Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Hey, YouTube theologians. Welcome to the Q and A Theology Q and A podcast. I'm Pastor Brad Wolfmuller, Austin, Texas, with Pastor Andrew Packer, Good Shepherd Lutheran Church, Collinsville, Illinois. Pastor Packer, I heard a rumor about you that you started a substack.
[00:00:18] Speaker B: Yes, Pastor. Pastor Odom started one. And I was like, I should finally do this. It's more.
Well, it's mostly for myself. It's going to force me to write some thoughts and things I think about and then just never do. It'll give me a place to put them. Even if, like, five people read them, it'll at least force me to write.
[00:00:35] Speaker A: So link in the description. All the cool kids have a substack.
[00:00:41] Speaker B: That's right.
That, you know, that's one of the reasons I put it off is because I'm like, do it. Does the world really need another substack? But I was, you never have to pay for my content, so it's all free.
[00:00:53] Speaker A: I think I pledged the this. I remember thinking about this back in the old blogging days, remember 25 years ago when everyone had the blogs. And I said, well, I also think that everyone should know everything, I think, but at least I'm embarrassed about it. So I didn't have a blog for a long time until I got over that.
That shame.
[00:01:13] Speaker B: The shame, yeah.
[00:01:15] Speaker A: What is that? What does that even the shame of my own shame.
I'm, you know, embarrassed about how humble I am. Anyhow, let's answer some theology questions. What do you say?
[00:01:28] Speaker B: All right. First one's pretty straightforward, and we've got a couple related to this today.
Can God forgive me if I don't feel forgiven?
Or related to that. Often is people say they believe, but they don't feel God's presence. I think those two often kind of go together. They don't.
Behind both of them is they don't feel anything. Like they want to know how they should feel about this stuff.
Why don't they feel.
[00:01:57] Speaker A: I think there's a great sort of way of framing this that I want to steal from another kind of area of theological reflection. Back in the old days of the battle of the Bible, I mean, I guess we're still fighting about it, but in these big, heady days about how do we think about the Scripture and the authority of Scripture, the Lutheran theologian said, look, we have to confess the ministerial use of reason, not the magisterial use of reason. And that distinction is really helpful because the idea of reason as a ruler or magistrate, that reason rules over the scripture, diminishes The Scripture. Because now I say, oh, well, I can't trust that because it doesn't make sense to my reason. They said, no, no, we use our reason, but our reason has a ministerial role. Our ministry serves the scripture. It doesn't judge the scripture, it confesses the scripture. It doesn't critique the scripture so that our reason stands under the sure word of God. So we don't abandon reason. We just put reason in the right place. I think we can use that same idea with our feelings. We don't, especially the church today.
And this comes as this is a result of free will theology that wants us to be free but manipulated. And so now everything is trying to get us fixed and it wants to put our feelings over the scripture. So am I forgiven? Well, do I feel forgiven?
Is God close to me? Do I feel God is close to me? Am I a Christian? Well, do I feel it? In other words, we use our feeling as the sort of judge of truth we want to say, no, your feelings are fine. You're supposed God gave them to you, but they have to serve the scriptures. They have to be in submission to the word of God.
So do my feelings match what God says? And if they do, this is how Paul or sorry, this is how John says it. He says, if our heart condemns us, and that would be like, say, I don't feel forgiven even though the Lord says, I forgive you all your sins. If my heart condemns me, I have one who is greater than my heart. And if my heart comforts me, then we have assurance before the Lord so that we have to say, well, do my feelings match up with what God commands and what God promises?
And if they do, then praise the Lord. My feelings are preaching the truth to me. But if my feelings are contradicted by the Bible, then I'm now even repenting of feeling the wrong way. Lord, I'm sorry that I don't feel like you're near me because I know you promised you'll never leave me or forsake me. Lord, I'm sorry that I feel like you've abandoned me because you promised you draw near to the brokenhearted. Lord, I'm sorry that I feel like my sins are not forgiven because you promised that whoever sins you forgive, they are forgiven.
I'm sorry that I don't feel saved because you promised whoever believes in is baptized will be saved.
So that we're even repenting and rejoicing in the Lord's mercy and forgiveness over our feelings which are trying to convince us. Well, not always, but half the time or whatever, trying to convince us of wrong things.
So can God forgive me if I don't feel forgiven? Absolutely, absolutely. He forgives you. And your feelings are trying to catch up with those promises so that they don't judge, but they stand under judgment. We know this from the. The tenth commandment, ninth commandment, you shall not covet that.
Our desires, our feelings, our emotions, all stand under the critique and judgment of God's Word.
[00:05:41] Speaker B: As they talk about this in adult instruction, I think around the third commandment when talking about worship, because this is often where this comes up, Right. So a couple things I try to emphasize is we often, as Lutherans, we're trying to focus on what's objective, right? What's outside of us with our focus there. Not that emotions don't matter, but the subjective experience of those things has to be put under, as you said, the word of God. So rather than letting our emotions interpret everything, God's Word has to interpret our emotions.
And it's the difference, I think it's kind of like between science and scientism. It's between emotions and emotionalism. Right? You, emotions have their place and they're very important. And sometimes maybe we undervalue those as Lutherans from time to time.
[00:06:22] Speaker A: But.
[00:06:23] Speaker B: And part of that is we don't. And part of that's the German background for so many.
I mean, honestly, part of that's a genetic thing, and then part of it is personality, personality within the lcms. But then part of it too is we don't want to see emotions put above Scripture. And so we, you know, it's a tension for us sometimes, I think, but we want to emphasize the objective, what's going on outside of us in Christ. And then, yes, we receive that subjectively. But whether, like you said, whether you feel it or not, the forgiveness of sins was pronounced. If I receive Christ's body and blood, that's an objective thing that I've received.
Whether I felt something or not, whether it felt a certain way, whether I had this emotional high or not doesn't really matter.
And we want to make sure that all of our emotions are interpreted. I often like to say, like, interpreted by the Word of God, like, what am I supposed to feel when I receive the Lord's Supper? If I don't feel that way, then like you said, maybe I need to repent of that or maybe I need to think about that. But it doesn't mean nothing's happened. And that's where people go astray, is thinking something's gotta happen. I Gotta feel it. But I always feel bad for kids when they receive their first communion.
Cause sometimes, you know, there's like that really high expectation and really for most of em, it's just kind of awkward because, you know, they haven't done it at the rail before with a whole group of people. They sometimes they've never had any wine before. And so there's kind of the shock of that. Like whatever it is, like they often think like the heavens are going to open and they're going to feel this warm fuzzy thing because they're receiving communion after everything we say about it. And then they receive it for the first time with their adult or kids. And I think it'd be disappointing if that's what you were looking for rather than, hey, no matter how you feel or how awkward it is today, you get to receive Christ's body and blood.
[00:08:03] Speaker A: Yep. This, this goes for the law too. So I remember one guy who, who said, hey, I'm thinking about divorce. My wife and I just feel like God wants me to be happy. I said, you do.
That's what you feel.
So what?
Like what does God say? You know, don't I hate divorce? Etc. So that like we try to go both ways. Like we try to be.
We try to do our, our theology by feeling. We try to do our ethics by feeling. We try to do.
All of this has to stand under the word of God.
The text I was thinking about. First John 3. I should have just remembered this. It's one of the most important passages.
First John 3:19 and following by this, we know that we are of the truth and shall assure our hearts before him.
For if our heart condemns us, God is greater than our heart and knows all things.
So if your heart's there condemning you, well, what of it? Your heart's not the judge. God, it's the judge. And then John goes on to say, beloved, if you our heart does not condemn us, we have confidence toward God. So your heart can condemn you. Doesn't matter. God is judge. Your heart cannot condemn you. And that's great because your heart's agreeing with what the Lord says. So the word of God our We have our reason, we have our emotions, we have all these things. But they serve God's word. They're not rulers over God's word.
[00:09:28] Speaker B: All right, so are you ready for the next one?
[00:09:29] Speaker A: Yeah. You? Oh yeah. Am I ready? I was born ready. I can't even. You offended me by asking, questioning your readiness.
[00:09:39] Speaker B: What do Lutherans believe about icons?
Oh, do Lutherans. I'm ready for that one.
[00:09:44] Speaker A: I didn't know that.
[00:09:46] Speaker B: Do Lutherans venerate icons like Orthodox Christians kissing and bowing before icons or statues etc, and burning incense before them?
Or are they simply an educational tool, nothing more, nothing less?
[00:10:00] Speaker A: Yeah, interesting. The, the Lutherans do not. The Lutherans are not iconoclastic. In other words, we are not icon destroyers.
But we. Neither are we.
I, I do not think the Lutherans want to bring images into worship.
That's a, that's a kind of general Lutheran rule, is that the images are understood as teaching images.
Not to say that they can't be in the worship space, but the activity that the Lutheran directs towards the images is normally a didactic activity, one of teaching and learning. So when I see the image, it's helping me to, to learn of God and to, to remember the scriptures and so forth.
So the Lutherans were big on creating images, but they were, they were a lot of times published in books like the catechism has all these woodcuts of explaining to the people so they can see it in some ways in a visual language and, and read the word of God in the image rather than if they don't know how to read the words printed and so forth.
So that I've never even in the realms that are influenced by the east and the iconic iconographic adoration of the East, I've never seen the Lutherans pick up that tradition.
What about you, Pastor Packer? Have you seen that? Did you know?
[00:11:31] Speaker B: I haven't seen it. I don't think I've seen too many Lutherans struggling with worshiping icons or seeing them as like a gateway to heaven or whatever language you want to use for that or, or, or things like that. I do sometimes think perhaps we've as Lutherans today, fallen off in the other direction, where we've become almost a kind of class where we don't have a lot of images or a lot of beauty in our churches. Like, we seem to struggle with that. Perhaps we seem to have lost some of the importance of beauty and beautiful artwork, beautiful pictures, paintings.
And sometimes I think it's an overreaction to that. Right. We don't want to be seen as worshiping these things or bowing down to them or whatever it may be. And so our answer is, hey, we don't want to do this. We just won't have them.
And then sometimes, like I saw a drawing for a church, it wasn't a Lutheran church, but I, I was excited. I watched the video because I wanted to see. I follow this guy's writing. So I want to see the church building. I thought, oh, this. This is gonna be beautiful. So I click on it, look at it, and I'm like, oh, wow, that's bear. Like. Like, it was just, like white walls and, you know, very minimalistic. And I was like, oh, that's. It's kind of sad. Like, there's no. There's no artwork whatsoever.
And I think we fall into that trap, that. Which is more common of, like, Reformed Presbyterians and stuff. Like, no images, no crosses, whatever, where we should really.
We should delight to have beautiful things because they do teach. And they don't just teach, though, but they like church itself, right? Is a return to.
To Eden throughout the Bible, right? Return to paradise. And it should be a place of beauty, right? Even vestments. What do we say about vestments? Quoting from the Old Testament, they were for beauty and glory, right? To make the worship beautiful. And so I think we should have more of them than we probably do. And I think we fall off on the other side.
Maybe there's some guys out there that struggle with worshiping them. I haven't really seen that. But I think we need more beautiful things, more beautiful paintings, beautiful icons, whatever you want to call them in our churches to teach and for beauty.
[00:13:30] Speaker A: It's good to maybe mention here the old iconoclastic controversy that came in the early church, and John of Damascus stood up and made the argument, I mean, to very oversimplify it, that when God makes himself into an image, then it would be idolatry not to have pictures of Jesus. Now, that's overstating the case, of course. It's not like, you know, we're going to go and claim someone's an idolater because they don't have pictures of Jesus everywhere. But if you forbid it, you. You are.
It's. It's a dangerous thing to forbid religious art that impinges on the incarnation. It says something about the incarnation, that if there would have been cameras, you could have had a picture of Jesus.
People saw what Jesus looked like and they knew it. And that's a important part of the kind of confession behind Christian art.
[00:14:22] Speaker B: I think coming out of my. My reform background and, you know, I. I had. I still have friends and people who think that any image of Jesus is completely wrong.
And that part of it, they say it's a lie because you don't know exactly what he looked like. Maybe we could debate that. Now, that'd be a whole nother discussion on what do we think about the Shroud of Turin.
[00:14:40] Speaker A: But what do we think about the Shroud of Turin?
[00:14:43] Speaker B: That's a whole different. We'll have to do that someday. But it is interesting because that picture of Jesus on that looks like just about every picture we have of Jesus. Right? I mean, it looks like most ones we have, but even beyond that, like, Jesus came in the flesh. And so I think, like you said, to deny a picture of Christ is, in many ways, I think, to deny the incarnation or the idea. I even had friends who wrestled with, can we even picture Jesus in our head? Or is that idolatrous? And it's like, how can you read the Bible and not picture Jesus in your head? Like, that's weird. Like, how would you read that and be like, oh, I don't picture anything going on.
That just seems odd to me. Like. Or like kids. Like, obviously kids are going to think about it. Adults mostly are going to think about it. So if Jesus came in the flesh, then it seems like having pictures and stuff of Jesus is the right way to honor him. And to deny that is to pretend like, well, he was here, but you can't ever wonder what he looked like, because that would be wrong.
Seems just odd to me. Like, I just. I've never understood that against the heavenly
[00:15:44] Speaker A: prophets is where Luther talks about that. And he says, we want to remove the idols from the heart, not from the. I mean, not the images from the eyes, but the idols from the heart. And Carlstadt wants to remove the images from the eyes and doesn't care about the idols in the heart. And that's always going to be the temptation.
[00:16:02] Speaker B: All right, here's another fun one for you.
[00:16:04] Speaker A: Okay?
[00:16:06] Speaker B: What do Lutherans believe about limbo? The Roman Catholic doctrine of limbo. And what happens to unbaptized babies?
[00:16:14] Speaker A: This is great because we get to. We just got to offend the Orthodox, and now we get to offend the Catholics, Right? So if I understand, please, please correct me on this. But limbo would be, basically, it's a place of suspension. It's not a place of condemnation, but nor is it a place of beautification or blessing. It's just sort of a middle ground. And it's where.
So the idea that children who are maybe unbaptized but born to Christian families, they just kind of get locked into this eternal state. So it's a way of confessing the eternal nature of the soul without having to imagine the horrible idea that children apart from baptism would go and be condemned.
And so it's another kind of landing place after.
After death. So you have hell and Heaven and then purgatory and then limbo. And maybe if you're like a really noble philosopher, do you make it into limbo too? Or did Vatican II say, now you get all the way to heaven?
Can limbo catch those folks also?
[00:17:21] Speaker B: I think those.
They go to heaven. I mean, if you according. I mean, this even goes back to Trent.
That's one thing I thought Chemnitz said was interesting. Like, some of the things we think were new in Vatican 2.
Chemnit saw as a logical outcome of even Trent as far as, like, noble pagans getting into heaven. So I'd have to verify for sure, but I don't see why not. Right? They're doing the best they can with what they were given.
[00:17:52] Speaker A: So we see this.
I mean, with limbo almost, you. You see the result of, like, what happens when natural affection is allowed to start to craft your theology.
Because there's no. There's nothing in the Bible about limbo. I mean, there's.
There's no proof text.
There's no even, like, hint at it.
But it just comes from the idea that God can't be so cruel as to condemn babies.
And yet we don't want to diminish the necessity of baptism because of John 3. 5. Okay?
The way that the Lutherans think of it is that after death, there's judgment and that there's only two places. There's either depart from me or come to me.
It's only with Jesus, or apart from him, it's only heaven or hell. It's only eternal life or eternal death.
And the thing that gets you to eternal life is faith in the saving work of Jesus.
We do not exclude babies, even in the womb, from having faith in Jesus. And the beautiful example of this is John the Baptist, who rejoiced at the greeting of Mary for joy at the word spoken in the womb of his mother, Elizabeth.
So that we do not exclude babies from saving faith, and we do not exclude them from hell. Now, that doesn't mean that there's some sort of automatic thing, like if you're a baby and you die before baptism, you go to heaven. It's just the same as an adult in some ways, the Lord will work faith by the word of God when and where it pleases Him.
Some will have that saving faith and go to eternal life, and some will not and go to eternal death, which is horrible to imagine. And as horrible as we could imagine hell itself and as horrible as we could think of it, we cannot imagine it as bad as Jesus does, who hates this idea that anybody would be condemned, which is why he came to save the lost and to rescue us.
But as much as we are are repulsed at the doctrine of hell, and Jesus is too, we have to recognize that it is actually what is deserved.
So that a child conceived in sin and adding nothing to it is already, well, deserving of the punishments of hell.
Now that seems like an impossible, ridiculous and absurd thing to say.
And I want to praise God that it seems ridiculous.
But the reason it seems so ridiculous is because the Lord hides from us the depth of our own wickedness.
You can't see it in me, I can't see it in you. We can't see it in children. Every now and again, in a person who's over abundantly evil, we get just a slight taste of. Of what they really are, like with God. But it's hidden.
The depth of our sin is hidden from us, so we can't see it. So there's no way for me to look at another person and say, oh, they deserve hell. I just can't get there.
There's no way to especially look at a child and say that they deserve hell. I can't.
That's a hidden fact.
So in some ways I have to praise the Lord that that's hidden from us. Because if I could see what I deserved, I would go jump off the building, I guess.
And I certainly wouldn't want to talk to you.
If I could see how bad, what a wretched sinner you are and so forth.
You know, you'd never.
So the fact that the depth of our sinfulness is hidden from us is the reason why we can kind of go about life. But the danger then is we don't know how bad we really are.
And we cannot observe the justice of condemnation. And so we come up with these kind of questions or arrangements to sort of to make it make sense in our own hearts and minds. So I suppose that we should praise the Lord for the false doctrine of limbo because it indicates that we receive children as innocent, even though he. Because that's how we're supposed to.
But we have to constrain ourselves when speaking about God and eternal life to what the Scripture says.
And we just can't. We can't confess what the Lord hasn't taught us to confess.
[00:22:30] Speaker B: I was thinking about Luther's letter to, like, the mom who had the miscarriage, where he said, you can have confidence because we've also. We've commended this child to the Lord in prayer. And you've commended the child to the Lord in prayer. And so we trust in the Lord's mercy.
So that's something we hold out to right Christian mothers all the time is that you've committed them to the Lord's care and we trust that he is merciful.
Another question that comes up maybe in relationship, well, not maybe, but definitely as a follow up to this is we believe that God can work saving faith apart from his appointed means, just that he normally does not do so.
[00:23:08] Speaker A: Right.
[00:23:10] Speaker B: So over, you know, over, over the years, people have often posited, well, it's possible we at least allow the possibility that God could grant faith to infants, all infants, if he wanted to. Right apart from his appointed means.
And some have leaned into that and saying, well, God is merciful. And so that's probably what he does, or most likely what he does or however they want to word it. What do you think about that line of thoughts?
[00:23:38] Speaker A: I, I think from this same letter that Luther wrote, there's a line that has gotten into the old order for the burial of a stillborn.
And it says, while God has bound his church to the means of grace and baptism, he has not bound Himself.
And so we don't have the choice but to preach the Word and to baptize and to. And to come to the supper and to receive the absolution. That's how the Lord has, that's what he's told us. If the Lord wants to do other things without telling us, that has to be his business. But if he hasn't spoken it, then we probably also shouldn't speak it.
So we trust that the Lord is merciful. We rejoice that he creates and sustains faith through the Word. He tells us, here's a place. This is kind of a different topic, but I think it has application.
He tells us, for example, that His Word has gone out into all the world. Paul talks about that like in the Colossians, chapter one and chapter three. He says the Word has gone out in all the world and we don't see it all. We, I mean, like, we see, well, how did it get to North America and South America and the Aztecs and all this? I mean, how did it get over there? We don't. So we have all these questions like what about people who've never heard?
How do we think about that? And according to the Word, everybody's heard, at least at some point the Word got to them.
Well, how did that happen? We don't know how it happened, but the Lord can accomplish it. So can we trust that the Lord can get his saving word to people according to his will. Yeah, but we leave that to him, and we have to kind of focus on what he's given to us to confess.
[00:25:17] Speaker B: All right, next one on Sola Scriptura.
How does Sola scriptura align with the establishment of biblical canon?
If Scripture alone is a sole infallible source, how do we decide which books are canon? Which is a question. I don't believe this person is Roman Catholic, but this is a question we get right from the Roman Catholics. Like, well, you don't have a magisterium to determine which books are canon or not, so this doesn't work for you guys. And so it's. I think it's very closely related.
[00:25:47] Speaker A: So where's my Chemnitz book?
[00:25:51] Speaker B: This is.
[00:25:52] Speaker A: So it's such an obnoxious question from the Romanists. I don't think our listener here is being obnoxious. But, man, this is when the Catholics are obnoxious about the Sola. Scripture is a circular argument. And because we have the authority to decide what books are in and out, we have authority over the scripture or however they say it. Rome examine is the part one is this Chemnitz on this, on Scripture. And he talks about it beautifully. And this is the basic Lutheran idea, and that is that the.
The.
The Scriptures are the writings of the prophets and apostles.
So the Lord puts men into the office of prophet and the apostle and the office of apostle. And not every prophet wrote. But when those prophets did write, their writing is called Scripture.
So the question for us is, is it prophetic and is it apostolic?
And that's determined both by the kind of history of the actual text itself. And sometimes it's very obvious, yes, that's apostolic and also by what's written in there as well. Because there are texts that claim to be apostolic or prophetic. And then we have to. Like the Book of Enoch or the. The Gospel of Peter, it claims to be prophetic or apostolic. So we have to say, well, is it really? And then you're just. It's a kind of history question. Did this come from the pen of Peter or not? Is someone trying to deceive us? I mean, you and I could sit down and write something that claims to come from the above. So the claim to be apostolic doesn't make it. It's this history question. So the church has the job of receiving the texts of the prophets and apostles, and that is the Scripture.
And so that. And that seems. I don't know, does that. That seems very, very simple in my mind.
And maybe it's helpful because we often think of the Bible as one book. Like, hey, this collection is that. This is the canon. But we should remember that the Bible is that. That collection of the writings of the prophets and apostles. And we don't use it that often, although our confessors did all the time. They would talk about the. The writings of the prophets. That's how they would talk about the Bible, the writings of the prophets and the apostles. And it might be helpful just to bring that back.
So if Paul wrote something, it. It's apostolic, I suppose he could write like a note to his friend or something, and he would not be writing that in his office of apostle, but as they do their writing in that office that God has given. The result is we have Scripture. It's almost a. It's. It's almost like a definition. And it. And it. And it comes back to this argument.
And, and that is that we have the Bible and maybe to hone it, we have these writings of the prophets and we have these writings of the apostles.
And we must have them because God wanted us to. We have them because they were written and preserved for us by God. So the fact of the text is an argument in itself. And Chemnitz points this out, that Rome keeps running into this. It's almost as if the apostles made a mistake by writing something down.
And because if you don't have sola scriptura, if you don't have the written teaching of the prophets and the apostles as that criteria under which everything else must be judged, then the writing of the text itself becomes a confusing mistake, which is what Rome says, at least that it's confusing. They have to constantly assert the obscurity of the Scriptures to maintain the authority of the teaching office of the Church.
So I think that's the best way to think about it.
[00:29:33] Speaker B: I was just having my students, my 8th grade students watch a few of West Huff's videos. The Canadian apologist who was on Joe Rogan, he's got a lot of great stuff. But the last one is about the Council of Nicaea.
And apparently I didn't realize it was this popular, but ever since the Da Vinci Code, and I guess if you go on TikTok or all these other places online, there's tons of videos with people saying Constantine is the one who determined what the canon was at the Council of Nicaea. Lots of people who don't know anything about history, like, just spouting off that that's where we get our canon is from Constantine, obviously. And they just all say this like it's fact.
And I, I thought westhop did a great job showing a number of things, but one was the Council of Nicaea. They're arguing everything from Scripture. Scripture's already authoritative. They already have a canon and they're using that canon to argue against the false teaching of Arius and against other false teachings at the council.
So they weren't waiting for Constantine to come in and say, hey guys, this is your Bible. You can use these books. They were already arguing from those books and using those books. Constantine had nothing to do with it. So because that's probably a follow up question, we might get to that because apparently it's all over the Internet.
Those don't show up in my algorithm. So yeah, I'm not familiar with that argument, but apparently it's out there, but it's just ridiculous.
[00:30:50] Speaker A: Yep, yep, yep. Here, I'll just read a little bit of Kim. That's really great. So this talks about from whence Scripture obtains its canonical authority. And here Rome would say, well, it's from us, which is so
[00:31:02] Speaker B: convenient.
[00:31:06] Speaker A: The Scripture has an extraordinary authority from the very start due to its divine inspiration. The canonical authority of Holy Scripture thus points back to the Holy Spirit through whose inspiration it was composed, to the authors to whom God himself made clear testimonies of the truth available, and to the original Church, which is a witness to when those writings were published and recognized.
So the Holy Spirit inspired the prophets and apostles and those writings were immediately received by the Church. And so praise the Lord. Here we have the Scriptures. And how, just to mention this thing that annoys me that we get two arguments that come to us from Rome. Number one, hey, we pick which books are in the Bible. Cool. Look how great we are. And then two, Luther wanted to pick which books in the Bible. Look how terrible he is. Okay, so first of all, let's just note the irony. Second of all, both of them are wrong.
Both of them. I mean,
[00:32:05] Speaker B: the other thing you should check, people should check out in that Chem on Chemnitz on Scripture is why we had to have Scripture written down for us and why we can't rely merely on like so called tradition being handed down.
[00:32:16] Speaker A: Right?
[00:32:16] Speaker B: And because he does a great job there showing that that that argument goes off the rails pretty fast even in the Old Testament, right? Like it was when they recover the word of God after following years of tradition that were idolatrous and terrible, that they clean the temple and they kind of down the Asherah and they do all kinds of stuff. So like we've always needed it written down. God gave it to us. Written down. We don't have to guess and wonder which traditions or others we should have that aren't written down because God gave us what he wants to have in his word.
[00:32:48] Speaker A: If the traditions were so great that Paul left in Thessalonica, why did he have to write the letter? That's how Kim says the fact of the letter testifies. You can download this for free, by the way. YouTube theologians. Wolfmuller.co Rome. I mean free. Free, free. Like a hundred. You don't have to put your email in and get on some sales funnel, or you just press download and you have the PDF on your computer.
Put it in your Kindle. I think I even have the E Reader edition there. It's as free as things can be on the Free, free, free.
And the footnotes are just worth their weight. Well, in gold, but it's free. It's free. Go. Good. Use this thing.
[00:33:28] Speaker B: All right.
Demon possessions and mental health. Our mental health struggles. Really? Demon possessions. I've heard many people mention it, even my pastor, but I'm not quite convinced our mental health concerns like depression, anxiety and schizophrenia. Demon possessions or simply an effect of original sin? What about gender and identity issues?
[00:33:48] Speaker A: Ooh, I was. We were just looking at this passage at the right before the sermon on the mount, Matthew 4.
And it's this kind of summary of what Jesus is doing. And it talks about how he's healing people from the demons and from epilepsy.
And I thought that was really important that these two things are distinguished there. There's a physical illness and a spiritual affliction.
He was healing sick people who were afflicted with various diseases and torments. Those who were demon possessed that demonized.
It should be demonized. Those who are demonized, epileptics, paralytics. And he healed them. And. And one of the things that's. Normally people think, well, epilepsy was confused, that seizure kind of activity with the demon possession. And here it's distinguished in the text as two different things, one being a physical malady, the other being a spiritual malady. And the point is that discernment is needed to determine if something is a. Is a physical or a mental or spiritual or demonic affliction or some sort of combination of both.
So we know that we confess the reality of the devil and the demons who are fighting everything good and everything that God puts in place. We also confess the fallen nature of our own humanity, which means that we're broken in various different ways. And so I don't think we can just say it's a yes or no thing. I think sometimes it's the world and sometimes it's the flesh, and sometimes it's the devil, and sometimes it's a combination of all of these things working together.
[00:35:22] Speaker B: Yeah, one thing I usually. I just had this conversation with someone just recently. Like, if they came into my office with a broken arm, like, I could pray for them, but I'd also send them where, like to the doctor.
[00:35:33] Speaker A: Right.
[00:35:35] Speaker B: And Luther even talks about this. And because sometimes Luther's accused of. Oh, he lived at a time when everyone just believed in lots of demons and spirits and stuff. And so he was really prone to those kind of things. But if you read Luther, he says, hey, pastors, be really careful because sometimes, like, some issues look like demon possession, but really there's some kind of mental or physical thing going on, and you can look really foolish and stupid if you jump to demon when it's one of these other things. So he's saying that 500 years ago. Right.
And so like you said, I think we have to be.
Oftentimes in the west, we want to jump to, like, the, the medical reason or the mental health reason to the exclusion of anything else.
But we also want to jump to the other side and say, oh, it's only demons. Like you said, it could be physical, it could be mental, it could be demonic. It could be a combination of those things. I think the devil definitely can use mental health issues and like, amp them up. Right. Make them worse, use them against you, etc, but it doesn't mean that it's only a spiritual issue.
Which is why, like, as. As a pastor, sometimes we have to treat like them spiritually and say, here's what you can do spiritually for this thing you're going through. But also I'm going to recommend, here's this good counselor that you can go see and get maybe some help for this, or maybe you have to go see a doctor or whatever it is for whatever they're dealing with. So I think we have to be really careful about that because what can happen is. And someone who's really struggling with maybe some kind of imbalance in chemicals that's causing a problem, and we tell them it's demons and then they just never get better. And then it's very much almost like the word of faith movement. Right? You don't have enough faith to get healed. So this is all your faults. You have demons. It's your fault. And obviously if you had enough faith, we'd cast out the Demons and you'd be healed.
And then these people are left in despair. Which is why I, when I see this come up and I see people just, just blame it on demons or whatever, it makes me angry because I don't want people to think, oh, this is all my faults, like I did something, now I'm demon possessed or whatever and whatever. I mean, he listed all kinds of issues and I think all of them fall into these various categories. Like it could be a combination of things. It could be physical, it could be mental. We don't know. That's why we have doctors and mental health professionals and pastors. Like we need them all this.
[00:37:56] Speaker A: So there's four things listed here and I wouldn't mind just actually walking through each of them. So depression, anxiety, schizophrenia and gendered identity stuff. So, so that's a lot of different things actually. So just think. So first on depression, I think that the old term for depression I prefer, which is melancholy.
First of all because it's cool, like instead of saying I've been diagnosed with depression to say I'm afflicted with melancholy because all of a sudden, I mean, depression is so clinical, but melancholy. You now recognize that anybody who ever did anything important in the history of the world was also afflicted with melancholy. I mean from Jeremiah the prophet to all of, I mean to Luther himself and CFW Wall, they all had these bouts of, of darkness. And it doesn't mean that you're useless. It doesn't mean that your life is meaningful or meaningless.
In fact this, the Lord calls us to suffering and it's in that suffering that he often brings us his, some of his most precious gifts. And so it's not to say that we shouldn't. If you're depressed and debilitated and you've, you've just lost the motivation to be able to love God and the neighbor that you, that you don't want to try to address that affliction and press past it. But, but there's a lot, there's a lot going on there that should not lead to despair. We can still be faithful in the midst of, in the midst of sadness.
[00:39:27] Speaker B: Can I add something to that?
[00:39:29] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, please.
[00:39:29] Speaker B: Yeah. Well, just depression and anxiety. I was just thinking those are two where one of my concerns is a lot of people today, I see this more and more. I'm sure you've seen this too. A lot of people self diagnose because they watch too many videos online or whatever. And so now everyone's their own mental health professional.
And so everyone People say things like I have anxiety or I have depression. Sometimes they just mean they're just sad.
It's not actual like clinical depression. It's like they're just kind of sad or I have anxiety. And what they mean is I'm kind of nervous about this thing. Well, yes, all human beings go through that all the time. So we just have to be careful like with these even as pastors, like is it actually depression or just they said about like one little thing and like this is just a normal thing, not something they're stuck in, not like full blown melancholy or depression. And this anxiety that they say they're feeling is this just like nervousness that like every human being has when they have to do something, right? Like our kids for confirmation have questioning on Friday nights. And I'm sure many of them are going to be anxious and nervous about speaking in front of people. But that's not the same thing as having some kind of like chronic anxiety. But people will talk that way, right? It's like they get nervous about something like oh, I have anxiety or I have depression or everybody's self diagnosing. So I think we have to be also be aware of that and be really careful because people throw around those terms sometimes today. What I think it does is it minimizes people who actually have those real things because then you look at somebody like that and you're like, well obviously like you talk to them and you're like, well you're not actually depressed or you're not actually have anxiety or whatever. And then you talk to someone who actually does and you're like, yeah, this person clearly is struggling with something much bigger than this other person. So I, I just, I always want to put that out there because I've more and more the self diagnosis stuff is getting one I think out of hand. But also it's dangerous because it can minimize help that people who really have those things can get and you don't want to. It can become a self fulfilling prophecy. If you keep telling yourself you have this thing or that thing, you can often end up pretty miserable, right? If that's like your approach to everything.
[00:41:34] Speaker A: So I want to receive those, those anxious moments as gifts from the Holy Spirit that remind me to pray. So Paul has this very specific instructions. Be anxious for nothing, but in everything, through prayer and supplication, with thanksgiving, give yourself, make your request known to God. And then his peace, which passes all understanding, will guard your hearts and minds through Jesus Christ our Lord. So that those moments of anxiety where I'm like, oh, yeah, that's the. Oh, this is now the Holy Spirit prompting me about that specific thing to in fact say, lord, thank you and here, help with this. Thank you and help. Thank you and help. Thank you and help. So that our anxieties are being constantly cast onto the Lord. I have to have those to be able to cast them. I think the danger in anxiety and depression is when our anxious thoughts or our sad thoughts, captivating sadness, become disconnected from what's real or happening and become almost our emotions start to have reference to themselves. So I remember I was visiting with a lady and.
And I said, why are you sad? And she says, because my daughter is sick. And I said, that's good.
That's what you're supposed to be sad about. I mean, it's not good.
Praise the Lord.
No, that. It's. No, it's. That's. If you weren't sad, it would. Something would be wrong. You're supposed to be sad about that thing. I remember visiting with the same lady a couple times, and she says, I'm sad. I said, why are you sad? She says, I'm sad because I'm so sad.
Oh, yo, yo. Now you're on the slippery slope now. When your emotions start to have reference to themselves, you're on this kind of toilet bowl whirlpool of being flushed inside of yourself, and. And there's kind of no escape. So we want to try to connect our. Our internal world to our external world as much as possible. So. Okay, well, you mentioned schizophrenia here. What do you say about that, Pastor Packer?
[00:43:33] Speaker B: I think it's. I think it's just like the others. I think there is one I don't want to.
[00:43:40] Speaker A: So the.
[00:43:40] Speaker B: The multiple personality. Personality disorder thing, I've looked into quite a bit for a variety of reasons, which. Schizophrenia is a little bit different than that. That's why I think it falls more under the others. Like, it could be a combination of things. Can be a mental health break there. There's a variety of things that it could be, but then there's something specifically called. I think they call it. DID now, it used to be just called multiple personality disorder. And if you read on that, it's kind of interesting because they don't really know what causes it.
Like, I've read a ton on this, and it looks like there's just not.
And they have some guesses what they think might cause it. And I've talked to some people who deal a lot with actual, like, demon possession, and that's one where they think it's probably primarily.
That one seems to primarily lean into, like, the spiritual side versus some of these others, which can often be multiple things.
So there's one where that seems to be on the closer to the spiritual issue. I, I haven't. I don't know enough to say it's always that, but from, from people I've talked to who've discovered. Dealt with this. Is this particular issue a lot? It seems like that's often a sign of like, some kind of demon possession.
And if you've dealt with people that have it, you can see that. But although now there's a new thing where people want to be accepted as having this. Like, they used to try to get help, and now there's like this whole group forming, like, where they want to be accepted for having multiple personalities. And this is just who I am kind of thing.
And I think that gets really dangerous. But I do think schizophrenia is one that again, can be caused by multiple things or a variety of things, but it also, it can be purely biological, mental, et cetera. Like, it can be those. Those factors. So. But I do think there's some, like the multiple personality that maybe start veering off into a different direction.
[00:45:26] Speaker A: Last one here is gender identity. We. This should be understood as kind of, in some ways the fruit of the false ideology of, of Gnosticism, which wants to divide the spirit and matter. And so you, you say, okay, I have two different things talking to me. My body that's telling me that I'm a man, and my inner self, which is telling me that I'm a woman.
And I now have to decide which one has authority and which one is true.
And, and if we can recognize ourselves as created, we say, well, it must be the body that must be telling the truth.
If we are Gnostic, then the spirit always has to have totalitarian dominion over the, over the physical.
And in that case, then I have to conform my body to my inner reality rather than change my inner reality.
And so a lot of times this gender stuff is a manifestation either, I think probably mostly unaware. I don't think people think it through. Like, I want to be agnostic, and then they turn transgender or something. It's. But it's that kind of seeping ideology that start. That we start to absorb that that trains our inner life to rule over our outer self.
And in some ways, it's back to the feeling question that we started with.
Like, it gives a unauthorized authority to my own feeling, and that. That becomes a tyranny, actually. It becomes a. It becomes A slavery. Because now I'm either trapped in my body, which is the language that you often hear. I'm a, you know, man trapped in a woman's body or whatever. So we understand our bodies as a prison.
And then we have to go to war to break out or to. And in some really tragic, profound ways, that the high amount of suicide in the transgender realm is an indication of success.
Like, if I go to war against my body, how do I win that war?
And so we just have to be not at war with our bodies. We have to kind of reject the underpinning ideology that's there. So the devil's certainly driving that. And we can't say, is there also kind of mental illness stuff that's going on? Is it.
Is it.
Is there this. We understand certainly that it's a social contagion and that there's all sorts of pressures as well that are happening. So it's a big mix of things, and it's good that we can see it as a multifaceted thing that we're trying to. And we don't have to say, well, is this chemical or is this biological or is this spiritual? The answer is, most of the time, yeah, it's all that.
It's all a big soup.
[00:48:21] Speaker B: I think the social contagion aspect of that one's really important because you look at the numbers, the way they've skyrocketed.
Abigail Schreier, in her book, does a good job of showing that that these things are. Have skyrocketed in correspondence with, like, cultural things. It's kind of like, what was it, the 90s? Like, anorexia. Right. Was like a.
[00:48:40] Speaker A: It's.
[00:48:40] Speaker B: It's very similar to that. The way it's spread, the way it's done things like the way it's caught on. Except for now, we have the Internet that's made it even easier to access things that are going to push you in that direction. So that. That's a big component of that, one that sometimes gets overlooked for people.
Like you said, still a combination of factors. But that's a. That's a big one. We can't miss the power of the influence of society on that, especially the late Gnosticism that people don't realize, just pushing everyone in that direction.
All right. Very different direction. Are you ready?
[00:49:13] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:49:14] Speaker B: All right. The Holy Spirit in the Bible.
Why is the Holy Spirit often overlooked in the Bible? In multiple verses in the Bible, we see the Holy spirit as the third person of the Trinity.
Acts 5. Ananias lied to the Holy Spirit and that in that section of Scripture the Holy Spirit is declared to be God. Matthew 28:19 shows the Holy Spirit as part of the Trinity. An acquaintance of mine mentioned that the Holy Spirit is just the Spirit of God the Father, that there is only the Father and the Son. And he sees the Holy Spirit as a power or force of God.
I don't believe that because of the verses mentioned above. But the Bible is relatively silent on the Holy Spirit.
Even in Paul's letters we see Paul greeting or saying his farewell in the name of God the Father and God the Son. I think only once does he mention the Holy Spirit. Why is a person of the Holy Spirit overshadowed in Scripture? Why didn't Paul include him in his greetings and farewells?
Was it because he was focused on declaring Jesus to be God to the people? He was writing to thank you for your thoughts and wisdom.
[00:50:14] Speaker A: Yeah. So the old formula of the trinitarian formula is that we, for just prayer, for example, is that we pray to the Father through the Son in the Spirit.
And so the Spirit is in a profound way with us. When we're reading the Scripture, we're reading the words spoken by the Spirit. It was the. These are the inspirited words of God, the theopanoimatos, the God spirited words. The Holy Holy Spirit spoke by the prophets.
So that we are hearing the voice of the Holy Spirit in the prophets and apostles.
So the very fact that we know of God is the Spirit's work. It's the Spirit who brings Christ to us and preaches Christ and brings him to remembrance. No one can say Jesus is Lord, but by the Holy Spirit.
So the Spirit is in the Word. Just like the Spirit was hovering over the water in creation. The Spirit is in. Is working in baptism, so that baptism is being born of water and the Spirit.
So I don't want to concede the idea that the Spirit is not spoken of in the Scriptures.
There are trinitarian blessings. You should probably look at these questions before you ask them sometimes. So I know these verses, but in my Bible, which I left a church, I have all these kind of trinitarian paragraphs by Paul. So you'll notice oftentimes in his own writings he will explicitly mention Father, Son and Holy Spirit.
So the Spirit is present.
Jesus promises, I'll send the Holy Spirit. It's better that I go, because if I leave, the comforter will come. And Jesus says in John chapter seven, all those who believe in me will be.
Will have rivers of living water. And he spoke of the Spirit who would come, but he hadn't been given because he hadn't been ascended yet. So Jesus ascends for the purpose of sending the Spirit.
And Peter has to explicate this in his Pentecost sermon where the Spirit has come. And he quotes Joel 2, how the new Testament is consummated in the restoration of the Holy Spirit to humanity.
So that in the fall, this is the chief loss of the fall, is that we lost the Spirit. And now the Spirit is being restored to us by the ascension of Jesus, poured out from that throne on us.
So the Holy Spirit must be together, worshiped and glorified. The Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, co eternal, co equal, the always existing, always together. So that when we worship God the Father, we worship him in the Spirit.
Now maybe that's the reason why it's not as obvious. Because the in the Spirit part means it's like maybe we don't notice the things. Like if I'm standing in a room and looking out the window, like I don't notice the room, I just look out the window. So maybe the Holy Spirit is so near to us that you kind of look past. But we should not. And I think there's a particular answer to this why question in modern history. Because our friends the Pentecostals have come along and argued that the proof of the Holy Spirit is disorder.
And this is demonic.
If you want me to get on a soapbox about something, this separation of the Holy Spirit and God's ordering of the world is, is of the evil one.
And the danger is that because God the Spirit is always working in God's ordering of things. There's the universal work of the Spirit, which is to create and sustain faith, which he does in baptism, and to give the fruits that follow. Love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness and self control. There's that universal work of the Spirit. No one can confess Jesus as Lord apart from the Spirit. But then there's the specific work of the Spirit according to office.
So that the gift of the Spirit was given to St Timothy by the laying on of hands. And this is true for now all who are in the public preaching office. The Spirit is given to us in the laying on of hands. And you remember the joke of the Son and the dad in the back of the ordination. And he says, what are they doing? Why are they laying hands on the guy? And the Father says to the Son, his boy there, they're giving him the Holy Spirit. And the Son says, we, we should have got a Pastor who had the Spirit already.
Well, he has the Spirit as a Christian, but now he's getting the Spirit to be a pastor. Just like when we bless the husband and wife, they have the Holy Spirit, but now the Holy Spirit comes upon them in the office of husband or wife. Just like we bless the conformance that are now communing and being public confessors of the faith, the Holy Spirit comes upon them to strengthen them for that confession. And for the parents too, when they have children, the Holy Spirit comes upon them for the office of parents. So the Holy Spirit comes with his universal gifts for every Christian and then with his specific gifts that are connected to the office.
And we don't talk about it as Lutherans, I think, because we absorbed this Catholic or this charismatic idea that there's spirit or order, not spirit and order, which is so obvious in the scriptures. I mean the, the Spirit of God is the spirit of order.
But they say it's spirit or order. And we say, well, we know we have order, so we must not have spirit. No, you have to throw out that separation. It's spirit and order.
So the more orderly things are, the more spiritual they are. I mean, if they're ordered according to God's word.
So I think the why part of the question here, why is the Holy Spirit not talked about?
Is because in order to preserve order, we think the Holy Spirit has to be diminished because we've just bought into this lie. It's a, ah, this lie. It's, it reminds me of.
Well, this is embarrassing, but I had a buddy, Bill, in high school. He's still my buddy, but we were in high school and we must have been like skipping lunch or something and we were over at the Walmart buying water gun or something.
And we're, we're horsing around and going through the checkout line and all of a sudden I see Bill, like, gets real serious and kind of stands up straight like, what's going on? And then I noticed that the checkout lady was kind of cute and that Bill was, oh, he was going to try to get her attention.
So I see all this happening. So I'm, I'm watching and Bill goes up and he, he starts chatting with this, the checkout lady and, and a little bit flirty and I slapped him on the chest. I said, hey Bill, how's that rash?
And he just deflates because what, you know, what are you going to do? How are you going to recover from that?
This is what the Charismatic Church has done for us. They slapped us on the Chest. And they say, do you still have the gifts of the Spirit? Are you a cessationist?
No, I'm not a cessationist. I think whatever you have, I don't think that that stopped. I don't think that ever started.
That's not the Spirit. Whatever this nonsense is that you're doing, horsing around.
The Spirit comes when God gives us his vocations and he strengthens us in those callings. This is constant all through the Scriptures. So that is my answer to why I think the Holy Spirit gets diminished. Because that we have that false separation of spirit and order working in our imaginations without even being identified.
And then we want to be orderly. We kind of diminish the work of the Spirit.
[00:57:58] Speaker B: I think perhaps part of the reason why the Holy Spirit is not talked more about in the Bible, like, explicitly is because, well, it's like we had a play performance here at our school Friday and Sunday, right? And you have a lot of people that help with stage setup and, you know, shifting things in between. And if you notice them too much, they're probably not doing a good job, right? Like, if you notice them setting up everything and doing everything, because they. They're doing all of that. So the people doing the performance can be like the stars.
In fact, a lot of those kids want to be in the background, right? They don't want to be on stage. They don't want to be seen by everybody. And that's seems like that's the role of the Holy Spirit, right? Is to show us Jesus and put the spotlight on Jesus. And so most of the time, the Holy Spirit's doing his job. The focus is not on the Holy Spirit. Like, there's a few instances in the Bible where, like, Pentecost, because of the uniqueness of that day, like, you see the Holy Spirit in a very unique way. But most of the time, the Holy Spirit, when he's present doing his work, he's pointing us to Jesus. And because it's normally orderly, like, we. He's just doing his thing. And if you're focused on Jesus and the Holy Spirit's present and working.
So if your church is focused on Jesus and his gifts, that's evidence that the Holy Spirit is there working.
And the Scriptures themselves are evidence that the Holy Spirit is there working. So I think part of it is the Holy Spirit's just because of his role in the Trinity, he's not there getting lots of attention to himself. He's usually pointing it on Christ.
And even as he works in us where is he putting our attention on Christ.
So as he does all these things for us, it's usually pointing us back to Jesus and, and his gifts. And he's the one who delivers Jesus and his gifts. So we're constantly being thrown back to Christ as He works in and through us.
[00:59:45] Speaker A: Yeah, that's right.
You could do something similar, I suppose, with the Father. Hey, we only hear the voice of the Father three times in the whole, in the whole New Testament. Well, that. And every time he says, this is my Son, this is my son, this is my Son.
So.
So Jesus is God made known to us. And the Holy Spirit and the Father are both saying, hey, here is Jesus for you.
[01:00:10] Speaker B: So like John 16, 5, 15 will be the reading, not this coming Sunday, but for the fifth Sunday of Easter, right? And it says, what does Holy Spirit do? He convicts the world of sin, of righteousness and judgment. And then. So that's what he does to the world. And then for Christians, what does he do? He guides you into all truth.
So again, that's like a background job. He's like guiding you in the truth.
And John's Gospel is already told is Jesus is the way, the truth and life. So what's he do? He's guiding you to Jesus and to follow him and to listen to him.
So once again, he's there convicting the world of sin, righteousness and judgment. But for the believer, what's he doing is he's leading you to Jesus and having you follow him. So a lot of times he's mentioned, the Holy Spirit's mentioned, he's doing what he's giving you Christ, or telling you to follow Christ.
[01:00:53] Speaker A: When Jesus teaches the Lord's Prayer, this last thing on this, in Luke 11, he give, he follows it up with a promise. So your Heavenly Father will give the Holy Spirit to all who ask.
And this is. So whenever you pray the Lord's Prayer, you are praying for the Holy Spirit. And Luther teaches us this in the explanation that God would send his words and by his Spirit we would believe it lead godly lives according to it.
So, but I think we need to explicitly pray that the Lord would send us his Holy Spirit so that we could do our work and service in his power and not in our own.
The Lord has promised us that. And so we want to pray for that also explicitly.
[01:01:36] Speaker B: All right, next question.
This is. I'm going to reword their question a little bit. They have some examples. I think it might be helpful if we rephrase it. So what's the difference between ignorant sin and willful sinning.
But really what they're getting at is how do we know someone's committing a willful sin versus an ignorant sin? So that's part of it. But then the second part is, why do we, like, if we see someone caught up in.
If we see someone commit abortion, we would say, hey, they willfully sinned, or someone who's stuck in the sin of homosexuality, we say, hey, they're willfully sinning.
But the Baptist on baptism, this is the example they give, is wrong. But we'll still call them Christians.
And we won't necessarily say they're. They're willfully rejecting God's teaching on baptism and still consider them Christians. So they see an inconsistency in how we're. How we as Lutherans handle this. On one hand, we'll say, hey, this, this is willful rejection of like, what God's telling you to do for your life.
He, you know, this is a sin. You're not, you're doing it. That's willful. But then on doctrine, it seems like according to them, that sometimes we're, we're not as hard on that we're not telling the Baptist, hey, you're willfully rejecting God on baptism.
[01:02:57] Speaker A: We're not going on that.
That's.
[01:03:00] Speaker B: I'm just. Well, I guess our example is like, we still tell them are Christian, and even though they're wrong, right. We would say they can still go to heaven. Whereas someone who's in unrepentant sin, we would say, well, you're an unrepentant sin. You're not going to heaven. That's where they're struggling.
[01:03:21] Speaker A: I'm trying to, I'm trying to get to the tension that the questioner feels here.
So the, the big, our big criteria ought to be in some ways maybe not sin or willful sin or even ruling sin. You know, we use that language sometime, but rather repentance, like, am I, am I, am I willing to repent? Am I willing to be a sinner?
Do I trust in Christ for the forgiveness of all of my sins?
And so that when, when it comes to, for example, homosexuality, the question is not homosexuality per se, but repentance regarding that sin. It's one of the dangers. It's one of the reasons why homosexuality is such a dangerous topic, because it wants to present itself as not sin as something good here. So we have pride marches and stuff like this where you shouldn't be ashamed of this. You should be proud of it, shouldn't repent of it, you should boast of it.
And any sin treated that way becomes a particularly dangerous sin. But you can imagine a conversation something like this, hey, Pastor, I'm gay. Can I come to communion? And the answer is, well, okay, let's talk about this. Do you know that's a sin?
Those desires, not only just the activity, but the desires itself, the very desires that can't have defined you in this way or threatened to define you in this way, that those themselves are sinful. Yes, I understand it. Are you sorry for them? Yes, I'm sorry for them. Do you want to be obedient to God, especially according to the sixth commandment, which commands chastity in and out of marriage, which means absence before and. And faithfulness afterwards?
Yes, I want to keep the sixth commandment. Well, then, not only can you come to community, you ought to come to communion.
In other words, if, if I'm. If I'm repentant, if I recognize my own sinful inclinations, and I'm sorry for that, and I'm asking for grace and I want to do better, that's exactly who the supper is for.
Now, if I say, on the other hand, no, no, this isn't sinful, it's just who I am, it doesn't need to be forgiven. Jesus has to accept me as I am. Well, now that is a rejection of the Lord's word and his wisdom for our life and therefore is an indication of a lack of repentance.
And that doesn't have to be. That's homosexual, heterosexual, whatever. Any sort of sexual sin, any sort of sin at all that we start to defend would be that way.
I would say the same thing if a Baptist then like to make the equivalent to doctrine.
If someone was shown that they're in false doctrine, like, hey, the Bible says we should baptize babies. And someone says, well, look, I don't care.
I don't care what the Bible says. I think this is better.
I'm not going to conform to what the Bible says about baptism. I'm going to trust myself and you have to accept me for this. That would be the equivalence of like doubling down on unrepentance.
But if a person is.
So there's a difference between like doubling down on it on a false teaching versus being a victim of false teaching. This is where Luther has this great analogy of you kick the dog and you console the child. So you make this distinction between the false teacher and the falsely taught, between the one who knows better from the Scriptures and who's still promulgating the error of, because of their own pride or whatever versus the person who's a victim of the false teaching and to the person who's a false teacher. We do say that, like if someone is there promulgating a false doctrine that steals away the Lord's comfort, we call them out in that sinfulness.
Yeah, I don't know. So I don't know. Maybe the problem is we do have a way of understanding that, that saving faith can endure past false teaching. And maybe we just don't say that clearly. I mean, I think saving faith can endure through like determined sin. It's just, it's, it's like, it's, you're in a really risky proposition.
Like you're going to, if you're going to go against the clear word of God knowingly.
I mean, maybe we don't, we want to be careful. And I say no, that's, that is, you risk your salvation at that point.
I think we, we would, we would warn against both of those pretty clearly. I don't know. Am I getting at the, am I getting at the question?
[01:08:11] Speaker B: Yeah, I think so. I was just going to add to what Lutherans really struggled with this, like how, how can we call them brothers in Christs or whatever.
And so it was the Lutherans who came up with the fundamental doctrines versus secondary doctrines, which has been greatly abused over time. Right. Because it was originally to say, hey, these are the fundamentals that we think you have to believe to be a Christian.
And then the secondary doctrines, you can get wrong and you're still, but still be a Christian. But it doesn't mean there's no consequences like right for holding false, false doctrine in other areas. It doesn't mean it doesn't affect anything. It just means, and it doesn't mean they're unimportant.
We just made that distinction to say this is what you must believe to be saved. And you can be wrong on these things and still be a Christian.
And like in the example you gave, right. If, if someone believes from their study of Scripture that Lutherans are wrong on a, a doctrine and so that's why they're teaching contrary. But it's still within the defense, if you will, of like Christian teaching, like we're still considering a Christian, that's very different than the person who says, well, I don't care if you're right or not. I don't care what the Bible says on it. Those are two very different attitudes to the word of God. And you can keep working with a person who wants to look at the word of God and see what the word of God says. You can't really have a conversation with someone who says, I don't really care what the word of God says on this topic. I'm just gonna believe what I want to believe. Those are two very different attitudes to scripture. And in the whole discussion, or even if someone who's in sin who says, I don't care what God's word says, I'm going to do what I want to do. Those are two very different attitudes to God and his Word. One you can work with, one you cannot, which we've as pastors experience all the time.
[01:09:55] Speaker A: I think I'm.
I'm going to invent a term here to see if I can get at the difference also. And I just might have to think about it a little bit more because it seems like the question is saying, well, we treat moral sins different than we treat theological sins.
False teaching. So false living is thought of one way and false teaching is thought of as another way.
And I think that's true, but I think there's reasons for it also.
So I don't know, I might need to also ask for a pause on this one and reflect on it for a couple of years or we'll circle back to it and think about that.
[01:10:36] Speaker B: Well, that's it. That's the last one.
[01:10:38] Speaker A: That's it.
[01:10:39] Speaker B: That's it.
So you got all the time you want now to think about that.
[01:10:44] Speaker A: So we offended the Orthodox with the question about the icons. We offended the Catholics with the questions about limbo. We. We offended the Baptists with the question about the theological sin. We offended the. The demons by the question about demon possession. Who did. Who's. Who has not been offended yet.
[01:11:08] Speaker B: You also went after the Pentecostals pretty hard.
[01:11:10] Speaker A: Oh yeah, Pentecostals got some. Oh yeah, they got a pretty big dose of it. All right, well, well done. I suppose
[01:11:18] Speaker B: that's what he's here for.
[01:11:19] Speaker A: Thanks everyone for your questions. Wolfmila co why do we do it by way. The. The way to make these distinctions? So Luther says every heresy strikes Christ. Maybe this is what we're talking about at the end is that false doctrine wants to steal away the comfort of the gospel.
And so when we are trying to hold forth the clarity of the scriptures, it's to ground us. It's to establish us in grace and truth so that we know the love of God in Christ and rejoice in that. So. So may God grant it for Christ's sake. Keep those questions coming. Wolfmeal co. Sign up. Sign up for the Wednesday whatnot. And Pastor Packer substack. Go check that out.
You can make a pledge to pay whenever he turns the paywall on. That'll be pretty cool. And we'll see you all soon. God's peace be with you.
