Sorry about that. And I'm going to try to give a summary of the book, a fairly condensed summary. I'll try to give you my assessment, what my thoughts were after reading it. I did not prepare a PowerPoint presentation. It just seemed like I was trying to condense a lot of information. So I provided this little volatized outline of some of the things I'm going to try to cover. Hopefully have that Cleland via Canvas, I think. This book was written in, or published in 1971, which makes it fairly early on in the period that Schaefer was writing his books. You might recall that his first couple books, God Who Is There and Escape from Reason, were published in 1968. So this was one of his earlier books. And this particular book was part of a group of books that I think, laid part of the foundation for Schaeffer's views on Christian life in the church. Later in 1984, Schaeffer talked about his books in three different groups. That he had a group of books related to philosophy, some related to Christian life in the church, and then he said he had later books more related to the needs of law and government. And so, this book, Church Before the Watch, Christian life in the church. It was intended to expand on what he had started to talk about in the church at the end of the 20th century. And then this book also complements The Mark of the Christian. Those two books were published in 1970, a year before the book I am talking about. So this particular book, it has an introduction and then three main chapters. There's an appendix at the end. I'll try to give a bit of a summary of what he covered. The introduction basically lays out the principles that Schaeffer thought were important when it comes to Christian life and the church, that he thought there were these two competing ideals of having doctrinal purity and a mutual love within the church. And he viewed these two things as sort of being opposed to each other in the sense that if you emphasize doctrinal purity, then perhaps you find that you're not showing love adequately and vice versa. He links these two things to two attributes of God. God's attributes of holiness and love. So he's saying there's a parallel there to how Christians live and how the church operates. As I said, this book really was complementing the mark of the Christian. He said the theme of that book was Christian love. And then in this book, Church Before the Watching World, was addressing doctrinal purity in the church. His big concern was that Christians claim to have the truth, and yet in the visible church, he was seeing a lot of untruth. So there was a big issue there. Chapter one, he leads in with a historical critique of theological liberalism, basically trying to say, how did we get where we are today? And a lot of this chapter forms the bulk of the book, really, and it's similar to what we've read from Schaeffer He traces the origin of theological liberalism back to about 300 years ago, when, particularly in Germany, he says, universities were beginning to practice a lot of naturalism, and therefore rationalism, the idea that you start with yourself, and then use reason to try to establish what is true. And his view was that this philosophy of rationalism enters in through, you know, the sciences and other secular areas of the university and then inevitably creeps into theology. Schaeffer wanted to be clear that he did support the use of scholarship to try to develop the most accurate understanding of the biblical text. So he wasn't really against good scholarship there. His problem was with what he would call higher criticism, where people were deciding which parts of the text they were going to accept or reject. And so he finished liberal theologians were setting out to develop a Bible that basically was not resting in any way on the supernatural. Something that they really had proven out through their own facts, logic, reason, what is the accurate Bible. So then he discusses the emergence of what he called a new theological liberalism that grew out of that effort. He says that the effort to develop this non-supernatural Bible was basically a failure. He saw the turning point as a book called The Quest of the Historical Jesus, written by Albert Schweitzer. You know, in that book, Schaeffer characterizes it as basically despairing of ever having a non-supernatural method of describing a historical Jesus. Now, as a bit of an aside, I'm not sure that those theologians would have stated it that way. I think they probably would have claimed that they were successful in the sense that they showed that it was not possible to ever truly know the historical Jesus. So I'm not sure they really saw themselves as a failure, but you know, but he was characterized, Schaeffer is characterizing this as a despair point that led them to turn to modern mysticism. In this case, a mysticism that tries to isolate spiritual truths from reason and rationality. And this is the thing we've talked about a lot in past books. Karl Barth developed this approach to having spiritual knowledge and spiritual experience that doesn't, it's not really linked to historical analysis. So Barth says, well, it's not super important know, what historical experts would say actually happened, what's really important to us, what you spiritually have come to know. Schaeffer gave an interesting example of this shift to a new liberalism. He said that the old liberalism was essentially arguing that man is not really sinful. But the new liberalism, in a sense, was. It was speaking of man sin, but maybe even more importantly saying that the historical origin of this flaw in man is not really that important. Because they don't really care what historically actually has happened as much. So Schaefer says that this leaves the nature of sin and its remedy kind of unanchored or floating in midair is the phrase that he likes to use a lot. Is there an effort to try to fall into an evolutionary kind of view of man in that new theology, do you think? Did you get that idea? In other words, obviously something's wrong with man and he needs improvement, but it's not that he started out good and then got bad somehow. Yeah. Well, first I'll say, I don't think Schaeffer explicitly addressed that point. But clearly his view was that the philosophies that were taking hold in academia were creeping into theology. So since evolutionary thought was very much influencing. Yeah, naturalism. I'm sure he would agree. So Schaeffer felt that this new liberalism just generally lacks clarity, except on one point, that the Bible is not really the word of God. You know, that they would say that the Bible contains the word of God in the sense that it is a means by which people could come to know truth somehow, but that it's not an objectively reliable word of God. So the result of this new theological liberalism is that it makes it easy for people then to use Jesus as kind of a banner. It's a familiar and well-loved concept of Jesus, but they can put it over basically any philosophical system because there's no objective standard here. Where he saw the danger is that liberal theology was now using a lot more traditional Christian terminology. So it sounded a lot more like what people were accustomed to, but underlying it is denying the concepts of truth and antithesis that Schaeffer saw as so critical. And so in that sense, Schaeffer judged that the new liberalism was actually farther from authentic Christianity than the old liberalism. Chapter 2, he kind of seemed to shift gears a bit, opens up this theme of adultery and apostasy and the theme of the bride and bridegroom in scripture. He talks about the theological significance of marriage looking at Ephesians 5 where we see that that Paul is revealing this mystery that marriage is an illustration of the relationship between Christ and the Church, and Schaeffer points out that the same language was used by John the Baptist and also by the Apostle Paul in other places, and that also the Old Testament frequently uses that kind of imagery with respect to Israel being in a marriage relationship with God. The Bible also uses adultery quite a bit in that imagery to describe a lack of faithfulness to God. So Schaeffer points out that just as physical adultery is repeatedly used as an example of wickedness throughout scripture, that spiritual adultery is also repeatedly condemned and uses some pretty harsh language. People who are turning away from God, being unfaithful to God are called prostitutes, harlots, whores, et cetera, et cetera. So therefore, Schaeffer is building up to this point that it is a very serious thing to claim to be God's people, you're claiming to be his bride, and yet turn aside from God's word. That that is the spiritual adultery that's so abhorrent. So theology that's becoming aberrant, he's saying it should not be taken lightly because it becomes a stain on Christ's bride, as seen by the world. Schaefer used the example of the way that liberal churches were accepting abortion and compares that to how Israelites at times were sacrificing their children to Molech. Which I found kind of interesting because this was, you know, two years before the finalization of Roe versus Wade. And, you know, so in later books Schaefer talks about how the church really was not responding well to Roe versus Wade, but in this This has been a longtime issue within the church. This was not something new that the church was having an issue with. So he finishes up with a strong point here that it's not enough to just seek doctrinal faithfulness, the church must also act accordingly, and he uses a comparison of a wife who maybe is very circumspect to avoid cheating on her husband, she's not sleeping around, and that she never does anything that shows any actual love toward her husband. So he says the church is not just to be a faithful bride, but also to be a bride in love. There's an active component to how the church lives. Chapter three then is bringing it around to, all right, how do we establish purity, doctrinal purity in the invisible church? This chapter was kind of short. I guess I wish that maybe there had been more practical application that he'd try to draw to this. But he wants to be sure that all churches are simultaneously exhibiting the holiness of God, the doctrinal purity side, and the love of God. to all churches, regardless of their denominational distinctives. This is basic stuff. He points out that this is something only possible for believers. He's saying that those in the flesh might be able to emphasize one of the two, either doctrinal purity or Christian love, but to actually do the two simultaneously, he said, is only possible through the Spirit. And he sees this then as something that demonstrates the unity of all believers, that regardless of all the denominational distinctives out there, this is one thing all believers can do, is practice both holiness and love together. The bulk of this chapter really was Schaefer talking about his frustration with what happened in the Presbyterian Church during the early 1900s, when theological liberalism was starting to invade the church around the turn of the 20th century, he feels that stricter adherence to doctrinal purity, if people have used more discipline, that might have prevented some of the division that occurred. But then he's also frustrated after the division occurred because of the lack of love, basically, that was being shown between people that left and people that stayed in the old denomination. So he sees that that widened the divide and made things worse. Those who had left the church, who was becoming more liberal, the people who had left that, he says the danger was becoming more absolutist in their points of doctrine, beginning to argue and bicker over even minor points. Those who did not leave, he sees as accepting this growing latitudinarianism, accepting more and more nomination. And that was pretty much where he finished. He didn't really provide a detailed plan of action. He did, though, provide this appendix that lays out some of his thoughts on what the absolute limits should be in doctrine. His concept of trying to find good doctrinal purity was that this is not something that you gain just by trying to stick to some exact wording of creeds and confessions and that kind of thing, that he envisioned more of a kind of a circle of doctrines within which he said there was freedom to move. And he used the Westminster Confession of Faith as a good example of that in the sense that you had many people from different areas of theological persuasion who all came together and tried to write up a document that allowed some flexibility. You know, it wasn't especially rigid. There was some room to move within the Westminster confessional faith. But he sees the edge of the circle as being like a cliff, that when you go too far, then you are in real trouble. So the challenge is to avoid the cliffs that are on basically either side of the circle. He divided doctrines up into two different groups. Those that he saw as being intrinsic to the Christian system. I'm not exactly sure what he meant by that. Intrinsic to the Christian system and then other doctrines that simply exist as a result of the fall. So I included a few examples here in my notes just to give you a feel for it. that God exists in total freedom. God's independent, does not depend on anything. But that that has to be considered, I guess, against the fact that man still has significance and that man can glorify God. So where are these two cliffs then? One cliff would be thinking that because God is so independent that therefore man has no value. That would be one cliff to fall off. The other cliff would be that you get so focused on independent on that, that somehow God is affected by what man is doing. So that would be an example of the two cliffs he's worried about. Another example, events are not determined by chance, so that's one truth, but then held against that would be the fact that history of events does have significance, that there is causality. So, you know, you don't want to become so fixated on the idea that there's no chance and that everything's determined by God, such that now you think that what you do doesn't matter, or that what somebody else did a hundred years ago doesn't matter, that there is, God does use the contingency of events as part of his plan. Another contrast would be that there are these various kinds of unity, you know, the three persons of God, the natures of Christ, human, divine, the unity of Christ and his people, but that that also has to be held against the significant distinctions there are due to diversity, that the people are all distinct persons. Here's a couple examples of doctrines that he relates to the fall. Justification, that it is a once for all thing, but that there is a continued battle with sin and a need for holiness. So we've seen people that fall into error on both sides, either seeing justification as so comprehensive that they claim they're perfect, the nature of justification by faith. Or another example would be the existence of absolute truth, meaning that there really is truth, but we as humans all fall short of that truth to varying degrees. So you need to have humility and understand that you may need to continue to grow in knowledge much thinking in those terms that you forget that there really is truth that everyone is trying to attain to. All right, so I'll hit my assessment here, and then we'll have some time for discussion, I think. I listed a few things that I thought were very helpful elements of the book. His emphasis on the importance of sound doctrine to faith and practice in the church. that if the word of God is not being taken seriously, then there really is not faithfulness to the truth of Christianity. He makes that point very strongly. I think it's an important point. And also, if the word of God is being taken seriously, then that means that it's going to affect not just people's beliefs, but also their daily living. He makes that point as well. I think both of them very important. You see a lot of issues in the church in both of those areas. He also makes the point that a proper approach to striving for doctrinal purity should actually promote unity within the Church. So I think anyone who finds that their approach to trying to achieve doctrinal purity is just naturally producing divisions constantly, that should make you stop and think, what am I missing here? It's not what we should be achieving within the church. I also like the whole concept of having a balanced way of avoiding doctrinal errors. Now, I'm not sure that I I'm a huge fan of his imagery of staying away from the two cliffs, and I'll expand on that here in just a moment why I don't like that as much. I prefer the imagery of trying to firmly grasp onto two truths, and if you start losing your grip on one side, you kind of become unbalanced and end up falling in the wrong direction. You know, part of the reason I prefer that imagery is because it I feel does a better job of stating that there are truths here that we're trying to grasp onto. It's not like there's just cliffs out there somewhere that we're trying to avoid. Like there really is something we're trying to grasp onto there. I'll expand on that a little bit more in a second. So where are my areas of concern? I have a couple concerns about the way that he is emphasizing holiness versus love. contrast just those two things, I worry that it creates the impression that these are like two separate areas of effort. It's like, well, I've been doing a lot of loving things lately. Uh-oh, I've forgotten to go practice doctrinal purity or something. It kind of makes it sound like these are two separate efforts. And so I would hope that it's clear to people that God's life and community, I think. So, yes, we should be practicing doctrinal purity in a way that's loving, and we should be loving people in a way that's consistent with good doctrine, but it should also be done in a wise way, in a just way, and, you know, all the other things that we should be striving for as we imitate God. Another area of my concern would be just his method of engaging with apostates or unbelievers, because that is part of what he's talking about in the book, is that a lot of the church he's saying are adulterers, that they've turned away from God, that they're apostates now. And the way he talks about it in the book, it seems like he expects Those warnings really apply more to people who are believers, and it's to keep us paying attention, to keep us in the faith, keep us diligent. If a person has intentionally turned away from the Word of God, which is kind of what he's describing in the book, because people have kind of knowingly discarded the Word of God, I would argue that the problem is likely a lot deeper than just that they need a lot of exhortation to be more faithful. There's something else going on there. So I would remind Schaefer of 1 Corinthians 2.14, a natural person does not accept the things of the Spirit of God, for they are folly to him, and he is not able to understand them because they are spiritually discerned. So if somebody has knowingly turned away from the truth, I don't know that you can just tell them you should try to pay more attention to the truth. Schaeffer seemed to be aware that some believers had knowingly compromised the truth by remaining in these liberal churches, and he was very disappointed that when some of these people, who were believers, decided to leave the liberal churches, that they weren't being, you know, more freely welcomed by the denominations that had splintered off. And, you know, I mean, I agree with him in many senses, but my concern is that You know, someone who has been intentionally compromising on their doctrine, when they come out of that situation, I think you would hope to see a degree of repentance and humility from them, that they would recognize, like, I messed up, I made a mistake, this went too far. You know, and they wouldn't expect now to just jump right into the other denomination and say, okay, well I'm gonna be a leader over here now. It's like, no, you need to maybe spend some time thinking about how it is that you ended up where you ended up. This concept of doctrinal circles, as I said, I have maybe a couple issues I guess with how that comes across. I mean I agree that a range of doctrines can coexist within the church, that's fine, but I also want to make sure it's clear that we are striving for one distinct truth that is found in Christ. So it's not like all of us are just freely running around through a circle, it's like we are trying to attain to Christ. I think that Schaeffer just defines Christianity too much in terms of affirming correct doctrines and behaving in certain ways. And so this is my opinion, obviously, but I think this has just long been a rampant problem within the church, that people say, well, if you agree with this creed and you affirm all these truths and you live a good life, that means you're a Christian. And I would say, no, it actually has and that you are entrusting your life to Christ, and that should result in good doctrine and good behavior. But people get the cart before the horse a lot, especially in theology classes, I find. So, for example, James 2.19, you believe that God is one, you do well, even the demons believe in shudder. So just because somebody can rightly write up a paper on doctrine, does not mean that they are Christians. Satan is able to teach people doctrine and yet have them be unbelievers. Behavior, even, is not a totally reliable indicator. When Jesus said that one of his disciples was going to betray him, nobody guessed who it was. you know, they could not figure it out. Judas said the right things, did stuff, and everybody felt like he was part of the group. So, you know, the fundamental characteristic of a Christian is a new heart that's inclined toward and can produce that genuine repentance and faith. So, I guess I worry that this idea of doctrinal circles puts a little bit too much emphasis on, like, do you just know the right facts about Christianity? The other issue I have with these cliffs is that I'm not sure that it's that easy to define where these cliffs are. I think depending on an individual person's weaknesses and inclinations, the cliffs can be in different places. And so I don't think they're always going to be the same for all people at all times and all places. I may be able to wander off in some direction still stay firm in my faith, other people may take one step in that direction and go right off the cliff. I also, personally, think that Schaeffer tends to overstate the newness of the challenges of the postmodern world. He tends to write about it as if, oh, this stuff has never happened before, and nobody's ever had to deal with this before. The more I go and read historical accounts of the church, the same issues back in the 1700s and 1600s. People were just as irrational, just as inclined toward mysticism, just as accepting of immoral behavior and all that sort of thing. I can start. I wanted to ask you, don't you feel, though, that he kind of supplants? I'm not sure what, ultimately, I know creeds are not what saves us, but creeds are a safety net for the church. And when you construct another apparatus to say these are our boundaries, it seems like a supplanting of the creeds, you know? And then there's the issue of, well, we already had a structure to say, this is how far we go. It's not what saves us. It's not what we use as our mainstay for our spiritual food. But it tells you the boundaries of our doctrine. And a church without a proper creed, confession, is exposing itself to danger. And I think that he has a false construct there. I think he already had something good. And I know he did give credence to the Westminster Confession, but he seemed to be constructing his own apparatus there. Yeah, I can see your point there, that he is kind of supplementing you know, a lot of work by many very intelligent and spiritually astute people went into developing those creeds and confessions. You know, so I suppose he would probably hope that people would join in with him and seeing, you know, all these creeds and confessions generally grew out of things happening in the church where there were conflicts and disputes over points. So I guess Schaeffer's probably trying to say he thinks there's more that needs to be because I fell down in that area for time. And it's too late to save it, but I would say the only thing I felt about my report was the question that, well, there were two things. You asked about the plasticity and how that plasticity, he puts that over why all these youngsters left the church. But then a man with his depth and spirituality, his own son turns away from the faith. I don't mean to be cruel, because sometimes that just happens. People apostatize from God, and sometimes you don't really want to criticize. You can, there are connections, but not all the time. It's not always the other generation's fault that the new generation walks away, and in his own life, you have proof of that. With Frankie. Randy? I see his reference to the boundaries and the cliffs in terms of his other uses of the terminology of form and freedom. So within our doctrinal understandings, we can move around. like I said, the form and freedom that we've got doctrinally. Baptism, you know, thinking back on church at the end of the 20th century, we had some discussion on statements that he said were almost made us suspicious of him in terms of baptism. He sounded more baptistic than Presbyterian in terms of covenant baptism. But within the body of Christ, we can call each other brother in Christ if you dunk or sprinkle or do it after professional faith or leading up to it, things like that. You know, I think that's a good point. When you think of his view of form and freedom, that does seem to have a lot of parallel with how he's viewing these circles and cliffs kind of thing. I guess my question, which I haven't really thought about a whole lot yet, is Is there really a parallel there? Because on one side you're talking about practice where you're saying, well, how are you going to practice baptism? There may be some freedom there. But then when you ask the question, well, what is the meaning of baptism? Now you're talking about truth, and so I guess my question would be, is there really a circle there, or is there really a truth that we're all trying to reach when it comes to what really is God's intention behind baptism? Yeah. That still might be a freedom. We practice baptism. We recognize that, well, in terms of form, we know that it's Trinitarian. We know that there is the sign of particular spiritual truths. One part of the church might emphasize it differently. They might elevate, say, the death, burial, and resurrection of Christ more than they do the covenantal aspect of connection with circumcision and circumcision And we can talk and debate without falling off that cliff, at least up to a pretty good range of freedom to be together in Christ. Just to pick that one example that you mentioned. Watching World, he intends us to show that we do believe in truth, but also that we are a redeemed people, and we know that we're all redeemed sinners. He emphasizes doctrinal standards and doctrinal truth, but he says, don't eat each other up. And I remember in his letters, he was so It became absolutist, if you didn't do it the hard way. And I didn't grow up in a strictly fundamentalist background, but I sure had some exposure to it. And 50 years down the road, these people are still talking about so-and-so did this, and so-and-so believes this. Well, it's not even a thing anymore, except the fact that they keep each other apart. I was there. So it was one of the earlier books that I did read, but it's time to re-read it. And there's elements in this book that will come out in the one that I did, Death in the City. He's got that whole chapter there on adultery and apostasy. So that's real cool. I'm glad we got that. I did more preaching As I study Schaeffer more, especially over these last few months, I kind of feel the tension. I think there's this tension between wanting to find the point of unity within the broader Christian community, but recognizing that there have to be some doctrinal boundaries that you don't compromise on. And it feels like we're still there, that we're always really struggling with that question. you know, who can we call brethren and who do we call apostates and consequently distance ourselves from. I could say that from a Reform standpoint, he, and I was just recently reading something that made this point, that he tended to de-emphasize things like predestination, even though that's obviously part of, a big part of what we believe about salvation in the Reform camp, but in order to to be able to reach a broader audience with an evangelicalism, he's willing to kind of set that aside and he's not going to make a big deal out of it. He talks about eschatology as well as another point that he doesn't want differences in eschatology to be that thing that prevents us from finding that common ground. So, I guess what I'm trying to say is that there's In some sense, Schaeffer's demonstrating his own kind of latitudinarianism with this idea of the circles and the cliffs, that there has to be, or he's saying that there's a latitude within some of these things, but that there have to be some limits on that as well. So it's a very difficult question to wrestle with, and something that still continues to plague the church. I'm still struggling with Barth on that very issue because, you know, when you read Barth, when he teaches on the Apostles' Creed, you feel like you're listening to an evangelical. But then when I hear Eli tell me, Barth's theology, and of course you've got this from Schaefer, I'm not laying, there's nothing wrong with it at all, I'm just saying, he's saying that it's not fixed in history, But that means it's not fixed in reality. And is His Jesus fixed in history? Because if His Jesus is not fixed in history, He's not fixed in reality, therefore, not the real Jesus. Maybe my syllogism is too strong, I don't know. I think I would agree with you there. I think this is the kind of language I've heard attributed to Barth is saying things like that God is invading reality. That through the event of the crucifixion that God is sort of invading. So I think he really did see it as being something sort of separate. And Schaefer had a sit down with him. He tried to reconcile him, and Art wouldn't have anything to do with it, you know? Yeah, that didn't go very well, did it? He basically said, Seifert's criticism of the new modernism is that you've closed the shutters of your mind, as it were. There's no reason to talk to you because you've already made up your mind. And I guess that proves part of the difficulty. You know, as I'm listening to Eli, I wrote down that every relativist is absolutely sure of at least one thing, that there's no such thing as truth. You can't escape from it. And even Schaefer makes the argument that you can't argue against antithesis without using the antithesis. So we're all caught in that trap, the trap of reality. Yeah. I don't mean to sound outdated. That was another critique I forgot to mention on my end. my report that... Your time's up, Leland. That work is outdated. I don't want to be a punctious pilot, but yes, we're all asking what is true. Yeah, everybody has a concept of truth, and that's the bottom line. I knew that Schaeffer had these deep concerns. That, or at least this is what we've learned, is that we have this crisis point over the conflict that was going on. People criticizing him, and the way he was treating other people. And so I was curious to see how he was going to approach this whole issue. Yeah, I'm not convinced that he necessarily found the answer. I think he makes some good points along the way. I mean, you know, personally, I think that since we are trying to achieve knowledge of true God, you know, I don't know that it's that helpful to tell people that I think there's this circle that you can get around in. I just, you know, I think that we all need to be trying to dialogue with each other about what we think is true and then have some You know, I don't know, I guess I would just say make room for God in the whole thing. You know, people become way too sort of arrogant thinking that I'm going to argue so and so into my views. And, you know, I mean, having a good rational argument is very helpful in me being an instrument that God can use. But it's really up to God whether or not he wants to use it. And I think by keeping that in mind, it makes you more accepting of the idea that somebody might listen to you and go, I still don't agree. And you can walk away being satisfied that you did what you needed to do. You don't necessarily need to treat somebody like they're your enemy now just because they didn't agree with you. compromised truth by remaining in liberal churches. How much tension do you think he really had there in terms of that? My question is kind of along the lines of, I guess, sort of the mark of the Christian and some of the to get out versus strict compromise. But I'm not sure what you thought about how much more is in your mind as far as that bullet point. I don't know if it made sense. I think I understand what you're asking there. And I guess I'm just not quite sure I know how to answer based on what I read. You know, the sense I got was that Schaefer, you know, felt that these people, you know, probably had stayed in the denomination because they wanted to keep trying to do good in the denomination. And then at some point realized that, I guess, things had gone too far, sort of thing. So now they were going to leave. But that along the way, in that process, I guess, of trying to stay, that's where he seems to be saying that they begin to compromise. You know, because, and he blames part of it on the divisiveness between the people that stayed and the people that left. So the people who stayed now are wanting to continue to stay because they don't, they don't appreciate what happened with the people that left. And that encourages them to compromise more and more because they don't want to, you know, say, yeah, you were right, I should have left. in many instances, they became more willing to go along. So, I mean, that's a good thing to recognize about both sides. That if we do make a doctrinal stand, don't become a bully about it. And if you do stay like you're trying to help, don't become a squish either. It seems like you see that kind of like with the Puritans, you know, when they come and start their colony in America. We're kind of out of time. But they kind of had this idea that like, well, we know the truth. We're going to establish a community where we get everything right. And it's like, no, no, you're not going to succeed. So the same thing if you found a new denomination. Don't think that this is going to be the first denomination that gets everything perfectly right. It's not going to happen. You know what? It's like that with Calvary Chapel. non-denominational. We go to Calvary Chapel. Calvary Chapel turned out to be a multi-megachurch denomination that was a non-denominational denomination. Kind of like the Southern Baptist Convention. Alright, let's wrap it up there. We have Just shy of 10 minutes before the next class starts. Thank you guys both for your presentations tonight. We'll hear from Randy next week, and then we'll have a special guest preacher, teacher, talking about whatever happened to the human race. So that will cover our last two book reports. We'll see. He didn't get his report finished by noon today, I can tell you that. OK. Is that the Illumined Doctor House himself? No, I was talking about myself. Oh, oh darn. You said guest speaker. He did. But we all got it. You're the host, my friend. Please, please be cognizant of that. Well, you know, I get to play kind of a dual role. So, you know, the next couple of weeks I get to be the student. So I'll be the student speaker next week. OK, here we go.