RPF0548-Christian_Economics-Interview_with_Gary

00:00:00.000 | Today on Radical Personal Finance, I have a real treat for you. That is, if you are

00:00:05.280 | the type of person who enjoys challenging, involved conversations about difficult social

00:00:13.680 | topics, economic topics, and theological topics. If that's you, you'll like today's show.

00:00:19.680 | Welcome to Radical Personal Finance, the show dedicated to providing you with the knowledge,

00:00:39.440 | skills, insight, and encouragement you need to live a rich and meaningful life now while

00:00:44.640 | building a plan for financial freedom in 10 years or less. My name is Joshua, and I am

00:00:49.040 | your host. I am your fellow financial freedom fighter. And today I am your interviewer as

00:00:54.960 | I welcome my interviewee, Dr. Gary North, to Radical Personal Finance.

00:01:08.000 | I have threatened many times on the show over the past weeks and months to start bringing

00:01:12.160 | back more interviews to the show. Once upon a time, I would do two interviews per week,

00:01:18.080 | and my intention is to bring you many more interviews. I have missed them, but I felt

00:01:21.760 | they were counterproductive for me given some of the things that I've had going on behind

00:01:25.120 | the scenes at Radical Personal Finance. But I intend to bring them back, and today we

00:01:28.160 | continue that process of bringing you more interviews on the show. And I'm excited to

00:01:32.800 | bring you this interview with Dr. Gary North. If you enjoy challenging discussions with

00:01:38.640 | complex topics, I think you'll really enjoy today's show. If you're looking for a simplistic

00:01:45.120 | discussion on just a couple of quick tips that you can do to make more money, skip this

00:01:49.520 | show. This one will not be for you. I will introduce Gary North in just a moment as I

00:01:54.400 | bring him on the show, but he is a force to be reckoned with, especially if you have any

00:01:58.640 | interest in the areas of Christian economics. Now, of course, there are many Christians

00:02:04.640 | who have no interest in economics, and there are many economists who have no interest in

00:02:09.200 | Christianity. So the audience for people who are interested in Christian economics is quite

00:02:14.960 | small, but I don't think it should be. I think it should be quite large. And if you have

00:02:19.760 | any interest in these particular types of discussions, I think you will enjoy this.

00:02:23.360 | Dr. Gary North is one of the more challenging teachers in this area. He is a force to be

00:02:28.080 | reckoned with. For the last 50 plus years of his career, he has been a prolific contributor

00:02:33.440 | in this particular area. In fact, I know of almost no one else who has done what he has

00:02:37.920 | done, which is to verse by verse systematically exegete the entirety of the Christian Bible

00:02:44.560 | with a specific focus on understanding what it has to say about money and economics.

00:02:50.800 | Trained as a historian, also a theologian, and also in the field of economics, I always find

00:02:58.240 | Dr. North's writing and his perspectives to be very, very challenging, and I've appreciated

00:03:03.200 | much of what he has written. I've intended to bring him on the show for a number of years,

00:03:07.520 | but it was only in 2017 when he finally published some of his capstone work. After

00:03:13.440 | years and dozens and dozens, tens of thousands of pages of writing specific biblical commentaries,

00:03:20.240 | he has been working through the process of publishing his capstone works, which are,

00:03:25.280 | in essence, a synthesis, an encapsulation of all of his 50 years of research in the area

00:03:31.840 | of Christian economics. He began in 2017 with the publication of Christian Economics,

00:03:37.760 | Student's Edition, and then he followed that up with Christian Economics, Teacher's Edition. I

00:03:41.840 | have read both of those books. This is the first two parts of a planned four-part series. He is

00:03:48.000 | working currently on Christian Economics, the Scholar's Edition, and that will be followed by

00:03:53.360 | the Christian Economics, Activist's Edition. So if you're interested in these particular areas,

00:03:58.080 | I think this will be an interview that will serve you extremely well. You'll find this interview

00:04:02.640 | very, very interesting and challenging. You will notice if you look at the timestamp on your

00:04:11.680 | podcast player that this is a long show. It wasn't necessarily intended to be as long as it is,

00:04:18.800 | but this interview was quite challenging and quite interesting. In essence, it's essentially

00:04:25.600 | two different parts. In the first part, I interviewed Dr. North and engaged with him

00:04:29.520 | on some of the topics that he has written on, but the interview became an ersatz debate, wherein

00:04:37.360 | he discovered some differences in my thinking. And as I engage with some of the things that he's

00:04:41.840 | written, we wound up having a somewhat complex and comprehensive theological debate. So I warn

00:04:47.760 | you now that this is not particularly specifically related to Christian Economics, but it is a very

00:04:55.440 | important part of life. And I am leaving it altogether because prior to the publication

00:05:00.160 | of this interview, I promised Dr. North I would release it as one unedited debate. Dr. North,

00:05:05.520 | of course, holds many controversial opinions, and so he's used to being taken out of context,

00:05:10.480 | misquoted, et cetera. And one of the commitments I made to him was simply that I would release this

00:05:15.520 | as an unedited podcast. So you will hear the entirety of our conversation, and I think it will

00:05:22.320 | challenge you. So without further ado, Dr. Gary North, welcome to Radical Personal Finance.

00:05:27.360 | Well, I'm glad to be here. I've looked forward to this conversation

00:05:32.560 | since we scheduled it because you have an extremely unique story which is of interest to me.

00:05:41.200 | And perhaps peculiarly so, I haven't told you prior to our recording this, I haven't told you

00:05:48.240 | anything about me, but in the introduction for one of your recent books, which will be the

00:05:55.600 | teacher's, it's the preface to the teacher's manual of your book on Christian Economics,

00:06:02.000 | which we'll be discussing in the context of today's interview, you write, "I have a target

00:06:06.640 | group in mind, Christians who read serious nonfiction books. Second, these people think

00:06:12.880 | that the Bible has answers for life's problems. Third, they are searching for explicitly Christian

00:06:18.560 | answers to economic issues. Fourth, they are concerned about the state of the economy.

00:06:24.080 | And fifth, they are willing to take action if they discover these answers. They are activists."

00:06:29.040 | So, in the next line you write, "Is this you?" So, if you're curious about who you're talking

00:06:34.080 | to, Dr. North, that is me to a T. So, in the context of that, we'll be doing this particular

00:06:39.760 | interview. That's fine.

00:06:41.840 | My audience, however, is a mixture. My audience is a mixture of Christians and non-Christians.

00:06:47.520 | I have many qualified professional financial advisors who listen to this show and many

00:06:52.720 | interested non-professionals. So, we'll be speaking and starting at a more basic level

00:06:57.840 | and then going into some specific questions that I have as a longtime reader of your work.

00:07:03.440 | I want to begin, though, with the background story to Christian economics and your series

00:07:09.440 | of books that you're publishing. How did you come to arrive and develop this project?

00:07:16.640 | Well, that began in the spring of 1960. And I was an undergraduate freshman student at

00:07:28.640 | the University of California, Riverside. I was taking an economics class and I had been

00:07:36.240 | reading materials in the Freeman Magazine, which was published by the Foundation for

00:07:43.040 | Economic Education in Irvington-on-Hudson, New York. I'd been reading that material for

00:07:48.240 | about two years. And I also read a tabloid, which was published in those days, every two

00:07:56.160 | weeks, called Christian Economics. And that tabloid was sent to almost every Protestant

00:08:04.080 | pastor in the United States. It was funded by a very rich man named J. Howard Pugh, who

00:08:10.800 | was the head of Sun Oil. And he had a lot of money. And so he published this tabloid

00:08:18.080 | that was sent to the pastors and I read it on a regular basis. And I found that most of the

00:08:25.680 | writers in Christian economics were also writing for the Freeman. Well, the Freeman was non-sectarian,

00:08:36.320 | certainly. And Christian economics was at least sectarian enough to be sent to something like

00:08:42.800 | 170,000 pastors. So I got a little bit confused because the men who were writing for the Freeman

00:08:51.280 | and for Christian economics tended to be, if not atheists, then agnostics. And their worldview

00:09:00.240 | did not, in any sense of the word, seem to be based on Christianity or the Bible.

00:09:05.600 | And that confused me at the time. So I decided that I would find out, if I could, what the

00:09:17.040 | relationship was between the Bible and the type of economic thought that was being published in

00:09:24.800 | the Freeman and in Christian economics. And that really began this project. It escalated over time,

00:09:33.840 | continued to escalate, and came to a head in 1976 when I began to devote 10 hours a week,

00:09:46.240 | 50 weeks a year, to a verse-by-verse exegesis of the Bible in those areas that had something to say

00:09:56.800 | about economic theory or practice. And my cutoff date was my birthday in 2012 when I would turn

00:10:07.280 | 70. And I finished the project approximately three weeks before I turned 70. So that may be

00:10:18.800 | an example of Parkinson's law, that is, work expands so as to fill the time allotted for its

00:10:27.200 | completion. But it was rather remarkable that the project, in fact, did take all of the last

00:10:36.240 | three weeks of that initial scheduling, which I'd done in 1976. I'm sorry, it was a little later. I

00:10:44.960 | think it was maybe 77, but it was a long period of time. >>SACHIT EGAN: And along the way,

00:10:53.040 | my understanding is you wrote, was it 31 volumes of commentary and perhaps six or seven

00:11:00.320 | supporting books that weren't specifically passage-by-passage commentary to arrive at

00:11:06.240 | the source material for your capstone projects? >>WARREN BUFFINGTON: Yes, it was 31 volumes. I've

00:11:12.320 | finally sat down and figured out the number of pages, and it was 8,500 pages typeset

00:11:25.600 | approximately. And to that, you would probably add another, I don't know, 1,500 pages, maybe

00:11:35.360 | something like that, of support volumes that came out of the writing project of the commentaries.

00:11:43.840 | >>SACHIT EGAN: This is, of course, in addition to the four articles that you write and publish to

00:11:50.240 | your blog every day. By the way, Dr. North, I've gone to various conferences with bloggers and

00:11:55.680 | writers, and there have been times when I've listened to writers struggling to come up with

00:12:01.440 | material. I've told them, "By the way, you ought to go and check out a writer that I read who

00:12:07.280 | writes not one every day, not one a week, but four new independent articles each day, six days per

00:12:13.920 | week for his website." And not a single one of them has believed me. >>WARREN BUFFINGTON: Well,

00:12:20.240 | yeah, I got into this habit, I guess, about 12 years ago. I'd always done a lot of writing,

00:12:26.800 | but I just got trapped in this thing, and so I just keep going on it. Now, compared to somebody

00:12:34.080 | who's a really thorough and productive writer, Jacob Neusner, I'm, of course, and we're all a

00:12:44.800 | bunch of pikers, because Neusner wrote a book every three weeks for 40 years. Every three weeks,

00:12:58.720 | a new book came out, original book that he had produced. So the total for Neusner was

00:13:05.200 | approximately 1,000 volumes by the time he died. Now, that's productivity, but I do crank out a

00:13:13.600 | good number of articles, and I have an advantage in that I have a lot of forums on my website,

00:13:19.600 | so when people ask a question on the forum that I can't answer in maybe a paragraph or so,

00:13:27.760 | then I will very often write an article that goes into detail to answer the particular question from

00:13:36.080 | the day before. And that's a very good source of inspiration for me to produce at least one or two

00:13:44.560 | articles a day, at least in those periods when people are asking a lot of questions.

00:13:50.000 | So I want to begin now to home in on the religious context of this work that you have done

00:13:58.240 | with some background questions before we get to the specific findings that you've developed from

00:14:04.800 | these decades of study. First, for your knowledge, how I arrived at your work was, I think,

00:14:11.120 | perhaps how others do as well. But my parents were not particularly involved in politics,

00:14:17.440 | nor were they particularly involved in economics. But when I was younger, being raised in a

00:14:28.800 | Protestant Christian household, I kind of naturally gravitated, as many Christians do,

00:14:33.520 | towards republicanism as an ideology. And I was always interested in money and finance,

00:14:39.360 | and so I pursued republicanism and economics in the fairly mainstream perspective.

00:14:46.640 | When I was 18 years old was when President George W. Bush chose to invade Iraq, and I was a

00:14:54.240 | drum-pounding supporter of that decision because of that background. But when I went to college,

00:15:01.440 | I studied under fairly mainstream professors, beginning with a degree in finance and accounting,

00:15:06.320 | and I had a pivotal moment when I was in my third year of college. I studied abroad

00:15:10.960 | in Central America, and my professors were Roman Catholic professors who were pretty hardcore

00:15:18.480 | liberation theologians. And our text for some of the discussion was the Book of Luke.

00:15:26.320 | And in the context of the Book of Luke, these Roman Catholic, although not all, some were

00:15:33.120 | Protestant and some were Roman Catholic, but these professors took Jesus' statements and

00:15:38.560 | teachings in the Book of Luke and started to expand them under the ideology of liberation

00:15:45.520 | theology, very, very hardcore leftist socialist liberation theology. This really bothered me

00:15:51.920 | because it confronted my own free market approach. But I was in Central America, and instead of

00:15:59.600 | cheering for ideology or cheering for events such as NAFTA, I'm here walking on farms in Central

00:16:06.720 | America seeing and being told about the damage that a free trade agreement such as NAFTA had

00:16:12.800 | wrought in that particular country. It was also a time, and it was one of the first times in my

00:16:17.680 | life, when my college professors were actually able to beat me down and dismantle my arguments

00:16:23.440 | to the point where I was left without an answer. After that time, I came back to the United States,

00:16:28.880 | and it was in that time that I became serious in my relationship with God. I became born again at

00:16:35.680 | about the age of 20, and I really started to go back to Scripture to try to understand if what I

00:16:41.680 | had been taught by these liberation theologians was true. After studying that for a while, at some

00:16:47.680 | point, I glommed on and became aware of your work, perhaps as a reference to Jim Wallace,

00:16:53.440 | but I started to look and compare. I've often used you as the antithesis of my liberation

00:17:01.760 | theology professors, and I've often looked at you and them as almost opposite sides, but yet both

00:17:10.000 | using the same text. I want to begin with the use of the biblical text within that context.

00:17:18.400 | Why do you think that it's appropriate to use the Bible to study a science like economics?

00:17:24.560 | For the same reason that I would say that you use the Bible for a study of political theory

00:17:32.800 | or ethics or basic philosophy, because you have to start somewhere. At some point,

00:17:41.040 | you have to say a certain set of presuppositions is true. No set of original presuppositions

00:17:49.200 | is ultimately self-supporting if there is not a higher power or greater source of knowledge

00:17:59.440 | available that informs the individual of the nature of cause and effect in history.

00:18:05.760 | So you have modern Darwinism, which begins with purposelessness, and of course ultimately begins

00:18:12.800 | with the Big Bang, for which there is no explanation as to what there was before the

00:18:17.920 | Big Bang or exactly what it is that the Big Bang is. But out of purposelessness, which was basic

00:18:24.640 | to Darwinianism, came ultimately life. Out of life came mankind, and only with mankind do you have

00:18:32.400 | purpose. That's not a strong position to use to construct a philosophy, which ultimately begins

00:18:41.280 | with meaninglessness and then goes back to the heat death of the universe when it's all over,

00:18:48.320 | which is ultimately meaningless. So I would say you have to start with something that is not

00:18:55.680 | inherently meaningless to begin to build any system of philosophy and especially any system

00:19:03.040 | of ethics. Where I differ primarily with free market economists, with a few exceptions,

00:19:12.160 | is that they assume that all economic theory is devoid of ethics or is in some way ethically

00:19:20.320 | neutral. That is the tremendous advantage liberation theologians have over conventional

00:19:26.720 | economists. And that is they appeal to ethics as the heart of their economic theory. And people

00:19:34.480 | want to hear about ethics. We teach our children that honesty is the best policy. You don't find

00:19:40.560 | a culture, or at least very few cultures, in which the children are taught that dishonesty is the

00:19:46.480 | best policy. And even in societies where that is taught, it's dishonesty against outsiders,

00:19:53.040 | but not dishonesty against those within the group. Ethics plays no real role in most approaches to

00:20:01.680 | economic theory. There were a few exceptions. Wilhelm Röpke was an exception, and I like

00:20:09.280 | Röpke's work. But generally, ethics plays no part in economic theory in the classroom,

00:20:16.800 | officially. Now, they sneak ethics through the back door, but officially,

00:20:20.480 | you have a supposedly systematic system of thought that is devoid of ethics. I was convinced very

00:20:30.400 | early that that could not be true because ethics infuses every area of social theory.

00:20:37.360 | So I think what I would tell you is you can start with Luke, which tends to be of the four

00:20:43.760 | gospels, the one that could most easily be interpreted from the point of view of poverty

00:20:50.640 | versus wealth. But there's a systematic effort on the part of liberation theologians to ignore Mark

00:20:57.680 | and to ignore certainly the writings of Paul and to ignore Matthew. So what I did was start with

00:21:03.920 | Genesis 1-1 and then spent almost 40 years getting to the book of Revelation. I wanted to do the

00:21:13.760 | homework first, and that had not been done before, and so that's what I did.

00:21:17.440 | >>SACHIT EGAN: The ethic that bothered me most—and by the way, Dr. North, could you give a concise

00:21:25.360 | summary of what liberation theology is? >>DR. NORTH: Well, liberation theology was a

00:21:29.920 | development primarily in Latin America in the 1960s and 1970s, mostly within the Roman Catholic

00:21:39.840 | Church. And that position was all over the spectrum, starting with a basic leftism that

00:21:50.080 | was in favor of the welfare state and stretching all the way to Marxist revolution, in which the

00:21:57.440 | particular theologian believed, as Marx believed, that you had to have some form of revolutionary

00:22:03.440 | violence in order to purge society. Most of them were somewhere in between those two positions.

00:22:10.960 | There were plenty of socialists. They believed in central planning. They believed in the idea

00:22:17.200 | that the government can help the poor and has a moral obligation to help the poor, and the way

00:22:22.560 | that you do that is by stealing from the rich. The basic theology is thou shalt not steal except

00:22:30.080 | by majority vote. You could call it a radical form of social gospel economics, which began

00:22:41.680 | in the United States in the 1880s. This was a somewhat more radical form of the social gospel,

00:22:49.360 | but the basic outlook is the same. That is, they believe in the healing power of coercion

00:22:55.280 | by the state, and that that is the way that you establish a viable economic order that is also

00:23:02.560 | a just economic order. Paul I will forever be indebted to those professors under whom I studied

00:23:10.080 | because they helped to disabuse me of the US-American imperialism that I had previously

00:23:19.440 | accepted without questioning just due to the virtue of being a part of mainstream Republican

00:23:25.520 | conservative circles in the United States. Ultimately, it was that question of coercion

00:23:30.960 | that I came down to and I realized it's not a matter of violence versus no violence. It's a

00:23:36.960 | matter of who gets to control the levers of violence. Even while I was in Central America,

00:23:43.520 | I realized that this is a fundamental, to use your word, ethic that to me seemed insuperable.

00:23:52.880 | It seemed very clear that I could read the book of Luke and see Jesus' heart for the poor and his

00:24:02.000 | strong warnings against the rich, but to then take and say the next step that now we're going

00:24:09.200 | to take up arms by the poor in order to take from the rich to me didn't seem true to the actual text.

00:24:18.000 | Speaking now of other religions, I've taken an interest to try to understand what other

00:24:26.800 | religious ideologies teach about economics. I've had a hard time finding representatives

00:24:33.520 | from other religions who have done similar work to you. Are you aware of anybody from

00:24:40.800 | non-Christian religions who has taken the central religious texts from their religious tradition

00:24:47.040 | and tried to bring it into a coherent model? Not that I have found, no. You would expect that

00:24:54.560 | some Jew would have done it. Actually, I expected that Israel Kirzner would have done it because

00:25:00.800 | he's an Orthodox Jew, and actually he's a rabbi and very well versed in Orthodox Judaism,

00:25:07.520 | and was one of the four men who received a PhD in economics under Ludwig von Mises.

00:25:13.440 | So I've often said, well, of all the men who've ever come down the pike, Kirzner is the one who

00:25:19.520 | is both a follower of Moses and Mises, but he kept the two positions sealed off from each other,

00:25:28.240 | using a pagan terminology, hermetically sealed off from each other, and never used his

00:25:35.920 | understanding of either the Torah or the Talmud to comment on economic theory as presented by

00:25:45.040 | Mises or anybody else. He was the obvious man of my generation who might have done a similar project,

00:25:53.920 | but he chose not to do that. Most Jews who write in the field of economics are not Orthodox.

00:26:01.920 | If anything, if they're practicing at all, they may go occasionally to a Reform Judaism

00:26:12.640 | temple, if they do it at all, but most of them are atheistic, and Mises is a good example,

00:26:19.280 | but Milton Friedman would be another example. And the texts of Judaism are simply ignored

00:26:27.520 | by these economists. However, that generally is also true of those who profess Christianity.

00:26:35.440 | I don't know anybody in the Mormon church that has done this. Mark Skousen is an excellent

00:26:43.840 | economist and is a Mormon, and will occasionally cite some aspect of Mormon practice as

00:26:53.360 | an example of how to handle property or how to handle charity, but he has not produced

00:27:03.120 | any kind of exegetical work that would apply the Book of Mormon or doctrine and covenants

00:27:10.800 | to the actual economic theories that he would preach in the classroom,

00:27:16.960 | and I don't know of anybody at Brigham Young University who has done that either.

00:27:21.040 | When you look at the world of Christian commentary, and I think it's probably any

00:27:30.640 | world, I recently have tried to find analogs to you and to your work from other religions. I've

00:27:39.360 | looked for, over the last couple years I've been studying the Quran, trying to understand it a

00:27:44.320 | little bit more because it's an area of significant weakness, and as Islam rises more and more to

00:27:50.880 | importance in public conversation, I've been trying to do my homework. I haven't been able

00:27:55.680 | to find an Islamic scholar who systematically works in the areas of Islamic finance yet,

00:28:00.640 | but in the world of Christian economic commentary, personal finance,

00:28:07.520 | economics, etc., it seems like you can find somebody professing an opinion on just about

00:28:19.440 | any extreme. So, for example, Jesus teaches that, it says in, was it Matthew 19, "Do not lay up for

00:28:26.800 | yourselves treasures on earth where moth and rust corrupt and where thieves break in and steal,

00:28:31.600 | but instead lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven where moth and rust do not corrupt and

00:28:34.800 | where thieves do not break in and steal, for where your treasure is, there your heart will be also."

00:28:39.120 | I have read books on that from people who take that verse very seriously to the explicit point

00:28:46.400 | of obedience of not laying up any significant savings, stores of money, etc., at all. On the

00:28:55.040 | other hand, there are entire, that's a very minority movement, but the people that I've

00:28:59.280 | encountered who write and who practice this type of approach are very sincere in their belief.

00:29:06.000 | On the other hand, there are wide swaths of Christianity all around the world which are

00:29:11.680 | major proponents of prosperity theology. Come and give to God, and after all it says in the Bible,

00:29:18.720 | "Try me in this and give to God and God will give to you and God will pour out the riches of heaven

00:29:22.720 | on you and bless you with great wealth." So my almost presuppositional question to you is this,

00:29:28.160 | how do you figure out what's right, especially if you're not willing to dedicate 50 years to

00:29:34.800 | a verse-by-verse exegesis of all of the passages of Scripture?

00:29:39.120 | Well, the safest bet, as I've told people, is get a verse that is bothering you, go online to my

00:29:50.320 | site at garynorth.com, click the section on Christian economics, go to the section on

00:29:56.640 | economic commentary on the Bible, and then choose the particular book of the Bible that has

00:30:04.080 | presented the problem to you and read what I've commented about it. The great advantage of writing

00:30:11.680 | a commentary is that the commentary does serve as a good source of immediate information to people

00:30:18.720 | who get stuck on a particular verse. Now, nobody ever sits down and reads a commentary cover to

00:30:25.600 | cover, especially when it's 31 volumes long, and also it doesn't have any covers. But what we do

00:30:32.400 | find is that when we get stuck with a passage that we can't explain, there are commentaries

00:30:39.440 | out there that may throw light on the passage, and that's where we ought to begin. Now, the issue

00:30:46.560 | of laying treasure up is a legitimate issue. If the treasure is productive capital that is

00:30:59.520 | improving the lives of individuals within the context of a free market economy,

00:31:05.680 | then the treasure which is laid up is a product of activities that have satisfied

00:31:15.280 | specific customers who come back and say again and again, "I'm going to deal with you again. I'm

00:31:21.360 | going to buy from you again. I trust the way you're doing business. Your price is right.

00:31:26.880 | The quality is good. You have a money-back guarantee," and so forth. Well, that was how

00:31:34.000 | Jeff Bezos got rich being the richest man in the world. He offered the best possible prices

00:31:42.640 | and the best delivery system in the history of retailing. He couldn't help but get rich.

00:31:51.440 | The profit system tells an entrepreneur what customers want, and when the customer begins

00:32:00.640 | throwing money at him, the customer is saying, "Do it again. Do it again. Harder, harder."

00:32:08.240 | The customer says, "I want to do business. I want better deals. I want better prices.

00:32:12.960 | I'll keep coming back to you if you provide the services that I'm after."

00:32:17.760 | On the other hand, when you suffer losses, the customer is saying, "No, you don't offer

00:32:23.040 | a good enough deal. I'm not going to be purchasing from you again. I don't like

00:32:29.440 | the arrangement that you're offering me. I've got better opportunities out there.

00:32:35.200 | I'm not going to be back." Well, that person gets poor. At least over time, he will get poor.

00:32:42.480 | That's the essence of the service motif. Jesus was clear that leadership within the church is to come

00:32:52.640 | from service. The service motif is basic to the Christian outlook. Well, the service motif is

00:32:59.440 | basic to the free market economy, too. Do you serve the wants, needs of paying customers?

00:33:08.480 | You have to be a faithful servant if you're going to be successful in a competitive market setting.

00:33:16.800 | So in terms of ethics, it's the same with respect to the general principles of success,

00:33:24.800 | both in the church and in the free market. Now, motivations can be radically different.

00:33:31.680 | And if somebody is out there saying, "My goal is to get rich, and I will provide these services

00:33:39.040 | in order to get rich," then he has been trapped by the service of what Jesus called mammon.

00:33:48.480 | He's serving himself. More for me in history. And that's what Jesus warned against.

00:33:55.120 | It's not that he said wealth is wrong, but he warned again and again against the motivation

00:34:02.080 | of the individual who seeks wealth in and of itself for its own sake. But that's not unique

00:34:09.200 | to Christianity. You find that in virtually every organized religion in the world. The ethical stand

00:34:17.680 | of virtually all religions is don't seek wealth and power for its own sake and for your own fame.

00:34:24.480 | But if wealth and power come because of faithful service, then wealth and power are legitimate.

00:34:32.400 | In your books, and here I'm referring to your Christian Economics Students Manual and the

00:34:43.120 | Teachers Manual, which are the two of the four that you've published, my understanding of your

00:34:50.080 | plan is that you started with a students manual, which is a simpler, concise presentation of your

00:34:56.480 | overall framework. And then you develop a teacher's manual, which has a little bit more

00:35:01.520 | background. You're working currently on a scholar's edition, which has more footnotes and more

00:35:07.520 | academic connection. And then you have planned an activist version as well.

00:35:12.240 | In the introduction for your book, you make it clear that you're writing to Christians,

00:35:15.760 | but in your actual text, you don't distinguish between Christians and non-Christians. Do you

00:35:23.920 | believe that somebody has to be a Christian in order to, for lack of better words, use the

00:35:33.440 | economic methods and principles of the Bible? Or do these rules or practices

00:35:40.640 | function the same for Christians and non-Christians?

00:35:44.160 | >>Well, let's go to the Ten Commandments. Let's go to this second set of five.

00:35:51.040 | The prohibition on murder applies across the board. The prohibition against adultery

00:36:00.640 | applies. The prohibition against theft applies. The prohibition against bearing false witness

00:36:06.800 | applies. Is there some good reason to believe that the prohibition on coveting another man's

00:36:14.400 | property or wife somehow does not apply? So from the perspective of the Bible,

00:36:25.600 | God said in Deuteronomy 4 that the world would look at the laws that he had given to Israel,

00:36:33.440 | and the world would say, "This nation has a wonderful set of laws, that there's no other

00:36:41.520 | nation with a set of laws like the Hebrew nation," and therefore that this would be,

00:36:48.160 | in effect, a tool of evangelism, which I think it is. So the law as given, at least with respect

00:36:56.400 | to economics and basic ethics in the Bible and in the Old Testament, certainly was expected by Moses

00:37:06.400 | and by the Hebrews to be applicable across the border. Now, not every law was. The laws regarding

00:37:15.120 | sacrifice were understood to be specific laws to the Hebrew nation, and certainly they did not go

00:37:23.040 | out and try to get people to adopt all the policies and practices of the priesthood as

00:37:32.000 | a way to transform the societies around them. But they did expect people to abide by what I call the

00:37:40.800 | cross-boundary laws, best seen certainly in the second set of five commandments, but I think also

00:37:48.240 | they would apply in the first set of the five commandments as well. But certainly with respect

00:37:54.480 | to economic policy and practice, we're talking about the second set of five as being laws that

00:38:02.400 | apply across borders and across cultures. >> So then in that answer, we come to the

00:38:10.880 | question of perhaps of, I guess, differentiation. It may have been one thing when Jews were

00:38:17.760 | ethnically separated by bloodline from Gentiles, but in our modern era, we have a question of those

00:38:26.880 | who walk by faith and those who don't, or some distinction, I use the terms Christians and

00:38:31.120 | non-Christians, believers, unbelievers, some form of that. How do you personally teach people to

00:38:40.640 | interact where, when the Bible talks about faith and the personal experience that somebody has

00:38:50.400 | when approaching a question like the deity of Jesus, for example, versus understanding

00:38:59.040 | these principles that you elucidate in your work? Is there any distinction between them, or do we

00:39:05.360 | just say, "Well, these workings of economic principle and perhaps law just apply universally,

00:39:11.600 | and it doesn't really matter whether you have faith or don't have faith"?

00:39:14.080 | >> Well, I've addressed that issue in a book that I wrote over 30 years ago called,

00:39:22.240 | a book on common grace, which you can download on my site, Dominion and Common Grace,

00:39:29.520 | and I talk about that. The problem you find is that at least through history,

00:39:36.000 | people will commit to fundamental ethical principles, but if they do not believe they'll

00:39:44.080 | be successful or their heirs will be successful in the future, or if they believe that they're

00:39:49.120 | going to be defeated in history, or if they believe that the basic cause and effect system

00:39:55.680 | which undergirds economic action, the profit and loss system, if people don't believe that

00:40:04.400 | there is something outside of themselves and outside of the state to enforce a system of

00:40:13.760 | causation, then at some point they will seek another god to be the incarnate deity, which

00:40:23.600 | they will then worship one way or another as an alternative to worshiping the God of the Bible.

00:40:30.720 | And in modern times, the great deity has been the state, and that certainly was the case in

00:40:38.400 | the time of the Roman Empire. It was far less so during the medieval period, which was inherently

00:40:45.200 | Christian. But with the rise of the Enlightenment and especially the rise of the French Revolution,

00:40:51.760 | there has been a deification of the state, and it is only really in the last 25 years or 30 years

00:41:01.040 | that we have finally seen the beginning of the breakdown of that religion, manifested obviously

00:41:08.640 | in the reforms of Deng Xiaoping in 1978 to free up agriculture in China, and then of course the

00:41:18.000 | classic example on December 25th, 1991, when Gorbachev went on national television and basically

00:41:25.760 | buried the Soviet Union. That was the end. Now, after that, it has become a lot more difficult

00:41:33.680 | for people to be taken seriously with some variety of the doctrine of salvation by state power.

00:41:42.720 | And so we're living in an era in which the alternative to the state as a way of establishing

00:41:50.320 | justice and defending ethics has been a kind of frantic scramble to see what the new deity is

00:41:59.280 | going to be. And there really is no agreement on that today as there would have been when you were

00:42:07.120 | studying under liberation theologians. But remember, even when you got down to Latin America,

00:42:13.760 | the Soviet Union was gone. And it was easy to say you didn't like the empire of the United States

00:42:21.520 | in 2003. That's pretty easy. What you did not find was liberation theologians in 1978 saying

00:42:30.480 | the Soviet Union is as evil an empire as the United States and a pox on both their houses.

00:42:38.240 | It was easy to do after 1991. >> There does seem to be,

00:42:44.640 | bringing it current, I have observed the trend that you're discussing in our modern society.

00:42:53.040 | It seems to me with 32 years of walking this earth worth of experience and perhaps 15 years of adult

00:43:01.840 | focus, it seems as though the stakes in our current world have about government action and

00:43:08.880 | the involvement of the state have gotten higher. I read and have referenced on this show RJ Rush

00:43:14.400 | Duny's book, The Messianic Character of American Education, where I think he lays out the case

00:43:20.240 | quite strongly that the educational system, the government school system has taken on the modern

00:43:28.400 | function of a priesthood and the delivering of sacraments and that salvation for a person,

00:43:34.240 | the getting rid of sin and the enhancement of virtue, one variation of the word salvation,

00:43:42.400 | it tries to accomplish it through education. That if we could just educate somebody well enough,

00:43:50.800 | if we could just educate all those poor rotten street urchins, then we could drive all their

00:43:55.360 | vices out of them and we could save them so that they would be good and upright people.

00:43:59.920 | It seems to me that my analysis of 2018 politics in the United States of America,

00:44:06.240 | that we have just an intensification of this trend over the last 50 years, where we've got to be the

00:44:12.400 | only tool left for secular post-Christian man is the government, that the state has to do it. The

00:44:18.960 | state has to be the one to come in and to cleanse the people from their sin, to lift up the people

00:44:24.480 | who are downtrodden and to perfect the society. I can see that. That's the trend that you're

00:44:30.960 | referring to in your commentary, right? >> Correct.

00:44:33.680 | >> Going back to the discussion of application, I'd like to go to one common scriptural passage

00:44:45.120 | and start in the Book of Malachi. I guess what I'm asking is here a hermeneutical question,

00:44:52.240 | a question of interpretation. There is a scripture that I find extremely challenging to know how to

00:44:59.600 | deal with rightly, because it seems to me to be a use of much abuse, a scripture that is,

00:45:07.040 | from my perspective, abused. I am very concerned in some of my travels and exposure to

00:45:17.040 | places outside of the Western world, especially parts of Africa and elsewhere, how the Bible

00:45:25.440 | seems to be used as a battering ram to make one person, the preacher, rich at the expense of the

00:45:34.400 | congregants. I think one of the most stark passages of this would come from Malachi 3.

00:45:40.480 | I want to read the verse in context. My question relates to how you approach a passage like this

00:45:48.160 | and understand who it is speaking to. Picking up in the middle of Malachi 3, verse 6,

00:45:54.320 | the prophet Malachi writes this, speaking in a prophetic voice for God himself. "For I,

00:46:01.840 | the Lord, do not change. Therefore you, O children of Jacob, are not consumed. From the days of your

00:46:08.960 | fathers you have turned aside from my statutes and have not kept them. Return to me, and I will

00:46:14.240 | return to you, says the Lord of hosts. But you say, 'How shall we return? Will man rob God?'

00:46:20.240 | Yet you are robbing me. But you say, 'How have we robbed you? In your tithes and contributions.'

00:46:26.480 | You are cursed with a curse, for you are robbing me, the whole nation of you. Bring the full tithe

00:46:32.960 | into the storehouse, that there may be food in my house, and thereby put me to the test,

00:46:37.600 | says the Lord of hosts. If I will not open the windows of heaven for you and pour down for you

00:46:43.440 | a blessing until there is no more need, I will rebuke the devourer for you, so that it will not

00:46:49.280 | destroy the fruits of your soil, and your vine in the field shall not fail to bear, says the Lord

00:46:54.720 | of hosts. Then all nations will call you blessed, for you will be a land of delight, says the Lord

00:46:59.920 | of hosts." So in this context, this particular passage, I see proclaimed by, I'm going to put

00:47:11.040 | my own ethical judgment, evil men who use this as a way of accreting to themselves great riches

00:47:18.640 | from the pockets of their congregants, which riches are used to furnish their own houses,

00:47:24.160 | to buy their own private planes on the backs of the poor. And yet, it's very hard for me to deny

00:47:30.800 | the straightforward message of this particular scripture. The preacher stands up and says,

00:47:36.320 | "Give to God, bring the full tithe into the storehouse, so that there may be food in my

00:47:40.960 | house, so give to the church." And it really bothers me, but yet, to know how to apply these,

00:47:46.800 | but it's basically a question of interpretation. So how do you approach a passage like this,

00:47:53.360 | which is addressed to the children of Jacob, and yet apply it in a modern context?

00:47:57.840 | Well, it's the same principle as I discussed before. It's a principle of servanship.

00:48:05.600 | That is, if you look at 1 Timothy 3, especially, chapter 3, you have outlined what criteria for

00:48:18.640 | being a pastor, and the criteria are the same for being a deacon who will control the money,

00:48:25.440 | and that is, they're supposed to have good reputations with respect to the government

00:48:32.560 | of their families, and to the fact that they are not after, in the words of the King James,

00:48:39.440 | "filthy lucre," or dirty money. The criteria are clear in terms of the New Testament,

00:48:48.800 | and I don't see that they would be any different in terms of the Old Testament as well,

00:48:53.600 | that the individual who is a good servant is not supposed to be impoverished. There is no

00:49:01.200 | teaching like that. But at the same time, there has to be a servant mentality in which

00:49:09.200 | the leaders are serving the people, whether they're political leaders,

00:49:13.440 | economic leaders, or ecclesiastical leaders.

00:49:17.200 | So another, so for clarification, what I'm hearing you say is you would have no fear of publicly

00:49:30.720 | preaching the message that Malachi here is proclaiming to any people, but you would balance

00:49:38.000 | that with the clear scriptural mandates for other expressions of virtue and integrity,

00:49:46.880 | and say that both of these things are true. So the point of, if one were to confront a pastor

00:49:53.600 | like I described, or preacher like I described, you would not confront him on the basis of his

00:49:59.840 | proclamation of this passage, but rather you would confront him on his seeming desire for

00:50:05.840 | filthy lucre. Is that an accurate summary of what you're saying?

00:50:09.360 | >>Kaufmann Yeah. His motivation is not service,

00:50:13.840 | which is reflected in the fact that he has accumulated wealth that has been provided by

00:50:21.280 | the poor, but then that applies to every king in history. That's not limited ecclesiastically.

00:50:28.800 | >>Ashkahn So, go ahead.

00:50:32.720 | >>Kaufmann I guess what I'm getting at is this. Would we say that a man who is

00:50:39.920 | accumulating wealth on the basis of service in the free market is doing the wrong thing? Well,

00:50:47.040 | the liberation theologians say yes he is, but the liberation theologians don't understand

00:50:52.560 | that he cannot be accumulating wealth in terms of a competitive market unless he's providing some

00:50:58.480 | kind of valuable service where people in the community voluntarily are coming back and saying,

00:51:04.640 | "Well, I think this is a good service." Similarly, people get reelected. Well,

00:51:09.600 | if they're reelected the way Ron Paul was reelected on the basis of shrinking the government

00:51:14.880 | and resisting the expansion of the state, I would say, "Well, that's certainly a positive thing."

00:51:20.000 | On the other hand, if they're reelected the way Lyndon Johnson was reelected as a means of

00:51:26.080 | extracting wealth from richer people, officially at least, and giving the money to the poor,

00:51:33.600 | then I would say that's a misuse of the office. But there's nothing illegitimate about the office.

00:51:38.560 | There's nothing illegitimate about the idea that people who run for office should be elected by

00:51:44.800 | the general public. The problem is that the public, unfortunately, wants to get its hands in

00:51:53.360 | the next door neighbor's wallet, but doesn't want to do it directly. So,

00:51:57.120 | these people vote for politicians who are going to give them what they want. And Johnson was an

00:52:03.440 | exceedingly wealthy man, and he didn't get it in the free market. He got it through

00:52:07.920 | political manipulation. His wife had the only licensed television station in Austin, Texas,

00:52:19.040 | for years. Well, that was no accident. So, we have a situation in which the principle of

00:52:26.240 | servanship can be used in order to accumulate wealth or power or influence or whatever else

00:52:36.960 | men pursue. And the old threesome has always been the same, money, sex, and power. And then for the

00:52:45.600 | people at the very top of the heap, we add fame. And people will do almost anything at the very top

00:52:54.080 | to gain some degree of fame. And that's been the king's weakness for as long as we have kingship.

00:53:02.320 | So, I guess what I'm saying is I don't see that there's any difference in principle between

00:53:14.240 | the person who accumulates great wealth in three different spheres. The question is,

00:53:20.800 | how did he do it? Does he lie? Does he cheat? Does he steal? Does he appeal to people's

00:53:28.240 | base instincts? That's certainly a way you can get rich, at least for a time.

00:53:33.200 | Or does he do something productive and yet cares only for himself, like the rich man who

00:53:41.120 | accumulated wealth in order to build barns so that he could store even more grain? Well,

00:53:47.680 | there's nothing wrong with large barns storing grain, but that man only thought of the immediate

00:53:54.960 | goal of building those barns. And Christ said, "You fool, you're going to give an account for

00:54:00.880 | yourself this evening." That's the great error of power seekers. That's the great error of

00:54:08.880 | wealth seekers. And that's the great error of people who use ecclesiastical influence to build

00:54:16.080 | up their own personal fiefdoms or personal kingdoms by means of a misuse of service.

00:54:23.600 | Coming back to Malachi chapter three, again, for a follow-up question. I use this passage because

00:54:33.920 | it's one of the only passages I'm aware of where there is such a strong statement by God where he

00:54:42.560 | says, "Put me to the test." And the passage says, "Bring the full tithe into the storehouse that

00:54:48.560 | there may be food in my house, and thereby put me to the test, says the Lord of hosts,

00:54:54.080 | if I will not open the windows of heaven for you and pour down for you a blessing until there is

00:54:58.640 | no more need." Does this... Go ahead. Well, that's just an extension of Deuteronomy 28,

00:55:07.760 | verses one through 14. The prophets always come to the people in the name of Moses, and thereby

00:55:16.880 | in the name of God who revealed himself to Moses. The message of the prophets over and over and over

00:55:22.640 | was simply, "You have violated my law. You knew the law. It's been in front of you from the

00:55:30.480 | beginning of the nation after the Exodus. You're violating the principles. So you're going to get

00:55:38.000 | the negative sanctions that were listed in Deuteronomy 15 through 68, and you're not going

00:55:45.360 | to get the positive sanctions of Deuteronomy 28, one through 14." But there's no deviation. And if

00:55:53.440 | you want to look at another passage, parallel passage, it's Leviticus 26. The prophets are not

00:56:00.320 | bringing a new message to Israel. The prophets always were bringing the original message that

00:56:08.640 | goes back to Moses immediately after the Exodus. So is this message in Malachi 3, Deuteronomy 28,

00:56:19.680 | and Leviticus 26, is this message to individuals, or is this message to a collective group?

00:56:28.800 | Well, because of the doctrine of the Trinity, we have to say that there is both one and many.

00:56:37.600 | God is both one and many. Therefore, the law applies both to the one and to the many.

00:56:45.120 | And to say that it applies only to one and not to the other is ultimately going to lead to some form

00:56:53.120 | of either Unitarianism or polytheism, and neither of those positions can be defended in terms of the

00:57:01.600 | New Testament. So that's a fundamental theological point that has to do with the original doctrine

00:57:09.600 | of God as taught in the New Testament, that there has to be both one and many. So the laws apply

00:57:18.080 | both to individuals and to collectives, and God holds both responsible. Societies are held

00:57:27.760 | responsible for deviant behavior. And you will find people who say, "Well, that can't be true."

00:57:35.360 | But then you look at Germany in the 1930s, and then you look at what happened to them in the 1940s,

00:57:42.240 | and most people in the West would say, "Yes, that's legitimate. That's what should have

00:57:47.920 | happened." You can't do what Germany did in the 1930s and not wind up with something like

00:57:55.040 | what happened to them in the mid-1940s. I think that's legitimate. People say there has to be

00:58:02.400 | some kind of relationship between ethical cause and economic collective effect,

00:58:09.920 | and that if you were caught in Germany under the rulership of a man like Hitler,

00:58:17.120 | then if you remained in Germany, you were very likely going to be on the receiving end of

00:58:23.680 | negative sanctions if he continued to follow the policies that he ultimately continued to follow.

00:58:30.000 | And I think the same thing is true of Stalin. The death rate that was suffered by the famines

00:58:39.920 | that Stalin engineered, the death rates were in the millions in the Soviet Union

00:58:50.560 | because of the horrendous policies of socialized agriculture and confiscation

00:58:57.840 | that Stalin mandated and that his henchmen like Khrushchev enforced.

00:59:04.160 | >>SAM: Beginning then with an individual, if I'm working giving financial counseling

00:59:14.800 | to an individual who is broke, poor, broke, I don't know that I've ever interacted with

00:59:22.080 | an individual except in another... I've never interacted with an individual in the United

00:59:27.200 | States that I think is ever truly broke or poor, at least using biblical standards that only has

00:59:33.840 | one cloak to cover them at night. But if I'm interacting with an individual, should I think

00:59:40.720 | this is that their poverty is a result of their personal nonconformity to or disobedience to

00:59:51.280 | God's laws, or should I think that they may be entirely innocent and their personal poverty

00:59:58.960 | is simply a reflection of other people or other factors?

01:00:03.120 | >>WILLIAMS Well, poverty in the modern world is virtually always the result of corrupt political

01:00:12.480 | systems. We've had the greatest amount of economic growth in history beginning around 1800,

01:00:20.240 | growth on a scale that could not have been conceived in 1800 and could barely be conceived

01:00:27.920 | in 1900, but that growth was not transferred to North Korea or Cuba, and it's certainly being

01:00:37.280 | withdrawn in Venezuela. And the policies of those countries have been the reason why individuals in

01:00:48.240 | those countries are really under the burden of extreme poverty. So if you're looking at an

01:00:56.720 | individual who is sober and has stayed with his wife and seems to be a pretty good leader within

01:01:03.200 | the community, participates in some kind of church activity, clothes his children, feeds his children,

01:01:12.320 | provides some kind of education for his children, and he is still poor, then my opinion is you start

01:01:19.040 | looking at the society around him, the presuppositions about the nature of economic

01:01:26.080 | cause and effect, and you look to see where envy is loose in the land, the desire to pull down the

01:01:34.160 | rich person just for the sake of pulling him down. Wherever you have political envy, you're going to

01:01:40.160 | have poverty. There's no way around that. That's the nature of economic cause and effect, and which

01:01:47.440 | is ultimately ethical cause and effect. So you have to look at the difference between what in

01:01:55.120 | the late 19th century and even earlier was called the distinction between the deserving poor and the

01:02:01.840 | undeserving poor. And the deserving poor were people who really were entitled from an ethical

01:02:08.400 | standpoint to be helped by others who had the means to do that, but the undeserving poor,

01:02:16.000 | the people whose lifestyle had brought them into poverty and who now want a handout, that was

01:02:23.360 | assumed to be wasted money unless you could bring that person to some kind of ethical transformation.

01:02:30.800 | Basically, it's the same as handing out money to a man on the street who is in poverty and is a

01:02:37.920 | known alcoholic. You know what he's going to do with the money, and it's not to help educate his

01:02:44.880 | children. - Yeah, that's my personal beef with the government's, to use the US American phrase,

01:02:54.800 | war on poverty, by which they mean taking money from some people and giving it to others.

01:03:00.560 | There's no mechanism for accountability. If I see the man in my neighborhood who is living on the

01:03:07.200 | street, I can go over and I can interact with him and I can find out what his circumstances are,

01:03:13.280 | and I can give him money to help him and seek to work with him. But then if I see him using that

01:03:20.160 | money in the wrong way and not making progress, not taking steps of action, then I can freely

01:03:25.200 | and easily cut him off and he can experience the just rewards for his poor decisions,

01:03:31.680 | rather than continuing to pour money in due to some policy of non-discrimination against poor

01:03:37.760 | people. It's really, I personally, from having done quite a bit of financial counseling, I really

01:03:44.880 | struggle with the destructiveness of government programs that transfer money from one person to

01:03:52.800 | another, because there is no ability for a bureaucrat to actually make judgments on the

01:04:00.800 | worthiness of a recipient. Only an individual can do that who's actually involved in taking the time,

01:04:06.160 | and only an individual who actually has the personal motivation to see their hard-earned

01:04:12.240 | dollars be used for good and to help somebody's life, only that individual will have the motivation

01:04:17.920 | to actually do the hard work of getting personally involved, at least as I see it.

01:04:21.680 | >>WARREN: Well, from a legal standpoint, the person working with a government welfare agency

01:04:29.440 | is not allowed to ask most questions associated with ethics. The rare exception would be the case

01:04:36.800 | of aid to a woman who has a man, not her husband, living with her. Of course, the problem with that

01:04:43.920 | is the guy doesn't live with her full time. He comes and goes. He is not a stable force in her

01:04:53.200 | life or the life of her children. So that law has backfired against the family structure

01:04:59.840 | in ghetto communities. There are no ethical criteria. There may be a technical criterion,

01:05:08.720 | that is, have you looked for a job over the last 30 days or however long it's been? Do you have

01:05:15.920 | evidence that you have looked for a job? But these people know how to work the system,

01:05:20.480 | and they never seem to get employed on a full-time basis. It's only when they decide

01:05:26.720 | they want to clean up their acts that there is any real hope for them. And that has to come

01:05:32.320 | from the individual. That's not going to work because some federal bureaucrat comes in and

01:05:41.360 | tells the person to shape up his life. Only if the bureaucrat is in a position to cut off the

01:05:47.680 | money is he going to get even token cooperation. >> So I want to finish this theme of questioning

01:05:56.160 | that I've been pursuing with an example from The Collective. In your judgment, in 2012,

01:06:05.440 | my wife and I visited Haiti as part of our honeymoon. And it was my first time visiting

01:06:10.880 | Haiti. I've known a lot of Haitians since I live in South Florida. But it was my first time visiting

01:06:14.720 | Haiti. I had previously spent time in Nicaragua, which is the second poorest country in the

01:06:19.680 | Western Hemisphere, but Haiti, of course, the poorest country. And it was one of the most

01:06:24.880 | sobering and humbling experiences to actually be there in Haiti. This was after the major earthquake.

01:06:34.720 | And so I was in downtown Port-au-Prince. And I was looking at the rubble of the governor's

01:06:45.840 | palace and mansion, et cetera. And it was the most emotionally draining place I have ever visited in

01:06:54.160 | my life. Because, of course, the majority of the country is dominated by squalor and tent cities

01:07:02.480 | and just ineffably awful human living conditions. And yet, those are the things that are easily seen

01:07:12.880 | in a video cast or pictures which tug at your heartstrings. But actually being there as a

01:07:19.680 | traveler, it was a draining place to be because practically, probably 80%, of course, but most

01:07:29.520 | of the people, with a few exceptions, most of the people with whom I interacted on a business level

01:07:35.200 | sought to cheat me and sought to take advantage of me and sought to...

01:07:39.680 | were not very good hosts. I have since warned many people, "Do everything you can not to visit

01:07:45.760 | Haiti." And of course, there were exceptions. There were several honest people along the way

01:07:50.960 | that helped us and served us, and we were very grateful for it. But I couldn't leave fast enough

01:07:56.800 | because of the difficulty of traveling there and my need to constantly be on guard. I was also,

01:08:04.960 | while there, deeply just impressed with a sense of darkness, just this deep spiritual darkness

01:08:12.720 | that was an impression, a feeling that was almost inescapable. Now, in modern society,

01:08:18.560 | I, of course, am guilty of racism for acknowledging these things of a primarily black country.

01:08:25.760 | But the reality was I have never known how to process that actual experience, the experience

01:08:32.560 | of being desperately filled with compassion and desperately wanting to help and to serve,

01:08:39.920 | but simultaneously being utterly offended and constantly on the defense because it seemed as

01:08:47.520 | though every single person was out to cheat me. And of course, that may be a little bit

01:08:52.720 | hyperbolic, but that was what it felt like. And of course, it's easy for me to feel guilty in the

01:08:59.360 | modern era to say, "No, they're poor people and they cheat because they're poor." And I've always

01:09:03.040 | wrestled with this question, "Did everybody try to cheat me because they were poor and desperate,

01:09:08.160 | or are they poor and desperate because they tried to cheat me? Is this a reflection of

01:09:12.560 | the broader culture?" So obviously, a difficult and pointed question. But when we consider

01:09:19.840 | a difficult case like Haiti, just a few hundred miles from me,

01:09:22.640 | how do we approach it from a biblical perspective, recognizing the darkness of the culture,

01:09:32.480 | but also recognizing our duty of compassion and care? How do we approach it? And who do we hold

01:09:38.640 | responsible for their decisions? >> Well, the first thing you do is you

01:09:43.600 | have half your vacation in the Dominican Republic. >> Which is exactly what we did.

01:09:48.000 | >> Yeah. >> We were only there for a small period of time.

01:09:50.720 | >> That's right. You see the difference. You can see the difference from the air.

01:09:55.760 | >> It's night and day. At the border, it's night and day.

01:09:58.800 | >> That's right. You don't have any better example of that in the Western Hemisphere.

01:10:04.240 | And I suspect you don't have any better example of that difference on Earth. You have two radically

01:10:13.440 | different societies. It has nothing to do with the fertility of the soil. It has nothing to do

01:10:18.480 | with differences in the weather. It has nothing to do with telecommunications, potentially.

01:10:27.200 | Same systems, technical systems are available to both societies, but they are radically different

01:10:35.120 | cultures. Now, the Dominican Republic is no paradise of wealth by any standard. But the

01:10:42.560 | contrast between the Dominican Republic and Haiti is such that if you wanted to make a video

01:10:51.360 | of the absolute bleakness of voodoo culture versus some degree of hope in Catholic culture,

01:11:02.800 | that's where you would make the video, on the two halves of that island.

01:11:09.920 | And this is not something new. This goes back certainly to the original revolution

01:11:17.520 | in Haiti that took place over 200 years ago. That problem has been endemic to Haiti

01:11:26.480 | for as long as it has existed as a separate society. So again, you have to look at the

01:11:35.760 | nature of the doctrine of cause and effect in the two countries, the two social orders.

01:11:41.440 | And they are very, very different social orders leading to different political orders,

01:11:47.280 | leading to radically different personal ethics, and then ultimately leading to radically different

01:11:54.320 | per capita income. Marc Thiessen So let me contrast that now with the United

01:12:00.560 | States of America, the per capita wealthiest country in the world, as my understanding at

01:12:06.000 | least. In the modern US-American context, it would be relatively easy to draw the idea that, well,

01:12:18.320 | we as US-Americans are just so great people. We're fantastic, and we're rich because we're good.

01:12:24.960 | And that is certainly a perspective that I understand because I absorb some of that,

01:12:30.720 | especially from republicanism and conservatism in the past when I was younger and perhaps a

01:12:35.840 | little bit less self-aware. But in our modern era, I desperately question that because by my analysis,

01:12:43.680 | the United States of America deserves very little except fire and brimstone from heaven,

01:12:50.880 | given our extremely deeply sinful culture. So do we take credit and say, "Well, we're rich because

01:13:01.360 | we're righteous in some way"? Do we look at, for example, I read a book on geography,

01:13:09.280 | the geography of the United States of America, people who try to explain the wealth of the

01:13:12.640 | United States based upon that, or do we look to ethics? And how do we know if we're looking at

01:13:17.600 | ethics too much or too little? You go to the borders, and you look across the northern border

01:13:28.080 | to Canada, and you can't tell the difference. You look at the southern border with Mexico,

01:13:33.600 | and you can't avoid the difference. It's not geography. The borders reflect two different

01:13:41.760 | cultures, two different approaches to the building of wealth and the inheritance of wealth

01:13:48.160 | over time. These are very, very different cultures on the southern border, and they are

01:13:55.840 | almost indistinguishable cultures at the northern border. People don't spend a lot of time

01:14:03.680 | discussing this and studying the difference, but certainly in North America, I think that's

01:14:10.080 | where I would begin any kind of analysis. What keeps Mexico poor? And at the same time,

01:14:17.920 | why in the last 40 years or 35 years has Mexico progressively gotten richer,

01:14:25.280 | whereas now it's not a third world country at all? Well, I think the answer that the free market

01:14:33.200 | economists have always said would be look at per capita capital investment. Look at the nature of

01:14:41.600 | the right of contract, for example. Mexico is much less tyrannical today than it was half a century

01:14:50.320 | ago, and certainly is much less tyrannical than it was prior to World War II. But we don't know

01:14:57.920 | much about Mexico. We don't study the matter. But here was a country that went through something

01:15:03.440 | like a socialist revolution before World War I. It was not the Soviet revolution that was the model,

01:15:11.360 | it was the Mexican revolution. And you had this enormous exodus out of Mexico. I don't know how,

01:15:19.040 | what the numbers are. I don't know if we can know, but it's certainly over a million people

01:15:23.280 | who got out and came here because they could cross the border in those days. It was legal.

01:15:28.320 | And they came here with nothing in their pockets and very little on their backs to escape the

01:15:34.720 | revolution in Mexico, which I think was a great idea. That's what I would have done too.

01:15:40.080 | So you have different social orders, different ethical standards, different legal orders.

01:15:47.840 | And when you find two societies across a border that reflect the different levels of productivity

01:15:59.280 | of the two social orders, then it's a good idea to start studying the differences between those

01:16:05.200 | social orders and legal orders as the source of the difference of wealth.

01:16:12.480 | Then how would you respond to the perhaps secular academic who would observe these facts? Mexico is

01:16:21.920 | deeply Catholic and has a strong history of Catholicism, including of course Roman Catholicism

01:16:28.720 | under perhaps just a broad tint of mere Christianity. But yet Canada is, I don't know if

01:16:35.680 | the adjective deeply is appropriate, but very secular and increasingly secular, much more

01:16:41.440 | secular than the United States. So the Catholic Mexico seems to be much poorer and perhaps

01:16:48.400 | through their society reflects these attributes that you're discussing. And yet the secular Canada

01:16:55.360 | seems to be much richer and to have a much higher standard of living, even though there is very

01:17:00.880 | little influence of the Christian religion. Does that defeat your case?

01:17:08.000 | No, you have different legal systems. And you have the fact that in Mexico, you have,

01:17:14.560 | or very close to it, a one party system. Only in recent years have you developed anything like a

01:17:21.600 | two party system and it's not very strong. You also have a legal order that is based on

01:17:27.840 | Spanish law, whereas in the United States and in Canada, you have a legal order that is based

01:17:35.440 | ultimately, bottom line, on a legal order in which the judiciary has an independent status.

01:17:45.200 | And so the legal orders of the two countries on the northern side of the Mexican border are very,

01:17:54.800 | very similar. The political orders, while different in terms of whether or not you have

01:18:00.640 | a parliamentary system or a congressional system, the legal orders are pretty much the same.

01:18:07.520 | There are strong two party systems. And to some extent, of course, in Canada,

01:18:13.200 | you may get a three party system operating because the country is a parliamentary system.

01:18:18.720 | But in both systems, across the northern borders, you have a legal order in which justice is assumed

01:18:28.640 | to be different from politics. And the justice is a product of a long tradition of the Western

01:18:37.440 | legal tradition, which is based on an independent judiciary that has the power to thwart the

01:18:45.600 | expansion of the politicians in the central government. And Britain has the same system.

01:18:52.320 | And you have it, obviously, in the ANZAC countries, New Zealand and Australia. You have

01:19:02.000 | English law, which is not centralized law, which is not politically based,

01:19:10.480 | but has an independent judiciary. Well, I think that's a basic biblical principle,

01:19:16.000 | is that you have to have the power of the courts deciding who is guilty and who is not.

01:19:22.400 | And until quite recently, you had the concept of the independent jury. And jury nullification

01:19:32.000 | was possible, certainly after the mid 17th century, to thwart the expansion of centralized power,

01:19:40.240 | first in Great Britain and then in North America. That's a powerful tradition to keep liberty.

01:19:47.600 | And the English speaking world has had that tremendous advantage that the rest of the world

01:19:53.840 | has not had. And it was in North America and in the British Isles that long term economic growth

01:20:02.880 | of 2% per annum first appeared. That had never happened in the world before. And over time,

01:20:10.960 | it has led to this tremendous disparity between the wealth of North America and the wealth of

01:20:16.480 | Great Britain compared to the second world and the third world. And neither of those worlds

01:20:24.240 | has an independent judiciary, minimal central government, and by comparison,

01:20:31.600 | relatively weak government compared to the Anglo American tradition and the Western legal tradition.

01:20:40.720 | Is it fair then to characterize some of what you're saying in this way?

01:20:48.720 | Although Mexico may have many people who, when asked on a survey, would say, "Yes, I'm Catholic,

01:20:56.960 | I'm Christian," and Canada would have very few, or fewer, many, many fewer, many more in Canada

01:21:04.960 | would say, "I'm atheist, agnostic, secular, non-believer, I'm a nun," are you characterizing

01:21:12.800 | that even though they would self-report their religious identity differently, that the Mexican

01:21:19.520 | culture society systems reflect a much weaker representation of the biblical ideal than the

01:21:31.440 | Canadian do, even though the Canadian culture society, et cetera, reflects the biblical ideal?

01:21:38.560 | Is that an accurate characterization of what you're saying, that the self-reporting

01:21:42.560 | is less important than the actual facts on the ground?

01:21:45.120 | >>WARREN: If you want to know the essence of what's going on in Mexico,

01:21:50.720 | look at the color of the people and look at the color of the rulers. That's as racist a society

01:21:57.840 | as you'll find anywhere in the Western hemisphere, with the possible exception of Haiti.

01:22:04.240 | They are a separate culture, separate worldview, separate educational system,

01:22:09.680 | and Mexico has always had that. Latin America always had it to some extent,

01:22:14.880 | but not to the degree that Mexico does. Everybody's white in the leadership in Mexico.

01:22:20.400 | Well, how is that possible in a democratic social order? The only time you have anybody who has dark

01:22:26.800 | skin is after a military coup, and you haven't had that in the post-World War II era. Something is

01:22:34.880 | fundamentally different about the Mexican political system, and you can see it if you look at the,

01:22:41.040 | literally, at the color of the leaders versus the color of the population.

01:22:48.000 | Now, with respect to how serious are Mexicans regarding their commitment to the Catholic

01:22:57.840 | Church, I'm not an expert in Mexican religion to tell you, but historically, the commitment

01:23:05.920 | of the leadership has been to a white European culture, not to a mixed or mestizo culture

01:23:13.760 | that is operating at the lower end, the vast majority, but still the lower end of the social

01:23:21.280 | order that exists in Mexico. There's something very peculiar going on there.

01:23:26.400 | Now, it's beginning to change. The free market is changing that. People can get

01:23:30.960 | good educations in Mexico today. There is greater freedom than there has been in the past.

01:23:38.800 | People who are at the lower end of the social order can use education and thrift and

01:23:45.360 | entrepreneurship to climb up the ladder of social influence and economic influence,

01:23:52.720 | and economic growth has been prominent in Mexico, certainly over the last 25 or 30 years.

01:24:00.480 | It's not a third world country. It's a second world country, and it's moving up pretty steadily.

01:24:08.240 | So the free market is having its effect. Technology is having its effect. Communications

01:24:14.240 | are having a tremendous liberating effect in Mexico, and the country is different today from

01:24:21.040 | what it was 50 years ago. But Mexico is behind, and I don't think it's primarily because of

01:24:28.800 | geography. I think it's because the social and political order has represented a more hierarchical

01:24:38.160 | system of ecclesiastical order than we have in a Protestant culture, and by the way,

01:24:44.320 | that we have in Catholic culture in the United States, which looks amazingly like

01:24:51.120 | Protestant culture, and especially that's true since the late 1960s.

01:24:56.240 | So then what defense... Let's assume... And what I'm driving at here, I guess, is the impact of...

01:25:08.080 | You've written for 50 years, perhaps 9,000 pages on what the Bible has to say about economics.

01:25:19.840 | So of course, you are arguing vigorously and consistently for accepting the biblical

01:25:28.160 | structure, the biblical version of events, the biblical structure for economic systems,

01:25:33.280 | both personal and societal. But I have, of course, many non-Christian friends, and I often

01:25:43.280 | look at the world through their eyes, and it's rather disheartening when you describe a deeply...

01:25:51.600 | Religion takes a bad rap, specifically Christian religion takes a bad rap when you describe a

01:26:01.440 | deeply Catholic culture as intensely racist, which aligns with some of my experience in

01:26:07.840 | Central America as well. I used to think I was rather naive when growing up. I used to think

01:26:14.160 | that racism was connected to the color of somebody's skin until I traveled in Central America,

01:26:20.080 | and without indicting the guilty, I would be in one Central American country and listen to the

01:26:26.000 | things that people warned me about the neighboring Central American country, both of whose occupants

01:26:31.760 | had brown skin and spoke very similar Spanish, and yet there was an intense opposition to them.

01:26:39.040 | Or similarly, I have worked with Black Haitians here in South Florida, and the level of racial

01:26:47.600 | animus between Black Haitians and African Americans, Black traditional African Americans,

01:26:56.560 | is not insubstantial. But back to the point, when I hear a Catholic culture, a predominantly

01:27:05.600 | Catholic Christian culture that is very racist, and yet a very secular culture that is less racist,

01:27:13.280 | and then it makes me say, "Well, what's the point of religion?" And, for example, our own

01:27:19.440 | Protestant heritage in the United States of America, we have so many sins in our past

01:27:27.280 | that it's not hard for me to understand the people who are vigorously anti-Christian.

01:27:37.120 | They have plenty of grist for their mill. So what do we do with that? Do we say, "Well,

01:27:43.600 | you don't have to actually believe these doctrines, just do these things"? Or how do we hold that when

01:27:49.360 | talking about these things in public? >> Well, give me an example.

01:27:54.720 | >> For my friend who says, "Well, I agree that justice is important, but I don't agree that the

01:28:08.480 | source of justice, of the ethic of justice," or let's go back to the ethic of coercion, right?

01:28:14.880 | There are many secular libertarians who practice the non-aggression principle, who defend and

01:28:21.760 | practice the non-aggression principle, and yet they don't draw... >> No, as a matter of fact,

01:28:26.160 | there aren't. >> Okay, how do you mean? >> Well, first of all, there are almost no libertarians.

01:28:32.800 | You're talking about... >> That is true. >> ...a couple of thousand people holding an oddball

01:28:37.520 | position. So who are these guys? Yeah, there are people who say they hold that position,

01:28:44.320 | but they are on the fringe of the culture. They've only been two representatives of the

01:28:49.760 | position of the 20th century and 21st, as Ron Paul and Howard Buffett, two congressmen

01:28:56.800 | at the time regarded as peculiar. So if you're talking... See, you run in strange circles,

01:29:06.320 | and the circles you run in are not representative of really much of anything.

01:29:13.520 | If you're talking about mainstream Democrats versus mainstream Republicans,

01:29:18.640 | then you're talking about people who have pretty much the same concept of justice. They believe in

01:29:27.440 | juries. Nobody's campaigning to say, "We gotta get rid of the jury system." You can't distinguish

01:29:34.320 | Democrats and Republicans on that issue. Nobody is saying that there has to be some means of

01:29:43.360 | centralizing power to such an extent that there has to be a vastly expanded, for example,

01:29:52.400 | federal department of education. It's still pretty much on the fringes. Most of the federal agencies

01:29:59.760 | are run by certainly full-time bureaucrats, but you don't have the degree of centralized

01:30:07.600 | political control that the Soviet Union had in 1970. There isn't anything like that. Americans

01:30:16.240 | would not affirm that. The two parties are pretty much the same on the issue of the deficits.

01:30:22.480 | The rhetoric may be different. They vote the same. So when somebody is running for office,

01:30:30.400 | do you ever find a guy saying, "I don't want the Christian vote. I'm going after the atheist vote."

01:30:36.720 | I've never heard that. If it's there, I've never heard a campaign based on that position.

01:30:43.040 | The number of people, or at least the percentage of people who claim that they

01:30:47.520 | are Christians is certainly in the range probably of 60 or 65 percent. People who attend church once

01:30:57.120 | a month maybe are probably in the range of 40 to 45 percent and so forth. The number of people who

01:31:04.880 | claim that they believe straight Darwinism is under 20 percent. Nobody else believes it.

01:31:10.480 | So what I want to see is in terms of the broad mass of American voters,

01:31:16.400 | where is this distinction that would say, "We don't believe in the 10 commandments. We believe

01:31:24.480 | in some other system," or "We don't believe in God. We don't believe that God intervenes in history.

01:31:30.560 | We don't want your prayers for my sick child who's dying of whatever."

01:31:35.680 | That kind of attitude has always been extremely limited in the United States and certainly

01:31:45.120 | limited in terms of Canadian practice. And I think it's generally not been true in Mexico either.

01:31:54.400 | I think you're running in a very narrow circle, interacting with a couple of dozen people

01:32:01.840 | who are not representative of American culture as a whole.

01:32:05.760 | >>AJ: I will concede your point. I find it very difficult in the modern era,

01:32:14.240 | especially for someone like me who spends much time alone in my office. I find it difficult to

01:32:21.120 | know how to avoid simply feeding my own confirmation bias with my own tiny, weird circles and how to

01:32:27.440 | get a grasp on what's happening broadly. And I'll grant this for you as anecdotal support for the

01:32:35.600 | statements you've made. I remember during the previous presidential election cycle, there was a

01:32:46.480 | political candidate named Austin Peterson who is an atheist or agnostic. I'm not sure how hardcore

01:32:52.720 | his secularism runs, but he was an atheist libertarian. And yet, he was trying to run for

01:32:59.920 | the libertarian ticket. He ultimately lost that attempt. But I have a much easier time with him.

01:33:08.960 | I would have an easier time voting for him because of his positions and supporting someone like him

01:33:14.480 | or preferring to live under the governance of someone like him because of his positions than I

01:33:19.520 | do some professing evangelical Christians who run under a statist platform. So I'll offer that as

01:33:27.440 | anecdotal evidence to the point that you were making. >>Corey: Well, your buddy is not going

01:33:34.560 | to get elected, so let's eliminate him. >>AJ: He's not. Never known him, just read about him.

01:33:39.920 | >>Corey: I'd like to ask one more theological question. I want to pivot to some practical

01:33:45.440 | things as we wrap up. So here's the last theological question. In all of your books,

01:33:50.880 | since I think as best I can discern from reading and skimming some of your work,

01:33:57.840 | since about the mid-'80s or late-'80s, you have seemingly structured your work in terms of a

01:34:07.440 | covenantal approach or the approach of the covenant. My understanding is that the framework

01:34:14.240 | that you use was first promoted by Ray Sutton, an associate of yours, during the 1980s,

01:34:20.720 | and you've adopted it and adapted all of your work to fit that particular framework. Could you

01:34:26.720 | first describe what that framework is before I ask a follow-up question to that, please?

01:34:32.480 | >>Jay: Well, in terms of social theory, there's a doctrine of sovereignty, and there's a doctrine

01:34:39.760 | of authority or representation. There's some system of ethics, in other words, a legal order.

01:34:46.400 | There's a system of cause and effect. And then finally, there's a doctrine of the future.

01:34:54.160 | And every social order has all five of these characteristics. You have to go looking for them

01:35:02.160 | in some cases, because they may not be openly stated. But sovereignty, authority, law, sanctions,

01:35:10.960 | and time are basic to understanding every political order, every economic system that you have

01:35:20.080 | anywhere in the world, because every system of thought has a doctrine of sovereignty, authority,

01:35:28.240 | that is representation, law, sanctions, and time. The version that

01:35:34.800 | Sutton was working with had been developed by a professor at Westminster Seminary in the 1960s

01:35:44.560 | by the name of Meredith Klein, and he got it from another professor in the 1950s who had worked on

01:35:51.760 | a similar study. His name was George Mendenhall. But the ancient treaties of the Middle East

01:36:01.920 | use this structure. And what I discovered and Sutton worked on and others of us worked on

01:36:08.720 | was that the Pentateuch is structured in terms of these five concepts, and certain books of the

01:36:15.840 | Bible use the five concepts, God, man, law, sanctions, and time. You can't escape the

01:36:24.480 | structure. Certainly, you can't escape it in terms of the Pentateuch, but I think it exists in

01:36:29.920 | the book of Exodus. I think it's basic to Leviticus. It's certainly true of

01:36:35.200 | Deuteronomy, and David Shilton worked on it with respect to the book of Revelation.

01:36:40.960 | So you can't escape this basic model. So what I have done is to take that basic model on this

01:36:47.280 | assumption. If you get these five points basically correct, you have a pretty good handle on whatever

01:36:52.800 | it is you're trying to discuss. You won't get everything done. You can't get everything done.

01:36:56.560 | But if you don't have any one of those five concepts, you're not going to have any way to

01:37:03.120 | analyze accurately a particular social order or economic order. And so in terms of economics,

01:37:11.120 | you've got to have some concept of ownership. That's fundamental. In other words, who owns the

01:37:18.400 | property? And then you have the question of service, which is the free market principle of

01:37:24.320 | serving the consumer. You've got to have some concept of law, which says your property is going

01:37:30.160 | to be defended by law. That's the eighth commandment. You've got to have some concept of

01:37:37.040 | judgment, which means you've got to have a legal order, which is not corrupt and which enforces

01:37:43.360 | predictably the legal order that has been established by law. And then you've got to

01:37:49.120 | have a system of succession. You've got to have probably, and certainly in our order,

01:37:55.920 | you've got to have elections in which there is peaceful transition, where there's not a

01:38:01.280 | revolution every time some major political figure dies. There has to be a system of orderly

01:38:08.640 | judicial transition to the next generation. These are basic concepts. You've got to have

01:38:15.360 | an inheritance. If you can't inherit what you've built up, if you can't leave that to your children,

01:38:22.080 | then what's the point of building up the inheritance? Why will people sacrifice for

01:38:27.040 | the future if that future is going to be called into question when they die and their children

01:38:34.160 | want to receive whatever it is the parents have built up and the state comes in and confiscates

01:38:40.160 | half the property, which is what is done, at least on paper, by the American political system,

01:38:47.280 | but which with non-profit foundations, the super-rich have always evaded the problem.

01:38:53.680 | So in your use of this covenant, I've, covenantal theology is not something that I,

01:39:05.280 | when after reading your use of this covenant, I went back and started trying to study in the

01:39:13.840 | scripture the various covenants to understand for myself from the text of scripture the

01:39:20.640 | implication of them. And your expression there is a little bit different than in tone, though not in

01:39:27.760 | substance, of kind of what I describe as covenantal theology. My question is this,

01:39:35.680 | do you think that somebody had, you defend a number of minority positions,

01:39:41.440 | minorities simply in terms of their broader acceptance in modern mainstream Protestant

01:39:47.920 | Christianity. You defend a number of minority positions, many of which are

01:39:54.320 | built around this, the tenets of this covenant or the tenets of covenantal theology. You apply

01:40:03.840 | this to many areas. In your opinion, is it a package deal to somebody who's studying your

01:40:11.440 | work and studying your particular understanding of scripture? Do they naturally have to lead to,

01:40:17.680 | if they naturally accept covenantal theology, will they naturally

01:40:22.480 | wind up in the various positions that you have taken, although they're a,

01:40:29.200 | currently a minority, or will they be able to, or can people pick and choose from some of the

01:40:36.240 | things that you publicly defend? Well, give me an example. Well, for example, covenantalism.

01:40:43.440 | So you defend the doctrine, you defend, with regard to Israel, you, I mean, grasping for the

01:40:53.120 | proper term, not, what's the term meaning that God finished with Israel and is no longer working

01:41:00.240 | with Israel? Well, that's the fundamentalist position. Okay. But there's a, at least among

01:41:07.200 | some fundamentalists, that there has been a transfer of what had been the bride of God in

01:41:16.400 | the Old Testament, which was the nation of Israel, that has been transferred to the institutional

01:41:22.160 | church. Is that what you're pushing at? Yes. So in much of modern, I'm grasping for the theological

01:41:29.760 | term, but it's probably more helpful for my listeners for me to describe the meaning. So

01:41:32.960 | in much of modern Protestant Christianity, especially more evangelical and fundamentalist

01:41:42.240 | sects, there is a promotion of the current nation state of Israel that as being God's chosen people,

01:41:51.520 | because of the ethnic bloodline coming down through Abraham. You reject that in your teaching.

01:41:57.360 | Rather, you say that God finished with Abraham and he judged Abraham in, or sorry, God finished

01:42:03.760 | with the Jews as an ethnic group, and that God finished with the Jews and he judged them in the

01:42:08.800 | year AD 70 with the destruction of Jerusalem. Now, I just recently finished reading the book,

01:42:18.320 | I was, I recently read a book that you wrote the editor's note to called Second Chance,

01:42:25.520 | which was an application of the covenantal system of theology to the question of marriage,

01:42:32.560 | divorce, and remarriage. And it's interesting because I follow often the logical continuation

01:42:42.720 | that you apply in applying this thinking, but I struggle with some of the particular applications.

01:42:47.840 | So in your writings on economics, I'm very much attracted to your writing on economics because

01:42:56.080 | a lot of it makes sense. I see the connection to scripture and it's a coherent, cohesive system.

01:43:00.640 | But yet I frankly have a difficult time with post-millennialism, although I am,

01:43:07.680 | well, I have a difficult time with post-millennialism. I have a difficult time

01:43:12.240 | with the idea of God divorcing Israel, and I study it and try to understand it and think about it,

01:43:18.720 | but I wonder, is this a package deal? Similarly, with- It's a package, it is a package deal.

01:43:23.120 | Okay. Do you care to expand on that at all from my own understanding?

01:43:27.760 | Because the covenant is a package deal. You don't take four points of the covenant,

01:43:36.480 | you take five points of the covenant there. Five points. God is sovereign. Man is created

01:43:42.720 | in order to serve God and to administer the creation. Law is given by God, and man is

01:43:53.600 | responsible to God for that law. The sanctions will be applied both in history and eternity.

01:44:01.200 | And there is over time a correlation between covenant keeping and prosperity,

01:44:10.320 | and there's also a correlation between covenant breaking and defeat. That goes back to Deuteronomy

01:44:18.320 | 28. Now, if that's not true, then covenant theology is wrong. All forms of covenant

01:44:24.240 | theology are wrong. But then try to build a civilization on this principle, honesty is not

01:44:30.320 | the best policy. What civilization is going to be built on that? Now, you've got to have a

01:44:37.520 | definition of honesty. You've got to have a system of cause and effect that brings that

01:44:43.760 | truth to fruition. And you'd better have examples of societies that have followed

01:44:49.440 | the legal order laid down in the Bible, the basic principles, and have established court systems

01:44:56.400 | that defend that legal order. And if you find time and again that that kind of correlation

01:45:04.800 | leads to defeat in history, then covenant theology is not true.

01:45:08.960 | >>SA: I appreciate the clear answer. I'll have to keep thinking and studying

01:45:15.040 | that question for myself to resolve it.

01:45:17.840 | >>CW: Well, I know what—let me tell you what your problem is. I can tell right now what the

01:45:22.480 | problem is, and you've cited the right book. You don't have a concept of biblical divorce.

01:45:28.240 | >>SA That is one fundamental, yes.

01:45:32.000 | >>CW Yeah, that's right. That you have to have a—the biblical concept of divorce

01:45:36.880 | in the Old Testament was divorce by execution. And so Rush Duny and Bonson and Sutton come to

01:45:46.800 | the conclusion that if you have certain kinds of practices that would have led to the execution

01:45:55.360 | of the guilty party under the Mosaic law, that should allow the breaking of the covenant of

01:46:05.680 | marriage because you have to have the principle of victim's rights. You have to defend the victim,

01:46:14.400 | not the perpetrator. And on that basis, you don't split the assets of the family 50/50.

01:46:23.840 | You take everything away from the victim—from the perpetrator. You transfer that to the victim.

01:46:29.760 | That should be the principle that you apply, not simply in the marriage covenant. That's

01:46:35.920 | the principle of the church covenant. That should be the principle of the civil covenant as well.

01:46:42.080 | That there have to be negative sanctions imposed and that a breaking of the covenant

01:46:47.520 | is the equivalent of covenantal death. I don't see any way to run a family without that. Now,

01:46:53.920 | I'm sure you can do it as we do in the modern world with easy divorce,

01:46:57.520 | no-fault divorce, but then it's breaking up the family structure.

01:47:01.920 | That's what happened. That's what happened to Israel. It was a covenantal divorce.

01:47:11.120 | That's what the difference is in terms of the covenant theology versus, say,

01:47:16.960 | premillennial dispensational theology. It's the issue of the covenantal divorce

01:47:24.320 | by God of Israel. Did that take place in AD 70 or didn't it? And the systems sort out

01:47:34.000 | on the basis of what was the divorce and what is the appropriate sanction for the divorce.

01:47:42.720 | Correct. So you struck to the heart of the matter, which I will affirm you are absolutely correct. I

01:47:50.640 | defend—I believe and defend, for lack of a better term, I guess the permanence view

01:47:56.480 | of not easy divorce but no divorce. And here's my kind of deeper structure, deeper problem.

01:48:05.200 | I affirm that there is great value in some of the

01:48:11.200 | insight that can be gained from seeing something like the five points of the covenant.

01:48:19.920 | I love to see a commentator write about the particulars, the background of a certain passage

01:48:29.920 | or a certain historical cultural thing. That's one of the reasons why I enjoy reading some of

01:48:35.520 | your commentary. Some of your appendices are books in and of themselves on topics that I find very

01:48:40.720 | fascinating but that would never have occurred to me. But it seems as though to defend covenantal

01:48:46.800 | theology, the simplicity, perhaps the more I think it would be accurate to say the fundamentalist

01:48:54.720 | approach to scripture is weakened. And I'm not defending a wooden literalism. I'm not trying to

01:49:02.960 | defend a wooden fundamentalist approach. But when I read a passage speaking about divorce and

01:49:09.200 | remarriage, when Jesus says, when asked about divorce in Matthew 19 or 5, when the Pharisees

01:49:17.120 | come to him and say, "For what reason can a man divorce his wife?" And Jesus responds and says,

01:49:21.680 | "Not read from the beginning. Man shall leave father and mother and be joined to his wife. And

01:49:27.360 | what God has joined together, let not man separate." He answers the question. And then

01:49:31.120 | the follow-up question goes on. And he says, "Why then did Moses permit a certificate of divorce?"

01:49:36.800 | And Jesus answers that and he says, "Because of the hardness of your hearts, Moses permitted

01:49:42.800 | divorce, but from the beginning it was not so." And there's this great impact of that from a

01:49:48.960 | theological perspective that you affirm and defend the various doctrines of theonomy and the binding

01:49:56.800 | applicability of God's law is revealed to Moses on many modern questions. And yet,

01:50:06.000 | the clear teaching of Jesus there is that he seems to refer to Moses as working in an unregenerate,

01:50:14.480 | unrepentant people. And so he's ushering in a new working and a new thing. And so I see the

01:50:22.880 | logical applicability. And in fact, I'm deeply attracted to some of the specific work that

01:50:33.280 | Sutton does in that book and that you do in some of your writings on victims' rights to defend the

01:50:38.800 | victim in the case of wrongdoing. And yet, I feel as though to affirm the theology or to affirm the

01:50:46.480 | aspects of covenantal theology would require me to deny the plain teaching of scripture and to

01:50:52.080 | have to tell somebody, "Well, in order to understand this, you can't take this in a simple

01:50:55.840 | way. You can't look at the New Testament and say, 'What did Jesus teach and let me apply it.' Rather,

01:51:01.040 | you have to have this deep understanding of 66 books of the Protestant Bible. You need to go

01:51:06.480 | back and understand the working of God's covenant in Deuteronomy. You need to go back and read Gary

01:51:10.800 | North and understand his appendices where he outlines this richness." And it puts me in a bind

01:51:16.160 | because I feel like the simple understanding is often lost by this application of covenantalism,

01:51:23.680 | which is not explicit but is drawn from the overall text. That's my personal problem that

01:51:32.640 | I don't know how to overcome. So don't be a wimp. Do you believe in the public execution of anybody

01:51:40.720 | who commits any crime listed as a capital crime in the Old Testament by which innocent parties

01:51:50.000 | gained divorce? I think so. But I'm not sure about the whole list. Could we restrict it to something?

01:51:58.160 | Rush Dooney lists it. So remember, it's on page 504 of the Institute. So the reason I think I

01:52:06.960 | remember that— I've been reading the Institute for the first time. I have not read all three

01:52:11.040 | of his books. You've got—well, you only have to read the first volume. And I think Bonson's—it

01:52:16.960 | occurred out it's the same page. I think it's 504 in Theonomy and Christian Ethics, depending on

01:52:22.080 | which typeset version you get. He's got the list. It's about 20 items. Okay, so you execute anybody

01:52:30.000 | who commits those items, male or female, certainly male. Well, then you don't have to have a divorce.

01:52:36.160 | The victimized party remarries. But Jesus didn't live in that society. Jesus lived in a Roman

01:52:42.880 | society. There wasn't any available divorce on that basis. So he was trying to deal,

01:52:49.440 | judicially speaking, with what constitutes a divorce if the person has not created

01:52:57.280 | a crisis situation for himself by violating one of the capital crimes, which would mean

01:53:04.640 | it's divorce by execution. That's what Rush Dooney talks about. Well, we don't live in that society

01:53:10.640 | now. Frankly, I think we're probably better if we did, but we don't. So then the question is,

01:53:16.080 | on what basis is there divorce? And the answer is covenantal death.

01:53:20.720 | That doesn't change Old Testament to New Testament. Now, what Jesus was talking about is that the

01:53:28.640 | Old Testament allowed them to divorce—a man could divorce his wife not for the violation of a

01:53:36.400 | capital crime, but because she displeased him. And that's what upset the disciples. And that is a

01:53:43.840 | major difference between Jesus' teaching on the family and Moses' teaching on the family.

01:53:50.800 | But he wasn't talking there about crimes that would have been divorced by execution. He was

01:53:57.520 | talking about what Moses did allow was that a wife had displeased her husband, and that was not even

01:54:06.000 | defined. And Jesus made a break with that, and the disciples said, "Wait a minute. How can you have

01:54:11.040 | any kind of justice in that system? Who would accept that?" Now, let's push it further. If that

01:54:22.880 | isn't true, tell me what the basis is. Tell me what the basis is biblically against polygamy.

01:54:31.280 | Because the only passage I can find in all the New Testament that challenges polygamy is

01:54:36.880 | indirect in that passage, in which women now are going to be protected against husbands who want

01:54:44.400 | to get rid of them. That's where you get protection for the wives. I don't know any other passage in

01:54:52.800 | Scripture in which there's anything like a statement where there is equality, and therefore,

01:54:59.120 | there is not to be a polygamous situation in which one wife is subservient to another wife.

01:55:04.640 | You had it in the Old Testament. You don't have it in the New Testament. This is the passage that

01:55:09.280 | I would go to to try to defend the Christian concept against bigamy, because you're going

01:55:15.600 | to be hard-pressed to find any other passage in the Scriptures in which you can find an attack

01:55:20.800 | on bigamy other than this passage in which male and female are brought to equivalence

01:55:27.920 | in the marriage bond. Paul

01:55:31.920 | I concede your point on polygamy. I generally try not to feed that particular argument,

01:55:40.640 | and very rarely do I come across somebody who's knowledgeable enough on the Bible

01:55:44.560 | to feed and say, "Well, Joshua, talk about polygamy." But it seems as though you're forced

01:55:51.600 | to one of two extremes, either to the extreme that you defend and are now defending,

01:55:59.040 | or to the extreme of, say, radical two-kingdomism or absolute all the way to where Jesus answers

01:56:10.640 | it and says, "But from the beginning, it was not so," and basically cut out, as much of

01:56:14.960 | Protestant Christianity does, cut out much of the Old Testament, specifically the law of Moses,

01:56:22.400 | and kind of cut it out and ignore it as only applying to Jews. It seems like both of those

01:56:29.120 | extreme positions solve that problem, but I don't love either of them, and I struggle.

01:56:37.280 | Well, all right. Okay. Who's your third party, third movement, third position, middle way? Who's

01:56:46.320 | the theological, philosophical, cultural, historical defender of a middle way?

01:56:53.120 | I can't say.

01:56:54.720 | Who are you going to go to? Yeah, because he doesn't exist. And that's the problem. That's

01:57:00.800 | been the problem in Christianity for a long time, certainly in Protestant Christianity. There's no

01:57:06.640 | middle position. So what happens is they just baptize the popular fad of 10 years ago.

01:57:12.320 | Right. Which is-

01:57:14.240 | Whatever that was, they buy into. Meanwhile, the humanist world has gone on to the next fad.

01:57:19.600 | Right. And I think you see the destruction in 2018 of many Christian churches, say,

01:57:24.400 | most public Christian churches in the United States of America embracing, just embracing,

01:57:29.520 | to use your terminology, baptized humanism, but 10 years later. And you see the destruction,

01:57:35.200 | I see the destruction today in our modern culture.

01:57:37.840 | Yeah, I think it's difficult to find the middle path because there aren't any leaders who've been

01:57:47.120 | on it and who've offered a philosophical defense of it. They're always quoting some humanist fad

01:57:53.840 | or some humanist philosopher and giving a little baptized language to it, but there's nothing

01:58:00.080 | consistent about the position. And that's why I've been doing the work in economics to provide

01:58:06.160 | an example. That's what Rush Duny did with at least that first volume of Institutes of Biblical

01:58:13.440 | Law. Do you realize that was the only book on that position for exactly 300 years?

01:58:18.080 | No.

01:58:19.600 | Only one. Yeah, it goes back to the late 17th century with Richard Baxter, who wrote

01:58:29.280 | in 1673 this huge book on social philosophy. It was the last time it was attempted on that scale.

01:58:38.560 | And for 300 years, the Protestant church simply stopped talking about it. Rush Duny shows up 300

01:58:45.920 | years later as a kind of extension of Baxter, and he said, "Let's look at the text of scripture to

01:58:55.520 | try to find out what God has to say in these areas of civil government, personal government,

01:59:01.120 | church government, family government," which is what Baxter did in his book,

01:59:06.800 | A Christian Directory. But nobody had read that for almost literally 300 years. It had

01:59:13.600 | been a completely forgotten book. So we have this problem of making up for lost time,

01:59:22.960 | and it's not easy to make up for 300 years of being in the shadows, not having anything

01:59:30.400 | particularly Christian to say, and simply adopting whatever the predominant humanist view is

01:59:37.600 | that prevails around us. And that began certainly no later than about 1700 with the rise of

01:59:46.160 | Newtonianism and the rise of what I would call a more consistent kind of Enlightenment humanism.

01:59:53.360 | And some Christians went to the left-wing side, the French Revolutionary side. Some Christians,

01:59:58.720 | most Protestants, went to the right-wing side, Adam Smith, for example. They prefer the free

02:00:06.000 | market social order of Smith to the French Revolution or to some version of communist

02:00:14.240 | tyranny, top-down tyranny. But the point is they chose those positions based on personal preference,

02:00:23.840 | not based on biblical exegesis.

02:00:26.560 | When I was younger, I did not realize this doctrinal problem that I have. It was not

02:00:33.920 | until I began speaking in public here on Radical Personal Finance where I faced the inconsistencies

02:00:40.960 | in my own thinking. And the reason was when not speaking in public, and I don't label Radical

02:00:47.280 | Personal Finance as a... It's not called Christian Personal Finance for a reason. It's called

02:00:52.320 | Radical Personal Finance. So I don't label nor do I have any desire to work just in the context of,

02:00:58.960 | "Oh, this is Christian stuff and just for Christians." But on the flip side, I also don't

02:01:03.920 | retreat from Christian positions. I see no reason why in the public marketplace of ideas why I

02:01:12.720 | should be the only diverse opinion that is beaten to the back and not permitted to compete in the

02:01:19.040 | marketplace of ideas. And so I pull no punches about defending Christian ideology in public.

02:01:28.160 | I see no reason why it should be, at the very least, at the most perhaps reserved position,

02:01:34.960 | I see no reason why it should not be given at least the same consideration as any other

02:01:41.680 | philosophy or background in the public marketplace of ideas. And so I don't

02:01:45.440 | label what I do as speaking to Christians, etc. But what that exposed for me was a new thing that

02:01:51.840 | prior to my beginning Radical Personal Finance, I was always clear on who I was talking to.

02:02:00.320 | If I was speaking in a meeting of a church, it was clear that I was speaking to people who were

02:02:05.280 | disciples, professing disciples of Jesus. And so I could speak in a particularly Christian context.

02:02:11.280 | If I was speaking in a public meeting or speaking in a public scenario, then it would be relatively

02:02:16.640 | easy to stay focused on the topic at hand and to avoid the necessary intersections of Christianity

02:02:24.000 | and secular humanism that governs our culture. But when speaking on my podcast, I have a mixed

02:02:29.440 | audience. And for the first time, I never knew who I was speaking to. And that was where I started

02:02:35.600 | to learn this deep conflict of, "Wait a second, are there different rules? Are there different

02:02:42.480 | rules for Christians and non-Christians?" which is why I have asked these questions of you.

02:02:46.880 | So I want to just clarify and let you answer, and then I'll go back to a couple quick things,

02:02:49.680 | and then we'll wrap up today. I want to go back and respond to your question on divorce. Here's my

02:02:54.080 | concern. I guess it's a subset of the, "What about the naked savage on the island who never

02:03:02.720 | has heard about Jesus" argument in Christian apologetics. But let's say that I only had

02:03:07.760 | the book of Mark to teach me about who Jesus was and the teachings of Jesus. Let's say that

02:03:13.760 | I were an early believer and I only had the book of Mark. In the book of Mark, chapter 10,

02:03:18.800 | in Jesus' teachings on divorce, marriage, there is... I'll just read it because I have it,

02:03:26.480 | and it'll be more succinct than me trying to talk about it. "And again, as was his custom,

02:03:32.560 | Jesus taught them. And Pharisees came up, and in order to test him, asked, 'Is it lawful for a man

02:03:37.680 | to divorce his wife?' He answered them, 'What did Moses command you?' They said, 'Moses allowed a

02:03:43.360 | man to write a certificate of divorce and to send her away.' And Jesus said to them, 'Because of

02:03:48.720 | your hardness of heart, he wrote you this commandment. But from the beginning of creation,

02:03:53.200 | God made them male and female. Therefore a man shall leave his father and mother and hold fast

02:03:57.280 | to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh. So they are no longer two, but one flesh. What

02:04:01.520 | therefore God has joined together, let not man separate.' And in the house, the disciples asked

02:04:05.760 | him again about this matter. And he said to them, 'Whoever divorces his wife and marries another

02:04:10.480 | commits adultery against her. And if she divorces her husband and marries another, she commits

02:04:14.480 | adultery.'" And it goes on and talks about the little children. And it's in looking at these

02:04:19.440 | letters where I recognize that if somebody only had... The question is, if somebody only had the

02:04:23.520 | book of Mark, would they have an accurate understanding of the teachings of Jesus?

02:04:29.280 | Or do they also have to go back and also have Matthew 19? Do they also have to then go back

02:04:34.640 | to Deuteronomy and understand what... Was it Jeremiah who rebuked... No, it was Ezra, I think,

02:04:40.720 | who rebuked the Israelites who had married foreign wives. Do they also have to go back to do all of

02:04:46.400 | this? And if they also have to go back and put this together as you have done, Dr. North, then

02:04:52.720 | it seems as though the simplicity of understanding Christian doctrine is diminished. So that's my

02:05:01.440 | specific question. What would somebody do if they only had the book of Mark?

02:05:05.360 | All right, go to Matthew 5, 17 through 19, and read it. You got your Bible in front of you,

02:05:11.840 | just go read it. Read it to the audience. So Matthew chapter 5...

02:05:20.240 | 17 to 19. Correct. So Jesus is speaking and he says this, "Do not think that I have come to

02:05:27.040 | abolish the law or the prophets. I have not come to abolish them, but to fulfill them. For truly,

02:05:32.400 | I say to you, until heaven and earth pass away, not an iota, not a dot will pass from the law

02:05:37.440 | until all is accomplished. Therefore, whoever relaxes one of the least of these commandments

02:05:42.160 | and teaches others to do the same will be called least in the kingdom of heaven. But whoever does

02:05:46.560 | them and teaches them will be called great in the kingdom of heaven. For I tell you, unless your

02:05:50.800 | righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees, you will never enter the kingdom of

02:05:55.120 | heaven." So you better have more than the book of Mark. And that's why we do have more than the

02:06:02.000 | book of Mark. That's why we have 66 books. And we have to be willing to study all 66 books to see

02:06:10.640 | in a particular topic, if there is anything specifically presented in any of those books

02:06:17.200 | that applies to the topic at hand. And the early church was not in a position to do that,

02:06:24.000 | but the church certainly has been in a position to do it for the last 1700 years,

02:06:29.440 | and generally the church prefers not to do it.

02:06:31.840 | So on that basis, and I know, I think, I guess this is an important point, because obviously

02:06:38.080 | it's fundamental in my thinking. In that same chapter of Matthew, and this was my beef with

02:06:42.400 | Sutton's book, again, his book Second Chance, was on that same chapter of Matthew, if we drop down

02:06:49.040 | to verse 31, which is one of the two references in Matthew where Jesus is teaching on divorce and

02:06:54.960 | remarriage. And Jesus says this, "It was also said, 'Whoever divorces his wife, let him give

02:07:00.800 | her a certificate of divorce.' But I say to you that everyone who divorces his wife, except on

02:07:06.400 | the ground of sexual immorality, makes her commit adultery. And whoever marries a divorced woman

02:07:11.600 | commits adultery." So in this context then, and this was, again, I guess I'm driving at it, which

02:07:17.840 | you wrote the editor's introduction to it, but this was my issue with Sutton's book, is if we

02:07:23.600 | assume this, and if I adopt the idea that you teach, that the law of Moses is binding on all

02:07:33.840 | people unless it is superseded or abrogated by a specific statement of Jesus. Is that a fair

02:07:40.160 | summary of what you would say about the law of Moses in your teaching on theonomy, Dr. North?

02:07:43.440 | I would say the major obvious break in the whole pattern of theonomic application is what you've

02:07:51.120 | just read. Jesus made a fundamental break with Moses's easy divorce position. That's why the

02:07:58.000 | disciples were so upset about it. That's clearly a point at which there has been a fundamental

02:08:08.160 | difference between Mosaic law and the New Testament concept of ethical and judicially

02:08:16.080 | valid marriage. But Sutton didn't restrict—we're getting so off of personal finance—Sutton didn't

02:08:22.320 | restrict— Look, you've got a problem, and you're inflicting on your listeners your personal

02:08:28.320 | problem. Now, we can go do this, and there are probably eight guys left out there who are

02:08:33.680 | listening. We can pursue it, but you have a personal problem with this particular passage.

02:08:40.080 | And the problem is this. You believe in victim subordination and perpetrator's rights.

02:08:47.440 | You believe that because that's the only way that you can maintain a zero-divorce position

02:08:54.560 | is to say that the victims must suck it up and the perpetrators are to win.

02:09:00.320 | There's no neutrality. There's either a victim who deserves protection,

02:09:05.680 | or there's a victim who must suck it up for the rest of his or her life.

02:09:10.160 | And my position is the victim has the rights and the perpetrator has none,

02:09:16.080 | and covenantal divorce is the theological basis of protecting the victim,

02:09:21.440 | because there's only one other alternative, and that's you protect the perpetrator.

02:09:25.200 | For the sake of the audience and personal finance, I'll go back to personal finance,

02:09:33.440 | and I'll concede that I do have my own personal understanding that I wrestle with on this.

02:09:39.920 | So let's go back to personal finance with three rapid-fire questions as we start.

02:09:45.680 | Don't give me three rapid-fire questions. Let's stick to this. Who gets the money?

02:09:50.800 | So the problem is—here would be my response then.

02:09:56.320 | I don't want to affirm perpetrator's rights, and I don't want to affirm the loss of—I

02:10:06.960 | don't want to affirm perpetrator's rights as contrasted against victim's rights. I want to

02:10:13.360 | defend consistently the victim. However, I also want to compare that with the clear teaching of

02:10:20.400 | the New Testament, specifically in the teaching of Jesus, of him not taking up his rights,

02:10:26.560 | specifically in the teachings of Paul and the victimization that he suffered, specifically

02:10:33.760 | in the instructions of Paul to slaves who were unjustly treated, etc., and specifically even

02:10:41.680 | in the context of paying taxes to an immoral government, simple things like that. There are

02:10:48.720 | so many instructions in the New Testament to disciples of Jesus not to stand up for their

02:10:56.800 | own rights that I don't want to affirm the perpetrator's rights as contrasted to the victim.

02:11:09.600 | But I do want to affirm that God has grace for the victim in a place of victimization,

02:11:16.240 | and that when a victim abandons—or when a victim, for lack of a better metaphor,

02:11:22.560 | takes up the sword, what happens is instead of it being a shame against the perpetrator,

02:11:27.680 | with the opportunity for the perpetrator to repent and to come back and for the perpetrator

02:11:36.080 | to repent, then it puts the victim in the place of the judge, and then the perpetrator has no

02:11:41.360 | incentive to come back. So I don't know how to apply it on a complete society-wide basis.

02:11:50.880 | But what happens is it seems as though you lose if we don't allow for the victim to know God's

02:12:02.640 | grace in the midst of suffering and for that expression of righteousness to be a deep and

02:12:12.000 | constant shame against a perpetrator, then...I'll give you an example. I know many people who are,

02:12:20.400 | from my own personal interaction and personal church and church experience, I know a number

02:12:26.080 | of people who were the victims in a marriage relationship. Specifically, let's talk about

02:12:31.360 | a very vulnerable person, a vulnerable woman who is the victim of her husband's immorality and

02:12:36.320 | adultery on her. However, even through the victimhood, even through her victimization,

02:12:44.240 | by the sin of her adulterous husband, she has consistently known, per personal testimony if

02:12:52.720 | she were here, she would give a testimony of the grace of God to be her husband through the entire

02:12:58.080 | process and to give her the grace of forgiveness of him. And that man, though he goes on sinning

02:13:04.320 | many decades later, that man will never be able to stand before God and say, "I don't know my sin,"

02:13:12.240 | because his wife wears her wedding ring and her righteousness is an affront to his sin.

02:13:18.320 | So that to me is a big part of the tone and tenor of so many passages of the New Testament is,

02:13:25.840 | "Why not better be wronged?" As Paul talks about in talking about Christians suing one another.

02:13:30.240 | He says, "Why would you not rather better be wronged?" And so for Christians, I can clearly

02:13:36.240 | and confidently proclaim that. The problem comes down to this question of the social order, which

02:13:41.680 | is, of course, what you're tackling in your work. It comes down to the question of, "Well, what

02:13:45.680 | about a social order that includes believers and non-believers, to use your terminology, covenant

02:13:53.200 | keepers and non-covenant keepers? What about a social order that includes these things? How do

02:13:57.600 | we deal justly with those?" Which is why you get this bifurcation between two kingdoms theology,

02:14:02.720 | kind of a radical pietism, a radical two kingdoms theology versus as contrasted, so that there

02:14:09.280 | becomes a separation. And I can see that there are difficult passages. Your writing is strong on that.

02:14:15.440 | But that's my concern is I don't want to affirm perpetrators' rights, but I also see even in the

02:14:21.360 | actual example of Jesus and his atonement on the cross, him laying down his rights and his judicial

02:14:28.800 | place of superiority for the sake of something greater. That would be my response to your question.

02:14:38.160 | Well, the sons of the woman you describe are being sent a message.

02:14:47.520 | And they're being sent a message because most sons imitate their fathers, not their

02:14:51.920 | mothers. And the message is I can get away with murder and nothing's going to happen to me.

02:14:56.160 | In Britain in the 19th century, if there was a divorce, the husband automatically got the children.

02:15:03.840 | And the husband was probably an adulterer. And the reason was very clear. Women would not leave

02:15:11.760 | their kids if they were going to lose the kids, so they put up with the husband. And also went the

02:15:18.400 | other way, so the husbands really didn't want to have all the responsibility of the kids if the

02:15:23.360 | wife left. And so on a very practical basis, British government for hundreds of years

02:15:31.760 | kept the families together based on the principle of perpetrators' rights.

02:15:38.720 | And it worked, highly practical, kept the families together and the wives had to put up with it.

02:15:44.000 | That I don't think is what Jesus taught.

02:15:46.720 | You're a pietist and yet you're schizophrenic. You're intellectually schizophrenic. Rush

02:15:57.360 | Duney wrote the book with that title. You are in the position of virtually all American

02:16:02.320 | Protestant Christians today. You don't want to make a break with either system.

02:16:08.000 | And that's why right down the middle, there isn't anybody or almost there are no people who go right

02:16:13.360 | down the middle and say, well, we can build a whole Christian philosophy without making a break.

02:16:18.880 | Well, they do make a break. Kingdom, two kingdoms philosophy is one, pietism is one.

02:16:24.400 | I'm working on building the Christian case for a Christian social order. It's not my job to get

02:16:34.160 | everybody to believe it. I'm just wanting to get them to believe that they have to make a decision.

02:16:39.440 | They have to fish or cut bait, as my mother-in-law used to say. And most Christians don't want to do

02:16:45.200 | either. And that's why we're in the situation we're in. It ultimately is a position that says

02:16:52.720 | perpetrators' rights. And we live in a society in which perpetrators' rights is the dominant

02:16:58.880 | philosophy operationally of the day. And socialism is perpetrators' rights.

02:17:05.440 | It's what it is. It's the thou shalt not steal except by majority vote. And the perps attempt

02:17:14.800 | to get the money. Of course, it backfires and the super rich get richer and richer and richer

02:17:19.520 | because they know how to beat the system. And the average voter does not. But he thinks he's

02:17:24.480 | going to beat the system. And we have built a social order since probably 1890s, 1895, that era

02:17:32.560 | with the rise of the social gospel and the rise of the progressive movement. We've built a whole

02:17:38.560 | social order based on perpetrators' rights. And I think it's time to break with it. But you can't

02:17:44.400 | just break with it in economics. You're going to have to break with it across the board.

02:17:51.920 | Thus my question of it being a complete system. Because pietism works within the context of

02:17:59.840 | premillennialism, be it dispensational premillennialism or historic premillennialism.

02:18:07.200 | It doesn't work in the context of postmillennialism. The task that you've--

02:18:11.120 | Go ahead. Yeah, but the world isn't premillennial.

02:18:14.880 | I can see that. It's never been premillennial. It's amillennial.

02:18:19.760 | That's been the Catholic position. That's the Lutheran position. That's the bulk of the Dutch

02:18:25.520 | Calvinist tradition. The tradition of the world is not a premillennial position, which is a

02:18:32.480 | position which has only been defended publicly on a widespread basis in the United States

02:18:38.560 | since the 1880s. It's an oddball position. Historic premillennialism has had almost no

02:18:45.200 | defenders. The world, the kingdom, two kingdoms philosophy is amillennial. And that's real clear.

02:18:53.520 | And that position is Deuteronomy 28 cannot possibly be true. And that either the rich

02:19:03.760 | get richer and the rich are unrighteous and they get richer, or it's a random position which

02:19:11.440 | covenant breakers and covenant keepers, it's flipping coins as to who wins and who loses.

02:19:16.320 | But don't assume that premillennialism has been a position that has been widely defended

02:19:23.440 | historically because almost nobody has ever held it. And the same thing is true of postmillennialism.

02:19:30.000 | The broad mass of humanity within the Christian church has been amillennial from day one,

02:19:38.480 | or almost day one, certainly from Augustine's work,

02:19:42.080 | the city of God, most of Christianity has been amillennial.

02:19:47.760 | Yeah, I've wrestled the last few years with eschatology and I'm unclear on

02:19:58.000 | where I personally, I'm unclear on my own personal conviction at present. It's been a difficult,

02:20:07.200 | a difficult journey for me that I've really wrestled with a lot over the last few years.

02:20:11.120 | I guess--

02:20:13.440 | Well, keep wrestling.

02:20:14.880 | Indeed I will. I guess the one comment, just to kind of conclude this,

02:20:20.800 | well, let me ask it in the context of a question. So preamble to the question. Throughout history

02:20:27.840 | and in the recorded history of the Bible, I'm thinking, for example, of Peter when he was jailed

02:20:34.240 | and then the angel came at night and released him. So for my non-Bible reading listeners,

02:20:44.480 | there's an account written in the book of Acts where the apostle Peter is thrown into jail by

02:20:49.520 | the Jewish leaders that day because he was preaching about Jesus. In the middle of the night,

02:20:53.760 | the early disciples are praying for Peter and an angel appears in Peter's jail cell,

02:21:02.000 | essentially blinds the guards and opens the door. Peter goes to the house of his friends

02:21:06.240 | and there's a quite humorous account recorded in the book of Acts where his friends, a servant girl

02:21:13.600 | within the household comes and opens the door and is so shocked to see Peter's face, she slams the

02:21:18.640 | door in his face and goes back in because she thinks she's seen the ghost or his angel. Meanwhile,

02:21:24.160 | the people inside say, "Go back and open the door," and they open the door. So whether it's

02:21:28.160 | in a biblical account like that one where Peter's in jail and he's released by an angel of God from

02:21:33.600 | jail, or whether it's an account like the many miraculous occurrences that are recorded in a

02:21:39.600 | place like communist China over the last 40 years. I remember reading a book called The Heavenly Man

02:21:44.880 | or Brother Yoon recounts a similar account where he is jailed for preaching by the communist

02:21:56.000 | government. He's many experiences, he's beaten, he's jailed multiple times entirely unjustly.

02:22:01.520 | But then during one context, an angel appears to him while he's in jail, literally blinds the

02:22:09.040 | eyes of the guard so that he can walk through, my memory doesn't give me the exact number, but

02:22:13.840 | three or four levels of security in the prison. And he's transported physically over the walls

02:22:19.360 | of the prison where there's a waiting taxi sitting there and waiting for him, an entirely supernatural

02:22:24.400 | divine intervention of God in human history for that individual person.

02:22:28.640 | So I find that the history of Christian testimony is filled with these types of supernatural

02:22:36.560 | victory of the victim in the context of difficult circumstances. And so it's not difficult for me,

02:22:45.520 | in the light of the whole tenor and tone of the New Testament, to affirm victim's rights,

02:22:52.880 | but also to affirm that God is the ultimate one who takes vengeance on the perpetrator. And that

02:22:59.520 | vengeance of God on the perpetrator is far worse than any vengeance of society around.

02:23:05.760 | So in the context of that, my question, Dr. North, is how do you reconcile the so many

02:23:13.600 | testimonies of Christians being willing to be victimized for the sake of the gospel

02:23:21.760 | with what you've discussed? How do you reconcile those things? Do you deny one of those other?

02:23:27.200 | How do you reconcile that? >>

02:23:29.240 | I think what I would say is very clear. The wife who's dealing with a drunken husband,

02:23:38.720 | she doesn't need him to be blinded. She's not blocked by the walls,

02:23:46.160 | but she probably ought to go out the front door and get that taxi. She doesn't need a miracle to

02:23:53.600 | get her into the taxi. She just needs common sense to say, "I'm going to defend myself

02:23:58.160 | and my children against this perverse man I have married. I'm going to take myself and my children

02:24:06.480 | out of his jurisdiction, and I'm leaving." And the church should back her up with that departure.

02:24:13.920 | Now let's go to the Lord's prayer. "Our Father who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name." Okay.

02:24:20.400 | "Thy kingdom come, thy will be done." And now we get to the bottom line,

02:24:28.560 | "On earth as it is in heaven." Do you believe that that prayer is going to be fulfilled?

02:24:34.960 | >> Yes. >> When? In history or eternity?

02:24:41.040 | >> I believe in history. >> You're a post-millennialist.

02:24:45.360 | >> [laughs] Which is, of course, my challenge. But then we get to the question of what does it

02:24:52.400 | mean for it to be fulfilled? What does it look like in history? Is it now being fulfilled? And

02:24:56.240 | that's where I would draw a bifurcation. Then why then does Paul draw a distinction in Corinthians

02:25:01.280 | behind what is appropriate in the church versus the state at that time? Why does he draw a

02:25:10.800 | special bifurcation about believers suing one another in the church if it's all a matter of

02:25:18.160 | the social system of the secular, of the, let me avoid that word secular, of the state, however it

02:25:24.080 | be? >> Good principle. You don't sue the guy in the state because it's a satanic state dealing

02:25:32.160 | with the Roman Empire. You don't take a guy into a judge who is part of a legal order that's

02:25:38.160 | corrupt. Is that true in a Christian social order? Paul wrote that before AD 70. In a Christian

02:25:46.800 | social order in which biblical law is enforced, why wouldn't you take him before a godly judge

02:25:54.240 | in a godly social order, godly legal order? He's broken the law. Okay, here's how we do it. We

02:26:01.840 | create a thing called a corporation. And so corporations sue each other because they're

02:26:08.800 | not members of churches, but the financial results are going to be the same, basically,

02:26:14.320 | not much difference. You can create all kinds of ways around it, but the bottom line is this,

02:26:21.280 | "Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven," which means it isn't done that way yet,

02:26:29.520 | and so you pray that it will be done that way at some point. And the amillennialist does not

02:26:37.520 | believe that can be fulfilled in history. The premillennialist believes it can only

02:26:41.680 | be fulfilled in history when Jesus returns with the angels to set up an international top-down

02:26:47.600 | bureaucracy, probably with headquarters at Jerusalem, or if not Jerusalem, then Colorado

02:26:53.200 | Springs. But the reality of it is, if you don't believe that's going to be fulfilled in history

02:27:01.280 | and cannot be fulfilled in history, then you're a two-kingdoms man and you're amillennial.

02:27:05.760 | So bringing it back then to the very example of Jesus, do you affirm or do you—Paul,

02:27:19.760 | when preaching about Jesus in Paul's letters, I can't cite the exact one off the top of my head,

02:27:26.480 | but Paul talks about how Jesus' death looked like a defeat, and yet for God it was a victory.

02:27:37.200 | So what looked like defeat in Jesus' death on the cross was actually victory.

02:27:46.400 | Did Jesus have victory or did he have defeat in history and how did that look?

02:27:52.480 | And of course, it's a leading question, so let me just clarify it and allow you to respond.

02:27:58.000 | Sometimes I think what looks like success may not be a success. And here we could go through

02:28:09.120 | much of Christian history over the last 2,000 years, and I think there are times—let me just

02:28:13.680 | use the example from our earlier conversation. What looks like success in Mexico with a broad

02:28:19.120 | Catholic population, a significant, perhaps majority, percentage of the people who would

02:28:24.800 | affirm and say, "Yes, I'm a Christian," in reality, based upon our earlier conversation,

02:28:30.000 | looks less successful than perhaps the less affirming society of Canada. So what looks like

02:28:38.080 | success sometimes may not actually be success, and yet what is actually successful may sometimes not

02:28:43.280 | look like success, as in the example of Jesus. So where Jesus—

02:28:48.480 | Wait a minute. Wait a minute!

02:28:50.560 | Go ahead.

02:28:50.960 | You're talking about the crucifixion.

02:28:54.480 | Correct.

02:28:54.800 | What about the resurrection?

02:28:57.200 | It was a success and it was clear and visible to all who saw Jesus.

02:29:03.920 | And what about the ascension?

02:29:05.760 | A success, clear and visible.

02:29:08.080 | Right. That's the pattern. That's the pattern.

02:29:13.120 | So—

02:29:13.520 | Thy will be done on earth, or in earth, if you're going to use King James, as it is in

02:29:20.800 | heaven. There's a prayer. Why would he ask us to pray that if he has no intention of

02:29:26.160 | fulfilling the prayer?

02:29:27.200 | Okay, so I concede your point. Now, let's go back to—and I never, of course, I never

02:29:36.080 | intended to get into divorce or remarriage here, but let's go back to this question

02:29:40.160 | that you talked about of an abusive and sinning husband. I affirm the need to protect the

02:29:47.200 | wife and children from that man, and here's where it's very important that we get involved,

02:29:51.200 | especially—

02:29:51.760 | Wait, wait, wait, wait. Who's "we"? Who is "we"?

02:29:57.520 | Any person who is involved in the situation and aware of somebody being victimized.

02:30:01.920 | And you're going to give that person advice?

02:30:06.240 | Yes. I'm saying you should seek to protect the victim.

02:30:08.640 | Tell me the advice you're going to give to that wife.

02:30:11.280 | Okay, so in that context, I will then go to 1 Corinthians chapter 7, and this would be

02:30:17.600 | where, in my mind, you have an amplification, a New Testament amplification of what it

02:30:24.800 | means of marriage. So Paul, speaking in 1 Corinthians chapter 7, he says this in verse

02:30:32.800 | 10, "To the married I give this charge, not I, but the Lord, the wife should not separate

02:30:40.000 | from her husband. But if she does, she should remain unmarried or else be reconciled to

02:30:48.000 | her husband, and the husband should not divorce his wife." Now, let me go on. "To the

02:30:53.760 | rest I say, I, not the Lord, that if any brother has a wife who is an unbeliever and she consents

02:30:59.920 | to live with him, he should not divorce her. If any woman has a husband who is an unbeliever

02:31:05.840 | and he consents to live with her, she should not divorce him. For the unbelieving husband

02:31:11.040 | is made holy because of his wife, and the unbelieving wife is made holy because of her

02:31:15.520 | husband. Otherwise your children would be unclean, but as it is, they are holy. But

02:31:20.000 | if the unbelieving partner separates, let it be so. In such cases, the brother or sister

02:31:24.640 | is not enslaved. God has called you to peace. For how do you know, wife, whether you will

02:31:29.840 | save your husband? Or how do you know, husband, whether you will save your wife? Only let

02:31:34.160 | each person lead the life that the Lord has assigned to him and to which God has called

02:31:38.880 | him. This is my rule in all the churches." So, I use that and say, I don't believe there

02:31:44.000 | is a contradiction between affirming, stopping, let's just stick with the physical battering

02:31:50.000 | of a wife or children. That should be stopped because that's a physical violence that needs

02:31:54.800 | to be stopped. And if the unbelieving husband separates, the wife is not enslaved. Paul

02:32:02.880 | says the wife should not separate from her husband, but if she does, she should remain

02:32:09.120 | unmarried or else be reconciled to her husband. So, let's assume that that wife is able

02:32:13.840 | to bear the burden that God has called her to, as we says, only let each person lead

02:32:19.520 | the life that the Lord has assigned to him. None of us get to choose. God may very well

02:32:24.000 | ordain and decree that tomorrow my wife is in a car accident and I care of the rest of

02:32:30.640 | my life for her. You're battling cancer right now. We don't get to choose these circumstances

02:32:35.520 | into which we're called, but God can give us the grace in those situations. And so,

02:32:40.000 | I have observed testimony of, personally, a wife who is separated from her husband.

02:32:47.840 | She remains unmarried because the scripture says that she must either, if she does, she

02:32:53.840 | should remain unmarried or else be reconciled to her husband. That husband, by virtue of

02:32:59.600 | the godly righteous testimony of his wife, is brought to a place of repentance. He repents,

02:33:05.600 | and here I would bring in godly wisdom on behalf of those who are involved in the situation

02:33:10.240 | to make sure that there is fruit of repentance, a genuine lasting fruit of repentance through

02:33:14.960 | a period of time, and then she's restored to his wife. And I've seen husbands and wives

02:33:19.040 | in that situation give testimony of God's saving grace in that circumstance. So, I don't see a

02:33:25.520 | disconnect between affirming protecting the victim, but also affirming that God's love can

02:33:33.120 | go even to the point where if we are victimized, we can still love in the midst of those circumstances.

02:33:40.560 | >>DAVID:

02:33:45.360 | They beat—the guy gets drunk every Saturday night, comes home, and beats the wife,

02:33:50.880 | puts her life in danger. Then he beats the kids, puts their lives in danger.

02:33:58.080 | What's your advice to that wife?

02:34:00.960 | >>ASHKAHN: The wife and children should be separated from the husband.

02:34:04.960 | >>DAVID: And she cannot remarry and get a righteous father for those children.

02:34:13.840 | >>ASHKAHN: Based on these scriptures, I don't see any way that such remarriage could be affirmed.

02:34:21.120 | Jesus was very clear that remarriage is adultery in his teaching.

02:34:25.200 | >>DAVID: In the Old Testament, they would have executed him for battery.

02:34:30.160 | >>ASHKAHN: Right.

02:34:32.080 | >>DAVID: So you're saying that because we live in an age of grace,

02:34:36.240 | grace has disappeared for the victim.

02:34:39.280 | >>ASHKAHN: Of course, this is the heart of what I'm wrestling with. Let me go back to the next

02:34:47.200 | question, which does connect, and I'll give you the chance to clarify. Let's talk about the

02:34:52.640 | question of taxation.

02:34:53.760 | >>DAVID: Now, wait a minute!

02:34:56.320 | >>ASHKAHN: Let me connect it, please.

02:34:57.600 | >>DAVID: Man, it's like I'm watching a dancing master!

02:35:01.360 | >>ASHKAHN: [laughs]

02:35:04.640 | I wonder now if I should have made the promise to you that I would release our podcast unedited.

02:35:09.200 | Let me just simply say this.

02:35:13.920 | >>DAVID: Now, listen.

02:35:15.040 | >>ASHKAHN: Go ahead.

02:35:15.360 | >>DAVID: Listen. You're dropping the text, man. Verse 10 of 1 Corinthians 7. Read that text.

02:35:23.680 | >>Text on screen: "To the married I give this charge, not I but the Lord, the wife should not

02:35:28.320 | separate..."

02:35:28.320 | >>DAVID: Stop! Stop! Read it again.

02:35:31.440 | >>Text on screen: "To the married I give this charge, not I but the Lord..."

02:35:35.360 | >>DAVID: Okay? This is the one passage in all of the Scripture that is not legally binding.

02:35:42.320 | >>ASHKAHN: How do you mean?

02:35:45.440 | >>DAVID: Because it's not from the Lord!

02:35:50.880 | This is his personal opinion, and you've gotten to that passage.

02:35:55.920 | The one passage in which he says this is not from the Lord...

02:36:01.680 | >>ASHKAHN: Verse 12 says that, not verse 10.

02:36:03.520 | >>DAVID: I'm looking at verse 10, which you're quoting.

02:36:06.880 | >>ASHKAHN: Verse 10 says, "To the married I..."

02:36:08.800 | >>DAVID: Oh, I'm sorry. You're right. You're right.

02:36:09.840 | >>ASHKAHN: 12 says that.

02:36:10.880 | >>DAVID: I'm going... I'm sorry. You're right. Okay.

02:36:13.360 | "To the rest I say, 'I, not the Lord.'"

02:36:16.320 | You have this situation in... Again, you are... It's for one, he is...

02:36:22.720 | This is not judicially binding, okay? Because it's his opinion.

02:36:28.720 | It is not from the Lord. But let's back it up.

02:36:32.560 | You're still in the position of affirming perpetrators' rights.

02:36:41.760 | Now, you can dance, you can shuffle, you can tap dance across the stage.

02:36:47.520 | You are still affirming perpetrators' rights.

02:36:50.240 | You have to come to grips with the doctrine,

02:36:52.480 | the biblical doctrine that Sutton describes and Rush Gunny holds,

02:36:56.560 | of divorce covenantally, covenantal divorce.

02:37:00.720 | And covenantal divorce is covenantal death.

02:37:03.760 | The Old Testament, the guy would have been executed,

02:37:09.680 | but not in the New Testament,

02:37:11.600 | because we don't live under a Christian social order in which those laws are enforced.

02:37:16.800 | So you have to have some kind of protection for the wife.

02:37:20.560 | And the answer to it, the answer to it is,

02:37:23.120 | she better get out of there and get her kids in a safe situation

02:37:26.640 | and get a good father and a supporter for that...

02:37:29.920 | For those children and for herself, because the courts probably won't enforce it.

02:37:35.200 | And the church surely won't enforce it.

02:37:37.200 | So how is that woman going to survive if she cannot remarry?

02:37:43.680 | Because she's living with a man who should be, biblically speaking, executed,

02:37:51.120 | but it isn't possible in this society.

02:37:54.320 | So God says, you have the right of divorce on the basis of covenantal death.

02:38:01.120 | The guy is dead.

02:38:05.840 | He's violated the rules of marriage.

02:38:09.360 | And that can happen with the woman doing it too.

02:38:14.240 | How about the case of the man who leaves the wife?

02:38:19.200 | Is there a legitimate divorce there?

02:38:22.560 | No.

02:38:25.060 | Well, let's put it this way.

02:38:28.720 | You've said the Catholic church is wrong.

02:38:32.320 | You've said all of Protestantism is wrong.

02:38:35.200 | The libertarians aren't paying any attention to you.

02:38:37.920 | Other than you, who holds this position?

02:38:40.640 | I know a number of people who do,

02:38:42.960 | including all the people that I'm involved with in my local church.

02:38:46.960 | So I don't deny that it's a minority position.

02:38:49.760 | Are they?

02:38:50.480 | Okay, who do they go to to defend this position theologically?

02:38:55.200 | And is it an independent church?

02:38:57.920 | And I'll bet it is.

02:38:58.800 | What do you mean by independent church?

02:39:01.200 | Does it answer to any hierarchy judicially?

02:39:04.800 | Yeah, there you got it.

02:39:06.080 | Okay, you're an independent guy in an independent church.

02:39:09.840 | You answer to nobody, and the perps are protected.

02:39:14.320 | But hold on a second, Dr. North.

02:39:15.600 | I think you hold positions which are in the extreme minority of public,

02:39:24.320 | prominent Protestant Christianity, and you've defended that.

02:39:28.480 | Not on the position of divorce.

02:39:30.400 | Correct. Not on this position.

02:39:31.600 | What I'm saying is, it's at least intellectually possible that you could hold a position

02:39:36.400 | that is in the minority and be right, and that I could hold a position on this and also be right.

02:39:42.080 | It's possible.

02:39:42.800 | But see, it's possible, but look.

02:39:47.120 | When any man stands against the tradition of the church, he's on thin ice.

02:39:55.680 | And I understand that with myself.

02:39:58.640 | But you're in a situation in which you have taken a stand against the entire history of the church.

02:40:04.000 | You are not in thin ice.

02:40:07.200 | You've gone through the ice.

02:40:08.640 | I would deny that on this basis.

02:40:11.280 | First, you ask, what do you look for for theology?

02:40:14.880 | I'm quoting the clear scripture, which I think seem fairly clear.

02:40:18.960 | Now, any listener or reader would have to judge for themselves, and each person I would defend

02:40:25.760 | is able to make their own judgment on the teaching of scripture, because I'm not seeking to have

02:40:33.840 | anybody stand before me and be judged on me.

02:40:35.680 | I'm saying we all stand before God.

02:40:37.040 | So my defense is these particular biblical passages that I'm quoting.

02:40:46.560 | That's my defense for a theologian.

02:40:48.560 | Now, we have to, of course, understand, apply, et cetera.

02:40:53.760 | We're not going to find a direct application for every point.

02:40:57.520 | We have to apply the teaching, or to use your terminology, we'd have to apply the case law

02:41:02.240 | to a system, which is what you are doing and what I'm seeking to try to do as well.

02:41:06.800 | Now, the second thing is, I don't see how this is a historical theological minority,

02:41:15.200 | considering that the position that I'm defending is, in essence, the official teaching of the

02:41:20.960 | Catholic Church today, even though their system of annulling a marriage has become, in my opinion,

02:41:27.520 | a mockery in the modern world.

02:41:29.520 | And I was struck by watching part of the series of The Crown that was produced by Netflix,

02:41:35.600 | and I was really struck at the inception of The Reign of Queen Elizabeth, how her predecessor,

02:41:41.600 | I think it was Edward, the guy who was bound to be king at that time, he was called, but

02:41:50.080 | in the land of Britain, he abdicated the throne because of his professed desire to marry a

02:41:57.600 | divorcee.

02:41:58.720 | Now, I don't know what the circumstances of her divorce were, but I was struck by seeing

02:42:02.960 | that in The Crown, and then to compare that against the news from this last year of 2018,

02:42:08.880 | where the next royal marriage is set to occur, or has occurred, between a divorcee, and yet

02:42:16.800 | nobody, including, seemingly nobody in British society wants to take a stand against that.

02:42:24.240 | And yet that was the very reason why Queen Elizabeth came to power.

02:42:27.600 | So I don't think I'm in the minority, I may be in the minority position, I am in the minority

02:42:31.680 | position today, I certainly seem to be that.

02:42:34.480 | But by all accounts, I look around at the mainstream Protestant position, and I don't

02:42:38.960 | see much success in maintaining marriages under any ground.

02:42:42.960 | Even if we grant an exception for divorce, perhaps we grant a so-called exception for

02:42:46.960 | abandonment, I don't hear any Protestant, I am not aware of many Protestant churches

02:42:54.960 | who would even take a book like Ray Sutton's and try to apply it.

02:42:59.200 | What I see to the left and right of me is thousands and thousands of people who trundle

02:43:04.720 | into church buildings and trundle out of church buildings with very little applicability of

02:43:10.480 | trying to understand even what Sutton teaches to their marriage.

02:43:13.920 | And I see the consequences of that worked out today in marriages all over the place,

02:43:17.680 | where I know plenty of people, those same, for example, those same liberation theologians

02:43:25.120 | would happily affirm homosexual relationships and homosexual marriages as entirely according

02:43:31.600 | to God's plan.

02:43:33.840 | I see it left and right of many people who happily affirm fornication with no marriage

02:43:39.720 | vows.

02:43:40.720 | And so I don't have a high opinion of, and I can trace that back to the dissolution of

02:43:47.040 | this particular doctrine, and I can affirm that we have problems, but I don't have that

02:43:50.840 | much of a high opinion to say that somehow marriage that allows for divorce in case of

02:43:55.800 | adultery or wife battering, et cetera, that somehow that's going to stand the test of

02:44:01.240 | the homosexual activists on our doorstep today.

02:44:05.520 | So I'll give you the last word on this to wrap up.

02:44:08.920 | I'll give you the last word, Dr. North.

02:44:13.480 | You're an amazing dancer.

02:44:15.000 | I love to see a guy with footwork like yours.

02:44:19.240 | What do you tell the wife?

02:44:21.720 | God's grace is sufficient.

02:44:24.120 | Victim, loss, perpetrators, rights.

02:44:31.520 | And I think we ought to end it on that.

02:44:33.680 | Deal.

02:44:34.680 | You've written an entire book on the subject, victims' rights.

02:44:37.200 | Please share with my audience a little bit about your books, your website, some of the

02:44:43.080 | things that you have available that may be helpful with a special emphasis on personal

02:44:46.800 | finance.

02:44:47.800 | Well, just go to the site.

02:44:50.200 | There's a large section of the site that's free.

02:44:53.080 | You can download hundreds, maybe not hundreds, maybe 150 books, something like that.

02:44:59.680 | A lot of books, free.

02:45:01.000 | You can download and print them out.

02:45:03.160 | There are sections on personal finance and so forth, not investment advice.

02:45:08.680 | That's part of the subscription section of the site.

02:45:12.100 | But if you want to pursue these topics, you can go to the site.

02:45:17.920 | You can look up the particular topic under Christian economics, or there's Gary North's

02:45:22.720 | free books, which is well-named.

02:45:25.440 | They're all free books.

02:45:26.440 | You can go in and look at the various titles that are available.

02:45:30.860 | And you can download all of them free of charge if you want to do that.

02:45:34.680 | So that's what the site's there to do.

02:45:36.800 | And it's been up, I guess, now about 12 years.

02:45:40.200 | So a lot of people have downloaded a lot of books over the years, and you might as well

02:45:44.480 | do it if any of these topics are really of interest to you.

02:45:48.280 | I will link in the show notes directly to your recent books on Christian economics,

02:45:53.760 | the student's manual and the teacher's edition.

02:45:56.040 | And Dr. North, I'll say to you publicly here, I do want to thank you and appreciate you

02:46:00.840 | for your willingness to stand for the difficult, unpopular doctrines that you believe or that

02:46:10.160 | you teach, the convictions that you hold in the face of much public scrutiny.

02:46:15.520 | I don't know if it comes easier for you than for me, but I have always found it very difficult

02:46:19.560 | to be in a minority position and to publicly be pilloried for those positions.

02:46:25.800 | And I take comfort in watching the testimony of other men, especially older men like you,

02:46:31.120 | who have withstood the flood of abuse for many decades and have stayed true to what

02:46:36.600 | you see.

02:46:37.600 | So thank you for your willingness to stand for and clearly proclaim what you believe

02:46:42.280 | and why you believe it.

02:46:43.280 | I appreciate that.

02:46:44.280 | All right.

02:46:45.280 | Very good.

02:46:46.280 | I hope you enjoyed that discussion with Dr. North.

02:46:50.200 | And certainly I would imagine it was provocative and I hope engaging for you.

02:46:56.720 | On the discussion regarding divorce, marriage, remarriage, I don't wish to discuss it further

02:47:02.460 | at this point in time here other than to simply send you back to your Bible and your knees.

02:47:07.500 | The end of life, we stand alone before God, not before one another.

02:47:12.320 | And you're not accountable to me or to Dr. North.

02:47:15.000 | You and I are accountable only to God.

02:47:17.000 | So I send you back to your Bible and to your knees.

02:47:20.640 | I will say this, that in our conversation, we touched on some of the most difficult,

02:47:27.800 | difficult things, most hotly debated topics.

02:47:32.560 | And so what I would commend to you is that if you have a source of significant disagreement

02:47:37.900 | on some of the moral issues, theological issues, even political issues, I would refer you before

02:47:42.760 | you write emails to me or Dr. North or post comments that are just short and angry, go

02:47:51.800 | and spend some time reading because it's very hard, especially on these topics.

02:47:55.640 | It's very hard when there have been serious thinkers who've written tens of thousands

02:47:58.400 | of pages.

02:47:59.400 | It's of course hard in an ad hoc interview like this to answer all of the criticisms

02:48:06.340 | and the responses and the rebuttals.

02:48:08.420 | So please, I urge you, go and spend some time doing some reading before just simply responding

02:48:13.040 | to let me know how upset you are.

02:48:16.740 | Go and read Dr. North's books on Christian economics.

02:48:19.580 | All of them are free, available for you free, which is fantastic.

02:48:24.280 | Download them, read them.

02:48:25.280 | I think you will learn something and whether you agree or disagree, you will be challenged

02:48:30.440 | and that is an excellent thing.

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RPF0548-Christian_Economics-Interview_with_Gary_North