Eschatology Matters
A Response to Owen Strachan's One Holy Nation in Christ
Dr Josh Howard, Pastor Jacob Tanner and Jon Wright respond to Dr Owen Strachan's latest article One "Holy Nation" In Christ, a critique of Christian Nationalism, Doug Wilson, Stephen Wolfe and more.
One Holy Nation In Christ full article
- Duration:
- 54m
- Broadcast on:
- 13 Jul 2024
- Audio Format:
- mp3
It's time for today's Lucky Land Horoscope with Victoria Cash. Life's gotten mundane, so shake up the daily routine and be adventurous, with a trip to Lucky Land. You know what they say, your chance to win starts with a spin, so go to luckylandslots.com to play over a hundred social casino style games for free for your chance to redeem some serious prizes. Get Lucky today at luckylandslots.com No purchase necessary, VGW Group void were prohibited by law 18 plus terms of condition supply. Is your vehicle stopping like it should? Does it squeal or grind when you break? Don't miss out on summer break deals at O'Reilly Auto Parts. [Music] [Music] Alright, welcome back to Eschatology Matters on the Fight Life Feast Network. I'm your host, Josh Howard. Before we get started today, I want to mention Boniface Media. Boniface Media is a streaming platform from Grace and Truth Press. Boniface is offering a 50% discount for up to 200 subscribers for the life of their subscription, unless their subscription is cancelled or payment lapses. So if you'd like to take advantage of this offer, please head over to boniface.com. That's B-O-N-A-F-I-C-E dot com and enter the code's alpha test or beta test to apply your 50% discount. I am joined today, though, by two of our co-hosts, co-contributors, co-guys here at Eschatology Matters. John Wright, Jacob Tander, guys, thanks so much for joining me today. Thanks for having me back. Yeah, thanks, Josh. Happy to be a part of it. It always cracks me up, Jacob, when you say thanks for having me back because I think you're on our channel more than I'm on our channel these days. But, yeah, so we're talking today, though, about an article John wrote. So the conception behind this was Owen Strand wrote an article. It was in the -- oh, I'm sorry, I don't have the journal article. Glory to you. Thank you. Yeah, Glory to you, journal. So it's GDJT, volume three. This is the 2024 edition. But the article title is "One Holy Nation in Christ, Christian nationalism in historical and theological perspective." And I thought this would be good for us to walk through some of the topics that came up. These are not usually isolated to this article. Several of these have been bubbling around and surfacing in various areas. John, though, you wrote one, kind of took on this article head-on and had a video that came out. He was last week or maybe the week before that go for you. Yeah, yeah, so, I mean, Owen's definitely been interacting with this whole Christian nationalism. It's been a big topic and, you know, he says, you know, puts out a tweet. I wrote a 20,000 page -- 20,000 page. That would be a long one. A 20,000 word journal article about this. So you're thinking, hey, this is going to be pretty robust. He's going to deal with the issues, actually dive into source materials, represent, you know, the positions well. And when you read through it, you really quickly realize this just feels like talking points from kind of the other side of a little bit of straw manning about some things. Gets into some of the history, right, and some of the -- I think he does actually a very good job describing why Christian nationalism is attractive right now in kind of American Christianity and kind of the faults of, you know, Tim Keller's neither left nor right kind of strategies that left this vacuum of what do we do about like public politics. But when he gets into the reasonings of it, it feels like it left a little bit lacking. And so I thought it would be helpful to kind of walk through, okay, what is the actual position of Christian nationalists? Do we want a kind of, you know, top-down government controlling and binding the consciences of Christian members' hearts, or is it something different, right? And I think it was helpful to kind of provide some pushback to kind of what it felt like was a wrong kind of understanding of the movement. And so when he's rejecting it, it's kind of like rejecting something that no one really holds to. Yeah, so this is number one. If you haven't seen John's video, go back, watch it. It was very good. One of the things I hope we can do with this is we want to hit a couple of topics. So there's three of us contributing to this episode. We're going to walk through a couple of topics. Hopefully that'll bring some things to light. This isn't just a critique of this article, but that's going to be kind of our subject matter and using that to kind of talk about the themes that are addressed. I think eschatology matters. Two of the things that we do, I think, are well-suited to kind of addressing this sort of article. Number one, we have a good mix of guys, even among the three of us. We're not all Christian nationalists, nor are we all the same sort of theonomists. Like there's a good mix of how to approach these things. So you've got a kind of diversity of views and we work a lot of those things out in-house and have discussions and even disagreements back and forth. Those are good. But that's one thing. But the second thing is part of the mission for eschatology matters has been to try to clarify within broadly reformed circles, clarify these issues, and demarcate some lines so that when we are disagreeing with one another, we're representing the opposition fairly and we're also understanding what is actually the source of disagreement. This article on the first page, it describes Christian nationalism as a cocktail. It says the cocktail that is Christian nationalism. And that's sort of a broad approach of the article is to approach Christian nationalism as a very confused, befuddled mixture of divergent opinions. And I think that that risks a lot of the things, John, you just brought up, which is if you're approaching something as a confusing conglomeration of ideas and you don't really have a clear target, you're going to say things that are just simply not applying to the people you think they're applying to, and you're going to wind up committing some of those exegetical fallacies that you're mentioning. So with all that kind of setup and background, let's start walking into, and Jacob, I don't know if you want to lead off or John, but let's start hitting a couple of these topics, these themes, and sort of give people an understanding of where the article was, but also sort of where this is in the broadly evangelical conversation about this sort of stuff. I think John did a great job with his article for Eschatology Matter. So if he wants to take the lead on it, there's a couple of things that I want to bring up, but it's a little bit further into the article. So John, if you want to take the lead on this. Yeah, I think maybe a good starting point. And kind of before we start recording, Jacob mentioned this is on the first page of it, right? It says on the first page in the first paragraph, for some, if you're inclined, you're optimistic and bold and taking the lordship of price seriously. But if you're not Christian nationalist inclined, you might have a predisposition to quote, loser theology, and you may not know quote, what time it is in Western history, and you may be obsolete soon. And so I do think kind of maybe a point to address is when we are interacting with eschatology, right? How does that actually frame a lot of what we do? I think Eschatology Matters has a nice little tagline that talks about it, right? It kind of contextualizes our history. It kind of explains where we are in this time. And I think one kind of comment that you hear kind of throughout is this idea of, I think Joel Webin was the one who uses the term like loser theology or something like that. There's a first note that Jacob's mentioned. Yeah, on page 56, there's a lot of footnotes throughout this whole essay. We were talking about that a little bit too. I think there's as many footnotes as there are words in the essay, but this is footnote 22. And here we have Owen quoting. He says on his podcast, Joel Webin called out quote, unquote, loser theology in response to a comment from revered pastor John MacArthur. And, and by the way, I do want to point out, just because I think it's, I think it's interesting that throughout this essay, which is purported to be an academic essay, there are a lot of terms. There's a lot of words that are used that are are definitely, I don't know if Owen intended this or not, but it's manipulative. The way that he talks about different people, you can even see it in that very first paragraph, you know, that if you're not on board with Christian nationalism. Well, people are saying all of these mean things about me that I'm going to soon be obsolete that I don't have knowledge of what time it actually is. And so it, it almost, this article almost sets up the idea that Christian nationalists on top of everything else must be bullies who are bullying everybody else in the room. And if you don't agree with them, well, then we're going to be really nasty to you. And I don't think that's really a helpful way to start either because to be honest, the Christian nationalists that I know are very kind, gracious. They're actually trying to work through these ideas and these things. But here we have Owen quoting webin and he starts the article off this way to bringing up this whole loser theology idea. And then he also says so to have Andrew Torba and Andrew Oscar defamed dispensationalist eschatology as in a word, doomer theology. But in reality, that's actually a lot of what dispensational theology and eschatology does. It is doomer in its approach. It is a sort of approach that says things are going to go from bad to even badder to as worse as they can possibly be. And then at the very end, if we're if we're lucky, we'll see Jesus come in, you know, on the Apache helicopter and he'll sort of rescue us out of there like the end of an action movie where everybody has just been totally annihilated. But here's the rescue helicopter coming in and the good guys have lost, but it's okay because because we're getting rescued out of here. We're getting raptured out of here. And so it actually is a doomsday approach. And that's why you'll see a lot of dispensationalists as well, tackle this sort of prepping for the doomsday prepping for what might come. And so I think that Owen is actually trying to get out of it and say, well, it's not actually loser theology, it's biblical theology, but in reality, it's not what the Bible teaches the Bible doesn't say, hey, gear up because you're going to lose. Go to the top of a mountain sinkhumbayah and wait for Christ to return. The Bible says, go forth, you know, proclaim the gospel, make disciples of the nations. And that's really where Christian nationalism is coming in and saying, okay, if this is the Great Commission, if this is what God's will is for us, then we can be victorious in this and we can actually grasp the promises of God and say, hey, this is going to work, it's going to be successful. And so I think that Owen's essay article, whatever you want to call it, really has a flimsy foundation right from the get go for that reason. And I don't think he intended it that way. I think that it just we're humans, right? It just comes across that way. Yeah, I want to add something on there because a lot of the so the loser theology comment in general was really interesting because when so the way the article kind of framed it was that loser theology is sort of endemic to rejecting Christian nationalism. If you're not on board with Christian nationalism, you're, you know, kind of labeled as a loser theology. And that's mixing several categories. Number one, again, Christian nationalism. You know, the article from Andrew David Nacelli was cited the, you know, taxonomy of Christian nationalism. I thought that was really helpful. Unfortunately, this current article did not have a lot of that nuance. So whereas some of us, myself included would be far more comfortable with a general equity, theonomic approach. That's not exactly the same as some of the Christian national advocates and that's okay. That's in house discussions, but there's differences there in approach and application. The thing, the thing is with applying loser theology, loser theology is inherently speaking about eschatology. That that's the whole context of and the article here at the very beginning, it frames this discussion. This is on page 40. It says, and eschatologically, when it, when it talks about three different categories of Christian nationalists, they say, first, there's some who are Christian nationalists who are labeled as it, but aren't, then they're second, some who are just kind of confused. And then third, and this is the only right actually meaningful category is those that embrace the label and enthusiasm enthusiastically advocate for an eschatologically driven Christian nationalist program in quote. So at the beginning of the article, the only true advocates of Christian nationalist Christian nationalism are framed as those who are eschatologically driven in their convictions. Number one, that's not a very accurate conception of Christian nationalism. You have Christian nationalists from all streams of eschatology. So that's, that's, that's not quite a very, it's not a very careful definition. But then the second thing is, when we talk about loser theology, that is inherently eschatological. So the comments from Pastor John MacArthur, when he talked about, we lose down here. And then you saw a lot of the reaction to that comment that we lose down here and people said, ah, that sounds like loser theology or a loser mentality, which pretty closely matches the language that was used. Then all of a sudden you have loser theology. That's an inherently eschatological discussion is what does the kingdom expanse look like in this world until the time Christ returns. That's not even necessarily tied to Christian nationalism that has to do with eschatological expectation here. So to say that loser theology is a smear against those who don't advocate for Christian nationalism is blurring a few different categories. The second part of that is, you know, kind of like you just brought up Jacob, I think it's interesting to use to invoke, you know, John MacArthur among others and say that, that this is a good example of why we should not throw around the term loser theology. If you believe that the church is going to recede and grow smaller in number and be essentially, you know, like the last bastion, the very few that are left fighting with a world that is that is filled with increasing darkness and hostility to the gospel and then Christ returns, you can you can play around with what words to use there, but I don't think saying that that is, you know, loser theology sounds a little bit, you know, it sounds a little bit vitriolic right that sounds a little bit feisty. But whatever term you use, I don't think you can say that's a victorious expectation for the church in this age. Again, that's just smearing, smearing categories together to the point that they're unrecognizable. We all agreed, as Jacob just pointed out, Christ returns his church is victorious. But if you believe the church is going to shrink and shrink and recede in power in this world, earthly, earthly realm, we could say, until such time as Christ returns to rescue us. No, I don't think that's going to be a using the term victorious is just, it becomes, it becomes a word with no meaning at that point. I think we have to have a differentiating category for does the church advance in this world, or does the church recede in this world? Well, and I just want to comment, like, so I went to the Masters University. That's why I got my basis of biblical studies. I go to a church that aligns itself with dispensational eschatology. I submit to the elders and all of that, right. And so I want to kind of present what to me. I've noticed with dispensational eschatology, right? So John MacArthur, I think, and you said it well, Josh, that lose the theology comes from the phrase where he says we lose down here, right? And I think in dispensational circles, there's kind of two fronts where there's kind of the rapture, like guessing and red heifer type, you know, charismatic, often dispensational. And then there's the other group with like shepherds, seminary. So Peter Gaiman is like a good example of that. We've had other people on eschatology matters that try to be like a very like biblicist kind of approach. And so you have these kind of interesting dynamic where the very evangelistic, optimistic, where like, hey, you know, this passage that says the harvest is plentiful and labors are few. God has the elect. He's going to save them. And they start building institutions, right? They build colleges, right? They start building private schools, right? And they start doing these things that feel very optimistic in their view of the church age while kind of still holding this approach that we ultimately will lose. And I think this is kind of Joe Rigny used the term kind of a pre-mill kneecap. And so at one level, you know, I think there was a faithfulness of guys like John MacArthur who I think have done great jobs for the sake of the gospel, like being very bold about like Joel Osteen, like on public media, against, I think, some extreme versions. Of charismatic theology, as we see, even though I think Benny Hinn, like, there's a very good job, I think pushing back against a lot of that in a very public way, even his court case about COVID I think is a great example of like pushing back against, you know, long, wrong governments. But then it's what they say about the church age, right, and that we do have to say like, okay, how successful is a church going to be. And I think that's kind of an important kind of distinction is that you could see that there's this kind of almost what I feel like is an internal, like, inconsistency of like, that's run hard for the gospel. But remember, we're going to lose. And so that I think theology of eschatology does matter. But what I think you made a great point is, and maybe this would bring us to our next point of this kind of article is confusing eschatology for what I think is the substantial argument in Christian nationalism, which is an anthropology. Like, what is man, how does he build government? What are those, are those different spheres, right, between the church, which is definitely driven towards kind of a heavenly goal, where there's governments that kind of have a kind of more earthly purpose, maybe ultimately directing us to kind of heavenly purposes. But like, as we are physically embodied, right, how do we kind of organize ourselves there. And I saw in a lot of different places that Owen, as he starts talking about, like, governments, I think he kind of wants to create this kind of neutral ground in this where he thinks about laws and says, well, law are almost this like neutral thing. You shouldn't legislate morality and things of that nature. So I think he starts confusing that just because the church and the state are different entities, one necessarily shouldn't rule over the other. You don't want kind of the state running the church, and you don't really want the church running state, but they both need you separately and uniquely submit to Christ. I think he kind of sees any type of claim that the state should submit to Christ as problematic. So I would point out on this on this article. So he cites Andrew David Nacelli's taxonomy, and he says that the main focus within this article is going to be that of Christian government. Now, if you read Andrew David Nacelli's taxonomy, you understand Christian government does not mean church ruling over state. This is not some sort of Old Testament theocratic model. And yet that in fact, that's one of the categories that Nacelli does interact with. It's down the down the line from these that we're talking about today. But that seems to consistently be the one that is addressed within the article. So Nacelli's Nacelli's conception is to overlapping spheres of authority over which Christ rules over both. But that's consistently confused for the church over state model, which is again, looking back to the taxonomy specifically different. I think I think it's interesting because he says that he was looking at at a government and he said that the government should not exclusively promote a particular religion. This is this is part of this is part of the perspective he is advocating, but that the government should not restrict the spread of false religious beliefs, but religion may influence the government. So this would be the Christian influence view you pick this up on page 43 and page 44. So that is what that is what Owen is advocating for is religious influence of government that there can be a kind of mitigating influence and yet that there can't be anything explicitly Christian coming from government. So you might have the government doing Christianly things, but they must never do so because they were told to because God has said these things and never must they recognize them as inherently Christian. Am I framing that right Jacob? I think so. And the one thing that I really want to highlight to throughout this article is something that I've noticed before with not even not just Owen, but a lot of the guys that are really opposed to Christian nationalism is that there's almost a Gnostic framing to the argumentation that they take. And so it's a very it's almost an anti this physical world view. It's almost it's almost an approach that says, you know, only the spirituals good physical bad and that's why it's good that we lose down here for example. Or that's why it's good that the the church doesn't really influence the government all that much that's why it's good that the Bible doesn't really influence laws all that much because, you know, this physical is bad. And this physical it's going to burn and this world it's it's all going to evaporate anyway and God's going to make old things new and I think that again Gnosticism is still alive and well. And it's I'm not saying that Owen's a heretic or anything like that. But what I am saying is that Gnosticism has definitely influenced the 21st century far, far more than we realize. And so that influencer approach, I think, misses one of the key elements that the Bible never tells us just, you know, be somewhat of an influence on people. It's almost taking the approach that that really famous misquote, where they say preach the gospel, if necessary, use words. And it's like one of the stupidest quotes in the world because it doesn't work. Here is something that just does not work. You can't just be an influence through your actions. You have to be an influencer through your words. And that by necessity is going to bear on the way that government is structured. It's going to bear on the way that laws are made. And a lot of the time people will say, well, you can't legislate morality, but my dear friends, that is the only thing that you can actually legislate. And that's why we should actually use God's word to legislate. And by the way, let me, let me add to this, I would fall under the umbrella, the category, probably, of a general equity theonomist. And so I have my own disagreements with Christian National. Josh, you did it again. There's the explosion things happening in the background. I'm not going to talk or then it'll switch over to me. Yeah, I gave you one. I was up with fireworks. Yeah. I wanted you. I wanted everybody to see it. Okay. But what I want to point out here, and I know I'm skipping ahead a bit, but it just, it goes along so well. This is on page 56. Owen says, this is the bottom of the page. If anybody wants to follow along. He says Christian nationalism burst through the paradigm of, you know, not left, not right. He liberally presents the Christian with simple choices, Christ or chaos. And then he has a footnote because there's a lot of footnotes throughout this whole thing. And I want to read the footnote here. He says, it is now common to hear any claim daring to speak of neutrality torn to verbal shreds. In truth, one either serves Christ or Satan. However, in our fallen world, Christians must in reality often live amidst societal institutions and cultural elements not explicitly consecrated to Christ. While we might long for the local laundromat to come under the banner of Christian leadership, we can still at base tolerate its non religious existence. Is there any actual neutrality in the cosmos? No, but this does not mean that we cannot function unless every police station private business post office and donut shop becomes explicitly Christianized. I sense that our rhetoric on this count might be outpacing our practice for in truth, whether Christian nationalist or not, we all must reckon with the reality that much in this world is not dedicated to Christ and footnote there, which is massively long. I've got a response. I got it. We got to get some back and forth on this because this you're pointing out a lot of things. So number one, if you think that Jacob is being unfair that we're being unfair in our presentation at the conclusion of the article, it explicitly says that the kingdom of Christ is spiritual and it is not of this world. So when Christ declares all authority in heaven and on earth belongs to me. He is, I think we could at least say the article is saying not exercising that authority in this world because his kingdom is not of this world is a holy spiritual kingdom. Okay, so that's, that's the, the, the article's conclusion, but I'm going to point to pages 44 and 45 because Jacob, I feel like this exemplifies a little bit of what you're talking about. So, so the article lays out, you know, that this is there's this, you know, this Christ versus chaos sort of dynamic. Here's where it gets really difficult for me to keep up logically with what is being presented. So page 44. We read when, when he is, he's summarizing the sellies view of the view that he says that he holds. And he says, it's one in which there is no state church instituted, which is good, or spreading doctrine that is explicitly Christian. Now, there's an interesting one. So the conception that is being advocated by the article is that we ought to have an expression of Christianity that does not spread doctrine that is explicitly Christian and then it defines it. When it talks about the Christian government pushback, which he frames as being incompatible with Baptist and free church tradition. Which makes makes very difficult, by the way, just as a side note, who gets to speak for the Baptist or free church tradition just by the, by the nature of Baptist or free church traditions, it gets a little bit dicey with like who gets to say what is, what is the Baptist or free church tradition, but that aside, page 44, he says a couple of comments and I just want to, I just want to think through how do these fit together. He said, the state is instituted by God and God's overarching sovereignty should be recognized by the state. That that's a good thing. If we're talking about the Christian God, the Triune God of Scripture, I think that's a little bit of doctrine that we're saying it is good for the state. Now, if we're just saying it's good for the state to recognize the sovereign God, I'm not on board with that. But this seems like he's saying the Christian God, the Triune God, the true God. This would be a good thing. He then later says a couple points down. He said it is good for when Christians run for office, hold office and make good laws when in office, which if I apply those two things together, how are we to know what is good? Well, God tells us what's good in Scripture. So if we have number one, the recognition of a sovereign God, I did the thumbs up. They just ruined the whole diatribe. Oh, well, anyway, so if you have good laws, you have to say why they're good laws. You have to have a standard by which they're adjudicated. They're good because God has said they're good. You're doing that into the banner of recognizing a sovereign God who is overall things that sounds a lot like explicit Christianity in our legal forums, but then he keeps going down. Every day when you log in to Chumbah Casino.com, the ultimate online social casino, you get a free daily bonus. Imagine if you got daily bonuses in other parts of your life. I chose French fries over loaded French fries. I asked Stewart from accounting about his weekend, even though I don't care. I updated my operating system without having to call tech support. Collect your free daily bonus at Chumbah Casino.com now. And live the Chumbah life. B-D-W group, no purchase necessary, we're prohibited by law, in terms of conditions in 18 plus. Is your vehicle stopping like it should? Does it squeal or grind when you break? Don't miss out on summer break deals at O'Reilly Auto Parts. Starting at the bottom of page 44, he said, "We should be thankful for good law, but we need not bring back theonomistic law." Which is a bit undefined, but this is how it's defined in sub points under that. Whatever laws we have, the conscience is and must be free. Only professing Christians should be baptized. This is the foundation of the Free Church, unruled by the state. Second sub point, religious liberty is, in this age, a great good and Christians should defend and promote it. If I'm understanding the article correctly, I think what we're hearing is that it is good for the state to recognize God as sovereign. Yet it is also good for Christians to, pointedly, not advocate for anything that is explicitly Christian. In fact, to advocate for and defend the right of false religions to be freely expressed within our culture as a societal good. Am I misreading that? No, that is definitively how he speaks in the article. He often uses the concept of the free market. This is the interesting dynamic of this journal. It almost feels like the free market is his goal rather than the seeing more public honoring of Christ. He mentions this idea of the free market and this idea that what we want is freedom. The problem is, everyone who spoke about freedom, especially as Americans, we have to acknowledge freedom only made sense to all our founders on the other side of virtue. And virtue did have a very specific way of being thought about it, even the Western tradition, even if we want to debate what our founders actually believed on each point. The Western tradition is a Christian tradition. It has its foundation on objective truth. It has its foundation on concepts of, I mean, even the morality of the Ten Commandments. And so that's where it gets a little confusing where he would say, I don't want to pose Christian doctrine, but why do we say murder is wrong? And he may say something like natural law, but then it gets very interesting. It's like, well, where do we draw the line of like, how do I determine it? The issue of abortion. Will he have an issue with Christians arguing from the Bible that abortions evil? Because it's not an imposing Christianity in the public sphere. It's a weird dynamic of, you know, I feel like constantly, like, let's be publicly motivated and let's try to see like a public gospel influence gospel effects. And he uses that language later in the article about gospel influence and all for that. And this is why I said at the very end of my whole little article and video on this is like, I truly believe this debate. I have true debate about theonomy, you know, general equity versus like just pull straight from the Old Testament versus, you know, more natural law kind of Aquinas theories as I was seeing wolf kind of gets after. Those are all I think good in house debates, but we're saying, Hey, this idea of like broadly as some people define, I think. Michael Foster defined Christian nationalism as basically I'm a Christian, I want to my nation, like acknowledge Christ, like that low level of Christian nationalism. I feel like, how could any Christian be against that? And it's like, well, I'm nervous about the meddling of the two. And my whole thing is like, if you want gospel influence, like, just keep taking that down the road. Okay, I want to see my neighbor, like come to personal individual faith. Okay, I want to see my other neighbor. I want to see, after some point, you're like, I'm seeing a critical mass of people, I desire to see change. I want to see these laws change. I celebrate when rotary weight is overturned. Right. I celebrate when a church is looking to get a permit to expand, you know, their building project. And it was initially rejected, but then they prayed for it, and it was expanded and accepted by the civil like magistrates. Right. And we see like all these small little local things. They're just saying, okay, what are we aiming towards? And that to me is like where the contradiction happens is on the local front, they're all about like, let's see that influence. But then when you say, okay, well, if all, if all these Christians are doing this locally, there should be some kind of national more corporate type of change that's happening. It's also the way being framed, like to your, I'm going to talk right over you, Jacob, I got this one out. John, to your point, though. So it's the way it's being framed is that this is the danger to Christianity, the danger that is being framed is Christian nationalism by which I'm reading this article is much broader than I think we would define Christian nationalism. We're lumping in general equity, the enemy and a whole variety of, of, of approaches and even, even eschatologies are being lumped in with this so Christian nationalism and a very broad sense is being lumped in as dangerous as to Christianity, because if I'm reading the article correctly, again, it kind of lends toward a, you know, I'm going to wield the sword to convert the heat then at the edge of the sword and approach that you can find with Twitter trolls for sure, but I'm not, I'm not hearing this from any actual advocates, anybody that's written on this, this topic, whether coming from a Christian nationalist approach or general equity, the enemy approach. I think what's, what's interesting with it, though, Jacob, go ahead. I'll come back to my point. No, no, all I was going to say was that I think again, this goes back to not only having a Gnostic influence here, but Owen's a pro, and it's interesting because as far as I know Owen is on mill, but anyway, his approach to history seems to be that it's going to come to a very abrupt conclusion when Christ returns rapture to church out of here, you know, again, it goes back to that loser theology. And I think it's for that reason that Owen's not looking to the end, he's not looking to an end goal, he's not seeing the telos of what God is doing throughout history because he's not seeing that God is actually redeeming, restoring, and, and creating something better than Eden, that he is actually invading Earth, as it were, with his kingdom and that the kingdom is coming and his will is being done. And so I think, again, this is why eschatology does matter because the way that you view the course of history, where you see things going, is definitely going to impact the way that you live in the here and now. But the other thing that I wanted to bring up because today I'm going to be hot take Jake for a second. When I read through this, when I read through this, the thing that I keep on thinking, and I'm going to sound like a major jerk here by saying this, but the thing I keep on thinking is, okay, why should I care? Why should I care what you have to say about any of this? What is your appeal? And so just, just, you know, to be one of those guys, he says here going back to what you were saying earlier, Josh, he says the state is instituted by God and God's overarching arching sovereignty should be recognized by the state by what standard on, and if you're going to say the Bible, then understand your entire argument is inconsistent the whole way through this is riddled with inconsistencies. And I don't see a reason why I should care at all what he has to say because he's not appealing to the Bible. But if he appeals to the Bible, then he loses the argument because he's actually siding with, you know, the anomic principles, which is what I think. So, glad you, glad you kind of pointed that out, Jake, because I'll take Jake rather sorry, because that's what I was hearing when when John was talking a minute ago. So many good Christians have disagreed, for example, and like presuppositionalism verse evidentialism or the role of natural law. We can have good, like you said, in house discussions on those things. What's interesting, though, is if you're if you were arguing for the, for the proliferation or the promulgation of good things, but you were specifically saying they cannot be explicitly Christian. In other words, I want to see good things, and I want to see them everywhere, but they can never be pushed or applauded for being explicitly Christian. In other words, that has to all be in the background because they just have to be good things in and of themselves. Now, we can be Christians in the background, but when these laws or social social standings come out, they can't be explicitly Christian because that apparently lends toward a dangerous Christian nationalism. You have that on one side where the advocates of those views are saying we should do the things that God says in scripture. And then you could argue with them in house of like, I think you're misapplying that or maybe that Old Testament passage doesn't really hold over in the general equity sense that you think it does, we could have those debates, but they're still arguing for the application of God's law. On the other hand, what I see from this article is that we should explicitly advocate for false religious values in our culture as a societal good, that it's actually good for us to, to advocate for a pluralistic secular religious liberty sphere, wherein every religion has a seat at the table. That's something, again, Jacob, if you looked at scripture, one side is at least trying to do what God has said in scripture, one side is saying we're going to actually make room intentionally make room and explicitly make room for things that God says he hates. And something that is an abomination against him. I find that very interesting as an underlying theme in the article that I think it dovetails with what you guys both just said, as far as like the application of that. I wonder if a lot of what we're seeing here in this article is a rejection of Christian nationalism, but an embracing of modern day conservatism from a political perspective is what I mean. And so that whole idea that freedom is the ultimate everything that's the ultimate virtue that's what we have to work towards everybody has to be free and everybody has to be able to do what they freely want to do but it goes back to that huge footnote that he has there of having a laundromat that is in run by Christians. I actually want the Christian laundromat though I actually want Christians running all of these different businesses because I think one thing that Owen doesn't consider here in the article is if I know that a business is being run by somebody that's fundamentally anti-Christ they are anti-Christian and I know that by giving them my, by giving them my money that it's going to fund, for example, perhaps an abortion, or it's going to fund some sort of demonic secularization of the culture, or it's going to fund something that's trying to brainwash children any one of those things. Why in the world would I want to go give my money to that business or that individual when I can instead go to the Christian business instead. On top of that, my desire should be to see that person save because it's not just about the business it's not just about a free market, it's about that person's soul and the fact that they're going to spend eternity somewhere whether with Christ or having Christ judgment poured out upon them for all eternity. And so again that's where this large inconsistency comes from that if if you're a Christian I can't see any argument where you come along and say, actually I don't want God's law to bear. Actually I don't want Christian doctrine to spread and to govern the land. Actually I don't want to see the business owner save because I want to see a free market. It just it doesn't make any sense whatsoever. It does make for, and I'm looking at the clock now and realizing we're going to have to land the plane here in a minute. So be thinking of any points, topics, themes that we've missed. We've missed lots, obviously, but but any we want to cover before the end here. But the takeaway from this article, because you're mentioning a minute ago, like, why should we care? Like, what should the person think when they read this? If you're reading, if you're taking the sort of approach that we want a kind of Christian influence in society that is never explicit, it's never explicitly Christian. There's never an actual bringing to bear of God's law as such against against those in the world. You get a, I think it's attractive to Christians because there's not a lot of conflict that comes from that. I can, I can be a Christian very privately. And my public engagements can be very nice and kind, but there's never anything that actually causes the rub of the world, right? There's never an actual, there's never me marching into, for example, a house of governance and telling lawmakers that the murder of the unborn is actually a murder in the side of God and they must repent or God will judge them and our nation. There's never any of that rub. It's a very, I think a peeling perspective to a lot of, especially American Christians because it doesn't lead to a lot of conflict on our behalf. And I'm not saying the article is necessarily like aiming for that. I just see, I see a lot of Christians in general, if you bring God's word to bear with specific application, it's labeled as legalism. Whereas sort of a generally Christian approach is a lot more comfortable, I think, and less confrontational. But John, what are we missing here from the article that we need to draw? Yeah, I mean, I think I think we hit some kind of major points. I do think this concept of like the free church, this kind of Baptist background is kind of a very major key theme. He's got a paragraph here where he, I believe he's his attempt at explaining kind of here is my vision of how we should do this. It's page 65. It's the first full paragraph and he says in kind of his position, right? The individual is free before God, the free individual with the free conscience joins a free church. This church is overseen by no state or magistrate. The free church worships in the context of religious liberty, or as the centuries war on in the West, political philosophy came to reject the overseeing of the church by the free state by the state. This religious quote free market brought with it, many challenged the problems to be sure, but religious liberty actually proved a great multiplier of gospel witness. And I think this is, I think partially what this is, is two things. It's a misreading of history, I believe, and also a doomed strategy. Right. And what I mean by that is with history, as we see the West develop, a lot of it was actually fighting against, like the pagan, like perspective. Right. If Christians were to say, Hey, let's have a free market. Well, we know the enemy, right? We know wicked men are going to look at a free market and want to then capture it and move it in the direction they want. Right. Even see this in capitalism in America of like, Hey, we want this laissez-faire market, what immediately happens, corporations start working with governments to impose restrictions on new entrants. Right. And so they find a way to say, Hey, here's freedom, but then I'm going to use my power. And if every person who could fight against it would say, Well, I don't want to push back against them. There's going to be this kind of practical sense of if one side saying, Hey, I'm willing to fight and the other side, I'm willing not to fight there becomes a very clear power imbalance where the freedom that we desire is actually going to be stripped from us. And we see that actually happen in history. I would argue. I think Owen sees this very clearly happening in America. And that's the kind of interesting thing is he sees the freedoms of Americans being stripped away because of the very philosophy he's promoting, which is this kind of a, Hey, I don't want to kind of impose anything. But then you're saying, okay, let the other person run, you know, right, right over us. And so I think there's that difficulty happening where he is presenting, presenting this kind of free market. And I love Doug Wilson's mere Christendom. I think if you're kind of very anti Christian nationalist, he kind of goes from a very, very punchy kind of jovial way. And he doesn't really make really big arguments like this even wolf does it makes him simple Christian arguments. And one of the arguments is, how do you get actual freedom. It's like, well, only Christianity could bring about this kind of free market that you would want because it's the only thing robust enough to not want to kill its enemies, but be able to like evangelize its enemies. Every other worldview. I mean, we see this right now in America wants to ultimately destroy and killed its enemies. Right. That's why the transing the kids and all this stuff is being said is like, they want to like, physically kind of do what they can to bring you out of this. Where Christianity may have some level of being able to say, Hey, we are robust enough have a strong enough Christ that we are able to keep some, you know, false religions, as you said, just not just to promote it. But like, Hey, I'm willing to present the gospel against that not use the sword as my tool, but the gospel again things that Owen all holds to. But I think he kind of assumes that the free market is the tree. Right. Instead of realizing it's the fruit of the Christian tree. Right. If that makes sense. It makes it makes perfect sense. And I'm going to reference one of the footnotes from your, from the paragraph you read, though, footnote 44. This is on page. On page 25, footnote 44, he says this quote, as I state elsewhere in this article, religious liberty is not for the lazy caricatures, a fabrication of sloppy post war secularism religious liberty as a doctrine is biblical and was championed, often heroically and at great cost by Baptists. He continues in technical terms, modern day Baptists who embrace the Christendom model that would be Doug Wilson's are rejecting the religious liberty their forefathers won through many trials and quote. So one of the things I think that bears defining, and it goes right along with what you just said, John, is it is good for us not to be kicking in people's homes and they are praying inside with their family to a false God. We kick in their door. We drag them off to prisons and we persecute them because of their false faith. That's a good thing. We are not doing that. Right. Nobody's advocating that I know anybody serious is advocating for that. So that's good that we don't do that. However, what we're talking about going along with what you said, John, is like, if somebody, if they're religious convictions because we all have religious convictions, this is Augustine's whole passions of our heart conception. If we are all our religious creatures and the culture around us, its religion is promoting drag queen story hour in the public park and that is their expression of what is good and true and holy. Do we have any grounds to object to that other than we find it icky? Like, do we actually have biblical warrant to come against that and say, no, this is something that God says is evil and you must not do this in the public square. That's not antagonistic to this conception of religious liberty, but it is. It is not to say then that we should advocate for public expressions of false religions and actually consider that a cultural good. That is not a Baptist or foundational, you know, like one of the founders conceptions of what religious liberty was. So thoughts on that. I think the other, the other thing that we got to keep in mind here. Owen rejects the idea that the Old Testament has any bearing on us or the Old Covenant laws have any bearing on us today in the New Testament age. Because his, his form of sort of understanding scripture is, let me think if I got the name right here, progressive covenantalism and under progressive covenantalism, the 10 commandments, for example, were fulfilled by Christ and they don't matter anymore for the Christian. And so it's, it's a very, at least they only matter in so far as we know they're fulfilled in Christ. They don't, they're not binding on us today in the same way they were binding them. Right. Right. And that, that would be one of the main reasons why he has to reject the sort of whether it's Christian nationalism, theonomy or any other position that would say Old Testament laws are good. Can I just point out one other footnote? This, this really has nothing to do with anything. It's just one of the footnotes that cracked me up when I was reading this. So let me read the line here real quick. It's at the very start. I just wanted to point this out to this way. If anybody hasn't read it, they can just get an idea of what the whole article is like. He says, page 41, this is pretty early on, my primary dialogue partner will be the third group mentioned above those who are driven by their eschatology to engage politics and often do so under the banner of Christianizing the nation and bringing old covenant law to bear on it. Then he has footnote footnote four. Among those I respond to, I should note that Stephen Wolf is not post millennial from what I understand. But he has published with Canon press and is one of the theorists behind present day, C.N. thinking the whole article is just kind of like that. And it's almost like why, what is the point of that footnote, except it just inflates the word count. No, he is not a post millennial. He is, in fact, Amil, he would actually agree with Owen on a lot of different things funny enough. But Owen felt the need to sort of lump everybody together here. And again, that's one of the big problems that he has here is that even when the evidence is before him to the contrary. He'll often appeal to something totally out in left field that doesn't matter like okay so he says he's not a post millennialist but he published with Canon press therefore post millennial list equal Batman. And it's just it's these weird arguments throughout the whole thing. What's that? What's that saying? Thou doth protest too much? I almost feel like Owen maybe is afraid that he might be a Christian nationalist. And that's why he had to write the 20,000 word essay hot take Jake over here. Okay, I gotta pull myself together. Hot take Jake just catches me off guard sometimes. John, what are we missing from anything from the article anything we want to wrap up. There's lots more and again, encourage you guys if you haven't checked out John's video, check it out, but anything as we land the plane. Yeah, I think so I guess I want to end with something positive. I think it's good to try to find some ecumenicism here. And maybe that's maybe that's just my personality but I think Owen does see that there was a giant vacuum that's created prior to it. And COVID awoke in the church, a desire for like, man, we need a robust political theology of like how we should think about the world and really the world outside the church walls, because the world can't see says, Hey, really? I mean, this is even Nebuchadnezzar like in your heart, you could worship your own God, but publicly I need you to kneel before the statute. And I feel like that's kind of what the world wants to do with Christianity. As long as it's an internal hidden religion, it's okay as long as you keep shrinking the church walls till the walls are pretty much just your own mind. That seems to be how the world focuses, right? And so I think we realized that we need to understand like, we got to keep our ground as the church and even we should desire to see it grow, right? And so I think Owen sees that. And I think what he's trying to do is figure out how does that look like through the church lens. And I think it's possible to say, Hey, there are many spheres I live in, right? I'm not just a churchman, right? As in I go to church on Sunday or small groups or whatever it is, but I also have work. And that's a sphere in which I could use to honor Christ. I'm also a political member of a body. That's another sphere I could use. And I think once you start adding those things, I think it's going to realize, yes, my mission in the church as an institution is like gospel focus on all of that. But then my job as maybe an accountant is I should have good spreadsheets, right? And that feels kind of, I think there's a tension in some people's minds of like, well, I could only be about the gospel and not spreadsheets or the gospel and not about good political laws, right? Because those are in conflict. And the reality is like, Hey, I could, and this is, I think, the brilliance of like the ordinate loves, right? The idea is that I could have all these different loves and all these different roles and spheres to honor Christ. And I think that's where I would want to see Owen keep pushing it is when you celebrate Roe Wade being overturned. What are you celebrating? Is it not that Christianity as it's like as it's actual theology is being promoted in the public sphere and even being promoted against wicked men, right? And that's a, I would just encourage people who push against Christian nations, like keep going with your thought as Jacob said, like, what's the tell us of where we want to go? Even if you think that full realization of that tell loss won't happen until the rapture and that I think you could still work with dispensational pre meals and say, listen, when do we want to see a taste of that even now? Like, I'm not going to be fully sanctified until the new heavens and new earth and until the resurrection, but I don't say, well, then I put off fighting for sanctification now. It's like, there's good things to be done here and now. And I think Owen sees that, but I just encourage him to keep pushing that logic forward. Yeah, I agree with what you said. And as for saying something positive at the end, I think that's, that's wise and we probably should have done that at the front end as well. But we want to, we want to emphasize, number one, I find it encouraging that a lot of Christians are recovering some really basic categories. We've mentioned a couple here is by what standard is something good or bad. We have to have categories for what is good and what is evil. I think it's good. I think it's good that we've recognized there's no neutrality in this world. I think it's good that we're seeking to honor God in many ways that I think we let fall by the wayside. So like those categorical distinctions, I think are good for Christians to retrieve. But this is something we have to do without eating each other. And that's really part of my concern with, and again, one of the reasons we chose to address the article was not because we wanted to eat Owen or him to eat us or any sort of fracturing within Christian circles. We were the article puts some of us on one side of a line. And I wish we could have a little more dialogue on those issues. I think the more we try to define and clarify where those lines are and the more we try to hash these things out and encourage one another. There are enemies at the gates. There is darkness that is that is swirling, especially in our culture and in our time. And this is the time that Christians can have in-house debates that don't lead us to fracture and fissure among one another or to cast disparagement upon one another or fear or doubt. Where there need not be that. So for all those things, obviously, Owen's always invited to come on and chatting. We would love to have him come on again. He's been on eschatology matters before, but this is something we want to do to encourage one another as Christians to think through these things, even where there might be some latent disagreements and some extent disagreements that we experienced. But anyway, Jacob, John, we got to land the plane. But thank you guys so much for joining me today. And I hope this is beneficial to those who watch. Hey, man. Thank you, John. Thanks so much for doing the article. Appreciate you too. Thanks guys. 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