Episode 205
DOUG WILSON | Mister Wilson Burns Bridges: Exploring Politics, Eschatology, and Idolatry
Pastor Doug Wilson returns to The Will Spencer Podcast for his fifth appearance, bringing an insightful analysis of the recent election results and the cultural landscape of America.
He emphasizes the importance of understanding ideological idolatry as outlined in Herbert Schlossberg's book, "Idols for Destruction," which Wilson strongly recommends as essential reading. The conversation delves into the implications of the election outcomes for evangelical Christians and discusses the potential for a renewed focus on economic freedom and deregulation under a Trump presidency.
Wilson also reflects on the need for a thoughtful engagement with culture, encouraging Christians to avoid the pitfalls of celebrity status and to root their faith in community worship. With a call to action, the episode underscores the importance of integrating faith into all aspects of life while confronting contemporary challenges with a robust biblical worldview.
Takeaways:
- Wilson emphasizes the importance of understanding cultural idols and their impact on society, particularly how they have seeped into the church.
- The podcast discusses the shifting political landscape in America, reflecting on the recent election and its implications for the future of evangelical influence.
- Wilson shares insights on the necessity for Christians to engage in the public sphere while maintaining a solid theological foundation to guide their actions.
- The conversation highlights the potential for deregulation under a Trump presidency to stimulate economic growth and support for church planting and community initiatives.
- A key theme is the call for evangelical leaders to return to foundational biblical truths rather than getting caught up in celebrity culture.
- The influence of Herbert Schlossberg's book 'Idols for Destruction' is stressed, advocating for a worldview that recognizes the dangers of ideological idolatry in contemporary Christianity
CONNECT WITH PASTOR WILSON
MENTIONED IN THIS PODCAST
- "Books for Head and Heart" talk
- "Idols for Destruction" by Herbert Schlossberg
- "The Basic Laws of Human Stupidity" by Carlo Cipolla
- "We Become What We Worship" by GK Beale
🌟 The Will Spencer Podcast was formerly known as "The Renaissance of Men."
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Transcript
Hello, my name is Will Spencer and welcome to the Will Spencer Podcast.
Will Spencer:This is a weekly show featuring in depth conversations with authors, leaders and influencers who help us understand our changing world.
Will Spencer:New episodes release every Friday.
Pastor Doug Wilson:This week.
Will Spencer:I'm excited to present to you my livestream conversation with Pastor Doug Wilson from this past Monday.
Will Spencer:You might recognize his name.
Will Spencer:He's been on the show before once or twice.
Will Spencer:To give you just a brief bit of backstory on this interview, I went to Grace Agenda in Moscow this past August and heard Pastor Wilson give a talk, Books for Head and Heart.
Will Spencer:You can find that talk on YouTube in the show.
Will Spencer:Notes in the Talk.
Will Spencer:Pastor Wilson strongly recommended the book Idols for Destruction by Herbert Schlossberg.
Will Spencer:He said it was, quote, not optional.
Will Spencer:And when Doug Wilson says a book isn't optional, I listen.
Will Spencer:So I purchased the book that day from the new St.
Will Spencer:Andrews Bookstore.
Will Spencer:Then I realized that no Quarter November would also be coming up soon, and that there was this little election thing going on.
Will Spencer:No big deal.
Will Spencer:So after coming back from Grace Agenda back in August, I asked for a November podcast date, specifically requesting a time as close to the election as I could get without going over.
Will Spencer:Dr.
Will Spencer:Wilson's assistant, Christine was happy to oblige with a Monday podcast slot when Doug usually records on Thursdays.
Will Spencer:Shout out Christine, you're awesome.
Will Spencer:So this conversation you're about to hear is that one which we broadcast live to YouTube and X because I thought people might be interested to hear Pastor Wilson's take on the election sooner rather than later.
Will Spencer:My thought was that we might get some bad news, if only due to a steal.
Will Spencer:And then I prayed that Pastor Wilson might be able to minister to the listeners during what I felt might be a trying time for us all.
Will Spencer:But as it turns out, we got good news.
Will Spencer:Far better than any of us expected, in fact.
Will Spencer:So the tenor of Monday felt a bit more like an afterglow, lending our conversation a more easy and freewheeling feel than I expected.
Will Spencer:But you know what?
Pastor Doug Wilson:I'll take it.
Will Spencer: es on the election results in: Will Spencer:If you enjoy this podcast, thank you.
Will Spencer:Please leave five star ratings on Spotify and Apple podcasts and share this episode with friends.
Will Spencer:You can Support us@willspencerpod.substack.com for ad free content or buy me a coffee in the show notes.
Will Spencer:Most importantly, please support our advertisers to help create generational wealth as we rebuild the West's Christian foundation.
Will Spencer:A quick personal note before we begin.
Will Spencer:Trump's election has dramatically shifted the American cultural, political and theological landscape, making me aware of unique opportunities in this moment that I'd like to be responsive to and that has bearing on this show.
Will Spencer:So this podcast is likely going to be changing in some significant ways in the near future.
Will Spencer:I'll continue to pray through those changes and keep you posted.
Will Spencer:As a man who takes seriously my responsibility to shepherd your time and attention and, and who's grateful for every single one of you, I prefer to do things with you, letting you into my process rather than just making changes and leaving you to figure out what's up.
Will Spencer:So stay tuned for some announcements about that coming soon.
Will Spencer:And please welcome this week's guest on the podcast back for his fifth appearance, the Pastor of Christ Kirk in Moscow, Idaho, and the chief fire starter of no Quarter November, Pastor Doug Wilson.
Pastor Doug Wilson:Pastor Wilson, thanks so much for joining me again on the Will Spencer podcast.
Speaker C:Yeah, good to be with you.
Speaker C:Thank you for the invitation.
Pastor Doug Wilson:It's a no Quarter November again and it's probably one of the most exciting Novembers that we've had in a while.
Pastor Doug Wilson:So I think we have a lot to talk about today.
Speaker C:Yeah, this is a nail biter.
Pastor Doug Wilson:So speaking of the nail biter, I think I want to real quick just start off by going into election night.
Pastor Doug Wilson:So I was watching the returns with a bunch of friends and I was wondering like what it was like in the Wilson household as the returns were coming in.
Pastor Doug Wilson:I imagine that you were having a good chuckle, maybe a few prayers of thanksgiving and supplication.
Pastor Doug Wilson:What was it, what was it like for you guys at home as you were watching that?
Speaker C:We were at some, some of the kids were over dropping in and visiting.
Speaker C:We were checking the returns periodically.
Speaker C:Back in the old days, we used to turn the television on and just watch the television.
Speaker C:Right now everybody just checks their websites periodically.
Speaker C:Probably the most reliable one being checked was polymarket, the betting, the betting site.
Speaker C:And around 9, 9:30 Pacific Time, it, which is normally when we go to bed, it was looking, it was not cinched up tight, but it was looking really good.
Speaker C:So we felt free to go to bed.
Speaker C:But then when I got up to use the bathroom at three in the morning and I went and checked, of course at three in the morning, okay.
Speaker C:So it was a very gratifying, it was apparent to me pretty early on which way it was going and, and it wasn't settled, but I was pretty, I felt pretty easy about it.
Pastor Doug Wilson:Did you have any concern at all when the returns were kind of slowing down a little bit around 9 o'clock, that it seemed like people forgot how to count around that time again?
Pastor Doug Wilson: we're looking at a replay of: Speaker C:Yeah, just in California.
Pastor Doug Wilson:Arizona too.
Speaker C:The thing that, the thing that is just beyond ridiculous to me is back in the day, back in the days of paper ballots, we had the results that night from all over the country that night.
Speaker C:And now we have machines that are way more expensive and not nearly as good.
Speaker C:One of the things I think that the next President Trump needs to do is there really needs to be a presidential task force on election integrity and like, best practices for elections that cannot be easily manipulated or rigged.
Speaker C: massive cheating last time in: Speaker C:And this time it looked like there was.
Speaker C:There was reasonable electoral oversight.
Speaker C:People knew what to expect.
Speaker C:So I think that was a trick that just worked one time.
Pastor Doug Wilson:Yeah, you posted your.
Pastor Doug Wilson:Just a slaughterhouse take on the election, which I want to get to.
Pastor Doug Wilson:But before that, you posted that graph, the damning graph and the non NQN post.
Pastor Doug Wilson:And maybe we can talk a little bit about that because it seems a lot of people are talking about the missing Democrats who didn't show up this time.
Pastor Doug Wilson:Statistical exaggerations and perhaps not.
Pastor Doug Wilson:Maybe we can talk a little bit about that because it does seem like if Joe Biden was so popular last time, why was Kamala Harris not so popular this time?
Pastor Doug Wilson:And other kind of.
Pastor Doug Wilson:Kind of big questions.
Speaker C:Right.
Speaker C:You can't say that Kamala was not popular because she's boring and tedious.
Speaker C:Because Biden was boring and tedious.
Speaker C:Yes, he was.
Speaker C:In other words.
Speaker C:And he was.
Speaker C:He was.
Speaker C:Ran his campaign from his basement.
Speaker C:At least she was energetic and out there and talking in a way that he was not.
Speaker C:And so it seems to me that you can't say, you can't explain why this dog didn't hunt because then you have to explain why the other one did.
Speaker C:That's right.
Pastor Doug Wilson:So how, like, where did, where did the drop off kind of come from?
Pastor Doug Wilson: Phoenix, central Phoenix, in: Pastor Doug Wilson:And I remember distinctly going into the polling place, which was in the Biltmore, a nice part of town, and I was handed a Sharpie, which I had never been handed before in all my time voting.
Pastor Doug Wilson:It bled through.
Pastor Doug Wilson:It bled through the ballot, which I had never recalled voting all my time in San Francisco, that happening.
Pastor Doug Wilson:And so I walked away with the impression that something really funny had happened because there was a strange air around the proceedings as well.
Pastor Doug Wilson:Now, I didn't feel that this time, and I don't know if anyone else did, but it felt much more solid and much more real, which, frankly, was unexpected.
Speaker C:Yeah, that is correct.
Speaker C: like what it ought to be than: Pastor Doug Wilson:And I'm old enough to remember, of course, the hanging chads of Florida.
Pastor Doug Wilson:What year was that?
Pastor Doug Wilson:2,000, something like that.
Speaker C:Whatever Bush, Gore was.
Pastor Doug Wilson:I think it was in that moment that it was kind of discovered that it was possible to game the American electoral system by focusing on just a few key counties, which, I mean, I remember watching the returns this time, and I didn't really see that happening in quite the same way.
Speaker C:Right, right.
Pastor Doug Wilson:So I wanted to talk a little bit also about the Schlossberg book with regard to this election.
Pastor Doug Wilson:Cause it seems that we've been given a little bit of a reprieve.
Pastor Doug Wilson:I remember, I think some of your writings had said that Kamala would kind of be the end of the fourth quarter or something like that, and Trump would be something less that maybe you can use that.
Pastor Doug Wilson:You can represent that metaphor accurately for me.
Speaker C:Yeah.
Speaker C:If I remember correctly, I was saying that if we go with Kamala, we are losing in the finals.
Speaker C:If we elect Trump, we are winning in the semifinals.
Speaker C:So if, because Trump has dramatically softened his stance on life issues, on abortion, and they're signaling in various ways, the first lady elect has put out the video that was sort of soft pro choice.
Speaker C:And JD Vance backed away from his previous pro life position for the sake of qualifying to be the veep.
Speaker C:Things like that indicated to me that there's going to be some collisions within the Trump coalition, because a lot of the people in that Trump coalition were there from the first time, and they were there from the first time because of Trump's commitment to appoint conservative judges.
Speaker C:So I think there's going to be some sort of showdown between Trump and some Trump supporters, which I trust.
Speaker C:I'm anticipating that that showdown will happen behind closed doors.
Speaker C:I don't think there's going to be a firefight out in public, but I think that what we need would be a handful of senators who would say, we're not going to vote for any SCOTUS nominee that's to the left of Alito or Thomas.
Pastor Doug Wilson:Okay.
Pastor Doug Wilson: So as opposed to: Pastor Doug Wilson:If you vote for me, I'll give you Supreme Court justices.
Pastor Doug Wilson:That voting happened.
Pastor Doug Wilson:The deal was made, he followed through, he gave the justices and overturned Roe.
Pastor Doug Wilson:And it seemed this time that the evangelical influence was greatly diminished compared to where it had been.
Pastor Doug Wilson:But you still think that there will be a collision behind closed doors around the life issue?
Speaker C:Yeah, you have to.
Speaker C:Basically, the first time around, the evangelicals had something to deal with.
Speaker C:So I think Trump is a transactional businessman.
Speaker C:He believes in deals, and he doesn't believe in the life issue, or at least not with understanding, but he does believe in deals.
Speaker C:Right.
Speaker C:And he keeps them.
Speaker C:So if he makes a transaction with a German bank or with Elon or with evangelicals, he keeps the deal.
Speaker C: in order to make the deal in: Speaker C:They had to have something to offer that might not come through if they didn't offer it.
Speaker C:And that would be their support in the general.
Speaker C:That would be their support in the election.
Speaker C:After that first go around and after things went hard left on the Democratic side, I think that Trump calculated pretty fairly that he had the evangelical vote locked in, baked in anyway, and there was not much for us to deal with.
Speaker C:What are we gonna.
Speaker C:What are we gonna offer?
Speaker C:And I think that what has to happen is if he wants to put forward a particular nominee for a federal court or for the Supreme Court, three.
Speaker C:Three Republican senators could say, we're not gonna vote for this guy because he's soft on abortion, and that would drop.
Speaker C:I'm not sure what the final margin of us holding the Senate is, but whatever it would take to drop below 50% that withheld support from those three senators or the Gang of Five or whoever it is, that would be something to negotiate with.
Speaker C:We're happy to support your nominees.
Speaker C:Just give us nominees like you did the first time.
Pastor Doug Wilson: lding the vote like it was in: Pastor Doug Wilson:It will be more leverage applied directly to senators to hold up the nomination process for justices that will maintain Roe perhaps being at the state level.
Pastor Doug Wilson:That seems to be where Trump is at.
Speaker C:Right.
Speaker C:And I believe that he's the kind of person who would respect a straight up the middle offer, you know, no funny business, no games, no being cute, just saying, no.
Speaker C:This is where we are.
Speaker C:This is where we've always been.
Speaker C:This is what we're after.
Speaker C:And we are happy to support you for the office of president, but we can't go against what we believe.
Pastor Doug Wilson:So a question about that, but there's, there's obviously a lot to be concerned about with the Trump presidency, particularly around the life issue.
Will Spencer:But what are you most excited about?
Pastor Doug Wilson:And I think I'm interested in an answer both as a minister, but also as a, as a grandfather and great grandfather.
Pastor Doug Wilson:So you're looking in sort of your professional role as a shepherd of a town, essentially, and many more.
Pastor Doug Wilson:But as a, as a, as a grandfather and a great grandfather, what makes you the most excited about a Trump presidency or this term?
Speaker C:The thing that excites me the most about what could be happening positively, and there are a number of them.
Speaker C:But quite frankly, I think the thing that excites me the most is the coming deregulation of business.
Speaker C:I think that this is something Trump has to do to protect the economy, because I think liberals will try to crash the economy, so, so they can blame him for it.
Speaker C:And I think that if, if the regulations that are currently constricting American industry and American business were lifted, I think there would be an explosion of a good kind where I, and I believe it would sort of liberate a lot of funds.
Speaker C:And in the kingdom of God, we're going to need funds.
Speaker C:We're going to be planting churches, planting schools.
Speaker C:I believe that we have a window of two to four years here to get ready for the next big collision with the left.
Speaker C:And as my son Nate put it to me once, he said, money is bullets.
Speaker C:And so consequently, I believe that if Trump acts shrewdly, and I've heard that he's committed to, in the first term, he said for every new regulation imposed, you have to remove two.
Speaker C:And I heard that he had said something similar, only this time it's four.
Speaker C:For every new regulation, you have to remove four regulations.
Speaker C:That's the thing that excites me more than anything else.
Pastor Doug Wilson:Yeah, I think that was probably, that was the thing for me that was the most exciting was the economic possibilities that would become open to people that wouldn't be possible under a Harris presidency.
Speaker C:Right.
Speaker C:Because I think that that what that does is that that issue that I care about connects to all the other issues that I care about.
Pastor Doug Wilson:Well, okay, so it Seems to me that we're coming out of an era of evangelicalism, which is a little bit before my time.
Pastor Doug Wilson:Admittedly that's.
Pastor Doug Wilson:That has the very different perspective on economic issues with regard to the life of the Christian.
Pastor Doug Wilson:I'm thinking of the book Radical by David Platt, which I haven't read, but certainly people have been talking about it lately.
Pastor Doug Wilson:So maybe you can talk a little bit about the mindset shift that may be required for some Christians who have been used to thinking about things in terms of perhaps a poverty gospel is the term that I've heard.
Pastor Doug Wilson:Or perhaps thinking maybe wealth is too worldly instead of thinking of it in earthy terms.
Speaker C:Yeah, this is actually a perennial issue among evangelicals.
Speaker C:It's just the book covers change and the authors change, but the debate remains the same.
Speaker C:Back in the 70s, the Hot Book at that time was Rich Christians in an Age of Hunger and by Ron Seider and which was a, you know, it was just the typical leftist thing and the first Reconstruction, the first book that I ever read by a reconstructionist was a guy named David Chilton and he wrote a response to David Chilton called Productive Christians in an Age of Guilt Manipulators.
Pastor Doug Wilson:Perfect.
Speaker C:So that's the matchup.
Speaker C:You either feel guilty for your wealth or you feel grateful for your wealth.
Speaker C:Now the issue is, I mean the Bible's full of warnings about how people can sin with riches and how they can become self sufficient and forget God and Jeshuan waxed fat and kicked.
Speaker C:That really is a scriptural warning.
Speaker C:But in Scripture the issue is never the wealth, but rather the heart.
Speaker C:Okay, God blesses.
Speaker C:In Deuteronomy, God blesses his people with wealth and then warns them, you're going to be tempted to forget me because you've been dazzled by this blessing that I gave you, right?
Speaker C:So we remember, we focus on the gift and forget the giver.
Speaker C:Well, the communist mentality, the leftist mentality, the collectivist mentality is always in everywhere.
Speaker C:A zero sum approach, and it's driven by envy, which means that we have a fixed piece of pie.
Speaker C:And that means that if you get a bigger piece of pie, that means I necessarily get a smaller piece of pie.
Speaker C:More for you means less for me.
Speaker C:More for me means less for you.
Speaker C:That's how the communists always think.
Speaker C:And so they say, we need a sheriff, we need someone to oversee the cutting of the piece, comrade.
Speaker C:And so they volunteer to oversee the cutting of the pie and then they take the pie and there we all are.
Speaker C:So in a free market system, which I Believe the Bible teaches and encourages and foments the pie grows.
Speaker C:Would I rather have 5% of a huge pie or 50% of a teeny piece?
Speaker C:Right, Absolutely.
Speaker C:So if we are living covenantally under God's blessing, the pie grows.
Speaker C:And that means more for me.
Speaker C:Means more for you.
Speaker C:So an employer comes in, he's got a great idea, he's an entrepreneur, he implements it and first thing you know, he's hiring 15 people to man the shop.
Speaker C:And it's more for him, more for them, more for everyone.
Speaker C:The rising tide floats all the boats.
Speaker C:So this is, I think, a fundamental issue that separates the leftist mentality from the conservative mentality.
Speaker C:Do we believe that God is a scrooge or do we believe that God is overflowing with generosity?
Pastor Doug Wilson:Amen to that.
Pastor Doug Wilson:So I think then the question becomes, my question is about eschatology, that it still seems to be an uphill battle to convince people of sort of maybe a post millennial hope to say that there is a future worth fighting for.
Speaker C:That is exactly right.
Speaker C:And there's a hazard in it because Christians, basically you become a, if somebody becomes a Christian, one of the first things that happens is the cocaine bill goes way down, let's hope, right?
Speaker C:And then he gets married, he becomes a responsible dad and he's got to provide for his kids and so forth.
Speaker C:And so this is, this is true of every form of Bible believing Christian, whether they're post mill or amil or premill or dispensational, whatever, whatever.
Speaker C:They live sober, decent, clean lives, which generally speaking is conducive to wealth acquisition.
Speaker C:If you went into an impoverished area in order to conduct evangelism and your evangelism was very successful and you established churches and the people there were getting sober and getting cleaned up and getting married and doing this, one of the first things that's going to emerge from that is a middle class.
Speaker C:That's what's going to happen.
Speaker C:And so regardless of eschatology, that's going to happen.
Speaker C:The difficulty is if you're a dispensational pre mill Christian, you're clean and sober and living a reasonable life, but you don't have a theology of advancing the kingdom, which would require funds, which would require donors, because you don't have a theology of that and you believe that Jesus is coming back in 36 months, right?
Speaker C:You're not going to want to build a university to use for half of those 36 months.
Speaker C:You're not going to want to build a multi generational business.
Speaker C:What you're going to do.
Speaker C:It's going to cause you to shrink your vision, shrink your horizon, which then, for two cents, become selfish.
Speaker C:You circle the wagons tightly and then it's just taking care of your family.
Speaker C:Now, obviously there's nothing wrong with taking care of your family, but I believe I'd like to quote Thomas Chalmers, the great Presbyterian, Scott's Presbyterian pastor, who said, regardless of how large, your vision is too small.
Pastor Doug Wilson:Yes, yes.
Pastor Doug Wilson:I remember when you and I first spoke.
Pastor Doug Wilson: I think it was in: Pastor Doug Wilson:And it actually made a lot of sense to me.
Pastor Doug Wilson:I'd never really explored the idea of eschatology very much, but it seemed to me coming from the new age, which also has sort of a pre millennial kind of view, this idea that this new era is coming and the leap into hyperspace, these are real things.
Pastor Doug Wilson:And so I had seen similar discussions, of course, in the Christian community from the Outside Left behind series and something like that.
Pastor Doug Wilson:It seemed the same projection of an apocalyptic vision.
Pastor Doug Wilson:And it was through you that I discovered post millennialism.
Pastor Doug Wilson:And I was like, oh, that makes a lot of sense.
Pastor Doug Wilson:To begin moving into the world with determination and focus, with a godly attitude.
Will Spencer:That seems to me to be a.
Pastor Doug Wilson:Much more righteous way to live rather than counting down the seconds until the Apocalypse.
Speaker C:Right, right.
Speaker C:As a famous Premill preacher once said, you don't polish brass on a sinking ship.
Pastor Doug Wilson:That's right.
Pastor Doug Wilson:That's right.
Pastor Doug Wilson:So just to go sort of off script for a second, I guess it seems that there's perhaps a generational or a cultural divide.
Pastor Doug Wilson:There are so many of them between Christians these days, and one of them is around the eschatological issue.
Pastor Doug Wilson:And of course I've watched, I think it was your night of eschatology, that roundtable discussion, which I don't recall how long ago that was.
Pastor Doug Wilson:What suggestions would you have given that we have this four year window, which I think is a very real thing.
Will Spencer:To reaching out and building bridges with.
Pastor Doug Wilson:So many believers in America that just have this pre mil kind of attitude when we could really use them on board.
Pastor Doug Wilson:The builder mentality?
Speaker C:Yeah, that is a very tough one because one of the features of primal dispensational thinking is that the world is going to hell in a handbasket.
Speaker C:And then if you look around, it kind of sort of is.
Speaker C:But people need to reflect that.
Speaker C:Perhaps it is because we're thinking that way.
Pastor Doug Wilson:Right.
Speaker C:So which is the chicken and which is the egg?
Speaker C:How is it possible for things to fall apart as drastically as They've fallen apart in the United States.
Speaker C:When the United States is home to millions upon millions of evangelical Christians, what happened?
Speaker C:Jesus says, what happens when the salt loses its saltiness, when the salt loses its savor?
Speaker C:Jesus says, it's only worth throwing out and being trampled on by men.
Speaker C:So I think there are times when the church is persecuted.
Speaker C:The church is vibrant, and it's persecuted because it's vibrant.
Speaker C:But there are other areas where the church is persecuted because it's lame.
Speaker C:And I believe that we've invited a lot of this on ourselves by not taking the Scriptures as seriously as we ought to have taken them.
Pastor Doug Wilson:Well, that provides a really great transition into the Schlossberg book, Idols for Destruction.
Pastor Doug Wilson:So I remember at the morning session on Friday when you so strongly recommended this book, and it's actually in your email signature, and I'll just read that really quick from page 304.
Pastor Doug Wilson:It says the Bible can be interpreted as a string of God's triumphs disguised as disasters.
Pastor Doug Wilson:And so that's in the signature of every single one of your emails.
Pastor Doug Wilson:And so for those listening, you know, that's the significance that you lend to this book.
Pastor Doug Wilson:So I'm glad that you provided that transition to speak about this.
Pastor Doug Wilson:This is an incredible work, by the way.
Speaker C:It really is, really is what Schlossberg does.
Speaker C:And he wrote that book.
Speaker C:Man, I forgot the copyright date, but it was decades ago.
Pastor Doug Wilson:83.
Speaker C:Yeah, 83.
Speaker C:So he.
Speaker C:What he does there is instead of talking about idols that are like Buddha or stone carvings that you leave baskets of fruit in front of or light candles in front of, he's not talking about idolatry like that.
Speaker C:He's talking about ideological idolatry, mental philosophical constructs that we use to shape our worldview and give ourselves to.
Speaker C:So one of his chapters is an idol of nature or an idol of humanity.
Speaker C:So you have this idea you're going to serve this idol.
Speaker C:And each idol that you serve, this goes back to another great book by G.K.
Speaker C:beale called We Become like what We Worship.
Speaker C:And in Psalm 115, it says it's taunting the idols.
Speaker C:And it says, they have eyes, but they see not ears, but they hear not noses, but they smell not.
Speaker C:And then it says, those that make them are like unto them.
Speaker C:So if you make deaf, dumb, and blind idols, if you worship deaf, dumb, and blind idols, you are going to become deaf, dumb, and blind.
Speaker C:If you worship cruel gods, you will become cruel.
Speaker C:If you worship lustful gods, you will become lustful even more so.
Speaker C:And what Schlossberg is doing is he is, in very careful, painstaking way, he's showing how the assumptions of each one of these idolatrous constructs can seep in to a Christian's thinking and framework.
Speaker C:And I just mentioned this in a sermon yesterday at the last line in the letter of first John, John says, little children keep yourself from idols.
Speaker C:Little children keep yourself from idols.
Speaker C:And the reason John says that to Christians, he's writing to Christians, but the reason he warns them of that is that he knows that they might not.
Speaker C:Yes, right.
Speaker C:There will be intense pressures to go along with the idolatrous assumptions.
Speaker C:Okay, so to illustrate this, most evangelical Reformed Christians, if you said, hey, let's go sacrifice a chicken in front of this painting or in front of this picture or in front of this statue, they'd say, no, I'm a Christian.
Speaker C:I'm not going to do that.
Speaker C:But if you look at the idol of egalitarianism, the assumptions of egalitarianism have crept into the church and have seriously infected vast wings of the church.
Speaker C:Right.
Speaker C:So, for example, one subset of egalitarianism would be feminism.
Speaker C:So you could have the most conservative evangelical political action group that you can imagine, and they could be having discussions on who should we select as our spokesman for our opposition to this abortion bill.
Speaker C:And they say, why don't we have Susie Q.
Speaker C:Do it?
Speaker C:Because she's a woman and she can speak to this.
Speaker C:So men don't get to speak to murder.
Speaker C:Men have no interest in what happens to their children.
Speaker C:Men have.
Speaker C:So what's happened is this would be a good example of Christians, conservative Christians, engaged in the culture war, fighting on the right side, imbibing an idolatrous assumption that if you don't have a uterus, you can't talk about these things.
Speaker C:Right?
Speaker C:Yep.
Speaker C:But then we've gotten to crazy town because they'll say, if you don't have a uterus, you can't speak about abortion.
Speaker C:And if you don't have a uterus, you can be a woman if you want to.
Pastor Doug Wilson:What is a woman after all?
Pastor Doug Wilson:Right.
Speaker C:What is it?
Speaker C:Who knows anymore?
Pastor Doug Wilson:Who knows?
Pastor Doug Wilson:That was one of the conclusions of the book that I thought was so interesting was that he said, we're not in a pagan America as in a pre Christian America.
Pastor Doug Wilson:It's actually far more dangerous.
Pastor Doug Wilson:We're in a post Christian America where the idols that he lists actually have adopted Christian language.
Pastor Doug Wilson:So they've had time to absorb Christian language and promote idolatry that way, egalitarianism being one of them.
Speaker C:Right.
Speaker C:Not only do they promote Christian, Adopt Christian language, but they will also adopt Christian structures of thought.
Speaker C:So for example, the biblical faith is an underdog faith.
Speaker C:Okay, That's a biblical idea.
Speaker C:The Christian faith is centered on the fact that Jesus Christ is a true victim.
Speaker C:We have a victim at the very center of our faith.
Speaker C:And so our generation, the generation around us, the pagan, post pagan, post Christian neopagan generation has adopted with a vengeance victim theology.
Speaker C:Everybody wants to be a victim, right?
Speaker C:And if you can be an intersectional victim, so much the better.
Speaker C:If you can be black and a lesbian and you know, whatever.
Speaker C:Yeah.
Speaker C:You know what?
Speaker C:Handicap layer them and then you, then you yell bingo.
Speaker C:If, if you do that, that what, what that they're doing is they're utilizing Christian structures.
Speaker C:Victimology is a rip off from the Christian faith because Christ is the only true victim.
Speaker C:And we see the underdog favored in Scripture.
Speaker C:David is the youngest of the brothers.
Speaker C:Jacob is younger than Esau.
Speaker C:The older will serve the younger.
Speaker C:Ishmael is older than Isaac.
Speaker C:Cain is older than Abel.
Speaker C:You know, it's just over and over and over again.
Speaker C:Well, in this post Christian era, they're making those structures work for them.
Speaker C:And because Christians are not what they haven't read enough Schlossberg, to see, to see the game that's being played on them, to see the play that's being run.
Pastor Doug Wilson:And this also gets, I think, to presuppositionalism, to say that like, well, so the Marxists will say this is wrong.
Pastor Doug Wilson:And you would say, well, by what standard is that wrong in a materialistic universe which always seems to blow their circuits.
Pastor Doug Wilson:And my question about that real quick is what happened?
Pastor Doug Wilson:Did Christians used to learn presuppositionalism?
Pastor Doug Wilson:Was that a thing or is that something that's coming back into fashion?
Speaker C:The genesis of that is really interesting.
Speaker C:Presuppositional apologetics is largely associated with Cornelius Van Til, who died in the 20th century.
Speaker C:He was a modern theologian.
Speaker C:The classical apologetics, you might say the Thomas Aquinas types of proofs for the existence of God are called classical apologetics.
Speaker C:That has a longer history in Christian apologetics.
Speaker C:Although if you go to some of the early fathers, their triumphalism sounds bad.
Speaker C:But men like, sounds fine to me.
Speaker C:Men like Athanasius were so confident of the authority of the risen Christ that they sound triumphalist to modern ears.
Speaker C:So I think you can point to different figures in church history who you say, well, that sounds presuppositional, but it wasn't ever worked out in detail.
Speaker C:The thing that is Funny about this is back in the early 90s, one of the first books I wrote was a little book called Persuasions.
Speaker C:This was pre Internet and pre all of that stuff.
Speaker C:And it was a dream of reason, meeting unbelief, conversations between a character called evangelist and various character.
Speaker C:He was on the road to the city and the characters he's talking to are on the road to the abyss and they have these conversations.
Speaker C:I sent this book and used to get, I used to get my books the way everybody else got their books through catalog companies.
Speaker C:So once a month you'd get a big new big thick wad of newsprint with 8 point font descriptions of all these books.
Speaker C:I would work through it and mark off the ones I want and order them and they'd come and that was all wonderful.
Speaker C:Well, I got the, I got this book that I wrote, Persuasions.
Speaker C:The people at one catalog company were kind enough to pick it up and I was very excited when the catalog came.
Speaker C:I looked up my book and someone at the company had written a copy for it and it said, this little book is a fine introduction to Van Til's apologetics.
Speaker C:And I thought it is.
Speaker C:I'd never, I'd heard Van Til's name, but I'd never read Van Til.
Speaker C:And I thought, oh golly, what am I doing?
Speaker C:What am I doing writing fine little introductions to someone that I've never read?
Speaker C:And I think, well, so I quick ordered one of Van Til's books, the Defense of the Faith, read it and breathed a sigh of relief.
Speaker C:Okay, I'm on the.
Speaker C:Okay, I'm on the same page with him.
Speaker C:But then the question is, if I didn't learn it from Van Til, which I didn't, where did I learn this form of argument with this structure of thought?
Speaker C:And the answer was C.S.
Speaker C:lewis.
Speaker C:So C.S.
Speaker C:lewis is both.
Speaker C:Depending on the circumstance, Lewis can reason like an evidentialist, which is the other apologetic school of thought.
Speaker C:He sometimes reasons like an evidentialist, but there are other times when he reasons strictly like a presuppositionalist.
Speaker C:And he's functioning in the classical stream of Christian thought.
Speaker C:So in his book Miracles, for example, he reasons like a presuppositionalist when he says, you can argue with a man who says that rice is unwholesome, but you need not argue with a man who says rice is unwholesome.
Speaker C:But I'm not saying this is true, okay?
Speaker C:And this is presuppositionalism in a nutshell.
Speaker C:The unbeliever says there is no God and I would say, are you saying that because that conforms to a state of affairs outside you, or are you saying that because you're just meat and bones and protoplasm and your thoughts are doing what those chemicals would always do at that temperature and with that pressure?
Speaker C:Well, a materialist has to say the latter.
Speaker C:Well, so if I went into an auditorium, there's a table up front, and I shook up a bottle of Mountain Dew and a bottle of Dr.
Speaker C:Pepper and put them on the table and they both fizz over.
Speaker C:I turn to the audience and say, which one is winning the debate?
Speaker C:Right?
Speaker C:They would all say, rightly, they're not debating, they're fizzing.
Speaker C:Well, the materialist, that's his position, that we're just fizzing.
Speaker C:I'm fizzing Christian Lee and he's fizzing atheistically.
Speaker C:But CS Lewis pointed out, well then you have therefore no reason for assuming anything about this to be true.
Speaker C:You've cut your own throat, you sawed off the branch you were sitting on and then cut your own throat on the way down, sort of refuting B.F.
Speaker C:skinner.
Pastor Doug Wilson:I think Schlossberg talks about B.F.
Pastor Doug Wilson:skinner, behavioralism, that it's all just fizzing chemicals and we should be comfortable and happy to know that that's our nature.
Pastor Doug Wilson:But primarily, I think Skinner's point was that if we are just fizzing chemicals, then we can be understood mechanically and we can be manipulated mechanically by the elites for their higher elite driven ends.
Speaker C:Right?
Speaker C:Now what Lewis points out in his great book Abolition of Man is those handlers, the people who are structuring, manipulating us, creating the brave new man, creating the.
Speaker C:They themselves are just chemicals.
Speaker C:These people always exempt themselves from the consequences of their own philosophy.
Speaker C:So I had a friend one time who was in a class at the university here, and the professor was English professor, trying to be a deconstructionist.
Speaker C:And he was saying, now class, there is no objective meaning in words.
Speaker C:There is no objective meaning in the text.
Speaker C:You can make the printed text, you can interpret it any way you want.
Speaker C:So my friend raised his hand and said, so let me get this right.
Speaker C:You're saying that words have objective, fixed value, right?
Speaker C:And he said, no, no, no, What I'm saying is that you can make words mean anything you want.
Speaker C:So my friend raised his hand again.
Speaker C:So you're saying that words have absolute value and they can't be changed.
Speaker C:He said, no, no, no.
Speaker C:And by this time the whole class is tittering because everybody could see that he was exempting his words from the rule that he wanted to apply to all words.
Speaker C:You can't advance an argument that no argument proves anything.
Pastor Doug Wilson:That's right.
Pastor Doug Wilson:So putting some of the pieces together, then, we're talking about the sort of four years of opportunity we have with Trump.
Pastor Doug Wilson:We're talking about the economic possibilities that are there available for Christians with sort of a long view.
Pastor Doug Wilson:But it also seems to me that, in a sense, Christians are kind of in occupied territory now that we've become a post Christian nation, and you have a rising wave of faithful orthodox, lowercase O, orthodox sentiment.
Pastor Doug Wilson:And so maybe there's an opportunity here as well to confront the idols of America over the next four years on presuppositional terms.
Speaker C:Right.
Speaker C:One of the advantages of everything being up for grabs is that you can introduce forgotten truths that we shouldn't have forgotten, but now that everything's so crazy, people might give it a listen.
Speaker C:So it says in Hebrews that God shakes everything up so that what cannot be shaken may remain.
Speaker C:So I have certainly seen.
Speaker C:I've been talking about these things, many of these things, for decades.
Speaker C:So I'm in my 70s now, and I've been in the ministry since I was in my 20s, coming up on 50 years of this.
Speaker C:And there are things that I've been saying for all this time that for most of that time, I couldn't get arrested.
Speaker C:I couldn't get anybody to pay attention to these things.
Speaker C:And now people really are willing to give radical proposals a listen.
Speaker C:Now, the downside is there's bad radical and there's.
Speaker C:There's forgotten radical.
Speaker C:It seems radical because it's a neglected truth.
Speaker C:And there are also radical options out there that are being advanced by scoundrels and miscreants, and people are chasing after cult leaders and they're chasing after online gurus.
Speaker C:But there's also a heightened interest in Orthodox, faithful confessional Christian ministers, because now it seems that we're the bad boys.
Pastor Doug Wilson:That's right.
Pastor Doug Wilson:Go figure.
Speaker C:Right?
Speaker C:Right.
Pastor Doug Wilson:So this morning I was actually watching one of your talks.
Pastor Doug Wilson:It's on the Ligonier website.
Pastor Doug Wilson:It's called I will be your God.
Pastor Doug Wilson:It was posted nine years ago, and I was listening to it, and I was so about a decade old.
Pastor Doug Wilson:What did you give that talk?
Will Spencer:Was it a decade ago or was.
Pastor Doug Wilson:It prior to that?
Speaker C:It would have been more than a decade ago.
Speaker C:Yeah.
Pastor Doug Wilson:So you were talking about Reformed liturgical worship more than a decade ago, and now it's probably one of the hottest topics out there, I think.
Speaker C:Right.
Speaker C:I've just told our people in the sermon yesterday and I send out a pastor's newsletter every Friday to the congregation.
Speaker C:I've said our task in our community here is to be Jehoshaphat's choir.
Speaker C:We want to lead with worship.
Speaker C:Worship is warfare.
Speaker C:Worship is potent.
Speaker C:Worship is something for which the enemy has no countermeasures.
Speaker C:You know, if we, if we organize and become an evangelical lobbying group, they have countermeasures, we might be effective, but they, they're not caught flat footed.
Speaker C:But when we worship God in spirit and in truth, this we what we're following the pattern of the book of Revelation where the, there's two layers to that whole book.
Speaker C:Worshiping the heavenlies and all kinds of chaos on earth.
Speaker C:You know, the God is worshiped in the heavens and then God pours out his judgments and God undertakes on behalf of his people.
Speaker C:All these things happen on earth.
Speaker C:So we.
Speaker C:One part of my understanding of the Lord's Prayer is thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.
Speaker C:So the kingdom coming has to do with reenacting on earth what has just been, what has been done in heaven.
Speaker C:I used to think that that meant just as the angels obey with alacrity in heaven, if God, God tells Michael to do something, Michael doesn't say, why, no, and I think that's true.
Speaker C:The angels obey with alacrity, and so should we obey with alacrity.
Speaker C:But I think there's more going on there now.
Speaker C:Thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.
Speaker C:Our privilege and our task is to go into the heavenly places every Lord's day and glorify there the name of Jesus Christ.
Speaker C:That's what we're doing.
Speaker C:We go into the heavenly places and we worship God the Father in the name of Jesus Christ, in the power of the Holy Spirit, so we glorify Christ's name in heaven.
Speaker C:And then we're in a good position to ask God to do on earth what we have just done in the heavenly places.
Speaker C:We've just glorified Christ in heaven.
Speaker C:Put it this way, you shouldn't expect God to glorify Christ's name on earth when his body is refusing to glorify it in heaven.
Speaker C:So when we worship God in the heavenly places, we can then turn to God and say, with a clean conscience, now would you glorify his name here in our community as we have just glorified it in the heavenly places in our worship of you?
Pastor Doug Wilson:One of the things, the themes that seems to come up in some of your interactions with evangelical leaders around the country is the invitation for them to come to Moscow and see the proof in the pudding.
Pastor Doug Wilson:Right.
Pastor Doug Wilson:Have you, have you been feeling more.
Will Spencer:People accepting that invitation?
Pastor Doug Wilson:Do you feel like there are some people that are closer to accepting that invitation than they would have otherwise been?
Pastor Doug Wilson:Perhaps, lately?
Speaker C:Yes, that is very, very true.
Speaker C:We've had.
Speaker C:We've had people, well over the years, we've made the invitation many times, and it was routinely rejected or ignored.
Speaker C:In the last.
Speaker C:I would say in the, in the COVID years, post Covid years, we've had more people taking us up on that invitation, coming to visit, coming to see, and we've even had some secret visitors, right?
Speaker C:So if someone said, hey, can we come and visit and check things out?
Speaker C:No microphones, no cameras, no nothing, we'd say, sure.
Speaker C:This is not.
Speaker C:This is not a PR stunt.
Speaker C:So if someone is in a position of influence and they want to come and check it out and see whether or not we have three heads with two of them drooling, they would be most welcome.
Speaker C:And more and more and more people are taking us up on that.
Pastor Doug Wilson:That must feel.
Pastor Doug Wilson:Does that feel vindicated?
Pastor Doug Wilson:Vindicating, or perhaps, you know, glory to God for, for the faithfulness?
Pastor Doug Wilson:Like, what.
Pastor Doug Wilson:What is that like after 50 years in ministry where you can't get arrested and now people want to arrest you?
Pastor Doug Wilson:Perhaps.
Pastor Doug Wilson:What is, what is that feeling like?
Speaker C:It does.
Speaker C:It.
Speaker C:It is.
Speaker C:It really is encouraging.
Speaker C:So genuinely encouraging, because even one of the things that, that you see happening is even friends, basically, friends of our ministry can sometimes think, oh, I've gotten your.
Speaker C:I've read your blog all the time, and I enjoy your sense of humor.
Speaker C:But they come expecting, you know, when they meet me, they are sort of braced for me to make fun of them the entire time, right?
Speaker C:And they're pleasantly surprised when they come and they encounter a bunch of normal Christians and it's like, oh.
Speaker C:And basically what this boils down to, speaking frankly, is the challenges of mass communication.
Speaker C:And there really is a challenge.
Speaker C:There's certain kinds of writers that I read and I appreciate, and I get their sense of humor.
Speaker C:When it's ink on a page, I can still see the twinkle in their eye because I get it, right?
Speaker C:But there are other people who don't get it at all.
Speaker C:They just think, oh, he's being mean.
Speaker C:And the Bible talks about this kind of thing.
Speaker C:Paul says how I wish to the Galatians, how I wish I were with you so I could change my tone with you, so I could look at your Faces.
Speaker C:And I could see how if I'm communicating and I could change up my approach.
Speaker C:And John says the same thing.
Speaker C:I have a lot of things to say, but I'd rather say it in person.
Speaker C:I'd rather say it face to face.
Speaker C:So face to face communication is a very different proposition than writing a blog post that's going to be read by 50,000 people.
Speaker C:So with 50,000 people, you can budget on the fact that a certain percentage of them are going to walk away hating you.
Pastor Doug Wilson:That's right, unfortunately, yeah.
Speaker C:Basically, they're going to.
Speaker C:You tell a joke, and if you're at a certain size crowd, a certain percentage will not get the joke, and a smaller percentage will be mortally offended by the joke.
Speaker C:Others will get the joke and be offended.
Speaker C:Other, you know, basically, one of the things I've sought to do as I've traveled around the country to conferences and whatnot, I've tried to get.
Speaker C:And people say, I've appreciated your writing, I've read your books.
Speaker C:One of the things I try to do is gauge what kind of people like what I do.
Speaker C:Right.
Speaker C:If they're normal, sweet Christian people, then I think, okay, this is okay.
Speaker C:But if everybody that liked my work looked like a pirate and snarled like a pirate, and.
Speaker C:And we just.
Speaker C:I would say, okay, I need to change something up.
Speaker C:So this is basically, all of this is a rhetorical issue.
Speaker C:If I'm talking to one on one, counseling with somebody, I talk one way.
Speaker C:If I'm leading a Bible study with 10 people in it, I talk another way.
Speaker C:If I'm preaching to 100 people, it's different than if I'm preaching to a thousand people.
Speaker C:If I'm writing in black and white, you know, for a blog post or a magazine or a book, it's another way.
Speaker C:If I'm communicating face to face, quote, unquote, face to face with you.
Speaker C:Now, this is a new thing, right?
Pastor Doug Wilson:Yeah.
Speaker C:I remember pre Covid, when Zoom technology and all of this technology was Precambrian and it was not reliable at all.
Speaker C:Right.
Speaker C:But then the.
Speaker C:The bugs got worked out during.
Speaker C:During COVID when people were working from.
Pastor Doug Wilson:Home, no pun intended.
Speaker C:And then we found a number of people.
Speaker C:In the last couple of years, hundreds of families have moved here, and a bunch of them were enabled to move here because of COVID because of lockdown.
Speaker C:They proved to their employer that they could work from home, they could work distance.
Speaker C:And so a lot of them have come here, moved here, having kept their jobs.
Pastor Doug Wilson:So you make me think of a question.
Pastor Doug Wilson:There are so Many young Christian content creators who have just sprung up in the past few years, I'm seeing, particularly coming out of the new age, a mass exodus or migration into the faith that's been inspired by many celebrities, but also an organic searching.
Pastor Doug Wilson:So you have people with communication gifts, writing gifts, you know, video editing gifts that are beginning to create Christian content.
Will Spencer:What advice would you give to these.
Pastor Doug Wilson:Young men and women who are sincere, but there aren't many.
Pastor Doug Wilson:There isn't a lot of discipleship in terms of Christian content creation, because what you just articulated was essentially, you're a Christian content creator now.
Pastor Doug Wilson:That's not how I think of you, and I don't think that's your primary role.
Pastor Doug Wilson:And yet it's still something that you do.
Pastor Doug Wilson:What guidance would you give to young men and women who are venturing out in this, particularly over the next four years?
Speaker C:I would say, particularly if we're talking about young, inexperienced Christians, people who are new to the faith, I would say stick to the basics.
Speaker C:Okay?
Speaker C:Stick to the basics.
Speaker C:Don't.
Speaker C:I've been a Christian for six weeks.
Speaker C:I'd like to study the Book of Revelation.
Pastor Doug Wilson:Right?
Speaker C:Don't do that.
Pastor Doug Wilson:That's what Voddie Baucom did, actually.
Pastor Doug Wilson:That was the first book of the Bible he read.
Speaker C:That's right, yeah.
Speaker C:I would start with the Gospel of Mark.
Speaker C:I would start, you know, who is this Jesus that I'm now following?
Speaker C:You know, basic sorts of things.
Speaker C:I would not.
Speaker C:I would encourage anybody who's in the content creation realm, who's been converted to keep it simple.
Speaker C:Keep it simple.
Speaker C:What are the basic doctrines of the Christian faith?
Speaker C:Basic Christianity by John Stott.
Speaker C:It's a good book.
Speaker C:Mere Christianity by C.S.
Speaker C:lewis is a good book.
Speaker C:Just keep it focused that way.
Speaker C:So that'd be the first thing.
Speaker C:Don't go esoteric.
Speaker C:Even if esoteric is going to get you clicks.
Speaker C:You know, if you say.
Speaker C:If you say, I'm starting a podcast that's dedicated to the intersection of Second Samuel and Bigfoot, Bigfoot sightings, you might be.
Speaker C:You might get more clicks, but it's.
Speaker C:That's going to be a cul de sac eventually.
Speaker C:So that's the first thing.
Speaker C:The second thing is don't become a celebrity.
Speaker C:Right?
Speaker C:You might.
Speaker C:And I make a distinction between becoming well known.
Speaker C:Of course, if you have a podcast, if you're creating content, you're gratified if people are finding it useful, you're gratified if people.
Speaker C:If you've got traffic, there's nothing wrong with wanting to see, you know, how can we enhance the traffic?
Speaker C:How can we get the message out?
Speaker C:But there's, there's a difference between that and becoming full of yourself.
Speaker C:Putting on airs, renting a limo.
Speaker C:Right.
Speaker C:In order, you know, hiring people to act like paparazzi when they follow you around.
Speaker C:You just don't, don't become a celebrity.
Speaker C:Stay a real person, an actual person, which is going to be connected to worshiping in a local congregation in a room where you're breathing the same air as the preacher and the fellow saints up and down the pew.
Speaker C:Yeah.
Pastor Doug Wilson:I was talking to Michael Foster earlier this year.
Pastor Doug Wilson:We were talking about something similar.
Pastor Doug Wilson:Be an offline Christian.
Pastor Doug Wilson:Christianity is not just what you do online.
Pastor Doug Wilson:In fact, that's a distant second.
Pastor Doug Wilson:Christianity is primarily lived in your offline life.
Speaker C:That's very good.
Speaker C:Yes.
Pastor Doug Wilson:So to, so to go back to the beginning of your ministry and Idols for Destruction.
Pastor Doug Wilson:I was curious as I was reading this book because I could see the ways that he may have influenced you.
Pastor Doug Wilson:Can you take us back into that moment when you read this book 40 years ago, which you would have been in your 30s, I reckon.
Pastor Doug Wilson:So take like, what was it like.
Will Spencer:Reading this as a 30 year old.
Pastor Doug Wilson:Man in the early 80s as you're looking out on a future career in the ministry?
Speaker C:Yeah.
Speaker C:So it's hard to reconstruct all the sensations, but I can, I can tell you part of it.
Speaker C:So I read the book initially because it was recommended to me strongly by my father.
Speaker C:And my, my father was an intensely practical evangelist.
Speaker C:Very.
Speaker C:He would keep the cookies on the lowest shelf for people.
Speaker C:He would just teach respect for parents and how to confess your sins, how to be free from bitterness.
Speaker C:That was his bread and butter ministry.
Speaker C:He was a very, he's a very bright man, but he was a very simple minister, you know, just meeting people where they were.
Speaker C:And he recommended this book to me strongly.
Speaker C:And it's a heady book.
Speaker C:Right.
Speaker C:You know, it's like eating 16 pieces of cheesecake in a row.
Speaker C:Right.
Speaker C:It's very dense.
Pastor Doug Wilson:Yeah.
Speaker C:Very rich, very textured.
Speaker C:In short, it was not, I would have thought it was not my dad's kind of book, but it was.
Speaker C:And, and the reason that book had an impact on me and this is my best reconstruction after the fact.
Speaker C:But I had grown up, I'd grown up in conservative evangelical churches and generally generically Premill circles.
Speaker C:My dad wasn't necessarily, but the culture around me was.
Speaker C:I grew up in a Southern Baptist setting and I was conservative evangelical, theologically conservative.
Speaker C:And followed was right in line with what my Parents had taught me and.
Speaker C:But it was a truncated, a truncated theology.
Speaker C:I was a conservative Christian also.
Speaker C:When I was in high school, I ran across a book, up from Liberalism by William F.
Speaker C:Buckley, which I read in high school.
Speaker C:And he made an immediate conquest of me.
Speaker C:I loved how he wrote and I became a political, political conservative.
Speaker C:But these were two different compartments in my head.
Speaker C:Right.
Pastor Doug Wilson:Makes sense.
Speaker C:Because it was worldview thinking was not.
Speaker C:It was an alien idea.
Speaker C:At the time, most most conservative Christians happened to be, happened to be politically conservative, but people had no real mechanism for connecting the two.
Speaker C:And I first encountered the connection with Francis Schaeffer in his work in the 70s.
Speaker C: writing a newspaper column in: Speaker C:Reagan ran for president and I was a Reagan supporter and I was a conservative Christian.
Speaker C:But they were, they were in different worlds.
Speaker C:And one of the things that Schaeffer did was he introduced those two worlds to one another.
Speaker C:And what Schlossberg and what Schlossberg did is he made it sort of an integrated, a densely integrated thing where it was not just, oh, these have a passing acquaintance with one another.
Speaker C:But no, this is a rigorous worldview system where if I read this and grasp this and hold onto this, it's going to be transformative, which it was.
Speaker C: dn't become a Calvinist until: Speaker C:And so if I read Schlossberg before that, then he would have been one of the major stepping stones toward me coming into the Reformed faith.
Pastor Doug Wilson:How's that?
Speaker C:Well, simply okay, if you want all things to be integrated together, you need a God who does that.
Pastor Doug Wilson:Okay.
Speaker C:Right.
Speaker C:One of the things you have to realize is that the God of the Calvinists is an in your face God.
Pastor Doug Wilson:Yes.
Speaker C:He's not an absentee landlord.
Speaker C:He's not a clockmaker God.
Speaker C:He's the one in whom we live and move and have our being.
Speaker C:And he relates to everything.
Speaker C:And everything in the world that I encounter relates to him somehow.
Pastor Doug Wilson:And that is definitely the book.
Pastor Doug Wilson:And the book lays out this is an all encompassing system of beliefs, of idolatry that American Christians are embedded within.
Pastor Doug Wilson:That's what I walked with, away with.
Pastor Doug Wilson:And that was in the early 80s, like he observing six different idols that had defined my upbringing, my childhood, my whole life.
Pastor Doug Wilson: t with this election, meaning: Pastor Doug Wilson:It was that profound.
Speaker C:Yeah, very much so.
Pastor Doug Wilson:Just one more quick question, if you don't mind.
Speaker C:Don't mind.
Pastor Doug Wilson:So one of the things that also struck me about this book was the bibliography.
Pastor Doug Wilson:So as I'm going through and I'm reading all of the footnotes and I'm highlighting the books that he recommended, and I've got an Amazon cart now that's full of 30 more books, as if I needed it, so.
Pastor Doug Wilson: an culture in the early, say,: Pastor Doug Wilson:And I see this as well in reading, for example, about the New Age, that there were a lot of really excellent books that were written about the.
Will Spencer:New Age in, like, the early 80s and the 90s.
Pastor Doug Wilson:Douglas Grutius is a good example.
Pastor Doug Wilson:But then between the 90s up until today, there's basically nothing.
Pastor Doug Wilson: angelical amnesia from, like,: Pastor Doug Wilson:Am I seeing that correctly?
Pastor Doug Wilson:Like, what happened there?
Speaker C:This would just be.
Speaker C:I'm not being dogmatic here, but it's a hypothesis.
Pastor Doug Wilson:Please.
Speaker C:Most.
Speaker C:Even though the homeschooling movement and the Christian school movement took off in the 80s and got established, and thanks be to God, millions of Christian kids are now being educated that way, that's just a tiny fraction of evangelical education.
Speaker C:And this is the same period where the bottom has fallen out of the academic standards in the public school system.
Speaker C:When men were writing, when Francis Schaeffer was writing, when Carl Henry was writing, when the early, you know, when Schlossberg was doing his thing, there really was an intelligent, literate population that read.
Speaker C:And now it's cat videos.
Pastor Doug Wilson:Right, Right.
Pastor Doug Wilson:So you think Christians have given up on their.
Pastor Doug Wilson:On their reading and intellectual tradition.
Speaker C:Correct.
Speaker C:I think that that's.
Speaker C:I think that's the center of the problem.
Pastor Doug Wilson:Well, sir, that's.
Pastor Doug Wilson:I appreciate that because you've participated in my little.
Pastor Doug Wilson:I'm going to trick Doug Wilson into a private book club because now we've talked about the ransom trilogy with C.S.
Pastor Doug Wilson:lewis, who talked about Men and Marriage and Mere Christendom and A Case for Christian Nationalism, and then American Milk and Honey and now Idols for Destruction so I've really, I've been enjoying this book club with you.
Pastor Doug Wilson:Is there another book you might recommend for our next installment of this conversation series?
Speaker C:Yes.
Speaker C:Oh, I mentioned it earlier.
Speaker C:We've become like what we worship would be a good one.
Speaker C:Another one, a small one and not by a believer, is the Basic Laws of Human Stupidity.
Pastor Doug Wilson:I think that one.
Pastor Doug Wilson:I think that one, that one must win.
Speaker C:It is a marvelous book.
Speaker C:It has so much explanatory power.
Speaker C:It's like a send up.
Speaker C:There are certain books like Parkinson's Law and the Peter Principle that are sort of satires on people get promoted to the level of incompetence or work expands to fill the time allotted for it and it's written as a satire.
Speaker C:But then you think, oh wait, that actually happens.
Speaker C:And it's that way with this book.
Speaker C:The Basic Laws of Human Stupidity.
Speaker C:It really is powerful.
Pastor Doug Wilson:Very convicting perhaps.
Speaker C:Yes.
Pastor Doug Wilson:Well, I look forward to picking up that book and for our next installment of our little private book club.
Speaker C:Sure thing.
Pastor Doug Wilson:So would you.
Will Spencer:Where would you like to send people.
Pastor Doug Wilson:To find out more about what you've got going on right now for a no quarter November or some of the promotions that are happening?
Speaker C:The way we've set it up is the clearinghouse for.
Speaker C:Pretty much everything I'm involved in is at my blog, Doug wills.com and the name of the blog is Blog and mayblog doug wills.com and there on the.
Speaker C:If you open up the front page, there's a link to pretty much everything I'm involved with.
Pastor Doug Wilson:Wonderful.
Pastor Doug Wilson:Well, I look forward to our next conversation.
Pastor Doug Wilson:We'll send everybody there.
Speaker C:Thank you.
Pastor Doug Wilson:Thank you for your time today, sir.
Speaker C:Yes.
