Episode Transcript
[00:00:03] Speaker A: Good morning, everyone. I'm Dr. Jeffrey Ventrella. I have the privilege of being the executive director of Truth Exchange as well as chair of the board. Since 1992, Dr. Jones and Truth Exchange have been documenting the rise of really neo pagan spirituality in what many considered Christian America.
God has called us, has called Truth Exchange to strengthen the church, to understand and to respond to these crucial issues. And in doing so, to equip a cohort of courageous young Christians to share the gospel of Jesus Christ. To share it, though, with a worldview context that addresses the mindset of many young people today, whether that's manifestation or whether that's yoga or wellness or any of the things that are challenging them where they live today. And now we have an opportunity for you, our faithful listeners and readers. This opportunity through Tooth Exchange, is to inform the public, equip the church and protect the future. Please help us by praying for us and giving us your treasure. Whether that's a one time special gift or sign up to be a monthly contributor. We are seeking to raise $100,000 by the end of our fiscal year, which is June 30th of this year.
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[00:02:30] Speaker B: Welcome to the Truth Exchange podcast. This is a weekly program with Dr. Jeffrey J. Ventrella where he answers questions from subscribers around the globe, answering questions about worldview, cultural apologetics and other miscellaneous items. I'm your host, Joshua Gilo, and this is another edition of the Director's Bag.
Let's see.
[00:02:55] Speaker A: Call down the fire.
[00:02:56] Speaker B: Call down the fire. Just don't offer strange fire.
[00:03:00] Speaker A: Well, you know, I'm dealing with Paula White this week in the Dicta, so.
[00:03:04] Speaker B: Boy, that's gonna be good. Can. Well, can you give us a little teaser on that?
[00:03:09] Speaker A: I'm gonna address how to think Christianly about the a newly established Office of Faith. Should we be cheerleaders for this. Should we be detractors from this? And I'm basically going to say this is a big yawn with two cheers and you'll just have to stay tuned and read the dicta to see, I think how we should think Christianly about the Office of Faith and its nominated leader, Paula White.
[00:03:38] Speaker B: Okay, for those who are not familiar with Paula White, could you share a little bit of background? Who is she? What's her her political affiliation and experience, if any?
[00:03:50] Speaker A: Well, it's interesting. Paula White has no formal education past high school, certainly no theological education.
And she has been in a variety of capacities being called a pastor and leading a variety of largely in the Word of Faith movement, non affiliated sorts of things and has been platformed in sort of that sort of ideas there. She got close to President elect Trump in 2015, 2016 and has been part of that circle, part of the prayer team or something along those lines.
[00:04:32] Speaker B: Yeah, this past week the dicta was on. It's not profiting from creation worship and sexual obsession. Mandy from Barlesville, Oklahoma writes, oh, that was disgusting. And I appreciate the author's note and warning. I'm a stay at home mom and homeschool my kids. I have three boys and known as a mob, which is to say a mother of boys.
[00:04:59] Speaker A: My wife term actually mothers of boys, the mom.
[00:05:02] Speaker B: Okay, okay.
[00:05:04] Speaker A: When we had four boys.
[00:05:07] Speaker B: And she says, I worry about the dangers of the Internet and wonder if you would share some Christian wisdom on how to break in children on using the Internet without being overly protective.
Is this one of those things where I'm going to have to get used to the idea that they're going to make some serious mistakes along the way via pornography? I think I recall hearing you and Josh discuss how you have four sons. How did you do it? How would you do it now?
[00:05:38] Speaker A: Yeah, that's a really insightful question. Really appreciate you asking about that. One of the best things you can do is to do what you're doing is to mother your children in the ways of the Lord. So thank you for doing that. A couple of thoughts. One, the Internet is not per se dangerous. It's the use of the Internet that can be deeply problematic. And guess what? We can control the use of the Internet. But let's also remember that the dangers that are fueled by impure images, including pornography, really begin in the heart. And so there had been problems with lust ever since the fall of man. We see covetousness and we see all these other animating desires that are really problematic. So simply cutting off may reduce some aspects of it, but there's still the sinful heart. And that sinful heart is prone to that sort of thing. However, we do need to moderate the use of. To monitor it, both monitor it and to moderate it. My wife works in a large Christian school and she says, and she works with pre K students and she says she can tell infallibly which parents read to their children, as opposed to which simply turn on a screen, a glowing rectangle of some sort, whether that's television and iPad and iPhone. And I think spending that time relationally, not transactionally with your children, reading to them, helping them understand and develop their moral imagination with good literature and sounds and language and all those sorts of things is going to prove far more, no pun intended, prophylactic to their spiritual and sexual formation than just saying no. And so, yes, we have to monitor it, yes, we have to moderate the use of it, but we need to fill that moderation with better content. And I think that by doing that, there's going to be a real way there. And I don't think we should simply settle for, well, you know, boys are going to do bad things. Well, not necessarily they're going to sin, but they may not get captivated or enslaved by those particular sins. Let's not lose hope in the power of, of the resurrected and ascended Savior and make that the standard, not the world's the standard. But thank you for that question. It is an ongoing battle. And by the way, that doesn't stop when they're 18, 25, 55 and so on.
We, we have this body of flesh until we're ultimately resurrected.
[00:08:33] Speaker B: Excellent. Thank you, Mandy, for that question. We have had a number of ongoing questions over the past year and I've kind of been gathering them up for the right moment. And we've had some followers of Truth Exchange over the years who have asked this question of Truth Exchange's stance on the millennium. What is the eschatological or end times view of Truth Exchange? And then another question that has been coming up is, what is Dr. Jones's or Dr. Ventrella's view on theonomy? Are they theonomists? One writer asked the question, I thought that Dr. Ventrell was a theonomist, at least in 2017, and he would be interested to know if he's changed his perspective, especially in light of Dr. Ventrell. You've been writing about the whole Christian nationalist movement and pushing against some of the sadism of the overreach of government.
[00:09:31] Speaker A: Yeah, no, I appreciate the question. So Truth Exchange does not have a eschatological litmus test.
That's just never been the, the situation. And people on the staff over the years have had various, all orthodox opinions. And the orthodox opinions would be, of course, that Christ bodily resurrected and Christ will bodily return to judge the living and the dead. There'll be a general resurrection and one to everlasting life embodied and one to everlasting punishment embodied as well.
I don't know if I should be flattered or just people are just being curious. I, I have held to a kind of a traditional post millennial view of eschatology for, for decades.
For millennia. Should I say that the millennium, my millennial view I've held for millennia? No, that's not true. But I have held it for many, many decades. I'm going back to the 1980s is when I did a lot of work in that area. And I was persuaded by people like John Owen and Benjamin Breckenridge Warfield and a lot of the people who came out of that great missionary movement, David Livingston and so on and so forth. And to me, the notion of the victory in Jesus is not just a song, it is a truth. And the gospel is more powerful. The light dissipates the darkness. And in fact, Christ is seated at the right hand of the Father, doing what? Subduing his enemies. And that is certainly in my view, a progression that occurs. And I think that is the, the very nature of what it means to be a new creature in Christ, beginning with Christ's resurrection. But then he regenerates our hearts and then we live in accordance with that. And I believe that ultimately Satan and his minions can only, only rebel against something that's dominant. And what's dominant is going to be, in my view, a very much, how can I say, this Christian influenced set of cultures. And he rebels against that. But if it were a absolute pagan dark culture, there'd be no rebellion, there'd be no contrast. And so the rebellion of Satan is against largely a evangelized and Christianized in that sense set of cultures. Not perfect, not a golden age.
But yeah, that's just kind of my view with respect to those things.
[00:12:08] Speaker B: Okay. And the issue of theonomy.
[00:12:10] Speaker A: Yeah, theonomies may be familiar with some. It's largely a word that has caused a lot of heartburn. The word itself just means God's law. And so we see people like the former pontiff John Paul II saying that you must either follow men or you must follow God. And he used the word theonomy and veritas Splendid. Or one of the encyclicals. My, my Latin's not very good. I'm not recalling it directly, but something he used that same.
We also see someone like Christian philosopher and apologist Cornelius Van Til, in speaking of the myth of neutrality, saying they're only one alternative to theonomy is autonomy. In other words, either mankind is autonomous, a self law, or he lives under Christ's rule, Theos, God's rule or God's law. So in that sense those are pretty much unconventional categories. The trouble is there was a lot of dust ups in a cul de sac of reformational thinking where a lot of heat was generated about to what extent is there continuity between the Old Testament, New Testament, particularly the idiosyncratic social norms for covenanted Israel. And so there's a big debate there how much continuity, particularly with respect to the penal sanctions of the Old Covenant to those transfer on essentially the argument has to be the normativity of God's moral order and law, creational norms and so on, so forth, the rubrics of the Ten Commandments. And yet that we must recognize a distinction between the uniqueness of a covenanted nation Israel and then post that the destruction of the temple and all that sort of stuff, what it means for the Christian era. How is it that the church then takes that the church is universalizing, the barriers have been broken down, so on, so forth. We are Jew and Greek worshiping together.
Those are things that are very different from the ethnic and ritualistic segregation that occurred because of covenanted Israel. And so we know that the Westminster standards recognize this. In fact the, the categorization of laws. Aquinas recognized the same categories that John Calvin did. And then the Westminster standards did the same thing. They talked about the so called moral law. I say so called because all of God's law has to be moral by definition. But basically talking about general precepts, the moral law, the judicial laws, the idea being those which were administered particularly in civic Israel. And then of course we have the ceremonial laws or the laws that prefigured redemption, dealing with sacrifices of bulls and goats and doves and all that sort of stuff. Obviously. And the confession even goes further. Those who are Presbyterian recognize that some are abrogated, some are expunged, expired.
The judicial laws, I believe are expired.
Ceremonial laws are abrogated. Why? Because Christ is the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world. So I would land and I have always landed on the area of the normativity of creational norms, the normativity of the core, or what the confession calls in 19.4, the general equity of the law.
What does that mean? Well, we are to protect against, you know, put railings on our houses. Well, the general equity of that is you ought to make your, your habitat that you own your property safe for those who are visiting. We should make a distinction between murder and say, negligent manslaughter. This is the old the ax head falling off the axe and unintentionally striking someone. The general equity is there's culpability for negligent homicide, but that's different from intentional first degree murder, so on and so forth. We've got to work that out. But just to take a, you know, photocopy machine and copy the law of the Covenant Exodus 21:23 and say that's the law for our society and the Constitution, that's, that's, frankly, how can I put it? That's silly and ignorant and by the way, unworkable and certainly not intended by Christ.
[00:17:04] Speaker B: This concludes a recording of the Director's Bag. For more resources from Truth Exchange, please visit us online at www.truthexchange.com. you can follow us on X as well as Facebook for more updates and content related to Truth Exchange. Be sure to join us next week for more questions from the Director's Bag. I'm your host, Joshua Gilo, and this is the Truth Exchange podcast.
