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- [00:17]
A
Well, hello everybody. Welcome to the Thinking Fellows Podcast. My name is Caleb Keith and I am joined by Adam Francisco and Scott Keith. Today we are live at the Here We Still Stand regional event in Bentonville, Arkansas. So thank you for joining us. Live podcasts are always fun for us. We record at the wee hours in the morning all alone in our offices usually. So it's a treat to see some faces as we record instead of just staring at the computer screen at the conference. We do have a book table and you should definitely go check out some books. And if you're listening to this, you should go to shop.1517.org to go buy some books. I have our newest book here. It's called Sinner Saint and you can see it here. I think you guys should check it out. I've been skimming it. It covers a very important and I think overlooked topic of the Simmel that's simultaneously sinner and Sin Saint. And there's some great sections in here. In fact, I've been reading a little bit and I think the sections on the myths about sanctification are phenomenal. I think this is like a must read. So everybody should go pick this up.
- [01:34]
B
Luke, Luke is a Lutheran Brethren pastor. He I never heard him of him before in my life and he spoke at one of our conferences. I want if Dan Pricer, I want to say it was five years ago, maybe back when we were doing the city event conferences and he was at the conference in where Gretchen lives in Minnesota, a very cold part of part of the world, Fergus Falls. That's it. And he did his talk was on the Simmel or at the same time Saint and Sinner. And it was outstanding. And this is one of the first books we're going to we'll have a new sort of philosophy for publishing moving forward. And this is one of the the first books in that sort of new way of how we look at publishing, where we actually went and found him and said, hey, we want you to write this particular book. And he said, well, I'd really like to write this other book. We said we don't care. We want you to write this. This is the book you're going to write. Then we'll talk about maybe book number two. But and it's just this first time I've seen a physical copy. I did have the PDF a couple months ago. It's very, very good. If you have ever wondered about what is this at the same time saint and sinner stuff, it sounds like a bunch of excuses from these Guys that are trying to dodge the Book of James, you should read this. It's a very, very good, solid, thorough and yet not too long explanation of the idea of the Simila. So check it out. I. Is it released yet here? It's released here.
- [03:11]
A
You know, if you're listening online, you can pre order it, I think when this comes out. And so then you'll get it as it comes out and then you have a second book up here. So I think.
- [03:21]
B
Oh, that's for later.
- [03:22]
A
Oh, that's for later. You're going to prove a point. Yeah, that's great. So I'm sure some of the people in the audience and are longtime listeners, some are new, some have never listened to the thinking fellows. And one of the challenges of our show is we do topical theology as sort of the main shtick on the show. Along with doing some Christian history, some great characters of the Christian faith. We've done apologetics and apologetics series. We've read through various books like Tolkien, like Tolkien and Lewis. There's a lot on there. But it's as you do this for. We're going on nine years here, right, guys?
- [03:58]
B
You're going on 10.
- [04:00]
A
No, this is not.
- [04:01]
B
How do you count this?
- [04:02]
A
10. Next is 10. So next year will be 10 is you feel like you're doing the same topics over and over again. And because it's podcast, you don't know if your audience is really getting sick of it or not. So then you try to mix it up, you try to reframe those topics, things like that. And I think in the last couple of months we've really landed in a great place with some of the questions we've been able to reframe and ask. We're currently episodes are coming out in the middle of what turned into a series on a Lutheran identity crisis is what we called it. And I think people have been really enjoying that. We've been getting great feedback. It was going. I intended for it to be one episode and I think we ended up recording five.
- [04:41]
B
And it turned into a series not just talking about Lutheran identity crisis, but kind of an identity crisis within Christianity too, more broadly in terms.
- [04:50]
A
So as we think in the future we're recording this, Adam, I think, came up with a great idea of sort of giving.
- [04:58]
B
I almost made a really bad joke.
- [05:01]
A
About doing a sort of a what's on your mind Set of podcasts to help mix it up. Because as we engage with things happening in culture or books we're reading or history or various theological topics that have Come in and out of the popular conversation. We're thinking about stuff, and it's a good place to maybe pick one topic and then challenge each other, ask questions, why are you thinking about that? Maybe you should stop thinking about that or something like that. And we're going to, as the kids say, workshop that idea a little bit today. And instead of one topic, we're going to try to slim this down to each of us getting to do a little bit of what is on our minds for this live show. And so I'll kick it over to my dad here and say, what are you thinking about? What is on your mind? And then Adam and I will grill you.
- [05:53]
B
Well, I'm always thinking about a few things, but lately I've been thinking a lot about Psalm 22 for two very good reasons. One, I don't preach that often, but I was asked to preach on Good Friday. And one of the texts for Good Friday was Psalm 22, which worked out really well because I'm giving a talk, the last talk here at this conference, and it's also on Psalm 22. And so that was just kind of serendipitous. So I've been working, working through that a lot and, you know, found some things in that psalm that had never really hit me very hard before and have been able to kind of wrestle with that. I we these guys make fun of me on the show all the time because I I don't read a lot of specifically theological books anymore just because I don't know, it just I read the books that we put out or at least, you know, go through the books that we put out. And it's 20ish, 25 years of reading theology, and I just sort of wanted to get to other places. And so back when I started researching Being dad, which is in the back, and you should buy every copy because there's no more pressing matter of our time than fatherhood. I really started looking into things like sociology, sociological data on parenthood and families and whether or not people are getting married and what's going on with sort of reproduction and the fact that people aren't having babies and how is this impacting society. And I've been working at least in research and in my head on a new book on families to follow up Being Dad. And so I think a lot about that stuff lately, and that's always on my mind. And you probably have even noticed that you'll be you have probably probably seen more and more, even in the media that you follow, including tv, about sort of Everyone waking up to the fact that we're kind of in. Socially, we're in this spiral where people are just not getting married, people are just not having children. And it's having, you know, as. As that plays out, we'll see the effects of that more and more in society. And I. And I'd argue we've already been seeing the effects of that in the church for years. Years and years and years. I sometimes will go to a church, and when I'm doing a Being dad talk or a talk on families, especially within our church, the lcms, it's pretty easy for me to go to a church and say, can look around at the people in this room and just. I bet you'll be able to count on one hand the number of them that are under 70, right? Just because that's sort of the way society is going. We've seen that in the church. And as people struggle with the fact that the church seems to be like church attendance, not that church seems to be in decline, they ask why? What programs can fix it? And the answer on the whole is kind of simple. It's just sort of following the path that society is taking. And there's some bumps in that lately. And I've been tracking the bumps. I've been thinking a lot about that. And then here's the funny one. I have a big interest in history in general, but I have, for the last, I don't know, long time, focused pretty much on reading and consuming just tons of information on the time period in our history. That would be kind of like 1913 to 1946, like just pre World War I to post World War II. And these guys make fun of me about it all the time because you.
- [09:27]
A
And everybody else's grandpa.
- [09:29]
B
Yeah. Oh, I just read this great book on World War II, and, oh, I just read this great book on World War I. Did you know that Woodrow Wilson was awful? He's truly terrible and just threw all these things. And then last week on the show, I said, listen, guys, I took your advice. And it didn't even occur to me what I was doing. I said, I took your advice. I'm reading a book on a figure in theology. And so, ha. And they're like, yeah, well, what are you reading? I'm sorry, I'm reading a biography of Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Occurred to all of you? Didn't occur to me.
- [10:01]
A
That's just another World War II book.
- [10:03]
B
And then Kill. You know, that's just another World War II book. Right. And I was like, oh, so I've been thinking a lot about Dietrich Bonhoeffer lately. I had read his Ethics when I was in my PhD program and truly despised that book. And I had read Life Together many, many years ago and didn't like that. And then just always remember Rod Rosenblatt while I was in undergrad, when he would talk about Dietrich Bonhoeffer, go say things like, well, his theology was truly awful, but he was a martyr, so I guess you got to give him some leeway. And so that was in my head. And then I read this biography, and it turns out, you know, I think the biography was intended to make you like him, and it just did not have that effect on me. I came out of the other side of it thinking he's a. He's in a lot of ways, a cautionary tale for how we tend to think about the Christian life and good works as opposed to how Scripture actually presents it. And he's often set up as sort of like the paragon of, if you want to live a Christian life, look at Dietrich Bonhoeffer and how much he was willing to give for the faith. And then when you even listen to or read his own words on why he was involved with this plot to kill Hitler, it just. It's difficult to make a good connection between that and actually the New Testament faith for me. And so that was interesting. But it was a World War II book and lots of stuff I already knew. So that's what I've been thinking about lately. On the whole, besides my beautiful wife and my kids and my grandkids, blah, blah, blah, blah. Almost seven of them now. We're almost there. I remember nine. Okay, go ahead, Adam. Do you have any questions for him?
- [11:52]
A
You want to make a case for many questions?
- [11:56]
C
No, no, I don't want to do that. But though I do think martyrs do ought to get a little bit of a pass. I mean, that's what Rod always said.
- [12:04]
B
Yeah.
- [12:06]
C
On the point on fatherhood and children and so on, I think about this, too. I know you're doing some research for a book on this, right?
- [12:17]
B
Yes. Yeah. Which I should be doing more, but I am. Yes.
- [12:21]
C
I get One question I always wonder is, what do you do then, like, in terms of, like, real practical sort of advice, what do you do with the. The fatherless among us?
- [12:33]
B
Yeah.
- [12:33]
C
Well, to encourage young people to maybe think about getting married and. And so on. But what do you do with the. The actual real fatherless kids among us?
- [12:46]
B
Let me say two things on that. One, I, at this point, do more than encourage Young people to get married. I've just gone straight to reminding them of God's first three commands in the garden, which are basically, get a job, you slacker. Get married and make babies. And anytime we sort of start, when we're raising our kids or when we're kind of talking to them about priorities in their life, anytime we start putting everything above those, get a job, you slacker, was particularly to Adam. But then get married and have babies to both. Anytime we put bunches of stuff ahead of that, like, you know, make sure you get all your degrees in line, make sure you've made enough money to sustain yourselves for a while, make sure you've traveled as much as you want to travel. And we do all this other nonsense on top of it. We're basically telling God says to Adam and Eve, these things are really, really important because I want you to populate the earth. And why does he say that? Well, because he wants them to go make other Christians and to raise them in the faith and in the knowledge of God and in the love of Christ. And so he does that. And then we say, yeah, but boy, you're really too young. Or boy, you haven't even finished your undergrad degree yet, or boy, you guys don't have enough money yet, you haven't even saved enough to buy a house. And we put all these sort of layers on top of it without. And even as Christians, we do that without really even thinking about what God says about it first and trying to sort of. In fact, most people won't even say those three things when they're raising their kids as important at all, let alone secondary or tertiary. It often doesn't even make the list. And so that I've just stopped beating around the bush and just saying, teach your kids that these are very, very important things. They're important to you. Likely, they're important to them. They're important to the planet as we move forward, if you care about that. And God actually said, this is what I want from you. And so think about that. And then on the fatherless among us. That's been a question for me since I first wrote and started teaching on being dad. One of the best books on fatherhood you could ever find it on the back table is that, you know, what about the softball to you, by the way? I know. Okay, I got that. Yeah. An interesting one for me because I grew up without a father in the home because he died when I was two. I don't actually. I have one sort of very, very, very, very, very vague memory of my dad, but that's kind of it. And so fatherlessness is a. Was a real reality for me. And I know it's a real reality for a lot of people. Something like 43% of children in America grow up in a home where there is no father. And so that's when, within the church context especially, we start talking about the fact that we are actually a family in Christ altogether. And much like when we were talking about James, where I would, you know, if somebody comes to you and you're bragging about your faith and somebody comes to you and you're a guy and you've got some time on your hands and says, man, that kid over there, he doesn't have a father. He could really use somebody to sort of mentor him and to talk to him about life and to talk to him about work and to talk to him about faith and being a faithful Christian and all this. And you go, oh, well, I'll tell him. Blessings on the way out the door. You know, we have to reframe the way we think about that, too. Good works at the end of the day is, as Melanchthon said it, good works at the end of the day is. Is. Is sharing the gospel with one another. And one of the primary things that parents do, fathers and mothers, I think, is sharing that gospel first in the home. Jim Nestigen always said, the gospel always comes on the lips of another, and it's often on the lips of somebody that we love, somebody that knows us so much that they love us. And that means your parents initially. And so when a child grows up without a father in the home, they're primarily missing one of those voices, right? Hopefully their mom is still doing that. Mine sure did. But they need other voices that do, too. And if you are a man in a church who can be that voice to a fatherless child in your congregation, and you have the time and the wherewithal to do that, I highly encourage you to consider making that a part of your normal routine on Sunday morning and thereafter. Again, Jim Nestian used to say things like, all over America, there are frustrated grandparents in every congregation. And they're frustrated because their kids have moved away from them and they never see their grandkids. And he would talk about when a church would then baptize a child, that the pastor should look at the parents and say, okay, this child belongs to us now. And we have all of these grandparents in the congregation that want to be a grandparent to your child, too, and they're going to do it. We're going to share with them the Bible stories. They're going to give you a break on Friday night and they're going to come tell them the Bible stories and they're going to pray with them. And this is all stuff that's. If we are a family of God in the church, these are all things that should be considered impossible. So thanks for the softball.
- [18:02]
A
I think about in relation to that, that when it comes to the fatherless among us, or they call it, I, you know, they use word singleness. So people who desire to get married and can't or are struggling to find a spouse or the. Or the childless, those who desire to have children and can't for the reasons that our sympathy or our empathy can get misplaced for these people who do have a tragedy in their lives. And instead our reaction is to just start using language that makes it so. It's normal. It's okay. It's normal. It's okay to be single or to struggle with singleness. And it's normal. It's okay. And it's normal to be without a father. It's okay. And it's normal. The reality is the reason people struggle with these things, fatherlessness, singleness, barrenness, the reason we can give them nest names is because they are not normal, because they are a struggle, because they are something to actually sympathize with. And you're not placing that sympathy correctly by just using inclusive language that normalizes it or tries to make people feel comfortable about it. I think you have to do harder work than that. To me, that's. That blessing be with you is just sort of changing the way you talk in order to be careful with people. I don't want to accidentally offend them. I think it's worth using words that, that confirm that this is a struggle, that it is a result of fall and sin, it's a tragedy. And that the answers to that then don't have to always be the easiest path forward, but can sometimes be the hard one. Like asking a mom if you can take their childless children fishing or on a trip with you or over to the house, or asking a barren couple to watch your kids on Friday nights or something like this, which, you know, on one side might sting because it reminds people what they don't have and on the other is actually a great gift to certain gifts, certain types of people. And we have to be a group of people willing to take the risk of offense on some of these things and not just make the language soft.
- [20:17]
B
Yeah, it's interesting one of the most common, I think lauded miracles that you'll find in the scripture is when a barren woman becomes pregnant. Right. It's in a lot of places in the text and it's always considered a great miracle, but it's only considered a great miracle because it's a great tragedy that she can't. Right. And so we've taken all of that and we sort of in our desire to never sort of, which is nice in a sense, make anybody feel bad by what we've said. And it's just normalized. And we do that in society. We normalize all sorts of behavior and things that are actually not normal. And we give them sort of words, you know, titles that normalize them. And it makes it so that we don't even think about it when we see something that is just not. Is not actually in all things sort of being as they should be in God's plan for you or your life. And we say, okay, well now that's normal. So when somebody does it, it's just normal.
- [21:26]
A
Well, should we move on to you or.
- [21:28]
B
Adam? Adam, what are you thinking about?
- [21:32]
C
You don't want to know. I. I woke up this morning though. When I travel, I. That's the only time I really watch the news. So on, on the news, of course I watch msnbc. Just kidding. That's be a joke.
- [21:47]
B
You said that they were great and I was even questioning. I'm like you do.
- [21:53]
C
There was a footage from Rome, you know, I guess the Pope, the recently deceased Pope is laying in state, lying in state. I'm not sure the grammar there. And so it made me think. I don't think about popes except as historical phenomena, but it made me think about the future of the Catholic Church a little bit and made me think even more and more focused way about the church, the nature of the church. We've been doing this series on like it started as is. Is there a Lutheran identity crisis? Now it's grown into more of a conversation about the, the character of the church, is it evangelical, missional, Catholic, you know, all these, these sorts of things. And so I oftentimes ask myself the question, you know, I think of Jesus words to Peter after he confesses that he was the Christ, the son of the living God. And, and Jesus says, blessed are you, Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church. And I believe. And I'm pretty sure I'm right, you can. I think you'd agree with me that when he says upon this rock, it's talking about the confession that Jesus is The Christ the son of living God, not the person of Peter. So I always ask myself the question, so what I wonder, and this is more speculative, but what did Jesus have in mind when he was talking about the church that was going to emerge in the wake of the Resurrection and the Ascension? Is it the church that all but worships Mary? Or to get hit a little closer to home, is it like my local LCMS church or is it the church you see that you can kind of piece together and see when you read through the Book of Acts, that's very evangelical and dare I say, I know you love this word, Scott. Missional.
- [23:44]
B
Missional.
- [23:46]
C
And where you have people who are, as is their custom, go into synagogues and begin debating or reasoning with the Jews and go to places like Mars Hill. So I'm. I don't like. I don't like Rod. I don't think about ecclesiology ever.
- [24:04]
B
Yeah.
- [24:05]
C
Except when Caleb Force is a show. But I, you know, I, I do. I don't have a whole lot of empathy. Those of you who know me know that probably. But I do kind of sometimes grieve the states of the church, though I don't have a church vocation or anything. So it's not even on my, my. In my arena to even change. But I get a little aggrieved that there's. There's so much division in the church. And I think a lot of it's necessary, but also a lot of it was caused by the guy that we hold up as the great. Our great Pedro Saint, great restorer of the gospel. So that's kind of what's on my mind. I'm also. Since you took the liberty of doing.
- [24:52]
B
More than one topic you don't believe in. Oh, was it one topic?
- [24:55]
C
I think you have freedom.
- [24:57]
B
Well, of the freedom of the baf. No, I also.
- [25:02]
C
And this. People are going to start thinking I'm kind of sympathetic to Catholicism, I guess. But I, I have been thinking. I've told you before about the Shroud of Turin a lot lately because it's, it's hit the socials when Joe Rogan was interviewing Mel Gibson. Are we, are we allowed to like Mel Gibson yet again?
- [25:22]
B
But we're getting closer. Although I saw him on after the LA fires on a couple of interviews and he's just the guy that he was on Lethal Weapon like in real life. I love him, but it was crazy. He's just that guy.
- [25:35]
C
Like he went to Nutty Crowd.
- [25:37]
B
Yeah.
- [25:37]
C
And then I saw this clip of Joe. You all probably know who Joe Rogan is, but pretty wide. It's a prolific podcast in terms of million, tens of millions of people who listen to it.
- [25:49]
B
Just shy.
- [25:49]
C
I mean, it's like a little above thinking, fellows.
- [25:51]
B
But I think he wishes. Yeah, he wishes he did our numbers. Yeah, yeah.
- [25:55]
C
And he was talking with this guy named Eddie Bravo, who I don't know a whole lot about, but I know he's a comedian. And, and.
- [26:05]
B
What do.
- [26:05]
C
What do they call these. These people who. Not like a homeless crystal meth user or something like that, but somebody who experiments with like hallucinogenics and things like that.
- [26:15]
B
Oh, microdosing. Yeah. I only know that from tv.
- [26:20]
A
But. But he.
- [26:22]
C
I saw an interview with Rogan on with Eddie Bravo, who's. Who's also gave Joe Rogan his black belt in jiu jitsu and stuff that. That sort of world. And Eddie Bravo is talking as if he's become a Christian. And he credits the. His deep dive into the history of the Shroud of Turin now. Wow.
- [26:40]
B
That's.
- [26:41]
A
That.
- [26:42]
B
What make.
- [26:43]
C
Why I think that's interesting is not that. I mean, I do have some. I want the Shroud to be legitimate, so that's why I'm a little cautious in saying it. It's. It's legitimate because I.
- [26:53]
B
You want it to be.
- [26:54]
C
I don't want it to be confirmation biased, but that somebody's. If in fact he has become a Christian, his journey to faith, if we could describe it that way, was by him just simply looking at the. The historicity of. Of things. And he. He came. The way Eddie Bravo put it is he believes that Jesus actually rose from the dead.
- [27:15]
B
Wow.
- [27:16]
C
And it makes me think I had a conversation with a Jewish person not too long ago who was Scott. I don't think we talked about on the air, but I had this party at my house where there was a lot of very liberal Jewish people connected to my family in some way, shape or form. And I met a guy there who was a Jewish person. He said to me as we were talking, he goes, you know, the one re. He had learned that I do Christian apologetics. And he says, you know, the one thing that keeps me from considering that Jesus was the Messiah is that I just can't believe he rose from the dead. And I thought, well, at least he's. That's a good reason. Yeah, that's a good reason. Believing Jesus is the five.
- [27:56]
B
Paul agrees with that reason.
- [27:58]
C
But it's unlike the other sort of conversations I've had with. With people of the Jewish persuasion, where they won't even consider anything of the event. So Ben Shapiro is like one of these guys who doesn't. When he's with. Talking with William Lane Craig, he just wouldn't even look at the evidence. But so anyway, so that's. This is a. As you know, when you make fun of me for I'm always like, rolling around in my head. The. Apart from the voices in my head is the, you know, the thinking about the evidence and how strong or weak perhaps the evidence for the truthfulness of Christianity is not that the evidence can produce saving faith, but sure could do a whole lot in tearing down those artificial barriers in our culture that preclude people from hearing that the gospel is not just comforting, but it's actually first and foremost true. And so that's the sort of. As you know, that's what you're always thinking about. The stuff that's in my head.
- [29:02]
B
We've been in conversations with a guy that he's known longer than I have, but it's kind of transitioned to where this guy has started asking me a lot of questions. And I'll get these texts and they're texts, and I do my best to text him back and give him answers. And one day he pops off with, hey, Scott, what do you think about the Shroud of Turn? And I'm like, hey, talk to Adam. And then ironically, we just got an email on the infoline this past week, and it was to me, of all people, and it's like, why doesn't Dr. Keith ever talk about the importance of the Shroud of Turin? And I was like, hey, talk to Adam.
- [29:39]
A
Now can I. Can I offer my concern? I'm sure it's one you've thought of about stuff like the Shroud of Turin and it too, which is.
- [29:52]
C
I don't know that I'll care.
- [29:53]
B
Okay.
- [29:53]
A
Yeah, it's fine.
- [29:54]
B
Sure.
- [29:57]
A
I think I. I think I want it to be real also, just because that would be cool. But the. The problem is that apart from a word from God that verifies it, there is no scientific seemingly way to get to that is Jesus Christ. We have no other sort of DNA record or other indications, et cetera. So you'll always get things like, this is unique, the imprint is unique. There's various things that are unrepeatable, but it's all there. But if it were to come out that it truly is a manufactured sort of fraud, like many relics are, 99% of all apostolic relics and things like that.
- [30:42]
B
Yeah.
- [30:44]
A
What is the potential for damage for people who were Converted on the grounds that this is real and that if that is sort of our gets put at the point of an apologetic conversation and as the turning point are we just doing more risk when the Gospel can testify and create faith? Why would I risk putting somebody's faith on something that could be totally fraudulent?
- [31:11]
C
Yeah, I think that's legit. So I do care about your question.
- [31:16]
B
Well, I'm glad but I, yeah, I.
- [31:19]
C
Don'T know that nobody is going to be converted by the Shroud or any sort of historical evidence. And I would like in the case of Eddie Bravo, if what I saw on the interwebs is not AI it led the Shroud, led him to do a sort of deep dive on the historicity of Jesus which made, which, which led him to consider the primary source eyewitness testimony to the life of Jesus. And I mean if I have to be a theologian for a minute, it's when he's reading what he thought were just historical texts where he's also unbeknownst to him reading the very word of God. So I think that it's a legitimate criticism. May I throw in one more thing though in terms of verifying this thing? So yeah, the Shroud, the earliest. The one problem I have with it is you don't hear about it in the historical record until the 14th, 13th, it's 14th century, 1340s. But everything's every test. There was a carbon 14 dating test back in the eight, I think it was 88 or 89 that put it in the, the Middle Ages. But the latest research has shown that, that that research was tainted. Right. And so there's a whole lot of stuff that's evidence that's pointing to its origin in the first century. And at best what it'll prove is that there was a Shroud put over a person who was crucified in the first century. There's another thing called the Sudarium of Ovida. Have you ever heard of it?
- [32:52]
B
No.
- [32:52]
C
It's Hella Sarah, the little cloth put over Jesus head that's mentioned in John chapter 20 and that thing actually you can trace its origin and the historical record to at least the sixth century A.D. and when, when they they've done tests on the blood, the blood type on both the Shroud and The Sudarium, both AB blood, both seem to be 1st century IT and let's say it's not, who cares. But it is really quite awesome if it is. It's sort of like the when they people started talking about the Nazareth inscription again though it's been around for over 100 years. But it's like, basically, it's an imperial decree that says, whoever. If you're caught going into tombs and messing with bodies, you're going to be executed. Who needs to be told not to go into a tomb and mess with a dead body?
- [33:50]
B
Sure.
- [33:53]
C
And the big question about the Nazareth inscription is, like, which emperor? We don't have the emperor signing, but if it's Tiberius Caesar, Holy cats. Yeah. There might be a reason why he issued that decree. So all this stuff is circumstantial and it's tangential, secondary tertiary to the apologetic task that we learned from Dr. Rosenblatt and Dr. Montgomery. But it certainly is great cooperating evidence, and we might even expect to find such evidence given that Jesus did, as a matter of fact, rise from the dead.
- [34:31]
B
Right.
- [34:32]
C
So that's what's on my mind. And I've got other things, too, but we don't have time.
- [34:37]
B
Sure.
- [34:38]
A
What do you guys want to ask me? What's on Mark?
- [34:40]
B
Oh, sure.
- [34:41]
A
Or we can just. We could just wrap it up, I guess.
- [34:43]
B
That's fine.
- [34:44]
C
Okay.
- [34:44]
B
Caleb, what's on your mind? Well, since you asked, I mean, we usually don't have to ask, but go ahead.
- [34:53]
A
Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's true. Well, that's the benefit of getting to.
- [34:58]
B
Pick and edit the show, you know, so.
- [35:02]
A
Lots of things like Adam said, the two that I can't shake lately. I guess I'll give you the first one, because I really wish it. Really wish it wasn't on my mind because it comes up over and over again, and somehow I feel like we escape it. And it comes back is I'm. I am forced to think about the third use of the law again. And I really. I really hate this so much.
- [35:24]
B
You got to stop.
- [35:26]
A
And it's mostly because Lutheran discourse brings it up over and over again, people, I'll say primarily outside of 1517. And it often comes up as a way to accuse us, the thinking fellows, us, 15 17, our conference speakers of various theological problems, without saying our names. And you can just kind of palpably taste it. And so then I think about it again, and I go, am I wrong? And then you start reading the magisterial reformers, you start reading the Book of Concord again on these sections, and I go, I don't think we are. And so, yeah, I think about that again, and I just kind of wish that discourse could die because it's about an anxiety of Christian behavior which the law presented as a kind package, does not achieve. And so you see sort of this error like, I sympathize. I keep using that word as I in this episode with the concern about societal behavior. But one of the major problems is that fixing the societal behavior by talking to Christians who agree with you delight in the law in the sense that they know that the law of God is good. They believe that. They confess that they're grieved when they sin. They're grieved when people in their lives sin. They know that this is also displeasing to God is not going to then change the culture by preaching to those people who agree with you. The law in a new flavor. Now, those people do need the law. But the idea that we can just change the mechanism of that or the presentation of that as such to now Christians will be effective culture changers is, I don't think, evidenced in the text. I don't think that's how the law is described in the Book of Concord and other places. And so it just doesn't seem evident to me that that's one of the uses of the law. So now I would still grant, you know, three uses as described by Melanchthon and then descriptively in the formula, but not in this new way that I actually think is new. It's new to Lutheranism. It's not new to certain other types of Christianity, the way that the third use of law is presented. But Lutherans are adopting language from certain Reformed churches and even Reformed confessions that are not native to our confession. So, for instance, I see things like good works and sanctification are synonymous with the third use of law that is not present in Lutheran theology, that is present in certain other traditions. And I don't like getting looked at like I'm the crazy person in the room when I go, that's not what the third use of law means. And so I think about that just because Lutherans talk so assuredly about this subject in a way that our tradition didn't until recently, that it makes you, I don't know, kind of go bonkers. So I think about that, unfortunately. And then the other thing I've been thinking about a lot lately, I guess is a delicate subject, but is about human genetics and in the sense that there is progress on the sort of scientific and medical front in decoding the human genome theoretically, understanding what it makes up when there's defects or problems on it, and then thinking of medical and scientific solutions to those problems, most of which right now are in the realm of sort of an advancing technology related to ivf, in vitro Fertilization where you can do genetic selection of embryos for filtering out things like certain genetic diseases or sex or other characteristics. And there are private companies popping up doing this advertising with major newspapers in the US and doing this. And it seems to just be advancing very quickly under the guise of curing all future disease and types of human suffering. The next step in eliminating human suffering and the presentation as such is that embryo selection isn't an ethical question. It's just a question about human suffering. And would any parent, if given the opportunity, turn down the ability to stop their children's suffering. And if we have a technology that does that now, the problem is that this is not a cure to genetic diseases. It's not removing the genetic diseases from embryos or people. They're human people, but it is eliminating people with a future suffering and then favoring those who we see would have better advantage. And I think it's, I actually think it's one of the greatest ethical dilemmas of our time that has the risk of being mass adopted without anybody thinking about it because it just seems like it will end something we all want an end to. We don't want children to die young. We don't want people to go blind or have heart defects that cause them to suffer later in their life. And so if we could end that suffering.
- [40:43]
B
And they.
- [40:44]
A
Several of these places are usually in the word cure. If we could cure that suffering, every person would jump at that opportunity.
- [40:52]
B
After you. He recorded a video of this. It's on our, I think it's on The Thinking Fellows YouTube page, which we're really trying to grow because we're behind the, we've.
- [41:02]
A
We started late to the video, we're.
- [41:04]
B
Late to the game on the video game because video is such a pain in the rear. But we're late to the game on the video game. But so go like and subscribe and do all the things. Do us a big favor if even like 40 of you did that, it would really help us out. But he recorded a great video of this is up on the Thinking Fellows YouTube page. You should watch it. But right after you made that video, I was listening to a podcast and this came up and one of the ladies on the podcast said this is being advertised as a way to cure disease. And it's, it's curing no disease. It's eliminating people who potentially might be.
- [41:33]
A
Born with the disease. Yes.
- [41:35]
B
And it's. I thought that was real. Just like a really striking way to.
- [41:38]
A
Say that there was, it was a New York Times. I Got it wrong in the video. I think I said Wall Street Journal, but it was New York Times article that was promoting this. I think it was a paid opinion piece. They do those. It was written by the CEO of one of the leading companies on this front. And her example was that her own mother went blind from a genetic disease in her 50s, and that this caused her great suffering and things like this, and that she didn't want that for her children. The problem is that essentially, if you follow the logic close enough, you're basically saying my mom shouldn't have been born, a different sibling should have been born who wouldn't have had this problem. Well, then she wouldn't have been born and this company wouldn't exist. And you have these sort of weird dilemmas. But the reality is that we're sort of flagrantly technologically able to do these things and that regulation in the United States on what you do with human embryos is virtually non existent. And that's the big problem. It's much more stringent in what are traditionally thought of as more progressive countries throughout Europe. But what you can do with human embryos is much more regulated in the United States. It's one of the largest free for alls. And part of that is that we have just adopted the language that there's no chance that a human embryo is human, that it is just an object that can be aborted or lost without care. And so when you do that, then you open up the door to why not experiment on these. The next step in some cases is going to be gene altering, which they're doing in animals right now. And there's thin regulation preventing that in human embryos right now that I don't expect to stand up. And so I do think we have to be conscious of this because in a lot of ways, as I was talking about the sympathy thing last time, this could be a sympathetic way that just kind of happens to people who are barren or maybe people with long histories of genetic disease and their families and things like that, who just do it out of kindness or out of that future concern. And there's so much scaremongering about this. The one bright light I have on this is that after that article was published, there are a lot of attacks on Christians, specifically on the Internet, from these transhumanists. This is really an aspect of transhumanism, basically saying Christians alone are going to be the barrier to get over this because they're the only people who think this embryo has a soul and its value and has doing this. So they're going to be in our way. That's turning out not to be true. As I was doing more research on this subject, there's actually a pretty decent contingent of atheistic evolutionary biologists find this atrocious as well, mostly because in their religion of evolution and evolutionary biology, you could be eliminating positive adaptations as well, and that you actually just have to let this process play out in order to advance the human creature. And so they find that this is a problem as well. So you actually do have secular people and people in science who will try to oppose this as well. And I do think it'll be interesting if. If there can be some coalitions of people who oppose this kind of advancement in technology. And it's really eugenics together, both Christian and sort of scientist alike. Or if this is just going to be something that, you know, like, I. I worry about insurance companies saying, well, this is the only kind of IVF we want to fund because we're going to be eliminating future costs to us in the medical system and some other really scary things that do happen quietly and quickly when it comes to, I don't know, genetics, fertility, medical practice.
- [45:31]
B
Yeah. And you can almost say on that tree, you know, does anybody think about anything happy? No.
- [45:40]
A
Are you thinking about anything happening? Oh, sure. I'm thinking about something happy.
- [45:43]
B
I'm thinking about my kids. There you go. What'd you say when I said that?
- [45:47]
A
Yeah, I'm thinking about your grandkids. There you go.
- [45:50]
B
Yeah.
- [45:51]
A
I'm hopeful to. I'll add this. I saw a lot of anecdotal sort of accounts that this Easter's attendance at various churches, various Lutheran churches was just up and that, like, there's been an uprising of younger people back to church.
- [46:07]
B
And in fact, younger men.
- [46:08]
A
Younger men.
- [46:08]
B
Younger men.
- [46:09]
A
Are younger men coming back to church?
- [46:11]
B
I think that's younger women. Sorry, I. Kind of funny, because for almost all of Christian history, it was the opposite. It's been the opposite. That the majority of people at any Christian church have been women and that women have been the driving force for going to church. That's been the case forever and ever. And that it might not last. Right. This is very small data set, just last six months or so. That is flipping a little bit. And the people that are coming back to church and kind of leading the way are younger, sort of like 30 and under men. So.
- [46:46]
A
Yeah. And that's good news. I mean, I gave a talk in the fall at Here We Still Stand. That was a little bit of doom and gloom about young men in the church because the previous sort of past 5, 10 years of data was really bad on, on young men and their.
- [47:01]
B
It's still really bad on young women.
- [47:04]
A
It's still not great for young men. There's just a positive shift. There's a palpable shift for some people. I think it's worth exploring what those reasons are. I think Adam was, were we talking about it yesterday too? That there's just, you know, there's people looking for something authentic and something real and the church seems to in some cases just not changed for a long time. And that leads people to then go why has this been so sturdy? And, and come ask that question out of curiosity. So I think that's a good thing.
- [47:37]
C
There is a notice. I mean in the like, I guess the, the public limelight, there have been some pretty high profile conversions to some type of Christianity from Ian Hersi Ali to. I think it's Kat Von D, the tattoo Wiccan person who's now, I think Catholic. Richard Dawkins said what, six months ago that he's, he considers himself a cultural Christian.
- [48:03]
B
He's really tired of seeing empty churches.
- [48:05]
C
I think, I mean like Europe's a different thing, but I think the, in Europe the, the assertiveness of Islam is driving a lot of Europeans to rethink their secularism and United States. I think it's a very complicated thing. Some of it I, I'm not like worried about it. I've got too many other things to think about in my own house. But there is sort of this. I, and generally I think it's okay so far, but this sort of emphasis on trad stuff, you know, and that's fine, like traditional stuff, but when, when it's like sort of all. And it's just driven by wanting to assert yourself and your own lives. Own the libs. Yeah. I mean I enjoy watching people own libs, but that just can't, that can't just be it just reasserting tradition for the sake of tradition. It's. If it's not true, don't bother with it.
- [49:06]
A
So that won't last. Right. Because that's a feeling. It's a, it's a sort of a vibe and it just. If you can only commit to church, as long as it's feeling like it's improving your life or giving you some emotional fulfillment, I don't know, can that. Or popular or popular. Can that sustain a lifetime? Only the proclamation of the gospel.
- [49:31]
B
Amen.
- [49:31]
A
To sustain a lifetime in the faith. And so I do Think churches should capitalize on the moment of interest as there's increased interest. But, but capitalizing on it not by being trendy, but by using it as an opportunity to go very specifically with the proclamation of the gospel, that thing which is promised to create and sustain faith. And so as you have more, that.
- [49:53]
B
Is the unchangingness of the church. Yeah. From the time that Christ instituted it till now to proclaim the gospel of Christ Jesus, boldly to defend it when necessary, and to give people the goods as the sacraments in accordance with His Word.
- [50:06]
A
Yeah.
- [50:07]
B
That's the church.
- [50:08]
A
That is the church.
- [50:09]
C
And the church isn't just a building, a visible institution. It's you and me and, and the sum total of all believers in Christ everywhere. And we've, you know, missiologists, people who study mission theology, which Scott loves.
- [50:29]
B
Have.
- [50:29]
C
Been kind of moving away from describing that the, I don't want to call it an obligation, the, the privilege Christians have in speaking the truth of the gospel. They've been moving away from describing that as the Great Commission to just simply participation in the mission of God, the Missio Day. And because God is at work in the world through means and he uses people. And I think, I mean, every time there's nothing new under the sun and. But we, you know, every history does not repeat itself in a cyclical way. But in our culture we have, despite all the bad news, the doom and gloom, there's. That means also that there's all sorts of new and interesting opportunity to speak the gospel to our neighbor in our house and on the streets and everywhere in between and invite them to church.
- [51:22]
B
Anybody else think when he was like the church is not a building, that he was going to do the steeple and the people? I did.
- [51:31]
A
Well, I don't know. We'll have to let you guys tell us that this format works or not if we should keep doing it on the show. But I had fun. You guys enjoy it? Well, good.
- [51:42]
B
We got one.
- [51:43]
A
We got one listener. Well, thank you for listening to the Thinking Fellows podcast. Do not forget to subscribe to the show and your favorite podcasting app. And actually we've got, as my dad said, we have a brand new YouTube channel. We're putting up the episodes on there, but also just these one off videos that are about 10 to 15 minutes long on just individual topics. Some of them that we've covered in the past in long form podcasting, but we're doing them in a succinct way that I think is very easily digestible and shareable so go check that out. Subscribe now on YouTube @ the Thinking fellows. We'll catch you next time.
- [52:15]
B
Bye bye.
- [52:21]
A
It.