3/6/2021 - A Conversation with Bill Federer

TNG Radio, where today's culture and timeless truths come together. It's reasoned relevant content apologetics, worldview, and answers to the questions that you need to know.

From Alex McFarland Ministries, this is Truth for a New Generation Radio. And now, the man who preached in 50 states in 50 days, speaker, writer, and advocate for Christian apologetics, Dr. Alex McFarland. Do you ever think about the nature of God? Do you think about how powerful God is? How wise God is? Do you think about how good God is? Because the Bible says he, Jesus, is altogether lovely and God is so good. And I want to talk about that and just think about the vastness of God, but think about the love of God.

This is Truth for a New Generation. Alex McFarland here, and I'm on the road recording this at Karras Bible College up in Colorado, and in walks Bill Federer. And many of you know Bill Federer. He's spoken in our conferences. I'm sure many of you have his books. He has been just one of the preeminent historians about our country, America's godly heritage, and so many people, myself included, have been blessed by his work. But Bill came in and we're visiting and we're talking about the nature of God. And I just felt like it was a conversation that it might bless some of you to hear, and so we're going to continue talking about the things of the Lord. But Bill, welcome. Thanks for taking some time to be with us on TNG radio. Bill Federer Alex, it's always great to be with you. Alex McFarland Well, we appreciate you and the American Minute so much. Give us an update on your ministry and where people can find you.

Bill Federer Americanminute.com is the website. I sent out a daily email and written a bunch of books. My latest one is called Miraculous Milestones in Science, Medicine, and Innovation and the Faith of Those Who Achieve Them.

And it goes through how, you know, they have a cancel culture now where it's wanting to erase anybody that believes in God, especially if you believe in Christianity or Christian morals. And so this is a book where it has great scientists and their statements of faith. So Copernicus that discovered the heliocentric solar system, right, the sun is the center, not the earth, and his statements of faith. And Galileo and Tycho Brahe, who catalogued all these different, he says, He that studies the stars has God for a teacher. And Sir Isaac Newton that had the first reflective telescope.

And he says, This universe could not be in existence other than the order of the Creator whom I call the Lord God. And then I have the different history of writing. It goes all the way back to the, you know, Chinese and the Sumerians and so forth, but actually ancient Israel, where you had in Egypt, 3000 hieroglyphs, and only 1% of Egypt agreed because it was the scribe's secret knowledge.

They actually kept writing complicator on purpose as job security that they were needed as a class. When Moses comes down the mountain, he doesn't have a law in 3000 characters. He has a law in a simple 22 character alphabet, first letters Aleph, second letter Beth, sound familiar?

All of a sudden you have an entire nation that's literate, right? And then I go through the invention of the printing press and Gutenberg. And then I go through the invention of hospitals. How it wasn't a pagan thing with Jesus who said, I was sick and you visited me.

And so you had these different orders of priests and nuns, you know, in the middle ages and the sisters of charity. And they would start the hotel view, the hospital in Paris and all across Europe. And then, so here they're wanting to get people to give up their Christian morals and tell doctors, you know, do abortions and stuff. And yet it was Christian motivation that created hospitals in the first place. Constantine arranged so that every place where people would take a pilgrimage to would have an infirmary. And so the people would go on pilgrimage to the Holy Land and wind up a little bit worn out.

And so they would convalesce. And so the word hosp is Latin for traveler. So hospital is where the travel is.

It's where you get the word hospitality. But anyway, so I go through the Christian origins of hospitals. I go through the calendar, the very A, D, B, C, where that came from. So, you know. And by the way, of course, everything now is C, E, and B, C, E, the common era and before the common era.

How pervasive is that? Do you think they've successfully expunged B, C, and A, D from most textbooks and calendars? Well, they may have, but their problem is it does not change from B, C to A, D other than at the time of Christ's birth.

So it's still, there's a great quote from Clarence Mannion, who was the dean of the Notre Dame law school. And he says, you know, on the night, the first Christmas night, the magnetic needle of time stood straight up and pointed toward God. And so I get into that, that they would date things according to kings, like in the sixth year of King Hezekiah or in the fifteenth year of Tiberius Caesar. Well, they were dating things according to Diocletian, who was the Roman emperor that persecuted Christians. And so now we're up to 526 A.D. and it's emperor Justinian, who's a Christian. And there's a scholarly monk named Dionysus Exiguus. And he is, you know, transcribing things and putting on Diocletian in the year of Diocletian. He's like, why are we dating things to this emperor who persecuted Christians? So he does the math and he counts it all the way back to the best he can figures the birth of Jesus.

And in the margin, he puts Anno Domini. This is 526 A.D. And so then the middle ages come. You know, the Muslims come in the Eastern Empire and destroy it. And so basically the only literate people are the monks. And they preserve writing and knowledge. And they transition to using A.D. And then you have, it was the Catholics that invented universities.

And then they would teach using this. And then you have Columbus discovering, you know, and the age of discovery. And so now you've got the Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, English, traveling around the world. And they're taking this dating system with them.

And then they end up having colonies. And lo and behold, it becomes the dating system for the world. So the entire world uses the dating system that goes back to the birth of Jesus. I just think that's amazing. And then also, I get into the history of the calendar.

And I don't know how much you want to get into it. Well, let me interject. This reminds me, many years ago, D. James Kennedy put out a book about what if Jesus had never been born.

And I'm sure he's a friend of you and he's a friend of me, Jerry Newcomb, who I just love and appreciate so much. But a number of people like Kennedy, Newcomb, Lilback, Rodney Stark, of course yourself, have documented, had Jesus not come along, had the church not been birthed, the world as we know it would be vastly different, I would say vastly impoverished. Even though Christianity is marginalized and demeaned in the press, the world we enjoy, the world we take for granted, really came to us through God and his people, didn't it?

It did. So I go through the scientific revolution, the leaders of that, the industrial revolution, the leaders of that, and all their statements of faith. Anyway, so that's a new book. I did another book on socialism.

I go all the way back to Plato, and it's quite fascinating. I want to talk about that. I want to talk about your two new books. And I appreciate you so much, folks. We're talking with William J.

Bill Federer, a historian, Christian thinker, author, colleague, and friend. What's your website? Americanminute.com.

Americanminute.com. Stay tuned. We're going to talk more about the greatness of God and the need of a revival in our day.

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Alex here talking with Bill Federer. Bill, you mentioned you've written a book on socialism, and frankly I'm aghast that our nation, not all but many in our nation, are becoming so enamored with socialism apparently. Tell us about the book and then let's talk a little bit about America flirting with something that I think is potentially disastrous, Marxism, socialism. But bring us up to speed on your book, brother.

Right. So Plato, in passing, writes about the island of Atlantis, this highly structured civilization and it sinks in the sea. Some think it might be an island called Santorini that used to be a volcanic island and all that's left is the rim.

So at some time in the distant past, it blew up and would have sent a tsunami wiping out lots of civilizations. But Plato hearkens back to this as the ideal structured society and Plato considers democracy an unstructured society. The chief characteristic of a democracy is tolerance. Everybody tolerates each other.

It's wonderful. Then they tolerate people that are a little bit off. Then they tolerate people that are a lot off. Finally, they're tolerating crooks and crime and fraud and immorality and disrespect and chaos and pretty soon it turns into lawlessness. And then they begin to say, can't someone come along and fix this mess? And that's when some governor comes along and says, I can fix it.

I just need some emergency powers. And before they know it, he stands up in the chariot estate holding the reins of power and he's revealed as the tyrant. And this tyrant will institute a structured society.

He is the head of gold. His administrators are the arms and chest of silver and they are the ruling class and everyone else is the abdomen of iron and bronze. They are the ruled class. So socialism is a socially structured society of a ruling class and a ruled class. Plato goes on, the ruling class are above the law. They have special treatment, but the ruled class, they own no property. They have no families.

The government decides who gets to have kids and the government takes the kids away from the families, brings them into government schools where they're indoctrinated with noble lies. He says, we want one single grand lie, which will be believed by everybody. So that's the origin. In the book, I fast forward 2000 years, you got 15, 16 Sir Thomas Morerides Island of Utopia. The word utopia means nowhere. And it's a fictitious island off the coast of South America. It's written as a Greek dialogue of a conversation with a traveler.

The traveler's name is Hythlodeus, which means peddler of nonsense. So here they have the Island of nowhere told us by the peddler of nonsense and on this Island of Utopia. And so there's the ruling class, the commoners and the commoners own no property. They all have free healthcare. There's free identical clothing. There's free housing in identical three-story houses with no locks on any doors. There's free food and communal monastic style dining halls.

I may have mentioned free clothes. But there's no locks on any doors. There's no privacy. Everyone's tracked with an internal passport everywhere you go. You have no ale houses, coffee houses, places for private gatherings. The government is totally in control. The government determines everybody's careers. And this is utopia.

Why is that important? Pilgrims. Now, by the way, somebody wrote a satire on his Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels. He's washed up on an island, finds this highly structured ruling class.

Little oputions. Yeah. And then everybody else is the commoner rule class. And anyway, so the pilgrims were originally a company colony with bylaws written by the investors that put up the money for their expedition. And the bylaws said that everything would be owned in common.

Everything gained by cooking, hunting, fishing, trading, you know, she'll go into common stock and everyone's livelihood shall come out of common stock. And William Bradford said they tried it. This was tried by well and honest people for several years. And he says they almost starved to death. And he says this proves the emptiness of the theory of Plato and other ancients applauded recently of latter times. Here he says the emptiness of the theory of Plato.

They knew that they were trying to live out this theoretical thing. He says that the taking away of private property would make men happy as if they were wiser than God. He says this breed had much confusion. The young man objected to having to do twice as much work as the old guy, but got paid the same. The old guy objected to having to be classed in labor with the younger ones and considered it a disrespect. And the women objected to having to wash other men's clothes. And nobody wanted to go out and plant.

And he says that after much discussion they scrapped it. And he says we decided that every man should plant corn for his own household. You know, and this was 400 years ago. I mean this is in the pilgrim's colony.

Bill, in Acts 5 it talks about the disciples held things in common. And I think about when Ananias and Sapphira sold a piece of land, lied to the church, and lied to Peter about what they gave and God struck them dead. But before he did, Peter said to Ananias, while it was yours, wasn't it yours to do with as you wanted? You know, why then have you lied to the Holy Spirit? You've not lied to man.

You've lied to God. And Ananias and Sapphira died. But I think about that where clearly it presupposed that the early church's communal sharing, it was voluntary. And it didn't mean that they didn't own private property.

They did have private property ownership. But I think about in Exodus 20 in the Ten Commandments where it says, Thou shalt not steal, doesn't the concept of theft presuppose that somebody owned something and somebody else took it? And so my point being, Bill, the Bible doesn't encourage socialism or communal confiscation of one's goods by the government. The Bible encourages private property ownership, doesn't it? Yeah, you're brilliant.

Yeah, you're hitting right on the head. So there are two differences, voluntary versus involuntary and church versus government. So the early believers voluntarily sold their land, brought the money to the feet of who? The church. They weren't involuntarily forced to sell their land and laid at the feet of Pilate for the Roman, here, Pilate, there's a little more money for Roman government to spread your rule around.

No. So God's into private property. When they go into the promised land, it's divvied up and it's permanently titled each family. If you own private property, you can be moved upon in your heart to give away some of it. That is called charity. So what's physical possessions are a opportunity for you to express the spiritual love that you have in your heart for people. So when Moses built the tabernacle in the wilderness, says, whoever's heart is willing, bring gold and purple stuff to build this tabernacle.

God is willing. And whenever the church helps anybody, it wants them to get out of their bad situation, get better off wise so they can help the next needy person that comes along. And this thing called the body of Christ can grow. Whenever the government helps anybody, it's in exchange for something. You're in Egypt, you're starving, the government will give you a bag of grain, but it's in exchange for your cattle, your land, your children, your lives, your vote, right? And so whenever the government helps people, it's impersonal. Whenever the church helps people, it's personal. You develop a relationship. You get to feel the love of God going through to meet this person's need.

They feel that God loves them through a physical person that they can see and they're touched in their heart and it develops a relationship of gratitude. And whenever the government helps anybody, it's impersonal. There's no gratitude and an interesting phenomenon. The person that receives free stuff long enough from the government gets to feel bad about themselves. They see other people working and being successful and they want to channel that bad feeling somewhere, so they channel it toward the very entity that's making them feel bad. The government, they end up hating the very government that's giving them free stuff. It's really a sophisticated means of slavery. You know, you mentioned the word charity, which is from the Greek word keris, for gift.

Not enforced, not confiscation, but a gift. You're listening to Truth for a New Generation with our very special guest, Bill Federer. Go away.

We're back after this. Join Alex McFarland for Spiritual Awakening in Our Times. Study in the Book of Acts, June 25 through 27, in the Billy Graham Training Center at the Cove near Asheville, North Carolina. Acts records the first days of the early church and tells the story of a powerful spiritual awakening among Jews and Gentiles alike. The Book of Acts also contains personal lessons about revival for believers like us today. In the seminar, Alex will examine God's principles for spiritual renewal and evangelism that work in every age, including ours.

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I hear you. We are so excited that you joined us. And this is just going to be a great new podcast dealing with issues around race, issues around friendship, and how do we deal with the tough issues. And I'm so excited to be here with my good friend, Alex.

It's great to be with you, Odell. And on the I Hear You podcast, we talk about race. We talk about culture. We talk about politics. And sometimes we agree, sometimes we disagree. But we find resolution and common ground. And you know what's really cool? Not only do we learn new things, we make friends, we grow. And that's good for all of us. We're just two friends, one white, one black. And we just invite everyone to come and join and share with us.

It's a big difference between hearing and listening. And we're going to show people. We love it. We look forward to it. And audience, thank you so much for giving us this chance. I Hear You with Alex and Odell, wherever you get your podcasts.

Welcome back to the program. Before we resume our conversation with Bill Federer, I want to remind everybody I'm coming to The Cove, the Billy Graham Training Center in western North Carolina, June 25 through 27. And that's coming up more quickly than you might imagine. It's not that far away.

The website is thecove.org. And what I'll be teaching, I'm going through the book of Acts. And we're going to be looking at revival, principles of spiritual awakening from the book of Acts. You will meet people from all over the country.

And hey, it always fills up. I would encourage you to register now. And I would love to meet you.

And I would love to see you there June 25 through 27 as we go through the book of Acts. Also let me remind everybody that my book, The Assault on America, it's doing very well. It's published by Harrison House. It's available on Amazon and Barnes & Noble and wherever you buy books. The Assault on America, How to Defend Our Nation Before It's Too Late.

And I would encourage you to read it. And please pray for our country, because we're talking about the future of the country, but we're talking about religious freedom. We're talking about the sanctity of human life, the nature of marriage.

We're basically talking about the soul of the country. And you can play a role. You can make a difference for God and country.

So I encourage you to check out that book. But right now, somebody who is, I know he's invested his life for God and country, and that's Bill Federer. And Bill, before we resume our conversation, I just want to say, and I know I speak for millions of people, thank you for doing the hard work. Only God knows the thousands of hours that you've put in in research and scholarship, and many people have benefited, myself included. So I want to say thanks.

Well, I can't live up to that, but you're kind for saying that. And I do want to throw in that God gives commands to five main groups, individuals, families, business, church, and government. The commands to the individuals includes caring for the poor. The commands to the family are mostly relational.

Husbands love your wife. Children submit to your parents. There are a few commands of taking care of your own.

You know, if you don't, you're worse than an infidel. And the commands to the business are do an honest day's work and don't hold back wages. There's really few commands, maybe leave the gleanings of your field for poor people to pick through. But there definitely are commands for the church to take care of the poor. And the church has fed the widows and the orphans and started medical clinics and hospitals and dug wells and villages and started schools and universities and all that. There's no command for the government to take care of the poor.

The command to the government is the shortest, protect the innocent, punish the guilty. There's no command for the government to be involved in education. There's no command for the government to be involved in healthcare. What's happened is the government has usurped the church's role, and the church has led it. And it largely happened with the Great Society Welfare State in the New Deal programs under Woodrow Wilson. Prior to then, most of the hospitals in America were started by churches, a lot of them Catholic hospitals and Presbyterians and Lutherans and Methodists and so forth. And the school system was started by churches.

So we see that the government has usurped the church's role. So the education in America was first in churches and denominational. So Massachusetts was Puritan. And they ended up starting Harvard, and then Connecticut was congregational and they started Yale. And then you had Princeton was Presbyterian and Brown University was Rhode Island, that was Baptist. But then they had a wave of immigrants coming into America.

And they said, well, now we need to educate them. And matter of fact, some of them were Catholic. And after the Irish Potato famine, there were millions of Irish Catholics flooding into the cities. And they began to, it was an incident in Boston, but they didn't want their Catholic kids being taught the Ten Commandments and the Protestant order. I mean, for those not familiar, Catholics more or less split the first and combined the 10th, but it's the same content. And then the Protestants add at the end of the Our Father, for thine is the kingdom, power, the glory, and the Catholics did little things according to the day, but they had marches in the streets and they were protesting. And so the Catholics split away and started the parochial school system.

And so you basically had the different denominations start. The public school system was Protestant. The parochial school system was Catholic. And so the public school system in America taught the Bible, but there was a case in 1927 and Nunn was teaching in the public school.

She was dressed in her Nunn outfit. And in different Protestant states, they're like, well, if she does a good job, people will like her and they might be tempted to want to look into her faith and become Catholic. And so it was basically the Protestant Catholic controversy that got it to the... And so you had the 1947 Everson case, I think it was, where there were Catholics getting bus rides to Catholic schools and somebody in the state said, no, no, no, we're not supposed to do that. And the result was, let's just get religion out of the public schools.

Let's not teach it. And the whole country was like 98% Christian of some denomination or the other. And they said, well, yeah, fine. And they couldn't imagine that in that vacuum, within a short time, not just come the sixties and the free sex and the putting on of condoms, all that kind of stuff, but now we're having this transgendered agenda where Jesus said, you know, if you cause one of these little ones that believes in me to stumble better that a millstone we put around your neck and you'd be throwing the depths of the sea, they're trying to guilt trip Christians into being more Christian than Christ. If you're really Christian, you'll tolerate them teaching this agenda to the kids. Would Jesus teach that?

Jesus said in the beginning, God made them male and female, right? And so they're trying to say, if you're really Christian, you won't act like Christ. And Christians have been letting this happen. And so the dilemma is that what was started by Christians has been co-opted by the government and they're not content with just coming out of the closet.

They want to shove you into it and worse than that. Other than prayer, obviously, what is your wish for the body of Christ in America at this point and moving forward? Yeah, well, the most common form of government in world history is kings as Pharaoh, Caesar, Kaiser, Sultans, Zars. And as the centuries go on, the kingdoms get bigger because with military advancements, they can kill more people. And if none of them had died off, they'd have been happy to have the whole world under their thumb. So it has this global goal as the ultimate.

King of England was the biggest at the time, a world empire, Sun never sat on, America's founders broke away and flipped it and made the people the king. Well, the majority of the people are Christian. And so they're sitting in pews and the latest PEW, Pew Religious Landscape Survey shows that 65% of Americans are Christian or identify. Now 20 years ago, it was 90%.

So we're going in the wrong direction, but still 65% is a majority. And here the pastors, you've got two kinds. One tells the king to go to sleep and the other tells the king to wake up. So my prayer and wish is that the people in America realize that being able to vote and get involved is not just a nice blessing liberty, it's a responsibility that's serious. In other words, if things go bad, God will hold you accountable the same way that Nathan went in and poked his finger at David and said, it's your fault.

We're the king in America, right? And God is letting this happen. He's pushing us to the place where we're going to have to choose. It's going to be Christ's time where each individual is going to be called upon to stand up. Well, folks, we're out of time for right now.

We're going to visit with Bill Federer again very soon, I hope. Pray, keep your eyes on the Lord and take your stand for Christ. Thanks for listening. TNG radio is made possible by the friends of Alex McFarland Ministries, P.O. Box 10231, Greensboro, North Carolina 27404. That's P.O. Box 10231, Greensboro, North Carolina 27404. Call us at 877-Yes-God-1.

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