Transcript: Episode 0027

WEBVTT

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Uh huh.

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Welcome to the Stone Choir podcast. I am Corey J. Mahler.

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And I'm Woe.

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Today, we're recording episode 27 of Stone Choir. We realized last week that we had

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hit the 26th week mark, which if you're a math PhD, you'll realize that means we've

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been doing this for half a year at this point. We didn't miss a couple weeks when my fancy

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new microphone died on me early on. So it's slightly past the six months mark. But since

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we're right at about a half a year into this, we thought that we would take a pause for

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one week and do kind of a listener appreciation episode. So we're going to spend some time

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today on the reader listener mailbag going through some emails and some messages we've

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received. Talk about some of the feedback that we've gotten in the towards the end.

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We'll talk a little bit about some of the listener stats and just kind of give you

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an idea about what's going on behind the scenes and how you can help spread the word.

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So again, we're just going to start right in with some of the questions. You know, he's

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been piling up for six months. So some of these a little older to everyone who sent

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feedback, you know, DMs, emails, whatever, we do really appreciate it. All the kind notes

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we've gotten. We're not going to read those obviously, but we get regular messages from

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people all over the world from probably about half Lutherans, half not Lutherans, all very

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supportive and encouraging. And we truly appreciate that. Corey and I have been under a lot of

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stress from having tackle these issues. Our own church despises the fact that we are speaking

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publicly about these things. And we've been punished for it. We've been censored for it.

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And so having people say, you know, you're doing good work, please keep it up means

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a lot because you don't have any reason to say that apart from the fact that you think

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it's true. So thank you for encouraging us and helping to keep us in the fight. So again,

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we'll we'll dive into some of the very first message I think we have recorded from way

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back in the the annals of history.

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So for the first question from listeners, we have a question about anonymity and pseudonymity

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in light of what we said about the genealogy of ideas, which is to say, how do you test

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the genealogy of an idea if it comes from someone who is anonymous or pseudonymous? And

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that is a good question. Ultimately, how you would do that is you look at the source of

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the ideas that person is presenting because he is not the ultimate source. No man to whom

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you speak is going to be the ultimate source on issues like this. He could be the ultimate

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source on a piece of fiction or something like that, some idea that can be intrinsic

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or specific to an individual. But that's not going to be the case with the sort of issues

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we're tackling on this podcast, because the issues we're tackling are are bigger issues,

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they're grander issues. And so you're always going to be able to trace those back to scripture,

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to natural revelation, to logic, philosophy, things like that. And if you trace it back

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to those sources, that's what we're saying you need to test. That's the real genealogy

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of that idea, because it comes through the man who said it to you, but he got it from

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somewhere. And so even if that man happens to be pseudonymous or even anonymous, look

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at the source of his ideas. On this podcast, I'm not anonymous or pseudonymous, woe is

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anonymous. But we couch everything we say, we ground everything we say in scripture and

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in creation. And so that is the actual source, we are going back to God as the source of

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what we're saying. And so even if you are dealing with pseudonymity, you can still look

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at those ultimate sources and trace that genealogy of ideas.

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And we did an entire episode on pseudonymity, why I am pseudonymous for now, although the

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LCMS has doxxed me. And so it seems like they've backed off on their initial plan to feed my

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information to Antifa when the Makaira action blog was set up. That was certainly the plan.

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And that's what was done to Corey. I have a feeling that they got some more lawyers involved

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and they've gotten cold feet about risking the legal ramifications of doing that to a layman.

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It's an important question, it's a valid question. Me in particular, I'm pseudonymous,

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what am I hiding? So we did the episode on that and then the episode later on on why we're

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Lutheran and why we're doing this podcast in general. It is important to know to whom you're

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speaking. One of the things that comes up online frequently on Twitter in particular is the

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early life check. You hear somebody saying something, maybe they were a trusted source in

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the news or some sort of media format and suddenly out of nowhere, they say something

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completely horrific and anti-Christian. You're like, where did this come from? And you look up

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their early life and guess what? Their grandparents came from Russia and Poland and they were

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Jews, they were Jewish refugees. Every single time is a meme on Twitter because it seems like

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virtually every time some random person says something horrific, it turns out that their

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grandparents were Jewish. At some point that pattern becomes relevant. And so the question,

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what am I hiding is completely relevant. What am I hiding? I'm hiding my home address,

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my physical address because I've had five years, six years now of people making physical threats

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against me saying that they would kill me, that they would do harm to my family. I'm not afraid,

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but when someone says they want to do horrible things to you, you don't completely ignore that.

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I'm positioned in such a fashion that I'm not worried about my physical safety much,

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but that doesn't mean that there's zero threat. So the flip side of the genealogy thing is that

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back to what Corey said, I'm not the origin of anything I say. I'm the vessel on the mouthpiece

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conveying it to you. But the fact that I have no name, I have no credentials,

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I have nothing upon which to base any perceived credibility that you might assign to me. So

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you have no reason to listen to me whatsoever. I'm not going to say I've got this degree,

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or I went to this place, or I do this thing professionally. And so I'm an expert and you

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should listen. It's the complete opposite of when, for example, a pastor says, hey, I have an MDiv,

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I have a caller. It's very important you listen to me because God is speaking when I speak to you.

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I am binding your conscious by what I say. By being pseudonymous, I completely forego even

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the possibility of being able to do any of that. All I can do is try to make reasoned arguments.

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And reason is something that shows up particularly in the New Testament when Paul was going to the

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Jews and to the Gentiles and arguing with them. He frequently used reason, the Jews in particular.

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It says that he reasoned from Scripture. And in that case, the Scripture was the Tanakh. It was

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what we have today as the 39 books of the Old Testament. Those were the Scriptures from which

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Paul reasoned with the Jews of that day to say, hey, all these prophecies, all these things,

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Jesus fulfilled them. Jesus' life was the embodiment of these things. Therefore,

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he is the Christ who has promised the Messiah. He used reason. Now, God was with him. He wasn't

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going to speak falsely. Nevertheless, many of the things that Paul said when he was preaching and

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speaking didn't need to be direct divine revelation because Scripture was the divine revelation that

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he was using. So when he made a logical argument from Scripture, it wasn't by his own authority

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that he was preaching. It was by the authority of the Word of God. Now, I'm not saying that to

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compare what we are doing here to Paul preaching. This isn't preaching. This is a podcast. We're

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talking about the Bible. But ultimately, what we're talking about is what God has given to all of us,

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to the whole world. The Christian Church in particular values Scripture. We value the Word

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of God. And so, as Corey said, the arguments that we make should always be rooted in Scriptural

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Truth, which doesn't necessarily mean that they're actually derived directly from Scripture.

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That's something that's come up a couple times recently that I think is worth pointing out

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explicitly. You can make claims that aren't in Scripture that are true. I think one of the

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hermeneutics that Lutherans bring to a lot of questions that can be valuable, but it also becomes

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kind of a hamstring when it's not understood correctly, is the idea that what we perceive as

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the law of God is always either a command or a promise. So if there's not a command from God

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or a promise from God, it's in a different category. And the problem is that a lot of these

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things that Corey and I point to is natural revelation. By that, I mean facts, scientific facts,

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like you have ancestors. They came from a place. They have a genealogy. They have actual genes

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going back in time. Their properties attendant to that. And revelation is kind of a fancy way

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just saying, it's an obvious truth. It's in reality. You don't need the Bible to tell you

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everything is true. You need the Bible to reveal the things that you can't derive from a truthful

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observation of creation. So one of the recent criticisms that came up against Stone Choir,

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thankfully, one of our opponents went on issues, etc., and devoted an hour to trying to debunk

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us. It was the best hour long advertisement we could have possibly hoped for, because we sounded

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completely sane and reasonable in their arguments. There were no arguments. It was just kind of

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hysteria. But one of the things that they tried to claim was that we were using things like Acts

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1726, which talks about the dwelling places of men and the boundaries thereof, or Revelation

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179, where the various races appear before the throne. They called those proof texts when we

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used them as though we were trying to impose something by saying, well, Acts says that there

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are borders, and Revelation says that there are races. Therefore, we as men are trying to impose

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these things. Those aren't proof texts. The reason that there's not a lot of Scripture assigned to

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those topics is not that they're not real. They were just asides mentioning something

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that's obvious. Those are done. There are boundaries in dwelling places of man, and God says,

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I take credit for those. All of the nations, all of the races of men are represented in heaven,

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both for the throne of God. God said it's already done in eternity, so there's nothing for us on

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earth to do to affect that. We're simply pointing to that because it's an aside in Scripture that

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simply recognizes reality. There's no prescription there from God to say, you must do this. We don't

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point to those things to make that case. We're just saying, it's done. It's already there. It's

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the same as if you listened to us last week, and if you read any of Job when God was responding to

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Job, one of the points that you made was that the glory of the horse's mane testifies to my glory.

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If I tell you that a horse's mane is something beautiful and that God did it,

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am I making some sort of data commander promise from God? No, I'm just saying,

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this is beautiful. It's a part of creation. God did it. By the way, God also specifically points

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to this thing. There are other things that aren't listed in that monologue from God and Job that

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equally testifies to his glory. There are things that were unknown at that time and mentioned some

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of the stars, some of the constellations. There's stuff further out in space and no one could see

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with the naked eye then, so God wouldn't have mentioned it. When we see them now, they testify

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to God's glory just as those things that are mentioned. Natural revelation is a part of

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God's revelation. It's not salvific, but it does proclaim God's glory. When we point to those things,

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it's not a denial of Christ. It's saying, look how big an amazing God is and he still cares about us.

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That gets back to where's this stuff coming from? It's not coming from Cory or me.

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We look at the Bible and we point to things that in many cases have been neglected for a while.

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In the case of the issues around race, they never really mattered because all the races were naturally

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separated according to the boundaries of their dwelling places and was only in the last couple

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centuries that mass movement of human beings and recently the artificial mass movement of human

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beings caused them to be dislocated and slammed together as neighbors where it never occurred

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in human history. We are now confronting things that no Christians have ever faced before. You

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might have port cities where there is a smattering of travel or maybe some contact, but that was a

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very specialized thing in a local, particular place. Frankly, a lot of those sorts of cities

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tended to be hotbeds of some of the worst idolatry because as people are coming from afar,

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they're bringing their gods with them. Those cities tended to become more pagan and that's

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something that's preserved to this day as well. Big port cities tend to be raunchy. They tend not

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to be great places. That's because it's hard to preserve a homogeneous Christian culture when you

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have all these foreign influences. Yes, we're talking about some things that the Christian Church has

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not talked about much because it didn't have to. Now, that doesn't mean that we're necessarily right

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because we're not inventing new theology. We're just taking what God has always said

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and applying it to the new problems today, which is I think the basis of all theology ultimately.

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You also touched on there an issue that comes up constantly and that is what exactly is meant

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by Sola Scriptura. I did a video on this at some point in the past. We've linked it previously

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in the show notes. Sola Scriptura is in the ablative, which I will continue to say that until

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people get tired of hearing the word ablative, but it means by scripture alone. What it means

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is that doctrine is determined by scripture alone. It does not mean that all truth flows from

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scripture alone. That is an abuse of Sola Scriptura and there are those who make that argument today

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that's not the case because as we keep pointing out, God appeals to creation. Creation declares the

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glory of God. Creation has truth content. There is such a thing as natural revelation

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and so you don't have to look to scripture for all truth. Scripture alone reveals the gospel

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because nature doesn't reveal the gospel. The natural world does not tell you that Christ

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died for you atoned for your sins was a substitute for you. There's nowhere to find that in creation,

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but creation can tell you a lot of other things and so it is perfectly fine to look to creation

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for the truth content that God has placed there and so it is important to bear in mind

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that Sola Scriptura means that doctrine is determined by scripture alone, not that all

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truth comes from scripture alone. And so the second question is about the common refrain of

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one race, the human race, and the issue of intermarriage, which convenient timing since that

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just blew up on Twitter with a tweet that I made on Friday. But the issue of one race,

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the human race is that it is a conflating of terms or really senses of one term here,

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because the term race can apply to humanity generally because we are all of the race of Adam.

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We're actually all of the race of Noah because Noah is the patriarch of all living,

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being the father of the three men who stepped off the Ark and went on to have children.

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However, there's also a race of Japheth, a race of Ham, a race of Shem, and so you can use the

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term race to mean these smaller groups or the larger group, and those who argue for one race,

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the human race, are using it maliciously. They are doing it in an attempt to erase these actual

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real distinctions between and among the races of men by appealing to the fact that we are all

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descended from Adam. Yes, we're all descended from Adam, but that's not the final word of truth

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on these matters, because if you're German, you are in fact very different from someone from Uganda.

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Yes, you are both sons of Adam, but you have differentiated over a long course of years,

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centuries, millennia, and so you are distinct. And so it is more meaningful to speak of the

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race of Ashkenaz, which would be the Germanic or the German peoples depending on how you

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interpret that history there, or the race of the various sons of Ham, Egypt, descended from

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Egypt, one of the ones that's easy to remember. We have to be careful when we use these terms and

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when the opponents use these terms, because they are used to deceive. You can use a term that is an

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accurate term that is a meaningful term, but you can use it in a deceptive way. And when someone

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tries to argue that there's one race, the human race, while they're saying something that is trivially

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true, but it is also false, because in context it is used to mislead. And so it is more meaningful

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again to speak of the individual races that have come to exist over a course of time due to

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differentiation, because that is how God designed it. We're not talking about speciation, we're not

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talking about neo-Darwinian evolution or modern synthesis, whatever particular argument you're

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using, whatever modern formulation of Darwinian theory, because it's due to a loss of information

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over time that you have these races. It's not due to mutation and then selection against the

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mutation, because that's a creation of new information and there is no proof of that. It's

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logically impossible, but that's a more complicated argument for another time.

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Due to a loss of information over millennia, we have the different races instead of the one race

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that you had when Adam and Eve were in the garden. But of course, the different races already existed

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to some degree on the Ark, because some of that genetic difference comes from the wives of Noah's

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sons. And we can see this in the various DNA, in the various groups of human beings, the three

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great groupings, being of course Europeans, Asians, and Africans essentially. Because you have the

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Neanderthal DNA in Europeans, you have Denisovan in Asian populations, and you have the so-called

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Ghost DNA in the African populations. That's just DNA from the wives of Noah's sons.

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And to tie the genealogy of man to the genealogy of ideas,

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everybody understood this until about 50 years ago. It's only within the last well closer to today

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than even 50 years ago that suddenly everyone forgot that human beings are different,

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that there are different groups of people from different places, and that that is consequential.

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It never had to be discussed much among theologians, because it was so blindingly obvious that no one,

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it was never a controversial statement. So for someone today to say, well, in the 1600s,

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they didn't talk about race. Well, that's arguing that a fish doesn't talk about water.

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When something is so pervasive, so a fundamental part of existence, that it doesn't bear

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discussion, it's only when that fundamental part of existence falls under attack, under existential

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threat from a hostile alien force that it requires a defense. So yes, we are saying things that

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haven't been said before. And yes, that should always concern anyone. You shouldn't be hearing

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new arguments in theology with the exception of an acknowledgement that Satan gets a vote.

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Satan doesn't sit on his laurels. The fight that Luther and the other reformers had

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in the 16th century against Rome's false teachings about how we are saved,

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Satan had been doing pretty well at that point. And then he got his teeth kicked in.

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He lost a lot of ground on the soteriological battle.

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Basically, all Protestant doctrines since then has more or less rested on those laurels and said,

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okay, we got that soteriological problem solved. We're done. We're good. We know how we're saved.

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We're going to lock that in for all time. And as the centuries have passed, men have gotten

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dumber and dumber and less able to recognize that Satan doesn't sleep. And Satan's not stupid.

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He's not going to make the same attack again when there's a new attack vector. And so in the post

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Enlightenment world, as all of these egalitarian thoughts about humanity have become so pervasive

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that they shifted from being niche philosophical arguments among the intelligentsia to today,

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they're seen as moral platitudes that if you defy them, you'll be excommunicated.

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That was a shift in theology that happened without anyone lifting a finger. There was no

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fight. The fact that you went from the 16th century to the 21st century with fundamental

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paradigm shifts about how we look at our relationship to God and our relationship to each other,

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there should have been a fight. We should have fought all along. And there were some men who

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did fight against the Enlightenment, but they lost. And part of that was that one of the key

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elements of the Enlightenment was democracy, was that everyone gets a vote, everyone gets a voice.

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And so when everyone can chime in and say, oh, well, I think, oh, well, here's my opinion. Well,

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here's what I want to do. Suddenly, the men who had been fighting over these things, some well,

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some poorly, like when I say intelligentsia, that is not flattering coming from my lips. I'm

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not a fan of having a brain trust sorting things out for everyone else. On the other hand,

23:47.340 --> 23:52.300
everyone else is even worse at it. So whether we're talking about professors or we're talking

23:52.300 --> 23:58.780
about pastors or theologians, we need some of the brightest men dealing with the subject,

23:58.780 --> 24:03.260
and we need them to be faithful to scripture. They don't need to do anything new if they're

24:03.260 --> 24:08.460
honest about the facts in front of them and they're honest about scripture. And so this shift

24:09.420 --> 24:14.620
along today, race is one of the primary things that's being attacked. The reason we devoted those

24:14.620 --> 24:19.420
episodes and the election episode before that, and the Christian nationalism episode before that,

24:19.420 --> 24:24.940
it's really a seven-part series with those together, specifically because Satan knows what

24:24.940 --> 24:31.100
he's doing. As he's continued to move the pieces around the board, race is now the battleground.

24:31.100 --> 24:36.460
And it's one that virtually no Protestant theologians are equipped for. And that is increasingly

24:36.460 --> 24:42.620
a problem. Just in the last week online, a bunch of the reform guys have been fighting out the

24:42.620 --> 24:50.700
definition of Christian nationalism. And on the leftward side, they're not very left, but within

24:50.700 --> 24:56.140
that relative small sphere, the guys who are further left are calling the guys to their right

24:56.140 --> 25:01.500
racists for talking about Christian nationalism. And what are the guys on the right side of that

25:01.500 --> 25:05.900
sphere doing? They're saying, no, no, we're not racist. Christian nationalism has nothing to do

25:05.980 --> 25:10.940
with race. It has nothing to do with nations. They're basically sivnats with Jesus. And that's a

25:10.940 --> 25:17.980
disaster. The idea that there can be magic soil, that when you move to a place, you just magically

25:17.980 --> 25:24.060
become something new, even if it's completely alien to everything in your past. That's trannyism.

25:24.060 --> 25:29.740
That's saying, I used to be African, but now I live in Detroit. And so I'm an American. That's the

25:29.740 --> 25:36.220
same as saying I identify as a woman, even though I was born a man. It doesn't work. Now, there are

25:36.220 --> 25:41.820
different aspects of human and biology that are going on here. But fundamentally, when you say

25:41.820 --> 25:46.460
that one thing can just become something else because it decides to be, or because it agrees

25:46.460 --> 25:52.380
with an idea, the US is a proposition nation. That was invented, by the way, in the late 19th,

25:52.380 --> 25:59.500
early 20th century. It was invented by surprise, Jewish immigrants. The melting pot, that was

25:59.500 --> 26:06.540
from a Jew named Swangly. I can't remember his name. I can remember his face. He's hideous looking

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human being. But what he said in his play in about 1908, something about the melting pot,

26:13.900 --> 26:22.460
was specifically to convince the blood citizens of America that having this continuous stream of

26:22.460 --> 26:27.500
aliens from Europe coming in had to be good. Because look at all the people who came here

26:27.500 --> 26:32.380
before that were also different. Well, Germans are different from the English in some ways,

26:32.380 --> 26:37.980
but not a lot. The Jewish immigrants who came to this country, on the other hand,

26:37.980 --> 26:43.820
were much more different. They had some European blood, but they were also Jewish by culture,

26:43.820 --> 26:51.020
Jewish by religion, Jewish by language. And they brought something that was alien to this nation

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and became very important for them to dilute and destroy the notion that American was anything

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other than, I want to live in America. And so now 120 years later, we have people who are trying to

27:03.900 --> 27:11.100
describe Christian nationalism in the same terms. They're not understanding that they're part of a

27:11.100 --> 27:16.700
Syop that began many generations before they were born. And so it's one of the reasons that

27:16.700 --> 27:22.140
almost the first episode we did of Stone Choir was about Christian nationalism, specifically to

27:22.140 --> 27:28.700
make the case for the nationalist part of that, national natal, same root. The root is the Proto

27:28.700 --> 27:36.380
Indo-European word for gene. It's literally descent. So you can't have Christian nationalism if you

27:36.380 --> 27:42.700
deny the race as a part of a nation. And we have discussions about where's that in the Bible. Well,

27:43.340 --> 27:47.820
I guess if you ignore all of the genealogies in the Bible and you ignore all the parts of the

27:47.820 --> 27:53.340
Bible that specifically refer to nation, sure, maybe you could say race isn't there. But it's the

27:53.340 --> 27:59.820
same thing. It's the same thing. And the fact that white can be called a race and English can be

27:59.820 --> 28:06.700
called a race doesn't mean that at most one of them exists and the other can't. We talked about

28:06.700 --> 28:11.900
in the Christian nationalism episode, there's a winnowing process. It was literally the definition

28:11.900 --> 28:18.060
in the Webster 1828 saying, you know, the race of Adam, the race of Noah, the race of Charlemagne

28:18.060 --> 28:25.260
on down as you winnow through the passage of time. But it's always lineal descent. A nation always has

28:25.260 --> 28:32.300
a root. You know, Jesus was the rod of Jesse's stem. It came down through the lineage that was,

28:32.300 --> 28:37.660
it was patrilineal. It was a bloodline that was important to God. And it wasn't just the one thing

28:37.660 --> 28:43.100
about Jesus. That's not the only time that's ever mattered. It was the most important bloodline.

28:43.100 --> 28:48.220
But it wasn't the only one. They're all bloodlines. Yeah, there were 70 nations in the Old Testament.

28:48.220 --> 28:53.180
There are 70 nations to whom the disciples are sent out in the New Testament. That's how God works.

28:53.820 --> 28:58.780
We don't get a vote. And so for us to come along today and say one race, the human race, we're all

28:58.780 --> 29:04.860
the same, we didn't get that from Scripture. We got that from the 60s and from the 90s and from

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today. And we're not talking about hip parade radio. We're talking about theology being evolved in

29:09.740 --> 29:15.260
real time before our eyes. That is a big problem, which is why Hori and I started this podcast

29:15.260 --> 29:19.820
to talk about this stuff that makes you uncomfortable. Because it is uncomfortable to be

29:19.820 --> 29:24.140
confronted with, on one hand, someone saying something that seems like it might have some

29:24.140 --> 29:28.940
foundations. And on the other hand, you have the whole world saying that's a lie and it's evil.

29:28.940 --> 29:34.380
Well, when we talk about the genealogy of ideas, it's because 100 years ago, no one thought anything

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different than we're saying today. Apart from the few people who had begun to adopt the melting pot

29:40.700 --> 29:47.580
idea that was inserted by a foreign element into the American psyche, that was enemy action,

29:47.580 --> 29:52.220
that was destructive. And today it's so pervasive that we have to battle against

29:53.580 --> 30:01.420
seemingly the immune system of our own people. But it's not an innate immunity. It's an

30:01.420 --> 30:07.580
artificially induced immunity to something true. So that's why we jump over some periods of history,

30:07.580 --> 30:12.140
specifically to say if this is true, it will always have been true. And when you look back

30:12.140 --> 30:17.420
100, 200, 300 years, many of these claims fall apart. That's why. The play you mentioned,

30:17.420 --> 30:23.820
the melting pot, gets even better if you look at the materials that were used to promote it.

30:23.820 --> 30:30.380
It's basically a vision of hell. And it also gets better when you know his first name,

30:30.380 --> 30:34.140
because his first name was Israel, and his name was Israel Zongville.

30:34.940 --> 30:41.820
So. Thank you. Yeah. No, it's worth looking up. Look it up on Wikipedia. And that is inserted

30:41.820 --> 30:47.820
today into the eternal record of the United States of America. And we're told that it was always there.

30:47.820 --> 30:54.460
It wasn't always there. My ancestors who came here in 1618, 1620, 1630, they'd never heard of that.

30:54.460 --> 30:59.740
They left England and they landed in England, and they were English. Nothing changed. There was

30:59.740 --> 31:04.700
no melting pot for them. And yes, some Dutch came and a few Swedes came and I'm descended from them

31:04.700 --> 31:10.060
too. That was what we were sold as being the melting pot, but those were all Western European

31:10.060 --> 31:17.660
Christians as a fundamentally different type of thing than complete aliens by culture, by religion,

31:17.660 --> 31:25.420
and by descent. And so yes, there are subdivisions, but that doesn't eliminate the fact that

31:25.420 --> 31:30.540
there's a real thing behind it. And so the other part of this question was the issue of

31:31.180 --> 31:39.420
interracial marriage. And I think I addressed that well enough in the podcast episode that I put

31:39.420 --> 31:46.540
out recently. So I think I'll just link that in the show notes. But just the very quick summary of

31:46.540 --> 31:56.140
it is that per se, not a sin, not explicitly banned by scripture as a sin in itself. However,

31:56.140 --> 32:05.260
in context, often a sin due to wrong motives and things like that. What I'll link in the show notes

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will go over it in greater depth, but that is the short version of why Christians should generally

32:11.500 --> 32:16.700
avoid interracial marriage. And yes, of course, there are the health reasons and other things

32:16.700 --> 32:20.700
like that, but those are mentioned in what I will be linking in the show notes.

32:21.980 --> 32:26.380
And it's also effectively brand new and it's heavily propagandized only in the last 10,

32:26.380 --> 32:32.300
15 years. I mean, a lot of it's only in the last five years. If you go look at TV shows even 15

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years ago, the composition of the couples and the advertisements and everything else is radically

32:37.820 --> 32:43.180
different than it is today. And that was propaganda too. So they were pushing the interracial mixing

32:43.180 --> 32:50.060
propaganda then, but it wasn't so overt today. It's hard to find any sort of advertisement for

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anything, including our own churches, where it's not a black man and a white woman together.

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It's usually that coupling. In reality, that virtually never happens. It's incredibly rare.

33:02.220 --> 33:06.060
And yet if you look at the advertisements and you look at TV and movies,

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you would think it was universal. And so that is the reason that people are so vehement about

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defending something that it's alien. I mean, when we were on issues, etc., hosted,

33:18.220 --> 33:21.580
you know, they didn't have our permission or anything, not that they needed, but

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when they played our clips, most of the responses were hysteria about interracial marriage,

33:28.460 --> 33:33.420
even though it didn't have anything to do with the clips. They devoted an hour mostly to defending

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interracial marriage as what? Is Christian theology? Corey makes the case in the episode,

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but in the podcast he's going to link. Suffice it to say, if something basically didn't exist 50

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years ago, 20 years ago, and still barely exists today, maybe you can have a discussion about

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whether or not it's a good idea without somebody saying you're going to hell. And the fact that

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it's the paramount moral issue in these people's hearts and minds makes you wonder what God they're

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serving, because it's not a God that existed 100 years ago. If the issue didn't exist, if the so-called

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sin didn't exist, there was no fight. This principle of faith that's so deeply held by these people

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that they lose their minds. You know, Corey blasphemed on Friday. He blasphemes virtually every

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Friday before he logs off Twitter. It's not blasphemy against God. It's blasphemy against the

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idols of this day. He deliberately posts something carefully worded and antagonistic to get people

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riled up, and everyone bites the bait every time, because those are the idols of this day.

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They're not God. They're not from God. What he's saying is consistent with Scripture.

34:41.820 --> 34:46.460
It's carefully worded, and it's always bait. And if you people were a little bit smarter and you

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took seriously that Corey is intelligent, that he's good with words, maybe you wouldn't get so

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riled up when he said something you didn't understand, because instead of continuously

34:56.300 --> 35:02.540
attacking this obvious bait, I see it, and I shake my head. I know it's going to just be a

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firestorm, and it's unpleasant. We don't censor each other's timelines. I wouldn't post some

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of the things he posts, and he probably wouldn't say some of the things that I say. It doesn't

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matter. It's not criticism. It's just that there are different approaches to things.

35:15.500 --> 35:21.260
But what you cannot doubt is that when he posts something about interracial marriages,

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a subject that is largely alien to all of human existence, it's happened, but it's

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incredibly rare. It's infrequent. It's never been considered a moral matter,

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and everyone loses their minds. We're told when Benghazi happened. We were told that it was

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because there was some video that was made, a movie was made that said something blasphemous

35:44.540 --> 35:50.140
about Muhammad or whatever, and so everyone rioted and everyone murdered. That's effectively the

35:50.460 --> 35:55.500
response that saying things like interracial marriage is generally a bad idea. Today, it

35:55.500 --> 36:00.940
lists it among most Christians. That's not normal. That's a response to a blasphemy against a God

36:00.940 --> 36:06.860
that even if Corey were wrong about what he says about interracial marriage, I believe he's correct.

36:06.860 --> 36:13.500
I think that his explanation is perfectly sound. Even if he were wrong, the degree and the vehemence

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of the response against it is so far out of proportion that you have to ask yourself,

36:19.660 --> 36:23.660
what is the animating spirit behind the people who are so mad about this?

36:23.660 --> 36:29.500
Why this one subject? The answer is very simple. It's on your television. It's on your news feed

36:29.500 --> 36:34.700
when you see ads over and over again showing mixed couples. You see black people continuously.

36:34.700 --> 36:40.060
Most people think that the blacks are 30 or 40% of the US population just based on what they see

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in ads. It's about 12% to 13%. They've always been in the 10 to 12, 13% range. That's been

36:47.100 --> 36:51.660
consistent as the US has grown. They've never been more than that. When you look at ads,

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you would think it was 75% of people because you can't have a TV show without one anymore.

36:58.300 --> 37:02.540
I mentioned previously, I watched the wire three or four times. I like it. It's virtually all black

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characters. I don't hate black people, but don't pretend that there's something that they're not.

37:07.740 --> 37:12.620
The reason I like the wire is that it was realistic. There were some smart ones. There were some dumb

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ones. There were some violent ones. There were some decent ones. It was an honest portrayal of

37:17.420 --> 37:24.220
the human condition in their community. That's not what you get on TV when it's always the black

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science guy or the black computer guy. On the IQ episode, we demonstrated that that's preposterous.

37:29.900 --> 37:35.660
It virtually never happens. The fact that you know a guy doesn't disprove the fact that there are only

37:35.660 --> 37:42.380
1.2 million African-Americans with IQs above 115, that's not very smart. If you're 115,

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great, God bless you. You can do pretty much anything that's useful in this world. It's still

37:46.940 --> 37:50.860
not very smart. It's not nearly smart enough to do the sorts of things that are portrayed

37:50.860 --> 37:57.100
in the media all the time. The expert that knows Latin and Greek off the top of her head,

37:57.100 --> 38:02.220
and she's a computer hacker, and she's really good with medicine. It's always the black girl

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who's 25 years old. That's gaslighting. That doesn't happen. On one hand, it's fiction,

38:08.380 --> 38:11.820
whatever. On the other hand, when it convinces people that that's actually what's happening in

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the world, and then they make moral pronouncements against brothers and Christ for saying, hey,

38:16.780 --> 38:21.580
maybe that's kind of silly, that's when it becomes a problem. That's why this artificial

38:21.580 --> 38:26.300
manufactured consent for these things exists in the mass media. It's to convince you that something

38:26.300 --> 38:30.940
has always been the case when it's virtually never been the case. When we come along and say,

38:30.940 --> 38:35.660
yeah, that's nonsense, we're going to get yelled at. We know that. It's part of why we're here,

38:35.660 --> 38:41.020
is to get yelled at so that after the yelling dies down, there can be an actual conversation

38:41.020 --> 38:47.820
about the reality of what's in the world, about creation, about what's revealed in creation.

38:49.260 --> 38:54.780
I actually want to read the ending, just the last paragraph or so, maybe two paragraphs,

38:55.500 --> 39:01.180
of the play The Melting Pot. Maybe not actually comment on it much, but those who are paying

39:01.180 --> 39:06.220
close attention and who have been listening all along will notice that this is an open

39:06.220 --> 39:15.020
hell mouth. To give a little background about the play, it's about a Russian Jewish family

39:15.020 --> 39:22.060
flees a pogrom in Russia, comes to the U.S., and I'm not going to give you a spoiler warning

39:22.060 --> 39:25.420
because it's a play and you're supposed to know plays before you go to see them, and I hope you

39:25.420 --> 39:33.340
never have to see this play. But the Jewish son of the family winds up falling in love, as it were,

39:33.900 --> 39:39.980
with the Russian daughter of the man who led the pogrom against his family back in Russia,

39:39.980 --> 39:46.700
because of course, it's as contrived as could possibly be. But at any rate, David is the Jewish

39:46.700 --> 39:53.420
son and Vera is the Russian daughter. And so here's the last bit of the play, David speaking.

39:54.380 --> 40:00.060
It is the fires of God round his crucible. There she lies the great melting pot. Listen,

40:00.060 --> 40:05.500
can't you hear the roaring and the bubbling? There gapes her mouth. The harbor where a thousand

40:05.500 --> 40:11.100
mammoth feeders come from the ends of the world to pour in their human freight. All what is stirring

40:11.100 --> 40:16.860
in a seething, Kelt and Latin, Slav and Teuton, Greek and Syrian, black and yellow.

40:17.500 --> 40:24.860
Vera, Jew and Gentile. David, yes, east and west and north and south. The palm and the pine,

40:24.860 --> 40:30.620
the pole and the equator, the crescent and the cross. How the great alchemist melts and fuses

40:30.620 --> 40:36.140
them with his purging flame. Here shall they all unite to build the Republic of Man and the Kingdom

40:36.140 --> 40:41.820
of God. Ah, Vera, what is the glory of Rome and Jerusalem, where all nations and races come to

40:41.820 --> 40:48.140
worship and look back. Compared with the glory of America, where all races and nations come to labor

40:48.140 --> 40:55.260
and look forward. Peace, peace, to all ye unborn millions, fated to fill this giant continent.

40:55.260 --> 41:00.540
The God of our children give you peace. And then just as an extra little touch,

41:01.100 --> 41:04.300
the play ends and is played out with my country, tis of thee.

41:07.660 --> 41:16.780
There really is just no need for a comment. Yeah, that's a litmus test. If you see that in your

41:16.780 --> 41:23.740
response, that sort of determines which side of everything you're on. The next question that we

41:23.740 --> 41:29.100
had addressed in part, we had a few different questions about hymns. Some of them referred

41:29.180 --> 41:34.620
specifically to, yeah, there's some hymns in the current, the Lutheran service book, the LSB,

41:35.260 --> 41:41.420
the hymnal, the talk about the human race, the talk about one race of Adam, and they're asking

41:41.420 --> 41:45.900
what we think about those. The first thing I'll say, I think the primary thing I'll say about any

41:45.900 --> 41:51.180
hymn you find in your hymnal is look at the bottom of the page and see what year was written.

41:52.300 --> 41:56.220
If you want to know what I think about the theology of it, tell me what year was written,

41:56.220 --> 42:01.100
tell me what language it was written, and I can give you a pretty good idea of what the

42:01.100 --> 42:08.140
theology of it will be. Now, in particular, some of the worst hymns in there that are deliberately

42:08.140 --> 42:14.700
one race, the human race propaganda, one of them that was highlighted on Twitter in the last couple

42:14.700 --> 42:19.980
weeks, was written in 1969 as a brand new hymn. I mean, there are hymns in our hymnal from the

42:19.980 --> 42:25.660
second and third centuries, just a couple. But I think those are treasures. I think anything

42:25.660 --> 42:31.260
written in 1969 should be said on fire without even reading it. I don't care what it is. If it

42:31.260 --> 42:37.260
was good, we can invent it again, but that decade should be erased from human memory. So yeah,

42:37.260 --> 42:42.540
there's some stuff in the hymnal. That doesn't make it authoritative. Yeah, that's one of the

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problems with churches publishing stuff in their own name is that by having the imprimatur of your

42:48.700 --> 42:53.020
church and having said that it's gone through some sort of doctrinal review, it binds your

42:53.020 --> 42:57.740
conscience. It says, oh, you disagree with this, you must not be a good Christian. Well,

42:57.740 --> 43:01.340
I disagree with some of the newer hymns, not all of them. And there are some great hymns that are

43:01.340 --> 43:06.540
newer, but not many. They're much better hymns that are older. And that's part of the reason why you

43:06.540 --> 43:13.580
can't, any place and time that produces a hymn, there's a reason someone wrote that song. They

43:13.580 --> 43:19.820
wrote it for a purpose. We have some hymns from the air of the plague where I can't remember,

43:20.220 --> 43:22.940
Cor, you probably remember which one. There's a hymn where a man wrote along

43:24.060 --> 43:30.540
as he had buried most of his family and most of his town. And he was under tremendous suffering.

43:30.540 --> 43:36.540
And so knowing that context for that hymn makes it all the more beautiful. When you know that a hymn

43:36.540 --> 43:42.780
about racial consolidation was written in 1969, that tells you something very different about

43:42.780 --> 43:46.620
what message you're supposed to receive. So they're good hymns and they're bad hymns.

43:47.500 --> 43:51.580
The related question was, are hymns that are written by women teaching by women?

43:54.060 --> 43:58.700
Personally, I think probably it's not in the top 50 list of issues that I think we need to solve.

43:59.260 --> 44:05.580
I think that there are much bigger issues to fix. And I pray for a day when we can worry about

44:05.580 --> 44:09.180
whether we need to get rid of the hymns that were written by women. The answer is, I think,

44:09.180 --> 44:13.180
probably yes. But that's not where I'm going to start. I'm going to start with saying, hey,

44:13.580 --> 44:17.820
maybe people need to believe the Bible in general. And then we can work our way down from there.

44:19.500 --> 44:23.020
That really sort of covers the issue of hymns. And

44:24.540 --> 44:29.660
except for the tangential issue of, should we be using hymns that were written by,

44:30.460 --> 44:36.780
if you're Lutheran, by non-Lutherans? And the answer is, as long as they're doctrinally sound,

44:37.420 --> 44:40.700
many of them are not. And so we should probably not be using them.

44:41.580 --> 44:46.700
But the ones that are doctrinally sound are, of course, fine. And you mentioned hymns that are

44:46.700 --> 44:51.260
a little more modern in terms when they were written that are still good. The obvious one would be,

44:51.900 --> 44:59.500
thy strong word is fairly modern, but still quite good. Despite being written, that was in the 60s

44:59.500 --> 45:07.500
as well, I believe. All right, well, one exception. Yeah, I know exactly. It's like we can think of

45:07.500 --> 45:14.620
one good hymn that was written in the 60s. The next all hymn. Exactly. There were a couple

45:14.620 --> 45:19.500
related questions to, do we think that women shouldn't be able to sing in church or to

45:19.500 --> 45:24.300
speak responsibly in church? Is that teaching? No. That's a public celebration. That's fine.

45:25.100 --> 45:29.580
Yeah, that's women being silent in the church. When you look at those passages,

45:29.580 --> 45:34.620
it's not talking about corporate worship. The questions are about the issue is,

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should women be speaking interactively in study? And so the Paul specifically says,

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God specifically says, if she has a question, she should go home and ask her husband.

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It doesn't even count as the idea of her having her own opinion. It's as if she has a question,

45:50.780 --> 45:55.020
she should go home and ask her husband there. So that's obviously not something that's happening

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during the church service proper. And that's obviously not related to singing, to chanting,

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to responsive readings. Corporate worship is the body of Christ unified together publicly,

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speaking with one voice, confessing what God has said back to him. That's beautiful. That's good.

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That is for every son of God, male or female. And of course, that answers the question of

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using the Magnificat or any of the other songs in scripture that are originally spoken by women.

46:26.220 --> 46:30.380
Of course, they are recorded by men because all of scripture was written by men and they

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are inspired by God, which is the ultimate reason that we should use them. And of course,

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we do use the Magnificat in the evening service. But those are, of course, totally fine to use.

46:41.740 --> 46:45.020
I believe the hymn writer you had in mind was Philip Nicolai.

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He was a pastor lived through the plague. He's commemorated on the 26th of October along with

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Hirman and Gerhardt, other hymn writers. I think one of the things underlying some

46:58.140 --> 47:01.500
of the questions about what do we think about women doing X, Y, or Z,

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they didn't seem to be hostile questions. But I think there's a perception of us sometimes that

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we are women, women haters or something. I actually got a DM yesterday from a lady who

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thanked me for the show and for speaking faithfully on these matters.

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We've gotten feedback from a number of women who they take no issue with what we say. Now,

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there's some that I'm sure do, but it's funny. I think we mentioned before, we get DMs all the

47:30.540 --> 47:37.740
time from mixed race guys, from non-whites, from non-lutherans, from women, all the people who

47:38.700 --> 47:43.740
the world tells everybody else hate us because we hate them. The people that we're supposed to hate

47:43.740 --> 47:50.060
don't think that we hate them. The people that were told that we hate, at least some of what

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we're saying, they can listen and they get value from it. In the particular case of the

47:54.860 --> 48:00.300
number of the mixed race people, I was one of the points that Corey makes in his about 30-minute

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podcast that he'll link on the previous question is that mixed race guys frequently thank us for

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speaking clearly on race. When race mixing is pushed on parents, they say, oh, it'll be beautiful.

48:14.700 --> 48:18.380
Your children will be beautiful. Everything will be wonderful. It's going to be a new dawn of a new

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age. It's going to be great. That's what they're getting from the world and from CNN. Their kids

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have a different experience and their kids by and large understand that their experience is

48:29.420 --> 48:34.780
to the degree that they suffer from alienation. It's not because the world is mean. It's because

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they're divided between two nations. When a man has two nations intersecting in his

48:41.820 --> 48:50.140
self, his own person, ultimately he basically has to pick one. That's a difficult choice that no

48:50.140 --> 48:54.940
man should be faced with. We talked about our own genealogies in the past. I'm mostly English

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and partly German. I don't have to pick either because it's far enough back that I'm just American

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by birth, by genes. There's no conflict between the guys who spoke German and the guys who spoke

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English in my past. They were able to coexist side by side as neighbors. Then when they all

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started speaking English, they basically became one finally. That's not an inherent conflict.

49:18.700 --> 49:25.740
The guy who is half white and half black or half Asian and half white, he has a much bigger

49:26.460 --> 49:31.260
internal struggle because he understands intrinsically. He doesn't completely belong to

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either community. When these guys talk to us privately, they're generally thankful. Part of

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the reason is that we're the only men in some cases that they've ever heard who will speak

49:42.460 --> 49:47.580
honestly about these things. They're thankful to hear a Christian speaking honestly. For all

49:47.580 --> 49:52.380
the people telling you that we hate and that people hate us, the actual experience we have with

49:52.380 --> 49:58.460
you, the listeners getting to us and telling us largely says the opposite. I guess if somebody

49:58.460 --> 50:02.300
hates us and thinks that we hate them, they're maybe not going to send a message at all. But

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the messages we have received have not only been supportive, they've been tremendously thankful.

50:06.940 --> 50:13.740
I do find it a little funny as someone who enjoys opera to be accused, not by the people who are

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questioning us, but by those who accuse us, by those who attack us on various platforms

50:19.260 --> 50:22.940
that I don't like women singing. How many times have I linked things that were

50:23.740 --> 50:30.060
soprano or other bits of pieces of music from operas and such in our chat?

50:32.780 --> 50:38.940
If God didn't want women to sing in the service, we would have an injunction against it.

50:39.740 --> 50:44.860
Women are not to speak in the service because women are not to teach. They are to remain silent

50:44.860 --> 50:49.660
because they are supposed to ask their husbands at home. Scripture is very clear about why these

50:49.660 --> 50:56.700
things are the way they are. But women are part of the body of Christ, and so they do participate

50:56.700 --> 51:02.700
in the service insofar as it is appropriate for them to do so, and that of course includes

51:02.700 --> 51:08.780
singing along with the congregation. And the congregational singing would be much impoverished

51:08.780 --> 51:13.820
if women were not singing as well. We are in fact much impoverished by the fact that we no longer

51:13.820 --> 51:19.580
use the corrals that separate male and female voices, and so you can get that distinction

51:19.580 --> 51:25.100
between them more clearly. Of course, part of that is a lack of men in the services who actually

51:25.100 --> 51:30.220
sing. And yes, I do intend to shame those of you who don't sing in the service. You should be doing so.

51:31.420 --> 51:38.140
If you don't sing particularly well, practice or sing anyway. There are plenty of men who

51:38.140 --> 51:43.740
don't sing very well. That's one of the great things about being part of a congregation or a

51:43.740 --> 51:50.380
larger choir. The individual imperfections are hidden by the fact that you have more people

51:50.380 --> 51:55.820
singing. The larger the number of people you have singing, the better it sounds when it

51:55.820 --> 52:02.140
comes to choral pieces. That's just how it works. Listen to a large choir sometime if you've never

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done that. It is far and away a better thing than if you just have a small handful of people

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singing. So yes, you should sing in church whether you are a man or a woman.

52:13.500 --> 52:17.340
We have the tangential question about whether or not we should be using the Psalms. And the answer

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is yes, of course. And it was, the emphasis of the question was, are we neglecting to use the

52:23.900 --> 52:28.220
Psalms? And I would say yes, most churches are in fact neglecting to use the Psalms.

52:29.260 --> 52:34.620
In the Lutheran church, we do use that as an intro it. And sometimes there's responsive bits

52:34.620 --> 52:39.100
that are the Psalm and we do have other bits of the Psalms in the Divine Service smattered

52:39.100 --> 52:45.980
here and there scattered about. But yes, we should be using the Psalter. Because as Scripture says,

52:45.980 --> 52:53.580
we're to use Psalms, hymns, etc. And so we should be using them because the Psalter is the original

52:53.580 --> 53:00.060
hymnal of the church. We should be employing it. We should be singing it. Or at least chanting it

53:00.060 --> 53:05.820
because whether or not it works particularly well sung in English is an open question,

53:05.820 --> 53:10.460
but it can certainly be chanted. We should make use of it. It is Scripture. We are commanded to

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use it. One of the accusations leveled against the Lutherans by Rome was that we were singing

53:17.420 --> 53:23.340
people into the faith. And I think that is a great accusation we should wear with pride.

53:23.500 --> 53:35.660
One of the first hymnals that was in the vernacular was produced largely by Luther. He wasn't the one

53:35.660 --> 53:41.420
who printed it and actually produced it. But he worked with the man who did and produced many of

53:41.420 --> 53:46.300
the hymns that were in it. And that was in 1524. That was even before the Reformation got into

53:46.300 --> 53:53.660
full swing. Obviously that was after 1517, after the theses had been posted, but before 1530 when

53:53.660 --> 54:00.460
the Augsburg Confession was presented. And so very early on Lutherans recognized the importance of

54:01.180 --> 54:07.660
teaching Christians via music, via hymns. Because as was mentioned, you are going to remember things

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better if they are set to music. That is just how human memory works.

54:14.380 --> 54:20.780
In addition to the question about the Psalms in particular, there were two other

54:22.220 --> 54:26.940
minor questions, one partly in jest that came from this particular questioner.

54:27.500 --> 54:33.180
One was do Lutherans have a category for non-lutheran theologians other than terrible?

54:33.180 --> 54:36.780
And the answer to that is yes, of course, we call him Philip Melanchthon.

54:38.140 --> 54:42.460
And then the other question was whether I am partly joking about that just for those who

54:42.460 --> 54:49.900
aren't familiar with the struggle that we had in Lutheranism when Philip Melanchthon attempted to

54:49.900 --> 54:57.660
reconcile to be ecumenical with the Reformed. There are some things that happened in that pursuit

54:58.620 --> 55:05.660
with which Lutherans would not agree. So partly in jest, partly serious. But the other part,

55:05.660 --> 55:10.380
the other question here was whether there are different levels of punishment in hell,

55:10.380 --> 55:16.060
and where do we get that from? There are a few different places you get that in Scripture.

55:16.060 --> 55:23.260
There is the one where Christ speaks of various servants being varying levels of

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honest or dutiful in their tasks and the amount of the beating they will receive,

55:30.140 --> 55:35.020
if they are not. And then there is, of course, Revelation 20, which speaks of the books being

55:35.020 --> 55:42.860
opened and the deeds of the dead being assessed. What you have done in life will be assessed at

55:42.860 --> 55:49.260
the judgment and you will be rewarded or punished accordingly. And so for those who are not in Christ,

55:49.900 --> 55:56.140
there will be varying degrees of punishment because you are paying for your sins because your

55:56.140 --> 56:02.060
sins are not covered by Christ's blood because you're not in Christ. And so you are paying for

56:02.060 --> 56:07.820
those sins. Each of those sins will take you an eternity to pay, but your eternity is going to

56:07.820 --> 56:14.220
be worse if you have more of them or if you have worse sins. And so that's where we get the doctrine

56:15.180 --> 56:20.060
of the varying degrees of punishment in hell. I'm sure that question came in before we did

56:20.060 --> 56:25.820
the recent episode on all sins are not equal, and we discussed it some length. That was what the whole

56:25.820 --> 56:31.180
episode was about. Not only are the degrees of sin different, but obviously the degrees of punishment

56:31.180 --> 56:37.580
will also vary. You're still either damned or you're saved. That's a binary, but heaven and hell

56:38.140 --> 56:44.700
will not be equal for those who are in those places. God is not egalitarian. There's no

56:44.700 --> 56:51.100
equality anywhere. There's a place of honor in heaven. There's a place of honor wherever God goes,

56:51.100 --> 56:55.740
and he bestows that upon whom he chooses. And so we don't get to whine about it. Well, it's not

56:55.740 --> 57:00.780
fair. That's not equal. Yeah, you're right. It's not fair or equal. God dispenses his gifts as he

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wishes. And we are duty bound as creatures to receive them in thanksgiving and anything else

57:06.300 --> 57:13.340
of sin. The last question we're going to touch on was about our thoughts on monasticism. He said

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he understands a concern with regard to perpetual vows, but with something like short-term monastic

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houses of work, prayer, and study, be a useful tool for young men in the church. This goes back

57:25.180 --> 57:31.260
to one of my stock answers of what problem are you trying to solve? Yes, I do think that a period

57:31.340 --> 57:37.020
of prayer and study and reflection away from the wicked world would benefit young men, particularly

57:37.020 --> 57:43.020
as they're exiting, as they're entering adulthood and transitioning into the real world. On the other

57:43.020 --> 57:49.180
hand, I don't think you need monastic houses to do that. I think a young man who's been raised well

57:49.180 --> 57:57.260
by a faithful father is going to have been doing that his entire life when a son is raised in a

57:57.260 --> 58:03.980
manner that is focusing on prayer and work and study. He's going to keep doing it. Children are

58:03.980 --> 58:08.460
going to be raised up by their parents to do what they're going to do for the rest of their lives,

58:08.460 --> 58:16.300
for good or ill. So if you get to be 18, 19, 20, and you decide you need to bolt on some prayer

58:16.300 --> 58:20.780
before you get going in the world, it's already too late. You should have been doing that all

58:20.780 --> 58:27.180
along. If we lived in a world where that were actually happening, the need for that sort of

58:28.220 --> 58:34.860
spiritual halfway house would basically vanish. Men would be properly formed as they entered

58:34.860 --> 58:41.340
adulthood without needing a timeout. Even if you don't have great parents, if you're a young man,

58:41.340 --> 58:47.100
you can still create this for yourself. Spend less time on the internet, spend less time on your phone,

58:47.820 --> 58:52.460
spend more time in nature, spend more time reading the Word of God and studying,

58:53.020 --> 59:02.460
spend more time seeking out sound sources of doctrine and reflect and judge your own actions

59:02.460 --> 59:07.020
according to what you're seeing in Scripture. And if you find that you can do better as a

59:07.020 --> 59:14.380
matter of conscience, work on that. Work on your own self-development. There are many passages,

59:14.460 --> 59:20.220
particularly in the New Testament, really in all of Scripture talking about athletes as an example

59:20.220 --> 59:27.660
of godly formation. When the body is disciplined, it's the same as the mind being disciplined.

59:28.220 --> 59:34.940
All of these things are beneficial. We're not just souls stuck in meat and we're not just bodies

59:34.940 --> 59:40.860
with no immortal soul. God puts all of these things together in one. We have a body, a mind, and a

59:40.860 --> 59:46.300
soul. Those are the words we use for it. We're not exactly sure how those are constituted in

59:46.300 --> 59:50.940
such a way that you can subdivide them. It doesn't matter. Those are philosophical questions that,

59:50.940 --> 59:57.180
frankly, I find kind of toxic because you go down that rabbit trail and suddenly you want to try

59:57.180 --> 01:00:03.580
to derive conclusions that are supported by the evidence. We know that if the body dies, the soul

01:00:03.580 --> 01:00:10.220
departs. We know that if you fracture someone's mind, the body can wither and die. We know that you

01:00:10.220 --> 01:00:16.940
can destroy a soul in place and leave just a shell of a human being through horrific things that are

01:00:16.940 --> 01:00:22.140
done to some people. All of those things are bad things. Let's focus on just not doing that,

01:00:22.140 --> 01:00:28.780
preserving the body, the mind, and the soul together. As God's put it together in the context of a young

01:00:28.780 --> 01:00:35.420
man being raised up or a young woman, focus on living a godly life as you are being brought up.

01:00:35.900 --> 01:00:41.500
You shouldn't get to your adulthood and realize you need to play spiritual catch-up. If you get

01:00:41.500 --> 01:00:47.180
to that point and you need to, yes, you should absolutely play spiritual catch-up, but proper

01:00:47.180 --> 01:00:53.740
formation of our youth obviates the need for nunneries and monasteries. As Lutherans, we,

01:00:53.740 --> 01:01:01.100
of course, do object to perpetual vows and to monasticism generally. We would not approve

01:01:01.180 --> 01:01:09.100
of monasteries or nunneries. However, just go camping. Take your Bible with you. Go out in nature,

01:01:09.100 --> 01:01:15.340
sit there and read. If you need some time away to spend time in the Word, do it. There are easy

01:01:15.340 --> 01:01:21.020
ways to do it. You don't even have to go particularly far. Go to a park and sit with your Bible.

01:01:22.060 --> 01:01:29.340
Now, are there benefits to having some time off from the world away from things to focus on God?

01:01:29.340 --> 01:01:33.580
Of course, absolutely. But again, you can do that by going camping with your Bible.

01:01:34.140 --> 01:01:40.140
You can go on a men's retreat. There are various things you can do that are not monasticism.

01:01:41.100 --> 01:01:46.780
And I will link it in the show notes. It's actually one of the longer articles in the

01:01:46.780 --> 01:01:53.660
Augsburg Confession is the one in which we condemn monasticism. That's article 27. I'll link both

01:01:54.620 --> 01:01:59.980
the confession and the apology of it. It is one of the longer articles because it was a very

01:01:59.980 --> 01:02:07.260
serious problem at the time and remains so in the case of Rome and the East. So for the

01:02:07.260 --> 01:02:14.380
pre-Reformation sects. And so no, we would not approve of monasticism, but there are certain

01:02:15.580 --> 01:02:21.580
practices that are associated with the monastic life that are not bad. So taking time away from

01:02:21.580 --> 01:02:27.900
the world to focus on God is entirely fine. Separating yourself entirely from the world

01:02:27.900 --> 01:02:33.660
to supposedly focus on God is not because all you're doing is separating yourself from your

01:02:33.660 --> 01:02:38.220
neighbor and refusing to actually serve God in the ways that he has told you to serve him

01:02:38.860 --> 01:02:44.380
and pretending that you have made this holy life for yourself when in fact all you're doing is

01:02:44.380 --> 01:02:52.060
rebelling against God. As a historical note, it's important I think to mention that monasticism

01:02:52.060 --> 01:02:59.340
for both men and women as it was practiced by the time of Luther, a lot of that was specifically

01:02:59.340 --> 01:03:05.340
financial. It was a financial trick employed by the Roman Catholic Church basically to interrupt

01:03:05.340 --> 01:03:11.420
inheritance because since the monks and the nuns couldn't inherit property, if they could get

01:03:12.220 --> 01:03:17.420
the descendants of someone in the church and everyone was in the church to become

01:03:18.380 --> 01:03:23.100
non-inheritors, it pretty much guaranteed that their property upon their death would be transferred

01:03:23.100 --> 01:03:28.700
to the church. So it was actually a financing, it was a fundraising drive. They would steal their

01:03:28.700 --> 01:03:34.540
children, commit them to lifelong bows of these obscenities, and then oh by the way when you die

01:03:34.540 --> 01:03:38.860
we'll take all your property. So it was one of the main ways that the Roman Catholic Church

01:03:38.860 --> 01:03:43.500
enriched itself. So today we don't think about or talk about that stuff and we think oh you know

01:03:43.500 --> 01:03:49.820
there's a monastery and they're praying and they're making beer or whatever. That was a small part of

01:03:49.820 --> 01:03:55.420
it. That was a machine, it was a financial machine. So if you want to try to have some

01:03:55.420 --> 01:03:59.980
trad fantasy, get serious about looking at what they were actually doing because there was a great

01:03:59.980 --> 01:04:06.140
deal more to it. And oh by the way abortions were very common in nunneries and sodomy was very

01:04:06.140 --> 01:04:12.300
common in the monasteries in the 1500s. That's something that's referred to obliquely in the

01:04:12.300 --> 01:04:17.420
Book of Concord. It also goes back another 500 years before that, Saint Peter Damien,

01:04:17.420 --> 01:04:25.100
one of the doctors of the Roman Catholic Church himself condemned the obscene sexual abuses that

01:04:25.100 --> 01:04:32.220
were occurring within those places in the Roman Catholic Church. So these places that were told

01:04:32.220 --> 01:04:40.780
oh it's just quiet reflection on God and prayer, no. The vows of celibacy led directly to egregious

01:04:40.780 --> 01:04:47.580
sexual sin as they always do. One important point that just as an aside I think is worth making,

01:04:48.220 --> 01:04:55.820
celibacy is a gift from God. It is a specific gift. If you hear my voice you are almost certainly

01:04:55.820 --> 01:05:01.020
not celibate. It is so rare. You've probably never met anyone who's celibate. Well that

01:05:01.020 --> 01:05:05.980
doesn't make sense because you're listening and you're not a fornicator. Yes, that's exactly the

01:05:05.980 --> 01:05:13.660
point. Celibate is not the antonym for having sex. Celibate is basically what is referred to today

01:05:13.660 --> 01:05:20.700
as asexuality. It's someone who has no desire whatsoever for the opposite sex. That is incredibly

01:05:20.700 --> 01:05:27.740
rare. And now today when people talk about being asexual a lot of them just have mental problems.

01:05:27.820 --> 01:05:31.260
I'm not saying all the people who say they're asexual have a gift from God.

01:05:31.260 --> 01:05:36.940
Most of them probably have a demon. But God has on occasion made people who simply do not have any

01:05:36.940 --> 01:05:43.100
desire. If you have ever had sexual desire for a member of the opposite sex you are not celibate.

01:05:43.100 --> 01:05:48.540
You are simply not a fornicator. So if you have desire and you burn with desire you should be

01:05:48.540 --> 01:05:53.820
married so that you can live a godly life and that desire can be fulfilled in a godly fashion.

01:05:53.820 --> 01:06:00.780
The opposite is not celibacy. So it's just a point to make because I think it's very dangerous when

01:06:00.780 --> 01:06:06.700
we conflate that term and then try to hold people to impossible standards.

01:06:08.940 --> 01:06:14.780
Young men you're not celibate. You're not married. And the implication of not being married is that

01:06:14.780 --> 01:06:21.420
you're not having sex. That should be the default. If you're not married you're either being chased

01:06:21.420 --> 01:06:26.140
or you're being a fornicator. And then if you are married you should be having sex

01:06:26.700 --> 01:06:31.660
except for periods of abstention with the agreement of both parties. That's what God says.

01:06:32.300 --> 01:06:37.500
Everything else is weird and sinful. So just stick to the basics. It's not complicated.

01:06:40.300 --> 01:06:45.500
So to wrap up we just want to talk a little bit about the progress we made in growing the

01:06:45.500 --> 01:06:49.900
audience for this podcast in the last six months. We went from absolutely nothing,

01:06:50.460 --> 01:06:54.860
no advertising budget, no curb appeal, no reason for anyone to listen to us.

01:06:55.420 --> 01:07:00.780
I've said before in private that when we started this I hope that we would get past the point that

01:07:00.780 --> 01:07:07.100
most of our friends would be kind of pity listening. So if we got passed about 50 listeners

01:07:07.100 --> 01:07:10.780
every week I was going to be pretty happy. That was kind of the first threshold for,

01:07:10.780 --> 01:07:16.620
okay, somebody's actually paying attention and maybe they care. We very rapidly blew past that.

01:07:16.620 --> 01:07:22.300
The growth has been very, very steady week over week and month over month. And it's been entirely

01:07:22.300 --> 01:07:26.620
word of mouth. It's been you, the listener, sharing it with friends, people at church,

01:07:26.620 --> 01:07:32.540
coworkers, just friends you know. Sometimes individual episodes, sometimes recommending

01:07:32.540 --> 01:07:36.380
the entire podcast series as a whole. We're very thankful for all of that.

01:07:36.460 --> 01:07:42.700
We never wanted to do this just to be shouting into the void, but at the same time it's very

01:07:42.700 --> 01:07:48.060
much appreciated that people see and hear some value in what it is that we're saying.

01:07:48.060 --> 01:07:52.700
And I think that the feedback that we've gotten has been very much along the lines of

01:07:52.700 --> 01:07:58.940
what we set out to do, which was to talk about the things that almost everybody else is afraid

01:07:58.940 --> 01:08:04.700
to talk about. Talk about them in an intelligent fashion, in a fearless fashion, that just goes

01:08:04.700 --> 01:08:10.540
through things that are actually impactful in the world and sheds some light on them.

01:08:10.540 --> 01:08:16.060
Not new light. We make the case as often as we can. We're not saying anything new about this.

01:08:16.060 --> 01:08:21.820
We're saying things that generally everyone used to think. And then at some point they went away.

01:08:21.820 --> 01:08:26.700
As Christians, we should want to be connected with what Christians have always believed.

01:08:26.700 --> 01:08:33.260
That's always an important question. So today, we're going from zero, going from me and Corey

01:08:33.260 --> 01:08:37.580
being the only listeners every morning as we had prepped the show to make sure it sounded good.

01:08:38.540 --> 01:08:43.100
One of the things that was important to us was the audio quality. It was hilarious to me when

01:08:43.660 --> 01:08:49.500
issues, etc., put those clips of us on their show. Our audio quality was actually better than

01:08:49.500 --> 01:08:55.820
theirs somehow in the same recording. I guess that's a function of how they have their voices

01:08:55.820 --> 01:09:00.620
compressed and stuff. But it actually sounds really good. And that was important to us. Corey and I

01:09:00.620 --> 01:09:06.460
both spent a fair amount of money on mics and hardware and software specifically so that

01:09:06.460 --> 01:09:10.780
this could be listenable. Because we knew that the things that we were going to be saying,

01:09:10.780 --> 01:09:14.860
we're going to be hard to hear. We wanted to make sure that actually hearing them would at least

01:09:14.860 --> 01:09:20.060
be an easy experience. So I think we pulled that off. I'm happy with how it sounds. There was

01:09:20.060 --> 01:09:24.860
some somebody making fun of my voice yesterday. I don't like my voice either, dude. It's what God

01:09:24.860 --> 01:09:32.220
gave me. It's what I got. Someone specifically said I was low T. Whatever. The irony is that

01:09:32.220 --> 01:09:37.740
a lot of my voice is below about 100 hertz. But I have to chop it all off because it doesn't come

01:09:37.740 --> 01:09:42.780
through as a pleasing baritone on the mic. It just comes through as a boomy. So I have to chop

01:09:42.780 --> 01:09:49.580
all the low end of my voice off. Not because it's a pleasing rumble. It sounds bad. I've done it

01:09:49.660 --> 01:09:55.020
both ways and listened. It would sound much worse if you heard all of my voice. So you're hearing

01:09:55.020 --> 01:09:58.700
some of the higher stuff, but that's typical in audio. Generally you have to roll off at about

01:09:58.700 --> 01:10:04.620
100 hertz. We cared about that stuff. So I could make myself sound deeper. I am not using a voice

01:10:04.620 --> 01:10:09.980
changer. This is what I sound like all the time. The funny thing is that before I bought this really

01:10:09.980 --> 01:10:16.460
fancy mic, I had a much lower regard for my voice because I'd only ever heard shoddy recordings of

01:10:16.460 --> 01:10:23.420
my voice. So I was actually pleased when I recorded it on good equipment. It didn't sound as bad as I

01:10:23.420 --> 01:10:28.220
thought. And it's worth noting that none of you have ever heard your own voice until you've heard

01:10:28.220 --> 01:10:34.220
recording. What you hear in your head is not only going through the air to your ears, but it's also

01:10:34.220 --> 01:10:39.100
going straight through all the meat in your head to your ears. So there's a muffled version of your

01:10:39.100 --> 01:10:43.980
voice going straight from your voice box into your eardrum without passing through the air,

01:10:43.980 --> 01:10:48.700
which is why all of us sound really weird on recordings. That's what everybody else hears.

01:10:48.700 --> 01:10:52.060
So I wish you could hear the sound of my voice in my head. I think it sounds better, but

01:10:53.340 --> 01:10:56.140
that's not real. That's not who I really am. This is who I really am.

01:10:57.580 --> 01:11:02.700
When we got set, we wanted to make sure it sounded good because we wanted to be a good

01:11:02.700 --> 01:11:08.140
podcast. We wanted to be listenable and enjoyable. I've listened to thousands of hours of podcasts

01:11:08.140 --> 01:11:12.380
and wanted to make sure that this was worth listening to in addition to the content, but

01:11:12.380 --> 01:11:17.740
that it was just sound good and be easy to hear. So thank you for those who have complimented us

01:11:17.740 --> 01:11:23.180
on the sound of those things as well. And so just to give some rough information about

01:11:23.900 --> 01:11:28.140
sort of how many listeners we have, how many total downloads and things like that,

01:11:29.740 --> 01:11:35.980
I want to start off by pointing out that we do not actually have particularly invasive tracking

01:11:35.980 --> 01:11:42.380
set up. So a lot of this is some math on my end and a bit of guesswork admittedly,

01:11:43.100 --> 01:11:49.340
because we just don't have invasive analytics. We're not tracking every single download and

01:11:49.340 --> 01:11:54.780
where it was downloaded and the device and all of that stuff. We're not doing that. That's not

01:11:54.780 --> 01:12:01.420
our goal here. You do that if you're trying to sell your podcast to advertisers. And one,

01:12:01.420 --> 01:12:08.220
we're not. And two, probably a fairly limited pool of advertisers. If we were so inclined,

01:12:08.220 --> 01:12:13.180
I can think of maybe one or two who would actually be interested, but not something we

01:12:13.180 --> 01:12:19.900
have in mind. As we mentioned, this is not something we're doing to make money. If we were

01:12:19.900 --> 01:12:24.540
doing this to make money, you would have to conclude that we're both idiots, because this

01:12:24.540 --> 01:12:29.740
is one of the worst possible ways you could try to do that, because we are going to offend

01:12:29.740 --> 01:12:35.020
basically everyone at some point. Everyone has idols and we're going to step on all of them.

01:12:37.180 --> 01:12:45.820
But anyway, to look at some rough numbers, if I look at the total number of downloads,

01:12:46.700 --> 01:12:49.820
and then do a little bit of math to figure out the actual ultimate number,

01:12:50.540 --> 01:12:58.220
we have somewhere between 70 and 75,000 total episode downloads so far.

01:13:00.220 --> 01:13:09.980
Now, I don't have a complete breakdown of that by episode, because I was not tracking that

01:13:09.980 --> 01:13:17.020
initially. I was just tracking the total number of downloads. And so do some very simple math. If

01:13:17.020 --> 01:13:24.140
you have 75,000 total, that's about 2,900 downloads per episode. If you assume the

01:13:24.140 --> 01:13:29.580
episodes are equal, they're not, some have more downloads than others. But that is about

01:13:31.100 --> 01:13:36.780
right on track now that I have per episode information, because we're at right around

01:13:36.780 --> 01:13:44.540
2,100, say for episode 22 and a little less for episode 23 and a little less than 23 for 24,

01:13:44.540 --> 01:13:49.820
because we have a long tail on these episodes. People are continuing to download them as they

01:13:49.820 --> 01:14:01.020
remain up. But we are getting right around 1,200 to maybe 1,500 depending downloads right away

01:14:01.020 --> 01:14:06.780
on release day. And so that represents the number of people we have who have subscribed in the

01:14:06.780 --> 01:14:12.700
various podcast apps, which we're quite pleased with that number. It's a good number. And then

01:14:12.700 --> 01:14:17.900
even more so with the number of, like I said, the long tail, the number of people who are

01:14:17.900 --> 01:14:24.460
continuing to download, share these episodes, listen to them weeks, months after the fact.

01:14:25.980 --> 01:14:31.740
We do not have a podcast where people are just listening on the day of release,

01:14:32.380 --> 01:14:36.860
deleting it and then ever thinking about it again, which of course is not what we want. We don't

01:14:36.860 --> 01:14:41.660
want people to never think about these issues again. These are important issues about which

01:14:41.660 --> 01:14:47.180
Christians should be continuing to think. And so some will return to these episodes

01:14:47.180 --> 01:14:52.860
when they have questions or when someone else asks a question, they want to provide an answer.

01:14:52.860 --> 01:14:59.020
Here's an episode about this specific question. And we see that we see spikes in downloads for

01:14:59.020 --> 01:15:05.420
certain episodes sometimes where someone has shared it somewhere. Sometimes we happen to notice

01:15:05.420 --> 01:15:09.980
the share. Sometimes we don't because some of these are shared in group chats to which we are not

01:15:09.980 --> 01:15:16.620
party. But we know that this is being shared, that the information is being spread, and it is basically

01:15:17.420 --> 01:15:23.180
all been organic at this point. We've been boosted a few times by people on Twitter and elsewhere

01:15:23.180 --> 01:15:30.060
who've liked the content, but it has been an entirely organic thing, how this podcast has

01:15:30.060 --> 01:15:35.420
spread and grown. So the reason we're talking about this is that if you are listening, we just

01:15:35.420 --> 01:15:41.420
want you to know you're in good company. If you happen to stumble across us and have no idea of

01:15:41.500 --> 01:15:45.660
it, it's just too crazy guys shouting into a microphone and then you basically with a

01:15:46.380 --> 01:15:52.620
shortwave radio tuning in in your cabin. It's not that isolated. There are thousands of people

01:15:52.620 --> 01:15:57.900
who are listening right along with you. And some of them are hate listeners. The guy I mentioned

01:15:57.900 --> 01:16:02.060
to was making fun of me yesterday, whatever dude. I'm glad you're listening. I think it's hilarious

01:16:02.060 --> 01:16:07.260
that we have hate listeners because they're keeping up with the latest episodes. They're listening.

01:16:07.260 --> 01:16:13.340
They're listening in every word we say. And all they can do is make fun. There's been no serious

01:16:13.340 --> 01:16:18.620
critique of our content. Even when we were on issues, et cetera, last week, it wasn't a serious

01:16:18.620 --> 01:16:25.900
critique. It was absurd. It was laughably goofy. They would play a very charitable clip. I was

01:16:25.900 --> 01:16:31.820
very thankful that when Jeff edited those clips, he was very fair. He put our entire argument

01:16:31.820 --> 01:16:36.940
on the air, which shocked me because the other guy who was on there had not done that on his own

01:16:36.940 --> 01:16:43.740
show, which was even more ham-fisted. So they would air a complete clip of us making an argument,

01:16:43.740 --> 01:16:48.460
and then Todd would say, so what did we just hear? And then the other guy would make some

01:16:48.460 --> 01:16:52.780
absurd comments that had literally nothing to do with what we had just said. Like I said,

01:16:52.780 --> 01:16:57.820
it was the best unpaid advertisement we ever could have hoped for. And so I hope that lots of people

01:16:57.820 --> 01:17:03.500
will discover us as a result of them trying to make fun of us and saying we're heretics and whatever.

01:17:03.500 --> 01:17:07.340
If you're listening, at least some of you think we're heretics, some of you hate us and want to

01:17:07.340 --> 01:17:12.460
make fun of us, we're glad you're listening. I hope that something we say will reach your heart too,

01:17:12.460 --> 01:17:17.980
because this isn't coming from us. We think that what we're saying is consonant with what God has

01:17:17.980 --> 01:17:22.300
said. So to everyone else, which is the majority of our listeners, certainly thank you very much

01:17:22.300 --> 01:17:27.740
for sharing it, for recommending to others, for spending the time listening to our voices.

01:17:28.940 --> 01:17:32.540
It's flattering and humbling that anyone would care what we have to say.

01:17:32.620 --> 01:17:37.100
I've said in the past, I spend most of my time getting called retarded for saying this stuff,

01:17:37.100 --> 01:17:43.660
because people don't get it. And it's nice for us to have the opportunity for a long-form discussion

01:17:43.660 --> 01:17:50.060
to make the case clearly. When people have asked me in person to defend some of the things that

01:17:50.060 --> 01:17:57.260
we've said here, it's a little puzzling for someone to think that a two-hour episode could fit in

01:17:57.260 --> 01:18:00.380
to part of a conversation that's not going to be that long.

01:18:01.580 --> 01:18:05.580
The nice thing about us being able to sit here and talk is that we can cover all the bases,

01:18:05.580 --> 01:18:11.420
at least ones we think are important. I think one of the best examples is Cory's tweet from

01:18:11.420 --> 01:18:17.500
last Friday about interracial marriage. It was like one sentence, got 600,000 plus views,

01:18:17.500 --> 01:18:23.180
got the whole world riled up condemning him. And then on Monday, you did about a half-hour

01:18:23.180 --> 01:18:29.660
podcast where you just discussed your explanation for it. And the few people who listened to that

01:18:29.660 --> 01:18:34.380
explanation most of them are like, okay, I can see that argument. That's the way this stuff works.

01:18:34.380 --> 01:18:38.540
You can't have a good discussion on Twitter. You can't have a good short-form discussion.

01:18:38.540 --> 01:18:43.580
You can light a fuse. You can shine a light. But that's all it does. To actually have a serious

01:18:43.580 --> 01:18:47.660
discussion about this stuff takes time. And so we're appreciative to everyone who would spend

01:18:47.660 --> 01:18:54.460
the time to actually hear us out because that's important. It's important to whatever it is that

01:18:54.460 --> 01:18:59.340
you think you want to focus on, spend some time on it. And we're glad the folks would spend some

01:18:59.340 --> 01:19:05.820
time with us. One of the things I wanted to mention is discoverability. If you listen to us,

01:19:05.820 --> 01:19:10.940
if you happen to listen on the web, please subscribe through whatever your platform's

01:19:10.940 --> 01:19:19.100
podcast player is. Those subscription stats help the engines of recommendation to recommend podcast

01:19:19.100 --> 01:19:25.980
to other people. Stonequire shows up with issues, et cetera. And a number of other shows, some are

01:19:25.980 --> 01:19:31.820
related to religion, some aren't, which is great. I'm glad that there are people who have diverse

01:19:31.820 --> 01:19:37.420
interests who are also tuning into this. We show up in the Christianity podcast listings.

01:19:38.060 --> 01:19:41.580
If you use one of those, we're going to ask you to take a few minutes,

01:19:41.580 --> 01:19:47.180
maybe a few minutes, take 20 seconds to go and please leave a five star review. We don't say

01:19:47.180 --> 01:19:51.900
five stars because you necessarily agree with everything. It's just that on a scale of one

01:19:51.900 --> 01:19:57.020
to five, if you want to say what you actually think and you say like a three or four, it drags

01:19:57.020 --> 01:20:01.260
down the score in such a way that when someone glances, you're just like on Yelp or anything

01:20:01.260 --> 01:20:06.460
else. Five stars, like, oh, that's amazing. That must be a great show. If you get down to 4.8,

01:20:06.460 --> 01:20:11.020
people are thinking, yeah, maybe. If something's like a three and a half, people think, that's

01:20:11.020 --> 01:20:20.060
mediocre. I'm not going to waste my time. Right now, we have like 56 reviews on the iOS listings,

01:20:20.620 --> 01:20:26.380
and we have a score like 4.5. We've had a few hate listeners leave some comments and their

01:20:26.380 --> 01:20:30.300
feedback, one star reviews. There will be more of this now that we're mentioning it. We had

01:20:30.300 --> 01:20:34.460
debated for a while whether we would say anything because some of the people who are so filled with

01:20:34.460 --> 01:20:39.900
hate will want to prevent anyone from discovering this podcast. Now that we're mentioning it,

01:20:39.900 --> 01:20:45.420
it is important for you if you listen and you like it at all, please leave us five stars.

01:20:45.420 --> 01:20:52.220
It's cheap. It's easy, and it will help improve discoverability. If we could get up to 500 reviews

01:20:52.220 --> 01:20:56.460
of whatever numbers, that makes a big difference in the engine saying, hey, there's something you

01:20:56.460 --> 01:21:02.700
could check out because as great as words of mouth has been, one of the fascinating things

01:21:02.700 --> 01:21:06.460
we've gotten in feedback from the show is that people as recently as this week have said,

01:21:07.180 --> 01:21:11.340
I knew what you guys were like on Twitter. I wasn't sure what to expect on the podcast.

01:21:11.340 --> 01:21:17.420
What I got was completely different than what I expected. We're sane, arguably,

01:21:17.420 --> 01:21:23.580
as sane as intelligent men can be. We're reasonable. We make our cases calmly and clearly.

01:21:23.580 --> 01:21:29.020
So folks who just stumble onto the podcast generally like it. We're stomping on idols,

01:21:29.020 --> 01:21:33.420
so there's absolutely content that's going to set people's hair on fire and they're going to hate it.

01:21:33.980 --> 01:21:38.700
It is what it is. I'm not worried about that. But if you like the show, if you like other people

01:21:38.700 --> 01:21:43.660
to discover it, please take a minute and leave a five-star review on whatever service you use.

01:21:43.660 --> 01:21:50.860
If it's Spotify, Google, Apple, whatever, that helps other people find us and help to continue to

01:21:51.420 --> 01:21:56.140
spread a message that we think is worth hearing. And if you're listening, hopefully you do as well.

01:21:56.140 --> 01:22:00.140
I know that some people have commented. I've had DMs and other things.

01:22:01.580 --> 01:22:07.740
They've said that I am a different person on Twitter versus on the podcast versus on my own

01:22:07.740 --> 01:22:17.020
podcast. And I would reject the frame that I am a different person. It is that different media

01:22:17.580 --> 01:22:24.220
warrant a different approach. And this is related to something that I've mentioned before. We have a

01:22:24.700 --> 01:22:31.900
flattening of behavior, of conduct in the modern context, particularly in the U.S. for various

01:22:31.900 --> 01:22:40.940
reasons. People behave, dress, speak the same everywhere these days. That's very unusual. That

01:22:40.940 --> 01:22:47.900
is not historically how human beings conducted themselves. You did not dress, act, and speak

01:22:47.900 --> 01:22:53.500
the same way on Sunday morning at church as you did at the pub with your friends after work on

01:22:53.500 --> 01:23:00.700
Friday or at home with your wife and children. You tailored these things to your audience,

01:23:00.700 --> 01:23:08.060
to the environment. And that is just exactly what I'm doing when I engage in a certain way on Twitter

01:23:08.060 --> 01:23:15.180
because Twitter, the only real use of Twitter, unless you're purely using it for some sort of

01:23:15.180 --> 01:23:21.980
entertainment, which I guess you can do that. But the way to engage on Twitter is that you

01:23:21.980 --> 01:23:28.940
actually have to get people to read what you say. You have to get them to want to respond to it.

01:23:29.500 --> 01:23:33.180
And so you have to get them to engage with it. Otherwise, there's really no purpose

01:23:33.180 --> 01:23:40.060
in it. You're just shouting into a void. And so I engage in a certain way to get that response

01:23:40.060 --> 01:23:44.060
because if you don't get the response, you can't teach because you don't get the person to listen.

01:23:44.780 --> 01:23:49.100
And so as was mentioned, yes, only a handful of people are going to bother clicking through

01:23:49.180 --> 01:23:55.340
and listening to the full explanation. But I did get the person to think about the topic.

01:23:56.540 --> 01:24:01.900
That is now something that has at least come up in his mind. And maybe at some point in the future,

01:24:02.460 --> 01:24:08.860
he will be willing to listen more on that topic. And so yes, I do engage in a different way in

01:24:09.420 --> 01:24:14.460
different contexts. And that's just the way that everything has been done historically.

01:24:14.460 --> 01:24:20.780
That is, I would say, the proper way to do things. The tweet you mentioned that I mentioned earlier,

01:24:20.780 --> 01:24:26.620
the episode as well, I think it's kind of burned itself out now. It's at three quarters of a million

01:24:26.620 --> 01:24:30.300
views. Who knows, someone could pick it up and it could hit a million by the time this podcast

01:24:30.300 --> 01:24:38.060
episode is released tomorrow. But well, exactly, that's how you engage. You get people to respond

01:24:38.060 --> 01:24:46.300
to it. And so yes, I am more polemical on Twitter than I am on this podcast. Because the point of

01:24:46.300 --> 01:24:52.700
this podcast isn't pure polemics. We do engage in polemics to some degree. But it's not pure polemics.

01:24:52.700 --> 01:24:59.340
Twitter is largely polemical. And so I'm going to say things on Twitter that are going to set

01:24:59.340 --> 01:25:03.660
your hair on fire from time to time. But that's Twitter. That's just what it is.

01:25:04.380 --> 01:25:08.620
Speaking of setting your hair on fire, the last thing we wanted to mention ties into something

01:25:08.620 --> 01:25:14.860
you said a minute ago. When we first started Stonequire, within a few weeks, Corey had a

01:25:14.860 --> 01:25:20.700
number of DMs requesting some sort of tip jar or something. And so he eventually set it up.

01:25:21.900 --> 01:25:25.820
I think largely just kind of as an experiment. We didn't know if anyone would use it.

01:25:25.820 --> 01:25:31.340
We've never mentioned it before anywhere. As we said, in the paywalling episode,

01:25:31.980 --> 01:25:38.060
Corey said earlier, this is not a money making enterprise for us. However, we do have a donation

01:25:38.060 --> 01:25:43.100
link at the top and the bottom of the top of your page on the Stonequire page in the footer.

01:25:43.900 --> 01:25:49.740
It's there so that if you would like to support what we're doing, you're able to throw us a few

01:25:49.740 --> 01:25:55.100
bucks. We're not asking for anybody's money. We're not saying you're a freeloader if you

01:25:55.100 --> 01:26:00.700
don't send us any money. And I mentioned this in the specific context of smashing idols and

01:26:00.780 --> 01:26:04.940
lighting hair on fire because if we haven't offended you yet, I'm certain at some point

01:26:04.940 --> 01:26:10.620
we're going to. So before anyone would ever even consider sending us a dime, which we're not asking

01:26:10.620 --> 01:26:16.780
for. But if you say, oh, there's a tip jar. I want to send them a few bucks. If you would send us

01:26:16.780 --> 01:26:22.380
$5 or whatever. And then in two months, we say something that you find incredibly offensive.

01:26:22.380 --> 01:26:26.940
You're like, I hate those guys. I feel so ripped off and betrayed. If you think that you could have

01:26:26.940 --> 01:26:31.580
that response in the future, please don't send us any money. I would much rather you not feel burned

01:26:31.580 --> 01:26:38.060
by us saying what we think is the truth because you didn't send us anything. So we're only mentioning

01:26:38.060 --> 01:26:43.580
it now because we've had a number of people who have sent us gifts, all of whom have been very

01:26:43.580 --> 01:26:48.780
generous. And we want to just take a minute to acknowledge that so far that what they have

01:26:48.780 --> 01:26:53.420
sent has basically just kind of been vanishing into a black hole. And we decided that's not really

01:26:53.420 --> 01:26:58.620
fair. So to each and every one of you who sent anything, thank you from the bottom of our hearts.

01:26:58.620 --> 01:27:06.060
It means a great deal. It's already offset the cost of what we had put into building, not studios,

01:27:06.060 --> 01:27:11.500
but our microphones and setups and stuff. We're very thankful for that. I've sent people money

01:27:11.500 --> 01:27:16.060
before just for similar things. So I totally get it. You're voting with your wallets.

01:27:17.340 --> 01:27:22.460
We're only mentioning this to say thank you. There are about 30 things that I would tell you

01:27:22.460 --> 01:27:27.260
to give money to before I would say to give us a dime. So the fact that we're mentioning this is

01:27:27.260 --> 01:27:32.220
not a solicitation. We had to mention it to be able to say thank you to those who've given anything.

01:27:32.220 --> 01:27:37.580
There are a whole lot of things that need our money. You need your money more than we do.

01:27:37.580 --> 01:27:41.660
For those of you who voted with your wallets by saying thank you for what we're doing here,

01:27:41.660 --> 01:27:46.700
we're eternally grateful. It's very generous of you and it is greatly appreciated and it's humbling.

01:27:46.940 --> 01:27:52.700
In a way, it's also kind of incrementally enslaving us because if you say, hey,

01:27:52.700 --> 01:27:58.140
this is valuable, here's a few bucks. To me, that tells me I'm on the hook to continue to deliver.

01:27:58.140 --> 01:28:04.700
So I appreciate the enslavement. It's a good reminder that what we're doing here is not for

01:28:04.700 --> 01:28:09.180
ourselves. It's something we're doing for God's glory and we're doing it for your edification

01:28:09.180 --> 01:28:13.500
and to know that that's actually happening is very rewarding. So thank you.

01:28:14.220 --> 01:28:19.100
I guess that's also a peek behind the curtain as to how I make some of the design decisions for

01:28:19.100 --> 01:28:27.100
the site and such because at first, I had those who asked about the ability to donate and so I

01:28:27.100 --> 01:28:31.740
generated a donation link and it wasn't really anywhere on the site, but it was available for

01:28:31.740 --> 01:28:36.940
people if they really wanted to find it. But then people kept asking me about it. So I put it in the

01:28:36.940 --> 01:28:43.660
footer, but then people kept asking me about where it was on the site. So then I also added

01:28:43.660 --> 01:28:49.500
a donate link to the top in part to head off having to answer where the link was.

01:28:49.500 --> 01:28:54.940
And so that's a peek behind the curtain as it were to part of my design philosophy,

01:28:54.940 --> 01:28:59.500
which is to head off questions. So now we look like grifters because we're putting

01:28:59.500 --> 01:29:04.460
donate links everywhere. It's literally just so if you want to use it, we're not going to put the

01:29:04.460 --> 01:29:08.700
donation link in the show notes. We're not going to tell you where it is. Don't go looking for it.

01:29:08.700 --> 01:29:13.820
Don't worry about it. But for someone who's frustrated by that, you know where to find it.

01:29:13.820 --> 01:29:18.940
But we're literally just saying thank you to folks who have taken advantage of that

01:29:18.940 --> 01:29:25.100
because it's humbling and rewarding. And like you said, it has offset the cost of the hardware

01:29:25.100 --> 01:29:31.020
certainly and the software cost as well, which is something we never expected. I mean, that's not

01:29:31.820 --> 01:29:34.780
we've said from the beginning. It's not why we're doing it. We're not going to change anything about

01:29:34.780 --> 01:29:40.540
what we do. We'll probably never mention it again. So if someone new does donate, we're never going

01:29:40.540 --> 01:29:46.300
to, I'm not going to say never. I think it's unlikely that we'll say anything for at least

01:29:46.300 --> 01:29:52.700
probably the rest of this year because that's not the point. The point is to try to be faithful

01:29:52.700 --> 01:29:58.300
to God's word and to share that with as many people as possible. And when we set this thing up

01:29:58.300 --> 01:30:05.100
originally, the hosting that Corey set up is designed to be resilient, uncancelable. We're

01:30:05.100 --> 01:30:10.220
not using any third-party podcast host, which is the reason we don't have any invasive podcast

01:30:10.220 --> 01:30:15.180
statistics. If we're using one of those hosts, we would get lots of metrics about stuff. We're

01:30:15.180 --> 01:30:21.580
both data guys, so we love that stuff. We've foregone having access to it because A, it'd be

01:30:21.580 --> 01:30:27.980
easy to cancel us, and B, we don't want to be creepy and snoopy. But we're curious about where

01:30:27.980 --> 01:30:34.940
people are coming in from, so we harvest what we can in a privacy-protecting manner. But ultimately,

01:30:34.940 --> 01:30:38.620
none of this is about numbers and it's not about self-cualification. It's just about,

01:30:39.420 --> 01:30:45.580
these are ideas we're spreading to steal the TED Talk theme once again. This stuff matters.

01:30:46.300 --> 01:30:51.500
And it matters in ways that we don't think these things should necessarily be showing up in most

01:30:51.580 --> 01:30:56.300
sermons most Sundays. We don't think this is the meat of the Christian faith. I want to make

01:30:56.940 --> 01:31:03.660
clear that that's not what we think about this stuff. We devoted five episodes to race. Race is

01:31:03.660 --> 01:31:10.060
not our hermeneutic for reading the Bible, but Satan is attacking race, so we had to address it.

01:31:10.060 --> 01:31:14.060
And a lot of people got a lot of value out of those episodes. That's why we're doing it. These are

01:31:14.060 --> 01:31:22.860
not necessarily the primary doctrines of Christianity, but Satan has learned to go after the primary

01:31:22.860 --> 01:31:28.700
doctrines. That stuff's mostly been shot down in the past. We have Pat answers for shooting down

01:31:28.700 --> 01:31:33.420
Satan's attacks on the primary stuff, so he's moving down the list. He's moving on to secondary

01:31:33.420 --> 01:31:38.220
things, because it turns out if you can get someone lying about anything, eventually you'll

01:31:38.220 --> 01:31:43.340
get them lying about everything. So Satan's not dumb. He's not resting on his laurels. We're trying

01:31:43.340 --> 01:31:49.820
to fight a rearguard action here against evil attacks on the church itself, because as long as

01:31:49.820 --> 01:31:55.580
people are adopting views from the world and confusing them with Christianity, that's a wide

01:31:55.580 --> 01:32:01.980
open door for Satan to just run wild. There's nothing stopping him once he sneaks in like that.

01:32:01.980 --> 01:32:06.940
So the seemingly eclectic set of issues that we've talked about in the past, and it's always going

01:32:06.940 --> 01:32:11.980
to be kind of a weird grab bag. It's not that we're scattered. It's that there's a pattern of where

01:32:11.980 --> 01:32:17.020
Satan is going after the Christian faith, and it looks random, which is why people aren't picking

01:32:17.020 --> 01:32:23.580
up on it. There's no direct connection between slavery and feminism unless you listen to feminist,

01:32:23.580 --> 01:32:27.100
and then they tell you, you know, we've been accused of lying about that when that's literally what

01:32:27.100 --> 01:32:32.700
those people are saying. So the random grab bag of stuff that we talk about, it's what's happening

01:32:32.700 --> 01:32:38.060
in the world. So as long as the battle continues to move and evolve, we'll continue to shine a

01:32:38.060 --> 01:32:43.740
bright light on it so that if someone wants to hear what's coming next, where the attack is,

01:32:43.740 --> 01:32:51.340
we can hopefully arm some of you to be able to at least see it. And seeing it is all I would ask,

01:32:51.340 --> 01:32:55.820
even if you don't agree with our conclusions, at least to know that, hey, there's something going

01:32:55.820 --> 01:33:00.380
on here that I didn't know about before. That might be important, like Corey said with his tweet,

01:33:00.380 --> 01:33:05.900
you know, maybe something we say goes in one ear and out the other. And a couple years from now,

01:33:05.900 --> 01:33:10.140
it comes up again in your life in some other context. You're like, oh, I remember hearing

01:33:10.140 --> 01:33:14.460
about this. Wait, there's something going on here. I should take it seriously. That's why

01:33:14.460 --> 01:33:18.460
we're talking about this stuff. You might not believe us today, but down the road, many of you

01:33:18.460 --> 01:33:22.140
who maybe disagree about some of these things today, I hope and pray you're going to find

01:33:22.140 --> 01:33:28.940
yourself agreeing because we're not care-brained about this stuff. We're just, we're looking where

01:33:28.940 --> 01:33:34.060
the attacks are coming in. We're saying, hey, this is important too. It's not as important as Christ

01:33:34.060 --> 01:33:40.380
on the cross, but if you start denying how your own body is created, pretty soon Christ's body

01:33:40.380 --> 01:33:43.980
doesn't need to be on the cross at all because we're all just spirits. What's this body stuff about?

01:33:44.620 --> 01:33:51.500
It's very easy to have some minor peripheral error turn into absolute blasphemy against God.

01:33:51.500 --> 01:33:56.700
Satan knows what he's doing. So we're going to continue to be weird. We're going to continue to

01:33:56.700 --> 01:34:01.340
be saying things that are upsetting. We're going to continue to light people's hair on fire,

01:34:01.340 --> 01:34:06.860
not to be antagonistic, not to be trolls, but because the spirit of this age is completely at

01:34:06.860 --> 01:34:13.580
odds with the history of the Christian faith. We're not claiming to be great repristinators

01:34:13.580 --> 01:34:19.100
that are reviving something that's been lost, but you read your Bible. When I read my Bible,

01:34:19.100 --> 01:34:23.420
like I've said before, I read my Bible and I find stuff that I'm guilty of and it smacks me in the

01:34:23.420 --> 01:34:29.180
face and I find other things that I have never heard in church. I'm like, well, if my pastor says

01:34:29.180 --> 01:34:33.980
he preaches the whole counsel of God and he never says this, what's going on? And sometimes that's

01:34:33.980 --> 01:34:37.580
just the basis for some of these episodes. You're like, I've never heard that before. That's really

01:34:37.580 --> 01:34:42.700
weird. And we go looking and we find that it was on the timeline for hundreds of years and then

01:34:42.700 --> 01:34:49.340
it vanished. That's interesting. And as a church that claims to be rooted in Christ's eternal word,

01:34:49.340 --> 01:34:53.740
that's a matter of concern. So we're going to continue the same format, the same style,

01:34:54.700 --> 01:34:58.300
same mode of thought and approach. And we hope you'll stick with us and we hope you'll share

01:34:58.300 --> 01:35:03.740
with all your friends and family. Yes, the summary then is, hear us today, believe us tomorrow.

01:35:03.740 --> 01:35:08.780
Yep. That's the story of my life. It's why I don't get upset when people don't believe me or

01:35:08.780 --> 01:35:14.140
say mean things. That's fine. I'm used to good friends thinking I was stupid for a decade or

01:35:14.140 --> 01:35:19.500
more and then eventually they'll come around and realize I was right about something. I told them

01:35:19.500 --> 01:35:25.500
10, 15, 20 years ago and sometimes I don't even get any credit and that's fine. We're not neither

01:35:25.500 --> 01:35:31.980
Corey nor I care about credit. In private, we tell people we're basically doing this stuff so

01:35:31.980 --> 01:35:38.140
that we can say the things that are true. We can take all the blame. We can start the conversations

01:35:38.140 --> 01:35:43.420
and then whatever happens to us, if we get shot down and emulated, faithful men can come in the

01:35:43.420 --> 01:35:48.700
breach behind us and can speak about these things and we will bore in the brunt of the punishment

01:35:48.700 --> 01:35:52.620
that they would have endured if they were the worst ones, the first ones to speak about it.

01:35:53.420 --> 01:35:56.380
We're going through the door first. We know it's going to hurt. We know it's going to suck.

01:35:56.380 --> 01:36:01.100
We're doing it anyway because it's important and we're hoping that other men are going to follow

01:36:01.100 --> 01:36:05.740
behind us and say, I'm sure they don't agree with everything. If you agree with anything,

01:36:06.620 --> 01:36:12.060
move the ball a little bit further down the field. Take what is true in Scripture and tell

01:36:12.060 --> 01:36:17.340
people about it, even if they've not heard before, even if it upsets them, maybe especially if it

01:36:17.340 --> 01:36:22.940
upsets them. Now, for a pastor, there's a right and wrong way to do that, but ultimately, if your

01:36:22.940 --> 01:36:29.180
people, if your flock has false beliefs in their hearts, those need to be replaced by true beliefs.

01:36:29.180 --> 01:36:34.300
That's your job as a shepherd, as a pastor. That's our job as Christians when we see a Christian

01:36:34.300 --> 01:36:40.060
brother urring to say, amen, you're not on a good path. Not to say you're going to hell if you do

01:36:40.060 --> 01:36:45.500
this, just to say this is not good for you. It's going to bear bad fruit. I don't want to see you

01:36:45.500 --> 01:36:53.340
get hurt. These conversations seem less important today than they will in the future, and we're

01:36:53.340 --> 01:36:58.380
thankful to everyone who's shared. If you've listened once in some of the episodes, I think most, if

01:36:58.380 --> 01:37:02.700
not all of them, are worth listening to a couple times. To be honest, I've listened to all of our

01:37:02.700 --> 01:37:09.340
episodes several times on par just to review what I've said myself, but also so I can use it as a

01:37:09.340 --> 01:37:14.460
library and a framework for building on what we say in the future because all the stuff is tied

01:37:14.460 --> 01:37:19.900
together in non-obvious ways. We're going to continue in the coming years to make the case that

01:37:21.260 --> 01:37:26.540
there's something going on here that's not just about Lutherans. It's about all of Christianity.

01:37:26.540 --> 01:37:33.580
We have Catholics listening. We have Presbyterians, Baptists, non-denominational. I've had messages

01:37:33.580 --> 01:37:38.540
from every corner of Christianity saying, hey, thank you for what you're saying. I've never heard

01:37:38.540 --> 01:37:43.980
anyone speak about scriptures clearly as you guys, and I really appreciate it. We appreciate hearing

01:37:43.980 --> 01:37:47.980
that because, like I said, there have been many times when those thoughtful messages have come

01:37:47.980 --> 01:37:53.580
when we are really getting kicked in the teeth. To those of you who have said nice things, to those

01:37:53.580 --> 01:37:58.220
of you who have donated or reviewed, it's deeply appreciated. It's humbling. It's not something we

01:37:58.220 --> 01:38:04.220
ever expected. Like I said, if it had gone beyond our small set of friends, we would have been happy

01:38:04.220 --> 01:38:08.700
because we would have known that we were laying the groundwork for later on. There would be a

01:38:08.700 --> 01:38:12.940
corpus of this content available that somebody would stumble across and say, hey, there's something

01:38:12.940 --> 01:38:19.340
good here. It's grown beyond our expectations, and that's by God's grace. I expect that that will

01:38:19.340 --> 01:38:25.980
continue to grow and to expand beyond places we could possibly imagine. Thank you to each

01:38:25.980 --> 01:38:29.820
and every one of our listeners. You are appreciated, and we thank you for your time.

01:38:30.540 --> 01:38:35.980
I think we'll end with an anecdote, not a personal one this time, but an anecdote, a Lutheran one,

01:38:36.860 --> 01:38:44.140
that sort of explains our outlook on this and how we view what we're doing and what we expect the

01:38:44.140 --> 01:38:52.780
results of this to be. When Luther was asked, and he was often asked this question, if he was worried

01:38:52.780 --> 01:39:01.820
about the consequences or worried about how to reach people, worried about how to teach the laity

01:39:01.820 --> 01:39:06.700
who knew very little, if anything, of the faith because of the failures of Rome,

01:39:06.700 --> 01:39:13.660
when he was asked those sorts of questions, he would respond that he wasn't worried and that he

01:39:13.660 --> 01:39:22.060
was enjoying his time drinking beer with Melanchthon because he read the word of God, put out the truth,

01:39:22.780 --> 01:39:28.700
and then the rest was in God's hands, so he felt secure. And that's the same way that we look at

01:39:28.700 --> 01:39:39.020
this. Our duty is to read God's word, to recognize God's truth, to speak that truth as best we can,

01:39:39.980 --> 01:39:46.140
and the rest is in God's hands. And so we don't have to worry about it and we don't worry about it

01:39:46.140 --> 01:39:50.140
because God will work everything together for the good.