Reverend Matthew Fenn

[00:00:00] Speaker A: Foreign commences Pastor Matthew Finn. Welcome, sir, to Lutheran Answers. [00:00:12] Speaker B: I'm on Lutheran Answers. [00:00:14] Speaker A: Oh, yes, unfortunately, you are. I know Jordan has probably warned you away from it. [00:00:20] Speaker B: It's okay. We can, you know. Did I beat Jordan? He hasn't been on yet, has he? [00:00:24] Speaker A: No. [00:00:25] Speaker B: Okay, good. [00:00:26] Speaker A: No, he won't return my calls or emails or anything. [00:00:31] Speaker B: Thanks for having me. It's a pleasure to have to be on. [00:00:34] Speaker A: Yeah. So I posted a video with Gage Garlinghouse in which we talked about sacred hours. The Lutheran Daily Office. [00:00:45] Speaker B: Yes. [00:00:46] Speaker A: And immediately after that went up, your lawyers sent me a cease and desist, saying that unless I had you on to give you full credit for the book, I could not keep that episode up. So you are actually not Gage, you are the mastermind behind that book. [00:01:03] Speaker B: I am the mastermind behind that book. That book exists because I was frustrated with all the other books that exist. [00:01:11] Speaker A: That's. I feel like the story behind most books, actually. [00:01:16] Speaker B: In all fairness, though, I mean, the treasury of Daily Prayer is an excellent resource. The Brotherhood Prayer Book is also an excellent resource. Oremus. Also very good resource. Those are the big three. But I have gripes with all of them. [00:01:37] Speaker A: Why is yours better? [00:01:39] Speaker B: Because I made. [00:01:40] Speaker A: It works for me. [00:01:44] Speaker B: No, ours is different. It's not intending to do the same thing. So the treasury of Daily Prayer gives you the lecture, the daily lecture that's in Lutheran service book that is not intended to be a lectionary for both matins and vespers every day. It's intending to give you an Old Testament lesson and a New Testament lesson, each of about 25 verses apiece to give you an overview. So it's not intending to try to cover the Old and New Testaments and the Psalms in. In a year. So. So. And. And it doesn't always have everything that is required to pray, that's traditionally required to pray. The daily office. It doesn't have the daily. The collects from the previous Sunday. It has other resources that are great, but it just didn't do exactly what I want. The Brotherhood Prayer Book is far closer to what I was looking for, except for it's in King Jameth, and I don't pray in King Jameth. And it. Not only is it in Elizabethan English, it's in Gregorian chant notation. And those. Those things are hindrances. But the. On the other side of that, it. It's also focused. It's also an actual breviary with all seven hours. And that's not what I wanted exactly, because the Reformation took the old service of Matins and prime or lauds. So matins and lauds and put them together to make what we know as matins. And then we took vespers. Yeah, vespers and compline and put them together as what we call vespers. And then we took the daytime hours and dropped them completely and took parts of prime and made it the suffrages. And that's what comes into the Common Service book in the 1800s, late 1800s. And that gets into service book and hymnal and TLH in the two streams in American Lutheranism. So having those twin sides of morning and evening, that goes back to like the Old Testament and the morning and evening sacrifice. There's good reason to have morning and evening prayer. It's even in our catechism. And so I felt that while I really love Brotherhood Prayer book, it wasn't exactly what I was looking for. And so the Sacred Hours went back to the Common service tradition and updated it. And when I thought of, well, how am I going to do that? I don't want to have to rewrite all these collects and, and all that. I went to the Book of Common Prayer 2019, which was a. It's a good conservative update to a lot of this material. A lot of these collects are the same. A lot of. And it's unlike the Book of Common Prayer 1979, which was very like kind of liberally and that kind of thing. It was in a conservative revision of. Of the Daily Office. And so they graciously just gave us permission to use that as our starting point. Just absolutely. The. The publisher said, long live the Daily Office. That was his email to me. [00:05:26] Speaker A: Amazing. [00:05:28] Speaker B: So they free and clear as long as we had the credit citation. And so that's how it got started. I made the book that I wanted to use. I wanted like all of the seasonal things in one spot so that you. Not in five spots or in the case of treasury, you have to grab five books. You have to have your treasury of Daily Prayer. And you've got to get, you know, the altar book or the Pastoral Care Companion or the propers book to get the. The prayers from Sunday. I just wanted one book in my Bible. And so that's how the. That's how the project started. We already have to make a second edition because there are errors and typos that we missed and some feedback that we got. So there's a second edition coming very soon. It'll just replace the first edition. So when you go to the page after it's up, it'll. It'll just replace it. So there'll be a second edition. So that's, that's great. We had a new, a new editor jump on board for the second edition to help us. Aaron Overly Graham did a great job finding some typos that we missed. You know, it's silly things in the second edition. Like we were inconsistent in how we approached pronouns to deity. Do you capitalize you or do you small? So we decided to capitalize well, so we have to go through the whole book and capitalize. So stuff like that. [00:07:03] Speaker A: Okay. [00:07:04] Speaker B: Is coming in a second edition very soon. Maybe like next week or the week after Chant. [00:07:10] Speaker A: Chant tones anywhere. [00:07:12] Speaker B: We have a. One of the other editors on that is Alex Lancaster, a fantastic musician, has a master's in. I believe it's music composition. He's working on it. It's slow. We've previewed some of it at our, at our seminary retreat last year we previewed a hymn and compline and that was, that went very well. And so he's in the process of writing that music. The. I think there's a. Rome has a book that they use for the sacred for the daily office. That's all the chant tones and all the, the music. And he didn't think he could use it. And then he realized, oh, it's it. Because it was from the 60s and 60s stuff is still under copyright. Well, this stuff was put into the public domain. And so that's, so that's a, that's a great boon. So we're able to use some pretty traditional chant tones. But he also wants to make it easy and singable and in modern notation. So as he's working on that, we want to make the, the second edition or the second edition, the music edition. We want to make it a premium edition, you know, leather cover, you know, something nice. And so we're just not sure how to do that yet because Justin Sinner is a, is a small time publishing operation and we use Amazon. [00:08:43] Speaker A: Take that, Dr. Cooper. [00:08:47] Speaker B: I mean I could say that I'm on the board, so. But it's, it's small and, and you know, we use print on demand services, Amazon whatnot. And you can't print on demand a leather cover and you know, gilded edges. Yeah, so. So we're gonna, we're looking into how we might be able to, you know, logistics of doing that besides putting them in Dr. Cooper's garage. He doesn't want to do that. [00:09:19] Speaker A: Yeah, you, I mean you would have to, you would have to do that though, right? Bulk order. You Know, like a. Like traditional publishing and then fulfill yourself. [00:09:30] Speaker B: Yeah. So, yeah, how we would go about doing that is yet to be seen. But we want to make that kind of an addition available. [00:09:40] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:09:40] Speaker B: And maybe. Maybe a door will open. We also have an app being developed and that's in active development that will come first before any music edition. And that's. We got more requests for the app that we did, the music edition. So the app will be. It'll be a fixed price point, something like 9.99. Not a subscription. You'll have it and you'll have it forever. It'll be both on Android and Apple and it'll. You know, we were. We wanted to make this because the old treasury of Daily Prayer app was discontinued and they turned it into a. [00:10:21] Speaker A: Now. Right. [00:10:22] Speaker B: Yeah. Yep. Yep, that's right. And even I still have it too, but even then, it still didn't have everything that was in the treasury. It. [00:10:30] Speaker A: I. I think it does. What is it missing? [00:10:33] Speaker B: It's missing responsive prayer one and two, which are in. It's missing. There's a few things like that. I think it's missing the. The seasonal ordinaries. It doesn't put those all in the responsories. The. The responsories, invitatories, antiphons for. For like Advent aren't in there. You know what I mean? So it's. It's always like. [00:11:07] Speaker A: Oh, yeah, these are the only prayers it has. [00:11:10] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:11:10] Speaker A: I don't know if you can see that. [00:11:12] Speaker B: Yep, yep. See? And then. So if you go with Matins in there. [00:11:17] Speaker A: Well, it's got all these prayers for the baptismal life. [00:11:20] Speaker B: Yes. It has those prayers. Yep. But what is missing is if you go to Matins, the only. And you have the invitatory that comes before Psalm 95, the vanite. It'll only ever have the one, the common one. Blessed be God, the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. Oh, come, let us worship him. But for Advent, that should be different. [00:11:42] Speaker A: Right. [00:11:43] Speaker B: And so it doesn't have those. And. And they didn't bother incorporating those. So in our app, we want to make it so that all of that stuff is. Is done for you. [00:11:53] Speaker A: And I just found out that that's even in this app. I didn't even know that it had madness. [00:12:01] Speaker B: Oh, it's a great. It's a great little app and people are disappointed that it's. It's. It's. Unless you had it before, you can't get it again. And so we're developing an app to have all that in there. I also hear that the seminarians from Alts are going to be releasing a daily podcast that goes through Matins. And so that's in the works. And that'll be available. Available where you, where you get your podcasts and also on the app. So for the matins for that day, you'll be able to hit play and you can hear the people reading it and praying it and you can pray with them. And so we're very excited about that. That's, that's cool. And the big news with the app is to make an app like a prayer app usable and one that people are going to want, you have to have a translation. You can't be using some public domain translation from the 1800s that nobody's heard of before. You have to use it. You have to use a translation that people that sounds close, at least close to what they're used to. And, and so we've paid for the rights to use the new King James because they're the only ones who would give it to us for a price. But so we're very happy to be able to offer the new King James in that, in that, in that app when it comes out. So that's, that's being developed. I'm hoping by, by the summer sometime it'll be out. You know, developing an app from scratch takes a heart. Takes. Takes time, especially when it's a team of one. [00:13:40] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, that's very cool. I'm. I'm very excited about it. I really just want to be able to chant all the pieces and I can't because I don't. No. Like, I need the music there. The music, you know, to do it. [00:13:58] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:13:58] Speaker A: So. [00:14:00] Speaker B: And it's more likely that we can incorporate music like that in an app than it is. It's quick. It'd be quick. It's quick. Honestly, quicker to do that because it's one thing to play some music and record it. It's another thing to transpose it onto a piece of paper. That takes lots of effort and to get it to look nice. [00:14:20] Speaker A: And the, like the Pray now app, one thing it does is like if you want to chant like the psalmody, you hit the little music icon and it gives you a selection of chant tones up top. And then all it, all it has to really play for you is just the. Oh, I don't have my volume up. [00:14:43] Speaker B: Yep. [00:14:45] Speaker A: You know, and then I can figure it out from there. [00:14:49] Speaker B: Oh, yeah. [00:14:49] Speaker A: Once I have the tone, I can, I can chant. I can chant it. So. [00:14:54] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. And maybe I hope that we can do something like that for our app, especially for the hymns at first and then eventually more things as they get done. I think, I think it'll be a good service to the church, especially, you know, if you're, if you're traveling, if you're on vacation and you want to pray, you don't want to be carrying 50 books with you and having a phone and having everything you need there with you is, is, is valuable. [00:15:25] Speaker A: Yeah. It's like the LCMS putting the Pastoral Care Companion into an app. [00:15:31] Speaker B: Oh, yeah. [00:15:31] Speaker A: I know so many pastors that like, it's, it's a lifeline. When you just least expect it and you need it, boom, it's on my phone. [00:15:39] Speaker B: Yeah, absolutely. And I, I don't know of any pastor who doesn't, you know, when they're out doing a shut in visit, doesn't have it with them because it's, it's invaluable and having it on your phone is fantastic. Absolutely. So, yeah, so those. And you know, we live in a digital age and people are used to, you know, to get people to pray. If you have an app that might be more convincing to try to get somebody to start it, you know, as, as to. Here's a book, you must learn it. Flip here, flip there. Open your Bible. You know, it's good to have that discipline and to learn that. But if somebody wants to start an app, an app helps. [00:16:26] Speaker A: Very good. I'm glad we were able to spend some time talking about sacred hours. I talk about it a lot, every chance I get. It's a wonderful little book. I would like to talk to you though, about you. [00:16:38] Speaker B: About me? [00:16:40] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:16:41] Speaker B: What about my bald? [00:16:42] Speaker A: Well, you are a repentant Canadian. [00:16:48] Speaker B: Yes. [00:16:49] Speaker A: You have repented of your Canadian ways. [00:16:52] Speaker B: It's understandable. I crossed the border when we moved to the States two years ago. We crossed the border and I go, I said to my wife, what's that you smell? She goes, freedom. No, what is it? Freedom. [00:17:07] Speaker A: Yep, yep. Yeah, I, I don't want to get political here, but I do hate that Trump is gonna have to send you back. And I'm gonna. [00:17:18] Speaker B: It's okay. It's gonna become the 51st state anyway. And. [00:17:21] Speaker A: Yeah, we're just gonna take it. We're just gonna take it. What, what are they doing up there anyway? [00:17:26] Speaker B: No, I, I was in Canada. I'm went to Concordia, Saint Catharines, up in, up near Niagara Falls, and my first call was there and, and then I received the call to go to Ascension Waterloo. And, and so we moved two years ago to Iowa. [00:17:50] Speaker A: Do you know what a Canadian standoff is? Do you know what a Mexican standoff is? [00:17:57] Speaker B: Vaguely. [00:17:58] Speaker A: So it's where like you have like three guys and everybody's pointing the gun at each other. Yeah. Canadian standoff is where you have two guys and like one of them's holding a door and they're like, oh, after you. No, after you go. [00:18:10] Speaker B: After you. [00:18:11] Speaker A: Eh, after you. [00:18:12] Speaker B: And they're both holding Tim Hortons. [00:18:14] Speaker A: Yeah, Good old, good old Canada. So polite. So you were raised a Jehovah's Witness? [00:18:23] Speaker B: I was, I was, I was raised a Jehovah's Witness and I. [00:18:28] Speaker A: Tell me as much about that as humanly possible. You're like the first ex Jehovah's Witness I've ever had on. [00:18:35] Speaker B: Oh, okay. Well, I mean, some people have like horror stories about their time, about their times in, in their, you know, in their false religion or whatever the culture. I didn't, I mean, the people were great. I loved them. They were kind, they were caring. I had good friends. All of that, you know, all of that was, was fine. But when I was in my 20s, I started to have friends, Christian friends who would challenge cord core beliefs. Where, where does that, where is that in the Bible? Is that really what that passage says? Let's look at this in context. And, and I had these discussions actually starting in my late teens and then going into my 20s. But, you know, being a, you know, being a Jehovah's Witnesses, it was. Is interesting because you're, your whole support system is right there. Your friends, your families, they encourage their people rightly to stay connected. And so it can be very hard to leave because you have to drop your social group to leave. And for those who don't know, Jehovah's Witnesses are a restorationist sect who was started in the late 1800s by a guy named Charles Taze Russell who floated around in the Adventist circles at that time. [00:20:34] Speaker A: And the Adventists also Restorationist movement, aren't they? [00:20:38] Speaker B: They are, yeah. [00:20:39] Speaker A: What was with the 1800s? Because the Mormons come out around then. They're also a restorationist movement. [00:20:47] Speaker B: Sensationalism comes in that same time. [00:20:49] Speaker A: Also a restorationist movement. [00:20:51] Speaker B: 1800S is where Christianity goes to die. Yeah. Well, you have, I think part of it, at least as far as JWs are concerned. Part of it goes back to William Miller. He was a Protestant evangelical style preacher. I forget which denomination explicitly he was, but he was a preacher who taught that the Rapture and the end of the world was going to happen in 1844. And he kind of gathered a group, like a pan denominational group of people together who would read his stuff and who were prepared and it didn't happen. It's called the Great Disappointment. And afterwards that Millerite movement splintered and it became the Adventist movement. And because they weren't, they weren't, they weren't a movement that had gathered together around true doctrine or what they had, they, they were only gathered together around eschatology, that they shared all their, they were divergent in all their other beliefs. Some were trinitarian, some were not trinitarian. Some believed in hell, some didn't believe in hell. Some believed that Saturday is the day of worship, others didn't. It was a huge, widely diverse movement. And so when it splintered, lots of people went back to Christendom, went back to their, their churches, but some of them stayed on and they became the Adventist movements. It's in that those circles you get, Seventh Day Adventists are the ones you probably remember. But an Adventist is simply someone who's waiting, who has. Their chief point of doctrine is about the second Coming, the second Advent. And so you have the Adventist movement. And it's in and among those Adventist preachers and teachers that a guy named Charles Russell from Pennsylvania finds his way. Nothing that Jehovah's Witnesses teach that's unique is unique to them. It can all be traced back to Charles Russell and some other Adventist preacher that, that came out of the Great Disappointment, the, the aftermath of the Great Disappointment. And so Charles believed that along with all these guys, that Jesus had returned invisibly in 1874 and the Armageddon was about to happen. The end of the world in 1914. That's what he, he taught. And so he started a magazine called the Watchtower and Herald of Christ's Presence. All right, so this is a magazine dedicated to the, the idea that Jesus is going to return or Jesus has returned invisibly and that Armageddon is going in in 1914. And he starts a group called the International Bible Students. And he writes this big massive thing called Study in the Scriptures. And you know, he calculates 1914 based on like the Great Pyramid in Egypt. And it gets really weird. 1914 rolls around and World War I breaks out. So he thinks he's got something right, but it doesn't happen. So he recalculates like, you know, your GPS recalculating, and then he dies shortly thereafter. Then there's this weird. His, his lawyer, a guy named Rutherford, basically does a Corporate takeover, takes over the institution and he, he drops the 1874 thing and he says that Jesus returned invisibly in 1914. And so he just. He took what, what? He took what he. What Russell said about 1874 and moved it to 1914 and dropped the 1914 bit. And they. During the war, during the First World War, because the International Bible Students, as they were known then, were. Their leadership was put in jail for a time and then at the end of the war, they were, they were released and they. Rutherford took this as a sign from God that Jesus had returned invisibly and that he had chosen them to be the one true church on earth. [00:26:15] Speaker A: There's it. In addition to being restorationist movements, a lot of these things are also like end times cults. [00:26:24] Speaker B: That's. Yeah, that's right. [00:26:26] Speaker A: That's weird. So, like the one true. Like the, the hell did prevail against Christchurch until 18, whatever, when our guy came along. [00:26:35] Speaker B: That's right. [00:26:36] Speaker A: And then now we're waiting for the end. It's so. It's so weird. It also feels very uniquely American, doesn't it? [00:26:47] Speaker B: Yeah. I don't think this, I don't think this could have taken. These groups could not have started anywhere else other than, you know, the aftermath of the Second Great Awakening and the Millerites and the end times fervor of the 1800s and, you know, this kind of thing. I don't think. I don't think it could have happened. [00:27:12] Speaker A: So was America a mistake? Like, should we not have done this? [00:27:19] Speaker B: Well, I'm Canadian, so what do I know? Fair. So I think. So at this point, this Rutherford guy renames the group as Jehovah's Witnesses. [00:27:36] Speaker A: Okay. [00:27:37] Speaker B: Based on a passage from Isaiah, they were using the 1901American Standard version, which translates the Tetragrammaton Yahweh in the Old Testament, God's covenant name, it translates it as Jehovah, the whole every. So that's. That was the translation they used before they did their own. And so. [00:28:00] Speaker A: And that's a mistranslation as well. Yeah, God's name. [00:28:06] Speaker B: Yeah, the. Yes, it is. Because you take the vowel pointings from Adonai and you use the so in Hebrew you have the consonants and you have little, little dots and dashes like Morse code underneath the letters that to tell you what vowels to pronounce well, under God's name, because you're not supposed to pronounce it, they put the vowel pointings for the word for Lord Adonai, so that when you saw the word and you saw the vowel pointings, you would remember to say Adonai instead of Yahweh. And if you read that through and you try to pronounce it as if it was a name, then you get Jehovah. And, and so it's, it's not actually how it was supposed to be pronounced. They admit that, but they like their name anyway and they're going to use it. Thank you very much. [00:29:01] Speaker A: It's, it's just, it's so weird because it's like, isn't it. I mean, it's a core, Isn't it like a core tenet of their faith that you have to submit to Jehovah, that's God's only name. [00:29:16] Speaker B: And I mean, I mean, not necessarily a. It is a very fun foundational belief for them that God's name is Jehovah and that their, their people should call upon God and use his name. Especially when they see it pop up everywhere in the Old Testament and they think, you know, and they, they apply the Psalms and the prayers of the Old Testament in their translation and they think, well, we should, we should call God this. Christians have called God Lord because in the 200s, 250s BC the Jews translated the Torah into Greek and used Kurios to translate the divine name. So they put Lord. And when the New Testament cites the Old Testament, anytime God's name Yahweh appeared in the Old Testament, in the New Testament, it appears as Lord, Kurios, Lord. And Christians have always followed that practice, both in our Bible translations and in our speech. If God inspired the Septuagint to, to do that, then. And the New Testament writers, you know, did that, copied that and followed that in the, Then it's good enough for, you know, St. Paul, good enough for me. Right, sure. [00:30:48] Speaker A: Fascinating. [00:30:50] Speaker B: So some of the core beliefs of Jehovah's Witnesses, they deny the Trinity. They don't believe that. They don't believe that God is one essence, three persons. They believe that only the Father is God. They believe that Jesus was originally Michael the Archangel and he was the very first thing that God the Father made by himself and that together they made the rest of creation. And they believe the Holy Spirit is God's active force, his, his power and influence in the world, vaguely similar to, you know, the force in Star Wars. They don't believe it's a, they, they don't believe it's a person whatsoever. They also, they also deny the immortality of the soul. They don't believe you have a soul. You, you are a soul and that when you die, you cease to exist. And, and obviously we've, we've covered the fact that they believe that Jesus returned invisibly in 1914 and that at any moment now Armageddon's gonna. Yep. [00:32:13] Speaker A: I'm still stuck on if you die, you cease to exist. What's the point? [00:32:20] Speaker B: They would say that the, the hope that the New Testament points out is they have a two tier salvation. If you're part of the 144,000, you are born again and you get to go to heaven where you are turned into, as they would call it, spirit creatures, angels, you basically become spirits and you go to heaven and reign with Christ whereas the rest of the group, the rest of those who are going to be saved are restored to perfect life. And, and during the millennial reign of Christ, because they are pre, millennial in their eschatology, during the millennial reign of Christ there will be a paradise and they'll be resurrected, restored to essentially a prefall state and then have the chance to live forever in a paradise earth. So, so, you know, they have a two tier salvation. 144,000 get to fly first class. The rest of us get coach. [00:33:38] Speaker A: So how do I, how do I get the best God has for me in this? How do I become one of these 144,000? [00:33:45] Speaker B: So the 144,000, generally speaking, had to be chosen before I Forget the date. 1930 something. [00:33:55] Speaker A: Oh, so there's no hope. [00:33:56] Speaker B: No, not to be part of the 144,000. The number dwindles. They only have communion once a year. On Nice. Yeah, on nice. And 14. And when they have communion, they meticulously count who communes and who doesn't because only the 144,000 are allowed to commune. And there's only a few thousand of them, people amongst the several million Jehovah's Witnesses who claim to be part of this group. And it dwindles each year. So when they go to a communion service for them, they call it the memorial. And, and by the way, the new world translation says take, eat. This means my body take. [00:34:45] Speaker A: Oh, wow. [00:34:47] Speaker B: So they, you know, they need to learn how their to be verb. First thing you learn in Greek class. So what happens is, you know, you get the cup and then you just pass it on to the next person. You don't drink from it at all. [00:35:02] Speaker A: Even though it's, there's a, there's most, most kingdom halls don't even have a communicant member in them then. [00:35:09] Speaker B: That's right. Thematically, yeah, one maybe, if you're lucky. [00:35:15] Speaker A: Wow. Do they use real bread and wine at least? [00:35:18] Speaker B: Oh yeah, they'll use real wine and unleavened bread. [00:35:20] Speaker A: Oh, okay. Well, something. [00:35:23] Speaker B: And, and so consider this. The average Jehovah's Witness who knocks on your door is not born again. And he will admit it. He's not part of the new covenant and he'll admit it. He's not a son of Abraham, and he will admit it. All of those things they will admit because they think, okay, to help understand this, this is like some people have a hard time grasping this. Do you remember the Left behind series? [00:35:54] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:35:54] Speaker B: Okay. Do you remember how like the church is raptured and there's these people who become end times saints? Imagine that. Okay. It, it's a sim. Very similar concept. The 144, 000 are those who go. [00:36:13] Speaker A: To heaven, the rest already sealed. [00:36:17] Speaker B: All the rest are the end time saints. [00:36:19] Speaker A: Wow. [00:36:22] Speaker B: And so it's a very different way. And then on top of that, because this is a super big, a super big and a super important point in theology, what you say about Jesus affects the. What you think he did. So, so, so if you change who Jesus is, because Orthodox Catholics, Lutherans, Anglicans, we all say the same thing. Jesus Christ is both true God and true man. Two natures in one undivided person. The hypostatic union. If you start denying that what Jesus does on the cross has to be different. Yeah, see, so they're connected. And so because the Watchtower society does not believe that Jesus is true God and true man, they believe he's only a man. The perfect, the best, the greatest man who ever lived, as one of their books says. But still only a man. [00:37:32] Speaker A: Technically correct. [00:37:35] Speaker B: Technically correct. Half points, right? But he's only a man. And because of that, what they think happens on the atonement has to change also. And so Jesus not being God, he cannot bear the entire sins of the world. He can't make satisfaction for the sins of the whole world. He can only stand in the place of one other man, and that's Adam. So they believe that he stands in Adam's place and makes a ransom for Adam, and that because of that, that will then trickle down to you. And how that works out is though, that God has graciously given you a chance to repent. Because the way they talk about faith is faith is not trust in the promises of God and the merits of Christ. Faith for them is, is translated in the new world translation as exercising faith. So they use it as A way to. To sneak in good works. [00:39:00] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:39:01] Speaker B: So they are explicitly semi Pelagian in. In their approach. They're not Pelagian because they. They do believe in sin, but they're. They're. They. They ultimately are semi Pelagian in how they. And synergistic in how they approach and how they approach salvation. And ultimately they believe that your salvation is. Is. Is by exercising your faith in. In it. In. In. In these things. And they have other things. They. They're weird things. They believe like, they don. They are politically neutral in all things, you know. Yeah. You know, like the. In the Augsburg Confession, it condemns the Anabaptists because they don't believe you can hold public office and this kind of thing. Well, that's. Jehovah's Witnesses today have that belief. [00:40:04] Speaker A: Fascinating. [00:40:05] Speaker B: So they won't stand for the national anthem. They won't go to war. That. Any of that. And that gets them in trouble in. In lots of places in the world. And they don't believe in blood transfusions because Acts 15 says abstain from blood. So. [00:40:27] Speaker A: Okay, I don't think that's what that meant when it said that, but. [00:40:30] Speaker B: Okay, so. And that leads to all sorts of problems in and of itself. [00:40:36] Speaker A: They don't celebrate holidays. Birthdays. [00:40:40] Speaker B: No birthdays. No. No Christmas. Now, isn't it funny? I find this terribly ironic. There's. The story is told. I think it's an apocryphal story, but I think it's true that the bishop of. Where was he? The Bishop of St Nicholas. St Nicholas was a bishop. Lira is the second issue. I forget where St Nicholas was a bishop. He attended the Council of Nicaea, and when he heard Arius speak, he clocked him. That's. That's the. That's the story. And I just find that very funny because the spiritual heirs of Arius to the Jehovah's Witnesses don't celebrate now. [00:41:30] Speaker A: Don't celebrate Christmas. That's pretty good, actually. That's pretty great. [00:41:37] Speaker B: So they don't celebrate Christmas because they claim it has pagan origins. Well, that's. That's been disproven. Saturnalia. It's the other way around. Saturnalia gets its stuff from Christmas, and we know the date of Christmas because of a Jewish belief that the prophet always died, was conceived on the same day he died. And so we have December 25th because we know the date he died on the Roman calendar and it was, you know, March 25th. At least that's what the early church thought. And so March 25, they would say, oh, that's when he was conceived. And so nine months from March 25th is Christmas. And then that's how we got the date of Christmas. It's. It's not pagan at all. But they don't celebrate birthdays, too, because they say, well, there's two birthdays in the Bible, Herod's and Pharaoh's. Bad things happened on both of them, so we shouldn't celebrate birthdays. [00:42:32] Speaker A: That's pretty good, too. That's, that's, that's amazing. That's. That's some magisterial use of reason right there. That is. That's wild. [00:42:43] Speaker B: So if, I mean, if you want. Yep. [00:42:47] Speaker A: Can I ask, demographically, what are the Jehovah's Witnesses like? Because here it's. It's really an African American phenomenon where I'm at in my area. [00:42:58] Speaker B: Interesting. [00:43:00] Speaker A: It's largely African American. You will not see any white, Asian, Hispanic Jehovah's Witnesses. You. You'll occasionally see some white Jehovah's Witnesses, but it's very rare. It's largely an African American movement here. [00:43:12] Speaker B: Oh, that's interesting. When I, where I attended, it was very multicultural. We had Hispanics, Europeans of all varieties, Blacks. We had. It was very multicultural. And they really are a multicultural phenomenon because they are in literally every. Almost every country. And the only countries that are not in. Are under the. Or Islamic for obvious reasons. And there's several million of them, eight, maybe nine worldwide. And the very strict liturgical. We would call it liturgical uniformity. There were. Their services are the same everywhere. You know, this kind of thing so that you could go one to another and you can, you know, it's not going to be drastically different. Yeah, so. So those are some of the demographics. I. Like I said I didn't have a bad experience with them. For me, it was, it was doctrinal. I left because I didn't think they were teaching the right. What the Bible says. [00:44:34] Speaker A: What brought you to that conclusion? [00:44:36] Speaker B: Oh, it did not happen overnight. So, like, when you're talking with people who are not Christians, you can't. Don't think you're going to convert them in one conversation. Sometimes it's slow. It's a slow process. You want to put a. As Greg Kokel says, you want to put a rock in their shoe. Not necessarily convert them. You want to ask them that question that keeps them up at night. But eventually, what. What did it for me was that what they teach about Jesus is fundamentally wrong. They. They don't under. And if they get Jesus wrong, Then the whole thing is wrong. Yeah. For me, there's the passage in Philippians where Paul. I think it's chapter three. It might be chapter two. I think it's three where Paul starts. And he starts listing his spiritual resume before God that he thought he had as a Jew. I was a Hebrew of the Hebrews. I, you know, circumcised the eighth day. And then he says all these things. Whatever gain I thought I had, I count as loss for the sake of Christ. Indeed, I count all things to be loss for the sake of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord, for whose sake I have suffered the loss of all things and count them as rubbish skubala crap in order that I may gain Christ and be found in him not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law. But. But the righteousness that comes through faith in him, that's in Philippians 3. And when I read those verses when I was about 20, it was like a light bulb came on. And I'm like. And the moment of clarity was, my goodness, this St. Paul guy is completely obsessed with Jesus. Like, Jesus is everything for him. It's about Christ and all of the other things, the good deeds he thought he was doing didn't mount to a hill of beans. And that, that text really hit me. And that's when I started to kind of re. Examine these things. And. And if you want to see a magisterial use of reason, get this. This is fun. Do you want to know how the Watchtower society gets to 1914? I'm sure you do. [00:47:25] Speaker A: I do. [00:47:26] Speaker B: Okay. In Daniel chapter four, there, Nebuchadnezzar has a dream about a tree. The tree is chopped down and the angels say that the trees chop down and seven times will pass over it and then it'll be restored. And that's what happened. And so they'll read you the text and they'll stop at pretty much that point and then they'll go to some other place, maybe one of the gospels where the. Where trees stand for the kingdom of God. And so they see the kingdom of God was chopped down. When did that happen? Well, that happened, they say in 607 BC when the Babylonians came and just. And took the last Israel Israelite king into exile and destroyed Jerusalem. Okay, well then what's seven times. Seven times seven years happened after that, and nothing happened. And they say, oh, but seven times is seven years. And seven years is 2,520 days. And just like in the Old Testament, you had a Sabbath year. And so we are going to do a day for a year. And so we'll count 25, 20 years and we'll start at 607 when the, when the, when Jerusalem was destroyed. And voila, bada bing, bada boom. 25, 20 years later, 1914. [00:49:07] Speaker A: Wow. Wow. Now that's undefeatable logic. [00:49:14] Speaker B: That's right. Now the problem with this. So the other problem is they have built their, the entire authority structure of the Watchtower society is built upon this idea that in 1919 God chose them to be the one true church. So if Jesus did not return in 1914, then they were not chosen to be the one true church on earth. [00:49:44] Speaker A: Yeah, but Jesus returned invisibly. So it's, it's first off their method of counting is arbitrary and then they're invisible. Returning thing is unfalsifiable. [00:49:55] Speaker B: And Yep, except for there's an error. There's an error in their logic or not their logic. There is an error in their logic, but there's an error. Jerusalem was not destroyed in 607 BC. It was just, it was destroyed in 586. And, and Christians, Jews, atheists, we all agree Jerusalem was destroyed in 586. [00:50:19] Speaker A: That's 19 years prior. [00:50:23] Speaker B: Yep. So it throws off the calculation. [00:50:26] Speaker A: Oh. [00:50:27] Speaker B: So when I, when I realized all this, when I realized, oh my goodness, none of the history books have the right date here, and I started digging into it, I was like, oh my goodness, Jesus didn't return in 1914. And if Jesus didn't return in 1914, then he didn't appoint the Watchtower Society to be the faithful and discreet slave. The, the, you know, that's from that passage in Matthew 25. And they're not the one true church on earth. [00:50:55] Speaker A: Wow. [00:50:56] Speaker B: And so shortly thereafter, I moved out from my parents house and I had a Pentecostal friend of mine, I worked with him. I say Pentecostal, I mean that in the loose sense, not part of the denomination, but in the loose sense they were a non denominational charismatic church, I would say. And his dad was a pastor and he said, well, you know, why don't you come, come to our church and you know, move in with us and you know, that kind of thing. [00:51:36] Speaker A: Did your parents kick you out? [00:51:37] Speaker B: No, but life was getting hard there, as you can imagine. And so yeah, the relationship was, was, was strained, we'll say. And as, as is understandable given the situation. Sure. And so I moved out and moved in with my friend Daniel and went to that church for at least three, three, four years. And it was a pentecostal Church, they had a, they called themselves Pentecostal with a seat belt. So, you know, you never saw the slain in the Spirit or anything like. [00:52:23] Speaker A: That because they said none of that's fun stuff. [00:52:26] Speaker B: None of the fun stuff. That's right. But I heard, you know, all the, all the cool praise songs from the early 2000s, you know, so that's great. [00:52:34] Speaker A: Nice. [00:52:37] Speaker B: But. So I was there for a while and, but I could never quite, never quite believed what they taught when they said that the baptism of the Holy Spirit was a, was an event subsequent to salvation that fills you with the Holy Spirit and that you'll only get true victory in your Christian life if you're filled with the Holy Spirit. And that's always manifested first by the speaking in tongues, second blessing, they sometimes call it. And I had a hard time with that, but I stayed there for a long time. And then they, they also started teaching what Lutherans would call intuitive, but which is really the Armenian doctrine that, you know, you, you God looks down the corridors of time, sees who freely of their own free will, chooses to believe in him, and then he picks them, which is not a choice at all. It's not really election. That's not the Lutheran view of election. But I just didn't see, you know, and when I oppressed the, the, the leadership at the time about that, I said, no, but the fall sin has affected our will. We can't choose him and their lie. And, and they, and they said, no, you still have a free will. And so I said, well, no, I can't, I can't stay here if you're going to teach something. That's a big error. That's not a small error. [00:54:15] Speaker A: Right. [00:54:16] Speaker B: And so I, I, I had a friend who, who went to the Reformed Baptist Church down the road. That's the, you know, 1689 London Baptist Confession, Baptist Presbyterians who Don't Baptize Babies Church. And, and I was there for, for, for several years as well. And it was at that church that a friend of mine got me a good job and who was there, and the job allowed me to listen to podcasts all the time. And so he turned me on to the White Horse Inn. And so I heard about Lutheranism from, you know, Rod Rosenblatt. And then I started listening to some Roseboro guy fighting for the faith. Yeah, I think, I think Jordan was just starting out at that time. [00:55:15] Speaker A: He was a guy called Lutheran Answers. [00:55:18] Speaker B: And said, let me, let me know. We were both listening to Pastor Wolf Mueller in Table Talk Radio. The Golden Age of the God Whisperers, Old School issues, Etc, when the opening was Coldplay, all those good things, Reverend Fisk, when it was worldview Everlasting, you know, back those. And it was. So I started hearing Lutheran doctrine. I said, man, this sounds strange. So I said, you know what? I'm tired of switching denominations. I better do a study on this. So I read Calvin's Institutes, I read some stuff from John Wesley. I read the Book of Common Prayer and used that devotionally for a while. And then from Roseboro, I heard about the Proper Distinction of Law and gospel by C.F.W. walther. And I started reading that book. And that book is what opened my eyes to. I'm like, yes, this is it. This is exactly the problem. You know, this is what I didn't get when I was a jw. This is. This is what, you know, this church here doesn't get. And it was shortly thereafter that I went to a Lutheran church and I asked the pastor there, I said, look, I've been reading Walter's Law and Gospel, and I really think this is an important thing, that we properly distinguish the law and the gospel. And the pastor said, if I don't preach law and gospel correctly, I want you to leave this church. And I'm like, that's a guy I like. That's a guy who puts himself under that authority and. And holds himself up to a standard. Now, did he preach long gospel perfectly every week? No. But no pastor does who does. But he. He held that up as the standard. Yeah. So I was there for. And that's my home church. And it's from there that they sent me. They said after a while of being there, they said, you should. You should become a pastor. And so they inflicted me upon. Upon North American Lutheranism after that. [00:57:59] Speaker A: Wow. And now here you are a pastor. Are you an a. You're an AALC pastor? You sure are. [00:58:06] Speaker B: I am now, yes. Yep. [00:58:08] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:58:08] Speaker B: Wow. So I was originally in Lutheran Church Canada. Lutheran Church Canada was. They were all once Missouri Synod churches back in the day. And I think part of the logistics of having a denomination across borders and a different national identity led to them. Basically. It's basically a Synod plant, you know. [00:58:34] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:58:36] Speaker B: And so Lutheran Church Canada is essentially Missouri north, and it's Missouri with Tim Hortons and an ice hockey and moose. And they're in fellowship with Missouri Synod. And. And we're. All three of us are together in the ilc, the International Lutheran Council. [00:59:06] Speaker A: I think we're working on a fellowship agreement with them. [00:59:10] Speaker B: Yes. Yeah. And that was Because I came over, I kind of forced them to sit down and start talking because they hadn't had the opportunity to, to engage in dialogue. Sometimes, you know, sometimes it's, you know, you just don't have the chance to sit down and. Hey, are we in fellowship yet? No. Okay. We should be in fellowship, you know, that kind of thing. Because you, you know, you see, you rub shoulders with all these. They, they rub. All these guys rub shoulders when they go to the ILC meetings in forever. [00:59:42] Speaker A: Yeah. Ice hockey is kind of yells thing in Canada, but we're better at it in the United States. How do you explain that? [00:59:54] Speaker B: Isn't it the American way to take something. Somebody else just take somebody else? Doesn't make it better. [00:59:59] Speaker A: Yeah. To just be great at everything. That is, in fact, the American way? [01:00:03] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, yeah. And, and, you know, American culture is, is much different than Canadian culture. Like, even in terms of like, you know, politics and how, how that's approached and, and the whole Christian life and society, it's very different. And at first it was a bit of a culture shock when I'm, when I got here, you know. Oh, you mean there are actually conservative people? Like, like here there's people who are actually conservative and they actually believe in like the family and stuff. Wow. You know, not. [01:00:44] Speaker A: So in Canada it's hard. [01:00:46] Speaker B: It's hard because, you know, progressive ideology, which is another religion really, it. Lots of people buy into it. [01:01:02] Speaker A: On the whole. Were Americans nicer than you expected about what you expected or meaner than you expected? [01:01:08] Speaker B: I can only say about Iowans because I'm in Iowa. Iowans. See, Canadians are polite. Americans are nice. [01:01:17] Speaker A: Yep. [01:01:19] Speaker B: Canadians are polite. That doesn't mean they're nice American. They're just polite. You know what I mean? Lots of passive aggressive people in Canada. [01:01:31] Speaker A: Yeah, well, so I. It's the same thing. It's the same thing between. I like to say the distinction between the north and the south is that people in the south are nice, people in the north are kind. And it's like in the north, they'll cuss you out if you bump into them or whatever, but if you need help, they're actually there to help you. In the south, we say things like, oh, bless your heart, and then we just ignore you and move on. You know, we won't actually help you if you need it. [01:02:01] Speaker B: That's right. It's a similar idea. Yeah, absolutely. At least that's my experience. Yeah. [01:02:07] Speaker A: Fascinating. Pastor Finn, thank you so much for coming on today and sharing a little bit about being a Jehovah's Witness. And now, thankfully, a Lutheran. [01:02:16] Speaker B: Yes. Soon. [01:02:17] Speaker A: In American soon. [01:02:18] Speaker B: Well, three years. [01:02:20] Speaker A: Three years. [01:02:21] Speaker B: We'll take. [01:02:22] Speaker A: We'll take all the ones we can get. [01:02:23] Speaker B: As you said, I'm a recovering Canadian. [01:02:27] Speaker A: That's right. A repentant Canadian. [01:02:29] Speaker B: Repentant Canadian. [01:02:30] Speaker A: That's right. [01:02:32] Speaker B: All right. [01:02:32] Speaker A: That's right. God bless you, sir. Anything you want to plug? [01:02:38] Speaker B: No. I want to plug going to church. Go to church, people. [01:02:41] Speaker A: Go to church. I want to plug Luther Nancers membership. Please feel free to get yourself a membership. Anybody listening? It's either $8 a month, $80 a year, $800 lifetime. You get access to free courses. Any downloadable content is free, 20% discount in the merch store. You get free weekly podcast that no one else gets called Table Talk. It's a lot of fun and live events, courses, all kinds of stuff. It's cool. Check it out. Lutherananswers.com membership options. Pastor, thank you so much for being here today. [01:03:17] Speaker B: My pleasure.