Welcome back to
the Liberty Insider.
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Before the break with
the guest Elijah Mvundura,
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you invoked the
Reformation, and I cut you short
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because that's just too big
a topic to have the sound bite
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on before our
break that, you know...
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Yes, the
Reformation is important.
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And for me, why it
is so important that we,
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I mean, not just
Christians, the whole world,
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is that it has been reduced
to justification by faith.
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And people, they think
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it was all by
justification by faith.
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It was more than that.
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Absolutely.
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The medieval culture
was the whole culture.
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It was an
all-embracing world view.
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It tried to give
guidelines for people
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in every area of their life.
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That's why, all those rituals,
those all religious calendars,
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they literally give
you a compass for life.
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And to oppose the church
was to oppose your society,
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to oppose the
government usually,
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and that's why Hitler was...
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Not Hitler.
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Why Luther was
before the emperor.
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Yes.
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But yes, you're saying...
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I would actually say
that to oppose your religion,
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it was really
destroying the whole universe
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because you have this...
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Let me use the technical terms.
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It was an Aristotelian,
scholastic synthesis,
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a complex technology...
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A heavy phrase.
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Yes, a heavy phrase,
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but I'm trying to say you had it
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at a philosophical level.
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It described how the
universe actually was organized.
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And it was in
terms of a hierarchy,
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so everything was connected.
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And for anyone to take
themselves away from that,
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it is literally
breaking up the whole universe.
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And the kind of moral confusion
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that the Western
world is experiencing today,
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you can trace it back
to there that that compass,
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how do you guide
yourself in your daily life.
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People, they no
longer have that compass.
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No wonder why we,
in terms of identity,
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people don't know who they are
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because within
the medieval culture,
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people knew their place.
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You know, people don't know yet.
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For example, and they
say it smith and butcher...
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Yes, the butcher
and they're like,
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you know, you are smith's son
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because your
father was a blacksmith.
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You follow the
trade of your father.
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Well, we've become
disconnected from history,
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and therefore, from
ourselves often in...
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That's why we know...
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don't know us.
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You know, you
read many of them too.
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The setting problem
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of Western
culture is alienation,
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ultimately, an alienation
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from self
whether it starts from...
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you don't your neighbors,
you don't know your history,
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you don't know your future,
very disempowering for...
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We're talking about Karl Marx.
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One of the key
terms with Karl Marx
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is alienation and estrangement,
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that you're estranged
from the things that you make,
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you're estranged
from your society.
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So Karl Marx was
actually undertaking
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a religious reform of some kind.
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He wanted to
reconcile the things
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that had been alienated.
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And so if we're going
to have a Christian witness
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in the modern world,
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our gospel has got to attend
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to kind of the
existential problems
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that people...
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That's to give
meaning. Yes. Yes.
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Which it does of
course. Yes, yes.
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It's meaning, yes, to
put it in simple terms,
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people, they don't
have meaning in their lives,
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but how can the Bible
give us meaning in our life
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and how does that
relate to religious liberty
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because the whole
idea what Luther did,
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you know, to go back to Luther,
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yes, I digress a little
bit, to go back to Luther...
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Luther has the reformation.
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He destroys this
Aristotelian scholastic complex.
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He destroys it.
How does he destroy it?
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Yeah, you and I know,
but explain for viewers,
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how did Aristotle
create a world view?
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I don't think of this stage,
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outside of maybe
colored circle people know
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what Aristotle, Plato,
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what the Greek
philosophers people.
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It's very...
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Plato and Aristotle,
those were Greek philosophers.
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And basically, their
philosophy describes the world,
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you know, the
cosmos and everything.
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And it interlinks from
the smallest objects in nature
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to the human beings.
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It puts them in this complex,
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so with the
collapse of the Roman Empire,
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the church took up the
writings of Plato and Aristotle
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and used them also to
describe a whole universe,
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to describe how
the world operates,
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to describe the morals,
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how society is supposed to
be governed and rule itself.
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So this why...
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Now let me
interject something. Yes.
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Those that have
watched this program
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before might have heard me
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speak about
some papal documents.
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And one that
troubled me at the time,
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not a document but
a speech from Benedict
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that caused
rioting all over the world
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because he used an
example of violence in Islam.
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But he spoke to
violence in Christianity,
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and he said there were
three incipient threats
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to the violence of Christianity.
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And the first he
said was the reformers
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by their
insistence on sola scriptura,
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expose the church to violence.
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Yes.
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And you know what he said
made Christianity non-violent?
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He said it adopted
Hellenistic rationality,
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and you've just described that.
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It was Plato and Aristotle,
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but I would say the
church adopted paganism.
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Yes, yes.
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You know, that's
very, very important
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because what people
miss is that when the church,
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after the collapse
of the Roman Empire
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and with the Christianization
of the Roman Empire,
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the church actually inherited
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all the coercive
operators of the Roman Empire.
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They are law. That's
why there is canon law.
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All that, they actually...
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And even Latin. Yes.
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People don't think about it.
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This is
Romanism, the Roman part.
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So they actually inherited
the coercive operators,
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the Constantine sword.
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The church did not have a sword.
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The church was born
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as an independent
body in the Roman Empire.
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It's the body of Christ.
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He did not have a sword.
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And I need to clarify
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what I said about
the Regensburg speech.
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That's what I was
quoting from, of Benedict.
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It was in Turkey that he had...
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No, it's a
Regensburg University.
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Yes, yes.
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He went to Turkey to placate
the Muslims at the Blue Mosque.
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But he gave the speech
at Regensburg University,
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but he made a false model.
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He said that early Christianity
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had been violent too like Islam.
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Well, it wasn't.
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The Romans
complained the Christians
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went willingly to the lions.
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But you have to accept his model
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to see where he's going,
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but then he says
it became non-violent
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when it adopted Greek
Hellenistic rationality.
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Now that's a
fallacious argument.
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So we need to point out
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early Christianity
was distinctly non-violent
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and passive in the
face of persecution.
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Yes.
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Actually, what
introduces violence out...
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Actually, they
say it's Aristotle
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because the whole
thing is, Aristotle,
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everything has
got to be precise,
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put up in these rational models,
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and anybody who
departs from that...
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So what you find, I think,
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in the middle ages is
trying to objectify the gospel.
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The gospel is
about the way you live.
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It's not so much the way
you think but the way you live.
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And I think that whole
process is one of the things
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that leads to the
persecution in the church.
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It's so much about
the church authority.
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The church had
actually embraced the world.
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It was not just the church.
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It was a church state.
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You know, today, we
speak about church state,
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those distinctions
came after the Reformation.
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Yeah, for a long, the church
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and the state
were indistinguishable.
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Yes.
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They actually called it just
simply the Christian society.
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That's why I
continued going back
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about it's very, very important
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that those
distinctions were not there,
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but when you mix
church and state,
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we must never forget
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that the church is
the body of Christ,
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it's the
mystical body of Christ.
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And so how do you
unite this body of Christ
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with a worldly body?
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Not...
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Well, that was done easily
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or at least they
slipped into it easily,
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but it was a forced marriage
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I think, always had
contradictions built to do it.
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And, of course, the
history, the middle ages,
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there was the rivalry
between the kings and the popes.
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And the popes used
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a lot of methods
including shaming
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or excommunicating the
king to keep him under control.
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But to me, it was
an uneasy alliance
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even at its most strong.
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Yes, and for me, I
think that we must not only
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look at the
distinction of church and state,
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when you mix church and state,
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you're also mixing
to use another language,
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religion, and politics,
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but when you also mix that,
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you are likely also to
not know the distinction
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between the
divine and the human,
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the divine and the demonic.
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This is very, very important.
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When we speak about
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the separation
of church and state,
00:08:57.13\00:08:58.47
it's not just
these institutions.
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There are deeper realities
that are involved in this.
00:09:00.50\00:09:03.10
And one of the realities
00:09:03.14\00:09:04.67
is that if you
mix church and state,
00:09:04.71\00:09:06.68
you're not going to be
aware of the distinction
00:09:06.71\00:09:09.01
between the
divine and the demonic.
00:09:09.04\00:09:12.78
I know this is part of
what you've written on,
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and what I think was the genius
00:09:14.82\00:09:16.85
of at least two of your articles
00:09:16.89\00:09:19.29
that I can think of.
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That's not an aspect
that people understand.
00:09:20.69\00:09:24.93
The false spirit
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that enters into the
church and state union,
00:09:26.33\00:09:29.46
you know, it's not just
the Spirit of God twisted.
00:09:29.50\00:09:33.07
It's a
malignant spirit comes in.
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Yes.
00:09:36.44\00:09:37.77
Because when you describe,
00:09:37.81\00:09:39.37
when you unite church and state,
00:09:39.41\00:09:41.98
as they used to
say in the middle ages,
00:09:42.01\00:09:43.75
anybody outside
the church is dumped,
00:09:43.78\00:09:47.15
he's not served.
00:09:47.18\00:09:48.55
Salvation is only in the church,
00:09:48.58\00:09:50.55
so where do you put
the devil in that equation?
00:09:50.59\00:09:53.86
If it is the
church versus the world,
00:09:53.89\00:09:56.29
where is the
devil in that dynamic?
00:09:56.32\00:09:58.89
And so for me, it's
a very, very important
00:09:58.93\00:10:00.43
as to know that we
cannot unite church and state.
00:10:00.46\00:10:03.70
This very
alienation that we talk about,
00:10:03.73\00:10:05.93
we cannot unite these fears
only until the end of time.
00:10:05.97\00:10:11.01
That's when...
00:10:11.04\00:10:12.44
We are clearly seeing
an attempt to unify it now,
00:10:12.47\00:10:15.24
but where do you
think that will end?
00:10:15.28\00:10:18.81
I think that it is going to...
00:10:18.85\00:10:21.92
It's hard to predict the future,
00:10:21.95\00:10:23.89
but what we're seeing today
00:10:23.92\00:10:25.25
is a collapse of
the very distinctions
00:10:25.29\00:10:29.56
between the
religious and the political.
00:10:29.59\00:10:34.43
And as we see this collapse,
00:10:34.46\00:10:37.40
I believe that
it is going to lead
00:10:37.43\00:10:39.03
to a whole collapse of
church and state and religion
00:10:39.07\00:10:43.04
and lead to a
totalitarian state.
00:10:43.07\00:10:44.61
And later, there
is another philosopher
00:10:44.64\00:10:46.14
who has actually
mentioned that...
00:10:46.17\00:10:49.21
From Notre Dame,
00:10:49.24\00:10:50.58
he speaks about the collapse
of liberalism and says that...
00:10:50.61\00:10:54.25
After liberalism,
00:10:54.28\00:10:55.62
actually what comes is
an authoritarian state.
00:10:55.65\00:10:59.45
And for me, after
liberalism comes the Antichrist.
00:10:59.49\00:11:03.56
Dreams of my father, of course,
00:11:07.26\00:11:09.66
evokes President
Obama's biography
00:11:09.70\00:11:14.30
that really launched
him into the public eye.
00:11:14.34\00:11:17.57
It was an amazing description
of the formative influences
00:11:17.61\00:11:20.48
of not only his father
00:11:20.51\00:11:22.34
but his whole African ancestry.
00:11:22.38\00:11:26.72
And today, on this
program, guest Elijah Mvundura
00:11:26.75\00:11:31.49
has shared many
of his imperatives
00:11:31.52\00:11:35.69
going back to his father.
00:11:35.72\00:11:37.43
I could do the same
thing with my father.
00:11:37.46\00:11:39.56
An influence of a
father is powerful
00:11:39.59\00:11:42.96
not just in the
imposing of their will on you,
00:11:43.00\00:11:46.17
which really they do,
00:11:46.20\00:11:47.97
but how they are a
model for behavior,
00:11:48.00\00:11:50.24
but when I think about this
00:11:50.27\00:11:51.91
and I hear his
discussion in my experience,
00:11:51.94\00:11:55.04
I'm reminded that all of
us need to be careful to obey
00:11:55.08\00:12:00.28
and to remember the
dreams of our Heavenly Father,
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which as it says...
00:12:03.99\00:12:05.69
As Paul says,
00:12:05.72\00:12:07.06
"For our goodness and our care."
00:12:07.09\00:12:09.36
For Liberty Insider,
this is Lincoln Steed.
00:12:09.39\00:12:12.66