SPEAKER_1: It is the 7th of August, 2026.
SPEAKER_1: I am Corey J.
SPEAKER_1: Mahler, and this is At Any Cost.
SPEAKER_1: This is episode 37, a Q&A episode.
SPEAKER_1: I will just check quickly to make sure my levels are good on a couple platforms here.
SPEAKER_1: I'm sure someone will let me know in the chat if my levels are not, of course.
SPEAKER_1: I updated OBS right before starting, so hopefully that will make things a little smoother.
SPEAKER_1: But I don't really have any housekeeping tonight, except to say that I have been away from my desk for just about a week, so I did not have time to get into any of the more, we'll say, complex questions on the pending list, so I will probably focus more on the chat tonight, in addition to a few quick questions from the forum.
SPEAKER_1: Before I get into the questions, I did want to note that I did see the question about someone who previously practiced witchcraft, and some things related to that.
SPEAKER_1: I will get into that one next week, because I want to dedicate a little bit more time to that one before I answer it.
SPEAKER_1: But getting into the questions, question one, do the devil and his minions mimic proper worship?
SPEAKER_1: As the devil and his minions only corrupt and not create, correct, do they mimic rightful worship and introduce corruptions and perversions, rather than actually creating new worship methods?
SPEAKER_1: Should we be worried this may have happened in Rome in the East, or that it could be happening in our churches today?
SPEAKER_1: Are there any forms of worship he cannot corrupt?
SPEAKER_1: So, of course, it is correct to stay off the bat that yes, Satan cannot create, and this actually goes to some issues that came up recently.
SPEAKER_1: But this is tangentially related to the issue of original sin, because original sin is not man's nature.
SPEAKER_1: This was...
SPEAKER_1: The names of the heresies don't matter that much when they're ones like these.
SPEAKER_1: You know, everyone knows the big ones, Arianism, things like that, but you can ignore the name, so I won't even bother to mention it.
SPEAKER_1: But there have been men who have contended, heretics who have contended, that after the fall, the nature of man is original sin.
SPEAKER_1: And the problem with that is it would be to say that Satan is our creator, because it would be to say that Satan is the creator of man's nature.
SPEAKER_1: And so, that's obviously false.
SPEAKER_1: He's not the creator of man's nature.
SPEAKER_1: Rather, what he has done is he has infused, as it were, a corruption into man's nature.
SPEAKER_1: There are many ways you can speak about original sin, and that is just a corruption.
SPEAKER_1: It's a perversion, it's not a substance, it's not an actual thing, as it were.
SPEAKER_1: Because every thing is created by God, every substance, every essence, and so those are good.
SPEAKER_1: And so, mankind's nature, even after the fall, is good.
SPEAKER_1: But to get into the question itself, which is, again, tangentially related, worship is good.
SPEAKER_1: All of the forms of worship of God that God has created, and he has created these forms of worship, they are good things.
SPEAKER_1: Now, we can't really create a form of worship of God, because it wouldn't be worship of God, right?
SPEAKER_1: The ways you worship God are things he has told you to do.
SPEAKER_1: You worship God by obeying his law.
SPEAKER_1: You worship God by helping your neighbor.
SPEAKER_1: You worship God with prayer.
SPEAKER_1: These are things God has instituted.
SPEAKER_1: And Satan can corrupt those, he can misdirect them, he can mislead you.
SPEAKER_1: He cannot actually create any form of worship.
SPEAKER_1: So, it's absolutely correct to say that, yes, the forms of worship he has created are perversions of the ones that God created.
SPEAKER_1: So, a good example here, and it is brought up, there's some additional text after this question for the reasoning.
SPEAKER_1: If you would like to read that, it's on the forum.
SPEAKER_1: But, yes, the Asherah and things like that are all corruptions of worship.
SPEAKER_1: In particular, Satan likes to corrupt sort of echoes of worship from all the way back in the garden.
SPEAKER_1: One of the things that is often overlooked in the Garden of Eden narrative, everyone tends to think that it was just one tree in the center of the garden.
SPEAKER_1: The thing is, the word there can be taken to mean tree or type of tree.
SPEAKER_1: So, it may have been a sacred grove.
SPEAKER_1: It probably was a sacred grove.
SPEAKER_1: And so, you don't have to believe that, right?
SPEAKER_1: It doesn't change your faith if you believe it or not.
SPEAKER_1: But we see echoes of that in the corruptions that took place in many places, where they planted so-called sacred groves.
SPEAKER_1: And then those were to worship false gods.
SPEAKER_1: So, they were doing something that they heard via telephone, basically, from their ancient ancestors, from what Adam and Eve were supposed to do in the garden.
SPEAKER_1: And Satan turned that to the worship of evil.
SPEAKER_1: Human sacrifice is the same way.
SPEAKER_1: There are a number of ways you can get to human sacrifice.
SPEAKER_1: Either you can corrupt the sacrifice of animals, which was part of Old Testament worship, or you can corrupt the narrative of Abraham, right?
SPEAKER_1: Abraham and Isaac.
SPEAKER_1: That's essentially what's happening there.
SPEAKER_1: And so, the logic is almost sound, right?
SPEAKER_1: But it's sound in that sort of demonic way, where the thing you're doing is inherently evil.
SPEAKER_1: And so, even if it seems to have a veneer of rationality to it, it's ultimately wrong.
SPEAKER_1: And the reason that it has that veneer is, okay, if I sacrifice the first of my flocks, the first fruits, right?
SPEAKER_1: That's giving something expensive, costly, meaningful to God.
SPEAKER_1: Well, what could be more expensive, costly, and meaningful than my firstborn son?
SPEAKER_1: That's basically the logic of the pagan cults that practice particularly sacrifice of the firstborn son for human sacrifices.
SPEAKER_1: And of course, that's extremely disgenic among other things, and it's part of the reason those populations look the way they do today.
SPEAKER_1: But yes, Satan is definitely corrupting worship.
SPEAKER_1: And the way that you avoid it is, you know the kinds of worship that God approves, and you stay within those bounds, right?
SPEAKER_1: God has music in the scriptures.
SPEAKER_1: Now, I do argue, and I believe, that there should be some level of decorum with regard to music, and there's an article on my website about that.
SPEAKER_1: But music is part of God's worship.
SPEAKER_1: Liturgy is part of God's worship.
SPEAKER_1: Look at all of his worship in the Old Testament.
SPEAKER_1: It's all structured.
SPEAKER_1: It doesn't mean all worship has to be structured, but the formal worship of God in church should be liturgical.
SPEAKER_1: You see the use of written prayers, memorized prayers.
SPEAKER_1: That's what the Psalter ultimately is.
SPEAKER_1: It's a combination of prayers and hymns, as we would call them.
SPEAKER_1: Christ teaches his apostles, his disciples, a prayer.
SPEAKER_1: We should use that one.
SPEAKER_1: It's the Lord's Prayer.
SPEAKER_1: As a Christian, you should be praying that one multiple times a day.
SPEAKER_1: If God gives you a specific prayer and says, I want to hear this one, you're not going to create a better one.
SPEAKER_1: He gave you the best one.
SPEAKER_1: It doesn't mean you use exclusively that prayer.
SPEAKER_1: It doesn't mean you repeat it mindlessly, but you use it, because it's a gift from God we can use to worship him.
SPEAKER_1: So as long as you stay within these boundaries that God has set, and your worship is directed toward God, right?
SPEAKER_1: That's kind of a key here.
SPEAKER_1: You don't need to be worried about going off the rails with regard to forms of worship.
SPEAKER_1: You worry about it when you start creating your own forms of worship, or you start worshiping something other than God.
SPEAKER_1: So that's what Satan wants you to do.
SPEAKER_1: He wants you to do something that seems good, and you go off the rails, or he wants you to outright worship another God, even if you're using something that looks kind of like worship of the one true God, or even would be proper worship, if it were directed at God instead of this other thing.
SPEAKER_1: That's the witchcraft question, which I will save for next week.
SPEAKER_1: Question two.
SPEAKER_1: This is actually sort of the inverse of a question that I answered in my chat, I think, just about a week ago, a little more than that.
SPEAKER_1: So question two.
SPEAKER_1: I am a Roman Catholic, and my boyfriend is Elsemeth Lutheran.
SPEAKER_1: We intend on getting married, and I am somewhat all right with becoming Lutheran because I feel as though I am submitting to my future husband, and after hearing your episode on the Lord's Supper and having my boyfriend explain Lutheranism, it makes more sense to me.
SPEAKER_1: I'm scared of becoming Lutheran, however, because when I converted to the Roman Catholic Church, I confessed that it was the one true church.
SPEAKER_1: I'm afraid that converting to Lutheranism would mean I am breaking a confession I made to God.
SPEAKER_1: It doesn't help that I am being told by Catholics in my church that I will go to hell if I convert.
SPEAKER_1: What reassurance do I have that I will not go to hell if I convert and that I am not wrong in leaving the one true church as they believe it to be, as she believed it to be?
SPEAKER_1: This came up, actually, like I said, in the inverse in my chat recently, because there was a woman asking if she would be wrong to follow her husband and attend the Roman Catholic Church, because he's Roman Catholic and wants her to attend that church.
SPEAKER_1: And I said, no, and I know there will be Lutherans that are angry at me for that.
SPEAKER_1: And I just admonished her, focus on Christ, Christ is your righteousness, Christ is the reason you are saved.
SPEAKER_1: So, you know, if you're going from whatever to Rome, don't go all in on the Mary stuff, don't go all in on the saint stuff, but there are plenty of very good Christians in Roman Catholic churches.
SPEAKER_1: As a Lutheran, I staunchly disagree with some things they do.
SPEAKER_1: I would go so far as to agree with the confession, of course, that some of the things they do are blasphemous.
SPEAKER_1: That doesn't mean that I think they're all damned.
SPEAKER_1: And with regard to going from Rome to Lutheranism, of course, I'm going to say that I don't have the same doctrinal problems, obviously.
SPEAKER_1: That's the reason that I'm a Lutheran.
SPEAKER_1: But I would start out by saying, what is the church, right?
SPEAKER_1: And so, as a Lutheran, when you become a Lutheran, you can, of course, appeal to the confession then, which has a very clear statement of that.
SPEAKER_1: We have the Small Called Articles, and that is Article 12 in Part 3.
SPEAKER_1: So, I'll just pull that up.
SPEAKER_1: And actually, I will just pull this up.
SPEAKER_1: I may as well pull it up in a browser window here, because...
SPEAKER_1: so you can read along if you are watching this instead of listening.
SPEAKER_1: So, in the Small Called Articles, Article 12 of the Church, we do not concede to them, speaking, of course, about Rome, that they are the Church, and in truth, they are not the Church, nor will we listen to those things which under the name of Church, they enjoin or forbid.
SPEAKER_1: And here's the key part of this that I wanted to really read.
SPEAKER_1: For thank God today, a child seven years old knows what the Church is, namely, the holy believers and lambs who hear the voice of their shepherd.
SPEAKER_1: For the children pray thus, I believe in one holy Christian Church.
SPEAKER_1: And holy and Catholic, I know there are some people who will complain about whether you say, the holy Christian or holy Catholic Church in the creed, both have been used for centuries.
SPEAKER_1: The Germans in the Reformation did not start doing Christian instead of Catholic.
SPEAKER_1: I learned it as Katholische Kirche.
SPEAKER_1: I learned it as Catholic Church in German.
SPEAKER_1: When I learned it in German, I learned it in English first.
SPEAKER_1: So don't let someone take you down that particular rabbit trail.
SPEAKER_1: There's no real difference there.
SPEAKER_1: But they mean the same thing.
SPEAKER_1: When it comes to the Church, the Church is all believers.
SPEAKER_1: I've said this many times before, but it bears repeating probably to the point where people get tired of hearing it, which is good.
SPEAKER_1: They should want to hear it that many times.
SPEAKER_1: Adam was a Christian, never a part of Rome.
SPEAKER_1: David's a Christian, never a part of Rome.
SPEAKER_1: Right?
SPEAKER_1: And I can keep listing these men.
SPEAKER_1: Abraham, Christian, never part of Rome.
SPEAKER_1: Japheth, when he walked off the ark, Christian, never part of Rome.
SPEAKER_1: His sons, undoubtedly Christians, never part of Rome.
SPEAKER_1: Rome didn't exist for thousands of years after these men were part of the Church.
SPEAKER_1: So, the Church cannot be limited to Rome, because the Church isn't Rome.
SPEAKER_1: The claims of Rome, with regard to being the Church, are the same as the claims of the Eastern Orthodox and so many others.
SPEAKER_1: They're just false on their face.
SPEAKER_1: Because who are the sheep?
SPEAKER_1: The sheep are those who hear the Master's voice.
SPEAKER_1: Are all the sheep in Rome?
SPEAKER_1: No, because there are true Christians outside Rome.
SPEAKER_1: Even, incidentally, you can use this with Roman Catholics.
SPEAKER_1: Mileage may vary, but Rome no longer says that those outside Rome are necessarily damned.
SPEAKER_1: They gave up on that argument a very long time ago.
SPEAKER_1: The extra ecclesiasticalis, right?
SPEAKER_1: Outside the Church, there is no salvation.
SPEAKER_1: They gave up on that a long time ago.
SPEAKER_1: They specifically said that some Lutherans, they'll, you know, not say every Lutheran, because they don't even believe every Roman Catholic is saved, right?
SPEAKER_1: But they will say that some Lutherans are indeed saved.
SPEAKER_1: The same for some Anglicans, some Reformed brothers as well.
SPEAKER_1: So, that is even in Rome, their current doctrine does not say that you are damned if you are not part of Rome.
SPEAKER_1: So, you don't have to be part of any corporate body to be saved.
SPEAKER_1: You have to be part of Christ Church.
SPEAKER_1: And again, Christ Church is all those lambs who hear the Master's voice.
SPEAKER_1: So, yes, you can be a Christian and be in a Roman Catholic Church.
SPEAKER_1: You can be in a Lutheran Church, you can be in an Anglican Church, you can be in a Presbyterian Church.
SPEAKER_1: Some have better theology, some have worse.
SPEAKER_1: But one of the things, of course, that comes into it is felicitous inconsistency.
SPEAKER_1: So, if you don't believe the things these other churches teach that are false, they don't harm you.
SPEAKER_1: It's better if you're not exposed to them, right?
SPEAKER_1: But if you don't believe them ultimately, you hold on to Christ and the faith that is the free gift from God, that's what justifies you, then you're a Christian.
SPEAKER_1: Just because you're attending a church that is heterodox, dogmatically, doctrinally, theologically, does not mean you're going to be damned.
SPEAKER_1: The standard is not perfection theologically.
SPEAKER_1: The standard is the free gift of faith and holding on to Christ.
SPEAKER_1: So, just cling to Christ.
SPEAKER_1: Perhaps you'll like the famous comment from Luther's wife, who will cling to Christ like a bird of cloth.
SPEAKER_1: So, just take comfort in that.
SPEAKER_1: You don't need to worry about going from Rome to a Lutheran church.
SPEAKER_1: You don't lose your salvation for that.
SPEAKER_1: You're not damned for it.
SPEAKER_1: You're still a baptized child of God.
SPEAKER_1: You still have your faith.
SPEAKER_1: You're just going to have different ceremonies.
SPEAKER_1: Yes, there are doctrinal and dogmatic differences and things like that.
SPEAKER_1: I believe the Lutheran stance is correct.
SPEAKER_1: But anyone telling you that you're going to be damned for doing that is completely out of line.
SPEAKER_1: That's inappropriate.
SPEAKER_1: And like I said, I just advised a woman that if she is going to obey her husband in attending a Roman Catholic Church with him, she's not damned for that either.
SPEAKER_1: Granted, I gave different admonishments in that case than I would going from Rome to Lutheranism, but I'm not going to say that she's damned for it because she's not.
SPEAKER_1: Because again, the sheep are those who hear the master's voice.
SPEAKER_1: Pull up the next question here.
SPEAKER_1: Getting some strange chat messages on another platform, so I will just skip over those.
SPEAKER_1: Let's see.
SPEAKER_1: Thankfully, the chat, I believe anyway, is working tonight.
SPEAKER_1: That's why I restarted the stream, because the OBS chat was not working, but I do have it working now.
SPEAKER_1: At least I see messages coming in, so I assume it's working.
SPEAKER_1: I will pull out the first question here from the chat.
SPEAKER_1: My question is, how does one obtain, this is question four, I should say, how does one obtain power in a godly way and maintain it when maintenance means deception and dealing and managing parties and people that actively seek to destroy you?
SPEAKER_1: You almost have that contained there in, actually, this is question three, rather.
SPEAKER_1: I swapped two questions around on my notepad here.
SPEAKER_1: The AI transcript can deal with that.
SPEAKER_1: It's their problem, not mine.
SPEAKER_1: But when it comes to power, you sort of answer the question for yourself there, right?
SPEAKER_1: If you have these individuals surrounding you, well, that's the problem.
SPEAKER_1: The problem isn't maintaining power.
SPEAKER_1: The problem is how you maintain power.
SPEAKER_1: It's removing these wicked parties from around you.
SPEAKER_1: And you should think of, perhaps, Proverbs 25.
SPEAKER_1: I'll pull up the verse here on my screen.
SPEAKER_1: I won't show it, since we're just reading one verse.
SPEAKER_1: Proverbs 25, verse 5.
SPEAKER_1: Cut off the impious from the presence of the king, and his throne will be established in righteousness.
SPEAKER_1: Well, there's the recommendation of how you maintain power properly in a government.
SPEAKER_1: You remove the wicked.
SPEAKER_1: You don't let them stick around.
SPEAKER_1: You don't let them cause you these problems.
SPEAKER_1: So, if you have a righteous government, and you have righteous advisors, there's nothing wrong with power.
SPEAKER_1: Power does not corrupt.
SPEAKER_1: That statement is dumb.
SPEAKER_1: And it's mostly used by those who want to undermine rightful authority and hierarchy and cause chaos.
SPEAKER_1: So, discord.
SPEAKER_1: And nor does absolute power corrupt absolutely, because that's perhaps even a dumber statement.
SPEAKER_1: Power may attract the corruptible and the corrupt, but it does not corrupt.
SPEAKER_1: It may give you the ability to give in to corruption that is already present in you, your own predilections, your own perhaps besetting sins, whatever it happens to be.
SPEAKER_1: Money does the same thing, right?
SPEAKER_1: There are certain vices you can't really indulge if you don't have the money to indulge them.
SPEAKER_1: So, the same thing is true with regard to power.
SPEAKER_1: But the fact that power does not corrupt means that you don't have to have this system of elaborate safeguards that you think are going to keep people from causing problems with regard to power, because that's not how it works.
SPEAKER_1: And also, the safeguards don't work for other reasons that perhaps get into another time.
SPEAKER_1: But on the other hand, a king is going to deal with the kind of men who are corrupt and attracted to power, and he has to deal with them.
SPEAKER_1: But Scripture is pretty clear about how you deal with wicked men.
SPEAKER_1: If you're the king, you destroy them.
SPEAKER_1: So you don't just let them hang around and give you bad advice and cause you problems and torment your people and generally be a nuisance.
SPEAKER_1: You get rid of them, and you make sure that you have righteous men in government doing what is right.
SPEAKER_1: That's possible.
SPEAKER_1: There have been good governments historically.
SPEAKER_1: There have even been good governments that weren't Christian governments, because being a Christian is not a requirement to be good in the earthly sense of good, right?
SPEAKER_1: You can obey the moral law without being a Christian.
SPEAKER_1: You don't get credit for it, because you're not in Christ, you're still a sinner.
SPEAKER_1: I've gotten to that before, I won't go to it right now.
SPEAKER_1: But you can be a good person, you can have a good government, you can run your state well without being a Christian.
SPEAKER_1: Being a Christian doesn't mean that you can't do that, doesn't change how you go about doing it, at least not very much.
SPEAKER_1: Because you're dealing in earthly reality, you're dealing in fleshly reality, you're dealing in concrete problems with regard to the kingdom of the left hand, not the kingdom of the right hand.
SPEAKER_1: So, the only people who really think that power is a problem and claim to be Christians are like the Anabaptists who say you can't, without sin, hold public office and things like that.
SPEAKER_1: And that's explicitly condemned in the Lutheran confessions and elsewhere, I believe some of the Reformed confessions condemn that as well.
SPEAKER_1: So, it's just, power and Christianity aren't incompatible.
SPEAKER_1: There are those who've tried to argue they are, but those are bad actors.
SPEAKER_1: They want Christians not to be in power, because they want evil men to be in power.
SPEAKER_1: So, cut off the impious from the presence of the king is the answer from Scripture, and completely sufficient.
SPEAKER_1: So, let me pull up some more questions here.
SPEAKER_1: If more questions come in the chat, I'll probably mostly focus on the chat tonight, like I said, but I also have quite a list of questions from which I can draw at this point.
SPEAKER_1: What is the Christian case for physiognomy?
SPEAKER_1: There's a question.
SPEAKER_1: This is one of those questions where I could certainly go into it at some length and in some depth, but to some degree, we really went over that and sort of covered it, not sort of extensively, or certainly not comprehensively, but we covered it in the series on race for stone choir, because obviously that is going to come up in the racial context, generally speaking.
SPEAKER_1: But the reason that physiognomy, and for those who don't know, it's basically looking at the physical characteristics of a person and being able to divine or discern things from the physical characteristics back to, say, personality disposition, things like that.
SPEAKER_1: The reason that you can do that is because the human being is a gestalt, right?
SPEAKER_1: You are something that is greater than the sum of the parts.
SPEAKER_1: You are not just your body, your flesh.
SPEAKER_1: You're not just your spirit.
SPEAKER_1: You're not just your mind.
SPEAKER_1: You're all of those together and more for being the sum of those things greater than the sum of those things.
SPEAKER_1: So, there is part of the underlying, the spiritual or the mental reality, that is going to show through in the flesh.
SPEAKER_1: And it's not just a one-way street.
SPEAKER_1: It's a feedback loop, because as the flesh becomes degenerate and corrupt, it influences the soul and the mind as well.
SPEAKER_1: We don't know exactly how that works, because God didn't tell us, and we don't have instruments to test the soul.
SPEAKER_1: But we know that it happens, because we can look at populations, we can look at history, we can look at individuals to some degree.
SPEAKER_1: Yes, they're outliers with regard to individuals, but when you're speaking about these things, you're talking about more like population level statistics, things like that.
SPEAKER_1: We can look at those realities and see that, yes, you can actually tell, to some degree, things like criminality and intelligence from how a man looks.
SPEAKER_1: And that's perfectly in line with how God designed the world, because insofar as you deviate from what God wanted you to be, now, the deviation is not due to you personally, exclusively, because much of it is due to the wicked actions of your ancestors, right?
SPEAKER_1: And the fact we live in a fallen world and accumulating corruption, degeneration, things like that.
SPEAKER_1: But the way that you look and the degree to which that deviates from what God, again, wanted you to be is the result of sin.
SPEAKER_1: And that sin does not affect just the flesh.
SPEAKER_1: Again, it affects also the mind and the spirit.
SPEAKER_1: Soul, whichever term you want to use.
SPEAKER_1: And so those go hand in hand, down through history.
SPEAKER_1: And so you can look at it physically in a person's features, how far he is from that thing, and extrapolate it to the mind and the soul.
SPEAKER_1: And generally speaking, the connection holds.
SPEAKER_1: Like I said, there are outliers.
SPEAKER_1: We're talking more about population level truth here than individual, because an individual could have, you know, a mutation during the very early stages of pregnancy, right?
SPEAKER_1: You can have some very unfortunate mutation that can lead to something that that individual severely disfigured.
SPEAKER_1: That's less an issue of physiognomy, which should be applied more to that population level truth, as it is just bad luck, essentially, in the Christian sense of luck, which I won't get into right now.
SPEAKER_1: But yes, absolutely, physiognomy makes perfect sense for Christians, aligns with what we know about God's creation, and is a valid tool.
SPEAKER_1: It's not the absolute source of all truth, but that's never the case with any of this stuff, but it is a source of truth.
SPEAKER_1: Just copying some things into my notes here, so that I will have those in the show notes.
SPEAKER_1: Well, I have to make someone else do it.
SPEAKER_1: And someone jokingly asked me, so I will not number this question, but is studying German grammar a good way to exacerbate hair loss?
SPEAKER_1: I think probably there are worse languages for that, but I guess it depends on if you enjoy German or not, because stress will actually cause you to lose more hair, so.
SPEAKER_1: Jokingly, I guess perhaps the answer is yes.
SPEAKER_1: Pull up my backlog of questions here.
SPEAKER_1: To decide if I want to answer this question right now.
SPEAKER_1: I'll give a preliminary answer to this one.
SPEAKER_1: I may not answer it fully, because this is one of those complex ones that I may address at a greater length in the future, but I...
SPEAKER_1: Question five.
SPEAKER_1: I had a friend argue that the Lord's words from the cross speaking of Christ, why have you forsaken me, mean that he is not all-knowing.
SPEAKER_1: I did not know how to respond to that.
SPEAKER_1: So, let me just drop that into the show notes here.
SPEAKER_1: That was not Christ saying that he didn't understand what was going on.
SPEAKER_1: That was Christ doing really one thing, but in two senses.
SPEAKER_1: It's fulfilling prophecy, because this was prophesied of the Christ, that he would be forsaken, he would be cursed, he would become a curse for us, and he would suffer the punishment that was rightly ours, which is what he was doing during his entire earthly ministry, which we call the state of humiliation, but certainly in intensity with his sacrifice on the cross.
SPEAKER_1: This came up in a recent debate, perhaps, and one side was very wrong about it.
SPEAKER_1: So we do not know the exact specifics of how this works, right?
SPEAKER_1: How is one person of the Trinity forsaken, and how does he become the propitiation for our sins on the cross?
SPEAKER_1: We can say some things about it, but we can't understand it fully.
SPEAKER_1: Because when you try to understand this fully, what you get into is the intimate details of the incarnation itself, right?
SPEAKER_1: This is something into which the angels long to look, and cannot because they can't understand it.
SPEAKER_1: That sort of truth is reserved for God.
SPEAKER_1: It's something we can't fully understand.
SPEAKER_1: We can see and we can believe God that Jesus Christ is fully man, fully God, one person, two natures.
SPEAKER_1: We can affirm the things that are said in the creeds and that are pulled directly from scripture, and then we have to accept their limitations to our reason.
SPEAKER_1: The reason that Christ had to be the payment for our sins on the cross, and the reason that it is ultimately penal substitutionary atonement, which I may get into.
SPEAKER_1: I know I have a pending question about that as well somewhere here.
SPEAKER_1: The reason that Christ had to do it is because the debt of sin that we owe to God is infinite.
SPEAKER_1: The only thing that can pay an infinite debt is an infinite sum.
SPEAKER_1: We, being finite, can never pay an infinite amount, right?
SPEAKER_1: Say you're working for $10 an hour, which isn't unusual in the US., unfortunately.
SPEAKER_1: Say you're doing that, right?
SPEAKER_1: How long would it take you to pay an infinite amount?
SPEAKER_1: Make it $1,000, make it $1,000,000 an hour.
SPEAKER_1: It will still take you eternity, because you are finite, and you're doing something that is finite.
SPEAKER_1: Christ, being fully God, was infinite, is infinite, and so his sacrifice fulfilled the law, the righteous demands of the law, in your place, and you are counted righteous when you're in Christ.
SPEAKER_1: So, he is forsaken in the sense that he is cut off and punished in our place and for us, and that's all we need to be able to say about his words, because that is what he was doing at the time.
SPEAKER_1: We don't have to understand exactly how it worked, because we can't.
SPEAKER_1: This is the infinite God doing something that is above and beyond us, and we thank him for it, because he did it for our sake.
SPEAKER_1: So, it's not saying that he's not omniscient.
SPEAKER_1: This is a fulfillment of prophecy, and a fulfillment of what was necessary for our salvation.
SPEAKER_1: But yes, this is one of those things that the Arians tried to bring up and argue that Christ was not truly God, which the problem, obviously, as I just explained, if he's not truly God, his sacrifice wouldn't be of infinite value, and like, then he'd just be another guy.
SPEAKER_1: If I die on a cross, it doesn't benefit you no matter what I say, right?
SPEAKER_1: Because I'm just a man.
SPEAKER_1: He has to be both man and God.
SPEAKER_1: Just make a note for myself here.
SPEAKER_1: Excuse me, someone asked me a question about Nietzsche.
SPEAKER_1: I think I will save that one.
SPEAKER_1: People trying to make me get into the polemical topics comparing John Calvin and Nietzsche.
SPEAKER_1: I already answered the question about speaking in tongues previously, so I'll just comment briefly on that one here.
SPEAKER_1: Speaking in tongues is a gift from God, and it is one of the sign gifts that accompanied the early part of the Church.
SPEAKER_1: This is question six, if I didn't say that.
SPEAKER_1: And it was made basically to give God's imprimatur, right?
SPEAKER_1: To give God's stamp of approval on the apostles he had chosen to spread his word and other men who were speaking his truth at the time amongst the early Christians in the early Church.
SPEAKER_1: The sign gifts are much rarer these days because they fulfilled their purpose in the early Church.
SPEAKER_1: God is just not doing that as much anymore.
SPEAKER_1: It's not to say that there are no miracles.
SPEAKER_1: Lutherans are not cessationists.
SPEAKER_1: There are cessationists.
SPEAKER_1: I think they're wrong.
SPEAKER_1: I think they're obviously wrong, but we aren't.
SPEAKER_1: So could God suddenly give you the ability to speak Romanian if you had the opportunity to talk to a Romanian group about Christ?
SPEAKER_1: Sure, he could do that.
SPEAKER_1: These days, I guess he doesn't really need to, since we have live translation, but it would certainly show something, right?
SPEAKER_1: The miracle would prove something.
SPEAKER_1: So that does, at least can still happen.
SPEAKER_1: God's not, you know, his arm isn't foreshortened.
SPEAKER_1: He isn't unable to do that.
SPEAKER_1: But the admonitions in scripture are important with regard to speaking in tongues.
SPEAKER_1: One, tongues are human languages.
SPEAKER_1: That's what tongue means.
SPEAKER_1: It even means that in English still, it's just an archaic sense that has fallen out of usage amongst most modern English speakers.
SPEAKER_1: But right now, I'm speaking the English tongue.
SPEAKER_1: Earlier, I said a couple of words in the German tongue.
SPEAKER_1: It just means language.
SPEAKER_1: So someone just gibbering incoherent nonsense is not speaking in tongues.
SPEAKER_1: He's gibbering incoherent nonsense.
SPEAKER_1: We have mental wards full of people who do that all the time.
SPEAKER_1: They're not speaking in tongues.
SPEAKER_1: Paul admonishes things to be done in order and not to do it unless there's an interpreter.
SPEAKER_1: Well, if there's an interpreter, you're interpreting a human language, right?
SPEAKER_1: So, that's really all speaking in tongues is the Pentecostal churches get it wrong because they want to have some sign of some kind that makes them feel special.
SPEAKER_1: And right, a wicked generation seeks for a sign, so don't fall into that trap.
SPEAKER_1: I don't remember if I answered this one previously or not.
SPEAKER_1: So, I will answer it.
SPEAKER_1: I know I've touched on many questions similar to this one, but I'll go ahead and answer it just in case I have not answered this specific one in the past.
SPEAKER_1: It's a quick one.
SPEAKER_1: Question seven, how should we respond to miscegenation within the church?
SPEAKER_1: So, the general answer to this is that it is not really the place of the church to deal with it, because this is something that is handled by the state.
SPEAKER_1: This is the left hand of Christ, not the right hand of Christ, first and foremost.
SPEAKER_1: And so, this should be the Christian prince handling this, which just means the rightful ruler.
SPEAKER_1: Preferably, it is a monarch instead of a president or a prime minister as we currently have, but you do the best you can with what you have.
SPEAKER_1: Within the church, I don't think that it is wrongful if a church restricts, and I think that actually a church should, restrict membership, actual membership.
SPEAKER_1: So, in the case of men, voting membership, if that's a thing in your church, which I think voting is fine for certain things, not for everything, but to restrict that to members of the nation.
SPEAKER_1: And that's one of the things that was done in National Socialist Germany.
SPEAKER_1: Only members of the nation could be members of, at least certain of the churches.
SPEAKER_1: You could attend if you were not a member of the nation because you weren't cut off from word and sacrament.
SPEAKER_1: A Christian who is a different race isn't a non-Christian.
SPEAKER_1: You can be a different race than a Christian, you're just a Christian of a different race.
SPEAKER_1: So, whether or not you're in the country is a question for the kingdom of the left hand of Christ, for the magistrate.
SPEAKER_1: But the magistrate should say that you can't be member of the church, an actual member of the church, which I hope everyone knows the difference between a member and just attending.
SPEAKER_1: So, you can't be a member of the church without being a member of the nation.
SPEAKER_1: That's perfectly fine.
SPEAKER_1: I have no problem with individual churches these days enforcing that, because granted, modulo, talk to your attorney on that one, but the state's not going to enforce it right now.
SPEAKER_1: So, this is something that you address by dealing with membership at the church level, because that's the only thing the church has in this area, is again, primarily a matter for the magistrate, not for the priest or the pastor, or the bishop for that matter.
SPEAKER_1: I see someone just joined the forum, so I will go ahead and approve that, just in case he wanted to ask a question that way.
SPEAKER_1: Then I'll pull up the next question here.
SPEAKER_1: The chat on my end has not refreshed for a little bit, so I don't know if it's working.
SPEAKER_1: I'm also going to pull up the chat in the web interface for Restream to make sure that it did not suddenly stop working again.
SPEAKER_1: Tech gremlins, they are unending.
SPEAKER_1: And the web interface shows one-tenth of the messages I've received so far.
SPEAKER_1: That's helpful.
SPEAKER_1: Great.
SPEAKER_1: I will just keep pulling from the backlog of questions in that case.
SPEAKER_1: I have quite the backlog of difficult questions at this point, some of which have to be worded carefully in how I answer them on a live stream.
SPEAKER_1: Someone asked about my favorite gun.
SPEAKER_1: I've answered that one before, but I do generally like either 9 mil or 10.
SPEAKER_1: Other ones are fine.
SPEAKER_1: I'm not going to be the crazy guy who's, you know, hiking with a desert eagle.
SPEAKER_1: I'm not quite a boomer, I'm half the age of the boomer, so.
SPEAKER_1: I'll go ahead and answer a question about communion.
SPEAKER_1: So since maybe it'll be a theme tonight of making certain amongst the other Lutherans annoyed with me.
SPEAKER_1: From which denominations churches in the USA may a confessional Lutheran accept communion these days?
SPEAKER_1: LCMS churches are hard to come by in some regions.
SPEAKER_1: That is very true.
SPEAKER_1: An Anglican church I visited declared in their bulletin that those who believe in the real presence were welcome to commune.
SPEAKER_1: Historically, and in the overwhelming majority, Lutherans are going to tell you, do not commune at other churches, because it is viewed as one of two ways, really.
SPEAKER_1: One would be assent to their theology of the real presence or the lack of the real presence, and say the case of the Baptist, and therefore would be you making a false declaration publicly, or it would be condemned as giving your approval to their false dogma, their false theology, and so it would be rejected on the grounds of potentially leading brothers astray by you holding out an affirmation of what they believe, or at least not condemning it in the way that people think that you should, right?
SPEAKER_1: So, the issue there, I understand why they make that argument, but at the same time, I don't think that it is always necessarily wrongful.
SPEAKER_1: I think, ultimately, to give you the short answer, I think it's a matter of conscience.
SPEAKER_1: You shouldn't commune at a Baptist church because they flatly deny the real presence, so you don't party to what they're doing.
SPEAKER_1: The Anglicans are one of the edge cases.
SPEAKER_1: One of the reasons I picked the question, because you mentioned the Anglicans.
SPEAKER_1: So, I wouldn't give a blanket condemnation.
SPEAKER_1: I'm not going to say it's wrong for you to do so.
SPEAKER_1: I think it is a matter of conscience.
SPEAKER_1: And I think the difference there is whether you view it as you are holding out or assenting to their dogma with regard to the real presence, or if instead what you are doing is emphasizing, I believe these men are Christian brothers, and I am partaking of the Lord's Supper with Christian brothers.
SPEAKER_1: And you're not making that statement about their dogma, their theology, their stance on the real presence, because obviously we do disagree with the way the Anglicans formalize it, because theirs is sort of more like the Reformed than what we believe.
SPEAKER_1: So there's a difference between what we would...
SPEAKER_1: If we were being very specific, we would call it the sacramental union to distinguish our belief from the Reformed view of the real presence, but they do believe in a form of presence.
SPEAKER_1: So that's basically what my answer would have to be.
SPEAKER_1: It's a matter of conscience, and do you view it as assenting to what you believe is error, as a Lutheran, or are you rather affirming that you do indeed believe they're Christian brothers?
SPEAKER_1: Because I think both of those views are legitimate.
SPEAKER_1: Ideally, yes, you attend an LCMS church, and you don't have this problem, but if you're attending an Anglican church, I'm not going to say that you're just flat out condemned because you communed there, because you still have that faith in the proper understanding of the real presence.
SPEAKER_1: The elements are there.
SPEAKER_1: The words of Christ are spoken.
SPEAKER_1: What Christ told us to do is being followed.
SPEAKER_1: And to some degree, whether those other men believe something that is an error or not is between them and Christ.
SPEAKER_1: So, if you view it as participating in their error, refrain.
SPEAKER_1: If you view it as affirming they are Christian brothers, commune.
SPEAKER_1: It's a matter of conscience.
SPEAKER_1: And for that, I would just say, go listen to the episode from Stone Choir for that.
SPEAKER_1: I think we pretty much covered that other than...
SPEAKER_1: I mean, if you want to just a blunt answer, are we sort of in circumstances where that comes into play?
SPEAKER_1: Absolutely yes, which we did say that in the episodes.
SPEAKER_1: I would say go listen to the episode for that one.
SPEAKER_1: That's not really a numbered question, just a sort of quick aside.
SPEAKER_1: A string of questions about psychology, which maybe I'll save those for an episode with a theme.
SPEAKER_1: So I can find that question about...
SPEAKER_1: No, I have several questions on X that just showed up.
SPEAKER_1: Some questions on X are from a crazy person, so I will skip those.
SPEAKER_1: No need to burden the stream with those.
SPEAKER_1: I think I will pull up instead...
SPEAKER_1: I had a question from someone about, like I said, PSA, so let me pull that one up.
SPEAKER_1: I sort of touched on this because I spoke in reply to an earlier question about the punishment on the cross, the nature of that with regard to Christ being forsaken, the fulfillment of prophecy.
SPEAKER_1: And I don't know that I really want to get into the morass of the Eastern misconception with regard to the penalty paid by Christ on the cross.
SPEAKER_1: Penal substitutionary atonement is the gospel, and so denying it is denying the gospel is to be damned.
SPEAKER_1: That is the baseline there.
SPEAKER_1: I guess I'll just make this sort of a short bit on penal substitutionary atonement that could be question nine.
SPEAKER_1: So penal substitutionary atonement, as the phrase itself kind of rather heavily implies, is that there is a juridical, which is, say, legal or judicial aspect to, core aspect to what is going on with Christ's earthly ministry, his submission, his fulfilling of the law, and ultimately his death and conquering sin, death, and the devil as resurrection.
SPEAKER_1: And bear in mind, he says, it is finished, so it's finished on the cross.
SPEAKER_1: After that point, it is his triumph.
SPEAKER_1: That is not yet the state of exaltation, but he has finished the state of humiliation, he's completed his work, so the descent into hell and things like that are after that state of humiliation, because Christ says, it is finished.
SPEAKER_1: He did not say it's almost finished.
SPEAKER_1: But with regard to penal substitutionary atonement, the penal part I explained, substitutionary, Christ is the substitute.
SPEAKER_1: Christ is the sacrificial lamb.
SPEAKER_1: He's taking your place with his perfect life and his death on the cross, because remember, it's not just the death on the cross.
SPEAKER_1: He fulfilled the law with his perfect life.
SPEAKER_1: That was a necessary part of it.
SPEAKER_1: He had a full earthly ministry, not just one very bad day at the end.
SPEAKER_1: All of it's important.
SPEAKER_1: It's all the state of humiliation.
SPEAKER_1: It's all the fulfillment of the righteous demands of the law.
SPEAKER_1: And you have this juridical language all throughout the scriptures.
SPEAKER_1: The words for it are all legal terms in the Greek, and you can look them up.
SPEAKER_1: I obviously don't have all of this prepared, so I won't get too technical right now.
SPEAKER_1: But you can get into the family of words that deals with being righteous, with righteousness, that deals with being justified.
SPEAKER_1: These are legal terms with legal definitions.
SPEAKER_1: And when the Greek-speaking audience of the early church heard these words, they had no doubt what was being said, because the Greek world knew what a court was.
SPEAKER_1: They knew what court proceedings were.
SPEAKER_1: They knew what it meant to be declared guilty or not guilty or whatever it happened to be.
SPEAKER_1: These were not foreign concepts to them.
SPEAKER_1: So the forensic justification as particularly those who oppose the correct Western view like to call it, is actual scripture.
SPEAKER_1: You are not made righteous by virtue of the declaration.
SPEAKER_1: This is not to say that God's words are ineffective.
SPEAKER_1: It's not to say that the things that God declares do not come to pass by his having spoken them.
SPEAKER_1: That is the reason that, for instance, the creation, God speaks creation into being.
SPEAKER_1: The problem with the East, and some others as well, is they don't understand the system that God is using.
SPEAKER_1: Christ is the propitiation.
SPEAKER_1: Christ is the payment for the debt that is rightfully yours because he fulfilled and suffered the things that you were supposed to fulfill and that you should have suffered.
SPEAKER_1: So that's been paid, but it is credited to you via faith.
SPEAKER_1: And so, faith is the means that God uses to make you righteous.
SPEAKER_1: First, you are made righteous in the judicial sense of declared righteous for the sake of Christ's work.
SPEAKER_1: Justification, that's the one and done.
SPEAKER_1: That's monergism, God did everything, you just benefit.
SPEAKER_1: Then there is sanctification, which takes place in this life.
SPEAKER_1: When you start to believe, you become progressively more righteous.
SPEAKER_1: That does not finish in this life, because you are still burdened by living in a fallen world, among fallen people, in corrupt fallen flesh.
SPEAKER_1: That doesn't go away until you are finally and fully regenerated in the resurrection of the just.
SPEAKER_1: And then you are glorified.
SPEAKER_1: And so, you can think of the golden chain from Romans 8, and you can write the whole way that it works.
SPEAKER_1: There is the election, there is calling, there is justification, there is sanctification.
SPEAKER_1: That's the process, how it works.
SPEAKER_1: It plays out with regard to God's decree of election and eternity past, with the means of grace in time, and then glorification and eternity future.
SPEAKER_1: That's the short version of this.
SPEAKER_1: And the reason that you have to understand that it is penal substitutionary atonement isn't just all of the juridical language.
SPEAKER_1: I'm not talking about, you know, three examples.
SPEAKER_1: I'm talking about 80, 90 examples of this occurring in scripture.
SPEAKER_1: This is all over the place, abundantly clear.
SPEAKER_1: You cannot get rid of it because everything else breaks down if you try to make some other theory of the atonement be your core understanding.
SPEAKER_1: And that's a key point in this.
SPEAKER_1: We don't deny Christ as Victor.
SPEAKER_1: We don't deny that Christ is a model of moral behavior and moral living.
SPEAKER_1: We don't deny these other theories of atonement.
SPEAKER_1: We don't deny ransom theory.
SPEAKER_1: They're not the core.
SPEAKER_1: The core is penal substitutionary atonement.
SPEAKER_1: The core is that you are accused by the law because the law has righteous demands placed upon you by God, your maker.
SPEAKER_1: You are his creature.
SPEAKER_1: You owe him that.
SPEAKER_1: You failed.
SPEAKER_1: Having failed, the law has punishments that you should rightly suffer.
SPEAKER_1: You will not suffer them because Christ paid for them as your substitute.
SPEAKER_1: He atoned for them.
SPEAKER_1: He atoned for you.
SPEAKER_1: That's the gospel.
SPEAKER_1: If you jettison that, you have removed the heart of the Christian faith, and you are no longer Christian.
SPEAKER_1: That is why I find it so important to condemn the dogma, the theology of the East, because their whole thing, mostly among the convertodox in the West, is because they have left their former faith and now hate it, they attack the part that is the core of it.
SPEAKER_1: The problem is they're attacking the gospel itself.
SPEAKER_1: And that's the reason that I've said bluntly that they are damned.
SPEAKER_1: If you deny that, you have denied Christ and you are damned, period.
SPEAKER_1: There is no way around that you can't mince words with that, because if you mince words, you are going to damn others by letting them walk the same path.
SPEAKER_1: So, that's the overview of penal substitutionary atonement.
SPEAKER_1: I'm not going to get into Essence, Energy's distinction tonight.
SPEAKER_1: Honestly, I don't really even ever want to get into it because it's just a morass of nonsensical philosophy.
SPEAKER_1: We got into it to some degree in the episode on Eastern Orthodoxy.
SPEAKER_1: I get into it in my article, on my website about Eastern Orthodoxy.
SPEAKER_1: So, listen to that, read the article.
SPEAKER_1: I think that's sufficient.
SPEAKER_1: It gets to be somewhat technical philosophy that most men don't ever need to hear.
SPEAKER_1: The short version is just that it creates a real distinction in God.
SPEAKER_1: And for those who don't know what that is, a real distinction means that God is composed of parts.
SPEAKER_1: If God is composed of parts, he's not simple in the philosophical sense.
SPEAKER_1: And what you've done with that real distinction, if you've created multiple deities, because that which is truly distinct isn't unitary, it's not one thing, and therefore, you're polytheist.
SPEAKER_1: That's the short version.
SPEAKER_1: If you didn't understand that, it doesn't matter.
SPEAKER_1: Because unless you are thinking about swimming the Bosphorus, it's utterly irrelevant.
SPEAKER_1: But it is heretical.
SPEAKER_1: Because it's polytheist.
SPEAKER_1: My replies on X are full of insane people asking things that are potentially criminal in some of those cases.
SPEAKER_1: So I think I will stick with my backlog of questions then.
SPEAKER_1: Seems like a better plan.
SPEAKER_1: Question about psychoanalysis.
SPEAKER_1: I've answered that one previously, so I would just refer to previous episodes.
SPEAKER_1: The short version is that...
SPEAKER_1: Psychology more generally, but psychoanalysts And the analysis specifically.
SPEAKER_1: has valuable insights.
SPEAKER_1: I guess this is question 10, as it were.
SPEAKER_1: But it will be short.
SPEAKER_1: However, cum granos salis, right, take it with a grain of salt.
SPEAKER_1: Because a lot of those men, particularly Freud, were evil, anti-Christian, in Freud's case a Jew, ungodly men.
SPEAKER_1: And so even if they had some insights that were correct, it's not necessarily worth sorting through all of the other stuff that is either nonsense or outright wicked, in order to find the bits that had some value.
SPEAKER_1: Jung is different.
SPEAKER_1: There's a lot of good stuff in his writings.
SPEAKER_1: There's also some Eastern mysticism and things like that, that are not beneficial, and Christians should generally avoid.
SPEAKER_1: This sort of gets into a larger topic that I don't want to get into right now, but the short version is just because a man isn't 100% right, or always perfect, doesn't mean we can't benefit from the parts of his work when he was correct, where he did good things, right?
SPEAKER_1: This desire to say, well, you can read that man, but all these caveats, or like, I like his work, but then all these...
SPEAKER_1: It should never be the assumption that a recommendation of something or a lack of a condemnation of something is an implied argument that the man or the source of the book, whatever, is perfect, right?
SPEAKER_1: Again, fallen world, fallen men, we're not dealing with perfection.
SPEAKER_1: But yes, there are some valuable insights in the field of psychoanalysis, and it's not all just evil anti-Christian Jews.
SPEAKER_1: But some of it is.
SPEAKER_1: So, you have a conscience.
SPEAKER_1: God has given you that.
SPEAKER_1: Compare what you see to scripture when scripture speaks to it, and rely on your conscience.
SPEAKER_1: And this is only if you have some reason to deal with this stuff, right?
SPEAKER_1: If you have no reason to deal with psychoanalysis, I don't know why you'd be reading it.
SPEAKER_1: It's not like it's a hobby or enjoyable.
SPEAKER_1: And maybe for some men, but I think unless you're working in the field, you probably don't need to be reading these things.
SPEAKER_1: And just to make sure that I'm clear, there are things Christians should never read, right?
SPEAKER_1: There are evil works that should not exist and no one should read.
SPEAKER_1: I don't think that psychoanalysis is in that category.
SPEAKER_1: Immediately scroll and see another question about Nietzsche, which it's almost the same answer, right?
SPEAKER_1: There's value, but also insanity and nonsense at times.
SPEAKER_1: Same is true of most philosophers.
SPEAKER_1: Let me see here.
SPEAKER_1: Answer a few more questions since I have not eaten dinner yet, and it is eight o'clock here, so.
SPEAKER_1: But if anyone has any more questions, I would recommend you get them into the chat now, because I think I'll only answer maybe two or three more for this stream.
SPEAKER_1: And yes, I do know that I have a backlog of some questions from last week, week before last week, but like I said, I have been away from my desk for a week, and did not have time to really get any of that done this past week.
SPEAKER_1: Another question on Eastern Orthodoxy.
SPEAKER_1: I think I've probably said enough about Eastern Orthodoxy recently that most men probably have a pretty good idea of my views and why I hold them.
SPEAKER_1: And again, we did the episode on that, and I wrote an article on it, which I will make a note for myself to link that article.
SPEAKER_1: Someone asked about the proper understanding of Ecclesiastes.
SPEAKER_1: I think I'd like to save that one for maybe just a stream specifically on that.
SPEAKER_1: That's one of my favorite books in Scripture, so.
SPEAKER_1: Of course, my drink is dripping on me.
SPEAKER_1: What is the Christian position on insurance, both as a concept and as the industry exists today?
SPEAKER_1: So, I guess this is question 10.
SPEAKER_1: This is another one of those where, historically, if you were to ask...
SPEAKER_1: Actually, this is question 11, because I answered that question about psychoanalysis briefly.
SPEAKER_1: Historically, and this includes a number of Lutheran writers, in particular, I can think of Walter, CFW.
SPEAKER_1: Walter wrote about this at one point.
SPEAKER_1: Many of them opposed things like life insurance and things like that on the grounds of it being a lack of trust in God and also some of the corrupting aspects of it and things like that.
SPEAKER_1: I would agree with them under the same circumstances in which they were operating.
SPEAKER_1: But today, I think that, generally speaking, it is often a wise thing to insure the things that it makes sense to insure, right?
SPEAKER_1: Like, your vehicle should be insured.
SPEAKER_1: If you are a man who works in a risky job and you are the sole provider for your family, which is often the case, you should probably have life insurance.
SPEAKER_1: You know, I have insurance on various things as well, right?
SPEAKER_1: Like the phone that I'm using right now as my camera.
SPEAKER_1: I have insurance on that.
SPEAKER_1: I don't think that insurance is necessarily inherently wrongful.
SPEAKER_1: I think that the industry itself is deeply evil, and it operates in a way that is pernicious, undermining, causes all sorts of harm in society.
SPEAKER_1: I can't change that system myself, right?
SPEAKER_1: I don't have that power.
SPEAKER_1: So, if I don't insure my iPhone, right, against damage, loss, theft, and it gets stolen, then I've harmed myself in a way that I could have prevented, and I haven't achieved anything concrete toward some other end.
SPEAKER_1: So, there is a degree of rationality that has to play a role in how we make our decisions here in time under the circumstances under which we live.
SPEAKER_1: So, I don't, again, I don't think that given the reality that insurance is wrongful just to own for Christians.
SPEAKER_1: So, yes, I think that there are times where you should insure things.
SPEAKER_1: If we had a proper government that was operated in a better way, I think the insurance field, the entire industry, would be, you would have to call it a new thing almost, because it would be so unlike what we have today.
SPEAKER_1: That would be a goal, a future goal, right?
SPEAKER_1: A Christian government, a Christian prince, should seek to implement those changes, to have the industry be something that is in line with Christian teaching.
SPEAKER_1: So, not practicing usury for one, but that gets into the bigger issue of having to reform banks, because ultimately, we're talking about banks, we're talking about insurance.
SPEAKER_1: So, I think that just the summary is again to say, yes, it's fine to insure the things that make sense to insure these days, but on the longer scale and the grander scheme, as Christians, I think we should oppose the insurance industry as it is formulated today.
SPEAKER_1: So, vote against it, right?
SPEAKER_1: Or advocate against it when the opportunity arrives.
SPEAKER_1: If God hands you the sword as the magistrate, use the sword against it, but as an individual Christian, it's a matter of conscience and perhaps even more so than conscience wisdom.
SPEAKER_1: And again, often these days, the wise choice is to insure things.
SPEAKER_1: So I think I will end with one more question from the chat.
SPEAKER_1: This one is from X.
SPEAKER_1: And then I will give my usual caveats and dismiss you all for the weekend, as it were, I guess.
SPEAKER_1: Question, which one is this?
SPEAKER_1: This 11, I'm looking at the wrong list.
SPEAKER_1: Question 12.
SPEAKER_1: Question 12, what is your opinion on going to another denomination if the Lutheran churches in my area do not pass the test of pastoral orthodoxy?
SPEAKER_1: So, if you're talking about my article, then you aren't going to find, unless you are very lucky, or you happen to be in one of a handful of places I know in the US., including one that I was this week, which is why I was not in my study and not at my desk.
SPEAKER_1: Unless you're in one of those areas, you are going to have to deal with pastors who are not completely orthodox, and not in the sense that we would prefer them, be not to the extent we would prefer.
SPEAKER_1: Because they're going to be wobbly on something.
SPEAKER_1: The standard today is not whether or not the pastor, the elders, the church, etc., whether these things are perfect, but whether they are good enough that you can have Christian fellowship, you can hear the word, you can receive the sacrament, you can do the things you are supposed to do, and the things that you do clearly want, and are supposed to want as a Christian, without endangering yourself, in some extreme cases, or going against your conscience.
SPEAKER_1: So, will your pastor probably say some dumb stuff every so often?
SPEAKER_1: Inevitably, almost.
SPEAKER_1: That doesn't mean that you have to leave the church immediately, right?
SPEAKER_1: Now, there are lines.
SPEAKER_1: There are obviously lines, right?
SPEAKER_1: If your pastor starts having women do the readings, maybe talk to him about that.
SPEAKER_1: Maybe talk to some of the elders first, so you can go with the elders to the pastor and have a little more clout, as it were, right?
SPEAKER_1: You can put a little more leverage on him, have your Bible verses prepared and things like that.
SPEAKER_1: If your pastor starts having women give the sermon, then you need to leave, because it's no longer a church, then it's a brothel, right?
SPEAKER_1: There are lines.
SPEAKER_1: There are bright lines that once crossed, you have to make a choice.
SPEAKER_1: And that is basically, you tell the pastor, you've done something that is inappropriate.
SPEAKER_1: This is something that is wicked, it's sinful, you need to stop, and his response will tell you whether you need to find a new church or not.
SPEAKER_1: Hopefully, if you go to an LCMS church, even though some of them are not that good these days, and the leadership is certainly wicked, there are still good parishes.
SPEAKER_1: And even if they're not that good, you're probably going to find one that is acceptable.
SPEAKER_1: The pastor's not going to step back and have a woman give the sermon.
SPEAKER_1: They still crack down on that in the LCMS, thankfully.
SPEAKER_1: But if you can't find a Lutheran church in your area, and you are, I assume, Lutheran for this, then yes, I've answered this question for many men before.
SPEAKER_1: If you can find a good Anglican church, right, you're going to have to check the parishes, because Anglicanism in the US particularly is a very broad umbrella.
SPEAKER_1: There are some good ones, there are some terrible ones.
SPEAKER_1: I've driven past Anglican churches, flying BLM, rainbow flags, all that.
SPEAKER_1: And I've spoken with Anglican pastors who are nearly Lutheran, in the good sense of being nearly Lutheran.
SPEAKER_1: So it just depends.
SPEAKER_1: Same thing with Presbyterians.
SPEAKER_1: There are some good Presbyterian parishes, there are some really bad ones.
SPEAKER_1: I've been to both.
SPEAKER_1: I've spoken to pastors and elders of both kinds.
SPEAKER_1: So, unfortunately, these days, the best advice that I can give on finding a church...
SPEAKER_1: And I get asked this all the time, but I'll try if I know about the area, then certainly.
SPEAKER_1: But if I don't, then the best advice I can give is, whatever tradition you are, find the most conservative version of that tradition in your area, and then start attending parishes.
SPEAKER_1: Attend them for two, three Sundays apiece and make an assessment.
SPEAKER_1: Go out to coffee with the pastor or the elders or a beer, whatever it happens to be.
SPEAKER_1: If you're reformed, I guess you get the cigars and whiskey.
SPEAKER_1: Talk to these men.
SPEAKER_1: You have to make the assessment for yourself, right?
SPEAKER_1: I can't make the assessment for everyone.
SPEAKER_1: I don't have enough time.
SPEAKER_1: I don't have enough days, hours, well, days in the week, hours in the day, either one.
SPEAKER_1: So do the best that you can, and then pick the church that is good enough, and make it better by being there, and talking to the elders, and talking to the pastor, and pushing things in the right direction when the opportunity arises.
SPEAKER_1: These things don't get better by good men abandoning them.
SPEAKER_1: They get better when good men stick around and push things in the right direction.
SPEAKER_1: That doesn't mean that you join a lost cause.
SPEAKER_1: I'm not telling you to do that.
SPEAKER_1: But if there's a church that's kind of wobbly, sort of in that gray area, you may be the deciding factor that pushes it back on to the straight and narrow.
SPEAKER_1: And that's a great thing, and God will bless you for it.
SPEAKER_1: But you have to make the call.
SPEAKER_1: And it is again a matter of conscience and wisdom.
SPEAKER_1: So according to the measure of those things that God has given you, use them to make the best call.
SPEAKER_1: I think that will be it for this stream.
SPEAKER_1: I don't see any other pending questions in the chat.
SPEAKER_1: If there are pending questions in the chat and I just do not see them, then it is a software thing which would not be unheard of using this software.
SPEAKER_1: But at any rate, thank you for those who asked the question.
SPEAKER_1: For those who have pending questions, I will try to work on some of those this week.
SPEAKER_1: Thankfully, I will be at my desk and have some time to do that this week.
SPEAKER_1: So other than that, if you want to submit questions, the best way to do that is, of course, the forum, that should be linked in the information for the stream or the show notes, whatever platform you happen to be using.
SPEAKER_1: It can be found just by searching for it.
SPEAKER_1: It can be found on my X page, et cetera.
SPEAKER_1: Of course, you can ask questions other ways.
SPEAKER_1: I respond to, I try to respond to the questions in the chat and questions on X and DM and however else people get them to me.
SPEAKER_1: The forum's the easiest because I can link them in the show notes and other people can find them.
SPEAKER_1: But if you ask them somewhere else, I do try to collect those together into one long list of pending questions which can be found again on the forum in the future topics slash question list.
SPEAKER_1: I think that pretty much covers it for this stream.
SPEAKER_1: Again, thank you for submitting questions and participating in the chat.
SPEAKER_1: I do like getting the opportunity to do this every week.
SPEAKER_1: I at least try to do it every week if I'm not out of town or whatever it happens to be.
SPEAKER_1: I attempt to do it on Thursdays, but it usually winds up being Friday.
SPEAKER_1: It just depends how my week goes.
SPEAKER_1: Given that it is Friday, I hope that you all have a good weekend.
SPEAKER_1: Maybe go out and get in nature a little bit if you happen to be in part of the country that isn't oppressively hot or actively on fire.
SPEAKER_1: For those of you who are in the part of the country, I was also just there.
SPEAKER_1: That is currently on fire.
SPEAKER_1: I wish you all the best, and I'll continue to pray for you, and I hope you pray for and check on your neighbors because it's pretty bad in a few places out west right now.
SPEAKER_1: So, for those of you who are not out west, also pray for our brothers and sisters who are out there in those very bad conditions.
SPEAKER_1: Particularly pray for the firefighters out there trying to get them under control.
SPEAKER_1: But that is it for this week.
SPEAKER_1: Again, I hope you all have a good weekend, and of course, go to church on Sunday.
SPEAKER_1: And until next week, God bless you all.