Transcript: Episode 0027

“Listener Feedback 001”

This transcript:
  1. Was machine generated.
  2. Has not been checked for errors.
  3. May not be entirely accurate.
WEBVTT

00:00:00 – 00:00:23:	Uh huh.

00:00:23 – 00:00:41:	Welcome to the Stone Choir podcast. I am Corey J. Mahler.

00:00:41 – 00:00:42:	And I'm Woe.

00:00:42 – 00:00:47:	Today, we're recording episode 27 of Stone Choir. We realized last week that we had

00:00:47 – 00:00:52:	hit the 26th week mark, which if you're a math PhD, you'll realize that means we've

00:00:52 – 00:00:56:	been doing this for half a year at this point. We didn't miss a couple weeks when my fancy

00:00:56 – 00:01:01:	new microphone died on me early on. So it's slightly past the six months mark. But since

00:01:01 – 00:01:05:	we're right at about a half a year into this, we thought that we would take a pause for

00:01:05 – 00:01:10:	one week and do kind of a listener appreciation episode. So we're going to spend some time

00:01:10 – 00:01:16:	today on the reader listener mailbag going through some emails and some messages we've

00:01:16 – 00:01:21:	received. Talk about some of the feedback that we've gotten in the towards the end.

00:01:21 – 00:01:24:	We'll talk a little bit about some of the listener stats and just kind of give you

00:01:24 – 00:01:30:	an idea about what's going on behind the scenes and how you can help spread the word.

00:01:30 – 00:01:34:	So again, we're just going to start right in with some of the questions. You know, he's

00:01:34 – 00:01:38:	been piling up for six months. So some of these a little older to everyone who sent

00:01:38 – 00:01:42:	feedback, you know, DMs, emails, whatever, we do really appreciate it. All the kind notes

00:01:42 – 00:01:47:	we've gotten. We're not going to read those obviously, but we get regular messages from

00:01:47 – 00:01:52:	people all over the world from probably about half Lutherans, half not Lutherans, all very

00:01:52 – 00:01:58:	supportive and encouraging. And we truly appreciate that. Corey and I have been under a lot of

00:01:58 – 00:02:04:	stress from having tackle these issues. Our own church despises the fact that we are speaking

00:02:04 – 00:02:10:	publicly about these things. And we've been punished for it. We've been censored for it.

00:02:10 – 00:02:14:	And so having people say, you know, you're doing good work, please keep it up means

00:02:14 – 00:02:18:	a lot because you don't have any reason to say that apart from the fact that you think

00:02:18 – 00:02:23:	it's true. So thank you for encouraging us and helping to keep us in the fight. So again,

00:02:23 – 00:02:27:	we'll we'll dive into some of the very first message I think we have recorded from way

00:02:27 – 00:02:30:	back in the the annals of history.

00:02:30 – 00:02:37:	So for the first question from listeners, we have a question about anonymity and pseudonymity

00:02:37 – 00:02:43:	in light of what we said about the genealogy of ideas, which is to say, how do you test

00:02:43 – 00:02:51:	the genealogy of an idea if it comes from someone who is anonymous or pseudonymous? And

00:02:51 – 00:02:57:	that is a good question. Ultimately, how you would do that is you look at the source of

00:02:57 – 00:03:03:	the ideas that person is presenting because he is not the ultimate source. No man to whom

00:03:03 – 00:03:09:	you speak is going to be the ultimate source on issues like this. He could be the ultimate

00:03:09 – 00:03:16:	source on a piece of fiction or something like that, some idea that can be intrinsic

00:03:16 – 00:03:20:	or specific to an individual. But that's not going to be the case with the sort of issues

00:03:20 – 00:03:27:	we're tackling on this podcast, because the issues we're tackling are are bigger issues,

00:03:27 – 00:03:33:	they're grander issues. And so you're always going to be able to trace those back to scripture,

00:03:33 – 00:03:38:	to natural revelation, to logic, philosophy, things like that. And if you trace it back

00:03:38 – 00:03:44:	to those sources, that's what we're saying you need to test. That's the real genealogy

00:03:44 – 00:03:49:	of that idea, because it comes through the man who said it to you, but he got it from

00:03:49 – 00:03:57:	somewhere. And so even if that man happens to be pseudonymous or even anonymous, look

00:03:57 – 00:04:05:	at the source of his ideas. On this podcast, I'm not anonymous or pseudonymous, woe is

00:04:05 – 00:04:12:	anonymous. But we couch everything we say, we ground everything we say in scripture and

00:04:12 – 00:04:18:	in creation. And so that is the actual source, we are going back to God as the source of

00:04:18 – 00:04:24:	what we're saying. And so even if you are dealing with pseudonymity, you can still look

00:04:24 – 00:04:28:	at those ultimate sources and trace that genealogy of ideas.

00:04:28 – 00:04:33:	And we did an entire episode on pseudonymity, why I am pseudonymous for now, although the

00:04:33 – 00:04:39:	LCMS has doxxed me. And so it seems like they've backed off on their initial plan to feed my

00:04:39 – 00:04:44:	information to Antifa when the Makaira action blog was set up. That was certainly the plan.

00:04:44 – 00:04:49:	And that's what was done to Corey. I have a feeling that they got some more lawyers involved

00:04:49 – 00:04:54:	and they've gotten cold feet about risking the legal ramifications of doing that to a layman.

00:04:54 – 00:04:59:	It's an important question, it's a valid question. Me in particular, I'm pseudonymous,

00:04:59 – 00:05:05:	what am I hiding? So we did the episode on that and then the episode later on on why we're

00:05:05 – 00:05:12:	Lutheran and why we're doing this podcast in general. It is important to know to whom you're

00:05:12 – 00:05:20:	speaking. One of the things that comes up online frequently on Twitter in particular is the

00:05:20 – 00:05:26:	early life check. You hear somebody saying something, maybe they were a trusted source in

00:05:26 – 00:05:31:	the news or some sort of media format and suddenly out of nowhere, they say something

00:05:31 – 00:05:36:	completely horrific and anti-Christian. You're like, where did this come from? And you look up

00:05:36 – 00:05:40:	their early life and guess what? Their grandparents came from Russia and Poland and they were

00:05:40 – 00:05:46:	Jews, they were Jewish refugees. Every single time is a meme on Twitter because it seems like

00:05:46 – 00:05:52:	virtually every time some random person says something horrific, it turns out that their

00:05:52 – 00:05:59:	grandparents were Jewish. At some point that pattern becomes relevant. And so the question,

00:05:59 – 00:06:06:	what am I hiding is completely relevant. What am I hiding? I'm hiding my home address,

00:06:06 – 00:06:12:	my physical address because I've had five years, six years now of people making physical threats

00:06:12 – 00:06:17:	against me saying that they would kill me, that they would do harm to my family. I'm not afraid,

00:06:17 – 00:06:23:	but when someone says they want to do horrible things to you, you don't completely ignore that.

00:06:24 – 00:06:27:	I'm positioned in such a fashion that I'm not worried about my physical safety much,

00:06:27 – 00:06:35:	but that doesn't mean that there's zero threat. So the flip side of the genealogy thing is that

00:06:35 – 00:06:42:	back to what Corey said, I'm not the origin of anything I say. I'm the vessel on the mouthpiece

00:06:42 – 00:06:48:	conveying it to you. But the fact that I have no name, I have no credentials,

00:06:48 – 00:06:56:	I have nothing upon which to base any perceived credibility that you might assign to me. So

00:06:56 – 00:07:00:	you have no reason to listen to me whatsoever. I'm not going to say I've got this degree,

00:07:00 – 00:07:04:	or I went to this place, or I do this thing professionally. And so I'm an expert and you

00:07:04 – 00:07:09:	should listen. It's the complete opposite of when, for example, a pastor says, hey, I have an MDiv,

00:07:09 – 00:07:14:	I have a caller. It's very important you listen to me because God is speaking when I speak to you.

00:07:14 – 00:07:19:	I am binding your conscious by what I say. By being pseudonymous, I completely forego even

00:07:19 – 00:07:24:	the possibility of being able to do any of that. All I can do is try to make reasoned arguments.

00:07:24 – 00:07:30:	And reason is something that shows up particularly in the New Testament when Paul was going to the

00:07:30 – 00:07:37:	Jews and to the Gentiles and arguing with them. He frequently used reason, the Jews in particular.

00:07:37 – 00:07:42:	It says that he reasoned from Scripture. And in that case, the Scripture was the Tanakh. It was

00:07:42 – 00:07:47:	what we have today as the 39 books of the Old Testament. Those were the Scriptures from which

00:07:47 – 00:07:53:	Paul reasoned with the Jews of that day to say, hey, all these prophecies, all these things,

00:07:53 – 00:07:58:	Jesus fulfilled them. Jesus' life was the embodiment of these things. Therefore,

00:07:58 – 00:08:05:	he is the Christ who has promised the Messiah. He used reason. Now, God was with him. He wasn't

00:08:05 – 00:08:11:	going to speak falsely. Nevertheless, many of the things that Paul said when he was preaching and

00:08:11 – 00:08:17:	speaking didn't need to be direct divine revelation because Scripture was the divine revelation that

00:08:17 – 00:08:22:	he was using. So when he made a logical argument from Scripture, it wasn't by his own authority

00:08:22 – 00:08:28:	that he was preaching. It was by the authority of the Word of God. Now, I'm not saying that to

00:08:28 – 00:08:34:	compare what we are doing here to Paul preaching. This isn't preaching. This is a podcast. We're

00:08:34 – 00:08:40:	talking about the Bible. But ultimately, what we're talking about is what God has given to all of us,

00:08:40 – 00:08:44:	to the whole world. The Christian Church in particular values Scripture. We value the Word

00:08:44 – 00:08:52:	of God. And so, as Corey said, the arguments that we make should always be rooted in Scriptural

00:08:52 – 00:08:57:	Truth, which doesn't necessarily mean that they're actually derived directly from Scripture.

00:08:57 – 00:09:01:	That's something that's come up a couple times recently that I think is worth pointing out

00:09:01 – 00:09:08:	explicitly. You can make claims that aren't in Scripture that are true. I think one of the

00:09:08 – 00:09:16:	hermeneutics that Lutherans bring to a lot of questions that can be valuable, but it also becomes

00:09:16 – 00:09:23:	kind of a hamstring when it's not understood correctly, is the idea that what we perceive as

00:09:23 – 00:09:28:	the law of God is always either a command or a promise. So if there's not a command from God

00:09:28 – 00:09:33:	or a promise from God, it's in a different category. And the problem is that a lot of these

00:09:33 – 00:09:40:	things that Corey and I point to is natural revelation. By that, I mean facts, scientific facts,

00:09:40 – 00:09:49:	like you have ancestors. They came from a place. They have a genealogy. They have actual genes

00:09:49 – 00:09:56:	going back in time. Their properties attendant to that. And revelation is kind of a fancy way

00:09:56 – 00:10:00:	just saying, it's an obvious truth. It's in reality. You don't need the Bible to tell you

00:10:00 – 00:10:07:	everything is true. You need the Bible to reveal the things that you can't derive from a truthful

00:10:07 – 00:10:15:	observation of creation. So one of the recent criticisms that came up against Stone Choir,

00:10:16 – 00:10:23:	thankfully, one of our opponents went on issues, etc., and devoted an hour to trying to debunk

00:10:23 – 00:10:29:	us. It was the best hour long advertisement we could have possibly hoped for, because we sounded

00:10:29 – 00:10:34:	completely sane and reasonable in their arguments. There were no arguments. It was just kind of

00:10:34 – 00:10:40:	hysteria. But one of the things that they tried to claim was that we were using things like Acts

00:10:40 – 00:10:46:	1726, which talks about the dwelling places of men and the boundaries thereof, or Revelation

00:10:46 – 00:10:54:	179, where the various races appear before the throne. They called those proof texts when we

00:10:54 – 00:10:59:	used them as though we were trying to impose something by saying, well, Acts says that there

00:10:59 – 00:11:06:	are borders, and Revelation says that there are races. Therefore, we as men are trying to impose

00:11:06 – 00:11:11:	these things. Those aren't proof texts. The reason that there's not a lot of Scripture assigned to

00:11:11 – 00:11:16:	those topics is not that they're not real. They were just asides mentioning something

00:11:16 – 00:11:23:	that's obvious. Those are done. There are boundaries in dwelling places of man, and God says,

00:11:23 – 00:11:29:	I take credit for those. All of the nations, all of the races of men are represented in heaven,

00:11:29 – 00:11:35:	both for the throne of God. God said it's already done in eternity, so there's nothing for us on

00:11:35 – 00:11:42:	earth to do to affect that. We're simply pointing to that because it's an aside in Scripture that

00:11:42 – 00:11:48:	simply recognizes reality. There's no prescription there from God to say, you must do this. We don't

00:11:48 – 00:11:53:	point to those things to make that case. We're just saying, it's done. It's already there. It's

00:11:53 – 00:11:59:	the same as if you listened to us last week, and if you read any of Job when God was responding to

00:11:59 – 00:12:04:	Job, one of the points that you made was that the glory of the horse's mane testifies to my glory.

00:12:05 – 00:12:09:	If I tell you that a horse's mane is something beautiful and that God did it,

00:12:10 – 00:12:14:	am I making some sort of data commander promise from God? No, I'm just saying,

00:12:14 – 00:12:19:	this is beautiful. It's a part of creation. God did it. By the way, God also specifically points

00:12:19 – 00:12:25:	to this thing. There are other things that aren't listed in that monologue from God and Job that

00:12:25 – 00:12:30:	equally testifies to his glory. There are things that were unknown at that time and mentioned some

00:12:30 – 00:12:35:	of the stars, some of the constellations. There's stuff further out in space and no one could see

00:12:35 – 00:12:41:	with the naked eye then, so God wouldn't have mentioned it. When we see them now, they testify

00:12:41 – 00:12:48:	to God's glory just as those things that are mentioned. Natural revelation is a part of

00:12:48 – 00:12:54:	God's revelation. It's not salvific, but it does proclaim God's glory. When we point to those things,

00:12:54 – 00:13:00:	it's not a denial of Christ. It's saying, look how big an amazing God is and he still cares about us.

00:13:01 – 00:13:06:	That gets back to where's this stuff coming from? It's not coming from Cory or me.

00:13:06 – 00:13:10:	We look at the Bible and we point to things that in many cases have been neglected for a while.

00:13:10 – 00:13:15:	In the case of the issues around race, they never really mattered because all the races were naturally

00:13:15 – 00:13:21:	separated according to the boundaries of their dwelling places and was only in the last couple

00:13:21 – 00:13:27:	centuries that mass movement of human beings and recently the artificial mass movement of human

00:13:27 – 00:13:33:	beings caused them to be dislocated and slammed together as neighbors where it never occurred

00:13:33 – 00:13:39:	in human history. We are now confronting things that no Christians have ever faced before. You

00:13:39 – 00:13:44:	might have port cities where there is a smattering of travel or maybe some contact, but that was a

00:13:44 – 00:13:50:	very specialized thing in a local, particular place. Frankly, a lot of those sorts of cities

00:13:50 – 00:13:54:	tended to be hotbeds of some of the worst idolatry because as people are coming from afar,

00:13:54 – 00:13:59:	they're bringing their gods with them. Those cities tended to become more pagan and that's

00:13:59 – 00:14:04:	something that's preserved to this day as well. Big port cities tend to be raunchy. They tend not

00:14:04 – 00:14:12:	to be great places. That's because it's hard to preserve a homogeneous Christian culture when you

00:14:12 – 00:14:17:	have all these foreign influences. Yes, we're talking about some things that the Christian Church has

00:14:17 – 00:14:23:	not talked about much because it didn't have to. Now, that doesn't mean that we're necessarily right

00:14:23 – 00:14:27:	because we're not inventing new theology. We're just taking what God has always said

00:14:27 – 00:14:33:	and applying it to the new problems today, which is I think the basis of all theology ultimately.

00:14:39 – 00:14:46:	You also touched on there an issue that comes up constantly and that is what exactly is meant

00:14:46 – 00:14:52:	by Sola Scriptura. I did a video on this at some point in the past. We've linked it previously

00:14:52 – 00:14:59:	in the show notes. Sola Scriptura is in the ablative, which I will continue to say that until

00:14:59 – 00:15:06:	people get tired of hearing the word ablative, but it means by scripture alone. What it means

00:15:06 – 00:15:13:	is that doctrine is determined by scripture alone. It does not mean that all truth flows from

00:15:13 – 00:15:20:	scripture alone. That is an abuse of Sola Scriptura and there are those who make that argument today

00:15:21 – 00:15:27:	that's not the case because as we keep pointing out, God appeals to creation. Creation declares the

00:15:27 – 00:15:33:	glory of God. Creation has truth content. There is such a thing as natural revelation

00:15:34 – 00:15:41:	and so you don't have to look to scripture for all truth. Scripture alone reveals the gospel

00:15:41 – 00:15:46:	because nature doesn't reveal the gospel. The natural world does not tell you that Christ

00:15:46 – 00:15:53:	died for you atoned for your sins was a substitute for you. There's nowhere to find that in creation,

00:15:54 – 00:16:00:	but creation can tell you a lot of other things and so it is perfectly fine to look to creation

00:16:00 – 00:16:05:	for the truth content that God has placed there and so it is important to bear in mind

00:16:05 – 00:16:12:	that Sola Scriptura means that doctrine is determined by scripture alone, not that all

00:16:12 – 00:16:20:	truth comes from scripture alone. And so the second question is about the common refrain of

00:16:20 – 00:16:26:	one race, the human race, and the issue of intermarriage, which convenient timing since that

00:16:26 – 00:16:34:	just blew up on Twitter with a tweet that I made on Friday. But the issue of one race,

00:16:34 – 00:16:41:	the human race is that it is a conflating of terms or really senses of one term here,

00:16:42 – 00:16:50:	because the term race can apply to humanity generally because we are all of the race of Adam.

00:16:50 – 00:16:56:	We're actually all of the race of Noah because Noah is the patriarch of all living,

00:16:57 – 00:17:01:	being the father of the three men who stepped off the Ark and went on to have children.

00:17:02 – 00:17:11:	However, there's also a race of Japheth, a race of Ham, a race of Shem, and so you can use the

00:17:11 – 00:17:17:	term race to mean these smaller groups or the larger group, and those who argue for one race,

00:17:17 – 00:17:25:	the human race, are using it maliciously. They are doing it in an attempt to erase these actual

00:17:25 – 00:17:32:	real distinctions between and among the races of men by appealing to the fact that we are all

00:17:32 – 00:17:38:	descended from Adam. Yes, we're all descended from Adam, but that's not the final word of truth

00:17:38 – 00:17:46:	on these matters, because if you're German, you are in fact very different from someone from Uganda.

00:17:47 – 00:17:53:	Yes, you are both sons of Adam, but you have differentiated over a long course of years,

00:17:53 – 00:18:02:	centuries, millennia, and so you are distinct. And so it is more meaningful to speak of the

00:18:02 – 00:18:08:	race of Ashkenaz, which would be the Germanic or the German peoples depending on how you

00:18:09 – 00:18:16:	interpret that history there, or the race of the various sons of Ham, Egypt, descended from

00:18:16 – 00:18:23:	Egypt, one of the ones that's easy to remember. We have to be careful when we use these terms and

00:18:23 – 00:18:29:	when the opponents use these terms, because they are used to deceive. You can use a term that is an

00:18:29 – 00:18:34:	accurate term that is a meaningful term, but you can use it in a deceptive way. And when someone

00:18:34 – 00:18:40:	tries to argue that there's one race, the human race, while they're saying something that is trivially

00:18:40 – 00:18:48:	true, but it is also false, because in context it is used to mislead. And so it is more meaningful

00:18:48 – 00:18:56:	again to speak of the individual races that have come to exist over a course of time due to

00:18:56 – 00:19:02:	differentiation, because that is how God designed it. We're not talking about speciation, we're not

00:19:02 – 00:19:10:	talking about neo-Darwinian evolution or modern synthesis, whatever particular argument you're

00:19:10 – 00:19:17:	using, whatever modern formulation of Darwinian theory, because it's due to a loss of information

00:19:17 – 00:19:23:	over time that you have these races. It's not due to mutation and then selection against the

00:19:23 – 00:19:28:	mutation, because that's a creation of new information and there is no proof of that. It's

00:19:28 – 00:19:31:	logically impossible, but that's a more complicated argument for another time.

00:19:33 – 00:19:42:	Due to a loss of information over millennia, we have the different races instead of the one race

00:19:42 – 00:19:48:	that you had when Adam and Eve were in the garden. But of course, the different races already existed

00:19:48 – 00:19:54:	to some degree on the Ark, because some of that genetic difference comes from the wives of Noah's

00:19:54 – 00:20:01:	sons. And we can see this in the various DNA, in the various groups of human beings, the three

00:20:01 – 00:20:09:	great groupings, being of course Europeans, Asians, and Africans essentially. Because you have the

00:20:09 – 00:20:16:	Neanderthal DNA in Europeans, you have Denisovan in Asian populations, and you have the so-called

00:20:16 – 00:20:21:	Ghost DNA in the African populations. That's just DNA from the wives of Noah's sons.

00:20:22 – 00:20:26:	And to tie the genealogy of man to the genealogy of ideas,

00:20:27 – 00:20:33:	everybody understood this until about 50 years ago. It's only within the last well closer to today

00:20:33 – 00:20:38:	than even 50 years ago that suddenly everyone forgot that human beings are different,

00:20:39 – 00:20:43:	that there are different groups of people from different places, and that that is consequential.

00:20:44 – 00:20:51:	It never had to be discussed much among theologians, because it was so blindingly obvious that no one,

00:20:51 – 00:20:57:	it was never a controversial statement. So for someone today to say, well, in the 1600s,

00:20:57 – 00:21:03:	they didn't talk about race. Well, that's arguing that a fish doesn't talk about water.

00:21:04 – 00:21:10:	When something is so pervasive, so a fundamental part of existence, that it doesn't bear

00:21:10 – 00:21:17:	discussion, it's only when that fundamental part of existence falls under attack, under existential

00:21:17 – 00:21:24:	threat from a hostile alien force that it requires a defense. So yes, we are saying things that

00:21:24 – 00:21:29:	haven't been said before. And yes, that should always concern anyone. You shouldn't be hearing

00:21:29 – 00:21:36:	new arguments in theology with the exception of an acknowledgement that Satan gets a vote.

00:21:36 – 00:21:43:	Satan doesn't sit on his laurels. The fight that Luther and the other reformers had

00:21:43 – 00:21:48:	in the 16th century against Rome's false teachings about how we are saved,

00:21:50 – 00:21:54:	Satan had been doing pretty well at that point. And then he got his teeth kicked in.

00:21:55 – 00:21:58:	He lost a lot of ground on the soteriological battle.

00:22:00 – 00:22:07:	Basically, all Protestant doctrines since then has more or less rested on those laurels and said,

00:22:07 – 00:22:12:	okay, we got that soteriological problem solved. We're done. We're good. We know how we're saved.

00:22:12 – 00:22:18:	We're going to lock that in for all time. And as the centuries have passed, men have gotten

00:22:18 – 00:22:24:	dumber and dumber and less able to recognize that Satan doesn't sleep. And Satan's not stupid.

00:22:24 – 00:22:29:	He's not going to make the same attack again when there's a new attack vector. And so in the post

00:22:29 – 00:22:38:	Enlightenment world, as all of these egalitarian thoughts about humanity have become so pervasive

00:22:38 – 00:22:45:	that they shifted from being niche philosophical arguments among the intelligentsia to today,

00:22:45 – 00:22:50:	they're seen as moral platitudes that if you defy them, you'll be excommunicated.

00:22:51 – 00:22:56:	That was a shift in theology that happened without anyone lifting a finger. There was no

00:22:56 – 00:23:03:	fight. The fact that you went from the 16th century to the 21st century with fundamental

00:23:03 – 00:23:09:	paradigm shifts about how we look at our relationship to God and our relationship to each other,

00:23:10 – 00:23:14:	there should have been a fight. We should have fought all along. And there were some men who

00:23:14 – 00:23:20:	did fight against the Enlightenment, but they lost. And part of that was that one of the key

00:23:20 – 00:23:25:	elements of the Enlightenment was democracy, was that everyone gets a vote, everyone gets a voice.

00:23:25 – 00:23:29:	And so when everyone can chime in and say, oh, well, I think, oh, well, here's my opinion. Well,

00:23:29 – 00:23:34:	here's what I want to do. Suddenly, the men who had been fighting over these things, some well,

00:23:34 – 00:23:40:	some poorly, like when I say intelligentsia, that is not flattering coming from my lips. I'm

00:23:41 – 00:23:47:	not a fan of having a brain trust sorting things out for everyone else. On the other hand,

00:23:47 – 00:23:52:	everyone else is even worse at it. So whether we're talking about professors or we're talking

00:23:52 – 00:23:58:	about pastors or theologians, we need some of the brightest men dealing with the subject,

00:23:58 – 00:24:03:	and we need them to be faithful to scripture. They don't need to do anything new if they're

00:24:03 – 00:24:08:	honest about the facts in front of them and they're honest about scripture. And so this shift

00:24:09 – 00:24:14:	along today, race is one of the primary things that's being attacked. The reason we devoted those

00:24:14 – 00:24:19:	episodes and the election episode before that, and the Christian nationalism episode before that,

00:24:19 – 00:24:24:	it's really a seven-part series with those together, specifically because Satan knows what

00:24:24 – 00:24:31:	he's doing. As he's continued to move the pieces around the board, race is now the battleground.

00:24:31 – 00:24:36:	And it's one that virtually no Protestant theologians are equipped for. And that is increasingly

00:24:36 – 00:24:42:	a problem. Just in the last week online, a bunch of the reform guys have been fighting out the

00:24:42 – 00:24:50:	definition of Christian nationalism. And on the leftward side, they're not very left, but within

00:24:50 – 00:24:56:	that relative small sphere, the guys who are further left are calling the guys to their right

00:24:56 – 00:25:01:	racists for talking about Christian nationalism. And what are the guys on the right side of that

00:25:01 – 00:25:05:	sphere doing? They're saying, no, no, we're not racist. Christian nationalism has nothing to do

00:25:05 – 00:25:10:	with race. It has nothing to do with nations. They're basically sivnats with Jesus. And that's a

00:25:10 – 00:25:17:	disaster. The idea that there can be magic soil, that when you move to a place, you just magically

00:25:17 – 00:25:24:	become something new, even if it's completely alien to everything in your past. That's trannyism.

00:25:24 – 00:25:29:	That's saying, I used to be African, but now I live in Detroit. And so I'm an American. That's the

00:25:29 – 00:25:36:	same as saying I identify as a woman, even though I was born a man. It doesn't work. Now, there are

00:25:36 – 00:25:41:	different aspects of human and biology that are going on here. But fundamentally, when you say

00:25:41 – 00:25:46:	that one thing can just become something else because it decides to be, or because it agrees

00:25:46 – 00:25:52:	with an idea, the US is a proposition nation. That was invented, by the way, in the late 19th,

00:25:52 – 00:25:59:	early 20th century. It was invented by surprise, Jewish immigrants. The melting pot, that was

00:25:59 – 00:26:06:	from a Jew named Swangly. I can't remember his name. I can remember his face. He's hideous looking

00:26:06 – 00:26:13:	human being. But what he said in his play in about 1908, something about the melting pot,

00:26:13 – 00:26:22:	was specifically to convince the blood citizens of America that having this continuous stream of

00:26:22 – 00:26:27:	aliens from Europe coming in had to be good. Because look at all the people who came here

00:26:27 – 00:26:32:	before that were also different. Well, Germans are different from the English in some ways,

00:26:32 – 00:26:37:	but not a lot. The Jewish immigrants who came to this country, on the other hand,

00:26:37 – 00:26:43:	were much more different. They had some European blood, but they were also Jewish by culture,

00:26:43 – 00:26:51:	Jewish by religion, Jewish by language. And they brought something that was alien to this nation

00:26:51 – 00:26:56:	and became very important for them to dilute and destroy the notion that American was anything

00:26:56 – 00:27:03:	other than, I want to live in America. And so now 120 years later, we have people who are trying to

00:27:03 – 00:27:11:	describe Christian nationalism in the same terms. They're not understanding that they're part of a

00:27:11 – 00:27:16:	Syop that began many generations before they were born. And so it's one of the reasons that

00:27:16 – 00:27:22:	almost the first episode we did of Stone Choir was about Christian nationalism, specifically to

00:27:22 – 00:27:28:	make the case for the nationalist part of that, national natal, same root. The root is the Proto

00:27:28 – 00:27:36:	Indo-European word for gene. It's literally descent. So you can't have Christian nationalism if you

00:27:36 – 00:27:42:	deny the race as a part of a nation. And we have discussions about where's that in the Bible. Well,

00:27:43 – 00:27:47:	I guess if you ignore all of the genealogies in the Bible and you ignore all the parts of the

00:27:47 – 00:27:53:	Bible that specifically refer to nation, sure, maybe you could say race isn't there. But it's the

00:27:53 – 00:27:59:	same thing. It's the same thing. And the fact that white can be called a race and English can be

00:27:59 – 00:28:06:	called a race doesn't mean that at most one of them exists and the other can't. We talked about

00:28:06 – 00:28:11:	in the Christian nationalism episode, there's a winnowing process. It was literally the definition

00:28:11 – 00:28:18:	in the Webster 1828 saying, you know, the race of Adam, the race of Noah, the race of Charlemagne

00:28:18 – 00:28:25:	on down as you winnow through the passage of time. But it's always lineal descent. A nation always has

00:28:25 – 00:28:32:	a root. You know, Jesus was the rod of Jesse's stem. It came down through the lineage that was,

00:28:32 – 00:28:37:	it was patrilineal. It was a bloodline that was important to God. And it wasn't just the one thing

00:28:37 – 00:28:43:	about Jesus. That's not the only time that's ever mattered. It was the most important bloodline.

00:28:43 – 00:28:48:	But it wasn't the only one. They're all bloodlines. Yeah, there were 70 nations in the Old Testament.

00:28:48 – 00:28:53:	There are 70 nations to whom the disciples are sent out in the New Testament. That's how God works.

00:28:53 – 00:28:58:	We don't get a vote. And so for us to come along today and say one race, the human race, we're all

00:28:58 – 00:29:04:	the same, we didn't get that from Scripture. We got that from the 60s and from the 90s and from

00:29:04 – 00:29:09:	today. And we're not talking about hip parade radio. We're talking about theology being evolved in

00:29:09 – 00:29:15:	real time before our eyes. That is a big problem, which is why Hori and I started this podcast

00:29:15 – 00:29:19:	to talk about this stuff that makes you uncomfortable. Because it is uncomfortable to be

00:29:19 – 00:29:24:	confronted with, on one hand, someone saying something that seems like it might have some

00:29:24 – 00:29:28:	foundations. And on the other hand, you have the whole world saying that's a lie and it's evil.

00:29:28 – 00:29:34:	Well, when we talk about the genealogy of ideas, it's because 100 years ago, no one thought anything

00:29:34 – 00:29:40:	different than we're saying today. Apart from the few people who had begun to adopt the melting pot

00:29:40 – 00:29:47:	idea that was inserted by a foreign element into the American psyche, that was enemy action,

00:29:47 – 00:29:52:	that was destructive. And today it's so pervasive that we have to battle against

00:29:53 – 00:30:01:	seemingly the immune system of our own people. But it's not an innate immunity. It's an

00:30:01 – 00:30:07:	artificially induced immunity to something true. So that's why we jump over some periods of history,

00:30:07 – 00:30:12:	specifically to say if this is true, it will always have been true. And when you look back

00:30:12 – 00:30:17:	100, 200, 300 years, many of these claims fall apart. That's why. The play you mentioned,

00:30:17 – 00:30:23:	the melting pot, gets even better if you look at the materials that were used to promote it.

00:30:23 – 00:30:30:	It's basically a vision of hell. And it also gets better when you know his first name,

00:30:30 – 00:30:34:	because his first name was Israel, and his name was Israel Zongville.

00:30:34 – 00:30:41:	So. Thank you. Yeah. No, it's worth looking up. Look it up on Wikipedia. And that is inserted

00:30:41 – 00:30:47:	today into the eternal record of the United States of America. And we're told that it was always there.

00:30:47 – 00:30:54:	It wasn't always there. My ancestors who came here in 1618, 1620, 1630, they'd never heard of that.

00:30:54 – 00:30:59:	They left England and they landed in England, and they were English. Nothing changed. There was

00:30:59 – 00:31:04:	no melting pot for them. And yes, some Dutch came and a few Swedes came and I'm descended from them

00:31:04 – 00:31:10:	too. That was what we were sold as being the melting pot, but those were all Western European

00:31:10 – 00:31:17:	Christians as a fundamentally different type of thing than complete aliens by culture, by religion,

00:31:17 – 00:31:25:	and by descent. And so yes, there are subdivisions, but that doesn't eliminate the fact that

00:31:25 – 00:31:30:	there's a real thing behind it. And so the other part of this question was the issue of

00:31:31 – 00:31:39:	interracial marriage. And I think I addressed that well enough in the podcast episode that I put

00:31:39 – 00:31:46:	out recently. So I think I'll just link that in the show notes. But just the very quick summary of

00:31:46 – 00:31:56:	it is that per se, not a sin, not explicitly banned by scripture as a sin in itself. However,

00:31:56 – 00:32:05:	in context, often a sin due to wrong motives and things like that. What I'll link in the show notes

00:32:05 – 00:32:11:	will go over it in greater depth, but that is the short version of why Christians should generally

00:32:11 – 00:32:16:	avoid interracial marriage. And yes, of course, there are the health reasons and other things

00:32:16 – 00:32:20:	like that, but those are mentioned in what I will be linking in the show notes.

00:32:21 – 00:32:26:	And it's also effectively brand new and it's heavily propagandized only in the last 10,

00:32:26 – 00:32:32:	15 years. I mean, a lot of it's only in the last five years. If you go look at TV shows even 15

00:32:32 – 00:32:37:	years ago, the composition of the couples and the advertisements and everything else is radically

00:32:37 – 00:32:43:	different than it is today. And that was propaganda too. So they were pushing the interracial mixing

00:32:43 – 00:32:50:	propaganda then, but it wasn't so overt today. It's hard to find any sort of advertisement for

00:32:50 – 00:32:54:	anything, including our own churches, where it's not a black man and a white woman together.

00:32:54 – 00:33:01:	It's usually that coupling. In reality, that virtually never happens. It's incredibly rare.

00:33:02 – 00:33:06:	And yet if you look at the advertisements and you look at TV and movies,

00:33:06 – 00:33:11:	you would think it was universal. And so that is the reason that people are so vehement about

00:33:13 – 00:33:18:	defending something that it's alien. I mean, when we were on issues, etc., hosted,

00:33:18 – 00:33:21:	you know, they didn't have our permission or anything, not that they needed, but

00:33:22 – 00:33:28:	when they played our clips, most of the responses were hysteria about interracial marriage,

00:33:28 – 00:33:33:	even though it didn't have anything to do with the clips. They devoted an hour mostly to defending

00:33:33 – 00:33:39:	interracial marriage as what? Is Christian theology? Corey makes the case in the episode,

00:33:39 – 00:33:46:	but in the podcast he's going to link. Suffice it to say, if something basically didn't exist 50

00:33:46 – 00:33:52:	years ago, 20 years ago, and still barely exists today, maybe you can have a discussion about

00:33:52 – 00:33:56:	whether or not it's a good idea without somebody saying you're going to hell. And the fact that

00:33:56 – 00:34:02:	it's the paramount moral issue in these people's hearts and minds makes you wonder what God they're

00:34:02 – 00:34:07:	serving, because it's not a God that existed 100 years ago. If the issue didn't exist, if the so-called

00:34:07 – 00:34:15:	sin didn't exist, there was no fight. This principle of faith that's so deeply held by these people

00:34:15 – 00:34:20:	that they lose their minds. You know, Corey blasphemed on Friday. He blasphemes virtually every

00:34:20 – 00:34:26:	Friday before he logs off Twitter. It's not blasphemy against God. It's blasphemy against the

00:34:26 – 00:34:31:	idols of this day. He deliberately posts something carefully worded and antagonistic to get people

00:34:31 – 00:34:37:	riled up, and everyone bites the bait every time, because those are the idols of this day.

00:34:37 – 00:34:41:	They're not God. They're not from God. What he's saying is consistent with Scripture.

00:34:41 – 00:34:46:	It's carefully worded, and it's always bait. And if you people were a little bit smarter and you

00:34:47 – 00:34:52:	took seriously that Corey is intelligent, that he's good with words, maybe you wouldn't get so

00:34:52 – 00:34:56:	riled up when he said something you didn't understand, because instead of continuously

00:34:56 – 00:35:02:	attacking this obvious bait, I see it, and I shake my head. I know it's going to just be a

00:35:02 – 00:35:08:	firestorm, and it's unpleasant. We don't censor each other's timelines. I wouldn't post some

00:35:08 – 00:35:11:	of the things he posts, and he probably wouldn't say some of the things that I say. It doesn't

00:35:11 – 00:35:15:	matter. It's not criticism. It's just that there are different approaches to things.

00:35:15 – 00:35:21:	But what you cannot doubt is that when he posts something about interracial marriages,

00:35:21 – 00:35:27:	a subject that is largely alien to all of human existence, it's happened, but it's

00:35:27 – 00:35:31:	incredibly rare. It's infrequent. It's never been considered a moral matter,

00:35:32 – 00:35:40:	and everyone loses their minds. We're told when Benghazi happened. We were told that it was

00:35:40 – 00:35:44:	because there was some video that was made, a movie was made that said something blasphemous

00:35:44 – 00:35:50:	about Muhammad or whatever, and so everyone rioted and everyone murdered. That's effectively the

00:35:50 – 00:35:55:	response that saying things like interracial marriage is generally a bad idea. Today, it

00:35:55 – 00:36:00:	lists it among most Christians. That's not normal. That's a response to a blasphemy against a God

00:36:00 – 00:36:06:	that even if Corey were wrong about what he says about interracial marriage, I believe he's correct.

00:36:06 – 00:36:13:	I think that his explanation is perfectly sound. Even if he were wrong, the degree and the vehemence

00:36:13 – 00:36:19:	of the response against it is so far out of proportion that you have to ask yourself,

00:36:19 – 00:36:23:	what is the animating spirit behind the people who are so mad about this?

00:36:23 – 00:36:29:	Why this one subject? The answer is very simple. It's on your television. It's on your news feed

00:36:29 – 00:36:34:	when you see ads over and over again showing mixed couples. You see black people continuously.

00:36:34 – 00:36:40:	Most people think that the blacks are 30 or 40% of the US population just based on what they see

00:36:40 – 00:36:47:	in ads. It's about 12% to 13%. They've always been in the 10 to 12, 13% range. That's been

00:36:47 – 00:36:51:	consistent as the US has grown. They've never been more than that. When you look at ads,

00:36:51 – 00:36:56:	you would think it was 75% of people because you can't have a TV show without one anymore.

00:36:58 – 00:37:02:	I mentioned previously, I watched the wire three or four times. I like it. It's virtually all black

00:37:02 – 00:37:07:	characters. I don't hate black people, but don't pretend that there's something that they're not.

00:37:07 – 00:37:12:	The reason I like the wire is that it was realistic. There were some smart ones. There were some dumb

00:37:12 – 00:37:17:	ones. There were some violent ones. There were some decent ones. It was an honest portrayal of

00:37:17 – 00:37:24:	the human condition in their community. That's not what you get on TV when it's always the black

00:37:24 – 00:37:29:	science guy or the black computer guy. On the IQ episode, we demonstrated that that's preposterous.

00:37:29 – 00:37:35:	It virtually never happens. The fact that you know a guy doesn't disprove the fact that there are only

00:37:35 – 00:37:42:	1.2 million African-Americans with IQs above 115, that's not very smart. If you're 115,

00:37:42 – 00:37:46:	great, God bless you. You can do pretty much anything that's useful in this world. It's still

00:37:46 – 00:37:50:	not very smart. It's not nearly smart enough to do the sorts of things that are portrayed

00:37:50 – 00:37:57:	in the media all the time. The expert that knows Latin and Greek off the top of her head,

00:37:57 – 00:38:02:	and she's a computer hacker, and she's really good with medicine. It's always the black girl

00:38:02 – 00:38:08:	who's 25 years old. That's gaslighting. That doesn't happen. On one hand, it's fiction,

00:38:08 – 00:38:11:	whatever. On the other hand, when it convinces people that that's actually what's happening in

00:38:11 – 00:38:16:	the world, and then they make moral pronouncements against brothers and Christ for saying, hey,

00:38:16 – 00:38:21:	maybe that's kind of silly, that's when it becomes a problem. That's why this artificial

00:38:21 – 00:38:26:	manufactured consent for these things exists in the mass media. It's to convince you that something

00:38:26 – 00:38:30:	has always been the case when it's virtually never been the case. When we come along and say,

00:38:30 – 00:38:35:	yeah, that's nonsense, we're going to get yelled at. We know that. It's part of why we're here,

00:38:35 – 00:38:41:	is to get yelled at so that after the yelling dies down, there can be an actual conversation

00:38:41 – 00:38:47:	about the reality of what's in the world, about creation, about what's revealed in creation.

00:38:49 – 00:38:54:	I actually want to read the ending, just the last paragraph or so, maybe two paragraphs,

00:38:55 – 00:39:01:	of the play The Melting Pot. Maybe not actually comment on it much, but those who are paying

00:39:01 – 00:39:06:	close attention and who have been listening all along will notice that this is an open

00:39:06 – 00:39:15:	hell mouth. To give a little background about the play, it's about a Russian Jewish family

00:39:15 – 00:39:22:	flees a pogrom in Russia, comes to the U.S., and I'm not going to give you a spoiler warning

00:39:22 – 00:39:25:	because it's a play and you're supposed to know plays before you go to see them, and I hope you

00:39:25 – 00:39:33:	never have to see this play. But the Jewish son of the family winds up falling in love, as it were,

00:39:33 – 00:39:39:	with the Russian daughter of the man who led the pogrom against his family back in Russia,

00:39:39 – 00:39:46:	because of course, it's as contrived as could possibly be. But at any rate, David is the Jewish

00:39:46 – 00:39:53:	son and Vera is the Russian daughter. And so here's the last bit of the play, David speaking.

00:39:54 – 00:40:00:	It is the fires of God round his crucible. There she lies the great melting pot. Listen,

00:40:00 – 00:40:05:	can't you hear the roaring and the bubbling? There gapes her mouth. The harbor where a thousand

00:40:05 – 00:40:11:	mammoth feeders come from the ends of the world to pour in their human freight. All what is stirring

00:40:11 – 00:40:16:	in a seething, Kelt and Latin, Slav and Teuton, Greek and Syrian, black and yellow.

00:40:17 – 00:40:24:	Vera, Jew and Gentile. David, yes, east and west and north and south. The palm and the pine,

00:40:24 – 00:40:30:	the pole and the equator, the crescent and the cross. How the great alchemist melts and fuses

00:40:30 – 00:40:36:	them with his purging flame. Here shall they all unite to build the Republic of Man and the Kingdom

00:40:36 – 00:40:41:	of God. Ah, Vera, what is the glory of Rome and Jerusalem, where all nations and races come to

00:40:41 – 00:40:48:	worship and look back. Compared with the glory of America, where all races and nations come to labor

00:40:48 – 00:40:55:	and look forward. Peace, peace, to all ye unborn millions, fated to fill this giant continent.

00:40:55 – 00:41:00:	The God of our children give you peace. And then just as an extra little touch,

00:41:01 – 00:41:04:	the play ends and is played out with my country, tis of thee.

00:41:07 – 00:41:16:	There really is just no need for a comment. Yeah, that's a litmus test. If you see that in your

00:41:16 – 00:41:23:	response, that sort of determines which side of everything you're on. The next question that we

00:41:23 – 00:41:29:	had addressed in part, we had a few different questions about hymns. Some of them referred

00:41:29 – 00:41:34:	specifically to, yeah, there's some hymns in the current, the Lutheran service book, the LSB,

00:41:35 – 00:41:41:	the hymnal, the talk about the human race, the talk about one race of Adam, and they're asking

00:41:41 – 00:41:45:	what we think about those. The first thing I'll say, I think the primary thing I'll say about any

00:41:45 – 00:41:51:	hymn you find in your hymnal is look at the bottom of the page and see what year was written.

00:41:52 – 00:41:56:	If you want to know what I think about the theology of it, tell me what year was written,

00:41:56 – 00:42:01:	tell me what language it was written, and I can give you a pretty good idea of what the

00:42:01 – 00:42:08:	theology of it will be. Now, in particular, some of the worst hymns in there that are deliberately

00:42:08 – 00:42:14:	one race, the human race propaganda, one of them that was highlighted on Twitter in the last couple

00:42:14 – 00:42:19:	weeks, was written in 1969 as a brand new hymn. I mean, there are hymns in our hymnal from the

00:42:19 – 00:42:25:	second and third centuries, just a couple. But I think those are treasures. I think anything

00:42:25 – 00:42:31:	written in 1969 should be said on fire without even reading it. I don't care what it is. If it

00:42:31 – 00:42:37:	was good, we can invent it again, but that decade should be erased from human memory. So yeah,

00:42:37 – 00:42:42:	there's some stuff in the hymnal. That doesn't make it authoritative. Yeah, that's one of the

00:42:42 – 00:42:48:	problems with churches publishing stuff in their own name is that by having the imprimatur of your

00:42:48 – 00:42:53:	church and having said that it's gone through some sort of doctrinal review, it binds your

00:42:53 – 00:42:57:	conscience. It says, oh, you disagree with this, you must not be a good Christian. Well,

00:42:57 – 00:43:01:	I disagree with some of the newer hymns, not all of them. And there are some great hymns that are

00:43:01 – 00:43:06:	newer, but not many. They're much better hymns that are older. And that's part of the reason why you

00:43:06 – 00:43:13:	can't, any place and time that produces a hymn, there's a reason someone wrote that song. They

00:43:13 – 00:43:19:	wrote it for a purpose. We have some hymns from the air of the plague where I can't remember,

00:43:20 – 00:43:22:	Cor, you probably remember which one. There's a hymn where a man wrote along

00:43:24 – 00:43:30:	as he had buried most of his family and most of his town. And he was under tremendous suffering.

00:43:30 – 00:43:36:	And so knowing that context for that hymn makes it all the more beautiful. When you know that a hymn

00:43:36 – 00:43:42:	about racial consolidation was written in 1969, that tells you something very different about

00:43:42 – 00:43:46:	what message you're supposed to receive. So they're good hymns and they're bad hymns.

00:43:47 – 00:43:51:	The related question was, are hymns that are written by women teaching by women?

00:43:54 – 00:43:58:	Personally, I think probably it's not in the top 50 list of issues that I think we need to solve.

00:43:59 – 00:44:05:	I think that there are much bigger issues to fix. And I pray for a day when we can worry about

00:44:05 – 00:44:09:	whether we need to get rid of the hymns that were written by women. The answer is, I think,

00:44:09 – 00:44:13:	probably yes. But that's not where I'm going to start. I'm going to start with saying, hey,

00:44:13 – 00:44:17:	maybe people need to believe the Bible in general. And then we can work our way down from there.

00:44:19 – 00:44:23:	That really sort of covers the issue of hymns. And

00:44:24 – 00:44:29:	except for the tangential issue of, should we be using hymns that were written by,

00:44:30 – 00:44:36:	if you're Lutheran, by non-Lutherans? And the answer is, as long as they're doctrinally sound,

00:44:37 – 00:44:40:	many of them are not. And so we should probably not be using them.

00:44:41 – 00:44:46:	But the ones that are doctrinally sound are, of course, fine. And you mentioned hymns that are

00:44:46 – 00:44:51:	a little more modern in terms when they were written that are still good. The obvious one would be,

00:44:51 – 00:44:59:	thy strong word is fairly modern, but still quite good. Despite being written, that was in the 60s

00:44:59 – 00:45:07:	as well, I believe. All right, well, one exception. Yeah, I know exactly. It's like we can think of

00:45:07 – 00:45:14:	one good hymn that was written in the 60s. The next all hymn. Exactly. There were a couple

00:45:14 – 00:45:19:	related questions to, do we think that women shouldn't be able to sing in church or to

00:45:19 – 00:45:24:	speak responsibly in church? Is that teaching? No. That's a public celebration. That's fine.

00:45:25 – 00:45:29:	Yeah, that's women being silent in the church. When you look at those passages,

00:45:29 – 00:45:34:	it's not talking about corporate worship. The questions are about the issue is,

00:45:35 – 00:45:41:	should women be speaking interactively in study? And so the Paul specifically says,

00:45:41 – 00:45:45:	God specifically says, if she has a question, she should go home and ask her husband.

00:45:45 – 00:45:50:	It doesn't even count as the idea of her having her own opinion. It's as if she has a question,

00:45:50 – 00:45:55:	she should go home and ask her husband there. So that's obviously not something that's happening

00:45:55 – 00:46:00:	during the church service proper. And that's obviously not related to singing, to chanting,

00:46:00 – 00:46:07:	to responsive readings. Corporate worship is the body of Christ unified together publicly,

00:46:08 – 00:46:13:	speaking with one voice, confessing what God has said back to him. That's beautiful. That's good.

00:46:13 – 00:46:20:	That is for every son of God, male or female. And of course, that answers the question of

00:46:20 – 00:46:26:	using the Magnificat or any of the other songs in scripture that are originally spoken by women.

00:46:26 – 00:46:30:	Of course, they are recorded by men because all of scripture was written by men and they

00:46:30 – 00:46:35:	are inspired by God, which is the ultimate reason that we should use them. And of course,

00:46:35 – 00:46:41:	we do use the Magnificat in the evening service. But those are, of course, totally fine to use.

00:46:41 – 00:46:45:	I believe the hymn writer you had in mind was Philip Nicolai.

00:46:45 – 00:46:52:	He was a pastor lived through the plague. He's commemorated on the 26th of October along with

00:46:52 – 00:46:58:	Hirman and Gerhardt, other hymn writers. I think one of the things underlying some

00:46:58 – 00:47:01:	of the questions about what do we think about women doing X, Y, or Z,

00:47:02 – 00:47:07:	they didn't seem to be hostile questions. But I think there's a perception of us sometimes that

00:47:07 – 00:47:11:	we are women, women haters or something. I actually got a DM yesterday from a lady who

00:47:11 – 00:47:17:	thanked me for the show and for speaking faithfully on these matters.

00:47:18 – 00:47:23:	We've gotten feedback from a number of women who they take no issue with what we say. Now,

00:47:23 – 00:47:30:	there's some that I'm sure do, but it's funny. I think we mentioned before, we get DMs all the

00:47:30 – 00:47:37:	time from mixed race guys, from non-whites, from non-lutherans, from women, all the people who

00:47:38 – 00:47:43:	the world tells everybody else hate us because we hate them. The people that we're supposed to hate

00:47:43 – 00:47:50:	don't think that we hate them. The people that were told that we hate, at least some of what

00:47:50 – 00:47:54:	we're saying, they can listen and they get value from it. In the particular case of the

00:47:54 – 00:48:00:	number of the mixed race people, I was one of the points that Corey makes in his about 30-minute

00:48:00 – 00:48:05:	podcast that he'll link on the previous question is that mixed race guys frequently thank us for

00:48:05 – 00:48:14:	speaking clearly on race. When race mixing is pushed on parents, they say, oh, it'll be beautiful.

00:48:14 – 00:48:18:	Your children will be beautiful. Everything will be wonderful. It's going to be a new dawn of a new

00:48:18 – 00:48:22:	age. It's going to be great. That's what they're getting from the world and from CNN. Their kids

00:48:22 – 00:48:28:	have a different experience and their kids by and large understand that their experience is

00:48:29 – 00:48:34:	to the degree that they suffer from alienation. It's not because the world is mean. It's because

00:48:34 – 00:48:41:	they're divided between two nations. When a man has two nations intersecting in his

00:48:41 – 00:48:50:	self, his own person, ultimately he basically has to pick one. That's a difficult choice that no

00:48:50 – 00:48:54:	man should be faced with. We talked about our own genealogies in the past. I'm mostly English

00:48:54 – 00:48:59:	and partly German. I don't have to pick either because it's far enough back that I'm just American

00:49:00 – 00:49:06:	by birth, by genes. There's no conflict between the guys who spoke German and the guys who spoke

00:49:06 – 00:49:11:	English in my past. They were able to coexist side by side as neighbors. Then when they all

00:49:11 – 00:49:17:	started speaking English, they basically became one finally. That's not an inherent conflict.

00:49:18 – 00:49:25:	The guy who is half white and half black or half Asian and half white, he has a much bigger

00:49:26 – 00:49:31:	internal struggle because he understands intrinsically. He doesn't completely belong to

00:49:31 – 00:49:37:	either community. When these guys talk to us privately, they're generally thankful. Part of

00:49:37 – 00:49:42:	the reason is that we're the only men in some cases that they've ever heard who will speak

00:49:42 – 00:49:47:	honestly about these things. They're thankful to hear a Christian speaking honestly. For all

00:49:47 – 00:49:52:	the people telling you that we hate and that people hate us, the actual experience we have with

00:49:52 – 00:49:58:	you, the listeners getting to us and telling us largely says the opposite. I guess if somebody

00:49:58 – 00:50:02:	hates us and thinks that we hate them, they're maybe not going to send a message at all. But

00:50:02 – 00:50:06:	the messages we have received have not only been supportive, they've been tremendously thankful.

00:50:06 – 00:50:13:	I do find it a little funny as someone who enjoys opera to be accused, not by the people who are

00:50:13 – 00:50:19:	questioning us, but by those who accuse us, by those who attack us on various platforms

00:50:19 – 00:50:22:	that I don't like women singing. How many times have I linked things that were

00:50:23 – 00:50:30:	soprano or other bits of pieces of music from operas and such in our chat?

00:50:32 – 00:50:38:	If God didn't want women to sing in the service, we would have an injunction against it.

00:50:39 – 00:50:44:	Women are not to speak in the service because women are not to teach. They are to remain silent

00:50:44 – 00:50:49:	because they are supposed to ask their husbands at home. Scripture is very clear about why these

00:50:49 – 00:50:56:	things are the way they are. But women are part of the body of Christ, and so they do participate

00:50:56 – 00:51:02:	in the service insofar as it is appropriate for them to do so, and that of course includes

00:51:02 – 00:51:08:	singing along with the congregation. And the congregational singing would be much impoverished

00:51:08 – 00:51:13:	if women were not singing as well. We are in fact much impoverished by the fact that we no longer

00:51:13 – 00:51:19:	use the corrals that separate male and female voices, and so you can get that distinction

00:51:19 – 00:51:25:	between them more clearly. Of course, part of that is a lack of men in the services who actually

00:51:25 – 00:51:30:	sing. And yes, I do intend to shame those of you who don't sing in the service. You should be doing so.

00:51:31 – 00:51:38:	If you don't sing particularly well, practice or sing anyway. There are plenty of men who

00:51:38 – 00:51:43:	don't sing very well. That's one of the great things about being part of a congregation or a

00:51:43 – 00:51:50:	larger choir. The individual imperfections are hidden by the fact that you have more people

00:51:50 – 00:51:55:	singing. The larger the number of people you have singing, the better it sounds when it

00:51:55 – 00:52:02:	comes to choral pieces. That's just how it works. Listen to a large choir sometime if you've never

00:52:02 – 00:52:08:	done that. It is far and away a better thing than if you just have a small handful of people

00:52:08 – 00:52:11:	singing. So yes, you should sing in church whether you are a man or a woman.

00:52:13 – 00:52:17:	We have the tangential question about whether or not we should be using the Psalms. And the answer

00:52:17 – 00:52:23:	is yes, of course. And it was, the emphasis of the question was, are we neglecting to use the

00:52:23 – 00:52:28:	Psalms? And I would say yes, most churches are in fact neglecting to use the Psalms.

00:52:29 – 00:52:34:	In the Lutheran church, we do use that as an intro it. And sometimes there's responsive bits

00:52:34 – 00:52:39:	that are the Psalm and we do have other bits of the Psalms in the Divine Service smattered

00:52:39 – 00:52:45:	here and there scattered about. But yes, we should be using the Psalter. Because as Scripture says,

00:52:45 – 00:52:53:	we're to use Psalms, hymns, etc. And so we should be using them because the Psalter is the original

00:52:53 – 00:53:00:	hymnal of the church. We should be employing it. We should be singing it. Or at least chanting it

00:53:00 – 00:53:05:	because whether or not it works particularly well sung in English is an open question,

00:53:05 – 00:53:10:	but it can certainly be chanted. We should make use of it. It is Scripture. We are commanded to

00:53:10 – 00:53:17:	use it. One of the accusations leveled against the Lutherans by Rome was that we were singing

00:53:17 – 00:53:23:	people into the faith. And I think that is a great accusation we should wear with pride.

00:53:23 – 00:53:35:	One of the first hymnals that was in the vernacular was produced largely by Luther. He wasn't the one

00:53:35 – 00:53:41:	who printed it and actually produced it. But he worked with the man who did and produced many of

00:53:41 – 00:53:46:	the hymns that were in it. And that was in 1524. That was even before the Reformation got into

00:53:46 – 00:53:53:	full swing. Obviously that was after 1517, after the theses had been posted, but before 1530 when

00:53:53 – 00:54:00:	the Augsburg Confession was presented. And so very early on Lutherans recognized the importance of

00:54:01 – 00:54:07:	teaching Christians via music, via hymns. Because as was mentioned, you are going to remember things

00:54:07 – 00:54:11:	better if they are set to music. That is just how human memory works.

00:54:14 – 00:54:20:	In addition to the question about the Psalms in particular, there were two other

00:54:22 – 00:54:26:	minor questions, one partly in jest that came from this particular questioner.

00:54:27 – 00:54:33:	One was do Lutherans have a category for non-lutheran theologians other than terrible?

00:54:33 – 00:54:36:	And the answer to that is yes, of course, we call him Philip Melanchthon.

00:54:38 – 00:54:42:	And then the other question was whether I am partly joking about that just for those who

00:54:42 – 00:54:49:	aren't familiar with the struggle that we had in Lutheranism when Philip Melanchthon attempted to

00:54:49 – 00:54:57:	reconcile to be ecumenical with the Reformed. There are some things that happened in that pursuit

00:54:58 – 00:55:05:	with which Lutherans would not agree. So partly in jest, partly serious. But the other part,

00:55:05 – 00:55:10:	the other question here was whether there are different levels of punishment in hell,

00:55:10 – 00:55:16:	and where do we get that from? There are a few different places you get that in Scripture.

00:55:16 – 00:55:23:	There is the one where Christ speaks of various servants being varying levels of

00:55:23 – 00:55:29:	honest or dutiful in their tasks and the amount of the beating they will receive,

00:55:30 – 00:55:35:	if they are not. And then there is, of course, Revelation 20, which speaks of the books being

00:55:35 – 00:55:42:	opened and the deeds of the dead being assessed. What you have done in life will be assessed at

00:55:42 – 00:55:49:	the judgment and you will be rewarded or punished accordingly. And so for those who are not in Christ,

00:55:49 – 00:55:56:	there will be varying degrees of punishment because you are paying for your sins because your

00:55:56 – 00:56:02:	sins are not covered by Christ's blood because you're not in Christ. And so you are paying for

00:56:02 – 00:56:07:	those sins. Each of those sins will take you an eternity to pay, but your eternity is going to

00:56:07 – 00:56:14:	be worse if you have more of them or if you have worse sins. And so that's where we get the doctrine

00:56:15 – 00:56:20:	of the varying degrees of punishment in hell. I'm sure that question came in before we did

00:56:20 – 00:56:25:	the recent episode on all sins are not equal, and we discussed it some length. That was what the whole

00:56:25 – 00:56:31:	episode was about. Not only are the degrees of sin different, but obviously the degrees of punishment

00:56:31 – 00:56:37:	will also vary. You're still either damned or you're saved. That's a binary, but heaven and hell

00:56:38 – 00:56:44:	will not be equal for those who are in those places. God is not egalitarian. There's no

00:56:44 – 00:56:51:	equality anywhere. There's a place of honor in heaven. There's a place of honor wherever God goes,

00:56:51 – 00:56:55:	and he bestows that upon whom he chooses. And so we don't get to whine about it. Well, it's not

00:56:55 – 00:57:00:	fair. That's not equal. Yeah, you're right. It's not fair or equal. God dispenses his gifts as he

00:57:00 – 00:57:06:	wishes. And we are duty bound as creatures to receive them in thanksgiving and anything else

00:57:06 – 00:57:13:	of sin. The last question we're going to touch on was about our thoughts on monasticism. He said

00:57:13 – 00:57:18:	he understands a concern with regard to perpetual vows, but with something like short-term monastic

00:57:18 – 00:57:25:	houses of work, prayer, and study, be a useful tool for young men in the church. This goes back

00:57:25 – 00:57:31:	to one of my stock answers of what problem are you trying to solve? Yes, I do think that a period

00:57:31 – 00:57:37:	of prayer and study and reflection away from the wicked world would benefit young men, particularly

00:57:37 – 00:57:43:	as they're exiting, as they're entering adulthood and transitioning into the real world. On the other

00:57:43 – 00:57:49:	hand, I don't think you need monastic houses to do that. I think a young man who's been raised well

00:57:49 – 00:57:57:	by a faithful father is going to have been doing that his entire life when a son is raised in a

00:57:57 – 00:58:03:	manner that is focusing on prayer and work and study. He's going to keep doing it. Children are

00:58:03 – 00:58:08:	going to be raised up by their parents to do what they're going to do for the rest of their lives,

00:58:08 – 00:58:16:	for good or ill. So if you get to be 18, 19, 20, and you decide you need to bolt on some prayer

00:58:16 – 00:58:20:	before you get going in the world, it's already too late. You should have been doing that all

00:58:20 – 00:58:27:	along. If we lived in a world where that were actually happening, the need for that sort of

00:58:28 – 00:58:34:	spiritual halfway house would basically vanish. Men would be properly formed as they entered

00:58:34 – 00:58:41:	adulthood without needing a timeout. Even if you don't have great parents, if you're a young man,

00:58:41 – 00:58:47:	you can still create this for yourself. Spend less time on the internet, spend less time on your phone,

00:58:47 – 00:58:52:	spend more time in nature, spend more time reading the Word of God and studying,

00:58:53 – 00:59:02:	spend more time seeking out sound sources of doctrine and reflect and judge your own actions

00:59:02 – 00:59:07:	according to what you're seeing in Scripture. And if you find that you can do better as a

00:59:07 – 00:59:14:	matter of conscience, work on that. Work on your own self-development. There are many passages,

00:59:14 – 00:59:20:	particularly in the New Testament, really in all of Scripture talking about athletes as an example

00:59:20 – 00:59:27:	of godly formation. When the body is disciplined, it's the same as the mind being disciplined.

00:59:28 – 00:59:34:	All of these things are beneficial. We're not just souls stuck in meat and we're not just bodies

00:59:34 – 00:59:40:	with no immortal soul. God puts all of these things together in one. We have a body, a mind, and a

00:59:40 – 00:59:46:	soul. Those are the words we use for it. We're not exactly sure how those are constituted in

00:59:46 – 00:59:50:	such a way that you can subdivide them. It doesn't matter. Those are philosophical questions that,

00:59:50 – 00:59:57:	frankly, I find kind of toxic because you go down that rabbit trail and suddenly you want to try

59:57 – 01:00:03
to derive conclusions that are supported by the evidence. We know that if the body dies, the soul

01:00:03 – 01:00:10:	departs. We know that if you fracture someone's mind, the body can wither and die. We know that you

01:00:10 – 01:00:16:	can destroy a soul in place and leave just a shell of a human being through horrific things that are

01:00:16 – 01:00:22:	done to some people. All of those things are bad things. Let's focus on just not doing that,

01:00:22 – 01:00:28:	preserving the body, the mind, and the soul together. As God's put it together in the context of a young

01:00:28 – 01:00:35:	man being raised up or a young woman, focus on living a godly life as you are being brought up.

01:00:35 – 01:00:41:	You shouldn't get to your adulthood and realize you need to play spiritual catch-up. If you get

01:00:41 – 01:00:47:	to that point and you need to, yes, you should absolutely play spiritual catch-up, but proper

01:00:47 – 01:00:53:	formation of our youth obviates the need for nunneries and monasteries. As Lutherans, we,

01:00:53 – 01:01:01:	of course, do object to perpetual vows and to monasticism generally. We would not approve

01:01:01 – 01:01:09:	of monasteries or nunneries. However, just go camping. Take your Bible with you. Go out in nature,

01:01:09 – 01:01:15:	sit there and read. If you need some time away to spend time in the Word, do it. There are easy

01:01:15 – 01:01:21:	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 – 01:01:29:	Now, are there benefits to having some time off from the world away from things to focus on God?

01:01:29 – 01:01:33:	Of course, absolutely. But again, you can do that by going camping with your Bible.

01:01:34 – 01:01:40:	You can go on a men's retreat. There are various things you can do that are not monasticism.

01:01:41 – 01:01:46:	And I will link it in the show notes. It's actually one of the longer articles in the

01:01:46 – 01:01:53:	Augsburg Confession is the one in which we condemn monasticism. That's article 27. I'll link both

01:01:54 – 01:01:59:	the confession and the apology of it. It is one of the longer articles because it was a very

01:01:59 – 01:02:07:	serious problem at the time and remains so in the case of Rome and the East. So for the

01:02:07 – 01:02:14:	pre-Reformation sects. And so no, we would not approve of monasticism, but there are certain

01:02:15 – 01:02:21:	practices that are associated with the monastic life that are not bad. So taking time away from

01:02:21 – 01:02:27:	the world to focus on God is entirely fine. Separating yourself entirely from the world

01:02:27 – 01:02:33:	to supposedly focus on God is not because all you're doing is separating yourself from your

01:02:33 – 01:02:38:	neighbor and refusing to actually serve God in the ways that he has told you to serve him

01:02:38 – 01:02:44:	and pretending that you have made this holy life for yourself when in fact all you're doing is

01:02:44 – 01:02:52:	rebelling against God. As a historical note, it's important I think to mention that monasticism

01:02:52 – 01:02:59:	for both men and women as it was practiced by the time of Luther, a lot of that was specifically

01:02:59 – 01:03:05:	financial. It was a financial trick employed by the Roman Catholic Church basically to interrupt

01:03:05 – 01:03:11:	inheritance because since the monks and the nuns couldn't inherit property, if they could get

01:03:12 – 01:03:17:	the descendants of someone in the church and everyone was in the church to become

01:03:18 – 01:03:23:	non-inheritors, it pretty much guaranteed that their property upon their death would be transferred

01:03:23 – 01:03:28:	to the church. So it was actually a financing, it was a fundraising drive. They would steal their

01:03:28 – 01:03:34:	children, commit them to lifelong bows of these obscenities, and then oh by the way when you die

01:03:34 – 01:03:38:	we'll take all your property. So it was one of the main ways that the Roman Catholic Church

01:03:38 – 01:03:43:	enriched itself. So today we don't think about or talk about that stuff and we think oh you know

01:03:43 – 01:03:49:	there's a monastery and they're praying and they're making beer or whatever. That was a small part of

01:03:49 – 01:03:55:	it. That was a machine, it was a financial machine. So if you want to try to have some

01:03:55 – 01:03:59:	trad fantasy, get serious about looking at what they were actually doing because there was a great

01:03:59 – 01:04:06:	deal more to it. And oh by the way abortions were very common in nunneries and sodomy was very

01:04:06 – 01:04:12:	common in the monasteries in the 1500s. That's something that's referred to obliquely in the

01:04:12 – 01:04:17:	Book of Concord. It also goes back another 500 years before that, Saint Peter Damien,

01:04:17 – 01:04:25:	one of the doctors of the Roman Catholic Church himself condemned the obscene sexual abuses that

01:04:25 – 01:04:32:	were occurring within those places in the Roman Catholic Church. So these places that were told

01:04:32 – 01:04:40:	oh it's just quiet reflection on God and prayer, no. The vows of celibacy led directly to egregious

01:04:40 – 01:04:47:	sexual sin as they always do. One important point that just as an aside I think is worth making,

01:04:48 – 01:04:55:	celibacy is a gift from God. It is a specific gift. If you hear my voice you are almost certainly

01:04:55 – 01:05:01:	not celibate. It is so rare. You've probably never met anyone who's celibate. Well that

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

01:05:05 – 01:05:13:	point. Celibate is not the antonym for having sex. Celibate is basically what is referred to today

01:05:13 – 01:05:20:	as asexuality. It's someone who has no desire whatsoever for the opposite sex. That is incredibly

01:05:20 – 01:05:27:	rare. And now today when people talk about being asexual a lot of them just have mental problems.

01:05:27 – 01:05:31:	I'm not saying all the people who say they're asexual have a gift from God.

01:05:31 – 01:05:36:	Most of them probably have a demon. But God has on occasion made people who simply do not have any

01:05:36 – 01:05:43:	desire. If you have ever had sexual desire for a member of the opposite sex you are not celibate.

01:05:43 – 01:05:48:	You are simply not a fornicator. So if you have desire and you burn with desire you should be

01:05:48 – 01:05:53:	married so that you can live a godly life and that desire can be fulfilled in a godly fashion.

01:05:53 – 01:06:00:	The opposite is not celibacy. So it's just a point to make because I think it's very dangerous when

01:06:00 – 01:06:06:	we conflate that term and then try to hold people to impossible standards.

01:06:08 – 01:06:14:	Young men you're not celibate. You're not married. And the implication of not being married is that

01:06:14 – 01:06:21:	you're not having sex. That should be the default. If you're not married you're either being chased

01:06:21 – 01:06:26:	or you're being a fornicator. And then if you are married you should be having sex

01:06:26 – 01:06:31:	except for periods of abstention with the agreement of both parties. That's what God says.

01:06:32 – 01:06:37:	Everything else is weird and sinful. So just stick to the basics. It's not complicated.

01:06:40 – 01:06:45:	So to wrap up we just want to talk a little bit about the progress we made in growing the

01:06:45 – 01:06:49:	audience for this podcast in the last six months. We went from absolutely nothing,

01:06:50 – 01:06:54:	no advertising budget, no curb appeal, no reason for anyone to listen to us.

01:06:55 – 01:07:00:	I've said before in private that when we started this I hope that we would get past the point that

01:07:00 – 01:07:07:	most of our friends would be kind of pity listening. So if we got passed about 50 listeners

01:07:07 – 01:07:10:	every week I was going to be pretty happy. That was kind of the first threshold for,

01:07:10 – 01:07:16:	okay, somebody's actually paying attention and maybe they care. We very rapidly blew past that.

01:07:16 – 01:07:22:	The growth has been very, very steady week over week and month over month. And it's been entirely

01:07:22 – 01:07:26:	word of mouth. It's been you, the listener, sharing it with friends, people at church,

01:07:26 – 01:07:32:	coworkers, just friends you know. Sometimes individual episodes, sometimes recommending

01:07:32 – 01:07:36:	the entire podcast series as a whole. We're very thankful for all of that.

01:07:36 – 01:07:42:	We never wanted to do this just to be shouting into the void, but at the same time it's very

01:07:42 – 01:07:48:	much appreciated that people see and hear some value in what it is that we're saying.

01:07:48 – 01:07:52:	And I think that the feedback that we've gotten has been very much along the lines of

01:07:52 – 01:07:58:	what we set out to do, which was to talk about the things that almost everybody else is afraid

01:07:58 – 01:08:04:	to talk about. Talk about them in an intelligent fashion, in a fearless fashion, that just goes

01:08:04 – 01:08:10:	through things that are actually impactful in the world and sheds some light on them.

01:08:10 – 01:08:16:	Not new light. We make the case as often as we can. We're not saying anything new about this.

01:08:16 – 01:08:21:	We're saying things that generally everyone used to think. And then at some point they went away.

01:08:21 – 01:08:26:	As Christians, we should want to be connected with what Christians have always believed.

01:08:26 – 01:08:33:	That's always an important question. So today, we're going from zero, going from me and Corey

01:08:33 – 01:08:37:	being the only listeners every morning as we had prepped the show to make sure it sounded good.

01:08:38 – 01:08:43:	One of the things that was important to us was the audio quality. It was hilarious to me when

01:08:43 – 01:08:49:	issues, etc., put those clips of us on their show. Our audio quality was actually better than

01:08:49 – 01:08:55:	theirs somehow in the same recording. I guess that's a function of how they have their voices

01:08:55 – 01:09:00:	compressed and stuff. But it actually sounds really good. And that was important to us. Corey and I

01:09:00 – 01:09:06:	both spent a fair amount of money on mics and hardware and software specifically so that

01:09:06 – 01:09:10:	this could be listenable. Because we knew that the things that we were going to be saying,

01:09:10 – 01:09:14:	we're going to be hard to hear. We wanted to make sure that actually hearing them would at least

01:09:14 – 01:09:20:	be an easy experience. So I think we pulled that off. I'm happy with how it sounds. There was

01:09:20 – 01:09:24:	some somebody making fun of my voice yesterday. I don't like my voice either, dude. It's what God

01:09:24 – 01:09:32:	gave me. It's what I got. Someone specifically said I was low T. Whatever. The irony is that

01:09:32 – 01:09:37:	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 – 01:09:42:	through as a pleasing baritone on the mic. It just comes through as a boomy. So I have to chop

01:09:42 – 01:09:49:	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 – 01:09:55:	both ways and listened. It would sound much worse if you heard all of my voice. So you're hearing

01:09:55 – 01:09:58:	some of the higher stuff, but that's typical in audio. Generally you have to roll off at about

01:09:58 – 01:10:04:	100 hertz. We cared about that stuff. So I could make myself sound deeper. I am not using a voice

01:10:04 – 01:10:09:	changer. This is what I sound like all the time. The funny thing is that before I bought this really

01:10:09 – 01:10:16:	fancy mic, I had a much lower regard for my voice because I'd only ever heard shoddy recordings of

01:10:16 – 01:10:23:	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 – 01:10:28:	thought. And it's worth noting that none of you have ever heard your own voice until you've heard

01:10:28 – 01:10:34:	recording. What you hear in your head is not only going through the air to your ears, but it's also

01:10:34 – 01:10:39:	going straight through all the meat in your head to your ears. So there's a muffled version of your

01:10:39 – 01:10:43:	voice going straight from your voice box into your eardrum without passing through the air,

01:10:43 – 01:10:48:	which is why all of us sound really weird on recordings. That's what everybody else hears.

01:10:48 – 01:10:52:	So I wish you could hear the sound of my voice in my head. I think it sounds better, but

01:10:53 – 01:10:56:	that's not real. That's not who I really am. This is who I really am.

01:10:57 – 01:11:02:	When we got set, we wanted to make sure it sounded good because we wanted to be a good

01:11:02 – 01:11:08:	podcast. We wanted to be listenable and enjoyable. I've listened to thousands of hours of podcasts

01:11:08 – 01:11:12:	and wanted to make sure that this was worth listening to in addition to the content, but

01:11:12 – 01:11:17:	that it was just sound good and be easy to hear. So thank you for those who have complimented us

01:11:17 – 01:11:23:	on the sound of those things as well. And so just to give some rough information about

01:11:23 – 01:11:28:	sort of how many listeners we have, how many total downloads and things like that,

01:11:29 – 01:11:35:	I want to start off by pointing out that we do not actually have particularly invasive tracking

01:11:35 – 01:11:42:	set up. So a lot of this is some math on my end and a bit of guesswork admittedly,

01:11:43 – 01:11:49:	because we just don't have invasive analytics. We're not tracking every single download and

01:11:49 – 01:11:54:	where it was downloaded and the device and all of that stuff. We're not doing that. That's not

01:11:54 – 01:12:01:	our goal here. You do that if you're trying to sell your podcast to advertisers. And one,

01:12:01 – 01:12:08:	we're not. And two, probably a fairly limited pool of advertisers. If we were so inclined,

01:12:08 – 01:12:13:	I can think of maybe one or two who would actually be interested, but not something we

01:12:13 – 01:12:19:	have in mind. As we mentioned, this is not something we're doing to make money. If we were

01:12:19 – 01:12:24:	doing this to make money, you would have to conclude that we're both idiots, because this

01:12:24 – 01:12:29:	is one of the worst possible ways you could try to do that, because we are going to offend

01:12:29 – 01:12:35:	basically everyone at some point. Everyone has idols and we're going to step on all of them.

01:12:37 – 01:12:45:	But anyway, to look at some rough numbers, if I look at the total number of downloads,

01:12:46 – 01:12:49:	and then do a little bit of math to figure out the actual ultimate number,

01:12:50 – 01:12:58:	we have somewhere between 70 and 75,000 total episode downloads so far.

01:13:00 – 01:13:09:	Now, I don't have a complete breakdown of that by episode, because I was not tracking that

01:13:09 – 01:13:17:	initially. I was just tracking the total number of downloads. And so do some very simple math. If

01:13:17 – 01:13:24:	you have 75,000 total, that's about 2,900 downloads per episode. If you assume the

01:13:24 – 01:13:29:	episodes are equal, they're not, some have more downloads than others. But that is about

01:13:31 – 01:13:36:	right on track now that I have per episode information, because we're at right around

01:13:36 – 01:13:44:	2,100, say for episode 22 and a little less for episode 23 and a little less than 23 for 24,

01:13:44 – 01:13:49:	because we have a long tail on these episodes. People are continuing to download them as they

01:13:49 – 01:14:01:	remain up. But we are getting right around 1,200 to maybe 1,500 depending downloads right away

01:14:01 – 01:14:06:	on release day. And so that represents the number of people we have who have subscribed in the

01:14:06 – 01:14:12:	various podcast apps, which we're quite pleased with that number. It's a good number. And then

01:14:12 – 01:14:17:	even more so with the number of, like I said, the long tail, the number of people who are

01:14:17 – 01:14:24:	continuing to download, share these episodes, listen to them weeks, months after the fact.

01:14:25 – 01:14:31:	We do not have a podcast where people are just listening on the day of release,

01:14:32 – 01:14:36:	deleting it and then ever thinking about it again, which of course is not what we want. We don't

01:14:36 – 01:14:41:	want people to never think about these issues again. These are important issues about which

01:14:41 – 01:14:47:	Christians should be continuing to think. And so some will return to these episodes

01:14:47 – 01:14:52:	when they have questions or when someone else asks a question, they want to provide an answer.

01:14:52 – 01:14:59:	Here's an episode about this specific question. And we see that we see spikes in downloads for

01:14:59 – 01:15:05:	certain episodes sometimes where someone has shared it somewhere. Sometimes we happen to notice

01:15:05 – 01:15:09:	the share. Sometimes we don't because some of these are shared in group chats to which we are not

01:15:09 – 01:15:16:	party. But we know that this is being shared, that the information is being spread, and it is basically

01:15:17 – 01:15:23:	all been organic at this point. We've been boosted a few times by people on Twitter and elsewhere

01:15:23 – 01:15:30:	who've liked the content, but it has been an entirely organic thing, how this podcast has

01:15:30 – 01:15:35:	spread and grown. So the reason we're talking about this is that if you are listening, we just

01:15:35 – 01:15:41:	want you to know you're in good company. If you happen to stumble across us and have no idea of

01:15:41 – 01:15:45:	it, it's just too crazy guys shouting into a microphone and then you basically with a

01:15:46 – 01:15:52:	shortwave radio tuning in in your cabin. It's not that isolated. There are thousands of people

01:15:52 – 01:15:57:	who are listening right along with you. And some of them are hate listeners. The guy I mentioned

01:15:57 – 01:16:02:	to was making fun of me yesterday, whatever dude. I'm glad you're listening. I think it's hilarious

01:16:02 – 01:16:07:	that we have hate listeners because they're keeping up with the latest episodes. They're listening.

01:16:07 – 01:16:13:	They're listening in every word we say. And all they can do is make fun. There's been no serious

01:16:13 – 01:16:18:	critique of our content. Even when we were on issues, et cetera, last week, it wasn't a serious

01:16:18 – 01:16:25:	critique. It was absurd. It was laughably goofy. They would play a very charitable clip. I was

01:16:25 – 01:16:31:	very thankful that when Jeff edited those clips, he was very fair. He put our entire argument

01:16:31 – 01:16:36:	on the air, which shocked me because the other guy who was on there had not done that on his own

01:16:36 – 01:16:43:	show, which was even more ham-fisted. So they would air a complete clip of us making an argument,

01:16:43 – 01:16:48:	and then Todd would say, so what did we just hear? And then the other guy would make some

01:16:48 – 01:16:52:	absurd comments that had literally nothing to do with what we had just said. Like I said,

01:16:52 – 01:16:57:	it was the best unpaid advertisement we ever could have hoped for. And so I hope that lots of people

01:16:57 – 01:17:03:	will discover us as a result of them trying to make fun of us and saying we're heretics and whatever.

01:17:03 – 01:17:07:	If you're listening, at least some of you think we're heretics, some of you hate us and want to

01:17:07 – 01:17:12:	make fun of us, we're glad you're listening. I hope that something we say will reach your heart too,

01:17:12 – 01:17:17:	because this isn't coming from us. We think that what we're saying is consonant with what God has

01:17:17 – 01:17:22:	said. So to everyone else, which is the majority of our listeners, certainly thank you very much

01:17:22 – 01:17:27:	for sharing it, for recommending to others, for spending the time listening to our voices.

01:17:28 – 01:17:32:	It's flattering and humbling that anyone would care what we have to say.

01:17:32 – 01:17:37:	I've said in the past, I spend most of my time getting called retarded for saying this stuff,

01:17:37 – 01:17:43:	because people don't get it. And it's nice for us to have the opportunity for a long-form discussion

01:17:43 – 01:17:50:	to make the case clearly. When people have asked me in person to defend some of the things that

01:17:50 – 01:17:57:	we've said here, it's a little puzzling for someone to think that a two-hour episode could fit in

01:17:57 – 01:18:00:	to part of a conversation that's not going to be that long.

01:18:01 – 01:18:05:	The nice thing about us being able to sit here and talk is that we can cover all the bases,

01:18:05 – 01:18:11:	at least ones we think are important. I think one of the best examples is Cory's tweet from

01:18:11 – 01:18:17:	last Friday about interracial marriage. It was like one sentence, got 600,000 plus views,

01:18:17 – 01:18:23:	got the whole world riled up condemning him. And then on Monday, you did about a half-hour

01:18:23 – 01:18:29:	podcast where you just discussed your explanation for it. And the few people who listened to that

01:18:29 – 01:18:34:	explanation most of them are like, okay, I can see that argument. That's the way this stuff works.

01:18:34 – 01:18:38:	You can't have a good discussion on Twitter. You can't have a good short-form discussion.

01:18:38 – 01:18:43:	You can light a fuse. You can shine a light. But that's all it does. To actually have a serious

01:18:43 – 01:18:47:	discussion about this stuff takes time. And so we're appreciative to everyone who would spend

01:18:47 – 01:18:54:	the time to actually hear us out because that's important. It's important to whatever it is that

01:18:54 – 01:18:59:	you think you want to focus on, spend some time on it. And we're glad the folks would spend some

01:18:59 – 01:19:05:	time with us. One of the things I wanted to mention is discoverability. If you listen to us,

01:19:05 – 01:19:10:	if you happen to listen on the web, please subscribe through whatever your platform's

01:19:10 – 01:19:19:	podcast player is. Those subscription stats help the engines of recommendation to recommend podcast

01:19:19 – 01:19:25:	to other people. Stonequire shows up with issues, et cetera. And a number of other shows, some are

01:19:25 – 01:19:31:	related to religion, some aren't, which is great. I'm glad that there are people who have diverse

01:19:31 – 01:19:37:	interests who are also tuning into this. We show up in the Christianity podcast listings.

01:19:38 – 01:19:41:	If you use one of those, we're going to ask you to take a few minutes,

01:19:41 – 01:19:47:	maybe a few minutes, take 20 seconds to go and please leave a five star review. We don't say

01:19:47 – 01:19:51:	five stars because you necessarily agree with everything. It's just that on a scale of one

01:19:51 – 01:19:57:	to five, if you want to say what you actually think and you say like a three or four, it drags

01:19:57 – 01:20:01:	down the score in such a way that when someone glances, you're just like on Yelp or anything

01:20:01 – 01:20:06:	else. Five stars, like, oh, that's amazing. That must be a great show. If you get down to 4.8,

01:20:06 – 01:20:11:	people are thinking, yeah, maybe. If something's like a three and a half, people think, that's

01:20:11 – 01:20:20:	mediocre. I'm not going to waste my time. Right now, we have like 56 reviews on the iOS listings,

01:20:20 – 01:20:26:	and we have a score like 4.5. We've had a few hate listeners leave some comments and their

01:20:26 – 01:20:30:	feedback, one star reviews. There will be more of this now that we're mentioning it. We had

01:20:30 – 01:20:34:	debated for a while whether we would say anything because some of the people who are so filled with

01:20:34 – 01:20:39:	hate will want to prevent anyone from discovering this podcast. Now that we're mentioning it,

01:20:39 – 01:20:45:	it is important for you if you listen and you like it at all, please leave us five stars.

01:20:45 – 01:20:52:	It's cheap. It's easy, and it will help improve discoverability. If we could get up to 500 reviews

01:20:52 – 01:20:56:	of whatever numbers, that makes a big difference in the engine saying, hey, there's something you

01:20:56 – 01:21:02:	could check out because as great as words of mouth has been, one of the fascinating things

01:21:02 – 01:21:06:	we've gotten in feedback from the show is that people as recently as this week have said,

01:21:07 – 01:21:11:	I knew what you guys were like on Twitter. I wasn't sure what to expect on the podcast.

01:21:11 – 01:21:17:	What I got was completely different than what I expected. We're sane, arguably,

01:21:17 – 01:21:23:	as sane as intelligent men can be. We're reasonable. We make our cases calmly and clearly.

01:21:23 – 01:21:29:	So folks who just stumble onto the podcast generally like it. We're stomping on idols,

01:21:29 – 01:21:33:	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 – 01:21:38:	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 – 01:21:43:	to discover it, please take a minute and leave a five-star review on whatever service you use.

01:21:43 – 01:21:50:	If it's Spotify, Google, Apple, whatever, that helps other people find us and help to continue to

01:21:51 – 01:21:56:	spread a message that we think is worth hearing. And if you're listening, hopefully you do as well.

01:21:56 – 01:22:00:	I know that some people have commented. I've had DMs and other things.

01:22:01 – 01:22:07:	They've said that I am a different person on Twitter versus on the podcast versus on my own

01:22:07 – 01:22:17:	podcast. And I would reject the frame that I am a different person. It is that different media

01:22:17 – 01:22:24:	warrant a different approach. And this is related to something that I've mentioned before. We have a

01:22:24 – 01:22:31:	flattening of behavior, of conduct in the modern context, particularly in the U.S. for various

01:22:31 – 01:22:40:	reasons. People behave, dress, speak the same everywhere these days. That's very unusual. That

01:22:40 – 01:22:47:	is not historically how human beings conducted themselves. You did not dress, act, and speak

01:22:47 – 01:22:53:	the same way on Sunday morning at church as you did at the pub with your friends after work on

01:22:53 – 01:23:00:	Friday or at home with your wife and children. You tailored these things to your audience,

01:23:00 – 01:23:08:	to the environment. And that is just exactly what I'm doing when I engage in a certain way on Twitter

01:23:08 – 01:23:15:	because Twitter, the only real use of Twitter, unless you're purely using it for some sort of

01:23:15 – 01:23:21:	entertainment, which I guess you can do that. But the way to engage on Twitter is that you

01:23:21 – 01:23:28:	actually have to get people to read what you say. You have to get them to want to respond to it.

01:23:29 – 01:23:33:	And so you have to get them to engage with it. Otherwise, there's really no purpose

01:23:33 – 01:23:40:	in it. You're just shouting into a void. And so I engage in a certain way to get that response

01:23:40 – 01:23:44:	because if you don't get the response, you can't teach because you don't get the person to listen.

01:23:44 – 01:23:49:	And so as was mentioned, yes, only a handful of people are going to bother clicking through

01:23:49 – 01:23:55:	and listening to the full explanation. But I did get the person to think about the topic.

01:23:56 – 01:24:01:	That is now something that has at least come up in his mind. And maybe at some point in the future,

01:24:02 – 01:24:08:	he will be willing to listen more on that topic. And so yes, I do engage in a different way in

01:24:09 – 01:24:14:	different contexts. And that's just the way that everything has been done historically.

01:24:14 – 01:24:20:	That is, I would say, the proper way to do things. The tweet you mentioned that I mentioned earlier,

01:24:20 – 01:24:26:	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 – 01:24:30:	views. Who knows, someone could pick it up and it could hit a million by the time this podcast

01:24:30 – 01:24:38:	episode is released tomorrow. But well, exactly, that's how you engage. You get people to respond

01:24:38 – 01:24:46:	to it. And so yes, I am more polemical on Twitter than I am on this podcast. Because the point of

01:24:46 – 01:24:52:	this podcast isn't pure polemics. We do engage in polemics to some degree. But it's not pure polemics.

01:24:52 – 01:24:59:	Twitter is largely polemical. And so I'm going to say things on Twitter that are going to set

01:24:59 – 01:25:03:	your hair on fire from time to time. But that's Twitter. That's just what it is.

01:25:04 – 01:25:08:	Speaking of setting your hair on fire, the last thing we wanted to mention ties into something

01:25:08 – 01:25:14:	you said a minute ago. When we first started Stonequire, within a few weeks, Corey had a

01:25:14 – 01:25:20:	number of DMs requesting some sort of tip jar or something. And so he eventually set it up.

01:25:21 – 01:25:25:	I think largely just kind of as an experiment. We didn't know if anyone would use it.

01:25:25 – 01:25:31:	We've never mentioned it before anywhere. As we said, in the paywalling episode,

01:25:31 – 01:25:38:	Corey said earlier, this is not a money making enterprise for us. However, we do have a donation

01:25:38 – 01:25:43:	link at the top and the bottom of the top of your page on the Stonequire page in the footer.

01:25:43 – 01:25:49:	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 – 01:25:55:	bucks. We're not asking for anybody's money. We're not saying you're a freeloader if you

01:25:55 – 01:26:00:	don't send us any money. And I mentioned this in the specific context of smashing idols and

01:26:00 – 01:26:04:	lighting hair on fire because if we haven't offended you yet, I'm certain at some point

01:26:04 – 01:26:10:	we're going to. So before anyone would ever even consider sending us a dime, which we're not asking

01:26:10 – 01:26:16:	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 – 01:26:22:	$5 or whatever. And then in two months, we say something that you find incredibly offensive.

01:26:22 – 01:26:26:	You're like, I hate those guys. I feel so ripped off and betrayed. If you think that you could have

01:26:26 – 01:26:31:	that response in the future, please don't send us any money. I would much rather you not feel burned

01:26:31 – 01:26:38:	by us saying what we think is the truth because you didn't send us anything. So we're only mentioning

01:26:38 – 01:26:43:	it now because we've had a number of people who have sent us gifts, all of whom have been very

01:26:43 – 01:26:48:	generous. And we want to just take a minute to acknowledge that so far that what they have

01:26:48 – 01:26:53:	sent has basically just kind of been vanishing into a black hole. And we decided that's not really

01:26:53 – 01:26:58:	fair. So to each and every one of you who sent anything, thank you from the bottom of our hearts.

01:26:58 – 01:27:06:	It means a great deal. It's already offset the cost of what we had put into building, not studios,

01:27:06 – 01:27:11:	but our microphones and setups and stuff. We're very thankful for that. I've sent people money

01:27:11 – 01:27:16:	before just for similar things. So I totally get it. You're voting with your wallets.

01:27:17 – 01:27:22:	We're only mentioning this to say thank you. There are about 30 things that I would tell you

01:27:22 – 01:27:27:	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 – 01:27:32:	not a solicitation. We had to mention it to be able to say thank you to those who've given anything.

01:27:32 – 01:27:37:	There are a whole lot of things that need our money. You need your money more than we do.

01:27:37 – 01:27:41:	For those of you who voted with your wallets by saying thank you for what we're doing here,

01:27:41 – 01:27:46:	we're eternally grateful. It's very generous of you and it is greatly appreciated and it's humbling.

01:27:46 – 01:27:52:	In a way, it's also kind of incrementally enslaving us because if you say, hey,

01:27:52 – 01:27:58:	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 – 01:28:04:	So I appreciate the enslavement. It's a good reminder that what we're doing here is not for

01:28:04 – 01:28:09:	ourselves. It's something we're doing for God's glory and we're doing it for your edification

01:28:09 – 01:28:13:	and to know that that's actually happening is very rewarding. So thank you.

01:28:14 – 01:28:19:	I guess that's also a peek behind the curtain as to how I make some of the design decisions for

01:28:19 – 01:28:27:	the site and such because at first, I had those who asked about the ability to donate and so I

01:28:27 – 01:28:31:	generated a donation link and it wasn't really anywhere on the site, but it was available for

01:28:31 – 01:28:36:	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 – 01:28:43:	footer, but then people kept asking me about where it was on the site. So then I also added

01:28:43 – 01:28:49:	a donate link to the top in part to head off having to answer where the link was.

01:28:49 – 01:28:54:	And so that's a peek behind the curtain as it were to part of my design philosophy,

01:28:54 – 01:28:59:	which is to head off questions. So now we look like grifters because we're putting

01:28:59 – 01:29:04:	donate links everywhere. It's literally just so if you want to use it, we're not going to put the

01:29:04 – 01:29:08:	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 – 01:29:13:	Don't worry about it. But for someone who's frustrated by that, you know where to find it.

01:29:13 – 01:29:18:	But we're literally just saying thank you to folks who have taken advantage of that

01:29:18 – 01:29:25:	because it's humbling and rewarding. And like you said, it has offset the cost of the hardware

01:29:25 – 01:29:31:	certainly and the software cost as well, which is something we never expected. I mean, that's not

01:29:31 – 01:29:34:	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 – 01:29:40:	what we do. We'll probably never mention it again. So if someone new does donate, we're never going

01:29:40 – 01:29:46:	to, I'm not going to say never. I think it's unlikely that we'll say anything for at least

01:29:46 – 01:29:52:	probably the rest of this year because that's not the point. The point is to try to be faithful

01:29:52 – 01:29:58:	to God's word and to share that with as many people as possible. And when we set this thing up

01:29:58 – 01:30:05:	originally, the hosting that Corey set up is designed to be resilient, uncancelable. We're

01:30:05 – 01:30:10:	not using any third-party podcast host, which is the reason we don't have any invasive podcast

01:30:10 – 01:30:15:	statistics. If we're using one of those hosts, we would get lots of metrics about stuff. We're

01:30:15 – 01:30:21:	both data guys, so we love that stuff. We've foregone having access to it because A, it'd be

01:30:21 – 01:30:27:	easy to cancel us, and B, we don't want to be creepy and snoopy. But we're curious about where

01:30:27 – 01:30:34:	people are coming in from, so we harvest what we can in a privacy-protecting manner. But ultimately,

01:30:34 – 01:30:38:	none of this is about numbers and it's not about self-cualification. It's just about,

01:30:39 – 01:30:45:	these are ideas we're spreading to steal the TED Talk theme once again. This stuff matters.

01:30:46 – 01:30:51:	And it matters in ways that we don't think these things should necessarily be showing up in most

01:30:51 – 01:30:56:	sermons most Sundays. We don't think this is the meat of the Christian faith. I want to make

01:30:56 – 01:31:03:	clear that that's not what we think about this stuff. We devoted five episodes to race. Race is

01:31:03 – 01:31:10:	not our hermeneutic for reading the Bible, but Satan is attacking race, so we had to address it.

01:31:10 – 01:31:14:	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 – 01:31:22:	not necessarily the primary doctrines of Christianity, but Satan has learned to go after the primary

01:31:22 – 01:31:28:	doctrines. That stuff's mostly been shot down in the past. We have Pat answers for shooting down

01:31:28 – 01:31:33:	Satan's attacks on the primary stuff, so he's moving down the list. He's moving on to secondary

01:31:33 – 01:31:38:	things, because it turns out if you can get someone lying about anything, eventually you'll

01:31:38 – 01:31:43:	get them lying about everything. So Satan's not dumb. He's not resting on his laurels. We're trying

01:31:43 – 01:31:49:	to fight a rearguard action here against evil attacks on the church itself, because as long as

01:31:49 – 01:31:55:	people are adopting views from the world and confusing them with Christianity, that's a wide

01:31:55 – 01:32:01:	open door for Satan to just run wild. There's nothing stopping him once he sneaks in like that.

01:32:01 – 01:32:06:	So the seemingly eclectic set of issues that we've talked about in the past, and it's always going

01:32:06 – 01:32:11:	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 – 01:32:17:	Satan is going after the Christian faith, and it looks random, which is why people aren't picking

01:32:17 – 01:32:23:	up on it. There's no direct connection between slavery and feminism unless you listen to feminist,

01:32:23 – 01:32:27:	and then they tell you, you know, we've been accused of lying about that when that's literally what

01:32:27 – 01:32:32:	those people are saying. So the random grab bag of stuff that we talk about, it's what's happening

01:32:32 – 01:32:38:	in the world. So as long as the battle continues to move and evolve, we'll continue to shine a

01:32:38 – 01:32:43:	bright light on it so that if someone wants to hear what's coming next, where the attack is,

01:32:43 – 01:32:51:	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 – 01:32:55:	even if you don't agree with our conclusions, at least to know that, hey, there's something going

01:32:55 – 01:33:00:	on here that I didn't know about before. That might be important, like Corey said with his tweet,

01:33:00 – 01:33:05:	you know, maybe something we say goes in one ear and out the other. And a couple years from now,

01:33:05 – 01:33:10:	it comes up again in your life in some other context. You're like, oh, I remember hearing

01:33:10 – 01:33:14:	about this. Wait, there's something going on here. I should take it seriously. That's why

01:33:14 – 01:33:18:	we're talking about this stuff. You might not believe us today, but down the road, many of you

01:33:18 – 01:33:22:	who maybe disagree about some of these things today, I hope and pray you're going to find

01:33:22 – 01:33:28:	yourself agreeing because we're not care-brained about this stuff. We're just, we're looking where

01:33:28 – 01:33:34:	the attacks are coming in. We're saying, hey, this is important too. It's not as important as Christ

01:33:34 – 01:33:40:	on the cross, but if you start denying how your own body is created, pretty soon Christ's body

01:33:40 – 01:33:43:	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 – 01:33:51:	It's very easy to have some minor peripheral error turn into absolute blasphemy against God.

01:33:51 – 01:33:56:	Satan knows what he's doing. So we're going to continue to be weird. We're going to continue to

01:33:56 – 01:34:01:	be saying things that are upsetting. We're going to continue to light people's hair on fire,

01:34:01 – 01:34:06:	not to be antagonistic, not to be trolls, but because the spirit of this age is completely at

01:34:06 – 01:34:13:	odds with the history of the Christian faith. We're not claiming to be great repristinators

01:34:13 – 01:34:19:	that are reviving something that's been lost, but you read your Bible. When I read my Bible,

01:34:19 – 01:34:23:	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 – 01:34:29:	face and I find other things that I have never heard in church. I'm like, well, if my pastor says

01:34:29 – 01:34:33:	he preaches the whole counsel of God and he never says this, what's going on? And sometimes that's

01:34:33 – 01:34:37:	just the basis for some of these episodes. You're like, I've never heard that before. That's really

01:34:37 – 01:34:42:	weird. And we go looking and we find that it was on the timeline for hundreds of years and then

01:34:42 – 01:34:49:	it vanished. That's interesting. And as a church that claims to be rooted in Christ's eternal word,

01:34:49 – 01:34:53:	that's a matter of concern. So we're going to continue the same format, the same style,

01:34:54 – 01:34:58:	same mode of thought and approach. And we hope you'll stick with us and we hope you'll share

01:34:58 – 01:35:03:	with all your friends and family. Yes, the summary then is, hear us today, believe us tomorrow.

01:35:03 – 01:35:08:	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 – 01:35:14:	say mean things. That's fine. I'm used to good friends thinking I was stupid for a decade or

01:35:14 – 01:35:19:	more and then eventually they'll come around and realize I was right about something. I told them

01:35:19 – 01:35:25:	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 – 01:35:31:	Corey nor I care about credit. In private, we tell people we're basically doing this stuff so

01:35:31 – 01:35:38:	that we can say the things that are true. We can take all the blame. We can start the conversations

01:35:38 – 01:35:43:	and then whatever happens to us, if we get shot down and emulated, faithful men can come in the

01:35:43 – 01:35:48:	breach behind us and can speak about these things and we will bore in the brunt of the punishment

01:35:48 – 01:35:52:	that they would have endured if they were the worst ones, the first ones to speak about it.

01:35:53 – 01:35:56:	We're going through the door first. We know it's going to hurt. We know it's going to suck.

01:35:56 – 01:36:01:	We're doing it anyway because it's important and we're hoping that other men are going to follow

01:36:01 – 01:36:05:	behind us and say, I'm sure they don't agree with everything. If you agree with anything,

01:36:06 – 01:36:12:	move the ball a little bit further down the field. Take what is true in Scripture and tell

01:36:12 – 01:36:17:	people about it, even if they've not heard before, even if it upsets them, maybe especially if it

01:36:17 – 01:36:22:	upsets them. Now, for a pastor, there's a right and wrong way to do that, but ultimately, if your

01:36:22 – 01:36:29:	people, if your flock has false beliefs in their hearts, those need to be replaced by true beliefs.

01:36:29 – 01:36:34:	That's your job as a shepherd, as a pastor. That's our job as Christians when we see a Christian

01:36:34 – 01:36:40:	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 – 01:36:45:	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 – 01:36:53:	get hurt. These conversations seem less important today than they will in the future, and we're

01:36:53 – 01:36:58:	thankful to everyone who's shared. If you've listened once in some of the episodes, I think most, if

01:36:58 – 01:37:02:	not all of them, are worth listening to a couple times. To be honest, I've listened to all of our

01:37:02 – 01:37:09:	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 – 01:37:14:	library and a framework for building on what we say in the future because all the stuff is tied

01:37:14 – 01:37:19:	together in non-obvious ways. We're going to continue in the coming years to make the case that

01:37:21 – 01:37:26:	there's something going on here that's not just about Lutherans. It's about all of Christianity.

01:37:26 – 01:37:33:	We have Catholics listening. We have Presbyterians, Baptists, non-denominational. I've had messages

01:37:33 – 01:37:38:	from every corner of Christianity saying, hey, thank you for what you're saying. I've never heard

01:37:38 – 01:37:43:	anyone speak about scriptures clearly as you guys, and I really appreciate it. We appreciate hearing

01:37:43 – 01:37:47:	that because, like I said, there have been many times when those thoughtful messages have come

01:37:47 – 01:37:53:	when we are really getting kicked in the teeth. To those of you who have said nice things, to those

01:37:53 – 01:37:58:	of you who have donated or reviewed, it's deeply appreciated. It's humbling. It's not something we

01:37:58 – 01:38:04:	ever expected. Like I said, if it had gone beyond our small set of friends, we would have been happy

01:38:04 – 01:38:08:	because we would have known that we were laying the groundwork for later on. There would be a

01:38:08 – 01:38:12:	corpus of this content available that somebody would stumble across and say, hey, there's something

01:38:12 – 01:38:19:	good here. It's grown beyond our expectations, and that's by God's grace. I expect that that will

01:38:19 – 01:38:25:	continue to grow and to expand beyond places we could possibly imagine. Thank you to each

01:38:25 – 01:38:29:	and every one of our listeners. You are appreciated, and we thank you for your time.

01:38:30 – 01:38:35:	I think we'll end with an anecdote, not a personal one this time, but an anecdote, a Lutheran one,

01:38:36 – 01:38:44:	that sort of explains our outlook on this and how we view what we're doing and what we expect the

01:38:44 – 01:38:52:	results of this to be. When Luther was asked, and he was often asked this question, if he was worried

01:38:52 – 01:39:01:	about the consequences or worried about how to reach people, worried about how to teach the laity

01:39:01 – 01:39:06:	who knew very little, if anything, of the faith because of the failures of Rome,

01:39:06 – 01:39:13:	when he was asked those sorts of questions, he would respond that he wasn't worried and that he

01:39:13 – 01:39:22:	was enjoying his time drinking beer with Melanchthon because he read the word of God, put out the truth,

01:39:22 – 01:39:28:	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 – 01:39:39:	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 – 01:39:46:	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 – 01:39:50:	because God will work everything together for the good.