Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Welcome, YouTube theologians. I'm Pastor Wolfmuller. I'm joined by Dr. Gregory Schultz, who we were just talking before we went on about. This is our three of three, but he is suspicious that you guys might want a four of three so you can lead a rebellion in the comments. We'll have to see how that goes. We're talking about the recent book written published by Dr. Schultz called the anatomy of an implosion discussion of woke Marxism, specifically at our Concordia universities and Concordia Mec one. He was watching some of these things unfold. So we've been talking about what is woke Marxism. What does it mean? I think there's three things that I want to lean into today to talk about academic freedom, what we learn from the formula of Concord. But first, welcome, by the way, it's good to see you again. Thanks, brother. I'm always interested in trying to make things as simple as possible, which is why these conversations are so great, because you give me a lot of things to try to process and simplify. So after thinking about our last conversation, I realized that one of the simple things that you present is this discernment, the simplicity of discernment, which says it's either the word of God or not the word of God. And that everything that we're talking about, from critical theory to the destruction of language in postmodernity, the discussions about language from the semiotics, expressive semiotics, and the destruction of language from daredevil, et cetera, et cetera.
How do you discern all these things without understanding all the history and everything is that, look, the devil is always trying to steal or crush or choke the word of God.
The devil is Antichrist, which means he is anti word. And so you can see it clearly.
There's a lot of different ways, angles that the devil attacks, but you can see it clearly in what's being attacked is the word of God.
I wanted to kind of lead off with that discussion of our christian discernment on all these things and how we discern when the word is under attack.
[00:02:31] Speaker B: Well, thanks. So how about the thought that we could use a term here that we use in philosophy somewhat to talk about something that's properly basic?
So there's, I think, always been a push in good philosophy to find out what is the most foundational thing, a fancy word for that would actually be metaphysics. Right? So to find out what must be the case, because physics are the way they are, what accounts for all of this?
So the thing is that we as Lutherans are, I believe, uniquely responsible so on the theme that our Lord gives us, to whom much has been given from him, shall much be required?
Is there any other religious group, is there any other denomination that in our preaching, in our catechizing, in our growing up, in our reading, Luther and all of this, is there any other denomination that pays such close attention to the properly basic means of grace?
Right. So what are the means by which, you may have noticed in the book, I've been hyphenating that to point out that's like a central concept. What are the means by which God communes, communicates with, relates to us and then we to him. Now, you can come at this through the back door.
Maybe it's the kitchen door, I don't know. By just doing kind of a minimum daily requirement of western thought. So it would be Aristotle, as we've discussed a little bit, saying the human being is the logos type of creature, the language creature. We really don't need Aristotle to tell us that. But somehow, hearing that he said that and then reading politics one and so forth, we see how sensible and true to life this actually is. This is what makes us unique in God's creation. We human beings are the logos or language people. Now then, the thing is that because in what we would say, a solo way, right, not because of us, but solely because of Christ and the way he does things, we know this from scripture in the first place. So we really don't need Aristotle for that part in scripture. God himself does his work in baptism, which is the word with the water, and in holy communion, which is the word in, with, and under that bread and wine.
Through the operation God shows us, convinces us, kind of cements us to the fact that the means of grace are the big issue now, the question about how we can be attuned to that, it may have something to do with censoring and poor education up until this point. So I noticed, for instance, just to use one example, that's, I know, very important to both of us. We've sure talked about this a lot with your YouTube followers, too, the issue of suffering.
So it certainly does seem that there's kind of a chasm between the way the reformers and the generation right after Luther looked after pastoral care, centering it on suffering in Christ.
[00:06:07] Speaker A: Right.
[00:06:08] Speaker B: There seems to be a huge gap between that and our negligence of suffering today. I think we can trace that back even to the 20th and 19th centuries.
So, at any rate, there is kind of an educational requirement, and there certainly is what, let's call it the liturgical, the biblical, the lutheran requirement that God has simply blessed us with that we don't really deserve this, and I don't think we're making good use of it. Here is the word, right? So faith comes by hearing and hearing by the word of God.
There are a few passages that we know as well in Lutheranism as that passage.
So that's where the.
I think you referred to it as simplicity. I would say let's try to use simplicity in the medieval sense. Right. So it's not just that it's an elementary little thing, though elementary would work pretty well here, if we can define it that way. The basic foundation. It's not just that, it's an elementary thing. Tis a gift to be simple. Don't know if that Quaker song applies or not, but for the medievals, simple meant to catch the whole phenomenon, to catch the whole reality.
So God is simple.
Not that he's some sort of atom outside the universe or something very elemental, but he's simple in that he is a unity, one God, three persons.
You can almost feel the elegance of that. And then the lifetime and all of our time in eternity, praising and worshipping him for being who he is as the holy trinity.
[00:07:58] Speaker A: So I want to be able to go as a Christian, a Lutheran, a person who's been shaped by the catechism, both in my own thinking and my own life.
I was baptized. I go to the supper.
I hear the scriptures every Sunday. So now I go off to the university and they want to tell me, hey, you can't know anything.
And we say, well, I don't know about that, but I know that God created me and that Christ redeemed me and that I'm going to be resurrected.
And they say, well, no, you are to be defined by your victimhood. Well, I don't know about that, but I confess that I'm a sinner. And then I hear the words of Jesus who says, your sins are forgiven, and I'm inviting you to eat my body and blood for the promise of that forgiveness. And then someone says, well, hey, you're supposed to be at war with the people who are different from you. And we say, well, I don't know about that, but I know that the Lord has created me and all creatures.
Hey, you're supposed to be a woman instead of a man. Or, look, I don't know about that, but he has given me my reason, my senses and all my members.
And he said, you're supposed to be mad at the people in authority. And I don't know about that, but I remember, honor your father and your mother, and it'll go well with you, and you'll live long in the land.
In other words, I don't know about all this other crazy nonsense, but I do know that I'm made by God and redeemed by God, and that he's bringing me to the resurrection with his whole church. And it's an inoculation to all of the crazy nonsense subtleties that are pressed upon us.
And that, I think, is the danger that we lose that right, that we lose the inoculation that the catechism provides, and that, like you said, that the liturgy provides.
And instead of giving that inoculation at our universities, we're opening up to the disease.
[00:10:17] Speaker B: Yeah, thanks.
So, I'm kind of stuck in the way I used your metaphor in the book.
I'll just do this. And I'm not disagreeing with you. I'm just stuck on my use of the metaphor. So the problem, I would say, is that our immune system has been compromised. And whereas you're doing the wonderful and vitally important work of addressing individual souls as individuals, which I totally agree with, my task has been to talk about the university as an institution as well as the people there and what they're doing or not doing. So our immune system has been beaten down and compromised for at least a full generation, maybe more than two. And it was this sort of thing. So I'll just give you an example from that institution I was blessed with my entire educational life growing up, actually was in the Wisconsin synod, and from kindergarten through seminary, had this rich lutheran diet. Don't think I was always the best student, so don't miss that point. But this rich diet of God's word and lutheran thought, right? And then I accepted a call to the first of the two lutheran higher education institutions where I served, Wisconsin Lutheran College. And I joined the faculty full time, just about the point where they were going through one of these cycles of accreditation. So one of the team members on campus, and I was responsible to talk with him, one of the team members on campus from the outside came from one of the southern baptist universities, and he identified himself as teaching philosophy. And I said, well, that's great.
I'm new here, and you're from a christian university. I got a lot of questions about how you're navigating stuff and so forth. And without a hitch in the conversation, I can remember exactly where we were sitting in the coffee in front of us, on the little table.
He said, you know, I think I can answer that right away. My job as a professor of philosophy at a christian university is to take all of these kids coming in from high school and from their churches and show them how they can't be sure of anything that they've learned.
My job is to upset that. And I knew right there this is not going to go well. So this sort of stuff, though, has been going on, as I say, certainly for my generation.
And I think for a couple before that, we've seen it in the public schools where God's word is the one thing that is absolutely forbidden.
Right. First it was Christmas songs, and then all of a sudden it was the Bible and so forth. And now it's in our religious universities. So it is to use this gift of being simple, as you said, to stay on target. It is the attack on language, which is an attack on the means of grace, because God speaks to us as language beings, the way he created us in terms of language. That's what the scriptures are.
This has been a very tactical and even a long term strategy. But then the problem is the universities have been doing such a bad job of this, probably we in the homes have been, too, that anything goes. And so all of a sudden, what you're seeing then and what you just described is a twofold disease or attack. In the first place, it's targeted at the means of grace. This is not accidental. That's what the foe is after.
And it's hitting people who are not founded in what the means of grace deliver. They just aren't. And then you add into that mix professors. My studied view is the university administration is the big problem, really. But the professors then, and there are some of them, right. The professors are actually doing in our Lutheran, some of, maybe many of our lutheran classes in those universities, those professors are doing the same thing that that Southern Baptist philosopher was doing to his kids.
And here we are.
[00:14:55] Speaker A: Yeah. There's a way that I think a lot about this with church bureaucracy. So the further you are away from the altar and the pulpit, the further you are from being helpful. And I imagine the same thing is true at the university. From the classroom. The further you are from the classroom, the more difficult it is to be helpful.
[00:15:13] Speaker B: Oh, that's right. And I think just a very rude and straightforward way of saying it is the administrators are not qualified to be professors. In many cases, they never were.
And there are too many of them. There are too many people who don't know, don't have the gifts, did not devote their lives to being professors in classrooms who now become administrators. And then here's the thing.
I think we can talk about the administrative state in a political analysis of things. We can talk about the administrative university and we can talk about the administrative church, can't we? The problem then is in the church being so far away from altar and pulpit and serving God's people when they're suffering, serving them with the Lord's supper, reminding them of their baptism and walking with them to the hospital and to the cemetery.
Being so far away from that is a huge problem. But as we're saying today, it's baked into the system. It's baked into the university system. The people who have the power, the university power, whatever. Exactly. That means, let's say higher and fire power, right? Those are the administrators, and those administrators are not professors. They fondly talk about how they used to be, and I still am. This, that's nonsense. And that's a big part of the.
[00:16:41] Speaker A: Problem you mentioned, and you're the only lutheran I've ever heard mention the idea of subsidiarity.
I think it probably is a catholic word, and I hear it. Al Mueller talks about it all the time. I think he picked it up. But it'd be good. Just since we're right on top of that idea, it'd be good to just put that out there for everybody so that we have it as part of our vocab.
[00:17:03] Speaker B: Well, thanks. So this too was, I guess, kind of a super metaphor.
I was put onto this by Dr. Angus Minooge, my department chair and friend at Concordia University, and he was recommending the vast amount of literature from Roman Catholicism for me to take a look at. But he said, the principle is that you should be making the curricular decisions at the level of the people who are doing the curriculum, which is the professors, not the administrators.
I did probably the same thing that you would do too. I decided, okay, well, I want to find out what subsidiarity is really about, because this is the thing in a book that I referred to called the fall of the faculty. It points out that it is the supersizing of administrators at universities that has really done us in. In american universities generally, and then the religious universities, whether it's marquette or Notre Dame or Concordias, they've just adopted this model. You need a lot of administrators. Okay, so subsidiarity. I discovered that that term, no surprise, is a latin term, but it goes to the tactics of the aqueous triplex. I remember this from high school, the three part line or the three line formation that the Romans had. So to cut a fascinating story a little bit too short.
There are three lines of soldiers, one behind the other or one ahead of the other. And the front line is the front line of soldiers that would be going against the enemy. They would fight. This is hand to hand fighting, of course. Think about Ephesians six, right, with Paul describing the armor of the roman soldier. These guys would be wearing that armor. This is how they fought. So the first row would fight and fight and fight. And when they got just too tired or when they were injured, there was a clockwork maneuver where the centurions would have the second row take the place of the first row. So it sounds like kind of a martial arts dance. So the second row comes up. The first row has the chance to get some desperately needed oxygen into their lungs and bind their wounds and maybe fix a shield real quick. And then these fresh guys from the second row are now the first row. Now you might say, well, wait a minute, sounds great. Why do you need a third row? And the answer is, and this is, I think, what really propelled Rome, along with their sandals, really propelled Rome to be the military power that they were. The third line was there just in case. Just in case those first two rows got beaten up, or this can happen. If there was kind of the smell of retreat in the air, maybe a whiff of surrender, the third row would step up. The third row, from my limited reading anyhow, would have been veterans. Kind of like the people who retired to Philippi. Right? Roman soldiers who earned their roman citizenship the hard way by fighting in the military. So these are grizzled old guys. The last thing they're going to do is surrender. So they go to the front. The principle of subsidiarity goes like this. The people in the front two rows who have been handing off the baton back and forth are surrendering.
They're giving it up.
They're inviting the woke trojan horse into the gates. They're going with woke Marxism, right? They need to step aside and the veterans come up. And as I said, these guys are take no prisoners.
It's like, to mix up my metaphor a little bit, it's like the Spartans at Thermopoli. Greeks, not Romans. It's like the Spartans at Thermopoli. And that's what I'm calling for. I think we're seeing this in a broader swath of society. But I want to offer the reminder.
We cannot sit back and say it's up to the president of the United States to take care of the United States or to tell us what to do.
The constitution is for that, by the way, which is an analog to the holy scriptures for us.
So what has to happen is we have to, well, operate with the talents we've been given and step up. So I think that means that, for instance, the professors should be ruling the university.
What an idea.
It's an old idea. Of course you can have a college or a school without an administration, but you can't have a college or a school without the teachers.
At any rate, this is desperately needed. And I do think that the signs of surrender and giving up and inviting the enemy into the gates, those indications are all over the place right now.
[00:22:33] Speaker A: There is this idea, I think, with subsidiarity that the best activity happens in the realm where the Lord has appointed it, which is almost always local. And the danger is when there's an institution trying to do something that it's not instituted for, you start to introduce all sorts of trouble. You lose efficiencies, you lose a lot of things. So like, for example, the family is for raising children, and if the state comes in and tries to raise the children, you're going against subsidiarity and you're now introducing all of these dangers really to it.
Education, for example, belongs to the family, and when the state takes that over, same thing happens. Charity belongs to the family and to the church, and the state assumes the role of charitable organization, and now you lose the local control and local effectiveness. So that there's a parallel with localism and subsidiarity, at least in my own mind as well. So all these things happen is you get this kind of, I don't know, this efficient bureaucracy, which by definition is inefficient.
[00:23:49] Speaker B: Yeah, well, we don't want the bureaucracy to be like, we don't want the congress to be efficient, but what we do need is faithfulness, and we need people with their armor in good shape.
Now, the counterpart to the family for the raising of children, which is certainly correct. Bless you. The counterpart to that is the matter of the divine call in the church. So this too is something that has to be pointed out. And we got to take a look at this from the third row, if you will.
In our concordias in the lutheran church Missouri Synod not long ago, the requirement was that the presidents, for instance, had to be an ordained pastor.
We have moved away from that rather dramatically and without any discussion so that we have a majority of lay presidents.
It's interesting that the descriptions are still there, often in the documents for the universities, that this person is to be the spiritual head for the campus or something like that.
And I would just say these are not people who have the armor on.
They're not battle hardened by having been in the parish. Our expectation not long ago was that you should have parish pastor experience, for reasons we alluded to just a few minutes ago, to see the efficacy of holy scripture and the means of grace in people's lives, to have this, to realize why you've got to strap on this piece and you've got to take up the shield and you have to use the sword and you can't leave home without your helmet.
And instead there's a whole, what is this? Some kind of artificial nursery of administrators who have no divine calls or in some cases are being given divine calls just to try to hep up their status.
Right. So that's a problem.
[00:26:20] Speaker A: To wrap that into the. So we had started to step down this road. I'm going to pull it back up, but then press that direction, because in regard to the formula of Concord. So I'd mentioned the catechism as kind of an individual inoculation toward this, and you said, we have to think of it as an institution. It seems like if the catechism is to our individual immune system, that kind of inoculation and protection, it's the format of Concord that serves as a church and our institutions as that inoculating thing. And it even functions that way in that it says, okay, here's what's wrong. And here's what's wrong. In other words, it does not look for compromise. It's looking for clarity.
One side says this, one side says this. But we're going to go now to the scriptures and to our lutheran confessions and to our lutheran church fathers and the church fathers. And we're not only going to tell you what's right, we're also going to reject what's wrong.
So you come back to the form, and I think this is why you do it. But I probably should let you tell me why you do it.
You come back to the formula over and over as the authoritative text for the lutheran church.
And it's not that you're not coming to the Augsburg confession or the catechism or even the Book of Concord as a whole, but specifically to the formula. So I'm interested in exploring that as well. So maybe like a two sentence introduction to what the formula is and then why you lean into it so heavily.
[00:27:53] Speaker B: Yeah, I'm going to transgress those directions just a tad.
[00:27:56] Speaker A: Well, you talk as much as you want.
[00:27:58] Speaker B: This does talk or link together our earlier discussion about fundamental matters. If you take away the means of grace, you cannot have a, you know, you can have a formerly christian university like Harvard or something, but you can't have a christian university.
Now, the reason that the formula of Concord is important is because you get all of the other confessions in it, and that this is all rifled towards the task of teaching in the churches and in the schools, the church schools. So that vocabulary is there. Right. So this is what we teach in our schools. This is what's necessary in our churches and schools. That's in the vocabulary. Just to remind your listeners they're ours temporarily. They're ours. Oh, well, I'll take you up on that. So everybody please be sure to vote for the fourth out of three conversations in there. Thanks.
[00:29:10] Speaker A: Well, you should also plug this, though, because just as we're plugging stuff, so that you have your website, lutheran philosopher, and you have classes that people can take with you and a lot of recordings there as well. So if you're not getting enough, Dr. Schultz here, go over there and you can have your full.
That's a. So that is not a point of the formula that I had actually considered.
It's already thinking of the church as church. And.
[00:29:43] Speaker B: That's right.
[00:29:44] Speaker A: Especially for educational institutions.
[00:29:46] Speaker B: And if we just were thinking about the historical context of it, it's also the last of the lutheran confessions written after Dr. Luther's death. And Langthon and Chemnitz and company could see the problems that the church and Wittenberg University could be facing with the immense gift of Luther himself out of the way in heaven. Right. So things are very particular. But you asked me for kind of a two sentence thing.
[00:30:21] Speaker A: Because I was going to set up what the formula is, but I just thought I'd let you do that. But now you have to explain why it's so important for.
[00:30:28] Speaker B: Yeah, thanks.
It's important in terms of the content of teaching, and it's important in terms of the method or the philosophy of teaching.
So let me talk about the philosophy part first.
Call it the method, call it the Hobbitus, if we want to get our latin going there, too.
Call it the way we do things, the way we're to do things as professors to that part of taking. We'll just let them in on this, Brian.
[00:31:01] Speaker A: Right.
[00:31:01] Speaker B: We're actually taking the epitome as well, along with this. So we've got these two documents, one explaining the other a little more briefly or in more length, depending which direction you. So what we have here is there is a continuing phrase, it is formative, it is normative. Also, the way that you are to teach is this.
You need to believe, teach and confess everything that Jesus has taught us in the scriptures. That means all of the scriptures. Because in John five, Jesus says, these are the scriptures that testify of me, Old Testament and new. All right, so the content is we believe. Sorry. The method is we believe, teach and confess.
We've been absolutely drilled in this as pastors, right? That's practically the first thing we're asked even before we unpack our stuff in our first parsonage.
Do you promise to do this? Yes. We'll believe, teach and confess the inerrant scriptures.
The other part of that, and I'm saying it's normative, which means it's required. The other part of this is to identify and reject false dogma. To reject and repudiate false dogma.
There is no option here.
I can't just sit here, especially as a called and ordained professor, and just say, well, I am teaching everything that I teach based on scripture and the authoritative confessions about the scripture. I can't settle for that. I also have to identify and repudiate and reject false doctrine.
I would just ask this question in a faculty that is not all pastors, not all lutheran pastors, and in a faculty that in fact isn't all Lutheran, is that going to be an expectation? More to the point, the formula of Concord is not being taught, has not been taught in faculty development. It has not been interrogated or brought up in conversations with faculty hiring and so forth. So the formula of Concord has been studiously ignored at my Concordia.
It's just not part of the fabric. Okay, now the other part of this, just to get the second sentence, so to speak, in there is. There's also the content of teaching.
And it is instructive to point out that the very first article of the formula talks about the corruption of human nature, the absolute corruption of human nature. And then it also sets the table for Christ having both a human nature and a divine nature, this utterly unique person because of the incarnation, but who also is without sin. All right, so if you dwell for a moment on, let's say nature is the first term really discussed in the formula of Concord article one, then my question is this, when we teach, don't we have to teach human nature and teach human nature according to the scriptures, that we are by nature blind, dead enemies of God? For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God. So there you have content and you have methodology, or the professor's teaching philosophy being required now? I just say on the content.
This is also right to your point where you brought up all the bizarre things that are being taught to our sons and daughters and grandkids in universities today.
The word nature is deliberately rejected and kept out of those conversations.
[00:35:30] Speaker A: Really?
[00:35:31] Speaker B: Yes, it is. So the woke people do not talk about nature. Human nature. It's just the opposite. The LGBTQ stuff, for instance, the transgendering, is this gnostic business. There's no such thing as nature. You get to do whatever you want to do and be whatever you want to be. When kids are taught to dress and to act in the bathrooms like animals in our public day schools, they are being taught that there is no such thing as human nature.
When our sons and daughters are being told that the answer to their restlessness and their distress is to deny the physical aspects of their human nature and alter them and amputate them and prop them up with washes of hormones, that's all a denial of human nature, you'll find that you alluded to the oppression, the oppressed groups, and the Oppressor groups. Marxist identity is substituted for human nature.
So this is. This is.
[00:36:41] Speaker A: Wait, so I don't want to. So, nate, so why, like. So that question of. Because I've been hearing a lot of christians now talk about how we need to think about identity, and we have to talk about identity in Christ, and identity is the way in.
But you're saying that when identity and nature are.
When you steal nature, you slide identity in there like the bag of.
You know, that the scene from Indiana Jones where he takes the gold, take nature and put identity in its place.
I had not noticed that.
[00:37:27] Speaker B: No, it's more violent than that. It's more violent even than Indiana Jones.
So the first thing is to blow up human nature.
This is all very tactical, I'm saying.
I mean, it's like there's some demonic force behind this, right?
So the thing is to get nature out of school, the discussions about nature, and that's important to continue the business of keeping people away from the scriptures. So now, even if you would hear. Right, let's just take a quick. I think fairly easy, even if you would hear your pastor talking, as I did a moment ago, about Jesus having two natures but being one person, if you haven't learned nature, and I'll go ahead and say, if you haven't discussed nature seriously in your literature classes, in your philosophy classes, in your ethics classes and so forth in university and college, you're not going to be able to make sense of that. You're going to think that that's outmoded thinking, when actually the marxist identity stuff is the non thinking approach. It's just ideology, mythology, you see. So nature's crucial. You could, if you wanted to do something meaningful instead of some generic.
Let's have a visitor from Synod come to campus and see if he thinks professors are being woke or not. I think whatever that means. I think you could pretty much go in and just have each professor write a two page essay on how the concept of nature figures in to their own researching and scholarship and into their classroom teaching.
Do you see?
[00:39:18] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:39:19] Speaker B: And what we're doing, we didn't just go off on a tangent here. That's the opening of the formula. So the opening of formula is about what you and some of our other conversations have been referring to as our need for a biblical anthropology. So the view of the human being as being a nature. Human nature, that's actually what's making the total mess of american and western society today is we've had generations of people grow up with no understanding of what human nature is. Or more to the point, there have been a lot of teachers and writers and administrators who don't want to talk about nature. They want to talk about marxist identity.
[00:40:08] Speaker A: Does the. So I have so many questions. I'm wondering also, I mean, about this origin of believe, teach and confess, as opposed to the Augsburg confession which says we teach and we condemn. And I'm wondering if that believe, teach and confess has a history. I'm wondering about that. I'm also wondering.
But here's the thing, actually that is interesting for me to wonder about, is that is there a sanctified and right way to talk about identity? Or does the language of identity bring with it that ideology altogether? Yeah, thanks.
[00:40:47] Speaker B: I think there's a good way to talk about it, and I committed that good way of talking about it. I believe in anatomy of an implosion. So in opposition to marxist identity, which, remember, is mythological and violent, in opposition to that, we want to promote baptismal identity.
Now, what I would point out there is that whereas the marxist identity and imposing that on people is always a violent sort of thing, even intellectually violent, right. This is just propaganda ideology jammed down the throats of our kids in baptism. What we're actually seeing is the means of grace at work, God at work, through the means of grace. And that's the famous t shirt you alluded to last time. God cannot be treated nisi per verbum except through the word, which is Christ in the first place, the scriptures in the second place. And then I will say necessarily that's also a very high understanding of the divine gift of language that comes along with that.
[00:42:05] Speaker A: Well, right, because when I'm baptized, and this has to do with the anthropological theses that we were discussing from Luther, a man is what God says of him. Yes.
So God says that we're sinners, and God says that we're justified. And he says that in our baptism. So that my identity is not a self appointed, self determined, or self discovered. It's divinely spoken.
Right.
[00:42:31] Speaker B: It's not made up. It's not made up. It is the ultimate norm and authority.
[00:42:36] Speaker A: In the voice of that. My identity is the name. It's the word. It's the God spoken one. So it's connected to my nature as the Aristotle quote, that man is a logos creature.
[00:42:52] Speaker B: Yes.
[00:42:53] Speaker A: So that its identity, because of the true spoken word of God, rather than that. There's nothing. Sure. So I have to figure out, I have to create myself or whatever the identity business is.
So we understand identity connected to nature.
So the marxist understanding would be identity against nature.
[00:43:20] Speaker B: No, it's blow up nature.
[00:43:23] Speaker A: Okay.
[00:43:23] Speaker B: There is no nature. It's like Darwin, right?
Yeah.
[00:43:31] Speaker A: Okay.
So we have to be grounded in the language of nature.
[00:43:38] Speaker B: Which is also. Can we just tuck this in here so everybody's clear with what we're saying, too, which is biblical terminology.
So Jesus, Philippians two. Right. Jesus being in very nature, God did not consider equality with God something to be grasped, so that the lutheran confession's emphasis on nature is one of those faithful doctrinal things, but it tends toward securing the means by which. So this is a particular biblical concept word that is brought to the head of the class, to the head of the syllabus, if you will, in the first article of the formula.
It is like the reformers who outlived Luther there. It's like they kind of sensed what could happen as the result of singing a mighty fortress. Right. The word they still shall let remain, nor any thanks for it. They can let the word remain in the 21st century because they're teaching everybody that the word doesn't mean anything.
And we're not going to teach people the central words of the word and give them a way to see what we're pulling over on them.
[00:45:01] Speaker A: And if it takes one little word to fell the devil, then he's not going to stop until he's gotten rid of all the little words.
[00:45:08] Speaker B: How about.
[00:45:10] Speaker A: So there's an argument just on Formula one because there's something here that's also intriguing to me.
The early lutheran confessions. And Luther leans into this, I imagine if you asked him what's the major problem with Catholicism, he would say their doctrine of sin. I mean, that man is free, the bondage of the will, he writes. He quotes all the scholastic theologians in small cult.
When you think that you can contribute to your salvation, you dethrone Jesus, you take him out of the office of savior and put yourself in there, which is the worst of idolatries, etc. So leaning into the doctrine of virginal sin after Luther died, along comes the idea that man is sin, that our nature is sin, and so in the formula, they have to correct that. Now, it's not that they're dialing it back like, no, you've gone too far. You've just confused the categories. Man's nature and original sin must be distinguished, not separated, but distinguished, and in these four beautiful ways, because God created man but not sin. God redeemed man. He didn't redeem sin. Christ became a man. He didn't become sin. In the resurrection, you're going to be fully human, so that sin is not our nature. Sin is in fact a corruption of our nature. Sin is an anti man thing, but that corruption is complete and thorough and deserving of God's wrath. So they're making that clear distinction.
It is a step beyond the we are all very bad, so they're forcing us to think past that we're all very bad into what it means to be a human and to be a sinner at the same time, and that they are not the same, although we can't see any.
So anyway, it's a beautiful thing to think about what the formula is doing there, and I'd love your reflection on it. In fact, in contrast to what, how would Marx set forth an anthropology? Or what would Darwin teach us to confess about what man is?
[00:47:31] Speaker B: Nothing.
All they can do is tear down the good stuff that's there. And we've allowed know. I mean, we generally, we've allowed this to happen.
And I'm just thinking, as you were talking about the formula, you know, the right word to use here is elegant, isn't it?
So the teaching of the biblical doctrine of Christ, of creation, redemption, sanctification, this is just an elegant way to put it. And I'm going to offer this too, when I refer to the fact that we don't have.
I'm not sure we even have a majority of lutheran professors at Concordia Mekwan. But when I say there are many who aren't here is another crime that's going on. I do know a number of people, whether originally from jewish and now christian or from roman catholic backgrounds, who would love to have that conversation that you were just setting up for us to have those four things on the board, to be talking about this instead of having an option to plan woke programming for your courses, and that is just terrible.
A lot of those folks who are not lutheran professors, I think, came not just to get a job, but came to do a sacred work that they understand teaching to be. And the university let them down by not providing all the best stuff that we have as Lutherans for them to consider and learn and grow into, whom much has been given from him shall much be required? And what does it mean, then, if we just bury this stuff under the ground and don't share it? Out of all places, a lutheran university.
[00:49:37] Speaker A: So the formula has been burned from the was. I'm getting ready to go over to Denmark in a couple of, you know, over there it was a Christian II or one of the kings. He was there at the diet of worms and made Denmark Lutheran. But then his sister sent him a copy of the book of Concord and he burned it. And he says, we have the Oxford confession, we have the catechism, we don't need anything else. And so that whole kind of scandinavian history of Lutheranism is built on a. I don't think they would say it this way. They would say it's built on the oxbow confession. We'd say it's built on a rejection of the formula of Concord. And because of that, it hasn't had the immune system to reject critical theory, to reject higher criticism.
It's probably what's running through, as the lutheran churches are. I mean, it's the problem with the ELCA, they never had the formula of Concord, so there was no way for them to reject reformed errors and more. So it's just an interesting kind of historical thing. It reminds me that we need to have a way just to hold this text up and to teach it.
Maybe you and I need to do a formula of Concord class.
Oh, that would be something, yes.
[00:51:05] Speaker B: My colleague, Pastor Paul Arendt, who has just done a world of good for me in many ways, including helping me get lutheran philosopher on this high tech platform with the AI searching and all of the emailing and stuff.
If your folks look online, they can find his course, which he titled with intrepid Hearts, which is a quote from the end of the formula with intrepid hearts.
And I think I don't know I shouldn't speak for him in front of all of your listeners here, but I think Paul would make a great guest.
[00:51:44] Speaker A: And I'll put a link to that, too, if someone will remind me. And I'll put it.
[00:51:47] Speaker B: I'll send that link along for you.
[00:51:49] Speaker A: Yeah, that'd be great, because I think that there's really something there. And even just on the way that they treat this distinction between human nature and original sin, it's not allowing us to say, look, we're all bad before, that we were created by God and that Christ is truly our brother. So that human values or whatever are built into the fact that we're created and created good and that there's an enduring result of that creation. Even though we're fallen, the Lord doesn't throw us away so that we can't be nothing, not because we are more than nothing, but because the Lord determines us to be more than nothing.
I saw a critique of the church that when we reduce everything into law gospel, we miss the first and the fourth chapter of the story.
So chapter one is creation, chapter two is fall. Chapter three is redemption. Chapter four is restoration. And we are tempted to miss the importance of that first chapter, creation.
And what article one of the formula does is it says, no. Look, you have to make sure that you have a distinction. Article two does it, too. There's four states of man's will before the fall, after the fall, after redemption, after the restoration, after resurrection. And so it's making sure that we see all four, the full story of what God has done. That's beautiful. Okay.
[00:53:24] Speaker B: It is beautiful. And thanks for that recitation.
I know this is a topic you and I have alluded to, and I know you work a lot on this notion of the orderliness or the ordering of.
And, you know, there you are. But now we were just talking about people in Europe, but I think somebody's going to be talking to another brother online or in a book somewhere and saying, those american Lutherans, nobody took the formula away from them, but they never used it. So de facto they didn't have it either.
[00:54:01] Speaker A: Well, look, our fathers in the faith have done everything to point us to it. I mean, they even named our seminaries Concordia and our universities Concordia and our publishing house Concordia. In other words, go to the formula of.
Know all the progressive Lutherans are like, forget it. We're Augustana. Everything's Augsburg. We don't need Concordia. But it's also important because Luther was not involved in the formula of Concord, which is significant because we can't ask Luther what he thinks now. I mean, maybe the AI Luther bot can tell us what Luther would have thought about transgenderism or something. Although I asked it the other day and I was not convinced that it was satisfactory. It just thinks that Luther is grumpy. That's like the thing that they picked up from him, which is wrong.
But that doesn't matter because the church is not founded on Luther. The church is founded on Christ and the prophets and the apostles, and so the word of God. And that's what stands now. Okay, so this is connected to something that I did not know it was connected to, but it's the other thing I wanted to make sure we talked about, and that is academic freedom. Because if you would have asked me before reading your book about academic freedom, I'd say, well, look, in the university, you don't want to be punished for saying things that are not authorized. But as a Christian, it doesn't matter because we're punished for saying the gospel. It's a matter of christian persecution. So whatever we're called to say what's true no matter what happens.
I thought academic freedom was just a way of sort of avoiding persecution. But you make a compelling argument that something very different is going on with academic freedom, and it has to do with the idea of the university, which is the pursuit of truth, anyway. So I want you to make that argument, if you could, to make that argument for us, and we can reflect on it some.
Sure.
[00:56:10] Speaker B: Let's just grab a quick basis for this, too. So freedom is a very big deal for us. If the sun sets you free, you shall be free. Indeed there are, we know from preaching this two dimensions to freedom. Some of us know this from speaking at Memorial Day observances and so forth. This showed up, by the way, in a very interesting essay by Isaiah Berlin in the 1960s called something close to the two dimensions, or the two types of freedom. There's freedom four and freedom two.
So you've doubtless done sermons on this, too. When you talk about Jesus setting us free, he sets us free from the punishment our sins deserve, but he set us free to love and honor and serve and obey him.
Now, in academic freedom, there is a misunderstanding to think that it is a legal matter.
Sometimes it is so. For instance, one of my alma maters, Marquette University in Wisconsin, had a professor, John McAdams a few years ago who was fired by his university. And it turned out that Marquette University, a formerly jesuit catholic university, had a provision in its faculty documentation, maybe in their contracts, that said that a professor would have the same freedom of speech that's guaranteed to all Americans in the first Amendment.
So this eventually went to the Wisconsin Supreme Court and he was reinstated as a professor. Now my point is that academic freedom is not a matter of law, it's a matter of morality.
So it is necessary for reasons that I detail, and I recommend a nice philosophy of law book on that, too, in implosion, for two reasons. Now there are two reasons that academic freedom has to be or should be part of any university that's really a university. The first thing is to protect it from political institutions outside the university.
The second reason is to protect professors from administrators.
So let's just think about those two together.
I don't know to say the more important, the more important for me has been that second one about protection from the administrators. But let me just mention my university, or any religious university that goes along with the United States government as it's presently constituted, with all of its notions of the nasty things we talked about before surgery on our kids, not teaching the word of God in school, taking parental rights away and doing like Minnesota is doing with a vengeance, making it a reportable crime if parents don't do radically altering sexual surgery on their kids who want it, and this sort of stuff. Okay, so the problem then is that the religious university is supposed to be standing up for the truth of scripture. Not that everybody else in the country has to follow that, but that's what we're here for.
And I would say by moving toward wokism, my Concordia was plainly becoming just another university. That's the direction they were headed.
The other part of this, though, is probably the one that's more interesting for our conversation, and that is protection from administrators.
So in the administrative university, the notion of academic freedom is meant to protect professors. So there can still be university stuff going on at the university. As I mentioned before, the modern 21st century president and senior administrators, and all administrators really at our universities are, has been professors at most. There was a time way back when when maybe they were a professor, but they're not a professor now and they haven't been for some time. They're an administrator. Interesting question is why in the world should administrators be paid more than professors at a university, given the fact that they're not actually doing the essence of the university work anyhow? So the problem is that administrators operate on an entirely different means by which than professors do. Professors profess. What do we profess? We profess the truth. We profess ways of getting at the truth. We profess great texts. We profess great ideas. We teach people to distinguish between ideology and authority, this sort of stuff. So we're all about texts. We write texts, we publish texts, we argue texts we teach our students, if we're doing our job, to argue for the truth and against error persuasively and truly and honestly, administrators don't do that. Administrators administrate, and they administrate on the basis of power, higher and fire power. Witness what's been done to me. So they don't debate. Last thing they want to do is debate.
And academic freedom, then, is meant to be a protection for the university, to be a university, despite the overbearing financial and structural weight of administrations.
I have this proviso in the book, and okay to mention to your folks, my book is half primary documentation and half biblical and philosophical analysis of things at the university. So in the primary documentation, you can find a couple of essays that were published, which I had written about academic freedom. And in there I say, well, if an administrator has the chops, I mean, if he's got the ability to argue a point against a professor, God bless him, go to it.
Publish a book.
Publish something in some referee journals. Let's have some debates and discussions. This has got to be good. Also, it's Lutheran as all get out.
What are some of those major writings from Luther that we were referring to or that you and I lean on all the time? The Heidelberg disputation, the 1536 disputation concerning man. What was Wittenberg University all about?
Research grants. No, wait, it was all about disputation. Do you see? For the good of all, hammer out the truth.
So how do you protect a professor from the overbearing power that administrators have? And the answer to that is academic freedom.
In anatomy of an implosion, there's a section where I refer to the problem that the university. I know some of the people at the university right now and on the board and so forth are saying that I was invited back to teach and I should stop complaining about things. I was invited back to teach, provided that I would agree to a number of conditions by putting my signature to it, including the provision that the president and provost, that's the chief academic administrator, the president and provost, could fire me at any time at their Sole discretion.
That's why I can't go back to teach.
Yes, you can come back to teach, but we've got this sword we want to hang over your head. And every time you're in class, there's going to be this sword of damocles there and every time you're at your desk there. And if we want to snip that, well, you know, that's just what we get to do.
So here I also included, this is actually AppenDIx r in the book, this paragraph. I'll be real quick. The universitY's. This is an ideal statement of academic freedom. This is not what my university does or hardly AnY Other university does. The university's fundamental commitment is to the principle that debate or deliberation may not be suppressed because the ideas put forth are thought by some or even by most of the members of the university community to be offensive, unwise, immoral, or wrongheaded. It is for the individual members of the university committee community, not for the university as an institution to make those judgments for themselves and to act on those judgments not by seeking to suppress speech, but by openly and vigorously contesting the ideas that they oppose.
Now let me just be sure that we don't misrepresent anything here or that people come away with the wrong thought.
I have not been disciplined, censored, suppressed, suspended, and still am exiled from the university and from teaching because I said something wrong.
I've been all of those things for living out the formula of conquered to believe, teach, and confess everything that Jesus says and to refute false dogma.
That's been my whole thing. So this freedom of speech is something that my university obviously does not want to follow. Most universities don't.
Why not?
Because they don't want to be a university.
They want to be a corporation.
And if I can just do a little more Latin. It's been many minutes since we did anything.
If you think about the word corporation, I need to point out that the church and her schools, if these concordias are church schools, the church and her schools are not to be corporations but to use our Lord's voice in Latin, corpus mayum, parts of my body.
[01:07:24] Speaker A: Right.
[01:07:24] Speaker B: Not a corporation, but a corpus mayhem.
That's why this disputation is important and academic freedom is meant to protect, well, lutheran disputation and the discussion of ideas.
[01:07:42] Speaker A: Yeah. By the way, I'm glad that I get to sit here and visit with you and explore these ideas. I have no idea. It's hard for me to think how.
It's hard for me to give an assessment on how everything happened and if I would have done anything different or anything.
Here's my guess at part of the problem, and you can either.
You could dispute it, I suppose.
You see this thing that woke ideology is anti word, and you see the problems of it. And you want to talk about it and you would love it if somebody.
No, Dr. Schultz, that's wrong. Woke ideology does not destroy, essentially destroy the power and efficacy of God's word. And here's why. And then you would write back and say, no, you are totally wrong about here's why. And you would love that person. It would be great.
But the assertion of a truth feels like something different to an ideologue. It feels like an assault, not like a conversation, but because it's only things of power.
And so your writing and disputation, if someone has to feel like something different, and I suppose that's what the academic freedom does, is it lets that conversation about what is true, that seeking of truth, it lets that matter where it matters most, and it keeps the people who can't handle it out of it. Right.
It's like the kids trying to get. If, like, two dads start fighting on a basketball hoop and the kids get in to try to break up the fight, it's like sometimes you got to just.
I don't know if that makes sense, what I'm suggesting.
[01:10:00] Speaker B: Well, it makes a great deal of sense. So in teaching this sort of stuff in the classroom, I mean, the disputation and seeking the truth, which is, after all, what all of the platonic dialogues are about, that sort of thing, I've reminded students that I don't want to be in the position of undercutting their parents. So your mom probably told you, stop arguing with your little brother.
So here I am, teaching why you need to argue. I said, it's a different kind of arguing. Don't tell your mom on me, though. I'll talk to her if we need to.
But then I go on to say, look, if you really want to show somebody that you don't love them, that you really don't care, then arguing with them is not the worst thing to do. Giving them the cold shoulder is.
And I said to my regret in the past when I was younger, and I'm certainly not free of this stuff, not till heaven.
I think that's when I've been at my worst as a dad or husband, when I, so to speak, kept my own counsel, didn't say anything, and basically wouldn't respond to anything at all. If we love one another, this is the point of, I think this is actually the point of Markworth's kind of famous australian journal article about what it means to confess the truth in love. Confess the truth in love.
So the point is, if we really do love one another and the truth incarnate.
We should argue, and we should certainly argue when the church is under attack by Satan. And as we've been saying at the point where we Lutherans should be standing the line at the point of the means of grace. But what do we get instead?
All sorts of efforts to shut people up. Not to answer, not to respond, not to engage in conversation with your bible. Open.
But this. And that's why academic freedom is important.
It would be by the know, the secular sources, the national academic freedom people who weighed in and reminded Concordia, you're not going to be regarded as a university if you keep on doing what you're doing to this professor.
They caught the fact that any university of any sort, including a secular university, cannot quash academic freedom on pain of not being a university anymore. So why not call it Concordia diversity Wisconsin?
[01:13:02] Speaker A: And that's the thing I want to get to because it's not what you talked about freedom from, but freedom for. And the university is for seeking truth. So the reason why you have freedom is because you're trying to press through to that thing which is truth. And truth is always resisted by the world and our flesh and by the devil. So you have to have some room there, which is an important point. I'm trying to think of something I disagree with you on to kind of put forth an example.
I don't know if I agree with you on the idea that.
And I just want to do this as an exercise to see how things.
To suggest how I think things could have gone well.
[01:13:46] Speaker B: Just remember now, your mom said not to argue.
[01:13:49] Speaker A: I tell my kids when they want to do something, I'll tell them this. I'll say, okay, give me an argument.
[01:13:54] Speaker B: Give me an argument.
[01:13:55] Speaker A: Yeah, go ahead. Let's say that I disagreed with you, that the president of the university ought to be an ordained pastor. Okay. Yeah, I don't think I disagree, but I don't probably have real strong opinions about that.
[01:14:10] Speaker B: But.
[01:14:10] Speaker A: So I could say to you, hey, Dr. Schultz, I appreciate what you intend by this argument. I disagree. And here's the reasons why I disagree. And some could be practical reasons, like our own training of pastors does not give them the skills that are particularly needed. And I'll make the argument. So maybe it'd be better if we have a corporate lawyer, for example, like we have in Chicago, and he kind of has the backbone to not be afraid of getting sued for everything. That's kind of a. I could make an argument like that. And you say, well, Brian, thank you for making that argument. Here's where I think your argument falls short. You haven't considered this and this and this particular thing here. And I say, well, thank you. I did consider that, but I didn't consider this. But I think that actually strengthens my argument and it gets against your argument in this point over here. And now we're actually doing something, and I'm helping you to think more clearly, and you're helping me to think more clearly, and we're serving each other in the midst of that disagreement. But if I see you saying, oh, he thinks a pastor should be the professor, well, he probably has a sasserdotalist idea of the pastoral office or whatever.
And now you're not helping each other.
You don't receive the argument as a gift, but rather you receive the argument as an assault. And as long as we're receiving the argument as an assault, I think that's probably what Marxism, that's probably what critical theory teaches us to do, is to receive an argument as an assault. And then now all we do is retreat and it becomes tribalism anyway. That's my assessment of the thing.
[01:15:58] Speaker B: Yeah, thanks.
I've noticed that I'm doing this, but you're being gentle and constructive in the way you're putting it. I want to say that Marxism is fundamentally anarchy.
So it doesn't have an idea even of a utopia. It doesn't have some sort of ideal state it would like to get to. It doesn't have something nice that it would like to do for certain groups of individuals. It wants revolution and violence in kind of the vague hope. We're told that this would lead to a more communist society.
So what I should pay a lot of respect to, though, is the fact that we can have an argument is probably what makes your interview so worthwhile and engaging for all of those folks in the wolf pack.
Right. It's because we are absolutely starved for this and we're looking for ways that we can, I don't know, kind of address our insight that we don't just need more talking for talk's sake, but we need, as you've been saying, conversation.
We need the kind of thing where you can say, I don't think so, or, I didn't think about that, and maybe we don't agree on that. Let's talk about that next time. You know, in part four of three.
[01:17:37] Speaker A: That'S an argument we're having.
[01:17:39] Speaker B: Yeah. So the thing of it here, though, is we are doing two things right now.
We are exercising our shared humanity.
We are language beings, and we are meant for this. And we are also exercising the divine gift of language, in particular, that God has given to us. This is that fittedness for the means of grace. Actually, though, we are also hardened sinners.
We get that. And now what we were saying, you know, this is why you want to listen to Pastor Wolfmiller, because talking about the formula of conquered and leave it to a Lutheran to say, the first thing to talk about is that we are all by nature sinful and unclean. We're fountainheads of corruption. That's from the formula.
And then talk about how Christ entered into our own species, though without any of that sin, in order to redeem us all.
And that's what I want to hear about. Well, of course you do. That's the gospel. And how about this for a thesis? No disputation, no gospel. It's going to get lost.
[01:18:56] Speaker A: Wow.
[01:18:57] Speaker B: Right?
So what's happening with the transgression against academic freedom is not just a failed attempt to beat up and destroy a professor, but it is an effort to quash. I think that's the right word here, to quash the means by which Lutherans stay Lutherans.
To quash the disputation, to quash the catechizing, to quash the discussion of the absolute, efficacious authority of every word of scripture applying to our lives.
[01:19:37] Speaker A: Right?
[01:19:38] Speaker B: That's what's in the balance.
[01:19:43] Speaker A: That's phenomenal.
It reminds me of this. This is my great comfort. When Solomon talks about wisdom, he says, rebuke a wise man and he will be wiser still.
That means that the wise man is not always right, otherwise, why would you rebuke him? But that wisdom is being able to hear a rebuke. And it should be that if we are truth seekers, which is what Jesus has put us into the office of seeking the truth, then we want to fight with people. We want people to argue against us, because if we're wrong, we want to be the first to know it. We're not trying to defend our rightness. We're trying to defend the truth. And we are called to be servants of the truth, so that we have to be right. Ready to hear that argument that we've been wrong. So I think that's really important. So, Dr. Schultz, everybody wants. Dr. Schultz wants you to argue with him, and me, too.
That's why we leave the comments on and we try to pay attention to this stuff, because, look, it's important.
[01:20:57] Speaker B: It's a gift to be able to do this. And as I said, I'm not making this up.
The gift of language is a direct gift from God, the divine gift of language.
And what we're doing is we're just acting like people who have been given much.
So there's a lot to be done and what an opportunity it is to share this with everybody.
[01:21:26] Speaker A: Well, this has been great. So thank you. Thank you so for writing the book, anatomy of an implosion. That's for everybody to pick up.
If you've ordered the book, I suppose you can vote twice on our poll if we keep going on this, but let us know what your questions are. In fact, that would probably be a good four of three, is to just take up the questions that have come up in the comments on these things. So if you have questions that are there, God be praised. That's really great.
Thank you again for leading us through this conversation as well.
You'll send me some links. I'll put in the bio there, including the link to the book, I think. I also have provided the formula of Concord as a free PDF download on the website. So if you are hopefully intrigued enough to go back to that fundamental text and look at it there, that would be great. Dr. Schultz, thanks so much for your time and for the congregation, for the conversation. A real conversation. God be praying.
[01:22:24] Speaker B: We can say congregation, too. Two or three gathered together around the word.
[01:22:28] Speaker A: Yeah.
[01:22:28] Speaker B: Thank you so much, brother.
I and of course, all of your listeners, I get to speak for them for a moment. Deeply appreciate the gift that you are to us all. Thanks.
[01:22:37] Speaker A: God be prayed. Bye.
