The Matt Walsh Show - Ep. 174 - Megachurch Pastor Thinks Old Testament Doesn't Apply

Episode Date: January 11, 2019

Today on the show, a Democrat congresswoman has, shockingly, taken a stand against the religious bigotry in her own ranks. Also, a megachurch pastor says the Old Testament no longer applies to Christians. We’ll discuss why that view is wrong, stupid, and heretical. Date: 01-11-2019 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Today on the Matt Wall Show, surprisingly, a Democrat Congresswoman has taken a stand against the religious bigotry in her own ranks. Also, a megachurch pastor says that the Old Testament no longer applies to Christians. We'll talk about that utter stupidity and heresy today on the Matt Walls show. So I really like this headline from Yahoo that I just saw on Twitter. The headline is, influencer says she was on a tapas and cocaine diet to stay thin. Here's why that's not healthy. I'm not sure if the here's why that's not healthy bit at the end there is strictly speaking necessary.

I don't know if anyone's going to read the first part of that headline and say themselves, oh, wow, you know, that sounds like a great idea. I'll just subsist on little appetizer dishes and cocaine. And, you know, that sounds like a great diet plan. And then they read the second part and say, oh, never mind, says here it's not healthy. Shoot. But let me click and find out why it's not healthy, though. That's the thing.

All right. A Democratic Congresswoman from Hawaii named Tulsi Gabbard has really impressed me, actually. Doesn't happen often with Democrats. But she wrote an op-ed in the Hill defending religious liberty and calling out her fellow Democrats for their attacks on it. She doesn't use their names specifically, but she's talking about senators Kamala Harris and Maisie Hirono because they've essentially been trying to impose a religious test on a Catholic judicial nominee named Brian Boucher. They're upset that Bosher is Catholic, and they're especially upset that he's a member of the Knights of Columbus. Now, Herono, who you may remember as somehow

managing to be the most insufferable Democrat during the Kavanaugh hearings. But she wants Boucher to leave the Knights of Columbus. She's very concerned. He's got to leave the Knights of Columbus if he wants to be a judge. And he should also recuse himself from any case that deals with issues that the Knights of Columbus have taken a position on. Not any case that the Knights of Columbus are specifically involved in, which of course in that case, he should recuse them.

But no, any case that deals with issues at the Knights, well, here's the thing. The Knights of Columbus, they're a Catholic organization, so their positions are just going to be whatever the Catholic Church's positions are. And the Catholic Church has a position on many different subjects, especially the big most controversial subjects like abortion and marriage and those sorts of things. So what she's really saying is, what she, you know, she might be saying Knights of Columbus, what she's really saying, though, is he should recuse himself from any case involving issues that the Catholic Church has taken a position on, which is another way of saying, you can't be a judge if you're Catholic. Let me read a little bit from Gabbard's Hill piece, and because this is really solid stuff.

She says, while I oppose the nomination of Brian Boucher to the U.S. District of, court at Nebraska, I stand strongly against those who are fomenting religious bigotry, citing as disqualifiers, Bocher's Catholicism and his affiliation with the Knights of Columbus. If Bocher is unqualified because of his Catholicism and his affiliation with the Knights of Columbus, then President John F. Kennedy and the liberal lion of the Senate, Ted Kennedy, would have been unqualified for the same reasons. Article 6 of the U.S. Constitution clearly states that there shall be no religious test for any seeking to serve in public offense. No Americans should be told that his or her public service is unwelcome because, quote,

the dogma lives loudly within you, as Senator Diane Feinstein, said to Amy Coney-Barrant during her confirmation hearings in 2017 to serve as U.S. Circuit Court Judge in the Seventh Circuit. While I absolutely believe in the separation of church and state as a necessary to the health of our nation, no Americans should be asked to renounce his or her face. or membership in a faith-based service organization in order to hold public office. The party that works so hard to convince people that Catholics and Knights of Columbus, like Al Smith and John F. Kennedy, could be good Catholics and good public service. It shows an alarming disregard of its own history in making such a tax.

Very well put. And this is coming from a Democrat. It's very rare you get this from a Democrat, which is why other Democrats and liberals are not, very pleased with Gabbard and have come out and made that clear. Coming to the defense of Heronow and Harris, Jill Philopovich, who's a leftist writer with apparently a pretty big following online, she had this to say on Twitter. She says, Tulsi Gabbard is accusing female senators of anti-Catholic bigotry for rightly questioning a judicial nominee's membership in an extreme right-wing, anti-choice, anti-LGBT, all-male organization.

Gabbard is not a progressive, she's a fraud. So if you stand up, Jill's making it very clear, and there are a lot of leftists to agree with her. If you stand for religious liberty, then you're a fraud. You're not a real progressive, you're a fraud. And I might actually agree with her on that, that if you stand for religious liberty, you're not a real leftist or a real progressive by today's progressive standards, which is a good thing. The only difference is I see that as a very positive thing. Now, Jill says that the Knights of Columbus,

and apparently Harris and Hirono feel the same way, the Knights of Columbus are an extreme right-wing group. If you aren't familiar, the Knights of Columbus is a group of men who get together and they pray and they do charity drives, and they do things like that. Okay? I mean, it is the most unthreatening group of people that you could possibly imagine. This is one of the main groups, you know, around Christmas time, where you see those boxes, and people are collecting toys, doing toys. This is one of the main groups that does toy drives around Christmas time, collecting toys for poor kids.

That's what the Knights of Columbus does. yet they are now an extremist group, as if the Knights of Columbus are wearing literal suits of armor and charging into battle with swords and spears and that sort of thing. So clearly, this stuff about the Knights of Columbus, it is, again, this is just very thinly veiled anti-Catholic bigotry. That's really what that's about. the Knights of Columbus when it comes down to it, these are just Catholic men who get together and, you know, have a, you know, fraternity. And as I said, do they pray and they do charity work and that sort of thing. So if you've got a problem with them, what you really have a problem with is Catholicism. So how do we account for this? How do we account for this just kind of open anti-Christian bigotry on the left?

Well, where now they're so straightforward about it, they're so blatant, it's like they're not even trying to disguise it. Well, there's a very obvious answer here, of course. The left hates Christianity because of the moral message of Christianity. And that moral message makes them feel bad. It cramps their style. It interferes with their relativistic approach to things. And that's the main reason why they hate it, which is pretty. pretty obvious. But I think there's something else as well. There's also a fundamental

lack of understanding on the left when it comes to religion. And that is, you know, when a leftist thinks of bigotry, they think of a person who hates someone else for that other person's identity. If you hate someone because of their identity, then you're a bigot. Except the problem is people on the left, they don't recognize religious affiliation as an identity. They just don't see it that way. They can't understand how a person's religion is not only a part of their identity, but any religious person will tell you it's not only a part of their identity. It is the most central, crucial, important part of their identity.

Now, you notice that we say this about religious bigotry and how they're not. They don't care about religious bigotry, yet they do talk about Islamophobia all the time. So they are worried about that kind of religious bigotry, but that's because they associate Islam with non-white people. And so when they're worried about Islamophobia, what they're really worried about in their mind is sort of an anti-Arab bias. So they see that as entirely ethnic and racial. That's why they care about that. if Muslims were mostly white, they wouldn't care about Islamophobia at all. And that's another one of the reasons why they don't care about anti-Christian bias

is because they see Christianity as a white thing, which of course is ridiculous. Christianity was born in the Middle East. The majority of Christians in the world are actually not white. I mean, there are a whole lot of Christians in Africa. there are a whole lot of Christians in South and Central America. There are plenty of Christians in Asia. It is not a white invention and it's not a white thing. It is a universal thing.

But it is also a choice. You have to choose to accept this faith, to accept the gospel. You have to choose that. But that doesn't make it any less a part of your identity. if anything it makes it more a part of your identity or at least it makes it a more important part of your identity because it's not something that you're just born with it's not just an accident of nature it's it's something that you pursue and find and organize your life around and that's why that's why it's not as simple as saying, oh, well, you know, it's okay to hate someone for their,

or to hate someone's religion because they choose that. They could easily choose a different religion. I mean, these are people on the left. These are the ones who are constantly talking about the value of choice, right? They're supposed to be pro-choice. They're supposed to be, they're supposed to see choice as this wonderful, beautiful thing. Well, okay, I agree. Religion is a choice. and that is what makes it such a crucial thing to a person's identity. Staying in the realm of religion, my friend Paul Blanc, the Daily Wire, has an interesting piece on the site right now about a megachurch pastor who has announced his congregation that the Ten Commandments no longer apply to Christians.

Here's what Paul writes. He says, popular megachurch pastor Andy Stan of North Point Ministries says Christians need to stop erecting monuments to the Ten Commandments because they apparently no longer applied to Christians, which is completely false. In a piece posted to Relevant Magazine on Monday, Pastor Stanley said that since the Ten Commandments come from the Old Covenant, Christians should stop erecting monuments dedicated to them. Stanley says, if we're going to create a monument to stand as a testament to our faith, shouldn't it at least be a monument of something that actually applies to us? participants in the new covenant, that's Christians, are not required to obey any of the commandments

found in the first part of their Bibles. Participants in the new covenants are expected to obey the single command Jesus issued as part of his new covenant, as I have loved you, so you must love one another. He continued, but how many times have you seen Christians trying to post the text of the sermon on the Mount at a public place, or the all-encompassing commandment Jesus gave us. Stanley goes on to say that this commandment from Christ is a replacement for everything in the existing list, including the Big Ten. Just as his new covenant replaced the old covenant, Jesus' new commandment replaced all the old commandments. Stanley contended. Stanley also among the fact that too many congregations placed too much emphasis on the old covenant.

Jesus was foreshadowed in the old covenant. He did not come to extend it. Dear Christian reader, why, why? Why would we even be tempted to reach back beyond the cross to borrow from a covenant that was temporary and inferior to the covenant established for us at Calvary? Okay. First of all, I'd be perfectly fine with putting the text of the sermon on the mount anywhere. I think that'd be great. Now, a monument with the entire text of the sermon on the mount might be, That'd be kind of a big monument because it's a pretty lengthy sermon but I'm perfectly fine with that.

So that's the only part of what you just read that I agree with. Let's put the sermon on the Mount. Let's make monuments of the sermon on the Mount. The rest of it though is just, it is bad exegesis, it is bad hermeneutics, it is bad theology, it is bad everything,

it's heresy, it's stupidity. It's the kind of thing, that you could maybe excuse a six-year-old for saying before his Sunday school teacher corrects him. And this guy pastors a church, not just any church, but a big, a mega church with thousands of adherents. And he writes best-selling books. And yet he has not the most basic theological understanding of his own religion. Because, you know, basically anyone could be a megachurch pastor. You just walk in and you say, here I am.

I'm going to tell you about Jesus. And people go and they sit and they listen to this guy pontificate. And they imagine that they're doing something religiously, you know, fulfilling or edifying. This is just this guy's opinion. He's just giving you his opinion. And it's a really bad, stupid, wrong opinion on top of that. He has no business being a pastor. Where to even begin with this?

Jesus is not a replacement, and the commandments he gives us are not replacement. A replacement is something you put in place because the old thing is broken. It's like God changed his mind and said, ah, you know, never mind with all that. Let's do this instead. No, Jesus came to fulfill the old covenant, fulfill it, not abolish it, not replace it. He says that himself.

He clarifies this exact point. It's right there in the book. Matthew 517, look it up. I did not come to abolish but to fulfill. There's a difference. And there's this as well. You shall love the Lord God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.

This is the great and first commandment and a second is like it. You shall love your neighbor as yourself. he calls these commandments greatest, great. He does not say they're the only ones. He doesn't say that they replace the old ones. Don't kill, don't steal, honor your parents, don't covet, don't take the Lord's name. Apparently Pastor Andy Staley thinks that Stanley thinks that, okay, well, I guess, so what, we can still, we don't have to honor our parents anymore.

We could take the Lord's name in vain. No, that's not what Jesus said. Jesus doesn't replace those. He doesn't do away with them. He doesn't say, yeah, forget about all that. In fact, again, he specifically clarifies this point in that verse I just read. Read one more sentence over. He says, on these two commandments depend all the law and the prophets.

Now, why would he be talking about that the law and the prophets depend on these two commandments that he just gave? if the law and the prophets are now irrelevant. What he's saying is that the moral laws of the Old Testament, including the Ten Commandments, rest upon these commandments that he gave. And these commandments are, this is a commandment of love. So he's saying, love is the foundation. And the law and the prophets depend upon,

are rooted in, are founded upon love. by the way, here's the difference between what I'm saying now and what Pastor Stanley is saying. I'm not giving like my interpretation or my opinion about it. I'm just telling you what I'm just telling you what the book says.

That's all. I'm just giving you what the book says. And I'm saying if we have to choose between siding with what Jesus says in the Gospels or siding with Andy Stanley, I'm going with Jesus personally. That's just me. The moral laws of the Old Testament hold. The moral laws hold forever and all time. This is just basic Christian theology. I mean,

again, this is Sunday school when you're seven years old type of stuff. There are different kinds of laws in the Old Testament, and you do have to distinguish between them. So you have moral laws decreed by God, and then you have ceremonial laws, like the stuff about mixed fabrics and dietary restrictions and so on. Now, those we are no longer bound to uphold. Those are not immutable, eternal, fundamentally moral laws. And this is also something that Paul spends a lot of time. Now I'm talking about St. Paul, not Paul Blas from Daily War. This is something that St. Paul spends a lot of time in his epistles explaining. That's the thing. All you have to go is just read the text. Just go read the text for yourself.

This stuff has been clarified. It's been settled. And it's amazing to me, I don't know how I could still be amazed by it, but it's amazing to me that people could still be confused about this stuff when you could just go pick up the book and read it. Not only are people confused, but pastors are confused. Have you ever read Paul? pick him up sometime, and it's not that, the epistles aren't that long, there aren't that many of them. Also, if you read church history, okay, if you read the history of early Christianity, if you read about the kind of things that the church fathers were dealing with in the first, second, third centuries, you'll find that heretics like Stanley, they're not even doing us the

favor of inventing new heresies, okay? They're just cooking up old ones. So they don't even have the creativity to come up with new ones, and at least that would keep me. make it a little bit interesting to have this conversation. There was a guy named Marcian. He was a false teacher, a leader of a heretical Christian sect in the early second century. That was 1900 years ago. And he taught what Stanley is basically saying here. He said the Old Testament doesn't apply to us. He also taught that the Old Testament God was a tyrant and a despot and a completely different God from the God of the New Testament.

Now, Stanley doesn't go that far, that's true, but the crux is the same. Okay, so this is basically Marcianism, repackaged, reheated, and made a little bit more palatable. Because, as I said, the guy Marcy in 1900 years ago, he was just, he had open contempt for the Old Testament and for that God,

and, you know, he basically spat upon it. Stanley isn't going to go that far, but their basic point is exactly the same, which is this stuff doesn't apply to us. It's not our book. This, you know, Stanley's church should be empty now. I mean, after writing this article, his church should be completely empty.

If you go to his church, you should be running for the hills at this point. If you keep going, just realize that you're not going to a church, okay? You're not going for anything that could be considered a church service. You're going to just sit down and hear some dude's opinion, an opinion which is disconnected, divorced from Christian theology and the text of scripture. So this dude is just inventing his new thing. That's all.

He's coming up with his new kind of religion. And if you go to his church, then you're a member of that religion that he's inventing. Let's call it Stanlyism. Okay, this is not Christianity. This is Stanleyism. And you have every right to be a member of Stanleyism. If it appeals to you, in America, First Amendment, you have every right to join that religion. but I just feel like you should know

it's not the Christian religion because all you have to do is read the text, read the scripture, read a little bit about the history of your own religion or of your former religion and you're going to find that these things have been dealt with. I mean, they've been dealt with. There's really no real controversy here.

It's very clear. All right, what else? Real quick, California is looking at a ban on paper receipts, apparently. They handled the straws, and now they're going over to the receipts. Now, all I want to say about this is, I'm the same as anyone else. I get annoyed by receipts. Like, you go to write aid or something, and you buy a soda and a pack of gum, and they give you a receipt that's this huge five-mile-long scroll, right?

And it's completely ridiculous. But this is, and everybody's annoyed by that, and it does seem like, I'm not much of an environmentalist. But sometimes when I get those receipts, I do think to myself, I mean, did we really have to kill a tree for this? Seems like sort of a waste. But this is an example. The reason I bring this up is this is an example, like with the plastic straw thing, but even more so with this. This is an example of the government trying to solve a problem that the market is all already in the process of solving. Because while it's true that you can still go to places

and get these absurdly long receipts, more and more places are moving away from paper receipts and they're doing the digital receipt. And I have found just my anecdotal experience, it's more and more common now when you go to a place that they'll actually ask you, do you want a receipt? And you can say no, and then they won't give you one. It used to be back in the day, they just gave a receipt to everybody without asking. So people are moving away from receipts, they're doing the digital receipts, and 10 or 15 years from now, paper receipts won't exist. So we're already heading in that direction without government involvement. All the government has to do is nothing. All it needs to do is just sit back and say, well, this problem's being solved.

So we don't even need to argue about whether or not this is a real problem or whether or not it matters. That's not the point. Because it's an issue that is already being addressed naturally by the marketplace. But then what happens is that bureaucrats stick their noses in it and what could have been a very natural and normal transition from one thing to another, now becomes complicated and expensive, and it involves regulations and laws, and all of it completely unnecessary. All right. Something to think about over the weekend.

We'll leave it there. Have a great weekend and enjoy watching playoff football over the weekend. I will not be watching. I retire from watching football after my Ravens lost in a heartbreaker last weekend. And I'm just, it's happened too many times, and I'm giving up. I'm looking for a new sport. So any suggestions, I've been looking for a new sport to watch because I'm done with football. I can't take it anymore.

I can't take the heartbreak. So, you know, I'm thinking something like, I watch competitive bass fishing a little bit. I'm thinking maybe I'll invest myself more in that. Soccer, maybe. Well, that's not really a sport. But I'm looking for something else besides football. But anyone who is watching it, hope you enjoy it. And I'll talk to you next week.

Godspeed. Today on the Ben Shapiro show. As government employees miss paychecks, President Trump visits the border, Democrats prep for 2020, and we check the mailbag. That's today on the Ben Shapiro show.