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Why SCOTUS Is About to SCREW US on Birthright Citizenship | Guest: Jon Harris | 4/2/26
01:39:52
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A
And greetings. Happy Thursday. Welcome to the Steve Day show here live and on demand alongside Todd erzin and Aaron McIntyre. I'm Steve Dase. Coming up on today's show, we have a conversation next hour for Theology Thursday where we're going to talk theology and we're going to look at the Jews that you absolutely do not want to miss. I wish there's like three of you that suggested that I bring that in, bring that back, but just sub out polls for Jews and I, I can't remember which three of you it was. So thank you to all of you for that suggestion. It wasn't my idea, it was yours. I'm just going to take full advantage of it. Peter Indeed.
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There it is.
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So we are going to look at the Jews. We're going to do that coming up in the next hour of the show for Theology Thursday and we're going to do so with somebody that is coming from a more reformed minded perspective on this and even he is troubled by some of the trend lines that we are seeing. So I think this I read his piece over the weekend and I was blown away by how good it was and I said, hey, we got to get this on right away. So we're going to do it here today for Theology Thursday. We're actually going to give you a little double barrel Theology Thursday. Coming up at the bottom of the hour, we're going to give you 10 questions. If you want to reject the resurrection, 10 questions then that you have to come up to come up with the answers to. If you reject that the resurrection of Jesus Christ occurred, you've got to answer then these 10 questions and I'll walk you through those 10 questions coming up in in the next segment of the show. But of course, let's kick this thing off as we always do with Aaron's rundown of what happened while we were away.
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What happened while we were away, Brought to you by the Stone Age. President Trump's address to the nation last night was basically breaking no news, but it was a rehashing of his social media message on the issue of Iran over the past two weeks. Trump didn't promise an escalation, nor did he rule it out.
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Thanks to the progress we've made, I can say tonight that we are on track to complete all of America's military objectives shortly, very shortly, we are going to hit them extremely hard over the next two to three weeks. We're going to bring them back to the Stone Ages where they belong. In the meantime, discussions are ongoing. Regime change was not Our goal. We never said regime change, but regime change has occurred because of all of their original leaders. Death. They're all dead.
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Secretary of State Marco Rubio on social media posted after the President's speech that Trump, quote, was clear about our objectives in Iran. Destroy their weapons factories, destroy their navy, destroy their air force, destroy their chances of ever having a nuclear weapon. The President's leadership sends a clear message to the world that the United States will defend its people and its interests and uphold peace through strength. End quote. At the Supreme Court yesterday, oral arguments were heard in the case regarding birthright citizenship and whether the 14th Amendment means 100 million Chinese Communists can give birth in the United States and whether that allows the resulting children to claim American citizenship. John Roberts couldn't wait to throw a cheap shot at US Solicitor General John Sauer on this very example, that based
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on Chinese media reports, there are 500, 500 birth tourism companies in the People's Republic of China whose business is to bring people here to give birth in return to that nation.
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Having said all that, you do agree
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that that has no impact on the
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legal analysis before us?
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I think it's, I quote what Justice Scalia said in his Hamdan dissent where they had, where like they interpretation has these implications that could not possibly have been approved by the 19th century framers of this amendment. I think that shows that they've made a mess. Their interpretation has made a mess of the provision.
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F
Well, it certainly wasn't a problem in the 19th century.
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No, but of course, we're in a new world now, as Justice Alito pointed out to where 8 billion people are one plane ride away from having a child who's a U.S. citizen.
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Well, it's a new world.
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It's the same constitution on what constitutes allegiance to a country. Justice Ketodji Brown Jackson says Mohammed Atta was just as much of a US Citizen as you Or I obviously have
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permanent allegiance based on being born in whatever country you're from. That's what everybody recognizes. But you also have local allegiance when you are on the soil of this other, other sovereign. And I was thinking, you know, I'm, I'm, I U.S. citizen, am visiting Japan. And what it means is that, you know, if I steal someone's wallet in Japan, the Japanese authorities can arrest me and prosecute me. It's allegiance meaning can they control you as a matter of law? I can also rely on them if my wallet is stolen to, you know, under Japanese law, go and prosecute the person who has stolen it. So there's this relationship Based on. Even though I'm a temporary traveler, I'm just on vacation in Japan, I'm still locally owing allegiance in that sense.
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Yesterday at the White House Holy Week celebration, President Trump shared the gospel, which was cool. Also at that ceremony, Trump spotted Erica Kirk sitting at a table near him.
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Hello, darling. Wow, this is a good table. I like that table. You're doing well, right? Okay. I think you should sue him. But you know, I told him, you ought to sue somebody. They're so jealous. America, I said, you're gonna sue their. I can say. You're not allowed to say this. You have to be nicer. Sue their ass off.
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We can still do cool things. Update, here's NASA.
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4, 3, 2, 1. Booster ignition and lift off. The crew of Artemis II now bound for the moon. Humanity's next great voyage begins.
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The Artemis II crew launched into history books Wednesday, blasting off aboard NASA's Orion spacecraft on a mission around moon, the first crewed journey beyond low Earth orbit in more than 50 years. NASA describes the Orion spacecraft as the most powerful launch system rocket it's ever built. And the mission, two around the moon and back again, is expected to last 10 days total. And finally, this why do you want to be here?
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Why do you love space?
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Why do you love being a part of history?
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We're going back to the moon, that's why.
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And that's what happened while we were away.
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Aaron's montage brought to you by a brand new partner. And it's a brand new book from Dr. Michael Youssef, who's been on our show several times over the years called An Unholy Alliance. How Progressivism Brought an Islamist Invasion. There, you can see the COVID there. Dr. Youssef grew up in the Middle East. He's very familiar with it. PhD in cultural anthropology. He's going to trace back 1400 years of history of cultural jihad and explain how it's now merging with today's leftism. Two ideologies that seem completely unopposed. So if you want to know why a rainbow jihad activists are claiming to be queers for Palestine, where they're. When they're not permitted to be queers in Palestine, Right? Not that there's even a place called Palestine. But I digress. If you, if you want to know this dynamic that we've all noticed, where it's coming from, he's going to go ahead and connect those dots for you in this brand new book. Get your copy of An Unholy alliance by Dr. Michael Youssef today at Amazon or wherever books are Sold. Start preparing for the spiritual battle that is now before us. All right, And I, and I listen, I just got over an issue. My throat was raw for the last week. You know, it's allergy kind of season traveling, you know, so I was, you guys probably heard me work in the halls, in the mouth a few times last week on the show. But the Solicitor General there for the United States, I wish he had a firmer voice because those clips are really unplayable with him. And, and we need viral clips to make this argument to get out into the gen pop and it's just, it's just difficult to understand what he is saying. And it gives people like an instant objection or reason to mock it or ridicule it rather than take what he is saying seriously because what, what he is saying is seriously correct. I just want to walk everybody through again the birthright citizenship debate and what it does and what it does not mean. This language is taken from the 14th amendment. The 13th, 14th and 15th amendments were passed as a package post Civil War to essentially try and stop the south from kind of trying to find end runs, backdoors, you know, gray areas by which to not comply with their defeat and provide equal rights for people, not practice slavery, not inhibit people from voting, etc. Based on the melanin levels in their skin. Now there was a great concern even at the time of this amendment, this, this citizenship language about what it does and doesn't mean when foreigners come. Now the reason this language was put into the Constitution is because one of the arguments that the, the, the, the, the residual Confederacy post Civil War wanted to make is that, well, because their ancestors weren't Americans, because their ancestors weren't Americans, we don't have to give equal rights to these black people. They're not Americans. Since their ancestors were not American citizens when they were born, they're not Americans either. Right? And so this line was added to the 14th Amendment in order to address this objection. And the line is subject to the jurisdiction thereof. Now what that meant at the time was that no, since we. Did the slaves hop on the boats and voluntarily come here to be enslaved? Did they do this?
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They did not.
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They did not. Did they swim the oceans? Did they swim hemispheres, anxious to come here and be treated as human chattel and pick cotton for no income and have their women raped and their children groomed to be endless indentured servitudes with no human rights recognized or God given rights whatsoever? Did they do this by any of their own efforts whatsoever?
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They did not.
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So they were then trafficked. Correct?
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Correct.
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And in order for something to be trafficked into a country. Well, this isn't true anymore. It was true back then when we believed it was okay to have borders and they didn't just make us terrible people. All right, but theoretically, when a nation pretends at least to have borders. Right. Okay. You cannot just traffic something into that country right through the front door without that country's compliance and consent. Right. They have customs there, they have border patrol there, they have military there. Right. They're going to want to know, what are you bringing into this country? Right. Do we want this in our country? Do you have a permit in this country? Do you have viable business in this country? Has anybody from this country requested that you come here and bring this product or service to us? Right. All right. They're going to check to make sure that this thing is on the up and up. Right. Okay. And so therefore, the argument that was made by the Northern senators to push back on the residual Confederate senators in the south during Reconstruction, the argument was, well, the, the, the, the, the. The blacks didn't slaves themselves. Okay. Somehow they got here. Somehow, you know, they, they, they didn't. Like there weren't like, long lines to jump on the slave ships and come here and be chattel. So how'd they get here? Oh, we brought them here. They were here. They were brought here under the jurisdiction of the United States of America. The United States of America imported their ancestors specifically for them to be treated as human chattel. Therefore, they are subject to the jurisdictions of the laws of the United States, and therefore so are their descendants. Now, there were counter concerns about this, and some of them were by again, residual Confederate senators who kind of wanted to see if they could come up with a false argument to defeat this amendment and say, well, okay, but have you considered then what that would also might mean? It also might mean that any foreigner now could come here, come across the border, plop out a kid, and they. And, and that. And so we have or invaded another way. Now, of course, this is a ridiculous example. The idea that anything like this could ever occur, let alone hit a critical mass of the tens of millions, that a country like the United States of America would ever permit this.
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Oh,
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any who. That was the argument that essentially, well, this is a back door to foreign invasion, then foreigners could essentially just come here against our will. And it just means then, it just means then that anybody who's here at the time, they're here, if they have a child, that child's a Citizen. And so when they, when the, when the Confederates lost the slavery argument, they tried to do an end run and say, oh, you're really saying we're an open borders country, then we don't have any borders. And keep in mind, we have at the time of the arguing of this. We have not completed manifest destiny yet. We have not. We, we are not 50 states yet. There are people alive who remember when California was not in the union. They don't know what the state of Arizona is. They don't know what Hawaii is yet. So these were real concerns. There were colonies that belong to foreign countries still inhabiting this land mass. Well, maybe they'll come and take Texas back. Maybe they'll, maybe the. Maybe let's come across the Rio Grande, have a bunch of kids and just take, take. Well, yeah, we're, you know what, we're taking it back. And so the senator who wrote this amendment, a Michigan senator named Jacob Howard, under testimony, which is part of the senate record, that you can just go find yourself if you want. It's everywhere online. It's in the national archives. And Jacob Howard responds to this and essentially says, what part of subject to the jurisdiction thereof do you not understand? This is the senate version of you're retarded. The people you're describing, Senator Howard said, would not be coming here under the jurisdiction of the United States. They were not invited here. They have no, they have no means. But again, they would not have known what, like, you know, green cards and H1B visas were. Okay. They would, they would have no V, they would have no business here. They were not invited here. They have no claim here. They have no paperwork that says that they were invited here or belong here. Therefore, they are not subject to the jurisdiction of the United States to claim citizenship. And that's exactly what that meant. Well, at least that's what it used to mean. And now we're unsure of what it means. Except we still kind of do. We still kind of do. I've used this example many times. I'll use it once more. When the French ambassador to the UN he's here with his pregnant wife and, and, and she gets labor pains and she's rushed into a hospital there in Manhattan and has a baby. Is that baby considered a US Citizen? No, it's a French citizen because we all agree he's here under the jurisdiction of the French government. Likewise. My wife was born in west Germany. Nuremberg, West Germany, to be precise. Yet she is a U. S. Citizen. Why? Because she was born in Nuremberg, West Germany. Because her father was in the 101st Airborne, so he was stationed overseas. He was subject to the jurisdiction of the United States. It was not meant to mean that the 300,000 Chinese students that we let come into the country, for reasons only Allah knows, every year. Could all get pregnant here, have kids, and then those kids can just grow up to raise your taxes if they want. That's not what it was supposed to mean. Or make China Mandarin the official language of the United States. In practicum, though, that is what it means now. Now, we could get around this, but we have other issues, like Plyler vs Doe, which says you have to give taxpayer funded benefits to illegal aliens. Right. We. We could attack this either on the supply side or the demand side. We could just attack it on the supply side with birthright citizenship. It's not a thing anymore. Then you could have an immigration moratorium, which is what I'm for, a permanent closed border until further notice, which is also what I'm for. Or you attack it on the demand side, which is, you know what? If you skirt our immigration laws and come here, just so you know, if you don't have a viable government id, like a driver's license, you got nothing. You're getting nothing. You can't have a job. We'll punish the companies that hire you. You can't have a job. No benefits, anything other than life and death health care. We'll give you that on the way of showing you out of the country. But no, there's no welfare, nothing. No hope for amnesty, nothing. You'll never get to vote here. That'll just never happen. Either one of these would effectively fix much of our problem. They would. The problem is we really haven't addressed either the supply or the demand. It's now we're getting what we used to call, when I was growing up in West Michigan, Dutch door action, where you're getting screwed on the way in and screwed on the way out. But we're gonna have to pick one of these. Now, based on what I. What I researched yesterday, I'm thinking we're gonna have to pick the demand side. I don't think there's any way this will be a 5 to 4 decision. I don't think there's any way Amy Coney Barrett and John Roberts will. Will rule differently. Well, Steve, they did on Roe v. Wade. Well, they did, but they kind of didn't. John Roberts also ruled in favor of the Mississippi abortion ban. Remember, that was six to three. He refused to go along with going as far as Overturning Roe. And that's one of the few significant decisions since she became a Supreme Court justice where Amy Coney Barrett has just not followed John Roberts's lead. I have a hard time believing she's going to do that here based on what I saw yesterday. So if I had to guess this decision will be six to three against us. I could even. And I think the three will get are Kavanaugh, Alito and Thomas Gorsuch is a libertarian. So they tend to just be open borders people. This would be one of the issues that retard libertarians, where they're 70% of the time, they're 100% right. And then the other 30% of the time you're like, which one of the nine realms within the Marvel Cinematic Universe, in which do you reside? Have you heard this thing called the Real World? I'll stop there. Gentlemen, get your thoughts? What do you think?
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Yeah, I think you should be hoping at this point, per your recent suggestions months ago on this front, that maybe it's seven to two against and that just convinces Alito and Thomas, like, I gotta get out of here and have somebody else appointed to me. You know, if you want to make a lemonade out of lemons on this front. Because listen, if we. If this is a court that literally is going to follow the lead on it like a safe bet in life is whatever Ketanji Brown Jackson is saying or doing do the exact opposite.
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Correct. That's a good starting point at least. Is not 100%, but it's going to be close.
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But the what's a woman gal who now compared being a citizen of a country. The fast track to being a citizen is to be a criminal. That's what she just said. This is invincible ignorance. And it's one that multiple justices on that court clearly share. John Roberts, just simply as a man, I don't like what. What his game is. You know, there's. It used to be you'd go too far in the name of carving out, you know, your. Your place in history. His. His place in history is to just indefinitely run in place like that's the statue of John Roberts to never clear anything up. If it's muddy, make it muddier.
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He's an institutionalist. He believes he is here to maintain the status quo and not permit any of the ideological wings of either side from gaining too much of a foothold. He sees himself as essentially America's referee.
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After seeing what I saw, I think really we should be hoping if we're going to lose, we Lose seven to two and make it abundantly clear that even a court approved by, largely approved by a Republican president is just so lost in the morass of modern day American legalisms that it cannot possibly be fixed, perhaps in this generation. And therefore we need to make sure that we have two relatively young bucks, far better vetted than have been done previously to take the place of Alito and Clarence Thomas, as Steve suggested to you. I don't know, when was that? Two to three months ago, when you predicted this.
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Can you talk about something good, I don't know, like the kid dropping an F bomb on cnn. This has been. I've heard these arguments as long as I've really been sentient and aware of, of politics. Does the 14th Amendment mean that anybody, pretty much anybody, can come into this country, even legally via visa or whatever, just enter US Territory, drop a kid, and that kid is now a citizen of the United States no matter what, unconditionally? Yes. Does that make any sense? Could the framers have possibly intended that? No. Do I believe that if there were a way for John Roberts, maybe Kavanaugh, certainly Barrett, if there were a way for them to wash their hands of this and not actually make a definitive choice that they could, you know, say, hey, it's Congress's duty to define what all of these mean, all of these terms mean, and what, you know, what the Amendment actually means. Yes, I believe they would try to do that, but there's no room for that right now. They either have to affirmatively say, yeah, that's what the 14th amendment means. The 14th amendment means no borders ever, for any reason. As it is written, so shall it be, forever and ever. Amen. That's what they're forced to do. Either that or say, heck, no, that's not what the 14th amendment means. This is suicide and we're here to finally clean up the mess. Do you think that any of them possess the ability or the desire to do the latter? You heard there. This wasn't even the full clip, but John Sauer, basically, John Roberts, Chief Justice John Roberts in that clip where he says, you know, times change, but the Constitution doesn't. Look at me. I'm an originalist who doesn't even know what a tax is. He actually brought that up. He broached the subject. And then he tries to pull the ground out from beneath John Sauer by saying, well, you'd agree that this has nothing to do with what we're talking about here today. You were the one who brought it up, numb nuts. And you, you did that for the soundbite that you got at the end there. That's how serious.
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Serious.
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That's how serious this court is. Much of it anyway, specifically our chief Justice. So as Blake Neff said yesterday, and you quoted it once or twice on the air, the real black pill here is that you know what? There's a recourse if the Supreme Court does not rule the way that they should. There's a recourse. It's called amending the Constitution. And how's that looking when we can't even pass the Save America Act? Is that looking good? It's not looking good. There's also a third option here. And the third option should have been the first option back in February of last year when I started. I was the first person to start panning this, openly mocking it openly. Just tell the Supreme Court, okay, cool, cool blog. We're not going to enforce your edict. The executive order stands.
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What would they do? Oh, no. We might lose the Congress and Trump might get impeached next year.
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Oh, that wasn't going to happen.
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Oh, that show you. Okay, that's already on the menu. Okay.
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This is just a Roman One indictment of us as a people. Because when it talks about us being without excuse, you know who else recognizes how stupid this is in terms of the law?
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The entire world. No one else in the entire world
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believes in this policy.
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I want to. In fact, since you brought that up, I'm glad you said that, because I had this prepared. Next, before we get out of here, are the countries that have what is called right of soil citizenship. That's what we're describing here. All right, all right. The United States, Canada, Mexico, Antigua, Barbuda, Barbados, Belize, Costa Rica, Cuba, Dominica. Noticing a trend here. El Salvador, Grenada, Guatemala, Honduras. Noticing a trend here. Jamaica, Nicaragua, Panama. Noticing a trend there. Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Ecuador. Noticing a trend here. Noticing a trend here. The only country outside of the Americas, you know that have been shipping us their citizens for the last 30 years. The only country outside of the Americas that matters in the world that has right of soil citizenship is Pakistan. Most of the world has either what's called right of blood or limited birthright citizenship. All right, write a Blood, meaning one of your parents has to be a citizen for you to be considered a citizen. That's, by the way, all 27 European Union countries have that.
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That's vastly different countries with all kinds of different religions, heritages, everything like that. Just because this is sane, that's the only reason.
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So I want you guys to understand what we just told you, number one, France has a tougher national abortion law than we do. You can't have an abortion after 15 weeks in France. We don't have that in America. Number two, France does not have right of soil, citizenship and right of blood. Now, you might say this makes the amount of Muslims they've allowed in even, even more inexcusable. And you would be right about that. Okay? Because there was no loopholes or anything for the Muslims to exploit. The French just said, by all means, come on in and take the parish that your ancestors were stopped from claiming. It's all yours. Right. But that's a cultural problem for them. Legally, they don't do this. So I want you to, if you know what, Aaron wanted to discuss some good news. Let me give you some really good news as we go to break here. All right, I'm here. I'm here on this Holy Thursday in the midst of Holy Week, I am here to bring you glad tidings of great joy. All right? France has a more based abortion law and immigration law than the United States does. I got that for you. Got that for you.
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On a Thursday, Matt Walsh is going to have an easier time doing the documentary what's a Frenchman Than what's an American?
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We didn't even have a chance to get to the president's statement last night. I'm not really even sure what to think of it at this point. I don't know. All I really care about at this point is when do we get the price of oil under control again? So we have some shot, okay, to, you know, make the country more affordable for the American people again, that, that's literally all I care about at this point. And if that requires, you know, completely and, you know, vaporizing the Iranian high command, I'm for it. If that, that is getting the hell out of there tomorrow, I'm for that, too. That's essentially, that's my, that's the Steve Day Strategic initiative. What's victory look like? How do we make the price of oil affordable for the American people again, as soon as possible? I'm for that.
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The Steve Day Show.
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All right, back here on the Steve Day show, powered by our friends over at Jace Medical. And again, when you see things like what's going on with the straight of Hormuz, understand, it's yes, it's the flow of oil there, but oil is in so many products and it's also in all of the tankers that go through there carrying our medications as well. All right? So again, make sure that you are prepared for. Come on, that can never happen here. Every time. It keeps happening here over and over again. Right. Roughly 80% of our medications come from India or China. So yeah, supply chains can break down faster than you expect. All right, get the OG Jace Medical or the OG Jace case from Jace Medical where they have the venerable antibiotics like doxycycline and amoxicillin and others that you may need in times of crisis. But you can also, they've got so many other variations now that they've added over the years that you can expand as well, including the verboten yet Nobel prize winning ivermectin. You can include that in your Jace case if you'd like to. Just get a discount though, when you use my last name, Dace D E A C E. When you go to jace.com, that's jace.com and use the promo code Dace for a discount on your order@jace.com. all right, in all seriousness, now everybody wants some good news. I'm going to. Let's discuss the greatest news of all. In fact, that's going to be a lot of the focus of the rest of this program.
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The good news.
- [31:37]
A
The good news, yes. From the greatest story ever told. Right. So this is Holy Thursday tomorrow, Good Friday. And then of course, Sunday will be resurrection day or Easter. Okay. And this is really the fundamental question of all of human history. Did Jesus Christ rise again? If he did, everything changes. And once people believe that he did, everything kind of did. If he didn't, then go about your way. And then lots of different ideologies and religious systems have some kind of claim on whether they are right or wrong, they're true or false. This is the fundamental question. It's not why are you here? Because that doesn't even come into. Come into account until we answer that question. Because we'll answer the question of why you're here if we know that Jesus walked out of that tomb or not. Because he'll clarify that question for you too. See, it is the question that clarifies all others. That's why it's the most important question in all of human history. Did a carpenter named Yeshua of Nazareth, who everyone agrees was dead, did he come back alive? And if that happened, pause, consider and in fact reconsider literally everything at that point. And if you didn't go about your merry way, it's just that simple. It's not easy, but it's that simple. Now, if you want to reject the resurrection, there are questions you have to answer. And I know sometimes you have been taught, if you're a skeptic, that you don't have any questions of your own belief system to answer. Well, that's because you didn't talk to us. You do. So you're welcome to question our narrative, but. But we also. We also get to question yours. So there's many. But for the sake of this conversation, and to keep it somewhat brief, I assembled 10 questions that you need to answer if you don't believe in the resurrection. Let's take number one, the most obvious one of them all. Where is the body? Where was the body at the time? Where's the body? Sense, where's the body? Where is it? Where did it go? And. And to answer that question with an alternative other than will he rose again, you're going to have to wrestle with a lot of Jewish burial custom. You're going to have to understand what the kind of tomb that a Joseph of Arimathea, a man of means, would have agreed to donate to Christ and have him buried in. This wasn't just some funeral plot that could be dug up. I was watching Young Sherlock Holmes on Amazon the other night. Great series, by the way. Amy and I are very much enjoying it. Guy Ritchie actually made something that was TV 13. No F bombs or nudity or anything. It's very good. And he's trying to solve a family mystery. He goes out there and exhumes a grave and a family estate. Okay, that's not how this burial custom worked. If you were buried in the tomb of a man of means such as Joseph Arimathea, if you weren't, and most people crucified weren't, you were just thrown into a pit to decompose. And the dogs and the animals, the wild animals would just come and eat you for food. So you got to wrestle with that. You also have to wrestle with your understanding of Roman security policy at the time and that the penalty for abandoning your post or losing a prisoner was life for life. It was for. It was death. That's why it didn't happen very often. So you're going to have to figure out what's your alternative to where's the body? Number two, what changed these timid Jewish men hiding after their leader Jesus was executed, why did they then suddenly change into bold proclaimers of their leader's message? You would think the boldest you would be would be right after his death. Right. Except they weren't bold. Then they ran, they hid. And then something suddenly changed. Where they went from hiding and denying him to now boldly proclaiming him, what changed? You're going to have to answer that question, because it would take a pretty stark event to consider that different level of courage in these individuals given everything they had just been to. Been through for the past few days. Really? Right.
- [36:32]
B
Yeah.
- [36:32]
A
Something dramatic would have had to occur for them to suddenly say, hey, we went from hiding to we're now out in the open.
- [36:40]
B
Mel Gibson put this a different way with Joe Rogan. No one dies for a lie.
- [36:43]
A
Correct. We're gonna get to that, too.
- [36:46]
B
Okay.
- [36:46]
A
Right. In fact, we're gonna get. That's the very next one. Number three. Why were those same disciples willing to be executed for something, and often via the most brutal methods, if they knew the resurrection to be a lie? Why would you do that? And what do I mean by the most brutal of methods? Watch this.
- [37:05]
H
Where did the 12 apostles go after Jesus resurrection? The 12 apostles spread across the ancient world to share his message. Peter went to Antioch, then Rome, crucified upside down. Andrew journeyed to Scythia and Greece, crucified in Patras. James the Greater preached in Spain, executed by sword in Jerusalem. John remained in Ephesus, exiled to Patmos, died peacefully. Philip went to Phrygia in Asia Minor, crucified upside down. Bartholomew traveled through Armenia and India, flayed and beheaded. Thomas preached in Persia and India, struck by spears. Matthew carried the Gospel to Ethiopia, stabbed to death. James the Less stayed in Jerusalem, thrown from the temple. Thaddeus, Jude went through Syria and Mesopotamia, martyred in Beirut. Simon the Zealot preached in North Africa, killed in Persia. Matthias, who succeeded Judas, went to the Caspian region, stoned and beheaded. Their mission changed the world.
- [38:14]
A
Who does that for nothing? And when you see, by the way, he says that John died in peace, well, that was after he was nearly tortured to death. Right? And when they couldn't kill him, they basically just exiled him and said, all right, we give up. We even threw this guy. He's the Rasputin of the disciples. We can't get rid of him, so just send him off and let him die alone in solitaire. Why would anybody do this for a lie? Not just. Why would anybody do it for something they do as a lie? Why would all 12 of these men do it? And did you notice they weren't just kind of hovering in the same area? They went all throughout the Roman Empire. They're often disconnected from each other. They're. They're not getting a game plan here. They're. They're not texting each other all the time. You know, they're not sharing. They're not dms. There's no dms. They go off into regions of the world that were considered savage. These are all Jews. They're not supposed to be out in these areas with all these gentile savages whatsoever to begin with. Why do they do this and face everything they faced and risked? Everything they risked and suffered? Everything they suffered. Totally 12 men, totally disconnected from each other all throughout the known world at the time for what they all simultaneously knew was a lie. Who does that?
- [39:29]
B
Even if they didn't die, just that. Spreading out just the risking of proof
- [39:34]
A
of their own life to begin with. Correct?
- [39:36]
F
Yep.
- [39:37]
A
Number four, for the last 2,000 years, why have more martyrs been willing to die for Christ than any other cause? Now, the same question that applies to these 12 disciples. Let's apply to all the masses of martyrs that have ever existed and are being martyred as we speak.
- [39:53]
C
Is it the Starbucks in the foyer?
- [39:55]
A
Maybe.
- [39:56]
B
You know, Aaron nailed it rock solid.
- [39:59]
A
Yeah. Number five, what made these Jewish men, that's Christ disciples, risk at great penalty, violating the religious law that they all grew up with, to change the day of worship from Saturday to Sunday. Why would they do this? I mean, this was a great cultural risk even of, in and of itself to do this. Something monumental must have occurred. So these guys are all hiding out. Hiding after their leader is, is, is, is is captured, tortured and executed. They come out of hiding, suddenly out of nowhere and boldly proclaim his message. And, and, and they're not anonymous on the Internet. They're going to the temple. All right, where is that? Is the hub of the culture here, trying to preach to where everyone that arrested their leader is in power. They went right to where these people reside and preached and violated their own cultural norms and their own religious traditions and changing the day of worship of Almighty God. And they did that before they went out to all these pagan gentile countries and risked their lives. Why? Why did they do this? And we have all kinds of ancient markers of all the names that were just shown. You can go to all these ancient lands and see and see markers of these individuals that have existed for over, for thousands of years. Why? Number six, why did most of this planet change how it marked time? Because of the resur based on the resurrection. Why would they do that? Okay, these guys are running a little con here. What a grift, by the way. Flayed, beheaded, crucified upside down. And these guys are really, these guys were really desperate for clicks to risk all of that. Right? They were Just asking questions, of course. But now whole countries and cultures are changing calendars. How we keep time. Is time kind of fundamental to human existence?
- [42:01]
B
It is a little bit.
- [42:04]
A
Number seven, by what power did this message of a so called Jewish Messiah spread throughout the non Jewish and non Hebrew speaking world to become the largest religious movement in all of human history? How would this have happened? What invading armada existed? What army was coined and commissioned? How did this happen? Well, you have the wrong Constantine myth. The way it's supposed, the way your Constantine mythology is supposed to work is Constantine saw all the influence of the Christians, realized he needed more soldiers and cynically converted to Christianity in order to fuel his, his ambitions. That's, that's, that's the right, that's. That, that's Tucker show tomorrow, I'm sure. But that's, that's the right scam, right? It's not that Constantine convert, converted in order to make Rome Christian. It's that he saw the Christian influence in Rome, needed the, needed, needed the bodies, needed the warm bodies for soldiers and for his own ambitions, and then con, and then pretended to convert him. That's right, that's the scam, right? Then pretended to convert himself in order to take advantage of the demographics that the Christians had. Meaning that the church was already growing in tremendous numbers in the hundred in the 400 years between Christ and. Or the 300 years between Christ and Constantine. Explain that. How, how, how, how. Number eight. Why are masses still following Christ but no longer following any of the other religions of the ancient world or pre Middle ages gods? Like the Egyptians gods, the Greek gods, the Norse gods, the Druidic gods? Where's the critical mass of all of their followers? Where they all go. In the first century, Zeus was more mainstream than Christ. Why is that no longer the case? Where did all of Zeus's followers go? Where'd they all go? What happened? Because history shows people love converting to different religions. They do this very easily. History shows people are always looking to switch religions. People are always looking for you to challenge their most cherished beliefs and prove that they're false. They're eager for this right? No wars have ever been fought over religion. It's never broken up any families or relationships whatsoever. People are very malleable where religion is concerned. That's what human nature and history has shown. Correct?
- [44:25]
B
Those were the people killing the apostles in point number three.
- [44:29]
A
And so then somehow, somehow all these other gods went away. There's no critical mass of people making sacrifices to Ishtar, but there are critical masses of people In Nigeria right now as we speak, willing to sacrifice for Jesus. Why? Why? Why? You have to answer why. I don't. You do. Number nine. Why is the world the way it is? Why are you the way you are and what can be done about it? I would love to see your worldview fill in the blanks of those three. Come up with a sufficient explanation. Why is the world imperfect? Why are you imperfect? What will be done about your imperfections? And if you can do this on your own, why aren't you doing it now? First of all, how would you even know what an imperfection is? By what standard would you define that? And then number 10, and my favorite question. Not that I didn't like the other nine, but number 10 is my favorite one. Do you know that you need to satisfy all nine of the aforementioned questions simultaneously in order to debunk the Resurrection? Meaning you don't just get to debunk one of these. It's an. It's an entire narrative of consequences that occurred because of belief in it and the credibility of the belief in it. That means you've got to debunk all nine of the questions I just answered in one fell swoop. Not just one of them. All nine. Good luck, gentlemen. What do you think?
- [45:51]
B
Well, I'm sure Ketanji Brown Jackson is going to take her best shot.
- [45:56]
C
I'm not a historian.
- [45:58]
A
Nice.
- [46:01]
C
Listen.
- [46:02]
A
Go ahead. Aaron.
- [46:03]
C
This is the difference between simple and easy. The task before you. If you don't believe the resurrection is simple. What is truly required, though, for you to make an honest assessment of where you land on these questions is for some and really for all of us, if we're being completely honest, because it cuts to the heart, and I'm using that on purpose, that term, on purpose. It cuts to the heart of who we are. That last, that ninth question. Why is the world the way that it is? Why am I the way that I am? And what can be done about it? That in our flesh is the hardest question to answer because we can't answer it honestly in our flesh. So the simple. It's simple nine questions. That's pretty simple. That's, you know, that's less than half the length of a typical quiz. I would say in, in your college classroom, just nine simple questions. Simple. But if you're going to answer them honestly, not easy in your flesh because it requires humility at the same time as you're evaluating real world history and evidence.
- [47:21]
A
Well said, Todd.
- [47:24]
B
The Aaron's little it. There's deep philosophy in what Aaron said. About the in the corridor having the right coffee. There's so much more there. We we are as much as fault as the person who doesn't believe believe for giving them so many reasons not to believe.
- [47:48]
A
We're going to look at the ch.
- [47:50]
B
There it is when we come back.
- [47:52]
A
Stay tuned. All right, back here with hour two, live and on demand on Blaze TV, radio and podcast with Aaron McIntyre. Todd Erzin, I'm Steve Dase. Let us know what you think about what we think via the stevedace.com inbox. Take advantage of that by emailing the show Steve dace.com that's D E A C E like us on Facebook, Me we and Gab. You can follow me at Steve Dacial on X Instagram and TikTok. You can subscribe to our YouTube channel at Day show on YouTube. That's at Day show on YouTube. And then also make sure you subscribe to the podcast if you're a podcast listener so that you can make sure every time we do a new episode, it's for sure in your podcast feed just hit that subscribe button unless you listen via Apple itunes, then hit follow and that will make sure that you're a permanent part of our audience. Thank you. For how many of you many of you have done that? Tens of thousands of you have left us five star reviews. We appreciate each and every one of those. And if you'd like to add yours today, we'd appreciate that as well as we appreciate our friends over at Chirp. I've got a lot of traveling to do this month. I'm going to be in Philadelphia next week for Make Heaven Crowded for tpusa. Faith gonna be at that event and then I'm gonna be in D.C. the following week. Couple different events. One over at the Conservative Partnership Institute for former Senator Jim DeMint. And then America Reads the Bible at the Museum of the Bible. Really looking forward to that. I'm looking forward to both, but I've never been to the Museum of the Bible before. Very looking forward to going to that. And then the three of us, since we couldn't get to Israel, we bought all this equipment. We were joking around about this a few weeks ago. We're gonna do it. I'm gonna take you two with me to the Faith Forward Pastor Summit for TPUSA that they're having in Dallas towards the end of April. I'm gonna take you two with me. We're gonna go together. We're gonna take all the mobile cams and stuff that we brought with us and and just do a road trip episode that we film, take you guys to BUC EE's for the first time. Okay.
- [50:17]
C
Hoping you wouldn't say that. That was supposed to be a surprise.
- [50:19]
A
I'm sorry. Okay. Did I let the cat out of the bag on my. Sorry. I'm sorry. My back.
- [50:23]
B
It's pretty much the same thing as Israel. I mean, no one will notice.
- [50:26]
A
Oh, no. Of course. It's virtually the same. Yes. Yeah, exactly. So it's, it's, it's not. But we're going to do our best to have fun with it as well. So I'm going to be on the road a lot, which means I'm going to have my, my Chirp rolling power massager with me on the road the whole time. So many preventative health devices that help you to stay healthy, help you to get and stay active, particularly as we get older, that you'll see at the Chirp store. Check out the trigger point rollers, the foam rollers I mentioned, the Rolling Power mini massager. Then when you get home, get right in the Chirp contour. That's a decompression massage table for spinal decompression, soothing massage, the kind of thing you'd go to a clinic for. You can do that right there in your own home. Right. They've got a whole menu of these things that definitely help with quality of life. So go to Goat Chirp. C H I r P. Go Chirp.com Steve. Take advantage with $50 off when you go there. Go Chirp.com/Steve, $50 off your order at Go Chirp.com/state. Well, one of the, the, the things that, in the last year, intellectually, that has blessed me quite a bit and I did not anticipate this. Now when I went down to Joel Webbins event about this time last year when everybody and my mother was telling me not to go to this event, all right. But I went there with an intent, all right, that to warn people, you will not be blessed for violating the word of God. It cannot happen. And I met a young man there, well, he's younger than me anyway, that had many of the same concerns that I did. And we served on a panel together, connected with one another. And I've become very familiar with his work. Last year we did an entire Evergreen episode on his piece, remember Red Pilled without Roots? Remember that piece about what's happening with our young men right now? And that's kind of where I got the idea of my way of saying, it is fine. It's not just about being based, but what are we based in? Based in what? Based in what? Based on what? Right. Well, John Harris is that writer and he has a piece that I read last week that blew my mind. It's so smart. It's titled Overhead Overhead at his substack, the New Anti Jewish Theology. First of all, if you want to be a lot smarter, why are you listening to this show? Go to John's Substack and subscribe to that because this is some of the most thoughtful writing on what's happening in American culture today, particularly from a Christian perspective that I am aware of. I can't recommend it highly enough. And John's going to be our guest for this hour of Theology Thursday. As we walk through his piece on what is happening and the various misconceptions, there's the words like dispensationalism being thrown around, and a lot of times people don't even know what they mean or what they're even talking about. Right. So we're going to try to clarify a few things, and John's going to be our tour guide here for this hour of Theology Thursday. It's good to see you again, my friend. How are you? Happy Easter.
- [53:28]
F
Yeah, happy Easter. Same to you, Steve. It's so good to be with you. You flatter me too much. I appreciate the kind words and your show and what you're doing. And we need more Christians like you in the public arena. So keep doing it.
- [53:40]
A
No, that's very, very kind. Thank you very much. I had one of my buddies kept sending me angry texts about Paula White, and I'm like, you do know I might be the most high profile evangelical conservative that never gets invited to these things. Right. I'm not the person to complain to about this. Right. That's why I don't get invited to these things because I have your complaints. Okay. But there's a lot of, there's a lot of messiness out there. And, and before we get into what you're trying to clarify, just give our audience a little bit about your theological background and, and, and where you're usually coming from on these kinds of things.
- [54:18]
F
Sure. So I grew up in kind of a John MacArthur style evangelical household, if that rings a bell for anyone. It's more reformed. In soteriology, the eschatology tends to be dispensational, but as John MacArthur described it, it's more leaky, meaning it's not classic dispensational. And I never really was interested in eschatology much until I got to seminary. I started to get a little bit interested just because I wanted to know what I believed. And so I went to actually a few different seminaries. I went to master seminary where John MacArthur was the president at the time. And then I transferred to Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary and I did a few courses with Liberty University online so I can help students who are trying to figure out what seminary they should go to understand what the differences are, just because of my wide ranging experience. But one of the reasons I went to Southeastern was I wanted to go to a seminary that explored various views within the orthodox tradition because I wasn't sure exactly where I lined up. And neither was my professor, unfortunately. So I had to figure out a lot of things for myself. And where I'm at now is I am. I've called myself an undeveloped premillennialist or some people have attributed my beliefs when I describe them to a historic premillennial position. I have not ever taken the label dispensational. I tend to because of my historian background, I did a master's in history. I tend to be disfavorable towards innovation or newer ideas. And dispensationalism itself is a lot of the elements in it are not necessarily new, but the systematized version of it is newer. And in historical sense that means 1800s. Just so the audience knows, when I say new, when historians say new, they're saying it's not the Roman Empire anyway. So I am in a position where I'm very open to other perspectives, but I'm very guarded about orthodoxy. I have friends who are amillennialists and post millennialists in different varieties of covenantal and also dispensational theology. And they're all good brothers who are well within orthodoxy on their beliefs on this. But there's a threat I think coming in that is actually going to undermine orthodoxy for all of those particular flavors regardless. So that's what I'm trying to write about in this piece. And I want people to understand historically how we got to the point we're at now and have more educated discussions about this because they think it's lacking.
- [56:41]
A
See, your viewpoint is similar to my own. I mean, when I first got saved, I, you know, my, before I got saved, right before I got saved, my mother in law gave me the First Left behind book and the, and I was always, I've always been very involved in right wing political causes as long as I can remember. And so the idea that if this kind of event called the Rapture occurred and how the media and stuff would lie and respond. It lined perfectly up with my political understanding. It seemed accessible to me. Right. Like, it seemed like I could see this kind of an event occurring. And it wasn't until, you know, well, after I was converted that I actually even knew John. There were other viewpoints. I. I had no idea that this is not what, like everybody believed. This was not the eschatology necessarily of everybody that ever lived in the history of Christendom. And I started studying these kinds of things and studying these viewpoints, some of the ones you've already mentioned, and comparing. And then I, then that was a mistake. And then I doubled down on that mistake by then reading what everybody else's critiques of everybody else was. And I thought this all sounds very reasonable to me. So I'm not entirely sure of what my own eschatology is at the moment other than Christ returns and every knee will bow and every tongue will confess. It doesn't mean I'm bored with the subject. We've done lots of shows on this subject over the years. We've had on guests from every persuasion over the years. We're going to do one with a dispensationalist seminary professor later this year. And I've done. I've been doing shows on orthodox criticisms from the likes of Gary Demar and Joel McDermott and that crowd. For 20 years I've been doing shows with people like that, questioning the traditional kind of left behind narrative. Well, it's traditional to modern American evangelicalism anyway. Right. So like you, though, I'm not. It's hard to nail down where I'm at. You used a term called historic premillennialism. Define that for the audience, if you don't mind.
- [58:37]
F
Well, it's often associated with chiliasm, which is just. It means a thousand. And it's the view. And I say view in a singular sense, though I think a good historian would say, ah, there's probably other views represented, but the mainstream view of the early church, where they believed, unsurprisingly after Christ went up in the beginning of Acts, that there was going to be a return of Christ coming and that he would reign for a thousand years. This was not a developed view like we have today so often. And I think part of the reason it is confusing is because especially during systemizations in the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries, a lot of these theological eschatological positions became a lot more firm. And as they compared and reacted to other eschatologies, you develop these various more, I would say, defined versions, but it was fairly undeveloped in the early Church. There's amillennialists who want to say their view existed back then. They don't have in the early, early church. Any examples to point to that I know of. There's an offhanded remark in one of the sources that says there were other views and they just assume that's them. But it was mostly pre. Millennial. Now, the dispensational scheme that people associate with Darby and Schofield, classic dispensationalism, that comes about later and we can talk about that if you want, if you want to go in that direction. I, I think, I thought we were going to talk more about just what's important to all of these different flavors correctly, what transcends these various theological views. But I will say, because I think maybe this is where you're going, that the people who blame dispensationalism for all of the Israel support and all and what's going on today, I don't think they quite understand what's actually motivating Israel support. I don't think it's dispensationalism per se. I think it's stuff that's behind dispensationalism and also behind just not just premillennialism, but even much of covenantal theology, if you look into the early church and the Reformation period. So Christian Zionism does not start with dispensationalists. And you can get rid of dispensationalism, you're still going to have Christians who feel the same way about Israel.
- [60:57]
A
So let's get into that then, because the dispensationalism has kind of become an ad hoc term, particularly by a lot of the online Right. That are critics of Israel and Zionism. And I'm teaching a worldview class at my home church that I developed 15 years ago and I used to teach it every year and I hadn't taught it in like in the last 10 years. And I, I pulled out the curriculum for the first time in 10 years, John, to get ready to teach the first class. And it's about, it's called the Seven Deadly Worldviews. All right, the, the, the deconstructive worldviews or belief systems that the spirit of the age will bring up in our, in a culture in order to deconstruct it away from Christianity. And the very first one, Gnosticism, right. The enemy comes and says to Eve, did God really say right. The early church faces the Gnostic heretics and stuff right away okay. The idea of we're just asking questions. We're never ever giving you any answers or finding any. We're just asking questions, you know, not. Does that sound like. And as I was, as I was getting into Marcion for this class and I started talking about Marcion and describing his life, what he was like and what he taught, and I blurted out organically, I didn't necessarily intend this. I blurted out organically. So in other words, Tucker Carlson. And I, and I. And I think we're kind of at the. And I and I. And this is where I want to start because he is the, he's the, he's the plumb line for I think a lot of people that have never really gotten into these debates before. He's by far the biggest name and the biggest platform trying to at least be intellectually serious about these debates. And I've come to the conclusion with Tucker, John, that the best case scenario is that his deconstruction essentially ends where he's at right now, which is he's kind of a Teemu version of Ron Paul where you, you get some just zany things, you know, that he says that like what world did that come from? But you know, Ron Paul would also give you very prophetic and poignant things to think about when it came to monetary policy and, and fiscal policy. Tucker I don't think is going to give us any of that. He's just going to give us the Ron Paul zaniness. But none of the seriousness. Like that's why I call it the Timu version of it. Basically. My fear is we're watching him become a full fledged Marcion, that we can divorce the Old Testament from the New Testament, that these are different gods. That, that, that, that there, there's, there's hidden knowledge and of course it'll be the Jews fault that, that we weren't given privy to like World War II now was a scam from the very beginning for a second for, you know, that kind of stuff. That's kind of my fear of where Tucker is going. And I. And what are, what are your thoughts on that?
- [63:36]
F
It's kind of you to say that Tucker's trying to be serious about these things because I don't see Tucker as consistent or trying to be serious at least about theology. Now he may be someone that people have said he's a new believer, he's trying to figure it out on eschatology. Tucker's interviewed people like John Rich and John Rich critiques Dar he actually, I think he, I'm trying to remember if it's Darby. I think it's Darby. He might also critique Schofield, but he
- [64:01]
A
mentioned the Schofield Bible notes in that interview with Tucker last year. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
- [64:05]
F
So John Nelson Darby, though, is the first one he brings up. And John Nelson Darby, of course, was not supportive of Zionism, neither was Scofield. But he, he is critiquing that from, I believe, a mid Trib position. So he's not abandoning the. As far as I know, I looked up John Rich. I don't think he's abandoning pre millennialism or dispensationalism necessarily, but Tucker seems to run with that a bit. And, and then there's some other interviews. These are the ones I think you're thinking of that I'm more suspicious of myself, where he starts saying things like, well, I'm a Christian, I have a New Testament ethic, and in the New Testament, we're not supposed to treat people like their groups.
- [64:45]
A
Exactly. Yes.
- [64:47]
F
And. And he's usually talking in the context about Israel, like Israel doesn't do this or something. And I'm thinking, what do you mean, New Testament? Why don't you just say the biblical view or what the Christian God expects, what Jesus commands. He. He wants to emphasize strongly the New Testament. And I sensed the same thing that you're sensing, that there is a disconnection. And he's not the only one. There's other sources. I don't know if I want to give them free press on your show, but there's definitely other sources online who have said things like, you can't really trust the Hebrew translation of the Old Testament. You got to trust the Septuagint, the Greek translation. And I'm like, what's motivating this? I do know, because I had Holocaust class and World War II class in my graduate studies, that the German Christian movement did attempt to de Judaize Christianity by getting rid of things that were deemed too Jewish. Could this be the beginning of that? I don't know. But I do want to create a wall. I do want to say we're not doing that. That's not biblical and it's not within our Orthodox tradition. There was a few other things I also, in my piece, wanted to focus on. We're not going to start questioning or hedging on Jesus being the Jewish Messiah. That's also Orthodox. I don't care what your eschatological flavor is. We're not going to start hating Jews or using them as a universal kind of sin category. And then twisting scriptures, changing our hermeneutic the way we'd study Scripture to accommodate this new view that's not within the orthodox understanding of how we should approach Scripture or look at Scripture. And there's a few other novel things that I was also concerned about, things like thinking the second coming has already taken place and so forth, like a full. A full or a very hard kind of preterism that's fairly novel and new. So I wanted to go after these things and say there are boundaries, and regardless of your eschatological flavor, you need to understand where the boundaries are. And. And I think people who are hard covenantal need to understand this isn't just dispensationalism. And people who are dispensational as dispensationalists need to understand this isn't just quote, unquote, replacement theology or sometimes covenantal theology that's causing this. This is much deeper and much different. And so that's why I wrote the piece was to give and understanding the long view for, not just for church history, but going back even into the biblical text so people understand why the church history is the way it is, how people approach these texts and what you'll find is it's very reasonable and it's been present ever since the formation of the church, to think that there's a restoration for ethnic Israel that God has. It's not a separation, in a sense. There's ethnic Israel and there's spiritual Israel. Spiritual Israel, the church is comprised of Jews and Gentiles. So we all believe that that's the orthodox position. But there is an acknowledgment throughout church history, and it is the mainstream view, regardless of eschatology, that there is some kind of special relationship God has that will be manifest in either an in gathering where Israel is saved, or there's a process that we are in now that will be completed at some point where Israel will be saved. There is. Some people think, and this goes back to the early church land promises for them, where they're going to be in the land. And this is all very reasonable. And there's no reason to start saying, as I've heard now online, that this is a heresy. Because if we do that, we are going to cut ourselves off from many of our church fathers, our Reformed heritage, and especially if you're in the Dutch Reformed or the English Reformed tradition, you are cutting yourself off from a lot of history.
- [68:26]
A
You just said, I want to make sure I heard you correctly, that neither Scofield nor Darby Considered kind of the Twin towers, if you will, of dispensationalism. Neither one of them were Zionist. Did I just hear you say that?
- [68:39]
F
No, they were not.
- [68:40]
A
All right, well.
- [68:42]
F
And you can find there's a quote from Arno Gabeline, who actually was one of the editors of the Scofield Reference Bible, where he specifically says Zionism, as he understood it at that time, is not a the restoration of Israel. So you can find these quotes among certain Zionists throughout time. And I. I gave actually two of them in the piece. The Ryrie Study Bible, also by James. By. I think it's James Ryrie, if I'm not mistaken. I'm trying to remember his first name now, but my mom had one of those when I was little. It's a very popular dispensational study Bible. He did not believe that the modern nation state of Israel was the Restoration. Neither did J. Vernon McGee, who was also a dispensationalist.
- [69:25]
A
So chances are, if you've listened to Christian radio In the last 50 years, you've heard the voice of J. Vernon McGee. If you don't know the name, you're like, who's this guy with this incredible. With this really unique voice? Chances are, if you've listened to any Christian radio on the evangelical side, you've heard J. Vernon McGee's voice.
- [69:40]
F
Yeah. And quick corrections. Charles Ryrie. I just remembered Charles Ryrie. So there are dispensationalists who did not believe that today, I would say most dispensationalists out there are probably within more charismatic circles, and they would believe that there's something significant to this. But it's also worth mentioning there are Covenantalists throughout time. Most of the quotes that I provided are from people who are covenantal in their theology, and they believed that there would be a restoration of ethnic Israel in the land of Palestine. And people like to pick some famous, more modern. Modern, in the historian sense, examples. People like Jonathan. Jonathan Edwards, Charles Spurgeon.
- [70:17]
A
I've said this to our audience. Yes. I've used these names to our audience. Yeah. So I want to make sure everybody hears what John just told you. All right? How? How. Listen, the Internet in and of itself is not the place to go for nuance. Okay. It's also about the last place to go for theological nuance. But what you. This is again, why. Where you go for information and what you study. Also, I would add just my own little personal pet peeve. It's why I say all the time that the outright jettisoning of Tradition by the Protestant church was the dumbest mistake the Protestant church ever made. All right, I don't agree with Todd. I do. I would not put it on the same line as scripture. Otherwise I go to church with Todd. Okay, but, but it is a valuable tool. Do you know how many, how do you understand how many ditches you would have avoided? How much brain rot you would have avoided if you, if you knew any of the just baseline church history that John just communicated with you? So right away, two guys that you're being stereotyped as the ones that are responsible for all the, the Israeli, Israel, crazy Protestants. He just told you they weren't even necessarily, by our own definitions, Zionist. That's Scofield and Darby. And then he told you two guys. One of them, by the way, Spurgeon was preaching in England during the advent of dispensationalism. He was a, he was a, he was a. He was critical it. All right, Edwards is pre dispensationalism. And they actually believe that there might be some form in the. Somewhere in the Palestine region a reconstitution of Israel necessary.
- [71:43]
F
Not.
- [71:43]
A
Or that they would be, forgive me, in order to, in order to ne. Necessitate the final, you know, revival of Jews towards the Messiah as, as it's described in Romans 9, 11. So right away, we are outside of what, 99% of the, of the, of the discussion that you're seeing about this online is John, which is that this is all very, this is all very patterned. There's. This is all very rigid and strict. Everybody's views on this have all been clearly defined for all this time. Right away you're telling us that that's not the case even within camps that don't agree with one another on this stuff.
- [72:18]
F
Yeah, it's remarkable what you find if you just do a little digging and look at the historical record. So I think if people understand that, and we can go into more detail if you want, about various views, they won't fall into some of the tribal pitfalls that I see forming today and misattribute motives to people that don't belong to them. We have to deal with the biblical text as well. I think sometimes that gets lost in all of this. When Jesus first came, the Jews in Jerusalem were looking for something. They, they thought, the Messiah is going to come. He's going to usher in the Davidic kingdom. This is going to be a final fulfillment of the Abrahamic covenant and it's going to be accompanied by things like peace and prosperity. The World's going to be ruled by Jerusalem. It's going to have, I mean, your young men are going to die at 100, right? It's like the Garden of Eden. There's all these comparisons and things in the major and minor prophets that they are looking to. And they're saying, this time hasn't happened, it's still coming. And they think that's Jesus. And if you remember the beginning of Acts, his disciples ask him before he leaves this earth. They say, hey, when are you going to set up the kingdom? And Jesus could have said to them, I tried to explain this to you guys, the kingdom is within you. The kingdom is a spiritual kingdom. It's. What do you. The kingdom is set up. He didn't say that though. He says it's not for you to know the times. Now that's mind blowing because the Jews did not expect Jesus to die, Remember, on the road to Emmaus, they say to him, his disciples say, we thought he was going to be the Messiah. And they don't know. They're talking to Jesus and he says, basically, look, I am. Let me explain to you, starting with Moses. That's what I tried to do with this piece. I'm going to explain to you, starting with Moses. They wrote about Jesus. That's what Jesus says. Moses and the prophets wrote about him. Let's go forward through the whole thing. Get to the point of Jesus coming. Mary says, this is the fulfillment of Abrahamic covenant. I mean, from the first pages, Matthew 11, this is the seed of David. It's undeniable who Jesus is. And if you understand the Old Testament, it's very clear. Jesus, of course, institutes the church. This is a, a, this is the thing that the Jews can't quite understand is what. What do you mean the Gentiles are now included? What is this new spiritual reality? And it's. And Paul has to explain to them, there's always been a remnant. There's always been a spiritual Israel. There's always been Gentiles who have been part of this. But we are not requiring them to be proselytes to the Jewish religion. And there is this new entity called the Church. And, and so there's some back and forth about the continuity and discontinuity between the church and Israel. To what extent does the Church supersede Israel? And then to what extent is ethnic Israel still in play? For what kind of promises apply to ethnic Israel and that kind of thing? But this is what happens. Throughout church history there are debates about this. But within those debates, there is A constant recognition that God, even in the Catholic Church, that God still has a plan for ethnic Jews. And there is a growing almost overnight theology online that seems to say that, no, the orthodox position is that they were completely replaced in every single way and God has nothing, no promises for them, not even salvation, as Romans 11 talks about. And I'm just telling you that's not accurate
- [75:42]
A
and it doesn't really take a deep dive along the lines of what you did, which in this conversation I could not possibly do justice to the level of scholarship you have done here. But it doesn't require that at all. Even a cursory reading of just Romans 9:11, as we just did on our show, we did a two year study, verse by verse of the book of Romans on theology Thursday. We just finished it just a few weeks ago. Even a cursory study of Romans 9:11 makes it very clear. Salvation is achievable to Jew and Gentile alike through Jesus Christ makes it very clear. So the idea that someone's just been cut off as a unique punishment of some kind, that just comes, it doesn't come from the Bible, John, on a cursory reading, I mean, that has to come from a dark place.
- [76:29]
F
Well, you have to understand the Context of Romans 9:11. What is Paul trying to communicate in Romans? Paul is trying to glorify God by showing his plan of salvation and the various elements in God's redemptive plan and how they each glorify him. So God is glorified in the punishment of the wicked. God is glorified in sanctification, justification, sanctification. And then he talks in Romans 8 about how there's this golden chain of redemption that if God, for those whom he foreknows, he's ultimately going to glorify and that nothing can separate you from the love of Christ. Now this is where Romans 9 starts. And he says, look, I'm going to tell you now about my kinsman according to the flesh, tell you a little bit more about God's election. And what he's doing is he's showing that towards ethnic Israel to them belong these promises, the covenants, he says, and even the Jewish identity of the Messiah. He talks about all this. And he says God has not forsaken them. He even says that explicitly. Chapter 11.
- [77:33]
A
Exactly.
- [77:33]
F
And so if God has not rejected them, he will not reject you. He keeps his covenants. That is the point, main point, at least Paul's trying to make there.
- [77:43]
A
All right, let's pick it up there
- [77:44]
B
when we come back.
- [77:45]
A
John we're up against the break. We'll pick it up there when we come back. And I want to get into Genesis 12:3, which has suddenly become the most debated Bible verse in America right now. We'll get into that. More with John Harris here next. Stay tuned,
- [77:58]
E
the Steve Day Show.
- [78:08]
A
Hey, we're gonna stick around and record overtime after today's show for Blaze TV subscribers. You don't want to miss it. To make sure you don't miss that or any of the other exclusive content we do for you here every day at BlazeTV. Go subscribe today. BlazeTV.com DACE use the code DACE for $20 off your annual subscription. BlazeTV.com days code DACE. You'll get $20 off your annual subscription. It comes out to about 8 cents a day. What is it, about 20 or. No, no. 26 cents a day. 8 bucks a month. That's what it is. A quarter a day. Less than 10 bucks a month. Can't beat it. At least I hope you can't. If you can. What do we. What are we doing here? I gotta fire somebody. Right place. Tv.com days code dace is where you can go to become a Blaze TV subscriber. You want to definitely go subscribe to John Harris a substack. There is a lot of very insightful stuff there. He's been our guest here today on Theology Thursday. And John, again, it would take multiple shows to go over all the level of scholarship and nuance you have provided in this piece. And it's exactly why I think the audience. You want to go check this out for yourself? It's on John Harris's substack. It's called the New Anti Jewish Theology, and it's from March 24th. It's just one of many fantastic offerings from John that makes me smarter. So, John, when I was growing up and I went. I didn't grow up in any. I wouldn't have known what a sodorology was. Okay. When I was growing up, all right? I mean, I grew up in a pagan household, all right? And I just remember watching football games and everybody held a John 3:16 sign, you know, behind the goal post when the guy was kicking the field goals. Okay. You know that that was the number one Bible verse when I was a kid. Then we became adults and it was Matthew 7 taken completely out of context, became the number one most debated Bible verse in America.
- [79:56]
F
Right.
- [79:57]
A
Genesis 12:3 now is. Okay. You've got an entire section in your piece on Genesis 12:3. All right, what does it say? What does it mean? Does it still stand?
- [80:11]
F
Genesis 12:3. God promises Abraham to bless him. And it's tied to three separate components, a land, a nation and a blessing. There's also a protection clause that those who bless Abraham's descendants, essentially who bless Abraham, they're going to be blessed and those who curse will be cursed. And so if you trace that out where this keeps coming up in Scripture, because it comes up an awful lot, it gets fine tuned throughout the Old Testament and applied to the a particular line. So it gets applied to Isaac and then to Jacob and then to Israel as the nation. In fact, Exodus opens up that way that this is now that God remembered his covenant.
- [80:53]
A
He remembered his covenant with Abraham hundreds of years before. Right. And that's why he calls Moses is to fulfill that covenant. He makes that very clear right at the start of the book of Exodus, correct?
- [81:02]
F
Yes, that's correct. And you, you see Abraham trying other ways to make this work. I don't have a kid. What about Ishmael? And then God changes his name to Abraham from Abram because that was his name before and, and says it's not going to be Ishmael, it's going to be Isaac. This is actually something that I had to address in the piece because the Muslims do don't believe that part of the story. They believe that the promise to Abraham was to both Isaac and, and Ishmael. They focus more on Ishmael and that this was to make a Muslim a universal Muslim nation. And so you saw a hint of that I think in the Tucker Carlson interview with Mike Huckabee a bit because Tucker really wanted to correct him that it's Abram and, and it was, it was a very strange thing if you didn't understand Muslim theology on this. But that gets traced through to the nation of Israel in the Old Testament and then applied to David. It's the, it becomes part of also are connected to the Davidic kingdom. There's going to be a land and it's going to be the seat of David's throne. That is going to be the everlasting kingdom or the dynasty over this. And then, and then scripture in the New Testament has this assumption that this is still something that is coming. Now there are different theologies as far as different views on what aspects of this were fulfilled at what time. I try to emphasize, and I agree with John Calvin on this, that Joshua and Solomon, their kingdoms were not the final fulfillments of the land promise. And the reason for that is because in Leviticus 26 there is a requirement that there's a prediction, I should say that Israel is going to reject God, they're going to go into captivity, they're going to repent, and they're going to be restored. And that doesn't happen before Solomon or Joshua. And there's some other issues that I, for the sake of time, I won't get into here. But this is something that Israel is waiting for. You get to the New Testament and Jesus is continually identified as this Messianic figure. And the Abrahamic covenant still keeps coming up as something that is still God has not forgotten. The the blessing to the nations is fulfilled explicitly, Galatians tells us in Christ. Now, now the whole thing is actually fulfilled in Christ. No one disagrees on that. But the question, the differences between various theologies on this is, okay, so Christ is the Davidic king and the forever kingdom in the restoration. But how much of this is ethnic Jews? How much of this is the church? Christ is of course, the Lord of this. No one disputes that. But very specifically, we see in Both Acts chapter 3 and in Galatians chapter 3, that the blessing to the nations is this inclusion of the Gentiles. So the land promise, though you don't see fulfilled anywhere, at least many people in church history did not see fulfilled anywhere and still don't see in a final form of fulfillment. And so I'll give you a few names of people who thought that way. People like Irenaeus of Lyon, Victorinus of Patel, the first commentary of Revelation, we know about Cyril of Alexandria, Jerome, when it comes to our more reformed tradition, of course I'm skipping over Catholics because I will say I'll give an honorable mention. Thomas Aquinas was very open to the idea that they were going to be restored into their land as well, because that's what Zechariah says. Zechariah says they're going to look on he whom they pierced. And he specifically says it is going to be the seed of David in Jerusalem. So it's really common sense why some people thought this. But Thomas Brightman, Sir Henry Finch, William Gouge, John Milton, people like Increase Mather, John Gill and we mentioned a few others, they all thought it's going to be in the Palestine region, that this is going to take place, place in some kind of final fulfillment. So land, nation and blessing and a protection clause, that's the Abrahamic covenant. How those things apply today, that's the subject of debate and discussion.
- [85:11]
A
How much do you think everything you just said should factor into American foreign policy?
- [85:17]
F
I don't think it should factor too strongly into what's happening today. But I will say this. I don't think someone is crazy if they think that blessing Israel means some kind of a diplomatic support. I don't dismiss that as fringy or just or heretical necessarily. I think there are rational ways people can get there, and I think there are irrational ways people can get there. My view, which is what I put in the piece, is that I think the responsibility of nations is to their own people and governments to their own people. And so we have to think through whether this makes sense now. The Abrahamic covenant is not just going to be fulfilled with land. There's a land, a nation, and a blessing. And there's also an expectation that we see throughout Jeremiah, Isaiah and Ezekiel that there is going to be a spiritual restoration. And I mentioned one of those verses from Zechariah. So there's a prediction, right, that Jesus is coming. Isaiah 53, Psalm 22. Amazing, those prophecies and how they are predicted. And there's also a prediction that the Jews are going to be restored in some way. They're going to look on the person that they pierced. Who is Jesus? They are going to. Jesus says In Matthew, chapter 23, after saying woe to the scribes and Pharisees, he says, I've so long wanted to gather you, Jerusalem, but you would not. You are not going to see me again until you say, blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord. This is after the triumphal entry. So that's just happened. People know what he's talking about. He is signaling it's coming. I'm going to come back, Jerusalem. And so there is this expectation that this is going to happen in Jerusalem that many of our forefathers in the faith had. Now, there's many who didn't say that because they didn't hold a view on it. It wasn't within their writings, or maybe they didn't believe that. They thought that that was fulfilled in the Church, even though they still held that there's going to be a spiritual restoration for Israel. So I acknowledge that in the piece, but I think that the blessing and cursing element of all of this, which is really the foreign policy question, comes down to what we can specifically prove from the Bible. And I'm not going to bind anyone's conscience to anything outside Scripture. We see in Acts 3, God's blessing to Israel is spiritual restoration. We see Paul's longing is that Israel would be saved. We see that Jesus goes to the lost sheep of the House of Israel. We see Jewish evangelism efforts in the early church, like dialogue with Trypho. This is where I think we should be blessing Israel as Christians. It's your Jewish neighbor. It's to the nation, it's not to a government. And the government itself is going to have to reflect a spiritual restoration for us to be able to identify it as the restoration that would be tied to the Abrahamic covenant. And so far that has not happened. So could this be a stepping stone, just like returning to the land after captivity was a stepping stone? Sure. That took 80 years. Cyrus started it off with a decree. It wasn't 80 years until we have repentance and Ezra proclaiming the law. So, sure, this could be the stepping stone, but I don't know that I can't tell you that from Scripture. So I'm not going to bind anyone to that. And I would personally like to see us make our foreign policy decisions based on what makes sense for our country and what's in. In being responsible and not what we think this might be someday. That would be smarter. And I don't think there's an obligation on us now. One last thing. I'll say the cursing element here. I think you don't have to root it in the Abrahamic covenant protection clause. This is just. This could just be a scriptural teaching. I think it connects, but you don't have to, Kurt. Hating Israel is forbidden and boasting against the branches is for Britain. You can't have this posture towards Jewish people that I see many people advocating today. Or you might learn the lesson that Haman got to learn in the Book of Esther. I think that is pretty cut and dry. I'm more certain about knowing what cursing is than blessing. But at the very least, blessing is evangelizing and not applying unequal weights and measures. And I'll say this in closing. Augustine set the tone for Christendom in Europe. And the tone for Christendom in Europe is that there is something special about the Jewish people. Not that there's a separation between Jews in the church. Like there's two peoples of God. These are straw mans that get thrown out there. There's a distinction that God makes. And this distinction led Augustine to say, you know what? The Jewish people, in their Scripture, they testify about the Messiah. They also testify that God actually come. He will, he has. There's a partial hardening, as Paul says, and that they are under a temporary curse or a hardening for their disbelief. These things seem evident in the Diaspora Jews. We should be tolerant of them on this basis. And so there were points of obviously persecution, but it's nothing like European pagans. Paganism was essentially eradicated in Europe. The Jewish people, even religious Jews, who Paul says they have a zeal for God without knowledge, those people were afforded a level of tolerance that was not afforded to the pagans. And that's been the Christian default setting for centuries.
- [90:40]
A
John, there's a ton of stuff I could ask you about, but I wanted to make sure I gave Todd and Aaron time to respond to everything. This was fantastic, folks. This is only the tip of the iceberg. I mean, you definitely need to take some time. You know, in an evening you're looking for something to read over the weekend and go over to John Substack. What's your substack again, John?
- [90:59]
F
Substack.com forward slash@ John Harris, 1989.
- [91:03]
A
And it's J O N. J O N. Sorry, sorry.
- [91:06]
F
I think it's John Harris. So I got actually got the first John Harris. For once in my life, it is John Harris.
- [91:12]
A
All right, so it's J O N. There's a ton of great, thoughtful, insightful stuff, but the one we're talking about here. All right, the new anti jewish theology from March 24th. Great stuff, brother. Good to see you as always, man. Thank you.
- [91:24]
F
Thank you, Steve.
- [91:24]
A
You bet. All right, we've got a good five minutes for you guys here. The floor belongs to the two of you. Based on what you just heard, I
- [91:32]
B
think I have to let Aaron, if you want to go first as the closer to that tribe, go ahead.
- [91:37]
C
What do you mean? My preconceived notions that I just learned 5 minutes ago online from jewelover69 me on X. What do you mean? Those preconceived notions that I just learned about five minutes ago might not be 100% accurate? Listen, we can have all sorts of disagreements. We can, and I think it's actually healthy. If you're Amil or post mil, you think that dispies maybe are basing theology both today and their missiology off of headlines. You know what? If your motivation is I'm concerned about building God's kingdom here and now and in the future and for all eternity. If that's your motivation, by all means, if that's your motivation, that's a healthy motivation to maybe critique that strain of thought. Conversely, if you think that maybe post or ah are a little bit too optimistic based on your read of history and looking at how history winds and turns and that's just not really an accurate view and that you should. It's maybe distracting you or dissuading you from a realistic outlook, both today in your missiology and elsewhere. If that's truly your motivation, if building God's kingdom is your motivation, then we can have all sorts of disagreements in good Christian faith with our brothers. We can. That's good and healthy and something that's unique about the Christian faith. We just talked about Islam last week on Theology Thursday. Look how they handle their disagreements. Not well. What's unique about us is that we can handle disagreements well because our primary mission is the mission. It's the good news that you just talked about last hour, Steve. What a great opportunity for us to disagree. Yes, but do it with the primary mission. However, what we have seen now and what I think John was articulating there is the rise of not missional disagreement, but narrative disagreement. Narrative disagreement. You don't agree with my narrative, my preconceived notion that I just learned about five, five minutes ago, you disagree with that. That means you're outside the flock. That means you're deceived. That means the Jews have paid you off. The Jews have paid you off from the people.
- [93:53]
A
Just asking questions, of course, yes.
- [93:55]
C
So we have a tremendous opportunity here. We still do. I believe, and this was my word of caution last year around this time. I don't want to look some of the young preachers, the young men who are really on fire. I don't want to look at them after having begged for decades, now, at least in my case, a decade. Hey, can we have some fire, some zeal for the Holy Spirit here? I didn't want the first aspect or the first reaction to be, let's tamp it down yet at the same token, I would rather reign in what we can reign in rather than trying to like the skinny, jean wearing, plated, khaki wearing, sweater vested Christian pastor at the Fill in the Blank megachurch. We've been through all of that before, rather trying to cattle prod them into doing anything at all. There's still tremendous opportunity. We just have to confront what needs to be confronted. We have to spit out what needs to be spat out and move forward, I think in as much Christian charity as we possibly can. As ever in the year 2026, as it was back in the days of the disciples and the apostles, the harvest is plentiful, but the workers are few.
- [95:09]
B
A ton of Catholic overlap there. When he started talking about the early church, obviously I believe that church to be Catholic, but yes, experientially it started off as premal, and it became this amillennial openness all the way up to St. Thomas Aquinas in the 14th century, which he's talking about. We we didn't do ain't how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. And that's for reasons, because there we aren't certain about it. So we are open to a lot of things. One thing we aren't open, though, is hating the Jews. Like you said at the end, those curses. This is really important. Even though I agree with a lot of things Carrie Briggine has said, she's ending at the point place. That means you get to hate Jews. No, we don't.
- [95:50]
A
Back editing Tomorrow noon to 2 Eastern, right after Glenn Beck, right here on Blaze TV. Until then, go hard. Romans 8, 28.