An Outsider Explains How LCMS Lutherans Sabotage Their Confession

Matt Whitman of the Ten Minute Bible Hour is interviewed by Bryan Stecker for On the Line.

Editorial Headnote

Matt Whitman spent nearly three hours with Bryan Stecker on On the Line, and he spent most of it doing something few outsiders are positioned to do: reporting back, tradition by tradition, on what each of American Christianity’s major bodies looks like from the vantage point of a man who has filmed himself walking into well over a hundred of their churches. What follows is worth reading start to finish, but four threads are worth drawing your attention to.

On the public face each tradition presents.

Whitman is not describing doctrine so much as demeanor, the pattern that shows up in his comment sections and his inbox once a video on a given tradition goes live. Latin Mass Catholics, he says, are “the worst,” a group that manages to accuse him of schism while treating their own Novus Ordo brethren as standing on the edge of schism themselves, and whose members once sent him hundreds of messages over nothing graver than where he put his hands during a conversation with a priest. Ethnic [Eastern] Orthodox correspondents he finds angrier still, and he extends them a courtesy he grants no one else in the conversation: he thinks the anger is earned. He traces it to a thousand years of geography, the Eastern churches having absorbed the weight of the Ottoman advance while the medieval West enjoyed the comparative comfort of the Pyrenees, and he reads the bitterness that surfaces in his occasional Greek-language hate mail as inherited grief rather than mere theological score-settling. Lutheran Twitter comes off no better, and worse than its manners, he names within it “unfortunate elements... who took pride in things unfortunate non-Christian elements of your group took pride in Germany in the 20th century,” a lineage he says still hides behind anonymity, a courtesy Luther himself never claimed for his own polemics. Against that backdrop, the LCMS as a whole fares unusually well in its overall accounting. He calls it, without qualification, “right at the top of my list,” a compliment made more notable by how sparingly he hands it out to anyone else across the conversation.

** For the LCMS warriors on social media constantly attacking and mocking other denominations, get a new schtick.

Why do the Baptists close the sale and the Lutherans do not?

Whitman’s central charge against confessional Lutheranism is not doctrinal but rhetorical, and he states it plainly: the tradition is, in his estimate, one of only five internally coherent systems in American Christianity, alongside the Reformed, the Baptistic evangelical, the Catholic, and the Orthodox, and of those five it requires the fewest assumptional leaps from him to embrace. What it lacks, in his telling, is a usable answer to the question a person actually asks on the way in the door. The Baptists, whom he is otherwise happy to mock for an “overly simplified” soteriology, win converts in prison ministries and storefront churches precisely because their gospel fits in an elevator ride, and he traces the growth of Pentecostalism to the same instinct one rung further down. Lutherans, by contrast, are handed what he calls a softball, a stranger asking how to be saved, and instead of answering the person in front of them, he has watched pastors reach reflexively for Trent and the sixteenth century, “fighting ghosts... who aren’t in the room with us right now.” The fault line he draws is not sacramental theology, which he thinks the LCMS gets right, but the absence of a front-facing sentence a confused stranger could actually use.

What he thinks Lutherans should do about it.

His prescription is narrow and repeated with some insistence: tighten the language, not the theology. “You should not rewrite your tradition, which is one of the last good ones standing. Just explain it better.” Concretely, that means building catechetical onramps across the whole week rather than compressing everything into a Sunday morning, and it means arriving at one clean, front-loaded sentence, something on the order of “to be a Christian is to be a part of the church,” said without qualification before the caveats arrive. He is emphatic that this is not an argument for evangelical accoutrements: the LCMS should not chase electric guitars or a looser liturgy, ground he considers already occupied and, by his own account, occupied with mixed results. What he does flag as a genuine cost is internal: the LCMS’s congregational polity, which he credits as an institutional advantage (lose one Concordia and two more remain, a redundancy the Evangelical Free Church could not claim when Trinity Evangelical Divinity School folded), also means synodical bandwidth gets consumed by fights over who leads and which worship style prevails, bandwidth a more centralized body might spend looking outward instead.

What else stands out?

Two further observations reward attention. The first is his account of what he calls “deep water evangelicalism”: the unheralded, unbranded churches running a hundred to three hundred members that make almost no online footprint because they are not optimized for the click economy, and that he credits as the only genuinely growing segment of American evangelicalism, converting competent, non-crisis adults rather than merely recycling the already churched. The second is biographical and left conspicuously underspecified: Whitman recounts leaving pastoral ministry in the Evangelical Free Church, spending several years in a Free Lutheran congregation, and then landing, by his account, in “a tradition that seems like it’s a really good fit” for the long term, without naming it. Given how much of the conversation turns on his outsider vantage relative to the LCMS specifically, that unnamed landing point is the one loose thread in an otherwise unusually candid two hours and fifty-four minutes.

Cold Open

Tell me why your thing is beautiful. Why are you this? What happens if someone is fully catechized in this for a lifetime? Show me what it looks like by how you talk to me. Show me what kind of art it produces. How does what you all think produce a building that looks like this? You misunderstand why people aren’t coming to your church. Every source of authority that we’ve had in our lives in the last 20 years has been burned through. We don’t trust anything anymore. Be you. Just make it make more sense. Just explain it better. Let the historic church, let the text, let the Holy Spirit through those things that we know he works through do the work. People are tired of everything being so colloquial and dumbed down that it feels like somebody just could have made it up last week. You should not rewrite your tradition, which is one of the last good ones standing. Just explain it better. Your industrialized era which I think is different than enlightenment and modern. Your industrialized 20th century era is a different animal.

The Algorithm, Social Media, and the Erosion of Trust

Then you have the postmyspace era and to act like that is not a new epoch of the life of the mind. And the world is deeply mistaken. Our grandparents living in the industrialized post-modern age in the 1960s are experiencing nothing like the postmyspace age. You got airplanes, you got TV, you got radio, everybody has a car, everybody’s got a house. Yes, mass produced toys, shared stories, movies, all of that stuff. But not just the internet, but specifically social media is a completely different animal. Feedback loop it creates on the brain is totally different.

How it affects theological thought, totally different. I just don’t think we’ve been doing it long enough to put a name on it yet. I thought about how much it’s affected us especially in that everything that we see we immediately look for some kind of controversy right so someone launches something immediately it’s like we’re looking for some reason to push back against that thing hate that thing we get these other groups over here and then we kind of get this little feedback loop of well this is what they’re really trying to do and so it’s just the eighth commandment has just been burned and the ashes have just been. Which one’s the eighth one again? Oh, that’s right. Because there’s different numberings. Thou shalt not bear false witness, lie, however it is. So, the slandering, hurting someone’s reputation, not explaining everything in the kindest way, like that’s the normal flow for everything that’s put out there.

And I think that changes the way that we think about things. It’s also in violation of the principle of no lawsuits among believers. You’ve got entire organizations dedicated to just hanging around and waiting for something that doesn’t look good to come down the pike. They literally don’t have work unless someone does something bad. But then if somebody does something bad, that’s your content for the next chunk of time. Hopefully someone else will do something bad before that content cycle runs out cuz that’s the whole model. Which is weird to adjudicate all of that in front of everybody in that kind of manner.

So you try to avoid that, right? I try to with your channel. You try to avoid the here’s this I thought you were being sarcastic. You try to avoid like lawsuits and I really try to avoid that. But with like your channel, you try to avoid saying, “Okay, here’s this here’s this story. This pastor did this thing or this controversy and so we’re going to capitalize on it. We’re going to do this like, fancy thumbnail and we’re going to talk about it for 3 weeks.” that’s low hanging fruit. It’s low hanging fruit and it’s boring.

And God forbid if you make content like that you ever get something wrong or the impression of getting something wrong cuz you’re going to get extra nuked. Oh boy. People sink their teeth into that. The bigger problem with it is I just don’t think it’s good content. I don’t think it’s interesting. Surprise. People did bad things. And there is a circle of people who will do a perfectly good job of sorting that out. But also the audience you curate on the internet is who you will become. It’s an irresistible feedback loop. And for people who don’t do it for a living or for fun on the side, it sounds like crazy talk from me to say your audience makes you who you are over time. With enough time, the audience you curate will inform you. You will not inform them. But if you’ve been around it and you know the power of the algorithm and you know the rhythms of this and you have these simple things in front of you make content and you go, “Well, I could continue to make this principled stuff and it will accomplish this much and that’s very nice.

I could make this slightly less principled stuff and it will outperform my more principled stuff. Well, it’s hard to keep pushing this button all the time. And maybe a couple pushes of this button over here makes sense, but over time you just do option B. The algo exaggerates everything about us, all of our tastes, all of our preferences. And you remember clicks overwhelmingly are private in the click economy. So people aren’t clicking what they think they ought to. People are clicking what they want to. And this just like literally how many of our clicks just happen on a toilet. There’s nobody here. I can just I watch what I want. I can This is me time. Well, I’ll see it. I’ll go on cuz I want to look something up. I’ll be like, I think so and so talked about this. I’ll start the search and then of course YouTube feeds something and it’s like whatever. It’s like, oh, there’s a massive shark that was found somewhere, maybe hypothetically, or so and so did this really bad thing. Oh, I’ve heard of that guy before. And all of a sudden, next thing like you’re 20 minutes in and you’re watching things you didn’t plan to watch because the algorithm knew how to catch you, but really you wanted to go in and learn something that was actually edifying and valuable for what you’re trying to do.

And then your feed for the next two months is people you thought were good, but possibly aren’t. Also, there are much bigger sharks than you think. Okay. This is my digital life now. Thanks. It seems like to push back against that, you just have to stay really curious and passionate about the things that actually matter and search things. Just don’t look at what’s fed to you at all. Just ignore it. Think about questions that you have and then go inquire of the second largest search engine in the world, which is YouTube. Go inquire of your questions and pull on the thread the way you would do research. So rather than treating YouTube as passive entertainment where just see what’s on the TV tonight like we used to do when we were children, instead, this is a tool. I’m going here to get the best stuff out of it. And what I search for and the quality of how I construct my search will that’ll be what informs me. That’ll be what influences me. So it’s a great tool, but if you’re using your feed to consume it, you’ve taken this great tool and you’ve just handed off all control and volition and whatever this godless ghost in the machine algorithm decides you ought to be, it’ll just shape you into that and you won’t even know that it happened.

Introduction: Welcoming Matt Whitman

Are we live by the way, Ben? All right, we are. So, welcome back to On the Line. Today we’re with Matt Whitman. Hopefully all that you said was really good. So I’m cool. Whatever. Great, man. Nice to be here. So Matt, you’ve got you’ve done a lot of YouTube work over the last 10 12 years. You’ve got the what’s the specific podcast where you’re walking through the Bible. You were telling me you’ve walked through Matthew, now you’re walking through John in depth. It’s just clean Bible study trying to interweave and understand, what’s going on, how does this connect with the Old Testament and such. And what’s the name of that?

That’s the 10-minute Bible Hour podcast. It’s a little confusing because my YouTube channel for a long time was just called the 10-minute Bible Hour. But so I used to do this thing with videos where I would pick a book of the Bible and just chip away one passage at a time until we were done with that book. So it took me maybe 90 videos to get through Acts. And they’re just kind of fast, fun, short, but deep divy like, hey, here’s the quick version of what you would get in a seminary class on Acts. But videos are much harder than podcasts. And the audience clearly wanted the Bible to be more of like a daily thing that we were doing together. So after I got done with Acts, I pivoted to doing a daily audio only podcast. And we did Matthew, one book of the Bible per day. So, like 70 episodes with bonus stuff. Esther, Nehemiah, Galatians, Philemon, and now John.

So, if I live long enough, get through the whole Bible. We’ll get them all. And then I guess the Apocrypha. I don’t know what we do after that. I’m in trouble if we get through all of them. It’s out of material. We can always circle back. So, but people, most people know you because of the videos on YouTube, and I think your following is actually bigger on the Bible study, but for those that they might just kind of recognize your face, they’re thinking of you going into Orthodox churches, you going into Catholic churches, you came into an LCMS church with Will Weedon, all sorts of UCCC churches as we were talking about before, right? So, just you go all over the place and you say, “Hey, we’re just going to talk. You tell me what do you believe? Why do you have this here? Why is this tree here? Why is this cross here?” Whatever. So in your own words, denominationally speaking, what’s going on with your branch of Christianity? So I think that’s fascinating. That’s how I got introduced to you. So I want to start off and just I want to hear your perspective because you’re not an LCMS Lutheran.

Mapping the Denominational Landscape

So I think your perspective, especially for kind of our core audience, which is LCMS Lutheran, is very valuable because this is not Bryan Stecker, it’s not Adam Co, it’s not Bryan Wolfmueller talking about, well, what do denominations believe? And it’s good to hear kind of LCMS voices speak on that if you’re a Lutheran. But from your perspective, how would you lay out the landscape of different denominations and what they actually believe? How would you start to categorize that? Fun. Wow. Okay. Was the first video you saw of mine? The one I did with LCMS with Will and Hamilton.

I saw it was either Catholic or Orthodox first and then eventually I found out you did an LCMS one. I was like, “Oh, that’s cool.” And then I did watch that one. And obviously I’ve done a bunch of videos with different threads of Catholicism, different threads of Orthodoxy. You do the Latin Mass group. I don’t I have not done one that is specifically dedicated to the Latin mass. Well, it’s a long form conversation, so I guess we’re just going with candor on everything. We got time. I look, every different group that I interact with, there is a different vibe. But there is a way that the LCMS crowd comes off in the comment section and in emails to me, a non-Lutheran. There is a way that postvatican 2 Catholics come off in the comment section. There is a way that old school ethnic Orthodox come off. There’s a way that new school young man disaffected by the trappings of American life and evangelicalism and now has discovered orthodoxy comes off in the comment section. There is a way that sentimental evangelical Christian bookstore mom and grandma come off. Like once you do this long enough, the patterns really start to emerge and you get a strong sense this is what each group cares about. And a service I would love to offer without any judgment would just be to meet with denominational leaders and be like, “Hey, so this is you guys’ internet game.”

This is what’s going great. This is what’s going weird. If you coached up your people on this just a little bit, I think it would be way more effective for you. So it’s I haven’t done the Latin mass because the people, your Trent Catholics, I don’t like the way they ask. I find it abrasive and condescending and I feel like if I have to wait until nobody asks for long enough so that I, don’t get a little talking to about, oh, you went and did the thing that I said. There’s a certain abrasiveness that I feel from that crowd that I don’t like, so I haven’t gone.

So, is it along the lines of you do something with post Vatican 2 Catholicism and they come at you and like, well, that’s not real Catholicism. They’re heterodox or whatever it is. So they’re very combative. Very combative. So they will simultaneously yell at me for being in schism from the church while saying that they’re no Novus Ordo brothers and sisters are right on the edge of being in schism with the church. So I don’t I’m just not on the internet to fight with people. Now it sounds like I’m on the internet to fight with people because I’m even acknowledging these things happen.

Interview Ethics: What Matt Publishes, and What He Doesn’t

When I go to these churches, the objective, ideally the objective is walk in, introduce myself, and just give the person I’m talking to carte blanche. Tell me why your thing is beautiful. Why are you this? What happens if someone is fully catechized in this for a lifetime? Show me what it looks like by how you talk to me. Show me what kind of art it produces. How does what you all think produce a building that looks like this? How does that connect? Is your building in departure from what your architecture normally looks like? Or is this directly flowing out of what you believe and why? Give me your inside language. Tell me about the things that you guys worry about. I want to get a sense of what a Catholic cathedral in Salt Lake City is anxious about.

What are they worried about? They took their hand. We got Mormons right down the street. So, we put some art up here on either side that is Catholic, but we picked a couple things that are Catholic that are specifically contrary to central claims of the Mormon church. Okay, cool. I got a sense of you. I know now I know what pressures you’re feeling. That’s interesting. What I do not do is debate me, bro. Show up at somebody’s church under the false pretense of would you show me your thing and teach me about it? And then as soon as I get there be like, well, actually, I think you’ll find if you look right here with me in God’s word, which you clearly don’t care about, that the Bible actually like, if I do that once and publish it, then I don’t get to talk to anybody but people like me anymore.

So, there are churches that I go to and I don’t like them. I don’t like the way it goes. I don’t think it would be good for the body of Christ or the kingdom of God to put it on the internet. So, I just don’t publish it. But also, if you’ve done a video with me and I haven’t published it yet, it could also be because of schedule and I just haven’t got to the edit. So I’m probably not talking about you, whoever you are. But maybe. But maybe. No, there have been churches. Okay, I’ll say it. I’ve done a couple of videos with people from reformed world that I thought would be useful for kind of filling in this little dark spot of the Christian family tree. I thought this particular church where it is geographically, the people who run it, the little narrow subthread of reformatism, this is a good one. If I pick this one right here, I bet their story is going to help people who have unfair characterizations of this branch of Christianity. I think it’s going to address some of that. I think it’s going to be helpful. I go and I shoot the thing and it’s a disaster. It’s not even heterodox. It’s anti-creedal nonsense. Well, okay. Some people think anti-creedal nonsense. All right. I still might even like the people, but it’s not going to help the kingdom. It’s going to muddy the water and make a mess. So then I don’t publish that one. I went to a Unitarian Universalist church. I knew exactly what I was doing going in. I said that on the front end. I framed up the interview as, “Okay, so ma’am, you and I agree what you’re doing is not Christianity and what I’m doing is Christianity. You are practicing a different religion unapologetically. Fair? And we’re both like, “Yeah, fair.” Okay, cool. There we go. Now, this is framed up for everybody. This is not a denomination of Christianity. This is a completely different religious tradition that has incorporated elements of Christianity. And I don’t want you to convert to this. I straight up said that to the camera.

I hope you don’t, but I want to learn about it. And I think we can have an enjoyable, charitable conversation. And so, framed up like that, it’s easy. What stresses me out and what I don’t feel great about is putting stuff on the internet where now I have to fight an entire denomination or 50% of a denomination if I put out the video that isn’t a great look for them and just say like this just isn’t historic creed Christianity like there are churches probably within this denomination that are I just happen to pick one that isn’t. I’m gonna show you the video anyway, but these 10 things you’re going to hear in this video, they’re just outside the boundaries of the historic faith.

A Taxonomy of Denominational Tribes Online

So, with that feedback loop, how would you start to define some of it? We can go through, you can kind of pick which denominations you want to highlight. You’ve covered a lot. How would you articulate, Roman Catholicism spectrum there, LCMS spectrum there. You’ve probably done like ELCA, you’ve probably done PCA, you’ve probably done PCUSA, you’ve got the Orthodox, you’ve got Southern Baptist, you’ve got EB Free. So, how would you begin to lay this road map out for someone that’s saying, “I know this denomination, but I don’t really actually understand what these other denominations are about.” Okay. Well, there’s a couple of levels to this, right? The gentleman’s name is escaping me. He has a YouTube channel. It’s called Ready to Harvest. He does a really nice job. It’s very academic and he just talks about different groups. He uses a ton of the language from their own websites to just say this group is from here founded in this year. They believe the following things. Uses very technical language. It’s very helpful. I am more interested in giving people a feel for it with, kind of less commentary from me and let’s just let this guy tell you about his thing. And if I do this long enough, I think if somebody were to go and right now we’re at like 100 110 videos including shorts. So, it’s a lot, but I think we need a lot more to really get a good sample size so that people can not only figure out, okay, here is how confessional oldw world Lutheranism manifesting in the new world, like Missouri and Wisconsin centered looks relative to liberal mainline Lutheranism in the new world, relative to what’s left of Lutheranism in Scandinavia and Germany in the old world, relative to missional Lutheranism in subsaharan Africa or Latin America. Those are all very different strains of Lutheranism, but you look at it long enough, you see the commonalities and the things that are just definitionally Lutheran.

That’s one branch. Well, okay, that branch seems like it’s pretty close to the reformed branch, but the continental branch of the reformed is a little different than the Scottish branch of the reformed. And that’s a little different than the reformed bro branch. From the late 2000s through the mid-2010s, a few hot books came out. It kind of became a fashionable thing for young men to try out for a little while. Some stuck, some moved on from it. And all of that’s very different than the big American strains of reformatism like the PCA, Christian Reformed Church, PCUSA. So you look at it long enough and you just let people talk long enough and you start to see, okay, these are the points of emphasis. This is where the injuries are. You get little hints of, well, in 1909, we had a meeting here in Murfreesboro, Tennessee, and this group decided that they and so we had to Okay, that’s really interesting to hear people talk about it. They weren’t even alive for it. You can still kind of hear the pain in their voice about this unfortunate thing that explains the state of it all now.

So that’s an interesting way to get a sense of denomination. Let’s just let people talk about it. I want to kind of build off that. We’ve talked about this before with like Christian Einertson and others like we’ve got our Book of Concord, right? So I as a pastor, I pledge that I’m going to uphold that the Book of Concord is a quia subscription and explanation to the holy scriptures which are inerrant and inspired. Right? So that’s what and then the churches make the same pledge like they’re going to uphold that as well. Now if you go into XL LCMS church there’s going to be a degree to which that’s actually articulated and lived out. Right? So in other words there’s kind of a slogan Lutheranism that can take over and all of a sudden you’ve missed certain articles in the Formula of Concord and such that you’re not actually articulating properly.

Diagnosing Drift Within Confessional Lutheranism

What gets missed? What’s the first thing to go? Well, I kind of want to hear your takes on it because I don’t want to muddy the waters on like here’s my takes on things. I want to hear your take from the outside as far as especially because our audience has heard our takes on, where are some pitfalls where we fall into in modern day sure Lutheranism. So, I just want to hear, carte blanche, you’ve got and you don’t know where I stand on most things. So, I just want to hear what’s your view and may maybe start with the Lutheran church. That’s a good entry point and then we can move into some of these other denominations.

Okay. So, you got this big Christian family tree. Even if somebody wouldn’t say the creeds, like there are certain Baptist groups, the Covenanters won’t say the creeds, but that’s objection to systematizing and formulizing in that format. Some would say it’s in opposition to the idea of the church fathers being uniquely authoritative. But guess what covenanters and Baptists think? The creeds. They just don’t say them. So I’m very comfortable putting all of those groups that I would call historic Christian Orthodox groups that bear all the marks of historic Christianity. They’re creedle whether they literally say them in church or not. They’re credle nature of Christ. You the nature of God, the divinity of Christ, all of that stuff. So you got this family tree with all of these groups and then you got a few offshoot trees that are over here where maybe some of their branches in the shade occupies some of the same air space. So they’re Christian family tree adjacent. They have some genetic things in common, but they’re different. They’re solidly outside those boundaries. So that’s category number one. Category number two is okay. Well, which thread, which strain, which branch are we talking about? But then category number three, when you really pinch zoom in, is what’s going on inside that group. And y’all are one of the most interesting case studies in what’s going on inside that group because you clearly have two distinct things. I’m not a Lutheran. I’m Lutheran adjacent. Evangelical free church is my tradition. So Scandinavian Lutheran free churchers with a dash of pyotism that end up in Minnesota and Missouri back in the day. This all sounds very Lutheran.

But a much more truncated essential doctrinal statement than say the book of Concord. So full disclosure, that’s my background. So I get to know LCMS and I didn’t know much about LCMS at all prior to going to church in Hamel, Illinois, hanging out with Will Weedon and you I went on a few of your shows. I went to the headquarters there in St. Louis. Was a really great experience across the board. I was like, “Yeah, okay, cool. I see the appeal.” And I started to see why people would make the leap from maybe squishier expressions of evangelicalism toward that more high church Protestant kind of like Protestant version of Western Catholic kind of look. It made sense to me. Well, then I got to know it a little bit better in the ensuing months and years after doing those interviews and kind of getting to know a lot of LCMS people and folks started to bend my ear a little bit, be like, “Well, let me tell you a little bit about what we got going on here.” There’s these old-timers, and this is our problem. We need to do things that make more sense to young people. We need to do things that are a little more in keeping with where church is headed and where culture is headed, but we need to do it with solid like with not compromising a bit theologically on who we are, but forms of worship come and go and there’s a division in our church because some people are really holding on to kind of an older approach. Well, then I you’re saying that’s what you’re hearing. I heard that people are articulating that to you.

I was like, okay. Well, then I’ll chat with another LCMS person, and we start talking about things. I tell you, there’s this whole group of people within our church and they just want to make it stylish. They’re going to make the same mistakes that the evangelicals, nothing personal, and the non-denominationals are making, and they want to part ways with a lot of our forms and just the look and feel of what we do. And that stuff’s important. That stuff is tied to what we believe and not sure it’s the best idea, and I’ve had both parties even kind of bend my ear a little bit and be like, if you could kind of just nudge like if you had anything you just maybe just incorporate this into way and I just keep hearing that. I my impression from the outside looking in of LCMS is as follows then one rich thick creamy historic reformation Christian orthodoxy. It’s just A+ brother in arms. I love it. There’s a couple of assumptions that as someone from the evangelical free church tradition I don’t exactly share, but it’s in the ballpark.

It’s not like I can’t celebrate a Lutheran baptism. No, I’m enthusiastic about that. That’s awesome. Some people in my tradition baptize kids. Most people don’t know that about the evangelical free church, but that exists within my tradition as well. Not salvific. But, so there’s a few details how we would characterize communion, what we would say happens, what the benefits of communion are. We would characterize that differently. But I wouldn’t even say I’m unthreatened by LCMS. I would say I’m enthusiastic about confessional Lutheranism. Cool. If I shared the exact same convictions, I’d just be it,. But here I stand, right? Isn’t you guys think can’t think what I don’t think.

So one, we’re not in a fight. We’re brothers in arms. I like your style. I really appreciate confessional Lutheranism. Two, the reputation LCMS has had for a long time outside of your circle, especially with enthusiastic, well-informed evangelicals, is don’t play well with others. The reputation of Wisconsin Synod, I don’t even know if this is true, but everybody repeats it. It’s like they won’t even pray with you if you’re not Wisconsin Synod. It’s not maybe not even enough to be Lutheran. That’s probably some urban legend or something.

It’s kind of that one’s kind of a mixed bag. So, we’ve had some Wells guys on to talk about this. So, they’ll say, you’re at a dinner table, it’s Thanksgiving, certain relatives are here, from like you can still say a prayer there. Wait, they have to clarify it that much? Because you couldn’t do it in a service like you could not have a joint service. Why? Well, I’d have to I’m not Wells, so I think they would say that there’s and we would agree with this too in that because even in LCMS’s history, I this might have been there at some point in our history. I’m not positive on that. So, we would say we cannot make it look as if we are in full doctrinal lockstep unity. Okay? So, that’s very important. So for instance, when it comes to communion, you couldn’t come to my church and take communion here.

I know I’ve been denied communion at your church. So that would be so the LCS would still have that. They would say, “Okay, at the very least, we can’t commune together because we believe something about the sacrament that you don’t believe. And if you come here, what we’re practicing is what we believe. And if you don’t believe that, you shouldn’t kind of put on a new mask and say, “Well, I’ll believe it for today.” So we say, “That’s not good for you.” And now we’re gonna get feisty. Well, I’m not doing that when I want to take communion with you. Are you kidding me? Do I sound like someone in our brief time that we’ve known each other that would show up and be like, I’m pretending to be Lutheran.

Give me your sacrament. So, let’s talk about this. No, of course not. So, we would say, okay, it is the true body and blood. This is the very body and blood of Christ that is here, and you’re going to take it on your tongue. It’s going to enter into you. There’s the forgiveness of sins. There’s a cleansing that takes place and there’s kind of a mystical union that takes place between you and Christ. Physical transformation. It is the very physical body and blood of Christ. Now, not trans look like bread.

We say in, with, and under. So, we say both are there in the same way that with Christ you’ve got he’s fully God and fully man in the same way the body or the bread up there is going to be fully bread and fully Christ physically speaking. So that’s going to so that would be our we wouldn’t use Aristotelian or platonic language about forms levels and degrees of reality. And we shy away from that too. In a very practical way we would say you put that under a microscope though like it’s still clearly bread. Come on. That’s why Catholics are so enthusiastic about Eucharistic miracles is because like they’re trying to make the claim like no get a better microscope.

On the Eucharist: Consubstantiation and the Limits of Explanation

I don’t see it. So that’s where we’ll stop there. Or we won’t say like, well, now we have to use transubstantiation as an explanation or consubstantiation. We just say, is that even a thing? We just say it is. What? Consubstantiation. Okay. What does that mean? I don’t I’d have to get a definition. I don’t know if I could explain it. I’ve been the impression that is a term that outsiders use and inflict on you to try to explain for our outsider brains how it’s different than what Catholics and Orthodox. I think it’s been used at times in the church, but we wouldn’t ascribe to it because we would just say if someone would ask me I just say it is like it is the body and blood of Christ. How I don’t fully know but we can get into we can get into the word incarnate. We can get in we get into some nice ways of explaining it. The incarnation is probably the route that I would go where I would say okay how is Jesus walking around 100% God 100% man. I’m not going to try to make a mathematical equation for you. I’m just that’s what it is. That’s what I confess. So same thing with this bread here is the very body of Christ. It’s not less than in it to any degree. It is fully the body of Christ and it’s also bread. I’m not going to deny that aspect or try to say let’s get a better microscope or anything like that and we’re just going to leave that as it is. Which is one of the it’s one of the LCMS things is we’re going to be able to like with double predestination, right? We’re just going to get to the point where scripture speaks and we’re going to stop there and we’re not I really like that about LCMS.

I’ve seen that again and again. It’s not that people have told me that’s what you do. It’s that when I hang out with your ideas and your people, that seems to be your habit of mind. That seems to be your theological practice. And I think it’s smart, safe, sustainable, true. I think where some from the more fundamentalist wing of my tradition get in trouble is they’re particularly they with all of the best intentions. They really want to try to make parts of the Bible that are not trying to speak to the question you’re asking speak to the question you’re asking. And then you end up how many angels can dance on the head of a pin just defending you end up defending stuff that’s just kind of indefensible and it’s like how did we get here? This isn’t the point. This isn’t why I started the conversation.

What are we doing? And I think that’s a place where I really resonate with the approach to the question of what happens with the elements. I think there are misconceptions about outsiders that create an unnecessary boundary to the table. I think it’s wrong for you guys to deny me communion. I think it’s silly. And the reason I think it’s silly is that I think you guys misunderstand a position you often call the memorialist position, which is this is a thing we do to remember, which is why we put do this in remembrance of me on all of our altars.

Yes, there is a memorialist element to that, but there is for you, too. You’re memorialists. You’re doing this in remembrance of him. Those aren’t even our words. Jesus words. We’re all memorialists. For crying out loud. Now, the Catholics would say that the mass and the sacrament is happening outside of time, which I think it’s a very interesting Catholic conception of it. And they’re right to conceive of a God unbound by the linear timeline on which we live. I think it’s kind of a fascinating way to frame it up. But we live in time.

Catholics remember when they take communion. Lutheran remember when they take communion. Reformed types remember when they take communion. Historic evangelical Protestant Orthodox, we remember when we take communion. What else is happening though? Well, there are some people who are so mad at Catholicism that they’ll cut off their noses despite their own face. Some Lutheran, some Baptists, some evangelicals, some reformed types. You’ll go so far in our theology that it’s like, are the Catholics in the room with you now? Kind of like settle down. At some point, we have to do church and positively confess and believe what we positively confess and believe. And one thing that frustrates me is two of the most important ordinances, sacraments, I’m fine with that language, too, ordained and instituted by Christ himself are the two where in my tradition we can lose the ability to see and celebrate the beauty of it and experience this. I have no problem calling this means of grace because we’re so worried about not sounding Catholic or not sounding Orthodox. Like at some point you just got to let those groups be what they are and they think their stuff but positively. What is it?

Well, I don’t just remember when I take communion. Of course, that’s the body and blood of Christ. I don’t need a priest to like the priesthood of all believers is something we take very seriously in our tradition. I there is no specific paperworked tradition that needs to exist for the body and blood of Christ to be present. Is it present in some sort of way that we could defined transformationally? No. It’s spiritual, but I think we all think spiritual is real. I don’t think spiritual means opinion or made up as some might imagine it to be. So when I listen to what you guys say about communion or the free Lutheran, that was a group I went to church there after I quit being a pastor.

I was a pastor for ever in an evangelical free church context. It was awesome. It started awesome. It middled awesome. It ended awesome. It’s just my internet stuff got to be too much. I like I had to pick. So I was like, “Hey, I’m going to let the next guy take over church and run with that and I’m going to go to church for a while and keep writing and doing my internet stuff.” Well, where do we land of all things? We landed a free Lutheran church for a few years. Why? I like the people. I like the teaching. It was great. And I didn’t resonate with some of the evangelical churches that were immediately available to me were they lacked the dignity of what I wanted to encounter.

And I want to get to that aspect. We talked about that a little bit last night. Okay, we’ll get to it. I don’t take that as a wholesale indictment of evangelicalism. I’m not throwing my group under the bus like that. It’s fashionable. It’s cheap. It’s easy. It’s low-hanging fruit to just, knock the whole thing. We’ll get to it. I’m more than happy to make fun of the make funible stuff, but I’m not willing to just pitch everything that’s faithful and rock solid and excellent for, a couple cheap joke clicks and feeling smug and superior together cuz we read a couple more books than maybe some other people did.

But I really was in the mood for just more historic church. I love church history. I love historic theology. I struggled to find an evangelical church in my community that would grapple with that would incorporate it into the service that would incorporate the rhythms of the historic church into the year. I’ve been around a bunch of churches that do that in an evangelical context. I just didn’t find one where we lived. Okay, that’s cool. So, I jumped in with my Free Lutheran friends for a while. Didn’t become members because like we just weren’t on the same page on a few of these very important things and for a season it worked great. No tension, no blow up, no anything. We knew it was a season and it was just wonderful. Eventually we ended up at a tradition that seems like it’s a really good fit and I think this is where we’ll be long term. But so to some extent I feel I’ve felt a little bit homeless in the age of sort of non-denominational evangelical dominance and also at some point like you just have to lead and help build good things. So more on that later but let’s go back to the because I want to get rest of your kind of diagnoses of the LCMS if we can stay on Eucharist for just a second.

But first I want to say in the Eucharist because I do want to get to this close communion aspect. So for me, I do not view it as a renewal of my salvation. When the church says, “Come and receive the forgiveness of your sins.” like that to that doesn’t totally sound like Luther to me. Well, where does that come from? No, there is a no, there’s an institutional priestess to that. My sins are forgiven by the work of Christ on the cross. Full stop. I am in communion with Christ. Therefore, I’m in communion with the church. Therefore, that’s that is how my sins are resolved. The repetition of communion is not what does that. That is the key difference that I see. So, it isn’t the communion that’s the key difference. It’s the sustenance of salvation that to me was the hey, we’re just not quite on the same page here.

And that’s where I didn’t resonate with what we were doing, but I didn’t feel like in any way we were disagreeing about what is happening with the elements, what has happened on the cross, who this is about, what this is about, the right posture with which to approach it, what the text teaches about it. There was extra biblical language that might be fine in a Lutheran context that we would recite before we would take communion where I would go, okay, I’m fine with saying, I’m coming to receive the forgiveness of my sins because this is in remembrance and celebration of the forgiveness of my sins. That But doesn’t Jesus say that though when he the night before he’s betrayed, right? He says given to you for the forgiveness of sins. But that’s his body and his blood which is are broken right there. The next day it’s there is a triumph over sin once and for all that is occurring.

And this is where I’m going to sound a little Baptisty. Me re-upping that weekly that feels like taking something that is a sacrament of grace and me adding a little bit of my work to it to re-up that. That sensibility is going to make no sense to your audience. I’ve been around churches, denominations, historic expressions of Christianity enough to know that like you don’t go in and just debate it. Like sensibilities are a real thing. They’re born out cultures, moments, times. The text on the page is going to make sense a certain way. It’s going to affect the way you read the rest of the text.

Five Internally Coherent Traditions

And so I’m going to sound like a relativist here, but both can be true. The thing hangs together. Lutheranism to me is one of about five traditions that is internally coherent. It’s cohesive. It works with itself and the Bible. Where you and I will disagree is I think there are four more. What are the other four real quick? I think the reformed camp works within itself. I think the baptistic evangelical system works within itself. And I think the Catholic and I think the Orthodox systems work within themselves. It takes much bigger leaps for me on those last two.

With Lutheranism, there’s about two assumptions that I’m like, man, if I shared those assumptions, and they’re sacramental. Give me a caller. I’d love to come work at one of your churches. Sacraments and the Office of the Keys. It’s soteriology, how you articulate it, how it sticks. Is that a thing that happens? Isn’t that a thing that you reup? So that would probably be so here’s like a Luther quote that helpful and then I’ll go back to the kind of close communion. So he’ll say, “Okay, Matt, you’re burdened by your sins.” Whatever. It’s a Saturday morning or whatever and all of a sudden you’re just like, “Ah, I feel really bad.” He said, he’ll say, “Well, where do you go?” And I’m guessing I know what your answer is. Where would you go?

I would go two places. Oh, okay. I would go to a person I trust in a church setting and directly to God. I thought you were going to say the cross. Well, you go to the cross for both forgiveness. So Luther would say you don’t go to the cross, you go to the means of grace, right? So you might go to your baptismal identity and if you can go to confession, absolution or go to the Eucharist. And we would say the cross is the means of grace. We would say that the cross is the source. It is finished. That’s where it’s accomplished. And then through time and space, God takes what was accomplished on the cross and then delivers it in time and space. And that would be like right. That’s that would be our sacrif. So that would be like the Eucharist for the forgiveness of sins. It’s not that and this would this is where we would differ from the Catholics right with the sacrifice of the mass that it’s not that there’s something going on there that is covering sins or accomplishing some kind of salvation that has been accomplished in the cross once and for all that’s finished but it is being given in time and space where you receive the forgiveness of sins and that doesn’t mean if you die in a car crash on the way that you’re not forgiven but that God understanding us who live in time and space he understands that he’s going to give actual places where that is delivered in time and confess and believe.

This is where the Baptists hold huge sway over our one of those five internally cohesive systems that I just mentioned. The nobody has clarity on the soteriological message like the Baptists and everything that comes out of that tradition. They can cover it in an elevator ride. Now, I sat with Will and I are pals. I really like Will Weedon. I the interview I did with him is my favorite church interview ever. LCMS threw wide open the doors. I’ve met so many great people doing the stuff I do, but I you’ll always kind of be my secret favorite. I just really like your group. I really like your people. I feel massive collegial collegiality in terms of where we are from the old world where we came from just we’re very close cousins and by the way I’m not looking for you to be like to support us. I’m looking I’m very interested in like in actual objective like here from the outside is fully comfortable with that you no problem. No I probably won’t become LCMS before the conversation’s done. If I do, that’ll be fascinating.

What’s Paul say? I wish you could be every I wish you could be like me in every way except for these chains. Well, there you go. In a group. Did you really think you were going to convert me in this like conversation? I like that one. Not my express goal, but what were we talking about? It was interesting. Close communion and internal consistency, the Eucharist. So you got these five groups and the amount of assumption leaps that I would have to make to be confessional Lutheran are not a lot.

It’s a couple of key things where I go well of course if I thought that click just everything you do would make sense and that would be the thing to do of course but I don’t think that the amount of assumptional leap that I would have to make to be reformed it’s not a lot like basically one reaction against Catholicism in terms of accutrants that I just don’t hold that assumption their sense of the second commandment I think the reform form types have an exaggerated sense of the second commandment and what is a violation of it in response to the abuses and excesses of the medieval Catholic church.

I think if the reformed theology crowd happens 200 years later and it isn’t born out of a response to Catholicism, I don’t think they’re going to be bothered by Jesus in a stained glass window. I think they’re responding to something that really was a problem when they developed those convictions. I’m just not I’m not sure it needs to be a timeless value. Do you think that’s a problem that we have that we’re too stuck in a reactionary against the Roman Catholicism of the 16th century? You guys fight the ghosts of Catholicism more than most people. You feel the pressure of it more than most people. Yes, you do. Yes. Yes. I think that how do you think that affects us today?

I think it makes it hard for you to explain how to become a Christian to people. Like positive theology of soteriology I think is one of the weaknesses of your group. I think it might be A+ airtight internally. I know so many of you’re all so smart and well catechized. You guys are good. You make solid Christians in your churches. Oh, this is what I was like, what were we talking about? This is what it was. But even talking to Will and he’s like, he’s like your champion in armor. He’s fantastic.

He’s great. He’s got to be a top five and he can talk to anybody like that guy. He’s like a Swiss Army knife of conversation. He’s great. But go back and watch the video. I’m like, “Yeah, but anyways, so if somebody wants to become a Christian and you can see my simple little evangelical brain going,” huh? Okay, let’s run it again, man. But like if somebody comes to you and they’re like, “I’m not a Christian and I want to be.” What would you tell them? And then you can see my simple evangelical brain go, “Huh?” But like say it in a way that will make sense to everybody who’s going to watch this.

Baptist Soteriology, Pentecostal Growth, and the Case for Simplicity

And that’s you guys might be right. Like of course like I’m the authority on anything, dude. I know I they can only think what I think, but it doesn’t mean I’m right. So your read on all of this could of course you could be the ones who are seeing this the correct way. But what I’m saying is the Baptists maybe it’s just a benefit of overly simplified theology. Let’s not be charitable. Let’s just give them the most negative take we can on the Baptist and soteriology. It’s overly simplified. But they can say it and when they say it makes sense to people. And even in the ways that we make fun of and would pat them on the head and be like, “You’re going to be if you die tonight, that kind of thing.” What if getting in a car wreck on the you know what? So there are four spiritual laws and you got to the second it has to be your butcher. It’s there’s a So there’s four of them. So just know those and you’re good to go. It’s like a chasm and then there’s a cross but like it’s turned sideways because you have to get up and over the top part but it’s like the cross goes in there and then you get to God. You we poo that stuff and make fun of it because it seems so like simple and simplistic and childish but people sign up for Baptist. People become Christians all the time. And then who picked up on the Baptist thing? The Pentecostals.

I’m massively uncomfortable in a Pentecostal setting. I feel like so much of it is performative and false, especially before the age of cell phones. I would be in a Pentecostal environment and they would say miracles are happening. And I would be like, “But I have five senses. They’re not happening. That didn’t happen. Why are we all acting like that just happened? It that wasn’t real. What are we doing?” And I’ve been in charismatic Pentecostal environments myself with my own experience. Not trying to make enemies here, but I’ve been in those environments where I felt like we all just kind of agreed to pretend a miracle happened that didn’t happen because the ends kind of justify the means and we’re kind of feeling it and some people are going to become Christians if we play along. I don’t feel good about that. What you win people with is what you win people to. You win people with stuff that feels a little bit made up or emotionally charged and we’re going to talk ourselves into it. That’s a faith time bomb that’s going to go off for that person later on. But you know what they do really well? Just explain the gospel and how to be a Christian and say it well to people whose lives are badly damaged. They do a really good job of that. And I could say, “Well, I don’t agree with your charismatic theology, so this is all dumb and bad.” But then I go and visit churches. I see all these people. Everybody I talk to is like, “Oh, I used to be in jail.” And then Pastor Ted here from this here church, he came to jail every day. Every day he was up there. He’d lead this Bible study with me. And he just kept explaining that, I need to confess my sins. I need to trust Christ. I give need to give my life to the Lord. And I did that and there’s been no looking back. And then I asked questions and it’s just this lifetime of fruit for the rest of the guy’s prison sentence and all of his life to date. I’m like, it takes this that punches the smuggery right off my face when a group that I’ve been a little upy toward, if I’m to be honest, does such a good job of saying the gospel in a way people can make sense and then people respond and their churches just keep growing. Last time I checked, the only group in our part of the Christian family tree that was growing was them. And it was like 0.1% in the black two years ago that they were still growing. But everybody else, like those of us who have a real fancy, sophisticated, complicated way of explaining what it is to go from not a Christian to a Christian, we’re all in the red. So there’s something to just know how to say the thing really well and get out of your own way. And that person who’s in jail is just not at all interested in well the Pope was engaged in these abuses. There was this guy named Tetzel. So he’s going around to these towns, right? And like I’m in jail cuz I punched my wife. I don’t really I don’t care. Help me get my life back on track. What’s going on? Well, then somebody else comes in and they’re like, “Well, Christ died for sinners like you. Are you a sinner? Yes, I am. Would you like to give your life to the Lord instead and have life abundantly in this lifetime? Serve God and live eternally with him with your sins forgiven in the next? Yes, I would. Okay. Well, let’s do that. And then you can be like, “Well, that’s fake.” But look at his life.

It worked. It’s real. So when I say there are five traditions drawing very big circles that I think if you can go with their assumptions, they’re internally cohesive, that internal cohesion is why I’m not threatened by there being other groups that aren’t my own. And I think it’s a beautiful gift of God that is in keeping with his every tongue, tribe, and nation kind of theme that runs through the whole Bible. I think if there were only one set of assumptions that could work and be internally cohesive, it would actually vastly reduce the ability of the gospel to be translated to all cultures.

The Catholics, for as much as I disagree, they make a lot of sense in a lot of places that the other four don’t make sense historically. I hope people grow out of it. I hope like I wish everyone could be like me. Isn’t that what you just said? Quoting Paul. But all the way out to the big picture of our conversation coming to kind of discover that these groups are not they work internally and they can carry forward the message of the gospel. Maybe I wouldn’t do it that way with my convictions, but looking for the internal cohesion of the thing makes it a lot easier to sit with a different expression of historic creedle orthodox Christianity and say, “I’m here as an anthropologist who wants to understand why your obedience to Christ works and why it makes sense to people.” as opposed to I’m here as a debate me bro to defeat Catholicism once and for all with my seminary degree. I got that one time.

So let’s go pal. It is interest like if you look at it from an anthropologist it is interesting that different denominations have success in different areas and it’s not only bec there might be an aspect to where they say we’re going to South Korea, right? So there’s an aspect where just boots on the ground that affects but if you look at South Korea the Presbyterian church has been very successful there. What’s that about? Well, I don’t fully So, if I think of Eastern cultures, right, they’re very So, like in I think the PCA its best growth has been in California with Asian immigrants.

It does really well in the southeast. In the southeast as well. Like the sophisticated southeast. Like kind of the new urban southeast and California where they say they thrive. So I think they’ve done well in Eastern context. Kind of interesting. Lutheranism has done very good in Africa. That’s probably been our stomping grounds. South America is going to be mostly the Roman Catholic Church. And then Pentecostals and Pentecostals they’re and they’re woven within Africa as well. The Pentecostals I have no idea what their effects on the east have been. And then Baptist I don’t know. Baptist at least over the last 40 years in America and especially in the south that’s been its big stomping ground. So, and Baptists have done great everywhere. It used to be there was sort of a fundamentalist expression of baptistic thought that was easy to export to places emerging from colonialism as the internet has made its way there. The fundamentalist version of baptistic thought has not done as well. But my understanding is the Baptists pivoted especially like the Southern Baptists, their mission organization has had remarkable success in Latin America and Africa and it does not look like the kind of Africa inland mission suit and tie sweaty towel kind of fundamentalism of the mid 20th century. I think those groups are doing pretty well also.

So there are certain nuances that make it more accessible to certain groups of people. So for the Lutheran church, your view is we don’t have a good elevator pitch and we’ll over complicate things too quickly for people that are looking just saying like you said, I punched my wife. My life’s kind of a wreck. I’m looking for some kind of answer on how to piece this together. Are there any divine answers that speak to me here? And you’re saying we over complicate and we go well let me teach you about the ten commandments and teach you about natural law and let me let’s talk about the two natures of Christ or let’s talk about historical inversions of Christianity that we’ve reacted positively against we move too quickly to that is what you’re saying from your view well here’s another downside of that and every group suffers from this to some degree dude aptitude is a thing I wish it weren’t I wish everybody just had the exact same skill set. So this uncomfortable reality wouldn’t exist. But the truth is I have friends in the educational scientific community. I have friends who have remarkable high-profile science jobs and I hate it. But I think they might just be smarter than me. Not like they studied harder. I study hard. Not like they read more. I read a lot. Not like they had better teachers. I had very good teachers. My teachers didn’t fail me. They’re smart. Like their brain holds a little more knowledge at once in their cache. They can spread it out on a slightly larger dimensioned mental workbench and they can work with more pieces at once to recognize patterns and solve problems. My workbench is pretty good. It’s got decent dimensions, but it’s not the extra-large size that some of my friends have. Their mind palace, what they can hold, what they can do, what they can process, what they can recall in real time. All those measurements of sharpness, they’re just better than me.

I’d rather be better than them. But hey, they win on this one, right? We do our best with what we have. Okay. Okay. Well, there are other people I interact with where I’m like feeling impatient as we talk. What are you doing? I used to interact with some people and I’d be like, “This is a character issue. Why are you being like this?” But then I met people way smarter than me and I realized, “Oh, this is what they must feel like with me.” no, this person is an absolute giant. They’re 68 and made a muscle and could dunk a basketball when they were in sixth grade. But academically they’re, average. That’s what their brain can do. And so you go around and you look at these traditions, right, with a an okay brain on in your own head. You go and you start looking at this and you realize, okay, some of these ideas require a certain threshold. And you can teach it, but some of it just requires a certain type of mind palace, a certain size of workbench, and it’s not going to make sense. You can talk with some people about double predestination, the sovereignty of God, the infinitude of God and how that interacts with the linear nature of humanity and how much we can know at any given time and volition. And some people are like, “Yeah, no problem. Give me more.” and they can sort out things that someone else is going to look at and they’re just going to look at it and say, “Okay, so God just he just double picks.” Well, okay, maybe. But look at what these guys wrote and look at like look at this text and consider this and Democritus and Plato like think about what they wrote. And if you look at like this has actually been their eyes are glazed over and they’re like okay so God just sends some people to hell and some people to heaven and he just picks a unpopular opinion here but is it possible that there are some theological ideas that I just lack the raw aptitude to play in that sandbox and kind of like that you know what Peter principle or whatever eventually I get promoted into one conversation above of what I can probably actually contribute to.

I went to a good seminary with very talented professors and advisers who you’ve heard of. It was hard for me as a young man to accept. You have talent. I don’t like I thought I’d be you. I’m not going to be you. I can’t do what you try doing an interview based podcast where that’s constantly thrust in front of you. You’re like, man, like this is really beautiful. I’m not going to be able to rearticulate it to the next guy. I can relate. Okay. So, we go back to these five internally cohesive things, right? Question on that. So, and this maybe this is even gesturing towards where you’re going, but so how do you as a church body make sure that you keep all of the complexity in tow that allows you not to steer into heterodox or heretical movements. And that takes your high academics having a certain level of systematics, having a certain level of poetic and typology, and weaving in through scripture. So that needs to be there and that needs to stay there. But at the same point, while keeping the church rigid on those areas so it doesn’t misstep also being able to communicate then to the lower to the people that don’t have as much aptitude and it’s like but here’s what you need to understand. We don’t want you to say that Jesus was the first of you know the son of God was the first of all of creation, right? We don’t want you to make that misstep, but as long as you don’t make that misstep, maybe we don’t need to like spend a couple weeks like unpacking the Athanasian Creed. Maybe we’ll have you say it once and just kind of trust. So how do you keep those things in tow? Because it seems like as you’re explaining this, certain denominations will move into what we would call heterodoxy, but they’re much more capable of articulating to the guy that’s in prison because he punched his wife and he’s just trying to kind of figure out, is there a way for me to be forgiven and is there a way that God’s going to help me pull this together? That’s what they’re looking for. How do you But then they might lose what you know the Book of Concord and the things that we would up and say like well this is great systematics that allows us not to fall in heterodoxy. How do those things stay in tow? Can they stay in tow?

This is what I loved about my tradition when I was a kid in the ‘9s and in the 2000s. I was not born evangelical free church. My family is we’re Vikings who raided the Scottish people. We’re Vikings who raided the Irish people. And then eventually our family ended up in England. And then eventually my granddaddy got burned by James I. I don’t think you needed to be burned, but in fairness, James was right theologically on the issue in question, and my granddaddy was wrong. And my family joined Roger Williams in Rhode Island. So, there’s my heritage. That’s not Evangelical Free Church. I picked it as a young man because without being able to put words to it like you just did, I sensed they could answer that question. I felt like their system was solid. I don’t know if it is anymore. The EFCA is kind of in a we’ll see pattern. Theological liberalism isn’t their problem.

I think strategy is the problem. I think like so many Christian denominations and not knowing what to do in the age of the internet is the problem. And it’s the biggest epoch shift, the fastest in the history of humankind. We can extend a little bit of grace to Christian groups if they don’t know exactly what to do. And if it takes a minute to solve the riddle, no one knows what to do. Especially like if you don’t have principles, it’s easy. If you’re trying to be principled, this has been very hard. Then I don’t think anybody’s going to look back on the last 20 years and be like that’s when we nailed it.

This has put the church to the test and I think it’s going to continue to put the church to the test. Maybe more on that later. So I picked the Evangelical Free Church because I think I thought they did that well. I thought it was a tradition and maybe still is that heavily idealized the life of the mind but also idealized sincere salt of the earth faithfulness. So there were two very obvious paths in the same congregation. We’re going to teach the text. We’re going to teach it hard. But my buddy who I make a podcast with, he’s got this graph for how he does videos. He makes very complicated videos about very complicated things, but he does them very understandably. He’s like, “All right, well, where we want to what we want to do is we want to start our video very accessible.” And then for a minute, we’re going to go all the way into the formulas and the deep divey super hard stuff. And then we’re going to come back out to real accessible. And we might go way into the deep divey hard stuff again for a minute, but we’re going to end in principles, first principles, simple stuff everybody can get. He’s wildly successful with this. His model is kind of what my tradition was when it was the fastest growing denomination in the country for 20 years.

It found this lovely balance. It found this lovely verbiage. It took something as large and complex as the Book of Concord or the Book of Common Prayer and said, “Those are great. Here’s 10 points. These 10 points have no there’s no bonus point. There’s no extra thing here that’s like our little pet fight.” We are going to write the broadest biblically orthodox statement of faith with the fewest words possible. And critics are going to look at it and be like, well, somebody could be a mill or dispensational at your church. Because those are not essential beliefs. They’re important, but they’re not essential. So the system was built to give all the room in the world for the intellectually curious high aptitude person who wants to explore the entire history of the Christian faith and dive deep into theology and all the room in the world as well for the person who can hold 10 points in a statement of faith remember the Lord’s prayer and the creeds great and everybody functioned together and missions worked very well and catechizing of young people went great. Scandalfree, rich, thick, creamy, center cut, life of the mind, evangelicalism. Was there inner fighting?

The Evangelical Free Church: Health, Drift, and Institutional Fragility

Not a lot. No. There were a couple characters who came along and kind of wanted to modernize things a little bit. It’s kind of slick there for a minute here or there, but nah, that didn’t really that kind of came and went pretty fast. The drift of my group. I was going to ask what was the issue because an issue finally came, right? It’s they the click economy was the issue. So, trying to make just absolute rockstar pastors was a high value. So, they had a great seminary, Trinity Evangelical Divinity School. They do not have it anymore. As we’re recording this a month ago, it went away. It’s absorbed or moved or the verb keeps changing to Canada.

So, I don’t know. We’re not crazy about it. Straight up, I like the EFCA. I’m not trying to pick a fight with my friends and my brothers there, but no, it’s a hard cell to be like, we think the future of the Evangelical Free Church of America is to move our seminary to Canada. It’s just not going to hit right for all of us who went there. And who believe in this tradition. That’s a place where Lutheran have a huge advantage just institutionally. You’re so much more solidly grounded and entrenched. If you lost one of your seminaries, we’ll just go to the other one called Concordia. You’ll be fine. A Concordia goes down. We got three more where that came from, buddy.

It’s that’s awesome. We were more fragile. And the group still has a lot of members, a lot of churches. I think it still has a good future. But what happened though? Was it other than the seminary, was it did liberalism come in? Was it a worship style thing? What do you think led it from that epoch of health as you described it to levels of downfall? No, you caught me. For the first time in the conversation, I was not talking to you. I apologize. I It’s true. I caught myself being like, “Ah, my friends are going to see this and I care about these people and I wasn’t talking to you.” that’s a rookie mistake. I apologize. Fair question. Liberalism, no. I do think maybe they flirted with it. Like everybody tried on a little bit of li liberalism.

No women pastors, right? No. -. But I think a lot of groups kind of just tried on theological lightly theological liberalism pants a little bit here and there. Let’s just see how it feels. See if this is kind of where things are going. I think the accusations against the FCA of that are vastly exaggerated. I would challenge people to go around to evangelical free churches and find all of this liberalism. I think what you might find in the weaker expressions of the tradition is just softness just kind of I call it EFCA beige.

It’s just the weakest expressions of it are very conference centery and lanyard and beige and what are we doing here kind of safe. The most robust expressions, which I’d like to think is still the majority, are still life of the Christian mind factories that do a wonderful job of incorporating a whole bunch of people with a whole bunch of different levels of giftedness and a whole bunch of different things and really modeling the body of Christ really well with outward-looking effectiveness. The ones that aren’t so effective. Just navel-gazing. Like what happens to evangelical churches, right? You start looking at the metrics, you start looking at the numbers.

Diagnosing the Weak Evangelical Church: A Consultant’s Method

Is it like liturgy things? Is it not talking about tough subjects or like what does that beige look like? It’s just nothing. It’s okay. Okay. So, like if I went to one of those churches and I did what you do, got my camera and they kind of walk me around and I go to the Sunday service. Like what are the things where I’m fidgety? You’re with me and you would say I’m sweaty. I’m getting sweaty. Come on, man. I brought this on myself. Okay, I won’t just say EFCA. I will say a weak stick evangelical church. This is what you’re going to see. And sometimes well before this interview sometimes churches would invite me in to give feedback and try to help them. When I go to churches and consult for free I don’t charge money for things like that. But when I go in I meet with elders and pastors and they’re like why isn’t this working? What you know what do you think? One of the things I’ll do is I’ll look at their last five worship services. Just stream it or whatever and I’ll go and look and I chart it in terms of how much time is spent on each thing for an evangelical church. This is where you catechize. This is where you teach. This is where you make your people. There aren’t a lot of other points of contact during the week. Ideally they are, but how many people are showing up for a Sunday night service or a midweek Bible study at this point in history? Not many. How many people are reading your newsletter or your little pastor midweek encouragement video? Not many. So Sunday service is where it’s at. That’s the bed my tradition has made. Okay. What do you use your service on? Well, let’s say you’ve got a 70-minute service. Okay. I’ll go through and I’ll chart that. All right. You guys spent 11 minutes talking about the life of the church, announcements, whether or not you pick up chairs, where did the chairs get stacked, what color are the chairs, don’t leave anything on the chairs. Lot about chairs. You talk a lot about scheduling things that you easily could have just communicated in writing or on the screen. You could just teach your people, you just need to know this. Tons of announcing, way too much announcing. So maybe 10 minutes goes to that kind of thing. Then you talk then you know a lot of times I’ll find they spend a lot of time talking about what they’re about to do.

Like a lot of just splurge about with phrases that play like in this place prayers that meander and are not written in advance. And so I’ll go through and I’ll break that down. Like here was your just kind of worship service word salad. It was about five minutes of your service was worship service. Like what even is this? There’s no you can’t even name what this word glob was. It was just things someone I don’t know who they are said in between things. Here’s how much time was wasted on transitions. Rhonda got done making announcements about chairs and now it’s time for Ted to come up and make a different announcement about chairs. But Ted’s not up there when Rhonda gets done. So, we have to have a minute of now Ted’s walking up there. It’s just stuff like that just isn’t tight. So, you add up all of that front end doesn’t teach, doesn’t do anything bloat. And in so many of this style of church, it’s just lack of tightness that burns a third of the service on nothing.

Nothing. And then here’s what you see when that’s going on. The women in the service know how hard it is to do church. They’re compassionate and empathetic and that is a gift from God. And that mentality is needed or these churches would immediately implode. So their eyebrows are up in the middle out of respect and they stay engaged and lean forward. Like Ted walking up there in silence to talk about more chairs is the most interesting thing cuz they’re supporting Ted cuz they’re nice women. The dudes, their arms are folded, their body language is closed, they’re grumpy at how sloppy this is.

Okay. Okay. So many churches that I give feedback on, you get that. Then we get into the actual substance. Okay. What is that in an evangelical church where you’re going to have a couple of prayers? You used to have Bible readings. I’m not seeing that as much anymore really. It’s just lumped in with the sermon. You’re not seeing that. You’ll see kind of vague Bible quoting or referencing during the singing in some of these weaker evangelical churches. Read the Old Testament. Read the New Testament. That’s what I recommend. Just read it. People need to hear it. They’re not getting it anywhere else. Where else would they get it? Even if they don’t listen, you’re teaching them that reading from the whole of scripture is very important. Kids watch their dad listen to the reading of the word. That’s very important. But what you get with the prayer and the music time in I’m only talking about the weaker expressions here, right? I get to come back and talk about the good ones, right?

You can do that. Absolutely. The songs aren’t about anything. They are ostensibly about Jesus or something, but they’re not about Jesus. Just Jesus is kind of the idea of the song and anxiety. So many of these songs just have this undercurrent of I’m anxious about things because of my phone. I guess probably my phone. And somehow Jesus makes me feel safe. Okay. So, I go to churches where they sing songs like that and you look at the ladies. Maybe they’re being supportive. Maybe that’s really their lived experience and it’s encouraging for some of the ladies. Some ladies will engage, some are bored. Dads, one hand here, one hand here, right over their crotch. Look around. Look around. Next time you’re there, you’ll see it. If the music is a disaster and needs to be drastically changed, every dude will have two hands over his crotch and he’ll be singing like this because it means nothing. He’s not singing timeless truths. He’s not singing anything that’s familiar to his lived experience spiritually. He is being made to perform a thing to support his wife and look busy so that it can feel like we did something at church and dude sees right through it.

What do I hear from churches like this when I interview the elders? What do they always tell me? Our men. They’re just not We need our men to step up. Okay, well, I think I know what’s I’m going to see tomorrow when I look at your service. It’s going to be 40 minutes of deeply, not the intellect informs the emotion worship, which that works on me. We sing the profound timeless truths of the church and the word of God. That’ll get me like I’ll turn mushy in church when we do that. And when I hear, especially my brothers singing it hard too, that’ll get me. That’s powerful. That shouldn’t be able to happen and it happens because it’s true and it’s real. But we sing drivel, the checkout is contagious and dudes especially just they can barely hide their revulsion at it. Talk about a vibe killer for church. And some evangelical churches kind of trade on vibe like this is supposed to be what you’re best at and you can’t see what’s happening. Come on.

So that’s rough. And then you get drivel-speak in between just people, they didn’t prepare anything. They just said something vaguely Christian. Maybe it’s orthodox but just like some stuff in between all the songs. It’s just poison. It’s awful. God, we feel you working in this place. And dude, that’s better than a lot of it. That’s not good. Don’t get me wrong. Way you just said didn’t move the needle for me, but it’s worse than that. And it just shouldn’t happen. And look, there are systems that would say that are internally cohesive where they’re hermeneutic works and they could say, we ordain women and women lead in our church. Okay, cool. I get that these traditions exist. I get how they get there. We can get along. We can have fellowship. Cool. It’s the churches that don’t ordain women or have women teach in church, but they’ll just have women who did not prepare catechize and teach with I just need to think of something real quick while the music is playing.

Not internally consistent is your point. It’s not internally consistent. So like if you want to go that route, okay, cool. Go that route. That those are not my convictions, but I get it. Go that route. It’s the churches that theoretically don’t. They wouldn’t have women elders. They wouldn’t have women teachers, but they do that. That’s a mixed message. That’s confusing from a purely church consult is this working or not perspective. No theological judgment at all. That isn’t a good idea. That’s confusing to your people. It’s particularly confusing to your men who every evangelical church laments are not engaged enough. Okay.

What’s the message look like? The sermon. Huh? Okay. So you get to the sermon and again I’m talking about the ones that aren’t working and we’re going to talk about the ones that are working, right? Okay. In the ones that aren’t working, the sermons are driven you get a lot of insecurity in the sermon and you get a lot of therapy from someone who has no training in therapy. Why? Because therapy gets clicks. Felt needs get clicks on the internet. The internet has come full circle and now informs what happens in the real world. We take our cues from it. And the data collection is strong enough in churches that you can figure out what plays and what doesn’t. It used to be that what would preach for an ill-prepared pastor, maybe illprepared, just illrained, maybe ill-prepared, like got busy this week and didn’t write anything. It used to be that what would play would be just a sweaty, fiery sermon about the perils of sin and overcoming temptation with the help of the Holy Spirit, devoting our lives to Christ. And if you are here and you’ve not given your life to the Lord, what are you waiting for? Today is the day. And everybody would be like, I don’t think he wrote a sermon this week. But you know what?

That resonates. That’s what the Bible says. Cool, man. Right on. Now, the thing that is the default, I’m not very well prepared for the job or I’m not very well prepared for this sermon this week cuz I just didn’t get to it. Is are you anxious? Do you feel bad? Do you worry about money? Do you struggle with thinking, the other ladies are prettier? Do you struggle with just feeling like you can’t get ahead? Your co-workers frustrate you. Well, Jesus says not to be anxious, by all things prayer and petition. I think that’s in the Bible, guys. I think I read that somewhere. So, let’s focus on that.

It just every message used to boil down to sin is bad. Depend on God. Turn from your sin. Repent. If you’re not a Christian yet, become a Christian. Now, the default setting overwhelmingly it’s not your fault. Anxiety is not sin. It’s just like we’re all just very sad. And Jesus somehow vaguely can help you with your anxious sadness. Why do you think that is? Let me Why do you think that is? I well let me give you a couple. I do like the internet feedback loop. Also if the music we listen to is always focused on that right that’s going to form the way we think of Christianity. So if we’re if we are in our service and then outside of our service listening to mostly these kind of therapeutic theism this if that’s the mantra then we’re going to say well that must be what Christianity is for. And when I’m driving in my car or whatever and I’m playing this music, I’m kind of forcing myself to have these types of emotions which are probably not natural if that music’s not forcing me into this like, I guess I do feel really low, don’t I? To whereas if I’m just like at the gym, with the kids, at work, running my account books, whatever, if I’m doing those things, I’m not actually thinking about how low I feel. I’m just doing things. But so I’ve naturally formed that. And then also I’ve heard this I don’t know how this works in the evangelical world but I think that if you were to go back I know if you were to go back 30 40 years it would or at least 50 years both in the Catholic church and in the Lutheran church it was very much understood like I’ve got this masculine son he should go to seminary and now if you look at it my friends that were kind of alphas type A individuals like that’s nice that we have pastors but like I’m going to go be an accountant or I’m going to go be an engineer. I’m going to get a profession that provides for my family.

Hustle culture one. And who’s left then is people that are more emotive, a little bit less alpha. So if that’s then the makeup of people that are leading service, depending on where you’re going at, if it’s a pastor in the Lutheran church, priest in the Catholic church, a worship leader, etc. in more of an evangelical church, they might be more skewed towards that type of demographic and less towards the people that are sitting in the audience that are actually doing those kind of normal jobs and maybe have more of like an alpha personality where they’re saying, “This doesn’t resonate with me. I don’t feel all that low.” whatever. Speak to me about masculine things like sin or spiritual warfare or the forgiveness of Christ or maybe some. So, that’s a couple anecdotes.

Wow. Oh, it’s a good day when you’re talking about something that you think about a lot and somebody points out a pattern that you haven’t seen yet. That’s a good observation. And it is a little different than evangelicalism because I’m not sure culturally for us it was a deal where somebody demonstrates these assertive leadership traits like somebody’s a young leader of men, that guy’s got to go to seminary. I ran into a lot of super solid guys like that in seminary and meet a lot of guys like that who went to seminary, but I don’t sense the natural cultural current toward that in evangelicalism. I’ve seen more of a cultural current in evangelicalism with you. The ideal young Christian is very sensitive. They mean it. The ideal Christian young man. They mean it when they sing and they’ll even like gesticulate in some way so that they mean it. I’m not saying they’re being performative. Surely some are. Surely some are not. Surely I have been.

But the ideal Christian is very sensitive in kind of that youth group culture that I grew up in. And not aggressive, but very in control of any assertive impulse. Which I think is good because I’ve met some pretty weird alpha pastors who are just about the most off-putting people I’ve ever met in my life. Like to some degree the gentleness of Christ probably ought to come through in the people who shepherd churches. But growing up, I sense kind of an over idealization of the kind of guy who would go on a youth retreat and just grab a guitar and go over in a corner and start playing Runaway Train by Soul Asylum, real sensitive like. And then some girls come over and he just keeps playing and then he looks up and he’s like, “Oh, I didn’t see you there. I could finish the song if you wanted.” And then he finishes the song and all the girls are like, “Oh.” And all the guys are on the other side of the room like, “We will beat him later.” like that.

I that was kind of the ideal. The exception to that who I really came to admire were the guys who were just a little more even keel and just meant it and didn’t really bend the knee of the performative thing. You’re socially smart. You can tell pe when people are faced with that fork in the road. Do this in a way where people will notice. Do this in a way that it’s just natural and sincere. And you know people in your life who when faced with that decision, they just tend to pick natural and sincere and you respect them for it.

A bunch of those guys went on to seminary as well from my tradition and they’ve all crushed it. Like every single dude I know like that who I, met as a young man or who I saw go through youth ministry. They’re just massively effective and they’re the ones leading the kinds of churches that we’re going to get that I think are going really well that we’re going to get to. Bottom line on the churches that I don’t think are going well and the churches that I think definitely exist, people who are not, one of the five circles that is evangelical, they look at these churches and typify all of evangelical Christianity based on these churches that are ineffective. I don’t think it’s at all fair or accurate. But I’m also not going to come on your podcast and be like, “What? That doesn’t exist.” No, it does. It’s a problem. Just like you would say this version of Lutherism is stupid over here. They’re missing the point. They don’t understand the richness of the tradition. They don’t even get what it is to be Lutheran. They make us all look bad. You would freely criticize that. So I will do with dumb versions of evangelicalism.

So when I do these evaluations, I’ll come back and I’ll have a little pie chart for elders or pastor. I’ll show them the pie chart. I’ll be like, “This is a bloat chart. This is a detailed like to the 5-second increment breakdown of what was substantive biblical teaching historic Christianity and what was bloat and I will reveal the chart and they will gasp. Your worship service is your flagship of your church. The thing that teaches the hardest, your most important thing. I had 11% substance. In other words, you could have done all of this in 14 minutes. Well, we’ll debate it for a little while, but ultimately, generally the question will then get asked, well, you what do you think? What should we do? Okay, here’s here’s what you should do. And what I recommend is now what I will tell you quality evangelical churches are doing all over the country with massive effectiveness. Okay, let’s take a quick pause and then jump into that.

All right. Sir Bennett says we’re back. So, the positive side. Thank you for remembering. I would have been sad and lost all my friends. You didn’t remind me right beforehand. I don’t remember that. Per se. May or may not have happened. Okay. The positive side. The negative side just has a lot of bloat. It’s not that it’s bad. It’s just you get done, you feel like nothing happened. When you drink a caffeine-free Coke Zero, it’s like that at some point there’s just nothing happened and none of the things that you feel when you consume a Coca-Cola occur when you drink a caffeine-free Coke Zero.

And the aspart is not enough to kill you tomorrow, but like it’ll get you make you dumb. So it’s not like it’s just rank heresy or anything but when people from more robust traditions come and check that out they find it hollow and disappointing and sometimes we’ll make sweeping judgments about the entire movement and this is flaky and dumb. Okay so you guys are good at your elevator pitch for becoming a Christian but what is becoming a Christian? And it’s that and you will hear this hyphenated word all the time hollowed out.

The “Hollowed Out” Critique, Answered

The Lutheran use it on us because of this expression of the tradition. The reformed types use it on us. The Orthodox, the Catholics push that button all the time. And to those other four of the five traditions that I think are internally cohesive, I would say yes. When you look at the weakest, most floundering expression of our thing, your criticism is fair. That is hollowed out. You not only are you losing all tethering with the historic church and almost everything good that every Christian who lived before us thought of or said or articulated or languaged, not only you losing the rhythms of the church, not only losing contact with the creeds, not only you losing contact with great Christian art, but you’re not even really getting the things that evangelicalism has typically had as kind of its superpower. So it’s not great. They don’t write their prayers. So you never have meaningful prayer. Like somebody gets up, they haven’t thought of what they’re going to say. They use the word just 75 times in 150-word prayer and they say some things and if three minutes have passed, that was a prayer.

Deep Water Evangelicalism: The Quietly Thriving Model

Why not just write something or read something that somebody else wrote and you don’t even have to write anything? That would be great. It’s weak. I concede. I agree. It isn’t terribly effective. That’s not the future of the church. Nature is going to cull that expression of the tradition. No one needs to worry about it. It’s not winning. It’s not going to win. It doesn’t have legs. The people in those traditions feel it. I’m in those churches. I’m talking with people. They don’t want to leave their church. You don’t want to leave your church. You don’t want to leave your church if something goes wrong. You love these people, you’ve been there for a while. It’s hard to leave a church, like you want to try to make it better, you want to fix it. Well, sometimes you get so far down the rabbit hole that it’s hard to fix. And these churches will either reform or they will go away. But there is there’s just no demand for it. It doesn’t have staying power. What does have staying power and what in the 2020s has been the one group that has demonstrated consistent growth is deep water evangelicalism. Okay, this is what that looks like. You’ve got that kind of EFCA, evangelical free church style statement of faith. It isn’t a confession. It isn’t a book of common prayer. It’s short. It’s understandable. It makes sense to everybody who’s there and all members are going to agree to some sort of phraseology like live in harmony with. So it leaves room for doubt growth reading traditions other than our own. But what you’re signing up for here is that this is what we believe and it’s very agreeable because you’re basically signing up for the creeds which don’t have soteriology. So it’s the creeds on the nature of God stuff and the basics of the facts of the history of the church and it’s Pauline’s soteriology.

That’s it. There will be an end time. Like our statement of faith it’s just basically the end of the Olivet discourse like those last parables at the end that kind of tell the disciples what to do with what Jesus is saying like keep enough oil in the lamp and be ready might be a long time might be quick live like it could happen tomorrow pace yourself like it could be your whole life okay so there’s more comfortability with we can agree to disagree on x- topics Yes. Not 1 through 10, but 11 through 20. That can be an internal conversation that continues within our church body.

And that works great in these kind of very mobilized life of the mind evangelical churches because now you don’t spend all of that time trying to get uniformity on points 11 to 20. Or 21 to 100. Those can just be points of enthusiasm and excitement and growth and we’re going to work on that this semester. We’re going to cover, this realm of topics. You can be patient. You can just gradually work those through those things. But you treat them all as an outflow of kind of what the creeds did in the early church, but they didn’t touch on salvation because salvation was just part and parcel with be a part of the church. Obviously that didn’t age with clarity through the high middle ages and it’s why we had a reformation.

So you build out of that you invite people to live in harmony with that. The best evangelical churches are cheap word maybe overused but it’s a good word missional. They’re like we will atrophy like a shark that doesn’t swim. We will atrophy if we do not go make disciples. Now, the best expressions of evangelicalism are not just making Christians, they’re making disciples. So, if I go and talk with people at a church or I have a meal with a pastor and they’re letting me kind of probe and try to help, even if it’s a little bit painful, a question I will always ask is, “Tell me about the last time you saw an individual who was an adult, well educated, with no crisis, not going through a divorce, not addicted to anything, not in recovery, doing well at life, socially competent, emotionally competent, intellectually competent who was an atheist non-Christian and they became a Christian through the ministry of your church and now they lead your church.

Well, these really healthy evangelical churches I’m telling you about are like, “Oh, there are so many. Okay, let me tell you about this couple.” And it’s like they have to pick which story they think would be the most fun to tell today. Churches like the ones I described that aren’t doing very well. Never. Zero. None. That church cannot win the kind of people who could lead their church. They can’t flip Sauls to Paul’s. Even though I know, that’s kind of a cheap way of putting it, but I know what you mean. But you know what I mean. They’re just not built for it. What’s happening in the service is just so off-putting that kind of competent non-believer looks at it and is like what would I even do here?

This isn’t serious. It’s not serious. But there’s this whole other uncelebrated consistently like 90% of these churches are midsized. They’re 100 to 300. It just tends to be where they land because they get to 305 and they just mitosis. Go make another one that’s 100 to 300. Then that one makes another one that’s 100 to 300. So nobody makes videos about these churches. Nobody celebrates this model and gets all excited and they don’t get book contracts and they’re not on all the shows. They are just faithful and steady and the numbers say they’re the ones who are consistently in the black making new Christians. Now, these kind of evangelical churches with almost exclusively they pick books of the Bible and teach straight through them. The hard stuff, the weird stuff, the things that aren’t going to play well culturally, they just teach it. They treat you like they’re intelligent, but they follow my buddy’s model for video making. Start accessible. This is the hard stuff. Aspire to it if you don’t understand it. Good art and deep thought is meant to push you when you don’t get it. Don’t get mad. Don’t get defensive. Learn how to do this. Also, let’s come back down to here and let’s make sure we just made this make sense. Maybe here’s a little bit more of that. Bottom line is here. Questions for further consideration are here. Boom, it’s good. A lot of them are even starting to manuscript. I’m seeing sermons in churches like this that are 17 minutes long, 20 minutes long, wall-to-wall depth. I would give these sermons, the church I go to, I would give it a 0% bloat score on their sermons. There is not a moment of bloat, but it also doesn’t feel like wall of words. I said Christian things toward you there. I did it. I said them. Who cares how you received it?

There’s a bunch of churches like this that get no press. And the thing about it is I’m sorry, I still have water on my beard. Thank you for the water though. That’s one of the values for beer. I didn’t mean to leave it there. It’s long-term hydration. They were like 10 minutes. Everybody like a Ron Swanson. Just please get the Please. I finally did. These churches get no press. They’re they constantly just fall to the ground and die so a new thing can grow again and again. But in a click economy, that’s stupid. Get those numbers up. That’s how you get critical mass for mega money and movements. And these churches don’t do that because what they’re trying to build, which is just A+ historic Protestant Orthodox Evangelical Christians who go out and do kingdom stuff and redemptive things. They’ve figured out that the returns diminish at a certain point other than in very exceptional situations.

There’s always there are mega churches. What’s the service look like? Okay. The ones that I like the most have a thick bulletin because you have to pay attention to what’s going on. Participatory doesn’t mean we’re going to sing some songs and you’re going to stand for an uncomfortably long amount of time and look into it. Participation means we will read scripture together. We will pray together. We will confess together. The best ones of these that I’m seeing look like an Anglo-Catholic service with evangelical theology. They look like an LCMS service. Like a more western Catholic looking expression of LCMS type service. They look like a free Lutheran worship service. The most of the language of communion would sound pretty much like what you would expect it to sound like. Three or four liturgical elements that maybe happen cyclically and rhythm for the table. More evangelical churches like this are doing communion every other week or every week as opposed to kind of making a point of we only do this once a month. Why do evangelical churches do that? Well, it’s to counter move you.

It’s to say no, it’s not that important. We do. No, it’s not that. No, it’s not that. No, they’re not saying no, it’s not that important. What they’re saying is not as important as we don’t come to the table to receive the forgiveness of our sins. Here, we’ll show you. Would we make it every fourth week if we thought we had to do this to keep receiving forgiveness of our sins? Checkmate, Lutheran. Well, so it’s kind of less important. Kind in that way. It’s fair. It’s fair, but you’re cutting off your noses by your own face at that point.

Take communion. It’s reactionary and it’s negative theology and we’re all reacting to each other. And probably we’re all overreacting to each other a little bit. And probably that’s why I want to make the videos because I’d like us to just like each other more, be less threatened by each other, and have fewer elements of our service and our practice be based on trying not to be you. I’d like to be more like you in a lot of ways. And listen to what I’m describing with these services. They’ve got a lot of the elements that are the best stuff about your tradition. So, these services that I’m seeing, there’s no dinking around on the front end. You’re literate. You can figure out some life of the church stuff on your own. You come in, singing is concise on the front end. In evangelical churches that maybe aren’t my favorite, the average song is maybe 9 to 12 minutes.

You repeat the bridge a lot until people feel it cuz the sacrament in that very low evangelical church is feeling things. If people aren’t feeling things, you got to sing it longer. People need to feel things. That’s how we know God is here and real. And that’s how we that’s the mechanism by which we receive grace, feeling things while singing. It’s a bad sacrament. It’s a fake sacrament. It’s not a good idea. It’s not for all the reasons I just said, it doesn’t work. Well, but there’s this other thread that is much more interested in just voluminous amounts of content, the rich stuff packed into the thing. If some of it happens faster than you can get, that’s fine. It’s in there. You heard it every week for 50 years. It’s in there. You’ll get Alzheimer’s someday and you’ll be repeating this liturgy without the ability to complete a sentence other than the things that you have heard again and again faithfully from the faith that was handed down to us. It sounds like I’m describing Anglicanism. It sounds like I’m describing Lutheranism. It sounds like I’m describing Catholicism. But this is happening within evangelicalism as well. And it will happen more increasingly. What you’re going to see are tight services, shorter in length, where emotion happens as an outflow of scripture and the best stuff that Christians in the past have written where the sermons are far less therapeutic and far more theological leading you right to the water and giving you one thing at the end. So, in light of God’s dealing with Israel and grafting in the Gentiles in Romans 11 in a passage that seems to have no application to you, wait. Think about the character of God here. Think about his superintendence over history. Think about the care that went into this plan. That’s enough.

We don’t need 40 minutes of application about our anxiety. You know what makes me feel less anxious? There’s a God who superintended a plan for redemption of all of humankind that had to start with one sample size people group who God would not then wad up and throw away, but that he would make a new and expanded family of faith and that he would be so comfortable in his own skin that he’d be like, “Yeah, this is exactly what I did and how I did it.” And I’m proud of it and it’s a good plan and there is nothing wrong with how I did it before and there’s nothing wrong with how I do it now and I want you to know my plan because you’re in it. Here it is. Oh, that’s nourishment to my soul.

Wonderful. Because it’s the character of God. It’s the grace of God. It’s the plan of God. So, I’m seeing these churches who the metaphor I always use is they’re trusting the club to do the work. You remember when you learned to play golf and you went out and hacked like Charles Barkley? And then some friend came along and put a hand on your shoulder and like that club cost 400 bucks, man. I’m letting you use my club. It just does it just hit the ball. It you’ll see it’ll go and you’re like okay and you just swing through the ball and you didn’t do anything and it’s the best ball you’ve ever hit. Let the club do the work.

Let the historic church, let the text, let the Holy Spirit through those things that we know he works through do the work. Evangelicals used to understand this. Evangelicals kind of forgot this, but there’s more than a remnant and evangelicalism is getting that again. You’re just not going to see articles about it. So, one area I’m interested in this is because this is to your point, this is kind of foreign from the way our Lutheran minds work, right? So, you say we got our 10 articles, but we don’t have 10 through 24, whatever it is, right? So, I’ll give you kind of an anecdote, and it’s an anecdote, right? So we had a he was an EV free pastor. So I don’t know what’s the EM what’s the other one? The that the body the church body you were part of. So the EFCA EFC is EV free.

So Evangelical Free Church of America is the name of the denomination formed by Norwegian and Swedish Pietist Lutheran Free Churchers. Okay. And that’s in Minnesota and Missouri and joined forces in the 20th century. Evangelical Free Church of America. The nickname, especially outside the Evangelical Free Church of America, is EV Free. Within you’ll usually hear E-Free. They’re all the same thing. Gotcha. So, I’m saying it correctly as an outsider. It’s supposed to say EV. They’re all fine. It’s great. So, he was EV free. He was E-Free.

And so he joined the Lutheran church, which like I said, it’s anecdotal. You could tell stories about Lutherans that join,. So, but his story was he was a pastor, got interested in early church things. So, he started to think about the Eucharist in kind of a Lutheran lens. So, when he came to me, he was like, “Well, I think I’m going either Lutheran, Orthodox, or Catholic. Let’s talk.” Right. Not Anglican. That surprises me. That tends to be that tends to be the move. Maybe he mentioned Anglican. I can’t remember. I don’t think so. But so the sticking point for him was so he was I think like an associate and he would go to the senior and say okay I think there’s more to the Eucharist right I think it might be more like is etc and he said well I disagree and so but basically said but that’s fine like you can believe what the Lutheran believe on the Eucharist as being is but for me I don’t believe that but that’s fine like we can operate together.

Sure. So that would be the an example to where from my lens I’m thinking well of course that would divide you have to you would have to have the same sacramental understanding which would get back to you know the close communion and all of that but from your operating system you’re saying no we can agree to disagree on those details right so I’m just I’m kind of especially where it deals in such abstraction and going back to that issue of aptitude it have you ever played sports against a professional athlete? Like a pickup game or anything like that? Were you a professional athlete and I just didn’t know that about?

No. No. I could say cycling more recently, but back in back with baseball, I played against MLB players. Okay. I was not an MLB player, but I’ve batted against theating. Yes. I’ve faced major league pitching. It’s shocking. And I faced a bad major league pitcher and it was shocking. I’ve hit with high-level tennis players. You get to thinking you’re good because you beat your peers, and you play some tournaments and stuff. There’s just a next universe, like unfathomable pace on those serves. Just four serves with I might as well just face the opposite direction. I have as good a chance of returning that. So humbling. My goodness. And you really think you’re doing okay. There are just leagues to this stuff.

And part of the reason I am at peace with this is when you get into the Eucharist, you get into accidentals, universals, forms, Platonic thought, Aristotelian thought, what the scholastics gave us in terms of input on this, the Radbertus-Ratramnus debates of the 9th century and what they lend to this conversation. Dude, it’s hard. And the conversation itself just excludes, frankly, the majority of people. It’s incredibly hard. You’re dealing in incredibly complex levels of abstraction that I’m sure I don’t remotely fully understand myself despite going to school for this my whole life. Okay. If it’s that hard that even people who think the right thing can’t possibly articulate it, but what they are saying is within the boundaries of biblical orthodoxy, let’s just take communion together.

Like come on, good enough. If what we’re talking about, this is where it is. So, you brought it up earlier, but if somebody comes back with something that is quite simple, quite simple, it’s an easy one or a zero, it’s in every creed, is Jesus the first and greatest thing God ever made, who he then elevated to savior and lord and made one exception for a created being to say, “This created being, the firstborn of creation, should be worshiped.” Other than that, don’t worship any created thing. Or is Jesus God? I don’t care how many words or how much complexity you try to put into it. It is a simple one or a zero. There is a Christian position. There is a heretical position that should be slapped.

One is Arianism, one is Christianity. Okay. Well, that’s an easy dividing line. Jesus be able to communicate your church. Absolutely not. Good heavens. No. What’s not Christianity? Like the central assumption of the whole thing is that Jesus is God, Lord, Savior, God in the flesh, second person of the Trinity. He’s the Christ. He’s the Messiah. Nathanael’s confession at the beginning of Jesus’ ministry. Peter’s confession in the middle of Jesus’ ministry. Thomas’s confession, my Lord and my God, confirmed by physical touch at the end of Jesus’ ministry. This is nonnegotiable front to back scripturally and in church history. No, you can’t play games with that. I do not see the incredibly esoteric distinctions on how we talk about communion the same way even if nothing else than as a function of necessary aptitude to enter into the conversation. But that first one’s for if to have an actual debate on the divinity of Christ like that gets pretty complicated pretty quick. If you’ve got someone that’s going to press the issue of like well I think he was the first creator like cuz they might go to what Proverbs 8 and kind of use that as an explanation. So just stance.

The Ten-Minute Answer: Defending the Divinity of Christ

So it would complicated person. Okay. Say you have let’s say you just have a normal person like smart, competent, socially competent like a C student in school like I don’t know not the kind of person that you’d be like hey I want you to design rockets to send to space but not like some idiot or something just a swell guy and they’re like hey I met this person and they said Jesus isn’t God and they said that if you look at the original Greek you’ll see that’s all something that you know people made up to take control as kind of a conspiracy that earth is flat and some other stuff and well gosh pastor I’m really confused they pointed me to these verses how would you fix that in 10 minutes or less with that person? That’s right, I would probably go to the creeds as a beginning point and then back into the scriptures from there okay we know the creeds where would you go scripturally You don’t have to give me specifics,.

Philippians 2, is a good place. Okay. So, you got the specifics off the top of the head. That’s a agreed. John’s upper room discourse, with John 14:16, Genesis 1 and two. Agreed. So John 1, all the confessions of Christ in the Bible. Thomas’s confession. Paul’s greetings. Just like almost throwaway lines, Jesus is God in several epistles. The point is this. Neither of you have a Bible. Neither of us have a Bible in front of us. And I knew I would not be putting you on the spot on your podcast by asking you that question.

I knew you would just go, “Well, okay. I hadn’t thought about that for a minute. I guess this and this and Colossians 1 or Philippians 2. About. Do we just winged 10 ironclad biblical responses to that we could show to this hypothetical gentleman and just be like, “Brother, it’s right here.” And he’d fix his spectacles and look at it and be like, “All right, I knew that guy was full of crap. Thanks, pastor.” And it’s over. It’s a one or a zero. In the beginning was the word and the word was with God and the word was God. Well, I don’t know if that means Jesus. Okay, read the next 19 verses.

Oh, okay. It’s Jesus. This just ain’t hard. You have to be obstinate, obtuse, conspiracy theorist, internet dork in the year that we’re having this conversation to try to do the Jesus isn’t God nonsense. I know secret knowledge baloney that you hear. You are equipped on the spot with cameras rolling to deal with that off the top of your head. And if you had five minutes to just kind of quickly run it through and pop open a couple of your notes, you’d have quintupled the material. My point is I don’t think it is esoteric. I think it’s smoking gun crystal clear from scripture and the history of the church. It is also the definitional taxonomical dividing line and boundary condition for what is and is not historical Christianity. Christianity it’s got Christ in the name. It’s what is the Christ. Like even that people try to act like that isn’t part and parcel with being the son of God. Disciples who met Jesus like an hour earlier could figure that out in John one.

The scriptures proclaim it is they are one and the same. So what about the Eucharist? Cuz Lutheran would make the claim that the Eucharist would fall into that same category. John 6. I would go with John 6 100%. Now some wouldn’t to be fair. But you don’t read John 6 the way the Orthodox do or the Catholics do. I don’t know about the Orthodox. I can’t speak to that. I don’t know if I can fully speak to the Catholics, but I’ve heard like Bishop Barron, the way he would talk about John 6, I would talk about it that way.

That has not been as historically obvious. The two Catholic heavyweights I mentioned as late as the 9th century were still duking that out. And you could avoid John 6. You could go with you could go with is means is. You could go with the way that Paul explains it. What is it? 1 Corinthians 10 sec I forget but even John 6 there are a lot of other reasons in the immediate context that a reasonable reader could look at that and push back on the Catholic apologetic there and say well there are a lot of things being said in John 6 that would cause people to be like I’m out on this which is kind of the heart like the Catholics will look at that and say clearly he meant literally that’s how all these people understood it and that’s why they wanted to leave and there are Lutheran that don’t take that view to be fair. So that’s but I would fully say John 6.

I know those Lutherans. But I would go to John 6, especially when he turns to his disciple like he and I would go to John 6 as the opposite to counter people who would say that the evangelical position is purely memorialist. We think Jesus was great and we try to remember that from time to time. I’m sure there are Christians who think that. Maybe they just think that because it’s a very hard concept and evangelicalism doesn’t have the structures built into it to just sort of inflict it on you even if you don’t get it.

But I don’t know a lot of people who hold that view. But everybody in my circles evangelically would say in an evangelical context would say like, “No, this is very significant like a powerful significant efficacious maybe not in the same way you would mean it thing occurs when we do this. It is it is a symbol and it’s more than a symbol.” And I would look to John 6 for that. Jesus is talking about eating his flesh and drinking his blood. To me, I read that and I say, “Well, clearly he does not mean that literally in the sense that we think of literally because that doesn’t happen.” Think that physical act that the Romans accused the Christians of did not literally in the physical world literal sense in the way that if we like if we cut my hand right now and said, “Let’s Right.” Just I’m not down, man. I still have to finish all of this, too. It’d be wasteful.

And I guess because the ma the macro question is like so where because it seems like that’s where denominations will differ is like where do you draw those lines and from a Lutheran lens like that’s going to be an important line where it’s we have to draw it on the on we have to draw it further down from that but from EV3 you’re going to say well we can draw it to the left of that and then how come I have to be the left? Well that was a little rhetorical device there. So you’re the left and I’m the right. I see what you just did.

So that so as you kind of look at the landscape and you can say so where are people drawing the lines? Maybe we can even just say like so is would you say one of the problems with Lutheran is that we push too far and we make too many things on the left side of the line. I think you would have reformed further if the Ottomans hadn’t been knocking at the door. I love you. I think you’re great. That is my opinion. You are welcome to have a few opinions. We talked about it last night. What do you mean by that? I think the Swiss reformers reformed further because they did not have the military pressure of needing to work things out with Rome because a common enemy a like the greatest threat to Europe since what Martel dealt with in 732 at Tours was at the door. We hadn’t seen a threat like that in almost a millennium. And we checked it at the Pyrenees with the Carolingians and that held for a really long time. But what was happening with the Ottomans was a that was a whole that was a modernized that was just a different version of Islam as a threat to Christendom, as a threat to Europe, as a threat to the West.

The Reformation, the Ottoman Threat, and Historical Contingency

And I am like, look, if I could pick ah man, I think the Lutheran had a little bit more reforming in them or Okay, let’s just do Augsburg and have Europe unite to hold the line against the Ottomans. I’ll take the second one. Thank you. Great job. My Anabaptist ancestors kind of sat that one out. I understand why they did. History unfolds the way it does for a reason, and it’s okay. And anytime you want to get after somebody for what their intellectual ancestors did in a given moment, you got to consider the other side of the coin.

Well, what if the intellectual descendants of Luther and Luther late in his career are like, no, we have a little further we need to go with this thing and the political concerns, the military concerns are just going to have to wait. We’re going to be a little bit more like Zwingli and Calvin and we’re going to run this a little further. We need to we need a little more time to game it out. I don’t think the states that are loyal to Rome are enough. That was close and it took like that was like a century project to check the advance of Islam and then specifically the Ottomans. And the Ottomans picked off the East.

They won. I really enjoy the perhaps exaggerated pivot point of history narrative that it all comes down to some Polish guys with wings to save the West at Vienna from, the invading East. But all of these things are rolled up together. And there are realities. It’s very easy from the comfortable smug seat of internet evangelicalism for me to pew at what you all should have done when I don’t have any Ottomans trying to kill me at all. So when you look at the thing holistically, I think it also becomes easier to cut each other some slack and be like, I get why you played it the way you played it.

That makes a ton of sense. And it’s why I don’t feel anti antipathy or tension with Lutheran in particular. You guys kind of broke all the cobwebs and that was not easy. So, some later groups have a little more of a luxury to say, well, Luther’s dead and gone. What if we take that line of thinking a little bit further? And the Anabaptists suffered for taking that line of thinking a little bit further at the hands of reformers and at the hands of Catholics. They got it from both sides. But obviously their read on what now a lot of evangelicals would call the ordinances of the church, what Catholics, Orthodox and Lutheran and Anglicans would call two of the two main sacraments of the church, baptism and communion. The Anabaptists reform further. You would say too much. I would say that about squares with how I read the text.

And yet it is historically naive to imagine that just happened at a seminary one day and there was a little debate between two little seminary clubs that got together and one landed here and one landed here. The Ottomans were coming. The lay investiture controversy that the dust had barely settled on that in the grand historical sense of things. The relationship between church and state in Germany. You’ve got to restructure an entire society this the reformation sets in motion modernism and not just like intellectually, but structurally, governmentally, the relationship between the state and the individual, it’s just very easy from my comfortable seat in my comfortable church to say how everyone always should have done things. But when you apply that rubric to the decisions people made in the moment in real historical situations, including giving the benefit of the doubt to Catholics and Orthodox and the pressures they faced at given times, it becomes much easier to look at these things and say kind of looks like the providence of God. I’d want to be Catholic. I would love to be Catholic. I just can’t think their things.

Of course I want to be in communion with a church that has paperwork that goes back that far. I love their churches. I love his. Of course that’s what I want. I just can’t think it. But also, Acts 18, you guys are going like, we’re not going to do a reckoning right now. The reckoning is later. I know you guys want a reckoning. You’re mad because they killed me. I’m back. It’s fine. A little bit of paraphrasing here. This isn’t exactly what Jesus of Nazareth said before he ascended to heaven, but it’s right there. Clearly, the disciples wanted a reckoning. Say the things that are right. Say the things that are wrong. Punish, reward the people who are right. Punish the people who are wrong. Reckoning. Jesus doesn’t want a reckoning yet. No, you don’t get to know when that’s going to happen. Here’s what you are going to do. You’re going to be my witnesses. Jerusalem, Judea, Samaria, to the ends of the earth. Acts gives us a little preview of that ark. Luke seem satisfied to say, “This is where I’m going to end the story.” As we conceive of Jerusalem, Judea, Samaria, to the ends of the earth. This accomplishes what the prophets envisioned, what Jesus commissioned us to do or the guys I joined up with to do. This is it. But also clearly in Luke’s writing, the expectation that the ends of the earth is always an expanding horizon is there. Every tongue, tribe, and nation, all the kings bringing their crowns and setting them down. The people of God, the original family of faith, the full family of faith, leading people into communion with God, showing them how to worship God. This is the vision for the end of history. And so, how’s that going to work? Look how hard it was just to jump from the gospel going to ancient Jews in Galilee to some ancient Jews, but also some people who migrated from Gaul in, like Galatia or Pisidian Antioch. You had to have a whole fiery letter of Galatians to make that work. And they’re practically the same people. How much weirder is it going to be if you go and deal with woad-covered, blue-painted Boudicca Celts who were fighting against the Caesars than the people that made you build Hadrian’s Wall and the Picts and rowdy Irishmen and Viking raiders and the Rus, they’re completely different people what if you’re Thomas and you drag this stuff all the way to India they’re nothing like these people and it was hard to make it make sense between two almost identical groups of people with the same identical Seleucid heritage.

Now you’re going to take it to India. You’re going to take it to China. You’re going to take this thing to subsaharan Africa. Like God’s providence is going to have to be over all of this accompanying the gospel, accompanying the church in the various moments of history as this to the ends of the earth project happens. If it’s going to make any sense to the people that you’re bringing this thing to. So instead of being all grumpy as an evangelical that God worked through the Catholic Church even though I don’t agree with them in their current state, when you start to get a sense of how difficult history was, it’s easier to be like grateful.

Like cool. Okay. That’s what needed to happen then. And there are some artifacts that make it not a fit for me. Now, I’ll take the artifacts along with what God did providentially to advance his church there. Lutheranism, like it’s built, it’s exactly what it ought to be. We’re always reforming. Everything should always be reforming. Cool. The same God who we can so clearly see superintending all of history and moving the hearts of kings like a water course through the Bible did not stop when John put the last period on revelation. He still no authority exists apart from what he put in place. Nothing surprises him. He’s the sovereign over history. The gates of ha of hell will not prevail against his church. He is the architect of all of that. So, if you’re going to do this globally in a place as diverse as planet Earth and redeem the whole thing for the glory of God, like I think the cost of doing business is that you’re going to have artifacts and legacies and stuff that are born out of those different moments. And at some point it becomes incumbent on us as faithful Christians who are loyal to the historic church and the word of God to find language to cut each other a little bit of slack and root for each other really hard in as close a communion as we can muster without disregarding what God has done throughout history.

Diagnosing Lutheranism: Twitter, Luther-Envy, and Anonymous Nonsense

And that’s what I’m trying to make sense of. And that’s what I’ve my tradition at its strongest. That’s what it has provided a mechanism and language to do. H well said. Cool. I’ve got a lot more questions here. Just looking at the time. Okay. So let’s complete the diagnosis from Matt Whitman on the Lutheran church or the LCMS. I keep trying to dodge it and you keep bringing us back. I’m interested. I’m very interested especially in light of all the things you talked about of kind of here’s the downside of evangelicalism. Here’s the positive side. So like when you look in on Lutheranism, where are we doing things where are we doing things in unhealthy ways in the same way you diagnose that with evangelical church?

Okay. So I just get a pass here. I’m going to take I’m going to take your approach. I’m not My goal is not to debate you on these things. My goal is to learn. Oh, that’s good because I’m almost surely wrong. I know my tradition very well. I’m in it. It’s like criticizing my brother. I don’t really need to hear that from you, but I got some notes for him. It’s these are the things I’ve seen. I could be wrong. I don’t know your tradition as well as I know mine, but I’m an admirer from a distance. That’s how I would put it. One, I think you got too many people on the internet who think they’re Luther, and so they act like Luther’s less agreeable traits, but they don’t have the talent.

Luther could get away with it because he had the talent. He’s one of the 10 geniuses in the history of the global church. There just aren’t a lot of these around. And Pojo Bunny 69 on Twitter isn’t Luther. If your face isn’t on your tweets, you’re not Luther. So, first of all, don’t act like Luther if you’re a part of Luther and Twitter and your name and your face isn’t on it. Cuz Martin Luther put his name and his face on everything. Had to hide in a castle to avoid getting killed by other Christians. This dude went through all kinds of stuff because his face was on all of it. He owned all of his words. He stood by everything he said and he did it under threat of death. Lutheran Twitter, Lutheran frustrates me when it does this anonymous nonsense.

I’m with you here. And it’s given rise to the stupidest elements of your group, deplorable elements of your group, who I know every single one of you would denounce. Every single one of you sees through their clownery, but they exist and they try to hide under your banner. It’s ridiculous. So that’s not your fault. You guys, are the Lutherans worse at this than other groups? I am calculating there is a buffer bar. There are unfortunate elements of your group who take pride in things unfortunate non-Christian elements of your group took pride in Germany in the 20th century and they have the same mixed up non-Christian but using Christian language and symbols view of the world that the worst elements of people who claimed Lutheran heritage had in Germany in the mid- 20th century and they still exist. You could probably put names to them right now.

They still exist. They’re out there. I’ve met them. When I dabble in Lutheran stuff, these people come to visit me. Not physically, but they show up and I hear from people like this. Gross. To your credit, I’ve never run into any Lutheran or LCMS person who’s doing actual ministry or any kind of redemptive stuff that’s like, well, I wouldn’t want to denounce that. It kind of takes all kinds. No, everybody from your tribe who I’ve talked to who has encountered this stuff on the internet is like, “Yeah, that ain’t us. That’s a problem.” Cool.

Every Tradition’s Online Shadow

Do you think that’s Do you think it’s worse than you mentioned the kind of Latin mass Catholics? No, I don’t. And the reason why So maybe a silver medal. It’s No. No. Better than that, too. No. The Eastern Orthodox are rough. They’re mad because they’re rightly mad because that stuff I was talking about with the Ottomans, they just held the pinch point between Europe and Asia for a thousand years, took all the damage. The Western church took a dump on them. Like every time it was time to come through, the Eastern Church got the nobles of Scotland at the Battle of Stirling treatment from Braveheart like now it’s time for you to do your part. We’re just going to ride off the battlefield.

I understand why the ethnic historic Eastern church is mad. I get it. They say they’re mad about the Filioque and stuff. They’re mad because they got hung out to dry and just caught bullets and sword points for the west so we could live in relative comfort where we’re from. And it’s a garbage fluke of geography. They drew the good straw in the ancient world when all the money was over there and the wealth of Persia was still on that side of things. But for the long game with the advent of Islam, they drew the bad straw. And so they’re mad. It comes through in the comments. It comes through in emails I get when I don’t become orthodox or don’t say nice enough things about it. It is personal in a way that I cannot relate despite being deeply connected to my history back into the early 1500s even as an American like the names of every ancestor. This is stuff I care about. My connection to my own history pales in comparison to theirs.

And so we get beyond theology real quick and into you let us down as Christians. You were our brothers and you betrayed us kind of hurt that still lingers. So if I get a message and it’s in Greek, which I’m not very good at anyway. I have to try. I promise I went to seminary, but it doesn’t look like English, man. It’s hard. I got to think. If I get a message in Greek, I know I’m in trouble. I’m gonna get an earful. Interesting. So that’s one is kind of mass and Twitter or Latin mass Catholics are the worst. They don’t know much but they know everything and they are furious. They’re mad that other Catholics call me a separated brethren when they know down in their hearts that the Council of Trent was right and I am anathema. So they’re mad. They’re mad that I don’t do videos on the things that they want me to do videos about that will prove that their thing is right. And so they’re just mad. I do not receive a lot of benefit of the doubt from Latin mass Catholics. There are exceptions. I’m grateful to them. I know who you are. I’m grateful to you. Thanks for being nice to me. Modern squishy American Catholics, pretty chill. Global modern global Catholics not as chill I to them sacredness goes where in the equipping slot where piety would go in the Pietist tradition like we’d be like well treat people well obey God integrity those kind of virtues and values respect is what should be put into that equipment slot in their mind and I don’t have it put my hands in my pockets while I talked with a priest a couple times. I don’t I was just I didn’t know what to do with my hands. I didn’t think Ricky Bobby quote.

I just put them in my pockets, man. And I got hundreds of messages about how disrespectful that was. I couldn’t understand what Our Lady of Guadalupe thing was. I was like, was it a painting? No. Okay. Was it like a projection? No. Dang it, dude. I’m just not understanding what the thing is. How did the thing get on the thing? How did it Why does it look like her? What is it? Boy, did I hear it from Latin American Catholics over that one. I just really don’t understand how what the ink is. I don’t get what made it. And eventually somebody explained it to me, but I just didn’t get it. Wasn’t trying to be disrespectful.

So, they’ll get after me for disrespect. The Greeks will get after me for just not getting it and not understanding the big scheme of history, thinking too much like an individual, too much like an American. The Lutheran are great unless you get somebody who’s trying to be like Luther without the chops for being like Luther. You get all the swagger, all the braggadocious stuff, and they’re just repeating talking points. You’re not talking to a person, but you get all the personality. It’s not that great. The King James onlys, they’re real aggressive.

And nobody’s aggressive like the Christian cult member who believes one ridiculous insane conspiracy theory and the rest is orthodoxy, like they believe Christianity and the actual Holy Land is in Arizona and the climate and the continents moved and stuff and then people covered it up. H haven’t heard that one before. Oh, you will now. You’re welcome. Check the inboxes, Bennett. So, no, I think the Lutheran internet game is actually pretty good. I think you guys like talking about ideas. I also think you guys believe the hype a little bit about traditions that aren’t your own.

I think you tend to be a little more insular than other groups because you just have like you guys are talking I went and kind of brushed up before I came on here. Oh my goodness. Your entire internetphere is talking about an internal election for one American denomination. It’s like the fate of Christendom hinges on this thing and the rest of us are like, “Okay, hope it goes great guys.” these are like internal arguments on is that what you mean? Like your internal politics are. Election, presidential election like yes your presidential election like I don’t think a lot of Lutheran understand how much air that takes up for you guys compared to other groups that I don’t know like maybe other groups are just built such that it doesn’t matter quite as much. Maybe it would be better if it did matter more. There are advantages to how you come at it, but I think that’s something Lutheran don’t understand about the non-lutheran world as much is that like you’re at a very strange intersection of kind of the western Catholicism structural mass. You got a big thing and you benefit from that a lot.

But it also makes the stakes very high for get who gets to put their hands on the wheel of that thing. But you don’t pick like the Catholics pick where everybody can gripe and moan all they want, but it’s some guys in robes and there’ll be some smoke that take it. This is your new guy. It’s how it is. You don’t get a vote. We get all the negatives of American political structure. Yes. And I so I don’t think it’s personality that makes LCMS Lutheran feel kind of detached from the rest of us who pretty much just view you as like allies and brothers like hey kind of like to be more friends you’ll y’all seem pretty cool pretty great like we like your schools and like every time you talk it’s like that sounds like Christianity I love these guys but I do I think you’re in a very unique place in terms of American Protestantism where you have all the stakes of that leadership hierarchy and who runs it, but you have the American democracy campaign season element built in. What does campaign season do in our country? Every four years, we just start to heal up from what we did to each other last time and it’s time to do it all again. Getting elected and winning elections, there’s some advantage to just having some elites pick it far away and you work with what you got so that you don’t so that you don’t have to do to each other what we have to do to each other to win elections. Which is inherently a brutal, punishing, costly process. But then again, you flip it the other way and you guys would probably be like a bunch of other Lutheran groups if you did it the other way and just one regime would come in and be like, “Hey, we’re just going to be theological liberals now and we’re just going to do leftism.” Well, once that grabs it doesn’t let go. So, I get why you care about it and I get why you come at it the way you do. But I guess I say this stuff not so much it’s definitely not a criticism, it’s a assessment.

It’s an assessment. Like every one of these groups that I’ve visited that I think is killing it, doing a great job. And LCMS is right at the top of my list of I’m not you, but I really like your thing and I’m all in. Your success is my success. It’s the kingdom success. Go LCMS. Win-win. I unapologetically am pulling for you. But with every group that I would roughly say that about, I would say the thing that makes that group awesome has an unavoidable other side of the coin. It’s just always going to be their challenge. We just talked about it in terms of ecclesial structure and how you pick your leaders. Well, that’s why you’re still awesome. It also means you’re going to get a little feisty with each other all the time and you’re not going to have much bandwidth to think about what’s going on outside your walls with people who are like, “Hey, but we could be friends. We’re having an election. Okay. Well, let us know when your election’s done if you remember, whatever. I’ll be at Sizzler.” it’s that kind of,.

Worship Style and the LCMS Liturgy Debate

It’s that kind of a deal. What’s your thoughts or you might have more on the list, but because one thing that’s adjacent to that is there’s internal dialogue. I think you’re aware of this of it’s kind of aafa is kind of one of the talking points for it, but it basically gets down to worship styles, right? So there’s a group that wants to become more Americanized, right? In the way that we do service, more contemporary music praise bands, lower church, whatever you want to call it. Most charitable version. Why do they want that?

For the sake of reaching other people. So they would say an ALB, divine service setting three, kind of the higher liturgy. That’s going to confuse people and that’s going to cause the person, the high school kid or the young 24-year-old or whatever who comes in to say, “This is weird. I don’t have a category in my mind to figure out what’s going on here. So I’m going to go home.” But if we can make it more accessible, if we could have a sermon series on things that someone cares about like whatever anxiety or leadership or whatever, like that point they’re going to be more interested and we’re going to kind of backdoor high-level confessional theological teaching when they’re kind of unaware. So that would be this has been tried.

And quickly, you know what I would say to that given our conversation, it is if you want to reach more people as confessional Lutheran, do languaging work on explaining how to become a Christian. Just make it tight. If your answer is really to be a Christian is to be a part of the church, then just say that. Cool. To be Christian is to be a part of the church. Being a part of the church includes all of these things. It includes these sacraments. All of it’s in there. God ordained the church to do all these things. To be a Christian is to be a part of the church. Become a part of the church. I don’t know if that’s the answer. But if it is, say the thing without qualification. Get it as tight as the Baptists for the part of LCMS that wants to reach more people. Man, I wouldn’t go chasing down the same mistakes that like let the evangelicals they tried that. I wouldn’t go chasing that down. I just say salvation clearer.

So you’re saying that approach versus kind of the other side would be more liturgical. They would define it as this is our inheritance. This is what Lutheranism is. What we believe is intertwined with what we do. And what we do has certain liturgical elements to it that we should be united around. And then you’d get kind of the business eyes or whatever that would say, well A or B is actually more advantageous to the current setting that we’re in. But then of course some people are going to say I don’t care either way. Hey, we have to do this or we have to do that. So, what would be your assessment on that? Because that’s one of the things that leads to a lot of the hyperfocus on who’s elected because people are concerned about I sense that issue. So, I’m just interested from the outside from your perspective. Where what would be your advice if you were a consultant?

Okay. You asked here’s my advice to each side of this debate and this debate is not new to me. As I said, I got introduced to this very early on in my exposure to LCMS. My advice to the spice it up and make it a little more relevant crowd would be you misunderstand why people aren’t coming to your church. You’re not reading the room. It’s not because you don’t do more pop songs. It’s not because it looks too fancy. Actually that it’s to your benefit to look fancy. Read the room. People are tired of everything being so colloquial and dumbed down that it feels like somebody just could have made it up last week. Every source of authority that we’ve had in our lives in the last 20 years has been burned through. We don’t trust anything anymore.

The Authority Crisis: Why the Old Playbook Won’t Work

Science, remember when I freaking love science was the thing? You don’t hear that anymore. Medicine. Half the country thinks that the entire medical community was wrong about their mitigation approaches to COVID and took advantage of trust that we had in medicine to get people to do things that weren’t in their best interest. Whether they’re right or wrong is irrelevant. I’m just saying read the room. Trust has been eroded in that regard. The news. Isn’t it adorable when you meet people who are like, “Well, I saw on CNN. I was watching Fox and Hannity said, “Are you kidding me?” Like, these are entertainment outlets.

Like the news. No one trusts the news. We know this, right? It’s cooked. It’s yellow journalism. No one trusts the news. It’s bought. It’s paid for by advertisers. People don’t trust it. It doesn’t mean they don’t say things that are true sometimes, but you have to dig through such ridiculous levels of bias. They’re interested in team loyalty and keeping you on the team and keeping you buying. It’s just we don’t believe it anymore. We don’t believe the internet anymore. Authenticity is something that YouTube content strategists went and sold, well, for $5,000, I’ll teach you how to internet. The key is authenticity. You got to find a way to fake it so that people will feel that authenticity. Here are 10 tricks to make the audience think you’re authentic. Well, now we all see through that. So, even the like person-to-person creator thing, it’s incredibly hard to earn trust with an audience at this point because everybody knows it can be weaponized and manipulated. New media, old media, science, medicine, politicians, who whoever is watching this conversation, someone who was president in the last 12 years of presidenting in our country made them realize that office can be held by clowns and is not to be trusted the way it was trusted in the past.

Doesn’t matter how you vote. You came to think that in the last 12 years. You think that office is now dangerous and should be voted on based on what dangerous person you want to keep away from that more than what forwardthinking person who could lead with justice who you want to put into that office. We’ve all been burned in the age under the bright lights of the internet. All these authority sources have been exposed. Now everybody’s coming back around. What about like God and the thing that more humans than any other thing have believed Christ the teachings of the historic church the Bible stuff that we just wrote off when MySpace came out because it didn’t play well on our posts on MySpace and stuff and we haven’t really looked back since then. Well, now everything else we tried in its place has come out looking stupid and easily corruptible. What about that? And now everybody quietly or loudly is coming back around. Everybody, even the people who aren’t admitting it are reconsidering that.

So, people come back right now in the middle of the 2020s wondering about that stuff. And we meet them with things that look like pop Christianity from 2005, right at the time they started to lose confidence in the historic church and Christianity. That’s the wrong play. That’s a wrong strategy. Those people who are seeking you out, those people who right now are Saul helping to throw rocks at Christians, but could just as easily be flipped to Paul who’ll get rocks thrown at him to lead the church. These people do not want to sign up for something that is cheap and looks like it was thought of yesterday and whose primary interest is in being relevant. It’s already relevant to them because they have no source of authority. The relevance is your claim to actually being an extension of the work of God in this world. So lean into that. If you need to have a guitar or something, it’s fine. Maybe you don’t have a pipe organ. Maybe you don’t have money. I don’t know. Like some of these things are just a function of where you live and what you have. And it’s not good to get on our high horse about that. What I’m talking about is not so much the accutrants. I’m talking about the strategy. LCMS friends who are on this side of the conversation. If it is your sincere belief that you want to reach people and that you want them to understand the beauty of this tradition and the beauty of the gospel by making it more accessible, all you need to do is explain it better. You should not rewrite your tradition, which is one of the last good ones standing. Just explain it better. You don’t have to do this all on a Sunday morning. You have all week. You have all year. You can build in all kinds of things that catechize, that inform, that teach in very accessible ways what is going on here where we do these timeless things.

Build onramps. Build on-ramps. Your tradition is so rich. It’s so good. We don’t have many more of them after you. You should not become evangelicals. We already have that. We’re very, some of us are doing well at that. Others of us are not doing as well. We’re mixed bagged, but we already have us and all of our problems. It’s well covered. We’re huge. There are gajillions of us. We don’t have a lot of you. You’re a unique thing. You can’t be replaced historically. We can’t go throw another reformation. We can’t fight the Ottomans again. We can’t do, the council. We can’t do the Concordat of Worms again. We can’t repeat this. You’re the product of something very important that was ordained by God. Don’t pitch it to imitate our little 20-year social experiment that has yielded mixed results. Be you. Just make it make more sense. And the number one place to make it make more sense is just say the gospel better. You guys are over complicating it. Use those many words to talk about all the layers of it after it. Just make it make sense. And we can make fun of the Baptists all we want and there is plenty to make fun of from the sweaty Baptists. But tell me where I’m wrong. We are sinners both by nature and choice. That sin is both evidence of and the reason for our separation from God. Unresolved that will result in eternal separation from God. God in his providence from before time began knew this would happen and designed a redemptive plan that would perfectly culminate by tabernacling among us, sending his son, who would go to the cross to resolve on every level the penalty for sin and the fallenness of this world, both intentional and accidental. He would verify it by his resurrection as promised from the grave. And we are invited into life in Christ as we submit to him as our King, as our Savior, as our Lord, as our God. And we live to worship, exalt him, and participate in the values of his kingdom and advancing his kingdom in fulfillment of the great commission. They’re not wrong. That’s good. That’s it. That of course there’s so many things we want to nuance about that because it’s interesting, because it’s the most beautiful thing ever. Of course, we want to think about it until the end of time and dig into all the complications because there’s beauty in the complicated stuff. But to my LCMS friends who are on the modernize it side, man, I just work on nailing how you want to say that timeless story of the human problem, God’s solution, and what it looks like to live richly in that in the community of believers. Now to people on the traditional side, you have a good thing going. The accutrants, the style, the way you have refined what your worship looks like and the way you have developed the ability to convey that from generation to generation is really special, really impressive, really unique. Your emphasis on schools to help accomplish that to make some of the most functional people in society as a byproduct of those convictions. Keep doing that stuff. I understand that you have to fight every so often about which leaders are going to be in charge. I don’t understand your internals well enough to tell you not to do that. You still believe Christian things after all these years. So, I guess keep fighting. It’s worked. I don’t know. I don’t know what to tell you on that front. What I do know it’s the same thing I would tell the other crowd. Just heighten the answer on, hey, I’m not a Christian. I want to be. What do I do? They don’t know that they’re not the ones who do it. They don’t know. They’re asking the question on a normal human timeline the way they would ask about anything else. Don’t go esoteric. Don’t solve all of theology. Don’t take them to seminary. Just take them from I’m not a Christian to I’m a Christian in the simplest language possible. And then your system is wonderful. They will be catechized. They will get it. But sometimes I have observed with my own eyes and my own ears a Lutheran have God lob a softball to them like this person is here asking how might I be saved and rather than just talking to the human in front of them I have observed wonderful Lutheran men and women instead picture a Catholic then picture the Reformation and the Council of Trent and you’re not talking to the person. You’re fighting ghosts from the 16th century who aren’t in the room with us right now. Who cares? You have the gospel. You’re wonderful ambassadors of it. Now, of course, for every example of that I’ve seen, I’ve seen a hundred examples of my Lutheran brothers and sisters just nail it and take that person under their wing and show them care and compassion and on board them and it goes great. The thing that I find that at times gets in the way is that scenario where defending our boundaries against a group I agree is wrong and as a result like that person just doesn’t get it on the front end. So the one thing that I think is a valid criticism from those who want to modernize your tradition is to say we could sharpen the user experience a little bit. We could maintain our theological fidelity while embracing a new effort to make it make sense on the front end for simple normal people who just want to get it. Those simple normal people, if they talk to a Lutheran and they talk to a Baptist, they’re going to get what the Baptist said. If they talk to a Pentecostal, they are going to get it. Well, I don’t know. I like Pentecostals and charismatics. If like this is dangerous, but I’ll say it. If I could choose, I’d rather have them jump into your church. I think what they’ll get over a lifetime is going to be more satisfying than what they will get in a Pentecostal church. I think they’ll get good things there, too. So, it’s okay. It’s okay to, meet them where they’re at and say it that way. But my strongest exhortation would be do not pitch what you guys are good at. You’re irreplaceable. Do not listen to the siren song of evangelical stuff. That’s already covered. It’s already happening. It is not the panacea. It’s not the magic pill that will solve flagging numbers or people not becoming Christians at a high enough rate. That ground is already covered. I don’t think there’s anything to be had for you there.

Closing: Matt Whitman’s Book, and a Case for Obadiah

Bennett, let’s clip that. So, mark that down. Let’s take a quick break. All right. And Bennett says we’re back and we’re actually looking at the clock and we got to close up, which that last segment I think was a perfect closeup. So, just to kind of finish for those that have enjoyed this interview, Matt, you wrote a book recently. Can you tell me about the book? It’s right here, by the way. It is that book. That’s exactly the book I wrote. Lightning fast field guide to the Bible. So, it’s about the Apocrypha, right? Nailed it.

This book is reflective of the philosophy that we just got done talking about. I think a great way forward is embrace all of the deep dive. Embrace. Just don’t shy away from the historic faith. Don’t shy away from the hard stuff of the Bible, but also don’t feel like you have to solve it all. Just engage it. Meditate on it like we’re taught to do in scripture, right? This is a lifetime endeavor. We chew on things. But also, it wouldn’t kill you to make it make sense. Like right now especially I think there’s a ton of people who’ve been in the church for a long time who have osmosed some Bible. But if you really ask them to sit down and be just give me the story beginning to end. They even throw in some dates here and there key names figures. What is God’s story of redemption played out in the Bible on a human timeline? I think it’s hard. I think if you asked even an established Christian to just say, “Why are all the books of the Bible in there? Just take me through one at a time. Why not have a Bible that has 65 books and not neah? Why would that be worse? I think that’s a hard question to answer. And it’s okay that it’s a hard question to answer. It doesn’t mean we’re bad at Christianity. It’s just God ordained to reveal himself in his written word in a large book that covers a lot of epochs of time and situations. And over all of it, we get a really good sense of who he is in all kinds of different moments, dealing with different people, sovereign over all of it. So, I wanted to write this book to try to make each book of the Bible make sense. Not like the first two pages of a study Bible that give you the quick little rundown, but more cohesive narrative. Theoretically, each chapter of this book and each chapter is a book of the Bible. Theoretically, each chapter of this book in kind of a fun kind of playful, quick moving format is going to cause the reader to come away feeling very confident that they’re like, “All right, this is exactly what this book is doing in the Bible. This is exactly why the Bible would be worse if this book weren’t in there. This is the theological lift that it is doing. These are the little details that are just if I can’t remember everything about it, the most important thing to get the heart of the book. And the way I structured it’s almost like a conversation. It’s a field guide, but the headings of each little quick hitting section are very dialoguy. So like you remember reading those old dialogues in seminary like the church like dialogue with trifo and stuff like that we had to read when we were in school.

A lot of that would be something where the one character poses the next logical question and then the other character interacts with that. It’s a light riff on that. I didn’t really know how to say like classical dialogues about the Bible not sound horrible. So field guide is what we went with. I figured people would get it. Well it is cool. If you look at you got stats which are kind of interesting. It’s like Romans popularity rank eight of 66. Seems about right, doesn’t it? Seems intuitive. Gives you the group most used words. Gives you a lightning fast summary. Talks about the original language. Letters until revelation. What prompted Romans? What’s the purpose to who to what do I owe the pleasure?

Well, I could have just said occasion, but that seemed like more fun, right? So it does it gives a pretty good holistic understanding of what’s going on there. And I do like the snapshot data, 21 verses for Obadiah, which is 66 of 66 popularity. Garbage, by the way. Obadiah is a rock star, dude. I know. We got to get going. We got to eat, too. Here’s my case for Obadiah and why it should be at least 65th. Okay. It’s like the only book, one of the book of the 12. What’s the only minor prophet that is just all about somebody else being awful instead of getting after Judah or Israel? Nahum is pretty much just hard on the Assyrians, but Obadiah, like the whole thing’s like, “Hey, cousin people group who live up on your lofty heights on these fancy mountains.” Boom. How’s it feel to fall from those heights? That’s what you get. Judah, Israel, I have no notes for you this time around.

Oh, so we just like gloat over God’s justice and him remembering to punish an oppressor. That should be in the Bible. Way to go, Obadiah. So, this is my vote for that being underrepresented. So, your real goal of coming on here was to make Obadiah 65th and not Dude, that was it. Can you just delete all the other stuff? Massive move if you shifted Obadiah up and that was your mark on Christendom. A glorious contribution. Matt Whitman. Ladies and gentlemen, hey, thanks. This has been great. I agree. Thanks, dude.

Cheers.

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A Note on This Transcript

This is a smoothed reading transcript, prepared by cross-referencing two independently generated caption exports of the same recording (a fine-grained, second-by-second auto-caption file and a rolling 60-second-window export). The two sources proved to be word-for-word identical once reconstructed, so there were no substantive discrepancies to reconcile between them.

It has been rendered in clean, or intelligent, verbatim: the words spoken are preserved, but the non-lexical scaffolding of speech has been removed so the conversation can be read with confidence. That means filler and hedging tokens (um, uh, and the discourse-marker uses of you know, I mean, and like), backchannel acknowledgments (yeah, mhm, yep, and the like), false starts, and immediate word and phrase repetitions have been taken out. Nothing has been paraphrased, reordered, or added, and meaning-bearing uses of the same words are kept, so feels like, like this, and a genuine you know what I mean remain. Speech reported inside quotation marks is left exactly as spoken, including any yeah or like that belongs to the quotation.

The caption source marked a change of speaker with a “>>” symbol but never identified who was speaking at any given turn. Those symbols have been removed, and the conversation now reads as continuous prose. Because the source did not diarize, no speaker labels have been supplied; the section headings orient the reader, and context makes the two voices clear throughout, with Bryan Stecker hosting and Matt Whitman as the guest.

Proper nouns and technical terms that the automatic captioner plainly mis-heard were corrected against outside sources. Among them: “book of conquered” to “Book of Concord,” “Sacramento” to “Sacraments,” “Wisconsin Senate” to “Wisconsin Synod,” “inherent and inspired” to “inerrant and inspired,” the several manglings of “soteriology,” “Aryanism” to “Arianism” (the christological heresy, not the racial term), “Aanasian” to “Athanasian,” “concordant of verms” to “Concordat of Worms,” “Battle of Sterling” to “Battle of Stirling,” “Filio way” to “Filioque,” “Pacidian Antioch” to “Pisidian Antioch,” “Christian Einson” to “Christian Einertson,” “Will Weeden” to “Will Weedon,” “Bishop Baron” to “Bishop Barron,” and the garbled book names in the closing restored to “Obadiah,” “Nahum,” and “Philemon.” A few badly garbled descriptive phrases were reconstructed from context (for example, a list of ancient peoples rendered as “wo covered blue paint bodica keelts” became “woad-covered, blue-painted Boudicca Celts”). One ninth-century reference the captioner produced as “Redus reptus” has been reconstructed as the Radbertus–Ratramnus eucharistic debate on the strength of the surrounding context.

Sentence-initial capitalization, which the caption source applied inconsistently, has been lightly normalized. Inline links have been added on the first mention of each named outside source (podcasts, YouTube channels, books, institutions); repeated mentions are not re-linked.

A few short passages reflect genuine crosstalk in the original recording, and a handful of proper nouns remained too garbled to resolve with confidence and were left as transcribed (among them a name rendered “Adam Co,” a “Will and Hamilton,” and one word given as “theating”). Any of these, and the Radbertus–Ratramnus reconstruction, can be confirmed against the audio; flag any passage and it can be tightened further.