Transcript: Episode 0032

“Michael ‘Martin Luther’ King: Arch-Heretic”

This transcript:
  1. Was machine generated.
  2. Has not been checked for errors.
  3. May not be entirely accurate.
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00:00:00 – 00:00:02:	Ok

00:00:03 – 00:00:05:	Yeah

00:00:30 – 00:00:41:	Welcome to the Stone Choir podcast. I am Corey J. Mahler.

00:00:41 – 00:00:47:	And I'm still whoa. On today's Stone Choir, we're going to be continuing the overarching

00:00:47 – 00:00:52:	theme that we've had on many of these episodes where we're effectively skewering sacred cows.

00:00:52 – 00:00:58:	We're going to be going after another topic today that is loved and embraced by the world.

00:00:58 – 00:01:02:	It's a big part of conversation politically. It's, in fact, a big part of conversation

00:01:02 – 00:01:08:	frequently in our churches. That is a man by the name of the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther

00:01:08 – 00:01:13:	King Jr., also known as Michael King. That's the name by which he was born.

00:01:13 – 00:01:18:	So today is almost certainly going to be a two-part episode. I did the research on his

00:01:18 – 00:01:24:	papers, on his sermons, on his speeches, and Corey did the research on his political connections,

00:01:24 – 00:01:31:	his affiliations, and kind of his later life outside of the immediate sphere of the church.

00:01:31 – 00:01:34:	And so it's almost certainly going to run long enough that we don't want to have another

00:01:34 – 00:01:39:	brutal four-hour marathon. So I think we'll probably make the call around the hour mark

00:01:39 – 00:01:42:	that we'll probably split this into two episodes. So just so you know, there's a possibility

00:01:42 – 00:01:50:	this might be one or it might be two. So for the first half of this episode or the first

00:01:50 – 00:01:56:	episode of this two-part series, however, pans out, we're going to be going over things

00:01:56 – 00:02:01:	that King wrote when he was in seminary, when he was in college, when he was getting his

00:02:01 – 00:02:07:	graduate degree, and then when he was a pastor, which incidentally overlaps. And so we'll

00:02:07 – 00:02:10:	go into a little bit of the detail of the timeline there.

00:02:10 – 00:02:15:	Before I get into all the specifics, I want to warn you up front, we are going to bury

00:02:15 – 00:02:20:	you in quotes. It is very deliberate this week that we are going to quote way too much.

00:02:20 – 00:02:24:	The quotes are going to be too long and they're going to be too many of them. The reason that

00:02:24 – 00:02:27:	we're going to do that, the reason that we're going to be reading a whole lot more than

00:02:27 – 00:02:33:	the usual, is that the single most common refutation of some of the objections we're

00:02:33 – 00:02:38:	going to have in this episode or this half of the episode is, oh, he was a good boy,

00:02:38 – 00:02:43:	he didn't do nothing. Basically, they argue when he was young, sure, he had some problems

00:02:43 – 00:02:49:	theologically, but later on, he was a really good Christian man. And so we're going to

00:02:49 – 00:02:54:	bury you in quotes that prove that that's utterly impossible. So rather than just name

00:02:54 – 00:02:59:	calling and say, he's burning an hell, which is a fact, we will demonstrate that. We're

00:02:59 – 00:03:05:	going to use his own words, we're going to use a trajectory of his life to demonstrate

00:03:05 – 00:03:09:	beyond any shadow of a doubt that there was probably not a single point, there's not

00:03:09 – 00:03:16:	probably not a single day in this man's life where he was actually a Christian. You probably

00:03:16 – 00:03:21:	know very little about him. He was a civil rights leader, that he was a pastor, that

00:03:21 – 00:03:27:	he was nonviolent. You probably have a generally good opinion of him. People on the dissident

00:03:27 – 00:03:32:	right who have gotten more into the revisionist history of some of these matters and have

00:03:32 – 00:03:36:	seen for themselves some of the facts like, yeah, no, that's nonsense. But for most of

00:03:36 – 00:03:41:	you listening, you probably have a generally favorable opinion. And this episode is not

00:03:41 – 00:03:46:	to tear down your opinion of a dead man. The reason specifically that we're tackling this

00:03:46 – 00:03:54:	subject, as I said at the beginning, in our church, it is extremely common for theologians,

00:03:54 – 00:04:00:	for pastors, for executives of churches, for men who frankly should know these things before

00:04:00 – 00:04:07:	they quote this man, will use him as a paragon of Christian virtue and as a paragon of Christian

00:04:07 – 00:04:12:	teaching and belief. And so in the spirit of the genealogy ideas, we're just checking

00:04:12 – 00:04:18:	their work. There are guys who in good conscience say, we should be like Martin Luther King

00:04:18 – 00:04:25:	Jr., we should be like this man, we should have faith like him. If that's true, then

00:04:25 – 00:04:31:	they will hold up under scrutiny. So this is that scrutiny. And so to begin, I spent

00:04:31 – 00:04:36:	the last two days reading this guy's writings. That was incredibly painful. I don't recommend

00:04:36 – 00:04:42:	doing it. He's a bad writer. He's illiterate. He clearly had a lot of help when he was submitting

00:04:42 – 00:04:46:	his papers, because when you look at his handwritten notes and compared to the papers

00:04:46 – 00:04:50:	that were submitted, it's night and day. But that's not the point of this episode.

00:04:50 – 00:04:54:	What we're going to talk about, we're going to begin in one of the middle of his papers.

00:04:55 – 00:05:01:	This is a paper that he wrote, I believe, while he was a seminary. So to give a brief bio,

00:05:01 – 00:05:07:	when he was 15, he went to Morehouse College. This was a historically black college. It was a

00:05:07 – 00:05:13:	preparatory college, basically pre-sem for Baptists. After going to Morehouse, he went to

00:05:13 – 00:05:20:	Crozer University. After Crozer, he went to Boston University, where he received a PhD.

00:05:21 – 00:05:26:	So the reason that that's important is that much of the writings that we're going to be talking

00:05:26 – 00:05:30:	about in this first part are from this period. They're from a period where he was in school.

00:05:31 – 00:05:35:	And in some cases, he was young. I don't think I have anything here when he was under 18.

00:05:35 – 00:05:39:	But as I said, a lot of people will defend him and say, oh, well, he was young. So it's okay,

00:05:39 – 00:05:45:	because he got better later. What we're going to demonstrate is that he, in fact, got worse later.

00:05:45 – 00:05:51:	But more importantly, as you hear us reading these things, these specific quotes from this man,

00:05:51 – 00:05:57:	whether he was a young man or an older man, think for yourself. If you had said these things,

00:05:57 – 00:06:03:	and then later on, you became a Christian, would you have repented of them publicly? I want you

00:06:03 – 00:06:07:	to keep that in mind, because that's finally the question you will have to deal with when

00:06:08 – 00:06:11:	you say to someone, if you're convinced by our argument here, if you tell someone, you know,

00:06:11 – 00:06:15:	actually Martin Luther King, Jr. was not even a Christian. He had some terrible

00:06:16 – 00:06:21:	false theology, and it was antithetical to the church. If you say that to someone,

00:06:21 – 00:06:25:	and they know anything about the details and the timing, they'll say, oh, that was when he was younger.

00:06:25 – 00:06:30:	So remember that question. If you had said these things when you were 18 or 20 or 23,

00:06:30 – 00:06:35:	and then later you became a Christian, would you admit it? Would you just pretend that nothing

00:06:35 – 00:06:40:	had changed? Or would you turn away from this wickedness that we're about to describe? And

00:06:41 – 00:06:45:	use it as an example of the Christian life and say, I used to believe something bad,

00:06:45 – 00:06:52:	now I believe the truth. Let me tell you about that. I know I personally would. We talk on this

00:06:52 – 00:06:57:	show sometimes about the errors that we made in our own past, not to be self-reflective,

00:06:57 – 00:07:03:	but simply to say, God fixes things, but you have to let him. And so as you hear these quotes,

00:07:03 – 00:07:08:	just remember, if this was your confession, then 10 years later you believe the opposite,

00:07:08 – 00:07:12:	would you have admitted it? And would you have said, yeah, I don't believe that anymore?

00:07:14 – 00:07:20:	So one of the papers that Michael, I'm going to call him Mike or Michael or MLK throughout this,

00:07:20 – 00:07:25:	because his name isn't Martin Luther. That was a name his father changed his name to when he was

00:07:25 – 00:07:29:	a couple years old. One of the papers he wrote when he was in seminary at Crozer when he was an

00:07:29 – 00:07:36:	adult was related to his trajectory in the faith, the name of the paper. And we're going to have

00:07:36 – 00:07:40:	links probably to some of these. I'm getting all these from the Stanford Martin Luther King

00:07:40 – 00:07:45:	Jr. Research and Education Institute. You can read them all for yourself. You can spend days doing

00:07:45 – 00:07:49:	it just like me. Like you said, don't recommend it. But this first one I'm going to quote from

00:07:49 – 00:07:55:	briefly is an autobiography of a religious development. So when King describes how he became

00:07:55 – 00:08:00:	a Christian, he says when he was at the age of five, he went up for an altar call because his

00:08:00 – 00:08:05:	bare sister had just done it. And so in his mind, that was kind of his introduction to the faith.

00:08:05 – 00:08:12:	And his father was a minister, so he was raised in the church. But his own first personal experience

00:08:12 – 00:08:18:	of engaging with that was a superficial altar call in competition with the sibling. He was five,

00:08:18 – 00:08:23:	there's nothing like, it was a mistake. I'm not holding a five year old's mistakes against him

00:08:23 – 00:08:27:	theologically for the rest of his life. The point is that that was kind of the high water mark

00:08:27 – 00:08:34:	of this guy theologically. Here's what he said in a seminary about his subsequent years.

00:08:35 – 00:08:41:	He writes, the lessons which I was taught in Sunday school were quite in the fundamentalist line.

00:08:41 – 00:08:45:	None of my teachers ever doubted the infallibility of scriptures. Most of them were unlettered and

00:08:45 – 00:08:50:	had never heard of biblical criticism. Naturally, I accepted the teachings as they were given to me.

00:08:50 – 00:08:56:	I never felt any need to doubt them, at least at the time I didn't. I guess I accepted biblical

00:08:56 – 00:09:01:	studies uncritically until I was about 12 years old. But this uncritical attitude could not last

00:09:01 – 00:09:06:	long, for it was contrary to the very nature of my being. I had always been the questioning and

00:09:06 – 00:09:13:	precocious type. At the age of 13, I shocked my Sunday school class by denying the bodily resurrection

00:09:13 – 00:09:20:	of Jesus. I'll say it again, age 13, I shocked my Sunday school class by denying the bodily

00:09:20 – 00:09:26:	resurrection of Jesus. From the age of 13 on, doubts began to spring forth unrelentingly.

00:09:26 – 00:09:30:	At the age of 15, I entered Morehouse College and more and more I could see a gap between

00:09:31 – 00:09:36:	what I had learned in Sunday school and what I was learning in college. This conflict continued

00:09:36 – 00:09:41:	until I studied a course in Bible in which I came to see that behind the legends and myths of the

00:09:41 – 00:09:47:	Bible were many profound truths with which one could not escape. My days in college were very

00:09:47 – 00:09:52:	exciting once. As stated above, my college training, especially the first two years,

00:09:52 – 00:09:57:	brought many doubts into my mind. It was at this period that the shackles of fundamentalism

00:09:57 – 00:10:02:	were removed from my body. This is why, when I came to Crozier, I could accept the liberal

00:10:02 – 00:10:08:	interpretation with relative ease. It was in my senior year of college that I entered the ministry.

00:10:08 – 00:10:12:	I had felt the urge to enter the ministry for my latter high school days, but accumulated

00:10:12 – 00:10:17:	doubts had somewhat blocked the urge. Now it appeared again with an inescapable drive.

00:10:17 – 00:10:20:	My call to the ministry was not a miraculous or supernatural something.

00:10:21 – 00:10:25:	On the contrary, it was an inner urge calling me to serve humanity.

00:10:26 – 00:10:32:	So this is a young man who, his trajectory, as I said, from that altar call in competition

00:10:32 – 00:10:38:	with his older sister, as soon as he started reading the Bible, his very first response

00:10:38 – 00:10:44:	from the age of 12 was, I don't believe this. The age of 13, he openly denied the resurrection

00:10:44 – 00:10:51:	of Jesus Christ from the grave. Then he was off to the races. Once he went to Morehouse at age 15

00:10:51 – 00:10:57:	from 15 through 18, it got even worse. When he's at seminary at Crozier, he continues to escalate

00:10:57 – 00:11:02:	down that path. We're beginning here because this is the arc of all the other quotes that we're

00:11:02 – 00:11:07:	going to have here today. It's not simply that, oh, well, he was young, and then later on he learned

00:11:07 – 00:11:13:	something different. He was young, he was not a Christian. He became more evil as it went,

00:11:14 – 00:11:21:	and he became more open about it as it went. So down the road, when he's been in the pulpit for

00:11:21 – 00:11:28:	10, 15 years, at no point was there a single moment when he repudiated any of these earlier

00:11:28 – 00:11:34:	beliefs. On the contrary, he hid them better. Early on, when he was at school and then at

00:11:34 – 00:11:39:	seminary and then working on his PhD, he would play to whatever audience to which he was speaking

00:11:39 – 00:11:44:	privately. So if they were more illiberal in his words, and that's the technical term he's using,

00:11:44 – 00:11:51:	he's correct, meaning they deny the inerrancy of scripture, they deny the divinity of God,

00:11:51 – 00:11:56:	they deny God entirely, they deny miracles. They're not Christian. He was not going to Christian

00:11:56 – 00:12:01:	schools. He made sure that he fit right in when he got into the pulpit, and he was working with

00:12:01 – 00:12:09:	actual Christians in his congregations. He was more careful. So as we go through these quotes,

00:12:09 – 00:12:14:	what's going to be established is that when he uses a word, it's going to be a word that you or I

00:12:14 – 00:12:18:	would use, but it will mean something completely different. That's another theme that's going to

00:12:18 – 00:12:23:	run through this entire segment, that when he says something, when King says something, it's

00:12:23 – 00:12:28:	going to be a word that Christians use, it's going to be Jesus dust, but he will mean the exact

00:12:28 – 00:12:34:	opposite when he says it. You also did mention his spelling and grammar issues that occur throughout

00:12:34 – 00:12:40:	his entire life. And that's not just us saying that, that is from a number of his biographers and

00:12:40 – 00:12:44:	from those who have collated his papers and such. This is a common critique.

00:12:45 – 00:12:50:	And one of the reasons that can be relevant is that you see a very big difference between

00:12:51 – 00:12:57:	certain of his works and say certain of his public speeches or the public works and private letters.

00:12:57 – 00:13:00:	And that's because a lot of times there were ghost writers involved for some of this.

00:13:01 – 00:13:07:	And so for some of the more public materials that sound better, if you're trying to pull

00:13:07 – 00:13:13:	something that sounds Christian from that, do bear in mind it was probably written by someone else.

00:13:13 – 00:13:19:	You can see the real man in the things that he wrote himself. And a lot of what we're going to

00:13:19 – 00:13:26:	be quoting today will be things that he wrote himself. And I agree with you when it comes to

00:13:26 – 00:13:33:	the name I was also just going to call him Michael King or MLK. Notably, his name was never even

00:13:33 – 00:13:38:	legally changed. So his father didn't even bother to change his name from Michael King to Martin

00:13:38 – 00:13:45:	Luther King. So he was born Michael King and he died Michael King. That's pretty much consistent

00:13:45 – 00:13:53:	with everything else about the guy. The public myth and the actual facts are just not related at all.

00:13:53 – 00:13:58:	And so again, we're not here to attack a dead guy. It's not because he's black. It's not because he

00:13:58 – 00:14:04:	was even a so-called civil rights leader. It's that when in our own churches this man is held up as

00:14:04 – 00:14:10:	a Christian paragon. Okay, you say that I should emulate this guy. Let me go look at what I need

00:14:10 – 00:14:16:	to emulate. And the very first thing we find is denying that Jesus was raised from the dead.

00:14:16 – 00:14:22:	And so it gets worse from there. Again, that was only at age 13. We're basically going to go through

00:14:22 – 00:14:27:	some of these papers in chronological order as he delivered them. So it'll jump around a little

00:14:27 – 00:14:33:	bit thematically. But the theme that's going to emerge fundamentally is one of, again, this man

00:14:33 – 00:14:37:	was never Christian a day in his life. And that's not just us saying it. As you hear the things that

00:14:37 – 00:14:43:	he says as we read them to you, they're all blasphemy. We're not talking about Lutherans

00:14:43 – 00:14:49:	disagreeing with Baptists about the sacraments. We're not talking about arguing tulip with the

00:14:49 – 00:14:55:	Reformed. We're talking about the very most basic elements of the Christian faith. And when he

00:14:55 – 00:15:01:	speaks about them, it's in very open terms to say, yeah, that's nonsense. And so the next quote we're

00:15:01 – 00:15:07:	going to go over is from a paper that he wrote at Crozer Seminary, and it's entitled The Purpose of

00:15:07 – 00:15:13:	Religion. What is the purpose of religion? Is it to perpetuate an idea about God? Is it totally

00:15:13 – 00:15:19:	dependent upon revelation? What part does psychological experience play? Is religion

00:15:19 – 00:15:26:	synonymous with theology? Harry Emerson Faustic says that the most hopeful thing about any system of

00:15:26 – 00:15:32:	theology is that it will not last. This statement will shock some, but is the purpose of religion

00:15:32 – 00:15:38:	the perpetuation of theological ideas. Religion is not validated by ideas, but by experience.

00:15:39 – 00:15:45:	This automatically raises the question of salvation. Is the basis for salvation in creeds

00:15:45 – 00:15:51:	and dogmas or inexperience? Catholics would have us believe the former. For them, the church,

00:15:51 – 00:15:56:	its creeds, its popes, and bishops have recited the essence of religion, and that is all there is to

00:15:56 – 00:16:03:	it. On the other hand, we say that each soul must make its own reconciliation to God, that no creed

00:16:03 – 00:16:08:	can take the place of that personal experience. This was expressed by Paul Tillich when he said,

00:16:09 – 00:16:14:	There is natural religion which belongs to man by nature, but there is also a revealed religion

00:16:14 – 00:16:20:	which man receives from a supernatural reality. Relevant religion therefore comes through revelation

00:16:20 – 00:16:26:	from God, on the one hand, and through repentance and acceptance of salvation on the other hand.

00:16:26 – 00:16:30:	Dogma as an agent in salvation has no essential place.

00:16:31 – 00:16:36:	This is the secret of our religion. This is what makes the saints move on in spite of problems

00:16:36 – 00:16:41:	and perplexities of life that they must face. This religion of experience by which man is

00:16:41 – 00:16:46:	aware of God seeking him, and saving him helps him to see the hands of God moving through history.

00:16:46 – 00:16:51:	Religion has to be interpreted for each age, stated in terms that age can understand,

00:16:52 – 00:16:57:	but the essential purpose of religion remains the same. It is not to perpetuate a dogma or

00:16:57 – 00:17:03:	theology, but to produce living witnesses and testimonies to the power of God in human experience,

00:17:04 – 00:17:11:	and then his signature. So when he's talking about religion, he fundamentally sees them as

00:17:11 – 00:17:18:	interchangeable. Now, if this were just a single paper where he was kind of talking conceptually

00:17:19 – 00:17:25:	about how religion is used among people, sure, maybe you could have an academic paper that would

00:17:25 – 00:17:29:	kind of minimize the truth, but it was being more general. And so you might

00:17:30 – 00:17:36:	hand wave and say, well, that wasn't so bad. But this first quote is completely revelatory

00:17:36 – 00:17:45:	about his approach to Christianity. He fundamentally sees Christianity as a human creation, and we'll

00:17:45 – 00:17:51:	establish that down the road with some of the other quotes. But the fact that to him,

00:17:51 – 00:17:58:	dogma as an agent in salvation has no essential place. Think about that means vis-a-vis the

00:17:58 – 00:18:05:	Christian faith. If an agent in salvation doesn't come from dogma, doesn't come from belief,

00:18:06 – 00:18:12:	where does it come from? And as he establishes throughout everything, he says, it's good works,

00:18:12 – 00:18:17:	it's being good to your neighbor. And that's why he spent all of his time basically externally

00:18:17 – 00:18:25:	focused not on the Christian life, but on the sort of social change that was repackaged as part

00:18:25 – 00:18:30:	of the civil rights movement. And he was weaponized to go out and do someone else's bidding. That's

00:18:30 – 00:18:37:	the second half of this episode, the part two of this. But really, it's just important to remember,

00:18:38 – 00:18:45:	he sees religion as a manmade thing. Is that what Christians believe? Absolutely not. No

00:18:45 – 00:18:52:	Christian believes that, first of all, there's Christianity and there's everything else. There's

00:18:52 – 00:18:57:	no such thing as competing religions because there's only one God. And so there's the God and

00:18:57 – 00:19:02:	there's a religion of that God. Everything else is fundamentally the teachings of demons.

00:19:02 – 00:19:06:	Yeah, it's a phrase that we frequently use on the show because it comes straight from First

00:19:06 – 00:19:13:	Timothy. God describes teachings of demons as the source of false doctrine. This is fundamentally

00:19:13 – 00:19:19:	false doctrine. Even this very early paper, he says salvation and dogma, they have nothing to do

00:19:19 – 00:19:26:	with each other. Meaning there's salvation apart from belief and apart even from any particular

00:19:26 – 00:19:32:	religion. That's astonishing. Well, I just look at that quote right in the middle. It's a straight

00:19:32 – 00:19:38:	up denial of Christianity. On the other hand, we say that each soul must make its own reconciliation

00:19:38 – 00:19:45:	to God. That's just a fundamental rejection of Christianity because Christianity is very clear.

00:19:45 – 00:19:54:	You cannot reconcile yourself to God. You can be reconciled to God in Christ. That is God

00:19:54 – 00:20:02:	acting, not you acting. This is just a straight up rejection of the Christian faith with a whole

00:20:02 – 00:20:07:	bunch of other errors thrown in, of course. I'm glad you picked up on that particular quote because

00:20:08 – 00:20:14:	as we get down further into these, that's literally what he says Jesus was. We'll get

00:20:14 – 00:20:19:	into where he says that Jesus was just a man and was not God at all, but that is what he believes

00:20:19 – 00:20:24:	that Jesus did. That's why he's saying this here to say that, on the other hand, we say that

00:20:25 – 00:20:30:	each soul must make its reconciliation to God. He says that that is the life that Jesus, the man,

00:20:30 – 00:20:39:	led, that he reconciled himself to God as the perfect example to us. Now, a Christian would hear

00:20:39 – 00:20:43:	that and say, well, that's bad theology, but I can kind of make that Christian if I reward it a

00:20:43 – 00:20:49:	little. The point to hamper home here is that that's not what he's doing. He's fundamentally coming

00:20:49 – 00:20:56:	from the opposite direction saying, there's no God as we conceive him. What Jesus did was what

00:20:56 – 00:21:02:	every man can do by interacting with his fellow man. The next paper that we're going to read from

00:21:02 – 00:21:12:	is also from 1948 at Crozier Seminary. This is from Three Essays on Religion. The subpart is

00:21:12 – 00:21:20:	Unreal Worship, Temple and Sacrifice. He's talking about the book of Jeremiah and one of the themes

00:21:20 – 00:21:25:	that he picked up on that was given to him by his professors and the men that he read was that

00:21:27 – 00:21:32:	the faith of the Old Testament was continuously evolving, that there was no direct revelation

00:21:32 – 00:21:39:	from God, but it was just men accreting new ideas. What he's saying here in this quote is that the

00:21:39 – 00:21:46:	book of Jeremiah and the prophet, so-called, in his mind, Jeremiah, was fundamentally teaching

00:21:46 – 00:21:54:	against what the Israelites had been practicing in the temple system. King writes, another line

00:21:54 – 00:21:59:	which can be added to the column of Jeremiah's contributions to religious thought is his stand

00:21:59 – 00:22:07:	against artificial worship. This action was started against the temple as we know the Deuteronomic

00:22:07 – 00:22:12:	Reformation culminated in the centralization of national worship in the temple at Jerusalem.

00:22:12 – 00:22:17:	This temple was the pivot of the nation's religion. In the course of years, elaborate

00:22:17 – 00:22:23:	ceremonies were enacted and priests prescribed sacrifices and the smoke of burnt offerings

00:22:23 – 00:22:28:	rose high from the altar. The temple was the apple of the people's eye. To criticize it was to set

00:22:28 – 00:22:34:	aflame the fires of both religion and patriotism. This was the very thing that Jeremiah did.

00:22:34 – 00:22:40:	So it might not be obvious if you read that or especially if I'm reading it to you, but

00:22:40 – 00:22:45:	what he's saying here is fundamentally, God did not institute the temple. God was not present at

00:22:45 – 00:22:50:	the temple. It was the priests making up things over time and saying, oh, now we're going to do

00:22:50 – 00:22:55:	this sort of sacrifice. We're going to dress this way and we're going to do this. And so what he's

00:22:55 – 00:23:00:	saying in this paper and in this section is, Jeremiah came along and said, that's all nonsense

00:23:00 – 00:23:06:	because it's not in your hearts. And while on one hand, Jeremiah was appropriately condemning the

00:23:06 – 00:23:13:	fact that their worship was false because they had abandoned God in their hearts, you don't need

00:23:13 – 00:23:20:	to say that the priests had invented things when it was actually God that did it. But this is one

00:23:20 – 00:23:27:	of the first quotes we have that reveals that in King's mind, there is no inspiration of Scripture.

00:23:27 – 00:23:35:	There was no God acting at any point in Scripture. God is not personal and active at any point

00:23:35 – 00:23:40:	in the Bible as King reads it. And so it makes the only way he can possibly understand

00:23:40 – 00:23:46:	Jeremiah condemning them is by condemning what the priests were doing. And if the priests were

00:23:46 – 00:23:52:	doing something that the new prophet would condemn, well, obviously, it's just what they made up.

00:23:52 – 00:23:58:	It's what men were doing. And that's, again, that's the overarching theme. All religion is manmade.

00:23:58 – 00:24:03:	All of the Christian religion, pre-incarnate Christ was manmade. The Christian religion in

00:24:03 – 00:24:08:	the age of the church was manmade. All of it has come from the mind of man.

00:24:08 – 00:24:12:	And the attentive reader will already, or listener in this case, will already hear

00:24:13 – 00:24:20:	some of the echoes of the social gospel, so called, and the sort of social agitation in

00:24:20 – 00:24:26:	which King will be engaging, really starting now in his life, but also later in life. And

00:24:26 – 00:24:31:	we'll mention some of the gentlemen who were responsible for that in the latter half of this

00:24:31 – 00:24:37:	episode, more likely the next episode, but still. The preaching of the first four centuries was

00:24:37 – 00:24:43:	mainly apologetic. After Christ had failed to return, there had to be some justification for

00:24:43 – 00:24:49:	the validity of the Christian gospel. They were out at every turn to defend the Christian religion.

00:24:49 – 00:24:53:	Such a man as Origen and Justin were forever attempting to prove the divinity of Christ.

00:24:54 – 00:25:00:	It was, his writing is so bad sometimes, it was during the period that the Trinitarian doctrine

00:25:00 – 00:25:05:	arose. It is also significant to know that the preaching of this period was mainly scriptural.

00:25:05 – 00:25:08:	The condition of the age required apologetic preaching.

00:25:09 – 00:25:12:	Twentieth-century preaching, on the contrary, deals with great social problems.

00:25:13 – 00:25:19:	That's in the singular, but I'll correct it. Moreover, much of our twentieth-century preaching

00:25:19 – 00:25:22:	is an attempt to adjust individuals to the complexities of modern society.

00:25:23 – 00:25:28:	The problem of the virgin birth and the trinity is not the most important features,

00:25:28 – 00:25:32:	a plural word should be singular, in twentieth-century preaching,

00:25:33 – 00:25:35:	as was the case in the first four centuries of preaching.

00:25:36 – 00:25:41:	So, did you hear what he just said? He said that the trinity was made up in the fourth century.

00:25:41 – 00:25:48:	The virgin birth is a problem that these men had to make this stuff up and try to justify

00:25:49 – 00:25:53:	Christ's failure to return. What an incredible presupposition.

00:25:54 – 00:25:58:	They believed that Christ was going to return because he said he would, and when he didn't,

00:25:58 – 00:26:02:	while he was a liar, so what they have to do, they had to permute the Christian faith

00:26:02 – 00:26:09:	into something that could still be sustained among believers, that if you were a believer

00:26:09 – 00:26:15:	in the third and fourth century AD, you had to have some new doctrine in order for you to stay

00:26:15 – 00:26:19:	engaged because we have these problems with the trinity that they made up, the virgin birth,

00:26:19 – 00:26:27:	that's obviously not going to be real. So, this is who he was. This is who he was in seminary,

00:26:27 – 00:26:33:	and I think it's important to note, Lutherans and Baptists, at least some Baptists,

00:26:33 – 00:26:40:	have different approaches to when a man enters the pulpit. King had already been preaching in

00:26:40 – 00:26:45:	churches before this. He had already stood up in a pulpit and spoken in the name of God.

00:26:45 – 00:26:49:	He didn't yet have a permanent call to a particular congregation

00:26:49 – 00:26:54:	that would come after he finished seminary, but he was already preaching at this point.

00:26:54 – 00:26:59:	He was well respected, and he was well respected in the very congregation,

00:26:59 – 00:27:06:	where he denied that Jesus was resurrected from the dead. Now, I don't point this out to impugn

00:27:06 – 00:27:10:	all Baptists because I know that there are many Baptists who are actually Christians,

00:27:10 – 00:27:14:	but what was going on in his dad's church that, although he shocked his Sunday school,

00:27:15 – 00:27:21:	he wasn't repudiated. He was recommended to go off to seminary. Surely, much of the congregation

00:27:21 – 00:27:26:	was paying for him to go to Morehouse and Crozer so that he could then get up in a pulpit and

00:27:26 – 00:27:32:	speak in God's name. As he goes along in this career, he gets further and further away from

00:27:32 – 00:27:38:	Orthodox Christian faith. I mean, you really can't be a Christian and say that the virgin birth is

00:27:38 – 00:27:45:	a problem and the Trinity is a problem. Now, as a Christian, you can recognize that the Trinity

00:27:45 – 00:27:51:	is a mystery that is distinct from a problem. Saying it's a problem is saying,

00:27:52 – 00:27:56:	this is something we can't explain, and so it can't possibly be part of our religion. That's

00:27:56 – 00:28:02:	what he's actually doing here. He wants to jettison core parts of Christianity

00:28:03 – 00:28:10:	because he is attempting to turn Christianity into a social gospel. He wants to turn Christianity

00:28:10 – 00:28:17:	into a vehicle for societal change, and so it's necessary to jettison these various bits and pieces

00:28:17 – 00:28:21:	of the religion that, oh, we don't need these because that's not the core. It's the experience

00:28:21 – 00:28:28:	of the religion. It's doing X, Y, and Z, which X, Y, and Z turn out to be what the Communist

00:28:28 – 00:28:35:	Party wants. We'll get into that more when it comes to the individuals around Michael King

00:28:35 – 00:28:44:	and his political activities. But what he is doing here is attempting to transform Christianity

00:28:44 – 00:28:49:	into something that it is not and cannot be, because if you get rid of these doctrines,

00:28:49 – 00:28:55:	you don't have Christianity anymore. You have something totally alien, and he's not the only

00:28:55 – 00:29:03:	one doing this, of course. This is not Michael King's project. This is a project of many academics,

00:29:04 – 00:29:08:	and King is simply parroting those lines, but he made those lies his own,

00:29:10 – 00:29:14:	and if you believe these things, you cannot be a Christian.

00:29:15 – 00:29:21:	Think what the Athanasian Creed says. If you do not hold these beliefs, if you do not hold

00:29:21 – 00:29:28:	these truths, you cannot be saved. That is the position of the Church, that is the position

00:29:28 – 00:29:33:	of Christianity down through the centuries. There are certain things to which you must hold

00:29:33 – 00:29:39:	to be a Christian, and most certainly, that is the virgin birth, the Trinity, and the resurrection

00:29:39 – 00:29:45:	of the dead. The same year, Mike wrote another paper called Light on the Old Testament from the

00:29:45 – 00:29:52:	Ancient Near East. He was writing about archaeological investigations as they relate to the text of

00:29:52 – 00:29:58:	scripture. He writes, fortunately, through numerous excavations and assiduous decipherings,

00:29:58 – 00:30:03:	that door has been opened. Ever since that time, we have been able to get a critical unbiased and

00:30:03 – 00:30:08:	scientific light upon the Old Testament. No logical thinker can doubt the fact that these

00:30:08 – 00:30:14:	archaeological findings are now indispensable to all concrete study of the Hebrew-Christian

00:30:14 – 00:30:19:	religion. These findings have proved to us that there are many striking analogies between the

00:30:19 – 00:30:23:	ideas expressed in the Old Testament and those found in the surrounding cultures of the Near

00:30:23 – 00:30:30:	East. For an instance, the views of the Old Testament are almost identical with those of

00:30:30 – 00:30:38:	Babylonian mythology. This is not to say that the Pentateuch writers sat down and copied these

00:30:38 – 00:30:44:	views verbatim. The differences of expression attest to that fact, but after being in contact with

00:30:44 – 00:30:49:	these surrounding cultures and hearing certain doctrines expressed, it was only natural for

00:30:49 – 00:30:54:	some of these views to become part of their subconscious minds. When they sat down to write,

00:30:54 – 00:30:59:	they were expressing consciously that which had dwelled in their subconscious minds.

00:30:59 – 00:31:05:	This is one of his recurring themes throughout. As he describes the men who wrote the various

00:31:05 – 00:31:14:	books of the Bible, the overarching, inexorable theme of each of those comments is that at no

00:31:14 – 00:31:21:	point is God's voice present in any measure. There's never a moment of consideration of

00:31:21 – 00:31:28:	plenary verbal inspiration by God of a single word. What he does say is that these were just

00:31:28 – 00:31:35:	men in their times. They were thinking about a God and that the so-called Hebrew-Christian religion

00:31:35 – 00:31:41:	meant that there was some sort of God that a group of men scattered across time

00:31:41 – 00:31:47:	happened to be oriented in the same direction. When they wrote these various books, they were

00:31:47 – 00:31:53:	thinking about the same hypothetical God, but they didn't know him with any immediacy. He didn't

00:31:53 – 00:32:01:	speak to them. What they knew was what they thought about, and they were inevitably influenced by

00:32:01 – 00:32:06:	all their neighbors. Whoever was around them at the time by osmosis, they were going to naturally

00:32:06 – 00:32:14:	absorb those beliefs from the other nearby religions. That's radical. Again, that's a

00:32:14 – 00:32:20:	nullification of the Christian faith. If God is not present in speaking through the men

00:32:20 – 00:32:27:	who are writing the Bible, it's all just nonsense. It is literally made up. That is not only the

00:32:27 – 00:32:34:	only possible conclusion of his beliefs, but that is what he believed. The reason for laying

00:32:34 – 00:32:40:	this groundwork early on is, like I said, when we get later on into his public ministry, so-called,

00:32:40 – 00:32:45:	where he was pretending to be a pastor, he didn't say this stuff as much. He didn't get out in the

00:32:45 – 00:32:53:	opening. I can only find a single case of him mentioning the virgin birth when he was a preacher.

00:32:53 – 00:32:58:	He would just stay away from it. See, in college and in seminary, he would deny it,

00:32:58 – 00:33:02:	but he knew better than to deny the virgin birth in church because he knew that might cause a riot

00:33:02 – 00:33:06:	with some of the nice old black Baptist ladies who actually cared about their Bible and knew

00:33:06 – 00:33:12:	better, so he wouldn't do it. But again, the point I made at the beginning, he never repudiated a

00:33:12 – 00:33:17:	single one of these beliefs. At no point in public or private did he say, you know what,

00:33:17 – 00:33:22:	I used to deny the Trinity and the virgin birth. Thank God, God brought me to repentance,

00:33:22 – 00:33:28:	and I now confess the true Christian faith. If he had done that, he might have emphasized it a bit

00:33:28 – 00:33:33:	more because it is so foundational, and yet we see the exact opposite. He condemns it. He says

00:33:33 – 00:33:38:	it's fake and made up, and then it just vanishes from his theology. He doesn't bring it up again,

00:33:38 – 00:33:44:	and that was one of the few smart things he did. These opinions that are blatantly anti-Christian,

00:33:44 – 00:33:49:	they just got buried. The reason that we're focusing now on his early life is that his early

00:33:49 – 00:33:54:	life is the only time he told the truth about this stuff, but he never changed his confession.

00:33:54 – 00:34:00:	He never believed anything differently. Later on, when he used some of the words, like he does talk

00:34:00 – 00:34:04:	about resurrection, we'll get to that in a bit. When he talks about resurrection later on,

00:34:05 – 00:34:10:	it's not of the body. It's a completely different, figmentary spiritual resurrection

00:34:10 – 00:34:16:	that he concocted in his own new religion so that he could have a religion of science,

00:34:16 – 00:34:21:	a religion of reason that was consistent with what he knew he could prove on paper.

00:34:21 – 00:34:25:	And he wouldn't have to believe any of those mythologies, any of the nonsense

00:34:25 – 00:34:29:	that these very primitive peoples had made up as they were just absorbing things from their neighbors.

00:34:30 – 00:34:35:	You helpfully pointed out that he used the plural for writers, authors of the Pentateuch,

00:34:36 – 00:34:40:	and for those who are less familiar with why that would be the case,

00:34:40 – 00:34:48:	in academic circles for a fairly long time at this point, long here being a bit over

00:34:48 – 00:34:54:	a century or so, not long in terms of history. There's a theory called the

00:34:54 – 00:35:02:	JEDP theory, which is the theory that there were at least four authors of the books of the Pentateuch.

00:35:03 – 00:35:06:	This is not the Christian position. The Christian position, the position of the church,

00:35:06 – 00:35:13:	the position of scripture is the Pentateuch was written by Moses. Now, there may be some little

00:35:13 – 00:35:20:	bits that were not written by Moses. For instance, you can be an Orthodox Christian and believe that

00:35:20 – 00:35:28:	Deuteronomy 34, which is the death of Moses, the mourning for Moses, and then the appointment of

00:35:28 – 00:35:32:	Joshua as the new leader of Israel. You can believe that that was written after Moses,

00:35:32 – 00:35:37:	because it tells of his death, or you can believe that it was Moses writing it as prophecy.

00:35:38 – 00:35:43:	You're not an unorthodox Christian if you believe one versus the other. However,

00:35:43 – 00:35:50:	if you deny that Moses was the author of the Pentateuch, you are outside of Orthodox Christianity.

00:35:51 – 00:35:57:	And that is the position of many academics when it comes to critical theory, which is what we're

00:35:57 – 00:36:06:	dealing with here. And to expand on a little bit, JEDP is Yahwist, which is because that author,

00:36:06 – 00:36:15:	supposedly, uses Yahweh for the name of God. Then you have the Eloist who uses Elohim, the Deuteronomist,

00:36:15 – 00:36:21:	author of Deuteronomy, and the priestly writer who would have written Leviticus. That is the

00:36:21 – 00:36:28:	contention that's what the theory is. There's no evidence for this. Their argument is based

00:36:28 – 00:36:34:	entirely on the fact that there are some linguistic differences, and there are different names used

00:36:34 – 00:36:40:	for God. But that's because Moses was writing about different things in these books. You could

00:36:40 – 00:36:46:	do the same thing with any living secular author. You're going to write a little differently depending

00:36:46 – 00:36:50:	on the subject you're writing. If I'm writing a case brief, I'm not going to do the same thing as if

00:36:50 – 00:36:57:	I'm writing fiction or an essay on scripture or politics. It's going to be different. And so their

00:36:57 – 00:37:03:	contention is completely insane. The reason it's insane is because of the second lack of evidence,

00:37:04 – 00:37:09:	and that is that no source has ever been found for any of these supposed authors.

00:37:10 – 00:37:16:	Because what the argument is, is that there were these original documents that were then either

00:37:16 – 00:37:22:	compiled by Moses or compiled by Moses and some others or redacted by this person. At any rate,

00:37:22 – 00:37:30:	there were various authors and it was compiled. Not one source of these other supposed documents

00:37:30 – 00:37:36:	has ever been located. This is spun entirely out of whole cloth, out of the minds of academics,

00:37:36 – 00:37:43:	who are simply seeking to deny the verbal inspiration of scripture. And that is what Michael

00:37:43 – 00:37:53:	King is doing when he says, writers. And so the next selection from Michael King's writings

00:37:53 – 00:37:59:	is from Light on the Old Testament from the Ancient Near East. This is the conclusion of that paper.

00:38:00 – 00:38:06:	What now is the conclusion of the whole matter? First, we must conclude that the Old Testament

00:38:06 – 00:38:11:	has its roots not only in the history of the Hebrew people. Instead, one must consider the

00:38:11 – 00:38:17:	Old Testament in relation to all the ancient civilizations of the Near East. Modern archaeology

00:38:17 – 00:38:22:	has proven to us that many of the ideas of the Old Testament have their roots in the ideas of

00:38:22 – 00:38:27:	surrounding cultures. Many would argue that these archaeological findings have proven to be very

00:38:27 – 00:38:31:	pernicious to modern religion. They argue that archaeologists have robbed the Old Testament

00:38:31 – 00:38:36:	of any claim to uniqueness. Of course, any logical thinker must believe the contrary.

00:38:36 – 00:38:40:	For from attempting to destroy the usefulness of the Old Testament archae…

00:38:41 – 00:38:47:	His writing is so hard to read sometimes. Far from attempting to destroy the usefulness of

00:38:47 – 00:38:52:	the Old Testament, archaeologists are attempting to give a better understanding of the contents of

00:38:52 – 00:38:59:	the Bible. They realize that religion, as far as possible, must be scientifically tenable.

00:38:59 – 00:39:04:	It is my opinion that biblical criticism and biblical archaeology will serve to justify

00:39:04 – 00:39:08:	the position of the Church in modern culture, especially in the face of modern youth who

00:39:08 – 00:39:13:	are taught to weigh and consider. Second, we must conclude that many of the things which we have

00:39:13 – 00:39:20:	accepted as true historical happenings are merely mythological. They are merely modified links,

00:39:20 – 00:39:24:	connected to the wide chain of mythology. Again, this conclusion will shock many,

00:39:24 – 00:39:30:	but why so? One needs only know that a myth serves the purpose of getting over an idea

00:39:30 – 00:39:35:	that is in the mind of the author. Therefore, it becomes just as valuable as the factual.

00:39:35 – 00:39:41:	Dr. Bevins succinctly stated it. We have documents which record actual historical events,

00:39:41 – 00:39:45:	with the names of persons who lived and acted more or less in the way described.

00:39:45 – 00:39:50:	Then, as we follow back the story, we find ourselves in a past with which

00:39:50 – 00:39:57:	the real history is apparently continuous, but which is, in truth, only a work of imagination,

00:39:57 – 00:40:03:	a mythical past set behind. There is an illegible section, the historical events,

00:40:03 – 00:40:08:	and concealing the real past out of which in actual fact the historical process came.

00:40:09 – 00:40:14:	If we accept the Old Testament as being true, we will find it full of errors,

00:40:14 – 00:40:20:	contradictions, and obvious impossibilities, as that the Pentateuch was written by Moses.

00:40:20 – 00:40:25:	But if we accept it as truth, we will find it to be one of the most logical vehicles of mankind's

00:40:25 – 00:40:30:	deepest devotional thoughts and aspirations, couched in language which still retains its

00:40:30 – 00:40:37:	original vigor and its moral intensity. As a sort of side note, when I am reading these,

00:40:37 – 00:40:42:	I will correct some of the more glaring grammar errors, because they are painful to me to read

00:40:42 – 00:40:48:	them. We can include these in the show notes so you can see how bad some of this is if it is not

00:40:48 – 00:40:54:	edited. Lots of subject verb disagreement. And this was after three years of college,

00:40:54 – 00:40:59:	this is in seminary, and his PhD stuff is no better. He was an atrocious speller.

00:41:00 – 00:41:06:	And so we see here, of course, he bluntly states what was stated previously, what I

00:41:06 – 00:41:11:	highlighted with the JEDP theory, he's denying that the Pentateuch was written by Moses, and he's

00:41:11 – 00:41:15:	saying that scripture is full of errors, contradictions, and obvious impossibilities.

00:41:17 – 00:41:22:	This is something that you expect to hear from an outright atheist, particularly a new atheist.

00:41:23 – 00:41:28:	This is not something that Christians say. This is not something that a Christian would say.

00:41:29 – 00:41:32:	This is not something that was said by a Christian.

00:41:32 – 00:41:43:	Christians do not deny the truth of scripture. They do not deny the inspiration of scripture.

00:41:43 – 00:41:48:	They do not deny the consistency of scripture. They do not attribute to scripture, and therefore

00:41:48 – 00:41:53:	to God, because scripture is the word of God, they do not attribute to God errors, contradictions,

00:41:53 – 00:42:00:	and obvious impossibilities. This is an academic paper, but it is a paper written

00:42:00 – 00:42:09:	by an academic who is not Christian. And this is just the consistent case with his writings.

00:42:10 – 00:42:13:	This is what you find from the beginning of his life to the end.

00:42:15 – 00:42:20:	The things that he wrote reject core truths, core claims of the Christian religion,

00:42:21 – 00:42:26:	and so they are not things that could have been written by a Christian.

00:42:26 – 00:42:33:	It is helpful here that he does something that I had pointed out in the episode on the

00:42:33 – 00:42:39:	perspicuity of scripture, on the clarity of scripture. I pointed out how frequently when

00:42:39 – 00:42:43:	these men are playing rhetorical games, they will say, oh, it is true, but it is not real.

00:42:44 – 00:42:50:	There is a narrative, but it is not a story, but it is not factual. They play these games,

00:42:50 – 00:42:54:	and he literally does it right here, and he put these in quotes. If we accepted the Old Testament

00:42:54 – 00:42:58:	as being, quote, unquote, true, we will find it is full of errors. On the other hand, if we

00:42:58 – 00:43:04:	accept it as, quote, unquote, truth, we will find it to be one of the most logical vehicles, etc.

00:43:04 – 00:43:12:	So he literally directly sets true and truth in opposition. That is Mike's religion.

00:43:12 – 00:43:19:	And so the only way he is able to find truth in scripture as he is denying everything about it

00:43:19 – 00:43:25:	is to just insert all of his own views, all of his own ideas to hollow out the Christian faith,

00:43:25 – 00:43:31:	our faith, and where it is a skinsuit. And that is what Mike King did his entire life.

00:43:31 – 00:43:34:	He hollowed out the Christian faith, and he wore it as a skinsuit.

00:43:34 – 00:43:40:	So again, the purpose of this episode, when you hear someone, a Christian, an actual Christian,

00:43:40 – 00:43:45:	in good conscience, quoting this man, know that this is the baggage that they are bringing along

00:43:45 – 00:43:52:	with their views. And then ask yourself, how did this man who denied Christ, he's burning in hell,

00:43:52 – 00:43:58:	he cannot possibly be in heaven as this was his confession, that we can say that beyond any

00:43:58 – 00:44:03:	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

00:44:03 – 00:44:08:	going to forgive him. It's got nothing to do with that. This man denied God, he denied scripture,

00:44:08 – 00:44:14:	he denied everything that is the source of our salvation. There's no possible hope for this

00:44:14 – 00:44:20:	man to be saved. How can such a man be an example of anything in the Christian life?

00:44:22 – 00:44:25:	You may be able to say, well, he was terrible, but he did this one thing, right?

00:44:26 – 00:44:30:	If anyone would actually say that, then we could have that discussion. That's the problem.

00:44:30 – 00:44:35:	No one's saying that. No one's saying he was an evil, wicked, damned man. But he got one thing

00:44:35 – 00:44:40:	pretty right. And let's maybe explain how he got that one thing right now. They say he's a

00:44:40 – 00:44:46:	paragon of virtue that he was a Christian man. And anyone who even questions that is blaspheming.

00:44:47 – 00:44:51:	As I said at the beginning, that's the overarching theme of this episode in the next few episodes.

00:44:51 – 00:44:58:	It is deliberately for Corey and I to blaspheme the gods of this age. Michael Martin Luther King

00:44:58 – 00:45:04:	Jr. is one of the gods of this age. This religion that he's espousing is the religion of this age.

00:45:04 – 00:45:08:	There's no doubt about that. This is a real religion he's describing. The problem is,

00:45:08 – 00:45:14:	it looks and smells a little bit like Christianity. If you're an ignorant Christian who's not paying

00:45:14 – 00:45:19:	any attention, but as soon as you look at this stuff, it just completely implodes.

00:45:20 – 00:45:27:	The next brief section here is just a, it's from Sermon Skechus. He was doing a sermon on Job 1925,

00:45:27 – 00:45:33:	where Job says, I know that my Redeemer lives. And the title of his sermon was The Assurance of

00:45:33 – 00:45:39:	Immortality. The theme that he had for sermon was, we were able to attain immortality through the men

00:45:39 – 00:45:44:	and women that we influence and through the children who are touched by the flame of our spirits.

00:45:44 – 00:45:50:	And the purpose of his sermon was to show that the desire for immortality will not be in vain.

00:45:50 – 00:45:56:	This is another one of his recurring themes. As he inserts his views into scripture, what he will

00:45:56 – 00:46:03:	say is that there was no notion of the resurrection of the dead until very near to Jesus' day.

00:46:04 – 00:46:07:	One of the things he'll do later on, he'll talk about a Deutero Isaiah,

00:46:08 – 00:46:13:	which is another thing from these critical readers, where they believe that just as with JDP,

00:46:13 – 00:46:19:	they believe that there were two authors of Isaiah. One wrote the first two-thirds,

00:46:19 – 00:46:25:	and then a different guy wrote the last third. And Deutero Isaiah is the one who has the prophecies,

00:46:25 – 00:46:32:	the one who talks about eternal life and resurrection. And so his claim, his belief,

00:46:32 – 00:46:37:	is that those things, saying that there's resurrection of the dead, that there's an

00:46:37 – 00:46:44:	afterlife of any sort, that no believer in Yahweh, in God, believed those things until very late

00:46:45 – 00:46:52:	in the Hebrew period. Again, it's not sub-Christian, it's anti-Christian.

00:46:53 – 00:46:57:	And so this is just one small blur, but it's consistent with his overarching theme that

00:46:57 – 00:47:03:	pops up everywhere. He does not believe that there's any continuity in scripture whatsoever,

00:47:03 – 00:47:09:	which makes perfect sense because he denies that it's from God. It was just a bunch of random people

00:47:09 – 00:47:13:	scattered across time. Well, sure, it's not going to make a lot of sense.

00:47:14 – 00:47:20:	And you mentioned that we're judging the man based on his confessions, based on the things that he

00:47:20 – 00:47:26:	said, the things that he wrote. But of course, a tree is also known by its fruit. And so we can

00:47:26 – 00:47:33:	look to his works, and we'll do a little bit more of that in, it's going to be a second episode. But

00:47:35 – 00:47:40:	Christians can very well at the least look to how he spent his last night on earth,

00:47:41 – 00:47:46:	and he spent his last night on earth fornicating with two prostitutes and beating a third woman.

00:47:46 – 00:47:54:	This is confirmed by the FBI who had him under surveillance for many years. This is well known.

00:47:55 – 00:48:01:	That is probably not how Christians are supposed to spend their last night on earth.

00:48:01 – 00:48:05:	That's not how Christians do spend any of their nights on earth.

00:48:06 – 00:48:13:	Now, can you be a Christian and still sin, of course? But if you are holding yourself out as a

00:48:13 – 00:48:19:	minister, holding yourself out as a teacher of the faith, and that is still how you are living

00:48:19 – 00:48:24:	your life, and that was not a one time thing that was consistent throughout his entire career as an

00:48:24 – 00:48:31:	activist. That is not a Christian man. But moving on to his next quote, this is from

00:48:32 – 00:48:37:	the ethics of late Judaism as evidenced in the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs.

00:48:38 – 00:48:43:	For a number of centuries it was generally held that the period between the old and new

00:48:43 – 00:48:48:	Testaments was a period of silence, and that no spiritual development was achieved within it.

00:48:49 – 00:48:53:	It was believed that this period of silence was broken when the New Testament appeared on the

00:48:53 – 00:48:59:	stage of history. Now the pendulum of interpretation is swinging in another direction. Most competent

00:48:59 – 00:49:04:	scholars have cast such positions out of the window. They would all agree that in reality

00:49:04 – 00:49:10:	there was no period of silence. To be sure, it was a period of great spiritual progress,

00:49:10 – 00:49:14:	and in many instances greater than any preceding it in Old Testament times,

00:49:14 – 00:49:20:	even though the Old Testament was its logical prelude. To my mind, many of the works of this

00:49:20 – 00:49:26:	period were infinitely more valuable than those that received canonicity. The materials to justify

00:49:26 – 00:49:31:	such statements are found mainly in the Apocrypha and the Sudwepagrapha. These works, although

00:49:31 – 00:49:36:	presented synonymously, are of lasting significance to the Biblical student.

00:49:38 – 00:49:43:	I would start out by just pointing out there's a weird inconsistency here in terms of saying

00:49:43 – 00:49:47:	there's silence and then referencing the Apocrypha, which of course was in the Inter-Testamental

00:49:47 – 00:49:54:	period, but even if you take it to mean silence in terms of no scripture, which is the Christian

00:49:54 – 00:50:01:	position, the Christian position is that there is a period of silence as it were between the

00:50:01 – 00:50:07:	close of the Old Testament and the open of the New Testament. We have materials written in that

00:50:07 – 00:50:13:	period. We call them the Apocrypha, and they are useful. They are to be read as historical

00:50:13 – 00:50:18:	documents, not a scripture. That has long been the position of the Church. There are some contentions

00:50:18 – 00:50:25:	over where exactly certain books belong in the canon, but the Apocrypha is a fairly set

00:50:25 – 00:50:33:	group of books that are considered historical books, not part of scripture. This was the position

00:50:33 – 00:50:40:	incidentally also of the Roman Church, until the Counter-Reformation, when in rejection of what

00:50:41 – 00:50:46:	the Lutherans did, because the Lutherans just affirmed what the Church had taught for centuries,

00:50:47 – 00:50:53:	Rome decided they would canonize these books because, well, they were rejecting what the

00:50:53 – 00:50:59:	Lutherans had done. That was done in response to the Lutherans, not for any theological or doctrinal

00:50:59 – 00:51:05:	reasons. Now, of course, they did do it for some dogmatic reasons, because you can get some of

00:51:05 – 00:51:10:	their arguments for praying to the saints and things like that from the Apocryphal books.

00:51:12 – 00:51:15:	Notably, the Apocryphal books themselves state that they are not scripture by saying there is no

00:51:15 – 00:51:25:	prophet during the time when these were written. But that aside, what he is saying here is that

00:51:25 – 00:51:32:	there is a sort of, and in his words, spiritual progress in religion, in Christianity.

00:51:33 – 00:51:40:	This is utopianism. This is a sort of New Age religion, the beginnings of it, of course,

00:51:40 – 00:51:45:	because it's become what we know modernly as sort of New Age religion. It's the belief that humanity

00:51:45 – 00:51:53:	is getting better as we go along. That's not the teaching of scripture. Humanity was very good

00:51:53 – 00:51:58:	in the words of Genesis in the Garten. Humanity fell, and we are degenerating as time goes on. We

00:51:58 – 00:52:04:	are not getting better. There is no spiritual progress. Now, as an individual, of course,

00:52:04 – 00:52:11:	you can make spiritual progress, because you can be converted to Christianity, you can be in Christ,

00:52:11 – 00:52:16:	and therefore you go through the process of sanctification. That is spiritual progress.

00:52:17 – 00:52:22:	But there's no spiritual progress in the terms of religion getting better as we go.

00:52:23 – 00:52:29:	That is not Christianity. That is the spirit of the age. That's outright Satanism, quite frankly.

00:52:30 – 00:52:33:	And that is what he's advocating here, and he's saying that that is better

00:52:33 – 00:52:37:	than the Old Testament. That is better than scripture. But, of course, that's in keeping

00:52:37 – 00:52:43:	with his position, because his position is that his project is better than scripture,

00:52:43 – 00:52:48:	all of scripture, the Old Testament, the New Testament. Because, again, it is that argument that

00:52:48 – 00:52:54:	when we're making progress, we're becoming better. We're more ethical. We are just all around

00:52:55 – 00:52:59:	better human beings, better men than our forebears, than our forefathers.

00:53:01 – 00:53:05:	And that is simply not the case, and it's not the Christian position, because, again, the Christian

00:53:05 – 00:53:12:	position is that this creation is fallen, and it is degenerating over time. It is getting

00:53:12 – 00:53:17:	worse. Things are not getting better. I'm not saying that as a black pill, as it were.

00:53:18 – 00:53:25:	That is simply the reality of it. Yes, we can work to make a better world than we have today,

00:53:25 – 00:53:32:	certainly. But we are not going to reverse the fall. Yes, in some minor way, you reverse the fall

00:53:32 – 00:53:36:	every time you work in your garden, and you remove the thistles and the weeds and things like that.

00:53:37 – 00:53:44:	But the overall trajectory of creation is downward until Christ returns and makes all things new.

00:53:46 – 00:53:51:	That is the Christian position, not what I just read in this paragraph.

00:53:52 – 00:53:54:	And the cash quote from that entire thing is,

00:53:55 – 00:54:01:	to my mind, many of the works of this period were infinitely more valuable than those that received

00:54:01 – 00:54:07:	canonicity. In other words, he's saying the Old Testament is trash. Most of it's really old.

00:54:07 – 00:54:11:	There's not a lot of value in there. In some of the later quotes, he specifically goes into

00:54:11 – 00:54:19:	explicitly damning the God of the old Old Testament. He says that the God of the newer Old Testament

00:54:19 – 00:54:23:	is getting closer to the sort of God that he likes, still not quite there yet,

00:54:23 – 00:54:29:	really done until Jesus shows up. But he very explicitly says the earliest parts of the Old

00:54:29 – 00:54:36:	Testament are basically trash. They're not real. They have a God who is evil. I reject them. I like

00:54:36 – 00:54:41:	this Apocrypha stuff. It's very new. It's got a lot of better things in there. I think it's much more

00:54:41 – 00:54:46:	valuable. Now, this is not someone making a claim and saying, well, I think I prefer reading the

00:54:46 – 00:54:53:	Apocrypha to the Old Testament. You have to review such a claim in terms of whether or not the Old

00:54:53 – 00:55:01:	Testament is scripture. If it's from God, if it's the Word of God, for a man to say anything is

00:55:01 – 00:55:08:	infinitely more valuable than that, is an explicit act of apostasy. Next quote I have here is from

00:55:08 – 00:55:14:	a sermon called Mastering Our Evil Selves. It's one of the few times he actually talks about evil. He

00:55:14 – 00:55:19:	tends to avoid that unless he's talking about racism or nationalism or white supremacy. There

00:55:19 – 00:55:25:	were a lot of sermons about that, but not many sermons about the actual sin of the people in

00:55:25 – 00:55:33:	his congregations. King preached, finally, we may master our evil selves by developing a continuous

00:55:33 – 00:55:38:	prayer and devotional life. Through this process, the soul of man will become united with the life

00:55:38 – 00:55:44:	of God. Yes, this is possible. Man can know God. This has been the ringing cry of the mystic

00:55:44 – 00:55:50:	throughout the ages. God is not wholly other. God is not a process projected somewhere of

00:55:50 – 00:55:57:	the lofty blue. God is not a divine hermit hiding himself in a cosmic cave, but God is

00:55:57 – 00:56:03:	forever present with us. The God of religion is the God of life. He somehow transcends the world,

00:56:03 – 00:56:08:	and yet at the same time, he is imminent in the world. So by identifying ourselves with this

00:56:08 – 00:56:15:	knowable God, our wills will somehow become his will. We will no longer think our selfish desires,

00:56:15 – 00:56:20:	we'll somehow rise above evil thoughts, we'll no longer possess two personalities, but only one.

00:56:20 – 00:56:25:	We'll be true because God is truth. We'll be just because God is justice. We will love because

00:56:25 – 00:56:30:	God is love. We will be good because God is goodness. We will be wise because God is wisdom.

00:56:30 – 00:56:36:	As Corey just said, a Christian wouldn't necessarily like some of that, but some of that

00:56:36 – 00:56:41:	sounds like sanctification. A Lutheran in particular would say, yeah, that's the process of sanctification.

00:56:41 – 00:56:51:	We become greater in terms of our possession of God's qualities in our own lives. As a matter of

00:56:51 – 00:56:57:	will in the regenerative spirit, it is possible to sin less and to do more of God's things,

00:56:57 – 00:57:02:	because that's a gift from God. It's no outgrowth of our own persons. It's something that is given

00:57:02 – 00:57:09:	to us as a gift first through the gift of faith. But he's not saying that. Again, when he says

00:57:09 – 00:57:15:	religion, it's a term of art in King's mouth. When he says religion, he's talking about a

00:57:15 – 00:57:20:	man-made thing, and he's talking about, again, the personal reinforcement of morality

00:57:21 – 00:57:27:	in pursuit of ticking alarm, in pursuit of perfecting the world through perfecting oneself.

00:57:28 – 00:57:33:	And now he said, this has been the ringing cry of the mystic throughout the ages. That's another

00:57:33 – 00:57:39:	big thing with him. He sees that mysticism is part and parcel of the genesis of religion,

00:57:39 – 00:57:44:	and then it's perfected. So the mystics early on gave us some stuff, and then what we do,

00:57:44 – 00:57:50:	we refine it, we winnow it down, we turn it into something that we can possess as our own religion

00:57:50 – 00:57:55:	as we go forth in the world and make it a better place. And he has a Christian listening that,

00:57:55 – 00:58:01:	if you're not familiar with some of the other non-Christian beliefs that sound exactly the same,

00:58:01 – 00:58:06:	that might not sound so bad. The problem is that that sounds exactly like some other non-Christian

00:58:06 – 00:58:13:	beliefs, and they have evil ends. When they say those things, they are ultimately pursuing

00:58:13 – 00:58:18:	ultimate evil. And part of why we're talking about some of these things is that Christians

00:58:19 – 00:58:23:	need to know how the other team talks. You can't just automatically assume that when you hear

00:58:23 – 00:58:29:	someone saying Christian sounding things, that they're on the same team. We've got to get past

00:58:29 – 00:58:36:	that, because it's clearly a glaring deficiency in our defenses against evil, against Satan's

00:58:36 – 00:58:40:	wiles. If he can just throw something that smells like Jesus at you, and you catch it,

00:58:40 – 00:58:46:	and you hold it, and you love it, all he has to do is just sprinkle Jesus dust on any manner of

00:58:46 – 00:58:52:	filth and evil, and you're going to pick it up and love it. We have to do better. And so,

00:58:52 – 00:58:58:	by pointing some of these contrasts and similarities out, we're trying to make the case that you will

00:58:58 – 00:59:04:	encounter people in your lives, you'll encounter people who influence you. They may not be

00:59:04 – 00:59:09:	evil like king, but they will certainly be citing men who are evil like king, and they won't know

00:59:09 – 00:59:14:	any better. And so, as a matter of spiritual discernment, it's not just enough to say,

00:59:14 – 00:59:19:	yet he said the right word. We're not talking about chivalrous here. It's not sufficient to say,

00:59:19 – 00:59:25:	well, if he has the right secret keyword, then you let him in, because you know you're on the

00:59:25 – 00:59:30:	same team. As Christians, we have to get past that point. It's been a weakness that has been

00:59:30 – 00:59:35:	exploited for far too long, and it's got us on the ropes. We don't have much left, because

00:59:37 – 00:59:41:	evil happens after. It's not like, oops, I accidentally agreed with a bad guy, but,

00:59:41 – 00:59:46:	okay, I just move on with my day. When you agree with someone like king, you have now

00:59:46 – 00:59:51:	adopted a false religion, and you're along for the ride. So, when he makes his moral pronouncements

00:59:51 – 00:59:57:	from his religion, if you don't know that it's a different religion than your own,

59:57 – 01:00:02
you're probably just going to go along with it. And that is catastrophic for the Christian faith.

01:00:03 – 01:00:10:	As anyone who's been involved in either, say, contract law or formal debates knows,

01:00:12 – 01:00:21:	you absolutely must define your terms up front. Because if you don't define your terms, you can

01:00:21 – 01:00:28:	argue past each other for the entirety of the debate, or you can wind up creating a contract

01:00:28 – 01:00:32:	in which there's no actual meeting of the minds, and so you don't really have a contract.

01:00:33 – 01:00:37:	Because the one party thought you were talking about A, and the other party thought you were

01:00:37 – 01:00:44:	talking about B, and these are mutually exclusive things. And Christians fall, as you said, into

01:00:44 – 01:00:50:	this trap, into this pit. Because we think, oh, well, he used the magical words, he must be a

01:00:50 – 01:00:56:	Christian. This speaker said justification. He said grace. He said sanctification. He said,

01:00:56 – 01:01:05:	whatever it happens to be, that's not what makes a Christian. It is the content

01:01:05 – 01:01:11:	of that confession, of that belief that makes a Christian. And so just because you're using

01:01:11 – 01:01:16:	the same terms doesn't mean you're saying the same things. So we have to be very careful about what

01:01:16 – 01:01:23:	these men are saying when they use these terms. Thankfully, in this case, we have a great deal

01:01:23 – 01:01:30:	of writing, speeches, various other information, where Mike tells us exactly what he believed.

01:01:31 – 01:01:38:	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 – 01:01:46:	us in his own words in many places. So listen to what is actually being said by him. Don't just

01:01:46 – 01:01:53:	latch on to these buzzwords, as it were. The terms are important. The terms matter. And Christians

01:01:53 – 01:01:59:	have fought over the terms for centuries. But you have to make sure that the person who is speaking

01:01:59 – 01:02:08:	is using those terms the way a Christian would, not a secular way. The next two quotes will be from

01:02:08 – 01:02:16:	a study of Mithraism, which, for those who aren't familiar, that is a Gnostic thing. That's

01:02:17 – 01:02:23:	a sufficient explanation for now. It is at this point that we are able to see why knowledge

01:02:23 – 01:02:28:	of these cults is important for any serious New Testament study. It is well nigh impossible to

01:02:28 – 01:02:34:	grasp Christianity through and through without knowledge of these cults. That there were striking

01:02:34 – 01:02:39:	similarities between the developing church and these religions cannot be denied. Even

01:02:39 – 01:02:46:	Christian apologists had to admit that fact. For instance, in the mystery religion's identification

01:02:46 – 01:02:51:	between the devotee and the Lord of the Cult was supposed to be brought about by various

01:02:51 – 01:02:57:	rites of initiation. Tarabolium or Bath of Blood, the eating of flesh of the sacrificial beast,

01:02:57 – 01:03:02:	and the like. Now there was something of this in Paul too, for he thought of the believer

01:03:02 – 01:03:07:	as buried with Christ in baptism and as feeding upon him in the Eucharist. This is only one of

01:03:07 – 01:03:12:	many examples that I could give to prove the similarity between the developing Christian

01:03:12 – 01:03:17:	church and the mystery religions. This is not to say that a Saint Paul or a Saint John sat down

01:03:17 – 01:03:22:	and copied these views verbatim, but after being in contact with these surrounding religions and

01:03:22 – 01:03:27:	hearing certain doctrines expressed, it was only natural for some of these views to become a part

01:03:27 – 01:03:34:	of their subconscious minds. When they sat down to write, they were expressing consciously that

01:03:34 – 01:03:39:	which had dwelled in their subconscious minds. It is also significant to know that Roman tolerance

01:03:39 – 01:03:45:	had favored this great syncretism of religious ideas. Borrowing was not only natural but inevitable.

01:03:47 – 01:03:52:	Think comment on that before moving on to the the next section of this, the conclusion from the

01:03:52 – 01:03:59:	same piece. Aside from the grammar errors which still are great fun to read,

01:04:01 – 01:04:05:	this is just, he mentions syncretism and really that's what we're talking about here.

01:04:06 – 01:04:13:	This is false on its face historically, because in large part the mystery cults that looked like

01:04:13 – 01:04:19:	Christianity stole from Christianity. These things went in the other order. It was not

01:04:19 – 01:04:25:	Christianity borrowing from pagans. It was pagan stealing from Christianity. You have the same thing

01:04:25 – 01:04:31:	with Christmas and Easter incidentally. I know people will try to say that the Christmas tree

01:04:31 – 01:04:37:	is pagan. It's not. It's Christian. The furthest back you can trace it is actually Martin Luther.

01:04:37 – 01:04:44:	There was a similar right that was practiced by some Christian monks before Luther. Luther

01:04:44 – 01:04:52:	took it and introduced it to Christians. That's just one example of many. So he's wrong on the

01:04:52 – 01:04:58:	face of this argument here. Historically he is wrong. But more important really than the

01:04:58 – 01:05:04:	historical argument is that he is saying that Christianity isn't really different from these

01:05:04 – 01:05:11:	cults. These are all religions and all religions are kind of equal. Christianity is just another

01:05:11 – 01:05:17:	mystery religion. You have the Eucharist. That's just another bath of blood or the consumption

01:05:17 – 01:05:25:	of flesh. He's literally comparing the sacrament to cannibalism. This was an accusation that has

01:05:25 – 01:05:30:	been leveled against Christians historically. This is one of the accusations that sent Christians

01:05:30 – 01:05:36:	to the lions in Rome. Incidentally also one of the accusations the Reformed have historically made

01:05:36 – 01:05:44:	against Lutherans from time to time. But he is arguing here that Christianity isn't really different

01:05:44 – 01:05:48:	from these cults and that actually you should study these cults if you really want to understand

01:05:48 – 01:05:54:	Christianity, which is the exact opposite of what a Christian would believe and what a Christian,

01:05:54 – 01:06:00:	particularly a supposed minister would tell you. That's literally his conclusion. Why don't you

01:06:00 – 01:06:06:	just read the conclusion because that's exactly how he finishes this paper. I'll read the conclusion

01:06:06 – 01:06:15:	then. That's funny that he did the work for you. Someone did. The conclusion.

01:06:16 – 01:06:21:	That Christianity did copy and borrow from Mithraism cannot be denied, but it was generally

01:06:21 – 01:06:26:	a natural and unconscious process rather than a deliberate plan of action. It was subject to the

01:06:26 – 01:06:31:	same influences from the environment as were the other cults, and it sometimes produced the same

01:06:31 – 01:06:37:	reaction. The people were conditioned by the contact with the older religions and the background

01:06:37 – 01:06:42:	and general trend of the time. Many of the views while passing out of paganism to Christianity

01:06:42 – 01:06:47:	were given a more profound and spiritual meaning by Christians, yet we must be indebted to the source.

01:06:48 – 01:06:52:	To discuss Christianity without mentioning other religions would be like discussing the

01:06:52 – 01:06:57:	greatness of the Atlantic Ocean without the slightest mention of the many tributaries that

01:06:57 – 01:07:06:	keep it flowing. I'm definitely not going to go to him for hydrological advice.

01:07:08 – 01:07:13:	That's why I cut you off. You could not have possibly said anything bad to make your conclusion

01:07:13 – 01:07:18:	that was nearly as bad as what he did for his own. That's just so bad.

01:07:21 – 01:07:24:	I hadn't read that one before. That is just alarmingly awful.

01:07:24 – 01:07:32:	I always like that the people who write this stuff, you can tell exactly what they've read. I can tell

01:07:32 – 01:07:39:	what he read in psychology. I can tell he read Bart. I know he also commented on Bart, so that

01:07:39 – 01:07:43:	that one helps along with that. But I can tell where he got these ideas, where these little

01:07:43 – 01:07:50:	things came from. And there's no real synthesis. It's just regurgitation of some little snippet

01:07:50 – 01:07:58:	that he picked up somewhere. And so it's Mithraism, because he obviously read someone who was writing

01:07:58 – 01:08:05:	about the mystery cults. Okay, well, if there's some sort of truth in all religions and that we

01:08:05 – 01:08:11:	have to look to all these old cults and paganism to pick up these very, why is there no mention of

01:08:12 – 01:08:20:	Norse religion? Do we have to look into the Eddas for truth? Do we have to look into Hinduism and

01:08:20 – 01:08:28:	Buddhism? It always comes out that it's just a regurgitation of whatever men like this have read

01:08:28 – 01:08:36:	last. But of course, the more interesting and the more salient point, not the less interesting point

01:08:36 – 01:08:42:	of it just being parroting, but the more interesting point is the fact that what he's doing here is

01:08:42 – 01:08:51:	just outright denying the uniqueness of Christianity. And Christianity, if it is true, must necessarily

01:08:51 – 01:09:00:	be unique. The claims of Christianity are exclusive truth claims. If Christianity is true, every other

01:09:00 – 01:09:06:	religion is false. And so when you have someone who is arguing for this sort of syncretism,

01:09:07 – 01:09:12:	arguing to blend the pagan and the Christian and he capitalizes paganism, notably.

01:09:13 – 01:09:17:	Now, I know some people are going to go troll my timeline and point out how you

01:09:17 – 01:09:24:	capitalize. I capitalize neopaganism, because I am speaking of it as a particular specific religion,

01:09:24 – 01:09:30:	and therefore it is properly a proper noun. Here, paganism is used as a collective noun and

01:09:30 – 01:09:35:	should not be capitalized. That is giving some indication of his underlying thoughts on this

01:09:35 – 01:09:43:	matter. But we see this, of course, all over Africa and other parts of the world where we have this

01:09:43 – 01:09:50:	incredible problem with syncretism. This is commented on frequently by missionaries where

01:09:50 – 01:09:54:	the local populations, Lutherans have had this experience, for instance, in Madagascar, where

01:09:54 – 01:10:00:	there's actually a very large Lutheran church now, but they have the problem of syncretism

01:10:01 – 01:10:07:	where the local population will adopt Christianity. They'll go to church, they'll be very excited

01:10:07 – 01:10:12:	about the church, there's dancing and singing, and there's a lot more activity in church in

01:10:12 – 01:10:19:	Africa typically than you would see in a German Lutheran church, certainly. But you have these

01:10:19 – 01:10:24:	individuals who seemingly have adopted Christianity, but then they go home and go right back to

01:10:24 – 01:10:30:	ancestor worship, or they go right back to offering various things at the tombs.

01:10:31 – 01:10:36:	It's just you have syncretism and it's a huge problem, and that is exactly what is being argued

01:10:36 – 01:10:44:	here. He is bluntly advocating that syncretism should be part of Christianity, and if you're

01:10:44 – 01:10:49:	advocating that Christianity, so-called, should be syncretist, you no longer have Christianity

01:10:49 – 01:11:00:	because Christ and Baal have nothing in common. You can't worship both. You must choose one.

01:11:01 – 01:11:05:	If you don't worship Christ, well, you are worshiping the other by default,

01:11:05 – 01:11:13:	but if you try to worship both, you're worshiping Baal, and that is what he is advocating here.

01:11:13 – 01:11:21:	This is just incredibly wicked. This is, again, not something that could be written by a Christian,

01:11:21 – 01:11:25:	and no Christian can hear this. No Christian can read this and think, well, of course,

01:11:25 – 01:11:31:	this man was Christian. No. On its face, it is obvious this author was no Christian.

01:11:34 – 01:11:37:	But he was confessing his faith. I mean, he's telling the truth when he says that

01:11:38 – 01:11:45:	his Christianity, the religion that he called Christianity, does come from paganism. It does

01:11:45 – 01:11:52:	come from worshiping these demons. He wasn't lying. He was lying about our Christianity. He was

01:11:52 – 01:11:57:	lying about the faith of our fathers, but he was not lying about the faith of his father,

01:11:57 – 01:12:01:	and as we've said on a number of episodes, that's a really hard thing for us as Christians to

01:12:01 – 01:12:06:	tackle. When someone comes to you and says, I'm a Christian brother, I hold the same faith as you,

01:12:06 – 01:12:09:	you should be able to just believe him and put your arm around him and said,

01:12:09 – 01:12:15:	thank God you're here, brother in Christ. Instead, we are faced with an adversary who

01:12:15 – 01:12:20:	knows how to exploit that, and so as a result, he sends waves of these people and says,

01:12:20 – 01:12:26:	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 – 01:12:31:	understand how paganism is such a huge influence on the religion that you claim to believe.

01:12:32 – 01:12:38:	That's how faith dies, full stop. That is how the Christian faith will die, unless we're able to

01:12:38 – 01:12:45:	detect and root out and destroy enemies who attempt to infiltrate. The reason that quoting

01:12:45 – 01:12:52:	Martin Luther King, Jr. in Christian churches is wicked is that this is what you're quoting.

01:12:52 – 01:12:57:	You're quoting a man who believed these things, and next week, we're going to get to the things

01:12:57 – 01:13:02:	that he did with those beliefs, and they were consonant. It's not like, oh, he preached one

01:13:02 – 01:13:07:	thing and then he did another. What he preached when you actually understand that he's confessing

01:13:07 – 01:13:12:	a false religion, that makes perfect sense too. Of course, he was doing all those wicked things

01:13:12 – 01:13:19:	because he was openly not Christian, and no one wanted to look. To this day, no one wants to look.

01:13:19 – 01:13:25:	We have been berated in the past, and on past MLK days and all these other garbage made up

01:13:25 – 01:13:31:	holidays, when we say, by the way, that guy was not Christian, we get shouted down by so-called

01:13:31 – 01:13:37:	pastors. They say, no, he was great. He was an important leader. He was certainly a better

01:13:37 – 01:13:43:	Christian than you. Well, in their version of Christianity, yes, that's true. They hold the

01:13:43 – 01:13:48:	same God, the same faith. It is not the one that we hold. I'm perfectly content with that contrast.

01:13:49 – 01:13:56:	I just want to add quickly a little bit of context for those who hear mythorism and have no

01:13:57 – 01:14:06:	idea what is going on here, don't have any real background. A modern analog for this,

01:14:06 – 01:14:12:	something to which you could reasonably and directly compare mythorism would be Freemasonry.

01:14:13 – 01:14:20:	And there is an argument that you get some of the rights and practices in Freemasonry

01:14:20 – 01:14:28:	from mythorism. Mythorism would have been in part derived from the earlier Zoroastrian religion,

01:14:28 – 01:14:36:	which would be Iranian, modern Iran, obviously, then Persian. And so Zoroastrianism through

01:14:36 – 01:14:41:	Roman mystery cults and mythorism, and then the modern version Freemasonry,

01:14:41 – 01:14:46:	just so people have some sort of context for what is meant there by that term.

01:14:47 – 01:14:51:	But when he brought it up, he was basically just being a redditoriathist, and that's the

01:14:51 – 01:14:58:	level of theology we're dealing with here. Very much so. The next essay that we're going to quote

01:14:58 – 01:15:04:	from is called The Sources of Fundamentalism and Liberalism Considered Historically and

01:15:04 – 01:15:10:	Psychologically. It's important to note that when King uses words like fundamentalism,

01:15:10 – 01:15:17:	like Orthodox Christianity, lower case O, he's referring to the Christian faith that we hold,

01:15:17 – 01:15:22:	one that says that scripture is inspired by God, that all the things in the Bible actually

01:15:22 – 01:15:30:	happen. They really, truly in truth happened. No wiggle words, no room to get out of. Yeah,

01:15:30 – 01:15:37:	that's a real physical event. In contrast, when he says things like liberalism, like modern,

01:15:37 – 01:15:43:	like scientific, he means himself. He is always referring to himself in every one of these papers

01:15:43 – 01:15:47:	when he refers to things like liberal. So when that term is used here, it's not insulting,

01:15:47 – 01:15:52:	it's not saying, oh, you're a lib, that's literally the contrast that he has. He writes,

01:15:53 – 01:15:58:	the use of the critical method in approaching the Bible is to the fundamentalist downright

01:15:58 – 01:16:03:	heresy. He sees the Bible as the infallible word of God, from the dotting of an i to the

01:16:03 – 01:16:09:	crossing of a t. He finds it to be unity and a coherence of parts. The New Testament is the

01:16:09 – 01:16:14:	old contained and the Old Testament is the new explained. Upon this first proposition, the

01:16:14 – 01:16:20:	infallibility of the Bible, all other fundamentalist views depend. They argue that if the Bible is true,

01:16:20 – 01:16:26:	that is so divinely inspired, as to be free from error, then all other truths flow inevitably,

01:16:26 – 01:16:30:	because they are based upon what the Bible actually says in language clear and unmistakable.

01:16:31 – 01:16:36:	When the fundamentalist comes to the nature of man, he finds all of his answers in the Bible.

01:16:36 – 01:16:41:	The story of man in the Garden of Eden gives a conclusive answer. Man was created by a direct

01:16:41 – 01:16:46:	act of God. Moreover, he was created in the image of God. But through the workings of the devil,

01:16:46 – 01:16:52:	man was led into disobedience. Then began all human ills, hardship and labor, the agony of

01:16:52 – 01:16:57:	childbirth, hatred, sorrow, suffering and death. The fundamentalist is quite aware of the fact

01:16:57 – 01:17:03:	that scholars regard the Garden of Eden and the serpent, Satan and the hell of fire as myths,

01:17:03 – 01:17:08:	analogous to those found in other oriental religions. He knows also that his beliefs

01:17:08 – 01:17:14:	are the center of ridicule by many. But this does not shake his faith. Rather, it convinces him,

01:17:14 – 01:17:19:	the fundamentalist, more of the existence of the devil. The critics, says the fundamentalist,

01:17:19 – 01:17:24:	would never indulge in such skeptical thinking if the devil hadn't influenced them.

01:17:24 – 01:17:30:	The fundamentalist is convinced that this skepticism of scholars and cheap humor of the lady

01:17:30 – 01:17:35:	can by no means prevent the revelation of God. Other doctrines such as a supernatural plan of

01:17:35 – 01:17:41:	salvation, the trinity, the substitutionary theory of atonement, and the second coming of Christ

01:17:41 – 01:17:47:	are all quite prominent in fundamentalist thinking. Such are the views of the fundamentalists,

01:17:47 – 01:17:52:	and they reveal that he is opposed to theological adaptation to social and cultural change.

01:17:53 – 01:17:59:	He sees a progressive scientific age as a retrogressive spiritual age. Amid change all

01:17:59 – 01:18:04:	around, he is willing to preserve certain ancient ideas, even though they are contrary to science.

01:18:06 – 01:18:11:	That was a mouthful. But again, we hit fundamentalism is in opposition to science.

01:18:11 – 01:18:16:	So if you're a stone choir listener, if you like some of the things that we say,

01:18:16 – 01:18:21:	if you think that we're trying to argue faithfully from scripture, you are certainly someone who

01:18:21 – 01:18:27:	is willing to preserve certain ancient ideas, even though they are contrary to science.

01:18:27 – 01:18:31:	Now when he says science, I don't think I have any of these quotes, but he was very fond,

01:18:31 – 01:18:36:	especially in college, of saying the Copernican universe. He read that somewhere and that sounded

01:18:36 – 01:18:45:	really good. That meant modern scientific knowledge with cause and effect, with rules and order,

01:18:46 – 01:18:51:	all the things that we understand about the universe. In his rational mind, anything that would

01:18:51 – 01:18:56:	violate any of those, anything that would be a miracle cannot exist. Fundamentalism is against

01:18:56 – 01:19:03:	miracles. So when he says, as I said, he calls himself a liberal, he was describing a fundamentalism

01:19:03 – 01:19:08:	here. He was describing Christianity, and he was making fun of it. He was saying, that stuff's a joke.

01:19:09 – 01:19:13:	These people think that when someone says it's a joke, that's just the devil attacking.

01:19:13 – 01:19:20:	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 – 01:19:25:	absolutely the devil speaking. When Michael King speaks, the devil is speaking. That is what we

01:19:25 – 01:19:33:	have here. And just to make that contrast more explicit, he calls himself a liberal constantly

01:19:33 – 01:19:39:	throughout his writing. And so when he says fundamentalist, he is using that as an epithet.

01:19:39 – 01:19:46:	He is using that as a pejorative. And he is using that specifically in contrast to liberal,

01:19:46 – 01:19:51:	which is to say he is saying that he is an enlightened liberal as opposed to these

01:19:52 – 01:19:58:	backwards, uneducated, illiterate fundamentalists who actually believe what Scripture says.

01:20:00 – 01:20:02:	And so when he says, these are the views of the fundamentalists,

01:20:03 – 01:20:11:	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 – 01:20:18:	things. And so think about that list. He basically listed out the core tenets of the Christian religion

01:20:18 – 01:20:24:	and rejected them. Rejecting penal substitutionary atonement is sufficient to declare yourself not

01:20:24 – 01:20:30:	a Christian because that is a rejection of Christ. It is a rejection of Christ's work. It is a

01:20:30 – 01:20:35:	rejection of justification. Of course, he throws in the other things as well because he also rejects

01:20:35 – 01:20:39:	the virgin birth, the resurrection of the body, and he rejects the Trinity.

01:20:40 – 01:20:43:	And the second coming of Christ and a supernatural plan for salvation.

01:20:44 – 01:20:49:	Exactly. What's left of Christianity once this man gets done? This is literally the entire Christian

01:20:49 – 01:20:53:	faith that he indites. And that's why we're burying you with these quotes. That's why we're

01:20:53 – 01:20:58:	reading one after another. And it's cumulative and it's getting long already. And it's like,

01:20:58 – 01:21:03:	we already said that, yeah, he always said the same things. See, if we had started just giving

01:21:03 – 01:21:07:	you five quotes, he'd say, well, if he gave me five more, I would hear something different.

01:21:07 – 01:21:11:	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 – 01:21:17:	all say the same thing for years and years and years. And this man never repented. He never

01:21:17 – 01:21:22:	repented. He went to hell with this confession on his lips. There's no other possible conclusion.

01:21:23 – 01:21:29:	He mocks this stuff. He mocks the Christian faith. He blasphemes with every word. And the fact

01:21:29 – 01:21:34:	that later on, when he was pretending to be a pastor, he used some of these words in ways that

01:21:34 – 01:21:40:	blended in, makes it all the more evil. That's when he says, oh, the devil is mocking these people,

01:21:40 – 01:21:43:	and they think the devil's coming for them when they hear ridicule.

01:21:44 – 01:21:49:	That was mockery. That was Satan sneering at us through time, through his words.

01:21:50 – 01:21:57:	It's astonishing that anyone, like I said earlier, if, okay, assume that when your

01:21:57 – 01:22:02:	pastor comes to you and says, yes, Martin Luther King Jr. is a paragon of moral virtue,

01:22:02 – 01:22:07:	he was a great pastor, he was a great Christian, be more like him, what are you going to actually do?

01:22:07 – 01:22:12:	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 – 01:22:17:	Any man who emulates this, this is damned. I can say that with absolute certainty. I don't

01:22:17 – 01:22:21:	need to know your heart. If you say that everything about the Christian faith is evil,

01:22:22 – 01:22:29:	okay, I believe you. Lutherans who actually pray the morning office or a shorter version of it

01:22:29 – 01:22:36:	anyway, and of course, many others, will start every day in part by praying the Apostles Creed.

01:22:38 – 01:22:45:	That is the summation of what we believe as Christians and run through the Apostles Creed

01:22:45 – 01:22:49:	in your mind. I'm not going to read it for you here or recite it for you here more

01:22:49 – 01:22:56:	realistically. He is rejecting basically everything in the Apostles Creed.

01:22:58 – 01:23:04:	And that is because the religion of Michael King was not Christianity. His religion was the

01:23:04 – 01:23:13:	social gospel. His religion was revolution. His religion was progress with a capital P.

01:23:13 – 01:23:18:	And again, you should be thinking of the Enlightenment when you hear that term because

01:23:19 – 01:23:25:	he is a damned son of the Enlightenment. And those who follow in his footsteps will

01:23:25 – 01:23:31:	spend eternity with him. And so our next selection is from examination answers,

01:23:31 – 01:23:37:	Christian theology for today. This is a second year seminary essay from him.

01:23:37 – 01:23:40:	Read two selections from this.

01:23:57 – 01:24:02:	This theistic view also means that God is imminent in the world. This

01:24:03 – 01:24:10:	seemed the only adequate way to explain religious experience. A God who is totally transcendent

01:24:10 – 01:24:16:	and out of touch with the world cannot come to man in religious experience. Moreover,

01:24:16 – 01:24:21:	this view of the imminence of God is more in accord with the theory of evolution.

01:24:23 – 01:24:32:	Some are going to miss, perhaps, part of what he is saying here. In part, and I can see him

01:24:32 – 01:24:40:	responding to Bart's theology in part here, but part of what he is arguing is he is arguing

01:24:40 – 01:24:48:	against God's transcendence, God's nature as being wholly other from the creation, from man,

01:24:48 – 01:24:57:	from everything. And that is fundamentally a rejection of God because God is his nature.

01:24:58 – 01:25:02:	Now, this gets to be a complicated theological topic fairly quickly, but

01:25:04 – 01:25:11:	God is simple, which is to say God is not composed of parts. Because if you say that God is composed

01:25:11 – 01:25:18:	of parts, you wind up with a real division in God and you wind up with multiple gods,

01:25:18 – 01:25:25:	or you wind up denying that God is God by denying the nature of God. We will probably get into that

01:25:25 – 01:25:32:	more if we do a future episode on Eastern Orthodoxy, because that very much ties into why

01:25:32 – 01:25:39:	palimism is a problem. But what he is saying here is that God is not really transcendent.

01:25:39 – 01:25:46:	God is imminent in the world. This is almost verging on pantheism or panentheism.

01:25:48 – 01:25:52:	Perhaps not quite there, but he may very well not have understood the concept,

01:25:52 – 01:26:00:	so maybe he couldn't make that argument. But this denies the nature of God. And again,

01:26:00 – 01:26:08:	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 – 01:26:15:	with that last sentence. Moreover, this view of the imminence of God is more in accord with the

01:26:15 – 01:26:22:	theory of evolution. And so again, he's just doubling down on this idea that the only truth

01:26:22 – 01:26:27:	comes from empirical evidence, comes from scientific so-called inquiry.

01:26:29 – 01:26:35:	This is the modern religion in a nutshell. This is what many of our fellows walking around in

01:26:35 – 01:26:41:	our society believe. If you cannot prove it with science, then it's not real. Never mind that science

01:26:41 – 01:26:49:	itself is fundamentally based on logic and reason, which are philosophy, which is not science.

01:26:50 – 01:26:55:	Never mind that problem for them. But what he's arguing here is that science

01:26:57 – 01:27:00:	should have a capital S, perhaps, scientism, we might call it modernly,

01:27:02 – 01:27:08:	is preeminent, that we should interpret scripture in the light of science. And so the theory of

01:27:08 – 01:27:15:	evolution is a scientific truth, is the claim here. And so God must comply with what we have

01:27:15 – 01:27:23:	discerned about his creation. I'm sure the Christians in the audience, which is most of our

01:27:23 – 01:27:29:	audience, can see the problem there. If you are working from the creation and trying to tell

01:27:29 – 01:27:34:	the Creator, you have to fit in this box that you made. You have it exactly backward.

01:27:35 – 01:27:45:	Again, this is not Christian. This is deism, in essence. Even worse than deism, because it's not

01:27:45 – 01:27:51:	even really deism, because at least the deist sometimes will affirm God's nature as truly

01:27:51 – 01:27:59:	transcendent. This even denies that. This is almost Buddhist in its conception of the deity.

01:28:00 – 01:28:05:	We will definitely be doing future episodes on Eastern Orthodoxy and on evolution, because

01:28:06 – 01:28:10:	both are at odds with scripture, both are at odds with the Christian faith. And we've had a lot

01:28:10 – 01:28:15:	of requests for it. A lot of these episodes we're getting into now take a lot more research, and I

01:28:15 – 01:28:20:	probably did 24 hours of research for this one, and I didn't get through all of his writings.

01:28:20 – 01:28:26:	It hurt a lot. But these are important topics, so it's well worth it.

01:28:27 – 01:28:30:	You mentioned we'll do an episode on evolution. There was one more thing that I did want to say

01:28:30 – 01:28:38:	that I almost forgot. What he's arguing here, there's an underlying current of an argument for

01:28:38 – 01:28:44:	theistic evolution. Although it's not explicitly theistic evolution, because theistic evolution

01:28:44 – 01:28:52:	would be God set up the conditions of the universe such that life would naturally come to be via

01:28:52 – 01:28:56:	evolution. That's more or less the theistic evolution argument. Some will argue that God

01:28:56 – 01:29:01:	intervened here and there to make sure that it went in the right direction. I mean, does it really

01:29:01 – 01:29:05:	matter if God set the starting conditions or intervened? It's the same when you're talking about

01:29:05 – 01:29:10:	God. That's not how it works. That's not what God did. But that's the theistic evolution argument.

01:29:10 – 01:29:16:	There's a little bit of that underlying what he says here, but this is like the grade school version

01:29:16 – 01:29:22:	of it. Yep. And he's explicit about that in some of his other papers. That was absolutely his

01:29:22 – 01:29:28:	confession. There's so many papers here. Part of the reason I'm reading the titles of them

01:29:28 – 01:29:32:	is we're not going to link them all in the show notes because it doesn't matter. This particular

01:29:32 – 01:29:36:	one, we are definitely going to link in the show notes because I think it's probably of all of them.

01:29:36 – 01:29:41:	If you only read one thing that this man ever wrote, this should be it. He wrote an essay his

01:29:41 – 01:29:45:	second year in seminary. He'd been in the pulpit. He'd been ordained as a pastor for years at this

01:29:45 – 01:29:51:	point. The title is, What experiences of Christians living in the early Christian century led to

01:29:51 – 01:29:58:	the Christian doctrines of the divine sonship of Jesus, the virgin birth, and the bodily resurrection.

01:29:59 – 01:30:04:	Now, the entire thing is terrible quotes, but I'm not going to waste 15 more minutes of your time

01:30:04 – 01:30:08:	reading the whole thing. If you're interested, go read the thing. I would encourage you to because

01:30:09 – 01:30:14:	it's a masterclass in blasphemy. The one particular part that I did highlight, which is amusing because

01:30:14 – 01:30:19:	a couple of minutes ago, Corey specifically said he was refuting the Apostle's Creed implicitly.

01:30:19 – 01:30:23:	Here he does it explicitly. Listen to his own words. King writes,

01:30:23 – 01:30:27:	In this paper, we shall discuss the experiences of the early Christians which led to three

01:30:27 – 01:30:34:	rather orthodox doctrines, the divine sonship of Jesus, the virgin birth, and the bodily resurrection.

01:30:34 – 01:30:38:	Each of these doctrines is enshrined in what is known as the Apostle's Creed.

01:30:38 – 01:30:42:	It is this Creed that has stood as a symbol of faith for many Christians over the years.

01:30:43 – 01:30:48:	Even to this day, it is recited in many churches, but in the minds of many sincere Christians,

01:30:48 – 01:30:53:	this Creed has planted a seed of confusion which has grown to an oak of doubt.

01:30:54 – 01:30:57:	They see this Creed as incompatible with all scientific knowledge,

01:30:57 – 01:31:03:	and so they have proceeded to reject its content. But if we delve into the deeper meaning of these

01:31:03 – 01:31:09:	doctrines and somehow strip them of their literal interpretation, we will find that they are based

01:31:09 – 01:31:18:	on a profound foundation. That's straight up Satan talking. Oh, the Apostle's Creed, that's goofy.

01:31:18 – 01:31:22:	That's just silly. But you know what? We can rescue it. If we say that none of what's in

01:31:22 – 01:31:28:	the Apostle's Creed is literal, if we take it all as figurative, it's actually rich. It's actually

01:31:28 – 01:31:32:	bounteous. One particularly interesting thing about this, there's a man I think I mentioned

01:31:32 – 01:31:38:	before. His name is William Campbell. He was a historian. He basically slots in between Jordan

01:31:38 – 01:31:47:	Peterson and Carl Jung on the trajectory of the modern application of psychology and psychiatry

01:31:47 – 01:31:53:	to religion in reverse order. So basically what these guys are doing is they're using psychology

01:31:53 – 01:32:01:	and psychiatry as a lens to explain how religion manifested among man. They believe exactly the

01:32:01 – 01:32:06:	same thing that King believes in that he said earlier that man created religion as an outgrowth

01:32:06 – 01:32:12:	of some inner expression of whatever. The reason I mentioned Campbell is that he did a lecture

01:32:12 – 01:32:19:	series 30, 40 years ago at this point where he spends 10 or 15 minutes going line by line

01:32:19 – 01:32:25:	through the Apostle's Creed and deconstructing it. I found it fascinating. It was utterly blasphemous

01:32:25 – 01:32:30:	and it was basically like a primordial TED talk that he was doing it. So he's not a theologian.

01:32:30 – 01:32:35:	He was doing it for the purpose of saying all the other religions in the world, all the other

01:32:35 – 01:32:40:	world religions have all this beauty. But when you look at the Apostle's Creed, look how stupid this

01:32:41 – 01:32:46:	is. And he went line by line telling his cackling audience how stupid the Apostle's Creed was,

01:32:46 – 01:32:50:	how backward, how fundamentalist, how goofy and insane and retarded.

01:32:53 – 01:32:59:	I notice these things because it's just so profoundly seemingly out of character. This

01:32:59 – 01:33:05:	is a serious intellectual guy. He's not Christian obviously. But to spend the time deconstructing

01:33:05 – 01:33:10:	the Apostle's Creed, just if you don't know anything, it's like, oh, well, okay, I guess

01:33:10 – 01:33:15:	those Christians have some goofy ideas. Here's something that's almost, it's close to 2,000 years

01:33:15 – 01:33:20:	old at this point. It is the confession of the faith. And I think that's a seminal thing here.

01:33:20 – 01:33:27:	Not only is King mocking and he says, they see this Creed as incompatible with all scientific

01:33:27 – 01:33:32:	knowledge and so they have proceeded to reject its content. That means that they're apostatizing.

01:33:32 – 01:33:38:	If you reject the Apostle's Creed, you're not a Christian. There's an insert that my former

01:33:38 – 01:33:43:	pastor produced that will attach in the show notes that shows every word of the Apostle's Creed,

01:33:43 – 01:33:47:	every word of the Nine Seen Creed, and it shows every Bible verse that they come from.

01:33:48 – 01:33:54:	It's interesting that we think of the creeds as these man-made things. They're basically an

01:33:54 – 01:34:01:	incredibly dense collection of proof texts. It's a word here, a phrase there, but every one of them

01:34:01 – 01:34:06:	comes from Scripture. Now, the difference between the Creed and the misapplication of proof texts,

01:34:06 – 01:34:13:	in which generally we're opposed to, is that they're faithful distillations of what is in

01:34:13 – 01:34:18:	Scripture. It's not that they're twisting and pulling out of context. The Nine Seen Creed,

01:34:18 – 01:34:25:	the Apostle's Creed, clearly expressed the Christian faith and they were created in a time when it was

01:34:25 – 01:34:31:	necessary to confess the God that the Christians were confessing, to say, this is the God we're

01:34:31 – 01:34:35:	talking about. See, that's the same problem that we're having here with King today. Frankly,

01:34:35 – 01:34:39:	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 – 01:34:43:	you worship God, I'm like, okay, great. We're all Christians. Well, which God are you talking about?

01:34:43 – 01:34:51:	Because as Corey said, Freemasons, they say they believe in God. Deists say they believe in God.

01:34:51 – 01:34:56:	All manner of people who are hellbound, so they say they believe in God. And so the purpose

01:34:56 – 01:35:03:	of a Creed and a Credo, Credo is Latin for, I believe, it's not some special thing. It's just

01:35:03 – 01:35:10:	these are the beliefs that I hold. And when they're distilled around what God is, as he reveals himself,

01:35:12 – 01:35:18:	it's a razor. It's something that separates true from false Christians. If you're a true

01:35:18 – 01:35:22:	Christian, you must believe it. Now, that's not to say that someone who doesn't know what it says

01:35:22 – 01:35:27:	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 – 01:35:31:	not that you're disagreeing with a Creed. As I said, you're disagreeing with Scripture because

01:35:31 – 01:35:37:	every word of it is from Scripture. Every word of the Apostles Creed is a quote from Scripture.

01:35:37 – 01:35:41:	So if you say, I don't believe this, this is garbage. This is stupid. You're saying God is

01:35:41 – 01:35:45:	garbage and God is stupid, which is precisely what King said early about the Old Testament. He's

01:35:45 – 01:35:49:	that Old Testament stuff is garbage. There's infinitely more valuable texts than that.

01:35:51 – 01:35:57:	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 – 01:36:01:	believe him, you have to believe that man. I don't think he was wrong. I think he was absolutely

01:36:01 – 01:36:05:	right. I think his confession was true. What his confession was not was Christian.

01:36:05 – 01:36:13:	And so here is the next selection from the writings of Michael King.

01:36:35 – 01:36:41:	Such a view impresses the modern mind as mythological rather than theological.

01:36:42 – 01:36:48:	The objection to the Latin type of theory, the Anselmic theory of satisfaction, the penal

01:36:48 – 01:36:53:	theory of the reformers, and the governmental theory of Grodius is found in the abstract and

01:36:53 – 01:36:59:	impersonal way in which it deals with such ideas as merit, guilt, and punishment. The guilt of

01:36:59 – 01:37:05:	others and the punishment do them are transferred to Christ and borne by him. Such views taken

01:37:05 – 01:37:11:	literally become bizarre. Merit and guilt are not concrete realities that can be detached

01:37:11 – 01:37:17:	from one person and transferred to another. Moreover, no person can morally be punished

01:37:17 – 01:37:22:	in place of another. Such ideas as ethical and penal substitution become immoral.

01:37:23 – 01:37:28:	In the next place, if Christ by his life and death paid the full penalty of sin,

01:37:28 – 01:37:33:	there is no valid ground for repentance or moral obedience as a condition of forgiveness.

01:37:34 – 01:37:39:	The debt is paid, the penalty is exacted, and there is consequently nothing to forgive.

01:37:40 – 01:37:45:	Again, it may be noted that the Latin theory falls short of the fully personal and Christian

01:37:45 – 01:37:51:	conception of God as Father. It presents God as a kind of feudal overlord, or as a stern judge,

01:37:51 – 01:37:57:	or as a governor of a state. Each of these minimizes the true Christian conception of God

01:37:57 – 01:38:04:	as a free personality. This is one of those where you're not even sure where to begin because it is

01:38:05 – 01:38:13:	terrible from beginning to end in two dozen ways. But I guess we have to begin with stating again

01:38:13 – 01:38:21:	that if you deny penal substitutionary atonement, you are not a Christian. That is the gospel.

01:38:22 – 01:38:28:	The gospel is Christ crucified for sinners. That is penal substitutionary atonement.

01:38:29 – 01:38:36:	That is Christ having taken upon himself the punishment for your sins so that you

01:38:36 – 01:38:40:	do not have to suffer that punishment, and to remind everyone.

01:38:42 – 01:38:48:	The debt from sin, the guilt incurred, the cost that you would have to pay, is infinite.

01:38:48 – 01:38:53:	That is why hell is eternal. That is why there is no end to the suffering of the damned.

01:38:54 – 01:39:00:	Because you can never as a finite being pay an infinite penalty. That is why Christ had

01:39:00 – 01:39:05:	to pay that penalty because his death was of infinite value, and so it was the only thing

01:39:05 – 01:39:13:	that could be set against the infinite debt of sin. And that is denied here by Michael King. He

01:39:13 – 01:39:22:	denies the core of the Christian faith. If you deny this, you cannot be saved. And that is what he

01:39:22 – 01:39:28:	did. The short version is really simple. The short version is Jesus didn't die for my sins.

01:39:28 – 01:39:34:	That's his confession. Like, that's okay, dude. He did, but if you reject it, it doesn't count. So,

01:39:34 – 01:39:40:	as Corgis said, he's spending eternity paying for all the sins that Jesus paid for because he said,

01:39:40 – 01:39:43:	that's nonsense. There's no math. There's no transference. God's not mean like that.

01:39:44 – 01:39:50:	Okay, that's gonna be your confession for the rest of your eternity. And there is no rest in

01:39:50 – 01:39:57:	eternity. Yes, God will let you pay for the sins for which Christ already paid. You can go ahead

01:39:57 – 01:40:04:	and attempt for eternity to pay that price. You will never successfully pay the entirety of it.

01:40:05 – 01:40:12:	Because again, infinite and again, infinite and eternal are basically synonymous here. And that

01:40:12 – 01:40:20:	is why hell is eternal because the price is infinite. And so he's paying the price for all of his

01:40:21 – 01:40:29:	many sins in this life because he chose that. He apostatized because he may very well have been

01:40:29 – 01:40:34:	a Christian as a child. I honestly don't believe so. Briefly. He may briefly.

01:40:38 – 01:40:42:	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 – 01:40:49:	He sort of sat there and listened, but we don't know. It is conceivable that he was at some point

01:40:49 – 01:40:55:	a Christian. Which is worse. But as soon as he engaged with scripture, he said, I reject this.

01:40:55 – 01:41:00:	And then he devoted the entirety of his life as a teenager and as an adult

01:41:00 – 01:41:06:	to fleeing as far from God as he could possibly get. This next quote is even worse than that

01:41:06 – 01:41:11:	somehow. This is from an essay. Again, he's still in seminary. He's still preaching. He's an ordained

01:41:11 – 01:41:18:	pastor. This essay is titled, The Humanity and Divinity of Jesus. Certainly, this view of the

01:41:18 – 01:41:23:	Divinity of Christ presents many modern minds within superable difficulties. Most of us are not

01:41:23 – 01:41:28:	willing to see the union of the human and divine in a metaphysical incarnation, yet among all our

01:41:28 – 01:41:34:	difficulty with the pre-existent idea and the view of supernatural generation, we must come to some

01:41:34 – 01:41:40:	view of the Divinity of Jesus. In order to remain in the orbit of the Christian religion, we must

01:41:40 – 01:41:47:	have a Christology. At least he knows there's a center of gravity there somewhere. As Dr. Bailey

01:41:47 – 01:41:52:	has reminded us, we cannot have a good theology without a Christology, where then can we in the

01:41:52 – 01:41:58:	liberal tradition find dimension of Jesus? We may find the Divinity of Christ not in his

01:41:58 – 01:42:04:	substantial unity with God, but in his filial consciousness and in his unique dependence upon

01:42:04 – 01:42:09:	God. It was his feeling of absolute dependence on God, as Schleiermacher would say, that made him

01:42:09 – 01:42:14:	divine. Yes, it was the warmest of his devotion to God and the intimacy of his trust in God

01:42:14 – 01:42:20:	that accounts for his being the supreme revelation of God. All this reveals to us that one man has

01:42:20 – 01:42:26:	last realized his true divine calling, that of becoming a true Son of Man by being a true Son

01:42:26 – 01:42:33:	of God. This is the achievement of a man who has, as nearly as we can tell, completely opened his life

01:42:33 – 01:42:39:	to the influence of the divine spirit. The orthodox attempt to explain the Divinity of Jesus in terms

01:42:39 – 01:42:45:	of an inherent metaphysical substance within him seems to me quite inadequate. To say that the

01:42:45 – 01:42:51:	Christ, whose example of living we are bid to follow, is divine in an ontological sense is

01:42:51 – 01:42:58:	actually harmful and detrimental. To invest this Christ with such new supernatural qualities

01:42:58 – 01:43:02:	makes the rejoinder, oh well, he had a better chance for that kind of life than we can possibly have.

01:43:03 – 01:43:08:	In other words, one could easily use this as a means to hide behind his failures. So the orthodox

01:43:08 – 01:43:15:	view of the Divinity of Christ is, in my mind, quite readily denied. The true significance of

01:43:15 – 01:43:20:	the Divinity of Christ lies in the fact that his achievement is prophetic and promissory

01:43:20 – 01:43:25:	for every other true Son of Man who is willing to submit his will to the will and spirit of God.

01:43:25 – 01:43:31:	Christ was to be the only prototype, one of many brothers. The appearance of such a person,

01:43:31 – 01:43:38:	more divine and more human than any other, and standing closest to unity at once with God and

01:43:38 – 01:43:43:	man, is the most significant and hopeful event in human history. This divine quality, or this

01:43:43 – 01:43:49:	unity with God, was not something thrust upon Jesus from above, but was a definite achievement

01:43:49 – 01:43:57:	through the process of moral struggle and self-abnegation. So this is a continuation of a

01:43:57 – 01:44:01:	quote that I pointed to earlier. When he talks about Jesus, when he talks about Christ,

01:44:01 – 01:44:06:	he's talking about a human being. He's talking about a man who lived and died 2,000 years ago,

01:44:06 – 01:44:11:	who was born from a father and a mother. In the previous essay, he denied the virgin birth, said

01:44:11 – 01:44:15:	there's no such thing that's absolutely impossible. It's just pure nonsense. They made it up,

01:44:15 – 01:44:18:	and they got it from Mithraism, by the way, and they got it from Egypt.

01:44:18 – 01:44:24:	Those were the old Eastern Oriental mystery religions influencing the Christian faith,

01:44:24 – 01:44:30:	because it was all just osmosis. He literally says here that he denies the Divinity of God,

01:44:30 – 01:44:35:	that is his confession. So when he talks about Jesus living a good life and Jesus having unity

01:44:36 – 01:44:43:	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 – 01:44:49:	the most gifted man of all men, and God used him for a special purpose of showing that a life of

01:44:49 – 01:44:58:	sacrifice and of faithfulness and of service to others is possible. Now, if he ever talks about

01:44:58 – 01:45:02:	Christ's Atonement, when he talks about Jesus as an example, this is literally what he means.

01:45:02 – 01:45:08:	Jesus wasn't God. Jesus is dead. He rotted. He's in the ground. He's like any other man,

01:45:08 – 01:45:12:	except that while he was alive, he did some really cool stuff, and it got written down,

01:45:12 – 01:45:18:	and got passed down to us. And so he's an example. This is the furthest thing from Christianity.

01:45:18 – 01:45:22:	Muslims literally have a higher Christology than Michael King.

01:45:24 – 01:45:32:	A lot of this boils down, as is so very often the case with heretics. It boils down

01:45:33 – 01:45:36:	to having a fundamentally flawed conception of sin.

01:45:38 – 01:45:46:	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 – 01:45:55:	realize that, again, the debt of sin is infinite, the breach between man and God is an infinite chasm.

01:45:56 – 01:46:04:	If you don't recognize that original sin is passed down from fathers to their children,

01:46:05 – 01:46:15:	from Adam to whatever man is born last on this earth, if you do not have a proper theology

01:46:15 – 01:46:22:	of sin, you are going to end up somewhere like this. Now, of course, there's a bit of mercenary

01:46:22 – 01:46:28:	dealing here, because a man who spends his life fornicating and beating prostitutes,

01:46:28 – 01:46:35:	engaging in violence, and I could go on for quite some time, and we will in the next episode,

01:46:35 – 01:46:41:	certainly. Perhaps that man has selfish reasons for wanting to minimize the nature of sin.

01:46:44 – 01:46:51:	But if your theology does not account properly for sin, then the atonement becomes unnecessary.

01:46:52 – 01:46:57:	Because if sin isn't infinite, in terms of the debt and the breach, the separation,

01:46:58 – 01:47:03:	then the atonement doesn't need to be infinite. And if the atonement doesn't need to be infinite,

01:47:04 – 01:47:10:	then a man can satisfy it. Because if there's some finite amount of work to be done,

01:47:10 – 01:47:17:	then a man can do that given enough time. And that always becomes the argument of these heretics.

01:47:18 – 01:47:25:	And so you have to get your theology right at the beginning. You have to understand the fall

01:47:25 – 01:47:30:	and original sin and the debt that is owed incurred by each and every sin. Yes, some are worse than

01:47:30 – 01:47:38:	others, and indeed the punishment in hell will be worse if you committed many great sins versus

01:47:38 – 01:47:46:	only lesser sins in this life. But the debt is infinite and can be paid only by Christ.

01:47:46 – 01:47:51:	And so that is why he feels free to deny the atonement, to deny all these things,

01:47:51 – 01:47:57:	because he does not understand just how terrible sin is. He understands it now,

01:47:59 – 01:48:03:	but he did not understand it then. And so that is why he writes these heretical things,

01:48:04 – 01:48:09:	because he gets sin wrong. And there are many Christians today who also do that,

01:48:10 – 01:48:14:	and they are in danger of ending up in the same place.

01:48:17 – 01:48:23:	As we keep saying, you do not have the luxury of getting any of these doctrines wrong.

01:48:25 – 01:48:32:	Are you necessarily damned if you get a particular doctrine in Christianity wrong?

01:48:32 – 01:48:37:	Perhaps not. It depends on the doctrine. There are minor doctrines, there are major doctrines,

01:48:37 – 01:48:44:	there are doctrines that are lesser that are more peripheral. But if you hold to that error,

01:48:45 – 01:48:51:	it never stops there. It always becomes a greater error.

01:48:53 – 01:49:01:	And so move on to the next piece here, the Christian pertinence of eschatological hope.

01:49:01 – 01:49:10:	They argue that such beliefs are unscientific, impossible, and even bizarre. Among the beliefs

01:49:10 – 01:49:16:	which many modern Christians find difficult to accept are those dealing with eschatological hopes,

01:49:16 – 01:49:21:	particularly the Second Coming of Christ, the Day of Judgment, and the Resurrection of the Body.

01:49:22 – 01:49:26:	In an attempt to solve this difficult problem, many modern Christians have jettisoned these

01:49:26 – 01:49:32:	beliefs altogether, failing to see that there is a profundity of spiritual meaning in these beliefs,

01:49:32 – 01:49:37:	which goes beyond the shackles of literalism. We must realize that these beliefs were formulated

01:49:37 – 01:49:43:	by an unscientific people who knew nothing about a Copernican universe or any of the laws of modern

01:49:43 – 01:49:49:	science. They were attempting to solve basic problems which were quite real to them, problems

01:49:49 – 01:49:54:	which to them dealt with ultimate destiny. So it was only natural for them to speak in the

01:49:54 – 01:49:59:	pre-scientific thought pattern of their day. They could do no other. Inspiration did not

01:49:59 – 01:50:04:	magically remove the limitations of the writers. It heightened their power, but did not remove

01:50:04 – 01:50:09:	their distortions. Therefore it is our job as Christians to seek the spiritual pertinence

01:50:09 – 01:50:16:	of these beliefs, which taken literally are quite absurd. It is obvious that most 20th century

01:50:16 – 01:50:23:	Christians must frankly and flatly reject any view of a physical return of Christ.

01:50:25 – 01:50:33:	So literally stop being Christian. I mean, that's it. These are some walls of text that

01:50:33 – 01:50:39:	were reading to you, but the bottom line is no Christian can possibly believe even 1% of this.

01:50:40 – 01:50:45:	Like I said at the beginning, we're not talking about nitpicks among denominations.

01:50:45 – 01:50:49:	We're talking about the beating heart of the Christian faith. There's literally no possible

01:50:49 – 01:50:55:	way for any Christian to say that Michael King is not damned based on these. And as I said,

01:50:55 – 01:51:00:	the only possible argument is, oh well, he changed his mind later. Okay, prove it.

01:51:00 – 01:51:05:	Show me a single place where he changed his mind. What is he doing throughout all these things?

01:51:05 – 01:51:12:	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 – 01:51:18:	resurrection, knowing that he means this. The next quote that I have from later on in the same

01:51:18 – 01:51:24:	paper, the most precious thought in Christianity is that Jesus is our daily friend, that he never

01:51:24 – 01:51:30:	did leave us comfortless or alone, and that we may know his transforming communion every day in our

01:51:30 – 01:51:36:	lives. As Dr. Headleys succinctly states, the second coming of Christ is not an event in space

01:51:36 – 01:51:42:	time, but an experience which transcends all physical categories. It belongs not to the sky,

01:51:42 – 01:51:47:	but to the human heart, not to the future, but to whatever present we are willing to assign to it.

01:51:48 – 01:51:53:	Actually, we are celebrating the second advent, every time we open our hearts to Jesus, every

01:51:53 – 01:51:58:	time we turn our backs to the low road and accept the high road, every time we say no to self,

01:51:58 – 01:52:03:	that we might say yes to Jesus Christ. Every time a man or woman turns from ugliness to beauty

01:52:03 – 01:52:08:	and is able to forgive even their enemies, Jesus stands at the door of our hearts if we are willing

01:52:08 – 01:52:14:	to admit him. He is far away if ugliness and evil, we crowd him out. The final doctrine of the

01:52:14 – 01:52:22:	second coming is that whenever we turn our lives to the highest and best, there is for us the Christ.

01:52:22 – 01:52:27:	This is what the early Christians were trying to say. To be sure, they got an unscientific realm

01:52:27 – 01:52:32:	because they began by saying that Jesus was the promised Messiah, but the question arises,

01:52:32 – 01:52:38:	what led them to say that in the first place? It was the magnetic personality of this historic Jesus

01:52:38 – 01:52:43:	that caused men to explain his life in a category beyond the human. Here we are one with the

01:52:43 – 01:52:48:	unscientific early Christians for all of our thoughts and teachings about the second coming,

01:52:48 – 01:52:52:	whether it be a physical or spiritual stem from the personality that Jesus, whom the Christians

01:52:52 – 01:53:02:	chose to call the root Christ. This is blasphemy. I feel like I need to confess my sins just for

01:53:02 – 01:53:09:	reading this man's words out loud. He denies the resurrection. He denies the divinity of Christ.

01:53:09 – 01:53:15:	He denies the virgin birth. He denies the Christian faith. We have men in our seminaries. We have men

01:53:15 – 01:53:20:	in our pulpits. We have men everywhere around us who use this man as a Christian example.

01:53:21 – 01:53:25:	Next week, we're going to get into the evil to the fact that not only he was not Christian,

01:53:25 – 01:53:31:	but he was a wicked pagan. But this alone, any one of these quotes should be sufficient,

01:53:31 – 01:53:37:	particularly in the current context of this podcast where we're being canceled for things

01:53:37 – 01:53:42:	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 – 01:53:49:	sufficient to cancel him and have his life destroyed today, maybe we should take the seminary

01:53:49 – 01:53:54:	writings of a man who is confessing a faith that he never abandoned. This is his faith. Again,

01:53:54 – 01:53:59:	this is Michael King's faith. It's simply not the Christian faith. It's the exact opposite.

01:54:02 – 01:54:08:	For the sake of contrast and so that we do hear the the word of God in this episode,

01:54:08 – 01:54:15:	perhaps, just a short reading from 1 Corinthians. Now, if Christ is proclaimed as raised from the

01:54:15 – 01:54:20:	dead, how can some of you say that there is no resurrection of the dead? But if there is no

01:54:20 – 01:54:26:	resurrection of the dead, then not even Christ has been raised. And if Christ has not been raised,

01:54:26 – 01:54:32:	then our preaching is in vain, and your faith is in vain. We are even found to be misrepresenting

01:54:32 – 01:54:38:	God, because we testified about God that he raised Christ, whom he did not raise if it is true that

01:54:38 – 01:54:44:	the dead are not raised. For if the dead are not raised, not even Christ has been raised. And if

01:54:44 – 01:54:51:	Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile, and you are still in your sins. Then those also

01:54:51 – 01:54:56:	who have fallen asleep in Christ have perished. If in Christ we have hope, in this life only,

01:54:57 – 01:55:05:	we are of all people most to be pitied. And so when you see someone who is rejecting the

01:55:05 – 01:55:13:	resurrection of the dead, you see someone who is rejecting the core hope that we have in Christianity,

01:55:13 – 01:55:23:	that we have in Christ. Because if we believe, like the Sadducees, that there's no resurrection

01:55:23 – 01:55:33:	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 – 01:55:39:	Christian is that- I'm only laughing. I'm laughing because immortality is literally the last part of

01:55:39 – 01:55:45:	this essay that he refutes. In the same paper that I just quoted, he ends by being a Sadducee.

01:55:46 – 01:55:54:	Of course. It's great that I can predict wicked men. But the hope of Christianity is the resurrection,

01:55:55 – 01:55:59:	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 – 01:56:07:	The atheists who take the truly nihilist position are at least being somewhat rational,

01:56:07 – 01:56:11:	given their beliefs. I mean, insofar as you can be rational at all as an atheist.

01:56:12 – 01:56:15:	But if you die and you're done, if you die in your worm food, and that's it,

01:56:15 – 01:56:18:	there's no hope. It doesn't matter what you do in this life. Everything is irrelevant.

01:56:20 – 01:56:23:	But you'll notice, particularly when we get to the next episode,

01:56:24 – 01:56:30:	men like Michael King never act as if this life is just irrelevant.

01:56:32 – 01:56:36:	Because they always pick to go the exact opposite direction.

01:56:36 – 01:56:40:	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 – 01:56:45:	But I'm going to do everything I can to make this world worse,

01:56:47 – 01:56:53:	because as we frequently say, there is an animating intelligence behind the other side.

01:56:54 – 01:57:01:	Nested in between the denial of the resurrection of the dead and the denial of the second coming of

01:57:01 – 01:57:10:	Christ, he also denies the day of judgment itself. Orthodox Christianity has held that when a man

01:57:10 – 01:57:15:	dies, he sleeps until the general resurrection on the last day at which time Christ, the judge,

01:57:15 – 01:57:19:	will appear to summon all to the bar of justice. He will separate them as they shepherd,

01:57:19 – 01:57:24:	divide with his sheep from the goats, sending the former to eternal bliss and the latter to

01:57:24 – 01:57:29:	endless hell. Needless to say, the average modern Christian finds it quite difficult

01:57:29 – 01:57:35:	to accept such a view of judgment. However, we must agree with the spiritual value of this view

01:57:35 – 01:57:40:	held by nearly all Christians, all early Christians, for the personality of Jesus does

01:57:40 – 01:57:45:	serve as a judgment upon us all. When we set aside the spectacular paraphernalia of the judgment

01:57:45 – 01:57:50:	seen in the literal throne, we come to the real meaning of the doctrine. The highest court of

01:57:50 – 01:57:55:	justice is in the heart of the man after the light of Christ has illumined his motive and

01:57:55 – 01:58:01:	is in our life. Any day when we wake into the fact that we are making a great moral decision,

01:58:01 – 01:58:07:	any day we have experienced nearness to Christ, any day when in the light of Christ we see ourselves

01:58:07 – 01:58:15:	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 – 01:58:20:	life. There's no judgment day. There's no resurrection of the dead. Jesus isn't coming back.

01:58:20 – 01:58:26:	This life is it. I hope that this superabundance of quotes and evidence

01:58:27 – 01:58:33:	hammers on the point, this man was not a Christian. What Christian could possibly quote this man in

01:58:33 – 01:58:40:	good conscience? It is an act of evil to say that Martin Luther King Jr. is anything but a damned

01:58:40 – 01:58:45:	heretic burning in hell. It's evil to say anything else. I will stand before the judgment

01:58:45 – 01:58:50:	throne of God and with that is my confession because the only possible way to obey and confess

01:58:50 – 01:58:57:	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 – 01:59:06:	It's just that simple. So our next selection is from Religion's Answer to the Problem of Evil.

01:59:08 – 01:59:14:	A second view explains physical evils as a punishment for moral evils. Such a view rests

01:59:14 – 01:59:20:	on the principle of retribution. This view goes back to the old Deuteronomic idea that

01:59:20 – 01:59:26:	prosperity follows piety and righteousness, should be righteousness, while suffering follows sin.

01:59:27 – 01:59:32:	Even in the days of Jesus we find traces of this theory. Hence the question is put to Jesus,

01:59:32 – 01:59:39:	who sinned, this man or his parents, that he should be born blind? The most rigorous expression of

01:59:39 – 01:59:45:	this viewpoint is found in India's ancient doctrine of karma. Karma means literally deed.

01:59:45 – 01:59:50:	Suffering is explained as the consequence of a man's deeds, whether committed in this

01:59:50 – 01:59:56:	present life or in some previous existence. Views of this variety continue to exist in

01:59:56 – 02:00:02:	the modern world, but such views are repugnant to the ethical sense of modern idealist.

02:00:02 – 02:00:10:	The modern idealist? Does a good God harbor resentment? Does perfect love achieve its

02:00:10 – 02:00:16:	purpose in such cruel ways? This crude theory was rejected long ago by the writer of the book of Job

02:00:16 – 02:00:22:	and by Jesus, according to John 9.3. The whole theory of punishment as a solution of the problem

02:00:22 – 02:00:30:	of evil collapses with a series of ethical objections. And so undoubtedly anyone who

02:00:30 – 02:00:36:	is familiar with modern writing from any of a number of fields is going to recognize this

02:00:36 – 02:00:44:	rejection of retribution, because this is a cornerstone of prison reform and criminal justice

02:00:44 – 02:00:52:	reform and all sorts of other wicked projects like that. Contrast that with what God says in

02:00:52 – 02:01:00:	the pages of Scripture, where he who sheds the blood of man by man shall his blood be shed

02:01:00 – 02:01:09:	for God made man in his image. God explicitly commands us as part of the unchanging moral law

02:01:09 – 02:01:14:	to enact the death penalty, to enact capital punishment against murderers.

02:01:16 – 02:01:22:	And there are a number of other transgressions that are listed as abominations to God

02:01:22 – 02:01:32:	for which execution is what God demands as punishment. Retribution is the beating heart of

02:01:32 – 02:01:40:	justice. That there are other aspects that can be considered in addition to retribution.

02:01:41 – 02:01:50:	But justice is a matter of retribution. You must punish the wrongdoer. It is not just a matter of

02:01:50 – 02:01:55:	restorative, so-called justice. Yes, that's part of it. If a man steals something, he must return

02:01:55 – 02:02:02:	it. That is restorative justice, but he must be punished for the theft. Because if he is not

02:02:02 – 02:02:10:	punished for the theft, you have not actually enacted justice. He is rejecting justice here,

02:02:10 – 02:02:17:	and justice is part of God's nature. So again, this is just ultimately a rejection of God. It is

02:02:17 – 02:02:22:	also an explicit rejection of much of the Old Testament, because he is rejecting

02:02:23 – 02:02:28:	all the various laws that recommend retributive justice. He is saying that those are immoral,

02:02:28 – 02:02:34:	those are unethical. He is accusing God of evil. So we've got manicheism here, basically.

02:02:35 – 02:02:38:	And that's a view that pops up right here in the very next one.

02:02:39 – 02:02:43:	King writes, It seems to me that the most untenable conceptions of God appear in the

02:02:43 – 02:02:50:	pre-prophetic period of the Old Testament. Here, God has looked upon first as anthropomorphic being.

02:02:50 – 02:02:54:	He walks in the garden in the cool of the evening. He comes down to the tower of Babel.

02:02:54 – 02:02:59:	He comes down in the clouds to speak to Moses. Also, in many of these writings, the moral character

02:02:59 – 02:03:06:	of God is quite low. He comes down to the tower out of jealousy, in Genesis 11-7. He comes to

02:03:06 – 02:03:12:	Abraham in a lie, or he justifies Abraham in a lie. He commands an individual to do something,

02:03:12 – 02:03:18:	and then scorns him for doing it from Numbers 22, 20 through 22. Also, at this period, we find Yahweh

02:03:18 – 02:03:24:	presented as a tribal deity. He is not a universal father whose love extends to all people. So we

02:03:24 – 02:03:29:	often find Yahweh justifying all types of immoral actions against non-Israelites. Even Yahweh himself

02:03:29 – 02:03:35:	is often found to be using deceitful and ruthless methods against individuals outside of his tribal

02:03:35 – 02:03:39:	authority. Finally, at this period, we find that God is not only one among many gods.

02:03:39 – 02:03:43:	To be sure, he is the only one worthy of worship, but other gods still exist.

02:03:44 – 02:03:47:	At this period, the Hebrews were henotheist rather than monotheist.

02:03:47 – 02:03:52:	Certainly, they are the utmost untenable conceptions of God found in the Old Testament.

02:03:53 – 02:03:59:	He damns God. He says that the God in the Old Testament is damned. He is unethical. He is

02:03:59 – 02:04:05:	immoral. He cheats. He lies. He murders. He is an evil, wicked God. Michael King says that the

02:04:05 – 02:04:13:	God of the Old Testament is not his God. Okay. If that's your answer, that's fine.

02:04:15 – 02:04:18:	Our next selection from the writings of Michael King.

02:04:20 – 02:04:26:	The suffering servant passage in the 53rd chapter of Isaiah could well be applied to Jesus.

02:04:27 – 02:04:31:	In a real sense, Jesus is the only one who fulfills this prophecy.

02:04:32 – 02:04:36:	Certainly, Jesus was a lowly man, a man of sorrow and acquainted with grief.

02:04:37 – 02:04:41:	Certainly, the real meaning of the atonement is that Christ died in order that sinful men

02:04:41 – 02:04:47:	might be incited to rise out of their sinfulness and be reconciled to God. In other words,

02:04:47 – 02:04:51:	through his suffering and moral influence, men are reconciled to God.

02:04:52 – 02:04:57:	There has been much debate as to whether this passage refers to the nation or to an individual.

02:04:57 – 02:05:02:	Jewish scholars have inclined toward the former, while Christian scholars have inclined

02:05:02 – 02:05:06:	toward the latter. It is my opinion that the passage refers to an individual,

02:05:06 – 02:05:12:	and Jesus more than any other fulfills its descriptions. Jesus fulfills it in a way that

02:05:12 – 02:05:19:	Isaiah could never have conceived of. To resist laughing several times, it's so bad.

02:05:22 – 02:05:26:	Just the initial contention that the suffering servant passage could well be applied to Je-

02:05:26 – 02:05:31:	No, really. That's just the standard exegesis in Christianity forever.

02:05:33 – 02:05:40:	But it's one that he rejects because this is Isaiah 53. He refers to this multiple times

02:05:40 – 02:05:45:	in other places as Deutero Isaiah. This is not the real Isaiah. This is the second author

02:05:45 – 02:05:50:	who tacked on another third to the end of the book. That's the modern way that these guys read

02:05:51 – 02:05:58:	the Bible. Just taking it is just an assembled collection of scrolls from history,

02:05:58 – 02:06:03:	with no unifying anything, because there's no God. If there's no God, it must just be

02:06:03 – 02:06:09:	a scrapbook. That's basically what they see the Bible as. The reason for him being confused about

02:06:09 – 02:06:13:	this is that Isaiah didn't write it. Some other guy wrote it, and he wrote it a whole lot later.

02:06:13 – 02:06:19:	That's the important part of Deutero Isaiah. The reason I included this is this goes back to

02:06:19 – 02:06:25:	the earlier comment about how, very early on, we're talking about Job, we're talking about Genesis,

02:06:25 – 02:06:31:	none of these ideas had been fleshed out. There was no notion of resurrection of the dead.

02:06:31 – 02:06:37:	There was really no Messiah because if a man's dead, why would he look forward to anything?

02:06:37 – 02:06:43:	Who cares? He's dead. He's not coming back. The Messiah means nothing. The Messiah promise

02:06:43 – 02:06:49:	only means something in the context of the resurrection. The reason that the Deutero Isaiah

02:06:50 – 02:06:56:	prophecies are considered to be relevant in his thinking is that, well, those prophecies were

02:06:56 – 02:07:02:	tacked on right near the time when Jesus came back. Even then, he says, Jesus fulfills this

02:07:02 – 02:07:07:	prophecy in a way that Isaiah could never have conceived of. Well, if you think he wasn't a

02:07:07 – 02:07:11:	prophet, and if you think God is silent and God doesn't really exist, then yeah, I guess that makes

02:07:11 – 02:07:17:	sense. It just goes to show that he absolutely rejects every word of Scripture. He rejects the

02:07:17 – 02:07:22:	God of Scripture, he damns the God of Scripture, he mocks the God of Scripture, and we're told

02:07:22 – 02:07:27:	that we should listen to this man. If this man were alive today, he should be driven out of

02:07:27 – 02:07:33:	town with sticks and stones. That would be the just Christian response to this degree of blasphemy.

02:07:33 – 02:07:39:	And we're not talking about small disputes among denominations. This man is so far outside of

02:07:39 – 02:07:46:	Christianity that it's an infinite chasm. He goes on towards the end of the writings.

02:07:47 – 02:07:50:	We're getting down to the dregs. We're running along here too. But again, I told you we're

02:07:50 – 02:07:55:	going to beat up on you with quotes. This is a point we have to make. We're not cherry picking.

02:07:57 – 02:08:00:	I cut it short. I mean, this is a small fraction of what I could have included.

02:08:01 – 02:08:08:	Later on in seminary towards the end, he was discussing the contrast between Luther and

02:08:08 – 02:08:14:	Calvin. He writes, We now may turn to the criticism of the reformer's views of the person and work

02:08:14 – 02:08:18:	of Christ. Concerning the person of Christ, both Luther and Calvin affirm the traditional

02:08:18 – 02:08:23:	two-nature doctrine. Both were convinced that a perfect divine and perfect human nature were

02:08:23 – 02:08:29:	united in the personality of Christ. This doctrine, however, calls for a reinterpretation

02:08:29 – 02:08:34:	and modification. It was based on a Platonic substance philosophy, which has been largely

02:08:35 – 02:08:41:	replaced today by a philosophy in which we see reality as active or dynamic on the one hand

02:08:41 – 02:08:46:	and as individual and concrete on the other. On the basis of such thinking, it is a mistake to

02:08:46 – 02:08:52:	look upon Christ as having two independently existing natures. As Knudsen has so well put it,

02:08:52 – 02:08:57:	there were factors in Jesus' personality that may be distinguished as human and divine,

02:08:57 – 02:09:01:	but they were not distinct substances. They were simply different aspects of one unique

02:09:01 – 02:09:07:	personality. This personality is to be viewed not as a substance as an agent. Hence, we must

02:09:07 – 02:09:12:	affirm that Christ is a unitary personality in this unity we find in his ego. There is nothing

02:09:12 – 02:09:17:	in rational speculation, nor New Testament thought to warrant the view that Jesus had

02:09:17 – 02:09:24:	two personal centers. We must then think of Christ as a unitary being whose divinity consists not

02:09:24 – 02:09:30:	in any second nature or in a substantial unity with God, but in a unique and potent

02:09:30 – 02:09:36:	God consciousness. His unity with God was a unity of purpose rather than a unity of substance.

02:09:36 – 02:09:43:	Again, this by itself is a literal absolute denial that Jesus Christ is God. Full stop.

02:09:43 – 02:09:50:	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 – 02:09:56:	not picking on a guy we don't like politically. This man has no business having a voice anywhere

02:09:56 – 02:10:00:	in the church or frankly anywhere in any Christian life because as we get to next week,

02:10:00 – 02:10:05:	all of his political activities, all of his personal activities, all of his influences

02:10:05 – 02:10:09:	were themselves downstream from the fact that he's a blasphemer.

02:10:09 – 02:10:15:	I'm sure some attentive listeners will have heard some echoes of Freud because very clearly

02:10:17 – 02:10:25:	Michael King was reading some theologians who had filtered Freud through their writings and then

02:10:25 – 02:10:30:	on to Michael King. And that's why we get some of these comments here and there that are very

02:10:30 – 02:10:35:	clearly reminiscent of Freud. And so another quote from the same paper.

02:10:36 – 02:10:42:	Another phase of thinking in which our two theologians went to an extreme was in the doctrine of man.

02:10:43 – 02:10:48:	Both affirm that man was originally righteous, but through some strange and striking accident,

02:10:48 – 02:10:53:	he became hopelessly sinful. Yet it has become increasingly difficult to imagine any such

02:10:53 – 02:10:58:	original state of perfection for man as Luther and Calvin continually presupposed.

02:10:59 – 02:11:04:	It is not within the scope of this paper to enter into any argument concerning evolution.

02:11:04 – 02:11:09:	However, it is perfectly evident that its major contentions would refute such a view.

02:11:09 – 02:11:14:	We are compelled therefore to reject the idea of a catastrophic fall and regard man's moral

02:11:14 – 02:11:19:	condition from another point of view. Man's fall is not due to some falling away from an

02:11:19 – 02:11:25:	original righteousness, but to a failure to rise to a higher level of his present existence.

02:11:27 – 02:11:33:	And so here again, we see the rejection of original sin, a rejection of the clear teaching of

02:11:33 – 02:11:40:	scripture, a rejection of the fall, contention that man is on an upward trajectory instead of

02:11:40 – 02:11:47:	downward, which is the reality. And of course, original righteousness is how one would describe

02:11:47 – 02:11:52:	the image of God in man. So this is also a denial of the Imago dei incidentally.

02:11:53 – 02:11:56:	So I'm going to read next in part from a sermon. The title of the sermon was

02:11:57 – 02:12:02:	Accepting Responsibility for Your Actions. He preached this in Atlanta, Georgia in 1953.

02:12:04 – 02:12:10:	This tendency to thrust responsibility for our actions on some eternal agency is by no means

02:12:10 – 02:12:16:	a new one. The Genesis writers, plural, found it present in the very beginning of history.

02:12:16 – 02:12:21:	Remember the story of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden? God had placed Adam and Eve in the

02:12:21 – 02:12:25:	garden to dress it. They were given liberty to make use of everything in the garden with the

02:12:25 – 02:12:30:	exception of one thing. They were not to eat the tree of good and evil. Very soon a serpent appeared

02:12:30 – 02:12:35:	on the scene and said, hath God said, ye shall not eat of the tree of the garden? And Eve answered,

02:12:35 – 02:12:39:	we made of the fruit of the trees of the garden, but of the tree of good and evil,

02:12:39 – 02:12:45:	God has commanded, that we not shall not eat, nor touch lest we die. And the serpent answered,

02:12:45 – 02:12:50:	ye shall not surely die, for God doth know that in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall

02:12:50 – 02:12:55:	be opened, and ye shall be laid as gods, knowing good and evil. After listening to those cogent

02:12:55 – 02:13:01:	words by the subtle serpent, Eve yielded to the temptation, and very soon Adam and Eve

02:13:01 – 02:13:05:	were found eating from the tree that God had forbidden them to touch. When God came back on

02:13:05 – 02:13:09:	the scene to ascertain why the sin had been committed, he found each shifting responsibility

02:13:09 – 02:13:15:	on some external agency. Adam's answer was, with the woman's customity to the tree,

02:13:15 – 02:13:19:	Eve claimed that the serpent had caused her to eat the tree, neither Adam nor Eve stopped to

02:13:19 – 02:13:24:	really realize that although they were tempted by external agencies, they were in the final

02:13:24 – 02:13:29:	analysis responsible for yielding to the temptation. Ultimately, individual responsibility lies not in

02:13:29 – 02:13:35:	the external situation, but in the internal response. The reason that I included this is that

02:13:35 – 02:13:41:	this is a sermon in 1953. This is within two years of him saying all the other things we've heard

02:13:41 – 02:13:46:	him say about the Garden of Eden. He mocked the idea that God walked in the garden in a paper.

02:13:46 – 02:13:53:	Two years later, he's saying God walked in the garden. Did King repent? No. He's talking to the

02:13:53 – 02:13:57:	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 – 02:14:03:	a point. Remember the thing about true and truth? He denies that this is true, but he says it's

02:14:03 – 02:14:10:	truth. He's trying to make a moral point to his audience, and so he's perfectly content to go

02:14:10 – 02:14:16:	along because as far as King is concerned, it's all just parables. It's all just made-up stories,

02:14:16 – 02:14:21:	except on Jesus' parables that we know are from God's mouth. These are just man-made stories.

02:14:21 – 02:14:25:	They were useful. It's like Aesop's fables or every other religion that has the same sort of

02:14:25 – 02:14:31:	wisdom literature. When he says that God walked in the cool of the day, that God spoke with him,

02:14:31 – 02:14:36:	that Adam and Eve existed, the fact that he would say Adam and Eve existed is itself false

02:14:36 – 02:14:42:	filed by the fact that he denies that Adam was created by God. He says that evolution is how

02:14:42 – 02:14:51:	man was created. I'm highlighting this because this man was a liar from the beginning. One day,

02:14:51 – 02:14:57:	he's confessing this is nonsense. This is garbage. This is myth. This is laughable. These

02:14:57 – 02:15:01:	rubes eat this stuff up. Thank goodness we have this new knowledge so we know how to be more

02:15:01 – 02:15:06:	scientific than them. Then when he gets up in the pulpit, he doesn't go that far. He goes a little

02:15:06 – 02:15:11:	bit. He says the Genesis writer's plural, which is obviously denying the Mosaic authorship,

02:15:12 – 02:15:16:	but he won't delve into that. That is fundamentally why these men sneak into our

02:15:16 – 02:15:22:	pulpits as God said that they would. They use these small deceptions, and so more and more,

02:15:22 – 02:15:27:	they will take things that sound Christian, the Christians recognize and say, yeah, that's a Christian

02:15:27 – 02:15:32:	up there talking to me about Christian stuff. Then they twist it and they turn it a few degrees

02:15:32 – 02:15:38:	at a time. They're turning a dial so slowly that their audience doesn't realize what's happening.

02:15:38 – 02:15:42:	That's why it's important to listen to all the other stuff he said. Again, this is not a sermon

02:15:42 – 02:15:47:	from 15 years later. This is a sermon within 18 months of him saying all the things that we'd

02:15:47 – 02:15:53:	said previously. This man was a preacher. He was a pastor. He was ordained. He was seminary educated.

02:15:53 – 02:16:00:	He was about to go off to Boston University where he would be given a PhD for plagiarism and other

02:16:00 – 02:16:06:	things. Every word that he said here was a lie in his mouth. It sounds true to us because we're

02:16:06 – 02:16:10:	Christians, and that's a fundamental point that we need to make here. As Christians, we listen

02:16:10 – 02:16:15:	to a man talking about Christian stuff, and we want to give them the benefit of the doubt,

02:16:15 – 02:16:20:	and we want to baptize even their mistakes by saying, I can make that work. There's a time

02:16:20 – 02:16:24:	and a place for that. I'm not saying be ruthless to everyone. No one could possibly survive that,

02:16:24 – 02:16:30:	even podcasters. Yet, it is important to note that this man, because of his other confessions,

02:16:30 – 02:16:36:	we must look with a jaundice to everything that he says. In this sermon, he's just flat out denying

02:16:36 – 02:16:42:	his own confession, but he can do it because he redefined truth, and he redefined God, and he

02:16:42 – 02:16:46:	redefined Adam and Eve in the garden. He does it with a straight face, and he doesn't even think

02:16:46 – 02:16:50:	about it. I don't think he even thinks he's getting away with anything when he does these

02:16:50 – 02:16:55:	sermons. He just knows that he's moving the ball in the direction of hell, which is his ultimate goal.

02:16:57 – 02:17:03:	Our next reading is another selection that is from his PhD program days.

02:17:04 – 02:17:12:	A final element in the Christian hope is the belief in immortality. It is at this point that the New

02:17:12 – 02:17:17:	Testament surpasses the old. The doctrine of immortality was very late appearing in the

02:17:17 – 02:17:22:	Old Testament. The emphasis in the earlier days was on the immortality of the nation,

02:17:22 – 02:17:28:	but with the Christian the individual will live again. This view runs throughout the New Testament,

02:17:28 – 02:17:33:	Jesus, in his argument against the Sadducees. There can be little doubt that every New Testament

02:17:33 – 02:17:41:	writer accepted belief in some form of immortality. The dominant note in the New Testament is a

02:17:41 – 02:17:47:	bodily resurrection rather than a survival of the soul independent of the body, but there are some

02:17:47 – 02:17:53:	signs of the latter view appearing in the New Testament. In the final analysis, this hope in

02:17:53 – 02:18:00:	immortality is for the Christian given by God. Rather than due to some natural immortal state

02:18:00 – 02:18:07:	of the soul, the Greek view, man will live again because he is of value to God. This one is a

02:18:07 – 02:18:14:	trainwreck theologically, at least on par with grammatically. Worst trainwreck theologically.

02:18:15 – 02:18:25:	Man's soul is immortal, period. This is great news if you're a Christian. This is terrible news if you

02:18:25 – 02:18:34:	are not. Man is not conditionally immortal. The soul is not here for a time and then evaporates or

02:18:34 – 02:18:41:	is annihilated when the body ceases to be. This is just nonsense and then in the other part of it

02:18:41 – 02:18:50:	he is arguing for basically the Greek view, the Gnostic view that matter is not necessarily real.

02:18:50 – 02:18:57:	It's the soul, it's the spiritual that truly matters. And of course his exegesis of the Old

02:18:57 – 02:19:06:	Testament versus the New Testament is also wrong. Immortality has always been a part of the Christian

02:19:06 – 02:19:13:	religion. It is a part of Scripture from the beginning to the end. And we went over this

02:19:13 – 02:19:18:	in commenting on some of the earlier quotes, so won't go into depth here.

02:19:19 – 02:19:23:	I think what all this boils down to is that this man just continuously denied every tenet of the

02:19:23 – 02:19:28:	Christian faith at every opportunity. Every time he had an opportunity to write a paper

02:19:29 – 02:19:36:	for school, for seminary in his PhD program, every time he interacted, he put down and writing

02:19:36 – 02:19:40:	things that were antithetical to Scripture. And he was excited about it. As we mentioned earlier

02:19:40 – 02:19:47:	on, when he moved on from Morehouse to Crozer, he was excited at the advancement. He was excited

02:19:47 – 02:19:52:	at the fact that enough of his faith had been destroyed at Morehouse, that he was ready for

02:19:52 – 02:19:57:	the liberalism of Crozer. And these were both Baptist institutions in the 50s. I'm not picking

02:19:57 – 02:20:01:	on Baptist, but like there's no possibility for someone to have come out of those places and

02:20:01 – 02:20:07:	been a Christian. Simply none. No Christian could survive in that environment. It's just it's not a

02:20:07 – 02:20:15:	possibility. The quote that we're going to end on here is one that was from a paper that he plagiarized

02:20:15 – 02:20:22:	himself on, as he did many times. He resubmitted the paper. He talked about paganism being a

02:20:22 – 02:20:27:	tributary to Christianity. And he added on a new paragraph at the very end when he resubmitted the

02:20:27 – 02:20:33:	same paper in another school, that I think really summarizes the entire arc of everything

02:20:33 – 02:20:38:	from where he was to then and where those beliefs are today in the modern world.

02:20:39 – 02:20:45:	King concludes, Christianity, however, survived because it appeared to be the result of a trend

02:20:45 – 02:20:51:	in the social order or in the historical cycle of human race. Forces have been known to delay trends,

02:20:51 – 02:20:55:	but very few have ever stopped them. The staggering question that now arises is,

02:20:55 – 02:21:01:	what will be the next stage of man's religious progress? Is Christianity the crowning achievement

02:21:01 – 02:21:06:	in the development of a religious thought, or will there be another religion more advanced?

02:21:07 – 02:21:14:	That's it. That's what we're talking about here. He was never a Christian. He was never looking at

02:21:14 – 02:21:21:	Christianity as anything other than a skin suit that he could wear his entire career as a stepping

02:21:21 – 02:21:28:	stone to a new, more advanced religion. If you're familiar with Revelation, you know how that ends

02:21:28 – 02:21:34:	up. We're talking about eschatology here. There will be a new religion in the end. It will be a

02:21:34 – 02:21:39:	world religion. And for all intents and purposes, it seems as though the whole world is headed that

02:21:39 – 02:21:46:	way. We have every major modern church body, including our own, abandoning the faith before our

02:21:46 – 02:21:50:	eyes. And everyone's going along with it. Why? Because they're doing it in the name of Jesus.

02:21:50 – 02:21:55:	They're saying, this is for love. This is for God. This is for Jesus. We got to do it. This is

02:21:55 – 02:22:01:	the direction we're going. You're not Christian if you don't follow us. And their religion is

02:22:01 – 02:22:07:	identical to the world religion. I omitted all the things that he said in his preaching and his

02:22:07 – 02:22:15:	teaching that was directly related to anti-racism, anti-white supremacy. His views in the 50s were

02:22:15 – 02:22:21:	identical to the views of our churches today. And that's the reason that we have professors and

02:22:21 – 02:22:26:	pastors quoting this damned heretic. It wasn't that he was a good Christian, it was that they

02:22:26 – 02:22:31:	have adopted the same religion as this man. And so, of course, they have to be on the same page.

02:22:31 – 02:22:37:	Because this new world religion that he describes here, that is the culmination of the development

02:22:37 – 02:22:44:	through Christianity into a final world religion, that's what we're seeing today. We're seeing CNN

02:22:44 – 02:22:52:	and the Pope and swamis and Matt Harrison and you pick it. Anywhere you look, any direction you look,

02:22:52 – 02:22:58:	you're seeing men on the same page morally. That would be a wonderful thing if they were

02:22:58 – 02:23:04:	in obedience to Christ. But we know for absolute certainty, it is the exact opposite. These men

02:23:04 – 02:23:09:	are all in rebellion against God. Michael King was in a rebellion against God every day of his

02:23:09 – 02:23:13:	ministry, every day of his college career, whether or not it was every day of his living life.

02:23:14 – 02:23:18:	At this point, it doesn't matter because his fruits are absolutely evil, his teachings were

02:23:18 – 02:23:24:	evil. The men who follow him are evil. There's no other possible conclusion. As I said, this is

02:23:24 – 02:23:28:	part one, this has already gone very long. Next week, we're going to do one that just talks about

02:23:28 – 02:23:33:	the secular side of this. What were his political activities? How did he take this new religion's

02:23:33 – 02:23:39:	advanced morality and what did he do with it in the world? Because that is the aftermath we're

02:23:39 – 02:23:46:	living in today. He died. He was a martyr for his religion. But what has come in the aftermath of

02:23:46 – 02:23:52:	that is a culmination of his efforts. The men who say that are telling the truth. We are living in

02:23:52 – 02:23:58:	the culmination of Michael King's work in his life. Unfortunately, he served Satan his entire life,

02:23:58 – 02:24:04:	and the culmination of that work is itself satanic and evil. The world you see today online and on

02:24:04 – 02:24:09:	TV and when you go down the street and you see parades and you see disgusting debauchery everywhere,

02:24:09 – 02:24:12:	that is the culmination of his dream. That is what we have today.

02:24:13 – 02:24:21:	Let's contrast his words about a supposed or potential and, in our experience, actual new

02:24:21 – 02:24:30:	religion with what Scripture says from Revelation. I warn everyone who hears the words of the prophecy

02:24:30 – 02:24:36:	of this book. If anyone adds to them, God will add to him the plagues described in this book.

02:24:37 – 02:24:40:	And if anyone takes away from the words of the prophecy of this book,

02:24:40 – 02:24:47:	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 – 02:24:58:	After going over so much terrible theology in this episode, I think it would be good if we end

02:24:58 – 02:25:06:	with actual Christian doctrine. And so earlier I said I was not going to go through the words

02:25:06 – 02:25:12:	of the Apostles Creed then, but I am going to go through them now and so we will close out

02:25:12 – 02:25:18:	with the Apostles Creed. I do actually recommend that you say it along with me

02:25:18 – 02:25:22:	if you haven't memorized and you most certainly should have it memorized.

02:25:22 – 02:25:30:	I believe in God the Father Almighty, maker of heaven and earth, and in Jesus Christ is only

02:25:30 – 02:25:37:	Son our Lord. Conceived by the Holy Spirit, born of the Virgin Mary, suffered under Pontius Pilate,

02:25:37 – 02:25:43:	was crucified, died, and was buried. He descended into hell. The third day he rose again from the

02:25:43 – 02:25:49:	dead. He ascended into heaven and sits at the right hand of God the Father Almighty. From thence

02:25:49 – 02:25:55:	he will come to judge the living and the dead. I believe in the Holy Spirit, the Holy Christian

02:25:55 – 02:26:01:	Church, the Communion of Saints, the Forgiveness of Sins, the Resurrection of the Body, and the

02:26:01 – 02:26:17:	Life Everlasting. Amen.