Michael ‘Martin Luther’ King: Arch-Heretic

0:37 Welcome to the Stone Choir Podcast. I am Corey J. Molly. And I'm still Wo. On today's Stone Choir we're going to be continuing the overarching theme that we've had on many of these episodes where we're effectively skewering sacred cows. We're going to be going after another topic today that is loved and embraced by the world. Uh it's a big part of conversation politically. It's in fact a big part of conversation frequently in our churches. Uh that is a man by the name of the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., also known as Michael King. That's the name by which he was born. So today is almost certainly going to be a two part episode. Uh I did the research on his papers, on his sermons, on

1:20 his speeches, and Corey did the research on his political connections, his affiliations, and kind of his later life outside of the immediate sphere of the church. And so it's almost certainly gonna run long enough that we don't want to have a another brutal four hour marathon. So I think we'll probably make the call around the hour mark that we'll probably split this in two episodes. So just so you know, there's a possibility this might be one or it might be two. So for the first half of this episode or the first episode of this two part series, however, pans out, we're going to be going over things that King wrote when he was in seminary, when he was in college, when he was getting his graduate degree, and then

2:03 when he was a pastor, which end incidentally overlaps. And so we'll go in a little bit of the detail of the timeline there. Before I get into the all the specifics, I want to warn you up front, we are going to bury you in quotes. It is very deliberate this week that we are going to quote way too much. The quotes are going to be too long and they're going to be too many of them. The reason that we're going to do that, the reason that we're gonna be reading a whole lot more than usual, is that the single most common refutation of some of the objections we're gonna have in this episode or this half of the episode is well he was a good boy, he didn't do nothing. Basically they argue when he was young, sure he had some problems

2:43 theologically, but later on he was a really good Christian man. And so we're going to bury you in quotes that prove that that's utterly impossible. So rather than not just name calling and say he's burning in hell, which is a fact, we will demonstrate that. We're going to use his own words, we're going to use a trajectory of his life to demonstrate, beyond any shadow of a doubt, that there was probably not a single point there's not probably not a single day in this man's life where he was actually a Christian. That's you know, uh you probably know very little about him, you know he was a civil rights leader, that he was a pastor, that you know, he he was nonviolent. You probably have a generally good opinion of him.

3:25 Uh people on the dissident right who have gotten more into the revisionist history of some of these matters and have seen for themselves some of the facts, like, yeah, no, that's nonsense. But for most of you listening, you probably have a generally favorable opinion. And this episode is not to tear down your opinion of a dead man. The reason specifically that we're tackling this subject is I said at the beginning, in our church it is extremely common for theologians, for pastors, for executives of churches, for men who frankly should know these things before they quote this man, will use him as a paragon of Christian virtue and as a paragon of Christian teaching and belief. And so in the spirit of the genealogy of ideas, we're just

4:12 checking their work. They're guys who in good conscience say we should be like Martin Luther King Jr., we should be like this man, we should have faith like him. If that's true, then it will hold up under scrutiny. So this is that scrutiny. And so to begin, I spent the last two days reading this guy's writings. I that was incredibly painful. I don't recommend doing it. Um he's a bad writer. he's illiterate. He clearly had a lot of help when he was submitting his papers because when you look at his handwritten notes and compare them to the papers that were submitted, it's night and day. But that's not the point of this episode. What we're gonna talk about, we're gonna begin in one of the middle of his papers.

4:54 This is a paper that he wrote, I believe while he was at seminary, so to give a brief bio, he when he was 15, he went to Morehouse College. This was a historically black college. It was a preparatory college, basically presem for Baptists. After going to Morehouse, he went to Crozer University. After Crozer, he went to Boston University, where he received a PhD. So the reason that that's important is that much of the writings that we're gonna be talking about in this first part are from this period. They're from a period where he was in school and in some cases he was young. Like I don't think I have anything here when he was under 18, but as I said, a lot of people will defend him and say, oh, well, he was young, so it's okay because he

5:40 got better later. What we're going to demonstrate is that he in fact got worse later. But more importantly, as you hear us reading these things, these specific quotes from this man, whether he was a young man or an older man, think for yourself, if you had said these things and then later on you became a Christian, would you have repented of them publicly? I want you to keep that in mind because that's fundamentally the question you will have to deal with when you say to someone, if if you're convinced by our argument here, if you tell someone, you know, actually Martin Luther King Jr. was not even a Christian. he had some terrible false theology and it was antithetical to the church. If you say that to someone and they know anything about

6:22 the details and the timing, they'll say, Oh, that was in when he was younger. So remember that question. If you had said these things when you were eighteen or twenty or twenty three, and then later you became a Christian, would you admit it? Would you just pretend that nothing had changed, or would you turn away from this wickedness that we're about to describe And use it as an example of the Christian life and say, I used to believe something bad. Now I believe the truth. Let me tell you about that. I know I personally would. There's I I we we talk on this on this show sometimes about the errors that we made in our own past, not to be self-reflective, but simply to say God fixes things, but you have

7:01 to let him. And so as you hear these quotes, just remember if this If this was your confession and then 10 years later you believed the opposite, would you have admitted it? And would you have said, yeah, I don't believe that anymore? So one of the papers that Mike Michael I'm going to call him Mike or Michael or MLK throughout this, because his name isn't Martin Luther. Uh that was a name his father changed his name to when he was a couple years old. One of the papers he wrote when he was in seminary at Crozer when he was an adult was related to his trajectory in the faith. Uh the name of the paper, and we're gonna have links probably to some of these. I'm getting all these from the Stanford Martin Luther King Jr.

7:41 Research and Education Institute. You can read them all for yourself. You can spend days doing it just like me. Like I said, don't recommend it. But this first This first one I'm going to quote from briefly is an autobiography of religious development. So when King describes how he became a Christian, he says when he was at the age of five, he went up for an altar call because his bigger sister had just done it. And so in his mind, that was kind of his introduction to the faith. And his father was a minister, so he was he was raised in the church, but his own first personal experience of engaging with that was a superficial altar call in competition with the sibling. He was five. There's nothing like it was a m it was a mistake.

8:20 I'm not holding a five year old's mistakes against him theologically for the rest of his life. The point is that that was kind of the high water mark of this guy theologically. Here's what he said in seminary about his subsequent years. He writes the lessons which I was taught in Sunday school were quite in the fundamentalist line. None of my teachers ever doubted the infallibility of scriptures. Most of them were unlettered and had never heard of biblical criticism. Naturally I accepted the teachings as they were given to me. I never felt any need to doubt them, at least at the time I didn't. I guess I accepted biblical studies uncritically until I was about twelve years old. But this uncritical attitude could not last long, for it was contrary

9:02 to the very nature of my being. I had always been the questioning and precocious type. At the age of thirteen, I shocked my Sunday school class by denying the bodily resurrection of Jesus. Well, age thirteen, I shocked my Sunday school class by denying the bodily resurrection of Jesus. From the age of thirteen on, doubts began to spring forth unrelentingly. At the age of fifteen I entered Morehouse College and more and more I could see a gap between what I had learned in Sunday school and what I was learning in college. This conflict continued until I studied a course in Bible, in which I came to see that behind the legends and myths And myths of the Bible were many profound truths with which one could not

9:45 escape. My days in college were very exciting ones. As stated above, my college training, especially the first two years, brought many doubts into my mind. It was at this period that the shackles of fundamentalism were removed from my body. This is why when I came to Crozer, I could accept the liberal interpretation with relative ease. It was in my senior year of college that I entered the ministry. I had felt the urge to enter the ministry from my latter high school days, but accumulated doubts had somewhat blocked the urge. Now it appeared again, with an inescapable drive. My call to the ministry was not a miraculous or supernatural something. On the contrary, it was an inner urge calling me to serve

10:25 humanity. So this is a young man who his trajectory, as I said, from that altar call in competition with his older sister, as soon as he started reading the Bible, his very first response from the age of twelve was I don't believe this. The age of thirteen he openly denied the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the grave. And then he was off to the races. Once he went to Morehouse at age fifteen, from fifteen through eighteen, it got even worse. And so when he's at seminary at Crozier, he continues to escalate down that path. And so we're beginning here because this is the arc of all the other quotes that we're gonna have here today. It's not simply that, oh well, he was young and then later

11:07 on he learned something different. He was young, he was not a Christian. He became more evil as it went, and he became more open about it as it went. And so down the road, you know, when he's been in the pulpit for 10, 15 years, at no point was there a single moment when he repudiated any of these earlier beliefs. On the contrary, he hid them better. Early on when he was at school and then a seminary and then working on his PhD, he would play to whatever audience to which he was speaking privately. So if they were more illiberal in his words, and that's the technical term he's using, he's correct, meaning they deny the errandy of scripture, they the inerrancy of scripture, they deny the divinity of God

11:50 of God. Uh they deny God entirely. They deny miracles. They're not Christian. He was not going to Christian schools and so he made sure that he fit right in. When he got into the pulpit and he was working with actual Christians in his in his congregations, he was more careful. So as we go through these quotes, what's going to be established is that when he uses a word, it's going to be a word that you or I would use, but it will mean something completely different. That's another theme that's going to run through this entire segment that when he says something, when King says something, it's going to be a word that Christians use, it's going to be Jesus dust, but he will mean the exact opposite when he says it.

12:30 You also did mention his spelling and grammar issues that occur throughout his entire life, and that's not just us saying that, that is from a number of his biographers and from those who have collated his papers and such. This is a common critique. And one of the reasons that can be relevant is that you see a very big difference between certain of his works and say certain of his public speeches or the public works and private letters. And that's because a lot of times there were ghost writers involved for some of this. And so for some of the more public materials that sound better, if you're trying to pull something that sounds Christian from that, do bear in mind it was probably written by someone else.

13:13 You can see the real man in the things that he wrote himself, and a lot of what we're going to be quoting today will be things that he wrote himself. And I agree with you when it comes to the name. I was also just going to call him Michael King or MLK. Notably, his name was never even legally changed. So his father didn't even bother to change his name from Michael King to Martin Luther King. So he was born Michael King and he died Michael King. That's pretty much consistent with everything else about the guy. the public myth and the actual facts uh are are just not related at all. And so again, we're not here to attack a dead guy. It's not because he's black. It's not because he was even a so called civil rights leader.

14:01 It's that when in our own churches this man is held up as a Christian paragon, okay, you say that I should emulate this guy, let me go look at what I need to emulate. And the very first thing we find is denying that Jesus was raised from the dead. And so it it gets worse from there. That again, that was only at age thirteen. We're basically gonna go through some of these papers in chronological order as he delivered them. so it'll it'll jump around a little bit thematically, but the theme that's going to emerge fundamentally is one of again, this man was never Christian a day in his life. And that's not just us saying it. As you hear the things that he says as we read them to you, they're all blasphemy.

14:41 Like we're not talking about Lutherans disagreeing with Baptists about the sacraments. We're not talking about arguing tulip with the reformed. We're talking about the very most basic elements of the Christian faith. And when he speaks about them, it's in very open terms to say, yeah, that's nonsense. And so the the next quote we're going to go over is from a paper that he wrote at Crozer Seminary, and it's entitled The Purpose of Religion. What is the purpose of religion? Is it to perpetuate an idea about God? Is it totally dependent upon revelation? What part does psychological experience play? Is religion synonymous with theology? Harry Emerson Fostic says that the most hopeful thing about any system

15:26 of theology is that it will not last. This statement will shock some, but is the purpose of religion the perpetuation of theological ideas? Religion is not validated by ideas, but by experience. This automatically raises the question of salvation. Is the basis for salvation in creeds and dogmas or in experience. Catholics would have us believe the former for them, the Church, its creeds, its popes and bishops, have recited the essence of religion, and that is all there is to it. On the other hand, we say that each soul must make its own reconciliation to God, that no creed can take the place of that personal experience. This was expressed by Paul Tillich when he said there is natural religion which belongs to man by nature, but there is also a

16:13 revealed religion which man receives from a supernatural reality. Relevant religion, therefore, comes through revelation from God, on the one hand, and through repentance and acceptance of salvation on the other hand, dogma as an agent in salvation has no essential place. This is the secret of our religion. This is what makes the saints move on in spite of problems and perplexities of life that they might be This religion of experience by which man is aware of God seeking him and saving him helps him to see the hands of God moving through history. Religion has to be interpreted for each age, stated in terms that age can understand, but the essential purpose of religion remains the same. It is not to perpetuate a dogma or theology, but to produce

16:59 living witnesses and testimonies to the power of God in human experience. And then his signature. So when he's talking about religion, he fundamentally sees them as interchangeable. Now, you know, if this were just a single paper where he was kind of talking the conceptually about how religion is used among people, sure. Maybe you could have an academic paper that would kind of minimize the truth, but it was being more general and so you might hand wave it and say, well that wasn't so bad. But this first quote is completely revelatory about his approach to Christianity. He fundamentally sees Christianity as a human creation. And we'll establish that down the road with some of the other the other quotes.

17:48 But the fact that to him, dogma as an agent in salvation has no essential place. Think what that means vis-a-vis the Christian faith. If an agent in salvation doesn't come from dogma, doesn't come from belief, where does it come from? And as he establishes throughout everything he says, it's good works. It's being good to your neighbor. And that's why he spent all of his time basically externally focused, not on the Christian life, but on the sort of social change that was repackaged as part of the civil rights movement, and he was weaponized to go out and do someone else's bidding. That's the second half of this episode, the part two of this. But But really, it's it's just important to remember he sees religion as a

18:40 man-made thing. Is that what Christians believe? Absolutely not. No Christian believes that that first of all, the religion is there's Christianity and there's everything else. There's no such thing as competing religions because there's only one God. And so there's a God and there's a religion of that God. Everything else is fundamentally the teachings of demons. Yeah, it's a phrase that we frequently use on this show because it comes straight from first Timothy. God describes teachings of demons as the source of false false doctrine. This is fundamentally false doctrine. Even this this very early paper he says salvation and dogma that's they're have nothing to do with each other. Meaning there's there's salvation apart from belief and apart even from any

19:25 particular religion. That is that's astonishing. Well I just look at that quote right in the middle. It's a straight up denial of Christianity. On the other hand, we say that each soul must make its own reconciliation to God That's just a fundamental rejection of Christianity because Christianity is very clear. You cannot reconcile yourself to God. You can be reconciled to God in Christ. That is God acting, not you acting. This is just a straight up rejection of the Christian faith. With a whole bunch of other errors thrown in, of course. I'm glad you picked up on that particular quote because that is as we get down further into these, that's literally what he says Jesus was. And we'll get into where he says that Jesus was just a

20:15 man and was not God at all, but that is what he believes that Jesus did. That's why he's saying this here to say that on the other hand, we say that each soul must make its reconciliation to God. He says that that is the life, the Jesus, the man led, that he reconciled himself to God as the perfect example to us. Now, a Christian would hear that and say, well, that's bad theology, but I can kind of make that Christian if I rewarded a little. The point to hammer home here is that that's not what he's doing. He's fundamentally coming from the opposite direction saying there's there's no God as we conceive him and what Jesus did was what every man can do by interacting with his fellow man. The next paper that we're going to read from is also from

21:03 nineteen forty eight at Crozer Seminary. It's the subpart is titled This is from uh three essays on religion. The subpart is Unreal Worship, Temple and Sacrifice. In this, he's talking about the book of Jeremiah, and one of the themes that he picked up on that was given to him by his professors, the men he read, was that the faith of the Old Testament was continuously evolving, that there was no direct revelation from God, but it was just men accreting new ideas. And so what he's saying here in this quote is that the book of Jeremiah and the prophet, so called, in his mind, Jeremiah, was fundamentally teaching against what the Israelites had been practicing in the temple system. King writes.

21:53 Another line which can be added to the column of Jeremiah's contributions to religious thought is his stand against artificial worship. This This action was started against the temple. As we know, the Deuteronomic Reformation culminated in the centralization of national worship in the temple at Jerusalem. This temple was the pivot of the nation's religion. In the course of years elaborate ceremonies were enacted, and priests prescribed sacrifices, and the smoke of burnt offerings rose high from the altar. The temple was the apple of the people's eye. To criticize it was to set aflame the fires of both religion and patriotism. This was the very thing that Jeremiah did. So it might not be obvious if you read that or especially

22:38 if if I'm reading it to you, but what he's saying here is fundamentally God did not institute the temple. God was not present at the temple. It was the priests making up things over time and saying, oh well now we're gonna do this sort of sacrifice, and we're gonna dress this way, and we're gonna do this And so what he's saying in this paper and in this section is Jeremiah came along and said, That's all nonsense because it's not in your hearts And while on one hand Jeremiah was appropriately condemning the fact that their worship was false because they had abandoned God in their hearts. You don't need to say that the priests had invented things when it was the actually God that did it. But this is one of the first quotes we have that reveals

23:22 that in King's mind there is no inspiration of scripture. There was no God acting at any point in Scripture. God God is not personal and active at any point in the Bible as King reads it. And so it makes the only way he can possibly understand Jeremiah condemning them is by condemning what the priests were doing. And if the priests were doing something that the new prophet would condemn, well obviously, you know, it's just what they made up. It's what men were doing. And that's again, that's the overarching theme. All religion is man-made. All of the Christian religion pre incarnate Christ was man-made, the Christian religion in the age of the church was man-made, all of it has come from the mind of man.

24:08 And the attentive reader will already, or listener in this case, will already hear some of the echoes of the social gospel so called and the sort of social agitation in which King will be engaging, really starting now in his life, but also later in life, and we'll mention some of the gentlemen who were responsible for that in the the latter half of this episode. More likely the next episode, but still. The preaching of the first four centuries was mainly apologetic. After Christ had failed to return, there had to be some justification for the validity of the Christian gospel. They were out at every turn to defend the Christian religion. Such a man is Origen and Justin were forever attempting to prove

24:52 the divinity of Christ. It was his writing is so bad sometimes. It was during the period that the Trinitarian doctrine arose. It is also significant to know that the preaching of this period was mainly scriptural. The condition of the age required apologetic preaching. Twentieth century preaching on the contrary deals with great social problems. That's in the singular, but I'll correct it. Moreover, much of our twentieth century preaching is an attempt to adjust individuals to the complexities of modern society. The problem of the virgin birth and the Trinity is not the most important feat features, these plural word should be singular, in twentieth century preaching, as was the case in the first four centuries of

25:35 preaching. So do you hear what just he just said? He said that the Trinity was made up in the fourth century, the virgin birth is a problem, that these men had to make this stuff up and try to justify Christ's failure to return. What an incredible presupposition. The they believed that Christ was going to return because he said he would, and when he didn't, well he was a liar, so what they have to do they had to permute the Christian faith into something that could still be sustained among believers. That if you were a believer in the third and fourth century A.D., you had to have some new doctrine in order for you to stay engaged, because we got this problems of the Trinity that they made up the virgin birth, that's obviously not going to be

26:21 real. So, like this is this is who he was. This is who he was in seminary. And I think it's important to note Lutherans and Baptists, at least some Baptists, have different approaches to when a man enters the pulpit. King had already been preaching in churches before this. He had already stood up in a pulpit and spoken in the name of God. He didn't yet have a permanent call to a particular congregation that would come after he finished seminary, but he was already preaching at this point. He was well respected, and he was well respected in the very congregation where he denied that Jesus was resurrected from the dead. Now, I don't point this out to impugn all Baptists because I know that there are many Baptists who are actually Christians, but what

27:10 was going on in his dad's church that although he shocked his Sunday school, he wasn't repudiated. He was recommended to go off to seminary. Like surely much of the congregation was paying for him to go to Moorehouse and Crozer so that he could then get up in a pulpit and speak in God's name. And yet as he goes along in this career, he gets further and further away from the Orthodox Christian faith. I mean, you really can't be a Christian and say that the virgin birth is a problem and the Trinity is a problem. Now, as a Christian, you can recognize that the Trinity is a mystery. That is distinct from a problem. Saying it's a problem is saying this is something we can't explain, and so it can't possibly be

27:55 part of our religion. That's what he's actually doing here. He wants to jettison core parts of Christianity because he is attempting to turn Christianity into a social gospel. He wants to turn Christianity into a vehicle for societal change, and so it's necessary to jettison these various bits and pieces of the religion that oh we don't need these because that's not the core. It's the experience of the religion. It's doing X, Y, and Z, which X, Y, and Z turn out to be what the Communist Party wants. We'll get into that more when it comes to the individuals around Michael King and his political activities. But what he is doing here is attempting to transform transform Christianity into something that it is not and cannot be.

28:47 Because if you get rid of these doctrines, you don't have Christianity anymore. You have something totally alien. And he's not the only one doing this, of course. This is not Michael King's project. This is a project of many academics, and King is simply parroting those lines, but he made those lies his own. And if you believe these things, you cannot be a Christian. Think what the Athanasian Creed says. If you do not hold these beliefs, if you do not hold these truths, you cannot be saved. That is the position of the church, that is the position of Christianity down through the centuries. There are certain things to which you must hold to be a Christian, and most certainly that is the virgin birth, the Trinity, and

29:38 the Resurrection of the Dead. The same year Mike wrote another paper called Light on the Old Testament from the Ancient Near East. Uh he was writing about archaeological investigations as they relate to the text of scripture. He writes, Fortunately through numerous excavations and assiduous decipherings, that door has been opened. Ever since that time we have been able to get a critical, unbiased and scientific light upon the Old Testament. No logical thinker can doubt the fact that these archaeological findings are now indispensable to all concrete study of the Hebrew hyphen Christian religion. These findings have proved to us that there are many striking analogies between the ideas expressed in the Old Testament and those found in

30:22 the surrounding cultures of the Near East. For an instance, the views of the Old Testament are almost identical with those of Babylonian mythology. This is not to say that the Pentateuch writers, note per plural, Pentateuch writers, sat down and copied these views verbatim, the differences of expression attest to that fact. But after being in contact with these surrounding cultures and hearing certain doctrines expressed, it was only natural for some of these views to become part of their subconscious minds. When they sat down to write, they were expressing consciously that which had dwelled in their subconscious minds. This is one of his recurring themes throughout as he describes the men who wrote the various books of the Bible, the overarching inexorable

31:10 theme of each of those comments is that at no point is does is God's voice present in any measure. There's never a moment of consideration of plenary verbal inspiration by God of a single word. What he does say is that these were just men in their times. They were thinking about a god, and that the so called Hebrew Christian religion meant that there was some sort of god that a group of men scattered across time happened to be sort of oriented in the same direction, and so when they wrote these various books, they were thinking about the same hypothetical god, but they didn't know him with any immediacy. He didn't speak to them. What they knew was what they thought about, and they were inevitably

31:59 influenced by all their neighbors. Whoever was around them at the time, by osmosis they were gonna naturally absorb those beliefs from the other nearby religions. That's radical. That is again, that's a nullification of the Christian faith. If God is not present in speaking through the men who are writing the Bible, it's all just nonsense. it is literally made up. That is not only the only possible conclusion of his beliefs, but that's that is what he believed. And so the reason for laying this groundwork early on is like like I said, when we get later on into his his public ministry so called where he was pretending to be a pastor, he didn't say this stuff as much. He didn't get out in the open.

32:46 he only I can only find a single case of him mentioning the virgin birth when he was a preacher. He would just stay away from it. See in college and in seminary he would deny it. But he knew better than to deny the virgin birth in church because he knew that might cause a riot with some of the nice old black Baptist ladies who actually cared about their Bible and knew better. So he wouldn't do it. But again, the the point I made at the beginning, he never repudiated a single one of these beliefs. At no point in public or private did he say, you know what? I used to deny the Trinity and the Virgin Birth. Thank God God brought me to repentance, and I now confess the true Christian faith. If he had done that, he might have emphasized it a bit

33:28 more because it is so foundational. And yet we see the exact opposite. He condemns it, he says it's fake and made up, and then it just vanishes from his theology. He doesn't bring it up again. And that was one of the few smart things he did. These opinions that are blatantly anti-Christian, they just got buried. So the reason that we're focusing now in his early life is that his early life is the only time he told the truth about this stuff. But he he never changed his confession. He never believed anything differently. And later on when he used some of the words, like he does talk about resurrection, we'll we'll get to that in a bit. When he talks about resurrection later on, it's not of the body,

34:06 it's a completely different figmentary spiritual resurrection that he concocted in his own new religion, so that he could have a religion of science, a religion of reason that was consistent with what he knew he could prove on paper. And he wouldn't have to believe any of those mythologies, any of the nonsense that these very primitive peoples had made up as they were just absorbing things from their neighbors. You helpfully pointed out that he used the plural for writers, authors of the Pentateuch, and for those who are less familiar with why that would be the case, in academic circles for a fairly long time at this point, long here being a bit over a century or so, not long in terms of history.

34:53 There's a theory called the JEDP theory, which is the theory that there were at least four authors of the books of the Pentateuch. This is not the Christian position. The Christian position, the position of the church, the position of Scripture, is the Pentateuch was written by Moses. Now, there may be some little bits that were not written by Moses. For instance, you can be an Orthodox Christian and believe that Deuteronomy 34, which is the death of Moses, the mourning for Moses, and then the appointment of Joshua as the new leader of Israel. You can believe that that was written after Moses because it tells of his death, or you can believe that it was Moses writing it as prophecy, you're not an unorthodox Christian if you believe one

35:41 versus the other. However, if you deny that Moses was the author of the Pentateuch, you are outside of Orthodox Christianity. And that is the position of many academics when it comes to critical theory, which is what we're dealing with here. And to expand on a little bit, JEDP is Yahwist, which is because that author supposedly uses Yahweh for the name of God, then you have the Eloist, who uses Elohim, the Deuteronomist, author of Deuteronomy, and the priestly writer who would have written Leviticus. That is the contention, that's what the theory is. There's no evidence for this. Their argument is based entirely on the fact that there are some linguistic differences and there are different names used for God.

36:35 But that's because Moses was writing about different things in these books. You could do the same thing with any living secular author. You're going to write a little differently depending on the subject you're writing. If I'm writing a case brief, I'm not going to do the same thing as if I'm writing fiction or an essay on scripture or politics, it's going to be different, and so their contention is completely insane. The reason it's insane is because of the second lack of evidence, and that is that no source has ever been found for any of these supposed authors. Because what the argument is, is that there were these original documents that were then either compiled by Moses or compiled by Moses and

37:19 some others or redacted by this person at any rate, there were various authors and it was compiled. Not one source of these other supposed documents has ever been located. This is spun entirely out of whole cloth, out of the minds of academics, who are simply seeking to deny the verbal inspiration of Scripture. And that is what Michael King is doing, when he says writers. And so the next selection from Michael King's writings is from Light on the Old Testament from the Ancient Near East. This is the conclusion of that paper. What now is the conclusion of the whole matter? First, we must conclude that the Old Testament has its roots not only in the history of the Hebrew people. Instead, one must consider the Old Testament in relation to all the

38:13 ancient civilizations of the Near East. Modern archaeology has proven to us that many of the ideas of the Old Testament have their roots in the ideas of surrounding cultures. Many would argue that these archaeological findings have proven to be very pernicious to modern religion. They argue that archaeologists have robbed the Old Testament of any claim to uniqueness. Of course, any logical thinker must believe the contrary, for from attempting to destroy the usefulness of the Old Testament, archaeolog his writing is so hard to read sometimes. Far from attempting to destroy the usefulness of the Old Testament, archaeologists are attempting to give a better understanding of the contents of the

38:53 Bible. They realize that religion, as far as possible, must be scientifically tenable. It is my opinion that biblical criticism and biblical archaeology will serve to justify the position of the church in modern culture, especially in the face of modern youth who are taught to weigh and consider. Second, we must conclude that many of the things which we have accepted as true historical happenings are merely mythological. They are merely modified links, connected to the wide chain of mythology. Again, this conclusion will shock many, but why so? One needs only know that a myth serves the purpose of getting over an idea that is in the mind of the author. Therefore, it becomes just as valuable as the factual.

39:35 Dr. Bevan succinctly stated it. We have documents which record actual historical events, with the names of persons who lived and acted more or less in the way described. Then, as we follow back the story, we find ourselves in a past with which the real history is apparently continuous, but which is in truth only a work of imagination, a mythical past set behind there's a illegible section, the historical events and concealing the real past out of which in actual fact the historical process came. If we accept the Old Testament as being true, we will find it full of errors, contradictions, and obvious impossibilities, as at the Pentateuch was written by Moses. But if we accept it as truth, we will find it to

40:23 be one of the most logical vehicles of mankind's deepest devotional thoughts and aspirations, couched in language which still retains its original vigor and its moral intensity. As a sort of side note, when I am reading these I will correct some of the more glaring grammar errors because they are painful to me to read them. We can include these in the show notes so you can see how bad some of this is if it is not edited. Lots of subject verb disagreement. And this was after three years of college. This is in seminary. And his PhD stuff is no better. he was an atrocious speller. And so we see here, of course, he bluntly states what was stated previously, what I highlighted with the JEDP theory.

41:09 denying that the Pentateuch was written by Moses, and he's saying that scripture is full of errors, contradictions and obvious impossibilities. This is something that you expect to hear from an outright atheist, particularly a new atheist. This is not something that Christians say. This is not something that a Christian would say. This is not something that was said by a Christian. Christians do not deny the truth of Scripture. They do not deny the inspiration of Scripture, they do not deny the consistency of Scripture, they do not attribute to Scripture, and therefore to God, because Scripture is the Word of God, they do not attribute to God errors, contradictions, and obvious impossibilities.

41:56 This is an academic paper, but it is a paper written by an academic who is not Christian. And this is just a Just the consistent case with his writings. This is what you find from the beginning of his life to the end. The things that he wrote reject core truths, core claims of the Christian religion. And so they are not things that could have been written by a Christian. It's helpful here that he does something that I had pointed out in the episode on the perspicuity of scripture, on the clarity of scripture. I pointed out how frequently when these men are playing rhetorical games, they will say oh it's true but it's not real. The n there's a narrative but it's not it's a story but it's not factual.

42:49 They play these games and he literally does it right here and he put these in quotes. If we accepted the old testament as being quote unquote true, we'll find it's full of errors. On the other hand, if we accept it as quote unquote truth, we will find it to be one of the most logical vehicles, etcetera. So he literally directly sets true and truth in opposition. That is Mike's religion. And so the only way he's able to find truth in scripture as he's denying everything about it is to just insert all of his own views, all of his own ideas, to to hollow out the Christian faith, our faith, and wear it as a skin suit. And that is what Mike King did his entire life. He hollowed out the Christian faith and he wore it as a

43:33 skin suit. So again, the purpose of this episode, when you hear someone, a Christian, an actual Christian, in good conscience, quoting this man, know that this is the baggage that they are bringing along with their views. And then ask yourself, how did this man, who who denied Christ, he he's burning in hell. He cannot possibly be in heaven as this was his confession. That we can say that beyond any shadow of a doubt. It's not like, well he sinned a lot and so yeah, I don't know. I th I don't think he's gonna forgive him. It's got nothing to do with that. This man denied God, he denied scripture, he denied everything that is the source of our salvation. There's no possible hope for this man to be saved.

44:15 How can such a man be an example of anything in the Christian life? You may be able to say, well, he was terrible, but he did he did this one thing right. If anyone actually say that, then we could have that discussion. That's the problem. No one's saying that. No one's saying he was an evil, wicked, damned man, but he got one thing pretty right. And let's maybe explain how he got that one thing right. No. They see he's he's a paragon of virtue, that he was a Christian man, and anyone who even questions that is blaspheming. And that as I said at the beginning, that's the overarching theme of this episode in the next few episodes. It is deliberately for Corey and I to blaspheme the gods of this age.

44:56 Michael Martin Luther King Jr. is one of the gods of this age. This religion that he's espousing is the religion of this age. There's no doubt about that. This is a real religion he's describing. The problem is it looks and smells a little bit like Christianity if you're an ignorant Christian who's not paying any attention, but as soon as you look at this stuff, it just completely implodes. The The next brief section here is just a it's from sermon sketches. He was doing a sermon on Job 1925, where Job says, I know that my redeemer lives. And the title of his sermon was The Assurance of Immortality. The theme that he had for sermon was we are able to attain immortality through the men and women that we influence and through

45:41 the children who are touched by the flame of our spirits. And the purpose of his sermon was to show that the desire for immortality will not be in vain. This is another one of his recurring themes. As he inserts his views into scripture, what he will say is that there was no notion of the resurrection of the dead until very near to Jesus Day. One of the things he'll do later on, he'll talk about a deutero Isaiah, which is another thing from these critical readers where they believe that just as with JEDP, they believe that there were two authors of Isaiah. One wrote the first two thirds, and then a different guy wrote the last third. And Deuterone Isaiah is the one who has the prophecies, the one

46:25 who talks about eternal life and resurrection. And so his claim, his belief is that those things say saying that there's resurrection of the dead, that there's an afterlife of any sort, that that no believer in Yahweh in God believed those things until very late in the Hebrew period. Again, that's that's it's not sub-Christian, it's anti-Christian. And so th this is just one small blur, but it's consistent with his overarching theme that that pops up everywhere. He does not believe that there's any continuity in scripture whatsoever. Which makes perfect sense because he denies that it's from God. If it's just a bunch of random people scattered across time, well sure it's not going to make a lot of sense.

47:14 And you mentioned that we're judging the man based on his confessions, based on the things that he said, the things that he wrote. But of course a tree is also known by its fruit, and so we can look to his works, and we'll do a little bit more of that in it's going to be a second episode. But Christians can very well at the least look to how he spent his last night on earth, and he spent his last night on earth fornicating with two prostitutes and beating a third woman. This is confirmed by the FBI, who had him under surveillance for many years. This is well known. That is probably not how Christians are supposed to spend their last night on earth. That's not how Christians do spend any of their nights on earth.

48:06 Now, can you be a Christian and still sin, of course. But if you are holding yourself out as a minister, holding yourself out as a teacher of the faith, and that is still how you are living your life, and that was not a one-time thing, that was the That was consistent throughout his entire career as an activist. That is not a Christian man. But moving on to his next quote, this is from the ethics of late Judaism as evidenced in the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs. For a number of centuries it was generally held that the period between the Old and New Testaments was a period of silence, and that no spiritual development was achieved within it. It was believed that this period of silence was broken when the

48:51 New Testament appeared on the stage of history. Now the pendulum of interpretation is swinging in another direction. Most competent scholars have cast such positions out of the window. They would all agree that in reality there was no period of silence. To be sure, it was a period of great spiritual progress, and in many instances greater than any preceding it in the In Old Testament times, even though the Old Testament was its logical prelude. To my mind, many of the works of this period were infinitely more valuable than those that received canonicity. The materials to justify such statements are found mainly in the Apocrypha and the Pseudoepigrapha. These works, although presented pseudonymously, are of lasting significance to the biblical

49:35 student. I would start out by just pointing out there's a weird inconsistency here in terms of saying there's silence and then referencing the Apocrypha, which of course was in the intertestamental period. But even if you take it to mean silence in terms of no scripture, which is the Christian position. The Christian position is that there is a period of silence, as it were, between the close of the Old Testament and the open of the New Testament. We have materials written in that period. We call them the Apocrypha, and they are useful. They are to be read as historical documents, not as scripture. That has long been the position of the church. There are some contentions over where exactly certain books belong in the canon, but the Apocrypha is

50:24 a fairly set group of books that are considered historical books, not part of scripture. This was the position, incidentally also of the Roman Church, until the Counter Reformation, when in rejection of what the Lutherans did, because the Lutherans just affirmed what the Church had taught for centuries, Rome decided they would canonize these books because well they were rejecting what the Lutherans had done. That was done in response to the Lutherans not for any theological or doctrinal reasons. Now of course they did do it for some dogmatic reasons, because you can get some of their arguments for praying to the saints and things like that from the apocryphal books. Notably, the apocryphal books themselves state that they are not scripture by

51:15 saying there is no prophet during the time when these were written. But that aside, what he is saying here is that there is a sort of, and in his words, spiritual progress in religion, in Christianity. This is utopianism. This is a sort of new age religion. The beginnings of it, of course, because it's become what we know modernly as sort of new age religion. It's the belief that humanity is getting better as we go along. That's not the teaching of Scripture. Humanity was very good in the words of Genesis in the garden. Humanity fell, and we are degenerating as time goes on. We are not getting better. There is no spiritual progress. Now, as an individual, of course, you can make spiritual progress, because

52:06 you can be converted to Christianity, you can be in Christ, and therefore you go through the process of sanctification. That is spiritual progress. But there's no spiritual progress in the terms of religion getting better as we go. That is not Christianity. That is the spirit of the age. That's outright Satanism, quite frankly. And that is what he's advocating here, and he's saying that that is better than the Old Testament, that is better than Scripture. But of course that's in keeping with his position, because his position is that his project is better than Scripture, all of Scripture, the Old Testament, the New Testament. Because again, it is that argument that, oh, we're making progress, we're

52:49 becoming better, we're more ethical, we are just all around better human beings, better men than our forebears, than our forefathers. And that is simply not the case, and it's not the Christian position, because again, the Christian position is is that this creation is fallen and it is degenerating over time. It is getting worse. Things are not getting better. I'm not saying that is a black pill, as it were. That is simply the reality of it. Yes, we can work to make a better world than we have today, certainly, but we are not going to reverse the fall. Yes, in some minor way, you reverse the fall every time you work in your garden and you remove the thistles and the weeds and things like that.

53:37 But the overall trajectory of creation is downward until Christ returns and makes all things new. That is the Christian position, not what I just read in this paragraph. And the cash quote from that entire thing is to my mind, many of the works of this period were infinitely more valuable than those that received canonicity. In other words, he's saying the old testament is trash. Most of it's really old. There's not a lot of value in there, and some of the later quotes he specifically goes into explicitly damning the god of the Old Old Testament. He says that the god of the newer Old Testament is getting closer to the sort of God that he likes, still not quite there yet, really not until Jesus shows up, but he he very

54:26 explicitly says the earliest parts of the Old Testament are basically trash. They're not real. They have a God who is evil. I reject them. I like this apocrypha stuff. It's very new. It's got a lot of better things in there. I think it's much more valuable. Now, this is not someone making a claim that's saying, well, I think the you know, I prefer reading the Apocrypha to the old testament. You have to review such a claim in terms of whether or not the Old Testament is scripture. If it's from God, if it's the Word of God, for for a man to say anything is infinitely more valuable than that. is an explicit act of apostasy. Next quote I have here is from a sermon called Mastering Our Evil Selves.

55:11 It's one of the few times he actually talks about evil. He tends to avoid that unless he's talking about racism or nationalism or white supremacy. There were a lot of sermons about that, but not much sermon, not many sermons about the actual sin of the people in his congregations. King preached. Finally, we may master our evil selves by developing a continuous prayer and devotional life. Through this process, the soul of man will become united with the life of God. Yes, this is possible. Man can know God. This has been the ringing cry of the mystic throughout the ages. God is not wholly other, God is not a process projected somewhere of the lofty blue. God is not a divine hermit hiding himself in a cosmic cave,

55:56 but God is forever present with us. The God of religion is the God of life. He somehow transcends the world and yet at the same time he is imminent in the world. And so by identifying ourselves with this knowable God, our wills will somehow become His will. We will no longer think our selfish desires, will somehow rise above evil thoughts, will no longer possess two personalities but only one will be true because God is truth, we'll be just because God is justice, we will love because God is love, we will be good because God is goodness, we will be wise because God is wisdom. And as Corey just said, a Christian wouldn't necessarily like some of that, but some of that sounds like sanctification.

56:37 A Lutheran in particular would say, Yeah, that's the process of sanctification. We become greater in terms of our possession of God's qualities in our own lives, as a matter of will in the regenerate spirit, it is possible to sin less and to do more of God's things, because that's a gift from God. It's no outgrowth of our own persons. It's something that is given to us as a gift, first through the gift of faith. But he's not saying that. He's again, he's when he says religion, it's it's a term of art in King's mouth. When he says religion, he's talking about a mad-made thing and he's talking about again the the personal reinforcement of morality in pursuit of tikkanolam, in pursuit of perfecting the world through perfecting oneself.

57:28 And no, he said this has been the ringing cry of the mystic throughout the ages. That's another big thing with him. He sees that mysticism is is part and parcel of the genesis of religion and then it's perfected. So the mystics early on gave us some stuff and then what we do, we refine it, we winnow it down, we turn it into something that we can possess as our own religion as we go forth in the world and make it a better place. And as a Christian listening that, if you're not familiar with some of the other non-Christian beliefs, they sound exactly the same, that might not sound so bad. The problem is that that sounds exactly like some other non Christian beliefs and they have evil ends. When they say those things, they are ultimately pursuing ultimate evil.

58:14 And that's why we're part of why we're talking about some of these things is that Christians need to know how the other team talks. You can't just automatically assume that when you hear someone saying Christian sounding things, that they're on the same team. We've got to get past that because it's clearly a glaring deficiency in our defenses against evil, against Satan's wiles. If he can just throw something that smells like Jesus at you and you catch it and you hold it and you love it, all he has to do is just s sprinkle Jesus dust on any manner of filth and evil and you're gonna pick it up and love it. That we have to do better. And so by pointing some of these contrasts and and similarities out,

58:56 we're trying to make the case that you will encounter people in your lives, you will encounter people who influence you. They may not be evil like king, but they will certainly be sighting men who are evil like king, and they won't know any better. And so as a matter of spiritual discernment, it's not just enough to say, yeah, he said the right word. We're not talking about shibbolets here. It's not sufficient to say, well, if he has the right secret keyword, then you let him in because you know you're on the same team. As Christians, we have to get past that point. It's been a weakness that has been exploited for far too long and it's it's got us on the ropes. We don't have much left because

59:36 even Evil happens after. You know, it's not like, oops, I accidentally agreed with a bad guy, but okay, you know, I just move on with my day. When you agree with someone like King, you have now adopted a false religion and you're along for the ride. So when he makes his moral pronouncements from his religion, if you don't know that it's a different religion than your own, you're probably just gonna go along with it. And that is that is catastrophic for the Christian faith. As anyone who's been involved in either say contract law or formal debates knows, you absolutely must define your terms up front. Because if you don't define your terms, you can argue past each other for the entirety of the debate, or you can wind up creating

1:00:27 a contract in which there's no actual meeting of the minds, and so you don't really have a contract. Because the one party thought you were talking about A and the other party thought you were talking about B and these are mutually exclusive things. And Christians fall, as you said, into this trap, into this pit. Because we think, oh, well, he used the magical words, he must be a Christian. This speaker said justification, he said grace, he said sanctification, he said whatever it happens to be. That's not what makes a Christian. It is the content of that confession, of that belief that makes a Christian. And so just because you're using the same terms doesn't mean you're saying the same things.

1:01:14 So we have to be very careful about what these men are saying when they use these terms. Thankfully in this case, we have a great deal of writing, speeches, various other information, where Mike tells us exactly what he believed. We don't have to look into his mind, we don't have to divine what he was really thinking, he tells us, in his own words, in many places. So listen to what is actually being said by him. Don't just latch on to these buzzwords, as it were. The terms are important, the terms matter, and Christians have fought over the terms for centuries. But you have to make sure that the person who is speaking is using those terms the way a Christian would, not a secular way. The next two quotes will be from a study of Mithraism

1:02:10 which for those who aren't familiar, that is a a Gnostic thing. That's a sufficient explanation for now. It is at this point that we are able to see why knowledge of these cults is important for any serious New Testament study. It is well nigh impossible to grasp Christianity through and through without knowledge of these cults. That there were striking similarities between the developing church and these religions cannot be denied. Even Christian apologists had to admit that fact. For instance, in the mystery religions identification between the devotee and the Lord of the Cult was supposed to be brought about by various rites of initiation. Tarabolium or bath of blood, the eating of flesh of the sacrificial

1:02:57 beast, and the like. Now there was something of this in Paul too, for he thought of the believer as buried with Christ in baptism, and as feeding upon him in the Eucharist. This is only one of many examples that I could give to prove the similarity between the developing Christian Church and the mystery religions. This is not to say that a Saint Paul or a Saint John sat down and copied these views verbatim, but after being in contact with these surrounding religions and hearing certain doctrines expressed, it was only natural for some of these views to become a part of their subconscious minds. When they sat down to write, they were expressing consciously that which had dwelled in their subconscious minds.

1:03:36 It is also significant to know that Roman tolerance had favored this great syncretism of religious ideas. Bar Borrowing was not only natural, but inevitable. Think comment on that before moving on to the the next section of this, the conclusion from the the same piece. Aside from the grammar errors, which still are great fun to read, this is just emension syncretism, and really that's what we're talking about here. This is false on its face, historically, because in large part, the mystery cults that looked like Christianity stole from Christianity. These things went in the other order. It was not Christianity borrowing from pagans, it was pagans stealing from Christianity. You have the same thing with Christmas and Easter, incidentally.

1:04:28 I know people will try to say that the Christmas tree is pagan. It's not, it's Christian. The furthest back you can trace it is actually Martin Luther. There was a similar rite that was practiced by some Christian monks before Luther Luther took it and introduced it to Christians. That's just one example of many He's so he's wrong on his on the face of this argument here. Historically he is wrong. But more important really than the historical argument is that he is saying that Christianity isn't really different from these cults. These are all religions, and all religions are kind of equal. Christianity is just another mystery religion. You have the Eucharist, that's just another bath of blood, or the

1:05:17 consumption of flesh. He's literally comparing the sacrament to cannibalism. This was an accusation that has been leveled against Christians historically. This is one of the accusations that sent Christians to the Lions in Rome. Incidentally also one of the accusations the Reformed have historically made against Lutherans from time to time. But he is arguing here that Christianity isn't really different from these cults, and that actually you should study these cults if you really want to understand Christianity, which is the exact opposite of what a Christian would believe and what a Christian, particularly a supposed minister, would tell you. That's literally his conclusion. Why don't you just read the conclusion?

1:06:02 That's exactly what he how he finishes this paper. Oh I'll okay I'll I'll read the conclusion then. That's funny that He did the work for you. Someone did. The conclusion. That Christianity did copy and borrow from Mithraism cannot be denied, but it was generally a natural and unconscious process rather than a deliberate plan of action. It was subject to the same influences from the environment as were the other cults, and it sometimes produced the same reaction. The people were conditioned by the contact with the older religions and the background and general trend of the time. Many of the views while passing out of paganism to Christianity were given a more profound and spiritual meaning by Christians, yet we must

1:06:46 be indebted to the source. To discuss Christianity without mentioning other religions would be like discussing the greatness of the Atlantic Ocean without the slightest mention of the many tributaries that keep it free. Flowing I I I just I'm definitely not going to go to him for hydrological advice. But that's why that's why I cut you off. Like you you could not have possibly said anything bad to make your conclusion that was nearly as bad as what he did for his own. I that's just so bad. I hadn't read that one before. That is just alarmingly awful. I always like that the people who write this stuff, you can tell exactly what they've read. I can tell what he read in psychology, I can tell he

1:07:35 read Bart. I know he also commented on Bart, so that that one helps along with that. But I can tell where he got these ideas, where these little things came from. And there's no real synthesis, it's just regurgitation of some little snippet that he picked up somewhere. And so it's Mithraism, because he obviously read someone who was writing about the mystery cults. Okay, well, if there's some sort of truth in all religions and that we have to look to all these old cults and paganism to pick up these very why is there no mention of Norse religion? Do we have to look into the Eddes for truth? Do we have to look into Hinduism and Buddhism? It always comes out that it's just a regurgitation of whatever men

1:08:27 like this have read last. But of course the more interesting and the more salient point not the the less interesting point of it just being parroting, but the more interesting point is the fact that what he's doing here is just outright denying the uniqueness of Christianity, and Christianity, if it is true, must necessarily be unique. The claims of Christianity are exclusive truth claims. If Christianity is true, every other religion is false. And so when you have someone who is arguing for this sort of syncretism, arguing to blend the pagan and the Christian, and he capitalizes paganism, notably. Now I know some people are going to go troll my timeline and point oh you capitalized I capitalize neopaganism because I am speaking

1:09:21 of it as a particular specific religion, and therefore it is properly a proper noun. Here paganism is used as a collective noun and should not be capitalized, that is giving some indication of his underlying thoughts on this matter. But we see this, of course, all over Africa and other parts of the world where we have this incredible problem with syncretism. This is commented on frequently by missionaries where the local populations Lutherans have had this experience, for instance, in Madagascar, where there's actually a very large Lutheran church now. But they have the problem of syncretism where the local population will adopt Christianity. They'll go to church, they'll be very excited about the church.

1:10:08 There's dancing and singing and there's a lot more activity in church in Africa typically than you would see in a German Lutheran church, certainly. But you have these individuals who seemingly have adopted Christianity, but then they go home and go right back to ancestor worship, or they go right back to offering various things at the tombs. It's just you have syncretism and it's a huge problem. And that is exactly what is being argued here. He is bluntly advocating that syncretism should be part of Christianity. And if you're advocating that Christianity, so called should be syncretist, you no longer have Christianity. Because Christ and Baal have nothing in common. You can't worship both.

1:10:59 You must choose one. If you don't worship Christ, well, you are worshiping the other by default. But if you try to worship both, you're worshiping Baal. And that is what he is advocating here. This is just incredibly wicked. This is again not something that could be written by a Christian. And no Christian can hear this, no Christian can read this and think, well, of course this man was Christian. No. On its face, it is obvious this author was no Christian. But he was confessing his faith. I mean, he's telling the truth when he says that his Christianity, the religion that he called Christianity does come from paganism. It does come from worshiping these demons. He wasn't lying. He was lying about our Christianity.

1:11:51 He was lying about the faith of our fathers. But he was not lying about the faith of his father. And as we've said on a number of episodes, that's a really hard thing for us as Christians to tackle. When someone comes to you and says I'm a Christian brother, I hold the same faith as you. You should be able to just believe him and put your arm around him and said, thank God you're here, brother in Christ. Instead, we are faced with an adversary who knows how to exploit that. And so as a result, he sends waves of these people that says hi, I'm here from Jesus, and I'm gonna tell you about Mithraism and I'm gonna help you understand how paganism is such a huge influence on the religion that you claim to believe.

1:12:33 That's how faith dies. Full stop. that is how the Christian faith will die. Unless we're able to detect and root out and destroy enemies who attempt to infiltrate. The reason that quoting Martin Luther King Jr. in Christian churches is wicked is that this is what you're quoting. You're quoting a man who believed these things. And next week we're going to get to the things that he did with those beliefs and they were consonant. It's not like oh he preached one thing and then he did another. What he preached when you actually understand that he's confessing a false religion, that makes perfect sense too. Of course he was doing all those wicked things because he was openly not Christian and no one wanted to look.

1:13:17 And s to this day no one wants to look. We have been berated in the past in on past you know MLK days and all this other these garbage made up holidays. When we say, you know, by the way, that guy was not Christian, we get shouted down by so-called pastors. They say no, he was great. He was he was an important leader. He was really he was certainly a better Christian than you. Well, in their version of Christianity, yes, that's true. they hold the same God, the same faith. It is not the one that we hold. I'm perfectly content with that contrast. I just want to add quickly a little bit of context for those who hear Mithraism and have no idea what is going on here. Don't have any real background.

1:14:02 A modern analogue for this, something to which you could reasonably and directly compare Mithraism would be Freemasonry. And there is an argument that you get some of the rites and practices in Freemasonry from Mithraism. Mithraism would have been in part derived from the earlier Zoroastrian religion, which would be Iranian modern Iran, obviously, then Persian, and so Zoroastrianism through Roman mystery cults and Mithraism, and then the modern version Freemasonry, just so people have some sort of context for what is meant there by that term. But when he brought it up, he was basically just being a reddit to your atheist. I mean that's the level of theology we're dealing with here. Very much so.

1:14:55 The The next essay that we're going to quote from is called The Sources of Fundamentalism and Liberalism, Considered Historically and Psychologically. It's important to note that when he when King uses words like fundamentalism, like orthodox Christianity, uh lowercase o, he's referring to the Christian faith that we hold, one that says that scripture is inspired by God, that all the things in the Bible actually happened, they really truly, in truth happened, no wiggle words, no, no room to get out of, yeah, that that's a real physical event. In contrast, when he says things like liberalism, like modern, like scientific, he means himself. he is always referring to himself in every one of these papers

1:15:43 when he refers to things like liberal. So when that term is used here, it's not insulting, it's not saying, oh, you're a lib, as literally the contrast that he has. He writes, The use of the critical method in approaching the Bible is to the fundamentalist downright heresy. He sees the Bible as the infallible word of God, from the dotting of an eye to the crossing of a T. He finds it to be a unity and a coherence of parts. The New Testament is the old contained and the Old Testament is the new explained. Upon this first proposition the infallibility of the Bible, all other fundamentalist views depend. They argue that if the Bible is true, that is so divinely inspired as to be free from error, then all other truths flow

1:16:25 inevitably, because they are based upon what the Bible actually says in language clear and unmistakable. When the fundamentalist comes to the nature of man, he finds all of his answers in the Bible. The story of man in the Garden of Eden gives a conclusive answer. Man was created by a direct act of God, moreover he was created in the image of God, but through the workings of the devil man was led into disobedience. Then began all human ills, hardship and labor, the agony of childbirth, hatred, sorrow, suffering, and death. The fundamentalist is quite aware of the fact that scholars regard the Garden of Eden and the Serpent Satan and the Hell of Fire as myths analogous to those found in other Oriental religions.

1:17:06 He knows also that his beliefs are the center of ridicule by many, but this does not shake his faith. Rather it convinces him, the fundamentalist, more of the existence of the devil, the critics, says the fundamentalist, would never indulge in such skeptical thinking if the devil hadn't influenced them. The fundamentalist is convinced that this skepticism of scholars and cheap humor of the laity can by no means prevent the revelation of God. Other doctrines, such as a supernatural plan of salvation, the Trinity, the substitutionary theory of atonement, and the second coming of Christ, are all quite prominent in fundamentalist thinking. Such are the views of the fundamentalists that and they reveal that

1:17:48 he is opposed to theological adaptation to social and cultural change. He sees a progressive scientific age as a retrogressive spiritual age, amid change all around he is willing to preserve certain ancient ideas even though they are contrary to science. That was a mouthful, but again, we hit fundamentalism is in opposition to science. So if you're a stone choir listener, if you like you know some of the things that we say, if you think that we're trying to argue faithfully from scripture, you are certainly someone who is willing to preserve certain ancient ideas even though they are s contrary to science. Now when he says science, it's I don't think I have in any of these quotes, but he was very fond, especially in college,

1:18:32 of saying the Copernican universe. He read that somewhere and that sounded really good. That meant modern scientific knowledge with cause and effect, with rules and order and all the things that we understand about the universe. And in his rational mind, anything that would violate any of those, anything that would be a miracle, cannot exist. Fundamentally, this is against miracles. So when he says, as I said, he calls himself a liberal, he was describing a fundamentalism here. He was describing Christianity and he was making fun of it. He was saying that stuff's a joke. These people think that when someone says it's a joke, that's just the devil attacking. That's how silly they are. That's what rubs they are.

1:19:16 Well I I'm happy to be a Rube because it is absolutely the devil speaking. When Michael King speaks, the devil is speaking. That is what we have here. And just to make that contrast more explicit, he calls himself a liberal constantly throughout his writing. And so when he says fundamentalist, he is using that as an epithet, he is using that as a pejorative, and he is using that specifically in contrast to liberal. Which is to say he is saying that he is an enlightened liberal as opposed to these backwoods, uneducated, illiterate fundamentalists who actually believe what scripture says. And so when he says these are the views of the fundamentalists, he is saying these are not his views. Because he's a liberal, and as a liberal he doesn't hold to

1:20:11 those things. And so think about that list. He basically listed out the core tenets of the Christian religion and rejected them. Rejecting penal substitutionary atonement is sufficient to declare yourself not a Christian, because that is a rejection of Christ, it is a rejection of Christ's work, it is a rejection of justification. Of course he throws in the other things as well because he also rejects the virgin birth, the resurrection of the body, and he rejects the Trinity. And the second coming of Christ and a supernatural plan for salvation. Like exactly what's going on. left of Christianity once this man gets done? This is literally the entire Christian faith that he indicts. And that that that's why we're burying you with these quotes.

1:20:53 That's why we're reading one after another, and it's it's cumulative and it's it's getting long already. And it's like we already said that, yeah. He always said the same things. See, if we had started and just giving you five quotes, you'd say, Well, if you gave me five more, I would hear something different. So we went from five to ten to twenty. We're gonna go two hours giving all these quotes because they all say the same thing for years and years and years. And this man never repented. He never repented. He went to hell with this confession on his lips. There's no other possible conclusion. He mocks this stuff. he mocks the Christian faith. He blasphemes with every word. And the fact that later on when he was pretending to be

1:21:31 a pastor, he used some of these words in ways that blended in makes it all the more evil. That's when he says, oh, the devil is mocking these people and they think they think the devil's coming for him when they hear ridicule, that was mockery. that was Satan sneering at us through time through his words. It's just it's astonishing that anyone like like I said earlier, if okay, assume that when your pastor comes to you and says, yes, Martin Luther King Jr. is a per paragon of moral virtue, he was a great pastor, he was a great Christian, be more like him. What are you gonna naturally do? You're gonna go read what he said and read what he did, and learn from us so you can emulate it. Any man who emulates this is damned.

1:22:14 I can say that with absolute certainty. I don't need to know your heart. If you say that everything about the Christian faith is evil, okay. I believe you. Lutherans who actually pray the morning office or a shorter version of it anyway, and of course many others, will start every day in part by praying the apostles Creed. That is the summation of what we believe as Christians, and what And run through the Apostles' Creed in your mind. I'm not going to read it for you here or recite it for you here more realistically. He is rejecting basically everything in the Apostles' Creed. And that is because the religion of Michael King was not Christianity. His religion was the social gospel. His religion was revolution.

1:23:08 His religion was progress with a capital P. And again, you should be thinking of the Enlightenment when you hear that term, because he is a damned son of the Enlightenment. And those who follow in his footsteps will spend eternity with him. And so our next selection is from Examination Answers Christian Theology for Today This is a second year seminary essay from him lead two selections from this I feel that the most valid conception of God is that of theism. God God for me along with other theists is a personal spirit imminent in nature and in the value structure of the universe. This theistic view also means that God is imminent in the world. This seem the only adequate way to explain religious experience.

1:24:08 A God who is totally transcendent and out of touch with the world cannot come to man in religious experience. Moreover, this view of the imminence of God is more in accord with the theory of evolution. Some are going to miss perhaps part of what he is saying here, in part, and I can see him responding to Bart's theology in part here, but part of what he is arguing is he is arguing against God's transcendence, God's nature as being wholly other from the creation, from man, from everything. And that is fundamentally a rejection of God, because God is his nature. Now, this gets to be a complicated theological topic fairly quickly, but God is simple, which is to say God is not composed of

1:25:08 parts. Because if you say that God is composed of parts, you wind up with a real division in God, and you wind up with multiple gods, or you wind up denying that God is God, by denying the nature of God. We will probably get into that more if we do a future episode on Eastern Orthodoxy, because that very much ties into why Palamism is a problem. But what he's saying here is that God is not really transcendent. God is imminent in the world. This is almost verging on pantheism or panentheism. Perhaps not quite there, but he may very well not have understood the concept, so maybe he couldn't make that argument. But this denies the nature of God. And again, to deny the nature of God is to deny God

1:26:04 because God is his nature. And we see why he's doing that with that last sentence. Moreover, this view of the imminence of God is more in accord with the theory of evolution. And so again, he's just doubling down on this idea that the only truth comes from empirical evidence, comes from scientific so-called inquiry. This is the modern religion in a nutshell. This is what many of our fellows walking around our society believe. If you cannot prove it with science, then it's not real. Never mind that science itself is fundamentally based on logic and reason, which are philosophy, which is not science. Never mind that problem for them. But what he's arguing here is that science should have a capital

1:26:58 S perhaps, scientism, we might call it modernly, is preeminent, that we should interpret Scripture in the light of science. And so the theory of evolution is a scientific truth, is the claim here, and so God must comply with what we have discerned about his creation. I'm sure the Christians in the audience, which is most of our audience, can see the problem there. If you are working from the creation and trying to tell the creator you have to fit in this box that you made, you have it exactly backward. Again, this is not Christian. This is deism, in essence, even worse than deism, because uh it's not even really deism, because at least the deists sometimes will affirm God's nature as truly transcendent.

1:27:52 This even denies that This is almost Buddhist in its conception of the deity. We will definitely be doing future episodes on Eastern Orthodoxy and on evolution because both are at odds with scripture. Both are at odds with the Christian faith. And we've had a lot of requests for it. Uh those are a lot of these episodes we're getting into now take a lot more research. I probably did 24 hours of research for this one and I didn't get through all of his writings. It hurt a lot. Um but these are important topics, so it's it's well worth it. You mentioned we'll do an episode of evolution. There was one more thing that I did want to say that I almost forgot. What he's arguing here, there's an underlying current of an argument for

1:28:38 theistic evolution. Although it's not explicitly theistic evolution, because theistic evolution would be God set up the conditions of the universe such that life would naturally come to be via evolution. That's more or less the theistic evolution argument. Some will argue that God intervened here and there to make sure that it went in the right direction. I mean, does it really matter if God set the starting conditions or intervened it's the same when you're talking about God? That's not how it works, that's not what God did. But that's the theistic evolution argument. There's a little bit of that underlying what he says here, but the This is like the grade school version of it. Yep. And he's explicit about that in some of his other papers.

1:29:20 That was that was absolutely his confession. Uh there's so many papers here. The re part of the reason I'm doing I'm reading the the titles of them is we're not gonna link them all in the show notes because it doesn't matter. This particular one we are definitely going to link in the show notes because I think is probably of all of them. If you only read one thing that this man ever wrote, this should be it. He wrote an essay his second year in seminary. He'd been in the pulpit. He had been ordained as a pastor for years at this point. The title is What experiences of Christians Living in the Early Christian Century led to the Christian doctrines of the divine sonship of Jesus, the virgin birth, and the bodily resurrection?

1:29:59 Now the entire thing is terrible quotes, but I'm not going to waste fifteen more minutes of your time reading the whole thing. If you're interested, go read the thing. I I would encourage you to because it's it's a master class in blasphemy. The one particular part that I did highlight which is amusing because a couple of minutes ago Cory specifically said he was refuting the apostles creed implicitly. Here he does it explicitly. Listen to his own words. King writes In this paper we shall discuss the experiences of the early Christians which led to three rather orthodox doctrines the divine sonship of Jesus, the virgin birth, and the bodily resurrection. Each of these doctrines is enshrined in what is known as the

1:30:37 Apostles Creed. It is this creed that has stood as a symbol of faith for many Christians over the Over the years. Even to this day, it is recited in many churches. But in the minds of many sincere Christians, this creed has planted a seed of confusion which has grown to an oak of doubt. They see this creed as incompatible with all scientific knowledge, and so they have proceeded to reject its content. But if we delve into the deeper meaning of these doctrines and somehow strip them of their literal interpretation, we will find that they are based on a profound foundation. That's straight up Satan talking. Oh, the Apostles' Creed? That's goofy. That's just silly. But you know what? We can rescue it.

1:31:21 If we say that none of what's in the Apostles' Creed is literal, if we take it all as figurative, it's actually rich. It's actually bounteous. One particularly interesting thing about this, there's a man I think I mentioned before, his name is William Campbell. He was a r historian. He He basically slots in between Jordan Peterson and Carl Jung on the trajectory of the the modern application of psychology and psychiatry to religion in reverse order. So basically what these guys are doing is they're using psychology and psychiatry as a lens to explain how religion manifested among men. They believe exactly the same thing the king believes, and that he said earlier that man created religion as an outgrowth of some inner

1:32:07 expression of whatever. The reason I mention Campbell is that he did a lecture series now thirty, forty years ago at this point, where he spends ten or fifteen minutes going line by line through the apostles' creed and deconstructing it. And I found it fascinating. I was it was utterly blasphemous. And it was basically like a primordial TED talk that he was doing it. So he's not a a theologian. He was doing it for the purpose of saying all the other religions in the world, all the other world religions have all this beauty. But when you look at the Apostles's creed, look how stupid this is. And he went line by line telling his cackling audience how stupid the Apostle's Creed was, how backward, how fundamentalist, how goofy and insane

1:32:50 and retarded. I I I notice these things because it's just so profoundly seemingly out of character. You know, like th this is a serious intellectual guy. He's not Christian, obviously, but to spend the time deconstructing the apostles' creed just if you don't know anything, it's like, oh well okay, I guess I guess those Christians have some goofy ideas. Here's something that's almost it's close to two thousand years old at this point. It is the confession of the faith. I think that's a seminal thing here. Not only is King mocking him, but he says they see this creed as incompatible with all scientific knowledge, and so they have proceeded to reject its content. That means that they're apostatizing.

1:33:32 If you reject the Apostles' Creed, you're not a Christian. There's a there's an insert the my former pastor produced that I'll we'll attach in the show notes that shows every word of the Apostles' Creed, every word of the Ninecene Creed, and it shows every Bible verse that they come from. Yeah, it's interesting that we think of the creeds as these man-made things. they're basically an incredibly dense collection. You know, it's it's a a word here, a phrase there, but every one of them comes from scripture. Now the difference between the creed and the misapplication of proof texting, which generally we're opposed to, is that they're faithful Distillations of what is in Scripture. It's not it's not that they're twisting and pulling out of context.

1:34:17 The non the Nicene Creed and the Apostles Creed clearly express the Christian faith, and they were created in a time when it was necessary to confess the God that the Christians were confessing, to say this is the God we're talking about. Because see, that's the same problem that we're having here with King today. And frankly, it's the same problem we're having in our churches today. If I say, Oh, I worship God and you say you worship God, like, okay, great, we're all Christians. Well, which God are you talking about? Because as Corey said, Freemasons, they say they believe in God. Deists say they believe in God. All manner of people who are hellbound so they say they believe in God. And so the purpose of a creed, and credo, credo is Latin

1:34:59 for I believe. It's not some special thing. It's just these are the beliefs that I hold. And when they're distilled around what God is as He reveals Himself, it's it's a it's a razor. It's something that separates true from false Christians. If you're a true Christian, you must believe it. Now that's not to say that someone who doesn't know what it says cannot be saved. It's to say that if you see it and you say, I don't believe that. Well now sound that you're disagreeing with the creed. As I said, you're disagreeing with scripture because every word of it is from Scripture. Every word of the apostles' creed is a quote from Scripture. So if you say I don't believe this, this is garbage, this

1:35:39 is stupid, you're saying God is garbage, and God is stupid, which is precisely what King said earlier about the Old Testament. He's like, that old testament stuff is garbage. There, there's infinitely more valuable text than that. That's why this stuff matters. If a man says, I don't believe in God, here's the God, I don't believe him, you have to believe that man. I don't think he was wrong. I think he was absolutely right. I think his confession was true. What his confession was not was Christian. And so here is the next selection from the writings of Michael King. Turning now to our main objective, I begin with a process of elimination. First, we may say that any doctrine which finds the meaning

1:36:22 of atonement in the triumph of Christ over such cosmic powers as sin, death and Satan, is inadequate. This dualistic view is incompatible with a thoroughgoing Christian theism. Such a view impresses the modern mind as mythological rather than theological. The objection to the Latin type of theory, the Anselmic theory of satisfaction, the penal theory of the reformers, and the governmental theory of Grotius, is found in the abstract and impersonal way in which it deals with such ideas as merit and Merit, guilt, and punishment. The guilt of others and the punishment due them are transferred to Christ and borne by him. Such views taken literally become bizarre. Merit and guilt are not concrete realities that can be detached from

1:37:10 one person and transferred to another. Moreover, no person can morally be punished in place of another. Such ideas as ethical and penal substitution become immoral. In the next place, if Christ by his life and death paid the full penalty of sin, there is no valid ground for repentance or moral obedience as a condition of forgiveness. The debt is paid, the penalty is exacted, and there is consequently nothing to forgive. Again, it may be noted that the Latin theory falls short of the fully personal and Christian conception of God as Father. It presents God as a kind of feudal overlord, or as a stern judge, or as a governor of a state. Each of these minimizes the true Christian conception of God as a

1:37:57 free personality. This is one of those where you're not even sure where to begin because it is terrible from beginning to end in two dozen ways. But I guess we have to begin with stating again that if you deny penal substitutionary atonement, you are not a Christian. That is the gospel. The gospel is Christ crucified for sinners. That is penal substitutionary atonement. That is Christ having taken upon himself the punishment for your sins, so that you do not have to suffer that punishment, and to remind Everyone. The debt from sin, the guilt incurred, the cost that you would have to pay, is infinite. That is why hell is eternal. That is why there is no end to the suffering of the damned. Because you can never, as a finite being, pay an infinite

1:38:58 penalty. That is why Christ had to pay that penalty, because his death was of infinite value, and so it was the only thing that could be set against the infinite debt of sin. And that is denied here by Michael King. He denies the core of the Christian faith. If you deny this, you cannot be saved. And that is what he did. The short version is really simple. The short version is Jesus didn't die for my sins. That's his confession. Like that's okay, dude. He did, but if you reject it, it doesn't count. So as Cory just said, he's spending eternity paying for all the sins that Jesus paid for because he said that's nonsense. There's no math, there's no transference, God's not mean like that. Okay. That's gonna be your confession for the rest of your eternity.

1:39:49 And there is no rest in eternity. Yes, God will let you pay for the sins for which Christ already paid. You can go ahead and attempt for eternity to pay that price. You will never successfully pay the entirety of it, because again, infinite and again infinite and eternal are basically synonymous here, and that is why hell is eternal because the price is infinite. And so he's paying the price for all of his many sins in this life, because he chose that. He apostatized. Because he may very well have been a Christian as a child. I honestly don't believe so. Briefly. I mean brief. He may briefly have been believed. It Yeah, it the first time he ever read the Bible, he said, I don't believe any of this.

1:40:41 Oh that was that was what he said. He said like he sort of sat there and listened, but I mean yeah, we don't know. it is conceivable that he was at some point a Christian. Which is worse. As soon Yeah. But as soon as he engaged with scripture, he said, I reject this. And then he devoted the entirety of his life as a teenager and as an adult to fleeing as far from God as he could possibly get. This next quote is even worse than that somehow. This is from an essay. Again, he's still in seminary, he's still preaching, he's an ordained pastor. This essay is titled The Humanity and Divinity of Jesus. Certainly this view of the divinity of Christ presents many modern minds with insuperable difficulties.

1:41:22 Most of us are not willing to see the union of the human and divine in a metaphysical incarnation. Yet among all our difficulty with the preexistent idea and the view of supernatural generation, we must come to some view of the divinity of Jesus. In order to remain in the orbit of the Christian religion, we must have a Christology Haha at least he knows there's a center of gravity there somewhere. As doctor Bailey has reminded us, we cannot have a good theology without a Christology. Where then can we in the liberal tradition find dimension of Jesus? We may find the divinity of Christ not in his substantial unity with God, but in his filial consciousness and in his unique dependence upon God.

1:42:04 It was his feeling of absolute dependence on God, as Schleiermacher would say, that made him divine. Yes, it was the warmest of his devotion to God and the intimacy of his trust in God that accounts for his being the supreme revelation of God. All this reveals to us that one man has at last realized his true divine calling, that of becoming a true son of man by being a true son of God. This is the achievement of a man who has, as nearly as we can tell, completely opened his life to the influence of the divine spirit. The Orthodox attempt to explain the divinity of Jesus in terms of an inherent metaphysical substance within him seems to me quite inadequate. To say that the Christ, whose example of living we are bid

1:42:47 to follow, is divine in an ontological sense is actually harmful and detrimental. To invest this Christ with such new supernatural qualities makes the rejoinder, oh well he had a better chance for that kind of life than we can possibly have. In other words, one could easily use this as a means to hide behind his failures. So the Orthodox view of the divinity of Christ is in my mind quite readily denied. The true significance of the divinity of Christ lies in the fact that his achievement is prophetic and promisory for every other true Son of Man who is willing to submit his will to the will and Spirit of God. Christ Christ was to be the only prototype, one among many brothers. The appearance of such a person more divine and more human than

1:43:33 any other, and stand in closest unity at once with God and man, is the most significant and hopeful event in human history. This divine quality or this unity with God was not something thrust upon Jesus from above, but was a definite achievement through the process of moral struggle and self-abnegation. So this is a continuation of a quote that I pointed to earlier. When he talks about Jesus, when he talks about Christ, he's talking about a human being. He's talking about a man who lived and died 2,000 years ago, who was born from a father and a mother. In the previous essay he denied the virgin birth, said there's no such thing. That's absolutely impossible. It's just pure nonsense. They made it up.

1:44:15 And they got it from Mithraism, by the way. And they got it from Egypt. Those were the old Eastern Oriental mystery religions influencing the Christian faith because it was all just osmosis. He literally says here that he denies the divinity of God. That is his confession. And so when he talks about Jesus living a good life and Jesus having unity of God with God, what he means is that he was a prophet, sort of. He was he was the best man in history. He was the most gifted man of all men in God used him for a special purpose of showing that a life of sacrifice and of faithfulness and of service to others is possible. And so when he talks about not if he ever talks about Christ's atonement, when he talks about Jesus as an example, this is

1:45:01 literally what he means. Jesus wasn't God. Jesus is dead. He rotted. He's in the ground. he's like any other man. Except that while he was alive, he did some really cool stuff and it got written down and got passed down to us. And so he's an example. This is the furthest thing from Christianity. Muslims literally have a higher Christology than Michael King. A lot of this boils down, as is so very often the case with heretics. It boils down to having a fundamentally flawed conception of sin. If you don't believe in the actual nature of sin, if you don't understand what sin is, if you don't realize that again, the debt of sin is infinite, the breach between man and God is an infinite chasm if you don't recognize that original sin is passed

1:46:01 down from fathers to their children, from Adam to whatever man is born last on this earth, if you do not have a proper theology of sin, you are going to end up somewhere like this. Now, of course, there's a bit of mercenary dealing here because a man who spends his life fornicating and beating prostitutes, engaging in violence, and I could go on for quite some time, and we will in the next episode, certainly. Perhaps that man has selfish reasons for wanting to minimize the nature of sin. But if your theology does not account properly for sin, then the atonement becomes unnecessary, because if sin isn't infinite in terms of the debt and the breach, the separation, then the atonement doesn't need to

1:47:00 be infinite. And if the atonement doesn't need to be infinite, then a man can satisfy it. Because if there's some finite amount of work to be done, then a man can do that given enough time. And that always becomes the argument of these heretics. And so you have to get your theology right at the beginning. You have to understand the fall and original sin and the debt that is owed, incurred by each and every sin. Yes, some are worse than others, and indeed the punishment in hell will be worse if you committed many great sins versus only lesser sins in this life. But the debt is infinite and can be paid only by Christ, and the And so that is why he feels free to deny the atonement, to deny all these things, because he does not understand

1:47:54 just how terrible sin is. He understands it now. But he did not understand it then, and so that is why he writes these heretical things. Because he gets sin wrong. And there are many Christians today who also do that, and they are in danger of ending up in the same place. As we keep saying, you do not have the luxury of getting any of these doctrines wrong Are you necessarily damned if you get a particular doctrine in Christianity wrong? Perhaps not. It depends on the doctrine. There are minor doctrines that are major doctrines. There are doctrines that are lesser that are more peripheral. But if you hold to that error, it never stops there. It always becomes a greater error. And so move on to the

1:48:56 next piece here the Christian pertinence of eschatological hope. They argue that such beliefs are unscientific, impossible, and even bizarre. Among the beliefs which many modern Christians find difficult to accept are those dealing with eschatological hopes, particularly the second coming of Christ, the day of judgment and the resurrection of the body? In an attempt to solve this difficult problem many modern Christians have jettisoned these beliefs altogether, failing to see that there is a profundity of spiritual meaning in these beliefs, which goes beyond the shackles of literalism. We must realize that these beliefs were formulated by an unscientific people, who knew nothing about a Copernican universe or any of the

1:49:43 laws of modern science? They were attempting to solve basic problems which were quite real to them, problems which to them dealt with ultimate destiny. So it was only natural for them to speak in the pre scientific thought pattern of their day, they could do no other. Inspiration did not magically remove the limitations of the writers. It heightened their power, but did not remove their distortions. Therefore it is our job as Christians to seek the spiritual pertinence of these beliefs, which taken literally are quite absurd. It is obvious that most twentieth century Christians must frankly and flatly reject any view of a physical return of Christ. So literally stop being Christian. I mean that's that's it.

1:50:30 I you know these these are these are some walls of text that we're reading to you, but the bottom line is no Christian can possibly believe even one percent of this. Like I said at the beginning, we're not talking about nitpicks among denominations. We're talking about the beating heart of the Christian faith. There's literally no possible way for any Christian to say that Michael King is not damned based on these. And as I said, the only possible argument is oh well he changed his mind later. Okay, prove it. Show me a single place where he changed his mind. What is he doing throughout all these things? All he's doing is redefining terms so that he can stand up in a pulpit and he can say things like resurrection, knowing that he means this.

1:51:15 The next quote that I have for later from later on in the same paper, the most precious thought in Christianity is that Jesus is our daily friend, that he never did leave us comfortless or alone, and that we may know his trans transforming communion every day in our lives. As doclair doctor Hedley succinctly states, the second coming of Christ is not an event in space-time, but an experience which transcends all physical categories. It belongs not to the sky, but to the human heart, not to the future, to put but to whatever present we are willing to assign to it. Actually we are celebrating the second advent every time we open our hearts to Jesus, every time we turn our backs to the low road and accept the high road, every time we say no to

1:51:58 self that we might say yes to Jesus Christ, every time a man or woman turns from ugliness to beauty and is able to forgive even their enemies, Jesus stands at the door of our hearts if we are willing to admit him. He is far away if ugliness and evil, we crowd him out. The final doctrine of the second coming is that wherever we whenever we turn our lives to the highest and best, there is for us the Christ. This is what the early Christians were trying to say. To be sure they got an unscientific realm, because they began by saying that Jesus was the promised Messiah. But the question arises what led them to say that in the first place? It was the magnetic personality of this historic Jesus that caused men

1:52:38 to explain his life in a category beyond the human. Here we are one with the unscientific early Christians for all of our thoughts and teachings about the second coming, whether it be a physical or spiritual, stem from the personality that Jesus whom the Christians chose to call the Christ This is blasphemy. I I I feel like I need to confess my sins just for reading this man's words out loud. He denies the resurrection, he denies the divinity of Christ, he denies the virgin birth. He denies the Christian faith. We have men in our seminaries, we have men in our pulpits, we have men everywhere around us who use this man as a Christian example. Next week we're going to get into the evil, to the fact

1:53:23 that not only he was not Christian, but he was a wicked pagan. But this alone, any one of these quotes should be sufficient, particularly in the current context of this podcast where we're being canceled for things that we've said or maybe said or didn't say in the past. If one word from a man years ago is sufficient to cancel him and have his life destroyed today, maybe we should take the seminary writings of a man who is confessing a faith that he never abandoned. This is his faith, again. This is Michael King's faith. It's simply not the Christian faith. It's the exact opposite. For the sake of contrast, and so that we do hear the word of God in this episode perhaps, just a short reading from 1

1:54:11 Corinthians. Now if Christ is proclaimed as raised from the dead, how can some of you say that there is no resurrection of the dead? But if there is no resurrection of the dead, then not even Christ has been raised. And if Christ has not been raised, then our preacher is in vain, and your faith is in vain. We are even found to be misrepresenting God, because we testified about God that He raised Christ, whom He did not raise, if it is true that the dead are not raised, for if the dead are not raised, not even Christ has been raised, and if Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile, and you are still in your sins. Then those also who have fallen asleep in Christ have perished. If in Christ we have hope, in this life only, we are

1:54:57 of all people most to be pitied. And so when you see someone who is rejecting the resurrection of the dead, you see someone who is rejecting the core hope that we have in Christianity, that we have in Christ. Because if we believe, like the Sadducees, that there's no resurrection of the dead, then there's no hope. Then it's just death. And that's the end. But the hope of the Christian is that I'm only laughing. I'm laughing because immortality is literally the last part of this F essay that he refutes. In the same paper that I just quoted, he ends by being a Sadducee. of course. it's great that wick I can predict wicked men. But the the hope of Christianity is the resurrection. Because if you if you just die at the end of this

1:55:57 life and it's over, it doesn't matter what you do. the atheists who take the truly nihilist position are at least being somewhat rational given their beliefs. I mean, insofar as you can be rational at all as an atheist But if you die and you're done, if you die in your worm food and that's it, there's no hope. It doesn't matter what you do in this life, everything is irrelevant. But you'll notice, particularly when we get to the next episode, men like Michael King never act as if this life is just irrelevant because they always pick to go the exact opposite direction. Well I'm not going to believe in Christ and I'm not going to believe in the resurrection of the dead, but I'm going to do everything I can to make this world worse.

1:56:46 Because as we frequently say, there is an animating intelligence behind the other side. Nested in between the denial of the resurrection of the dead and the denial of the second coming of Christ. He also denies the day of judgment itself. Orthodox Christianity, again, that's us, that's actual Christians as Orthodox Christianity, has held that when a man dies he sleeps until the general resurrection on the last day, at which time Christ, the judge, will appear to summon all to the bar of justice. He will separate them as a shepherd divideth his sheep from the goats, sending the former to eternal bliss and the latter to endless hell. Needless to say, the average modern Christian finds it quite difficult

1:57:29 to accept such a view of judgment. However, we must agree with the spiritual value of this view held by nearly all Christians, all early Christians, for the personality of Jesus does serve as a judgment upon us all. When we set aside the spectacular paraphernalia of the judgment scene, in the literal throne, we come to the real meaning of the doctrine. The highest court of justice is in the heart of the man after the light of Christ has illumined his motive in his inner life. Any day when we awaken to the fact that we are making a great moral decision, any day we have experienced nearness to Christ, any day when in the light of Christ we see ourselves is a day of judgment. That's Satan. That's saying just go do whatever you want, try to live a

1:58:14 good life. There's no judgment day. There's no resurrection of the dead. Jesus isn't coming back. This life is it. I hope that this superabundance of quotes and evidence hammers home the point this man was not a Christian. What Christian could possibly quote this man in good conscience? It is an act of evil to say that Martin Luther King junior is anything but a damned heretic burning in hell. It's evil to say anything else. I will stand before the judgment throne of God and with that as my confession, because the only possible way to obey and confess God is to confess that this man denies God. It's one or the other. One of us is going to hell. It's just that simple. So our next selection is from Religion's Answer to the Problem of Evil.

1:59:08 A second view explains physical evils as a punishment for moral evils. Such a view rests on the principle of retribution. This view goes back to the old Deuteronomic idea that prosperity follows piety and righteous should be righteousness, while suffering follows sin. Even in the days of Jesus we find traces of this theory. Hence the question is put to Jesus Who sinned, this man or his parents, that he should be born blind? The most rigorous expression of this viewpoint is found in India's ancient doctrine of karma. Karma means literally deed. Suffering is explained as the consequence of a man's deeds, whether committed in this present life or in some previous existence. Views of this variety continue to exist in the modern world, but

1:59:58 such views are repugnant to the ethical sense of modern idealist. the modern idealist does a good god harbour resentment? Does perfect love achieve its purpose in such cruel ways? This crude theory was rejected long ago by the writer of the book of Job and by Jesus, according to John nine three, the whole theory of punishment as a solution of the problem of evil collapses with a series of ethical objections. And so undoubtedly anyone who is familiar with modern modern writing from any of a number of fields is going to recognize this rejection of retribution. Because this is a cornerstone of prison reform and criminal justice reform and all sorts of other wicked projects like that. Contrast that with what God says in the pages of Scripture, where

2:00:55 he who sheds the blood of man by man shall his blood be shed, for God made man in his image. God explicitly commands us as part of the unchanging moral law to enact the death penalty, to enact capital punishment against murderers. And there are a number of other transgressions that are listed as abominations to God, for which execution is what God demands as punishment. Retribution is the beating heart of justice. That there are other aspects that can be considered in addition to retribution, but justice is a matter of retribution. You must punish the wrongdoer. It is not just a matter of restorative so called justice. Yes, that's part of it. If a man steals something, he must return it.

2:01:56 That is restorative justice. But he must be punished For the theft. Because if he is not punished for the theft, you have not actually enacted justice. He is rejecting justice here, and justice is part of God's nature. So again, this is just ultimately a rejection of God. It is also an explicit rejection of much of the Old Testament, because he is rejecting all the various laws that recommend retributive justice. He is saying that those are immoral, those are unethical. He's accusing God of evil. So we've got Manicheeism here, basically. And that's a view that pops up right here in the very next one. King writes It seems to me that the most untenable conceptions of God appear in the pre prophetic period of the Old Testament.

2:02:46 Here God is looked upon first as an anthropomorphic being. He walks in the garden in the cool of the evening. He comes down to the tower of Babel, he comes down in the clouds to speak to Moses. Also in many of these writings the moral character of God is quite low. He comes down to the tower out of jealousy in Genesis eleven seven. He comes to Abraham in a lie, or he justifies Abraham in a lie. He commands an individual to do something and then scorns him for doing it from Numbers twenty two twenty through twenty two. Also at this period we find Yahweh presented as a tribal deity. He is not a universal father whose love extends to all people. So we often find Yahweh justifying all types of immoral actions against

2:03:27 non-Israelites. Even Yahweh himself is often found to be using deceitful and ruthless methods against individuals outside of his tribal authority. Finally, at this period, we find that God is only one among many gods. To be sure, he is the only one worthy of worship, but other gods still exist. At this period, the Hebrews were henotheist rather than monotheist. Certainly they're the utmost untenable conceptions of God found in the Old Testament. He damns God. He says that the God in the Old Testament is damned. He's unethical. He's immoral. He cheats. He lies. He murders. He's an evil, wicked God. Michael King says the God of the Old Testament is not his God. Okay. Our next selection from the writings of Michael King.

2:04:20 The suffering servant passage in the fifty-third chapter of Isaiah could well be applied to Jesus. In a real sense Jesus is the only one who fulfills this prophecy. Certainly Jesus was a lowly man, a man of sorrow and acquainted with grief. Certainly the real meaning of the Atonement is that Christ died in order that sinful men might be incited to rise out of their sinfulness, and be reconciled to God. In other words, through his suffering and moral influence, men are reconciled to God. There has been much debate as to whether this passage refers to the nation or to an individual. Jewish scholars have inclined toward the former, while Christian scholars have inclined toward the latter. It is my opinion that the passage refers to an individual, and

2:05:07 Jesus more than any other fulfills its descriptions. Jesus fulfills it in a way that Isaiah could never have conceived of. And to resist laughing several times, it's so bad. Just the initial contention that the suffering servant passage could well be applied to G no really. That's just the standard exegesis in Christianity forever. But it's one that he rejects because this is Isaiah fifty three is of course the he refers to this multiple times in other places as deuter Isaiah. So this is not the real Isaiah. This is the second author who tacked on another third to the end of the book. That's the modern way that these guys read the Bible, just taking it as just an assembled collection of scrolls from history with no

2:05:58 unifying anything because there's no God. If there's no God, it must just be a scrapbook. That's basically what they see the Bible as. So the reason for him being confused about this is that Isaiah didn't write it. Some other guy wrote it, and he wrote it a whole lot later. That's the important part of Deuter Isaiah. He and this is this goes back the reason I included this is this goes back to the earlier comment about how very original early on, you know, we're talking about Job, we're talking about Genesis. None of these ideas had been fleshed out. There was no notion of resurrection of the dead. There is really no Messiah, because why what if a man's dead, why would he look forward to anything?

2:06:37 Who cares? He's dead, he's not coming back. He the Messiah means nothing. The Messiah promise only means something in the context of the resurrection. And so the reason that the Deutero Isaiah prophecies are considered to be relevant in his thinking is that well those prophecies were tacked on right near the time when Jesus came back. You know, and even then he says Jesus fulfills this prophecy in a way that Isaiah could never have conceived of. Well, if you think he wasn't a prophet, and if you think God is silent and God doesn't really exist, then yeah, I guess that makes sense. It just goes to show that he absolutely rejects every word of scripture. He rejects the god of scripture, he damns the god of

2:07:18 scripture, he mocks the god of scripture, and we're told that we should listen to this man. If this man were alive today he should be driven out of town with sticks and stones. That would be the just Christian response to this degree of blasphemy. Again we're not talking about small disputes among denominations. This man is so far outside of Christianity that i it it's an infinite chasm. He goes on towards the end of the writings that one of the we're getting down to the dregs, we're running along here too, but again I told you we're gonna beat up on you with quotes. This is a point we have to make. We're not cherry picking. I cut it short. I mean this is a small fraction of what I could have

2:08:00 included. Later on in seminary towards the end, uh he was He was discussing the contrast between Luther and Calvin. And he writes, we mount now may turn to the criticism of the reformers' views of the person and work of Christ. Concerning the person of Christ, both Luther and Calvin affirmed the traditional two nature doctrine. Both were convinced that a perfect divine and perfect human nature were united in the personality of Christ. This doctrine, however, calls for a reinterpretation and modification Modification. It was based on a platonic substance philosophy, which has been largely replaced today by a philosophy in which real we see reality as active or dynamic on the one hand and as individual and concrete

2:08:43 on the other On the On the basis of such thinking it is a mistake to look upon Christ as having two independently existing natures. As Knutsen has so well put it, there were factors in Jesus' personality that may be distinguished as human and divine, but they were not distinct substances, they were simply different aspects of one unique personality. This personality is to be viewed not as a substance but as an agent. Hence we must affirm that Christ is a unitary personality in this unity we find in his ego, there's nothing in rational speculation nor New Testament thought to warrant the view that Jesus had two personal centers. We must then think of Christ as a unitary being whose divinity consists not in any second nature or in a substantial unity

2:09:27 with God, but in a unique and potent God consciousness. His unity with God was a unity of purpose, rather than a unity of substance. Again, this by itself is a literal absolute denial that Jesus Christ is God. Full stop. If you deny that Jesus Christ is God, you burn in hell. The end. So we're not name calling. We're not picking on a guy we don't like politically. This man has no business having a voice anywhere in the church, or frankly anywhere in any Christian life. 'Cause as we get to next week, all of his political activities, all of his personal activities, all of his influences were themselves downstream from the fact that he's a blasphemer. I'm sure some attentive listeners will have heard some echoes of Freud

2:10:14 because very clearly Michael King was reading some theologians who had filtered Freud through their writings and then on to Michael King, and that's why we get some of these comments here and there that are very clearly reminiscent of Freud. And so another quote from the same paper another phase of thinking in which our two theologians went to an extreme was in the doctrine of man. Both affirm that man was originally righteous, but through some strange and striking accident he became hopelessly sinful. Yet it has become increasingly difficult to imagine any such original state of perfection for man as Luther and Calvin continually presupposed. It is not within the scope of this paper to enter into

2:11:02 any argument concerning evolution. However, it is perfectly evident that its major contentions would refute such a view. We are compelled, therefore, to reject the idea of a catastrophic fall and regard man's moral condition from another point of view. Man's fall is not due to some falling away from an original righteousness, but to a failure to rise to a higher level of his present existence. And so here again we see the rejection of original sin, a rejection of the clear teaching of Scripture, a rejection of the fall, contention that man is on an upward trajectory instead of downward, which is the reality, and of course original righteousness is how one would describe the image of God in man.

2:11:48 So this is also a denial of the Imago Dei, incidentally. So I'm going to read next in part from a sermon. The title of the sermon was Expe Accepting Responsibility for Your Actions. He preached this in Atlanta, Georgia nineteen fifty three. This tendency to thrust responsibility for our actions on some eternal agency is by no means a new one. The Genesis writers plural found it present in the very beginning of history. Remember the story of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden? God had placed Adam and Eve in the garden to dress it. They were given liberty to make use of everything in the garden with the exception of one thing. They were not to eat the tree of good and evil. Very soon a serpent appeared on the scene and said, Hath God

2:12:31 said ye shall not eat of the tree of the garden? And Eve answered, We may eat of the fruit of the trees of the garden, but of the tree of good and evil God has commanded, that we not shall not eat, or nor touch lest we die. And the serpent answered, ye shall not surely die, for God doth know that in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be lay as gods, knowing good and evil. After listening to those cogent words by the subtle serpent, Eve yielded to the temptation, and very soon Adam and Eve were found eating from the tree that God had forbidden them to touch. When God came back on the scene to ascertain why the sin had been committed, he found each shifting responsibility on some external agency.

2:13:11 Adam's answer was what the what the woman caused him to eat of the tree. Eve claimed that the serpent had caused her to eat the tree. Neither Adam nor Eve stopped to really realize that although they were tempted by external agencies, they were in the final analysis responsible for yielding to the temptation. Ultimately individual responsibility lies not in the external situation, but in the internal response. The reason that I included this is that this is a sermon in nineteen fifty-three. This is within two years of him saying all the other third things we've heard him say about the Garden of Eden. He mocked the idea that God walked in the garden in a paper. Two years later he's saying God walked in the garden.

2:13:49 Did King repent? No. He's talking to the rubes because he knows it's a myth. He knows it's a myth that they believe and he's trying to make a point. Because remember the thing about true and truth? He denies that this is true, but he says it's truth. He's minded he's trying to make a moral point to his audience, and so he's perfectly content to go along, because as far as King is concerned, it's all just parables. It's all just made up stories, except unlike Jesus' parables that we know are from God's mouth, these are just man-made stories. They were useful. It's like Aesop's fables or every other religion that has the same sort of wisdom literature. So when he says that you know God walked in the cool

2:14:29 of the day, that God spoke with them, that Adam and Eve existed, the fact that he would say Adam and Eve existed is itself false file by the fact that he denies that Adam was created by God. He says that evolution is how man was created. So the this I'm highlighting this because this man was a liar from the beginning. One day he's confessing this is nonsense, this is garbage, this is myth, this is laughable. These rubs eat this stuff up. Thank goodness we have this new knowledge, so we know how to be more scientific than them. And then when he gets up in the pulpit, he doesn't go that far. He goes a little bit. He says the Genesis writers plural, which is obviously denying the Mosaic authorship, but he won't delve into that.

2:15:14 And that is fundamentally why these men sneak into our pulpits as God said that they would. They use these small deceptions, and so more and more they will take things that sound Christian, the Christians recognize and say, yeah, that's a Christian up there talking to me about Christian stuff. And then they twist it and they turn it. You know, a few degrees at a time. They're turning a dial so slowly that their audience doesn't realize what's happening. That's why it's important to listen to all the other stuff he said. Again, this is not a sermon from fifteen years later. This is a sermon within eighteen months of him saying all the things that we'd said previously. This man was a preacher, he was a pastor, he was ordained,

2:15:51 he was seminary educated, he was about to go off to Boston University, where he would get his he would be given a PhD for plagiarism and other things. Every word that he said here was a lie in his mouth. It sounds true to us because we're Christians. And that's a fundamental point that we need to make here. As Christians, we listen to a man talking about Christian stuff, and we want to give them the benefit of the doubt, and we want to baptize even their mistakes by saying, well, I can make that work. There's a time and a place for that. I'm not saying be ruthless to everyone. No one could possibly survive that. Even podcasters. And yet it is important to note that this man, because of his other confessions, we must look with a jaundiced eye at everything

2:16:32 that he says. And so in this sermon, he's just flat out denying his own confession, but he can do it because he redefined truth, and he redefined God, and he redefined Adam and Eve in the garden, and so he does it with a straight face, and he doesn't even think about it. I don't think he even thinks he's getting away with anything when he does these sermons. He just knows that he's moving the ball in the direction of hell, which is his ultimate goal. Our next reading is another selection that is from his PhD program days. A final element in the Christian hope is the belief in immortality. It is at this point that the New Testament surpasses the Old. The doctrine of immortality was very late appearing in the Old

2:17:18 Testament. The emphasis in the earlier days was on the immortality of the nation, but with the Christian the individual will live again. This view runs throughout the New Testament, Jesus in his argument against the Sadducees. There can be little doubt that every New Testament writer, accepted belief in some form of immortality. The dominant note in the New Testament is a bodily resurrection rather than a survival of the soul independent of the body. But there are some signs of the latter view appearing in the New Testament. In the final analysis, this hope in immortality is for the Christian given by God. Rather than due to some natural immortal state of the soul, the Greek view, man will live again because he is of value to

2:18:05 God. This one is a train wreck theologically, at least on par with grammatically. Worse train wreck theologically. Man's soul is immortal. This is great news if you're a Christian. This is terrible news if you are not. Man is not conditionally immortal. The soul is not here for a time and then evaporates or is annihilated when the body ceases to be. This is just nonsense. And then in the other part of it, he is arguing for basically the Greek view, the the Gnostic view, that matter is not necessarily real, it's the soul, it's the spiritual that truly matters. And of course, his exegesis of the Old Testament versus the New Testament is also wrong. Immortality is has always been a part of the Christian religion.

2:19:07 It is a part of scripture from the beginning to the end. And we went over this in commenting on some of the earlier quotes, so won't go into depth here. I think what all this boils down to is that this man just continuously denied every tenet of the Christian faith. He had every opportunity, every time he had an opportunity to write a paper for school, for seminary in his PhD program, every time he interacted, he put down in writing things that were antithetical to scripture. And he was excited about it. He mentioned as we mentioned earlier on, when he moved on from Morehouse to Crozer, he was He was excited at the advancement. He was excited at the fact that enough of his faith had been destroyed at Morehouse that he was ready for the liberalism of

2:19:52 Krozer. And these were both Baptist institutions in the 50s. I'm not picking on Baptist, but like there's no possibility for someone to have come out of those places and been a Christian. Simply none. No Christian could survive in that environment. It's just it's not a possibility. The quote that we're going to end on here is one that was from a paper that he plagiarized himself on, as he did many times. Uh he re he resubmitted the paper where he talked about paganism being a tributary to Christianity. And he added on a new paragraph at the very end when he resubmitted the same paper in another school that I think really summarizes the entire arc of everything from where he was t then and where those beliefs are today in the modern world.

2:20:39 King concludes Christianity, however, survived because it appeared to be the result of a trend in the social order or in the historical cycle of the human race. Forces have been known to delay trends, but very few have ever stopped them. The staggering question that now arises is what will be the next stage of man's religious progress? Is Christianity the crowning achievement in the development of religious thought? Or will there be another religion more advanced? That's it. That's what we're talking about here. He's n he was never a Christian. He was never looking at Christianity as anything other than a skin suit that he could wear his entire career as a stepping stone to a new, more advanced religion.

2:21:25 If you're familiar with Revelation, you know how that ends up. We're talking about eschatology here. There will be a new religion in the end. It will be a world religion. And for all intents and purposes, it seems as though the whole world is headed that way. We have every major modern church body, including our own, abandoning the faith before our eyes. And everyone's going along with it. Why? Because they're doing it in the name of Jesus. They're saying this is for love, this is for God, this is for Jesus, we gotta do it, this is the direction we're going. You're not Christian if you don't follow us. And their religion is identical to the world religion. I omitted all the things that he said in his preaching, in

2:22:07 his teaching, that was directly related to anti-racism, anti-white supremacy. His views in the 50s were identical to the views of our churches today. And And that's the reason that we have professors and pastors quoting this damned heretic. It wasn't that he was a good Christian, is that they have adopted the same religion as this man. And so of course they have to be on the same page, because this new world religion that he describes here, that is the culmination of the development through Christianity into a final world religion, that's what we're seeing today. We're seeing CNN and the Pope and Swami's and Matt Harrison and you picket. Anywhere you look, any direction you look, you're seeing men on the

2:22:53 same page morally. That would be a wonderful thing if they were in obedience to Christ, but we know for absolute certainty it is the exact opposite. These men are all in rebellion against God. Michael King was in a rebellion against God every day of his ministry, every day of his college career, whether or not it was every day of his living life, at this point it doesn't matter, because his fruits are absolutely evil, his teachings were evil, the men who follow him are evil. There's no other possible conclusion. As I said, this is part one. This is already gone very long. Next week we're gonna do one that just talks about the secular side of this. What were his political activities? How did he take this new religion's advanced morality?

2:23:35 And what did he do with it in the world? Because that is the aftermath we're living in today. He died. He was a martyr for his religion. But what has come in the aftermath of that is a culmination of his efforts. The men who say that are telling the truth. We are living in the culmination of Michael King's work in his life. Unfortunately, he served Satan his entire life, and the culmination of that work is itself satanic and evil. And the world you see today online and on TV and when you go down the street and you see parades and you see disgusting debauchery everywhere, that is the culmination of his dream. That is what we have today. Let's contrast his words about a supposed or potential and in our experience actual new religion with what scripture says from

2:24:25 Revelation. I warn everyone who hears the words of the prophecy of this book. If anyone adds to them, God will add to him the plagues described in this book. And if any one takes away from the words of the prophecy of this book, God will take away his share in the tree of life and in the holy city, which are described in this book. After going over so much terrible theology in this episode, I think it would be good if we end with actual Christian doctrine. And so earlier I said I was not going to go through the words of the Apostles' Creed then but I am going to go through them now and so we will close out with the Apostles Creed. I do actually recommend that you say it along with me if you have it memorized, and you most certainly should have it memorized.

2:25:24 I believe in God the Father almighty, maker of heaven and earth, and in Jesus Christ his only Son, our Lord, conceived by the Holy Spirit, born of the Virgin Mary, suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, died, and was buried, he descended into hell, the third day he rose again from the dead, he ascended into heaven, and sits at the right hand of God the Father Almighty, from thence he will come to judge the living and the dead. I believe in the Holy Spirit, the Holy Christian Church, the communion of saints, the forgiveness of sins, the resurrection of the body, and the life everlasting. Amen.