Bonus: The Battle for the Mind
With all the hootenanny of me spilling my entrails everywhere recently and with thanksgiving being upon us, I thought perhaps we would go back, way back, back in the time. What you're about to hear is the greatest epic ever produced in the history of twenty fifteen Issues, etcetera, conferences attended by me in which I spoke. It is the greatest epic ever produced so far as me speaking in such times and contexts and places. I really have always enjoyed being invited to these conferences. They are a blessing to attend and to converse at.
Speaker 1:And I just wanted to, I don't know, throw it out there as a reminder that just because I'm crazy doesn't mean I haven't always been crazy. And just because I'm questioning things and calling things like I see him doesn't mean that's well, it's kinda the only thing I do. But I think you'll enjoy it. I do. So from the twenty fifteen issues that's sort of making the case conference, a little repristination here of my talk, making the case against post modernism.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Making the case that you should fight for your mind in a world that's gone mad.
Speaker 2:I'd like to begin with a trigger warning. This is Completely utterly
Speaker 3:You're gone. Insulting. Jesus. Impulsory education. Someone needs to save this
Speaker 2:If you're doing what everyone else is doing, you're doing it wrong.
Speaker 3:One of the greatest epics ever produced. So get ready. You ain't seen nothing yet. Making the case against the
Speaker 1:what is
Speaker 3:the actual title say? The case for the church's response to post modernism. I'm retitling this in my head at least, the case against the postmodern jungle. What does it really mean to be in it and not of it? The church has been talking about postmodernism for many years now.
Speaker 3:Trying to figure out what this shift in culture, the shift in history, the shift in thinking and philosophy and worldview really means. But I'm increasingly of the opinion that as much as, use Stanley Howard was, if you're familiar with his work, he saw the move out of Constantinian government supported, society supported church into an anti church culture as a good thing. I don't disagree with that. I think there is much to be gained by no longer just being bottle fed by the culture. Everyone assumes Christianity is true.
Speaker 3:It also, it's got to be more than a head game. It is more than, well we've got this knowledge now. We're going to call this thing post modern now. Okay, let's go back to work and play just like everybody does. I think we have to start to see ourselves as aliens in this culture.
Speaker 3:Those who are being forced to this point are having more trouble with it than I think if you grapple with it before you are forced to that point. So today I'm gonna make the case, not just against the postmodern lack of truth, but then for a particular at least style of response that I think as Christians we need to embrace. And then a particular set of ideas or knowledge that are at the heart of that. Most people who are my age grew up watching cable TV, probably in their own room. The internet comes along, makes this even more complete.
Speaker 3:But there had already been, before the TV kind of took over with cable in the 80s, TV was influencing the culture. And there had been a social engineering project taking place in our colleges for many, many years, if not decades, At least going back to the 60s and the 50s. And what this means is that there were thinking minds, powerful people, people with charismatic ideas who were shaping the culture by teaching the young people as they went away to school. That gradually they taught the teachers who then went and did this again. And it spread over the course of decades and decades.
Speaker 3:The fact of the matter is that today, the average American has their mind, assumptions more shaped by names like Friedrich Nietzsche, Martin Heidegger, Herbert Marcuse, Peter Drucker, Alfred Kinsey, and Margaret Sanger, than they do by just about anybody else. And the sad thing to me is that they don't know that. The average post modern Joe on the street thinks he's coming up with all this stuff on his own. He thinks he's just thinking outside the box and really smart. I got these amazing ideas.
Speaker 3:Did you ever think of it this way, that maybe there's no truth? You know, kind of thing. I think that's sad. I think that if you're gonna think something's true or false, even if you're not a Christian and you want to believe there is no truth or there is no God, you should at least know who taught you that. And the challenge with the media culture we're in is it's really brainwashing.
Speaker 3:Just to run down the list, Nietzsche is the guy who really established a foundation for argument against God's existence, and a foundation for morality based in willpower. Heidegger came along and lifted that up even more, kind of as the king of contextualization, that everything is relative. Heidegger, as a Nazi, was a big part of making that movement moral in his culture, that they could argue for its rightness. Marcuse was a philosopher who expatriated after the war and taught at several universities in The United States. He is most famous for coining the term make love not war.
Speaker 3:He was a sexual radical who wanted to overturn society's values, and he was very open about that. He also was the guy who changed the meaning of the word tolerance. He literally redefined it, and you can find it in his writings. He says that tolerance is not putting up with somebody else's ideas that you disagree with. Tolerance is intolerance for conservative ideas and pressing forward of progressive ideas.
Speaker 3:And that is really what the word does mean today, as people do use it. Peter Drucker, father of the church growth movement, Roseboro knows a lot more about this, but very connected to fascism, which is all about community being bound together to move in a direction by the will of a strong man. So that also then goes back to Nietzsche as well. Alfred Kinsey, the father of sex education in America, a pervert and a liar who forged scientific evidence, but that evidence is still being used today to teach in our schools kids things that maybe they don't need to know yet. And then Margaret Sanger, who you should know her name by now, the mother of birth control and abortion, Done more to damage society, I think, than maybe the others combined.
Speaker 3:And we'll come back to some of that in a moment. So, new media world, mind control and truth through advertising. That in this age, if it's on TV, it's true. Even if you can tell yourself, no, it's probably not. Like you watch a commercial, I tell you, was set up watching NBA basketball, I love NBA basketball, commercial for some restaurant that I can't go to, not I'm in North Dakota, they didn't even have in Chicago, know, Carl's Jr.
Speaker 3:Or something like that comes on, and they got this hamburger, and I don't want it, but golly, I'm suddenly hungry. And it's amazing the power that this stuff has over us to get behind the front of our head, back in here and start to influence how we think. And when this is being done intentionally to get your money, but then also with an agenda to change the society itself coming out of our educational systems, it is a powerful, powerful thing. Something you can't just say I disagree with and then hide your head in a hole and think you're gonna fight back. Also, then it gives us, all of us, I would say, expectations that aren't our own expectations.
Speaker 3:Expectations that have been planted in us by a lifetime of absorbing new media. And again, I love movies. I love TV. Don't hear anything I'm saying today as like, we've got to turn off the tube. But I think we do have to start being aware of the fact that much of what Christians in America, what Lutherans in America, LCMS Lutherans in America, conservative LCMS Lutherans in America assume to be true, maybe isn't.
Speaker 3:At the very least, we have to stop assuming things are true. And instead begin testing the spirits, to quote St. John, finding truth in the scriptures themselves. And if it's not from scripture, asking why are we believing this thing that's not in scripture. The results of this media experiment, broken homes, broken families and broken hearts, the number of divorces skyrocketing, the number of abortions out of control, the American dream of dink boredom and Netflix.
Speaker 3:We're not allowed to have a presentation in here today in terms of pictures. I'm kind of thankful for that because it's a lot more work, but I have this picture that I love because it's the American dream. And it's this guy sitting on a couch with a bowl of popcorn. He's about my age, a little bit more overweight, but not too much, but balding on top. And his wife, girlfriend, I don't know, is sitting beside him.
Speaker 3:They get the blue glow of the TV is on them. And they both have looks just kind of like this, sitting and watching the TV. And that's the American dream right now. It really is. No kids, right?
Speaker 3:We have our job. We have our money. On the weekend, we can ride our toys or whatever. But our relationship isn't with each other either. Right?
Speaker 3:We're just going to sit here and be bottle fed by the tube. And I love Netflix. Don't get me wrong. My wife and I binge watched Agents of Shield season one, and thank goodness, they finally got season two on. But if that's what life's about, man, what a sad state of affairs.
Speaker 3:Is to say nothing then of how this media pressure has impacted us through pornography and its effect on teens and the college life and college atmosphere, the absolute orgie ism that is going on at almost every college in America. I can't speak for Concordia's exactly, but I can tell you Concordia Portland's where I first did drugs. And so it's not like it's safe place either, but that sexual revolution and the view of the human as object for use or for physical pleasure is out of control. Porn is not just something for a couple of guys. It is a massive, massive movement then affecting the way we view each other, the way we view sex, and then the way we expect what we expect of marriage.
Speaker 3:We're talking again about expectations that aren't our own or aren't the scriptures. What the average young adult expects out of marriage is more influenced by Victoria's Secret and romance novels, which are their own forms of pornography, than they are by the scriptures and what scripture says of marriage. You throw into this the marriage industry selling weddings, selling these amazing dreamlike expensive states. The only thing more expensive than your funeral is gonna be your wedding. You're gonna be on a beach with a picture of the sunset behind you, and somehow this is going to be happily ever after.
Speaker 3:And if you transpose the picture of the bride and the groom on the beach with the sunset and no kids, with the picture of the bride and the groom or the live in boyfriend or whatever on the couch watching Dink TV, and it's like, well this is what we think we're getting, and this is what we're getting. And they're paying us, or we're paying them for this one, so we can put it on the wall next to the TV, so we can look at it and say, that's what we're living. But you can't live like that. Life isn't that, it's impossible. You can't live on a beach.
Speaker 3:It doesn't work. I mentioned the abortion industry already, the holocaust and sale of bodies is quick fix. The numbers are astounding. The fact that we're still wanting to use these dead baby bodies for solving all of our medical problems without really even knowing that that's possible, should be astounding to any human being who takes the pause to think about it. And yet it's just thrown out there and assumed today.
Speaker 3:The divorce industry, which is a machine now that ensures the cycle of destruction of young lives, removing fathers from homes more often than not, which is about the most damaging thing you can do to their the young child's development and their future marriage. Touchdown magazine has done some really good work on that. And I can point you to that if you want more information on it. All of this and even affecting at a worldwide level, this isn't just about The United Our culture is our biggest export. It's going all over the world.
Speaker 3:And what it's doing is destroying cultures. It's a culture that destroys cultures in the name of diversity. Destroying cultures Children are also disappearing. Disappearing children and then as a result of both, children, family being no longer things that bind us together, disappearing churches. And that's where I think a lot of LCMS Lutherans are feeling it now, is they're in the small church saying, What's going on?
Speaker 3:But that isn't about church. The problem isn't about whether or not you got word and sacrament right, and it isn't about whether or not worship is entertaining. It's a bigger problem going on in the entire culture, which I'll get to in a moment. But that you can label it all under the militant fascist social confirmation program that has shifted the American worldview. And we are moving intentionally toward goals that connect with a loss of human life.
Speaker 3:One more piece of the whole puzzle, I suppose. The kid, teen, young adult, I'm not old narcissism epidemic. We're all narcissists now. And not a one of us can bear to say that we're old. So afraid to be honest about death and what age and decay and sin has done to us.
Speaker 3:That Christians get upset about being old is sad. And I'm this boat too, but it's sad. Gray hair is a crown to be worn with honor, not anymore. Yeah, the idolization of youth, but what does this do? It creates a cycle of pleasure and pain as we try to get to this picture of unreality, but we keep being drawn back to the reality.
Speaker 3:And all of it is just throw more money at it, throw more time at it, throw more energy at it, try to make it perfect. Self justify the world in just a new more hedonistic way. With relationships that then become founded on pleasure and willpower. Very difficult to have a marriage founded on pleasure and willpower, but that's I think what most people are trying to do today. I think at the root of all of this is two lies.
Speaker 3:Two foundational untruths. And I probably have them in the reverse order of what we should think of them as most important, but it really doesn't matter. They're both ultimately catechetical truths that have been destroyed. And you're going to know this. This isn't new information to you.
Speaker 3:The first one is the rejection of the diversity of man and woman as God designed us. Molly's going to talk about this after this. The belief that there is no uniqueness to woman and then resulting belief that there is no uniqueness to man. Obviously, in the history of the human race, humans have done really horrible things to each other and man and woman have been fighting. I think since Genesis chapter three over what it means to be man and woman.
Speaker 3:But I don't think the rejection of the obvious is the answer to tyranny. But that is what our culture is pushing. The other thing is the rejection of the resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth as a historical fact with personal implications for individuals in the world. And I have Doctor. Myers gonna be talking about this later as well.
Speaker 3:Both of these facts, man and woman are different. Jesus' tomb is empty and the only way to explain it is that He walked out. These are the things that have to be at the foundation of our stand against the postmodern jungle or I should maybe say our stand in the middle of the postmodern jungle. I don't know if you play Minecraft. I play Minecraft.
Speaker 3:And this stupid game, it's a box of Legos with monsters inside, which is kind of cool. But you start off with nothing and you got to knock over a tree and build a table and build an axe and then start doing stuff. But the first time I played it, I was in a jungle and I didn't know what I was doing at all. I dug a little hole and tried to stay alive through the night kind of stuff. But in the jungle, I couldn't get out of it.
Speaker 3:I had to find what I needed in the jungle. I had to be there. I had to survive the attacks that were coming through the night. That picture, that image of I can't run away, I'm here, but I don't want to be here, I need to survive here is the motif that I think we have to grab with these two facts again. As opposed to just lying out in the middle of the jungle and assuming that the zombies and the skeletons are going to be nice to us.
Speaker 3:They're not. They're not going to be nice. That was not planned. Going back to what was planned. So the results of the rejection of the diversity of man and woman, you have an increasing number of 40 singles who cannot get married and this is because they will not get married.
Speaker 3:That's just a large percentage of our economy now. They may be living together, right? But marriage is just not an option for them. And part of this is that you have a large number, not of women who don't want get married. By the time they're in their 30s, most women would like the picture on the wall with the brides dress and all that stuff.
Speaker 3:But you have men that simply can't support a family, because they don't want to support a family. You have an increasing number of young men who would rather be boys the rest of their lives. And especially if they got a live in girlfriend, that takes care of the biggest problem. And so why would they go and ruin it all with these little monsters called children? So that mindset is just assumed now.
Speaker 3:It's normal. Right? Even if you think it's wrong, you got to deal with this. This is how people think now. Right?
Speaker 3:We don't want to get married, and we don't want to have children. And you're stupid to think that we're wrong. They've never really thought any other way. Why would they do anything that would destroy the pleasure that they're getting out of their American life. With this then, you have many young women who then are supporting their live in boyfriend.
Speaker 3:But I think this is one of the saddest things I'm going to say today. Both of them consider children to be the greatest possible hindrance to an ideal life. Children are in the way. And this is as much as we laud children in this culture and all the money we throw at the educational system, we really do, when it comes down to my individual life and my individual marriage, believe that children are in the way. That they will stop us from our dreams.
Speaker 3:I'm not gonna have kids until I'm ready. I mean you've heard it. Ready for what? Well, need all my dreams fulfilled. That's what?
Speaker 3:Yeah? You just, you still have the lie telling you what is true. Of course, then there's the moment in the mid-30s when they realize they still would like one child. It's kind like having a cat. You need a pet.
Speaker 3:And so we want a kid now, we're ready for it because we're bored with everything else. The house didn't make us happy. The trips didn't make us happy. Let's have a kid and then you can't. Now it's time for IVF and now we're selling embryos again.
Speaker 3:All for the pet baby. The fact is you can't live on vacation forever. We can't each be a superstar. Emotions are as fleeting as the wind. And every single one of us is going to get old, grumpy, sick, and die a generally slow and painful death.
Speaker 3:And we kind of laugh a little bit, but that's because the insanity of it is, oh my gosh, it's true. And we're in a chaos trying to pretend it's not true as hard as they possibly can. And we have a bunch of Christians doing the same thing. Why? Why are we thinking the way the world is thinking?
Speaker 3:What's wrong with us? Why are we programmed by the world? Every time there is a shooting, there was the other one called the ELCA kid now, at the college campus just this week. The world is surprised. Christians are surprised.
Speaker 3:How did this happen? I've stopped being surprised. I really have. I feel cold and mean about it because it's just like, yeah, duh. I had a conversation with a dentist once.
Speaker 3:He was a member at my vicarage congregation. He was nice enough to give me a filling for free. He wanted to talk for about fifteen minutes afterwards as payment, I think. And he was telling me how disturbed he was about the pressure he was receiving from biochemical companies to make prescriptions that he didn't need to make. He could get free cruises and all sorts of stuff out of it.
Speaker 3:And he was bothered by how many of his colleagues were doing it. It shouldn't surprise us. You believe in original sin, right? We're all evil, We confess it every week, right? So why are we surprised when pagans who don't have any mercy in their life, any justification in their life, do evil things?
Speaker 3:We should expect it. Thieves, murderers all, liars all. You too, right? You just have God slapping your hand every Sunday and then patting you on the head, saying be nice, be nice. Right?
Speaker 3:But if you don't have that, why are we surprised? Now what we need to hear, and this is law, I'm not here giving you a lot of gospel this morning. I'm giving you a bit of law. The gospel is true, it's what Christianity is about, but sometimes we do need a little slap in the face. Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that by testing you may discern what is the will of God.
Speaker 3:Do not be conformed to this world. Doesn't mean you can't watch Netflix, but it means don't let Netflix tell you what truth is. The renewal of the mind, that is scripture. You have a foundation, sure and certain. And by knowing it, you may test out all things.
Speaker 3:You can know what God's will is in all things. Maybe not the color of your shirt, right? Whatever. But all things that matter. We also have this reality then behind this.
Speaker 3:Why? Why is it so important? Because sin, as I just said, is real. Death is real as much as we ignore it. And the thing that we really ignore, the devil is real.
Speaker 3:It's an archangel of some sort, rebelling against God with half of God's armies cast down to this planet who knows his time is short and could care less about the pagan. He's got the pagan. He's prowling around looking for you. And he wants you to give up the renewal of your mind. Law and gospel.
Speaker 3:And he knows that as much as in the parable of the sower, the sun can scorch the weeds that have no root. But if there's any root, he's got to take a different tact. So he's got to use his son can scorch the seed that has no root. He's got to take a different tact. The weeds are the cares and pleasures.
Speaker 3:Don't miss it. Pleasures of this life. The deceitfulness of wealth, he says in Mark's gospel. That's what he's using right now. Persecution may come.
Speaker 3:I'm not blind to it. It may be coming down the pipe pretty fast. But right now for the average LCMS American, it is the pleasures of life that have distracted us from truth. Luther said, God's real wrath is silent. When he lets us do what we want.
Speaker 3:I'm not a mystic. I'm not gonna try to pretend to know what he's doing. But golly, he's quiet. And I look at evangelical Christian world, LCMS world. I feel like our current president's doing a better job than maybe he's been done in the past, but man we're still pretty quiet.
Speaker 3:Especially when it comes to preaching about the cross and again, the actual diversity of man and woman as God designed us. You hear a lot of people yelling about homosexuality. You don't hear a lot of people yelling about procreation. And come back to that in a minute. You hear a lot of Christians yelling about Israel.
Speaker 3:You don't hear a lot of them yelling about the cross and the death and resurrection of Jesus as a fact. So you have the sixth commandment and the second and third articles of the creed, which should be at the core of our Christian culture. And our world is leaching it out a little bit at a time. And you want to believe these things? Sixth commandment.
Speaker 3:Old Lutheran theology. Very simple. God built sex. He put three parts in it. Three legs of a stool.
Speaker 3:And if you think about a three legged stool, not ideal for sitting on always, but it can be stable enough, but you take away one leg and what happens? Bye bye stool. You fall down. What are the three legs of the stool of sex that God designed? First one, this is the old Lutherans.
Speaker 3:These are the old scary guys who were always mean, right? Physical pleasure. They weren't dumb. Physical pleasure is the first part of the design of sex. It is there to give enjoyment to husband and wife.
Speaker 3:That's what everybody is, when they're young, after. We know this intuitively. Second leg is emotional consolation. That in the joining together of this physical pleasure between man and wife, there is a spiritual connection that is binding them in shared vulnerability with each other. It's kind of like a soul glue, if you think of it that way.
Speaker 3:Holding them together. And then thirdly, the two shall become one flesh. A little piece breaks off of him and sticks onto a little piece of her. Next thing you know, you've got a third. It's not good for man to be alone.
Speaker 3:Let me give him Eve. No, not just Eve. Let me give him the rest of the human race. Those three parts, the old Lutheran said, go together. You can't take away one and not have the others get abused.
Speaker 3:And that goes in every direction. So what's our culture doing? Well, got the removal of procreation from the whole picture. Go ahead. Do what you want.
Speaker 3:We've advanced to that point now where you can make your own decisions. Well, we're yanking away essence of our truth. The other side, you have a reaction the other direction, that's saying, Well, procreation is the only real reason for sex. You better only make love in certain positions, and don't enjoy it. Just have babies, and as many as you can, no matter what it does to her body.
Speaker 3:That's not right either. Right? That's not right either. Both sides are pulling at and away from the gift God gave us in marriage. Which, and here's kind of my point, I don't know, I went through catechism class as a kid.
Speaker 3:I don't remember being taught that having children was a good work that would benefit the church in the world. They taught me a lot of things. I know I wasn't listening to a lot of it, but I'm pretty sure they didn't teach me that one. I'm pretty sure, because the culture just doesn't believe it. And we don't believe it.
Speaker 3:As LCMAS Lutherans, we don't believe it. Body. You want to say, see where we're united as a body, I would say this is it. That procreation is not necessary. It is not a part of marriage.
Speaker 3:Now maybe, our last LCMS witness seemed to kind of hint that maybe we're realizing we can't just quite go this direction. But how long is it before any of throws an egg at me right now? Right? I mean I do feel today I'm stepping out a little bit and risking things because we hate this truth. These three parts are a whole.
Speaker 3:And they're a kind of glue. Now the glue is all for a purpose. So that when family or when a man and a woman are joined together in sex, they're bound emotionally, spiritually to each other, so that that offspring can be cared for by both parties. And God has designed man and woman distinctly to have roles in that as well. Our table of duties is pretty clear about that if you care about scripture.
Speaker 3:I'm sure we always do. One thing that we don't tell young children, we kind of tell them the opposite, is that part of this glue, this physical touch is something to be toyed with and played with. And yet, we all kind of know this. A hug, any hug, is an exchange of spiritual energy, emotional energy. You know this.
Speaker 3:That's why all pastors generally will hug you like this. We know this. And we know that it is inappropriate. If my little three year old runs up, and I grab her and hug her like this, and squeeze her, do this, well okay, fine. I do that to your wife.
Speaker 3:Not appropriate, right? Because the hug is doing something. It is exchanging energy. So there's a difference, yes, between a hug with a friend and a hug with a sexual attraction. But what this means is that holding hands.
Speaker 3:Right or wrong, I don't care. I'm not going call it a sin. It's glue. It's emotional glue. And so if a young couple are going to hold hands, they just got to know they are exchanging emotional energy that if they decide not to get married, they're going to have to rip the glue apart.
Speaker 3:And when you rip glue apart, you ever superglue your fingers together? It hurts. It does damage. It leaves scars. Now, I'm a let Christians make their decisions about whether or not they want scars, but I'd like them to know that they're gonna get scars.
Speaker 3:Right? I would have liked to have known this. Other than just don't have sex, it's wrong, which is all I ever got. Tell me about how it's there to bind my soul to someone so that I'm committed to her for the sake of my children. I might think about that then.
Speaker 3:Right? As opposed to it's wrong, you never told me why and it feels good. And the world says do what feels good. It's not easy to dismiss your soul. And this is why you see, those of you who are younger, you've seen this in action.
Speaker 3:The guy that she should break up with, but she won't was because they're physically you doing things together. That's why, she can't see the rest of it. The couple that breaks up in a huge fight and gets back together over and over again. Why? Because the physical glue is pulling them back together.
Speaker 3:The girl who dates the same guy from high school until grad school and then breaks up with no plan. What's she gonna do? Who's she gonna meet after that? Missing the window. Scars and calluses abounding.
Speaker 3:Alright, so what the glue is for. And this is, I should check my time here. Make sure we're on. The hard science of populations and demographics. Something that you really do need to know, and we do need to be talking about as the Missouri Synodist is.
Speaker 3:So if we're going to talk about church growth and needing to do mission, we got to know what's going on with world populations. And I feel like we're totally ignorant of it. I am not going to talk about morality for the next ten minutes. This has nothing to do with my moral opinions. I have moral opinions on the matter, but this is not that.
Speaker 3:This is simple, science facts. Can find socialist German study years of culture and economy that are talking about these same issues. It's a cold hard fact that overpopulation of the planet was a myth to begin with, asserted without any evidence and assumed to be true. And thanks to it, the opposite problem is about to hit the planet. There is a demographic bomb coming in my generation and the next one worldwide.
Speaker 3:The replacement rate for any population to survive, whether it's a culture, a race or religion is 2.1 children per family. Right? Per couple, 2.1 children. That is to deal with not just two, right? Because you have death and other things like that.
Speaker 3:2.1. Over seventy first world countries are below this rate. Seventy first world countries. What that means is that you're not going to have these countries replacing their populations. These advanced information based, technology based countries are going to run out of workers in about twenty years.
Speaker 3:It is a fact of history that economic prosperity has never coexisted with a decreasing population base. So you have this inverted pyramid that's beginning, right? If you think of a pyramid being shaped like this, a pyramid of workers with a group that's this big run-in the economy, that's going to have to be run eventually by a group that's this big. You already think about this when you think about social security. Yeah, Medicare, taxes, the housing bubble.
Speaker 3:2008 was the year the boomers started retiring. They all had these big houses. Now they all want to sell them and downsize, but there's no one to buy the houses. We didn't replace ourselves and it's going to hurt. The few that remain produced fewer still because they're watching Netflix instead.
Speaker 3:We're not going to benefit from this. Having fewer humans is not healthy for the planet at this point. What's going to happen is, it's going to be harder to find work that pays to sustain the current lifestyle you enjoy. You might be able to find work, you might be able to eat, but the lifestyle that you enjoy now will be harder. Harder to become qualified to do work at higher levels of income.
Speaker 3:Harder to find marriages worth embarking on. So if you think it's tough to meet an LCMS confessional Lutheran spouse now, wait ten years. It's going to be tougher. Tougher still. What about immigration?
Speaker 3:Or in ecclesiological terms, what about mission? Can't we just evangelize our way through this? Or can't we just import people from other countries? Immigration already does account for 50% of The U. S.
Speaker 3:Birth rate. The immigrants do have more kids than we do that have lived here. But Mexico is about to implode due to a low birth rate. On top of this, taking workers from poor countries means taking young males means less marriages for them means less children for them. And so you can only do that for so long, and all you're doing is keeping the poor poorer.
Speaker 3:So that argument is a very callous argument. And a very white middle class, unaware of the world argument. And the hardest piece of this, just got to it hurts. We can't fix this. We can't change this.
Speaker 3:We just have to go through it because you got the pyramid, right? And so you have this age group that's maybe right here that's going to have to take over that economy in twenty years. You can't go back and have more kids in 2008. That age group is set for the next seventy five years worldwide. It's set.
Speaker 3:There's no fixing the problem other than to go through the result of it. And then as Christians start to wonder, do we have to continue this pattern? Especially when you think about it, it's nothing new. The devil's always hated babies. He hates humans, right?
Speaker 3:The all worship, burning babies alive. Romans, they practiced abortion. Augustus Caesar, one of the greatest emperors ever, although he was a dictator, yes, but he was smart. He said to the Roman nobility, You seem too eager that your family name should perish with yourself. Young Roman men unwilling to bear children.
Speaker 3:Ambrose said, Women are in a hurry to wean their children. If they be rich, they scorn to suckle them. Poor women use murderous juices to kill the fetus within the womb. It's not new. The devil wants us to kill our babies.
Speaker 3:He does. He wants us to not have them. He wants less people in paradise if he can manage it. Now, I'll trust an election to get the right number there, but I think the right number has to do with trusting what God has said about marriage as well. Abortion and abortifacient birth control something about which we are terribly silent.
Speaker 3:And embryo killing IVF, which we finally talked about in this recent Lutheran witness. But the real question, still, what I'm really asking this morning is, when did we start letting the world tell us what's true about all of this? Because no matter your stance on birth control, women's roles, revivalism, it doesn't matter. What matters is, the change in average Joe thinking among postmodern Christians was not based upon ideas that we found in the Bible, but upon the storm of postmodern thought proposing these things to us. Much of it founded by non Christian or anti Christian thinkers within the last two hundred years.
Speaker 3:The reason we changed our view on marriage is not because we went back to the Bible and said, oh my goodness, a woman can go to work. That wasn't where we came up with the idea. Someone else told us women can go to work, so because of that, we need to make sure that they don't have to have kids and get in the way of their career. And we went, Oh, that sounds great. Let's do it.
Speaker 3:Because women are equal. Right? And we believe that. They are. They're capable.
Speaker 3:Right? And so we took their lie with the half truth that was buried within it. And we didn't ask, what does scripture say about marriage? What does scripture say about children? This question was posed to me by a fellow seminarian in my second year at seminary.
Speaker 3:We were three years married and had no kids yet. We were on the pill. I didn't like the question. But he challenged me. He said, find what scripture actually says about children.
Speaker 3:Go look it up. Figure it out. Psalm 127 is pretty hard to ignore. I'm really glad. I got five of them now and they're great.
Speaker 3:They're horrible, I hate them. But they're great too. They've ruined my life almost as much as being a pastor's ruined my life. But they're the only thing I can maybe take with me. And it is up to Jesus to have that be the case at the end of the day, but train up a child, teach them the word, and he will be in charge.
Speaker 3:They're the only thing on this planet that is eternal. It's my kids. Your kids. Us. In Jesus.
Speaker 3:The real question is, why are we still letting the world teach us and our children how to think? Why are we letting them define love, marriage and success for our young people? The old Walther League, which had its issues by the time it was over, had a really neat motto. The LCMS, what a world it must have been when we could actually have this be our motto. Pro My Latin pronunciation is horrible.
Speaker 3:Often translated as church and home, or even God and country. But the English that I ran across first when I learned this was for altar and for hearth. That was what we wanted to raise our children to want. For altar and for hearth. What a striking image.
Speaker 3:What a purpose filled, purpose driven life. Right? Let me close with these thoughts. Fear, if you know your Dune, fear is the mind killer. Seeing the demographic winter coming our way and shaking our boots is not what we are called to as Christians.
Speaker 3:It'll just keep us from responding adequately. Today's worldview exists on the foundational idea that the immediate individual pleasure of the adult is more important than the well-being of all future generations. And that is what as Christians we have to believe is wrong. My immediate pleasure, my goals in life are not more important than the future of the church in the world. And that I have a duty to the future of the church in the world.
Speaker 3:For over forty years now, we haven't been teaching our kids this. We haven't had been teaching them the responsibility to future generations to actually have future generations. That it is a duty for the world, instead of being ignored and abandoned. What we need as a goal is to raise a generation of Christians who actually believe that truth is not a matter of opinion. That a college education, while good, is not more important than children.
Speaker 3:That a successful career, while fulfilling, is not more fulfilling than faithful and steady marriage. And that gluing and ungluing yourself to lots of people will not help you find your soul mate. We should believe the scriptures instead, which teach that we should not store up treasures on earth where moth and rust are just gonna destroy them. Where charm is deceptive and beauty is fleeting, but the fear of the Lord is to be praised. Where a man shall leave his father and mother and hold fast to his wife and the two shall become one flesh.
Speaker 3:Where the fruit of the womb is a reward. Where what we believe about who Jesus was and how He saved us influences how we treat each other all the time. Where we teach His words because He's God, whether or not we like those words. If And we don't like them, our first action is not to try to make them go away, but to find out how and why they're right. Where the good news is yelled every single day by all of us at our dinner table to our kids, Listen, God is calling.
Speaker 3:Where when he says, Come out and I will give you a new mind and a new heart, we hear that as good news as well. Cross, vocation, freedom, altar and hearth, Christianity as an alien colony, children as a gift, marriage as a goal and a good work, Christ as crucified and covering all of it with his blood. It is a jungle out there, and as God first said, it is not good for man to be alone. And I think that was a gift.
Speaker 2:What's your name? And where are you from? What's your question?
Speaker 4:Kurt Roland, St. Louis, Missouri. Jonathan, you're obviously encouraging us to not comply or conform ourselves to the world and the world view and everything, but yet throughout your presentation you talk a lot about how even you yourself are spending time watching Netflix and binge watching and commercials and so on and so forth. Not wanting to be a legalist here, but we say that we don't want to conform to the world, but yet where are we spending our time? Even you yourself, right?
Speaker 4:And so we can't say we need to change and yet dance with the devil so to speak. So my question really is, is there more that you and our pastors should be encouraging us to do besides just simply don't conform to the worldview. At some point it needs to translate into action.
Speaker 3:Yeah. I mostly agree with what you said and I certainly do have my own share of what I would say not having done enough saying no to Netflix to confess. But I don't think that I think that's surface. I think the confirmation, the non conformity with the world is not about what we see or even necessarily what we do first, it's about what we think and how we think. So I think there's a massive difference between somebody sitting watching Netflix saying, oh, I see how that this is attempting to mold my thinking in a different direction than what truth is.
Speaker 3:Or even, Oh, look how this man's conscience is forcing him to struggle and he seeks to justify himself with his actions. And sitting back assuming that it's not doing anything to me. So the renewal of the mind is knowing Scripture, knowing what you believe and why you believe it. And when that is true, you can live in the postmodern jungle. We can't leave the jungle.
Speaker 3:We're here. You're going to be absorbed by it. And there's a point at which, it's a fine line. There's a fine line between being the alien people who are weird, which we are going to have to get used to that a little bit, telling our kids you can't do what the other kids are doing, and also still speaking the language. We are not Orthodox Jews.
Speaker 3:We don't have to wear funny clothing. It's a fine line, it's a gray line. I think the answer is, what should we do as Lady Moore? It is devote ourselves to the Word, devote ourselves to catechesis and study. And I think law and gospel in their cycle drives you to the point where I see my kid and I see my Netflix and I want to watch that, but my kid's crying, so I'm driven by the duty, the truth, the law, and then the mercy for the kid, which God's word has created in me.
Speaker 3:Knowing that at the same time, I'm always going to be sinning one way or the other. Not murdering people, but being selfish, preferring entertainment or leisure to what is right. But I think that getting duty into my generation, we didn't get it. I'm trying to pick it up. And then trying to give my children duty as an ideal.
Speaker 3:I think that's a big start of it with the cross and the resurrection at the heart of what all that's about. And we can't miss that at all. Go ahead.
Speaker 2:Hi, my name is Sam Sessa, originally from Fort Lauderdale, now in St. Louis. So my question is, how do we bring the gospel to a postmodern society that holds truth to be relative? And as a subset of that, how do we bridge from our objective truth to their subjective opinion?
Speaker 3:Right. That's the million dollar question. I think there's two answers to that. One is, you don't just walk in and beat them in the face with truth. You guys recommend tactics by Greg Kugel.
Speaker 3:You've had Kugel on a number of times. You've a book tactics about conversation starting, and asking questions rather than making statements, and sort of letting the postmodern lack of thinking thinker hang themself with their own ideas, so that they are like, what I'm saying doesn't make any sense, and then you can begin to have that conversation about truth. The other half of it, as Doctor. Meyer is gonna talk about, is the simple fact of the resurrection. It is a fact, that tomb was empty, and to deny that is foolish.
Speaker 3:Why was it empty? What did it mean? What did it cause? And then embracing the narrative, the story, the history. We got the best story in the history of the world and it's true.
Speaker 3:And telling it as a story. For so long, we have taught catechism and theology as a series of bullet points pulled out of scripture. And there's a certain truth to that. It's not like it's wrong. It's not like it's not helpful to have a reference source for a question.
Speaker 3:But the Scriptures didn't come to us as peepers dogmatics, which I love peepers dogmatics, but that's not how Scripture came. It came as letters and stories. And so as Christians being equipped to tell the story, rather than to just simply make assertions about soteriology. Right? People want to hear stories today and we got a good one and it actually explains what's wrong with their life, which they might start to listen to.
Speaker 3:You also but you got to get to know them too. You can't just expect Joe on the street to care what you think and that's a fact. Go ahead.
Speaker 5:Hello. My name is Mary Britschke. I'm formerly from St. Louis and currently from Carterville, Illinois, which is done by Carbondale. I'm married to a wonderful old Lutheran, and I think that you're what you're saying is splash of cool water in the face, and I want him to know about it.
Speaker 5:But as I look at your book and hear the comments that you need an editor, I'm wondering if you're going to write another book that my husband might be more inclined to read so that you know, you understand what I'm saying, that he when I first met him and he talked about he never reads fiction, thought, wow, this is really boring and now I'm the same way. It's like fiction is a waste of time when there's so much wonderful non fiction that I haven't read. So what do Well, you
Speaker 3:I have on my computer about 10 books all started. I've got two that maybe could sometime be done in a year or so. I'm I don't know. I keep trying. I really do.
Speaker 3:I just read a book yesterday about doing one project at a time, so I'm hoping that helps a little bit. I'm going to try that. But yes, but I don't think I'll ever write stuff insane the way Broken is. Yeah. Lots of the fiction influence.
Speaker 3:I went to school to be a fiction writer. That's what I thought I was going to do. And so you're going to see that in any book that comes out. But I think CPH does have a lot of good material still that others are doing that are for the non fiction. Go ahead.
Speaker 6:Hi, my name is Aaron Boyer, I'm from Marengo, Illinois. And I kind of have a suggestion that's related to the first question that was asked, I want your thoughts on it. As a young person in the thick of this postmodern thinking, to me the question or the fact that a family unit is important, which can kind of sum up a lot of what you were saying. That's not in question. That's just something I've always believed.
Speaker 6:But my suggestion is maybe that the family unit is not enough, is not enough to drive us to create a culture that is God pleasing. It's the start, right? Well, maybe the start is individuals, and then the family unit. But what's after the family unit? Church for one thing, church community.
Speaker 6:Is there a next level of organization that we should be striving towards that incorporates family units in an organized way?
Speaker 3:Yeah, I don't know, maybe. You know the church is free to organize between humans however we see fit. I still would say though, I think that you use the word family unit, believe that in any average LCMS congregation, you say that and it's got two different definitions and the dominant definition is a guy and a girl with maybe a kid if they want. And I think the biblical definition is a man, a woman and some kids. Three at least if we believe the demographic stuff.
Speaker 3:Right? So I don't know that we've got that family unit in our congregations. And how are we gonna have a congregation create a culture when we have within it a dominant culture that doesn't want to even create a family unit? It's So I challenging. And I don't think it starts with fixing.
Speaker 3:You can't. It doesn't start with fixing the minds of 50 year olds. No offense. Thanks. But you're past the age.
Speaker 3:You're not going to have more kids, right? You're past the
Speaker 2:age. It starts I'm with not your having any more kids. Yes. But that's why you're here.
Speaker 3:We got those who can and will be the future families are where the minds need to be shifted a little bit. That we at least, and don't get me wrong, I'm not saying you have to have as many kids as possible, I'm saying it would be nice if we believed again that kids were a gift.
Speaker 2:One more question.
Speaker 7:Mine is actually going back actually to that topic about movies or, you know, Netflix. And the thing is I'm thinking is it I it's not just a story. It's not just entertainment. I think that's actually a big problem as we just go, oh, we just watch mindless entertainment. We shut our minds down when we watch movies or TV and not when we don't dialogue with it.
Speaker 7:We don't open up our minds and think I mean, I take for instance, the one that just came out this week and it's called, Inside Out. For one, if an apparent it's an awesome opportunity to talk about how emotions work. But even in it, there's this whole there's this one character that plays a central character, and she's a character that's about emotion, that's that's joy, and everything has to be joyous. And you eventually realize that you actually have to cry at times. Yeah.
Speaker 7:And things, you know, distinct at times.
Speaker 3:Right.
Speaker 7:And so and even there, you could even use that to talk about the theology of the cross that not every being a Christian does not mean that we're gonna have you know, life is gonna be hunky dory and we're gonna, you know, around and sing all the time joy or excitedly or whatever. There are you know, there's gonna be times where we are gonna be sorrowful. We're gonna be down on our knees before the cross saying, Lord have mercy. And so like, I mean, that's just a kids movie. And
Speaker 3:So for the sake of time, I'm gonna interrupt you in response. I think I think you're saying something very important. You're focusing on the specific thing, I think the bigger picture idea is that in this media stuff that we have, these movies, they are the narratives of our neighbors and the expressions of their lives. And there is almost no faster way to bond with a young neighbor or an 40 year old person than to share these stories with them and to be able to know the pain of the character Joy. Or to be able to talk about Walter White and his destruction, and how amazing it was to watch and unbelievable, and yet then connect it to the world view that's driving him, is actually Nietzsche's will to power.
Speaker 3:Leads him to suicide and death. So that's where we can't abandon these stories because they are hooks to get into your neighbor's mind and they're the stories of our world's lives. The mythology as it were. So I think you're onto something there. We do need to engage it.
Speaker 3:So thank you so much.
Speaker 2:Suspecting the. About Well Cities inhabitants are losing their minds. Trigger warning. This ain't a safe space. Impostor insanity by going Yes.
Speaker 2:Completely utterly confused. If you're doing what everyone else is doing, you're doing it bad.
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