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This is Undaunted Life of Man's Podcast.
0:50
I'm your host Kyle Thompson.
0:52
Let's get into it.
0:53
All right, guys.
0:53
Today I've got a special guest on the podcast.
0:55
His name is Dr. Joe Boot.
0:57
So Dr. Joe Boot is a Christian thinker, cultural apologist and philosopher and also the founder
1:01
of the Ezra Institute for Contemporary Christianity and founding pastor of Westminster Chapel
1:06
in Toronto, where he currently resides.
1:08
So Joe is originally from Great Britain and he has worked in the fields of Christian apologetics
1:12
and worldview education and church leadership for over 20 years, both here in North America
1:17
and across the pond.
1:18
He's done a lot of speaking engagements over his career.
1:20
A lot of debates, he actually regularly addresses pastors and Christian leaders as well as academic,
1:25
medical, legal and political professionals, as he does these public debates leading with
1:31
leading atheist thinkers and philosophers in Canada and the United States.
1:34
He really, really engages with a lot of things about the Christian worldview on a regular basis.
1:38
He's the author of a lot of different books, including his new book, which we'll be spending
1:42
a lot of the time during this interview talking about and that is Ruler of Kings.
1:46
So the thing about this interview is we can win in a lot of different directions.
1:50
We had somewhat limited time.
1:51
We're going to take care of that later in the future.
1:52
We're going to have him on to talk about some other things.
1:54
He deals with so many things in the world of theology and philosophy and Christian apologetics,
1:59
but the overwhelming majority of our time today was spent on the role between essentially
2:03
the government and the church or the government and God.
2:07
And so that is what the mainstay and the main focus of his book, Ruler of Kings is,
2:11
because guys in this world that we live in right now with COVID, we're going into three years now
2:15
of this COVID stuff and the overreach and tyrannical overreach really have a lot of governments around
2:20
the country. We see these internment camps essentially in Australia.
2:23
We've seen some of the crazy lockdown issues that they're having in Europe.
2:26
All the craziness going on in Canada and even here in the United States, we're liberty filled
2:29
people and we want to push back and all those different things.
2:32
And yet we've rolled over and played dead in a lot of different areas of our life here.
2:36
And he wants to speak directly to that.
2:38
He's going to do things that a lot of pastors are too scared to do.
2:41
A lot of pastors are like, yeah, sure, local government, tell me when we can open our church
2:45
doors, tell me whether or not we can have small group meetings and prayer meetings.
2:48
Tell me whether or not we can sing praises to the creator God of the universe, right?
2:53
But he's really speaking to these churches and speaking to these people to give them the ability
2:57
to push back darkness. I mean, again, here at Undaunted Life, we equipment to push back darkness.
3:01
And you're going to be able to do that with some of the things that Dr. Joe Boot says.
3:04
So guys, I'm not going to keep him from you any longer. So without further ado, let's get into it.
3:08
Dr. Joe Boot, welcome to Undaunted Life, a man's podcast.
3:12
Great to be here. Thanks for having me, Carl.
3:14
I'm so happy to have somebody with your intellect and your skill set on this show.
3:18
We're so thankful to John Cooper for hooking this up, but in means as a means of introduction.
3:23
So for guys that don't know who you are, and they're not familiar with your work,
3:25
you are a pastor and a Christian apologist in Canada, but you weren't always those things,
3:30
and you didn't always live in Canada. So if you could just give us a quick version
3:33
about how you ended up being a pastor and a Christian apologist, and also how you ended up in Canada.
3:38
Sure. So very quickly, I actually began my Christian ministry in music, believe it or not.
3:45
I was in a Christian rock band called The Boot Brothers. It was myself and my brothers.
3:51
And into my early 20s, that's what we were doing. And for a few years, we did that full time.
3:57
Now, was that on iTunes? Can we get this?
3:59
No, it's too old. I'm too old now.
4:01
Okay. All right.
4:02
Before any of that. Okay.
4:04
So, but I would often speak, give a sort of an evangelistic apologetic message
4:11
after our gigs in hotels and pubs and prisons and music festivals and whatever.
4:17
And eventually it got to the point where I was looking forward to the speaking more than I was
4:22
the playing. So that's how my actual ministry began after seminary. I was in music for a while,
4:26
and then was the full time evangelist in England for an organization called Salt Mine Trust.
4:32
And then I was in pastoral ministry in London, England for about three years before I joined
4:39
an apologetics ministry, an international apologetics ministry based out of Oxford.
4:45
I was asked at that juncture after a couple of years there whether I would consider launching
4:50
an apologetics ministry office in Canada. And I came and did that. My wife and I came and moved
4:57
to Canada did that for five years. And after five years, I stepped out of that particular ministry,
5:02
and I planted Westminster Chapel in downtown Toronto, the church, and formed the Ezra Institute
5:09
for Contemporary Christianity, which is our cultural apologetics Christian philosophy
5:13
worldview training organization that is what I focus my time on now. So I'm the founding
5:19
pastor of Westminster. I led that church for 10 years. I'm now the founding pastor at large.
5:24
I'm still on the elders board. I preach periodically, but I handed over the leadership of the church
5:29
about two and a half, three years ago to a colleague that I was training there for many years.
5:35
And now my time is focused almost exclusively on the Ezra Institute, where we do writing,
5:43
scholarship speaking, cultural apologetics, Christian philosophy work.
5:47
That's it's a fantastic resource for a lot of folks. I've used it quite a bit myself.
5:51
The link is in the show notes for you guys to go and check that out. Now, I'm going to spend
5:55
most of our time today, Joe, really focusing on your new book, which we'll get to. But I did have
5:59
one question for you from a book that's that's done well that I've seen in a lot of different
6:03
circles. And that's the mission of God, a manifesto of hope for society back from 2016, I believe.
6:08
But in the introduction of this book, you pose the question, which is, what is the relationship
6:13
between faith and public morality and policy? Okay, not just faith and morality, not just faith
6:19
and policy, but public morality and policy. So we can't do much, but scratch the surface on that
6:25
subject. But how would you answer that question? Well, I think the issue that it speaks to is that
6:31
for a variety of reasons, over time, there's been a radical separation of our faith or we might call
6:38
religion and public life. And that has led to a kind of radical disjunction in people's minds that
6:46
faith has to do with my personal walk with God, my personal ethical behavior, perhaps my marriage,
6:53
my personal devotions, my life of the church. But it doesn't have anything specific to do with law,
6:59
politics, education, the arts meet all of those things. And so what I'm arguing in mission of
7:05
God fundamentally is that the we've we've we've steadily surrendered the keynote of the Bible,
7:12
which is the kingdom of God, which encompasses much more than my personal life and the life of
7:17
the institutional church, it's for all of life, every aspect of life, whether you're a butcher,
7:22
a baker or a candlestick maker, it touches every area and every sphere of life. And so that at the
7:29
root of all of public life and public morality and policy are religious assumptions, there is no
7:35
neutral space in any area of life. There's no neutral law, there's no neutral politics,
7:40
there's no neutral education, there is a religious foundation for all of it. So my answer is that
7:45
we have to recover a scriptural vision of the kingdom of God and the law of God in all of scripture
7:55
for public life. And that's the fundamental message of my book, The Mission of God, is that we need a
8:01
wholesale recovery of a biblical vision of the kingdom of God that touches every area of life
8:07
and break out of this two story mentality. If you imagine a double deck of bus with a top
8:12
upper story and a lower story, and we've kind of said to ourselves, well, faith is in the upper
8:17
story and that spirituality, personal devotions, church and Bible study, and then culture and the
8:23
rest of the stuff that really matters in history and in life, that's all on the lower story, that's
8:28
secular, and that we don't need the Bible, we don't need scripture, we don't need Christ and His
8:33
lordship in the lower story, just the upper story. We have to shatter that false dichotomy,
8:38
that false duality, and recognize the relevance of the word of God and the kingdom of God for every
8:44
area of life. That's the message of mission of God. Well, and the great thing about The Mission
8:48
of God and a lot of things that you just brought up there, Joe, that really dovetails very nicely
8:52
into ruler of kings and into the world that we're currently trying to traverse right now. I mean,
8:57
you're in Canada, I'm sure you still have a lot of work that you do across the pond as well. But in
9:01
the introduction of your new book, which again, guys, that'll be in the show, no, you should grab
9:04
it, it's a very short book, but it's dense. I mean, it's like, you know, a really thick chili that
9:09
book is, but in the introduction, you say that you want to make sense of three issues related to the
9:14
realm of politics and civil government. So those are number one, the phenomenon of intellectualism
9:19
and the cult of the expert. The second is globalism and utopianism. And the third is fact of authority.
9:25
So I do want to take those kind of one by one and kind of look at them. So the first thing is
9:30
the phenomenon of intellectualism and the cult of the experts. So in this section,
9:34
you do a deep dive into what you call and this is actually a quote, the human tendency to shift
9:38
great decision making power on intellectuals in the belief that expertise in one isolated area
9:44
equips one to lead an order in a broader area, unquote. And for us, we've seen that a lot with
9:51
our public health experts, people telling us that they know what's best for us and for our children,
9:55
those types of things. So give us an idea about that first section about this phenomenon of
9:59
intellectualism and how that leads to the cult of the expert. Sure. So really part of the Western
10:06
tradition, since the, you know, the influence that the basically Kyle, the ancient Greeks had on us.
10:14
But you see it in the Bible too. You see it very simply in in some of the amazing stories of
10:21
scripture, like the story of the Daniel Shadrach, Meshach and Abedigo, and they're being dragged
10:26
off into exile and schooled in a school for a Babylonian elite, so that they could be advisors
10:34
in the king's court. You see it in Egypt. You see it even when you think about the magi that came to
10:40
see Jesus. This is a kind of this has been something that has throughout human history has been a
10:46
peculiar phenomenon is that rulers and leaders and governments have sought out particular kinds of
10:51
experts. Sometimes they were called satraps or magicians or magi or advisors or whatever
10:57
to counsel government to advise government. Now, of course, from a Christian standpoint,
11:05
we recognize that it's actually important that our elected officials receive decent guidance,
11:15
decent advice so that they're not isolated and alone. But the more recent modern phenomenon that
11:22
we really inherited through the Western tradition, but as our culture is steadily
11:28
decrystionized has become a significant problem, is that the in many respects in the West,
11:35
the people that we used to go to for advice about life generally for life counsel were pastors.
11:42
It was priests. It was the church when you really needed counsel and advice about your life, about
11:47
your family, about your plans, about your struggles, about your problems. It was the pastor. It was
11:55
the priest that you went to. But as we've secularized a new beginning, perhaps with figures like Jean
12:02
Chacruso, at the beginnings of the French Revolution, we've seen this development of a new intellectual
12:10
class in the West. And by intellectual, I don't mean somebody who's smarter than everybody else.
12:16
I mean, somebody whose work product is ideas. I mean, you have listeners who are
12:22
engineers, firefighters, police officers, truck drivers, manufacturers, welders, whatever.
12:30
And we all have a different product from our work. The intellectual is somebody who is characterized
12:36
by ideas being their work product. And this has taken on in our own era, especially over the
12:44
since World War II, a new kind of sort of cultic religious expression where
12:52
cadres of elites, of intellectual elites, have become the new counselors, the new advisors,
13:00
the new priesthood within our society. And as you said, it's been on, frankly, almost terrifying
13:07
display the last two years. And a sort of technocratic elite have taken the place of the church and
13:18
also taken the place of other important influences, like the influence of the family in our lives,
13:26
to almost pretend to a kind of authority to aggregate to themselves a kind of authority that
13:33
really only belongs to the word of God. And to those that seek to guide us in terms of the scriptures,
13:42
take of drawn an authority to themselves to say, we have a unique anointing, and I would use that
13:50
word, a unique anointing, not just to advise, but to tell people how they ought to live.
14:01
And very often, those rules, the way that people ought to live, society ought to live,
14:08
doesn't apply to them. And that makes them this kind of an elite, because very often the rules
14:15
don't apply to them. These are rules, these are ideas that should apply to everybody else,
14:22
but don't necessarily apply to them. And in the book, I try and give numerous examples,
14:27
going back to the French Revolution, revolution, and even to showing the kind of things in pagan
14:33
contexts in scripture, right through to more, much more modern examples in the 20th century.
14:39
And then talking about how that has impacted our daily lives, right through to the present,
14:44
where modellers, computer modellers, and virologists, and epidemiologists with a very, very narrow
14:50
area of expertise, on which we do well to say, okay, what does the virologists say about virology?
14:57
But I don't really care what they have to say about my going to church, or coming to the communion
15:03
table, or how I'm going to lead my family, or how I'm going to conduct my work and my business.
15:09
They can say what they want about virology, and I will take that under advisement.
15:14
But there's been this perception now, and it's been going on for a long time, and it's not just
15:20
this issue of the recent COVID response, but it's in multiple areas now where we're being told,
15:27
take, for example, the area of human sexuality. Some bizarre collection of radical intellectuals
15:34
tell us that there are numerous genders and sex, biological sex is a fiction, and now we have to
15:40
teach our children that, and educate in terms of that, and even reorder our entire lives around that.
15:46
And so this cult of the expert, this new secular priesthood that claims to speak with an anointing
15:53
and with an authority, is something that I pick up in the book, and is something that as Christians
15:58
we have to reject. When you do give a lot of great examples, I kind of elucidate it out a
16:02
little bit further, but also something in which we don't have time to really talk about, because
16:06
we need to get into the rest of the parts of the book. It's interesting how they can always
16:09
move the target, right? So there's a quote I do in a read, it says, "When the lives, education,
16:14
and socioeconomic future of children, families, and society are destroyed by the application of
16:19
these intellectuals as near unintelligible word games, the blame is placed on societal taboos,
16:25
the patriarchal family, traditional institutions, structural inequality, and systemic racism for
16:30
things not working out well, which has got to be super convenient, Joe. Whenever you're wrong,
16:35
and you've made the wrong call, how you can just easily be like, oh, no, no, no, it's that person,
16:39
or no, no, no, we need to debate this thing. It's like, hey, look at this shiny thing over here,
16:43
you know, here recently in the United States, we did the anniversary of January 6th, so that we
16:47
don't have to worry about the jobs report, that we don't have to worry about COVID cases,
16:50
we don't have to worry about this. It's look at this shiny thing over here, that if, you know,
16:54
things were flipped, we wouldn't even be talking about it. But that section leads into the second
16:58
section, Joe, which is globalism and utopianism. So I want to read a quick quote from this,
17:03
because I think it sums up a little bit of the section. When developing a distinctly Christian
17:07
political vision, it is imperative that Christians understand the difference between utopianism
17:12
and the kingdom of God, lest they be found advancing the cause of other gods and another faith.
17:17
And so I've been taught, Joe, that globalism is a positive thing. It's a positive word in that
17:24
we should be striving for utopia, right? But utopianism, ISM, theism, and the kingdom of God,
17:30
those are like oil and water. So kind of help explain that to our listeners here. Yeah. So it's
17:37
important to distinguish between globalism, as you've mentioned there, with that suffix, ISM,
17:44
on the end, which tends to suggest to us, hang on, some things being overly exaggerated here,
17:49
and globalization. So, or we might call internationalization. So most of us to a large
17:58
degree have benefited from a positive internationalism or globalization. Globalization involves things
18:05
like information technology, communications ability. For example, what we're doing today,
18:11
you in the States, me and Canada, is part of the reality of globalization, the way we're able to
18:18
interact faster and more effectively, global trade, international relations, global interaction
18:26
between independent nation states. We could say those are positive things. There's a kind of
18:31
positive internationalization where we get to communicate with one another, trade with one another,
18:37
and so on. So it's not an attack on international relations and the positive things. Of course,
18:44
many negative things come with globalization as well. For example, the export of international
18:50
terror, the problem of the international sexual slave trade and so on. So there's all kinds of
18:56
negatives that have to be monitored too. But in general, we can say that we've benefited from
19:01
internationalization in the modern world. The problem is not globalization, but globalism,
19:08
and that is essentially the modern take, the most recent take on utopianism. And utopia,
19:16
probably a term coined by Sir Thomas Moore, his book, Utopia, which was a sort of communist
19:23
manifesto of sorts. It means no place, quite literally. But utopia is an idea, of course, goes
19:32
back again to, well, I would argue in the Bible, it goes right back to Genesis chapter 11 and the
19:39
Tower of Babel and the attempt to build a single world order, an idolatrous world order in rebellion
19:47
against God. And this idea of utopianism has seen multiple different incarnations. I mean,
19:54
the famous Greek philosophers like Plato and Aristotle wrote their utopias, their republics,
20:00
their ideas of again, a collectivist communist order led by who? A set of elites, philosopher
20:10
kings who are going to tell the rest of us how to live, not surrendered to God, because of course,
20:15
if you don't have God and his word and those who preach God's word, you need a kind of
20:22
substitute priestly class. And that's the secular intellectuals. So these utopian schemes have always
20:28
come from the thinking of these intellectual elites. And globalism is the latest expression
20:36
of utopianism. And what it really means, what it really says is that nation states are bad. You
20:45
know, America has a independent sovereign nation state going its own way, establishing its own laws,
20:54
governing its own people is bad. What we need is a global order where borders are broken down,
21:06
where we have an international law that governs everybody, where we can export an
21:13
equalitarian egalitarian view of reality, where distinctions are being broken down,
21:18
where unity is the ideal and is the idea that the basic idea. And there is a kind of world
21:26
empire, a global humanistic empire led by man's reason, and established and dictated to by
21:37
a group of global intellectual elites, who will tell humanity how to live, what is the best way to
21:44
live, and exert growing and increasing controls over people's lives. The last two years have been a
21:51
big expression of that. You may have come across the book I mentioned in my book, Ruler of Kings,
21:57
I mentioned the interesting expression of this in as it's manifest in international bodies and
22:02
globalist organizations like the World Economic Forum, the founder of that Klaus Schwab, he looks
22:08
a bit like a Bond villain. He wrote the book COVID-19 The Great Reset, which I read in some of my
22:18
preparations for this book, and it parrots this same message. And that's in radical contrast
22:25
to what the Bible says about the Kingdom of God, which you may want to comment on or ask me about.
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23:00
Well, I think that the important thing about that is it's how all these things coalesce
23:05
together because this is not an easy subject to talk about in terms of, you know, keeping it very,
23:10
very short, but because there's so many different tendrils that come off of it. And like I've
23:14
mentioned in your very, very short book, you talk about all these different things that are happening
23:18
now, but how they're related to history. And it reminds me of times whenever I talk to men in my
23:23
community that are angry about what's going on at their school boards, right? Because of critical
23:26
race theory. And I'm like, okay, what is critical theory? They have no idea. Okay, what is the
23:31
Frankfurt school? No idea. Hey, what is Marxism? They have no idea. They have no idea who influenced
23:36
Carl Marx. And yet they're just so outraged and angry. And it's a problem of definition for them.
23:40
It's hard for them to define their enemy. So it's hard for them to fight them. But I really think
23:45
everything kind of comes together in the last section of your book, Joe, where you talk about
23:48
the fact of authority, because this is this is where the rubber meets the road. This is where
23:52
we really start, you know, kind of coming out of the ethereal and getting to what's really at the
23:55
core of everything. And there's a major through point in that section. And guys, just again,
24:00
we're barely scratching the surface here. You've got to get this book and read it for yourself.
24:03
The major through point, though, in this section is something that you call sphere sovereignty.
24:07
Okay, and I was not familiar with that phrase before. So what is sphere sovereignty? And I
24:12
guess why is that important to this overall discussion? Yeah. So it relates actually back to
24:18
the second point that you raised, Carl, about globalism is that at the heart of the Christian
24:24
response, which is the kingdom of God. So we could say that in many respects, utopianism or
24:30
globalism is a kind of logical necessity for the unbeliever, because they don't have the kingdom
24:35
of God. They don't know the lordship of Christ. So they need a replacement substitute kingdom.
24:41
These ideas are essentially inescapable. And utopianism apes it copies the biblical idea
24:51
of the kingdom of God. And it tries to secularize it. And actually, that's what Marxism is.
24:55
That's what these collectivist utopian schemes are. There are attempts to bring about unity among
25:00
people without God. They're an attempt to build a kingdom and a, in a certain sense, a universal
25:10
empire, but without recognition of the kingdom of God and the lordship of Jesus Christ and his
25:16
salvation. So the scriptural response is that man cannot, under his own power, save himself,
25:24
which is what utopianism essentially means. Man must organize his own planetary salvation.
25:30
No, only Jesus Christ is Savior and Lord. And he is establishing his universal empire,
25:36
his universal kingdom. We're told that in Philippians two, every knee shall bow, every tongue will
25:40
confess that Jesus Christ is Lord to the glory of God the Father. Revelation 1, 5, from where I get
25:46
the title of my book, he is the ruler of the kings of the earth. This is who Jesus Christ really is.
25:53
So there is only one sovereign potentate. That's the Lord Jesus Christ. And because he is God
25:59
and man, he has the right and the authority, unlike the cadre of self-annointed experts,
26:07
he alone, as both God and man, has the right to be the king of kings and the Lord of lords,
26:12
and to tell us how we should live and to establish his rule and his kingdom and his reign.
26:17
Now, the root of that idea in the Bible is the principle of sphere sovereignty.
26:21
And it basically, sphere sovereignty simply says, Jesus Christ is Lord and King over every single
26:28
area of life. That's the first most fundamental principle. And he governs all of these spheres
26:34
of life in terms of his law word. That's the fundamental basis and principle of sphere sovereignty.
26:40
And it recognizes that God has established and separated different areas of authority,
26:48
what we might call different jurisdictions or spheres of authority in creation. We see three
26:55
very obvious ones in scripture. The first is the family, which is a pre-political institution.
27:02
It's there before the state and before the church. The second is the state. We can see the beginnings
27:09
of that in Genesis nine after the flood, God establishing organized institutional human authority.
27:15
And the third is the life of the church. We see those distinct spheres. And actually,
27:19
even in the Old Testament, Kyle, we see that God insisted on the separation of kingship or the state
27:26
and the priesthood because Saul lost his kingdom for his presumption to act as a priest and offer
27:33
the sacrifices. We see that in the life of Aziah as well. There are several times where we see
27:39
the rebuke of kings for their attempts to either use up the family or the church, whether the Old
27:48
Testament church or the New Testament church. So these spheres of authority are governed in
27:54
terms of God's word, in terms of God's law, in terms of God's purpose. And they have their own
27:59
distinct law with respect to them. So the family and the state and the church are not governed in
28:04
the same way. And if you actually destroy the distinctions between family church and state,
28:11
if the family encroaches on the life of the state and of the church, you have a mafia.
28:16
If the church tries to control the state and the family, you have an ecclesiocracy, which was
28:23
expressed to some degree in the medieval era. And of course, if the state tries to control
28:28
and usurp the authority of family and church, you have stateism, and that is totalitarianism.
28:36
And that, of course, is what I address in my book. The sphere sovereignty is the Christian
28:40
principle that protects us from a totalitarianism, which we saw on terrifying display in the 20th
28:46
century, in the Soviet Union and in Nazi Germany. And we're seeing it increasingly on display again
28:52
here in the West. Totalitarianism essentially means Kyle, that one institution, in this case,
28:59
the state, tries to treat all the other spheres of life as lesser parts of itself. They try to
29:06
treat it in parts to whole fashion. And so it tries to steadily make the individual stand naked
29:13
before the state as merely a, essentially, a number, as purely a component, a part of the state,
29:23
without any free mediating institutions like the family and the church and our vocations,
29:29
which also govern us. And that is the great threat of our era, which I deal with in the book,
29:34
and sphere sovereignty is the scriptural kingdom principle that says, no, Christ is Lord over the
29:39
family, the church and the state, and they must be restricted and delimited to their particular
29:45
and peculiar spheres of authority. The thing that's shocking about everything
29:49
that you just described, and thanks for going into so much detail and sphere sovereignty,
29:52
is how easily people are persuaded or forced to do the opposite of what they know to even be correct.
30:00
So there's a quote from the book that is my absolute favorite quote. I highlighted it,
30:03
I drew all kinds of things all around it. So I want to read it here, because I think this really
30:07
goes to the point there. It's what has become increasingly clear in recent debacle or decades
30:13
is that we are entering an era likely protracted of struggle for the freedom of the church in the
30:17
West, not just with the state and its bureaucracy, but with various church movements themselves,
30:23
some of whose leaders are emerging as committed apologists for statism. There has never been
30:27
a shortage of cultural leaders ready to support and advise falling down before the image of the
30:32
absolute estate when the music plays to obey the state elites without question. It is always the
30:38
Daniels and his three friends ready to pray despite the king's edict or refusing to bow down to
30:44
overreaching political power who are in short supply. As a result, when it comes to analyzing
30:49
threats to freedom from their own civil government, courts and bureaucracy, Christians are generally
30:55
poorly equipped like the proverbial frog slowly boiled to death for failing to detect the rising
31:00
temperature of the water. We are sleepwalking towards tyranny. Right there, Joe, sleepwalking
31:07
towards tyranny. Now, I know people from the UK and people from Canada, they look at us Americans
31:11
like we're a bunch of weirdos with our liberty and our guns and our amendments and all these
31:15
different things. But I'm shocked in this country to see how many people were so willing, especially
31:21
in the church, not in spite of, but especially inside the church, to just say, sure, you tell
31:26
me whether or not we can sing at church. You tell me whether or not we can gather. You tell us,
31:31
tell us whether or not we can be the ecclesia, those types of things. Joe, I'm a little bit scared.
31:36
I'm not scared easily. I'm not, you know, ready to throw my hands up and say the war has been lost.
31:41
But what exactly is happening here? Because I'm not as scared about the push they're making now.
31:47
I'm scared about the next one, because right now they're pushing us to the edge. The CDC here in
31:52
America just released recently that the 10 days of quarantining after COVID, that wasn't based on
31:58
any scientific data or any studies. It was based on how much they thought they could get people to
32:03
comply. When they moved it from 10 days to five days, it's like, why'd you cut it in half? I'm
32:08
not worried about this push. I'm worried about the next one. Am I crazy? No, no, this is the
32:13
problem is that tyranny is a slow creep. And if you look at the history and the birth and growth of
32:21
tyranny and totalitarianism, it typically comes during periods of peculiar cultural pressure,
32:27
societal decay, economic pressures, and steady decrystionization. And it creeps upon people until
32:37
suddenly they ask themselves, how on earth did we get here? And if we lack in the life of the
32:45
church, men and women of Isekar, who understand the times and are ready to speak prophetically to
32:51
them, who are informed by a robust biblical world and life view, then we have all kinds of problems
32:56
in the church as well. And I think as somebody who's a British and been living in Canada for many
33:01
years, I too have been surprised at the USA, not just politically that the sort of astonishing way
33:11
in which the nobody would have expected the United States of all countries to have submitted
33:17
to this kind of thing. Politically, it's been troubling to look at large portions of the church
33:25
who unequipped with a biblical world and life view and without the principle of sphere sovereignty.
33:31
Simply do not know how to respond cogently to what has taken place and this growth of
33:38
statism and the totalitarian creep that's all around us. I think you are still in a better
33:44
situation than Canada for sure in terms of pushback and your constitution offers much better protection
33:52
than the almost entirely useless Canadian charter, which actually was written in any case and became
34:01
the sort of law of the land back in 82 in Canada with an agenda actually of giving the state
34:09
much greater power than it had under the British North America, that's another subject. But you
34:13
are in a better condition nonetheless in the US and it isn't too late, but the pushback has to come
34:19
and it has to come from the church. You understand that Jesus is Lord, that he is sovereign and that
34:26
the church, that Christ is head of the church, not the state and that Jesus Christ is head of the
34:33
family and we submit to him, that's Paul's teaching in Ephesians, we submit to one another as unto
34:40
the Lord because the family, it's the Father from whom every family in heaven and earth is named.
34:48
It's not the state and so if we as believers don't recover a deep understanding of our biblical
34:55
worldview and this is what's happened, Kyle, is that basically our biblical understanding of a
35:01
scriptural worldview, I'm not talking now simply about knowing Bible verses or having a good handle
35:08
on the Bible for one's personal life, how does the scripture inform a total biblical world and
35:15
life view so that we know and understand what is a biblical view of the state, what is a biblical
35:20
view of law, what's a biblical view of family, what is a biblical view of economics, what is a
35:25
biblical view of business, how we to understand the freedoms and liberties of the church,
35:30
you said it yourself, we don't understand and therefore we don't know how to respond to
35:35
critical theory, Marxism, totalitarianism because we haven't taken the time we've lost in a certain
35:43
sense a depth of understanding in the implications of the gospel and this is in the end what it's
35:49
about, Kyle, it's about the gospel, it's about our understanding of the fullness of the meaning
35:54
and implications of the gospel and we've restricted that, we said at the beginning to that upper story,
35:59
that dualistic view, we said yeah the Bible, we've ecclesiastesized it, we said it belongs only in
36:05
the church, it's not a book for the world, it's not a book for the state, it's not a book for the school,
36:10
it's not a book for the totality of life, it's just a spiritual book up here in this
36:15
in this privatized area of my life and because we've allowed that, we now don't know how to respond
36:22
in the so-called lower story, we need to shatter those two stories, reunify the Christian life so
36:27
that we're able to respond meaningfully. I absolutely agree and you know you've said we've privatized
36:32
that part of our life but we've also like bumper-stickorized it, we've tried to make the gospel in Jesus
36:38
like this cute thing that we put on a coffee cup or this cute soft featured white guy that you know
36:44
walked around in his sandals a couple thousand years ago, you know basically perpetrating the
36:50
dictates of socialism somehow, right like we've somehow gotten to that point where we've made the
36:55
line of Judah into this guy that we can just curl up and put into our shirt pocket and pull out when
36:59
we need him to say something piffy to a friend at work but I think that your book did a great job
37:05
of helping us you know look at the theology and the philosophy behind all these different things,
37:10
so guys again ruler of kings, you got to make sure that you check that out, I do want to transition
37:14
a little bit in our time here that we have left because obviously you are a Christian apologist,
37:18
you've done a lot of speeches, you've given a lot of debates and there's always that one question
37:22
that comes up that whenever I talk to an atheist or when I talk to somebody that really struggles
37:26
with the idea that there could even be a god, we're not even worried about the resurrection yet,
37:29
we're not worried about Jonah and the well and the dinosaurs and everything else, we're just worried
37:33
about why do bad things happen? You know the problem of evil, the problem of pain, so anytime
37:38
I get to interact with a Christian apologist like yourself, I'd like to hear how you interact with
37:43
that question, now I understand you're not just answering a question, you're answering a question
37:46
or and so there's going to be different things that you would have but in general how do you as a
37:51
Christian apologist deal with the problem of evil, the problem of pain? So this is a sort of subset
37:58
of the moral problem and it's one of the oldest questions and objections, interestingly enough
38:05
it's primarily a question that arises in the West where there is perhaps the least amount of suffering
38:12
and less in the east but fundamentally the way I go about answering it to begin with is to ask the
38:20
person, usually I answer a question with a question and this is actually one of the things that Jesus
38:28
did frequently, is he posed questions because it gets people to open up about their own assumptions
38:34
and one of the things that I like to say is well when you say that there's a problem of suffering
38:40
or a problem of pain or a problem what we might call this problem of evil of which the problem
38:45
of pain or suffering is a subset, are you saying that there is such a thing as good and evil?
38:51
I mean that's the foundational starting point is that the notion that we can use the categories of
38:58
good and evil to deny the existence of God who provides the only foundation for the categories
39:05
of good and evil is a problem right so it's forcing people to first of all recognize that
39:12
are they saying that that good and evil are more than subjective states in my own mind or my own
39:20
perception are they just are they preferences or is there really a standard of good and evil of right
39:29
and wrong is there a law that would say this is evil and this is good if there is a law
39:36
that defines good and evil right from wrong then there must be a law giver and when people say well
39:44
yes but there's pain and there's suffering in life and surely a good God would want to eliminate
39:51
pain and suffering there's a number of things that we could say about that but first of all
39:55
you have to ask people what's the alternative if you reject God and his good creation
40:00
and the fact that we are fallen and ruined creatures because of our sin and rebellion against God
40:05
I mean in that sense the scriptural response that I build around is that the Bible doesn't so much
40:13
solve as it dissolves the problem of evil in terms of its own narrative a good creation fell into
40:21
ruin because of sin and rebellion against God and the suffering that we see and the pain that we
40:27
see in the world is a consequence of that sin what's the alternative though the alternative is to say
40:32
that there is an evolutionary background only to our experience in the world we're with a product
40:39
of cosmic chance and flux from the goo through the zoo to you and actually it's just survival
40:48
of the fittest and pain suffering is part of the story of evolution what are you complaining about
40:55
in fact suffering and death are the engine of change and of life in evolution so usually you're
41:03
dealing with people who have a contradict who are struggling with a will struggle at that point
41:07
with a cognitive dissonance their worldview says pain and suffering ultimately is a is a
41:14
positive good because it brings about change and moves the universe the world to a
41:20
predetermined well some kind of goal some kind of end that's evolution is working itself out into
41:29
so if that's true you got no complaints so what are you not whining about the only way you could
41:34
possibly even raise the question is if you are already assuming that there is a good God
41:40
and creation is somehow broken it's root it's it's it's defective somehow and that's exactly what
41:47
scripture says creation is broken it's been subject to futility and it needs redemption
41:54
through the Lord Jesus Christ when creation itself Romans eight Paul says in Romans eight is
41:59
going to be released finally from its bondage to corruption and it's it's bondage to futility
42:04
with the resurrection of our bodies so in that sense there's a glorious solution to the problem
42:10
of pain and suffering but the one who objects to a god on the basis of good and evil
42:15
assumes the existence of the god they're trying to disprove because without such a god there can be
42:22
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tire buying should be when the thing about it that's so interesting to me when I engage with
42:56
them is I'm like why do you care if we're just stardust bumping into other stardust if we're
43:01
highly evolved chimps that wear pants and talk to each other none of it matters we're all room food
43:05
and in the way that I gave it to a guy who was he was not in a militant atheist he was just a very
43:10
thoughtful guy that's like yeah I just don't really believe any of this stuff it's like the
43:14
thing is is that you have to reckon with that question way more than I do because if we go our
43:19
our ways throughout life and we both died our you know in our 80s or something like that and you're
43:24
right then we're just worm food baby I've just wasted a whole lot of time effort and money over
43:29
these years worshiping a god that didn't exist and we ended up in the same place the problem is is
43:34
if I'm right and you're wrong it's your eternity brother and so it's like you really have to
43:38
reckon and I try to get people pointed to the resurrection as the starting point because they
43:43
get they get too torn up with the you know how could somebody split the sea and how could somebody
43:48
you know turn have a burning bush that's not consumed it's like let's not worry about that
43:52
let's worry about the resurrection which I guess really goes to my last question that we have time
43:56
for for today is when you engage with somebody that believes the bible is nonsense either there's
44:03
they're an intellectual that believes hey this has been translated so many times we don't have the
44:07
absolute originals you know there's the this council that decided these books can be added
44:12
and this council that could be cited whether they're describing those things accurate early or not
44:16
it's kind of dubious but you have the people that just don't take the bible seriously hey that's just
44:19
a collection of ancient manuscripts that's not really indicative of how I should live my life
44:24
why are you making a biblical argument to me I don't agree with it in one way you see this is in
44:29
the abortion side of things you know we're talking about hey we shouldn't end an innocent human life
44:33
well someone starts making a biblical arguments like no no I don't really care about all that but
44:37
I guess the way that it's it's just harder for me to answer that question to somebody whenever I
44:41
point them a scripture and they're like yeah I categorically dismiss this book entirely how do you
44:46
work with that yeah so I think it's important I work within a tradition car that's called the
44:54
presuppositional tradition in Christian apologetics and I would engage in a use of a transcendental
45:04
argument and for the sake of your listeners I boil that down very simply in my little book
45:08
called why I still believe which is available from the from the institute why I still believe
45:13
I I deal in that book with how I tackle these these kinds of questions I think the important thing
45:20
to note is that anybody who wants to engage with you in an argument is presupposing that there is
45:26
such a thing as truth and that and that they would insist that you are using logical rational
45:34
argumentation in a certain sense following rules or laws of reasoning so that we can have a
45:42
meaningful discussion or a meaningful argument so if they want to object to the Bible on the basis
45:46
of a given number of reasons they're assuming that those reasons are valid in terms of rational
45:53
principles so the first question then becomes well how can you have a rational principle laws of
46:00
reasoning laws of thought in a universe in a materialist universe without God so the very
46:05
idea of argument itself I would begin there presupposes the god of scripture and I think where we
46:13
well the thing to emphasize and this is how I would advise people is think about these kinds of
46:17
discussions in terms of a much broader worldview perspective you can get into the details as
46:23
you've mentioned there of you know manuscripts and archaeology and so on and so forth and have
46:28
those discussions and there's value in that as long as we acknowledge we're coming at those
46:32
arguments from a from a biblical worldview perspective what we need to challenge the the
46:36
unbeliever with who's coming with that sort of perspective is they hold to a worldview that says
46:42
they reject any transcendent authority they reject any notion that there is a god who has spoken
46:47
there's a god who is there and who was spoken so they must now assume that for themselves another
46:54
kind of authority uh in there even in there presupposing the idea of truth which makes no
47:01
sense without god there can only be the way your atoms shake down in your head and the way mind
47:05
shake down the very idea of truth that transcends our minds disappears when you destroy the idea
47:10
of the biblical god if you remove that there is really no truth but going beyond that we can say
47:16
that we're talking about worldviews and they are presupposing one form of authority and we are
47:22
saying that with scripture and positing the god of scripture we're not we're not saying that we can
47:28
prove in detail from something else the authority of the bible the authority of scripture and of the
47:35
lord jesus christ is our starting point he's our because i said so moment the unbeliever has
47:41
there because i said so moment as well they also in their worldview posit an ultimate source of
47:47
authority the question becomes then which ultimate source of authority makes human life intelligible
47:54
their authority is themselves the reach of their own minds the idea that they that we have to trust
48:01
that they in their own cogitations are are the valid source of authority for life we can show
48:09
in the course of discussion that their very idea of truth and reason and everything breaks down
48:14
and dissipates into nothing our beginning our starting point though is god and his self revelation
48:21
in scripture and what we really want to ask the nonbeliever to do is say look let me put on the
48:26
glasses your worldview for a moment which you've got cemented to your nose i'm going to put your
48:30
worldview on for a moment and i'm going to look at the world as no there's no god and no revelation
48:34
from god and i'm going to show you how that become produces an unintelligible view of reality where
48:41
there's no truth no moral law no laws of thought no laws of reason no actual ability to have scholarly
48:47
communication now and no answer to problems like morality and evil and so on now take my worldview
48:55
given in scripture the lordship of christ and i invite you just for a moment just for the sake
49:00
of argument put those on your nose and look at the world in terms of how scripture says it is
49:07
and see how it makes entire sense of the human situation you snuck in earlier actually a little
49:13
bit of Pascal's wager when you said you know if i'm wrong and i'm just a ball of you know i'm just
49:20
stardust uh what does it matter i've lived a fulfilling life i've had meaning i've had a sense
49:26
of purpose we both end up in oblivion but if you're wrong and i'm right there's eternal consequences
49:32
now what pascal meant by that was not just hey look it's a 50 50 flip what he meant was
49:38
because this is true because as he said the fall makes entire sense of the human situation
49:46
the human condition once accepted he says at first it seems offensive to our reason he says this in
49:51
his paul say but he says once accepted it makes sense it makes entire sense of the human condition
49:57
and so what he meant by his wager was if you are really sincere about the pursuit of truth
50:05
put yourself in a situation where you might encounter it this is what christ claims this is
50:12
what the bible claims so why not speak to christians why not read the bible why not
50:19
go to those places like a church where those claims that those christians are making
50:28
can be put to the test taste and see that the lord is good that's really what pascal was saying
50:34
place your bet there and see if god does not reveal himself to you because that's the
50:39
assurance of scripture that those who seek find and to those who not the door will be open so we
50:47
start with that worldview perspective and then challenge people to say put the put the lenses
50:51
of scripture on and ask god as you do so to reveal himself to you if you're truly sincere because
50:59
he will and it's the sincerity part a lot of these people they never seek they never knock
51:04
and for a lot of people listening to this as well i've said this a lot on the show Greg
51:07
coco who's another great apologist and speaker he always talks about putting a rock in someone's
51:12
shoe he's like you're expecting to go up to the plate and hit a grand slam every time that's not
51:16
what's going to happen a lot of these people have to go on their own journey and they have the time
51:20
in order to do that but joe we are out of time for this interview but i'm so glad we're
51:24
able to get into the subject matters that we did i'm sure we'll have you back on at some point
51:27
to dig into some more difficult topics but for now that's all for me is there anything else you
51:31
want to get off your chest no just to say if uh so thankful that you've had me on the show car
51:36
great to make the connection thanks to john cooper and if people want to connect with us it's
51:40
esra institute dot ca and they can follow us uh on twitter and they also follow it on facebook and
51:45
they can follow me on twitter to it uh at dr joe boot all that will be in the show notes my
51:50
guys and dr joe boot thank you for coming on a daunted life a man's podcast god bless you thank
51:54
you car there you go guys i hope you enjoyed our interview with dr joe boot but before we let you
51:59
go we are going to do a quick resilience boost at undaunted life our mission is equipping men to
52:03
pushback darkness and specifically we do that with content like this podcast that helps you
52:07
forward spiritual mental and physical resilience i've got a lot of links for you today because they've
52:10
got a lot of resources through dr joe boot so i've got links to the esra institute and then i've also
52:15
got links where you can pick up this new book ruler of kings at esra press books that's for the united
52:19
states audience and will be forced publications out of the uk i've also got an amazon link to all
52:23
joe boots books that are on amazon and specifically the one why i still believe which is one that he
52:28
mentioned there in the interview also i've got a link to the esra institute podcast for cultural
52:32
reformation a link to joe's twitter account in the esra institute's twitter account and in the
52:37
initial interview that i've discovered joe boot which is when he was on john cooper's podcast and
52:41
that was podcast episode 84 god government and how to fix this mess with dr joseph boot all right
52:47
guys thanks so much for listening to the show we do appreciate it wherever you're listening this
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ties which is off their tenth anniversary re-recording of their album leveler the links are in the
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description i'm your host kyle tomsen remember keep pushing back darkness keep forging spiritual
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mental and physical resilience keep seeking the lion of juda
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you