Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: YouTube theologians, welcome to the Q a podcast. Pastor Brian Wolfmuller here of St. Paul and Jesus deaf Lutheran churches joined with Pastor Andrew Packer, good Shepherd Lutheran Church, Collinsville, Illinois. Pastor Pack, I heard a rumor about you and that is that you only believe in one cleansing of the temple. Is that true?
[00:00:17] Speaker B: No, actually I preached the opposite recently, so that's not true.
You listen carefully to my sermon.
[00:00:24] Speaker A: Just thing that's one of the indications of a theological liberal. By the way, that's one of my little. Just sneak them in there. You got one cleansing of the temple or two. And I'm glad to hear that, that rumor.
[00:00:37] Speaker B: Do you want to know what the Concordia.
You do not want to know what the Concordia commentary says?
[00:00:41] Speaker A: Then on this it says there's one cleansing. Oh, it does. Come on.
[00:00:46] Speaker B: What's interesting is the argument that I hear for that constantly is they wouldn't have let him do it twice. And I say, let him?
Who's anything about letting him?
[00:00:58] Speaker A: You're Jesus. Hey, welcome back.
We kept the whip for you. Would you like to? Yeah.
[00:01:06] Speaker B: In fact, I think the two cleansings is related to. In the Old Testament, a house of leprosy is checked on twice, right? The first time it's gone and you see if there's leprosy, and if there is, you mark it out and then you go back the second time and if it's spread, then it's fit for destruction. So Jesus goes twice because his house is full of leprosy. So now it's got to be destroyed.
So there you go.
[00:01:31] Speaker A: I didn't know. So you've added to the very literal two cleansings an allegorical interpretation. So that's nice.
[00:01:39] Speaker B: I would say a typological interpretation, not allegorical.
I know. I believe all the Bibles about Jesus. It's weird.
[00:01:47] Speaker A: Last week we recorded a Q a thing, but connection was horrible. So we're doing it again. But that means we forgot the questions. So it's again for us. Hopefully the tech is better this week and also the answers maybe is a second chance to improve. So what do you got for us today?
[00:02:07] Speaker B: Well, I had gone in discussion in an online Facebook.
It's a group chat for Christians about various books, and someone had posted there a book that I owned that I really like, and they were concerned about a line in it. It's the fat Cat series from Lexim Press. It's the book on the Apostles'Creed. The whole series is really good on the Ten Commandments, the Lord's Prayer, the apostles Creed. There's Lutheran editors to it. Hal Sankbile is one of the editors for it. And he wrote, I believe the one on the Lord's Prayer, maybe the one on the Ten Commandments too. Great series. But the one on the apostles Creed had this line that said God wanted Jesus to have sisters and brothers. That's why you were made. God's life is big enough to share or something like that. I might have it slightly off, but that's the basics of it. And everyone in that group, or almost everyone, not everyone, said, this is Mormonism. That Jesus having sisters and brothers is Mormonism. This cannot be. This is heresy. You should throw this book in the trash. And I jumped in and said, wait a minute. Jesus says that we're his brothers. It says he's not ashamed to call us his brothers, that in fact, all this is saying is that God creates out of love and that we're created because of God's. That's why creation comes into being, is his love. And that he does indeed redeem us and create us because he wants us to be part of his family. And I said, he's saying that in a kid's kind of way. So what do you think about that? Am I wrong? Are they right?
[00:03:34] Speaker A: Well, this is phenomenal because obviously we are the children of God, right? I mean, this is this. Behold what manner of love the father has given unto us, that we should be called the children of God, and such we are. It's a beautiful, absolutely beautiful promise that we are God's children, that Jesus is our brother. We're heirs of God. We're co heirs with Christ. He called many that we were.
Hebrews quotes to psalm 22 I will proclaim your this is coming up on Good Friday next week. Your glory to my brothers. Is that how that, what is he proclaiming to his brothers?
[00:04:18] Speaker B: I should psalm 22 22 I think somewhere in there.
[00:04:23] Speaker A: Yeah, I will tell of you. There it is. I will tell of your name to my brethren in the midst of the assembly. I will praise you.
And that's quoted in Hebrews two that God would take us who are born children of wrath and adopt us into his family as his own children. And that's what baptism is. That's why we're baptized in the name of the father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Beautiful.
That that would be a troublesome thing to people is bad. Now I suppose you could make it Mormon by saying that we're the children of God like by being by ontology, and deny that Jesus is the only begotten son of God. I mean, Jesus is the son of the father in a unique way. He's God of God, light of light. Very God of very God. And that applies only to Jesus and not to us. So we are not light of light. We are brought into the family of God not by being but by adoption.
And so we are the brothers of Jesus not because we're little gods. That's the Mormon error. The Mormon error is summed up in this thing is that as man is now, God once was, and as God is now, man shall become. So we're the little spirit baby. We were little kind of eternal spirit babies conceived by Father God on the planet Caleb or whatever. Then our parents had bodies and the Lord sent our little spirits. And so we're on this kind of evolutionary progression to divinity. That's all pagan kind of crazy nonsense. Now, if that's what you mean by saying that Jesus can have brothers and sisters, then yeah, that's wrong. But the idea that the Lord adopts us as his children, that's just so profoundly biblical. I mean, it's just even there when Jesus says, when you pray, say our father, what does that mean? If God is our father, then we are his children by grace. So, yeah, I don't know. Where do you think it comes from, that kind of kickback?
[00:06:48] Speaker B: I don't know. Some of it seemed like some people were really stressing God creates us for his glory, excluding the idea, which is interesting too, because those same people would probably have a pretty high view of St. Augustine, who says God creates out of love, but it seems like they're emphasizing glory to the exclusion, I guess, of this love and this family aspect that's all through the New Testament. I don't know. It's the strangest thing to me, but people were calling for it to be burned, to be trashed, that the book was heretical, although some people thought the apostles Creed itself might be suspect. So I saw a comment about that, don't progressive churches use the apostles Creed? And I was like, wow, we have still a lot of teaching to do. Speaking of the Mormon thing for a moment, if you go to YouTube and you search for the Mormon cartoon, you can still find this cartoon the Mormons made in the 80s that explains their views. Exactly what you were saying. And it's kind of crazy to watch, though. So I encourage people to watch it. If you want to understand Mormonism, that video is great because it's the stuff you don't often hear about, but it's still out there on YouTube. Go watch it.
Be amazed at what it's teaching. But as far as Bible believing Christians looking at the Bible and saying, you can't be Jesus brothers and sisters, I don't know how you get there. I just don't. I don't get it.
[00:08:10] Speaker A: Here's an is. So I've got a theory. So back in the old evangelical days, you have to tell me if it was the same for you as it was for me. The only time we ever talked about the doctrine of the Trinity was in the apologetic arguments against Mormonism. So that the doctrine of the Trinity was never just simply confessed. It was never there in the liturgy because we didn't have the liturgy. It wasn't there in the creeds because we didn't have the creed.
It was never discussed because it was never theological anyways. It was always all practical sermons.
I think if you grow up, like evangelical, maybe even Bible church or Baptist or whatever, the only time that the whole conversation of the Trinity comes up is when the pastor is explaining why you're not mormon. And so a lot of evangelical churches, trinitarian theology is anti Mormonism. Like, that's where it comes in. And so I wonder if that, because we've learned the Mormon doctrine of God having all these spirit children's spirit children, and the oldest is Jesus and the second oldest is Lucifer. And so we have this Mormon mythology as our anti. That's our anti trinitarianism. And so then this idea that God has children, sons and daughters, that for whatever reason, strikes us as heresy because the Mormons could say the same thing. So that would be my theory. Or here's another theory.
I'm just putting out theories why people are reacting this way and be interested. So first, let me see if you respond to that. What do you think about that idea? Did you have that same experience?
[00:09:43] Speaker B: I hadn't really thought about it, but when you said it, yeah, I don't think we had much of discuss the Trinity, very much outside of, like you said, apologetics kind of discussions. So if there's apologetics discussion, the Trinity comes in. But you're right, we're not confessing it. We don't have a Trinity Sunday. Right, where you really focus in on the Trinity, you're not confessing it week in and week out in the creed. So definitely something that's probably lacking. And I do think there is this knee jerk reaction to anything that's possibly Mormon, although it's weird because there was a Mormon in the comments. Not sure how they got in the group, especially since it's supposed to be a christian group, but a Mormon saying basically, no. I think that's a weird sentence, too. But I was like, who cares what the Mormon thinks about it? What is it actually teaching? But I think you've got some insight there that there's a lack of understanding. So then when we talk about these things, about the familiar aspect, the first thing that pops in their mind is not the New Testament and all these verses. It's, wait. Mormons say that Satan is jesus'brother, and we don't want to go down that path. Right? We don't want to be wrong on that. So we got to stop it right here. Rather than saying there's a right way and a wrong way to talk about this topic. Here's the right way. Here's the wrong way.
[00:10:54] Speaker A: Yeah. Here's another theory on why this caused such reaction. This is interesting to me to think about that. One of the diagnostic tools we use to think theologically is what's the big picture, right? So just to look at the reformation, the big picture of salvation was the pope thought of salvation as a bank. Here's the treasury of merit, and I've got the keys and I'll dole that out to you. When you sin, you make a withdrawal. When you do penance, you make a deposit, et cetera, et cetera. This kind of very economic view of salvation, the Lutherans came in and said, no, it's a court. You stand before the judge and you're guilty. But you have an advocate who pleads his death and resurrection, his blood, for you. And through his work you're forgiven and declared to be innocent, righteous, acquitted. The major picture amongst evangelicalism is the picture of the prom date. Right? Jesus has es you out. The devil also wouldn't mind going out with you. You have to accept his invitation. Then you have to grow in your relate. It's all about this personal relationship with this kind of emotive thing. But I wonder if, because that becomes the major metaphor, the personal relationship metaphor, that the idea of being the children of God is strange because we are the spouse of God, or at least we're dating God kind of thing.
So I wonder if the introduction to children in the equation is what makes it awkward for the evangelical mind. Now, we do confess, rightly, that the church is the bride of Christ, but it gets kind of weird when you take that from the corporate reality to the individual reality. Like, the Christian is not the bride of Christ, the church is the bride of Christ. So that we altogether are Christ's bride. And that's pretty important for our confession. But because the evangelical mind is also so individualistic, it has a very difficult time with thinking of those corporate realities of the church.
[00:12:58] Speaker B: It's a good reminder that whenever we start using the biblical imagery, we have to make sure we know the Bible well enough to see the bigger picture, right. To know that the Bible talks in a variety of ways about salvation, about the church. And we have to be able to distinguish from the individual being saved and the church's relationship to, like. We talk about those things slightly differently because the church is the bride of Christ, but the individual believer is not the bride of Christ. And once you get those things confused or you stop reading your Bible and you don't realize how many times it says, we're Jesus brothers and sisters. Things like, there's all kinds of things that if we just stop reading and go with one metaphor or one image that we kind of like that we miss out on, we miss the bigger picture of what the glorious picture of what scriptures actually say to us about our relationship to Christ and the church and all of those things.
[00:13:49] Speaker A: This is what mean John commands us, behold what manner of love the father's given to us. Not that we're called his servants or even that we're called his friends, but that we are called his children and that we are his children, that we're commanded to behold that in the scripture. It's not an, it's John himself highlights. It underlines that you are God's children now, and it hasn't been revealed what we will be, but when he appears in glory, we will be like he is.
That's the promise. Do not take that away from the Lord's people. This is one of the dangers of error. Theological error is it steals these good promises from the Lord's people. Right.
[00:14:31] Speaker B: Well, Hebrew says, Jesus himself is not ashamed to call best brothers and sisters, and yet they were ashamed to be called his brothers and sisters. That's exactly what you're talking about. It went from one extreme to another. Jesus says, I'm not ashamed to call you this. And a bunch of Christians are saying, we're kind of ashamed of that language. That makes us. No, no. Jesus says he's not ashamed to do it. Therefore, rejoice in it and delight that he calls you his brothers and sisters. Know that and believe it.
[00:14:59] Speaker A: Exactly. Awesome.
[00:15:01] Speaker B: All right, the next one's kind of strange. I had downloaded a couple of weeks ago this new app that Facebook was pushing called Bible Chat. And it's had all kinds of promises in the ad that this will revolutionize your Bible study. It'll even free you from Facebook scrolling and even pornography addiction because you'll get, I guess, kind of addicted to the app. And studying your Bible was the promise. So it's a Bible chats run by this AI program. And so I kept asking it questions.
[00:15:29] Speaker A: I kept asking it important questions.
[00:15:31] Speaker B: Some of them were kind of lame, like, what do you think about worship? Or what does worship look like in the church? And it actually gave a lot of decent answers to a lot of topics. I asked it, what do you think about so called homosexual marriage? Gave a pretty solid answer, but then I said, what about transgenderism?
And then I kept pushing on that because its answer was basically, the Bible doesn't really talk about this. We should love and affirm everybody. And no matter what I would say to it, that was its answer. I even went on Facebook and I complained about this problem with the. I actually, it was the AI bot that responded to me via Facebook messenger with these kind of pat answers again. And once I realized it was AI responding to just, I ended that conversation very quickly.
But it's interesting because I think to me, it revealed the danger. One, we have these things now. People are kind of overly trusting of answers it's getting from AI, right?
It's drawing from all these resources and has the answer and it gives it to you. So you open this app and you think the AI is going to draw from the Bible and give you biblical answers? Well, those answers were put in there by somebody, and so you're only going to get out what's been put in. And clearly on this issue, it was told, hey, on this issue we're loving and affirming. That's all the Bible says about it, periods. And then another issue, I thought as I studied that was this could be used. Well, like, what if we had a Lutheran app where we had it read the Bible and the confessions and Luther and Gerhard and these great Lutheran theologians, and the answers were drawn from those? Like, that could be kind of amazing. But then on the flip side, you have people going to this app expecting to get biblical answers, and now instead you're being told, well, the only thing we can say about transgenderism is be loving and affirming, period. The Bible does not speak to this issue. So wondering if you would want to talk at all about the kind of dangers of AI, but also how it could be used. Well, for Christians.
[00:17:29] Speaker A: Yes, it's very good. We're going to talk about. We should plug this, by the way. We're going to have this summer the digital Catacombs conference down here at St. Paul in Austin, Texas. You're going to be presenting? I'm going to be presenting. Got a bunch of stuff. This is on the dangers of technology and also the opportunities of technology. How we can be cautious, basically. How can we be wise with the technological advances, especially AI, because I'm not 100% sure I have my head around what this thing is, or anybody has their head around what it is. I think artificial intelligence is a misnomer in a way that kind of throws us off, because what we mostly have is these large language models which have been able to consume so much writing and information and then articulate it in a way that seems human.
So that's what we're dealing with. So you have the training stuff, and I guess the Bible bot is trained on the Bible, but it must have some other stuff in there, too, so that it's then articulating things in a certain way.
Here's the danger, is that you isolate knowledge. So if I could give a picture for what I think both the danger is, and then that would set forth some use cases that might be helpful, is that we live now in a time where knowledge that is a fact or a truth or an articulation of something is.
There's an abundance of knowledge.
It used to be in the ancient world. For example, you would try to build a library where you had a concentration of texts where you could have that knowledge there. And then when that grew into these universities, which were basically built around libraries where you had a repository of knowledge, I can't imagine that the library that I have would have been unimaginable in the ancient world. This kind of collection of things that's become easier and easier through books and publications and then the Internet, and then the AI, which now is able to learn so much and to bring it to us. So it used to be going to get. There was something that came before knowledge and something that came after knowledge. So the thing that came before knowledge was the work to learn. It was just the process of learning. You had to work to learn something. And then what came after knowledge was the integration of that knowledge into the other things that you knew and into your own life. And that's wisdom. You had learning knowledge and wisdom. So there was kind of a track that was there. What we've now kind of removed is the learning and the wisdom, and it's just this knowledge which sort of stands alone in the middle, and I don't think that's good. It was never meant to stand alone, but I was thinking about it.
So here's an example I wrote a couple years back, this book called and take they are life, Martin Luther's theology of martyrdom. And that book took me about. Well, I was in pretty good writing shape, because I actually came off of writing a martyr's faith in a faithless world. And I had done the research on Luther's idea of martyrdom. So I was writing it into an essay. And when you're in good writing shape, then instead of writing 100 words, you write 10,000 words. So I was trying to write this little essay, and it turned into 30,000 words. So I'm like, all right, well, it's a book. So published as a book. Now, the way that it worked was I have Luther's works on logos, and so I could search martyr. In fact, that's how this whole thing started. I was trying to find where Luther said the blood of the martyrs is the seed of the church. And so I was looking for that quote, and I found all of this stuff that Luther said about the martyrs. And I said, oh, he really likes Agatha and Agnes. So I could search Agatha and Agnes. I could see where he talks about that. I could see where he talks about blood. I could just search everything that's in English from Luther.
And what would have taken me a lifetime to do if the books weren't in English? What would have taken me months and years to do if the books weren't in a collection?
What would have taken me weeks to do if the books weren't electronically searchable? Took me minutes to do. Now, I suppose the result was helpful in the sense that I could just have all of these texts isolated and could just deal with them. But what I lost was I lost both the need and the difficulty of learning german. The need and the difficulty of traveling over to Germany, where the books were. The need and the difficulty of learning, consuming all of these texts to get to these parts that I needed. I lost all of that. Now, the result is I was able to put together the book in a short time, but I'm not that much wiser for it. I mean, I'm a bit wiser, but not as much as I would have been if all of this learning and the difficulty of putting that together was there. So when we can just kind of WHOOP with the knowledge and AI takes it even a step further than the search, it starts to assemble it for us and exercise some sort of electronic discernment, all of that process is lost. And I'm not sure that's good, because that learning the thing and the integration and the discernment that comes afterwards is also lost.
We can exploit knowledge, which is now very cheap. The problem is we are going to have a debt of both learning and wisdom on the danger. That's my thoughts.
I saw this, too.
[00:23:47] Speaker B: Have you ever played around with what's called the sermon AI? They sent out an email to pastors.
[00:23:52] Speaker A: To ask them to.
[00:23:53] Speaker B: It's a weekly subscription. I just played around with a free trial for a week. But the video, the promo video for it says, this is not to write your sermon for you. But then the video shows you how it can write your sermon for you, which is really, I think, terrible on many levels. But I played around with it because I wanted to see what it could do. So I asked it to write a sermon in the style of John Chrysostom, a sermon in the style of Augustine, sermon in this style, that style. And it gave you a sermon on various texts that weren't. None of them were really theologically bad. I didn't think there were very good sermons overall. They were very wooden. They felt like a junior high kid writing his first five paragraph essay kind of thing. But one thing I did find interesting was it asks you to put, like, what denomination you are. So I put LCMs, and then it gives me commentaries, Lutheran commentaries, and it gives me a summary of those commentaries for the text I'm looking at.
And I had read all of those commentaries I did on a text I just preached on. And I went through those commentaries and it gave partial truth on each one, but it made them all sound like they're exactly the same. The problem was, not all the commentaries said the exact same thing, but the only way you could know that is if you had actually read the commentaries. So it goes back to this problem of if you haven't done the legwork of actually studying the thing, you don't have the wisdom or discernment to know what the AI doesn't know. So now you're dependent on this thing to give you the right information, because you're assuming it's done the reading for you and it's done the legwork. In this case. It had not. It clearly had not. It just gave you the same generic answer for each commentary summary. And again, it wasn't as if the commentary summary was terrible. It didn't say anything heretical or anything like that, but it's not what the commentaries actually said. But I had read every one of those commentaries and knew that it was lacking. But I think that's one of the big dangers with all of these things, not just Bible related, but we don't know what it doesn't know. If you haven't actually studied the topic yourself at all in any kind of depth with actual books or actual articles or actual learning, if you haven't put forth the effort now, you're assuming it's done the work for you. When I have found time after time that it's done some work, but often the work is incomplete. Or in the Bible chat example with transgenderism, it's just flat out wrong and it's a machine. It doesn't know what it doesn't know.
It's just telling you what it's been programmed to tell you. And so you have to be able to be wise and discerning and look into these things yourselves, not just take AI's word for it. Because it said, this is the answer to your question, right?
[00:26:28] Speaker A: That's right.
I was thinking about how this is going to change education because you can't assign. Hey, give me a three page paper on this. Because then someone just goes and the chat GPT writes it and you can run it through. I've seen this now. You can run it through the filters that make it look like a human thing, make it undetectable from AI. And so the AI can even make look like it's not AI. So that for class, it's just going to have to be the professor and the student sitting down and saying, hey, tell me about this, and listening. And I wonder if that is how we're going to have to preach, too. So it was during the sermon hymn on Sunday, I was thinking about this, and someone walked behind the pulpit to go kind of. They go through the little chapel, it's right behind me to go back to the bathroom, I guess they were walking past me and I thought, well, what it might be is in the future, the elders might have to sit in the back and decide what they want a sermon on. And then right before the sermon, come and hand me a note. We want you to preach on Genesis three or whatever. And then I stand up and I preach on that thing so that the people know that they're getting a real sermon from a real person rather than something written by the Bible. Sermon. Chat bot.
I don't know how this is going to change our liturgy and our thinking about this, but pastors have to be committed to holding forth from the Lord's word and not from our own whatever. Not from the chat bot, not from the sermon.com or we. I think we've lost. Pastor Pack, are you there? Pastor Packer, did I lose you?
I think we got to the answer to this question. And so I think we'll call it quits now before we get too many technical problems coming up. Thank you for, by the way, for watching, for being involved, for having fun with the Q a thing. If you go to Wolfmuller co contact, you can send your questions there. You can also send your questions on the comments on this video. Pastor Packer takes a look at those. So put those there as well, and we'll see you soon. Thanks. God's peace be with.
