← Thinking Fellows
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- [00:00]
A
Hello 15:17 podcast listeners. This is Caleb Keith, director of the 15:17 podcast network, here to talk about our June Podcast Fundraiser. The June Podcast Network Fundraiser has become an integral part of the fundraising we do to support these shows throughout the entire year. The 15:17 podcast network is special. We have many shows ranging from topics in the Old Testament, New Testament theology, history, and so much more, and each one of these manages to keep the focus on Christ and Him crucified for the forgiveness of sins. We thank you for being a listener and for your support, both subscribing and donating to keep these shows on the air this year. The Podcast Network Fundraiser has a goal of $150,000 to support the production, the posting and the hosting of these shows. We believe that the Podcast Network is worth it and we think that you do too. We keep all of these shows free and ad free, meaning that we do not put these shows behind paywalls. You can listen to all of the episodes, the entire archive of our shows for free, and when you do so, that experience will be ad free. No advertisements jumping in between the content, just the entire recording presented to you uninterrupted. We believe that these are the best ways to present our podcasts and the best way to listen to podcasts as a whole, and we greatly need your support to keep it that way. Without collecting revenue from subscriptions and ads, the Podcast Network is entirely dependent on donors who love and are impacted by these shows to keep them going. If you would consider supporting this show, you can go to 1517.org donate. You can also go to the Show Notes here and there are links directly to a giving page where you can support the Podcast Network Fundraiser. Thank you for helping us reach our goal of $150,000 this June and we hope that you continue to enjoy these shows by. Hello and welcome to the Thinking Fellows Podcast. My name is Caleb Keith. Today I am joined by Adam Francisco, Scott Keith and Bruce Hillman. The Thinking Fellows is part of the 1517 podcast network of shows. You can go to 1517.orgpodcasts to see all of our shows. Don't forget to support this show and your favorite shows on the 1517 podcast network. You can go to1517.org donate or you can follow the links in this show notes below. We have a bunch of resources there. We put a lot of effort into keeping the website up to date. We have new articles basically every day of the week. We have podcasts coming out every day of the week. We have preaching helps. We have a whole lot going on. That's 1517. Org. Stop by the homepage and see the latest there. Okay. We are talking about the apostle Paul and how he invented Christianity today. We're talking about the question, I suppose the more serious version is is there a difference between the Christianity of Jesus and the Christianity of Paul? This comes up in both academic like in both like university lecture settings especially. I've heard it firsthand when it came to talking about manuscript dating and the content of Christianity. So it comes up there. It comes up in like liberal Christianity, progressive Christianity in America by looking at sort of the, there's been like the red letter or what Montgomery coined as like the actual version of gospel reductionism. So pinning say that there's things in Paul that make the church uncomfortable today. Maybe that's where you're arguments against women's ordination come from, or harsh stances against homosexuality. And if you actually just follow the words of Jesus, you would learn to love everybody. That's one of those. And then there's a third version which is essentially that Paul had a gentile focused religion, Jesus and his writings, and then the development of the church de emphasize the Jewish influence on Christianity there as well. So that's actually rising in sort of online popularity again today, which is that Paul made a shift away from the Jewish context and now Christianity has lost all these other Jewish sources that Jesus was pulling from. And the one thing all three groups seem to agree on is that Paul is radically different than Jesus and invents essentially what we would call Christianity today. So we're going to deal with this. I know that Bruce has thoughts on this. I know that Adam has even older context with potentially some Islam connection to this. But I don't know where to start besides, because there's a lot here besides the general question. Did Paul invent what we call Christianity and it's just totally different than what you see in the Gospels?
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B
No.
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A
Is that the whole episode?
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B
Yeah.
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C
Yeah.
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A
Okay.
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D
I would say that there's a, the problem is that there is a difference between Jesus and Paul in that Paul is doing theology and Jesus can stuff the proclamation of the gospel and the ethical teachings and stuff that Jesus is doing. The social stuff that all the liberal people like is not, properly speaking, like doing theology, like he's doing ministry, which is theological, but Paul's actually like functionally doing theology. So of course if you read the two and you don't know the difference between the two, you're going to say, well wait a minute, this sounds really different than what Jesus was. Jesus was all about love and, like, caring for people and doing the. But Paul's not writing about how to do a social gospel or how to do something like that. He's actually teaching the church how the church is different from Israel and also how it fulfills all the Old Testament and what has happened in Israel through the gospel and giving that real clarity of the gospel and how it's universal, how it's gone to Gentiles and this whole thing, which, by the way, people who are listening, this is still pretty big debate in academic theology today. It's still a big deal. And it's. It kind of. Obviously you can tell right away, like in academia, whether someone's kind of more liberal, progressive, or more conservative, traditional by where they sit on this issue. But the people love to write and talk all about this kind of stuff. It predates this. But the real where this really came from was the Tubingen School, which was a University of Tubagen in Germany. And in the 19th century, 1800s, there was a guy, Ferdinand Christian Bauer, who came up with this idea, or at least synthesized it in a kind of academic way that hadn't really been done prior. Other people before it had kind of made mention. What was interesting about the Tubicin School, though, was the University of Tubigen had Protestant Germans and Catholics. So they developed the historical critical method of reading the Bible in the Tubican school. But they also came up with this idea that Peter and James represented the Jewish side of the church, as Caleb, you had kind of alluded to, and that Paul represented a Gentile or a new type of Christianity to the church. And that Paul won out and that Judaism was kind of deflated. And so essentially, Paul gives us something completely different and completely new. And what made it so impactful was that you had Protestants and Catholics working together on this. So it. It just. It infiltrated really fast into academic theology. And then of course, that always trickles down over time. And I think on social media now, some people are hearing this for the first time, but this is not new. This has been around for a very long time, and there's a lot of great, great academics and apologists and others who can show what the real problems are in this thesis. But people should be informed that it is still something that, like, if they go to a seminary or they take a religion course at college, they're going to. They're going to encounter this.
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B
Can I. Before Adam does the really smart stuff, Can I. That was very, very smart as well, Bruce. By the way. Good job. Can I do sort of like the Bruce hit on what the problem with this is. So I don't actually think the problem is looking at Paul and the writings of Paul, and these are direct writings of Paul, so that's one difference. And looking at the Gospels, which record the life history of Jesus, which includes things that he said, so his direct teachings, but recorded by somebody else as they're hearing it, and then recording it sort of for posterity, that in itself is a pretty big difference. But the issue is that when people do this, they're going into this generally with an agenda. They want the conclusion to be this is something different than what Jesus taught. And so they go into that and. And they use critical methodology, higher critical methodology, which is I just. The level of disdain I have for higher critical method is probably can't be recorded on a reasonable scale. It's just, to put it frankly, it's just bs. It's stuff that's made up to sound really smart, but cannot be applied even the same way twice. And it's just fallacious. So whatever conclusion they come up with, even if there's some truth in what they say, it's like a broken clock being right twice a day. They just stumbled onto something there. It's not the actual method that helped them with it. And so I do think it might be a little valuable to say, how does Paul communicate this one truth differently than the recorded teachings of Jesus? Because obviously it seems obvious to me that sort of the master plan was to give this to us for posterity through the mouths of different people, so that we can kind of get multiple perspectives on this one truth that is being recorded. And then you sort of have to just ask, what does it seem to be like? Is there a through line here? And if there's a through line, it seems pretty obvious to me that the teaching is that Jesus is the way, the truth and the life, and that nobody comes to the Father but through him. Once you get that, then you can actually maybe examine. Is that what Paul's teaching on the whole? Is that what the other authors in the New Testament are teaching on the whole? Is that what's coming through in the Gospels as it's recorded, that Jesus taught himself on the whole? And the big issue to me is this, is that the agenda that they're always trying to find is that Jesus was some sort of social changer, like he wanted to change society to make it more amenable to poor people or to the disenfranchised or something like that. And I got to tell you, you can get that through posting snippets on Twitter of what Jesus said. But you're not going to get that as a major project in the life of Jesus as it's recorded for us in Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. You're just not going to. If we are proposing that he is God and that that meant that he had all the powers of God, if that were his agenda, he could have done it right. And he didn't do it. And he leaves you all sorts of clues that this is not why he's here. Not even clues, just direct statements. This is not why I'm here. And so when that's sort of the presupposition and then you do all of this like really complicated and unrepeatable critical methodology to get to it. It's academics being academics. And that just drives me nuts, man. Especially when you're sort of in this side of it. This is not math. They act like this is completely objective and they've come to an objective conclusion that everybody else should come to too, because they found the two plus two equals four. And Paul is creating something different than Jesus and it's just not that at all. Don't buy into it. They're not smarter than you. I mean, they might be more educated than you, but they're not smarter than you. All right, go ahead.
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C
I don't know what else to say. I mean, I could say Bruce made the point that this goes way back. C. Bauer would be probably like the. He's usually attributed with the founder of the historical Jesus school or one of the founders. Right. And wouldn't he buddies or wouldn't Karl Marx, a big admirer of him.
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B
That's the way I heard it told.
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C
Primarily because he saw it as a way to discredit Christianity using Bauer's methodology and techniques and assumptions. But I'll just throw something else into the mix that not only does this go back that far in the European sort of context of Western Christianity, if you will, you can find
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A
maybe even
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C
the origins of this accusation back in Islamic polemical literature. So I'm going to pull a Bruce and read some of you.
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A
Wow.
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C
Just like two sentences.
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A
Please tell us this is not the Quran.
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D
No.
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B
Read us more.
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C
No, no, no, no. This is not the Quran. This is an early 20th century Muslim polemicist and apologist named Said Qutub. He's. I'm sure you all know his name. Just kidding. Absolutely. But he is named. We were just named in the 911 Commission Report and so on. So he's not like an insignificant figure in the history of Islamic thought. I don't know if it's still the case, but his commentaries. I think it's the. The he wrote a commentary in the entirety of the Quran, were for some time bestsellers, maybe because they're some of the earliest that were translated into English. Anyway, he's also connected with the Muslim Brotherhood, has American connections in that he went to America from his native Egypt. I don't remember the years anymore, but. And spent time at. In Colorado at. It wasn't Colorado State, but somewhere near Fort Collins, Greeley Teachers College or something like that, and went back and was radicalized and so on. Anyway, not an insignificant figure. My point that I should have made instead of all that gobbledygook, academic gobbledygook, was that his thinking about Islam and Christianity was learned from the, if you will, the. I wanted to say great, but the Islamic tradition, you know, like the historic Islamic tradition. Here's what he has to say. It was Paul who was considered the principal propagator of the Christian faith to the Gentiles himself, being a Roman heathen, converted to Christianity. Paul's conception of Christianity was adulterated by the residues of Roman mythology and Greek philosophy. That was a catastrophe which infected Christianity since its early days in Europe. And I could go on, but that sort of point that Christianity, as you and I confess it, or as we confess it as Orthodox, with a small O, Christians confess it around the globe, those who would, at least in doctrine, confess the Apostles, Apostles Creed, the Nicene Creed and so on, that Christianity and Islamic thought is an innovation away from the teaching of Jesus in the original 12. And you can trace that, this argument that Christianity has been altered. Because if we could go back with Bill and Ted, I don't know if it's still in San Dimas, California or not, but if they have that time
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B
where the 2:10 and the 210 meet in San Diego.
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C
That's right. You can go there.
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A
The earthquake hasn't taken that out yet.
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C
You could go there. And if in there, in the mind of a Muslim, like a traditionalist Muslim, if you go back to Jesus and his apostles, they're basically, Jesus is a messenger of Islam. His apostles are messengers of Islam, though we don't have much from them. Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. The rest of the New Testament is a redaction from their message, but it's primarily Paul. I think you could at least go back to a guy named Ibn Taymiyyah. So he's 13th and 14th century, one of the Towering figures in Islamic thought who wrote this polemic work entitled the Correct Response to those who Change the Religion of Jesus Christ. And he asserts that it was somewhere early on. It was done by the 4th century in the Council of Nicaea. Most likely, Paul is the culprit. So precedes. I don't think it'd be really interesting to know. I don't think that there's a connection. I don't think Bauer and others got their idea from the Islamic tradition. But it is really interesting the way they parallel each other and what goes on now in Christian Muslim discourse, like apologetic polemical discourse, which is all over YouTube these days.
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B
The get in on that game, Adam.
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C
It's. I think it's fruitless. There's and. And there's some Christian. David Wood and Jay Smith and others are just. Those guys are light years ahead of. They've been doing this for 30 years. They got the scars to prove it too. But anyway, the interesting claim made now by some Muslims is that we Muslims have said what Christian scholars, Christian scholars using the term loosely, are saying, have only been saying for about 150 years to suggest that scholarship has caught up with this Islamic understanding of the history of Christianity. And it's just, to use the academic language of Scott Keith. It's B.S. i mean, by that, though, before any serious study, because I'm not as crass and vulgar as
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D
I would say too, just for listeners. So maybe, I don't know, 20, 30 years ago, actually a little before that too, there's another emerging Paul that's debated. And not to go off on a tangent, but just to kind of put everything in its sort of big picture in the way that theologians and academics are dealing with this. So you have E.P. sanders, who's a theologian, but his work really gets picked up and made famous by NT or Tom Wright, the former Bishop of Durham, who's very active on social media. I'm sure lots of people know him or his books and stuff, or have heard of him anyway. That thesis is sometimes called the Second Temple Judaism thesis, and it says that Paul's been misunderstood because he's actually more Jewish than you think he is. That's a really summarized picture of it, but it's kind of upset a bit of the stability of this particular dichotomy between like, well, Peter and James were Jewish and Paul was just Gentile and he was philosophical and he was. Of course, the new perspectives on Paul, which is what that school represents, also has problems, but it sort of sits in this gray space where Some conservatives are intrigued by it because it destroys this thesis. But, you know, you trade one thing for another. And so some people think it goes too far, and then liberals like it because it redeems part of the idea of Paul's Judaism. But then some liberals don't like it because they think it's going too far. So there's a. Paul is a. Is like all the rage right now in theology one way or the other. Everybody's kind of. That's all the. That's the stuff that's selling. That's the stuff that's. Departments are happy to work on. And what's getting lost in all this, I think, is just the simple gospel and it's getting confused by this schizophrenic Paul that you can see in different shades.
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C
What's curious, back to Scott's point about this alleged discrepancy or difference between Paul and Jesus is Paul's writings most likely were put down and started to be circulated before the Gospels were circulated. So to believe that there's like two different Christianities in the earliest days,
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B
you
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C
believe whatever you want, but there's just no evidence for it.
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A
Yeah, there's an oppression narrative that happens at this. A lecture I sat in on, on that, so happened to be on this topic, was about essentially what you were just saying, Adam. Two schools of Christianity, and the one that wins out, the one we have today, was extraordinarily oppressive and destructive to the other ideas and interpretations of Jesus. Now, the lectures I sat on then went on to talk about how the Gospels we have were corrupted by Paul and that there's a proto gospel that is uncorrupted, like a Q. Like a Q.
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C
They're calling it proto gospel.
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A
And the important thing what I heard was that Q would have had some of these, some differences that were substantial in regards to the ethical changes that Paul makes. Now, the other thing I. This isn't universal, but oftentimes with people, there are personal motivations. So in this scholarship, in this line of scholarship, one of the things that happens is there's a type of psychoanalysis. We see this with Luther, too. I just wrote a article on the sort of the academic scheme of the young Luther and the mature Luther and stuff like that, which was popularized by psychoanalysis and schools of psychoanalysis, and creating a character, Lutheran. And then you read his works now with this character in mind, you know, the distraught and anxious young man who has no idea what to do with his life and becomes a monk and regrets it and, you know, is probably some Sort of deep sinner and he's dealing with all this guilt. And then the mature older man who's lived an experienced life and is the leader of a movement and his psychological state affects the readings. You see the same thing with the Pauline scholarship, which is before we analyze the theological content of Paul and the theological content of the Gospels, we first have to come up with the character Paul and come up with a background, you know, probably loosely based on the epistles and acts of Paul that then gives you motivations, psycho, you know, psychology and deep motivations that maybe he wouldn't have written about for doing particular things. So for emphasizing certain kinds of laws or for rejecting Judaism and leaning into the Gentiles, you know, he left being a Pharisee or the Pharisee school of thought for personal reasons. And thus he has this, you know, he's got a bent against it. Oh, my dad's getting fired up. But the funny thing is the authors who do this and the scholars who do this often when you look into the biographies of their own lives, do have very personal reasons for doing this. So sometimes it's, well, why does this author focus so much on Paul's anti homosexuality? Oh, they're homosexual. Why does this authority. Oh, he's had four affairs. You know, it's like it's not inconvenient. Even somebody like Bart Ehrman, who is probably the most popular person doing a lot of this today in his sort of how Jesus became God thesis and pins a lot of that on Paul, has personal motivations in that before he wrote about this Pauline creation of Jesus, he had already left the Christian faith. And we'll say things like in that book, he literally says that he doesn't do a historical investigation of the resurrection. He leaves it completely open ended as to whether Jesus Christ actually rose from the dead or not. Because that's not a historical inquiry, it's a religious one. And he's not going to do that theology. He's an agnostic atheist. So, and it's not history, it's theology. So then we leave the biggest historical question in Christianity out while still pinning the blame on, or perhaps not blame, but like the reality of Jesus being taught to be God on Paul, largely on Paul, again, he's personally motivated to need an out or an explanation for how Jesus became God in the minds of Christians, in the minds of the west and all of this stuff. So I think for all their work to pin this on the personal, psychological, religious needs of Paul, they often, you look into the backgrounds of these scholars and that same kind of bias that the bias that they're proposing exists in their own lives and work.
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B
Go ahead, Scott.
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D
We know you're.
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B
Do you know how much we're all waiting, Scott, in explaining, like trying to do your best to sort of explain all of these people. I mean, even Bruce, he's. Oh, no, it was you, man. You just sort of, you did Erickson right by your, like sort of just eighth commandment explanation of what he's doing in Young man Luther there. I mean, and I even think you did, you know, the airmen right over there too. So kudos on your eighth commandment. You know, just centrality there. I appreciate it in a sense, but how much conjecture is needed to make all of these assertions? Give me a break. The problem is they propose to know all these things that you could never know. It's not recorded anywhere. Paul didn't say it of himself. You don't have, you know, 10 sources from Paul's time saying, yeah, I know Paul said he was this and was doing this, but actually in private conversation with him, he told me he was doing this and he's doing this. That's not happening. They're looking at this material and they're saying, well, Paul said this, but obviously that's. It can't be what's going on here. Like Paul said, oh, Jesus appeared to me. He knocked me off my freaking animal here, and I'm on the ground and he appears to me and then he tells me to go out and teach exactly the same thing that he's teaching. And so that, that's what I did. And there's like five sources that say, well, I know he wrote that down. I mean, I know that's what's recorded about what happened to him, but really, when he and I were getting mirrors over don't exist.
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A
So they know this.
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B
We were beers over at the White Horse Inn and he shot at me straight with it. He's like, I'm making up something completely different that's going to put me as the head of it and I'm going to be the hero of this story. Like, you don't have any of that. So this is. It's it. It's academic gobbly gook. That makes it sound smart. But that is honestly meaningless. It's just, honestly, it's meaningless. You can't. And then to, to make the deeper problem. I mean, the deeper problem is the one that you actually, that you pointed out that they have their own motivations for doing this, obviously. And most of the time with just, like, a little critical analysis, you can find out what the motivation is. But even without that, the endeavor in itself is ridiculous. It'd be like if I wanted to know something about Adam, right? And my way of getting that information would be to interview Adam and to write down everything. Where were you born? Where did you go to school? What'd you do after high school? Oh, you were in the Navy. What'd you do after the Navy? I write all these things down, right? And then I published those. Just from his words, I published those. But then five years later, through talking to nobody else, like through interviewing nobody else that knew Adam, not his mother, not his father, not his brother, not his wife, not his children, talking to nobody that knew Adam, I said, well, I know that's what he told me, but I can tell by the way that he said it that none of this is true. Or even somebody else, not me, somebody else comes along five years later, doesn't interview anybody else, reads my account that I wrote down about him, said, well, by the way his words are written down on this page, I can tell that none of that is true. Well, did you go find his high school records? No need. Did you go talk to anybody that he knew someone over a thousand years later?
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D
Not just five?
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B
Yeah, I mean, five years would be bad enough, but five years would be bad enough, right Now. Think about doing this a thousand years later. It's like, give me a break. This is not. This is not. I mean, I know it sounds like. And they write it up to sound like an high intellectual and respected academic pursuit, but it's not. It's just not.
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C
I like how you described it as meaningless, I think, like, technically meaningless by the standards of sort of the epistemology. We learn that if some, like we mentioned it last episode, that when Caleb was getting on my case for wanting to wear a shirt that says talk less, you know, if there's things you can't talk about, don't talk about them. Meaning if you don't have evidence for it, zip it.
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B
Well, none of these assertions are either verifiable or falsifiable, which puts them in the category of technically meaningless.
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A
I do find there's a type of. Maybe it's irony. I don't know. It's sadder than irony to the fact of what my dad's just saying, which is a lot of these people deny the historicity of the Resurrection. And the Resurrection accounts, usually with some presuppositions, but often referring to historical methodology and the inability of historical methodology to analyze certain miraculous accounts within the scriptures, then use non like methods that are not compatible with it for the same reasons to come up with character witnesses who are not able to speak. And I think one of the reasons they get away with it is so like in the case of the young man, old, mature Luther stuff with Erickson and you know, even Freud and like you have, you have a quote, science being engaged that people then have been acculturated to being equal in knowledge and methodology to the hard sciences. And so if you, if you believe
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C
that because psychology is a hard science
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A
or you have a presupposition that psychology.
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B
Sorry, we're going to get in trouble again.
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C
Sorry Caleb, I just had to.
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A
We are going to get in trouble again. But if you have a presupposition that psychoanalysis can be done, I mean, let's say you even are fully bought into it with living people, but that it can then be done with people who have been dead for over a thousand
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D
years, that's a major critique of that by people in psychology is that you can't psych from historical documents.
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A
That only works as your historical evidence. If you believe that that's like a hard fast science or that it's close enough. That's the other one that like, oh, somebody could refute it maybe as fact, but it's close enough. Look how erratic this person acted or look what they said about themselves.
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B
Yeah, that's. You're buying a couple presuppositions there though too.
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A
Yeah, absolutely.
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B
You just have to completely buy into. Now I know society has, has mostly bought into that psychoanalysis is always 100% true, like math and that history is, you know, completely just ridiculous, can never be shown to be true. But that's pretty big like in the history of academia. That's a pretty big, you know, buy right there. You got to lean into something that again is hardly repeatable.
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D
I think a lot of this kind of, to begin school and all this comparison, I think a lot of this came out of the fact that the church, and I mean like the conservative church, like the church that was connected with the traditional interpretation of the gospel and everything and not all this new stuff. The church did sort of fail back then and maybe to some extent now to take seriously the hard questions that then this thesis was able to give an answer to. And what I mean by that is anyone who's been a Christian for a period of time knows like if you read Paul and then you read James or you read Paul and you read Peter, they don't sound exactly the same, not just because they're different people. I mean, James in particular sounds like, sometimes like crazy. And Christians struggle with this. And so instead of the Church doing the work of showing the congruence in the diversity of the different biblical authors, it kind of just was like, just believe it. Just follow the Church's teachings. It didn't really want to address it. And so these academics were filling a gap, really, in a genuine curiosity that readers of the Bible had had, because the Reformation had put that Bible in the hands of regular readers. And now they're reading it for the first time.
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B
I agree with you.
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D
And so they're having questions, and people are getting nervous with some of the questions. And so they're just kind of shutting it down. And then what happens is, is they come in and they provide answers to the questions that the Church didn't really want to deal with. And this is why it was happening in Catholicism and in Protestantism, like the Tubican school. I mean, the influence of the Tuban school. It's crazy. We don't talk about it more because it was so influential and I think not in a great way, but like, Vatican II can be traced to the Tubigan school, just like the Historical Critical Method is traced to the Tubigan School, just like this Paul stuff is traced to the Tubican school. It was a turning point in the way that the Church in the world started to do theology. And every seminary and every faculty in the world that does theology has been affected or infected by the Tubican school. However way you want to think about it.
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B
Well, just because I don't want to get crucified for not saying it. Seminex. Yeah, seminex can be attributed to the tubing in school. Can you.
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C
Why don't you. Can you define seminex? Because I'm guessing a lot of our listeners are gonna be like, what does that refer to?
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B
I mean, you would probably be better at it than I am. But it was. It was basically a walkout of liberal seminary faculty. I was at 72. Adam. 73.
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C
73, I think.
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B
Yeah.
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C
Yeah.
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B
I think from both seminaries. Or was it three at that time? Three seminaries. Was Springfield still around at that time that they.
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C
Louis. But I don't know. I don't know that history that well. So.
- [37:06]
B
Believed that the LCMS was sort of oppressing their liberalism, and they left to form an alternate seminary. And it was these higher critical guys. And it was a big fight in the LCMS. It almost took out big parts of the LCMS Dr. Montgomery records it in his two volume book, the Crisis in Lutheran Theology, which I did read like 30 years ago. So I apologize for not remembering all the dates a long time ago. Caleb was like 6 months old when I read that book. So just to give you context, but I mean that's the blame there too. I mean the way Rod used to describe it kind of simply is just that all these. And it happened in the, like the AALC too, the American or the alc, the American Lutheran Church too. Where the way Rod would describe it is we sent all of our best and brightest off to Tubagan to get educated because they were our best and brightest and they came back infected with this liberal hierarchical theology and they started destroying our seminaries and our churches. Some of the Lutheran denominations didn't do anything about it, but through people in the LCMS like Dr. Montgomery. And I'd honestly say, you know, I know he's not a big fan of us, but. And Adam can correct me, I believe David Scare was right up in that mix with that fight too. Yep. And they, they fought it off successfully in the lcms and it was a real victory because most denominations were not able to fight it off once it infected the denomination.
- [38:51]
A
Yeah, I would say in a victory in the Missouri Synod and Seminex. I mean some would argue even then from the walkouts and where those people went, created and destroyed what became the ELCA as well in a lot of ways.
- [39:08]
B
So yeah, I mean, I think the way, the way Rod used to tell that is just that I don't remember all the acronyms, the ELC or the whatever. But as those churches went more liberal there, they came together in a sense and the ALC was sort of like the least liberal of all those other churches that came together. But when they came together with the more liberal churches, Rod would say, I could see the writing on the wall. So he jumped ship. Right. And there's a couple other people that. There's a lot of people that jump ship. Like names that you would know. I think Steve Hein jumped ship. What's that?
- [39:46]
A
John Pless.
- [39:47]
B
John Pless. And some didn't. Right. Some stayed and fought within the sort of the system. I think that would even include gymnaste in. And yeah, it just wrecked a lot of other churches. But the LCMS through the sort of heroic efforts of people like Dr. Montgomery and even David Scare fought it off.
- [40:13]
A
So the kind of concluding questions or thing is if I think we've done a good job of showing that this is a particular set of presuppositions that gets then read onto the Bible. You create a Jesus, you create a historical Jesus or character named Jesus, you create a character named Paul, and the characters have different interests and goals, and then you read their works and they're incompatible. And as Bruce said, it then helps explain difficulties in the text that people perceive when reading the Bible that the ministry of Jesus looks different than the epistles of Paul, or that there seem to be some tensions between, you know, some of the statements in the Pauline epistles and statements in James or John or whatever it may be, and that they can be then explained by these character motivations that we've set up, these stories that we set up for your regular everyday listener. Besides the presuppositions, the question that stands is, are the texts of the Scriptures so at odds with each other? Are the Gospels at odds with Paul, specifically? On, there's essentially two questions on Judaism and on ethics, on morals. Are the moral imperatives of Jesus and Paul contradictory or so different that we can get a different set from Jesus than we can from Paul when you actually read the Gospel, since that's the source we have and not mystery documents that nobody can find. And is there a Judaism that was never meant to be fulfilled? I think that's the other one. And I see this is where this is popping up in what I would call conservative churches in America today, which is that the ministry of Jesus was particularly Jewish and Judaism was not meant to be fulfilled or brought to a close, and that Paul is the one who fulfills ends, closes Judaism. So that we then have the problem that we have in most Protestant churches today that aren't some sort of dispensationalist or Zionist or however you want to phrase that, which is that they ignore the Jewish context and they ignore the benefits and the gifts that Judaism could bring to Christianity today. Are those two things present in the text?
- [42:57]
B
I think if you think that Jesus was trying to keep Judaism going, I think you need to read the Gospels again. I honestly don't even see how you get there. His constant foils are the Pharisees and the Sadducees and the Teachers of the Law. The account of his death, at his death, the temple curtain is torn in two, that he literally says that I am going. He's describing his death and resurrection, but he's doing it in front of the temple. And it's a comparative thing. I'm going to destroy this temple and in three days rise it up again. He's talking about himself, but in the process, he's destroying the temple sacrificial system. I mean, he's literally tearing all of that down in his death and resurrection and saying that there's now not this path that you messed up all these years and was never the path that you thought it was. There's one path, and that's me. No one is going to come to the Father but through me. If that's not the destruction of Judaism as a quote unquote system, I don't know what is. In fact, I would say Paul is nicer to the Jews than Jesus is. I mean, seriously, you know, he. I don't get that. I think Bruce has had a point earlier that there's some. The bigger differences between, see, like the epistles of Paul and say James and you could even say stylistically difference too between like Paul and the epistles of Peter or even John, that you can kind of read both of those and you go, man, these are sort of, kind of feel like they're doing the same thing like Bruce said earlier, they're doing theology. But the approach seems different. But even if you take the most extreme example, which is the difference between Paul and James, I think he's right that the church for a very long time just didn't deal with the real issues there. And I do think there are real issues there that the church needs to deal with and explain and have a better explanation to than just like, oh, whatever, just, you know, just, just take it. And that did leave an opening for this stuff, but. And is Jesus teaching a moral system, my Lord, guys, or is he overlooking immorality when he sees it and not. Not condemning it?
- [45:38]
A
I think particularly the idea of a moral system that is substantially different than Paul's is.
- [45:45]
B
Well, Paul is going out to seeing all this, like, weird pagan stuff everywhere. Like, this is what he. This is what he's doing, right? Jesus isn't. Jesus isn't going to Philippi, he's not going to Ephesus, he's not going to Galatia, he's not seeing these things that are going on there in their sex temples and stuff like that. And addressing that. Give me a break. He's in Israel. He's walking around near Jerusalem the whole time.
- [46:14]
A
I just find it's like an argument from silence in a lot of ways. If a lot of this has to do with adultery, like, like always, like whenever we're trying to get around moral stuff. If sex isn't like number one or two on the list, it's always number
- [46:30]
B
one through five for them. Yeah, it's all the various kinds of debauched sex have to be protected by these people.
- [46:37]
A
Every time. You know the idea that, well, Jesus doesn't give lists of all the debauched sex. He just says adultery or he accuses with the law this woman caught in adultery with multiple husbands or various other things in his ministry, but he doesn't ever. He doesn't run into a homosexual and rebuke them or something like that.
- [46:59]
B
Is there an account in the text of him encountering a homosexual that he doesn't rebuke?
- [47:04]
D
No, that would be the disciple whom he loved. That's what the liberals say.
- [47:07]
B
Oh, give me a freaking break. These people need to have a stone tied around their neck and be tossed into the freaking sea. If this isn't definitionally making a child to stumble. Yeah, Millstone.
- [47:22]
A
The idea that he doesn't. The idea that Jesus definition of adultery would differ substantially from the Jewish tradition while also he's being more Jewish than Paul and that we don't have access to what the Jewish tradition would have said about adultery, homosexuality, multiple husbands and wives, sex outside of marriage.
- [47:51]
B
Anytime a man looks at a woman lost on his heart, he's committed adultery with her.
- [47:55]
A
We have this massive collection of works called the Old Testament that happens to outline these pretty directly, including even if you don't want to except the whole Old Testament, just a little thing called the Decalogue and the law and the first five books, the Pentateuch, which at least every Jewish tradition has held onto. So that all outline these morals. So it just is. Again, it's a weird isolating Jesus. It's like, well, I didn't see this story in there.
- [48:29]
B
See, the accounts of Paul don't sort of make an account of his interaction with people from a, from a third party perspective like Jesus does. Right. So what these people don't see what they're doing is they're. It's classic Luther here. Sorry guys. They're confusing law and gospel. They're seeing that because Jesus encounters these people and he forgives them, that he's sort of. That it's. That their sin is okay, but that's never what he's doing. That is never what he's doing. He calls them out on their lying. When they lie to him about their sin, he points out their sin to them. Now does that, does that usually and often and most always or even always end in their absolution in some way for that sin as he takes their sin on himself? Yes, it does. Paul, like Bruce said, is doing theology. He's teaching this stuff, right? He's teaching it now. Does Paul teach about forgiveness? Yes. Does he teach about grace and graciousness? Yes. Does he teach about the gospel? And does he teach about Christ taking the sin on himself? I mean, literally, you get the, the whole like the hillasterion thing from Paul. Yes, he does teach about that. But as Christ is living it, and
- [49:41]
D
this is Paul is the so what to the whole four gospel narratives. Like, does Paul need to write a fifth gospel? Like, how many do you need? Like, you got these four gospels. And then it's like, okay, in light of this death and resurrection, so what? All right, well, here we go. Let me tell you.
- [49:57]
B
Paul goes out into the world, he preaches Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John to these people as it's been given to him directly by the Holy Spirit, right? He says this. I've been given these accounts directly by the Holy Spirit so that I can preach them to you just as if Matthew were standing in front of you doing it. The Holy Spirit gave these to me. He preaches these to these people. He converts them, he catechizes people in those places. He lifts up pastors being those places, and he trots himself along to somewhere else because he's trying to get the gospel out to as many places as possible. Then they have problems. They scratch out a letter to him. Man, you wouldn't believe what's going on over here in Corinth. They scratch out a letter to him and he's like, what the heck's going on over there? Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Teach, teach, teach, teach, teach. Catechize, catechize, boom, back. I mean, that is not the same project, but it is the same project.
- [50:45]
C
Since you're all riled up, I'm going to drop like, slide a grenade in the room for you.
- [50:50]
B
You ready? Yep. Pull the pin out, baby.
- [50:52]
C
If you go to Google and type in Muslim friendly Christian worship, you'll be treated to an essay by a Missouri Synod missiologist who considers how to make Christian worship Muslim friendly. And one of the recommended things you take into consideration is removing anything written by Paul in your scripture readings. So, and which, which is interesting because you're like, if you can think, you're like, trying to be as, like, generous as possible.
- [51:31]
D
I'm reading this quickly. And revise the creeds as well.
- [51:34]
B
Sure, yeah. Just revise the creeds.
- [51:36]
D
Might we revise the creeds in Muslim context to address their misconceptions?
- [51:41]
C
Behind that is this presumption that the theology of Paul is different than the theology find in The Gospels, of course, which is kind of interesting because as Kayla's been talking about, what he sees is there's a desire among like progressivist Christians to remove Paul because of the moral stuff is allegedly so much more.
- [52:06]
A
But there's a desire amongst conservatives to get rid of justification.
- [52:11]
C
Yeah. So like Bruce said earlier, I'm trying to tie this all like put a nice bow on things here.
- [52:16]
B
Good job. Go for it.
- [52:18]
C
Like Bruce said earlier, this is a deep and pervasive issue. Now, does it affect the local, like faithful Christian church? I don't, probably not. But if you're doing anything outside of that context, it probably does. So I want to recommend one book. It's an older book by. And we did, I guess it was a couple years ago now. We did a whole episode, maybe we even did like a little series on Jay Gresham Machen's Christianity and liberalism.
- [52:55]
B
We did.
- [52:55]
C
He also has a great book, though it's older, entitled the Origin of Paul's Religion, which argues the thesis that Paul's theology is completely coherent with the rest of the New Testament. Go figure, right?
- [53:10]
B
Yeah. Amen, brother.
- [53:12]
C
But he illustrates well Scott's point. So this is like I'm really wrapping the bow up here.
- [53:17]
B
Good job.
- [53:18]
C
What's behind in Machen's thesis is that this whole sort of proposal that Paul has his theology, John has his theology and so on is rooted in this sort of anti supernaturalism of higher education. So called higher education, not just in Germany, but certainly has its like. And that's its, its heart and soul is in 19th century Tubingen and other places which Meacham actually did his. A lot of his graduate work in. So anyway, I just recommend that book. I don't. I'm sure there's lots of more contemporary books, but Machen has a sort of. He has a flair with an ability to get to the real root of the issue.
- [54:02]
B
It does. Can we, can we end it on this? Because I've been thinking about apologetics again a lot lately and why we would still do apologetics. And I think one of the most important reasons to continue to do apologetics, especially with younger people and maybe with their parents too, is to just let them know that when they run into this stuff and you run into really, really educated people that seem like they're smart that are going to make you feel stupid for what you believe, that you're not stupid, that what you believe is perfectly reasonable, it's as reasonable, if not more reasonable. Absolutely. More reasonable than what these trying to not use bad language.
- [54:45]
A
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
- [54:48]
B
Individuals. Sorry, that took me off. I had to get every curse word out of my head first. With these individuals believe themselves, they have learned to speak in a way that they use academic wording to convince people that they're teaching, that everything that they've learned that is faithful and true is stupid. Not just wrong, but stupid. Right. You should listen to shows like this and do some reading, like Adam just said, just so that when you run into these people in high school or college, you don't even have to fight with them in the class, but you can at least sit there and go, man, what you're saying is stupid. And what I believe is the truth, and it has been all along. You just have, you know, wasted a life learning ways to destroy oftentimes a religion that you say you're teaching, and I'm tired of it. I hate it.
- [55:51]
D
We cannot pick up on that at all.
- [55:54]
B
Yeah, good. Yeah.
- [55:56]
C
I want to ask you how you really feel, but I'll wait till we hit end record.
- [56:02]
B
God bless Dr. Montgomery in this context for fighting this for till he was 96 or something like that. 93. Well, we're done. Podcast. If you like what you hear today, Please go to 1517.org and hit the donate button at the top. We could really use your help. Help. Have a good one. Okay. All right.