Hypocrisy, Self-Deception and The Foolishness of Preaching: The Gospel in Mayberry
Ministers…must study to feed their flocks with a continual feast on the glorious fullness there is in Christ.1
I
I remain fascinated with the employment by some within the anti-Christian Nationalist camp2 of the image of Mayberry in their arguments. In fact, the image has become more interesting than the debates themselves. Despite having written about it at least once, much of the significance of the image was lost on me because I never watched the “Andy Griffith Show”, except for an occasional rerun here or there as a kid. That being the case, I began binge-watching the show to get a better understanding of the applicability of the concept of “Mayberry” — beyond its use as a means of disparaging Christian Nationalists.
You get a feel for life in Mayberry right away. There are third world problems. There are first world problems. And then there are Mayberry problems. In the pilot episode Barney Fife wants to jail an old lady for jaywalking, claiming that if even the smallest crimes go unpunished, Mayberry will become sin city. In the real world, citing a government official’s use of the word sin, the local chapter of the ACLU would sue the Mayberry Sheriff’s Department for attempting an unconstitutional establishment of religion. As it is, Sheriff Taylor simply lets the old lady go, which likely wouldn’t happen in the real world today: the old lady would be thrown in the slammer, where inmates, and subsequently a judge would lecture on her white privilege. (I mean, only white people would think they can just cross the street anywhere they want and cars will stop for them, except for Chicago, back in the 1970s, when I spent a summer there with relatives. In Chicago, at least that summer, all the white people I saw used the crosswalk. It would be racist for me to elaborate upon who did most of the jaywalking, so I won’t. But I digress.)
Having binged the show for several weeks now, I believe I am actually more irritated by anti-Christian Nationalists’ references to Mayberry than before. We are to believe that Christian Nationalists want Christian Nationalism (whatever that is) because (i) they believe that the USA, at one time was Mayberry and (ii) the USA can be Mayberry again. A Christian America means we can all live in Mayberry, where life will be so grand the preaching of the gospel will be unnecessary. It’s stupid, insulting, and serves no purpose.
It would be an insult to straw men everywhere to call that nonsense a straw man. I am fairly certain no one who is serious about Christian Nationalism, however it is defined, is interested in a return to Mayberry, whether literally or metaphorically: even they know Mayberry never existed, and never will — not even if all of their sweetest Christian Nationalist dreams come true. Talk of Mayberry, like dismissive references to cosplay, is little more than spiteful dismissal of people who are supposed to be our brothers. What some of us lack in painstaking argumentation, we make up for with spicy takes, contemptuous memes, and dismissive lampoons. And that’s what we do in public. You should see us in our private discord servers. We can at least be proud of ourselves for not saying to them, “Raca.” 3
Nevertheless, it’s easy to see why critics of Christian Nationalism employ the imagery suggested by Mayberry. Andy Taylor, the sheriff, rarely carries a sidearm, although his deputy, Barney Fife, does; but he is permitted to load it only on certain occasions. The town drunk saves Sheriff Taylor the trouble and puts himself in a jail cell, to sleep it off. In one episode, his son Opie is respectful enough to ask permission to run away from home. Mayberry easily serves as a caricature of Christian Nationalists’ supposed goals. These are people who supposedly believe there was a time in America when the whole county was a lot like Mayberry, a peaceful town in a peaceful country with no troubles at all, as long as you discount the Korean War (which ended 7 years before the show’s debut) and the escalation of hostilities in Vietnam (which began 10 years before the show’s debut), as well as the civil rights movement; the assassinations of John F. Kennedy, Jr., Martin Luther King, Jr., and Robert F. Kennedy; the birth of Generation X, and the British invasion.
II
The idyllic nature of life in Mayberry leads us to the question: In such circumstances, in such a city, how could anyone see his need for Christ? The answer, on my understanding of Moore and others, is that they would not see their need; hence Moore’s observation that Mayberry leads to hell just as surely as Sodom does. It is true, a materially good life can blind us to our need, and can create in us the conviction that we ourselves have produced this good life. The Law warns us about this fact:
Beware that you do not forget the Lord your God by not keeping His commandments, His judgments, and His statutes which I command you today, lest—when you have eaten and are full, and have built beautiful houses and dwell in them; and when your herds and your flocks multiply, and your silver and your gold are multiplied, and all that you have is multiplied; when your heart is lifted up, and you forget the Lord your God who brought you out of the land of Egypt, from the house of bondage; who led you through that great and terrible wilderness, in which were fiery serpents and scorpions and thirsty land where there was no water; who brought water for you out of the flinty rock; who fed you in the wilderness with manna, which your fathers did not know, that He might humble you and that He might test you, to do you good in the end— then you say in your heart, “My power and the might of my hand have gained me this wealth.”
And you shall remember the Lord your God, for it is He who gives you power to get wealth, that He may establish His covenant which He swore to your fathers, as it is this day. Then it shall be, if you by any means forget the Lord your God, and follow other gods, and serve them and worship them, I testify against you this day that you shall surely perish. As the nations which the Lord destroys before you, so you shall perish, because you would not be obedient to the voice of the Lord your God.4
The Scriptures give us reason to believe that the material successes of the cities of the plain contributed greatly to the growth of their wickedness:
[T]his was the iniquity of your sister Sodom: She and her daughter had pride, fullness of food, and abundance of idleness; neither did she strengthen the hand of the poor and needy. And they were haughty and committed abomination before Me; therefore I took them away as I saw fit.5
This is the spirit of which God warns the Israelites in the passage above. Commenting on this passage, Calvin identifies pride as the first step in Sodom’s fall into wickedness:
[W]e must see how Sodom rushed forward to that degree of licentiousness so as to be horrified by no enormity. God says that they began by pride, and surely pride is the mother of all contempt of God and of all cruelty. Let us learn, then, that we cannot be restrained by the fear of God, unless moderation and humility reign within us. Pride, we know, has two horns, so to speak; one is, when men forget their own condition, and claim to themselves not only more than is right, but what God alone calls his own. This, then, is one horn of pride, when men, trusting in their dignity, excellence, plenty, and wealth, are intoxicated by false imaginations, so as to think themselves equal to God. Now, another horn of pride is, when they do not acknowledge their vices, and despise others in comparison with themselves, and please themselves in enormities, just as if they were free from any future account. Since, therefore, pride is contained in these two clauses, when men arrogate too much to themselves, and thus are blind to their own vices, each of these is doubtless condemned in the Sodomites, since they first raised themselves by a rash confidence, and then refused to subject themselves to God, and rebelled against him as if they could shake off his yoke.
The thing that has bothered me most about anti-Christian Nationalist rhetoric about Mayberry, is the implication that Christian Nationalists believe that Mayberry is a place where the gospel would not need to be preached, because Mayberry leads to heaven (or something).6 I have yet to read or hear any advocate for Christian Nationalism declare that we need to rebuild Mayberry, so I am not sure how punching at Mayberry refutes any Christian Nationalist claims. So when Russell Moore says that Mayberry leads to hell as surely as Sodom, he is obviously correct, but he hasn’t said anything relevant to the issue: original sin means there is no place on earth that does not lead to hell. It was the pride of the Sodomites that made Sodom a place that leads to hell.
Since it is the sinful human heart, and neither Sodom nor Mayberry, that leads to hell, when Moore says, “Good riddance to Mayberry,” he is letting Mayberry’s preachers off the hook. Whether he is preaching in Sodom or in Mayberry, it is a preacher’s job to help people to see their pride (and all of their other sins, as well as his own) and impress upon them the need for repentance, to demonstrate their need for Christ:
Whatever subject ministers are upon, it must somehow point to Christ. All sin must be witnessed against and preached down as opposed to the holy nature, the wise and generous designs, and the just government of Christ.7
Preaching the gospel in Mayberry may require preachers to be serious about matters that may make them seem unduly persnickety. Take, for example, the fifth episode of the first season of The Andy Griffith Show, “Irresistible Andy”. Andy asks Ellie to accompany him to the church picnic, except that he really doesn’t ask her. He takes so long stumbling and stammering towards asking that she goes to the point and informs him that she would be glad to attend the picnic with him. Later, while explaining to Aunt Bee how he asked out Ellie, he realizes that he didn’t ask her, she asked him and furthermore “realizes” that she in fact manipulated him into asking her and when he didn’t take the bait she took the reins. He then concludes that her ultimate goal is matrimony. In comes Opie, eating an ice cream cone given to him by Ellie as a gift, which, Andy decides, is not a gift but “a down-payment on a husband.” Determined not to be roped into a marriage, he concocts a plan to get Ellie off his scent and onto others’. The plan involves convincing three different men that Ellie has expressed interest in them. Needless to say, the three men make fools of themselves under the impression that she is interested in them. Opie inadvertently explains things to Ellie, who, understandably, is unhappy and determines to teach Andy a lesson.
Now, that plot might make for some good comedy, but in real life Andy committed some serious sins against Ellie, beginning with misconstruing her true motives. The fact is, giving a kid a free ice cream cone is something consistent with Ellie’s character; giving a kid a free ice cream cone as “a down-payment on a husband” is not. In the real world, a claim that a woman’s generosity had ulterior motives, is an act of wickedness. Even if Mayberry were a place in the real world, this wouldn’t be funny — at all. But Andy’s sins go even further than that: telling a man that a woman is interested in him, and thereby inducing him to make a fool of himself, is a wicked thing to do.
When one takes sin so seriously as to see the sinful conduct in the plot of a comedy, one can readily agree with Russell Moore that Mayberry leads to hell just as surely as Sodom. But the sort of preacher who could develop a sermon calling out Sheriff Taylor’s sins against Ellie and those three men would likely be dismissed as a killjoy. He would be as popular as one who called out people for actually enjoying the plots of any one of a number of popular sit-coms. Friends? Seinfeld? Big Bang Theory? The Office? He might ask a congregation, “Do you ever pause and feel shame over some of the things you laugh at? Do you ask yourself, ‘Why am I laughing?’ or, ‘If I have to get past this or that, then why am I watching?’ And don’t let’s talk about Game of Thrones.”
The point I am making is this. Even assuming that the Christian Nationalist project wants to go back to Mayberry — whatever that is supposed to mean — pointing out all the things wrong with Mayberry (combined with minimizing all the things right with Mayberry) hardly counts as an argument against Christian Nationalism. If Mayberry leads to hell just as surely as Sodom then, the two cities being equal in at least that regard, why object to anyone rebuilding Mayberry? The gospel would be no less necessary in Mayberry as in Sodom. Life in Mayberry, in addition to intact families, would have at least this much going for it: you wouldn’t live in fear of having a phalanx of sodomites banging on your door in the middle of the night, angry that you were so rude as not to introduce them to your house guests. You also wouldn’t live in fear of having government authorities taking your children from you because you wouldn’t acknowledge their non-binary pronouns.
Christian Nationalists can consistently claim two things about life in Mayberry: (i) all the good things that Moore and others recognize about life in Mayberry (such as intact families) are superior to life in Sodom; and (ii) it is just as necessary for the gospel to be preached in Mayberry as it would be in Sodom, and with the same passion and intensity as an evangelist on the Titanic, importuning passengers and crew alike to lay hold of Christ by faith in the few minutes remaining before they are buried in freezing water.8
It might be that Mayberry is such a nice place that its denizens could never see their need for Christ; but the fact is, that may be more the fault of Mayberry’s preachers than the idyllic nature of life there. The fact is, if a preacher (accounting for the Holy Spirit’s work in human hearts) cannot persuade the good folk of Mayberry of their need for Christ, then he should do something else. One suspects that many critics of Christian Nationalism do not have the stomach to preach the sort of (persnickety) sermons that would cut Mayberrians to the quick, making them rend their garments over the TV programs they enjoy. Russell Moore — and I only say this because he is a very public theologian — has probably never told the likes of a Joy Reid or the ladies of The View that, as bad as white evangelicals are, those despicable white evangelicals will nevertheless inherit eternal life, while the ladies of The View (among others), the kind gentle “sons of disobedience” they are, will perish eternally if they do not repent and lay hold of Christ by faith for the forgiveness of their sins. It’s easy enough, isn’t it? The next time he cozies up with his favorite sons of disobedience, (after the usual excoriation of white evangelicals for their latest offense against truth, justice, and the globalist way) all he has to do is ask, “Do you suppose that these white evangelicals are worse sinners than you because they voted for Donald Trump?” and then tell them, “No. And unless you repent you will perish.”9
III
I do not claim there are not legitimate concerns regarding Mayberry. After several years of listening to critics of Christian Nationalism, the two chief concerns (aside from the exegetical difficulties) seem to be (i) hypocrisy and (ii) self-deception — that is, as strategies employed by people who would wish to participate in the political and cultural life of Mayberry (i.e., as a model Christian nation). I will deal with them ever so briefly.
a
Hypocrisy
Hypocrisy is a legitimate concern, the expression of which runs something like this. In a Christian nation — presumably, a nation in which one would have to affirm orthodox Christian belief10 — men and women desiring to participate in the nation’s governing structure would be forced into professing a faith they do not have. They may possibly have to do so even in order to vote: it would make little sense to allow non-Christians to vote, as they would have little interest in maintaining a Christian nation. Since a profession of faith would not be credible without church membership, office seekers would be obliged to join churches and participate in the worship of a God they do not know, recite creeds and confessions they do not believe, and partake of sacraments to which they have no right and which will result in judgment. We should not force people into hypocrisy; that is not to love one’s neighbor as one’s self.
Agreed.
The fact is, however, any hypocrisy would be the responsibility of the hypocrite, who could easily avoid hypocrisy by not seeking office. To deny that is to the deny the Christian doctrine of sin: I, and no one else, am responsible for my sins; I am without excuse. It is the desire to hold political office that motivates the hypocrisy, not the fact that the office he seeks is one within a Christian nation. More than likely, there are those who would argue in reply that there is a certain unfairness about denying to people who must live under laws the right to participate in the process according to which those laws are created and administered. But that overlooks the difficulty created by permitting the participation of those who would wish to tear down what others are building. That just isn’t very smart; it’s like letting communists run for office in a republic that opposes communist ideologies.
Wait. Never mind.
So, a Christian nation would have to be run by professing Christians; and if some of those professing Christians are hypocrites, that is on them — just as it is on those hypocrites currently sitting in our pews, preaching from our pulpits, and hosting podcasts. It sounds a bit marxian to blame “the system” for creating hypocrites, rather than to blame the hypocrites for their hypocrisy. These people would make themselves at home in a mosque if that is what it took to make it in society.
Yes, it may very well be that everyone is in church on Sundays in Mayberry because being in church on Sundays is just what good people do in Mayberry. Yes, that means a great many people (hypocrites) would be in church rather than someplace else they would prefer to be. But it also means they will hear the gospel preached, assuming, of course, that there is a gospel-believing preacher in the pulpit. The answer isn't to complain about how many people are in church for the wrong reasons; the answer is to make sure that they hear preaching that confronts them with their sins.
Besides, without even being a Christian nation, when it comes to hypocrites, America is a target rich environment, and includes many of the people complaining about hypocrisy, while making friendly with the sons of disobedience for the sake of a writing or speaking gig.
b
Self-deception
As bad as hypocrisy may be, self-deception may be worse, both because of the difficulty in understanding it and in dealing with it. The hypocrite is not interested in the faith, or in what he believes the faith offers; his interest is in those worldly benefits which he believes may accrue to him by professing the faith, even joining a church and being active in it. The hypocrite is under no delusions. He is not in church to signal his virtue, or to put up a front of being a good person (“a good Christian man” as it was once styled). The self-deceiver, on the other hand, is interested in the faith, at least to some extent, even if only for fire insurance. Showing up for worship services, singing the hymns, saying amen to the prayers, hearing sermons — all of these affirm him in the belief that he can say, “Heaven,” with a straight face when asked, “Do you know where you will go after you die?” And he wants to be able to have an answer when he is asked why he should be allowed into heaven. The answer he may give may make some reference to Jesus Christ, but an examination of his conscience would reveal a different source of comfort.
Many years ago I watched a documentary about a cult purporting to be Christian, some of whose members committed suicide. The mother of one of those members said that her son was despondent over feeling that he was not good enough for God. As true as that is, it is not the good news of the gospel, which proclaims release to captives. The self-deceived person wants to know that he is good enough for God. He is religious in a way that neither the hypocrite nor the true believer are. He wants to believe — and frankly, so do we — that he is good enough for God, that his own righteousness is not filthy rags. The most common manifestation of self-deception today is probably Moralistic Therapeutic Deism, which assures us that we are good people, good enough even for God, who wants us to be happy, or perhaps that we can be good enough for God, if only we try harder.
We should know better. And according to the Apostle Paul, we do know better:
What may be known of God is manifest in them, for God has shown it to them. For since the creation of the world His invisible attributes are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even His eternal power and Godhead, so that they are without excuse, because, although they knew God, they did not glorify Him as God, nor were thankful, but became futile in their thoughts, and their foolish hearts were darkened….11
But how does self-deception work? In conceiving of it, we need to understand at least three things. First, in Scripture, foolish is a moral quality, not an intellectual quality, we must recognize that self-deception is a work of our darkened, foolish hearts. Self-deception works because we want it to work; more than that, we need it to work.
Second, we need to understand belief as a subjective attitude regarding the truth value of a proposition:
Belief is a propositional attitude (not excluding false propositions) of a positive, cognitive, type constituted by a continuing, intentional, action-guiding mental state (made up of ideas which give it a determinate character corresponding to the proposition believed) with a stimulus-independent causal capacity to affect one’s theoretical and/or practical behavior (such that one relies upon the propositional attitude in his reasoning and conduct), under suitable circumstances, in a wide variety of manifestations (some of which are subject to degrees of strength.)12
Third, we need to understand that in self-deception two types of belief are pitted against each other: first-order beliefs (i.e., the beliefs we hold); and second-order beliefs (i.e., beliefs about the beliefs we hold).
Self-deception then is a work of our sinful hearts, in which we maintain some propositional attitude, which attitude, among other things, guides and directs our actions. In actual practice, self-deception can work something like this. Alice believes (a first-order belief) she is in love with Nick; that is, she has a positive propositional attitude to the proposition, I am in love with Nick (which we will take in the honorable sense and stipulate that she has a desire for marriage and family with Nick). Sadly, Alice (because she is a good woman, or very much sincerely wants to be) experiences a need to ignore or escape her belief that she is in love with Nick: Nick is married, making her desire for him sinful. On one hand, she isn’t bothered as much as she should be: Nick’s wife wants the prestige that comes with being Mrs Nick; Alice simply wants to be Mrs Nick. Nevertheless, coveting is sinful, and so are adulterous desires. As a means of ignoring, misconstruing or adjusting the evidence; by exercising control over her attention and over the interpretation of evidence — Alice generates another (second-order) belief, the belief, that she does not believe she is in love with Nick. This is not an instance of substitution: Alice does not “drop” her belief about her love for Nick; she adds to her first-order belief about her love for Nick, the second-order belief about her first-order belief that she is in love with Nick. She believes she is in love with Nick, but avoids acknowledging that belief by believing that she does not believe she is in love with Nick. That second-order belief could even take the form of believing that, in fact, she loathes Nick — any second-order belief that amounts to a denial of the first-order belief.
It doesn’t even seem possible, does it? And it isn’t, if we think of self-deception as a somehow similar to deceiving others, getting others to believe things that they do not know to be false. But use of the term deception must be nuanced by the term self; the nature of the deception is not the same. Other-deception involves pitting two first-order beliefs against each other. The purpose of self-deception is not primarily to generate another belief, or to substitute a false first-order belief for a true first-order belief; the purpose of self-deception is to avoid, to forget, or to evade the implications of a dreaded, first-order, belief. Self-deception (again) involves a relation between first-order beliefs and second-order beliefs. We do not change our belief; we change what we believe about our beliefs. Self-deception works as a form of confirmation bias or motivated reasoning. We count, discount, and interpret evidence in a way that will confirm certain beliefs about our beliefs. Over against the proposition, I believe I am in love with Nick, Alice asserts, I believe that the proposition, ‘I believe I am in love with Nick’ is false or, I do not believe I am in love with Nick. Pursuant to her (understandable) purpose, she adduces a great deal of evidence in support of the second-order belief that she does not believe she is in love with Nick. After all, she reasons, how could I possibly love a man who..? — followed by an exhaustive list of every personality quirk, character flaw, bad habit, to whatever extent those may even be blown out of proportion, and so on.
Of course, self-deception need not be always so self-serving. Many are the tales of the man who, after weeks, months or even years of denial, must face the reality that his wife has committed adultery. “All the signs were there,” he admits, “but I ignored them, and explained them away.” We can understand and even laud this sort of self-deception: we want always to believe the very best of those we love, but most especially those to whom we have given our hearts. We will do anything, including the rejection of evidence that challenges what we wish to believe, to avoid having our world rocked, as the saying goes. Against the first-order belief, I believe my wife has been unfaithful he pits the second-order belief, I do not believe that I believe my wife has been unfaithful.
Whatever intentions may attend some of our efforts to deceive ourselves, when it comes to the gospel, our intentions are to justify ourselves, to deny our need for repentance, to minimize the extent of our sinfulness. I am not perfect; no one is. But I’m sure no one has to die for my sins. This is the case regardless where the gospel is preached, Sodom or Mayberry. The gospel may have less success in Mayberry than in Sodom; or it may have the same failure rate in Mayberry as in Sodom. In neither case, however, is that the fault of the founders of Mayberry, not even if they intended, in whatever sense, to found a Christian city. Neither Sodom nor Mayberry lead to hell; we take hell with us wherever we go.
IV
It may be true that something about a Christian nation will result in more hypocrisy and self-deception (and a host of other problems) than there might otherwise be. I doubt that: these things are simply the sinful human condition. Ironically, it is the same sort of thinking which seems to attend Christian Nationalism: we can avoid certain social ills if we just organize our societies correctly. We can avoid the hypocrisy and self-deception of Mayberry by destroying Mayberry — or not building it in the first place. Christian Nationalists and their opponents both agree on that principle; Russell Moore and Doug Wilson both agree that a better ordering of society can meaningfully treat many of our social ills. They disagree only about what that meaningful treatment will look like, and to some extent what are the social ills that require treatment; they disagree about whose vision will result in the better-ordered society they seek. Moore and Wilson both agree on the need for a consistent life ethic; they just don’t agree on which of them possesses that consistent life ethic.
But let’s grant critics the assumption that a Christian nation will have a worse problem with things like self-deception than whatever alternatives they propose. As true as that may be, it does not argue against Christian Nationalism: inasmuch as a Christian nation might have more hypocrites than an Old School/Southern Presbyterian church, this only means there is greater need for good preaching. It was after all through the “foolishness of preaching” (1 Cor. 1.21) that St Paul claimed to be “casting down strongholds” (2 Cor. 10.4-5). And among the many strongholds which require being pulled down are hypocrisy and self-deception, each of which in different ways results in rejecting the gospel call to repentance.
The goal of preaching — or at least one of many — is to do what Francis Schaeffer called removing the roof. In The God Who is There, Schaeffer writes of the need for preachers to address the point of tension between the non-Christian’s presuppositions and reality, always driving home the fact that the non-Christian cannot consistently live out the logical conclusions of his non-Christian presuppositions.13 The non-Christian’s conviction that he can do so, is one form of self-deception to which the preacher must address himself.14 The same goes for hypocrisy: there is a point of tension between the mask that the hypocrite wears (those things he would like others to believe about him) and what he knows himself truly to be. Somewhere in the non-Christian there is a point of inconsistency, and he must be helped in finding it; the same holds true for the hypocrite and the self-deceiver. It also holds true for the growing Christian, which includes — lest we forget — the preacher himself. The only true difference (and it is no small difference) between the non-Christian hypocrite and self-deceiver and the Christian hypocrite and self-deceiver is that the latter has been saved — and is being saved — by grace, and is, also by grace, dying more and more to sin.
On that note, one must wonder if much of what passes for preaching these days is really up to the task. Seriously, how many people would really be stricken in conscience by listening to a preacher expostulating with his congregation about the actual sinfulness entailed in the plot of their favorite television sit-coms? The smart money says they would want to expostulate with him about his judgmentalism and their liberty of conscience.
Hey! Preacher! Leave them shows alone!
Mayberry may lead to hell just as surely as Sodom. But is there the slightest possibility that it may have more to do with Mayberry’s preachers being less serious about Mayberry’s sins because, after all, Mayberry’s sodomites are not assaulting people’s homes?
Strictly speaking, it doesn’t matter: nothing about Mayberry’s arguable relation to hell constitutes a rational argument against Christian Nationalists’ goals, not even if, in fact, one of those goals is to re-establish Mayberry.
Thomas Foxcroft, The Gospel Ministry, “The Minister as a Preacher.”
See Matthew 5.22.
Deuteronomy 8.11-20, emphasis added.
Ezekiel 16.49-50.
In Moore’s defense, it doesn’t help when Christian Nationalists such Stephen Wolfe tweet things such as, “Cultural Christianity is enough.”
Thomas Foxcroft, The Gospel Ministry, “The Minister as a Preacher.”
In his defense, I have heard Stephen Wolfe say this in countless podcast interviews.
Cf. Luke 13.1-5.
Specifically, and minimally, Nicene-Constantinopolitan orthodoxy.
Romans 1.19-20.
Greg Bahnsen, “A Conditional Resolution of the Apparent Paradox of Self-Deception,” (PhD dissertation, University of Southern California, 1978), 143.
See The God Who is There, Complete Works, Volume 1, 140-142 (section iv, chapter 2, in the original text).
Fn. 4 appears to be in error. That's definitely Deuteronomy.