Anatomy of an Implosion (1 of 3)

[00:00:01] Speaker A: Hello, YouTube theologians. Pastor Wolf Mueller here with Dr. Schultz, who's written and published. I have. This is not a. [00:00:08] Speaker B: Can you. [00:00:08] Speaker A: Is it even, is it backwards anatomy of an implosion? One pastor professor's diagnosis and lament of the mission drift to woke Marxism in lutheran higher education. Dr. Schultz, welcome back. Good to see you again. It's been a while. [00:00:22] Speaker C: Well, thanks, pastor. Always my pleasure. [00:00:24] Speaker A: It's. It's my fault, by the way, you guys who are watching and listening, because Dr. Schultz, he loves to come and visit and I'm always busy with other nonsense, so it's. Sorry, but I'm glad to have you back. And congratulations on the publication of the book. It's somewhat autobiographical because this is not. I mean, you had a chance to observe what you're talking about up close. Do you want to give just a thumbnail sketch of what's happened the last few years? [00:00:52] Speaker C: Well, thanks, brother. So I think I'd resist the thought that it's very much autobiographical. What I'd like to offer is that it is, I hope, a very faithful pastor professor's view of what's been going on at our Concordia universities in the lutheran church Missouri synod and beyond in conservative lutheran education. And what perhaps is unique about it is that there's a first person familiarity with things. So I'm in the front row for some of the stuff that's been happening. The very brief, in a nutshell description of things is that about two years ago, Concordia University Wisconsin. The unofficial way of talking about that university is that it's the flagship university for our Concordia system, for your listeners who are extraordinarily well informed. I know, but who may be listening in right now. We love to confuse things by calling every single institution that we in the LCMs have Concordia. So you really have to be sure you're having a nice back and forth conversation and say, well, which Concordia? So all the universities and formerly colleges used to be called are called Concordia. Our seminaries have Concordia. So this is Concordia University Wisconsin, which is located just up the shoreline on Lake Michigan from Chicago in Mequan, Wisconsin. It also has an extended campus in Michigan. So what was happening about two years ago is that the former president of some 20 some years had announced his retirement and there was a search underway for a new president. In the process of that search, there was a very public posting defining the qualities. This was actually the terminology that was used, the important qualities which the next president would have to fulfill. And those qualities actually described the three terms that we know now as die most people do dei, but I'm playing around a little bit with it. So diversity, inclusion and equity and the quotes can be found at the head of my book and probably all over the place online. But they were looking for a new university professor who would believe in and be committed to racialized diversity inclusion, which means inclusion of everything, actually, except the christian and western worldview on things and equity, a word which is a very nasty substitute for equality under the law, to talk again about ratios of people based on their self identified race or self identified sexual predilections or whatever. So this announcement was online for a span of two years, 2021 into 2022. Being a professor, not to mention a confessional lutheran pastor in our LCMS synod, I did my best to talk with the board of regents when they were doing strange things, glad to talk about that if we need to, and tried to talk with the administration and anybody else who would listen. And ultimately I realized that nobody was going to stop the momentum of this push for the woke president. So I published an essay in Christian News called Woke Dysphoria at Concordia. The reaction to that published essay, along with the published open letters I'd been sending to the board and so forth, was not what I was hoping for. When I called for repentance and pointed out what a horrible business this wokeness is for education, I identified it as kind of a potent cocktail of progressivism and neomarxism and postmodernism and so forth. And it's also just in diametric contrast to Christ and his gospel. So the reaction of the university was summarily to ban me from campus without any procedure. I was locked out, locked out of the system, prohibited from stepping on campus. Long story short, the university, under its interim president and with the compliance of its board, went after me for the better part of a year after that, while I was not allowed on campus and not allowed to teach and actually, according to their verbiage, prohibited from having contact with my colleagues or students or anything. Pretty ridiculous considering I usually preach and teach Bible classes and help with liturgy in the surrounding congregations. This whole business garnered an awful lot of national attention from people concerned with academic freedom, which is another topic I'm happy to talk about, especially in connection with lutheran disputation and teaching. The process went on for over a. [00:06:27] Speaker B: Year to try to get me, I. [00:06:30] Speaker C: Think, quite frankly, to get me. [00:06:33] Speaker B: Fired, but also to infer that by the. [00:06:39] Speaker C: Way they were speaking about one or two Bible passages, I had done something truly horrible and couldn't be around students or human beings and really should crawl under a rock and die. So I went through all of that business and with some protection from the Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty on the civil side of things, went through another year a little bit less, and now there's a new administration on board. The new administration has indicated its commitment. [00:07:09] Speaker B: To taking me back if and only. [00:07:12] Speaker C: If I will agree that they can fire me at any time they want, for whatever reason or no reason whatsoever by the senior administrators, the president and the provost. Now the problem here, I think, and I know you just asked for the summary, but the problem here is, you could say multilayered or nested, there are some very obvious things. The sheer malice, wrongness and probably illegality. [00:07:40] Speaker B: Of handling a professor the way the. [00:07:43] Speaker C: University has manhandled me, that's the least of it. The other problems, though, are Concordia has established itself as being an institution, according to national legal organizations at Princeton and where else? As being an institution that really is not living up to the name of. [00:08:03] Speaker B: Being a university because it will not allow criticism of the university and what it's doing won't even allow discussion of that. [00:08:14] Speaker C: Now, furthermore, that tips over then onto. [00:08:16] Speaker B: The church side of things. [00:08:19] Speaker C: So you and I know this very. [00:08:20] Speaker B: Well, but just to remind your viewers. [00:08:23] Speaker C: And listeners about it, we are actually, you and I, as called and ordained pastors. We're responsible to do as, for instance, the scriptures say, and our lutheran confessions demand of us, that we must believe, teach and confess everything that scripture says. [00:08:41] Speaker B: Nothing more or less. [00:08:43] Speaker C: And this is actually a quote as that was. This is actually a quote from our formula of Concord. And to reject and condemn false doctrine. [00:08:53] Speaker B: False dogma is the word there. [00:08:56] Speaker C: So that's actually what I was doing and calling for repentance. There is, of course, a longer story in there with how church leaders reacted, what's going on back and forth. [00:09:06] Speaker B: But this is, I think, a story and a concern and a problem and a worry which has both a civil kind of academic side to it. And what's more important for you and. [00:09:20] Speaker C: Me and probably most of your listeners, it has this doctrinal question. [00:09:26] Speaker B: Is a university of the church, such as Concordia University, Wisconsin, completely beholden to the word of God? [00:09:35] Speaker C: And then, by the way, to the faithful confessions of Luther and the reformers and the creeds, are they completely beholden to that or are they free to. [00:09:44] Speaker B: Do whatever they feel they need to do to be a university the way they understand it? [00:09:51] Speaker C: All of this comes to a focus, I think, in my saying, bless you, in my saying that what's actually at. [00:09:58] Speaker B: Issue here is a matter of doctrine, which I think most of us have seen. Anyone who's interested, that's what I want. [00:10:09] Speaker A: To dig down on. But just one quick thing. So you mentioned how the university isn't living up to that name university, which is that kind of seeking for that one truth. And you mentioned the kind of promises that they all mention, Princeton and so forth. But I think you would say, rightly that it's not like Concordia isn't living up to that while all the other universities are. I mean, this is a problem that's throughout higher education, that it's been captivated by an ideology that's militating against the seeking after of truth and the freedom to seek after it. [00:10:48] Speaker C: Right. Well, let's take an example here. So you and I are talking in Epiphany, which is right after the Christmas season in 2024. It's January 2024 as we're visiting now. This is right after the three university presidents from Princeton, MIT and Harvard were. [00:11:11] Speaker B: In front of a congressional committee. [00:11:13] Speaker C: And we've recently learned that the president of Harvard had to resign from her position there because of what you could call this woke Marxism stuff. So her conclusions, such as they were, led her actually to say in front of God, Congress and everybody that it was not immoral to be calling for. [00:11:43] Speaker B: The genocide of the jewish people and more things. She simply would not speak to that. [00:11:49] Speaker C: So you're certainly right that this woke. [00:11:52] Speaker B: Marxism, which no doubt we'll define and. [00:11:56] Speaker C: Exemplify a bit more in our conversation, as we always do, but this woke Marxism is pervasive. [00:12:02] Speaker B: But here's the thing. [00:12:04] Speaker C: It should not be pervasive in religious universities. And in fact, I'd be happy to make the argument one of Concordia University, Wisconsin's biggest failures in going after me the way they did is their failure. [00:12:20] Speaker B: To be an option for parents around. [00:12:23] Speaker C: The country, perhaps the world, who want a place to entrust their sons and daughters to where they will not be taught the oppressor oppression made up mantra, the mythology of Harvard's critical race theory. [00:12:40] Speaker B: But Concordia University is finding itself right. [00:12:44] Speaker C: Now in the position of defending its. [00:12:47] Speaker B: Right to do whatever it wants to do, while at the same time seeking to silence a professor and a pastor. [00:12:57] Speaker C: Of the church who's saying, wait a. [00:12:58] Speaker B: Minute, this is contrary to our own. [00:13:02] Speaker C: Religious commitments, our own confessional identity. [00:13:07] Speaker A: Right. I think the same thing is true with churches. Just in the very broad swath of things, you have lutheran churches trying to be like evangelical churches. And it's not like we have a shortage of evangelical churches. I mean, let them do that, I suppose. I mean, they should also be lutheran, but we should probably do the only thing that we are called to do, which is to be lutheran. I mean, that's the. The only thing that lutheran churches are good at is being Lutheran, and we're not even that good at that. And apparently it's true of our universities as well. [00:13:38] Speaker C: Well, let me add something that we both want to say here. You can tell me if you don't agree. I know you do, though. Our thing as Lutherans, and this is not a dismissal of our congregational life. Our big thing is education. You and I both have a heart for mission work, too. But our mission work fundamentally has been education in the United States of America, in the world, in our history. We are a university faith. We come from the University of Wittenberg. So the problem then, to put it this way, for maybe a broader audience, I don't know. But the problem is that our universities are, number one, the feeder schools for most of the students into our seminaries. And number two, if our universities were doing what they are supposed to do, you and I know that the universities should be providing, sending out professors and so forth to back up and sustain and help the parish pastors and their people on the front lines. So when this whole education thing falls apart, or if you will, to use the biblical thought, when the trumpet, the chauffeur doesn't give a clear sound. Right. When we are not different from all of the other universities in the United States, we have failed at our mission to the church. [00:15:13] Speaker A: I want to dig in, especially the language of woke Marxism. So this is kind of my goal for the conversation that I want to be able to. I think I mentioned you before we started. I can smell how the whole thing is woke Marxism, but I can't argue it. I can't say how what we're seeing here is connected to Marxism and what the unique. So Marxism as a broad category, woke as a specific smaller circle in that broader category. So you have to broaden Marxism out as a category for me so that the woke fits into it. So could we start there with Marxism and define the term and the history there? [00:15:55] Speaker C: Right. So the book that we're talking about, anatomy of an implosion, is not, strictly speaking, an academic book, though it is all about academics. It's not the kind of book that I'm used to writing, where you've got a zillion footnotes and it's written for, well, mostly an academic audience, or it's going to be used in a graduate course or something. This is meant to be very accessible to our pastors and people in the parishes to see what the concern is. And your request for clear definition is, of course, exactly one of the things that we desperately need in this entire conversation, where we can have it but are not getting, practically not getting anywhere. Our own church has been dallying more broadly with condemning people, even for asking. [00:16:49] Speaker B: Questions online about woke things that are. [00:16:54] Speaker C: Entering into some of our publications and conversations. So this is a big deal. Now, I'm going to offer the thought that what I'm doing, you may regard this as a little sloppy or a little sloshy, but I just said it's not strictly an academic book. So woke is the popular term. Marxism is the more focused term. So I'm going to say that I needed to use both of those together to explain to people that this is. [00:17:24] Speaker B: All the same thing. [00:17:25] Speaker C: So I could have said, this is one pastor professor's concern for the neomarxism infecting our institutions. And I don't think people would recognize it as what is also described as woke. So I've said in the book a couple of times that actually this is. [00:17:41] Speaker B: A hydra headed thing. [00:17:43] Speaker C: The different heads have different names. Ultimately, we'd be able to say that the phenomenon we're talking about here is lgbtqism, that it is the social justice movement, the so called racial justice movement. It is wokeness, the way it had usually been described in grade school or board of education conversations. So let me just follow your lead and do what you were asking for. The term woke is nothing more or less than an effort to talk about things happening now, going downhill, as if they were actually enlightened instead of benighted. So think back to the term enlightenment. The enlightenment, European Enlightenment, would be, for instance, the stuff going on around the time of the Declaration of Independence and the revolution in the United States. Emmanuel Kant is pretty much at the head of this academically and in a writing way. You folks could look up a very accessible, especially for him, a very accessible essay online. What is enlightenment? But all we need right now is to catch that word enlightenment. Oh, what a wonderful marketing word. Right? So, Professor Kant, it's pretty clear that you want to be able to do philosophy and thought and politics and civilization utterly apart from Christ and the Bible without mentioning the name of Christ, without depending on the authority of the Bible. This seems like a pretty bad thing to be doing. And he'll say, oh, well, my dear fellow, actually, what this is is it's enlightenment. We're finally growing up. We're going to be adults, we're going to stand on our own. 2ft. Doesn't that sound wonderful? Enlightenment was the term of art, still is, for acting as if Christ in the Bible never existed. Woke is the same thing. It's exactly the same thing, only I'm going to go ahead and say it a lot less educated, lot less thoughtful, lot less concerned about making the case. It's simply something that imposes itself on us. Woke ism, actually is some nebulism. If you want to do something here, it's actually a way to put people to sleep. So instead of being enlightened, the enlightenment darkened the source of salvation, wisdom and full understanding of the value of each and every human being. That's what it was really doing. Wokism is putting people to sleep. So the government or bad actors or administrators who perhaps don't know what they're doing, that's my most charitable read, where they can visit something on us and it sounds, oh, kind of benign, kind of harmless and even kind of nice. Do students at your university sleep through their classes or are they wide awake and woke? Now, Marxism then comes in, because that is what, that's the spin, that's the way this is all rifled as it hits us, especially. This is why it's to be opposed, especially the way it's assaulting our children and our grandchildren. So Marxism is something that is, I think, very apparent in everything that's going on. You could catch this, I think, in an easy to read way, by taking a look at Solja Nitsen. So I don't mean reading all his three volumes of the Gulag archipelago. The worst things could happen. But I mean catching his essay online, the one we've all heard the title of, I think, live not by lies. And look at this man, 1974, coming out of being a prisoner in the Gulag in the Soviet Union, warning like a prophet, right, warning the west, you're headed for the very same thing that's going on with the communism in the Soviet Union. You need not to live by lies. Take a look at that and I think you'll see the Marxism almost automatically. But I'm one of those people who can speak about this, I think, with some familiarity and authority. [00:22:07] Speaker B: So this has to do with german idealism. [00:22:09] Speaker C: Here's the very quick version. This picks things up with that story about the enlightenment. So after Emmanuel Kant did everything he could to teach people to do without the Bible and to do without Christ, I think it looks pretty often like Kant seriously thinks he can have all the good stuff apart from Christ and apart from the Bible. His ethics actually turns out to be kind of a secularized version of the golden rule, which is actually a quote from our lord. [00:22:45] Speaker B: Right? [00:22:45] Speaker C: Do to others as you would have them do to you, which doesn't work. [00:22:48] Speaker B: If you don't know. [00:22:50] Speaker C: And remember and keep on listening to the voice that's speaking that which is the voice of the incarnate God. So Kant was seriously trying to do that. It's all quite horrible and obviously devastating as time goes on. But after the enlightenment and Immanuel Kant comes a philosopher by the name of Hegel. And Hegel goes with Kant's notion of departing from scripture, getting rid of that bothersome crutch of the Bible in western culture. And Hegel actually teaches philosophy as if it were mythology. You've got to put something in there to bring some sort of authority, or, if you will, some sort of grip and persuasion to this message about how society is getting better and better. So what he did was what Jay Glenn Gray calls philosophical mythology. Now, Hegel then, in writings such as, well, in a number of his writings, they're pretty hard things to get through. I recommend looking at Hegel. For those who want to read, looking at the website. Squashed philosophers. [00:24:01] Speaker B: Squashed philosophers. [00:24:03] Speaker C: And you'll find some of Hegel's stuff blessedly abbreviated and introduced, sometimes even with a little bit of humor, to help you remember what he's up to. [00:24:14] Speaker B: So Hegel was teaching this. [00:24:17] Speaker C: And now here's the reason I mentioned Hegel in our short conversation right now. A major follower of Hegel was Karl Marx. Karl Marx, at a point where we might think of him as being well, along in high school or starting off his college career, just decided that he. [00:24:35] Speaker B: Was going to abandon his christian upbringing and he was going to follow Hegel, which he did. [00:24:44] Speaker C: He took Hegel's basic thought, that society gets better and better by a process of thesis, antithesis, and know there's a unifying idea for a culture or society, then somebody comes up with the opposite. And as the result of the collision of those two opposite ideas, you get a better synthesis. And so society gets better and better and better. [00:25:08] Speaker B: By which he meant more communist, probably. [00:25:11] Speaker C: So anyhow, Marx picks that up, and we know this. Marx is just repurposing Hegel when he, marx says, okay, here's what I'm going. [00:25:24] Speaker B: To say, and this is all made up. [00:25:26] Speaker C: Society is composed fundamentally of two different classes. And in his case, it was the bourgeoisie. We're even saying that today sometimes thoughtlessly, the bougie people, right? The owners, the rich people, the movers and the shakers. And then there's the proletariat, the poor working schmucks and the bourgeoisie is taking away the meaningfulness and the identity and the money from the proletariat. So the proletariat needs to rise up and in kind of a Hunger Games version of yahtzee, right? You got to roll the dice and take this over. And then, of course, we're going to get a better. And Mark says it, communist society. That's communism. That's communism in kind of a nutshell. And that's what I'm saying here. There's another element we can come to as well. [00:26:19] Speaker A: If communism, the synthesis for Hegel, like thesis, antithesis, and then synthesis, and then that synthesis becomes the new thesis which has an antithesis. Did Marx sort out, I'm just curious, when communism went from being the synthesis to the thesis, what would be the antithesis? And he worked through the next iteration of that, or no? [00:26:43] Speaker C: I'm going to say no. I suppose some people who are fans of Marx will say he did work it out. But Marx was careless, philosophically careless, and just intellectually hasty because he wanted to change things. So that's some of the most famous kind of verbiage from him. I don't just want to teach people things. He doesn't just want to be a philosopher, he wants to change society. Now, please notice the overarching thing here is Kant, with the start of the enlightenment, gets rid of the authoritative word of God and Christ. That's how they're doing things. Hegel picks this up, and with a ridiculous amount of output, Hegel puts down the individual, exalts society or nation states or whatever, and he keeps God so far out of this that he's known for teaching dialectical materialism. That means dialogues, writings. Thinking for him, absolutely, positively denies entrance to Christ. You may not use the scriptures, you cannot talk about Christ. We're doing materialism here. That's what Marx picks up, and then he makes it more violent. So instead of just ideas automatically colliding and automatically somehow producing better societies toward perfect freedom, that's Hegel. Marx says, well, you know, we need people to clash. We need some real violence here to make real change. And that's the inheritance that I see in what I'm calling woke Marxism. I'm hardly the only person who's doing that. [00:28:29] Speaker A: That's right. [00:28:29] Speaker C: I'm concerned with that biblical censorship in there. You see, when you say woke Marxism, you are saying a way of education or a way of life or a way of discourse in the United States, for instance, that will not allow any reference to the authority of scripture, which is the word of Christ incarnate. [00:28:52] Speaker A: I'm going to try to summarize it and see if I get it in my very oversimplified way. But it occurs to me that nobody is calling it woke hegelianism or woke Kantianism, although I suppose this is the point that you want to make, is that Marx includes those three. So the three moves are Kant says, hey, we want to think without Christ. And Hegel picks that up and says, all there is is matter, but it is moving in a mythological way. There's a progress that's happening in history, some sort of mystical material progress. And Mark says, right, and we are part of that progress. And to accomplish that, he divides people up. And it's that division of people, the division of classes. I think that is the main thing that we're picking up now, because woke Marxism is not identifying people necessarily by simply economics, but you sort of pick your line. We want to make sure that everybody is divided from everyone. So there's a battle between men and women. There's a battle between racial minorities and majorities. There's a battle between, I suppose, any minority, sexual minority or whatever. So that the woke part is expanding the divisions. Is that right? [00:30:15] Speaker B: Yes. [00:30:15] Speaker C: Let's also catch this. I meant to drop in the words that I did before. So when Hegel operates on the basis of mythology, that's, of course, a return to things before the fullness of time, when God came. So it's a return to paganism. Right? So how do you motivate people? How do you explain things? You do it by myths. Now, I want to make it clear that Marx was being mythological when he divided up society economically. People think it's an economic argument, and that's not the heart of it. The heart of it is that he arbitrarily divided people according to an identity that he imposed, and then he got everybody riled up and set them at each other's throats. That's the heart of Marxism. It's so opposed to Christ that it wants to avoid even the understanding that you need to love your neighbor, even as an aspiration. So what is marxist about? Woke Marxism is the mythological character of it. The critical race theory, sponsored by, lived by, worshipped by Harvard, and now by just about everybody else, is totally made up. There's nothing there. There's nothing there except this. Willfulness not to consult Christ, not to consult the sacred texts, such as the Declaration of Independence and the constitution in our country, and to do what powerful people want to do to the rest of us. And in some utterly perverse way, we seem happy to join in, at least on some elements of that, which is to join in on that project. [00:32:02] Speaker A: Pick up the story, then, in the philosophical conversation where critical theory enters into it. Because I think three years ago, and I would have seen critical theory, and I would not have seen it with a capital c, capital t. As a technical term. Yes, it has been a technical term for a long time, but I just missed it. So can you flow that stream into the whole deal? [00:32:27] Speaker C: I think I can. How about if I try to be a little briefer here, and then you tell me where we'd like to expand it if we need to. So, critical, just as the word woke or enlightenment by themselves are perfectly wonderful. [00:32:40] Speaker B: Parts of the divine gift of language, right? [00:32:43] Speaker C: I mean, these are nice words. However, in our day and age, when conversation doesn't happen, when people are put into prison for trying to have conversations, when professors are hounded and fired just for trying to have conversations about what is right and wrong. Right, in this day and age, very often all people get is a quick micro sound bite of a word. And that's where I'd like to caution things. So everybody should do with the term critical what you and I are endeavoring to model in our conversation, and that is stop and practice the first act of the mind. What does that term critical mean? What does it mean in this conversation? What does it mean when you see it in the paragraphs and the sentences and the books? [00:33:32] Speaker B: Right. [00:33:33] Speaker C: And the fact of the matter is that critical has become a technical term for Marxist. So I don't mean to base what I'm saying on just googling things online. I know that's a problem, too. But if a person were to look at the etymology of critical, it fundamentally means to judge, to judge or discern, and that would seem like it's a pretty good thing. But the word has been co opted. So I'm going to say it's been kind of re baptized for a particular nasty purpose. So we always have to stop down, slow down. And I've even been recommending that we need to find a different vocabulary for what we want to talk about there. So the word critical traces back at least to the Frankfurt school, the beginning of the 20th century, which was an effort to make the entire world communist. The very thing that's going on and has been going on with the European Union since then. In fact, it kind of looks like those same folks and their disciples just decided they have to be more patient to turn everything global and communist. [00:34:41] Speaker B: Right? [00:34:41] Speaker C: Okay, so critical, then, is a way. [00:34:44] Speaker B: Of saying thinking according to critical theory. [00:34:48] Speaker C: Which is the view that there is no God. The scriptures are a tool of oppression or propaganda. Religion is the opiate of the people. Right? All of that stuff. And then to do your thinking that way. So what I actually do, Brian, is I've been teaching recently. I'm doing this a lot on lutheran philosopher. The kind of thinking that we need to develop is not. Now, remember, these are quick little sound bites is not critical thinking, but it should be crucial thinking. So I've adopted the slogan that we'd like you to join us at our aligned platform on lutheran philosopher to practice clear, crucial and christian thinking as an antidote to the enlightenment and the woke stuff. So I think that the word crucial, which after all, means having to do. [00:35:43] Speaker B: With the cross, that's the kind of. [00:35:46] Speaker C: Thinking that we are in need of, a thinking which is not so censorious, so cowardly and so vicious at the same time that it wants to pre. [00:35:59] Speaker B: Censor the word of God from people. [00:36:02] Speaker C: I mentioned that we're talking at the time that we are here in January of 2024. We're just after the Iowa caucuses. And I'm not making a political observation here, though I think that conversation is fine, too. But in the aftermath of an overwhelming indication about a candidate for the president, all sorts of people on tv, on the legacy or corporate media sites are talking about the misrepresentation of the vote in the Iowa caucus because there's a preponderance of Christians and Bible believing people and evangelicals in Iowa. [00:36:44] Speaker B: Okay? [00:36:45] Speaker C: So that is all critical theory speaking, that whole business. Why should the Bible. What does this mean when our country is founded on the proposition that all men have been endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights? What does it say if a whole swath of people are publicly saying and teaching that we must not pay attention to any of this God and Bible stuff because it's just horrible, and then they pile in their mythology, right? Because it's white supremacy, all christians are white, and so forth and so on, right? So I think that we need to replace in our common conversation, though I'm not one for giving up words just because people are abusing them. But in our quicker conversations, I think the term that we want is crucial. So we want clear, crucial and christian thinking. I'll give you a chance to get at that. But first let me just throw in a quick anecdote. I had a professor in my philosophy doctoral program who was from Chile originally, and every once in a while you can imagine philosophy discussions like ours could get a little dicey and also a little confused by everybody saying and talking past each other. And he said, wait a minute. He said, in my home country, when conversation nations got confused and people were talking past each other and getting angry and maybe even feeling violent toward each other, our parents used to say, wait. [00:38:29] Speaker B: A minute, speak Christian. How about that? [00:38:36] Speaker C: This is what woke Marxism is out to destroy utterly and eternally. If they could, they can't. But this is what a lot of people are falling into. [00:38:49] Speaker A: First, you mentioned the three acts of the mind, the first act of the three acts of the mind. We've talked enough to where I finally figured out what that is just to kind of backfill everyone because I always, oh, three acts of the mind. I love lists like that. It's basically the word and the sentence and the paragraph. It's the meaning of a thing. So it's a thing word. It's an assertion, a sentence, and it's an argument, a paragraph. So those three acts of the mind are to define and to express and then to reason. At least that's how I'm summarizing those. And so you have to start with, if you don't have the right words, then you talk past each other, then your assertions, that has to do with your principled understanding of truth. And then how do you reason out from that? And how do you make those things together? And you can make errors at every level, which, by the way, is why, and this is the second point why you always push me, Dr. Schultz. [00:39:54] Speaker B: I've. [00:39:54] Speaker A: Been trying to put my finger on it. And then in your last answer, I think I really put my finger on why. Because if you asked me, hey, what's critical theory? And I would have said, well, critical theory assumes there's an invisible structure in the world of oppression and oppressor and you can't see it because you're not woke. But I'm going to show it to you. It's this kind of gnostic reality that I'm going to bring you into. And I don't think you would disagree with that. But you start by saying it's the assumption that there is no God or scripture. I don't know if this is helpful for those who are watching or for you. You are always starting with the truth of Christ and putting everything against that, and that is taking every thought captive to Christ. And it's wonderful, but it's hard because that's not normally where we start. So, anyway, I just figured out one of the reasons why I enjoy our conversations so much and why they're always so challenging to me. So I don't know if you have thoughts on that. [00:41:10] Speaker B: Well, I enjoy our conversations too, and. [00:41:12] Speaker C: I think they're wonderfully challenging. I also love the thought, brother, that we are having a substantial conversation about. [00:41:21] Speaker B: The most important things and we are taking a stand against the woke flood. [00:41:29] Speaker C: And against the marxist mythology and saying, no, we are luggas, beings who have been created by a lord who revealed himself as the Lugas. [00:41:41] Speaker B: And that word means language. [00:41:44] Speaker C: What's happening is we're being tricked into surrendering the gift of language. When institutions like Concordia University, Wisconsin go for all this woke stuff, and it's. [00:41:56] Speaker B: Mostly a top down thing from the administrations and from the board, when this sort of stuff is going on, it is stultifying, it is hampering the work. [00:42:11] Speaker C: Of the gospel by interfering with our humanity. [00:42:14] Speaker B: We should be able to be having. [00:42:16] Speaker C: Conversations like you and I are having right now, all the time and everywhere. [00:42:22] Speaker B: I also would just observe if one. [00:42:27] Speaker C: Of our more gifted pastors, like you can say I wasn't familiar with the. [00:42:31] Speaker B: Three acts of the mind. [00:42:33] Speaker C: For all of the other blessings that we got through our education coming up. [00:42:37] Speaker B: And in seminary, this was some pre. [00:42:41] Speaker C: Censoring that was carried over there, too. [00:42:44] Speaker B: So the antipathy, the hatred toward classical. [00:42:49] Speaker C: Text is also, of course, a hallmark. [00:42:51] Speaker B: Of enlightenment and woke, quote unquote, thinking. [00:42:57] Speaker C: This is why, as you know very well, this is why we've been adding words to try to make this clear. We are Lutherans. [00:43:07] Speaker B: Yes. [00:43:07] Speaker C: We're confessional Lutherans. [00:43:09] Speaker A: Yes. [00:43:10] Speaker C: That means we speak in line with texts, especially the scriptures, and we are also classical confessional Lutherans, which is to say, we are not going to give up these texts which can serve us by helping us to talk about, to do our theology and do our teaching of these sacred and always authoritative, efficacious words of scripture. But of course, that's what's been happening, and I'm just going to throw this in there. I think a huge part of the problem here is that we have uneducated administrators and board members. Well, I think these are not people who read. They're not people who have taught in the classroom or pastored in congregations for decades like we have. They don't know the power of the word. They haven't been obliged. I hope you don't mind my saying this for both of us when we get out of bed in the morning. As a parish pastor, you got to do the Bible, you can't not do it. So they haven't been through this. They're just a bunch of people who have been administrators. And what are they administrating? I don't know. They're administrating administrations. It's quite a plague, actually. [00:44:26] Speaker A: So I don't think it's anything new. Now my imagination is always to say, well, ok, where do we find these things? Also in the Bible. So we have a great mutual friend, Warren Graff, who loves to talk about how the Baal worshippers were, and I love that. And I know the historians and maybe the philosophers don't like to make that move, but if I can find it in the script, I'm always doing this exercise, which is probably a first act of the mind exercise is to say, okay, how would I take this term and speak of it using only biblical words? So how would I use the language of the scripture to define this? And I don't want to say that that's necessary. I mean, we can use words that aren't in the Bible, of course, but as a mental exercise, how would I limit myself, how would I constrain myself to what the scriptures give me to talk about this? And I think that's really helpful with critical theory as well. There's a wall of partition. This is how Paul talks in ephesians two. There's a wall of partition that the flesh builds up between whatever, between. He puts a bunch of categories there, between male and female, between jew and gentile, between slave and free, so that we're always building up a wall of partition between the sexes, between the economic groups, between different races, and that Christ is the one who's tearing down that wall. And it seems to me like especially the diversity business of die is trying to rebuild the wall of separation that the flesh always wants to build, but that Christ is torn down. How would you take that up or criticize that analysis? [00:46:22] Speaker C: Oh, that's exactly right, pastor. So probably the heart of anatomy of an implosion is my analysis of the philosophy of language that is being adopted by woke marxist institutions and administrators and so forth. That's probably something that will come up for a longer discussion later on. And I'm not going to pass up the chance to say that our mutual friend Warren is one sharp cookie for whom we're both and more people should be very grateful. So he had actually recommended to me, speaking about getting a little bit more literate on this stuff, which we all could stand to work at. He recommended to me the anthology the great lie, which may or may not be over my left shoulder here. So I think his insight is exactly right. What we also need, though, from time to time, is less evocative and powerful preachers and speakers than Warren to do some of the connecting the dots. And I think maybe that's the more modest work that I can help with. So when St. Paul talks about that barrier and that Berlin wall built up between those different categories of people, St. Paul is combating woke Marxism because these made up categories are what are killing us. This is how the woke Marxists are doing their damage. [00:48:02] Speaker B: This is how they are achieving the. [00:48:07] Speaker C: Mutilation of our sons and daughters. And you and I are not being hyperbolic or overstating that too dramatically. That's exactly what's going on. But the means in the middle of all of this is the means of language. So let me just elaborate a point here and see if that both reinforces your observation. Let me know if you don't think. [00:48:29] Speaker B: It does, and also helps our conversation to continue. [00:48:33] Speaker C: And that is, the categories of sexual preference are not biblical categories. The notion of LGBTQ, and you've got to go, et cetera, mouse isms in there, right? That is simply and obviously a continual marxist project to get people mad and. [00:48:57] Speaker B: Murderous with each other. Sexual proclivity is not the issue. [00:49:04] Speaker C: The issue is, of course, what is healthy and right and what have we been created for, and what does God say about us? The notion of race is also socially constructed. [00:49:15] Speaker B: It's mythological in scripture. [00:49:20] Speaker C: When we hear about race, it's about the human race. When we hear about nations, it's whether the nations are in line with God or opposing him. When we hear about peoples, that is not some sort of color quota that's being evoked there. It's the universality of the gospel. So a good resource to look at to think that through. Though I don't think that this resource goes far enough. As I say in the book, is. [00:49:52] Speaker B: The Dallas statement, where our evangelical neighbors have pointed out, and maybe it matters. [00:50:00] Speaker C: To some folks that this is being done by people of different racial appearance, too. [00:50:06] Speaker B: To point out, well, no, racism is. [00:50:11] Speaker C: A great evil, but systemic racism. And the way this is being construed is just anti biblical. And then they give the passages to show that sort of thing. [00:50:21] Speaker B: So education is an important thing here. [00:50:26] Speaker C: Let's say that for this conversation, though, it seems that our keyword is probably authority. So where does the authority rest? Alarmingly, we also have to have the conversation, or part of the conversation being is there such a thing as authority today? Marxism denies that. It depends on it. [00:50:47] Speaker B: Marxism is all about an unending revolution. [00:50:52] Speaker C: Think about things in Cuba, closer to our shores and maybe our experience here, but it's constant revolution. Revolution against what? I think you could make a case that it's revolution against our human nature and human being, but it's fundamentally an argument, no? A bloody revolution. I don't mean that in the british sense. I mean a lot of blood is spilled. A bloody revolution against the authority of Christ. People are dying and being killed, and I think know time to say it. They're being imprisoned in the United States too, because of their commitment to the authority of Christ. Is it possible, do you think, that the real reason for the cry of the genocide of the jewish people today. [00:51:40] Speaker B: In our universities primarily, right, such as. [00:51:45] Speaker C: Harvard and so forth, is it possible that that is fundamentally a revolt against. [00:51:52] Speaker B: The authority of the Bible? [00:51:55] Speaker C: Because our jewish neighbors, I'm well aware that some can be reformed, non religious Jews, and some are religious, but the jewish people are known for their fidelity, their attention to the Old Testament Hebrew word of God. So you put that all together and. [00:52:13] Speaker B: Woke Marxism is not just antiscriptural and. [00:52:20] Speaker C: Anti christian, it's also anti human being because of its continual revolution against authority. Woke Marxists don't recognize anybody's authority, though they're certainly happy to grab the power when they can take it. But they are very interested in, in. [00:52:44] Speaker B: Complete rebellion against all authority, capital a. [00:52:48] Speaker C: Authority to begin with, and any vestige of that. Why the rebellion against the opening paragraph of the Declaration of Independence? Because of the authority of the creator there. [00:52:59] Speaker B: The universal authority of the creator. [00:53:02] Speaker C: These people are anarchists. [00:53:05] Speaker B: Anarchists. [00:53:07] Speaker C: And when we remember that the word. [00:53:08] Speaker B: Arch is used in the opening of John's gospel, right? [00:53:14] Speaker C: Nrk ain hallugas. We usually translate that beginning. It could be translated the ultimate authority or the first principle of everything. [00:53:23] Speaker B: Wow. [00:53:24] Speaker C: You see, that's anarchy. [00:53:27] Speaker B: And it's bloody, murderous, violent, hateful anarchy. [00:53:33] Speaker C: Why in the world would we want to invite even a little bit of something or another from that into a lutheran university or a lutheran congregation or a lutheran church body? Why would any human being want to invite that stuff in, much less those of us who know the value of every human being because of God's incarnation in Christ and his death and resurrection for every single person? It's just outrageous. [00:54:05] Speaker A: I want to put maybe a bow on this conversation, I want to take up that philosophy of language as the kind of starting point for our next conversation. And we're hoping to have three of. So let me give you a theory, an attempt to answer your question. So why would anyone do. So? [00:54:25] Speaker B: I'm going to test this and I'm. [00:54:26] Speaker A: Going to quote Nietzsche to sound smart so I can try to sneak past you here, because I think something is happening. This ideology does not appear as dangerous as it really is because it's covered over by christian ethical momentum. Someone told me this last didn't, but Nietzsche in the gay science talks about how the shadow of the Buddha stayed on the wall for a hundred years after Buddha died. [00:55:08] Speaker B: Is that how it goes? [00:55:10] Speaker A: I think that. So is that the argument from Nietzsche is that the implications of christian thought, of the biblical authority, the implications remain even after the underpinning is collapsed. So you destroy the foundation, but it's almost like a Wiley coyote commercial or cartoon. He runs out and there's a delay before the collapse, and we're in that delay of the collapse. The shadow of the Budha is still on the wall. The momentum of Christianity is still there. We still think that there's a right and a wrong, a good and a bad, even though we have no philosophical underpinning to hold that up. And so we've kind of skirted on that momentum. But here's my maybe second. So that would be my first argument is wise because we don't see the real danger of a thing because it's a wolf in sheep's clothing, the sheep's clothing of the Buddha shadow there. But my second idea is that the shadow is starting to fade and people are starting to realize, hey. [00:56:26] Speaker B: If the. [00:56:26] Speaker A: Whole world is nothing but matter, everything's deterministic, everything's nihilistic, there's no spirit at all, there's no logos, there's nothing. Then it's an uniurable meaninglessness. It doesn't just set us free from the commandments we want to be set free from, like don't commit adultery and don't have other gods. It sets us free. Here's another nietzsche picture. It chains us from the sun and it flings us off into oblivion. And that people are starting to realize this. So just in the last few months, a number of major atheistic thinkers have said, well, I'm not an atheist anymore. It's untenable. I'm not a christian yet, but I wish I was and everyone should be because Christ is our only hope. So there's two theses for you to maybe wrestle with, I suppose. [00:57:26] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:57:27] Speaker C: Thanks so much. So I'm going to be a little rude and say I would like to have that conversation about society in general or people that we meet on the street, but that's not really what I'm here for today. So what I'm here for today is to talk about this within the lutheran church and in our lutheran universities. So here comes the rude part. That description is 50 years out of date. That was taking place at the time of Seminix in the lutheran church Missouri Synod when. When Kurt Markworth in anatomy of an explosion, he talks about this in chapter five. And everybody should be rereading that right about now. He says that the problem with the incursion of this horrible. Speaking about raising walls, this hermeneutic or way of interpreting the Bible, right. Putting a wall between the pastor and the scriptural text, between the person and her Bible, right. That was going on at St. Louis. He says that this is due to critical theory. That's his vocabulary. And he's not talking about something that's really picky. He's talking about the marxist stuff. All right, so 50 years ago, before our colleges decided that they were going to become universities modeled after the secular universities in the United States, the formerly religious places like Harvard and whatnot, right before that, or maybe it's around the time, but before that really took hold, Marcourt was saying, look, the problem here is that the social sciences on which this lousy hermeneutic that's being taught at St. Louis is based, the social sciences, do not have any room for authoritative texts. What does that mean? That means no learning can take place. And what it really means is the Bible is not being read and followed. No room for authoritative texts. Now, why in the world didn't we pick up the hint there and say, okay, so how are we going to be sure that all of our colleges and our universities and our grade schools and our high schools remain faithful to God and his word? What are we going to do? We did just about nothing except to kind of go along with the departments of education, in our education departments and all of this stuff. So here's the real problem. It is everything that you said, but it's something that if anybody should have caught this, it should have been the confessional Lutherans, because we're all about the means by which that foundation comes into our curricula and comes into our lives. This woke Marxism is fundamentally an assault on the means of grace. That's our terminology in the church. And that's exactly the problem with the Concordias. [01:00:52] Speaker A: I'm in seminary in 2000. I went to seminary 2001 to 2005. Had Dr. Markworth. The story of Seminex was that we survived, we made it. We were able to hold the institution to biblical fidelity and those who were fighting against it, they're out. They're now with the ElCa or this. I think this is, at least from my perspective, why we weren't like, oh, we need to go check the foundations. We need to go under the house and see if the beams are falling apart. We thought, no, we did it. We kicked out all the progressive liberals and now we're okay again. Does that make sense for the. And it was, I think, a mythology, as you're pointing out. We didn't carve out the rotted wood. We just picked up a couple of the termites. But that's, I think, to answer your question, why we didn't go and kind of revisit the top down educational structures because we thought we succeeded because we handled it and maybe because we handled it in a political way. [01:02:11] Speaker C: Yeah. So I have a little longer stretch into the days of your than you do. So I was in high school in 74, graduating from high school and I was not in the LCMS but certainly was watching because I came from an LCMS church and family and so forth. But what I'm saying is here we are. Now I'm not a church historian, as you know. I'm talking about the reality of this. Had Marcourt saying plain as day that the problem with the hermeneutics at one of our seminaries was the undue or maybe the influence of social sciences. [01:02:58] Speaker B: Now. [01:03:02] Speaker C: I don't see that it was dealt with really at all or certainly not anywhere after the sigh of relief that things seem to have been corrected right at the time. Because what TAC did our Concordia universities take? I can speak only with some familiarity with Concordia, Wisconsin. The recently retired president there followed church. [01:03:28] Speaker B: Growth theory for growing the university. Church growth theory is based on the social sciences. It's based on the metrics, the demographics. [01:03:39] Speaker C: The measures of success that come from. Well, sometimes from psychology or social this or social that. [01:03:48] Speaker B: Right. And not from the word of God that's been going on. [01:03:55] Speaker C: What about the questions about things in our congregations? [01:04:02] Speaker B: And what really are we insisting on with those who come into seminary? [01:04:07] Speaker C: What kind of backgrounds do they have to have? I don't say this with any delight and I just wasn't here. Wasn't here to be saying we have to do more. [01:04:16] Speaker B: I'm saying it now, though, alas, time to lament. [01:04:23] Speaker C: We're not doing the job. Even now. I know that Concordia seminary, Fort Wayne. [01:04:30] Speaker B: Just was having their annual January seminars right now. [01:04:34] Speaker C: And I heard that the 50th anniversary of Seminix was kind of a theme. Okay, it just sounds a little od to me. The question, though, is what are we doing right now? Here's a bit of irony for you. Concordia University Wisconsin awarded Kurt Markwhort an honorary doctorate several years ago. [01:04:58] Speaker B: And I said in memoriam to Professor. [01:05:02] Speaker C: Markhort in the introduction of my, said, you know, that was certainly a rightly. [01:05:07] Speaker B: Deserved honor, but I don't think that the president and board of regents then were paying any attention to Marcourt and his writing. And I know that they're not today, otherwise this stuff wouldn't be going on. [01:05:22] Speaker C: So the point is to address this existentially now in real time and what is happening, as I have said, and if I can be proved wrong, please go ahead. What's happening is woke Marxism is happening, and Lutherans are welcoming this trojan horse in through the gate. It's not even just a trojan horse. It's like that stuff that was catapulted into cities under siege, infected dead animals and stuff. That's what this is. And people want to keep pieces of this. They want to harbor this. They want to have people whose whole job as administrators or program directors is to do woke stuff. Woke marxist stuff. [01:06:03] Speaker A: Right. Well, I always thought that Missouri Senate was always 30 years, 20 years behind on the church growth stuff. So we are always adopting it 20 years later. So maybe there's some hope in this is that we're behind the curve. It should let us see what this all results in so we can see it clearly. Thanks for that. I hope also, I haven't listened to the symposium. It's part of my to do list today. Hopefully they're talking about. Hopefully they're doing what you are doing. Hey, look, we need to understand what was happening back then so that we can beware of it today. [01:06:42] Speaker C: I think you'll be able to tell whether we are or not doing that by how much attention is paid to Markwhart's writings, right? [01:06:49] Speaker A: That's right. And how much he's honored. I miss him. His voice is missed in the church boy and his camouflage parachute pants. The first time I met Dr. Barkhart, it was at, like, the opening. It was a barbecue before classes start. And he was wearing these huge, big, baggy camouflage. And I think he's, what, 75 years old, and he's wearing these parachute camouflage it was great. [01:07:16] Speaker C: Probably all the rage in Australia. And as is happening with me too. I don't really care about fashion anymore, but phenomenal. [01:07:25] Speaker A: Well, I became a pastor for two reasons, so I wouldn't have to study chemistry and I would never have to wear a tie. Those are the two driving factors. Well, thank you for this great start to the conversation. I'm looking forward to the next ones. Thanks for the book, too. Is it's on Amazon and people can get it. Anatomy of them. [01:07:43] Speaker C: Yes, it's all over the place. So Barnes and noble has it. All of the Amazons. So if folks are hearing you from mission fields or overseas countries, whether it's french or spanish or whatever, all of the Amazons do have it. If a person is looking for the best price in the United States, though, you will have to pay shipping, I think, and wait a little longer. Christian news or lutheran news? My publisher has that on sale right now as well. And is it okay to mention this? [01:08:15] Speaker B: Sure. [01:08:15] Speaker C: It's available in print copy as well as in a digital form. So the digital form includes a little device where you can let the book read itself for you. [01:08:27] Speaker B: Nice. [01:08:28] Speaker C: As well. And then finally, I wanted to just sandwich in that it may sound like the book is kind of destructive because of taking on a big issue, but the whole purpose here, and in a way, the reason that I didn't wait until after whatever happens happens, is because I didn't want it to be a post mortem, as Professor Markhort's fine book is. In other words, he wrote that stuff after the fallout of Seminix. And I would like to help mitigate or reduce the carnage from this sort of thing. People need to talk and pray about this. And then finally, a portion of each book is going to support the confessional classical lutheran education in Casper, Wyoming, which is due to start in about a year or so. And also I am a member in exile of the philosophy department at Concordia Cordia University, Wisconsin. It is my belief that the university is, by a kind of neglect trying to destroy the philosophy department. So part of the revenues also will. [01:09:43] Speaker B: Go to Dr. Manuj, who is the. [01:09:46] Speaker C: Chairman of the department there, directly and exclusively for use to help the students and professors in the philosophy department. [01:09:53] Speaker B: Thanks. [01:09:55] Speaker A: And you have a website, lutheranphilosopher.com. If you send me all that, and we'll put that in the link too. So you have online classes, you have a lot of resources available. I was able to duck in a couple of times in the last year to your reading group. You're reading through Doskayevsky, we're reading through Kirkegaard. [01:10:15] Speaker B: Right. [01:10:15] Speaker C: Kirkgard. I think we were there for that. [01:10:17] Speaker A: Yeah, that's right KirkeGaard. And do you have, by the way, an annotated version of or a teaching on the sultanits and live not by lies that you could refer to? [01:10:30] Speaker C: Yes, I have, I thought, I remember that narrated PowerPoint series that are headed live not by lies. And then they look at different features of our life. Okay. [01:10:39] Speaker A: And that's there as well. So we'll put all those links in the description so people can get a hold of you and see this work that you're doing. That'll be really great. Thank you for this start. And we'll see you again, and we'll see you again soon for the next conversation. [01:10:53] Speaker B: Thank you, brother. Appreciate it. Bye.