Speaking the Truth Plainly

0:37 Welcome to the Stone Choir Podcast. I am Cory J. Mahler. And I'm Wo. What problem are you trying to solve? Anyone who's been friends with me for any length of time has probably heard me ask that question more than once. Uh probably dreads hearing it. Uh if you come to me with a problem or a question, or even if with an earshot you're complaining about something, there's a decent chance that eventually I will ask you what problem are you trying to solve. Today we're gonna apply that question to a couple different circumstances that are part of the Christian experience. as part of our Christian lives, we are we're called to testify to our faith to others and we're called to discuss our faith with others um in within the church.

1:24 So outside of the church to those who are unbelievers and inside the church to those who do have faith. But maybe they have they come from differing beliefs. So the first scenario we're going to discuss in the first half of the episode is how do you discuss your faith with an unbeliever? And the reason I want to frame that in terms of what question are you trying to solve is that as Christians, we want to ultimately share the good news of the gospel, namely that Jesus Christ died for our sins on the cross because we know that there's nothing we can do to pay for our sins. But for an unbeliever, those there are a lot of assumptions packed into that that they don't follow. They don't have the gimmins givens that we have.

2:09 So to tell them Jesus died for your sins, sort of is the intro, it's kinda like reading the last page of a novel to someone. They don't care. Like they're they're they're not invested in any of it. So you gave them a fact. Why does it how's it connected to them? So we're gonna talk about how to in some cases discuss your faith with people in a way that you wouldn't necessarily think of normally. And it's going to challenge all of us to think about Christian life in areas where we don't normally think about it, in areas that don't typically apply to faith when you're looking at them. And we'll give some examples. The second half of the episode, we're going to talk about something that's blown up on Twitter for the last couple weeks, but it's

2:54 a very good example of how within the church it's possible to not ask the question, what problem am I trying to solve before you start arguing with someone or start correcting someone or start trying to manage the words that someone's using in such a way that you can actually do more harm than good because you didn't understand where they were coming from and so you were trying to solve the wrong problem. So we're gonna talk about listening better and about unwinding back to what's going on it to begin with, so that you can communicate clearly, but you don't do harm in attempting to do so. Because if you can't communicate without doing harm, then you should keep your mouth shut. That's That's always an option for anyone.

3:40 Um ironic for the jerk with a microphone to say bet, but that's honestly something that's an important part of the Christian life too. And as I've said in past episodes, there are times when I do keep my mouth shut, but not right now, not for the next hour. So the first scenario we're going to talk about is you know, say in the workplace you have a coworker who you're having lunch with him and And he confides in you that his teenage boy has fallen under the spell of some friends, he's fallen into new friends, and there's influence he's getting in his social circle that amounts to pressuring him to do drugs. But it's not the drugs that maybe you or your parents' generations are familiar with.

4:24 I'm not talking about pro party drugs. I'm talking about hormone replacement therapy. His friends don't want him to get high on cocaine or smoke marijuana. His friends want him to inject estrogen into his body so that he will grow breasts and so that he will lose his facial hair. And he's going to want to have his genitals surgically removed because he's been convinced that he wants to be a girl or that he is a girl, and that the only way to realize that is through the application of science. And so you as a Christian are sitting there listening to this horror story from this man and the question that though the reason I'm raising the question what problem are you trying to solve is that I feel I think that

5:10 today as Christians, as we're looking at the decaying world, as we're looking at things like that man is suffering, and you know, this this hypothetical conversation, the other person's not a Christian. So he's he's completely at a loss. Not only is he bereft and beside himself suffering for the future of his son, but he doesn't have a frame of reference for how something so terrible could happen. And If you're a Christian, you're listening to this podcast, you're you're gonna be a conservative. You're probably very conservative. Again, that's not a great word, but you know what we mean when we say that. As conservatives, we are fond of calling this the culture war or calling it wokeism. Or, you know, maybe if you've done some more sophisticated digging into

5:59 the genealogy of these ideas, you'll call it cultural Marxism or just Marxism. And to some extent all of those things are true, but as we talked about in the frame episode, it's not the frame that the Christian should bring to the discussion because what is implicit in all of those characterizations is in the case of calling something woke, you're saying effectively it's you're being derisive or you're being dismissive, saying that well, those guys are just being silly. Uh it's you know, kind of implying that it's a phase. The yeah, this world's really crazy right now, I don't know what's going on. This is a bunch of wild cultural stuff. Um, or if you want to call it Marxism, you can maybe get closer to the root that there's something bad happening, but you're

6:47 thinking of it even as a Christian as bad in terms of good ideas or bad ideas, and which ones are going to win in the marketplace of ideas. So what I want you to think about is the the question that you should be asking and the way that you should frame your response to anyone who's coming to you describing their suffering in the world is to avoid discussing it in terms that don't starkly speak of good and evil. Because fundamentally that's what this is. The fact that that man's son has fallen under the spell of this destruction is satanic. For a for anyone to be convinced that he should destroy his body, it's three things that Satan's doing. First, Satan has robbed him his of his faith, if he ever

7:36 had it, because no Christian is ever going to decide to change their sex. It's an impossibility. To reject the body that God gave you is to have already rejected your creator, is to say, I hate you, God, you don't exist. This is my body, I'm gonna do what I want. So the faith has already been lost before they even get to that point. And then Satan destroys their minds by convincing them of these lies that yes, I was born a boy, but now I'm a girl, and so I need to fix that. And the fix is the third act of destruction by Satan, and that is the destruction of the body. So the soul and then the mind and then the body are destroyed. And in the case of transsexuals or those who who mutilate their bodies to pretend to be the other sex, the suicide rate

8:23 is over forty percent for those people. And when that is admitted by those who will advocate those acts, they're not saying it to say, wow, maybe this is a really bad place to take someone. The excuse is that well, these people are misunderstood and they're bullied and that's why they're killing themselves. No. The suicide rate is so high because that is the final act of Satan in this act of destruction. Begins with the soul, then the mind, and then the body, and he doesn't care what order he does it in, but that's the order that happens in this case. And the destruction of the body through mutilation and then through self murder ultimately ensures damnation. Because even someone who has suffered through that sort of demonic oppression,

9:08 there's still hope for them as long as they draw breath. Doesn't matter what you've done to your body, it doesn't matter what you've done in your life, you can be redeemed. And so Christians know that, but we also know that there's evil that's causing these things. And so when we say, well, that's that's woke, that's crazy, that's cultural, and we can't say that's evil, we're fundamentally betraying the faith. We're in effect as Christians providing cover for Satan to run wild in the world. Because the only people who are going to call him out, who are gonna shine a light and say, look at what Satan is doing, look at this evil, we're the only ones who know that and can see that authoritatively.

9:50 There are non-believers who can see it's evil, but they don't know what evil means. They it's more relativistic to them. We know that there's absolute good and evil. And so we must learn as Christians to make sure that when we see evil in the world, that's that's what we call it. Because as I said, to discuss your faith with someone in this century, it's not going to begin with talking about Jesus. It's going to begin with pointing to the evil in the world that you share with your neighbor and then helping to frame that evil that he's suffering from in terms of the Christian faith that you want to be his as well. Some unbelievers do see some of this more clearly than Christians because much of this is not only immoral, not only against the moral

10:38 law, but it's against nature. And in particular, some pagans actually do better with the against nature, the continentum arguments than some Christians do. And so when it comes to things like transsexualism, they will look at that and viscerally understand that is contrary to nature, and so they'll call it evil, which they're right. They just don't understand why it's necessarily evil and the source of that evil. And so it depends on the person with whom you're speaking. For a pagan who already recognizes the evil, you can explain, well, I can tell you why it's evil and the source of that evil. And so that can be a way you can open up that conversation and maybe get somewhere. But you mentioned the the order in which this particular new it's

11:26 actually not a new evil because this existed back in cult prostitution in ancient times, but it's a recurrent evil, it's new for recent times. Soul, mind, and body, it's really the inversion of what happens with most drugs, because most drugs destroy the body. Then there's addiction that follows on, which is the destruction of the mind, and ultimately despair, which is the destruction of the soul. Satan found a way to do it in reverse, which is quite effective, unfortunately. But one of the other problems when dealing with Christians who say, you know, it's just woke or it's liberal or leftist or and I'm not saying it's necess not necessarily those things, because it is indeed those things, although I think the term woke is terribly stupid,

12:14 I wouldn't really use it. You're making it sound like Christianity is one solution among many. And it lends a sort of legitimacy, it's a framing issue. It lends legitimacy to the other side, to Satan and his minions, that they do not have. You are saying, well, my view is better, the way that I look at the world has more explanatory power or is X, Y, and Z, and so you should really believe my view. No, you should believe what Christians believe because it's true. It's not one competing view among many. It is the only solution. It is the only truth. And so it matters how you frame these things. If you make it sound like it is just politics, if you make it sound like your solution is one among many, you've already

13:04 seeded the field in a way that has probably fatally undermined any chance you have of really getting through to that person with the law and then the gospel. Because of course you have to have the law first. You're exactly right. And that's it's a case that is we've talked about in previous episodes, what Satan is doing to the world in this century and beginning in the last century century is to attack creation itself. Satan's not going after Jesus died for you anymore. I mean he does, but he doesn't even need to go there because Christendom is dead. There's no there's no more Christianity built into society. Christianity itself is dying as a part of the nations that have hosted it for thousands of years.

13:58 And so he doesn't have to go after how are you saved? He's going after what you are and turning people from men and women who were made men who are made in the image of God into self-actualized not creatures because creature implies creator. He's saying you are your own person, you can be whatever you want to be. If you want to be a dog, you can be a dog. And this is something happening before the zoomer generation, now we're younger kids, are actually being convinced that they can be animals and they are living their lives in school in some cases as animals, where they will dress up like an animal in school. They will not sit in a chair. They have to sit on their dog bed. And the teachers are required to tolerate this behavior, to not interfere

14:49 with their self-realization of their identity as a dog or a cat or whatever they're doing. And as an adult who is not paying attention to what's going on, when you hear these things, you think instinctively, that's just crazy. And yes, it is crazy. Like a hundred and fifty years ago, these sorts of things would uh periodically pop up, but they were either in people who were directly and overtly demon possessed or oppressed or or clinically insane, if there can be if you can say there's any difference between those two. I don't know that there is, but even assuming for the sake of argument they're not the same thing, those are the only categories of people who would ever think, I'm a dog, you need

15:31 to treat me like a dog. Today there's so many kids doing it. The schools have to have policies around it. Now, that's their generation that people aren't seeing yet because they're too young really to have a lot of this stuff videotaped and show up on the internet, but it's happening and it's coming. And so again, Satan is destroying creation itself, both by the pollution and the destruction of the physical world, and by convincing man to destroy himself. And he's man is destroying himself by denying how God made him. So we spend a lot of time talking about how God made us as men for this very reason. You know, we've we've alluded to race numerous times as a future episode. We're gonna do an episode soon where we go into it

16:20 in depth. And it's not because we think race is that important or interesting. Honestly, I find it a tedious and boring topic. It's not gonna be a tedious and boring episode because it's probably gonna light your hair on fire. It you're gonna hear some things you've never heard and it's probably gonna make you pretty mad. And that's also not why we're talking about we're talking about it because it's true. The way that God made the races is a real thing. And so it's not a coincidence that before Satan convinced people to deny that they were human, or to die deny that they were men and women. He got everyone, including a lot of Christians, denying that God made you as an African or as a European or as an Asian.

16:58 Those aren't things. Those are social categories. They're superficial, they're not real, God didn't do that. And that was a small crack in the door, but all of the rest of the stuff is plowed right through it. So when we discuss these things, again it's not because we think like, oh well race is the foundation of the faith. No. It has nothing to do with it, except that it's how God operates in our lives to create us. And when you concede that, well, you're just a generic human being. Well why aren't I just a generic human being that's sexless? how is that dichotomy possibly tolerated in a world where all these other differentiations that are physically observable and scientifically demonstrable, if those can

17:44 be discarded, well you can't tell me I'm not a woman. I'm a woman. I I feel like a woman, I have a woman's thoughts and a woman's needs. You can't tell me otherwise. You lose the moral high ground and you lose any credibility as a Christian. If you lie about one, you've lost the ability to speak truthfully about the other. And we've seen that play out in history. As you mentioned, that is exactly what happened. You have the attack on On it really happened sort of simultaneously, but the attack on the reality of human race took off more effectively earlier, and then you had following on the attack on male and female. So you have the denial of the distinction, the differences between the races of men and the very existence of them.

18:29 Initially that's not of course where they started, but today that is what you see. You see that all the time. People will deny that race is real. They will say that it is, as you mentioned, merely a social construct, merely a reporting category for the census. I saw someone actually argue that I didn't follow it because I didn't want to go insane. But the attack was first on that, and then it immediately followed. Well, if there's no difference between it among the races of men, then there's no real difference between men and women. And that's where you get the nineteenth Amendment. And before that in Europe, you get all of the countries permitting women to vote and run for office and do all these various

19:10 things. Because as soon as you give up any of these truths about creation, you've lost all of them. It's just a matter of time. You already gave Satan the foot in the door, you opened the door for him and let him walk into the room. He is going to own everything before he's done, unless he's stopped. Today, he is attacking still male and female because the goal is to completely destroy that distinction. But he's moving on as well, and that's why, as mentioned, you have people who say, No, I'm actually not a human, I'm a dog or a cat. You have officers in our military posting pictures of themselves on social media in fursuits. This is not something that is in the closet or under the rug, or no, this is out in the open.

19:59 Happening before the eyes of the world. Satan is not subtle. He doesn't need to be subtle, because Christians have abandoned the field. And I think most people listening probably don't know what fursuits are and I don't I don't want to tell you, but it's the Again, back to the the term wokeism and woke. you're right. it's a I I please do not Google it for your own sanity. Don't don't look it up, you don't need to know, just it's horrible. It's horrible, it's depraved, it's evil, it's degenerate, and it's normal today, in the sense that it happens and you can't stop it or you will be arrested. And so as Christians, the reason that that I want us to focus on what problem are you trying to solve when you're talking to

20:48 people, whether it's a coworker or you know, maybe it's an extended family member, who is seeing the horrors happening in the world. The reason that we I mentioned race and we're talking about a couple of these things is for the fact that people who aren't Christians can see that these things are evil. They can look at them and see that as Corey as you said, it is contrary to nature on its face, plainly. Christians have lost the ability to say that. We're afraid to say that now, because Satan convinced Christians judge not means that you can't point at something in evil and say it's evil. When Scripture directly commands us to do that very thing, if you cannot point to evil and say that's evil, you're not a

21:34 Christian. Period. If you can't say something's evil, you're not a Christian. Well and if you're not calling it evil, you are tacitly calling it good. Exactly. Woe to those who call evil good and good evil. Scripture is not subtle about this. It's very clear. And so as we discuss these things with friends and family, whether it's in person or on the internet or whatever, you're going to talk to people who do not have faith. They don't know Jesus. They don't know God. They don't know about justification. They know that the world is evil. And this is the this is God opening the door for us to share our faith with them. But we don't begin I humbly submit. I'm not saying you can never talk about Jesus.

22:20 We have to get to talking about Jesus. I would humbly submit to you can to consider that you don't begin by talking about Jesus when someone says, Why is my child mutilating himself? Why are my neighbors pretending to be dogs and doing obscene things in the yard and the police won't stop them? Why is this happening? If you as a Christian, you know, you're a Tucker Carlson listener or whatever, like if you call these things woke, if you say that they're cultural warfare, if as as Corey said, if you say that, well, maybe Christianity has a better explanation for what's going on, you're never going to make any impact in that person's life. Because that's the same equivocation and the same gutlessness that they see

23:05 defining the very people who are destroying things. If you can come to someone who is horrified by the evil in the world, and I think one of the things that Christians need to get comfortable with is being strategic about how we share our faith. So for example, I have I have numerous friends who are not Christians. they're good friends, they're loyal, they're funny, they are sincere and they're honest, and they some of them don't have faith. There are a few who, when I share my faith with them, in whatever context, or even just if something comes up, they will go out of their way to blaspheme and say, ha, I can't believe you fall for this crap and you know they'll say terrible things about God and so I try not to instigate situations where

23:56 they would do that because I don't want them to be sitting because I go to them into it. But at the same time, when situations arise where I can point to my faith and say, look, I know you think this is silly. I know you don't believe it. I know you think it's stupid. I'm going to tell you anyway why I think that Christianity, that my faith, that my godly understanding of the world is relevant to this situation. And you can say up front, I know you're gonna think I'm stupid. I know that I have friends who think I'm retarded because I believe in Sky Daddy and I don't care. Because you know what? Every time they insult me and say that stuff When I don't respond in kind and I just continue to share what I know

24:39 in whatever small way I can in the moment, that is demonstrating my faith too. Even if they don't care, they don't believe anything I say. The fact that I can respond in a way that is consistent and tries to be supportive of doing something good will stand out to someone even if they reject the message. And you never know how the Holy Spirit's gonna work in someone's life. I th I think that we know as Christians intellectually, but we don't necessarily internalize it, that we're planting God's seeds and He will give the growth. We don't know what's going to happen. All we can do is speak truthfully. And truthfully, as I've said, as we've said numerous times, is all truth. It's not just truth about John 3:16.

25:28 I say John 3.16 all the time, not because I don't love that verse, I love it dearly. It's the perfect encapsulation of why we are Christians, but it's not an explanation for why someone someone would be Christian if they don't already know why they need to be Christian. You know, we've talked before about the law gospel distinction. The gospel is incoherent to someone who doesn't think they're a sinner, who doesn't think they have a creator? So the first hurdle you need to cross with someone is not let me tell you how Jesus died for your sins. It's let me connect your lived experience to use the Marxist term. Let me let me use your life. Let me you use what you are suffering in this world to

26:13 connect you to your creator whom you do not know. And if you can make even that one small connection, maybe you can't talk about Jesus that day. That's fine. If you can plant a seed that will grow a little bit, if you can nail them down on one simple concession to your frame, to to your your Christian worldview, to use another terrible term, but we're kind of stuck in a world where we have to use terrible terms because the good ones are dead. And that's amusingly, that's actually the subject for the second half of this episode episode. But when we fail to realize that these struggles people face are spiritual, that they have Satan behind them and that they have human beings acting in this life as Satan's agents, some of whom know and

27:02 some of whom don't know. They don't realize that they're serving Satan. They just they're motivated by whatever has possessed them. It's usually good intentions. They're malformed intentions, but they think they're doing good. They think they're making the world a better pay place by denying creation. And so when Christians can say, What problem are you trying to solve by looking at the state of the world, eventually you will have to unwind that conversation back to the source of good and evil and the source of creation itself, and how God's rules are baked into creation, and how every time we physically and spiritually and mentally deviate from what God has ordained, we suffer in this life, we suffer temporal consequences for the sin of disbelief of not

27:53 doing the things that God has ordered the world to function. And as as we're talking about this today, I realize that this is probably not the way the most people who are listening. You probably don't look at the world this way. You probably think more in terms of culture war. You don't want to think about evil. And you especially the the sort of existential looming evil that is ravenous and is all consuming and all destructive. That's too much for most people to bear. That's understandable. But if you want to share the gospel in this year with people who are facing that devouring lion, you're going to have to face the existential evil, even if it's in a small way, even if it's in a conversation that's limited.

28:38 And so I'm encouraging people to just to think about this because if we're not looking at the world through spiritual eyes, we can't describe it in that way. We if we can see the frame that this is just it's culture war, man, I hope I hope that the good culture wins and the bad culture loses. If you've taken good and evil off the table, you cannot speak as a Christian. And that's a terrible thing because that that's an opportunity that God's given you in someone else's life to tell the truth. And if if you can't do it, even in a small way, that person's just gonna go on like nothing ever happened. But it was a it was a a change that occurred in that in that timeline where in the other direction, if you'd been

29:22 able to mount a forceful, clear defense of what God wants for the world, even knowing that they don't believe in God, yes, fine for you to talk about God and say, I understand that you don't believe this is true, but if you don't mind, you can be you can act a little bit embarrassed about it. That's fine. And you can say if God is real. That's not a denial of God in con in conversation for you to say if. You're offering an alternative to what they already believe. So you're not making thinning things any worse. What you're doing is enticing the other person to concede for a moment the possibility that maybe you have something that's explanatory for what is ailing them. Because the thing that's ailing them, while it is ultimately sin, they're

30:03 not going to get that until they get a lot of other givens taken out of the way first. And it is worth noting that all men who do not have a seared conscience do believe in God. They are suppressing it, but they do actually believe in God. And your opening for many of these interactions is going to be if the other person is looking for an explanation for why the world is as it is, that person has already tacitly admitted a belief in God. He may not recognize that it's a belief in God, but that is where that eventuates. That is the end of that line of thought. Because if there's a reason, there's a God. We're not going to get into that today. We're not going to explain all of the reasoning that gets you

30:54 there, but the alternative is to say there's no reason. And then it's just a matter of preferences, and this is one of the arguments of modern philosophy and modern ethics. I think I just don't like that, or I do like that. If someone is speaking in those terms, you're going to have more trouble. Because that person is saying there's no reason. There's no ultimate meaning. It's just preferences expressing themselves and catching on in groups and then group psychology, etc. But if someone is open to the idea that there may be a reason people behave the way they do, things are the way they are, our society has changed in the ways that it has changed. That's your opening. That's someone you can give him.

31:37 You can say, Well, I know the reason. I know why things are the way they are. I know what the cause is. It's evil. And there's an alternative to that. It's called God. And so there's an opening for you there. You just have to recognize that opening and know how to approach that person, how to offer the information that you have that he needs. There was something fundamentally fascinating that happened at the very beginning of the BLM riots that followed George Floyd's suicide in 2000. Early on when BLM kicked off, there were a few people who were the ringleaders, who were the they were out in front, they were collecting the funding, they were shaping the messaging. They were helping to orchestrate nationally both the violence and the public-facing

32:31 good parts of what they were trying to sell, even while they were destroying our cities. The fascinating thing that happened was that for a period of several months after the the BLM was formed and before this came to wide knowledge, Black Lives Matter's website as part of their ethos page, part of their about page, talking about their motives. They went far beyond racial justice and racial equity and the various other things that most naive observers thought that their so called movement was about. They went on on the very same page to say we are also here to topple the patriarchy, we are here to topple heteronormativity, we are here to topple the nuclear family. And they went into depth on each of those why they wanted

33:27 to destroy those foundational things. Now, as a Christian who has thought about these things for some time and who has a proper understanding of what's actually going on, it's no surprise at all that the people, the same people who are shouting racial justice are shouting down with the patriarchy, they're shouting up with homosexuality, up with homosexu with transgenderism for children, shouting destroy the family, let us have groups of individuals who are connected by bonds that have nothing to do with bloods whatsoever. To the naive observer, that sounds like just a random grab bag. Like that's all how did all those crazy woke things end up in the same place? These guys are such Lib Tards.

34:14 That's what a lot of people thought. What was actually going on was that all of those things, including the racial aspect that was the top line item, they're all part of the same attack. The fact that patriarchy was second on the list was not a coincidence. And so we're not going to get into that today. We're going to we've talked about patriarchy and headship in past episodes, and we'll connect it in some future ones as well. But I want to ill I want to use that as an illustrative example of how. So something that if you're naive, if you don't have spiritual eyes, you can't really make sense of it. Like why do these people who are upset that cops are being mean to minorities, why are they mad at the nuclear family?

34:58 And why do they want sodomy for children? That doesn't make any sense. And on paper, it doesn't. Unless you realize that the animating evil behind one of those things is the animating evil behind every one of those things. And the overarching goal is the subversion of nature. Because Satan is already more or less one when it comes to the field of making the church irrelevant in modern society. We can look at the numbers all day that say, you know, double digit whatever, high double digit percentages, claim to be Christian. But when you actually get down into the real information There are very few Christians in the world. And even in the places that are more Christian than most others, there are very few actual Christians.

35:45 And that's just basic things in Christianity. You know, is Jesus the Son of God? Is Jesus God? Is Jesus created? And they give the wrong answers to these. These are not Christians. But so the animation behind it, the animating intelligence behind it is Satan and his goal is the subversion of nature. And that's what all of these things have in common. Now, as mentioned earlier, there are some pagans and others who will recognize that all of these are against nature. They're all perversions, and so it makes sense that they're related. Many will not, most will not recognize these things are related. But every so often, Satan slips up, and he puts out a website that gives you his game plan. It pays to pay attention when your enemy accidentally publishes his battle

36:35 plan. Satan telegraphs what he's going to do and we should pay attention to that because he is telling us what he hates, and he hates all of the things that God loves. And we need to take them seriously. And that's why we're that's why we're attacking the concept of using culture war as any sort of frame of reference for what's going on. If you think it's just cultural or it's just people being silly or stupid or unrealistic or impractical, you will never see Satan's hand up their butt. And it's there. Those people who are advocating those things, even if they're in our churches, they are agents of Satan when they're doing those things. It doesn't mean that they don't think do godly things on other

37:21 days, but when they're doing these things, they are acting on behalf of Satan. Get behind me, Satan said to Peter. Yeah. In the in the Lutheran church, and I think in in many churches, I just don't know of the others when someone is baptized as an infant, their parents and sponsors will speak these words and when you're confirmed you you will speak these words again. Do you renounce the devil and all his works and all his ways and the Christian will respond, I do renounce them. We don't want to think about all his works in all his ways as as modern Christians. We want to renounce the devil, but we don't want to pay attention to what his works and his ways are. Because you know what? if we unravel that too deeply, we might find that the genealogy

38:11 of some of our beliefs and some of our ideas traces back to something that isn't godly. And I don't know how many people realize that, either consciously or subconsciously, but I can tell you for a fact that it's there. And it's not only there in people who are casual, it's there in people who are serious about their belief. Uh the guys up in Wyoming in Wyoming that are doing Luther Classical College are doing fantastic work. I'm very excited to see how that's coming together. One thing that frightens me is that a lot of their discussion is framing things in terms of cultural war and how can we be in opposition to the culture? And now when they go downstream a bit, they'll focus on Jesus. If you give the farm away by not explicitly condemning and damning

38:58 the evil that is occurring, you're not drawing a strong enough contrast. And that's the reason that Corey, you and I are viewed by most people as speaking so stridently. I've had numerous people say to me uh on Twitter since I got on for the first time ever, I expected you to be much angrier. You sound normal. You sound like a normal human being. Um Yes. Which is funny. Like, you know, in two hundred and eighty characters there's only so much you can do. And so I've always been careful when I'm speaking online to speak clearly. I don't care if I hurt your feelings, if I've spoken clearly. It's not my principal concern that you come away feeling good about the interaction. It is my principal concern that you have clarity about what it

39:49 is I'm trying to say, which is the other topic we're gonna get to in a couple minutes. Speaking unclearly is what Satan loves. 'Cause it doesn't matter what you're speaking unclearly about. See, when these Christians categorize something as culture war or or Marxist or woke, those things are all true to a degree, but they're not the final cause of what's going on. And so when you can say something is just kind of silly, you're providing cover for Satan even while you're condemning it. See, it's not that you didn't land on the right side of the issue. It's that you landed on the right side so weakly that it has no impact on the observer. Because someone looking at the thing will say, Well that Christian doesn't

40:32 seem that worked up about it. I guess, you know, I think I care about this more than the Christian. I think it's more evil than this Christian does. Why would why would that person who doesn't know God, but they do know evil when they see it, why would they ever listen to you as a lukewarm Christian who can't even condemn the evil that they do see? When someone comes to you who's not a Christian, who's left the faith, or they're weak in the faith, or they're an absolute unbeliever, if you can't stand right beside them shoulder to shoulder and say, yes, that is this is evil, and I can tell you where this evil came from because there's more going on than meets the eye. If you can do that, you have at least had the

41:14 door opened to have a conversation that will lead to a conversation about the gospel and about the saving work of Jesus. If you're weaker on evil than they are in that moment, they're not going to think you have any credibility when you try to bring it up elsewhere. You're slamming the door on your own face if you can't condemn evil where it pops up. And it's not going to pop up where you want it to. It's going to be these things that are called cultural. It's gonna be these thorny issues like race and IQ and nationality, things that are divisive because we've been lied to for so long in order to ensure that they're divisive. The truth is not divisive, except that it divides people who can discern the truth from those who can't, for those who confuse truth

41:59 with lies. So the division is not caused by the tone of voice or by the clarity of speech, it's caused fundamentally by the content. And so when Corey and I speak and we seem strident and we seem forceful, one, that's our personality, but I can be more laid back about stuff. I can I can be I can get into the weeds on things and not take a strong point and talk about the subtleties. And there are subtle subtleties to some of those things. Subtleties are a luxury. You don't get to debate the subtleties and you till you agree on the principles. And the principles are that these things are either good or they're evil. And until we can settle on that, there are no subtleties to be discussed under any circumstances.

42:47 Cause as soon as you start wrestling with that pig, the pig is happy and you get covered in mud and Satan loves it. He's sitting on the sidelines and cheering. Cause you're working your butt off, trying to be a good Christian in the fight, and all you're doing is making things worse for everyone who's observing. And I I think that as Christians, we have to think all of these worldly things through. It's not enough just to think about your faith anymore. You can't just think about justification and think, all right, I'm done being Christian for the day. You need to think about the world, about all the things that happen in creation and how they apply to the Christian life and how they apply to God's word.

43:27 Because God has something to say about all of these things, all of them. God tells us how He created us. He gave us a roadmap for how He created us. And Corey, as you mentioned, Satan gave us a roadmap for how he's trying to destroy it. And we just laughed and pointed and said, Look how silly that is. No one believes that. And Satan was like, wow, that was a close one. Meanwhile, he's already on point five or six of his ten point plan. But no, clearly he's not accomplishing anything. He's only been one after the other with basically no opposition. And the reason, you know, we like I've said we we we mentioned race very frequently. Race is one of the principal ways that Corey and I have been able to speak to non-believers on the right because there is

44:10 a discussion around how God made us and it's largely taking place among people who don't believe in God, which is a nightmare. Because while they can discern the truth from creation, they can discern measurable truth, they can discern things that can be correlated that can be observed, they don't have any frame of reference for where it came from. And the lack of God in those conversations will take them to dark places that we condemn. And so while others are afraid to speak about those subjects or to speak to those people, the reason that we have found it vital to do so and to gain expertise on the matter is specifically because that's where Satan's taking the battle and it's where he's been for a while.

44:55 And there's a fight to be had there that's a vital fight to the Christian faith. And if you as a Christian are talking to someone who's an unbeliever who's you know they're very conservative, they're concerned about societal decay, they're concerned about violence in bad neighborhoods, they're concerned about the performance of groups of people in schools, all of these problems have explanations that in many cases they have access to that you don't, because as soon as they say, Hey, it seems like all the African American kids are scoring over a standard deviation lower than the white kids, you say that's disparity. That's caused by socioeconomic differences. When the other person knows for a fact that that's not true,

45:45 you've lied and you've last lost credibility. And like I've said repeatedly, Satan is the father of every single lie. And the unbeliever who hears you telling lies that are leftist lies, they know that they're not true. They don't know Jesus, but they know they know test scores and they know crime statistics and they know how to parse those out in such a way to arrive at unassailable conclusions. If you lie to them and you say, Well, no, that's not what's really going on, all people are exactly alike. That's how God made us. He made us all exactly alike in this life, we're all unidentified, fungible, interchangeable creatures who could you could drop one person anywhere on the planet, they're gonna be exactly the same as any other person.

46:31 When you tell that lie to someone who knows better, you have closed the door on ever sharing your faith. Because you've proven yourself a liar about the very God that you claim to proclaim. They know that he if if there is a true God who's created things, that this is the creation that God made. Or maybe those things are the result of the fall, which they wouldn't know because they don't know about the fall. You should know about the fall and how it correlates with these facts on the ground and where the fall is in play and where God's created order is in play. And we do a lot of in-depth episodes on those things specifically to equip the Christian to speak truthfully when otherwise there's a very

47:09 good chance that you would lie inadvertently. Like it's it's not a lie that you intend to deceive, is that you never looked at the genealogy of where your talking points came from. You thought, well, this is just how Christians talk. I know that X, Y, and Z. When someone who's an unbeliever who knows more than you about the world says, no, well, X, Y, and Z are not actually true. I know this to be a fact. If you argue with them, you've lost the chance to have any credibility about any truth. And the most important truth that that person can ever hear about their salvation, they'll be deaf to you saying it because why would they believe you have something big when you're gonna lie about something

47:46 as small as test scores? And even if there is no intent to deceive, you are still endangering your soul by holding to that lie. It may not be that lie itself that will endanger your soul. You could potentially hold a small lie your entire life right up to your death, and be fine. Would you have been better off believing the truth? Yes. Can you believe certain lies without damning yourself? Of course. But if you believe a lie, it's never one lie. Because you have to defend that lie in order to continue to hold it in the face of countervailing information. And so you will tell yourself another lie, or someone else will tell you a lie, and you'll believe that one, and another lie, and another lie, and over time, these add up, you will eventually

48:43 get to something that touches on some part of the faith more directly, and you will have to choose. Are you going to continue to believe this entire house of cards, all these lies you've built up over the years, or are you going to let that collapse and up And uphold the Christian truth, many people will choose to compromise on the truth. Because it is easier to compromise on the truth. It's easier to say, well, the six-day creation wasn't literal. It was Was eras or ages or an indefinite period of time. There were gaps between the days. God was active for a while, then he took a nap. It's easier to do that than to let the entire house of cards collapse because your entire worldview I don't mind the term as much, but your entire worldview

49:33 has now turned into dust because you built it on one lie, and you had to tell all the other lies to support it. And so when it comes to race, the reason Satan loves it so much, loves the issue of race, he hates race, because he hates everything about creation, everything about humanity particularly. But the reason that he loves the issue is because he gets both sides with it. He gets those on the largely political right who recognize that biological race is real. And he gets them because many of them do not believe they aren't Christians. But they'll talk to Christians, and then Christians will deny race, and so these people who know that race is real, who know the truth now think that Christianity is a lie, because Christians keep lying

50:27 to them. Well, as I just mentioned, the other side is Satan gets Christians, because Christians are supporting a lie and building their worldview on a lie. So he gets you as a Christian, and he gets those who could have been Christians if you had believed the truth. And that is why Satan loves the issue of race and loves that modern Christians fall all over themselves to support what the world says about it, to support lies, to support what Satan says about this issue. instead of what Scripture says about the issue, and what reality, what biology says about the issue, because God has two books one of them is the Bible, one of them is creation. God is the author of both. Both of them are true.

51:16 I never would have cared about race until I saw the attacks that were occurring in the world and the direction of those attacks. It was it's just never been a part of my life. It's never been interesting. I've observed things. I've I've had observations and I've had opinions, but it never seemed important to me because I was I I fell into the the lulled false sense of security that I can just ignore something and everything's honky dory. And that usually works when there's no attack. But when the storm comes, if you haven't battened down all the hatches. If you haven't put the storm shutters on all the windows, when the wind starts howling and the branches start flying off the trees, they're gonna punch through those windows and you're gonna have glass

51:59 everywhere and you're gonna have water everywhere and it's going to be a terrible mess because you didn't plug one of the holes in your defenses. And so it's important to look at these subjects and to be knowledgeable about them to the point that you can at least not lie to someone else. And ideally that you would know enough to be able to amount a simple defense. Even just you know for a a a minute or two in a conversation. It's why we talked a little bit about in one of the recent episodes about evolution and or not about evolution per se, but about the creation of the universe and how God created the six day universe and how scientists have now simulated some of those things. I made clear that we're not trying to say science justifies faith,

52:49 but the point that the unbeliever who would point to that article and maybe come taunt you with and say, look, where's your God in this? If you know about the science enough that you can point to Genesis and say, well, I'm glad you found that article. Here's my version of that article. I've known this since I was a little kid. It's nice to see the scientists catching up. That's how the truth works, and that's how God works in the Christian life by revealing truth through scripture and through reason. Both avenues are accessible ways of reaching truth. Reason can apprehend truth on its own, not that truth which saves. That is contained only in scripture, which is precisely why a vital part of the Christian life must be precisely this, must be making

53:36 sure that the problem that you're solving when you're talking to someone is that you're being truthful and that you're paving the road in such a way that maybe that conversation won't take you there, but it's going to be a brick in the road. So then a future conversation, you will have built up credibility and you will have been building a road towards God by saying things that are truthful and things that are scriptural in ways that are consistent with what the person knows, so that you become a more and more trusted source of truth to them because you know things that they don't from a perspective they don't share share and they may never believe in Jesus, they may never believe in the cross

54:17 and in their salvation, but you will never get the chance if you lie to them so many times that they're like, I just don't care what you have to say. And in many cases, the number of lies that it may take from you who claim to have a source of all truth before they will disregard your opinion, it may be one. It may be the one time that you say something worldly that's popular on MSNBC is the one time that they'd say, you know what, I'll still talk to this guy, he's my friend, but this Christianity stuff he's selling is a bunch of garbage. All the churches around me have rainbow flags, I know exactly what these guys are up to, and I know what it is that they're capable of defending, and it's not the sort of good and

54:58 evil that I know as an unbeliever. This is the frame that we need to bring in our own minds as we're tackling these problems, because God will ultimately give you the chance to share the good news of their salvation, but only if you can first tell them the good news of God's creation. And again, we're I'm not trying to say never talk about Jesus first. Every situation is different. Every conversation is different. There's no script, which is why we're not giving you a script here. I don't know what conversations you're gonna have, but I can tell you that if you've not thought things through in this way, you're not going to be equipped to have those conversations later on. We would love to give people a script, but that's just not

55:39 how this works. You have to have a sort of general knowledge of a lot of different things in order to have these conversations because you're having a conversation. This is not a telemarketing call. That's not what you're doing. You're not cold calling people, you're dealing with another human being as an actual person, asking questions, answering questions, moving things forward in the discussion. Yes, you may very well have a goal in mind. You may be trying to get somewhere, but conversations evolve naturally, you just have to know how to conduct yourself in the conversation. And if you lie to people, one of the things they are going to think about you is that you are stupid. Because as mentioned, they are going to see these rainbow flags and

56:24 they're going to think, well, he's just he doesn't pay attention. Or they'll think you don't really believe it. Or they'll think that you are lying. None of these options are good. You may very well destroy any opportunity of ever getting that person to truly listen to the gospel because you lied about something about which he knows the truth. And it is incumbent on you to speak the truth. You don't have to know everything. If you don't know, it is fine to say, I don't know, and then find someone who does. Because there are plenty of very intelligent Christians who are specialists in various different areas. The information is there. You can find it, you can get it for this person. It is better to say I don't know than to give a

57:13 false answer. I'm glad you brought up scripts because I think that's a good swing to the second half of this conversation. Uh there's a recent debate that occurs I mentioned on Lutheran Twitter that had to do with the sacrament of the altar, with communion or Eucharist. The Eucharist. Now, we're not going to go through the entire discussion and we're not going to make the case for the full case for the proper view of the sacrament. What we're going to do is discuss this conversation as it played out online as an example of how the treatment of conversation as a series of scripted responses can do tremendous harm. Because again, when people are talking about points of doctrine and you're disagreeing about terms, the first question you need to ask is what

58:07 problem are you trying to solve by disagreeing with the other person? Now I realize that there's a bit of irony in the two of us sort of bac backing away from the discussion of terms because has been such a prominent aspect of so many episodes. But I think that a careful problems. Yes. And we're we're we're focusing on terms specifically so that there isn't confusion sown by the misuse of that terms, those terms. So if you've listened to me talk about what a nation is When I say nation, you're never going to think I mean coun country. You're always going to think I mean race, if you've been paying attention. I'm very specific about the terms that I'm using. So even if you think that's terrible, even if you think I'm

58:56 a a horrible or a stupid person, at least you know what I'm talking about. And you can properly cag categorize whatever it is I'm saying about nations at the moment. The problem that played out online, and again, this is not an online question. This is not about online drama. This is specifically about how a group of Lutherans who were generally aligned on the same type of beliefs ended up having a knockdown drag out fight over a single word that was taken out of context, was misused by people who on both sides didn't understand the word or how it was being used by either side, and it resulted in people having their faith undermined to the point that there are absolutely people who observe that conversation who will ultimately leave the

59:44 Lutheran church because of how it played out. So this began with someone who's probably going to come up perhaps on his own episode at some point in the future, a guy named Jordan Cooper. He's he has the largest single presence online as a Lutheran talking head. He's got a YouTube channel with over 20,000 followers. He's got a bunch of people on Twitter, but he cares about YouTube because he makes some money there. He tweeted, apparently there's discourse on here about the Lutheran doctrine of communion. We do not believe in a physical presence or local presence. It's a real presence and a substantial presence, but a mysterious one. Now, in a recent episode where w where I was talking about,

1:00:31 you know, the the Genesis narrative, you may have heard me over and over talk about real but not factual and I sort of iterated through things seemingly at random and it was deliberately at random because that's a very common thing that happens where people will say, Well, real doesn't mean true, and true doesn't mean factual, and factual doesn't mean actual. And that's the perfect opportunity for Satan to undermine faith. And so the reason that this discussion blew up was that in the sixteenth century, the very same f fight was being had among the Lutherans, the Reformed, and the Roman Catholics. The Roman Catholics had invented the doctrine of transubstantiation, which I mentioned in in an earlier episode, where they agreed with the reformed at

1:01:25 the time. Either the bread and wine in communion is only bread and wine or it is only Christ's body and blood. Now scripture says both. In separate places it says one and it says the other. In some places it says both. But as a logical deduction, both the reformed and the Romanists agreed that it can only be one of them. If you have body, you don't have have bread, if you have bread, you don't have body, and the same with the blood and the wine. The Lutherans were caught in the middle of this highly technical, highly philosophical debate, and they necessarily engaged with it because this was not only a doctrinal problem, but it was a political problem because there were princes who were choosing one side or the other in these fights.

1:02:20 And so they were basically demanding explanations for what's going on. The Pope says one thing, Calvin says another, what do you Lutherans say? We need to know the truth. And so for a period of fifty years, the Lutheran reformers and the fathers in the faith formulated repeated arguments getting deeper and deeper into the philosophical weeds to try to narrow down what the sacrament was and what it was not. And I think unfortunately, by doing so, they fundamentally ceded the frame to the rationalists who were using these philosophical presuppositions to impose rules on God, when as we've said before, this is a God who spoke the universe into existence. If Jesus says this is my body, that's declarative.

1:03:15 That that's a statement of fact. Not because Jesus can't lie, but because when he says it, it becomes true. It's performative as well, exactly. That's what I was going to point out. It's both yes. It's both. Yeah. it's it's not descriptive. That that's the crucial distinction. Exactly. And again, yeah. Again, we again these things were like uh we use a lot of synonyms, do they mean the same thing? So Jordan back to the tweet says we don't believe in physical or local, we do believe in real and substantial. And so there was a reply from one of his followers who said getting a lot of pushback from your fellow Lutherans here as they insist that Christ is physically present, and several have told that

1:03:58 when it says real, it means physical. And Jordan's reply was sorry, but they're wrong. Now, this is interesting for several reasons. we'll get into the rest, but a friend dug up one of Jordan's comments on YouTube four years ago where he says the exact opposite, and he says it in a good way. The fight that they were having uh again on one hand you have the romanists the pope who's saying this is christ's body and blood only the position of Rome is that the bread and wine are no longer there There's no bread and there's no wine anymore. It's not home. All you have is Jesus body and blood. We're scripture. Yes. Yes. Plus some philosophy to explain why you don't taste flesh. You taste flesh. Which is why

1:04:47 Cooper said substantial. That is what well at least if he was actually thinking about it, he may have been to be charitable. That's what he was thinking of when he said substantial. He was thinking of the essence. Why don't you give the breakdown? give the substance. Yeah, I may as well give the the quick version. When it comes to the Eucharist, you can fall off one side or the other of the horse. It's like so many other issues in Christianity. The Romanists, the Papists fall off the right side of the horse. They say, Well, Christ says it's his body and his blood. So it's just his body and his blood. Of course they miss the part where he says, This bread is my body. So he actually does say two things.

1:05:28 One, it's bread, two, it's his body. That's the Lutheran position. We don't fall off the horse. The Reformed fall off the other side of the horse. They say, Well, I see bread. I taste bread. I see wine, I taste wine, and so according to my reason it's bread and wine, and so when Christ says it's his body and blood, he must mean something else, and so then they launch into their arguments about what it actually is, or how it actually happens, etc. And that's where you get giant volumes on this full of terms that are alien to scripture. And so they fall off the left side of the horse. Lutherans, to reiterate, stay on the horse. Christ says, this bread, okay, it's bread, is my body, okay, it's

1:06:10 his body. This cup, the wine, is my blood, okay, it's wine and blood. We just affirm what Christ said, and we're fine with it. That's enough, we're done. Now, the reason that the Romans came to their conclusion is that they mixed the words of God, Scripture, with Aristotle. I am not necessarily condemning all philosophy. Philosophy is useful, you can go overboard. And they did. So what they do is they take Aristotle, which the two terms you need to know here are essence and accident. The essence of a thing, which is what substance is, we're just dealing with Greek versus Latin essentially in different terms for the same things. The essence of a thing is what that thing is. I am male. I am a human.

1:07:01 These are things related to my essence as a being. I happen to have a black shirt on. That is an accident. That is not something that is essential to me. I could have paint on myself or something. These are accidents. And so what the papists say is that the essence of bread and wine is removed by the words of institution, by the consecration, and that the essence of body of flesh and blood is what takes the place, but the accidents of bread and wine remain. And so it looks and tastes like bread and wine, but in essence, it is body and blood. Now, of course, you could wrangle over whether or not taste is part of the essence of bread and wine, and they have, trust me. But that is essentially how they came to their conclusion.

1:07:55 So again, to the short summary is just Rome falls off the right side of the horse, the reformed fall off the left side of the horse and Lutherans stay on the horse and just say God said it, I believe it. But when Lutherans stayed on the right side of the horse, which I believe, which is on top of it, right in the middle, they engaged in lengthy debate in the terms of their opponents. So they got down in the mud and they argued these things in philosophical terms. Now, the reason the script was a good jumping-off point is that that's where the conversation online really went to hell. I mean that literally. I I can tell you one one of the well Yeah, well here's one of the follow-ups from someone else on that thread a

1:08:39 few hours later. This entire thing is honestly shaken my faith today. I was always under the impression that we did affirm a physical presence. If we don't, I don't see a distinction between us and the reformed. I need to talk with my pastor about this. I'm terrified of receiving improperly. And he was right to do so. His faith was rightly underbined by this argument. Now, the reason that this argument was so contentious was that in the the response that Jordan had, rather than trying to comfort this soul who was terrif terrified and terrorized by this sort of scholastic wrangling, he said read the formula of Conquered Article Seven, which is very long, it's very detailed, it's very technical, it's all the very

1:09:23 worst things about the Reformed and the Romanist position on these things. Now, it expresses the Lutheran position, but it doesn't do it in Lutheran terms. It does it in the opponent's terms in order to circumscribe our position in contradistinction to theirs. So to make clear, this was a sixteenth century argument taking place among extraordinarily learned men who were s far smarter than anyone involved in this modern debate, who had Who had far greater knowledge, far greater training and education than anyone who's saying read the formula of Concord. Now, this is not an argument against the formula of Concord. It's an argument for what problem are you trying to solve? Because no, the the people who were expressing doubt in this thread

1:10:19 about whether physical means real, they were Lutherans. They were not papists who are saying, No, that's only that's transubstantiation. It's physical, it means blood and guts, minus this the accidents. It wasn't Reformed guys saying, No, there's no Jesus there. it's only spiritual. It was Lutherans. And see the problem that they were trying to solve should have been can I make sure that my Lutheran brothers are describing this the way that we understand it to be faithfully described. Nobody in the conversation did that. Nobody. Except for me and Corey and and uh one or two other people. I was still banned at the time, so I didn't participate. Yeah. Yeah, your God's New Year's present to Lutheran Twitter is that

1:11:06 Cory was unbanned. So welcome back, Cotter. The the the terrible thing that happened in this fight was that Jordan and a number of other other people focused on the word physically. Now they did it not because they understood what the man meant when he said it because again his comment was is Christ physically present in the sacrament when a Lutheran asks that he's talking about the sacramental union and no point has any Lutheran in my life that I've ever talked to or heard talking believed in transubstantiation or that Jesus isn't really present. Every Lutheran, regardless of their education level that I've ever heard discuss this, whether they use the word or not, they effectively subscribed to

1:12:01 the mystery of the Eucharist. And I I have to give credit again to the Eastern Orthodox. They just call it a mystery. They didn't get bogged down in this crap like we did in the West. And I think they were better for it in that one regard. They're terrible about anything everything else, but at least they didn't make the mistake of wrestling with these pigs. Because Because again, it's not that the formula of Concord is wrong. It's that when you take a 16th century technical treatise and you take physic philosophical terms from that treatise that we're not telling Lutherans, here is what we believe, they were telling the reformed, here's what is in error. That's a that's a crucial distinction.

1:12:44 What problem were you trying to solve? They knew what problem they were trying to solve. They were trying to testify for once and for all time. Here is how our position differs from the Reformed and differs from the Romanists. They were not in the Formula of Concord, which was written in fifteen seventy seven, this is nearly fifty years after the initial confessions of what we believe about the Eucharist. Those initial confessions were sufficient for any Lutheran to understand what we're talking about. It was only once these philosophical fights dragged out for decades after Luther was dead that these other guys wrestled with the pig and wrote these things down. And so again, I I want to keep saying this because I

1:13:27 was accused of numerous hilarious and terrible things, including that I didn't believe in the Book of Concord at all. Um I was also accused simultaneously of uh being a cannibal, uh, which is fascinating because that is not only the accusation that the Calvinists leveled against the Lutherans, but it's a com it's an accusation that was leveled in the first and second century by the Romans when they were murdering Christians, when when the first and second century Christians were testifying to what the sacrament was to them, and they said this is Jesus' body and blood, they were legally charged with cannibalism. And they were sentenced to death. And at any point, they could have said, no, we don't mean

1:14:13 physically, we don't mean that it's actually really Jesus' body and blood in a real sense. It's just it's there in a spiritual sense. And let me explain how Jesus body is in heaven, but it's a spirit body, and so there's a spiritual mode of presence. They didn't say any of that. those explanations hadn't been invented yet. Well also to be clear, if they had done that, Romans would have been fine with that. That would have been just like any other Gnostic cult. They would have been totally fine with that. Oh, you're just doing weird Gnostic stuff. Great. Have fun. They didn't do that. That would have been a very natural explanation at the time in that context. Yeah, that's an excellent point.

1:14:52 And yet there's no record of that ever happening. Those men, the men who were ripped to shreds by lions, yeah, we've heard about Christians being fed to lions. We don't get told why that happened, except that they were Christians. In some cases, they were literally fed to lions because they were accused of cannibalism and they would not deny it. Now it wasn't that they wouldn't deny it because they were cannibals. They were nothing of the sort. There is no Christian belief that we are gnawing on the toe or on the finger of Jesus. It is mysterious. We don't know how he's there, but we know that he's God. And when Jesus said this bread is my body, that's the end of the discussion. If you don't believe that, if you need other explanations, that is

1:15:40 unbelief. That is sin. And he was holding physical bread with his physical body, worth noting. Yes. And he hadn't been crucified yet. This the the the thing that one of the one of the ways that our reason breaks down when we discuss God's action in the creation is that God is not bound by time. So when Jesus on Thursday night held up the bread and said, This is my body, referring to the body that was sacrificed on the cross the following afternoon, he wasn't saying something he he wasn't making a forward forward looking statement. He wasn't something saying something that would be true the next time they had communion, because it would be after Jesus was sacrificed on the cross. He was saying something that was true because the propitiating sacrifice of

1:16:28 Christ's body and blood, physical body and blood, real blood and guts on the cross, that happened one time for all sins in every direction. And we receive that by faith, and we receive it in the sacrament, and we also receive it in baptism because God pours out his blessings on us because he knows that we need the reassurance. And so for these men to take what was intended to be reassurance and turned it into something that undermined faith is the most wicked and evil thing that you can possibly do in Christian discourse. So if any of these guys had asked at any point, what problem am I trying to solve by arguing with the man who is saying physical presence, they would have known better. they wouldn't have done it because they would have understood

1:17:20 that I'm talking to a Lutheran. I I'm not confused about what he believes. Maybe it's worth clarifying when physical means toenails and when physical means real but mysterious and we don't understand. I affirm the physical presence of Christ's body and blood because I affirm the mystery. I don't affirm transubstantiation. I don't affirm solely a spiritual mode by which I ascend to heaven where Christ's spiritual body body comes down to earth. I affirm that it's truly his body and blood. Because that's what he said. And I don't need any further explanation. And if the conversation had been left at that, we would have been fine, but it wasn't. And everyone is worse for it. It's also worth mentioning just how ridiculous the entirety of it was,

1:18:12 because the word physical doesn't actually appear in either article under discussion. Because of course he directed people to article seven, which is the article on the Lord's this is in the epitome, incidentally, it's worth mentioning that. There's the epitome and the solid declaration. Article seven is the Lord's Supper. The word physical doesn't appear anywhere in that article. And I just checked in the reader's edition as well, it's also not in there. The word physical appears once in Article eight, which is on the nature, the person of Christ. Now it appears twice in the reader's edition because they translate one word differently is physically, but it's a it's a different issue, so it's not related.

1:18:58 The one that is translated physical is in brackets to give people context to help them understand what is meant, and then it is also said Copernitic, which is exactly what you were just saying. We're not saying that you're chewing on Jesus' toe. That's all that's condemned there. And again, not the word physical, because the word that is actually used, as I've mentioned elsewhere, is Idisch in German, which does not mean physical. Physical is Kerpelish, a different word. Iddish means earthly or mundane. That's all we're saying. We're saying you're not chewing on his toe. It's a polemic against the reformed. And so not only does the word not appear in the actual text, the argument they were having is not at all what is

1:19:51 addressed by the article, because it is a polemic against the Reformed, and they're basically adopting the Reformed argument. So the entirety of it was harmful to me to faith and had by men who didn't even understand the terms being used in German or Latin. They tenuously perhaps understood them in English and got them wrong. And it was done for the worst possible motives because it wasn't done to try to clarify Yeah. It was about what it was was that a man said the word physically and that set off all the alarms at Lutheran headquarters. Like, well, physically, that sounds like that might be one of these number of errors. We have to fight this error without any regard for either the man who is speaking or anyone who is observing.

1:20:34 Now you mentioned Capernaic, which is a word that got thrown around around a whole bunch by guys, which I found hilarious because the word basically doesn't exist. Yes. I I looked in Google Google books. The word refers to the Jews from Capernaum in John six fifty-two, who were arguing with Jesus, how can this man give us his flesh to eat? So Capernaatic is a term of art specific to this very argument. It doesn't exist anywhere else. it's it's the most technical term I I think I've probably ever heard. Like it comes from one verse, it deals with one dispute, and it exists nowhere else in the English language. I did a search on Google broke Google Books. it it's effectively never used. It's like five zeros before you get past where you will find

1:21:22 a numeral for the frequency of the use of the word. It's such a technical term that for a bunch of guys on Twitter to be throwing it around pretending that they're clarifying, it would be laughable if not for the fact that it was so destructive. And it was destructive because I don't disagree with I I think what came out of this, I think 80% of them were fighting the wrong fight for a silly reason. I I think that they were just mad that someone said physical and they said, well that sounds like it might be heresy. I'm gonna get really mad on the internet. I think the other twenty percent it came out actually are reformed because the the number of people who made z explicitly Zwinglian Calvinistic

1:22:04 arguments against me and against other Lutherans. Again, I I have never held any anything other than the mysterious bodily presence that I can't understand or explain beyond its true. Now I'm not using true as a as a weasel word. I'm saying I don't how is anything truer than the word of God? There's no truer true than when truth speaks truth. So I let that rest. But But people came out of the woodwork, including some people who had been friends, called me a demon and a wolf because I said physically. And again, as you said, like the words not even in the book of Concord, except in error irrelevant places. And they were using Capernaatic as though it meant anything to them. All of this was a fight about a word that nobody understood.

1:22:52 And if they had asked themselves what question what problem am I trying to solve, the fight never would have happened in the first place. If Jordan had any sense, he could have linked to the video four years ago where he did clearly explain this in a way that was defensible. His explanation this time was not only indefensible, but it was fundamentally subversive because it destroyed faith in real time. It's not the first time that he's done this. Jordan has mentioned repeatedly on his streams that he had that he has lost track of the number of men who have reached out to him and said because of your videos I became Roman Catholic. This is a man who claims to be Lutheran, who claims to be making Lutheran videos.

1:23:32 When people hear him talk, they become papists. Some of them go east, some of them become Roman uh Eastern Orthodox. I have talked to a lot of people and I've made many of them angry. I've never convinced anyone to become a papist because I argued the Lutheran position for anything. So when we express a concern for the clarity of speech and the clarity of descriptors, it's for this reason. When a man can talk for an hour and the end result is that people are more confused than when he began, that man shouldn't be speaking at all. And that's what we had here. And again, some some of the people who are arguing against us, I think actually don't believe in the the sacramental union. They don't believe that it is Christ's body and blood.

1:24:17 They had to resort to so many terms that pushed God his body can't be here. His body's somewhere else. Jesus not here. And the fact that they called us cannibals just like happened in the 1600s and just like happened in the first century, like I'm not insulted. Like it's it's it would be laughable again if it weren't so tragic and if it weren't so blasphemous. They're blaspheming the body and blood of Christ, which is truly present when they call a Lutheran who receives the sacrament a cannibal for believing what Christ says. That is a horrible thing. And although a couple men spoke up and said that their consciences were burdened, many thousands of people saw that. And the ones who weren't Lutheran went away thinking who knows what

1:25:02 they thought, but they certainly didn't think Lutherans had her act together. They did either they think that we're reformed or they think that we're just jerks and we're incoherent. And uh the Lutherans who read it, some of them will cease to be Lutheran as is Corey, as you said, not because of that one thing. What happens the way Satan takes advantage of error, a point that we will make over and over. Satan just needs a chink in the armor in this one small subversion of one corner of faith in some of the men who read that, later on it's gonna come up in a different context, and they're gonna have doubts maybe in some from some other angle. And then Satan's gonna hit them from a completely different perspective.

1:25:42 It's got nothing to do with the sacrament. And you know what? Maybe one day they just don't go back to church. You know, their kids got a soccer game, and then their kid makes the finals, and so it's three more weeks. And you know, come to think of it, Jesus isn't actually present there and the preacher's kind of boring, he's kind he's got a limp handshake. I'm just not gonna go back. You know, I'll maybe I'll find another church later, but it's I'm just I wasn't getting anything that I thought I was getting there in the first place first place, that man will eventually lose his soul because of what happened on Twitter. So when we talk about being careful about what problem you're trying to solve, it's not about being spurgy and it's not about being

1:26:21 picky. It's about understanding who you're talking to when you speak because if it had been Romanists or if it had been Calvinists, some of those discussions maybe could have happened. I think it's it's pointless to happen on Twitter 'cause you can't make any point really on Twitter. But the fact that the words of the Lutheran confessions were used as weapons against other Lutherans is evil. It's honestly the most evil thing I have ever seen happen in the Lutheran Church and I I I grow increasingly ashamed of Lutheranism, not because I don't believe our claims, but because the more I see of the conduct of Lutherans, the less I can explain to people when I'm trying to explain that we're right.

1:27:02 How can we be right if we say and do these things? And you know, it's it's there's nowhere else to go. it's not like, oh well, I don't believe these things, I'm gonna find another church. No. Lutheranism is the best explanation for these things, but it doesn't mean that we've been infallible, we've been perfect about it. And the Book of Concord is not a script. If it were a script, it would tell us how to deal with trannies. It would tell us how to deal with all these things that aren't in there. Because Satan wasn't attacking creation. It doesn't fair century have a statement that God created us male and female. That is actually in there. So that's just quoting scripture. I've exactly I've paid close enough attention that I've found these little

1:27:45 tidbits that Lutherans keep missing, like for instance it basically does advocate for monarchy. But that's a discussion for another time. And you're right. It's the to say that the Book of Concord is incomplete is not to denigrate it. It's to say that they settled the questions that they were debating. And so when it said it is. Yes. In their own writing. Yes. They were very explicit within the text of the Book of Concord that this is not everything that there is to be said. This is what there is to say about these controversies. And I I'm not advocating for a new book of Conquer for a volume tube to be written, principally because there are no worthy theologians alive today who would be remotely competent to the task.

1:28:30 There might be one man somewhere, but frankly, you know, I don't know what his name is, but the fact that I don't know his name tells me that he's not competent to do this because he would already be producing the works that are necessary to battle today's fights. So I'm not saying crack anything open. I'm not saying give it a second shot. I'm saying don't take something that you don't understand and use it as a cudgel against your brother when he's trying to be faithful, even if he made a small mistake, talk about how to narrow down that mistake in a way that won't undermine his faith and won't betray the truth of scripture. Because this is about scripture. It's not about the book of Concord or anybody else's confessions.

1:29:13 If you're from another denomination and you have another confession, insofar as it agrees with scripture, it's valuable. Now I said insofar specifically because that's one of the disputes within Lutheranism. There are those who subscribe to the Book of Concord in so far as it agrees with Scripture, and there are those who subscribe to it because it agrees with Scripture. Corey and I are the latter. It agrees with Scripture, which is why it's true, but it's not true by itself. It's only true because it agrees with scripture. It doesn't have anything new to say. It has arguments to be made from scripture and reason to defend what is re-revealed in Scripture. And Lutherans who go to proof texting from the confessions to attack

1:30:00 faith and to attack scripture Guys, you're not Lutheran anymore. you're doing something terrible. And it's not about winning arguments. It's about being a faithful confess confessor. And if you don't have the words, shut up. That's okay. There are arguments that occur that I bow out of because I'm not fit to engage in them. When we raise topics on this podcast, it's because we believe that we can speak speak faithfully in a way that will be true to God, that will be edifying, and that will will teach something that is not going to do harm, but is going to do good for people If we didn't believe that about a subject, you're never going to hear us talk about it. That's the approach. You can be quiet.

1:30:48 You don't have to have an opinion. And don't go word searching either in the Bible or the Book of Concord or in any in anything else. Don't say oh is not theology. Yeah. Yeah, that's Control F for the the windows, unfortunates. Yeah, and that's uh we probably won't use that for the title of this episode, but that's pretty much what it could be. Command F is not theology. You don't just go find a word and say, Well, you you use the wrong word, you you lose, you're wrong, you're you're a demon, you're a blasphemer. No, man. I particularly when you don't know what the word means. Yes. in the sixth, in the fifth, in the sixteenth century, when the accusation against the Lutherans that they ascribe to a physical presence,

1:31:29 it was false. When a twenty-first century Lutheran says, if they choose to, that they confess a physical presence in the context of the Lutheran faith and scripture, that is a true and faithful statement. Now you may ask for clarification, that's fine, but to say it is untrue is not solving the right problem, and it's potentially doing tremendous harm. And so just pay attention to what it is you're doing before you wade into something. Because it's easy to do damage trying to score points without even realizing that you're doing it. I think that some had good intentions and I think that a lot were just midwits were in over their head. They felt like there was some attack on the faith and they

1:32:13 had to protect the symbol of the faith, which is the book of Concord. But they didn't know how to do it because they didn't realize that it wasn't under attack. The only the only people talking were Lutherans. And then Reform saying, wait, you guys are reformed? You're like, no, no, no, we're not reformed. But some of them effectively said the same thing. And that's the the confusion and the damage is unspeakable. So as we've talked about this, we haven't tried to make the case for the full the full Lutheran position you can find it in the book of Concord. You can look for where where communion is discussed. Start with the catechisms. Yeah exactly. start small because the simplest explanation is the best one.

1:32:54 start with scripture. Start with where Jesus gave them the Eucharist and then where Paul describes the use Eucharist that was given to him. I think that's one of the well that's a topic for another day. But these comp these conversations don't need to be complicated. I think one of the most valuable differences between Lutheranism and some other denominations is you don't have to be smart to be a good Lutheran. You don't have to be able to debate in these highly technical philosophical terms in order to hold pop proper doctrine. And that's what really actually happened. Everyone suddenly believed, I I'm not sure if I'm Lutheran because they thought maybe they were using the words wrong or maybe they believed

1:33:37 the wrong words. When Jesus says this is my body, if you believe that, you're done. There's nothing more. The reason that the Book of Concord has so much to say about the Eucharist is the unbelief of others. It's because people said, Well, what about? Well, I don't believe that. Well, I don't think that's possible. They were arguing with God. It was sinful doubt. And so, yes, there's a lot said, but it's not because there's a lot that has to be said for you to believe. It's because there's a lot that can be said in refutation of unbelief. Those are two separate questions. They may look the same superficially, but it's a crucial distinction that Christians need to make. Just because there's a lot to be said about something doesn't need

1:34:21 to mean that you necessarily need to understand all of it to understand the thing. The person, you know, the 13 year old who maybe is a little slow developmentally, who's been catechized properly by his parents and his pastor, who's told this is the body and blood of Jesus? This bread and wine is the body and blood of Jesus that he shed on the cross for you for the forgiveness of your sins. If that boy believes that, he is worthily receiving the sacrament, the end. Nothing else needs understood. And he's blessed if he's developmentally challenged, because he's not going to devolve into Aristotelian arguments over well ha is is is that really true? it's the smart people that make these horrible.

1:35:04 Is it the essence or the accident? Yeah. Is he is it his physical mode? Is it his spiritual body? Which cause are we talking about here? Yeah. These terms Yeah. Th these terms of art have a place in highly formal debate. Personally I don't think I don't think they have any place in the normal Christian discussion of what's going on. Yeah, no pastors shouldn't be explaining things to the laity in this way. And although actually I am fine with the pastor saying physical because I think physical today is the right way to describe it. I We'll add in the show notes the the one the one sentence that I said say it this way. This is this is the best way to say it. Because I I think that that was so I'll show us read

1:35:50 the sentence. Christ is physically, substantially, sacramentally present in with and under the bread and the wine in the supper as he promises. That's it. That is the totality of the correct of the Lutheran position on the supper, and in fairness to the men who wrote the Book of Concord, if those telling them to go read the Epitome had told them to read paragraphs six and seven, they would have been set. Because those are the Lutheran position. The rest of it is refuting false doctrine. So if you just and it those two paragraphs are very short. I won't read them. You can go read them yourself, I'll link them in the show notes. But they are very short, and they are the correct statement of what Lutherans believe, of what Scripture teaches.

1:36:35 Anything beyond that has its place. If you want to have a Stammtisch and go drink beer and talk with your theologically literate friends about these issues, by all means have fun. But don't privately church. Exactly. You do Twitter. Yeah. these are BS sessions that you can have with friends privately where you're not going to burden consciousness of people you don't know where you're Luther did with Melanchthon. That's fine. So again, what problem are you trying to solve? If you want to wade into an argument by control Fing the Bible or the Book of Concord and saying, Well, I found this word here, here's a screenshot where it says the opposite of what you said, but it's a screenshot from a forty page treat forty

1:37:20 page treatise that's refuting the reformed or somebody else, it's not refuting what you believe. Don't begin with the presumption that the Lutheran you're talking to is a crypto Calvinist. Like there's I I uh it hasn't come up yet on this podcast, but I have a real problem with the way the English small catechism translates Luther's words, put the best construction on everything for the eighth commandment. Not that it wasn't a correct thing to say, but that the way it's employed as a weapon within modern discourse is actively destructive. Because today when a pastor says put the best construction on things, usually they mean pretend something evil is good so you don't have to condemn it. There is a time for a best construction, and that's when a

1:38:06 Lutheran who's concerned about making a faithful statement about the Eucharist says physically, and he's concerned specifically that we don't deny that Christ is truly present. You don't beat that man over the head with a book of Concord. You give him a hug and you say thank you, I share your belief. I would put it a different way and hear some of my reasons why and then you can talk about the book of Concord, but you don't begin by undermining a true confession. If you're if the problem you're trying to solve is that someone is using a word that you don't understand and don't like, please be quiet. For the sake of souls, for the sake of observers, and for the sake of everyone's sanity, it's okay to sit out some conversations.

1:38:51 There's also a little comment there in the best construction that is always left out rather curiously, it's a parenthetical. It's there even in the English, in the words of the triglotta, if it be not notoriously evil. There is a very clear, very obvious exception to best construction. So many of the times that we are supposedly supposed to apply it to various people by these very online pastors, it doesn't apply. Even literally as it's just written, even if you don't actually understand what is meant by best construction, the exception is what applies in many of those cases. If you have someone who is openly defending abortion, this is not a best construction issue. That's notoriously evil.

1:39:41 You speak truthfully, so I think to wrap things up, I would just point back to the first first example in concert with the second. As a Christian, you have a duty to God to talk about your faith with unbelievers and with believers. You're going to talk to them differently. You would never go to someone who didn't even understand Jesus and try to explain the sacrament to them in any words, because it would be it would be like talking to your dog, it's just noisy. He has no idea. Like he might pick up one word, but there's no context. When we speak about our faith, we must speak truthfully and we must speak with wisdom. We must understand to whom we're speaking so that the manner in which we speak, the words that we use, and the approach that

1:40:29 we take, and how far we go are all in accord with what they can receive, because different people can receive different teachings at different times. Paul talks about spiritual milk and solid food as different types of teaching, and that some of the people they still needed milk. they weren't ready for solid food because they had so little understanding. That's fine. That's That's in a way that's a blessing for someone to still need spiritual milk because whatever mistakes you're going to make are going to be very simple and very easily corrected. By the time you get into the red meat of of theology, you're if you keep learning and you keep digging, you may get very far off into the weeds. Not to say that that's necessarily a bad thing, but it does

1:41:16 become dangerous because when you start worrying more about putting your reason above what God has revealed, you can make these messes that we're describing in this episode. And again, it's ultimately always about sharing your faith faithfully. Sometimes that requires silence. Sometimes it requires only sharing a tiny piece of it at a time and praying for the opportunity to go further. Sometimes it involves in-depth discussion, but the more in-depth you go, the more wisdom and understanding you need to have about what it is you're saying, to whom you're speaking, and what problem you're trying to solve. Because maybe nothing mean needs to be said. I if if the argument that the Lutheran Reformers had made had been

1:42:04 is means is the sacrament is a mystery. That would have been a sufficient confession. Personally I wish that they left it at that. I understand why they didn't, and I don't fault them, but as a Lutheran, that's all we need. His means is this is my body means precisely that. God cannot lie. I believe it, it is my confession, and it's what I receive. No amount of philosophizing is going to change that. That is what the faith is supposed to be. Amen.