Our Friend, Bad Bunny | (Ep. 415)

In this episode, Douglas Wilson reflects on the Super Bowl halftime show and its cultural meaning, then continues his study of sin by explaining what Scripture means by having a doubtful mind and why worry is ultimately rooted in unbelief. He closes by discussing Philip Hamburger’s Separation of Church and State, clarifying the history of the phrase and what the First Amendment actually requires.

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What is Plodcast?

In the Plodcast, pastor Douglas Wilson covers anything related to theology and culture with his usual entertaining style. Whether it involves talking about Chestertonian Calvinism (not an oxymoron), the benefits of a Classical Christian education (not in that order), or the latest pomosexuality farce, the plodcast aims to apply all of Christ to all of life, for all the world. Douglas Wilson is an evangelical, postmill, Calvinist, Reformed, and Presbyterian (pretty much in that order) and is politically to the right of Jeb Stuart.

Welcome to the podcast. My name is Douglas Wilson. This is episode 415. Can you believe it? 415. The podcast. Just make sure you're in the right place. Since it is still fresh and all the hot news, I thought I'd talk a little bit about Super Bowl halftime and our friend Bad Bunny. So there are many layers to this whole thing and many things should go out to the turning point people who sort of put us a spotlight on the whole thing by providing an alternative halftime show that people could come over and watch and watch. Instead of watching the usual monstrosity that gets served up in official in the official Super Bowl. So the challenge worked. There's there was a challenge element involved and there was also natural consequences to the whole thing. There's an outfit called Samba TV that measures ratings and it's far more granulated than the old Nielsen system. The Nielsen system, I think it's been going since 1950 or something. And Samba TV is geared for smart televisions, which pretty much everybody's television is these days and they can get a lot more. Right. And according to Samba TV, S-A-M-B-A, Samba TV, about 22 million people switched away from the Super Bowl during the halftime or just turned it off. 22 million people. That's a lot of people. And if you're an advertiser who is paying a trillion dollars a minute for ad space during the Super Bowl, they're not there. Obviously, not happy. Now, there were a number of things to say about the objectionable nature of the program that Bad Bunny put on. One was the usual provocative stuff, the grinding, inappropriate grinding and whatever. There was also the fact that the lyrics of his songs were vile, just really bad. The reason there wasn't an explosion right away is that these vile things were sung in Spanish. So that was a more effective way of bleeping everything out than bleeps would be. So most people didn't hear it, but that moved the offensiveness to another area entirely. In Deuteronomy 28 and in Isaiah, we're told that one of the judgments of God, one of the ways that you can see that a nation or people is under judgment, is that their streets are filled up with people speaking a language that the natives don't understand. And this is a signal that something has gone very wrong indeed. In fact, this is part of Paul's argument in 1 Corinthians 14 that this is a that tongues is assigned for unbelievers. And well, how can that be? Well, it's a sign of judgment. Basically, the streets of Jerusalem at Pentecost were filled up with people speaking in these strange tongues. And that was a harbinger of what was to come. And what we saw in the Super Bowl incident was the premier American event, you know, Super Bowl, American football. It's called American football. And it's the championship between two American teams and you've got 70,000 people in the stands and you've got millions watching on television. And they put it on a halftime show that is sort of a middle finger to everybody, you know, who cares what language you guys speak. We're not going to do it. But as I said in recent blog posts, it's like inviting somebody over for Sunday dinner and they bring some extra guests and they insist on talking the entire time to one another in a language nobody in your house understands. At some point, you're going to decide that they were picking a fight that they wanted that they wanted this problem. Now, given what turning point did and given the fact that so many people left or went somewhere else. The NFL may have picked a fight that they're not able to finish, but they really need to they either need to double down and let us finish this quick or they need to make some hard course corrections. I don't think they're going to make the course correction so. So continuing with the blog cast for 15 we come to well, we must never become complacent in our study of from our theology. There's always another send a deal with and when we get to the end of our list, the best thing would be to just go back to the beginning and start over again. The chances are pretty good that we will have forgotten much of what we learned as we went through this list of sins. The word meterizo means to be of a doubtful mind, but contextually it has a very specific meaning closer to what we would call anxiety or worry. The reason we can tell this, the one place this word is used in the New Testament is in Luke. It's in the passage, the parallel passage in Luke to where Jesus is teaching us to trust God with all our earthly needs. So here's the passage. And seek not ye, what you shall eat or what you shall drink, neither be ye of doubtful mind. So don't seek what you can eat, don't seek what you can drink and don't be of a doubtful mind. So Jesus has just finished exhorting the people, the way he did in the sermon on the Mount in Matthew. And this is a parallel passage to that. Consider how God closed the lilies, consider how God feeds the ravens. Don't chase after what you're going to eat or what you're going to have drink. And this is where he says not to be of a doubtful mind. So under this circumstance, what would you be doubting? You would be doubting the very thing that Jesus tells you not to worry about, whether God will take care of you, whether he will provide for you. So being of doubtful mind here doesn't have as a primary meaning, to say you're reading a difficult passage in the Old Testament. And you suddenly wonder, is this was this inspired by God? Is this really, you know, really? That's doubt and that's bad. That's not what you want. But that's not what he's talking about here. Doubtful mind here has to do with whether or not you're going to have to skip a meal or whether or not you're going to be clothed tomorrow. This is an a 40-ore argument, which means it's a how much more argument. If God feeds all the birds and they are not of a doubtful mind, you don't see birds out in your backyard worrying about it. Then how much more you ought not to have a doubtful mind? If God feeds sparrows and ravens and all his creatures out there, then why are you anxious? According to the Lord Jesus, worry is the sin of unbelief. It's the sin of not trusting. It's the sin of not trusting. So don't be of a doubtful mind. Don't doubt whether God is going to take care of you. He most certainly will. God don't ever change. He's God. In our book review section today, I want to point you in the direction of a book called Separation of Church and State, written by a legal scholar named Philip Hamburger. I read one of Hamburger's previous books. And honestly, it was one of the best books of political thinking that I've ever read. The title of that was Is Administrative Law Unlawful? Is Administrative Law Unlawful? And Hamburger shows conclusively in that book that yes, the kind of law, the kind of regulations that we function under today are precisely the kind of regulations that we fought the war for independence to get rid of arbitrary law, capricious law, as laid down by the king's men. Right. Well, he has written another book. This is a it's a hefty tone, but it's accessible readable stuff. And it's a thoroughgoing treatment of the history of the phrase separation church and state. Now, here's the thing. That phrase separation of church and state is a phrase that has sort of taken on a life of its own. In the first amendment, it says Congress shall make no law concerning the establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof. So you've got the establishment clause and you've got the free exercise clause. But in the first amendment, it simply says that Congress shall make no law. And that means that the only entity on earth that can violate the first amendment is Congress. Congress shall not establish a church of the United States, the same way that England had a church of England and Denmark had a church of Denmark. Our founders wisely and rightly did not want that for us at the federal level. But that's crucial because when the Constitution was approved, there were states that had churches established supported with tax money at the state level, Massachusetts and Connecticut and New Hampshire all had a formal relationship with the Congressional church. And then after the Constitution was ratified and there were 13 states in the now freshly minted United States, Vermont came in as the 14th state. And when Vermont came in, they had an established state church. Now, what that means, now, as it happens, I'm not an establishment area. And I'm, I think that established churches at the state level is not a good idea there either. But the point I'm making is that it's not an unconstitutional idea. I'm opposed to it. I think it's a bad idea, but I don't think it's an unconstitutional idea. And South Carolina did something more to my liking. They did not support a particular denomination with tax money. But South Carolina basically formally declared that the Protestant religion is the religion of this state. And that meant that they were not giving money to a particular denomination. There was not a kept denomination for South Carolina. But it was explicitly Christian and it was explicitly Protestant. So that's the first amendment. In a letter to the Danbury Baptists, Danbury, Connecticut, Thomas Jefferson used the phrase wall of separation. And then this idea of separation of church and state is a phrase that has taken on a life of its own and has sort of been read back into the first amendment. And people think that the first amendment requires a separation of church and state. Well, no, it requires a non-established church. Right? But not a separate. So if you have an influential church, a very strong church, a robust church, the church in the state can interact closely. The state can certainly agree with the church on certain things, just as the church can agree with the state on certain things. The first amendment says that you cannot do is simply adopt this denomination, say the Presbyterians over the Baptists or the Baptists over the Episcopalians or as it usually goes picking the Episcopalians. So this is, so Philip Hamburger does a marvelous job going back to the beginning and just walking through tracing the meaning of that phrase, what it meant in different eras and how it came to mean what it means today. So Philip Hamburger, the separation of church and state and check out his other book too is administrative law unlawful. Thank you.