Hi, I'm David Bercot. And this afternoon, we have our fourth lesson in the series of finding spiritual truth through critical thinking. And what we're going to be doing this afternoon is looking at some of the questions that our listeners have sent in that pertain to this whole topic of critical thinking. And then I'll read you the question and then I'll give my answer. The first one is dealing with the subject. Do we really need the early church? And this is what the listener wrote in.
They said, " I understand that you argue for the value of using the consensus of the early church understanding of Scripture to double-check our reading. " I also understand your point that many people read the Bible with biases about what it teaches. I agree. Some may hear what you are saying, however, and think that you're arguing that it's necessary to consult the early church to arrive at truth.
They would argue that God is ready and willing to lead all people who sincerely seek Him for the truth, and that He primarily does so by the Holy Spirit through the Scriptures. The question continues, " How would you respond to this reasoning? How would you advise people to discuss doctrinal matters with Christians who are uninterested with the beliefs of figures in church history and want any doctrine to be established on the Bible alone?
If the early church writings disappeared tomorrow, how would you seek the truth and guide others to it? " Okay, this was an excellent question. In fact, this is something I have been hearing from, I would say, like the first year when I read the early Christians and began sharing what I was learning with my friends, that was the very argument I first heard, and then I've heard it thousands of times since then. So it's a very valid question, and it's a good question for someone to ask.
So since it was rather long, I'm going to break it down into a couple parts. So the first part I'm going to address is what was written. Some may hear what you're saying, however, and think that you're arguing that it's necessary to consult the early church to arrive at truth. If the early church writings disappeared tomorrow, how would you seek the truth and guide others to it? Well, my answer would be that the Scriptures were given to us as our primary and essential guide.
In fact, they are our only infallible guide. If a person reads the Scriptures with a blank slate, and he reads them at face value, he or she will arrive at the essential spiritual truths, even if they've never read a single word of the early Christian writings. So that would be where I stand that, no, we don't have to have the early Christian writings to arrive at truth. If we read the Scriptures with a blank slate, and we take what it says at face value. Now, the key phrase there is " blank slate.
" Are we reading them with a blank slate? I'm going to give you just some examples. The first one is Acts 2:38. It says, " Then Peter said to them, ' Repent, and let every one of you be baptized in the name of Jesus Christ for the remission of sins, and you shall receive the gift of the Holy Spirit. " Now it was that verse that opened my eyes to my own biases, to the fact that I had not been reading Scripture with a blank slate.
I had, oh, I don't know, been reading the early Christians for perhaps three months, and I've related this before, and I finally one night just sat down and read the whole New Testament through to see what it was saying, and to see, is any of this stuff in the New Testament or the early Christians just making stuff up?
And there were probably other verses that jumped out at me, but this is the verse that really caught my attention was Acts 2:38, " To be baptized in the name of Jesus Christ for the remission of sins. " Now, the early church talked a lot about being baptized for the forgiveness or remission of sins, and I kept thinking, " Where are you getting this? Where does baptism have to do with forgiveness of sins? " And then I read this verse, and it's like, " Well, it's right there in front of me.
" I have read that verse probably 500 times, maybe a thousand? And I've never noticed it. I'd never once in my whole life noticed what it had said. And I realized it's because it had always been explained to me what it meant, and the explanation had nothing to do with the remission of sins. And so I had read the words, and literally, they just went right past me. They went through my eyes, but didn't stay in my brain.
And so that was the big turnaround for me and made me aware, you know, I've been reading the Scriptures my whole life with glasses on and not seeing the actual words of so many verses. Then, of course, that evening I saw more and more and more verses, and as time went on, I discovered even more beyond that. So that would be an illustration. Can you read Acts 2:38 and actually believe what it says? Or are you going to sit there and argue, " Well, no, it's not really saying that it means such and such.
" I mean, that is so black and white. Plus there are a lot of other verses. I'm not going to go into a discussion of baptism this afternoon, but there's a lot of other verses that back that up. It's not just some isolated verse by itself. I'll give you another illustration. 1 Corinthians 11. I had read that my whole life again. Certainly hundreds of times, maybe as many as a thousand times.
And yeah, what it says of a woman prays without her head covered and all that, did I read that and think, " Huh, my wife should have her head covered when she prays or any of the sisters in the congregation. " No, I didn't think that at all. Jehovah's Witnesses that I grew up in, they had their explanation of that verse. They did actually apply it to a few situations where they would have a sister cover her head. But then when I was evangelical, they said, " Oh, no, that's just cultural.
That doesn't have any application today. " Now, nothing in there that Paul says has anything to do with culture. He never refers to culture. He refers to creation. He refers to the order of headship. He refers to the angels. He never says a word about culture, but that had always been explained away to me. And so when I read it, yeah, none of it sunk in my mind. So I would ask the same question to somebody else.
Can you read that and say, " Huh, I am going to apply that, " or are you going to read it and come up with a jillion excuses of why that doesn't apply? If you're going to explain it away, then you're not reading the Scriptures with a blank slate. Another one, James 2:24, where James says, " You see then that a man is justified by works and not by faith alone. " Now, can you accept that as being infallible truth, or do you explain that verse away?
And this isn't a situation where it's an isolated verse, and reading it by itself is taking it out of context. If you read the whole paragraph that that verse is in, the whole paragraph is discussing works of Abraham, of Rahab, and showing that it was their works by which they were justified or declared righteous. It was not by their faith alone. And then Paul says very similar words in Romans chapter 2. Jesus says it all throughout His gospels. You'll look at the whole of Matthew 25, for example.
So it's all throughout Scripture. Now, if you can read those verses and say, " Yes, they mean what they say, and I believe them, " okay, fine. But if you're going to dismiss every single one of them, you're not reading Scripture with a blank slate. And of course, the same would be true, all the verses that do talk about being saved by faith. Now, it never says we're saved by faith alone, but there are many verses that say we are saved by faith, and we have to give full credits to them as well.
We have to have an explanation that gives full faith and credit to both sets of Scriptures. Okay, so those are just three examples. But in other words, sure, you don't need the early Christian writings if you'll just take the New Testament and read it for what it says. But the early Christian writings are what opened my eyes to my biases. It made me realize I'm reading the Scriptures through glasses. I am not listening to the actual words of Scripture.
I'm listening to the explanations given by my pastors, given by the Christian literature that I read, et cetera, et cetera. So, that's the big caveat. Sure, if you're just reading the Scriptures, you're going to come to the truth. You don't need the early Christian writings. But most of us have been prejudiced against the actual words of Scripture. And something else to remember is that the New Testament wasn't given to the church in a vacuum. A body of teachings were handed down to the New Testament church.
The apostles were there to teach them. They didn't just give them the New Testament and say, " Here, read it and try to understand it for yourself. " No, they were teaching and explaining the whole time they were living, which through the entire first century, you had at least one apostle there who was alive and teaching. And most of the time you had several apostles teaching throughout the entire ancient world. And so they handed down a body of teachings, not just the writings.
And so the next generation, after the apostles, they had received this body of teaching, which gave light to the meaning of the New Testament. And the nice thing is the light that it gives is the New Testament means exactly what it says. If there is a commandment there, then it means we're supposed to obey that commandment. If it says we're justified by works, then we're justified by works. If it says we're justified by faith, then we're also justified by faith. Every bit of it is true. That's what we learn.
Okay, the second part of that question was, " How would you advise people to discuss doctrinal matters with Christians who are uninterested with the beliefs of figures in church history and want any doctrine to be established on the Bible alone? " Well, you know, I have no issue with people like that. I mean, I would say, yes, it has to be established by the Bible alone. If it's resting purely on the testimony of the early Christians, then we don't have very strong basis for the truth. It has to rest on Scripture.
So, yeah, I don't have a big argument with that. In fact, I would say most Christians would take that position. We have to find the truth in the Bible. But there's a very big but there. Again, back to what I was saying before. Are they willing to read the Bible with a blank slate? Are they willing to set aside their preconceived beliefs?
Are they willing to look at all the verses that pertain to a given topic, and then to read them all at face value, like I was talking about, the ones that talk about justification by faith and the ones that talk about justification by works. We have to give full faith and credit to all of those. And then we have to come up with an understanding that gives weight to all those verses. We don't explain any of them away.
And if our method of dealing with Scripture is to explain away a whole lot of verses, which people do who say, " Oh, you're saved by faith alone. Obedience plays no role. " Well, what do you do with this verse and this verse and this verse and this verse? Oh, well, that means this, and that one means this, and well, that one doesn't really mean this, and that one you're playing games when you do that.
Now, if nine verses say one thing and there's a tenth that says something else, well, yeah, you might say that tenth one, we can explain that away because it's totally out of step with, you know, these other nine. But when it's 50/50, 60/40, or something like that, no, we can't do that. We have to look at what they all say and give full faith to all of them. And that's what's exciting about the early Christian understanding, that you don't have to hide any verses.
Their understandings give full faith to everything that's written in the New Testament. And that's one of the things that impressed me so much about their writings. Again, it's not their writings that have the truth, it's the New Testament, but it opened my eyes to these facts. Okay, now after taking those steps, if we still can't agree on the meaning of Scripture, in other words, we look at them in a blank slate. We give them serious attention. We read them at face value.
We look at all the verses dealing with a particular subject, and yet you and I still can't agree on what the Scriptures mean. Well, why wouldn't we want to go back and look at the historic faith? What did they believe in the beginning? You and I are looking at these same Scriptures, and we can't find a way to harmonize them between us. I mean, isn't that just common sense to say, " Hey, let's go back and see how they understood this when they lived just a generation after the apostles.
" Okay, let's move to the next question, which is dealing with the subject of letting the Spirit guide us. This is what the listener sent in. He said, or she, " The practice among spirit-filled Christians differ a lot in this area. This means that even if one practice has more scriptural support than the other, it must not matter that much. If God cared, wouldn't He convict all these Christians on this topic?
This could be said in context of the head covering, of dress, of cosmetics, of accumulation of wealth, et cetera. Again, a very good question, and it's something I've been asked. I would say, once again, almost from the beginning. Well, David, the Holy Spirit is going to guide us to all truth. So we don't need the early Christian writings. Well, of course, if we take this argument to its logical conclusion, I mean, the truth of the matter, as the question points out, is no one can agree.
There's all these different views on every topic, whether it's theological or it's application of Bible teachings on lifestyle, there's no uniformity in agreement. I mean, there's a few things all Bible-believing Christians believe in, like the incarnation, but boy, it's only a small handful of things. So the person is saying, " Well, then maybe the Holy Spirit just doesn't care whether we dress modestly or whether we wear a head covering.
" Well, if you take that to its logical conclusion, then you'd have to say, " God must not care much about anything, " whether it's the Trinity or salvation or baptism or communion or eschatology, the two kingdoms, whether or not we keep the Sabbath, whether we practice war, divorce, modesty, wealth. I mean, you name it. You'd have to say that God just simply doesn't care. Whatever we do is fine, because if He cared, He would give us unity in the Holy Spirit, and we don't have unity in the Holy Spirit.
Okay, so yeah, there's a flaw, obviously, in the reasoning. And Jude 1:3, written towards the end of the New Testament period, would indicate otherwise. It says, " Contend earnestly for the faith which was once for all delivered to the saints. " So there's two truths here. One is that the faith was once for all delivered to us, and number two, we're supposed to contend for it. So God does want us to be united.
He doesn't want this massive confusion that we have with everybody speaking so many different contradictory things about what the Scriptures say. And even worse, often when they speak in unity, they're speaking something that's false. One of the things that we should notice is going to John 16 verses 12 through 13, where it talks about the Spirit guiding us to all truth, that Jesus did not say that to the crowds. He did not say that to the future generations.
He was alone in the upper room with the twelve, and he said that to them. Let me just read those verses. I mean, John 16:12 and 13. Jesus said, " I still have many things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now. However, when He, the Spirit of truth has come, He will guide you into all truth, for He will not speak on His own authority, but whatever He hears, He will speak, and He will tell you things to come. " Now, we know that was fulfilled in the 12 apostles, because guess what?
They all spoke the same thing. Here you have 12 leaders. Peter acted as sort of the ad hoc head, but I mean, he didn't have some kind of magisterial authority over the other 11. You have 12 apostles. And if you had that situation today, you know what you'd end up with? 12 different denominations, all saying something different. But you had one united church. It stayed united from the day of Pentecost to the death of the Apostle John. You had one church.
That shows that the apostles had the Holy Spirit, that He had guided the apostles to all truth, because they all spoke the same thing. And then for the next couple of centuries, the church stuck to what the apostles had handed down, and they were able to stay united as one church. So the Spirit gave instructions primarily through the apostles. And as long as the church made a concerted effort to hold to those teachings that were handed down from the apostles.
And of course, to do that, they had to look at what was handed down. They would consult churches where the apostles had personally taught to ask them, " What did the apostles say on this subject or this subject? Or what was the practice concerning this or that? " They made, like I say, a concerted effort to stay close to what the apostles handed down, and so they had that unity. But now today, what's the situation? Well, it's everyone saying, " Oh, the Holy Spirit is going to guide us to all truth.
" Well, we can test that and look at this disunity that's out there with different teachings on just about every doctrinal subject and on almost every lifestyle subject. And I'd say it's obvious to anyone who's honest that, no, the Spirit is not guiding each individual Christian to all truth, and he's not guiding each church or each denomination into all truth because they're all in conflict.
All right, the next question concerns church standards, and it applies to our general topic of critical thinking because, yeah, it means the answer to the question involves critical thinking. It's a good question. And this is the question sent in. It said, " The Bible doesn't say very much about modesty. We shouldn't impose things on people that the Bible doesn't say. " Since the Bible doesn't give specifics about modesty, that means we certainly shouldn't make black and white rules about modesty.
Whether something is modest is subjective, and it depends on individual conscience and the culture that you're living in. Now, the person sending this in didn't necessarily it doesn't represent their personal view necessarily. They're saying this is what they hear all the time, and how would we respond to this? And it's not absurd reasoning. I mean, it's a very logical question, nothing uncritical about that thinking.
And I'd say there's a lot of truth in the basic premise, but the conclusion does contain a fallacy. And I'll point to the fallacy. The conclusion is saying that because people can't agree where to draw the line between two points in this situation, modesty. What constitutes modesty? What constitutes immodesty? Since Christians can't agree, then there isn't a line that we can point to. Now, like I say, this fallacy occurs all the time in a lot of different forms. So it's really good.
One reason I wanted to address this question is that you'll recognize this fallacy when it comes up in other things, because it takes different shapes, but it's always the same kind of argument. Now, when I was in college and I took a course in logic, this was known as the fallacy of the beard. And that may sound like a strange name, but it was called that through the illustration of somebody, you know, no one would argue this, but someone supposedly arguing, " Well, there's no such thing as a beard.
" And someone else would say, " Well, of course there is. That guy over there has got a beard. " " Oh, really? Well, tell me how many whiskers you have to have on your face to constitute a beard. " Well, the person would say, " Well, I don't know. Uh-huh. See, there's no such thing as a beard. If there was, you could tell me how many whiskers it takes. " Well, yeah, that's a fallacy just because there's not a hard line somewhere.
And in the case of a beard, no, nobody has a magic number that if you've got 100 hairs on your face, that's a beard. If you have 99, nope, that's not a beard. It just means you haven't shaved. Well, yeah, there's no hard line, but there is such a thing as a beard and there is such a thing as a beardless man like myself. And because you can't draw a line doesn't mean that those two truths don't exist. Now, today, this fallacy is usually called the continuum fallacy.
A continuum just means a line that, you know, starts here and ends there without any break. It's just, you know, one continual thing. And because you can't point to a spot on that line to distinguish something, then you're saying, " Oh, well, it doesn't exist. " For example, you might say, " Well, there's no such thing as a good boy or a bad boy. " What do you mean by that? Well, if there is, now you tell me exactly what constitutes a good boy and what constitutes a bad boy.
How many times do they have to disobey before they're disobedient? And how many times do they get to disobey and still be called an obedient child? Oh, you can't name the number? See? It doesn't exist. I mean, it's absurd reasoning, but it sounds logical. And so it occurs, like I say, not usually in such obvious ways like the beard, but in ones that are a lot more subtle. And this one that we're just looking at about modesty is a more subtle way.
Another way to state the fallacy with regard to modesty, the present question, would be to say that because churches can't draw the line or agree where the line is to be drawn on what is modest and what is immodest, then that means there is no such thing as a hard line, and no one should try to draw one. Well, that's the fallacy of the beard. Just because sometimes we have to draw an arbitrary line doesn't mean that truth doesn't exist. So, like, you know, what constitutes long hair on a man?
Well, I don't know that anyone has an objective thing, but there is hair that's long, and there is hair that's short, and churches or when I was in school, they would draw an arbitrary line, okay? It had to be above your like in my school, it couldn't go over your ear. If it was over your ear, it constituted long hair. That's an arbitrary definition, but you have the right to draw definitions where there's a continuum. Otherwise, you couldn't make any laws or any rules anywhere.
And the interesting thing is, a lot of people think, " Well, it's only the Mennonites who have standards on modesty. " But I'll tell you right now, virtually every church draws a line somewhere on modesty. I mean, for example, I don't think there's a church on earth that would allow you to show up to church in your bathing suit, and they wouldn't say something to you. Or even worse, you show up in your underwear.
Is there a church that would say, " Oh, hi, yeah, you look nice today, " or maybe something even less than that. No, I mean, even a very worldly church is going to draw a line somewhere. Now, that line has moved. When I was a boy, even a worldly church would not have let you come to church in shorts. I mean, they may not have stopped you at the door, but someone would have said something to you about, " Don't come back dressed that way again, " or to come in a t-shirt.
Now, nowadays, when I'm heading to church on Sunday and I go by a number of other churches, yeah, I see people coming in or out of churches. Some of them have very early services. And yeah, they're in shorts and t-shirts and tank tops and all of that. So the line has moved from where it was when I was a little boy of what they call modest, but they still do have a line. I haven't seen anyone in their underwear, you know, crossing the street and walking into a church.
So, yeah, is it wrong then for a kingdom-minded church to have stricter standards about dress than allowing people to come in shorts? I personally think that a kingdom-minded church is going to try to draw a line that best represents the standards of the New Testament Church. I don't mean that we're going to dress like New Testament Christians, but you know as the question itself pointed out, it is a subjective decision. There isn't a hard line in the Bible.
It's subjective, but that doesn't mean it's not valid just because it's subjective. And I would also agree that styles of dress change between cultures and across centuries. What would have been immodest or strange in say the year 500 or 1,000 or even 1800 is different than what it is in 2022. But that doesn't mean just because something is considered okay in 2022, that that means that it's modest. No, there's still some objective standards.
And let's just look at what some of those objective universal principles are that we can see in the early church. And those objective standards, they stay the same in every century and every culture. In other words, the kind of dress might change between cultures and between centuries, but not these principles. One of the principles is, does our clothing cover most of our bodies? Or does it expose a lot of our bodies, okay? So that's one principle that doesn't change about modesty.
A second one, is our clothing tight or sensuous? Does it invite lust from the opposite sex? If it does, then it's not modest. And that principle, like I say, it never changes. The style of dress might be different in different countries and different centuries, but that standard doesn't change. And then a third standard I'll give that is universal and that was practiced by the early Christians and is consistent with the New Testament. Is our clothing costly, luxurious?
Or is it showy where everybody notices, " Oh, what a beautiful new dress you have on. " If it is, it isn't modest because it's drawing attention to ourselves in a way to flatter ourselves. All right, the next question is dealing with the non-enforcement of church standards and also government laws passed by Caesar. This is what the person writes. They say, " If a rule isn't being enforced, then it's not an actual rule, and you don't have to follow it.
" And they mentioned that in the context of speed limits, for example, the COVID masking, church standards, et cetera. Now, again, I don't think the person is saying that was their view, but that they've heard people say this. Now, here, it's a good example of how to analyze this using critical thinking. Here, it's not the conclusion that is fallacious, it's the premise.
In other words, you can have a very logical argument, and the conclusion fits the premise, but if your premise is false, then the whole thing is false. And the premise here, we're going to first talk about the laws of the government. The premise that is fallacious, or that is in error, is saying that if a law isn't being enforced, then it's not an actual law. Well, and again, here I'm talking about Caesar's laws. And as an attorney, I mean, I can just flatly say that that's a false premise. It's not true.
I mean, for example, for several years, you may drive over the speed limit in a certain stretch of road, and no one has ever stopped you or pulled you over and given you a ticket. And so you may say, " Well, that law doesn't apply. " But no, it doesn't mean that that speed limit is no longer the law. Because tomorrow, there might be a police officer there. Maybe somebody who's new. Maybe the ones in the past let people speed in that area and didn't do anything about it.
But you have a new law enforcement officer, and he or she pulls you over and gives you a ticket. And when you go before the judge, it's not going to work to say, " Well, hey, I was speeding there for years, and I never got a ticket for it, and so I shouldn't get a ticket now. " I mean, the judge is probably going to throw the book at you for admitting that you've been speeding all of those years. So just because a law isn't enforced, that doesn't nullify the law. The law is still there.
There might be some strange exceptions of laws written you know back in the 1800s that for some reason weren't taken off the books, and they're so obsolete, no one even pays attention to them now. But that's kind of a special category. Now, I will give this qualification. This is my opinion. Someone may have a different one, and you know I'm satisfied with that. I personally don't think that as Christians, we have to be more scrupulous than Caesar is about Caesar's own laws. And I'll give you an example.
When I was newly married, I was throwing a paper route. I would get up at three o'clock in the morning. We lived in a small town of 9,000 people. It was in a rural area. And at 3:00 in the morning, I mean, there was just nobody out driving in town except mainly those of us throwing newspapers or police cars.
Now, there was long before I was throwing newspapers, there was an unwritten understanding that had come up between the police and the newspaper carriers that you don't have to stop at the red lights during the middle of the night. They didn't have the money to equip the lights that they would shut off at a certain time and just go to blinking lights or something like that. They didn't have the funds for that.
So the police officer said, " Yeah, just, you know, be careful, but yeah, we're not going to give you a ticket for going through a red light at three o'clock in the morning. " And in fact, this one light that I would go through all the time, because it was in the center of town, and so I crossed it back and forth several times. There was often a police officer sitting there and there was no issue. Now there I would say that was fine because Caesar did not care. It was not dangerous.
There were no cars out at that hour. And so Caesar specifically did not enforce that law for a valid reason, because it wasn't necessary. And I would feel that as a Christian, I don't have to be more scrupulous than Caesar. It's Caesar's law. But now someone else might take a different position. Now, the person brought up the COVID rules. Now, here in Pennsylvania, the government back in 2020 banned all gatherings of over 10 people.
This lasted for about a month, and the law specifically included religious gatherings. Now, some Mennonite churches ignored the law, and they just met anyway, and ignored it entirely. And the law also said you were supposed to mask when you were in public. A lot of Mennonites I say Mennonites. I think there were other people, but as far as the churches, the only ones I saw meeting were Mennonite churches. Yeah, they just decided we're going to ignore that law.
Now, because it was a touchy issue, the government had decided, " Look, we're not going to arrest people going to church. We're not going to go inside churches and look and see if people are wearing masks. " The police officer might have stopped you on the road walking to church if you weren't wearing a mask, but once you went inside the building and the door was shut, the police didn't go in the churches to see whether or not you were obeying the law.
And so a lot of Mennonites said, " Well, they're not enforcing it, so that means we don't have to obey it. " But does it really mean that? See, this wasn't like the situation of the red light at three o'clock in the morning. Caesar didn't enforce that for a good reason, and the reason was, it served no purpose. There were no cars there. There was no necessity for it. And it just lacked the funds to be able to change the lights, to become blinking lights at that hour in the morning. But this was very different.
This was a matter of a pandemic that nobody knew where it would lead to. The hospitals were overcrowded. A lot of elderly people were dying from COVID. And the government, right or wrong, of our state, was trying to protect the spread of it, and that was the reason for the law. They didn't go inside of churches because they realized that could create a lot of bad publicity, and it would look really bad, you know, a bunch of men and women, you know, a hundred of them being carted off in police vans from a church.
And you can picture, you know, the news wagons being there with their cameras and all of that. And they realized, just let it go. 90 percent of the churches obeyed the law, and like I said, it only lasted for about a month. And you could meet in small groups of less than ten or ten or less, I should say. And so most churches obeyed it. But yeah, I would personally say that was very wrong to just disobey Caesar because we didn't like it.
Particularly, someone could argue, " Well, it says we should meet together as a church. " And certainly, if we had been banned for a long time, I would have been inclined to say, " Well, yeah, we need to have clandestine meetings, but they can be small. We don't have to meet in large groups. " And even then, the law did allow small gatherings of 10, so at least a couple families were still able to get together. But wearing a mask, how does that violate any law of God? It's inconvenient.
I don't like wearing them myself, but it certainly doesn't violate one of God's laws. But, you know, people saw that, " Oh, they're not going to come in our church and do anything about it, so we're free to just disobey the law. " Well, that's not true. It's still Caesar's law, and Romans 13 hasn't been overruled that you obey what Caesar says unless Caesar is giving you a commandment that directly contradicts the commandment of Jesus Christ that causes you to disobey Christ.
And there are other secular examples where there have been periods where the police did not enforce the law, but not because they didn't want to. It's because of the political or social consequences at the time. One example that for many of you, this was before your time, you wouldn't remember it. I would still remember the event. I wasn't there though. And this was Woodstock. It was a big outdoor concert. And people had put up a lot of money. They rented the property, and there were fences and gates.
You know, you had to pay to get in. It was a several-day-long concert. And after a while, what people started doing was just crashing the gates, going in without paying, climbing over the fence. So many people were doing it that they gave up trying to enforce it. They appealed to the government, and it was like, " Wow, we would have to bring in the army almost to enforce this. " Then there were a lot of young people there openly smoking marijuana or taking drugs. There was public nudity.
There was just a lot of laws that were violated. And the government, I think, wisely decided, " Look, this is going to create such a huge negative reaction to come in there with soldiers or the National Guard and arrest hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of young people. There's going to be rioting. There's going to be all this negative publicity. Since it'll just be three or four days, or maybe it was a week, however long it was, we're just going to let them get by with breaking the law this one time.
But that didn't change the fact they were still breaking the law. It was wrong. It was just the political considerations made it hard to enforce it. It's the same with riots that often happen today. Today, most riots have a racial principle element behind them. And so often the police are told by their authorities higher than them to just stand down. If someone busts a window and goes in and starts stealing things, don't shoot them. It's going to cause just even more backlash, more rioting, more bad publicity.
So they just let them get away with it. And that's an enforcement principle, but it's still stealing. It doesn't change that. It's not because the police feel like, " Hey, that's okay. That store owner doesn't care if his merchandise is stolen. " It's just that we don't want to throw gasoline on a fire that's already existing. So no, just because a law isn't enforced doesn't mean it's no longer a law. It's still there. Okay, what about church standards? Well, here the situation is a little different.
Many churches don't bother to keep their standards up to date. They have rules on their books that nobody in the church follows any longer, and the church authorities have no intention to enforce it. They just haven't taken the time to officially veto that standard, whatever it was. It made sense maybe in the year 1910, it doesn't make any sense now, but they've never taken the trouble to scratch it off the books.
So, in a situation like that, no, I don't think it's wrong to violate the church standard because for all intents and purposes, the standard has already been revoked. It just hasn't been officially, but unofficially it has, even by the authorities in the church. It just hasn't been removed from the books. And there I would fault the Church for not keeping their standards up to date, deleting rules that the church feels are no longer applicable and that they don't intend to enforce.
However, that's very different than someone just pushing the boundaries to see how far they can violate the letter or spirit of a church standard without getting into trouble. Because if you've made a covenant with a church to live by certain brotherhood rules, then you should honor your covenant. Now, many Christians today, many kingdom Christians, would feel like they don't want to be part of a church with a lot of brotherhood rules. And I think they're right.
I don't think there's any obligation that a Christian has to belong to a church that decides we're going to spell out you know what modesty means or what this means. As I said, every church in some degree spells out modesty, but on other issues, some churches would not have any standard whatsoever. And I think that's fine. If you choose to go to a church like that, I feel like that's a voluntary thing.
And I personally am not critical of somebody who would rather go to church that didn't have written standards or unwritten ones. But on the other hand, many Christians find standards helpful. They like the fact that, " Hey, we're all doing the same thing. This helps me to resist temptation to, say, go to movies. If our church has a written standard, you know we don't go to movies, and so we're all doing it together. " I will say this, it's voluntary whether you join a church like that or not.
But if you're going to join a church with written standards, and you make a brotherhood covenant that you're going to follow those, then you should keep your covenant. That's part of Jesus ' commandment of let your yes mean yes, and your no mean no. Okay, I believe this is our last question, and it deals with unity among Christians. And this person said, " We cannot be in unity and love if we're divided as to God's Word.
" So how would you deal with the unity movement, which says that this and that are just secondary issues when they aren't secondary issues? For example, Calvinism is not secondary, yet many Bible teachers today treat it like it is. Okay, my answer would be, it depends on the level of unity that we're talking about. No, we're not going to have perfect unity or anything close to it in today's church.
That was lost with the Reformation, and I personally believe only a miracle of the Holy Spirit could ever bring us back to being one, but it doesn't mean that we should cause more division ourselves. Now, I personally would maintain very strict criteria as to which church I'm going to be willing to join. But my criteria as to whom I will work with, say, in relief work, or helping the poor, or whom I'm going to pray with as a brother or sister, well, my standards there are very different.
I want to work with other professing Christians, as long as they're not living totally ungodly lives, to the extent that I can be in unity with them. Now, the interesting thing is the statement of faith that lasted for nearly 300 years after the birth of the church was what we know today as the Apostles ' Creed. And virtually everyone out there who calls himself a Christian or a Bible-believing Christian, I should say, well, they would hold to the teachings that are in the Apostles ' Creed.
So, in a sense, most of the theological things we argue about today would have been considered secondary issues by the early Christians. Our problem is that we are too dogmatic about matters about which no one can be 100% certain, or that do not affect our walk with Christ. So if we want the unity of the early church, we have to realize we can't spell out every little jot and tittle. We have to accept there's going to be some differences of opinions.
Now, again, they didn't have the wide division of opinion that we had today because they were sticking to the historic faith, and it's why I emphasize the historic faith. I think that we Christians can have love among ourselves, even though we don't agree on many theological and lifestyle issues. I mean, I personally look for areas of agreement with other Christians. Where do you and I agree? And let's focus on that instead of looking for areas where you and I disagree. I mean, that is on a personal basis.
I, of course, have spent most of my adult life arguing for the historic faith and trying to educate Christians about it to bring us to the unity of the faith that was there in the beginning. But we should always remember that the two great commandments are still loving God with our whole heart, soul, and mind, and loving our neighbor as ourselves. And there are tens of thousands of Christians who hold to theological errors who exceed me in both of those areas of loving God and loving their neighbor.
So who am I to sit in judgment on them when I know that they stand taller in the kingdom of God than I do? My theology might be better, at least in my mind it is, but I don't think that's going to mean very much to Jesus Christ compared to their love. At the same time, I totally reject ecumenism. And by ecumenism, I mean it's where we try to find the lowest common denominator where we can all agree, such as, " Well, today that would mean we agree that there's God. " And that would be about it.
If you got all the churches together, that'd be about the only thing they would agree in common. And even there, they wouldn't agree on what they mean by God. And then in Ecumenism, you end up ignoring a lot of serious Bible teachings, both on theology and on lifestyle.
So in summary, I'm very restrictive as to whom I'm going to be in church fellowship with, but I'm very slow to judge others because of their doctrinal errors, particularly if they're not errors that were set forth in the Apostles ' Creed, if they were not errors that the early Christians would have put you out of the church for maintaining. Now, if someone is living in serious sin, then that's a totally different thing.
But if it's just a matter of a theological error, then I'm happy to leave the judging in God's hands in that area. But again, as I said before, I do think theology is important, or I wouldn't be hosting this historic faith series or writing the books that I've written. I think we can be zealous for the truth and to contend for the faith once for all handed down to the saints without judging the hearts of those who are holding to theological errors.
Well, that concludes today's questions, and I want to thank the people who sent those questions in. They make a huge difference. It helps me to be in touch with what my listeners and readers are thinking or what they're hearing from other people, and other people benefit from hearing the answers to the questions that you submit. So we want to encourage everyone to keep submitting questions when we do have the question and answers sessions.
We don't do it every month right now, but we probably will be going back to that once we finish the series on critical thinking. But even as we go through this series, every few months, the thought right now is to have a Q&A session where we can look at questions that pertain to critical thinking. Now, if you submitted a question and we didn't get to it, please don't be discouraged. We can't answer everyone's questions, so we have to pick and choose.
But if you submitted one and it wasn't answered, if it was on topic, now we did have some people who submitted questions that didn't have anything to do with critical thinking, and so we chose not to address them this time. But maybe you can submit them on one of the question and answer sessions where we say, " Ask David anything about the early church.
" Or if it was dealing with critical thinking, well, then the next time we ask for questions, please resubmit it, and we'll be happy to look at it again at that time. Again, thanks so much for your contributions in the way of questions and appreciate the feedback from everyone.