Stephen Wolfe

First off, um, I'm the least controversial speaker you have today.

You have, [laughs] you have Stephen Wolfe, the author of The Rise of Christian Na- or The Case for Christian Nationalism.

Absolutely brilliant.

You've got Beau French, you've got Mike Howe, others, a whole slate of others.

So anyway, you got David Van Drunen on the one side.

And then as you were having this debate, he compared David Van Drunen to Stephen Wolfe.

Stephen Wolfe wrote The Case for Christian Nationalism, which Moscow, Idaho published a couple of years ago now.

And it obviously took this whole conversation by storm.

And people are still debating over that book and all those things.

So they, they do some sort of creative things with the mosaic administration.

A lot of that's tied to Meredith Klein.

etc etc like that's we've done podcasts on that one before so I was thinking in my mind because I don't know that I've ever heard Stephen Wolfe really talk a whole lot about that sort of dynamic because again he's not he's approaching a political philosophy not a political theology so he's not really as concerned about how the mosaic I'm putting words in his mouth but I think that would be fair to say he doesn't seem as concerned with the mosaic administration and how that republication theory and all these sort of things so I was thinking okay that might that might ring true It was just interesting to hear that the Escondido guys, and this kind of plays into a question I wanted to ask you from one comment where it got real awkward, but it was interesting with all of the administration thereof is different.

a theocratic monarchy, right? That's not what I'm saying.

I would instead like to summarize how Stephen Wolfe, the author of The Case for Christian Nationalism, defines the term.

So Of course, when you have a conversation, you need to all be in agreement of what the definition of these terms means.

So let me just go ahead and do that so that this can't be misconstrued.

According to Paul Miller, I'm probably a Christian nationalist.

And then you use Stephen Wolfe in his book, The Case for Christian Nationalism, as the primary foil for your basic argument.

And you say, according to that person's definition, I'm definitely not a Christian nationalist.

My criticism is Stephen Wolfe's definition, as important as it is, as serious a scholar and as impressive the work that his book is, is not the final word on what Christian nationalism means.

And in fact – I'm going to let you finish.

No, no, no. You're good.

And Oscar explains that Kevin uses a magic number he calls Kalevin.

And whenever the books don't square, you just insert Kalevin and all of a sudden everything makes sense.

The kingdom of God, the king has come, that's inherently political.

So to the extent that that's what Stephen Wolfe's book is assuming, I agree with that.

The complaint I have against Wolf is what I said briefly a few minutes ago, and that is that the church has virtually no political role in his vision.

He doesn't think of the church as a political reality at all.

... just to be clear.

But the criticism of, like, we're taking two steps from scripture, and by the way, the biblical hermeneutic that we, we've talked about, also the natural, the natural revelation, right? The, uh, uh, cr- you know, Stephen Wolfe makes this argument at the beginning of The Case for Christian Nationalism where he talks about how we can from nature determine man's telos, and it's actually from how he's created and what he does.

In other words, God has made man for a pers- particular purpose.

Therefore, by, by observing, interestingly enough, observing how man acts, we can actually determine what he's meant for.