Welcome back to
the Liberty Insider.
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Before the break
with guest Dr. John Reeve.
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We were holding forth,
John, on all sorts of stuff
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that related to
American exceptionalism,
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divine right of the church,
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and civil history
that lay behind that.
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During the break,
you mentioned, Charles I.
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And that's the
period of English history
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that really gets my attention.
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Tell me the point
you want to make about
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divine right of kings there?
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Well, you know, when his
father took over from Elizabeth,
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James I of England,
James V of Scotland,
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he comes into
England with the idea
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that now he can do what he wants
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because he is king of a country
that actually has a treasury.
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And so he's going to be
able to do what he wants to.
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Yeah, 'cause Scotland
was sort of the poor neighbor
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to the north.
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Right.
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The mountain men, some
of them, the highlanders,
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you know, going wild and wooly,
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and I even laughed sometimes
at our current president.
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They make a lot of
his German ancestry,
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but I'm part
Scots or half Scots.
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I think we can
explain a lot by the Scots
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about the layered
and his whiskey jug here.
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He's like do this, do
that, ordering the hands around.
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So Charles is raised in a family
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where it is understood that
the king has absolute power.
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And so he that's
what he was winged on,
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king has absolute
power, now I'm king,
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so he just
starts making dictates.
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And when the Parliament
starts arguing against him,
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he says, I dissolve Parliament,
I'll run without them.
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But what he
didn't realize is that
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if he doesn't have
Parliament, he can't tax,
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and he can't run wars.
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So he needs Parliament,
so he calls them back,
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and they disagree with
him, they disbands him again,
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so then they squabble,
ends up in the civil war.
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And he only called them
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because he wanted
money to wage a war.
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Correct. And a war, not a wall.
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Yeah.
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And this was so big
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that they started
murmuring against him.
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And then he decided he
would arrest the speaker,
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you remember that.
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And he comes in with
his own private guard
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to arrest the speaker
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'cause they've
gone out the back door.
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From that moment on, the
revolution or the civil war
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was pretty much certain.
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And so then how was
the civil war decided
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once it comes to fisticuffs,
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and battles, and guns, and such.
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A war is decided
on the battlefield.
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But in the case of Charles
I, he says, "It can't be."
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He says, "You can defeat
me, you can defeat my armies,
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but I'm still the king.
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God put me here,
you can't change that."
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Yeah, it was an
interesting argument,
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and it was the standard argument
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but he did it more vigorously,
and more in your face to.
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Once he lost his military cause,
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he still persisted in this.
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He pretended that whatever
he said they should still obey
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not because they won a war,
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but because God
put him in as king.
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God's man,
therefore, everybody must obey.
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And very few people
sort of connect this,
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but this was the direct
origin of the modern day
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constitutional monarchy.
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They basically trimmed
all of the grand claims away,
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and he became a
hereditary figurehead.
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Well, he was shot.
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Well, not he, but I
mean the monarchs of England.
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Right.
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And it took a few
generations to work that out,
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but eventually the monarch...
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Glorious
Revolution and all the rest.
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Yeah, yeah, but
clear up to the time
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where Charles I
was actually beheaded.
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He did not think they
would actually kill him.
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Yeah, and, you know, I
feel pity for the guy to
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read his speech just
before the axe came down.
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I mean he was looking forward
to heaven and clear conscience,
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and he felt that he
was the wrong party.
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And, of course, many
people at the time treated him
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as almost a saint.
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So there was a spiritual patina
over this affair of state.
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And this is the
parallel I'm trying to draw.
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You know, messy
and wooly things happen
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in political affairs,
and especially in conflicts
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that might even
come to a civil war.
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But to inject religion
turns the whole thing greatly.
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It makes it very, very messy.
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And the United States,
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you know, I'm a long
term resident of the US,
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but a young man that
grew up in Australia,
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and I came here and
I've studied it carefully,
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and I've come to
really love the United States.
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Its aspirations are unequaled.
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But more and more
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I see the ghosts
of the past rise up,
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and at the moment that
troubles me greatly that
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well meaning Christians
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have chosen this
present administration.
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And even this
President is God's man,
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and their religious
agenda is now to be run forward
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with through a political means.
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And I think they're falling
into the errors of the past,
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big time, with good
intention as of Charles.
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Hey, the worst
mistakes always are made
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with the best intentions.
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And that's one thing
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I've always
learned in history is that,
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nobody makes a
mistake on purpose.
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They always make a
mistake with good intentions.
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And the good intentions here
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are to try to get a
more Christian nation.
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The good intention's here
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to try to get a
more moral nation.
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It's the same push
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as the moral
majority of last generation.
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The idea that we
put in God's Man,
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and then God gets to
rule through that person.
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The problem is, is
the man is still a man.
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Well, let me
connect this, I mean,
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my line of logic
often leaps that,
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you know, the
church, the Medieval Church,
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Roman Catholic Church,
but for hundreds of years,
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it was the only
real game in town,
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at least in an organized sense,
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you know, they run with an
idea that you can sort of half
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get out of some of
the statements of Jesus,
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but that they had the authority
to establish things on earth
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and to make dictates and so on.
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I don't think that's
consistent with the way that God
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has dealt with
mankind in general.
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But they picked up on that,
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and I think we're seeing
through American exceptionalism
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that sort of a transference
of that troublesome assumption,
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even into somewhat
secular, political landscape.
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Well, to follow that logic back
to where I think it came from,
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you've got the very good
intentions of Irenaeus of Leon
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in the late part
of the 2nd century
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to try to get the scriptures
back from the Gnostics.
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The Gnostics had interpreted
scriptures very, very strict.
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Maybe some of our
viewers don't know
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who the Gnostics were.
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Well, I'll tell you that.
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The Gnostics are the ones
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who figured that that
Jesus left us with knowledge,
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and there's secret
knowledge still coming,
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and that secret
knowledge is the basis
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for the ascent of the
soul back to divine form.
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They were the
hyper spiritualists,
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weren't they?
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Everything became
spiritual rather than real.
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Correct.
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And the point at
which Irenaeus said,
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"We must bring the
scriptures back home
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is when they started arguing
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that the creator, God,"
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you know, they
had this dichotomy
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between
materiality is necessary evil,
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therefore anything with a body
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or anything with
materiality is evil,
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which is way beyond
replayed or ever thought.
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But anyway, the Gnostics
are going that direction,
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so they argue that the bad guy
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in the Old
Testament is the Creator, God,
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and the good guy
in the Old Testament
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is one urging them to
eat the knowledge, so...
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Or it's another variation
on dualism which long existed.
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Sure, sure.
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So then the serpent in
the garden is the good guy,
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and the Creator is the bad guy.
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And Irenaeus says,
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"No, you can't
read scripture that way.
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There's no way that
that's what Moses meant.
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So you have to
come back and have
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only one right
reading of scripture,
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and that right reading is
the reading of the church."
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Now it's a correction
to pull scripture away
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from the Gnostics,
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but then to say whatever
the church teaches is now
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the only thing you can
interpret from scripture
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is bringing the
pendulum way over,
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and it's
starting a dangerous trend
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that says the church resides...
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The truth
resides with the church,
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rather the truth
resides with scripture.
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Well, I was being a
little more particular.
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Remember, Jesus says that
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whatever you bind here on
earth will be banned in heaven
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or loosed in heaven,
and depending what you do.
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But is that meaning that
people that are acting for God
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will act
according to God's will,
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or is that meaning that people
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acting on earth
force God's hand?
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I think that's
really what was intended
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that we don't need to
reference God directly or way,
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you know, and the rulers
don't need to reference God,
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whatever we do is
God's will by definition.
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And so God is now
our puppet, I think,
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and that's not a
good way to approach it.
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And then that's
unfortunately the way
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the sacerdotal
view of salvation.
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We do the right things,
and God must give us salvation.
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You better explain
that word to our viewers.
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Some of them are not
even English speakers.
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Okay, well. Sacerdotal.
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The sacerdotal idea of salvation
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is simply saying that
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when the Holy
Church does holy things,
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then holy salvation happens.
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Its sacerdotal has
to do with holiness.
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And if you have
the understanding
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that if we offer the sacrifice
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of the Eucharist
freshly here now,
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and then we have
everybody eat it,
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we are providing salvation.
00:10:03.93\00:10:06.50
If that equals salvation,
00:10:06.53\00:10:08.77
then the church is
in charge of salvation
00:10:08.80\00:10:11.67
rather than Jesus
Christ in charge of salvation.
00:10:11.71\00:10:14.41
So it seems to me,
we're back to the point.
00:10:14.44\00:10:16.68
Look at your own salvation
with fear and trembling.
00:10:16.71\00:10:19.01
Yes, yes.
00:10:19.05\00:10:20.98
So now you have it that
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if the truth
resides with scripture
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rather than in God's Word,
00:10:26.52\00:10:29.82
then whoever's in
charge of scripture
00:10:29.86\00:10:32.06
is in charge of truth.
00:10:32.09\00:10:33.83
The most of the past 100,
150 years or so in America
00:10:36.83\00:10:42.07
and in England,
the standard Christian,
00:10:42.10\00:10:45.97
the standard
Protestant Christian
00:10:46.01\00:10:47.74
would have in their
library the Bible, of course,
00:10:47.78\00:10:51.78
Pilgrims Progress,
00:10:51.81\00:10:53.21
and John
Milton's magisterial work,
00:10:53.25\00:10:58.82
The Paradise Lost and Paradise
Regained, part two of it.
00:10:58.85\00:11:05.43
That was written shortly
00:11:05.46\00:11:07.53
after a grand experiment in
England with religious rule.
00:11:07.56\00:11:11.73
But when I go, and when I read,
00:11:11.77\00:11:13.67
and you can read
too, Paradise Lost,
00:11:13.70\00:11:16.64
there in grand poetic terms,
00:11:16.67\00:11:18.71
he lays out
God's plan for mankind,
00:11:18.74\00:11:23.35
which didn't seem to go
well for much of the term.
00:11:23.38\00:11:26.11
But as the poet
says at the beginning,
00:11:26.15\00:11:28.18
his aim was to justify
the ways of God to man.
00:11:28.22\00:11:33.46
The ways of men
are hard to justify,
00:11:33.49\00:11:36.56
and the ways of godly
men are often hard to justify
00:11:36.59\00:11:39.96
or at least God intention men
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and false
kingdoms of earth on earth,
00:11:42.13\00:11:44.67
but ultimately,
the ways of God for men
00:11:44.70\00:11:48.00
are for
salvation, for restitution,
00:11:48.04\00:11:50.84
and for ultimate
religious, personal conscience.
00:11:50.87\00:11:56.08
For liberty Insider,
this is Lincoln Steed.
00:11:56.11\00:11:59.01