So we'll just bring Doug right on up. And I've asked him to make sure to repeat the questions that he's asked just for the sake of the recording. So you might all hear the question. He'll repeat it anyway. It might sound a little weird, but nothing to it. All right. Thanks. Good to be here this morning. And I am not going to say anything. I'm going to let you ask questions, because if I start saying something, you won't have time to ask questions. You probably all believe that, don't you? What are your questions? Some things come up. I know some people have asked me some questions afterwards. You didn't actually finish telling us where Huguenot came from, so I'll get to that if that's a question. Just given your understanding of history, I'd like to hear from you. The intolerance of the European Catholics, what we see is the intolerance of Islam today. That's going well, right? Yeah. The question is, given what we've been seeing about Roman Catholicism in the Middle Ages, in the Renaissance and Reformation, and the parallels with ISIS and the Islamic fundamentalism, terrorism and all of that. And our enlightened American, I'm kind of paraphrasing a little bit here, but our enlightened American understanding that, you know, really all ideas are the same. You know, multiculturalism says, you know, that, you know, we want to make sure that we understand that all races are equal and that there's, you know, you go to Psalm 87 and what do you have? You have true diversity. Where's true diversity? It's in the body of Christ, you know. But it's not about a diversity of ideas or a diversity of truths. It's about, you know, people from Philistia, you know, in Psalm 87, you think about how inflammatory that psalm would be because the psalmist is sort of speaking on God's behalf and saying that God before the foundation of the world said, this one was born there, right? from Philistia and the Israelites, whoa, no, no, no, not the Philistines. We're not gonna bring them in. And Christ says, yes, we are gonna bring them in. And I think that's the big fallacy of our so-called pluralism in America is that it's a lie. It's not real pluralism. So for example, when you say all ideas should be the same and should be equal, What did you just express? An idea, a worldview, a Weltanschauung. You just expressed an understanding of philosophy, the nature of things in the world, and now you're imposing that on everybody else. Whoops. You just shot yourself in a philosophical foot. because you said that all ideas are equal and everybody should accept that all ideas are equal and all truths are equal. Well, that's a truth. That you're imposing your philosophy of life on everybody else. That's a religious assumption about the nature of things. And now you're saying that everybody else should accept your religious assumption that says that multiculturalism should rule today. I think there's a vast difference between this flawed idea of multiculturalism, which reads like this in, say, an educational textbook. Somebody who goes to college and studies to be a teacher. Where did that discipline come from? Study to know history, study to know physics, study to know chemistry, study to know philosophy or something, but study to know how to be a teacher means study to learn how there are no absolute truths. Study to convey to people that really nothing matters, you can believe anything you want. You know, that's crazy. But they'll say that instruction in the American classroom, the instructors ought to, and I'm quoting here, ought to embrace and affirm all the beliefs, values, and traditions represented in the multicultural, multi-ethnic classroom in America. Did you hear that? I mean, that's what's being said and I'm quoting directly from a current, textbook on education that it ought to, whoops, as soon as we use ought, we suddenly have kind of shown our colors here, that it ought to embrace and affirm all the beliefs, values, and traditions represented in multi-ethnic, multi-cultural America. That's not pluralism. Just let's get that straight. That's not pluralism. That's fire hosing your worldview on everybody else. And your worldview says there's, what's behind that? Well, there's no absolute truth. There's nothing objectively real and there's no transcendent authority. That's what you just said. So I want everybody to believe my worldview which says that there's no transcendent authority. Everything's individual. That's what shapes the thinking of everybody in our culture. That's what we're surrounded 360 degrees by is that there's no transcendent authority. You're your own authority. There's nothing objectively real. Reality is individual. It's how you perceive reality. So gender's not this objectively real thing. You can just perceive yourself any way you want. Marriage is not this objectively real institution that a transcendent authority has ordained. You can spin it any way you want. And there's nothing that's absolutely true. It could be true for you. It's individual. Everything's individual. Long answer to your question, but I don't believe we have pluralism in America. We have a new worldview that's being imposed on us that says that because we want to end racism and we want people to look at other ethnicities and so forth as equal and that if you have White skin and fair hair. You're not more important. You're not more valuable than if you have like my my granddaughters my oldest son married a African American girl and You know if you have kinky hair, and you know if you have more pigment in your skin that you're not as important I Totally am on board with that Back to Psalm 87, true diversity, body of Christ. It's made up of all kinds of races and ethnicities and it's for everybody. What does Revelation 5, 9 say? You have purchased with your blood men from every tribe, kindred, nation, tongue, and that's what the body of Christ is. That's true diversity. And the pluralism that we have cobbled up in our country is not real. It's not true. It's a backdoor way of imposing a new worldview on everybody and calling it multiculturalism and calling it pluralism. I don't know if that answers your question fully but I think it's our system is not working at all because it's not honest. It's not actually telling us the real thing. It's not telling us you can believe whatever you want. No, it's telling us you can believe what we want you to believe which is that there's nothing objectively real, nothing absolutely true and no transcendent authority. Good question. I don't know if it's a good answer, but it was a good question. Anyone else? Victor. My question is a little bit more personal in terms of our church, particularly for our children. We're all pretty much homeschoolers here, and we all learn a lot of stuff. on the top rule with the shorter suit the yeah uh... uh... uh... I'm not checking my Facebook here. I just wanted to let you know that. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's a good question. What are you doing here? This is a history class. Why would you even ask questions? No, I'm glad you did. That's good. Yeah. Restate the question, why study Middle English? Why study Chaucer? And can I expand it for you too? Why study any of this stuff? We got our Bible, right? My wife's grandfather, late grandfather, died when he was 97. He was a rancher. When I first met him, he was wearing his winter insulated Carhartt overalls, and he was driving a flatbed truck out in the field, and he was throwing bales off. Actually, my grandmother-in-law, it was her turn to be on the flatbed throwing the bales off for supplemental feed in the winter. And there was a whole herd of cattle that was following around. And I became a Christian later in life. And he would say, you should only read the Bible. Just read the Bible. And he read the Farm Journal, too, because he needed to know what was going on at the next auction, where he was selling cattle. But he only read the Bible, and that's really what he did. How are you going to win that one? Well, you know, Grampy, you know, only reading the Bible, you're going to lose that argument, especially with a guy in his 80s who became a Christian as an adult. So I never took that on with him because for his context, he had just a very basic education. And then he raised cattle and read the Bible, went to church, and read the Farm Journal. That was his life. And that's great. I mean, given the context, given his opportunities and all, lived through the Depression, working hard all the time, calluses on his hands. I'm okay with that. But everybody sitting here has a whole bunch of opportunities that Grampy never had, you know. And so why, another quick story if I may. I had a girl that was a student of mine, very, very bright girl, black girl, African-American girl, very intelligent. She got, she was applying to college and all this. She got into the honors program at the University of Washington where there's 39,000 students. She's a really bright girl. I remember when she was a sophomore and we were studying Middle English, Anglo-Saxon first, then Middle English, kind of the development of our language, which is a good thing in and of itself to know, kind of the leading edge of my answer is, we're going to discover where this language came from, the etymology of our language, which that's a good thing to know. It's going to help us in many, many ways. One thing, it's going to help us understand why it's so difficult to spell English. People coming in learning English as a second language, we can empathize with them better if we've studied etymology, where our language came from. So that's just a little part of the answer to that question. But she asked me that in class, and she was really funny, and she was loud, and she was boisterous, and she said, would somebody please tell me how studying Middle English, learning Chaucer's Canterbury Tales in Middle English is gonna help moi, she said, I remember. And so I joked with her, Angela was her name, and she was man enough when she got up to the honors program, to send an email to the office of the school and say, I got to tell you this story. I'm in an upper division English literature class. And the professor gets up day one of the class. She typed this all out. I've still got it. She typed this all out in her email. She said, and he said, I've been teaching this course for how many years at the University of Washington? It's upper division, it's like a 400 level course in Middle English. He says, I've never had anybody take me up on this, but if somebody can rise to their feet right now and credibly recite some lines from Chaucer's Canon in Middle English, you will get an automatic A in this course. You still have to attend, but you will get an automatic A in this course. And Angela, oh boy, she stands up. Hona ta prul with his shora sutada, droga ta marcha, perse to the ruta. And she's very dramatic and everything. And when she was done, the class applauds and the professor said, in my 25 years of teaching this course, this is the first time a person's ever been able to do that. That's actually not my answer to your question. I'm getting to that. I'm getting there. But that's not my answer to the question because it's not just about, well, you'll get a better job if you learn Middle English. You'll be on a faster track to advancement in your corporation if you study Middle English. That may actually be true. And I think that that probably could be demonstrated. I don't know if there's a quantitative study on that. But I think that it might be. I'm getting to my full answer here, but there was a recent Emory University study. Did I mention that at all in this? I thought I might have in the writing workshop. A recent study, I think the results were released about a year ago. The BBC released results on a UK study that was similar to this. Long story short, what they discovered in the course of this study, has anybody heard of this? Does this sound familiar at all? The result of this study was that they had a control group that's reading pop fiction and watching movies. And then they had a group that were reading classic literature, imaginative literature from the classics. So they're reading novels by Jane Austen. They're reading novels by Dostoevsky. And they were reading, they read five hours a day in this study for five days. That's what they did. And then they had these questions that they were asking these people in the study. And they did a brain scan of these people while they were reading. They did a brain scan of the people reading pop fiction. You know? And they did a brain scan. I'm watching movies. And they did a brain scan. Oh, and they also were reading textbooks, the people doing the pop fiction part. It's kind of coming back to me, the details. Sorry. But that's what you get to in Q&A. You can just kind of make it up as you go. You know, they say 80% of statistics are made up at the moment. But they discovered two very important things from this study, maybe more than that, but they discovered that the young people and adults, it was not just the young people, that were reading classic literature in the course of these questions that they asked people on both sides of the study, They increased by some something like 41% Here it was really it was really it was somewhere in the 40s in empathy toward other people from that study. There was a significant, we're not talking two or three percent, that's not statistically significant. We're talking like, you know, 40 percent increase. And the other thing was the brain scan was astonishing. What they discovered was that there was, you know, kind of little parts of the brain were active in the brain scan when they were reading a textbook, a book of, or as Jeeves would call it, an improving book, right? You know, a book of information, you know. But when they were reading Jane Austen, I'll just use her as sort of my synecdoche, she's going to represent the whole. When they were reading Jane Austen, if you think of your brain as a globe, all continents were active. all continents were active. It was astonishing. You could tell by some of the reports I heard and listened to and watched, didn't like the results of this study. And they were saying, well, I'm not sure there's really a big difference between popular, you know, I read J.K. Rowling and reading Jane Austen. I mean, they're both women authors. They're both British authors. What could possibly be the difference, right? This was some of the reviewers, but the study still stands. There was a vast difference. A vast difference. Something about your whole being was awake and alert and active when you were immersed in reading Cicero, or when you were immersed in reading Homer, or when you were immersed in reading the classics. We Christians, you know, sometimes do what my, you know, my grampy-in-law was doing, and that says, we're just gonna read the Bible. And I'm a big solo scriptura person here, don't misunderstand me at all. And if you are not reading the Bible, don't waste your time reading the other stuff. The Bible's what's going to give you discernment, help you to know what you're reading, whether it's true or not. What dimensions of it are true? This is discernment, right? This is being able to weigh out. This is a lot of what we want to accomplish in our homeschooling, isn't it? We want to teach our young people to be discerning, to weigh out the good. I mean, even Plato said that the goal of education is to teach the next generation what they ought to love and what they ought to hate. That's discernment, isn't it? I like Calvin and I like Augustine a lot. They say a lot of things about this, about this very topic. You might be tempted to think that a soul scripture guy like Calvin might say, just read the Bible. But he doesn't. He says this. in reading from his Institute's book too, in reading profane authors, the admirable light of truth displayed in them should remind us that the human mind, however much fallen and perverted from its original integrity is still adorned and invested with admirable gifts from its creator. So he's commending the reading of profane authors. Now he goes on, I have a talk I do on culture. Should we be reading pagans? And I use this particular quote in that talk. It's the foundation really that I think Calvin gets to here. After all, all truth is God's truth, right? All truth is God's truth. All beauty is God's beauty. All pleasure is God made pleasure. You know, our world distorts all of that and they offer you an aesthetic that's a counterfeit. But not always fully a counterfeit, right? They may create beautiful art. They may create beautiful music. and often do. They may create something that is true and wonderful. Doris Lessing, she's a pagan. She's dead now, and she knows better, sadly. Thank you, sir. and I mean she gets the Nobel Prize in what 2007 I think it was and The BBC's there with the cameras rolling as she gets out of a taxi cab in front of her flat in London And they tell her have you heard the news? You just won the Nobel Prize and the first word out of her mouth is is taking the Lord's name in vain. This is not a Christian woman at all, but I think it was the Spectator in London was reviewing her and they said that the defining characteristic of Doris Lessing's best writing is that she's brutally honest about the human condition. And I use Doris Lessing, short stories from her African stories and all that because she portrays honestly the human condition. And she does it bewildered, you know, she doesn't like it that it's this way necessarily and she doesn't know what to do but she defines the God delusion that everybody has. and how we think that we control everything, how we think that we contain the world. I'm using some brief quotes from some of her writing. And that we want to know how to define the word eternity and that time overtakes us and bewilders us and leaves us without a definition. And that at the end we come and we see the fellow suffering of another creature and our flawed sense of our own invincibility gets smashed by that And we don't know what to do. We actually don't control our lives. We can't change things. We can't accomplish all these things that we thought we could control. This is a pagan writer. This is an unbeliever. She doesn't know how to give us the truth in the end, but she knows how to create longing in the reader and in herself, right? Because she's doing what Lewis said from the writing seminar, write what you need. She wanted to know the definition of eternity. She wanted to know why it is that human beings think they're God and they really aren't and the experiences of life teach you oftentimes very painfully that you're not and that you don't control things and that you are caged and mastered. What did Sophocles say? Sophocles in his great work, sort of the signature tragedy of all time. It's the model for all tragedy. In Oedipus the King, the chorus summarizes the problem. Listen to this. summarizes the problem. You'll think I'm reciting from Isaiah or something, right? This is a pagan guy writing back in the golden age of Greece in the 400s who never, as far as anybody knows, had any connection to the law of the prophets. The Old Testament didn't have any of that. And what does he say? Yet man desires to be more than man, to rule his world for himself. This desire blown to immensity on the rich empty food of its ambition, out of place, out of time, clamors to the crown of the rock, then stands there tottering, then comes the steepling plunge down to earth, to the earth where we are caged and mastered. Sophocles, a pagan golden age writer of tragedy, the greatest writer of tragedy. They made him, they deified him after he died, you know, because he was such a great writer and people loved going to his plays. They didn't get everything right, you know, don't misunderstand me, and that's why we need discernment, but he got that right, you know. And these are all the things that are being exited, right, from the curriculum, right? So you lose the honesty, the brutal honesty of unbelievers, but who are honest about observing the human condition in the world. They know something's wrong. Something's not the way it ought to be. You know, there's a desire for eternity. God's put eternity in our hearts. And so the unbeliever who doesn't have the grace of the gospel, the spirit of God regenerating their heart, knows that there's something out there that they just can't get to and that it's not supposed to be this way. And the honest, gifted ones, like Sophocles, like Doris Lessing, like a number of others, they get that right. Think of, they create the longing, because they have the longing, but they don't know the answer. Last part of my answer to your question. Augustine, in his great confessions, tells us in the early stages as he's brutally honest about his conversion and about his life before he was converted and all that. He says that reading Cicero's Hortentius made him fall on his knees and offer prayers to God. Calvin was writing a great treatise from Seneca on mercy before he was a Christian. In fact, it was his commentary and treatise on that great work from the classic world from Seneca who was no Christian, he was a pagan. became a Renaissance, at least minor classic in Calvin's own day. And other Renaissance scholars ranked Calvin, this was before Calvin is converted in probably about 1529 or so, 1528 or 29. He'd finished that while he was at the University of Paris at the College de Montague. And it was being read by all the Renaissance scholars. And they were hailing him as an up-and-coming, rising scholar. And Calvin was, you know, mercy is a pretty central thing to the gospel, right? And Calvin's learning, you know, sort of in the kindergarten of mercy, he's learning at first from a pagan, from Seneca. So, long answer to the question, you know, why should we read Chaucer? Why should we read any of these authors? Why should we learn Middle English? Because all truth is God's truth. All beauty is God's beauty. All goodness is God's goodness. All great literature, great music, great painting, great sculpture is God's. The unbeliever who did that was doing that by God's enabling. reflective of their Creator. I want to know that. It's ours. It's not the pagans. They're borrowing from our worldview. They're borrowing from our God, our Creator, our Redeemer. When they do that, we need to own that. We need to recognize that. We need our kids to do that. The danger for us is that we either engage without discernment, So, hey, you know, there's gotta be some truth in this, you know, in Philip Pullman, you know, you know, and so I'm gonna read Philip Pullman. Okay, be careful, be very cautious. So we over, we engage without discernment, and that often leads people over cliffs. So we're not actually saying, we're not holding it up to a standard. That's why I say don't read anything if you're not reading your Bible. Because you don't have the tools, you don't have the illumination to be discerning. But then the other thing is that we retreat. We're retreatists. So we end up, who needs that? My grampy-in-law, dear fellow, And I know he was an earnest Christian, but he just didn't have any categories for these things. He'd worked all his life, hard, hard work, and became a Christian as an adult, read his Bible, read the Farm Journal. That's all he really had. I love the guy, and he's in glory, and he knows better now. standing behind the lectern and I'm standing in front. I can't tell you what's behind the lectern, but if you can tell me and if you write a book about it, I can learn something Right, right. Spot on, Larry. This is a reader. This is a guy who was up late last night reading, too, right? And he made it for Sunday school. That's pretty good. But, and crying, too, you were telling me. But, which is a good thing. Well, it's a good thing to cry when you're reading, I think, you know. It's a good thing to laugh, too. But that's another dimension to that answer, Larry, and that is it gives me perspective that I didn't have before. It gives me a vantage point I didn't have. Oh, how does Lewis put it? He said, we read to know we're not alone. And so you may have a perspective and you think it's bewildering and you're hiding it because you don't, and then you read somebody and you find out, ah, okay. And by reading them, you also gain another perspective on yourself and on your condition in the world. God gifts people. He doesn't, I went through a stage in my life And I think Labrie actually really helped me with this. But I went through a stage in my life where I only wanted to listen to Mendelssohn and Bach and Haydn, Franz Josef Haydn, because I'd read about them and they were real Christians. They were the real article. So I'm only going to listen to their music. And I thought that was sort of the higher, superior spiritual ground that I was on. It really wasn't. Things are counterintuitive in a broken world, aren't they? And when God's ways are higher above our ways, they're counterintuitive. And God gave Beethoven a great musical gift. I have no confidence that he was a believer. And the list could go on and on and on, right? I love Yo-Yo Ma's cello playing. Yo-Yo Ma is really whacked out, you know, religiously. He's a cut-and-paste postmodern, but he's a brilliantly gifted cellist. So I can listen to his music and glorify God and give thanks for his creator and maker who particularly gifted him. This is the rationale for reading Shakespeare. Shakespeare, like I read to you from Lewis in the writing session, that he has an imaginative splendor. It's a gift from God. And he has a perspective and an honesty about the real human condition. combined with this marvelous gift of words. And Lewis says that reading Shakespeare, a young man who wants to remain a sound atheist can't be too careful of his reading, Lewis said. And he says that reading Shakespeare and Edmund Spencer, Fairy Queen, and Milton, John Donne and others, some of whom were really out there, clearly Christians. Shakespeare was shaped and informed by the Geneva Bible and by a sort of a broadly Christian worldview. I don't know Shakespeare's heart. There's things he writes, and I'm thinking, why would a Christian want to do that? But nevertheless, Lewis credits reading Shakespeare as a significant piece in his conversion. Well, just as Augustine credits Seneca. I'm not even looking at the clock, so you can just go, you know, when it's time, but. Okay. One more question or one more answer? Yeah, right. Yes. I like it when the older part of the congregation pitches in, the 93-year-olds. I think that's good when they participate. Yeah, go ahead. Oh, okay, I guess, yeah, okay. So just, it's very sad, you know, to hear a lot about all of the performers and all of the people involved in the Great Reformation, basically. A lot of them are persecuted for their faith. And so just going back to the Scripture and just reading about like the fall of Jerusalem and how God told the Christians to get out of there before the Scripture came upon it, it kind of makes me wonder, like, why wouldn't they Why didn't they buy a plane ticket and fly out of there, right? I mean, it's a good question. And sometimes God does come and he delivers people. The Waldensians, many of them, he didn't deliver them for whatever the reason. In glory he did, but what does it say in Psalm 34? This poor man cried to you and you delivered him from all his troubles. That was one of my dad's favorite verses in the last weeks of his life. And it came to, he grew in his understanding of the meaning of that. His deliverance was passing into glory. And so with others. In the modern world, we look back and we're portable. We can move around, we can get in a car and we can drive up to the Percompasses. Beautiful place up there. And then drive and come back to church here and we can move around, get on I-5, boom. We move around, we're much more portable, so we wonder why didn't they just flee? For the Scots and the Covenanters in the 17th century, the English Puritans had a lot more money and resources. They could buy the equivalent of the plane ticket and get out of there. Many of them could. Scots didn't. They just had a lower socioeconomic level. And so if they were going to leave, if they were going to flee, they were going to have to sell themselves and their family as indentured servants. And some of them, they just couldn't do that. And that was kind of your only way out. So it's a very good question, and it does help us to know. And at some point, You know, where do you flee? You know, things get bad here. You know, occasionally my son will say, we need to go to Switzerland or to Canada or something like that. And I'm thinking, you read about those places lately? You know, they're not the haven that we think they're. Well, go to Easter Island down in the South Pacific, you know, something like that. You know, we're going to take sin with us, right? And wherever there's human beings, there's going to be sin. God sometimes calls people to flee. Other times he calls them to stay and suffer. In the mystery of God's providence, there's no formula for that, but that's a good question. We want Rene of Farrar to be happily married in the end, don't we? And we want Eugene d'Albret to be happily married. and we want them to get away from monstrous husbands and be able to have a joyful life. God reserves the joy of eternal life for some people, and they don't have the foretaste now. One last word from Lewis. If you pursue heaven now, You get both thrown in. You get foretaste of it now, but it's still ultimately going to come in heaven. If you pursue earth now, you get neither. We were made for eternity. We were made for pleasure and joy and happiness and good relationships, joyful relationships. In a broken world, all those things are broken. But, I've felt it, I've seen it, I've been surrounded by it this Heritage Week here. In the body of Christ, in the church, in the sanctuary of the Lord, when we come into His presence, when we worship Him, when we hear His word proclaimed, when we partake of Christ in His body and blood in the supper, That's where we have those four tastes of heaven. That's where we have the greatest four tastes of heaven. In the family circle, when we're worshiping as a family certainly too, but in the body of Christ, the whole body of Christ with all of its diversity, with all of its differences of ethnicity and color of hair and eyes and all of that. we are one in Christ. And it's been a delight for me to be here this week. It really has. I mean, I'm supposed to come and bless other people, but honestly, I think I always take away more blessing with me. And certainly from this weekend, it's been a real delight to have the chats with many of you. And then just to be with you and share with you. And I particularly want to thank the Percompases. I've had such a great time at their place and under their warm, Christ-like hospitality. It's been a delight.