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Ok
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Yeah
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Welcome to the Stone Choir podcast. I am Corey J. Mahler.
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And I'm still whoa. On today's Stone Choir, we're going to be continuing the overarching
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theme that we've had on many of these episodes where we're effectively skewering sacred cows.
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We're going to be going after another topic today that is loved and embraced by the world.
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It's a big part of conversation politically. It's, in fact, a big part of conversation
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frequently in our churches. That is a man by the name of the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther
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King Jr., also known as Michael King. That's the name by which he was born.
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So today is almost certainly going to be a two-part episode. I did the research on his
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papers, on his sermons, on his speeches, and Corey did the research on his political connections,
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his affiliations, and kind of his later life outside of the immediate sphere of the church.
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And so it's almost certainly going to run long enough that we don't want to have another
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brutal four-hour marathon. So I think we'll probably make the call around the hour mark
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that we'll probably split this into two episodes. So just so you know, there's a possibility
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this might be one or it might be two. So for the first half of this episode or the first
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episode of this two-part series, however, pans out, we're going to be going over things
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that King wrote when he was in seminary, when he was in college, when he was getting his
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graduate degree, and then when he was a pastor, which incidentally overlaps. And so we'll
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go into a little bit of the detail of the timeline there.
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Before I get into all the specifics, I want to warn you up front, we are going to bury
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you in quotes. It is very deliberate this week that we are going to quote way too much.
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The quotes are going to be too long and they're going to be too many of them. The reason that
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we're going to do that, the reason that we're going to be reading a whole lot more than
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the usual, is that the single most common refutation of some of the objections we're
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going to have in this episode or this half of the episode is, oh, he was a good boy,
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he didn't do nothing. Basically, they argue when he was young, sure, he had some problems
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theologically, but later on, he was a really good Christian man. And so we're going to
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bury you in quotes that prove that that's utterly impossible. So rather than just name
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calling and say, he's burning an hell, which is a fact, we will demonstrate that. We're
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going to use his own words, we're going to use a trajectory of his life to demonstrate
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beyond any shadow of a doubt that there was probably not a single point, there's not
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probably not a single day in this man's life where he was actually a Christian. You probably
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know very little about him. He was a civil rights leader, that he was a pastor, that
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he was nonviolent. You probably have a generally good opinion of him. People on the dissident
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right who have gotten more into the revisionist history of some of these matters and have
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seen for themselves some of the facts like, yeah, no, that's nonsense. But for most of
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you listening, you probably have a generally favorable opinion. And this episode is not
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to tear down your opinion of a dead man. The reason specifically that we're tackling this
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subject, as I said at the beginning, in our church, it is extremely common for theologians,
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for pastors, for executives of churches, for men who frankly should know these things before
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they quote this man, will use him as a paragon of Christian virtue and as a paragon of Christian
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teaching and belief. And so in the spirit of the genealogy ideas, we're just checking
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their work. There are guys who in good conscience say, we should be like Martin Luther King
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Jr., we should be like this man, we should have faith like him. If that's true, then
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they will hold up under scrutiny. So this is that scrutiny. And so to begin, I spent
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the last two days reading this guy's writings. That was incredibly painful. I don't recommend
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doing it. He's a bad writer. He's illiterate. He clearly had a lot of help when he was submitting
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his papers, because when you look at his handwritten notes and compared to the papers
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that were submitted, it's night and day. But that's not the point of this episode.
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What we're going to talk about, we're going to begin in one of the middle of his papers.
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This is a paper that he wrote, I believe, while he was a seminary. So to give a brief bio,
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when he was 15, he went to Morehouse College. This was a historically black college. It was a
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preparatory college, basically pre-sem for Baptists. After going to Morehouse, he went to
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Crozer University. After Crozer, he went to Boston University, where he received a PhD.
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So the reason that that's important is that much of the writings that we're going to be talking
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about in this first part are from this period. They're from a period where he was in school.
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And in some cases, he was young. I don't think I have anything here when he was under 18.
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But as I said, a lot of people will defend him and say, oh, well, he was young. So it's okay,
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because he got better later. What we're going to demonstrate is that he, in fact, got worse later.
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But more importantly, as you hear us reading these things, these specific quotes from this man,
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whether he was a young man or an older man, think for yourself. If you had said these things,
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and then later on, you became a Christian, would you have repented of them publicly? I want you
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to keep that in mind, because that's finally the question you will have to deal with when
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you say to someone, if you're convinced by our argument here, if you tell someone, you know,
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actually Martin Luther King, Jr. was not even a Christian. He had some terrible
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false theology, and it was antithetical to the church. If you say that to someone,
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and they know anything about the details and the timing, they'll say, oh, that was when he was younger.
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So remember that question. If you had said these things when you were 18 or 20 or 23,
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and then later you became a Christian, would you admit it? Would you just pretend that nothing
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had changed? Or would you turn away from this wickedness that we're about to describe? And
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use it as an example of the Christian life and say, I used to believe something bad,
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now I believe the truth. Let me tell you about that. I know I personally would. We talk on this
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show sometimes about the errors that we made in our own past, not to be self-reflective,
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but simply to say, God fixes things, but you have to let him. And so as you hear these quotes,
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just remember, if this was your confession, then 10 years later you believe the opposite,
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would you have admitted it? And would you have said, yeah, I don't believe that anymore?
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So one of the papers that Michael, I'm going to call him Mike or Michael or MLK throughout this,
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because his name isn't Martin Luther. That was a name his father changed his name to when he was
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a couple years old. One of the papers he wrote when he was in seminary at Crozer when he was an
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adult was related to his trajectory in the faith, the name of the paper. And we're going to have
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links probably to some of these. I'm getting all these from the Stanford Martin Luther King
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Jr. Research and Education Institute. You can read them all for yourself. You can spend days doing
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it just like me. Like you said, don't recommend it. But this first one I'm going to quote from
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briefly is an autobiography of a religious development. So when King describes how he became
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a Christian, he says when he was at the age of five, he went up for an altar call because his
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bare sister had just done it. And so in his mind, that was kind of his introduction to the faith.
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And his father was a minister, so he was raised in the church. But his own first personal experience
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of engaging with that was a superficial altar call in competition with the sibling. He was five,
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there's nothing like, it was a mistake. I'm not holding a five year old's mistakes against him
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theologically for the rest of his life. The point is that that was kind of the high water mark
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of this guy theologically. Here's what he said in a seminary about his subsequent years.
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He writes, the lessons which I was taught in Sunday school were quite in the fundamentalist line.
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None of my teachers ever doubted the infallibility of scriptures. Most of them were unlettered and
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had never heard of biblical criticism. Naturally, I accepted the teachings as they were given to me.
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I never felt any need to doubt them, at least at the time I didn't. I guess I accepted biblical
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studies uncritically until I was about 12 years old. But this uncritical attitude could not last
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long, for it was contrary to the very nature of my being. I had always been the questioning and
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precocious type. At the age of 13, I shocked my Sunday school class by denying the bodily resurrection
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of Jesus. I'll say it again, age 13, I shocked my Sunday school class by denying the bodily
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resurrection of Jesus. From the age of 13 on, doubts began to spring forth unrelentingly.
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At the age of 15, I entered Morehouse College and more and more I could see a gap between
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what I had learned in Sunday school and what I was learning in college. This conflict continued
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until I studied a course in Bible in which I came to see that behind the legends and myths of the
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Bible were many profound truths with which one could not escape. My days in college were very
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exciting once. As stated above, my college training, especially the first two years,
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brought many doubts into my mind. It was at this period that the shackles of fundamentalism
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were removed from my body. This is why, when I came to Crozier, I could accept the liberal
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interpretation with relative ease. It was in my senior year of college that I entered the ministry.
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I had felt the urge to enter the ministry for my latter high school days, but accumulated
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doubts had somewhat blocked the urge. Now it appeared again with an inescapable drive.
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My call to the ministry was not a miraculous or supernatural something.
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On the contrary, it was an inner urge calling me to serve humanity.
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So this is a young man who, his trajectory, as I said, from that altar call in competition
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with his older sister, as soon as he started reading the Bible, his very first response
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from the age of 12 was, I don't believe this. The age of 13, he openly denied the resurrection
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of Jesus Christ from the grave. Then he was off to the races. Once he went to Morehouse at age 15
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from 15 through 18, it got even worse. When he's at seminary at Crozier, he continues to escalate
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down that path. We're beginning here because this is the arc of all the other quotes that we're
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going to have here today. It's not simply that, oh, well, he was young, and then later on he learned
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something different. He was young, he was not a Christian. He became more evil as it went,
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and he became more open about it as it went. So down the road, when he's been in the pulpit for
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10, 15 years, at no point was there a single moment when he repudiated any of these earlier
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beliefs. On the contrary, he hid them better. Early on, when he was at school and then at
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seminary and then working on his PhD, he would play to whatever audience to which he was speaking
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privately. So if they were more illiberal in his words, and that's the technical term he's using,
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he's correct, meaning they deny the inerrancy of scripture, they deny the divinity of God,
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they deny God entirely, they deny miracles. They're not Christian. He was not going to Christian
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schools. He made sure that he fit right in when he got into the pulpit, and he was working with
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actual Christians in his congregations. He was more careful. So as we go through these quotes,
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what's going to be established is that when he uses a word, it's going to be a word that you or I
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would use, but it will mean something completely different. That's another theme that's going to
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run through this entire segment, that when he says something, when King says something, it's
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going to be a word that Christians use, it's going to be Jesus dust, but he will mean the exact
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opposite when he says it. You also did mention his spelling and grammar issues that occur throughout
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his entire life. And that's not just us saying that, that is from a number of his biographers and
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from those who have collated his papers and such. This is a common critique.
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And one of the reasons that can be relevant is that you see a very big difference between
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certain of his works and say certain of his public speeches or the public works and private letters.
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And that's because a lot of times there were ghost writers involved for some of this.
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And so for some of the more public materials that sound better, if you're trying to pull
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something that sounds Christian from that, do bear in mind it was probably written by someone else.
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You can see the real man in the things that he wrote himself. And a lot of what we're going to
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be quoting today will be things that he wrote himself. And I agree with you when it comes to
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the name I was also just going to call him Michael King or MLK. Notably, his name was never even
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legally changed. So his father didn't even bother to change his name from Michael King to Martin
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Luther King. So he was born Michael King and he died Michael King. That's pretty much consistent
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with everything else about the guy. The public myth and the actual facts are just not related at all.
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And so again, we're not here to attack a dead guy. It's not because he's black. It's not because he
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was even a so-called civil rights leader. It's that when in our own churches this man is held up as
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a Christian paragon. Okay, you say that I should emulate this guy. Let me go look at what I need
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to emulate. And the very first thing we find is denying that Jesus was raised from the dead.
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And so it gets worse from there. Again, that was only at age 13. We're basically going to go through
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some of these papers in chronological order as he delivered them. So it'll jump around a little
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bit thematically. But the theme that's going to emerge fundamentally is one of, again, this man
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was never Christian a day in his life. And that's not just us saying it. As you hear the things that
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he says as we read them to you, they're all blasphemy. We're not talking about Lutherans
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disagreeing with Baptists about the sacraments. We're not talking about arguing tulip with the
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Reformed. We're talking about the very most basic elements of the Christian faith. And when he
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speaks about them, it's in very open terms to say, yeah, that's nonsense. And so the next quote we're
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going to go over is from a paper that he wrote at Crozer Seminary, and it's entitled The Purpose of
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Religion. What is the purpose of religion? Is it to perpetuate an idea about God? Is it totally
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dependent upon revelation? What part does psychological experience play? Is religion
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synonymous with theology? Harry Emerson Faustic says that the most hopeful thing about any system of
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theology is that it will not last. This statement will shock some, but is the purpose of religion
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the perpetuation of theological ideas. Religion is not validated by ideas, but by experience.
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This automatically raises the question of salvation. Is the basis for salvation in creeds
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and dogmas or inexperience? Catholics would have us believe the former. For them, the church,
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its creeds, its popes, and bishops have recited the essence of religion, and that is all there is to
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it. On the other hand, we say that each soul must make its own reconciliation to God, that no creed
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can take the place of that personal experience. This was expressed by Paul Tillich when he said,
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There is natural religion which belongs to man by nature, but there is also a revealed religion
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which man receives from a supernatural reality. Relevant religion therefore comes through revelation
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from God, on the one hand, and through repentance and acceptance of salvation on the other hand.
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Dogma as an agent in salvation has no essential place.
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This is the secret of our religion. This is what makes the saints move on in spite of problems
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and perplexities of life that they must face. This religion of experience by which man is
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aware of God seeking him, and saving him helps him to see the hands of God moving through history.
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Religion has to be interpreted for each age, stated in terms that age can understand,
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but the essential purpose of religion remains the same. It is not to perpetuate a dogma or
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theology, but to produce living witnesses and testimonies to the power of God in human experience,
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and then his signature. So when he's talking about religion, he fundamentally sees them as
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interchangeable. Now, if this were just a single paper where he was kind of talking conceptually
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about how religion is used among people, sure, maybe you could have an academic paper that would
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kind of minimize the truth, but it was being more general. And so you might
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hand wave and say, well, that wasn't so bad. But this first quote is completely revelatory
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about his approach to Christianity. He fundamentally sees Christianity as a human creation, and we'll
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establish that down the road with some of the other quotes. But the fact that to him,
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dogma as an agent in salvation has no essential place. Think about that means vis-a-vis the
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Christian faith. If an agent in salvation doesn't come from dogma, doesn't come from belief,
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where does it come from? And as he establishes throughout everything, he says, it's good works,
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it's being good to your neighbor. And that's why he spent all of his time basically externally
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focused not on the Christian life, but on the sort of social change that was repackaged as part
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of the civil rights movement. And he was weaponized to go out and do someone else's bidding. That's
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the second half of this episode, the part two of this. But really, it's just important to remember,
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he sees religion as a manmade thing. Is that what Christians believe? Absolutely not. No
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Christian believes that, first of all, there's Christianity and there's everything else. There's
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no such thing as competing religions because there's only one God. And so there's the God and
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there's a religion of that God. Everything else is fundamentally the teachings of demons.
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Yeah, it's a phrase that we frequently use on the show because it comes straight from First
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Timothy. God describes teachings of demons as the source of false doctrine. This is fundamentally
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false doctrine. Even this very early paper, he says salvation and dogma, they have nothing to do
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with each other. Meaning there's salvation apart from belief and apart even from any particular
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religion. That's astonishing. Well, I just look at that quote right in the middle. It's a straight
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up denial of Christianity. On the other hand, we say that each soul must make its own reconciliation
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to God. That's just a fundamental rejection of Christianity because Christianity is very clear.
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You cannot reconcile yourself to God. You can be reconciled to God in Christ. That is God
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acting, not you acting. This is just a straight up rejection of the Christian faith with a whole
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bunch of other errors thrown in, of course. I'm glad you picked up on that particular quote because
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as we get down further into these, that's literally what he says Jesus was. We'll get
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into where he says that Jesus was just a man and was not God at all, but that is what he believes
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that Jesus did. That's why he's saying this here to say that, on the other hand, we say that
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each soul must make its reconciliation to God. He says that that is the life that Jesus, the man,
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led, that he reconciled himself to God as the perfect example to us. Now, a Christian would hear
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that and say, well, that's bad theology, but I can kind of make that Christian if I reward it a
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little. The point to hamper home here is that that's not what he's doing. He's fundamentally coming
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from the opposite direction saying, there's no God as we conceive him. What Jesus did was what
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every man can do by interacting with his fellow man. The next paper that we're going to read from
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is also from 1948 at Crozier Seminary. This is from Three Essays on Religion. The subpart is
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Unreal Worship, Temple and Sacrifice. He's talking about the book of Jeremiah and one of the themes
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that he picked up on that was given to him by his professors and the men that he read was that
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the faith of the Old Testament was continuously evolving, that there was no direct revelation
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from God, but it was just men accreting new ideas. What he's saying here in this quote is that the
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book of Jeremiah and the prophet, so-called, in his mind, Jeremiah, was fundamentally teaching
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against what the Israelites had been practicing in the temple system. King writes, another line
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which can be added to the column of Jeremiah's contributions to religious thought is his stand
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against artificial worship. This action was started against the temple as we know the Deuteronomic
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Reformation culminated in the centralization of national worship in the temple at Jerusalem.
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This temple was the pivot of the nation's religion. In the course of years, elaborate
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ceremonies were enacted and priests prescribed sacrifices and the smoke of burnt offerings
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rose high from the altar. The temple was the apple of the people's eye. To criticize it was to set
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aflame the fires of both religion and patriotism. This was the very thing that Jeremiah did.
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So it might not be obvious if you read that or especially if I'm reading it to you, but
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what he's saying here is fundamentally, God did not institute the temple. God was not present at
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the temple. It was the priests making up things over time and saying, oh, now we're going to do
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this sort of sacrifice. We're going to dress this way and we're going to do this. And so what he's
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saying in this paper and in this section is, Jeremiah came along and said, that's all nonsense
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because it's not in your hearts. And while on one hand, Jeremiah was appropriately condemning the
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fact that their worship was false because they had abandoned God in their hearts, you don't need
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to say that the priests had invented things when it was actually God that did it. But this is one
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of the first quotes we have that reveals that in King's mind, there is no inspiration of Scripture.
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There was no God acting at any point in Scripture. God is not personal and active at any point
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in the Bible as King reads it. And so it makes the only way he can possibly understand
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Jeremiah condemning them is by condemning what the priests were doing. And if the priests were
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doing something that the new prophet would condemn, well, obviously, it's just what they made up.
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It's what men were doing. And that's, again, that's the overarching theme. All religion is manmade.
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All of the Christian religion, pre-incarnate Christ was manmade. The Christian religion in
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the age of the church was manmade. All of it has come from the mind of man.
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And the attentive reader will already, or listener in this case, will already hear
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some of the echoes of the social gospel, so called, and the sort of social agitation in
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which King will be engaging, really starting now in his life, but also later in life. And
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we'll mention some of the gentlemen who were responsible for that in the latter half of this
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episode, more likely the next episode, but still. The preaching of the first four centuries was
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mainly apologetic. After Christ had failed to return, there had to be some justification for
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the validity of the Christian gospel. They were out at every turn to defend the Christian religion.
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Such a man as Origen and Justin were forever attempting to prove the divinity of Christ.
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It was, his writing is so bad sometimes, it was during the period that the Trinitarian doctrine
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arose. It is also significant to know that the preaching of this period was mainly scriptural.
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The condition of the age required apologetic preaching.
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Twentieth-century preaching, on the contrary, deals with great social problems.
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That's in the singular, but I'll correct it. Moreover, much of our twentieth-century preaching
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is an attempt to adjust individuals to the complexities of modern society.
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The problem of the virgin birth and the trinity is not the most important features,
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a plural word should be singular, in twentieth-century preaching,
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as was the case in the first four centuries of preaching.
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So, did you hear what he just said? He said that the trinity was made up in the fourth century.
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The virgin birth is a problem that these men had to make this stuff up and try to justify
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Christ's failure to return. What an incredible presupposition.
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They believed that Christ was going to return because he said he would, and when he didn't,
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while he was a liar, so what they have to do, they had to permute the Christian faith
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into something that could still be sustained among believers, that if you were a believer
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in the third and fourth century AD, you had to have some new doctrine in order for you to stay
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engaged because we have these problems with the trinity that they made up, the virgin birth,
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that's obviously not going to be real. So, this is who he was. This is who he was in seminary,
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and I think it's important to note, Lutherans and Baptists, at least some Baptists,
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have different approaches to when a man enters the pulpit. King had already been preaching in
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churches before this. He had already stood up in a pulpit and spoken in the name of God.
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He didn't yet have a permanent call to a particular congregation
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that would come after he finished seminary, but he was already preaching at this point.
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He was well respected, and he was well respected in the very congregation,
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where he denied that Jesus was resurrected from the dead. Now, I don't point this out to impugn
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all Baptists because I know that there are many Baptists who are actually Christians,
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but what was going on in his dad's church that, although he shocked his Sunday school,
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he wasn't repudiated. He was recommended to go off to seminary. Surely, much of the congregation
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was paying for him to go to Morehouse and Crozer so that he could then get up in a pulpit and
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speak in God's name. As he goes along in this career, he gets further and further away from
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Orthodox Christian faith. I mean, you really can't be a Christian and say that the virgin birth is
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a problem and the Trinity is a problem. Now, as a Christian, you can recognize that the Trinity
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is a mystery that is distinct from a problem. Saying it's a problem is saying,
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this is something we can't explain, and so it can't possibly be part of our religion. That's
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what he's actually doing here. He wants to jettison core parts of Christianity
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because he is attempting to turn Christianity into a social gospel. He wants to turn Christianity
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into a vehicle for societal change, and so it's necessary to jettison these various bits and pieces
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of the religion that, oh, we don't need these because that's not the core. It's the experience
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of the religion. It's doing X, Y, and Z, which X, Y, and Z turn out to be what the Communist
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Party wants. We'll get into that more when it comes to the individuals around Michael King
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and his political activities. But what he is doing here is attempting to transform Christianity
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into something that it is not and cannot be, because if you get rid of these doctrines,
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you don't have Christianity anymore. You have something totally alien, and he's not the only
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one doing this, of course. This is not Michael King's project. This is a project of many academics,
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and King is simply parroting those lines, but he made those lies his own,
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and if you believe these things, you cannot be a Christian.
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Think what the Athanasian Creed says. If you do not hold these beliefs, if you do not hold
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these truths, you cannot be saved. That is the position of the Church, that is the position
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of Christianity down through the centuries. There are certain things to which you must hold
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to be a Christian, and most certainly, that is the virgin birth, the Trinity, and the resurrection
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of the dead. The same year, Mike wrote another paper called Light on the Old Testament from the
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Ancient Near East. He was writing about archaeological investigations as they relate to the text of
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scripture. He writes, fortunately, through numerous excavations and assiduous decipherings,
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that door has been opened. Ever since that time, we have been able to get a critical unbiased and
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scientific light upon the Old Testament. No logical thinker can doubt the fact that these
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archaeological findings are now indispensable to all concrete study of the Hebrew-Christian
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religion. These findings have proved to us that there are many striking analogies between the
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ideas expressed in the Old Testament and those found in the surrounding cultures of the Near
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East. For an instance, the views of the Old Testament are almost identical with those of
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Babylonian mythology. This is not to say that the Pentateuch writers sat down and copied these
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views verbatim. The differences of expression attest to that fact, but after being in contact with
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these surrounding cultures and hearing certain doctrines expressed, it was only natural for
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some of these views to become part of their subconscious minds. When they sat down to write,
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they were expressing consciously that which had dwelled in their subconscious minds.
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This is one of his recurring themes throughout. As he describes the men who wrote the various
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books of the Bible, the overarching, inexorable theme of each of those comments is that at no
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point is God's voice present in any measure. There's never a moment of consideration of
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plenary verbal inspiration by God of a single word. What he does say is that these were just
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men in their times. They were thinking about a God and that the so-called Hebrew-Christian religion
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meant that there was some sort of God that a group of men scattered across time
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happened to be oriented in the same direction. When they wrote these various books, they were
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thinking about the same hypothetical God, but they didn't know him with any immediacy. He didn't
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speak to them. What they knew was what they thought about, and they were inevitably influenced by
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all their neighbors. Whoever was around them at the time by osmosis, they were going to naturally
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absorb those beliefs from the other nearby religions. That's radical. Again, that's a
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nullification of the Christian faith. If God is not present in speaking through the men
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who are writing the Bible, it's all just nonsense. It is literally made up. That is not only the
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only possible conclusion of his beliefs, but that is what he believed. The reason for laying
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this groundwork early on is, like I said, when we get later on into his public ministry, so-called,
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where he was pretending to be a pastor, he didn't say this stuff as much. He didn't get out in the
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opening. I can only find a single case of him mentioning the virgin birth when he was a preacher.
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He would just stay away from it. See, in college and in seminary, he would deny it,
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but he knew better than to deny the virgin birth in church because he knew that might cause a riot
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with some of the nice old black Baptist ladies who actually cared about their Bible and knew
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better, so he wouldn't do it. But again, the point I made at the beginning, he never repudiated a
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single one of these beliefs. At no point in public or private did he say, you know what,
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I used to deny the Trinity and the virgin birth. Thank God, God brought me to repentance,
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and I now confess the true Christian faith. If he had done that, he might have emphasized it a bit
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more because it is so foundational, and yet we see the exact opposite. He condemns it. He says
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it's fake and made up, and then it just vanishes from his theology. He doesn't bring it up again,
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and that was one of the few smart things he did. These opinions that are blatantly anti-Christian,
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they just got buried. The reason that we're focusing now on his early life is that his early
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life is the only time he told the truth about this stuff, but he never changed his confession.
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He never believed anything differently. Later on, when he used some of the words, like he does talk
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about resurrection, we'll get to that in a bit. When he talks about resurrection later on,
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it's not of the body. It's a completely different, figmentary spiritual resurrection
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that he concocted in his own new religion so that he could have a religion of science,
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a religion of reason that was consistent with what he knew he could prove on paper.
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And he wouldn't have to believe any of those mythologies, any of the nonsense
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that these very primitive peoples had made up as they were just absorbing things from their neighbors.
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You helpfully pointed out that he used the plural for writers, authors of the Pentateuch,
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and for those who are less familiar with why that would be the case,
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in academic circles for a fairly long time at this point, long here being a bit over
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a century or so, not long in terms of history. There's a theory called the
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JEDP theory, which is the theory that there were at least four authors of the books of the Pentateuch.
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This is not the Christian position. The Christian position, the position of the church,
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the position of scripture is the Pentateuch was written by Moses. Now, there may be some little
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bits that were not written by Moses. For instance, you can be an Orthodox Christian and believe that
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Deuteronomy 34, which is the death of Moses, the mourning for Moses, and then the appointment of
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Joshua as the new leader of Israel. You can believe that that was written after Moses,
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because it tells of his death, or you can believe that it was Moses writing it as prophecy.
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You're not an unorthodox Christian if you believe one versus the other. However,
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if you deny that Moses was the author of the Pentateuch, you are outside of Orthodox Christianity.
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And that is the position of many academics when it comes to critical theory, which is what we're
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dealing with here. And to expand on a little bit, JEDP is Yahwist, which is because that author,
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supposedly, uses Yahweh for the name of God. Then you have the Eloist who uses Elohim, the Deuteronomist,
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author of Deuteronomy, and the priestly writer who would have written Leviticus. That is the
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contention that's what the theory is. There's no evidence for this. Their argument is based
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entirely on the fact that there are some linguistic differences, and there are different names used
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for God. But that's because Moses was writing about different things in these books. You could
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do the same thing with any living secular author. You're going to write a little differently depending
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on the subject you're writing. If I'm writing a case brief, I'm not going to do the same thing as if
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I'm writing fiction or an essay on scripture or politics. It's going to be different. And so their
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contention is completely insane. The reason it's insane is because of the second lack of evidence,
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and that is that no source has ever been found for any of these supposed authors.
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Because what the argument is, is that there were these original documents that were then either
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compiled by Moses or compiled by Moses and some others or redacted by this person. At any rate,
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there were various authors and it was compiled. Not one source of these other supposed documents
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has ever been located. This is spun entirely out of whole cloth, out of the minds of academics,
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who are simply seeking to deny the verbal inspiration of scripture. And that is what Michael
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King is doing when he says, writers. And so the next selection from Michael King's writings
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is from Light on the Old Testament from the Ancient Near East. This is the conclusion of that paper.
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What now is the conclusion of the whole matter? First, we must conclude that the Old Testament
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has its roots not only in the history of the Hebrew people. Instead, one must consider the
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Old Testament in relation to all the ancient civilizations of the Near East. Modern archaeology
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has proven to us that many of the ideas of the Old Testament have their roots in the ideas of
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surrounding cultures. Many would argue that these archaeological findings have proven to be very
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pernicious to modern religion. They argue that archaeologists have robbed the Old Testament
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of any claim to uniqueness. Of course, any logical thinker must believe the contrary.
38:36.800 --> 38:40.800
For from attempting to destroy the usefulness of the Old Testament archae…
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His writing is so hard to read sometimes. Far from attempting to destroy the usefulness of
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the Old Testament, archaeologists are attempting to give a better understanding of the contents of
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the Bible. They realize that religion, as far as possible, must be scientifically tenable.
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It is my opinion that biblical criticism and biblical archaeology will serve to justify
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the position of the Church in modern culture, especially in the face of modern youth who
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are taught to weigh and consider. Second, we must conclude that many of the things which we have
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accepted as true historical happenings are merely mythological. They are merely modified links,
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connected to the wide chain of mythology. Again, this conclusion will shock many,
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but why so? One needs only know that a myth serves the purpose of getting over an idea
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that is in the mind of the author. Therefore, it becomes just as valuable as the factual.
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Dr. Bevins succinctly stated it. We have documents which record actual historical events,
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with the names of persons who lived and acted more or less in the way described.
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Then, as we follow back the story, we find ourselves in a past with which
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the real history is apparently continuous, but which is, in truth, only a work of imagination,
39:57.840 --> 40:03.520
a mythical past set behind. There is an illegible section, the historical events,
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and concealing the real past out of which in actual fact the historical process came.
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If we accept the Old Testament as being true, we will find it full of errors,
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contradictions, and obvious impossibilities, as that the Pentateuch was written by Moses.
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But if we accept it as truth, we will find it to be one of the most logical vehicles of mankind's
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deepest devotional thoughts and aspirations, couched in language which still retains its
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original vigor and its moral intensity. As a sort of side note, when I am reading these,
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I will correct some of the more glaring grammar errors, because they are painful to me to read
40:42.080 --> 40:48.240
them. We can include these in the show notes so you can see how bad some of this is if it is not
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edited. Lots of subject verb disagreement. And this was after three years of college,
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this is in seminary, and his PhD stuff is no better. He was an atrocious speller.
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And so we see here, of course, he bluntly states what was stated previously, what I
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highlighted with the JEDP theory, he's denying that the Pentateuch was written by Moses, and he's
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saying that scripture is full of errors, contradictions, and obvious impossibilities.
41:17.200 --> 41:22.560
This is something that you expect to hear from an outright atheist, particularly a new atheist.
41:23.840 --> 41:28.880
This is not something that Christians say. This is not something that a Christian would say.
41:29.520 --> 41:32.320
This is not something that was said by a Christian.
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Christians do not deny the truth of scripture. They do not deny the inspiration of scripture.
41:43.040 --> 41:48.560
They do not deny the consistency of scripture. They do not attribute to scripture, and therefore
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to God, because scripture is the word of God, they do not attribute to God errors, contradictions,
41:53.280 --> 42:00.640
and obvious impossibilities. This is an academic paper, but it is a paper written
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by an academic who is not Christian. And this is just the consistent case with his writings.
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This is what you find from the beginning of his life to the end.
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The things that he wrote reject core truths, core claims of the Christian religion,
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and so they are not things that could have been written by a Christian.
42:26.880 --> 42:33.680
It is helpful here that he does something that I had pointed out in the episode on the
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perspicuity of scripture, on the clarity of scripture. I pointed out how frequently when
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these men are playing rhetorical games, they will say, oh, it is true, but it is not real.
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There is a narrative, but it is not a story, but it is not factual. They play these games,
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and he literally does it right here, and he put these in quotes. If we accepted the Old Testament
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as being, quote, unquote, true, we will find it is full of errors. On the other hand, if we
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accept it as, quote, unquote, truth, we will find it to be one of the most logical vehicles, etc.
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So he literally directly sets true and truth in opposition. That is Mike's religion.
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And so the only way he is able to find truth in scripture as he is denying everything about it
43:19.520 --> 43:25.680
is to just insert all of his own views, all of his own ideas to hollow out the Christian faith,
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our faith, and where it is a skinsuit. And that is what Mike King did his entire life.
43:31.200 --> 43:34.080
He hollowed out the Christian faith, and he wore it as a skinsuit.
43:34.720 --> 43:40.000
So again, the purpose of this episode, when you hear someone, a Christian, an actual Christian,
43:40.000 --> 43:45.520
in good conscience, quoting this man, know that this is the baggage that they are bringing along
43:45.520 --> 43:52.480
with their views. And then ask yourself, how did this man who denied Christ, he's burning in hell,
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he cannot possibly be in heaven as this was his confession, that we can say that beyond any
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shadow of a doubt. It's not like, well, he sinned a lot. And so, I don't know, I don't think he's
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going to forgive him. It's got nothing to do with that. This man denied God, he denied scripture,
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he denied everything that is the source of our salvation. There's no possible hope for this
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man to be saved. How can such a man be an example of anything in the Christian life?
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You may be able to say, well, he was terrible, but he did this one thing, right?
44:26.240 --> 44:30.000
If anyone would actually say that, then we could have that discussion. That's the problem.
44:30.000 --> 44:35.280
No one's saying that. No one's saying he was an evil, wicked, damned man. But he got one thing
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pretty right. And let's maybe explain how he got that one thing right now. They say he's a
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paragon of virtue that he was a Christian man. And anyone who even questions that is blaspheming.
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As I said at the beginning, that's the overarching theme of this episode in the next few episodes.
44:51.760 --> 44:58.320
It is deliberately for Corey and I to blaspheme the gods of this age. Michael Martin Luther King
44:58.320 --> 45:04.320
Jr. is one of the gods of this age. This religion that he's espousing is the religion of this age.
45:04.320 --> 45:08.960
There's no doubt about that. This is a real religion he's describing. The problem is,
45:08.960 --> 45:14.400
it looks and smells a little bit like Christianity. If you're an ignorant Christian who's not paying
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any attention, but as soon as you look at this stuff, it just completely implodes.
45:20.400 --> 45:27.360
The next brief section here is just a, it's from Sermon Skechus. He was doing a sermon on Job 1925,
45:27.360 --> 45:33.520
where Job says, I know that my Redeemer lives. And the title of his sermon was The Assurance of
45:33.520 --> 45:39.520
Immortality. The theme that he had for sermon was, we were able to attain immortality through the men
45:39.520 --> 45:44.720
and women that we influence and through the children who are touched by the flame of our spirits.
45:44.720 --> 45:50.240
And the purpose of his sermon was to show that the desire for immortality will not be in vain.
45:50.240 --> 45:56.480
This is another one of his recurring themes. As he inserts his views into scripture, what he will
45:56.480 --> 46:03.520
say is that there was no notion of the resurrection of the dead until very near to Jesus' day.
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One of the things he'll do later on, he'll talk about a Deutero Isaiah,
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which is another thing from these critical readers, where they believe that just as with JDP,
46:13.920 --> 46:19.840
they believe that there were two authors of Isaiah. One wrote the first two-thirds,
46:19.840 --> 46:25.440
and then a different guy wrote the last third. And Deutero Isaiah is the one who has the prophecies,
46:25.440 --> 46:32.800
the one who talks about eternal life and resurrection. And so his claim, his belief,
46:32.800 --> 46:37.040
is that those things, saying that there's resurrection of the dead, that there's an
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afterlife of any sort, that no believer in Yahweh, in God, believed those things until very late
46:45.440 --> 46:52.480
in the Hebrew period. Again, it's not sub-Christian, it's anti-Christian.
46:53.040 --> 46:57.920
And so this is just one small blur, but it's consistent with his overarching theme that
46:57.920 --> 47:03.360
pops up everywhere. He does not believe that there's any continuity in scripture whatsoever,
47:03.360 --> 47:09.200
which makes perfect sense because he denies that it's from God. It was just a bunch of random people
47:09.760 --> 47:13.200
scattered across time. Well, sure, it's not going to make a lot of sense.
47:14.400 --> 47:20.400
And you mentioned that we're judging the man based on his confessions, based on the things that he
47:20.400 --> 47:26.240
said, the things that he wrote. But of course, a tree is also known by its fruit. And so we can
47:26.240 --> 47:33.440
look to his works, and we'll do a little bit more of that in, it's going to be a second episode. But
47:35.680 --> 47:40.640
Christians can very well at the least look to how he spent his last night on earth,
47:41.680 --> 47:46.960
and he spent his last night on earth fornicating with two prostitutes and beating a third woman.
47:46.960 --> 47:54.000
This is confirmed by the FBI who had him under surveillance for many years. This is well known.
47:55.840 --> 48:01.040
That is probably not how Christians are supposed to spend their last night on earth.
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That's not how Christians do spend any of their nights on earth.
48:06.560 --> 48:13.840
Now, can you be a Christian and still sin, of course? But if you are holding yourself out as a
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minister, holding yourself out as a teacher of the faith, and that is still how you are living
48:19.120 --> 48:24.320
your life, and that was not a one time thing that was consistent throughout his entire career as an
48:24.320 --> 48:31.840
activist. That is not a Christian man. But moving on to his next quote, this is from
48:32.480 --> 48:37.600
the ethics of late Judaism as evidenced in the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs.
48:38.400 --> 48:43.760
For a number of centuries it was generally held that the period between the old and new
48:43.760 --> 48:48.720
Testaments was a period of silence, and that no spiritual development was achieved within it.
48:49.360 --> 48:53.120
It was believed that this period of silence was broken when the New Testament appeared on the
48:53.120 --> 48:59.280
stage of history. Now the pendulum of interpretation is swinging in another direction. Most competent
48:59.280 --> 49:04.720
scholars have cast such positions out of the window. They would all agree that in reality
49:04.720 --> 49:10.240
there was no period of silence. To be sure, it was a period of great spiritual progress,
49:10.240 --> 49:14.320
and in many instances greater than any preceding it in Old Testament times,
49:14.960 --> 49:20.480
even though the Old Testament was its logical prelude. To my mind, many of the works of this
49:20.480 --> 49:26.240
period were infinitely more valuable than those that received canonicity. The materials to justify
49:26.240 --> 49:31.840
such statements are found mainly in the Apocrypha and the Sudwepagrapha. These works, although
49:31.840 --> 49:36.080
presented synonymously, are of lasting significance to the Biblical student.
49:38.960 --> 49:43.920
I would start out by just pointing out there's a weird inconsistency here in terms of saying
49:43.920 --> 49:47.760
there's silence and then referencing the Apocrypha, which of course was in the Inter-Testamental
49:47.760 --> 49:54.080
period, but even if you take it to mean silence in terms of no scripture, which is the Christian
49:54.080 --> 50:01.680
position, the Christian position is that there is a period of silence as it were between the
50:01.680 --> 50:07.680
close of the Old Testament and the open of the New Testament. We have materials written in that
50:07.680 --> 50:13.200
period. We call them the Apocrypha, and they are useful. They are to be read as historical
50:13.200 --> 50:18.480
documents, not a scripture. That has long been the position of the Church. There are some contentions
50:18.480 --> 50:25.120
over where exactly certain books belong in the canon, but the Apocrypha is a fairly set
50:25.840 --> 50:33.120
group of books that are considered historical books, not part of scripture. This was the position
50:33.120 --> 50:40.960
incidentally also of the Roman Church, until the Counter-Reformation, when in rejection of what
50:41.760 --> 50:46.640
the Lutherans did, because the Lutherans just affirmed what the Church had taught for centuries,
50:47.200 --> 50:53.520
Rome decided they would canonize these books because, well, they were rejecting what the
50:53.520 --> 50:59.600
Lutherans had done. That was done in response to the Lutherans, not for any theological or doctrinal
50:59.600 --> 51:05.520
reasons. Now, of course, they did do it for some dogmatic reasons, because you can get some of
51:05.520 --> 51:10.080
their arguments for praying to the saints and things like that from the Apocryphal books.
51:12.000 --> 51:15.920
Notably, the Apocryphal books themselves state that they are not scripture by saying there is no
51:15.920 --> 51:25.680
prophet during the time when these were written. But that aside, what he is saying here is that
51:25.680 --> 51:32.000
there is a sort of, and in his words, spiritual progress in religion, in Christianity.
51:33.840 --> 51:40.000
This is utopianism. This is a sort of New Age religion, the beginnings of it, of course,
51:40.000 --> 51:45.600
because it's become what we know modernly as sort of New Age religion. It's the belief that humanity
51:45.600 --> 51:53.040
is getting better as we go along. That's not the teaching of scripture. Humanity was very good
51:53.040 --> 51:58.880
in the words of Genesis in the Garten. Humanity fell, and we are degenerating as time goes on. We
51:58.880 --> 52:04.560
are not getting better. There is no spiritual progress. Now, as an individual, of course,
52:04.560 --> 52:11.360
you can make spiritual progress, because you can be converted to Christianity, you can be in Christ,
52:11.440 --> 52:16.160
and therefore you go through the process of sanctification. That is spiritual progress.
52:17.440 --> 52:22.080
But there's no spiritual progress in the terms of religion getting better as we go.
52:23.520 --> 52:29.280
That is not Christianity. That is the spirit of the age. That's outright Satanism, quite frankly.
52:30.400 --> 52:33.040
And that is what he's advocating here, and he's saying that that is better
52:33.760 --> 52:37.920
than the Old Testament. That is better than scripture. But, of course, that's in keeping
52:37.920 --> 52:43.280
with his position, because his position is that his project is better than scripture,
52:43.280 --> 52:48.320
all of scripture, the Old Testament, the New Testament. Because, again, it is that argument that
52:48.320 --> 52:54.560
when we're making progress, we're becoming better. We're more ethical. We are just all around
52:55.280 --> 52:59.920
better human beings, better men than our forebears, than our forefathers.
53:01.760 --> 53:05.440
And that is simply not the case, and it's not the Christian position, because, again, the Christian
53:05.440 --> 53:12.800
position is that this creation is fallen, and it is degenerating over time. It is getting
53:12.800 --> 53:17.760
worse. Things are not getting better. I'm not saying that as a black pill, as it were.
53:18.960 --> 53:25.520
That is simply the reality of it. Yes, we can work to make a better world than we have today,
53:25.520 --> 53:32.320
certainly. But we are not going to reverse the fall. Yes, in some minor way, you reverse the fall
53:32.320 --> 53:36.480
every time you work in your garden, and you remove the thistles and the weeds and things like that.
53:37.280 --> 53:44.880
But the overall trajectory of creation is downward until Christ returns and makes all things new.
53:46.480 --> 53:51.120
That is the Christian position, not what I just read in this paragraph.
53:52.320 --> 53:54.480
And the cash quote from that entire thing is,
53:55.440 --> 54:01.840
to my mind, many of the works of this period were infinitely more valuable than those that received
54:01.840 --> 54:07.360
canonicity. In other words, he's saying the Old Testament is trash. Most of it's really old.
54:07.360 --> 54:11.920
There's not a lot of value in there. In some of the later quotes, he specifically goes into
54:11.920 --> 54:19.760
explicitly damning the God of the old Old Testament. He says that the God of the newer Old Testament
54:19.840 --> 54:23.840
is getting closer to the sort of God that he likes, still not quite there yet,
54:23.840 --> 54:29.760
really done until Jesus shows up. But he very explicitly says the earliest parts of the Old
54:29.760 --> 54:36.640
Testament are basically trash. They're not real. They have a God who is evil. I reject them. I like
54:36.640 --> 54:41.040
this Apocrypha stuff. It's very new. It's got a lot of better things in there. I think it's much more
54:41.040 --> 54:46.720
valuable. Now, this is not someone making a claim and saying, well, I think I prefer reading the
54:46.720 --> 54:53.920
Apocrypha to the Old Testament. You have to review such a claim in terms of whether or not the Old
54:53.920 --> 55:01.200
Testament is scripture. If it's from God, if it's the Word of God, for a man to say anything is
55:01.200 --> 55:08.560
infinitely more valuable than that, is an explicit act of apostasy. Next quote I have here is from
55:08.560 --> 55:14.080
a sermon called Mastering Our Evil Selves. It's one of the few times he actually talks about evil. He
55:14.080 --> 55:19.680
tends to avoid that unless he's talking about racism or nationalism or white supremacy. There
55:19.680 --> 55:25.120
were a lot of sermons about that, but not many sermons about the actual sin of the people in
55:25.120 --> 55:33.280
his congregations. King preached, finally, we may master our evil selves by developing a continuous
55:33.280 --> 55:38.560
prayer and devotional life. Through this process, the soul of man will become united with the life
55:38.560 --> 55:44.480
of God. Yes, this is possible. Man can know God. This has been the ringing cry of the mystic
55:44.480 --> 55:50.640
throughout the ages. God is not wholly other. God is not a process projected somewhere of
55:50.640 --> 55:57.200
the lofty blue. God is not a divine hermit hiding himself in a cosmic cave, but God is
55:57.200 --> 56:03.440
forever present with us. The God of religion is the God of life. He somehow transcends the world,
56:03.520 --> 56:08.960
and yet at the same time, he is imminent in the world. So by identifying ourselves with this
56:08.960 --> 56:15.280
knowable God, our wills will somehow become his will. We will no longer think our selfish desires,
56:15.280 --> 56:20.640
we'll somehow rise above evil thoughts, we'll no longer possess two personalities, but only one.
56:20.640 --> 56:25.680
We'll be true because God is truth. We'll be just because God is justice. We will love because
56:25.680 --> 56:30.080
God is love. We will be good because God is goodness. We will be wise because God is wisdom.
56:30.720 --> 56:36.400
As Corey just said, a Christian wouldn't necessarily like some of that, but some of that
56:36.400 --> 56:41.600
sounds like sanctification. A Lutheran in particular would say, yeah, that's the process of sanctification.
56:41.600 --> 56:51.360
We become greater in terms of our possession of God's qualities in our own lives. As a matter of
56:51.360 --> 56:57.680
will in the regenerative spirit, it is possible to sin less and to do more of God's things,
56:57.760 --> 57:02.640
because that's a gift from God. It's no outgrowth of our own persons. It's something that is given
57:02.640 --> 57:09.040
to us as a gift first through the gift of faith. But he's not saying that. Again, when he says
57:09.040 --> 57:15.200
religion, it's a term of art in King's mouth. When he says religion, he's talking about a
57:15.200 --> 57:20.800
man-made thing, and he's talking about, again, the personal reinforcement of morality
57:21.760 --> 57:27.760
in pursuit of ticking alarm, in pursuit of perfecting the world through perfecting oneself.
57:28.480 --> 57:33.120
And now he said, this has been the ringing cry of the mystic throughout the ages. That's another
57:33.120 --> 57:39.840
big thing with him. He sees that mysticism is part and parcel of the genesis of religion,
57:39.840 --> 57:44.240
and then it's perfected. So the mystics early on gave us some stuff, and then what we do,
57:44.240 --> 57:50.320
we refine it, we winnow it down, we turn it into something that we can possess as our own religion
57:50.320 --> 57:55.920
as we go forth in the world and make it a better place. And he has a Christian listening that,
57:55.920 --> 58:01.440
if you're not familiar with some of the other non-Christian beliefs that sound exactly the same,
58:01.440 --> 58:06.880
that might not sound so bad. The problem is that that sounds exactly like some other non-Christian
58:06.880 --> 58:13.040
beliefs, and they have evil ends. When they say those things, they are ultimately pursuing
58:13.040 --> 58:18.400
ultimate evil. And part of why we're talking about some of these things is that Christians
58:19.040 --> 58:23.760
need to know how the other team talks. You can't just automatically assume that when you hear
58:23.760 --> 58:29.600
someone saying Christian sounding things, that they're on the same team. We've got to get past
58:29.600 --> 58:36.160
that, because it's clearly a glaring deficiency in our defenses against evil, against Satan's
58:36.160 --> 58:40.960
wiles. If he can just throw something that smells like Jesus at you, and you catch it,
58:40.960 --> 58:46.080
and you hold it, and you love it, all he has to do is just sprinkle Jesus dust on any manner of
58:46.080 --> 58:52.240
filth and evil, and you're going to pick it up and love it. We have to do better. And so,
58:52.240 --> 58:58.400
by pointing some of these contrasts and similarities out, we're trying to make the case that you will
58:58.400 --> 59:04.160
encounter people in your lives, you'll encounter people who influence you. They may not be
59:04.160 --> 59:09.280
evil like king, but they will certainly be citing men who are evil like king, and they won't know
59:09.280 --> 59:14.640
any better. And so, as a matter of spiritual discernment, it's not just enough to say,
59:14.720 --> 59:19.920
yet he said the right word. We're not talking about chivalrous here. It's not sufficient to say,
59:19.920 --> 59:25.360
well, if he has the right secret keyword, then you let him in, because you know you're on the
59:25.360 --> 59:30.000
same team. As Christians, we have to get past that point. It's been a weakness that has been
59:30.000 --> 59:35.600
exploited for far too long, and it's got us on the ropes. We don't have much left, because
59:37.120 --> 59:41.440
evil happens after. It's not like, oops, I accidentally agreed with a bad guy, but,
59:41.440 --> 59:46.000
okay, I just move on with my day. When you agree with someone like king, you have now
59:46.000 --> 59:51.840
adopted a false religion, and you're along for the ride. So, when he makes his moral pronouncements
59:51.840 --> 59:57.120
from his religion, if you don't know that it's a different religion than your own,
59:57.120 --> 01:00:02.560
you're probably just going to go along with it. And that is catastrophic for the Christian faith.
01:00:03.520 --> 01:00:10.640
As anyone who's been involved in either, say, contract law or formal debates knows,
01:00:12.480 --> 01:00:21.280
you absolutely must define your terms up front. Because if you don't define your terms, you can
01:00:21.280 --> 01:00:28.400
argue past each other for the entirety of the debate, or you can wind up creating a contract
01:00:28.400 --> 01:00:32.560
in which there's no actual meeting of the minds, and so you don't really have a contract.
01:00:33.360 --> 01:00:37.120
Because the one party thought you were talking about A, and the other party thought you were
01:00:37.120 --> 01:00:44.160
talking about B, and these are mutually exclusive things. And Christians fall, as you said, into
01:00:44.160 --> 01:00:50.320
this trap, into this pit. Because we think, oh, well, he used the magical words, he must be a
01:00:50.320 --> 01:00:56.960
Christian. This speaker said justification. He said grace. He said sanctification. He said,
01:00:56.960 --> 01:01:05.360
whatever it happens to be, that's not what makes a Christian. It is the content
01:01:05.360 --> 01:01:11.040
of that confession, of that belief that makes a Christian. And so just because you're using
01:01:11.040 --> 01:01:16.640
the same terms doesn't mean you're saying the same things. So we have to be very careful about what
01:01:16.640 --> 01:01:23.440
these men are saying when they use these terms. Thankfully, in this case, we have a great deal
01:01:23.440 --> 01:01:30.560
of writing, speeches, various other information, where Mike tells us exactly what he believed.
01:01:31.600 --> 01:01:38.160
We don't have to look into his mind. We don't have to divine what he was really thinking. He tells
01:01:38.160 --> 01:01:46.720
us in his own words in many places. So listen to what is actually being said by him. Don't just
01:01:46.720 --> 01:01:53.760
latch on to these buzzwords, as it were. The terms are important. The terms matter. And Christians
01:01:53.760 --> 01:01:59.040
have fought over the terms for centuries. But you have to make sure that the person who is speaking
01:01:59.040 --> 01:02:08.960
is using those terms the way a Christian would, not a secular way. The next two quotes will be from
01:02:08.960 --> 01:02:16.800
a study of Mithraism, which, for those who aren't familiar, that is a Gnostic thing. That's
01:02:17.520 --> 01:02:23.120
a sufficient explanation for now. It is at this point that we are able to see why knowledge
01:02:23.120 --> 01:02:28.560
of these cults is important for any serious New Testament study. It is well nigh impossible to
01:02:28.560 --> 01:02:34.080
grasp Christianity through and through without knowledge of these cults. That there were striking
01:02:34.080 --> 01:02:39.040
similarities between the developing church and these religions cannot be denied. Even
01:02:39.040 --> 01:02:46.560
Christian apologists had to admit that fact. For instance, in the mystery religion's identification
01:02:46.560 --> 01:02:51.120
between the devotee and the Lord of the Cult was supposed to be brought about by various
01:02:51.120 --> 01:02:57.440
rites of initiation. Tarabolium or Bath of Blood, the eating of flesh of the sacrificial beast,
01:02:57.440 --> 01:03:02.160
and the like. Now there was something of this in Paul too, for he thought of the believer
01:03:02.160 --> 01:03:07.920
as buried with Christ in baptism and as feeding upon him in the Eucharist. This is only one of
01:03:07.920 --> 01:03:12.000
many examples that I could give to prove the similarity between the developing Christian
01:03:12.000 --> 01:03:17.440
church and the mystery religions. This is not to say that a Saint Paul or a Saint John sat down
01:03:17.440 --> 01:03:22.560
and copied these views verbatim, but after being in contact with these surrounding religions and
01:03:22.560 --> 01:03:27.760
hearing certain doctrines expressed, it was only natural for some of these views to become a part
01:03:27.840 --> 01:03:34.320
of their subconscious minds. When they sat down to write, they were expressing consciously that
01:03:34.320 --> 01:03:39.760
which had dwelled in their subconscious minds. It is also significant to know that Roman tolerance
01:03:39.760 --> 01:03:45.520
had favored this great syncretism of religious ideas. Borrowing was not only natural but inevitable.
01:03:47.120 --> 01:03:52.320
Think comment on that before moving on to the the next section of this, the conclusion from the
01:03:52.400 --> 01:03:59.520
same piece. Aside from the grammar errors which still are great fun to read,
01:04:01.520 --> 01:04:05.760
this is just, he mentions syncretism and really that's what we're talking about here.
01:04:06.880 --> 01:04:13.840
This is false on its face historically, because in large part the mystery cults that looked like
01:04:13.840 --> 01:04:19.920
Christianity stole from Christianity. These things went in the other order. It was not
01:04:19.920 --> 01:04:25.360
Christianity borrowing from pagans. It was pagan stealing from Christianity. You have the same thing
01:04:25.920 --> 01:04:31.760
with Christmas and Easter incidentally. I know people will try to say that the Christmas tree
01:04:31.760 --> 01:04:37.600
is pagan. It's not. It's Christian. The furthest back you can trace it is actually Martin Luther.
01:04:37.600 --> 01:04:44.880
There was a similar right that was practiced by some Christian monks before Luther. Luther
01:04:44.880 --> 01:04:52.720
took it and introduced it to Christians. That's just one example of many. So he's wrong on the
01:04:52.720 --> 01:04:58.080
face of this argument here. Historically he is wrong. But more important really than the
01:04:58.080 --> 01:05:04.640
historical argument is that he is saying that Christianity isn't really different from these
01:05:04.640 --> 01:05:11.040
cults. These are all religions and all religions are kind of equal. Christianity is just another
01:05:11.040 --> 01:05:17.680
mystery religion. You have the Eucharist. That's just another bath of blood or the consumption
01:05:17.680 --> 01:05:25.920
of flesh. He's literally comparing the sacrament to cannibalism. This was an accusation that has
01:05:25.920 --> 01:05:30.400
been leveled against Christians historically. This is one of the accusations that sent Christians
01:05:30.400 --> 01:05:36.160
to the lions in Rome. Incidentally also one of the accusations the Reformed have historically made
01:05:36.160 --> 01:05:44.400
against Lutherans from time to time. But he is arguing here that Christianity isn't really different
01:05:44.400 --> 01:05:48.240
from these cults and that actually you should study these cults if you really want to understand
01:05:48.240 --> 01:05:54.800
Christianity, which is the exact opposite of what a Christian would believe and what a Christian,
01:05:54.800 --> 01:06:00.240
particularly a supposed minister would tell you. That's literally his conclusion. Why don't you
01:06:00.240 --> 01:06:06.080
just read the conclusion because that's exactly how he finishes this paper. I'll read the conclusion
01:06:06.160 --> 01:06:15.120
then. That's funny that he did the work for you. Someone did. The conclusion.
01:06:16.400 --> 01:06:21.200
That Christianity did copy and borrow from Mithraism cannot be denied, but it was generally
01:06:21.200 --> 01:06:26.640
a natural and unconscious process rather than a deliberate plan of action. It was subject to the
01:06:26.640 --> 01:06:31.840
same influences from the environment as were the other cults, and it sometimes produced the same
01:06:31.840 --> 01:06:37.120
reaction. The people were conditioned by the contact with the older religions and the background
01:06:37.120 --> 01:06:42.560
and general trend of the time. Many of the views while passing out of paganism to Christianity
01:06:42.560 --> 01:06:47.680
were given a more profound and spiritual meaning by Christians, yet we must be indebted to the source.
01:06:48.240 --> 01:06:52.560
To discuss Christianity without mentioning other religions would be like discussing the
01:06:52.560 --> 01:06:57.200
greatness of the Atlantic Ocean without the slightest mention of the many tributaries that
01:06:57.280 --> 01:07:06.720
keep it flowing. I'm definitely not going to go to him for hydrological advice.
01:07:08.160 --> 01:07:13.520
That's why I cut you off. You could not have possibly said anything bad to make your conclusion
01:07:13.520 --> 01:07:18.080
that was nearly as bad as what he did for his own. That's just so bad.
01:07:21.200 --> 01:07:24.320
I hadn't read that one before. That is just alarmingly awful.
01:07:24.480 --> 01:07:32.160
I always like that the people who write this stuff, you can tell exactly what they've read. I can tell
01:07:32.880 --> 01:07:39.520
what he read in psychology. I can tell he read Bart. I know he also commented on Bart, so that
01:07:39.520 --> 01:07:43.840
that one helps along with that. But I can tell where he got these ideas, where these little
01:07:43.840 --> 01:07:50.560
things came from. And there's no real synthesis. It's just regurgitation of some little snippet
01:07:50.560 --> 01:07:58.480
that he picked up somewhere. And so it's Mithraism, because he obviously read someone who was writing
01:07:58.480 --> 01:08:05.360
about the mystery cults. Okay, well, if there's some sort of truth in all religions and that we
01:08:05.360 --> 01:08:11.440
have to look to all these old cults and paganism to pick up these very, why is there no mention of
01:08:12.400 --> 01:08:20.320
Norse religion? Do we have to look into the Eddas for truth? Do we have to look into Hinduism and
01:08:20.320 --> 01:08:28.640
Buddhism? It always comes out that it's just a regurgitation of whatever men like this have read
01:08:28.640 --> 01:08:36.160
last. But of course, the more interesting and the more salient point, not the less interesting point
01:08:36.160 --> 01:08:42.640
of it just being parroting, but the more interesting point is the fact that what he's doing here is
01:08:42.640 --> 01:08:51.840
just outright denying the uniqueness of Christianity. And Christianity, if it is true, must necessarily
01:08:51.840 --> 01:09:00.960
be unique. The claims of Christianity are exclusive truth claims. If Christianity is true, every other
01:09:00.960 --> 01:09:06.720
religion is false. And so when you have someone who is arguing for this sort of syncretism,
01:09:07.280 --> 01:09:12.320
arguing to blend the pagan and the Christian and he capitalizes paganism, notably.
01:09:13.760 --> 01:09:17.120
Now, I know some people are going to go troll my timeline and point out how you
01:09:17.120 --> 01:09:24.240
capitalize. I capitalize neopaganism, because I am speaking of it as a particular specific religion,
01:09:24.240 --> 01:09:30.320
and therefore it is properly a proper noun. Here, paganism is used as a collective noun and
01:09:30.320 --> 01:09:35.520
should not be capitalized. That is giving some indication of his underlying thoughts on this
01:09:35.520 --> 01:09:43.680
matter. But we see this, of course, all over Africa and other parts of the world where we have this
01:09:43.680 --> 01:09:50.000
incredible problem with syncretism. This is commented on frequently by missionaries where
01:09:50.000 --> 01:09:54.560
the local populations, Lutherans have had this experience, for instance, in Madagascar, where
01:09:54.560 --> 01:10:00.640
there's actually a very large Lutheran church now, but they have the problem of syncretism
01:10:01.200 --> 01:10:07.600
where the local population will adopt Christianity. They'll go to church, they'll be very excited
01:10:07.600 --> 01:10:12.720
about the church, there's dancing and singing, and there's a lot more activity in church in
01:10:12.720 --> 01:10:19.360
Africa typically than you would see in a German Lutheran church, certainly. But you have these
01:10:19.360 --> 01:10:24.480
individuals who seemingly have adopted Christianity, but then they go home and go right back to
01:10:24.480 --> 01:10:30.560
ancestor worship, or they go right back to offering various things at the tombs.
01:10:31.760 --> 01:10:36.560
It's just you have syncretism and it's a huge problem, and that is exactly what is being argued
01:10:36.560 --> 01:10:44.000
here. He is bluntly advocating that syncretism should be part of Christianity, and if you're
01:10:44.000 --> 01:10:49.680
advocating that Christianity, so-called, should be syncretist, you no longer have Christianity
01:10:49.680 --> 01:11:00.400
because Christ and Baal have nothing in common. You can't worship both. You must choose one.
01:11:01.520 --> 01:11:05.280
If you don't worship Christ, well, you are worshiping the other by default,
01:11:05.920 --> 01:11:13.280
but if you try to worship both, you're worshiping Baal, and that is what he is advocating here.
01:11:13.360 --> 01:11:21.040
This is just incredibly wicked. This is, again, not something that could be written by a Christian,
01:11:21.040 --> 01:11:25.040
and no Christian can hear this. No Christian can read this and think, well, of course,
01:11:25.040 --> 01:11:31.280
this man was Christian. No. On its face, it is obvious this author was no Christian.
01:11:34.320 --> 01:11:37.840
But he was confessing his faith. I mean, he's telling the truth when he says that
01:11:38.480 --> 01:11:45.440
his Christianity, the religion that he called Christianity, does come from paganism. It does
01:11:45.440 --> 01:11:52.080
come from worshiping these demons. He wasn't lying. He was lying about our Christianity. He was
01:11:52.080 --> 01:11:57.040
lying about the faith of our fathers, but he was not lying about the faith of his father,
01:11:57.040 --> 01:12:01.200
and as we've said on a number of episodes, that's a really hard thing for us as Christians to
01:12:01.200 --> 01:12:06.000
tackle. When someone comes to you and says, I'm a Christian brother, I hold the same faith as you,
01:12:06.000 --> 01:12:09.200
you should be able to just believe him and put your arm around him and said,
01:12:09.200 --> 01:12:15.520
thank God you're here, brother in Christ. Instead, we are faced with an adversary who
01:12:15.520 --> 01:12:20.800
knows how to exploit that, and so as a result, he sends waves of these people and says,
01:12:20.800 --> 01:12:26.320
hi, I'm here from Jesus, and I'm going to tell you about Mithraism, and I'm going to help you
01:12:26.320 --> 01:12:31.760
understand how paganism is such a huge influence on the religion that you claim to believe.
01:12:32.480 --> 01:12:38.880
That's how faith dies, full stop. That is how the Christian faith will die, unless we're able to
01:12:38.880 --> 01:12:45.280
detect and root out and destroy enemies who attempt to infiltrate. The reason that quoting
01:12:45.280 --> 01:12:52.720
Martin Luther King, Jr. in Christian churches is wicked is that this is what you're quoting.
01:12:52.720 --> 01:12:57.120
You're quoting a man who believed these things, and next week, we're going to get to the things
01:12:57.840 --> 01:13:02.480
that he did with those beliefs, and they were consonant. It's not like, oh, he preached one
01:13:02.480 --> 01:13:07.200
thing and then he did another. What he preached when you actually understand that he's confessing
01:13:07.200 --> 01:13:12.320
a false religion, that makes perfect sense too. Of course, he was doing all those wicked things
01:13:12.320 --> 01:13:19.440
because he was openly not Christian, and no one wanted to look. To this day, no one wants to look.
01:13:19.440 --> 01:13:25.760
We have been berated in the past, and on past MLK days and all these other garbage made up
01:13:25.760 --> 01:13:31.680
holidays, when we say, by the way, that guy was not Christian, we get shouted down by so-called
01:13:31.680 --> 01:13:37.440
pastors. They say, no, he was great. He was an important leader. He was certainly a better
01:13:37.440 --> 01:13:43.040
Christian than you. Well, in their version of Christianity, yes, that's true. They hold the
01:13:43.040 --> 01:13:48.960
same God, the same faith. It is not the one that we hold. I'm perfectly content with that contrast.
01:13:49.920 --> 01:13:56.400
I just want to add quickly a little bit of context for those who hear mythorism and have no
01:13:57.200 --> 01:14:06.560
idea what is going on here, don't have any real background. A modern analog for this,
01:14:06.560 --> 01:14:12.320
something to which you could reasonably and directly compare mythorism would be Freemasonry.
01:14:13.120 --> 01:14:20.000
And there is an argument that you get some of the rights and practices in Freemasonry
01:14:20.560 --> 01:14:28.960
from mythorism. Mythorism would have been in part derived from the earlier Zoroastrian religion,
01:14:28.960 --> 01:14:36.560
which would be Iranian, modern Iran, obviously, then Persian. And so Zoroastrianism through
01:14:36.560 --> 01:14:41.760
Roman mystery cults and mythorism, and then the modern version Freemasonry,
01:14:41.760 --> 01:14:46.160
just so people have some sort of context for what is meant there by that term.
01:14:47.520 --> 01:14:51.440
But when he brought it up, he was basically just being a redditoriathist, and that's the
01:14:51.440 --> 01:14:58.960
level of theology we're dealing with here. Very much so. The next essay that we're going to quote
01:14:58.960 --> 01:15:04.160
from is called The Sources of Fundamentalism and Liberalism Considered Historically and
01:15:04.160 --> 01:15:10.560
Psychologically. It's important to note that when King uses words like fundamentalism,
01:15:10.560 --> 01:15:17.840
like Orthodox Christianity, lower case O, he's referring to the Christian faith that we hold,
01:15:17.840 --> 01:15:22.960
one that says that scripture is inspired by God, that all the things in the Bible actually
01:15:22.960 --> 01:15:30.160
happen. They really, truly in truth happened. No wiggle words, no room to get out of. Yeah,
01:15:30.400 --> 01:15:37.040
that's a real physical event. In contrast, when he says things like liberalism, like modern,
01:15:37.040 --> 01:15:43.120
like scientific, he means himself. He is always referring to himself in every one of these papers
01:15:43.120 --> 01:15:47.680
when he refers to things like liberal. So when that term is used here, it's not insulting,
01:15:47.680 --> 01:15:52.400
it's not saying, oh, you're a lib, that's literally the contrast that he has. He writes,
01:15:53.600 --> 01:15:58.240
the use of the critical method in approaching the Bible is to the fundamentalist downright
01:15:58.240 --> 01:16:03.360
heresy. He sees the Bible as the infallible word of God, from the dotting of an i to the
01:16:03.360 --> 01:16:09.520
crossing of a t. He finds it to be unity and a coherence of parts. The New Testament is the
01:16:09.520 --> 01:16:14.560
old contained and the Old Testament is the new explained. Upon this first proposition, the
01:16:14.560 --> 01:16:20.240
infallibility of the Bible, all other fundamentalist views depend. They argue that if the Bible is true,
01:16:20.240 --> 01:16:26.080
that is so divinely inspired, as to be free from error, then all other truths flow inevitably,
01:16:26.080 --> 01:16:30.800
because they are based upon what the Bible actually says in language clear and unmistakable.
01:16:31.520 --> 01:16:36.560
When the fundamentalist comes to the nature of man, he finds all of his answers in the Bible.
01:16:36.560 --> 01:16:41.440
The story of man in the Garden of Eden gives a conclusive answer. Man was created by a direct
01:16:41.440 --> 01:16:46.640
act of God. Moreover, he was created in the image of God. But through the workings of the devil,
01:16:46.640 --> 01:16:52.640
man was led into disobedience. Then began all human ills, hardship and labor, the agony of
01:16:52.640 --> 01:16:57.680
childbirth, hatred, sorrow, suffering and death. The fundamentalist is quite aware of the fact
01:16:57.680 --> 01:17:03.360
that scholars regard the Garden of Eden and the serpent, Satan and the hell of fire as myths,
01:17:03.360 --> 01:17:08.400
analogous to those found in other oriental religions. He knows also that his beliefs
01:17:08.400 --> 01:17:14.160
are the center of ridicule by many. But this does not shake his faith. Rather, it convinces him,
01:17:14.160 --> 01:17:19.840
the fundamentalist, more of the existence of the devil. The critics, says the fundamentalist,
01:17:19.840 --> 01:17:24.640
would never indulge in such skeptical thinking if the devil hadn't influenced them.
01:17:24.640 --> 01:17:30.000
The fundamentalist is convinced that this skepticism of scholars and cheap humor of the lady
01:17:30.000 --> 01:17:35.520
can by no means prevent the revelation of God. Other doctrines such as a supernatural plan of
01:17:35.520 --> 01:17:41.440
salvation, the trinity, the substitutionary theory of atonement, and the second coming of Christ
01:17:41.440 --> 01:17:47.040
are all quite prominent in fundamentalist thinking. Such are the views of the fundamentalists,
01:17:47.120 --> 01:17:52.640
and they reveal that he is opposed to theological adaptation to social and cultural change.
01:17:53.200 --> 01:17:59.280
He sees a progressive scientific age as a retrogressive spiritual age. Amid change all
01:17:59.280 --> 01:18:04.880
around, he is willing to preserve certain ancient ideas, even though they are contrary to science.
01:18:06.320 --> 01:18:11.600
That was a mouthful. But again, we hit fundamentalism is in opposition to science.
01:18:11.600 --> 01:18:16.240
So if you're a stone choir listener, if you like some of the things that we say,
01:18:16.240 --> 01:18:21.280
if you think that we're trying to argue faithfully from scripture, you are certainly someone who
01:18:21.280 --> 01:18:27.120
is willing to preserve certain ancient ideas, even though they are contrary to science.
01:18:27.120 --> 01:18:31.520
Now when he says science, I don't think I have any of these quotes, but he was very fond,
01:18:31.520 --> 01:18:36.880
especially in college, of saying the Copernican universe. He read that somewhere and that sounded
01:18:36.880 --> 01:18:45.760
really good. That meant modern scientific knowledge with cause and effect, with rules and order,
01:18:46.080 --> 01:18:51.840
all the things that we understand about the universe. In his rational mind, anything that would
01:18:51.840 --> 01:18:56.640
violate any of those, anything that would be a miracle cannot exist. Fundamentalism is against
01:18:56.640 --> 01:19:03.200
miracles. So when he says, as I said, he calls himself a liberal, he was describing a fundamentalism
01:19:03.200 --> 01:19:08.720
here. He was describing Christianity, and he was making fun of it. He was saying, that stuff's a joke.
01:19:09.760 --> 01:19:13.520
These people think that when someone says it's a joke, that's just the devil attacking.
01:19:13.520 --> 01:19:20.720
That's how silly they are. That's what rubes they are. Well, I'm happy to be a rub because it is
01:19:20.720 --> 01:19:25.520
absolutely the devil speaking. When Michael King speaks, the devil is speaking. That is what we
01:19:25.520 --> 01:19:33.120
have here. And just to make that contrast more explicit, he calls himself a liberal constantly
01:19:33.120 --> 01:19:39.360
throughout his writing. And so when he says fundamentalist, he is using that as an epithet.
01:19:39.920 --> 01:19:46.320
He is using that as a pejorative. And he is using that specifically in contrast to liberal,
01:19:46.960 --> 01:19:51.760
which is to say he is saying that he is an enlightened liberal as opposed to these
01:19:52.320 --> 01:19:58.880
backwards, uneducated, illiterate fundamentalists who actually believe what Scripture says.
01:20:00.480 --> 01:20:02.960
And so when he says, these are the views of the fundamentalists,
01:20:03.920 --> 01:20:11.840
he is saying these are not his views because he's a liberal and as a liberal he doesn't hold to those
01:20:11.840 --> 01:20:18.720
things. And so think about that list. He basically listed out the core tenets of the Christian religion
01:20:18.720 --> 01:20:24.960
and rejected them. Rejecting penal substitutionary atonement is sufficient to declare yourself not
01:20:24.960 --> 01:20:30.320
a Christian because that is a rejection of Christ. It is a rejection of Christ's work. It is a
01:20:30.320 --> 01:20:35.360
rejection of justification. Of course, he throws in the other things as well because he also rejects
01:20:35.360 --> 01:20:39.600
the virgin birth, the resurrection of the body, and he rejects the Trinity.
01:20:40.320 --> 01:20:43.840
And the second coming of Christ and a supernatural plan for salvation.
01:20:44.720 --> 01:20:49.280
Exactly. What's left of Christianity once this man gets done? This is literally the entire Christian
01:20:49.280 --> 01:20:53.920
faith that he indites. And that's why we're burying you with these quotes. That's why we're
01:20:53.920 --> 01:20:58.960
reading one after another. And it's cumulative and it's getting long already. And it's like,
01:20:58.960 --> 01:21:03.440
we already said that, yeah, he always said the same things. See, if we had started just giving
01:21:03.440 --> 01:21:07.200
you five quotes, he'd say, well, if he gave me five more, I would hear something different.
01:21:07.200 --> 01:21:11.440
So we went from five to 10 to 20. We're going to go two hours giving all these quotes because they
01:21:11.440 --> 01:21:17.680
all say the same thing for years and years and years. And this man never repented. He never
01:21:17.680 --> 01:21:22.960
repented. He went to hell with this confession on his lips. There's no other possible conclusion.
01:21:23.040 --> 01:21:29.680
He mocks this stuff. He mocks the Christian faith. He blasphemes with every word. And the fact
01:21:29.680 --> 01:21:34.640
that later on, when he was pretending to be a pastor, he used some of these words in ways that
01:21:34.640 --> 01:21:40.640
blended in, makes it all the more evil. That's when he says, oh, the devil is mocking these people,
01:21:40.640 --> 01:21:43.600
and they think the devil's coming for them when they hear ridicule.
01:21:44.720 --> 01:21:49.920
That was mockery. That was Satan sneering at us through time, through his words.
01:21:50.720 --> 01:21:57.360
It's astonishing that anyone, like I said earlier, if, okay, assume that when your
01:21:57.360 --> 01:22:02.800
pastor comes to you and says, yes, Martin Luther King Jr. is a paragon of moral virtue,
01:22:02.800 --> 01:22:07.280
he was a great pastor, he was a great Christian, be more like him, what are you going to actually do?
01:22:07.280 --> 01:22:12.560
You're going to go read what he said and read what he did and learn from us so you can emulate it.
01:22:12.560 --> 01:22:17.120
Any man who emulates this, this is damned. I can say that with absolute certainty. I don't
01:22:17.120 --> 01:22:21.280
need to know your heart. If you say that everything about the Christian faith is evil,
01:22:22.000 --> 01:22:29.520
okay, I believe you. Lutherans who actually pray the morning office or a shorter version of it
01:22:29.520 --> 01:22:36.560
anyway, and of course, many others, will start every day in part by praying the Apostles Creed.
01:22:38.800 --> 01:22:45.200
That is the summation of what we believe as Christians and run through the Apostles Creed
01:22:45.840 --> 01:22:49.760
in your mind. I'm not going to read it for you here or recite it for you here more
01:22:49.760 --> 01:22:56.240
realistically. He is rejecting basically everything in the Apostles Creed.
01:22:58.320 --> 01:23:04.960
And that is because the religion of Michael King was not Christianity. His religion was the
01:23:04.960 --> 01:23:13.120
social gospel. His religion was revolution. His religion was progress with a capital P.
01:23:13.360 --> 01:23:18.320
And again, you should be thinking of the Enlightenment when you hear that term because
01:23:19.120 --> 01:23:25.280
he is a damned son of the Enlightenment. And those who follow in his footsteps will
01:23:25.280 --> 01:23:31.840
spend eternity with him. And so our next selection is from examination answers,
01:23:31.840 --> 01:23:37.120
Christian theology for today. This is a second year seminary essay from him.
01:23:37.760 --> 01:23:40.400
Read two selections from this.
01:23:57.440 --> 01:24:02.720
This theistic view also means that God is imminent in the world. This
01:24:03.520 --> 01:24:10.480
seemed the only adequate way to explain religious experience. A God who is totally transcendent
01:24:10.480 --> 01:24:16.800
and out of touch with the world cannot come to man in religious experience. Moreover,
01:24:16.800 --> 01:24:21.440
this view of the imminence of God is more in accord with the theory of evolution.
01:24:23.440 --> 01:24:32.080
Some are going to miss, perhaps, part of what he is saying here. In part, and I can see him
01:24:32.080 --> 01:24:40.160
responding to Bart's theology in part here, but part of what he is arguing is he is arguing
01:24:40.160 --> 01:24:48.640
against God's transcendence, God's nature as being wholly other from the creation, from man,
01:24:48.640 --> 01:24:57.360
from everything. And that is fundamentally a rejection of God because God is his nature.
01:24:58.160 --> 01:25:02.960
Now, this gets to be a complicated theological topic fairly quickly, but
01:25:04.720 --> 01:25:11.040
God is simple, which is to say God is not composed of parts. Because if you say that God is composed
01:25:11.040 --> 01:25:18.880
of parts, you wind up with a real division in God and you wind up with multiple gods,
01:25:18.880 --> 01:25:25.200
or you wind up denying that God is God by denying the nature of God. We will probably get into that
01:25:25.200 --> 01:25:32.080
more if we do a future episode on Eastern Orthodoxy, because that very much ties into why
01:25:32.080 --> 01:25:39.200
palimism is a problem. But what he is saying here is that God is not really transcendent.
01:25:39.840 --> 01:25:46.480
God is imminent in the world. This is almost verging on pantheism or panentheism.
01:25:48.080 --> 01:25:52.000
Perhaps not quite there, but he may very well not have understood the concept,
01:25:52.000 --> 01:26:00.720
so maybe he couldn't make that argument. But this denies the nature of God. And again,
01:26:00.720 --> 01:26:08.240
to deny the nature of God is to deny God because God is his nature. And we see why he is doing that
01:26:08.240 --> 01:26:15.280
with that last sentence. Moreover, this view of the imminence of God is more in accord with the
01:26:15.280 --> 01:26:22.000
theory of evolution. And so again, he's just doubling down on this idea that the only truth
01:26:22.800 --> 01:26:27.520
comes from empirical evidence, comes from scientific so-called inquiry.
01:26:29.520 --> 01:26:35.360
This is the modern religion in a nutshell. This is what many of our fellows walking around in
01:26:35.360 --> 01:26:41.200
our society believe. If you cannot prove it with science, then it's not real. Never mind that science
01:26:41.200 --> 01:26:49.360
itself is fundamentally based on logic and reason, which are philosophy, which is not science.
01:26:50.880 --> 01:26:55.920
Never mind that problem for them. But what he's arguing here is that science
01:26:57.120 --> 01:27:00.880
should have a capital S, perhaps, scientism, we might call it modernly,
01:27:02.160 --> 01:27:08.400
is preeminent, that we should interpret scripture in the light of science. And so the theory of
01:27:08.400 --> 01:27:15.840
evolution is a scientific truth, is the claim here. And so God must comply with what we have
01:27:15.840 --> 01:27:23.360
discerned about his creation. I'm sure the Christians in the audience, which is most of our
01:27:23.360 --> 01:27:29.280
audience, can see the problem there. If you are working from the creation and trying to tell
01:27:29.280 --> 01:27:34.400
the Creator, you have to fit in this box that you made. You have it exactly backward.
01:27:35.200 --> 01:27:45.360
Again, this is not Christian. This is deism, in essence. Even worse than deism, because it's not
01:27:45.360 --> 01:27:51.680
even really deism, because at least the deist sometimes will affirm God's nature as truly
01:27:51.680 --> 01:27:59.200
transcendent. This even denies that. This is almost Buddhist in its conception of the deity.
01:28:00.160 --> 01:28:05.440
We will definitely be doing future episodes on Eastern Orthodoxy and on evolution, because
01:28:06.720 --> 01:28:10.480
both are at odds with scripture, both are at odds with the Christian faith. And we've had a lot
01:28:10.480 --> 01:28:15.360
of requests for it. A lot of these episodes we're getting into now take a lot more research, and I
01:28:15.360 --> 01:28:20.240
probably did 24 hours of research for this one, and I didn't get through all of his writings.
01:28:20.960 --> 01:28:26.240
It hurt a lot. But these are important topics, so it's well worth it.
01:28:27.040 --> 01:28:30.480
You mentioned we'll do an episode on evolution. There was one more thing that I did want to say
01:28:30.480 --> 01:28:38.080
that I almost forgot. What he's arguing here, there's an underlying current of an argument for
01:28:38.080 --> 01:28:44.880
theistic evolution. Although it's not explicitly theistic evolution, because theistic evolution
01:28:44.880 --> 01:28:52.720
would be God set up the conditions of the universe such that life would naturally come to be via
01:28:52.720 --> 01:28:56.880
evolution. That's more or less the theistic evolution argument. Some will argue that God
01:28:56.880 --> 01:29:01.600
intervened here and there to make sure that it went in the right direction. I mean, does it really
01:29:01.600 --> 01:29:05.360
matter if God set the starting conditions or intervened? It's the same when you're talking about
01:29:05.360 --> 01:29:10.000
God. That's not how it works. That's not what God did. But that's the theistic evolution argument.
01:29:10.560 --> 01:29:16.320
There's a little bit of that underlying what he says here, but this is like the grade school version
01:29:16.320 --> 01:29:22.000
of it. Yep. And he's explicit about that in some of his other papers. That was absolutely his
01:29:22.000 --> 01:29:28.720
confession. There's so many papers here. Part of the reason I'm reading the titles of them
01:29:28.720 --> 01:29:32.320
is we're not going to link them all in the show notes because it doesn't matter. This particular
01:29:32.320 --> 01:29:36.320
one, we are definitely going to link in the show notes because I think it's probably of all of them.
01:29:36.320 --> 01:29:41.120
If you only read one thing that this man ever wrote, this should be it. He wrote an essay his
01:29:41.120 --> 01:29:45.520
second year in seminary. He'd been in the pulpit. He'd been ordained as a pastor for years at this
01:29:45.520 --> 01:29:51.920
point. The title is, What experiences of Christians living in the early Christian century led to
01:29:51.920 --> 01:29:58.400
the Christian doctrines of the divine sonship of Jesus, the virgin birth, and the bodily resurrection.
01:29:59.120 --> 01:30:04.000
Now, the entire thing is terrible quotes, but I'm not going to waste 15 more minutes of your time
01:30:04.000 --> 01:30:08.080
reading the whole thing. If you're interested, go read the thing. I would encourage you to because
01:30:09.040 --> 01:30:14.880
it's a masterclass in blasphemy. The one particular part that I did highlight, which is amusing because
01:30:14.880 --> 01:30:19.360
a couple of minutes ago, Corey specifically said he was refuting the Apostle's Creed implicitly.
01:30:19.360 --> 01:30:23.440
Here he does it explicitly. Listen to his own words. King writes,
01:30:23.440 --> 01:30:27.680
In this paper, we shall discuss the experiences of the early Christians which led to three
01:30:27.680 --> 01:30:34.080
rather orthodox doctrines, the divine sonship of Jesus, the virgin birth, and the bodily resurrection.
01:30:34.080 --> 01:30:38.400
Each of these doctrines is enshrined in what is known as the Apostle's Creed.
01:30:38.400 --> 01:30:42.880
It is this Creed that has stood as a symbol of faith for many Christians over the years.
01:30:43.440 --> 01:30:48.960
Even to this day, it is recited in many churches, but in the minds of many sincere Christians,
01:30:48.960 --> 01:30:53.520
this Creed has planted a seed of confusion which has grown to an oak of doubt.
01:30:54.080 --> 01:30:57.760
They see this Creed as incompatible with all scientific knowledge,
01:30:57.760 --> 01:31:03.360
and so they have proceeded to reject its content. But if we delve into the deeper meaning of these
01:31:03.360 --> 01:31:09.600
doctrines and somehow strip them of their literal interpretation, we will find that they are based
01:31:09.600 --> 01:31:18.240
on a profound foundation. That's straight up Satan talking. Oh, the Apostle's Creed, that's goofy.
01:31:18.320 --> 01:31:22.880
That's just silly. But you know what? We can rescue it. If we say that none of what's in
01:31:22.880 --> 01:31:28.000
the Apostle's Creed is literal, if we take it all as figurative, it's actually rich. It's actually
01:31:28.000 --> 01:31:32.640
bounteous. One particularly interesting thing about this, there's a man I think I mentioned
01:31:32.640 --> 01:31:38.080
before. His name is William Campbell. He was a historian. He basically slots in between Jordan
01:31:38.080 --> 01:31:47.840
Peterson and Carl Jung on the trajectory of the modern application of psychology and psychiatry
01:31:47.840 --> 01:31:53.440
to religion in reverse order. So basically what these guys are doing is they're using psychology
01:31:53.440 --> 01:32:01.040
and psychiatry as a lens to explain how religion manifested among man. They believe exactly the
01:32:01.040 --> 01:32:06.400
same thing that King believes in that he said earlier that man created religion as an outgrowth
01:32:06.400 --> 01:32:12.320
of some inner expression of whatever. The reason I mentioned Campbell is that he did a lecture
01:32:12.320 --> 01:32:19.200
series 30, 40 years ago at this point where he spends 10 or 15 minutes going line by line
01:32:19.200 --> 01:32:25.440
through the Apostle's Creed and deconstructing it. I found it fascinating. It was utterly blasphemous
01:32:25.440 --> 01:32:30.880
and it was basically like a primordial TED talk that he was doing it. So he's not a theologian.
01:32:30.880 --> 01:32:35.760
He was doing it for the purpose of saying all the other religions in the world, all the other
01:32:35.760 --> 01:32:40.560
world religions have all this beauty. But when you look at the Apostle's Creed, look how stupid this
01:32:41.120 --> 01:32:46.640
is. And he went line by line telling his cackling audience how stupid the Apostle's Creed was,
01:32:46.640 --> 01:32:50.720
how backward, how fundamentalist, how goofy and insane and retarded.
01:32:53.040 --> 01:32:59.120
I notice these things because it's just so profoundly seemingly out of character. This
01:32:59.120 --> 01:33:05.440
is a serious intellectual guy. He's not Christian obviously. But to spend the time deconstructing
01:33:05.440 --> 01:33:10.480
the Apostle's Creed, just if you don't know anything, it's like, oh, well, okay, I guess
01:33:10.480 --> 01:33:15.920
those Christians have some goofy ideas. Here's something that's almost, it's close to 2,000 years
01:33:15.920 --> 01:33:20.800
old at this point. It is the confession of the faith. And I think that's a seminal thing here.
01:33:20.800 --> 01:33:27.040
Not only is King mocking and he says, they see this Creed as incompatible with all scientific
01:33:27.040 --> 01:33:32.400
knowledge and so they have proceeded to reject its content. That means that they're apostatizing.
01:33:32.400 --> 01:33:38.160
If you reject the Apostle's Creed, you're not a Christian. There's an insert that my former
01:33:38.160 --> 01:33:43.360
pastor produced that will attach in the show notes that shows every word of the Apostle's Creed,
01:33:43.360 --> 01:33:47.520
every word of the Nine Seen Creed, and it shows every Bible verse that they come from.
01:33:48.400 --> 01:33:54.560
It's interesting that we think of the creeds as these man-made things. They're basically an
01:33:54.560 --> 01:34:01.040
incredibly dense collection of proof texts. It's a word here, a phrase there, but every one of them
01:34:01.040 --> 01:34:06.160
comes from Scripture. Now, the difference between the Creed and the misapplication of proof texts,
01:34:06.160 --> 01:34:13.040
in which generally we're opposed to, is that they're faithful distillations of what is in
01:34:13.040 --> 01:34:18.800
Scripture. It's not that they're twisting and pulling out of context. The Nine Seen Creed,
01:34:18.800 --> 01:34:25.040
the Apostle's Creed, clearly expressed the Christian faith and they were created in a time when it was
01:34:25.040 --> 01:34:31.280
necessary to confess the God that the Christians were confessing, to say, this is the God we're
01:34:31.280 --> 01:34:35.280
talking about. See, that's the same problem that we're having here with King today. Frankly,
01:34:35.280 --> 01:34:39.520
it's the same problem we're having in our churches today. If I say, oh, I worship God and you say,
01:34:39.520 --> 01:34:43.840
you worship God, I'm like, okay, great. We're all Christians. Well, which God are you talking about?
01:34:43.840 --> 01:34:51.520
Because as Corey said, Freemasons, they say they believe in God. Deists say they believe in God.
01:34:51.520 --> 01:34:56.480
All manner of people who are hellbound, so they say they believe in God. And so the purpose
01:34:56.480 --> 01:35:03.280
of a Creed and a Credo, Credo is Latin for, I believe, it's not some special thing. It's just
01:35:03.280 --> 01:35:10.240
these are the beliefs that I hold. And when they're distilled around what God is, as he reveals himself,
01:35:12.480 --> 01:35:18.080
it's a razor. It's something that separates true from false Christians. If you're a true
01:35:18.080 --> 01:35:22.640
Christian, you must believe it. Now, that's not to say that someone who doesn't know what it says
01:35:22.640 --> 01:35:27.840
cannot be saved. It's to say that if you see it and you say, I don't believe that, well, now it's
01:35:27.840 --> 01:35:31.920
not that you're disagreeing with a Creed. As I said, you're disagreeing with Scripture because
01:35:31.920 --> 01:35:37.200
every word of it is from Scripture. Every word of the Apostles Creed is a quote from Scripture.
01:35:37.200 --> 01:35:41.360
So if you say, I don't believe this, this is garbage. This is stupid. You're saying God is
01:35:41.360 --> 01:35:45.280
garbage and God is stupid, which is precisely what King said early about the Old Testament. He's
01:35:45.840 --> 01:35:49.680
that Old Testament stuff is garbage. There's infinitely more valuable texts than that.
01:35:51.760 --> 01:35:57.120
That's why this stuff matters. If a man says, I don't believe in God, here's the God, I don't
01:35:57.120 --> 01:36:01.760
believe him, you have to believe that man. I don't think he was wrong. I think he was absolutely
01:36:01.760 --> 01:36:05.840
right. I think his confession was true. What his confession was not was Christian.
01:36:05.840 --> 01:36:13.280
And so here is the next selection from the writings of Michael King.
01:36:35.840 --> 01:36:41.440
Such a view impresses the modern mind as mythological rather than theological.
01:36:42.720 --> 01:36:48.080
The objection to the Latin type of theory, the Anselmic theory of satisfaction, the penal
01:36:48.080 --> 01:36:53.840
theory of the reformers, and the governmental theory of Grodius is found in the abstract and
01:36:53.840 --> 01:36:59.520
impersonal way in which it deals with such ideas as merit, guilt, and punishment. The guilt of
01:36:59.520 --> 01:37:05.840
others and the punishment do them are transferred to Christ and borne by him. Such views taken
01:37:05.840 --> 01:37:11.120
literally become bizarre. Merit and guilt are not concrete realities that can be detached
01:37:11.120 --> 01:37:17.120
from one person and transferred to another. Moreover, no person can morally be punished
01:37:17.120 --> 01:37:22.160
in place of another. Such ideas as ethical and penal substitution become immoral.
01:37:23.120 --> 01:37:28.480
In the next place, if Christ by his life and death paid the full penalty of sin,
01:37:28.560 --> 01:37:33.360
there is no valid ground for repentance or moral obedience as a condition of forgiveness.
01:37:34.080 --> 01:37:39.600
The debt is paid, the penalty is exacted, and there is consequently nothing to forgive.
01:37:40.480 --> 01:37:45.440
Again, it may be noted that the Latin theory falls short of the fully personal and Christian
01:37:45.440 --> 01:37:51.840
conception of God as Father. It presents God as a kind of feudal overlord, or as a stern judge,
01:37:51.840 --> 01:37:57.440
or as a governor of a state. Each of these minimizes the true Christian conception of God
01:37:57.440 --> 01:38:04.800
as a free personality. This is one of those where you're not even sure where to begin because it is
01:38:05.440 --> 01:38:13.760
terrible from beginning to end in two dozen ways. But I guess we have to begin with stating again
01:38:13.760 --> 01:38:21.360
that if you deny penal substitutionary atonement, you are not a Christian. That is the gospel.
01:38:22.160 --> 01:38:28.800
The gospel is Christ crucified for sinners. That is penal substitutionary atonement.
01:38:29.360 --> 01:38:36.080
That is Christ having taken upon himself the punishment for your sins so that you
01:38:36.080 --> 01:38:40.880
do not have to suffer that punishment, and to remind everyone.
01:38:42.080 --> 01:38:48.480
The debt from sin, the guilt incurred, the cost that you would have to pay, is infinite.
01:38:48.480 --> 01:38:53.520
That is why hell is eternal. That is why there is no end to the suffering of the damned.
01:38:54.160 --> 01:39:00.320
Because you can never as a finite being pay an infinite penalty. That is why Christ had
01:39:00.320 --> 01:39:05.840
to pay that penalty because his death was of infinite value, and so it was the only thing
01:39:05.840 --> 01:39:13.120
that could be set against the infinite debt of sin. And that is denied here by Michael King. He
01:39:13.120 --> 01:39:22.720
denies the core of the Christian faith. If you deny this, you cannot be saved. And that is what he
01:39:22.720 --> 01:39:28.320
did. The short version is really simple. The short version is Jesus didn't die for my sins.
01:39:28.320 --> 01:39:34.640
That's his confession. Like, that's okay, dude. He did, but if you reject it, it doesn't count. So,
01:39:34.640 --> 01:39:40.080
as Corgis said, he's spending eternity paying for all the sins that Jesus paid for because he said,
01:39:40.080 --> 01:39:43.920
that's nonsense. There's no math. There's no transference. God's not mean like that.
01:39:44.720 --> 01:39:50.800
Okay, that's gonna be your confession for the rest of your eternity. And there is no rest in
01:39:50.800 --> 01:39:57.120
eternity. Yes, God will let you pay for the sins for which Christ already paid. You can go ahead
01:39:57.120 --> 01:40:04.560
and attempt for eternity to pay that price. You will never successfully pay the entirety of it.
01:40:05.120 --> 01:40:12.160
Because again, infinite and again, infinite and eternal are basically synonymous here. And that
01:40:12.160 --> 01:40:20.240
is why hell is eternal because the price is infinite. And so he's paying the price for all of his
01:40:21.040 --> 01:40:29.280
many sins in this life because he chose that. He apostatized because he may very well have been
01:40:29.280 --> 01:40:34.720
a Christian as a child. I honestly don't believe so. Briefly. He may briefly.
01:40:38.000 --> 01:40:42.720
The first time you ever read the Bible, he said, I don't believe any of this. That was what he said.
01:40:43.280 --> 01:40:49.840
He sort of sat there and listened, but we don't know. It is conceivable that he was at some point
01:40:49.840 --> 01:40:55.920
a Christian. Which is worse. But as soon as he engaged with scripture, he said, I reject this.
01:40:55.920 --> 01:41:00.480
And then he devoted the entirety of his life as a teenager and as an adult
01:41:00.480 --> 01:41:06.720
to fleeing as far from God as he could possibly get. This next quote is even worse than that
01:41:06.720 --> 01:41:11.920
somehow. This is from an essay. Again, he's still in seminary. He's still preaching. He's an ordained
01:41:11.920 --> 01:41:18.080
pastor. This essay is titled, The Humanity and Divinity of Jesus. Certainly, this view of the
01:41:18.080 --> 01:41:23.280
Divinity of Christ presents many modern minds within superable difficulties. Most of us are not
01:41:23.280 --> 01:41:28.560
willing to see the union of the human and divine in a metaphysical incarnation, yet among all our
01:41:28.560 --> 01:41:34.560
difficulty with the pre-existent idea and the view of supernatural generation, we must come to some
01:41:34.560 --> 01:41:40.160
view of the Divinity of Jesus. In order to remain in the orbit of the Christian religion, we must
01:41:40.160 --> 01:41:47.600
have a Christology. At least he knows there's a center of gravity there somewhere. As Dr. Bailey
01:41:47.600 --> 01:41:52.240
has reminded us, we cannot have a good theology without a Christology, where then can we in the
01:41:52.240 --> 01:41:58.320
liberal tradition find dimension of Jesus? We may find the Divinity of Christ not in his
01:41:58.320 --> 01:42:04.080
substantial unity with God, but in his filial consciousness and in his unique dependence upon
01:42:04.080 --> 01:42:09.680
God. It was his feeling of absolute dependence on God, as Schleiermacher would say, that made him
01:42:09.680 --> 01:42:14.560
divine. Yes, it was the warmest of his devotion to God and the intimacy of his trust in God
01:42:14.560 --> 01:42:20.160
that accounts for his being the supreme revelation of God. All this reveals to us that one man has
01:42:20.320 --> 01:42:26.960
last realized his true divine calling, that of becoming a true Son of Man by being a true Son
01:42:26.960 --> 01:42:33.200
of God. This is the achievement of a man who has, as nearly as we can tell, completely opened his life
01:42:33.200 --> 01:42:39.680
to the influence of the divine spirit. The orthodox attempt to explain the Divinity of Jesus in terms
01:42:39.680 --> 01:42:45.520
of an inherent metaphysical substance within him seems to me quite inadequate. To say that the
01:42:45.520 --> 01:42:51.600
Christ, whose example of living we are bid to follow, is divine in an ontological sense is
01:42:51.600 --> 01:42:58.000
actually harmful and detrimental. To invest this Christ with such new supernatural qualities
01:42:58.000 --> 01:43:02.640
makes the rejoinder, oh well, he had a better chance for that kind of life than we can possibly have.
01:43:03.280 --> 01:43:08.960
In other words, one could easily use this as a means to hide behind his failures. So the orthodox
01:43:08.960 --> 01:43:15.040
view of the Divinity of Christ is, in my mind, quite readily denied. The true significance of
01:43:15.040 --> 01:43:20.000
the Divinity of Christ lies in the fact that his achievement is prophetic and promissory
01:43:20.000 --> 01:43:25.600
for every other true Son of Man who is willing to submit his will to the will and spirit of God.
01:43:25.600 --> 01:43:31.920
Christ was to be the only prototype, one of many brothers. The appearance of such a person,
01:43:31.920 --> 01:43:38.160
more divine and more human than any other, and standing closest to unity at once with God and
01:43:38.160 --> 01:43:43.760
man, is the most significant and hopeful event in human history. This divine quality, or this
01:43:43.760 --> 01:43:49.920
unity with God, was not something thrust upon Jesus from above, but was a definite achievement
01:43:49.920 --> 01:43:57.200
through the process of moral struggle and self-abnegation. So this is a continuation of a
01:43:57.200 --> 01:44:01.760
quote that I pointed to earlier. When he talks about Jesus, when he talks about Christ,
01:44:01.760 --> 01:44:06.720
he's talking about a human being. He's talking about a man who lived and died 2,000 years ago,
01:44:06.720 --> 01:44:11.280
who was born from a father and a mother. In the previous essay, he denied the virgin birth, said
01:44:11.280 --> 01:44:15.120
there's no such thing that's absolutely impossible. It's just pure nonsense. They made it up,
01:44:15.120 --> 01:44:18.560
and they got it from Mithraism, by the way, and they got it from Egypt.
01:44:18.560 --> 01:44:24.480
Those were the old Eastern Oriental mystery religions influencing the Christian faith,
01:44:24.480 --> 01:44:30.080
because it was all just osmosis. He literally says here that he denies the Divinity of God,
01:44:30.080 --> 01:44:35.840
that is his confession. So when he talks about Jesus living a good life and Jesus having unity
01:44:36.320 --> 01:44:43.120
with God, what he means is that he was a prophet, sort of. He was the best man in history. He was
01:44:43.120 --> 01:44:49.520
the most gifted man of all men, and God used him for a special purpose of showing that a life of
01:44:49.520 --> 01:44:58.480
sacrifice and of faithfulness and of service to others is possible. Now, if he ever talks about
01:44:58.480 --> 01:45:02.960
Christ's Atonement, when he talks about Jesus as an example, this is literally what he means.
01:45:02.960 --> 01:45:08.320
Jesus wasn't God. Jesus is dead. He rotted. He's in the ground. He's like any other man,
01:45:08.320 --> 01:45:12.160
except that while he was alive, he did some really cool stuff, and it got written down,
01:45:12.160 --> 01:45:18.160
and got passed down to us. And so he's an example. This is the furthest thing from Christianity.
01:45:18.800 --> 01:45:22.560
Muslims literally have a higher Christology than Michael King.
01:45:24.560 --> 01:45:32.160
A lot of this boils down, as is so very often the case with heretics. It boils down
01:45:33.120 --> 01:45:36.720
to having a fundamentally flawed conception of sin.
01:45:38.800 --> 01:45:46.240
If you don't believe in the actual nature of sin, if you don't understand what sin is, if you don't
01:45:46.240 --> 01:45:55.920
realize that, again, the debt of sin is infinite, the breach between man and God is an infinite chasm.
01:45:56.160 --> 01:46:04.320
If you don't recognize that original sin is passed down from fathers to their children,
01:46:05.440 --> 01:46:15.200
from Adam to whatever man is born last on this earth, if you do not have a proper theology
01:46:15.200 --> 01:46:22.960
of sin, you are going to end up somewhere like this. Now, of course, there's a bit of mercenary
01:46:22.960 --> 01:46:28.880
dealing here, because a man who spends his life fornicating and beating prostitutes,
01:46:28.880 --> 01:46:35.360
engaging in violence, and I could go on for quite some time, and we will in the next episode,
01:46:35.360 --> 01:46:41.760
certainly. Perhaps that man has selfish reasons for wanting to minimize the nature of sin.
01:46:44.960 --> 01:46:51.040
But if your theology does not account properly for sin, then the atonement becomes unnecessary.
01:46:52.000 --> 01:46:57.920
Because if sin isn't infinite, in terms of the debt and the breach, the separation,
01:46:58.880 --> 01:47:03.440
then the atonement doesn't need to be infinite. And if the atonement doesn't need to be infinite,
01:47:04.160 --> 01:47:10.000
then a man can satisfy it. Because if there's some finite amount of work to be done,
01:47:10.800 --> 01:47:17.440
then a man can do that given enough time. And that always becomes the argument of these heretics.
01:47:18.400 --> 01:47:25.360
And so you have to get your theology right at the beginning. You have to understand the fall
01:47:25.360 --> 01:47:30.560
and original sin and the debt that is owed incurred by each and every sin. Yes, some are worse than
01:47:30.560 --> 01:47:38.400
others, and indeed the punishment in hell will be worse if you committed many great sins versus
01:47:38.400 --> 01:47:46.160
only lesser sins in this life. But the debt is infinite and can be paid only by Christ.
01:47:46.480 --> 01:47:51.200
And so that is why he feels free to deny the atonement, to deny all these things,
01:47:51.200 --> 01:47:57.200
because he does not understand just how terrible sin is. He understands it now,
01:47:59.120 --> 01:48:03.680
but he did not understand it then. And so that is why he writes these heretical things,
01:48:04.720 --> 01:48:09.680
because he gets sin wrong. And there are many Christians today who also do that,
01:48:10.480 --> 01:48:14.480
and they are in danger of ending up in the same place.
01:48:17.280 --> 01:48:23.840
As we keep saying, you do not have the luxury of getting any of these doctrines wrong.
01:48:25.520 --> 01:48:32.400
Are you necessarily damned if you get a particular doctrine in Christianity wrong?
01:48:32.400 --> 01:48:37.760
Perhaps not. It depends on the doctrine. There are minor doctrines, there are major doctrines,
01:48:37.760 --> 01:48:44.240
there are doctrines that are lesser that are more peripheral. But if you hold to that error,
01:48:45.760 --> 01:48:51.040
it never stops there. It always becomes a greater error.
01:48:53.120 --> 01:49:01.200
And so move on to the next piece here, the Christian pertinence of eschatological hope.
01:49:01.440 --> 01:49:10.800
They argue that such beliefs are unscientific, impossible, and even bizarre. Among the beliefs
01:49:10.800 --> 01:49:16.320
which many modern Christians find difficult to accept are those dealing with eschatological hopes,
01:49:16.320 --> 01:49:21.360
particularly the Second Coming of Christ, the Day of Judgment, and the Resurrection of the Body.
01:49:22.240 --> 01:49:26.320
In an attempt to solve this difficult problem, many modern Christians have jettisoned these
01:49:26.320 --> 01:49:32.240
beliefs altogether, failing to see that there is a profundity of spiritual meaning in these beliefs,
01:49:32.240 --> 01:49:37.840
which goes beyond the shackles of literalism. We must realize that these beliefs were formulated
01:49:37.840 --> 01:49:43.760
by an unscientific people who knew nothing about a Copernican universe or any of the laws of modern
01:49:43.760 --> 01:49:49.360
science. They were attempting to solve basic problems which were quite real to them, problems
01:49:49.360 --> 01:49:54.240
which to them dealt with ultimate destiny. So it was only natural for them to speak in the
01:49:54.240 --> 01:49:59.600
pre-scientific thought pattern of their day. They could do no other. Inspiration did not
01:49:59.600 --> 01:50:04.800
magically remove the limitations of the writers. It heightened their power, but did not remove
01:50:04.800 --> 01:50:09.920
their distortions. Therefore it is our job as Christians to seek the spiritual pertinence
01:50:09.920 --> 01:50:16.640
of these beliefs, which taken literally are quite absurd. It is obvious that most 20th century
01:50:16.720 --> 01:50:23.360
Christians must frankly and flatly reject any view of a physical return of Christ.
01:50:25.680 --> 01:50:33.120
So literally stop being Christian. I mean, that's it. These are some walls of text that
01:50:33.120 --> 01:50:39.840
were reading to you, but the bottom line is no Christian can possibly believe even 1% of this.
01:50:40.480 --> 01:50:45.120
Like I said at the beginning, we're not talking about nitpicks among denominations.
01:50:45.200 --> 01:50:49.680
We're talking about the beating heart of the Christian faith. There's literally no possible
01:50:49.680 --> 01:50:55.840
way for any Christian to say that Michael King is not damned based on these. And as I said,
01:50:55.840 --> 01:51:00.640
the only possible argument is, oh well, he changed his mind later. Okay, prove it.
01:51:00.640 --> 01:51:05.280
Show me a single place where he changed his mind. What is he doing throughout all these things?
01:51:05.280 --> 01:51:12.960
All he's doing is redefining terms so that he can stand up in a pulpit and he can say things like
01:51:12.960 --> 01:51:18.720
resurrection, knowing that he means this. The next quote that I have from later on in the same
01:51:18.720 --> 01:51:24.000
paper, the most precious thought in Christianity is that Jesus is our daily friend, that he never
01:51:24.000 --> 01:51:30.240
did leave us comfortless or alone, and that we may know his transforming communion every day in our
01:51:30.240 --> 01:51:36.720
lives. As Dr. Headleys succinctly states, the second coming of Christ is not an event in space
01:51:36.720 --> 01:51:42.160
time, but an experience which transcends all physical categories. It belongs not to the sky,
01:51:42.160 --> 01:51:47.920
but to the human heart, not to the future, but to whatever present we are willing to assign to it.
01:51:48.480 --> 01:51:53.440
Actually, we are celebrating the second advent, every time we open our hearts to Jesus, every
01:51:53.440 --> 01:51:58.800
time we turn our backs to the low road and accept the high road, every time we say no to self,
01:51:58.800 --> 01:52:03.920
that we might say yes to Jesus Christ. Every time a man or woman turns from ugliness to beauty
01:52:03.920 --> 01:52:08.960
and is able to forgive even their enemies, Jesus stands at the door of our hearts if we are willing
01:52:08.960 --> 01:52:14.400
to admit him. He is far away if ugliness and evil, we crowd him out. The final doctrine of the
01:52:14.400 --> 01:52:22.160
second coming is that whenever we turn our lives to the highest and best, there is for us the Christ.
01:52:22.880 --> 01:52:27.840
This is what the early Christians were trying to say. To be sure, they got an unscientific realm
01:52:27.840 --> 01:52:32.640
because they began by saying that Jesus was the promised Messiah, but the question arises,
01:52:32.640 --> 01:52:38.080
what led them to say that in the first place? It was the magnetic personality of this historic Jesus
01:52:38.080 --> 01:52:43.600
that caused men to explain his life in a category beyond the human. Here we are one with the
01:52:43.600 --> 01:52:48.240
unscientific early Christians for all of our thoughts and teachings about the second coming,
01:52:48.240 --> 01:52:52.960
whether it be a physical or spiritual stem from the personality that Jesus, whom the Christians
01:52:52.960 --> 01:53:02.400
chose to call the root Christ. This is blasphemy. I feel like I need to confess my sins just for
01:53:02.400 --> 01:53:09.040
reading this man's words out loud. He denies the resurrection. He denies the divinity of Christ.
01:53:09.040 --> 01:53:15.120
He denies the virgin birth. He denies the Christian faith. We have men in our seminaries. We have men
01:53:15.120 --> 01:53:20.640
in our pulpits. We have men everywhere around us who use this man as a Christian example.
01:53:21.280 --> 01:53:25.360
Next week, we're going to get into the evil to the fact that not only he was not Christian,
01:53:25.360 --> 01:53:31.600
but he was a wicked pagan. But this alone, any one of these quotes should be sufficient,
01:53:31.600 --> 01:53:37.200
particularly in the current context of this podcast where we're being canceled for things
01:53:37.200 --> 01:53:42.320
that we've said or maybe said or didn't say in the past. If one word from a man years ago is
01:53:42.320 --> 01:53:49.040
sufficient to cancel him and have his life destroyed today, maybe we should take the seminary
01:53:49.040 --> 01:53:54.720
writings of a man who is confessing a faith that he never abandoned. This is his faith. Again,
01:53:54.720 --> 01:53:59.760
this is Michael King's faith. It's simply not the Christian faith. It's the exact opposite.
01:54:02.000 --> 01:54:08.320
For the sake of contrast and so that we do hear the the word of God in this episode,
01:54:08.320 --> 01:54:15.600
perhaps, just a short reading from 1 Corinthians. Now, if Christ is proclaimed as raised from the
01:54:15.600 --> 01:54:20.560
dead, how can some of you say that there is no resurrection of the dead? But if there is no
01:54:20.560 --> 01:54:26.400
resurrection of the dead, then not even Christ has been raised. And if Christ has not been raised,
01:54:26.400 --> 01:54:32.480
then our preaching is in vain, and your faith is in vain. We are even found to be misrepresenting
01:54:32.480 --> 01:54:38.320
God, because we testified about God that he raised Christ, whom he did not raise if it is true that
01:54:38.320 --> 01:54:44.560
the dead are not raised. For if the dead are not raised, not even Christ has been raised. And if
01:54:44.560 --> 01:54:51.120
Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile, and you are still in your sins. Then those also
01:54:51.200 --> 01:54:56.880
who have fallen asleep in Christ have perished. If in Christ we have hope, in this life only,
01:54:57.440 --> 01:55:05.520
we are of all people most to be pitied. And so when you see someone who is rejecting the
01:55:05.520 --> 01:55:13.920
resurrection of the dead, you see someone who is rejecting the core hope that we have in Christianity,
01:55:13.920 --> 01:55:23.200
that we have in Christ. Because if we believe, like the Sadducees, that there's no resurrection
01:55:23.200 --> 01:55:33.520
of the dead, then there's no hope. Then it's just death, and that's the end. But the hope of the
01:55:33.520 --> 01:55:39.600
Christian is that- I'm only laughing. I'm laughing because immortality is literally the last part of
01:55:39.600 --> 01:55:45.680
this essay that he refutes. In the same paper that I just quoted, he ends by being a Sadducee.
01:55:46.480 --> 01:55:54.320
Of course. It's great that I can predict wicked men. But the hope of Christianity is the resurrection,
01:55:55.040 --> 01:55:59.520
because if you just die at the end of this life and it's over, it doesn't matter what you do.
01:56:01.120 --> 01:56:07.360
The atheists who take the truly nihilist position are at least being somewhat rational,
01:56:07.360 --> 01:56:11.040
given their beliefs. I mean, insofar as you can be rational at all as an atheist.
01:56:12.000 --> 01:56:15.680
But if you die and you're done, if you die in your worm food, and that's it,
01:56:15.680 --> 01:56:18.560
there's no hope. It doesn't matter what you do in this life. Everything is irrelevant.
01:56:20.320 --> 01:56:23.200
But you'll notice, particularly when we get to the next episode,
01:56:24.240 --> 01:56:30.000
men like Michael King never act as if this life is just irrelevant.
01:56:32.560 --> 01:56:36.160
Because they always pick to go the exact opposite direction.
01:56:36.160 --> 01:56:40.720
Well, I'm not going to believe in Christ, and I'm not going to believe in the resurrection of the dead.
01:56:42.400 --> 01:56:45.120
But I'm going to do everything I can to make this world worse,
01:56:47.040 --> 01:56:53.200
because as we frequently say, there is an animating intelligence behind the other side.
01:56:54.400 --> 01:57:01.200
Nested in between the denial of the resurrection of the dead and the denial of the second coming of
01:57:01.200 --> 01:57:10.080
Christ, he also denies the day of judgment itself. Orthodox Christianity has held that when a man
01:57:10.080 --> 01:57:15.040
dies, he sleeps until the general resurrection on the last day at which time Christ, the judge,
01:57:15.040 --> 01:57:19.360
will appear to summon all to the bar of justice. He will separate them as they shepherd,
01:57:19.360 --> 01:57:24.320
divide with his sheep from the goats, sending the former to eternal bliss and the latter to
01:57:24.320 --> 01:57:29.520
endless hell. Needless to say, the average modern Christian finds it quite difficult
01:57:29.600 --> 01:57:35.440
to accept such a view of judgment. However, we must agree with the spiritual value of this view
01:57:35.440 --> 01:57:40.160
held by nearly all Christians, all early Christians, for the personality of Jesus does
01:57:40.160 --> 01:57:45.200
serve as a judgment upon us all. When we set aside the spectacular paraphernalia of the judgment
01:57:45.200 --> 01:57:50.640
seen in the literal throne, we come to the real meaning of the doctrine. The highest court of
01:57:50.640 --> 01:57:55.520
justice is in the heart of the man after the light of Christ has illumined his motive and
01:57:55.520 --> 01:58:01.280
is in our life. Any day when we wake into the fact that we are making a great moral decision,
01:58:01.280 --> 01:58:07.120
any day we have experienced nearness to Christ, any day when in the light of Christ we see ourselves
01:58:07.120 --> 01:58:15.120
is a day of judgment, that's Satan. That's saying just go do whatever you want, try to live a good
01:58:15.120 --> 01:58:20.160
life. There's no judgment day. There's no resurrection of the dead. Jesus isn't coming back.
01:58:20.160 --> 01:58:26.720
This life is it. I hope that this superabundance of quotes and evidence
01:58:27.360 --> 01:58:33.360
hammers on the point, this man was not a Christian. What Christian could possibly quote this man in
01:58:33.360 --> 01:58:40.080
good conscience? It is an act of evil to say that Martin Luther King Jr. is anything but a damned
01:58:40.080 --> 01:58:45.280
heretic burning in hell. It's evil to say anything else. I will stand before the judgment
01:58:45.280 --> 01:58:50.800
throne of God and with that is my confession because the only possible way to obey and confess
01:58:50.800 --> 01:58:57.120
God is to confess that this man denies God. It's one or the other. One of us is going to hell.
01:58:58.640 --> 01:59:06.000
It's just that simple. So our next selection is from Religion's Answer to the Problem of Evil.
01:59:08.320 --> 01:59:14.640
A second view explains physical evils as a punishment for moral evils. Such a view rests
01:59:14.720 --> 01:59:20.080
on the principle of retribution. This view goes back to the old Deuteronomic idea that
01:59:20.080 --> 01:59:26.400
prosperity follows piety and righteousness, should be righteousness, while suffering follows sin.
01:59:27.280 --> 01:59:32.880
Even in the days of Jesus we find traces of this theory. Hence the question is put to Jesus,
01:59:32.880 --> 01:59:39.600
who sinned, this man or his parents, that he should be born blind? The most rigorous expression of
01:59:39.600 --> 01:59:45.120
this viewpoint is found in India's ancient doctrine of karma. Karma means literally deed.
01:59:45.840 --> 01:59:50.560
Suffering is explained as the consequence of a man's deeds, whether committed in this
01:59:50.560 --> 01:59:56.480
present life or in some previous existence. Views of this variety continue to exist in
01:59:56.480 --> 02:00:02.480
the modern world, but such views are repugnant to the ethical sense of modern idealist.
02:00:02.800 --> 02:00:10.160
The modern idealist? Does a good God harbor resentment? Does perfect love achieve its
02:00:10.160 --> 02:00:16.080
purpose in such cruel ways? This crude theory was rejected long ago by the writer of the book of Job
02:00:16.080 --> 02:00:22.400
and by Jesus, according to John 9.3. The whole theory of punishment as a solution of the problem
02:00:22.400 --> 02:00:30.160
of evil collapses with a series of ethical objections. And so undoubtedly anyone who
02:00:30.160 --> 02:00:36.560
is familiar with modern writing from any of a number of fields is going to recognize this
02:00:36.560 --> 02:00:44.000
rejection of retribution, because this is a cornerstone of prison reform and criminal justice
02:00:44.000 --> 02:00:52.880
reform and all sorts of other wicked projects like that. Contrast that with what God says in
02:00:52.880 --> 02:01:00.240
the pages of Scripture, where he who sheds the blood of man by man shall his blood be shed
02:01:00.240 --> 02:01:09.440
for God made man in his image. God explicitly commands us as part of the unchanging moral law
02:01:09.440 --> 02:01:14.560
to enact the death penalty, to enact capital punishment against murderers.
02:01:16.800 --> 02:01:22.480
And there are a number of other transgressions that are listed as abominations to God
02:01:22.480 --> 02:01:32.080
for which execution is what God demands as punishment. Retribution is the beating heart of
02:01:32.080 --> 02:01:40.080
justice. That there are other aspects that can be considered in addition to retribution.
02:01:41.200 --> 02:01:50.080
But justice is a matter of retribution. You must punish the wrongdoer. It is not just a matter of
02:01:50.080 --> 02:01:55.920
restorative, so-called justice. Yes, that's part of it. If a man steals something, he must return
02:01:55.920 --> 02:02:02.960
it. That is restorative justice, but he must be punished for the theft. Because if he is not
02:02:02.960 --> 02:02:10.640
punished for the theft, you have not actually enacted justice. He is rejecting justice here,
02:02:10.640 --> 02:02:17.520
and justice is part of God's nature. So again, this is just ultimately a rejection of God. It is
02:02:17.520 --> 02:02:22.400
also an explicit rejection of much of the Old Testament, because he is rejecting
02:02:23.040 --> 02:02:28.160
all the various laws that recommend retributive justice. He is saying that those are immoral,
02:02:28.160 --> 02:02:34.480
those are unethical. He is accusing God of evil. So we've got manicheism here, basically.
02:02:35.120 --> 02:02:38.400
And that's a view that pops up right here in the very next one.
02:02:39.280 --> 02:02:43.760
King writes, It seems to me that the most untenable conceptions of God appear in the
02:02:43.760 --> 02:02:50.000
pre-prophetic period of the Old Testament. Here, God has looked upon first as anthropomorphic being.
02:02:50.000 --> 02:02:54.320
He walks in the garden in the cool of the evening. He comes down to the tower of Babel.
02:02:54.320 --> 02:02:59.600
He comes down in the clouds to speak to Moses. Also, in many of these writings, the moral character
02:02:59.600 --> 02:03:06.400
of God is quite low. He comes down to the tower out of jealousy, in Genesis 11-7. He comes to
02:03:06.400 --> 02:03:12.080
Abraham in a lie, or he justifies Abraham in a lie. He commands an individual to do something,
02:03:12.160 --> 02:03:18.640
and then scorns him for doing it from Numbers 22, 20 through 22. Also, at this period, we find Yahweh
02:03:18.640 --> 02:03:24.080
presented as a tribal deity. He is not a universal father whose love extends to all people. So we
02:03:24.080 --> 02:03:29.840
often find Yahweh justifying all types of immoral actions against non-Israelites. Even Yahweh himself
02:03:29.840 --> 02:03:35.200
is often found to be using deceitful and ruthless methods against individuals outside of his tribal
02:03:35.200 --> 02:03:39.840
authority. Finally, at this period, we find that God is not only one among many gods.
02:03:39.840 --> 02:03:43.600
To be sure, he is the only one worthy of worship, but other gods still exist.
02:03:44.160 --> 02:03:47.760
At this period, the Hebrews were henotheist rather than monotheist.
02:03:47.760 --> 02:03:52.080
Certainly, they are the utmost untenable conceptions of God found in the Old Testament.
02:03:53.920 --> 02:03:59.120
He damns God. He says that the God in the Old Testament is damned. He is unethical. He is
02:03:59.120 --> 02:04:05.280
immoral. He cheats. He lies. He murders. He is an evil, wicked God. Michael King says that the
02:04:05.280 --> 02:04:13.360
God of the Old Testament is not his God. Okay. If that's your answer, that's fine.
02:04:15.360 --> 02:04:18.800
Our next selection from the writings of Michael King.
02:04:20.800 --> 02:04:26.400
The suffering servant passage in the 53rd chapter of Isaiah could well be applied to Jesus.
02:04:27.840 --> 02:04:31.520
In a real sense, Jesus is the only one who fulfills this prophecy.
02:04:32.160 --> 02:04:36.400
Certainly, Jesus was a lowly man, a man of sorrow and acquainted with grief.
02:04:37.200 --> 02:04:41.840
Certainly, the real meaning of the atonement is that Christ died in order that sinful men
02:04:41.840 --> 02:04:47.920
might be incited to rise out of their sinfulness and be reconciled to God. In other words,
02:04:47.920 --> 02:04:51.520
through his suffering and moral influence, men are reconciled to God.
02:04:52.640 --> 02:04:57.200
There has been much debate as to whether this passage refers to the nation or to an individual.
02:04:57.840 --> 02:05:02.160
Jewish scholars have inclined toward the former, while Christian scholars have inclined
02:05:02.160 --> 02:05:06.880
toward the latter. It is my opinion that the passage refers to an individual,
02:05:06.880 --> 02:05:12.320
and Jesus more than any other fulfills its descriptions. Jesus fulfills it in a way that
02:05:12.320 --> 02:05:19.280
Isaiah could never have conceived of. To resist laughing several times, it's so bad.
02:05:22.320 --> 02:05:26.400
Just the initial contention that the suffering servant passage could well be applied to Je-
02:05:26.480 --> 02:05:31.520
No, really. That's just the standard exegesis in Christianity forever.
02:05:33.520 --> 02:05:40.480
But it's one that he rejects because this is Isaiah 53. He refers to this multiple times
02:05:40.480 --> 02:05:45.600
in other places as Deutero Isaiah. This is not the real Isaiah. This is the second author
02:05:45.600 --> 02:05:50.480
who tacked on another third to the end of the book. That's the modern way that these guys read
02:05:51.280 --> 02:05:58.080
the Bible. Just taking it is just an assembled collection of scrolls from history,
02:05:58.080 --> 02:06:03.360
with no unifying anything, because there's no God. If there's no God, it must just be
02:06:03.360 --> 02:06:09.200
a scrapbook. That's basically what they see the Bible as. The reason for him being confused about
02:06:09.200 --> 02:06:13.520
this is that Isaiah didn't write it. Some other guy wrote it, and he wrote it a whole lot later.
02:06:13.520 --> 02:06:19.520
That's the important part of Deutero Isaiah. The reason I included this is this goes back to
02:06:19.520 --> 02:06:25.040
the earlier comment about how, very early on, we're talking about Job, we're talking about Genesis,
02:06:25.840 --> 02:06:31.520
none of these ideas had been fleshed out. There was no notion of resurrection of the dead.
02:06:31.520 --> 02:06:37.120
There was really no Messiah because if a man's dead, why would he look forward to anything?
02:06:37.120 --> 02:06:43.120
Who cares? He's dead. He's not coming back. The Messiah means nothing. The Messiah promise
02:06:43.120 --> 02:06:49.120
only means something in the context of the resurrection. The reason that the Deutero Isaiah
02:06:50.480 --> 02:06:56.000
prophecies are considered to be relevant in his thinking is that, well, those prophecies were
02:06:56.000 --> 02:07:02.320
tacked on right near the time when Jesus came back. Even then, he says, Jesus fulfills this
02:07:02.320 --> 02:07:07.440
prophecy in a way that Isaiah could never have conceived of. Well, if you think he wasn't a
02:07:07.440 --> 02:07:11.280
prophet, and if you think God is silent and God doesn't really exist, then yeah, I guess that makes
02:07:11.280 --> 02:07:17.040
sense. It just goes to show that he absolutely rejects every word of Scripture. He rejects the
02:07:17.040 --> 02:07:22.560
God of Scripture, he damns the God of Scripture, he mocks the God of Scripture, and we're told
02:07:22.560 --> 02:07:27.360
that we should listen to this man. If this man were alive today, he should be driven out of
02:07:27.360 --> 02:07:33.360
town with sticks and stones. That would be the just Christian response to this degree of blasphemy.
02:07:33.360 --> 02:07:39.280
And we're not talking about small disputes among denominations. This man is so far outside of
02:07:39.280 --> 02:07:46.080
Christianity that it's an infinite chasm. He goes on towards the end of the writings.
02:07:47.040 --> 02:07:50.640
We're getting down to the dregs. We're running along here too. But again, I told you we're
02:07:50.640 --> 02:07:55.840
going to beat up on you with quotes. This is a point we have to make. We're not cherry picking.
02:07:57.280 --> 02:08:00.720
I cut it short. I mean, this is a small fraction of what I could have included.
02:08:01.920 --> 02:08:08.640
Later on in seminary towards the end, he was discussing the contrast between Luther and
02:08:08.640 --> 02:08:14.000
Calvin. He writes, We now may turn to the criticism of the reformer's views of the person and work
02:08:14.000 --> 02:08:18.400
of Christ. Concerning the person of Christ, both Luther and Calvin affirm the traditional
02:08:18.400 --> 02:08:23.760
two-nature doctrine. Both were convinced that a perfect divine and perfect human nature were
02:08:23.760 --> 02:08:29.520
united in the personality of Christ. This doctrine, however, calls for a reinterpretation
02:08:29.520 --> 02:08:34.960
and modification. It was based on a Platonic substance philosophy, which has been largely
02:08:35.040 --> 02:08:41.600
replaced today by a philosophy in which we see reality as active or dynamic on the one hand
02:08:41.600 --> 02:08:46.720
and as individual and concrete on the other. On the basis of such thinking, it is a mistake to
02:08:46.720 --> 02:08:52.960
look upon Christ as having two independently existing natures. As Knudsen has so well put it,
02:08:52.960 --> 02:08:57.040
there were factors in Jesus' personality that may be distinguished as human and divine,
02:08:57.040 --> 02:09:01.520
but they were not distinct substances. They were simply different aspects of one unique
02:09:01.520 --> 02:09:07.440
personality. This personality is to be viewed not as a substance as an agent. Hence, we must
02:09:07.440 --> 02:09:12.960
affirm that Christ is a unitary personality in this unity we find in his ego. There is nothing
02:09:12.960 --> 02:09:17.760
in rational speculation, nor New Testament thought to warrant the view that Jesus had
02:09:17.760 --> 02:09:24.080
two personal centers. We must then think of Christ as a unitary being whose divinity consists not
02:09:24.080 --> 02:09:30.000
in any second nature or in a substantial unity with God, but in a unique and potent
02:09:30.000 --> 02:09:36.000
God consciousness. His unity with God was a unity of purpose rather than a unity of substance.
02:09:36.960 --> 02:09:43.600
Again, this by itself is a literal absolute denial that Jesus Christ is God. Full stop.
02:09:43.600 --> 02:09:50.080
If you deny that Jesus Christ is God, you burn in hell. The end. So we're not name calling. We're
02:09:50.080 --> 02:09:56.240
not picking on a guy we don't like politically. This man has no business having a voice anywhere
02:09:56.240 --> 02:10:00.960
in the church or frankly anywhere in any Christian life because as we get to next week,
02:10:00.960 --> 02:10:05.760
all of his political activities, all of his personal activities, all of his influences
02:10:05.760 --> 02:10:09.040
were themselves downstream from the fact that he's a blasphemer.
02:10:09.840 --> 02:10:15.360
I'm sure some attentive listeners will have heard some echoes of Freud because very clearly
02:10:17.120 --> 02:10:25.520
Michael King was reading some theologians who had filtered Freud through their writings and then
02:10:25.520 --> 02:10:30.000
on to Michael King. And that's why we get some of these comments here and there that are very
02:10:30.000 --> 02:10:35.360
clearly reminiscent of Freud. And so another quote from the same paper.
02:10:36.960 --> 02:10:42.400
Another phase of thinking in which our two theologians went to an extreme was in the doctrine of man.
02:10:43.120 --> 02:10:48.320
Both affirm that man was originally righteous, but through some strange and striking accident,
02:10:48.320 --> 02:10:53.680
he became hopelessly sinful. Yet it has become increasingly difficult to imagine any such
02:10:53.680 --> 02:10:58.880
original state of perfection for man as Luther and Calvin continually presupposed.
02:10:59.600 --> 02:11:04.400
It is not within the scope of this paper to enter into any argument concerning evolution.
02:11:04.400 --> 02:11:09.120
However, it is perfectly evident that its major contentions would refute such a view.
02:11:09.680 --> 02:11:14.960
We are compelled therefore to reject the idea of a catastrophic fall and regard man's moral
02:11:14.960 --> 02:11:19.840
condition from another point of view. Man's fall is not due to some falling away from an
02:11:19.840 --> 02:11:25.440
original righteousness, but to a failure to rise to a higher level of his present existence.
02:11:27.280 --> 02:11:33.600
And so here again, we see the rejection of original sin, a rejection of the clear teaching of
02:11:33.600 --> 02:11:40.720
scripture, a rejection of the fall, contention that man is on an upward trajectory instead of
02:11:40.720 --> 02:11:47.040
downward, which is the reality. And of course, original righteousness is how one would describe
02:11:47.040 --> 02:11:52.240
the image of God in man. So this is also a denial of the Imago dei incidentally.
02:11:53.200 --> 02:11:56.880
So I'm going to read next in part from a sermon. The title of the sermon was
02:11:57.440 --> 02:12:02.880
Accepting Responsibility for Your Actions. He preached this in Atlanta, Georgia in 1953.
02:12:04.960 --> 02:12:10.400
This tendency to thrust responsibility for our actions on some eternal agency is by no means
02:12:10.400 --> 02:12:16.800
a new one. The Genesis writers, plural, found it present in the very beginning of history.
02:12:16.800 --> 02:12:21.440
Remember the story of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden? God had placed Adam and Eve in the
02:12:21.440 --> 02:12:25.200
garden to dress it. They were given liberty to make use of everything in the garden with the
02:12:25.200 --> 02:12:30.160
exception of one thing. They were not to eat the tree of good and evil. Very soon a serpent appeared
02:12:30.160 --> 02:12:35.760
on the scene and said, hath God said, ye shall not eat of the tree of the garden? And Eve answered,
02:12:35.760 --> 02:12:39.040
we made of the fruit of the trees of the garden, but of the tree of good and evil,
02:12:39.040 --> 02:12:45.200
God has commanded, that we not shall not eat, nor touch lest we die. And the serpent answered,
02:12:45.200 --> 02:12:50.240
ye shall not surely die, for God doth know that in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall
02:12:50.240 --> 02:12:55.920
be opened, and ye shall be laid as gods, knowing good and evil. After listening to those cogent
02:12:55.920 --> 02:13:01.200
words by the subtle serpent, Eve yielded to the temptation, and very soon Adam and Eve
02:13:01.200 --> 02:13:05.280
were found eating from the tree that God had forbidden them to touch. When God came back on
02:13:05.280 --> 02:13:09.920
the scene to ascertain why the sin had been committed, he found each shifting responsibility
02:13:09.920 --> 02:13:15.040
on some external agency. Adam's answer was, with the woman's customity to the tree,
02:13:15.040 --> 02:13:19.280
Eve claimed that the serpent had caused her to eat the tree, neither Adam nor Eve stopped to
02:13:19.280 --> 02:13:24.000
really realize that although they were tempted by external agencies, they were in the final
02:13:24.000 --> 02:13:29.200
analysis responsible for yielding to the temptation. Ultimately, individual responsibility lies not in
02:13:29.200 --> 02:13:35.360
the external situation, but in the internal response. The reason that I included this is that
02:13:35.360 --> 02:13:41.840
this is a sermon in 1953. This is within two years of him saying all the other things we've heard
02:13:41.840 --> 02:13:46.960
him say about the Garden of Eden. He mocked the idea that God walked in the garden in a paper.
02:13:46.960 --> 02:13:53.120
Two years later, he's saying God walked in the garden. Did King repent? No. He's talking to the
02:13:53.120 --> 02:13:57.760
rubes because he knows it's a myth. He knows it's a myth that they believe, and he's trying to make
02:13:57.760 --> 02:14:03.840
a point. Remember the thing about true and truth? He denies that this is true, but he says it's
02:14:03.840 --> 02:14:10.480
truth. He's trying to make a moral point to his audience, and so he's perfectly content to go
02:14:10.480 --> 02:14:16.560
along because as far as King is concerned, it's all just parables. It's all just made-up stories,
02:14:16.560 --> 02:14:21.360
except on Jesus' parables that we know are from God's mouth. These are just man-made stories.
02:14:21.360 --> 02:14:25.840
They were useful. It's like Aesop's fables or every other religion that has the same sort of
02:14:25.840 --> 02:14:31.280
wisdom literature. When he says that God walked in the cool of the day, that God spoke with him,
02:14:31.280 --> 02:14:36.240
that Adam and Eve existed, the fact that he would say Adam and Eve existed is itself false
02:14:36.240 --> 02:14:42.640
filed by the fact that he denies that Adam was created by God. He says that evolution is how
02:14:42.640 --> 02:14:51.360
man was created. I'm highlighting this because this man was a liar from the beginning. One day,
02:14:51.440 --> 02:14:57.120
he's confessing this is nonsense. This is garbage. This is myth. This is laughable. These
02:14:57.120 --> 02:15:01.680
rubes eat this stuff up. Thank goodness we have this new knowledge so we know how to be more
02:15:01.680 --> 02:15:06.640
scientific than them. Then when he gets up in the pulpit, he doesn't go that far. He goes a little
02:15:06.640 --> 02:15:11.840
bit. He says the Genesis writer's plural, which is obviously denying the Mosaic authorship,
02:15:12.400 --> 02:15:16.640
but he won't delve into that. That is fundamentally why these men sneak into our
02:15:16.640 --> 02:15:22.720
pulpits as God said that they would. They use these small deceptions, and so more and more,
02:15:22.720 --> 02:15:27.600
they will take things that sound Christian, the Christians recognize and say, yeah, that's a Christian
02:15:27.600 --> 02:15:32.960
up there talking to me about Christian stuff. Then they twist it and they turn it a few degrees
02:15:32.960 --> 02:15:38.000
at a time. They're turning a dial so slowly that their audience doesn't realize what's happening.
02:15:38.560 --> 02:15:42.960
That's why it's important to listen to all the other stuff he said. Again, this is not a sermon
02:15:42.960 --> 02:15:47.360
from 15 years later. This is a sermon within 18 months of him saying all the things that we'd
02:15:47.360 --> 02:15:53.280
said previously. This man was a preacher. He was a pastor. He was ordained. He was seminary educated.
02:15:53.280 --> 02:16:00.160
He was about to go off to Boston University where he would be given a PhD for plagiarism and other
02:16:00.160 --> 02:16:06.240
things. Every word that he said here was a lie in his mouth. It sounds true to us because we're
02:16:06.240 --> 02:16:10.240
Christians, and that's a fundamental point that we need to make here. As Christians, we listen
02:16:10.240 --> 02:16:15.520
to a man talking about Christian stuff, and we want to give them the benefit of the doubt,
02:16:15.520 --> 02:16:20.080
and we want to baptize even their mistakes by saying, I can make that work. There's a time
02:16:20.080 --> 02:16:24.560
and a place for that. I'm not saying be ruthless to everyone. No one could possibly survive that,
02:16:24.560 --> 02:16:30.320
even podcasters. Yet, it is important to note that this man, because of his other confessions,
02:16:30.320 --> 02:16:36.960
we must look with a jaundice to everything that he says. In this sermon, he's just flat out denying
02:16:36.960 --> 02:16:42.400
his own confession, but he can do it because he redefined truth, and he redefined God, and he
02:16:42.400 --> 02:16:46.880
redefined Adam and Eve in the garden. He does it with a straight face, and he doesn't even think
02:16:46.880 --> 02:16:50.400
about it. I don't think he even thinks he's getting away with anything when he does these
02:16:50.400 --> 02:16:55.920
sermons. He just knows that he's moving the ball in the direction of hell, which is his ultimate goal.
02:16:57.200 --> 02:17:03.520
Our next reading is another selection that is from his PhD program days.
02:17:04.400 --> 02:17:12.720
A final element in the Christian hope is the belief in immortality. It is at this point that the New
02:17:12.720 --> 02:17:17.680
Testament surpasses the old. The doctrine of immortality was very late appearing in the
02:17:17.680 --> 02:17:22.400
Old Testament. The emphasis in the earlier days was on the immortality of the nation,
02:17:22.960 --> 02:17:28.160
but with the Christian the individual will live again. This view runs throughout the New Testament,
02:17:28.160 --> 02:17:33.440
Jesus, in his argument against the Sadducees. There can be little doubt that every New Testament
02:17:33.440 --> 02:17:41.760
writer accepted belief in some form of immortality. The dominant note in the New Testament is a
02:17:41.760 --> 02:17:47.920
bodily resurrection rather than a survival of the soul independent of the body, but there are some
02:17:47.920 --> 02:17:53.600
signs of the latter view appearing in the New Testament. In the final analysis, this hope in
02:17:53.600 --> 02:18:00.480
immortality is for the Christian given by God. Rather than due to some natural immortal state
02:18:00.480 --> 02:18:07.920
of the soul, the Greek view, man will live again because he is of value to God. This one is a
02:18:07.920 --> 02:18:14.880
trainwreck theologically, at least on par with grammatically. Worst trainwreck theologically.
02:18:15.200 --> 02:18:25.200
Man's soul is immortal, period. This is great news if you're a Christian. This is terrible news if you
02:18:25.200 --> 02:18:34.000
are not. Man is not conditionally immortal. The soul is not here for a time and then evaporates or
02:18:34.000 --> 02:18:41.920
is annihilated when the body ceases to be. This is just nonsense and then in the other part of it
02:18:41.920 --> 02:18:50.320
he is arguing for basically the Greek view, the Gnostic view that matter is not necessarily real.
02:18:50.320 --> 02:18:57.440
It's the soul, it's the spiritual that truly matters. And of course his exegesis of the Old
02:18:57.440 --> 02:19:06.720
Testament versus the New Testament is also wrong. Immortality has always been a part of the Christian
02:19:06.720 --> 02:19:13.280
religion. It is a part of Scripture from the beginning to the end. And we went over this
02:19:13.840 --> 02:19:18.160
in commenting on some of the earlier quotes, so won't go into depth here.
02:19:19.120 --> 02:19:23.520
I think what all this boils down to is that this man just continuously denied every tenet of the
02:19:23.520 --> 02:19:28.160
Christian faith at every opportunity. Every time he had an opportunity to write a paper
02:19:29.360 --> 02:19:36.000
for school, for seminary in his PhD program, every time he interacted, he put down and writing
02:19:36.080 --> 02:19:40.960
things that were antithetical to Scripture. And he was excited about it. As we mentioned earlier
02:19:40.960 --> 02:19:47.200
on, when he moved on from Morehouse to Crozer, he was excited at the advancement. He was excited
02:19:47.200 --> 02:19:52.080
at the fact that enough of his faith had been destroyed at Morehouse, that he was ready for
02:19:52.080 --> 02:19:57.840
the liberalism of Crozer. And these were both Baptist institutions in the 50s. I'm not picking
02:19:57.840 --> 02:20:01.760
on Baptist, but like there's no possibility for someone to have come out of those places and
02:20:01.760 --> 02:20:07.680
been a Christian. Simply none. No Christian could survive in that environment. It's just it's not a
02:20:07.680 --> 02:20:15.920
possibility. The quote that we're going to end on here is one that was from a paper that he plagiarized
02:20:15.920 --> 02:20:22.000
himself on, as he did many times. He resubmitted the paper. He talked about paganism being a
02:20:22.000 --> 02:20:27.600
tributary to Christianity. And he added on a new paragraph at the very end when he resubmitted the
02:20:27.600 --> 02:20:33.200
same paper in another school, that I think really summarizes the entire arc of everything
02:20:33.200 --> 02:20:38.560
from where he was to then and where those beliefs are today in the modern world.
02:20:39.680 --> 02:20:45.200
King concludes, Christianity, however, survived because it appeared to be the result of a trend
02:20:45.200 --> 02:20:51.040
in the social order or in the historical cycle of human race. Forces have been known to delay trends,
02:20:51.040 --> 02:20:55.840
but very few have ever stopped them. The staggering question that now arises is,
02:20:55.840 --> 02:21:01.600
what will be the next stage of man's religious progress? Is Christianity the crowning achievement
02:21:01.600 --> 02:21:06.000
in the development of a religious thought, or will there be another religion more advanced?
02:21:07.200 --> 02:21:14.160
That's it. That's what we're talking about here. He was never a Christian. He was never looking at
02:21:14.160 --> 02:21:21.840
Christianity as anything other than a skin suit that he could wear his entire career as a stepping
02:21:21.840 --> 02:21:28.320
stone to a new, more advanced religion. If you're familiar with Revelation, you know how that ends
02:21:28.320 --> 02:21:34.400
up. We're talking about eschatology here. There will be a new religion in the end. It will be a
02:21:34.400 --> 02:21:39.600
world religion. And for all intents and purposes, it seems as though the whole world is headed that
02:21:39.600 --> 02:21:46.240
way. We have every major modern church body, including our own, abandoning the faith before our
02:21:46.240 --> 02:21:50.800
eyes. And everyone's going along with it. Why? Because they're doing it in the name of Jesus.
02:21:50.800 --> 02:21:55.360
They're saying, this is for love. This is for God. This is for Jesus. We got to do it. This is
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the direction we're going. You're not Christian if you don't follow us. And their religion is
02:22:01.440 --> 02:22:07.680
identical to the world religion. I omitted all the things that he said in his preaching and his
02:22:07.680 --> 02:22:15.600
teaching that was directly related to anti-racism, anti-white supremacy. His views in the 50s were
02:22:15.600 --> 02:22:21.040
identical to the views of our churches today. And that's the reason that we have professors and
02:22:21.040 --> 02:22:26.160
pastors quoting this damned heretic. It wasn't that he was a good Christian, it was that they
02:22:26.160 --> 02:22:31.040
have adopted the same religion as this man. And so, of course, they have to be on the same page.
02:22:31.040 --> 02:22:37.120
Because this new world religion that he describes here, that is the culmination of the development
02:22:37.120 --> 02:22:44.960
through Christianity into a final world religion, that's what we're seeing today. We're seeing CNN
02:22:44.960 --> 02:22:52.240
and the Pope and swamis and Matt Harrison and you pick it. Anywhere you look, any direction you look,
02:22:52.240 --> 02:22:58.720
you're seeing men on the same page morally. That would be a wonderful thing if they were
02:22:58.720 --> 02:23:04.560
in obedience to Christ. But we know for absolute certainty, it is the exact opposite. These men
02:23:04.560 --> 02:23:09.440
are all in rebellion against God. Michael King was in a rebellion against God every day of his
02:23:09.440 --> 02:23:13.680
ministry, every day of his college career, whether or not it was every day of his living life.
02:23:14.560 --> 02:23:18.640
At this point, it doesn't matter because his fruits are absolutely evil, his teachings were
02:23:18.640 --> 02:23:24.960
evil. The men who follow him are evil. There's no other possible conclusion. As I said, this is
02:23:24.960 --> 02:23:28.800
part one, this has already gone very long. Next week, we're going to do one that just talks about
02:23:28.800 --> 02:23:33.760
the secular side of this. What were his political activities? How did he take this new religion's
02:23:33.760 --> 02:23:39.120
advanced morality and what did he do with it in the world? Because that is the aftermath we're
02:23:39.120 --> 02:23:46.720
living in today. He died. He was a martyr for his religion. But what has come in the aftermath of
02:23:46.720 --> 02:23:52.960
that is a culmination of his efforts. The men who say that are telling the truth. We are living in
02:23:52.960 --> 02:23:58.480
the culmination of Michael King's work in his life. Unfortunately, he served Satan his entire life,
02:23:58.480 --> 02:24:04.320
and the culmination of that work is itself satanic and evil. The world you see today online and on
02:24:04.320 --> 02:24:09.600
TV and when you go down the street and you see parades and you see disgusting debauchery everywhere,
02:24:09.600 --> 02:24:12.880
that is the culmination of his dream. That is what we have today.
02:24:13.760 --> 02:24:21.520
Let's contrast his words about a supposed or potential and, in our experience, actual new
02:24:21.520 --> 02:24:30.400
religion with what Scripture says from Revelation. I warn everyone who hears the words of the prophecy
02:24:30.400 --> 02:24:36.320
of this book. If anyone adds to them, God will add to him the plagues described in this book.
02:24:37.040 --> 02:24:40.240
And if anyone takes away from the words of the prophecy of this book,
02:24:40.960 --> 02:24:47.360
God will take away his share in the Tree of Life and in the Holy City, which are described in this book.
02:24:52.960 --> 02:24:58.800
After going over so much terrible theology in this episode, I think it would be good if we end
02:24:58.800 --> 02:25:06.640
with actual Christian doctrine. And so earlier I said I was not going to go through the words
02:25:06.640 --> 02:25:12.080
of the Apostles Creed then, but I am going to go through them now and so we will close out
02:25:12.720 --> 02:25:18.080
with the Apostles Creed. I do actually recommend that you say it along with me
02:25:18.080 --> 02:25:22.400
if you haven't memorized and you most certainly should have it memorized.
02:25:22.640 --> 02:25:30.800
I believe in God the Father Almighty, maker of heaven and earth, and in Jesus Christ is only
02:25:30.800 --> 02:25:37.680
Son our Lord. Conceived by the Holy Spirit, born of the Virgin Mary, suffered under Pontius Pilate,
02:25:37.680 --> 02:25:43.680
was crucified, died, and was buried. He descended into hell. The third day he rose again from the
02:25:43.680 --> 02:25:49.920
dead. He ascended into heaven and sits at the right hand of God the Father Almighty. From thence
02:25:49.920 --> 02:25:55.600
he will come to judge the living and the dead. I believe in the Holy Spirit, the Holy Christian
02:25:55.600 --> 02:26:01.840
Church, the Communion of Saints, the Forgiveness of Sins, the Resurrection of the Body, and the
02:26:01.840 --> 02:26:17.760
Life Everlasting. Amen.