no loss

6:50 of life. Um so it had a happy ending in that case, but I think as an example for us, I it as soon as I read that it struck me because I knew we were gonna be talking about this today. It's similar to our situation in this. The thesis of this episode is that Christianity is and has been the fuel of Christendom's ascent and trajectory for the last fifteen hundred years. And the fuel has run out and we're not even coasting on fumes anymore. We are just gliding. And so the reason that we're losing altitude and things are getting bumpy and people are starting to scream is that the fuel is gone. And we want to talk about today the fact that most observers don't understand, they haven't diagnosed the problem, just like the pilot hasn't

7:43 diagnosed the problem until the very last minute. So they don't realize that it's out of fuel. They just think, well, the plane's going down. It should go back up. You know, maybe they just need to return to their prior trajectory. Not understanding that the thing that made it a plane in the first place, the thing that was keeping it in the air was the fuel. And so as we are living today in the ashes of Christendom, if we don't recognize that Christianity has been the fuel that has given the West all of the good things that it has, not only are we not going to be able to diagnose the problem, but we're not in any position to restore any of the former glory that we have. And the reason it's important to Corey and I to frame this

8:24 in terms of Christianity is that we're we're going to talk about about Greece and Rome, but we're going to make the case that the things that we think are good about the world that we have lost are the things that Christianity gave us. And the things that we look back with nostalgia that seemed beautiful in the distance didn't necessarily have that tenor at the time. If you had modern uh Christian morals, oh, you don't have to be Christian to hold them, like Western morality. As you know, as it existed a hundred years ago, most people, even if they weren't Christian, they still basically believed in good and evil from somewhere. They believed in not robbing, not murdering, not doing any harm to

9:06 your neighbor. And so we're making the case that when the fuel went out of of Christianity and it began to die in the West, we lost the momentum that was keeping us in the air. And the problems we see today are because of that loss. And we see this in so many of our institutions, not just our government institutions, but also our social institutions, our universities, our corporations. So many places it's inertia is what we're running on. Things were going at such a speed and for such a period of time, with so much mass behind them, that even though the engine is now dead and cut out because the fuel is gone, things continue for a while as if there are no problems. But as we go, things get worse and worse.

9:57 Just as if you're in a plane that has run out of fuel, you cannot help but notice at some point in your descent, things are a little off. And so we see the cracks and the fissures forming in our institutions, and academia is a great example I'm sure many listening will have at some point been on a university campus as a student, perhaps some as professors, what have you? And you can see this happening. The quality of the education dropped off precipitously long ago. But the reputation of the institutions remains. And so we are turning out students, graduates who know far less, who are far less capable, and that will have ramifications down the line for society, and we see that with collapsing bridges and our space program that it basically

10:50 defunct for decades. The private sector has started it up a little bit, again, we could debate exactly the specifics of that another time. But we see all of these consequences building up as that inertia spends itself. And so there are those who try to look for some other explanation of what has happened. And if you don't get to the root causes, you won't propose solutions that will actually address the problems you see. If you happen to be a new listener to this episode, this episode will stand alone, but uh if you want to check the back archives, we've only this is a episode I think eleven, so we don't have that many. But I would recommend beginning with the Christian nationalism episode and then

11:35 the one after it about election and view of headship. That was kind of a two-parter in one where the first part was about doctrine, uh the doctrine of election, so that's a very explicitly Christian part of it. And the second half was really about the history of Christendom, not at a deep level, but but focusing in our case on the spread of the gospel and how everything that we think of today as Western civilization after Roman Greece has been fundamentally Christian. And obviously there was a period of time from about five hundred to one thousand AD when different parts of of Europe were being Christianized at different rates and at different times, but by about a thousand, give or take, it was it was pr the transition was

12:23 pretty well over. And so generally as Westerners today, when we look back at our history, and that is our history, both the parts that were Christian and the parts that were pagan, um and I I should note, I I don't think I've mentioned this before, but when when we use the term pagan, it doesn't mean Thor worshipper, um, which is really a modern LARP. That's not even th that's a reinvention of something. And it's certainly not an insult. I I say pagan in contrast to Christian uh another term might be unbeliever. But that sign it kinda seems more adversarial because if I say If I say you're an unbeliever, it's it begs the question that you should be believing in something, which I obviously as a Christian

13:04 believe, but I I don't want to pose that challenge to someone who's listening. So if I say pagan or unbeliever, it means the same thing and neither neither should be taken as a pejorative. So those European nations, beginning with Greece and and Rome and their follow ones, as they became Christian, they largely gave gave a transfer of what they had into the more modern era. Now there are a few different groups of people on the internet, which are obviously just people in real life. But it plays out very clearly online. As I mentioned, you know, you have kind of zoomers looking at the vapor m wave nostalgia. Uh there's s some fifties of nostalgia, but for the most part, I think a lot of people have a good sense, a proper

13:51 sense that a lot of our problems begin with the light the enlightenment, which is absolutely true. The reason that Christendom is dead today is that the Enlightenment happened. And we'll do an episode on that in the future, but it's just a given for everything that Corey and I say about this stuff. Prior to the Enlightenment, Western Europe, Christianity, Christendom reached its pinnacle in terms of arts, in terms of cultural advancement, which is kind of a dangerous word because that's what's been happening ever since. There's been the promise of what's called progress, the promise of improvement over previous eras, where it's been done through the lens and with the ethos of the Enlightenment, where it wasn't a question of how

14:40 can we serve God better? It was a question of can we do this without God at all? Because look how well we're doing today. Look at all, look at everything that we have built. And the mistake that I think that a lot of people make today, especially in the sphere of the right, is to think that the greatness of Europe's history existed without Christianity, without its influence. And that's a really dangerous presupposition. we'll talk about that in a few minutes. But there's a there's a clear dividing line in groups because if if you're not a Christian, if you're a pagan, you're gonna want to find something like ancient Greece and Rome, where they had beautiful architecture, they had art, they had science, they had civilization.

15:27 It was a proper civilization, it was a godless civilization. Uh you can also look east to China. Uh if you've ever had the privilege of seeing some three thousand year old Chinese art, it is absolutely stunning. It is it is far ahead of what the West was doing three thousand years ago. And I say that as someone who looked at that stuff not wanting to find that, but just objectively the beauty and the intricacy and the advancement of the art that the Chinese had three thousand years ago, it's it's breathtaking. It's beautiful. I think that those periods of time are very interesting because if you're a Christian, then you must necessarily be a young earth creationist. And so we have the flood and we have Babel about forty

16:12 five hundred years ago. So three thousand years ago is only fifteen hundred years from the Tower of Babel where man was scattered. And most of the men who were scattered abandoned God. That was that was part of the the election episode. But the succeeding generations fell away from God to different degrees and suffered different degrees of punishment and decay as a result. I'm not I'm not making that as as a doctrinal claim. I just personally based on observing the timeline and observing the state of the very Civilizations. I think it can be derived from the facts that we find from archaeology and from anthropology. We can dig stuff up and we can see the state of civilizations 3,000 years ago versus 2,000 versus 1,000.

17:02 And I think that if you look at that history through the view of knowledge of the true God, it's clear, at least to me, and I hope to to some of you that the further we got from Babel, the worse it got for people who had not maintained a connection with God. Now obviously by the time that Jesus arrived, it was really just the Jews and a few others who knew of God and God and even many of them hated and didn't believe him. So uh it's not the claim of material gain, it's the claim that without God you will lose other things, even if you lose those things with God through chastisement. Uh but the fact that China was frankly greater three thousand years ago than it was two thousand years ago, I think demonstrates that

17:52 point. And that's the case when you look at Rome and Greece. They were degenerate b before before the birth of Christ. Yeah. They the in so to address those who may who might happen to be listening who are not Christians, who maybe have a great fondness for ancient Greece and Rome, particularly because A, it seems beautiful, and B, there was no Jesus around, so you don't have to buy any of this stuff that you know we're selling. If you actually look at what life was like in that period, it was basically like we have today. There was abortion, there was sodomy, there was euthanasia, there was cruelty, uh boundless cruelty based on disqualifying the the humanity of other people. And in our case, I mean we're not talking about slavery.

18:43 We're talking just about people who would just be killed because they were they were in their wrong class and you could treat them like animals. You could mistreat them like animals. Even if you deal with slavery, although that's an episode from their time, but just briefly, many people like to bring up that there was a reform under I cannot remember which emperor now, but there was a reform of slavery around the time of the New Testament. And all that it changed was that you needed a reason why you killed your slave. And almost any reason would do. Because before that in the Roman Empire, you could just kill your slave because you were bored. That might still have been a good enough reason after the reform,

19:24 even. But that's the sort of thing you had at the height of the power of the Roman Empire. And obviously you had the social decay creeping in as well, and Greece had already fallen at this point. So and you mentioned Phoenicia earlier they were known for child sacrifice. That was their big contribution. Despite some of the things they achieved in their civilization. They burned children alive to their gods in order to get a good harvest or favorable winds. So you can't look back at these societies and not look at the totality of what they were doing. They were doing all of the sorts of evil things our society is doing today just in a different way. And it's particularly the things that I think the people looking back fondly

20:13 to those periods are trying to escape. We if if you're if you want to return to tradition, you wanna return to the Roman tradition because they had indoor plumbing and, you know, law and order, you're gonna get all of the things that you're trying to escape today as well because they were godless and they were in a period of decay even as they were building their empire. Now there's a lot of political stuff that we're not going to get into this because it's not a political podcast, but I just want to point we want to point to those areas in particular to to try to make the case that the wince the the nostalgia that we have for those periods if if you if you feel that uh I would strongly encourage you to look

20:58 at what life was actually like in those times because I think you'll find that the things that are decaying today and the things that the Christianization of the West solved are the very things that you're trying to escape today. And we're making the case that you're escaping it today because the Christianization of the the West ended. And so we're ret we still have the technology, we have the indoor plumbing, we have some of the laws, but there But they're rapidly being destroyed one by one precisely because the thing that got us here was not that we're white, that we're high IQ, that we're good unto ourselves. Those to whatever degree those things are blessings, they are not intrinsic goods if we are setting ourselves against God.

21:47 And I I think that the societal state of of Greece and Rome it in my opinion demonstrates that. They were again they were just they were depraved. They were doing the same sort of depravity that makes us recoil. Whether you're a Christian or a pagan, today, you see the stuff that's going on in parades and ever elsewhere, and you're just you're rightly horrified. You don't need to know God to know that this is the face of evil. The face of evil was the norm twenty five hundred years ago and two thousand year years ago as well, because although they had technological advancement and some of it was stunning, what they didn't have was the source of moral authority that does not change across time.

22:29 And the loss of that structure, as Corey said, the the fact that the underpinnings have been knocked out and yet we still have the facade I think makes Christians as well as unbelievers look at it and say, well, it's still basically mostly Christian. You know, some people go to church and yeah, it's not as good as it used to be. The reality is that we're not only running on fumes, but the engine is out. We're still at 30,000 feet, but we're on a glide path to the middle of the ocean. And in our case, there's not going to be an Azores Island for us to land at because the problems that we have are the destruction of the airplane. Like, you know, the the analogy breaks down at some point. You can't you can't save the craft unless you put the fuel

23:14 back in it. And in their case, there was no putting a fuel in it until they landed. For us, the only The only landing we're gonna have if we don't get this going in mid-air is going to be the complete destruction of everything. And rewinding thirty or forty or a hundred or two hundred or two thousand years won't fix our problems if we don't know what solved the absence of the problems in the first place. The word progress is one of those curious little words that people always get wrong. And so, in keeping with a general theme, terms and their meanings matter. Progress, because of the fact that it starts with pro, as opposed to say con, leads many to conclude that it is necessarily good. That is a secondary meaning of it, it has come to

24:02 be one of the meanings, but that's not inherently what the term means. The term comes from pro in Latin which just means forward and forward is not always good. If you're walking forward and there's a cliff, that's generally bad. And the the verb for to walk, that's all it is, to walk forward. That's what progress means. And so what matters is your destination. Anyone who goes hiking or camping knows that if you're making progress down the wrong trail, that's not a good thing. So it matters what your destination is. Yes, our society is still in some ways making progress, but toward what are we progressing? Well, we're progressing toward evil, no longer toward good. And so you have to be careful when you use these terms

24:46 like progress, because it is one hundred percent a matter of the destination, not just of the fact that well I'm still upright and walking it must be good. That's not necessarily the case. And this is something that we in the church have fallen for hook line and sinker as well, as the post-Enlightenment expansion of a fundamentally new religion without God progressed, the way cancer progresses in a dying person's body. There was the sense that we were leaving the old things behind and we were discovering new things and new ways of doing things. And what's funny is that if you know history, especially know the history of heresies and the history of ancient d degenerate civilizations, we weren't inventing anything new.

25:36 We were rediscovering the same old gods that had been cast down by prep peop previous generations. there's truly nothing new under the sun. You're not going to find something that you think is better and clever that has not been tried before by people who got it from someplace evil and ran with it. And so what's happened, particularly I think since you know I mentioned Antibellum South, I think since particularly in the United States, slavery was ended as a legal institution outside of prisons, which would be something we'll talk about in the slavery episode, because slavery is still one hundred percent legal in the in the United States today. Go read the thirteenth Amendment if you think I'm wrong.

26:21 Slavery is legal. It's they changed for whom it was legal. That was done principally not by Christians at the time. The abolitionists were principally radicals, non-Christians, in some cases they were anarchists. And so they were fighting in moral terms for something that when they would try to sell it to Christians, it was sold as a moral good, as a Christian good. And Christians are commanded to test the spirits. It's one of the things that God says. Don't just believe somebody that they show up, whether it's somebody with a collar or somebody with a podcast. Don't just believe 'em because they say something that sounds convincing. Test the spirits. Does this accord with scripture? What happened, particularly in the nineteenth century in the West, was that

27:11 Was that things like slavery and then following hot on its heels, the so called emancipation of women, funny how they use the same language, when women were given the franchise, it was done in moral terms. It was done in terms of expanding freedom and expanding so-called rights and in terms of progress. And it was sold in terms that Christians would gobble up because, like, oh, that sounds Jesus y because we stopped looking at what scripture says about any of those things. Scripture has a lot to say about slavery, and it has a lot to say about women and about a woman's place in society. And today when someone hears just the phrase a woman's place, it sounds like a physical assault. It sounds like I'm this madman that wants to chain women and

28:04 wants to belittle and just treat them as subhuman. To know your place in life is is one of the greatest blessings. It's the reason that teenagers are so angsty. they don't know their place in life, 'cause they've been told they're teenagers. We stop saying that they're young men and young women, where they have a clear trajectory to adulthood and to entering into civilization with their elders. We started calling them teenagers. Whereas this transitive property and you know, you roll the dice and who knows what's gonna come out. But you don't have any idea what your place in life is. And so for us to say a woman's place Uh it's intended as a blessing because God gives clear instructions for what that is.

28:49 And the women who are happiest in this world today are the ones who are closest to God's model for what they should be doing. Because ontology and vocation, the more they overlap, the more joy we are given. And the attack on slavery and the attack on the absence of feminism, which was itself an attack on civilization, the creation of feminism as an idea, was done specifically to knock some of these supports out of civilization. Now to be clear, I'm not saying that slavery was a support of civilization. I don't believe that. I don't think it's a moral good or evil. And I think scripture makes that clear. So I'm if somebody wants to misquote me, they're gonna do that anyway. I'm not saying you need slavery to have civilization.

29:35 I don't believe that. However, if you're a Christian, you can have reasons to not want or to not like slavery, but you cannot have reasons that you ascribe to God because God doesn't do that. And what has been happening ever since the 1850s and really since the Enlightenment, one by one, we've been taking things where God was clear, as we talked about early on, the the genealogy of ideas. There's never been any doubt about these questions in all of Christian history until suddenly these questions arose and people are like, wow, this is fascinating. I I I'm really concerned that everyone before me is in hell because they were unrepentant sinners for doing these things. And so more and more today, worldly ideas that have no genesis

30:22 in scripture, that have no nexus to God, are imported, they're slathered in Jesus butter, and everyone is told, Well, yeah, that's Christian, 'cause it sounds loving. And that has to be the end of the argument. And if you point to Scripture and say, Well, what does Scripture say about slaves? or what does Scripture say about women? You're attacked, you're shouted down as an evil person. Now, are there evil people who've asked those questions? I don't know, probably. But is the question evil? No. As a Christian, the question is vital. And as someone trying to undo the damage civilizationally that we're facing today, the questions must be asked because the fuel ran out of Christianity as we stopped believing the Bible, even as we talk about

31:08 sola scriptura and how yeah, I believe everything in there, we just say, Well, yeah, but that's not what that means, or that was in that day, it doesn't really apply. Well, no one ever thought that before, and the fact that we freely think that now is precisely why civilization and Christendom are in a nosedive and we don't know how to fix it because we refuse to actually turn back to the God who gave us the tools to prevent the decay that is frankly being given to us as punishment. God is abandoning us to our baser passions. And we deserve the destruction if we don't return to godly living. And so we're trying to reframe this episode in Christian in terms of Christianity because it is the only source of truth that can

31:55 maintain these things over extended periods of time. If you live a life in accord with God, you will live a blessed life. You might not be prosperous, but you will be prospered by God even if you're poor, even if all your children die in infancy. You will still be prospered. We don't know what form it's going to take, but we know that God will bless us. And we also know that God will punish us when we turn our backs on him. And we've done that. And Corey and I want people to ask the questions about, you know, w maybe we need to turn on the lights in here so we can see what we're doing because we're not looking to scripture when these problems arise. And if Christians can't look to scripture to help guide the rest

32:35 of the world how are we doing our duty as Christians? Are we not hiding our light under a bushel if we can't even explain how evil is evil and good is good and maybe we should do one and not the other, and here's why. And if you look at all these movements that were born really as the children of the Enlightenment, which would be the anti slavery, feminism, all of these various things. One of the underlying goals is atomization. The goal is to separate people, men and women, from from the groups into which God placed them. It's to separate women from their families. It's to separate men from their families. It's to say you're not a member of a class or a group or a race or any of these other things, you're an

33:29 individual. And it's only you, you're the only one who matters. And that's not how God made us. And that's the reason it's fundamentally subversive all of these various movements. And the reason that it knocks the legs out from under any civilization, that's the death of Christendom, that's the death of civilization. When people, when men and women start thinking of themselves as an individual, first and foremost, instead of a father or a mother, or a son or a daughter, a brother or a sister, because these are the things God made you. You are in the family God gave you because God gave you that family. God created you in the womb to make you part of that family, to make you a child of your mother and your father.

34:19 God made you the rest of the race that you are. God made you all of the various things you are, the attributes you have are gifts from God. So when you just start denying these things and saying that no, I am this self-sufficient island, I stand alone, and I need no one else and nothing. You are denying the reality of creation, you are denying what God created, and you are becoming part of the process. You are becoming part of what is destroying civilization all around us. And that is what these have in common. And of course they have that in common because they have a common motivating intelligence else behind them. And as I've said before, no, human beings could not form these sorts of conspiracies over a course of centuries and orchestrate these things.

35:08 We know historically humans are not very good at working on that scale, at least in secret for that long. But Satan is. And ultimately that is the power behind all of these movements, and that's why they have a coherent goal. That's why they all work toward that goal, because there is actually a plan. And so you can choose. Do you want to be on that side with Satan supporting his forces? Or do you want to be on God's side? It's a very stark choice and one would think it would be an easy choice, but so many today make the choice that no, I like these things that the Enlightenment has given me, even though they're cancer answer, in the short run they're pleasant, some of them, and so people opt to keep those.

35:56 Instead of asking the hard questions, actually looking at scripture, seeing what it is that God says is right and true and good. And as Christians, first and foremost, we should be looking to Scripture to see what God has said about these things, not looking to what the world has done, not looking to what we are told is progress. A great example of looking to scripture and atomization can be found in second Corinthians twelve, where God says for children are not obligated to save up for their parents, but parents for their children. Now try saying that in a room full of boomers and see if you don't get lynched because that the idea of atomization and individualization, and I got mine, and you

36:46 need to earn her yours and pick yourself up front by your bootstraps had become so normal that those are now moral claims. It's not simply wisdom, whether it's true or false, but those are moral dicta that are given by older generations to younger generations without regard to their circumstances, without r th regard to the fact that picking yourself up by your bootstraps isn't possible today the way it was fifty years ago. Well, and not only that, it's fundamentally impossible. Which is one thing that I think is funny because it came over from a German fairy tale, it's Bern Munchausen, and one of the the famous stories about him it's it's told in various ways, but he saves himself and his horse from quicksand or a muddy

37:34 trap, whatever it happens to be in the particular tail, by pulling himself and his horse up by his hair. Well, some of them are pulling himself up by his bootstraps. That's where we literally get it from. It was meant to be something that is literally impossible and it's become this phrase in the US that's practically sacrosanct that well no you pull yourself up by your boot it's meant to be something that is impossible. And so there's this great irony that it's used so frequently to mean that that somehow this is something you can do if you just work hard enough. I guess we can all be Baron Munchausen and pull our horse out of a muddy puddle by pulling our own hair. That's amazing. There's a another application of that uh same technique in a different

38:18 uh fairy tale uh Rumpel Stiltskin in the original ending. The way he died when she guessed his name was he stamped his foot so hard that he got one of his feet stuck in his in the ground and he pulled his other foot up over his head and tore himself in half and died. So when he tried to pull himself up by his bootstraps, that's how it actually ends up. You end up eviscerated and dead. And you know it's So atomized. As Yeah. R return to the dust. I guess that was the only biblical part of the whole thing. It's Yeah, the fact that scripture says the women are to be silent and that slaves are to obey their masters and that parents are to save up for their children. These are counter-cultural things today.

39:09 These are things that will make people so angry that they will say you're not Christian simply for quoting scripture. And The reason we're doing this podcast series, the reason that we're that we had spent the money and the time to do any of this, was that more and more we saw Christians reacting with visceral hatred to the plain words of scripture. And as we look, like I I've said before, and Corey and I have both spent a lot of time reaching out to people who are not Christians To explain the world in Christian terms that they can understand. Yeah, it's funny when the communion thing blew up in the last couple weeks, there were at least two different one was a not a Lutheran, one wasn't a

39:58 Christian at all, who asked if I could briefly explain what the controversy was. And in both cases, in like four tweets, which is two hundred and eighty characters each, I was able to explain it well enough that they said thank you, I understand perfectly what's going on now. Now, that sort of clarity of speech and thought and communication should be the bare minimum. That should be table stakes for any pastor who wants to speak on any issue. And as Christians, we should be equipped whenever we're speaking about the world to speak in such a way that if someone doesn't know God and they don't care about God, maybe we can make the pragmatic case for God. That's not a bad thing. To say, you know what, the suffering and the misery in your

40:42 family for the last couple generations, you know, this isn't your opening salvo, but at some point you should be able to make the point to them that the decay and the misery that you're suffering from is due to disobedience to God. the fact that the you know grandpa was alcoholic and mom was abusive and the kid is now looking at hormone replacement therapy and you just found Jesus and you're like y once you once those people find Jesus, they understand what was missing from all those previous generations. But the curse of sin is baked into the acts of sinfulness. The fact that when you do evil, you will typically get walloped immediately with the evil consequences. There might be a delay of you know a few minutes or

41:31 six months or a year, but you're always going to pay the price for whatever evil you do. Not just from guilt, and not talking about the eternal price, talking about in this life. You know, sometimes people can steal stuff and get away with Yeah. and temporal consequences are are something that Christians used to believe in. It's something that we, you know, Lutherans confess every Sunday when we confess our sins. But if you don't believe that, how can you explain to someone who's not a Christian who's looking at You know, we're sitting in the ashes of Christendom, we're seeing everything collapsing around us, and we don't understand why. And on one hand, like we're not simply saying, Well, yeah, this

42:17 is God punishing us, like that's true, but it's not even it's not even close to the most interesting part of what's going on because God's punishment is reversible when the sin ends, when Israel repented, God stopped chastising them. And then they would fall into sin again and they would be chastised again. And it was a cycle. And it's a human cycle. It wasn't particular to them. It's particular to all of us. And what we've seen and what we described in the election episode and are continuing here is that for Western society and civilization, we had an incredibly long, long arc of well over a thousand years, where God's blessings were poured out pretty much continuously, and we had exponential growth of population in an entirely sustainable

43:09 manner. It wasn't simply ballooning as has happened in Africa and they're only kept alive completely artificially by drug and food subsidies that are shipped in from outside. Their nap natural population is twenty percent or less of what they have today. And that was not the case in Europe. Europe grew as God gave the growth, and we were able to continue to feed ourselves despite not having a whole lot of arable land through improvements in technology, which are the result of wisdom, which are the result of blessing. And so Christians shouldn't be afraid afraid of science and we shouldn't be afraid of knowledge, but we should because we should understand that those good things come from God, but they're gifts.

43:53 Just like if you are given a million dollars from some some long dead ant that you didn't know existed, that's a gift from God. What kind of person are you after that? Are you the kind that goes and blows it all on drugs or on fast cars or on gambling? Or do you save it away or do you put it to work in a church? Or you know there's not a right answer, but there are a lot of wrong answers. And when God gives us gifts, we need to be conscious of the fact, one, that they're coming from God, and two, that they're not just for us to sit on or to be happy, they're for us to be a blessing in the lives of others. So if you're given the gift of being able to explain things clearly, use that gift to explain important things clearly to people who

44:43 need them explained. And if you're not given the gift, please don't try beyond your limits. Please find someone who can help explain things so that you don't make things worse. The gifts that God has given, God will also withdraw. You know, we we see this with the weather and we see this with famine. Scripture is very clear that the storehouses of the winds are controlled by God. And the fact that today we understand that the sun heats the earth's crust and gives rise to currents that rise and fall and cause the winds to blow doesn't change the fact that God controls the winds. There can be both a side. Yes. Yeah. Just removes it one step. Yeah, exactly. But that's that's the way God designed the system.

45:31 And that's the system that God is operating and continuing to maintain. And I think that the reason, one of the reasons that the Enlightenment was so damaging was that on one hand our scientific, and the we talked about this a little bit a couple weeks ago, but scantia is Latin for knowledge. It doesn't mean truth. That's Veritas. Scantia means knowledge. Science is the pursuit of knowledge and knowledge is implicitly of truth. You can't know something false. You can be misled, but you have knowledge. If you have knowledge, you have knowledge of a true thing. So science properly understood can only ever be right to the degree that it understands something. And a lot of science involves speculation and hypothesis and proving and

46:23 disproving hypotheses. But ultimately the things that we understand about the world, if you have a Christian worldview, it's simply laying bare more of what God is doing. And again, we shouldn't be afraid of thinking and talking in these ways because there are people who don't know God, but they know science. Maybe they know the crappy modern version of science that's really nothing of the sort, but they see some value, at least in the historical trajectory of gaining knowledge of the universe. If we can only as Christians argue with them and say, well, that's not true, that's not true, and have no other explanation for anything, we look We look stupid, as Corey said last week. You just look dumb because they don't know God, but they know

47:11 that that's nonsense. And if you're telling them nonsense in a way that's verifiable to them as untrue, they will never listen to you and believe things that they don't have knowledge of. And so the trajectory of God's work in history and the manner in which he works in space and time is important to us because his wrath ebbs and flows according to our sin and so do his blessings. And I'm not trying to do, you know, the Jerry Fallwall thing of attracti attributing a particular storm to a particular sin. I don't necessarily think that's invalid, but I think it's typological. there are small and big ways that these things manifest. And we're not prophets, we can't correlate these things im without with

48:00 perfect certainty. But we can know in general that when things are getting worse, as a Christian we need to understand that's chastisement. And we have to ask the question, chastisement for what? And so we're talking about the ashes of Christendom because we're so far down the path of the what that we can't even see it anymore. We had to we gotta throw this thing in reverse and go full blast just to get back to where we can have some semblance of Christianity. Even while we're still celebrating the liturgy in church and we still have the Bible and we're still Christians on Sunday. The point we're trying to make is let's be Christians every day, not about doing good works for salvation, but about being beacons of

48:46 God's truth in every step of your life. Because if you're doing that, God will continue to open doors for you to be able to explain things to people that would never have happened if you don't let people know you're Christian and let them know you have something to say. And maybe they won't believe you, maybe they'll think it was stupid. Who cares? I I get called stupid all the time by people who are aren't even close to how smart I am and I don't take it personally. They don't they don't understand. That that's that's for the IQ episode. But you can't care you can't care if people don't like you or don't believe you. Tell the truth and let that be its own reward and you'll be surprised and blessed by who does hear you 'cause it'll

49:26 be someone you didn't even know was listening. But we got to talk about these things, frankly, and we got to talk about them to people who think we're stupid when we say the believe in Jesus. That's part of it. That's part of being a Christian. And modern evangelism is about talking about these things. The entire project of the Enlightenment essentially was to remove God from everything. Because the animating intelligence behind the enlightenment, I would hope, would be obvious by now. But that was accomplished by redefining knowledge and truth. And for centuries it had been the case that the physical sciences, the artis servilis, the servile arts, were considered secondary to the artis liberalis, the liberal arts, which would include such things as philosophy and

50:19 theology. Theology was originally conceived of as the queen of the sciences. It was the pinnacle of human knowledge. Everything else flowed from that because that was knowledge of ultimate things, ultimate truth, ultimate good. And so, insofar as things agreed with truth, they were considered useful or good. And so science was a method, so developed, in the more modern sense of the term, to go about acquiring knowledge that was consistent with the good, the beautiful, and the true. No However, it is still the case that truth is prior to knowledge. What the Enlightenment attempted to do was redefine it so that truth is merely the cumulative noun in order to describe it's sort of the plural of plurals

51:14 of data, of knowledge. And so if you acquire enough data, well that adds up to a truth, and that's not how it works. Truth is something fundamentally different. And so And so what we're talking about here is truth. We're talking about ultimate realities, not just a collection of data points that give us a pattern and point to something, a probabilistic reality, as it were. But to go back for a second here to God blessing and cursing, because both are of course present in scripture, I thought of Jeremiah 18, and so I'll read verses seven through I think ten here If at any time I declare concerning a nation or a kingdom, that I will pluck up and break down and destroy it, and if that nation, concerning which I have spoken, turns from its evil,

52:05 I will relent of the disaster that I intended to do to it. And if at any time I declare concerning a nation or a kingdom, that I will build and plant it, and if it does evil in my sight, not listening to my voice, then I will relent of the good that I had intended to do to it. Right now we are a bit of both of those, because obviously in centuries past we were the kingdom God planted and blessed, and we turned from him. Now we are the wicked kingdom that God is going to curse, and if we turn back to God, of course, He will bless us again, in the words of David, I believe that I will see the good of the Lord in the land of the living. And so if we turn back to God, He will relent of the judgment.

52:51 That's just in his word, that's what He promises. We believe his word. But currently our society is not turning back to God, it is doubling down on rejecting him. And part of that is because Christians no longer know how to talk about God, how to actually believe in God and to act as Christians out in the world. We're Christians, as was said for an hour, an hour and a half, three hours, whatever it is on Sunday, for the liturgy and Bible study. And then we live the rest of our lives. That's not how it's supposed to be. We are supposed to be Christians twenty four seven our entire lives, not just for an hour or two on Sunday. So if you apply that frame to the the different time periods that I mentioned towards the beginning of the episode, going back to

53:38 the eighties, is that gonna solve this problem? You know, when everything's uh pink and lasers? No. It there's uh Christianity was already dead at that point. It's just that there was less momentum lost than than we're seeing now. Going back to the fifties, no better. The same problems. Because you're already centuries into the Enlightenment. You're over a century into the revolution against headship that occurred first in the Civil War and then in the uh nineteenth Amendment. Going back to the Renaissance doesn't help either because even when you get there, the question is what good did they have? Why did they have it? It's not because they were European, it's not because they were white. It's not because they had a monarchy, although that's an improvement.

54:26 It's what God has ordained since we ceased to have his direct intervention. What was good about them was that they lived and walked with God. Now, obviously, there were terrible things that happened then too. We're not uh we're not making the error that we're trying to condemn here by saying that it was a true, pure golden age where only Christianity prevailed. Obviously you can work at look at the wars and the famines and the things and see that there is chastisement then then as well. So the reason that we're highlighting those things and then we previously highlighted Rome and Greece is to point to in all of these periods, the only good things that we had were because we were living in accord with God.

55:10 Yeah, I mentioned uh we talked, I think last week about BLM and about their webpage where they talked about attacking slavery, attacking the patriarchy, attacking heteronormativity. Very interesting, and I forgot to mention it then, but that their manifesto was basically a complete inversion of Galatians 328 and 329. Got Satan knows scripture. Satan when when Satan laid Yeah. When Satan laid out his roadmap on the BLML BLM website for what he was planning to do in 2020 and beyond, it's no coincidence that it reads like Galatians 3:28. And when you read that verse, uh there's a tremendous amount to unpack there. Corey's probably gonna write a book about it pretty soon if he finishes if he hasn't run out of ink.

56:04 Well I won't I won't run out of ink, thankfully. I do have enough of that. It's just there's that matter of time. If God gives me the time. But if you're not looking at scripture, if you're looking at it through enlightenment eyes, you're gonna read Galatians 3.28 in a very particular way, then no one received it prior to the Enlightenment. The way it was received in Christianity, prior to us ceasing to believe in God, even while we still call ourselves Christians, what it was strictly soteriological. It is strictly about how faith saves us and how God acts within creation without regard to class, without regard to race, without regard to sex. And the fact that God vertically interacts with us in that way does

56:55 not change the horizontal interactions that we have with each other. It's actually an affirmation of those. Yes. Yeah, it's a good idea. Because it's using Yeah, it's using real things in order to make an important point. If these were all illusory, if these were false, if they were not real Then the verse would be either incoherent or useless. But it's not because these are all real. I've practically memorized it by now, but I'll I'll go ahead and pull it up. I've got I have logos up in the background, so there is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is no male and female, for you are all one in Jesus Christ. And what people latch on to is that one in Jesus Christ.

57:40 Now that's referring to the church. That's referring to Christ's bride. We are unified through faith as the bride of Christ with our head, who is the head of the church. That's salvation talk. That's not in this life talk. We are not all one in this life. And that was never God's intention. You know whose intention it was to be all one in this life? That's the cry of Babel. That was what they were saying at the Tower of Babel. We will we will show the whole world that we are unified, that we can do things that are unthinkable. They had technological advancement. They had pride. And God scattered them by confusing our language specifically so that man would no longer be one. And today, when you say man is not one, now

58:33 we're not setting Galatians 3.28 against Genesis 9 or 10, 11, wherever it is wherever it is, thing nine. Anyway, we're not setting against the Tower of Babel. We're specifically saying that when God saw that man was trying to be one, God saw it was evil. It was one of the most profound evils in human history. It was probably an evil second only to the flood, because how many times does God intervene globally with a curse that affects every man? Not often. You'll have localized curses, but the flood wiped out all but eight, and Babel confused all language for all time. Even in heaven, languages are preserved, they're no longer confused. In Revelation seven nine and following it talks about how every tongue

59:22 was represented. They still had their tongues. In heaven we will be able to understand each other, but our unique distinctive identities as different races with different languages, we have no reason to believe that those won't be preserved. Now I think it's important to note when we're talking about this that Pentecost didn't undo Babel. Pentecost was the fulfillment of Galatians 3:28. If you look at it closely, the words that they were speaking at Pentecost, they couldn't just understand each other. They weren't just sitting around having a conversation. What could they understand? They understood the gospel, the preaching of the Word of God and the announcement of Jesus Christ coming as the Savior is what they

1:00:05 understood in their own tongues. It was salvific. It pointed to God. It didn't mean that they could order off a Chinese menu even though they were Greek. That was not the point. That was not the gift. God did not use Pentecost and he did not use Christianity to turn mankind back into one. And today to say that will probably get you kicked out of even a lot of the Lutheran churches because we are again, we're so inculcated in the the Enlightenment viewpoint that is fundamentally satanic. It is an undoing of Babel. It's an undoing of Galatians three hundred twenty eight. It's a reversal of the things that God has done and God has declared, and it's saying no, humanity will once again be united,

1:00:49 but not in Jesus. When God says we are one in Jesus, that's about faith. We are only one in so far as we are the elect. We are not one because we're all human. That's there's no such thing. And that is that's basically the gospel today to most people. It's a false gospel from a false God, but it's pres it's presented in terms that sound Jesus. They sound sorta Christian and even Christians fall for it. And then Satan can keep going. He can keep marching. Because look like we see keep saying, if you fall for one trick, if you fall for one lie, you're gonna fall for one after another. And eventually you're gonna find yourself so far separated from God that you won't even realize that you've run out of fuel and that

1:01:38 you're coasting into the the Atlantic Ocean at four in the morning and there's no island for you to land on speaking of lies, when we use Galatians three hundred twenty eight, we should probably really use three twenty nine as well, just because it refutes one of the most common lies in particularly American Christianity today, and just to read that verse, and if you are Christ's, then you are Abraham's offspring, heirs according to the promise, which of course is a blunt and complete refutation of Zionism, sometimes called Christian Zionism. The Jews aren't chosen, the elect are chosen, and you are amongst the elect if you are heirs according to the promised, which is to say, if you are in Christ.

1:02:27 And so really we should make sure to include that verse just because it is such an important verse for our context. And again it's it's another one of the lies that yes, these ethnic distinctions race, these are real things, these do matter. But three hundred twenty eight, this part of Galatians is dealing with soteriology not not with the physical reality that we live in now, not with horizontal relationships. Or even where we'll be preserved in heaven. Because now we're not the nations are there. Well, because they're good. Yeah. The destruction of that which is good is evil. And so God is not going to destroy these things because they are part of his good creation. The nations probably were part of his design from the beginning.

1:03:17 Perhaps Babel accelerated things? We don't know exactly how that worked out, but we know that the nations are good because in Revelation they are preserved. The kings of the nations will bring the glory of the nations into the new heavens and the new earth. That means they are preserved, and only that which is good is preserved, because there is nothing wicked or evil or wrong in paradise. And so we know the nations, the races are good. I think we can absolutely say that because the god the command that God gave to Abraham and that he reiterated to Noah, or sorry, not to Abraham, to Adam and reiterated to Noah, was be fruitful and multiply, fill the earth and subdue it. And Babel was about ref refusing to fill the earth.

1:04:02 Now earth doesn't just mean the Mesopotamian, it means the whole planet. And what happens when you move from Mount Ararat to Norway? You get pale and you get light eyes because because it's the only way that you don't go snowblind, because it's really bright up there and there's hardly any sunshine, and you need vitamin D and you need to be able to see. So you turn into a Norwegian when you move to Norway. When you move to Ethiopia, not anymore. You get dark skin. Yes, yeah. That was a that was a one-time thing God built in. Same for dogs. You can't go from a chihuahua back to a golden retriever. But from the original breedstock, you could get both. Yeah. And so all of the genetic diversity that we observe today

1:04:47 was preserved in Noah and his sons and their wives. And the diversity of the three distinct major nations almost certainly comes from the three wives of the major nations Who were they were descended from people who were killed in the flood. They were descended from people who were different. And there'd been about ten generations. So there had been time for genetic divergence at that point. And That filtering and that winnowing and then that expansion through Babel ensured that people went where God wanted them to go. Acts 1726 says that God appointed the dwelling places of the nations and the boundaries. God ordained for nations to go to places. He ordained for Ethiopians to live in Ethiopia and Norwegians to live

1:05:33 in Nor Norway. And the undoing of that is contrary to God's will. And yet today it's practically the rallying cry of many of our I say churches in the most small C version possible. There are pastors who advocate these things, again in view of the enlightenment. And so the reason that we're ending this episode about Christendom's ashes is that it's not just cultural. It's not just about the law and about good behavior in public. It's about our ability to even hear the word of God. You know, when King Josiah rediscovered the law that had been lost, they didn't sit, they hadn't simply lost the part of the Torah, they forgot it existed because they weren't looking for it. A workman found it in some rubble as they were doing construction

1:06:26 and said, Hey, look what I found he brought to Hilkiah, and when Josiah heard it, he was horrified, and he he rent his robes because he knew that even though he was a faithful king who had been repairing the temple, and he thought that he was observing the law, he realized that not only had he not been observing all of it, but he'd forgotten part of it existed. And it wasn't his doing, it was father's, his father's and grandfather's doing that that had been lost. That's where we are at today with scripture. But without misplacing it, we have the whole Bible. We have as many Bials as we need. We're not reading and believing any of the things every single person has it in his pocket. Yes. And yet today we have pastors who hate Corey and me,

1:07:10 absolutely hate with every fibre of their f being. I have never seen them fight any evil in their lives as hard as they fight us saying what we're saying on this podcast and fighting as hard as they can to he keep you from hearing it. Now these are men who were trained in the Word of God, who have been ordained by our own churches, who were sent forth to proclaim the Word, and yet when we say the very same things that God says, we're told and they tell the world that we're damned. That's why we're talking about Christensen Christendom's ashes, because it's not just it's not just on TV. It's in our own pulpits, and it's in our own churches, and in some cases it's in our own hearts, where we have grown

1:07:53 so cold and so deaf to God's voice that when the master speaks the sheep no wrong longer recognize him. And that is truly terrifying. That is something that we must reverse before we can reverse the cultural decline. Before we can fix the other things, we need to have faithful, faithful preachers preaching faithfully, and they can only do that if they believe the whole word of God. You need to believe Genesis 1 and 2. You need to believe that the world was created in six 24-hour days. If you believe anything else, you are cursing God. You are calling him a liar, and you were saying you don't want anything else that he has, because he's not going to give it to you if you call him a liar. It's not a it's not an a la carte menu where we

1:08:38 get to pick and choose which parts of scripture are from God and which parts we have better ideas about? Every word is from the mouth of God, and to reject any of it or to poo poo it or to try to translate and interpret it away is to renounce your own salvation, even while you confess it. And so we're doing this episode in this series because this is the chief challenge of our day. There won't be any Lutheranism in twenty years if these things continue, because our churches are dying, and the boomers who are paying all the bills are dying literally. Their children are apostate, their grandchildren are obviously apostate. There's nobody coming. That is God's punishment too. The grandfathers were faithless, and so the grandchildren are faithless.

1:09:25 It may be two different modes of faithlessness, but the result is the same. And it's a curse from God. Yes. And it will keep getting worse. You know, there there are big parts of this country where you're not only dealing with atheist neighbors, but you're dealing with second and third generation atheists where not only were they not baptized, not only did they grow up around the church or the word at all, but their parents didn't either. And in some cases, their grandparents didn't. To think that we can preserve the Christian civilization that we inherited without the foundation of that civilization is the very definition of insanity. In some places, we're actually dealing now with Muslim and other neighbors as

1:10:11 well, which again scripture very clear about this. That's a curse from God. To have foreigners come into your country and take over your country is a curse from God. God is used that many times throughout history in order to punish an apostate people. And we have Or to be ruled by women. Yes, or women or children directly compared the same. Yeah. But we have pastors who say this is a good thing that we have oh all this opportunity to outreach to No, being cursed by God is not a good thing. I I can't believe we even have to say that, and yet people no longer see that this is a curse from God. I'm not saying you don't proselytize those who are not of the same race as you. Of course not. What?, as Europeans, took Christendom to the entire rest of the world,

1:11:11 with the sole exception being a tiny part of the Levant and a church in India, and of course Ethiopia, which had things for other historical reasons we've touched on that in other episodes. That is the reason Satan hates us, of course. Because we built Christendom and then we took the gospel to everyone else. That is how you do it, because that is how you are blessed by God. God will bless you if you are faithful in that way. Having your nation invaded by foreigners is not an opportunity, it is a curse. And it's an act of war, and both must be responded to in the so called left and the right hand kingdoms of God. One other point I want to make about culture, because I don't you know we'll we're gonna do an episode soon about Jews and

1:12:02 Judaism, but a lot of times you will find even fairly good pastors use the term Judeo Christian. You know, we're talking about culture and ethics is sort of implied in that. And so you'll talk you'll hear people talk about the Judeo Christian roots of our laws or of our culture of our ethics. That's a brand new term. That term was invented after Jews started showing up in the United States because this is one of the places where they began to integrate and they wanted to not be treated as outsiders. And how do you do that? You co-opt the existing population. You say, Oh, you you guys are Christian? we're Jews. You're we're Judeo Christian. It it's it's the same thing. It's two sides of the same coin, guys.

1:12:51 You got your religion from us. We had it first and then we gave it to you. Which is pure nonsense and pure blasphemy. As we've said before, Adam believed in the promise of the Christ given to him in Genesis three fifteen. That's Christianity. Noah believed the same promise. Abraham received believed the same promise. Thomas and his faith was counted to him, like was accor accorded to him. Everyone who's in heaven is Christian. Some of them were also Jews, not because of the so called Jewish faith, but because they had the Christian faith within the Jewish tradition. Now this is a point that we'll make more clearly. I'm it's I'm not gonna make a good case for it now, but it is fundamentally subversive when someone says Judeo-Christian.

1:13:39 What they are doing is they are advancing the enlightenment because there's a whole lot of Judeo going on TV right now. When you see transsexuals and you see transgender surgeries for children, that's the Judeo and Judeo Christian. We've all seen the the the terrifying, horrifying pictures of books being burned in Germany in the 1930s. Nobody tells you what those books were that they were burned, or if they tell you, they say, Oh yeah, those they're burn them Bibles. Those guys hated God. No. The books that they were burning, specifically burning in those literal pictures, were from Magnus Hirschfeld's disease emporium. They were the original transgender surgery materials. They were the original material about homosexuality and sodomy and transgenderism and

1:14:28 how to spread this filth and this evil in the West. When you hear wa about Weimar Germany, the period that happened before the thirties, and you hear about the cultural decay and the depravity, that's what they're talking about. What happened in the 30s was a collective political response from the German people in opposition to the terrible societal decay that they had been exposed to. And it was the Judeo half of Judeo Christianity that was doing all that. There were no Christians involved at any point. You know, as I I mentioned recently in the episode where we mentioned head coverings, it was a Jew who told churches to burn their veils and we all responded. And now fifty years later, it's uh it's nearly unthinkable in most

1:15:14 churches for a girl to wear a veil, let alone for us to say you should veil, let alone you must veil. That wasn't Christian. That was the Judeo half of that so called two sides to one coin. There's a clear and marked difference in the God that we worship and the God that they worship. They worship the God of the Enlightenment. They worship the prince of this world. We worship the one true God. And the fruits of the two opposing religions could not be more clear. That's the reason we're gonna do an episode on that. You may hear this and think that we're just the most evil people in the world. You know, i if you don't hate us enough that you can listen to the future episode where we go into depth on it,

1:15:57 you can either really hate us or you can say, Well, yeah, I I don't like how that sounds, but I gotta think about it because they made some points. It's funny. Every time somebody posts on Reddit or somewhere else about listening to this, that's frequently the claim. I either I hate those guys, but they made some really good points, or I Or I want to hate them, but I can't because they made some really good points. Or I want to disagree with what they said, but it all makes sense. That's the reason that people are terrified of you listening to us. We're not playing rhetorical games. Corey and I could both run circles around people rhetorically. We speak clearly precisely to avoid that. It's easy to deceive someone.

1:16:37 It's hard to tell someone the truth, especially in this day and age. And so there are people who go around, some of them have callers on, who say the word deceivers. Well, if saying the very words that God says the way that God intended them is deception in your religion, you know, I'm not going to be in the same line as you on Judgment Day. That's all I can say. But to get back to the theme of this episode, Christendom's ashes are not just cultural. And they're not just religious either. Because as we've said in past episodes, you don't have to be Christian to live a godly life. We've seen that for the past couple generations, and that's precisely by people have been deceived into thinking you don't need Christianity to have

1:17:26 a good life, because they were coasting on the fumes of Christendom. They were coasting on the fumes of morals and laws and society that was explicitly and openly and unapologetically Christian. And when those supports got knocked out, there was still some momentum left in the thing. So you don't have to believe in God to do godly things, but you cannot do godly things in the long term if you don't know where they come from. Because soon as somebody else comes along with a better idea or some new progressive solution for a problem you didn't even know you have, eventually you're gonna fall for it. Or your neighbor will fall for it and so you'll try it out because you don't wanna you know you don't wanna ro roke

1:18:11 the rock the boat. And you will ultimately inevitably lose the godly things, as every civilization in history did. We mentioned at the beginning, Greece and Rome and China, they lost God after Babel. And they were on the downslope, which is why the the the cultures and societies collapsed. Chinese art three thousand years ago is better than it was twenty five hundred years ago. And two thousand years ago, there was a downslope and then it started to get better. And it was for other reasons, but they were coasting on the fumes of a religion that was no longer theirs. And that's what we're doing today as the Western world. And we need to point to the truth underlying all the reasons that we do things.

1:18:57 Otherwise we cannot possibly repair the damage, let alone explain to people why things are going wrong in the first place. The moral law is written in the heart of every man. However, we have run this experiment. We know what happens if you have over a course of generations and it may be many generations, or it may be only a few. Look at the sons of Ham, it did not take very long. Look at the sons of Shem and Japheth, it took longer, but eventually it may not be you, you may not be the one who loses the moral law. It may be your great, great, great, great, great grandchild, or even farther in the distance. However, it will eventually be lost because you lost the actual foundation, the actual truth, you lost Christendom.

1:19:52 You lost God's favor, and you are running on the fumes. And so it is only a matter of how long and how far you manage to make it, but you are going to crash. And that is what we want to restore. We want to restore Christendom because that is the only way to get out of the dive in which we find ourselves. And so yes, there may have been virtuous pagans, because they had the moral law written in their heart. But there will always be that competition against it because there's Satan out there who wants to steal that from you. There's your neighbor who wants to try something new and novel, or something a demon told him in the woods, in the case for many pagans, historically, and eventually that will take over.

1:20:39 Because you are not fighting against it. And Christians today we have the tools to fight against it. We have God's word. Word. We have it everywhere. I have it on my computer right now. It's on my phone. I have multiple Bibles on my desk. But if we don't read these things, if we don't use them, if we don't actually speak the words God has spoken to us, then all of that does nothing for us. We may as well have lost it in a wall in a run down temple, like the Jews did at one point. God has given us his word. We do not have the luxury or the option to ignore the things he has said, and, as said before, to a la carte, pick the bits we like and leave the rest. Everything God has said is true and good, and we have to

1:21:25 hold to every single word of it. And that is quite simply our goal here. Our goal is to be true to Scripture. One because we are Christians and that is our duty. Two because we have taken up the task of teachers, and the stricter judgment does await, and so no, we are not going to lie or deceive or play rhetorical games. We're not going to do that. Because we will be called to account for every idle word. And we know that, so we are going to speak the truth in the way God has spoken it to us in his word. Amen