This is a youtube video transcript from a channel called Paul. In this video Paul talk about lot of things but I want to know one thing. Who is a christian according to Paul?




Youtube transcript:
hi this is Paul last week or the week before Sam tabin said oh you're going to want to watch the mother Maiden matriarch Tom Holland and I did in fact I wanted to watch it so badly I subscribed to her subst substack because I needed to hear the rest of the conversation and the rest of the conversation was in alignment with the first part of it that she had on YouTube she had another 20 minutes behind the rest and the rest was good too and maybe I'll get back to some of it Glenn rer then almost out of the gate Glenn's getting faster than me on some of this stuff well I've been busy lately but um Glenn almost out of the gate had a video on this and maybe Glenn and I are going to have to have a conversation about this I don't know if I'm going have time in the next three weeks before before July and Italy and all of those things um but this question of heresy this question of Christianity this question of is Christianity in some ways I was I was thinking about this this morning when I was read when I was finishing up listening to Glenn's thing is is Christianity a thing is Christianity a method now in many ways Christianity is that and is that or is it Jesus now I I made this video which was a clip from the Friday live stream where Yosef and a bunch of us had this conversation about Peterson and Alex o Conor are wrestling with this question about Christianity uh Glenn had some had some great pieces in this so I might just start with Glenn's video because I I think he did a great job on this but I think I think the conversation has to go on from where he started because I think I I think this is moving beyond this so is very much uh a friend of Christianity and very much somebody who talks openly about going to church and thinking about Christian as sociologically true and try to figure out whether that means it's also supernaturally true she sees the benefits of the morals and right there when he says Supernatural That's of course where I'm going to say whoa we gota we got to be careful with that word we got to be careful with that word and she's figuring out whether she can also believe the metaphysics and in many ways she's been on a journey that Tom Holland has pioneered she came along to one of the events that we put on with Tom Holland back in 2022 and she references that at the start of this video so Tom I think it was uh I think it was you I I first heard um suggesting that the 1960s are the equivalent of um something like a second Reformation I think you're in in conversation with Glenn scrier um a little while ago when we first met and um I I I shave the beard and I disappear I'm invisible I found it such a compelling idea so that is the thesis that is under discussion in this video is the 1960s another reformation and it is the subject of Tom Holland's upcoming book which is going to be called love is all you need and I am super excited about this book because if if it's possible to follow up on Dominion this is the topic and and when I first heard him starting to talk about this topic super super interested in this but I think I'm going to I'm going to yeah I I have to I have to I'm not exactly comfortable with with exactly how Glenn treats this so I I don't disagree with him really it's just that I don't know that the categories that he's using are going to endure the jump we are currently in I'll say it that way riffing on that Beatles lyric uh in fact love is all you need is uh one of the opening two quotations in the book Dominion uh back in 2019 it opens with a quote from s Augustine saying love and do what you will and then Love is All You Need John Lennon and really what Dominion is doing is showing how you don't get John Lennon singing Love is All You Need without St Augustine saying love and do what you will and that both figures are profoundly Christian figures not just St Austin we are all swimming in Christian Waters we are all breathing Christian air uh which is why my book is called the air we breathe uh which is coming at it from a more confessionally Christian point of view okay and here's Glenn's book and I do o Glenn a conversation about his book and maybe this will be the Advent for that uh I don't know if I can get it in in June or if I might have to wait till August or September but um so Glenn you know is this Dominion for [Laughter] dummies he now now one of the things that I thought of a lot during this video was Glenn in Speak life is very much acting like a Christian evangelist which is absolutely appropriate I act in the same way but I think part of what's happening is that the way we are approaching these words themselves are making are are shifting the conversation and that's exactly what we saw with Jordan Peterson and Alex o'conor and that's very evident in the Richard Dawkins Ian hery Ali debate which has come out you can find it on both the unheard Channel and you can find it on the the um on the dissident dialogues I think that's it that that's having those and there are a lot of interesting aspects about this conversation too but I think again using Christian as an adjective is going to increasingly become insufficient as Tom Holland's thesis continues to gain traction as modernity recedes and we begin to see the roots of modernity in Christianity that will be that's not exposed let's say simply by dissident thinkers on the uh let's say now the the dissident left if you can call the Free Press uh Nelly B's conversation with Louise Perry also in the substack the full one that was also excellent flebus pointed that one out to me not only do we see this in the likes of Jordan Peterson and John Veri and Jonathan Pau and the people here we are increasingly seeing worldwide as modernity recedes the um the hity the hity I mean people have been arguing for we need to get Beyond um the colonial period um okay yeah we are but I think the colonizers who were screaming against colonialism didn't understand the branch they were sitting on either and and so this is a huge piece of Tom Holland's thesis and Glenn scrier follow up on that towards Evangelistic ends but I think in the process how we use how we employ Christian as an adjective to really large things is going to shift view but it's the same kind of tomholland thesis that we are far more Christian than we imagine and that even our problems with Christianity have been been given to us by Christianity and that makes you think of the 1960s in a certain light if the Beatles thought that they were bigger than Jesus and were creating a counterculture well perhaps they were but they couldn't help but use Christian ideas like love is all you need in order to do so and so much of people's critiques of Christianity are profoundly Christian or Christian is critiques in my book the air we breathe I go through equality compassion consent Enlightenment science freedom and progress as these seven values that Christianity has given to the west and yet the standard critique of the church is that it is unequal cruel coercive unenlightened anti-science restrictive and regressive uh but those seven critiques have not been plucked from the air those seven critiques are simply the reverse of the seven values that Christianity has taught us and so what happens in the counterculture of course is that the complaint is that the church is these things and that the church shouldn't be those things and so what we get is a fork now watch the whole Glenn scrier video I thought it was very good but again I think we have to talk about how we talk about these Forks in the Jord and and these issues were just front and center in the Jordan Peters and Alex o'conor conversation now notice how this one issue about Christianity as an adjective and at what level we talk about Christianity as an adjective our front and sensor in how many of these issues as the the Christian West sort of continues to sort itself out and I I'll just lay my cards on the table I side with Tom Holland more than Glenn scrier on this I think Tom thes thesis is right and when you get to the end of even just the substack only podcast where where Luis Perry is sort of pushing back on Tom I I think I think Tom's I think Tom's right I think that I keep talking about the recession of modernity Peterson keeps talking about a counter Enlightenment we're sort of grasping at words to try to get at a recalibration of our assumptions and a few videos back I talked about ontology we're recalibrating in a deep level the nature of the world and we're we're struggling with this and and it's just true that these seams can be seen all over the place I had a had a conversation with kale zeldon on defense against the dark arts that um someone has I don't know who he is he's he's remaining Anonymous at this point which is absolutely fine and he sort of put it into a much polished documentary and it was interesting how much the CRC is a part of this I just had someone it was really nice it was kind of refreshing to have someone approach me uh because they were Church shopping and they were curious about my church and had absolutely nothing to do with my YouTube channel that that that hasn't happened for a while and not not that I don't not that I haven't not that I don't like the fact that a lot of people approach me because of my YouTube channel but someone approached me and uh there was a misunderstanding his wife thought that maybe a relative used to go here but that was the church across the street that two churches ago was owned by a Russian church and since then it's been two Hispanic churches that have owned it and anyway and then he sends me an email this morning and wants to know about the Solas and and I was like oh if if if you only knew how deep this solas's conversation goes and he wants to know about you know what what is what is your church believe and I'm I'm in many ways deeply very feel very at home very comfortable with sort of standard Christian Reformed Doctrine and Dogma so I thought I'll just I'll just go to the the denominational website and see how they handle it and I thought they they really handle it nicely because the difficulty that you have when someone comes to you and asks you a question like that is you can first of all you you have to sort of read them to figure out now what really are they asking because you don't know their worldview if you don't know them at all so it's sort of a cold read as in leap of faith you're doing a cold read on them and and you don't want to give them too much because then they'll just be confused and you don't want to give them something that's just going to basically Trace chase them down a rabbit Trail so basically you want to give them some orientating information with um with additional links that they can go further if they desire and actually I think the Christian Reformed web page does this beautifully but beautifully within a context and a word worldview and a sphere at the same time someone else sent me a piece that was on the reformed Journal now the reformed Journal is a in the Christian in the Heyday of the Christian Reformed Church in Calvin College in the 60s and 70s the reformed Journal was a very important Journal where Christian Reformed and Christian Reformed adjacent people sort of um the intellectual leadership sort of trotted out their new ideas and worked on them and and this is a piece written by a man that I know fairly well he graduated with my father from Seminary so he's getting up there in years uh I went to church with him for a number of years at Madison at Madison Square uh he was um a man I've got a lot of respect for he he wrote a piece which is basically taking Isabelle wilkerson's latest book on cast applying this to the Christian reform church sort of the the money paragraph is a little bit down to the page it puzzles me when CRC congregations firmly committed to racial and ethnic diversity equity and inclusion at the same time officially Embrace discrimination and oppression of sexual minority populations this inconsistency characterizes many majority white and multi-racial congregations as well as many racially and ethnic minority congregations so basically he's taken this is this is a shot in the crc's current little culture War okay and he's decidedly on one side of it but just reading the two p ages back to back you certainly get the sense that there is a fork and again in the Christian reform church I was seeing this back at the beginning of the 201s I was watching this coming because I was listening to you know people that I had gone to church with people that I had worked on all sorts of things with in terms of whole missions and um you know the the racial reconciliation churches like my father's church and like this church that grew out of the 60s and 70s and these were all the same people and they go like this and I've been watching it go like this and and so I've been in the denomination raising my voice as much as I could from a pastor of an insignificant Church in Sacramento saying uh we all need to talk about this because this thing is forking and how are we going to think about this fork and how are we going to manage this fork with respect to institutions and sinid and relationships and how can we maintain conversations um beyond the fork that will actually help both sides of the fork really manage their stuff and so I know I come to YouTube in 2017 and then a bunch of people discover me but you know I've been working this stuff since 2010 2011 in the denomination and for the most part got a little bit of traction in 2016 but the the progressives looked at me and they F they felt at that point that they had a winning hand so they weren't really into uh confessions and the confessionals always saw conversations as sort of a a strategy to undermine um true confessional Fidelity so they weren't at it and so now in uh now in 2022 my time my moment arrived lucky me unlucky me this is not this is not a conflict I ever wanted to have but this is exactly what what Tom Holland is talking about with respect to this new religion and I agree with Tom Holland and Glenn scrier that this this is a fork of Christianity now now Glenn basically says well we have the tree and this is a heresy and and I'm not saying that the fork is equal but what I'm saying is that I don't know that the old mechanics of managing these forks will work today like they used to if they ever worked now longtime viewers of the channel will remember me talking about this book by aliser mcrath about heresy and longtime viewers of the channel who are also diggers who bought the book because I mentioned it will sort of say I'm not sure if Alistair is saying what you say you're see you're saying but I understand what you're saying because basically what I see in the early chapters really the introduction of this book is that he he defines heresy not sort of in the solos scriptura and not sort of in in kind of the traditional way that the church has but he defines heresy in terms of in a in a rather darwinian way and that heresies are Forks in the church that wind up in dead ends okay now I in saying that I don't deny the validity of Revelation or the validity of sound Doctrine or any of those things but in our deeply skeptical culture which is also deeply impacted by pluralism the purity of the source argument is harder to make I'll say it that way another one of his books I don't know if I have it in physical or if I have it in Kindle okay here are all my here are all my aliser McGrath books in my Kindle library um you can thank me I should have I should have I didn't shake his hand when I was in uh when I was in Edinburgh and at a lecture of his so thank you Taio um and and my friend in edoro for getting me to that lecture but his book um Christianity's dangerous idea where he gets into Martin Luther this is from alist McGrath's dangerous let's see if I can close this okay get a little bit more room all right the dangerous idea firmly embodied in the heart of the Protestant Revolution was that all Christians have a right to interpret the Bible for themselves however it is ultimately un uncontrollable spawning developments that few at the time could have envisioned or predicted the great convulsion of the early 16th century that historians Now call the Reformation introduced into the history into the history of Christianity a dangerous new idea that gave rise to unparallel unparalleled degree of creativity and growth on one hand while on the other hand causing new tensions and debates that by their very nature probably lie Beyond resolution the development of protestantism as a major religious force in the world has been shaped decisively by the creative tensions emerging from this principle at its heart the emergence and growth of protestantism concerned one of the more fundamental questions that can confront any religion who has the authority to Define its Faith Institution or individuals who has the right to interpret its foundational document the Bible now it's not only institutions and individuals although that is a deeply part of this but it's see individuals see this is part of what's changing right now is that individuals aren't just these little atoms floating in space when we talk about the individual we currently have two different issu isues to contend with one is what exactly is speaking through this individual is it Renaissance humanism that was certainly speaking through Luther um it was also speaking through arasmus who remained a faithful son of the church lots of things are speaking through Luther Luther is an individual but Luther is also a complex amalgam of a variety of spirits that are working their way through and of course those Spirits if you read um Carlos A's book Reformation those Spirits have been work all over the place in some ways the S The Same Spirit that's sort of at work in Yan hus and gets burned to the stake is at work in Martin Luther but it happens at a different period in time and whoosh out it goes and there was also a a confidence that well see and this is where things like listening to Richard Dawkins talk about truth and reason it's like well yeah truth and reason and Luther thought thought well you know if we can get the best text and if we can get truth and reason then we can nail down this interpretation and everyone will agree and the um and and some of the peculiarities that have happened with respect to um Jerome's Vulgate we can get all that ironed out and off we'll go together and of course exactly the opposite happened so what what McGrath sort of weaves into his book early on is well these sort of take root in the church and what you've seen throughout the history of the church right from the beginning you know some of these conflicts that I'm talking about in terms of my in my Sunday sermons about Paul and um certain uh diaspora Jews from Asia that come down to Jerusalem and of which Paul used to be one of them until he had the road to Damascus and all of this happening is that all of these things sort of sit in the church and then some of them wither and disappear or just mostly wither and one of the issues that was beneath this conversation or this um this this video is of course Sam tieman's uh I almost I almost said the wrong World Unitarian crusade to to try to well maybe he's not going to convince all the trinitarians but maybe he can plea his cause that they no longer be burned at the stake now you can thank the enlightenment for that because no one in this little corner is looking to burn Sam at the stake in fact I'll usually have Sam on as much as I can because Sam is a is a wonderful guy and we we continue to have wonderful conversations and I always learn a ton from him but what tends to happen in time is that certain theological options basically dead end or wither to almost nothing and it's it's it's hard not to notice that trinitarians won sorry Sam they they they pretty much mostly won and and unitarians are kind of this interesting Fringe on the corners of the church for the most part who um yeah we love you but uh I don't really find it convincingly but then but then you have this this question of well how can then how can we resolve Luther's dangerous idea we can go back to sort of originalism now now this of course has strains some originalists say well that's why you got to go to Rome or that's why you got to go to Orthodoxy Protestants of course say well that's why you got to go to the Bible because it comes out of the Bible and so there you see those fights and you know fights over Solas I I did write I did write The Inquirer a nice little brief um suggesting to him that I think Solas are uh they they don't make good doctrines they're a little too skinny for that they're sort of postures prior postures and prior priorities and and you definitely see Protestants reading tradition and you definitely see Orthodox and Catholic reading scripture but it it's sort of the the way that they kind of deal with the interrelationship often between institution and text so it's not just institutions individuals texts are involved there too and individuals increasingly are not what they appear to be the culture wars are basically hurling Bible verses at each other we've all just forgotten the references and so that gives you a certain understanding of the West it gives you a certain understanding of the culture wars and absolutely you don't have transgender rights without a concept of the individual that Christianity has given to us without a concept of human rights that Christianity has given to us without a concept of consent at the heart of sex and sexuality that is all determining U it's become all determining in the West whereas consent is something certainly that Christianity has taught uh the west and without having a special dignity for minorities and the marginalized and therefore what do you get when you mix up this heady Brew well you might end up getting something that ends up being far from Biblical truth but it's something that you could not have imagined without the Bible uh to believe that trans women are women is not what the Bible teaches but it's also Unthinkable without the Christian Revolution that is given us the moral Furniture the moral tools to make those sorts of arguments so Louise really wants to get Tom Holland to explain the thesis that the 1960s are another reformation and she asks the question in this way so my guess would be if the First Reformation was about the rejection of Catholicism this is about the Reformation of Christianity per se right or do you think that there's something else going on so your mic H well before I'll get doing this meta thing I get to stop Glenn and have my word before he gets his obviously the Protestants when the belgic confession gets written when the heberg catechism confession you know catechism gets written the Protestant reformers are saying no um there there's been some Forks that have emerged and and and those Forks are accretions and they need to be trimmed and we want to get to what original Christianity was now of course my my friend Sam tan will say well how conscious were those earliest earliest Christians about the Trinity and so if if we don't find the Trinity sort of out there you know even even my Seminary professors would say things like well you can find the doctrine of the trinity in scripture in solution all the building blocks are there but it takes time for those things to get put together and those things then get put together in uh in Creeds and councils now of course if you're if you're arguing for a really originalist you'd say well the purest Christianity was well maybe the the Pentecost was there nothing left for development but but you're going to have a hard time saying well what about Paul wasn't there at Pentecost and if he was he would not have been welcome in that room um at that date but later on Paul's going to admonish Peter with respect to Gentiles and and so you clearly see development and so you're almost sort of stuck with something analogous to a secessionist argument what what I mean by that I don't mean about um American Civil War I mean that things like well Miracles have ceased which is an argument that you hear in some reformed camps and they ceased after the Bible time and the difficulty of course is well when exactly is that Bible time when when the last Apostles died the Mir the Miracles ended and now that idea I would say is an idea that increasingly just sort of Falls by the wayside too but there's still people out there promoting it and there probably will continue to be because it's a it's an answer it's a helpful answer to certain questions for certain people it doesn't mean it's a right answer but it's a helpful answer to to get them out of sort of a bind that they're in with respect to other things so all along the way we have to deal with this question of development and the difficulty that Christianity has is is it's been so astoundingly successful and again I would argue that secularism and again in many ways I get this thesis from at least I don't know if Tom believes it or not but I developed it based on the stuff that he gave me that that secularism is has been an extremely viable colonization strategy of Jesus Christ out into the world and a great many good things have come of that and that's sort of the horns upon which Richard Dawkins now rides because on one hand he wants to say oh that Christianity is full of all of this BS that you can't believe on the other hand if uh if this secular humanism that I think is best really can't be maintained in terms of her immunity for very long as susceptible to the virus of Islam let's at least have the Christian virus although I'd prefer to have no virus at all that's sort of where um that's sort of where Richard Dawkins ends his conversation things as um in the First Reformation in the 1520s the Protestants were coming along and saying let's get rid of indulgences and Pap infallibility and marry and idolatry and all that kind of stuff and we'll just clear away all that stuff to get down to simple Christianity and the argument could then be that is the 19 and again that's an sort of an originalist thing but then you have the problem of well where where where is sort of your high water mark is it on the day of Pentecost before you know they do anything wrong Richard Dawkins wants to say well Jesus is a great guy and it's it's like Paul and all those Apostles that muddied it up um okay but where is your originalism and and I think this is where this is where you're going to get into okay we have this thing we call Christianity let's call it a hyper thing in terms of this definition that John Veri threw out and you can find a book on hyper things and it's it's you can see us just sort of in a very Thomas sort of way getting beyond the substance ontologies and uh materialisms that we've sort of been in meshed with in the modern period And as modernity sort of loses its grip and we recalibrate we're obviously thinking more in terms of process in some regards but we're also understanding that there's an ontology to things that don't seem to have a substance that we can control in the lab these things have always been with us and so then we wind up with these fights like what exactly is real Christianity who exactly is a real Christian who gets to speak for Christianity 60 is just another faithful Rippling on of that same wave of reformation but instead of getting rid of transubstantiation and indulgences you get rid of God and Christ and the gospels and the Bible and church and is that an extension of this Latin Western Christendom Protestant Enlightenment project and to answer that question Tom appropriately enough does a little bit of a history lesson in talking about the ways in which we have foregrounded to profoundly Christian Notions but we've detached those Christian Notions from Christianity per se and we've elevated those two Christian Notions to the exclusion of pretty much everything else and those first two values I summarize in my book as equality and compassion he talks about compassion first one of those is absolutely the valorization of um of victimhood the notion that Christianity radically discovers that the person who is being tortured can ultimately in the long run have a power over the person who is torturing him I think that's actually the most Christian thing he says in this interview did you notice the word discovers um Christianity discovers now Glenn's really going to do hard work on this on this word in this video that there is victory in the victim that that there is a value and a dignity and a Worth to the one who is victimized um Tom doesn't say Christianity invents that he says Christianity discovers that there's something there to be discovered in the same way that Isaac Newton did not invent gravity he discovered it because it was something there to be discovered Tom Holland is saying that the victory of the victim is not something that Christians simply insist on and it's not a story that they like to tell it's a discovery about something profound in the universe Revelation 13:8 says that Christ is the Lamb who was slain from the foundation of the world there is something glorious about the victim the lamb from before the foundation the world woven into creation and when Christ dies the most divine revelation of God is Christ bleeding for his enemies the moment when the Centurion Rams a spear up into his side is the moment where God is revealed most clearly and he's not revealed as the enforcer of that violence he is revealed as the victim of that violence okay now now now Glenn's been doing a little bit of preaching here which is totally good and I like his sermon but God is both enforcer and victim of the violence because it's hard you're hard pressed and so again back to Richard Dawkins withan hery Ali he will say a number of times well it's that Old Testament God he's absolutely Dreadful well why because he's the enforcer of the violence he's also the victim of the violence how how on Earth can God play these roles and you know there's been plenty of Christian theology to talk about how in fact God can be on both sides of these roles you can you can find it in John Calvin in his commentary on on uh the Book of Genesis where Jacob is wrestling with the angel and and basically John Calvin says well Jacob could never wrestle with the angel if God didn't strengthened Jacob enough to wrestle with the angel and so in some ways this drama is being played through in some ways on both sides now I I agree with Glenn that this moment is is just a a revelatory moment I mean and the entire text is built that way this moment is the day of the Lord the day of the Lord is all about the revelation of God but the revelation of God and the day of the Lord is always this very complex day it's a day of vindication and it's a day of judgment it's a day of exaltation and deliverance and it's a day of condemnation the day of the lord always sort of has both of these sides to it and so echoing on through Christendom has been this idea that there is a worth and a dignity to the weak and this runs counter to everything that Evolution would teach you that evolution is the survival of the fittest and the sacrifice of the weakest this is the sacrifice of the fittest Christ for the survival of we the weakest so that we the weakest might survive and pass on this compassion Revolution and and on it ripples into the world and so Tom identifies that now maybe I've spent more time with the Orthodox than Glenn has but or maybe just more time with Pou but whenever you hear that word revolution whole bunch of older PE you know Catholics and Orthodox say you better be careful with that word because is it a re is it a res is it a revolution or is it a counterrevolution did the revolution happen in the garden and is this the counterrevolution that happens on the cross and and I don't think Glenn would you know having said that I don't think Glenn would say oh yeah yeah yeah I I understand it that way but these are some of the ways in which sort of the move of that that the churches have used for a very long time I I think we're going to recalibrate a bunch of these moves passion is one of these virtues that has sort of rippled on and it takes hold of us so powerfully that when we see Adolf Hitler in the 20th century oppose that and actually want to get back to Nature and get back to the will to power and the strong should rule over the weak when we see Hitler we cannot but see him as something that is Antichrist and so what do you call the battle to defeat Hitler I mean it is the most epic duel and in the myth ology of the West the second world war kind of has that that quality to it Tom talks about in these terms for a civilization deeply shaped by this conviction is that in the wake of the second world war and the destruction of of Nazism Hitler has basically been enshrined as the devil the Nazis as as as as as Devils uh outfits as hell and the vision of Nazi Germany is held um and that is what we now react against um we don't really need the Christian mythology anymore because we have we have the example of of of of Nazi Europe to to to kind of offer us moral guidance uh we don't need to do what Jesus did we need to do the opposite of what Hitler did as Alec ryy the historian says our moral framework is now summarized by Harrison Ford as Indiana Jones saying Nazis I hate those guys but to Simply invert the Nazis who were themselves an inversion of Christianity is not to restore us to the original um it is to secularize all other aspects of our Christian instincts and simply privilege the now did you hear him say the original because that's we set off onto this quest to find the original and see I would argue that we should set off on a quest to find Jesus because when we look for the original we sort of take Jesus and well we're going to instantiate this thing over here and does that make me more Protestant or less Protestant than Glenn I don't know um I'm gonna have to I'm gonna have to screenshot this uh this moment here because it's it's kind of a fun one um that's that's a kind of fun thing you can use on uh you can use on Twitter I I've Glenn and I spent quite a bit of time at ARC together and so um I I he and and before at the Tom Holland event too he picked me up at the airport he has a he has a picture of me enjoying um my first sausage role that I ever had in the UK and he sort of chuckled at that and you know if I'm sure he's been to the United States a few times but if he ever came to Sacramento I would have to take him to In-N-Out burger and take a picture of him watch eating an In-N-Out burger or maybe something from The Habit so um anyway and this is this is where I think this is where I think we're going to move to I've yet to really I've wanted to engage with this video it's it's not an easy video to engage I just haven't really had time I should probably get some get some clips of it that I can I can get into it a and of course for for John so so Glenn keeps wanting to sort of get at the original here but I think the the original that you want to get at for Christianity is Jesus himself and and Christianity is going to continue to be a term that on one hand is as broad as the Tom Holland Christianity that we talked about at the live stream and and and that Jordan Peterson and Alex oconor are sort of chasing but that's that's too broke a thing and and again we're going to have to get at Jesus is going to be the way into the Christianity and and the and I'm a trinitarian and the Triune God the the the presence and the power and the indwelling of the Holy Spirit and the transformation that's that's going to be it but this is going to be this is going to be relational you can't so many so many move ments Downstream from the Reformation tried one way or another to we're going to somehow get at the original and and in the burnover district of Upstate New York that birthed the Latter-Day Saints it birthed to Jehovah's Witnesses the history of protestantism has been attempts to finally get at the original to Define it propositionally to define it procedurally and but then and what and what and and I think the my favorite Great Commission is the beginning of Acts um you receive power when the Holy Spirit comes on you and you will be my Witnesses in Jerusalem Judea Samaria to the ends of the Earth now now I think one of the fascinating things that's been happening is watching John verve's continual Journey along now his own Silk Road he begins this he begins this video basically saying I want everybody to hear this the religion that not it's not a religion out it's out it's gone no more religion that's not a religion Silk Road is the metaphor and they explore that here now again he's going to say some things that some of you are going to say well I can't swallow you don't have to swallow it's not you saying them this is John saying them and this is where John is at right now but notice the trajectory of where he's going because this trajectory is going to impact us all in the same way that you know I deeply appreciated um brat sel's book transubstantiation and noticing H how was Luther reading how was Luther reading um aquinus and Aristotle and just a a a seminary um a friend of mine from seminary in college Randy blackader who is now working on a new translation of Calvin's institutes he notes that you know Calvin Calvin didn't deal with these characters much at all and um and Calvin has sort of been misshaped by by not dealing with them but Calvin was dealing with what he had in his context been thinking about this is a as I have been Shifting the emphasis from propositional contradiction to performative contradiction right um not the propositional contradiction doesn't matter but that performative contradiction is way more important I've also correspondingly shifted from propositional resolution to Performance resolution which of course kard does recommend and Socrates does recommend um and there's a way in which you you can't resolve these and yeah this is where the training comes in the woo way you know you the you can't resolve the tonos of the yin and the Yang if you try to resolve it you are misunderstanding and misapprehend it but you can resolve to you can do a performative resolution in which you commit yourself to being responsible to it and faithful to it uh and right there okay you commit yourself to being responsible to it and faithful to it and I think you don't make yourself responsible to it and faithful to it in terms of this thing over here you make it to Christ now now Christ comes to us through his word through his church through his Spirit but it's that sort of fidelity and relationality that is key in terms of navigating all of these changes that comes and and that's why I I want to in many ways the institutionalization that the Protestant Reformation pushed back against in Catholicism they pushed back against it with it with sort of an originalism okay we're going to now use scripture against the institution and the institution must be tested by scripture that's basic protestantism I think now 500 years later many Roman Catholics would say yeah yeah you know the the hierarchy and the pope and all of them should be tested by scripture I I don't think we necessarily have a big fight about that and and and the difference in that moment is in fact this relationality and you would say it all has to be tested against Jesus now someone might say well but now many people right away get triggered because they've seen this trick before where they say well yeah but you know I believe in the real Jesus not the one I find in the Bible and I would say oh I tell me tell me how you know this real Jesus because we've seen many times that I have this picture of Jesus which tends to be sort of sourced through a whole bunch of other hierarchies and agendas and then I'm going to use that to sort of filter out the Jesus of the Bible and that's been done many times to we're going to get at the Historical Jesus Oh you applied a filter to that um so you're not a lot different from from you're maybe just a little bit more learned than Thomas Jefferson no I'm I remain a Protestant the to me the real Jesus is the Jesus I learned from scripture but I also remain a calvinist because Calvin basically and and Luther's Luther Scholars can probably correct me here and I'm certainly open to that correction but what one of the things Calvin basically said is that we we learn we learn we learn Jesus from the the Bible through the work of the Holy Spirit the work of the holy spirit is key in biblical interpretations now I know that makes some people really nervous because it feels like that that that could in some way sort of UNM the Bible and the Bible can mean anything well yeah that certainly is a danger but we are already living in a world where there's plenty of people out there that make the Bible mean anything and I'm not saying a grammatical historical approach to interpretation is invalid no I think it's a very valid method um but it is not finally we are answerable not to some originalism finally we are answerable to Jesus and in this context now where we have this significant fork in Christianity we're going to have to work through that fork as Jesus would and we're going to use his word we're going to also read you know Church fathers and tradition and we're going to talk about it that to me seems the way to be the way we always do it now there's different priorities and different emphases and different hierarchies at play but that's the way we approach it now let me let John finish as the thing that is beyond your final conceptualization and I think that personal resolution which I think is something what kard meant by faith purity of heart I think is what really really matters ultimately um for bringing about the cultivation of wisdom and virtue um and and you know along the way I mean I've been doing a lot of work about the imaginal and then how it feeds into the imaginal within the rational and the rational within the imaginal and I Think Jesus and Socrates are both figures that are properly uh and and the Buddha are properly imaginal um and that and and that they enliven and vitalize a now now for those of you who haven't listened to to much John imaginal for him is a way of relationally I'm going to say it this way I'm talking to him in about a week week and a half it's a it's a way of attempting to relationally appropriate someone who is not before you in this time and space um and and so it's it's really amazing what John Jordan Peterson invited John to the Jesus to the gospel seminar I'm really looking forward to watching that and and and but again we always work this way I know some of you might thinking no no this is new no no no this is how we always work now we we often think we're working no it's just me and the Bible and the plain sense or me and the Bible and reason or me and all of this new historical material that's been dug up and so the these are the grounds of my truth and and I would I would say that well again what is my definition of a Christian it's someone who trusts Jesus more than they trust thems and my definition of a Christian is someone who follows that lamb wherever he goes now I know some of you are really looking for a definition that will achieve particular ends against particular Rivals here and now and I understand that and those kind of things always work through our assumptions and biases I get that but the definition of a Christian is someone who is a disciple of Jesus now when we start using this label on really big things like civilizations well obviously it's going to get super complex I I want John to finish here the ritual and practice within anology practice is in a way in which no proposition ever can and therefore that personal resolution to follow their way I think is actually more important um again I don't want people to Mish hear me as some kind of laxidasical romantic resolving propositional contradiction is important getting conceptual Clarity is important but in the end the cultivation of wisdom is not driven by that it is those are merely necessary and very far from sufficient conditions and um so um one of the gifts that came out of the the gospel seminar is Jesus is imaginal for me now oh interesting I was thinking it when you guys were talking about all right more Glenn fascist part of things and so compassion starts to be this superordinate value that we have but it's compassion that is divorced from the Christian story in which compassion makes sense that is value number one that Tom Holland points to Value number two that Tom Holland points to is equality the idea that all of us male or female gay or straight slave or free black or white we are all morally equal in the eyes of God or at least in the eyes of the law right and if World War Two taught us about compassion the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 60s taught us equality he speaks about that here the other traumatic experience has been the fact that in the wake of the American Civil War um Racial equality was not established in the United States and um racism was institutionally hardwired into um large SES of the United States and this provoked I think the last great manifestation of Christianity as a as a political reform movement that the West has seen which was a civil rights movement interesting that the last discernably Christian social political movement is the Civil Rights Movement um he doesn't make claims for things Beyond MLK there's there's lots of people who want to say oh well because of mtin Luther King Jr and the Civil Rights Movement therefore this is also like the Civil Rights Movement isn't it and if that's like the Civil Rights Movement then this is like the civil rights movement and this is like the civil rights movement and this is like the Civil Rights Movement right but Tom seems to have a coff point he he he seems to say MLK now I have to say a few things about this I I agree with Glenn that everybody sort of um coat tailed the civil rights movement and the Civil Rights Movement was the the last Great Awakening that we had in America and it was a Great Awakening with within a secular register now Tom Holland will continue to point to the fact that Martin Luther King Jr uses the Deep Well of protestant africanamerican Christianity to mobilize a disciplined force of activists to change the country and and what's what's interesting about the Civil Rights Movement that that people usually seem to forget are the specific dynamics of that activism it wasn't just that many people would show up what really changed was that humble disciplined churchgoing moral African-Americans were beaten and imprisoned by the government for exercising constitutional rights that woke up America and America says this can't be our country we have to change the laws and I've read a lot of civil rights history because this was this was the this was the story I was raised in and so much of that history is about changing the laws now they changed the laws by changing the hearts of America now you also have at the same time right after the Civil Rights Movement because a lot of that work was done in the early 60s then you of course have Vietnam you begin to have a similar ilar Dynamic where H what are the soldiers doing now our government is doing this now our government is doing that and and this then leads to well an entire well never trust the government oh okay um and then of course you're going to have Watergate after that that's one point another point someone recently Sam in fact recently commented that he was reading some Martin Luther King Jr uh some of his writing some of his theological writings he was no Martin Luther King Jr had an excellent mid 20th century let's say to a degree Neo Orthodox and and some of you aren't going to track with that term theological education he was not a backwoods preacher uh the Martin Luther King Jr was not in that sense anal similar to the background of the beginning of the 20th century of the isua street Mission Martin Luther King Jr was educated well educated um a good thinker a good writer and then a good preacher and Tom Holland continually makes the point that he appropriates this Christianity which is deeply Civ civilizational and and uses that to move the culture and impress the world and everything else sort of jumps on it after that the point I make often with respect to this that Tom doesn't exactly make but Tom could make is part of how this then feeds into the Reformation of the 1960s is churches all these you have all these little you have all these little churches that are sort of siloed in their own ethnic enclaves in the United States like the Christian reform church thinking we're the only ones that God really loves because we have all our propositions correct even the Reformed Church of America that we left from we had to leave them because they weren't as pure as us even though they had the same doctrines that we did we just really held to ours but then when you have this massive Civil Rights Movement going through all of these different churches including the mainline looks at themselves and says if we had such a handle on the truth how could we have been so blind and so negligent and so lacad isical when it came to racism in the Jim Crow South and then again racism in the north as well how could we be if we if we had the truth if we had the thing itself the Christianity right here how could we be so blind to the truth now what that leads to is I think one of the real one of the things that Ian hery Ali has been pointing to which is this loss of confidence because Mainline American Christianity was the state religion but it didn't have an Institutional embodiment it was deeply Protestant because again you go back to aliser McGrath well how do you hold this how do you hold this truth do you hold it in institutions in the Roman Catholic Church in your Orthodox hierarchies or do you hold it in the Bible and then try to have people try to have people hold you to it in the Bible how do you hold this well when it wasn't held and when it was exposed by the Civil Rights Movement churches then begin asking what else have we gotten wrong women you've gotten women wrong okay let's change that gays okay let's change that and again and again and again let's change this and this is where you get the fork because they're trying to do the right thing because they realize that they missed the boat on racism and then I don't want to miss the boat on anything else and that's when you get this lack of confidence and so ion hery Ali comes to the west and looks around and says you have no more confidence and now suddenly we're finding all sorts of reasons why we don't have any confidence because if we missed racism if we missed sexism if we missed homophobia if we missed transphobia if we missed anything that you can put right in front of the phobia word that anybody can say and say you've mistreated let's see what what new class can I think of you've mistreated you've mistreated tall bald men you know you know it's a good thing I got my wife when I still had hair cuz you know I miss my hair my hair's gone and I'm tall and I'm bald so it can't be it you know I'm I'm I'm half-done walking around Northern California and people stop and say I didn't think I was in yose Valley well put a phobia on that and oh and so you have this loss of confidence and and so you have this fork and what what we have now is that via the Boomers the like the Pig and the python the Civil Rights the the the civil rights movement that impact has sort of worked itself through the system and now you have a whole bunch of people tracing various chasing various traditionalism because we need to be confident again we need to be confident to stand up against Islam we need to be confident again to fill our churches we need to be confident in the enthusiastic and so all of the things that were on the menu before well let's double down on the Solas let's double down on Apostolic succession let's double down on relics let's double down on on on UK Miracles let's double down on but I think at the heart of it is and I put all my cards on the table this way a living relationship with the one who sits at the right hand of the father guided and informed by his holy spirit now I know a bunch of you were hoping that I would have some other program for you and this has been the frustration of a good number of people from whenever I started this Channel all along the way many people have been sort of like Vander Clay is going to come out with something and what I always come out with is what's always been there because that's what I believe so there's a fork and the way we're going to deal with this Fork is is not sort of how our various tribal historiographies let's see our various trib hagiographies have dealt with them before we're going to we're going to deal with them how we've always dealt with them before and they're going to be messy so maybe I'll have to talk to Glenn about this what would be really cool is if we could have a conversation with Glenn and and Louise all together that would be that would be a lot of fun but we'll we'll see what happens I've my my schedule I've got another I've got another I had one son's married I got to marry off another son this summer um so it's a it's a busy summer and um yeah life isn't life isn't getting less busy and so yeah maybe maybe that's you know I get to this point and I'm always tempted to delete the video because I think have I been clear and I think no I haven't been clear and you know I think Glenn was Glenn was very clear in this video and I thought Tom was clear and I thought Louise was clear but Paul Vander clay not very clear and if not very clear not very helpful if as the old preacher saying goes if it's a Mist in the study it's a fog in the Pulpit or it's if it's a fog if it's a Mist in the Pulpit it's a fog in the Pew which is very very true so I I think part of how we're going to manage this now is going to be I I don't think we can go back to originalism's I don't think lining our all of our propositions is really going to save us I think it's going to be far more relational and far more organic and as a Christian I Min Minister I say as the Old Dutch Theologian who got himself into jail for resisting the the the city people in the Netherlands you follow that lamb wherever he goes and um yeah I think I think that's I think that's I think that's how we be Christians so um I I I have a certain amount of comfort that I put out so many videos because I realize so often that I flood my channel to hide within the mess and um because maybe I don't have enough confidence but the thing I do have confidence about is you follow that lamb and he'll Guide You by his spirit and I I you trust Jesus more than you trust yourself that's that's what I got for you that's what I got for you well how do I learn about him well you learn about him you learn about him by reading his word and you learn about him through prayer and you learn about him in church and you learn about and all of this is Guided by the Holy Spirit and I know some of you are like no Calvinism is all about determinism no Calvinism is all about trusting in Jes Jesus and John Calvin was sometimes called the you know a theologian of the Holy Spirit not because in all the ways that people think uh Holy Spirit should be used now in terms of signs and wonders and things but because for Calvin the role of the spirit was so critical in the operation of the Christian life so so Glenn I love you but uh yeah I I had some and I probably didn't Express them clearly I had some I had some yeah butts on your video and I I I'm I'm kind of leaning with Tom Holland on this one so we'll see where this goes