Vancepocalypse Now (and Paul's Spiritual Gifts)

The spiritual gift of sexiness.

If you’ve seen Magic Mike where one of the guys is too gifted to the degree that it’s a problem.

Okay. I’m surprised at your familiarity with the Magic Mike franchise.

I have approximate knowledge of many things. Hey, everybody, I’m Dan McClellan.

And I’m Dan Beecher.

And this is Data Over Dogma, where we increase public access to the academic study of the Bible and religion and we combat the spread of misinformation. About the same. And I hope you got your combat boots on and I hope you’re ready for to hear some Good Morning Vietnam. Da Nang me. Da Nang me. Well, I don’t know, but anyway, we.

Got our full battle rattle on today because we are. We’re going after a Marine. I don’t know if you realize this, but we are going after a Marine. We. I do want to first. I. Okay, I just remembered it, so I’m going to put it out there.

Because you and I are trying to push our, our membership on our YouTube channel. And for anyone listening or viewing, you can, you can check out membership in the Tribe of Dan on the YouTube channel. You get access to all of our videos a day early and exclusive access to, you know, live YouTube, live streams and stuff. And we’re doing one of those coming up. Yeah, yeah, that’s right. So on October 27th, there’s going to be a live stream.

September 27th.

Yeah, whatever. One of the months this month. So yes, September 27th, we’ll be doing a live four hour. Members just getting that out there. Let’s get on with the show. We. We are going to be going after one Mr. J.D. Vance. I don’t know if you’ve heard of him.

You might have done John Dominic Vance, or is it John Dorian?

I don’t think J.D. Stands for anything. I think it’s just. No, I’m just kidding. J.D. Vance, he. He, he went on a child’s podcast. I don’t know who this kid was. I do. I literally, I, I’m guessing he has a bigger following than we do. If he, if he bagged, if he’s bagging.

I’ve responded to a couple of his videos.

Anyway. Yeah, there’s a kid who has a podcast that’s doing better than ours and he, and he had JD Vance on and, and Vance said some stuff about end times and, and was reasonably cavalier about causing them. So I thought that that was interesting. We’ll be talking about that. We’ll be Taking Issue with that.

Although we’re also going to qualify to some degree the issue we are taking.

We. We will have.

We’re going to be fair. We’re going to have to be fair.

I don’t want to be fair. Yes, to Brother Vance, but we’re gonna. We’re gonna. And then in this, in the latter portion of the show, we’re gonna do a. What’s that? It is. We got an email from a listener about. And I thought it was for a show. And that is the. The gifts of the spirit. So that one, that entire section we will be doing in tongues. So here’s hoping that you understand us.

As in case, you know.

All right, so let’s just dive in here with Taking Issue.

All right.

Brother Vance goes on this other podcast and yeah, I think, I think the.

Guy’s name is Bryce Crawford.

Yeah, like, I think that’s right.

Definitely the name somebody in their 20s has.

Yeah. But yeah, and. And the kid decided to put on a tie for this interview, which I thought was respectful because the rest of his channel does not see him in a tie, though.

Anyway, I won’t. I’m not going to go after the kid. He’s. He is. Whatever he is. But JD Vance at one point started talking about being fascinated by End Times prophecy and theology. And, and just saying. He mentioned that the first Bible that he ever got was the John Hagee Prophecy Study Bible. Yeah. I don’t know if you’ve dived into that piece of work.

That’s a piece of literature that is in my TBR pile, which is entirely a lie. I will never even look at it.

But TBR stands for to be rejected.

Yes. To be recycled. Yes. No. I have no intention of looking at a John Hagee Prophecy Study Bible. But, yeah, he seemed to be. He seemed to. To The. The idea of the Antichrist seemed to have gained some purchase in his conscience starting at a fairly young age. And didn’t he. Didn’t he say something along the lines of he wouldn’t be surprised if the Antichrist were already walking among us?

Or something spooky like that. But. But he also. And as you pointed out when we were talking about doing this segment, to be fair, qualified an awful lot of this. It.

Which was actually refreshing. And I’m mad that you made me, like, watch a thing where I was like, yeah, but now we’ve got to be fair to Vance because he doesn’t say the thing that a lot of Christians, that we hear a lot of Christians say. Maybe it’s the Catholic thing. Maybe him converting to Catholicism, like sort of took it down a notch or two for him.

But. But I. But I think at the same time, it kind of shows that he’s. I don’t think he’s fully. I don’t think he’s fully aware of or fully invested in what Catholicism is, is really Catholicism’s relationship to end times, the eschaton, because they actually have a pretty clear prohibition on trying to escalate to catalyze the end times. And there’s. And there’s even. I think there’s a catechism, and folks who are Catholic or know the catechism a lot better than me are going to know this far better than I do. But. But I thought there was a catechism that said something along the lines of we should never allow our anticipation of the end times get in the way of trying to make the world we live in now a better place.

Right.

Which. Which kind of says you have a priority. Yeah, it is. It is making the world a better.

And I think that that is a very useful thing to have because as we have seen and as we are going to talk about, there are people who don’t view it that way now.

Oh, yeah.

Vance, in this interview did say, do I think that we’re in the end times? This is a quote. I don’t know. And I think it’s probably bad for me spiritually to focus too much on it. I have to give him credit for that. Yeah, that would be a bad thing to speak for the leader or one of leaders of our country to focus on.

Unfortunately, there are a lot of other leaders in our country at various levels who are heavily focused on it.

And are. Are even. It seems giddy about it. Yeah.

It feels like that’s Hegseth sort of territory right there. But we haven’t heard him say it, so I can’t. Don’t quote me on that.

Yeah. Well, we recently had the flooding in Nepal, which was just. Just bonkers weatherish climate events where you had melting snow and a glacier collapsed.

Right.

And fell like a kilometer into a very narrow, steep valley and just sent hundreds of millions of. Of gallons, tons of debris and stuff and just in water just scraping a bunch of habitations just right off the.

Yeah, it was. It was devastating. I’ve seen, you know, I’m used to seeing flash flood footage because it happens here all the time because we live in a desert with lots of canyons and, you know, water feeds water and whatever, but that’s. That’s nothing like anything we’ve Ever.

It was apocalyptic.

Yeah, it was, it was devastating. And, and horrif.

Yeah. And. But I, I saw videos. People were making videos. Like, it’s the end times. This is it, people. We gotta make sure we’re right with Jesus. I was like, hey, don’t exploit that kind of horrific tragedy for some clicks and some digital pats on the butt. Yeah, like, and, and like, this is. Climate change is definitely involved in, in what happened here. It might not have been the proximate cause, but it was definitely a factor in this happening. And so this is, and it might.

Well have been the proximate cause at this point.

It could have been.

Who knows? But, you know, at this point, it’s not that Jesus is making things worse because he’s about to return. We’re making things worse because we are refusing to take these things seriously.

Right.

And, and so this is, this is really on us. But, but I’ve seen a lot of, of that kind of stuff of you guys need to be paying attention because Jesus is coming.

And this, of course, this happens with every major world, you know, every time there’s a major earthquake somewhere. And unfortunately, and really unfortunately, we live in the convergence of a few things that make this much worse. A. Everybody’s got a camera, so everything is being videotaped. So we’re, we’re, we’re, we’re faced with the visuals of it. It’s not just, we’re not just reading about it in our newspaper. And if you didn’t read the paper, you, you don’t even know.

Right.

We’re seeing videos come in from all over the place of everything. If there’s, you know, if there’s an earthquake in Nicaragua, if there’s a, whatever over here or over there, we’re seeing it. And at the same time, as you say global warming is happening, you know what I mean? Climate change is real. And so we’re, we’re actually causing a bunch of major, like, catastrophic weather phenomena as well.

Yeah. And now we’ve got, we’ve got three hurricanes making their way across the Pacific Ocean because of El Nino, and which as, as we learned from Chris Farley a long time ago, means the Nino.

It is Spanish for the Nino. It’s true.

Yes. And, and you know, we’re all on social, not all of us, a lot of us are on social media. And the algo daddy is feeding us all the stuff that, that, you know, we pause on.

Right.

And so we’re, we’re being made to feel like there’s an increase in the occurrence of these kinds of things.

Unless people think, I do want to say, lest people think that we’re just talking about like a few crackpots going. No, like Adventist Angels Watchman Radio, I don’t know. That’s a, that’s a website. They had an article called Prophetic News Analysis, Nepal’s devastating Flood Wave. A call to prepare. And you know, there’s a group called Rapture Ready, that’s a long running prophecy website. And they’re, they had a thing called. Yeah, they, they talked about the Nepal death toll rising and, and basically it, you know, they, they’re seeing it as a, as something to, as a sign.

Yeah. And you know, a few. What was it, 2021, 2022, the Euphrates River water levels were getting incredibly low. And so you had all these misinformed people. Maybe is, is how I’ll say it, talking about how this is all in the book of Revelation, that the great river will dry up and make way for the armies of the East. And when the river dries up, the four angels that are trapped or that are imprisoned underneath the Euphrates River will be freed to go destroy one third of humanity. And, and oh my gosh. And people are like giddy about it. The people on social media are making a lot of hay off of freaking people out about horrifying natural disasters and climate emergencies that are taking lives on the other side of the planet. About whom the people who are spreading this stuff could not care less.

Right.

And unfortunately so much of it has to do with a human own goal, the self inflicted wound of anthropogenic climate change. But yeah. J.D. Vance, big on the John Hagee Prophecy Study Bible, big into eschatology. He converted to Catholicism not too long ago, right? Yeah, yeah, just a handful of years ago and. But still seems to have brought with him a lot of his evangelical eschatological outlook. But is trying to, it sounds like he’s trying to temper it.

Right.

By saying.

Well, one doesn’t know if that’s because he’s a politician or because he’s now a Catholic or you know, one doesn’t know too much to attribute that. But there’s one thing that I wanted to bring up that surprised me a little bit as I was sort of looking at those different articles and researching this because you mentioned Revelation as being a place and that’s generally where my mind goes to when people start talking about end times and whatever. But then I kept seeing Matthew 24 come up and I think that that’s actually pretty interesting because I hadn’t realized that in the Gospels themselves there’s also stuff that’s interesting now. You know, it’s, it’s talking about signs of, you know, the sort of end times.

Kind of thing that. The signs of the age, the end of the age. And it’s, you know, it’s Jesus talking and saying, you know, when he’ll come back, essentially.

Right. Second coming.

And, and he says, you know, and he talks about persecutions and he talks about lawlessness and then he talks and, but he does talk about. He sort of. He quotes Daniel, I guess, and, and says. So when you see the desolating sacrilege spoken of by the prophet Daniel standing in the holy place, let the reader understand. Then those in Judea must flee to the mountains. The one on the housetops must house top must not go down to take things from the house. Blah, blah, blah.

And I just. But then, you know, it does have a whole bunch of. Of stuff about when the Son of Man is coming. They, you know, it says the sun will be darkened and the moon will not give its light, the stars will fall from the heaven and the powers of heaven will be shaken.

And I think that that is, you know, I think, I think they’re quoting from, from Ghostbusters in that part, but.

Or Ghostbusters could be kind of riffing on the Bible. But. Yeah, that’s. That. That is. Right. You have that in like Joel and Isaiah and, and Ezekiel and stuff like that. So. Yeah, it’s kind of a common motif.

Right. And I think that’s what. But this is what they’re looking for. Right. These are the, this is the things that they, that, that these people like JD Vance are looking for and, and sort of delighting in, because the end goal for a lot of the, the end times people, for a lot of the, the, the people who are focused on the rapture or the eschaton or whatever are. They’re kind of, you know, they want Jesus to. The second coming to occur, and that’s understandable. That’s kind of the main event of the Bible, I guess, at least of the New Testament. So it makes a logical sense. There’s a certain sense that it makes to say, I want that to happen as quickly as possible. It’s been 2,000 years. I want it to happen. How do we, what do we do to make it happen?

And that leads people down some very dark roads and some very scary roads.

Yeah. I think it’s important to note that when we look at the Olivet Discourse. When we look at Matthew 24, when we look at what. What Jesus was supposed to have been prophesying, it’s a lot of imagery drawn from the Hebrew Bible. And it seems pretty clear to me, and particularly in Matthew, there’s an argument to make about Mark, but it seems pretty clear to me that at least in Matthew it should have happened in the first century. That’s the. The Jesus is prophesying that his second coming would happen while the people he was talking to were still alive, at least some of them.

Right.

And you know, the, the Gospel of Matthew is probably written between 80 and 90 CE somewhere around there. And so that’s. That’s a handful of decades after Jesus’s death. And so it would be kind of like, hey, we’re on the. You know, we’re on the back nine definitely of right. This. We are walking off the green of 18. So. Yeah. And. And that any minute now position has kind of ebbed and flowed over the centuries. There have been times when people are like, meh. And then today it’s definitely we’re back into the ooh, it’s coming. Anything. Yeah. And I mean people are getting so amazing about it.

How long any minute now can last.

Yeah. Yeah. And we have unfortunately, you talked about a convergence of a bunch of different things. The rise of Christian nationalism, I think is. Is kind of feeding into that evangelical fervor because Christian nationalism has got its hooks most deeply into American evangelicalism. And that is the movement that I think has the most influence today on. On Trumpism, which has been kind of the way things have been going for the last decade since we heard the president boast about getting away with sexually assaulting women because of his celebrity. For some reason, this is the era that we still are in. But the. I think the Christian nationalism has only gotten more fervent and unfortunately it is just dialed up the millennial expectations to 11 and to the degree that even an ostensible Catholic is.

Is talking about this where. And. And the. The quote that I don’t think that we’ve gotten to yet, but that was. Was what made me first go exqueeze me baking powder when. When I ran across it on. On social media and I think I have lost the exact quote. But do you have the exact quote here?

I. I’ve been looking. It is.

We probably should have had that queued up, but. I thought I just had it and now. Yeah. He thinks end times are coming, that he wouldn’t be surprised if the Antichrist was walking among us. He says he puts his odds at getting into heaven at 75%. But he also says that he’s focused on doing the work, doing God’s work, and if that brings about the end times, he’s okay with that.

Yeah, that was. That was it. I finally found it just as you were saying it. So, yes, that is pretty shocking.

I mean, it’s. I, again, I understand that sentiment from the perspective of, you know, if. If that is. If you believe that Jesus is coming and that that is inevitable and that that is what brings about the glory of the world at some point or whatever, if you believe that Revelation was talking about something literal or whatever, then, yeah, you want it to happen. Like, yeah, we. You were promised a second coming. When is it happening? But the thought that he’s saying, if my actions, me lead to the end times, the thought that that’s even in his head, that he could take actions that lead to the end times is shocking and very scary.

Yeah, it is rather disturbing.

And the whole thing, like, a lot of the folks who are so excited about this are folks who are promoting ideologies and policy making and things like that that are directly responsible for causing more inequity, more instability, for causing a lot of socioeconomic problems, a lot of geopolitical problems. The war in Iran, the dumbest war in a long string of dumb wars.

That we, if we will be lucky to call this war a wash. We will be lucky to just get back to the. The way things were before we started the war.

And that’s just ignoring the lives and the money and, and the harm to the economy. We will be lucky to get back to the point where we were when Donald Trump decided to start a war. But a lot of people think Iran is a major player in what’s going to happen because.

Yeah, they do talk about that all the time.

Yeah. It’s. It’s Iran, it’s Russia, it’s China. Because the prophecies in, in Ezekiel that are about entirely different people groups occupying entirely different territories obviously has to correlate to some political entity that exists today. And so that’s got a lot of people excited as well. But.

Yeah, well, so in fairness to. To Vance, I am going to finish the quote because he says, he says, he says what I’m trying to, as you said, what I’m trying to focus on is doing as much of God’s work as possible right now. And if that leads to the end times. Okay. And if that leads to, you know, us building a better world that thrives and survives for a very long time after I’m gone. That’s great too.

Now, A.

And then he goes on to say the end times may be coming. In fact, they are coming. It’s just a question of whether they’re coming in thousands of years or down the thousands of years down the road or a few months down the road. I. Here’s the thing. The other, the other thing that bothers. I mean, we’ve kind of made all the points about the end times stuff and how scary that is. But one of the points that bothers me is that he thinks he’s supposed to be doing God’s work as opposed to the work of the. The American people, which is what his.

Job is, which he’s also not doing. Really, what he’s doing is, is the work of the person. Yeah, we all heard boast about getting away with sexually assaulting women because of his celebrity.

Oh, not just him. I, I think. I think he’s on a pretty short Peter Thiel leash as well. But that’s.

It’s.

He’s not serving who? The electorate, I think. I think that’s not his. His primary goal.

So I, I just wanted to read this from Pope Paul VI on December 7, 1965. A very long. This is chapter three, and in a very long text. But this paragraph says, therefore, while we are warned that it profits a man nothing if he gain the whole world and lose himself, the expectation of a new earth must not weaken, but rather stimulate our concern for cultivating this one. For here grows the body of a new human family, a body which even now is able to give some kind of foreshadowing of the new age. Hence, while earthly progress must be carefully distinguished from the growth of Christ’s kingdom, to the extent that the former can contribute to the better ordering of human society, it is of vital concern to the kingdom of God. So I don’t know the degree to which JD Vance signs off on a lot of the claims that, oh, it doesn’t matter. We can only expect these things to be fixed when Christ comes, or we don’t have to fix the environment.

Christ is coming like that. I don’t know if Vance signs off on all that kind of stuff, but it would seem that the official position of the church to which he now belongs is don’t do that. And yeah, I think he. But he’s gone up against the Pope several times already.

He killed that one.

Yeah, he said a lot of stuff. When the Pope has to issue a statement calling you out as wrong. Maybe reconsider opening your mouth and talking about these things.

All right, well, there you have it. That’s. Oh, J.D. What a. What a peach he is. So let’s. Let’s leave that at that and, and move on to our. What’s that? All right, so. Hamanashamana Skabadu. It is the gifts of the Spirit that. That we’re. That is the. That of. What’s that? So. So let’s. Let’s get into it. I believe we’re. We’re the. The most obvious place start. Starting point is 1 Corinthians 12. Is that correct?

That is correct. Chapter 12 through 14 is a. Is a long discourse about the gifts of the Spirit. But there we actually have a few different places in the New Testament where we rattle off different degrees of gifts of the Spirit. We also have Romans 12. We have a few verses in there. Ephesians 4, not Paul, most likely somebody else. And we’ll get to how the. The gifts are slightly different there.

1 Peter 4, and then to the degree that we want to use the. The tongues thing as a gift of the Spirit discussion. Then. Then Acts 2.

We should probably do our. Do a whole thing on the gift of tongues, if we haven’t already, because that just seems like it’s a. But we do need. But we. But it’s part of this whole thing. So, yeah, I think we. I think we need to include it. The gifts of the Spirit that are listed according to 1 Corinthians and 1 Corinthians is Paul. Yes.

Yes. Yes. 1 Corinthians is definitely Paul.

Okay. So. So basically what he’s doing is he’s. He’s writing to the people of Corinth and he is saying there’s. There’s all these cool things that come with it. It’s basically like Patreon bonuses that you get when you sign up to be a Christian. Or rather when you. When you get. When. When the Spirit favors you. Maybe we should just. I guess it seemed obvious to me, but suddenly it might not be obvious. The Spirit. What are we talking about? Is that the Holy Ghost? Is that.

Yeah, well, yeah, it’s supposed to be. But the gifts of the Spirit. Well, in 1 Corinthians 12:1 he says, which doesn’t actually include the word gifts. He just says, now, concerning the spirituals or the spiritual things, that. Which is spiritual. And he goes off and. And it’s actually interesting if you read it in context and you read it carefully. There’s kind of a. An argument that Paul is developing, which is not, look how cool the gifts are. It’s actually, shut up about all of this and. And get along. Because what he’s. What he’s trying to say is. Is kind of there. There’s a lot of contention. There’s a lot of. It seems like there’s a lot of tension in the church. And what he’s basically saying is, hey, we all have different things that we bring to the table. And these are the things he’s talking about as the gifts of the Spirit.

And there’s diversity, but diversity does not imply hierarchy. So he’s kind of taking a separate but equal approach to. To these different spiritual gifts. But then he goes on to say that this is not competition. This is not a hierarchy. You’re all different parts of the same body, and you all have your different functions. So quit bickering, because the head cannot say to the hand, I have no need of you, or words to that effect. I don’t remember exactly what. What he says, but he’s basically making the case that, hey, we need everyone with their various gifts to contribute to the greater good of the congregation, of the community of the people. And so it’s not, look how cool I am. It’s, what do I bring to the table? How can I make things better? How can I benefit the people who lack my gift?

Right.

So he’s. He’s actually kind of trying to calm some unrest. And the gifts of the Spirit are how he goes about getting people to stop competing, to stop glaring down their snouts at the people who have gifts, other gifts, who are not blessed with the gifts that they have. So it’s kind of all about edification. It’s all about order.

Yeah. One of the things that I thought was interesting is I just. Just that part, the part that you’re talking about, when I have thought of the gifts of the spirit, the image in my mind, and I don’t know where this came from, whether this came from just sort of like being in church or hearing people talk about it or whatever. It certainly didn’t come from reading the Bible, because I didn’t do a lot of that. But the image that I always had was there was this list of gifts of the spirit. Wisdom, knowledge, faith, healing, miracles, you know, powerful deeds, prophecy. And my sense was that if you just sort of advanced your spirituality far enough, it was like, you know, a game of D and D. You know, you got. You level up, and then you. You get another gift. And, like, the more you level up, the more of these gifts you sort of accrue to yourself. And reading Corinthians, it’s like, it’s not that at all.

It’s like, look, this guy has wisdom and that person has knowledge, and this person has that. And you don’t get all of them. Like, not every, not this is. This isn’t that. It’s not like everyone can have access to all of these things if they are spiritual enough. That’s not the idea here at all.

It’s a little more like Encanto. It’s like you open the magic door and bam, right, you have super strength or you can hear everything or, and, and it’s all contributing to the betterment of, of the group. And you rattled off most of the things that are named in, in 1st Corinthians 12, 8 through 10, but also various kinds of tongues. Interpretation of tongues. My favorite, though, is it’s actually not mentioned in 1 Corinthians 12. We actually got to go back back to 1 Corinthians 7 for this thing that is referred to as a gift.

And it’s in verse seven, and here’s where Paul is talking about celibacy. And he says, I wish that all were as I myself am, but each has a particular gift from God, one having one kind and another a different kind. So I think we gotta add, we gotta add the discipline to be celibate. Yeah, and he uses, I’m pretty sure he uses charisma. Charisma? Yeah. Is that the word there? Yeah, he, he used the exact same word that he uses later on as a gift.

Oh, okay. So here’s, here’s my question, though. Could that not be interpreted as, Look, I think everybody, I wish everybody was like me, but some dudes got the gift and they’re going to be having, getting out. They just are too good for the ladies. They got the charisma. And so their gift is, is making other people is sexiness. Well, and the spiritual gift of sexiness.

If you’ve seen Magic Mike, I think. Is it the second one where one of the guys is too gifted to the degree that it’s a problem.

And that he has to find the right person who can, who can accommodate his giftiness.

I’m surprised at your familiarity with the Magic Mike franchise.

I, I, I, I have more knowledge of, of pop cultures than.

Yes, then it’s not just the Avengers, all right?

I have, I have approximate knowledge of many things, which itself is, is, is me making reference to another piece of pop culture. But, but yeah, so I, I don’t think Paul’s aimed at that idea of.

No, no, I like. I like the idea of. Of celibacy being a gift of.

Yeah, yeah. And that’s what he’s saying. Not everybody can hack it.

Because not everyone is blessed with my whateverness.

With being an. Being ace.

Yeah. Yeah. And, you know, there’s a. There’s an argument to make that maybe that’s what Paul was. Was really on. That’s what. That’s. That was his bag. Yeah. Or maybe he just, I don’t know, had something that didn’t. He couldn’t really find a place for and was like, I guess I’m just not going to do anything. So in Corinthians, we have references to these gifts in a couple of different places. We have.

That’s really interesting.

Yeah. So it’s. But when you talked about. Yeah. It’s like there’s a catalog of gifts. You know, you sell enough chocolate bars to your neighbors or force your parents to write a check for enough chocolate bars, and you get a little catalog and you get to pick out your gift. No, it’s not like that at all. But also, when we look at the difference, the cataloging of the gifts, they are different because in addition to just talking about these skills and abilities, Paul also makes reference to. In 1 Corinthians, 12:28, he makes reference to different. I don’t know that we can talk about them as offices, yet I think it’s really in Ephesians that they’re offices. But in 12:28, he talks about God has appointed in the church, first apostles, second prophets, third teachers, then deeds of power, then gifts of healing, forms of assistance, forms of leadership, various kinds of tongues.

So the. I think there’s an awful lot of overlap between your gift and your role.

And so I. I think the. The roles are really the manifestation of the gift in. In some ways. Yeah.

He doesn’t seem to be distinguishing those two categories. At all.

Right.

It just seems to be that, like some people, their gift of the Spirit is apostolic and others is prophetic, and some is, you know, others it’s teaching, and others it’s power. And so. Yeah. I mean, that makes. That makes a certain amount of sense. Like the what? Like an apostle. That is a thing to do. Yes. And, you know, prophesying is a thing that you do. It’s not. It’s not so much, you know, I guess it is a title. But he’s. But here, I think it’s an interesting way to look at it as just a proclivity.

Yeah. And people talk about the church during Paul’s day as being more spirit led, which is kind of like this person has shown up and they’ve joined us and they are really good at whatever. And so bam, that is now their role. That’s what they do. And, and so the spirit kind of generates their role within the community because everybody can see that that’s what they have been spiritually gifted with. So it’s not yet. Oh, well, you are now an overseer. If you want to be an overseer. By the way, here are all the qualifications that you have to meet, which is what we get in 1 Timothy and what we get in Titus, the Pastoral Epistles that are probably coming from the end of the first or the beginning of the second century, where it’s not as. As much a spirit led thing, where it’s more of an institution with set of roles.

So things have started to sort of solidify into an organizational structure.

Yeah. Where, where it’s not so much I show up, I have a special ability. And they say, great, we could use you over here.

Now I’m a prophet. Here are the roles. And everybody’s like, oh cool, you’re a prophet. Well, prophesy in our behalf. Now it’s like we’re gonna assign. You’re the, you’re the prophet and you’re the apostle and you’re the this and that.

And, and it’s kind of like here are the roles, here are the, the prereqs for each role. Here are the requirements. And you pick one.

So it’s, it’s less spirit led when we get to the Pastoral Epistles, I think it seems to me. And when we go to Romans 12, we have some more references where Paul uses that word charisma. We have gifts that differ according to the grace given to us. Prophecy in proportion to faith, ministry in ministering, the teacher in teaching, the encourager in encouragement. That would be a great calling.

The LDS Church, we’re calling you to.

Be the encourager in all the churches. The churches need to start getting encouragers going.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. We need glazers in the, in the church. The. Don’t. Don’t research that if you don’t know what that means. The giver in sincerity, the leader in diligence, the compassionate in cheerfulness. So we’re still in the kind of spirit led realm which, which I think is, works when you’re still a fledgling movement. Yeah. I think once you have tax exempt status and once you have, you know, lawyers that you’ve got to work with. You know, it becomes things. It’s a lot harder to work in, in that, with that kind of flexibility. What is the, the training system that I used to have to, to go through? Oh, shoot. I can’t remember what it was, but it had some silly name that, that was supposed to be how you, you, you know, respond flexibly to stuff. Oh, you can tell the training went really well.

But you, you definitely, you, you definitely paid a lot of attention and it.

Was 10 years ago and when I got certified in that. So yeah, we then, you know, Paul goes on. Let love be genuine. Hate what is evil. Hold fast to what is good. Love one another with mutual affection. Outdo one another in showing honor. Do not, do not lag in zeal. Be ardent in spirit. Serve the Lord. Like this is a, this is a lot more as, as much as people hate the idea of the, of the Kumbaya Jesus, kind of a Kumbaya Paul, in, in some ways, right. It’s, it’s very communal. It’s. It’s not, you know, it’s, it’s not your tax-exempt institution.

Right.

Yeah. And then tongues, that’s the one that a lot of people want to. Want to Glossolalia is, is a big deal for some reason these days.

Well, and it’s so interesting because. And again, I, I do want to save this as a. I think, I think speaking in tongues should be its own segment. So we’ll probably do that coming up pretty soon here. But yeah, it seems to me that the original idea of speaking in tongues or being able to hear tongues is understanding, which is kind of the opposite of what people who speak in tongues now do.

Yeah, there’s kind of a distinction. Xenoglossia and glossolalia. And xenoglossia seems to be. Is definitely what’s going on in Acts 2.

And this is the idea not, not that you are somehow having your faculties taken over by, by some agents so that you’re speaking some kind of heavenly language which a lot of former Pentecostals and evangelicals have said. Yeah, I was just making stuff up, you know, just. But xenoglossia would be you’re understanding someone else who does not speak your language and you have the ability to engage in and speak the, the same language. And that was, you know, as, as a Latter-day Saint who served a foreign proselytizing mission. When I first joined the, the LDS Church, well, a year after I joined the church, we understood the gift of tongues to be a particular kind of facility with picking up languages. So, so we, you know, we were not into the whole, you know, gibberish, babbling idea of, of the gift of tongues.

We were of the, the mindset that this is. You are blessed to be able to learn a foreign language more, much more quickly and in situations where it is needful for you to be able to communicate something in a language that you may not understand that, well, you are blessed with the ability to do something.

And I’ve definitely heard of missionaries, Mormon missionaries, talking at the missionary training center, talking about, you know, praying so that they can receive that gift better because, you know, they’re all, they’re all terrified. They’re. They’re getting two weeks of language training or whatever it is or something before they just get thrown to the wolves in some other. In some foreign country. So they are, they’re they’re all. Yeah, they’re all praying and, and actually, you know, believing that they will. That. That it’s very possible that they could really. That they could be blessed with that. But I don’t know if you know this. There is history and in the LDS Church of people speaking in tongues in the early part of the church, which I think is in the sense of like, you know, standing up in the middle of a church service and saying a bunch of syllables that sound like gibberish to everybody else.

Well, you know what? The early days of the church were much more the Paul to today’s Pastoral Epistles.

Yes, indeed.

So it was not. Things had not become calcified into the global institution and the corporation sole that. That it now is today. So, so that is not at all, should not be at all shocking to anyone who, who has a good grasp on those things.

Indeed.

But, but yeah, so. So gifts of the Spirit are really the skills, the abilities, the facilities that everybody brings to the table to help, you know, the body of Christ to grow. And we, we didn’t even get to Ephesians.

It’s almost like Voltron. All of the, all of the, all of the.

Yeah, yeah, it’s Captain Planet. It’s Voltron. It’s. It’s all of them put together. And, and I think the, and Ephesians. And this is one of the disputed Pauline epistles. I happen to think that this was probably not written by Paul, but Ephesians 4:11, he himself granted that some are apostles, prophets, evangelists, pastors and teachers. And then the point, the reason for all this, to equip the saints for the work of ministry, for building up the body of Christ until all of us come to the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God, to maturity, to the measure of the full stature of Christ. We must no longer be children tossed to and fro and blown about by every wind of doctrine, by people’s trickery, by their craftiness and deceitful scheming. But speaking the truth, in love, we must grow in every way into him who is the head into Christ from whom the whole body joined and knit together by every ligament with which it is equipped. Each part is working properly, promotes the body’s growth and building itself up in love.

So what are the gifts of the Spirit? The gifts of the Spirit are the things that facilitate growth in the body of Christ so that it can become perfected, so that all. It can be fit together perfectly and all the joints and ligaments and the sinews and can all function optimally.

Love a good sinew.

Yeah, when the, when the mutton is nice and lean. Yeah, the. So. So I think that’s the message that at least Paul was trying to get across in, in talking about the gifts of the Spirit is that, hey, this is not so you can boast about having this cool gift, even if it’s the Magic Mike kind of gift. You’re. You’re not supposed to be boasting about that kind of thing. It is so you can contribute and you can help other people and you can make a difference in their lives. And I think that’s, That’s a wonderful message. And I think if. If more people who are, who talk about the gifts of the spirit were concerned for trying to bring communities together and trying to fill needs where they have capacities to do so, I think this could be a much better place to live.

Yeah. Yeah, I think that’s a lovely sentiment. I. You know, if, if rather than. Yeah. Because we so often see someone who has, who is gifted and talented in a certain way, and we want to raise that person up and say, oh, look at this person who, you know, who’s, who’s got this, you know, this gift. Let’s make them in charge of us. Or let’s make that, you know, let’s, let’s. Let’s put them on a pedestal in some way rather than saying, cool gift. What are you doing with it?

Yeah, get to work.

Yeah, you got, you got. You’ve got good to do in the world. Yeah, awesome.

Yeah, awesome indeed.

All right, well, we’ll leave it at that. I’ll remind our. Everyone who, especially those of you who are experiencing us videographically on the YouTubes that they can. You can join as you can hit the join button and become a member of the tribe of Dan. You’ll get access to all of our videos will will come a day early. You’ll get live streams from Dan and I, the first one being on the 27th of this here Septembrae and more going forward etc and there’s a bunch of other cool stuff. Or you can become a patron over on patreon.com/dataoverdogma it’s very much these are the ways that we keep this show going and so that is we appreciate it so much. Over there you can get exclusive content also we do, we do patrons only content every week.

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Bye everybody.

Vancepocalypse Now (and Paul's Spiritual Gifts)

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