[00:00:06] Speaker A: Welcome to the Truth Exchange podcast. This is a weekly program with doctor 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 Guillotine, and this is another edition of the director's Bag.
Kyle, from Honolulu, Hawaii, says, I volunteer my son's church youth group, and recently I overheard some of the boys talking about the post war consensus, and that led to all kinds of other things, and I couldn't believe my ears. The next day, your dicta came in and mentioned this briefly and tagged another guy for me to look at. I'm still puzzled. And apparently everything I know is a part of some global scheme. Is this a new uprising of post modernism and history that the right are embracing, or is there some new evidence regarding history that I'm not aware of?
[00:01:10] Speaker B: Kyle, that's a perceptive question. And first of all, thank you for being involved in your son's youth group.
So many people just defer to an institution and kind of forego fathering in that situation, and you're not doing that. And that's a really good thing. Yeah. What's happening is there has been, in the last five to eight years, direct attacks on the political philosophy known as classical liberalism. This political philosophy was animated in many respects by christian principles so that we can accurately say the United States had a christian founding. It wasn't a christian nation, but had a christian founding in the sense that the animating ideas were from many streams of christian development, thinking, theology and political theory. And so part of the attack on classical liberalism is to say that it was actually a trojan horse, that this idea of honoring and valorizing the individual as a free and moral agent is somehow compromised and wrong. And so we're seeing a lot of people, both scholars and frankly, people I would call hacks, that are developing placeholders to say, for example, you'll see this on social media. Well, you're a boomer. Of course you would say that because you're part of the post war consensus. And what they mean by that, it's a placeholder that suggests that after World War Two, somehow in some smoke filled room, a bunch of elites got together and decided to be globalists. And to do that, they decided to we're going to have a sort of pluralism. We are not going to be distinctively this or that or christian, and we're just going to manage everyone and so forth. And so it's a placeholder that is used to demean what we call classical liberalism which is not to be confused with the political left at all, which a lot of people call that liberalism. We really shouldn't. We should call it what it really is, progressivism. And so the post war consensus is really just a rubric that people use to criticize and to dismiss. More than criticize, they just dismiss out of hand anything that stems from a, what we call a liberal social political order. The idea that the state exists, it should be small. It should protect individuals in their enjoyment of their life, of their property, their pursuit of happiness, as the declaration of independence puts it. Meaning that we get the fruit of our labors. That's what that means, and so on and so forth. So it's really designed to undermine kind of where we are now. Are there certain things of some of our globalist friends that we would disagree with? Yes, strongly so. But what we're seeing here is a lot of people are ceasing to think and instead substituting labels of derision and not really thinking about what needs to be happening. So that's really what you're hearing here. It's usually by not very informed folks that are using that as a handle and a club to demean we call the classical liberal order.
[00:04:49] Speaker A: Next up is Joe Sutter. Case from think Institute writes, how would your view of one ism versus two ism jive with Francis Schaeffer's description of false worldviews, presenting two stories, the transcendent upper story being totally disjuncted from and inaccessible to the particular lower story.
[00:05:15] Speaker B: Yeah, so they're not exactly the same. When truth exchange talks about, and Peter Jones has done that often, one ism and two ism. What he's really talking about is a fundamental binary between the creator and the creation, which is predicated, really throughout the scripture, but pinpointed in Romans chapter one. And that's what we're talking about there. What Schaeffer is talking about is a form of dualism, which is not to be confused with binary thinking, but the idea of cutting off any transcendent, knowable truths that are relevant then to our life today.
The philosopher Charles Taylor talked about living in an eminent frame of existence that there is nothing above. And so really, the idea of what Schaeffer's addressing is what we call the cartesian divide, named after the philosopher Descartes, who was a Christian but just mistaken. He's the guy who famously said, I think, therefore I am. And how do you put together then what you think with what you do? He couldn't really do it, and that was a form of dualism that led to Kant distinguishing things with respect to facts and values and so on and so forth, which then produced a gap. And so we just trust the science, trust what's real, and don't trust that, you know, spooky, scary, haunted cosmos stuff, as some people might want to say. But the reality is that we bring these things together because God created all things in heaven and on earth. So Schaefer would be consistent with the fundamental binary, but when he talks about upper story and lower story, he's talking about a different thing. And a popularizer of Schaeffer's view would be in the writings of Nancy Pearcey, for example, a cultural apologist. And she uses that framework quite a bit with respect to that. But it's, again, it's the idea is that we cut off anything, transcendence. So all we have is the imminent frame, and thus it just becomes about power. That's all we're dealing with. We're not talking about truth, goodness and beauty. It's just who can get the most votes or who has the biggest badge, biggest bazooka, biggest billy club.
[00:07:41] Speaker A: Wade from San Francisco, California, writes Doctor Ventrella, I think I heard at one point that you teach or taught law.
Could you do an episode where you talk about just war theory? I would like to know the christian principles or worldview behind it. And doing so, would you tackle the conflict of what Jesus taught in turning the other cheek? Something like a little bit of use at bellum in the morning for our listeners.
[00:08:09] Speaker B: Here you go. The law of war. So it's an interesting concept. Some people think out of the box that, look, war is just simply violence unleashed. It's like in the film gladiator, when the guy says, unleash hell, those sorts of things. And yet, in the christian tradition, there was this development of something called just war theory. That is to say that just as Frederick Bastiat said, just as an individual has a right to protect himself and his loved ones, so to a community that's bonded together can defend themselves as well. And so we have this development of just war theory that has principles. Such as?
Principles such as, it has to be a defensive war.
It has to be a just cause.
You have to minimize collateral damages. Not that innocence might suffer casualties, but you don't argue innocence and you have to use proportionality and those sorts of things. This largely comes from the mind of the great Augustine.
And, you know, it's been debated through the ages, but the idea is that in a fallen world, there is going to be aggression and that aggression needs to be stopped. Now, I agree with Harold OJ Brown, who says that first striking can be a form of defensive just war, a first strike. You don't have to like, get punched in the face in order to defend yourself. By the same token, you don't have to let nuclear missiles hit and annihilate half your population before you can take them out, before they're launched, that sort of thing. So those are kind of the big parameters where we see disagreement among christians, and it's particularly in a catholic protestant divide. Many of the catholic natural law thinkers since World War Two have condemned categorically the use of nuclear weapons because they tend to have indiscriminate destruction. While you may not target innocents or what have you, the innocent people, so to speak, the civilians, but it will affect them because of the effects of radiation and so on and so forth.
I disagree with that, but it's probably too long of a discussion to get into it here. But I think I could make an argument at least that's plausible, suggesting that it's not the weapon itself, it's the use of the weapon that matters in that. No weapon.
It depends on how it's employed, not what it is. So I think that there's some reasons for that. Now, I may be too much of a hawk for some people with respect to that, but having competed in martial arts for ten years, you know, I think there's a good use of aggression and force in a proper context. So that's kind of the basis of it. He also had put there a question there with respect to turning the other cheek. Now, our anabaptist brothers and sisters would say that that's exactly the ethic we should use, that you must be completely passive. You may never defend person or property, essentially, because you need to turn the other cheek.
I believe that the teaching there, Jesus is talking about, do not seek personal vengeance, do not sit there and rise up and let your anger control you and so forth. You know, it's okay to be insulted, it's okay to be slapped in the face and that sort of thing. Turn your other cheek. In other words, I am not going to stand up just for myself as a matter of ego or that sort of thing. But it's quite another thing. The law of God makes very clear that the defense of family and property and things is well within the law of God with respect to those things. Remember, God created all things, and we can't have people derogate that, particularly if they're going to violate it. In terms of you shall not steal the 8th Commandment. So there's a whole lot of stuff in that. It's a really good question. And maybe we can maybe bring in some of our scholars or something like that and have a podcast dedicated to it. I mean, yes, I'm a trained lawyer, and yes, I teach law, so I'd be glad to do it. In fact, we talked about, I taught in Europe this summer, and one of the things we talked about was just war theory. There's actually international law on the law of war, and that deals with things like particularized weapons, how to treat POWs and all those sorts of things. The confusion arises, and this happened under the Obama administration, where it began to require, why are treating enemy combatants as if the Constitution of the United States applied to them as being criminals? Those are two separate things. Being an accused criminal triggers a lot of protections, starting with Magna Carta and then all the way through the United States Constitution. Being an enemy combatant is completely dissimilar, and that's a category mistake that the Obama administration made. And so I would push back very hard on treating enemy combatants as accused criminals. It's very different than that.
[00:13:28] Speaker A: This has been the Truth Exchange podcast, the unique program where we have conversations about worldview all through the lens of one ism and two ism. I'm your host, Joshua Guillo. Be sure to join us next week for another edition of the Truth Exchange podcast. For more weekly resources from Truth Exchange, please join
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