Wednesday, January 17th | American Doctrine

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We're going to be leaving some links in the description, so you can do just that. The verse of the day today comes from Joshua chapter 1, verse 8. This book of the law shall not depart from your mouth, but you shall meditate in it day and night, that you may observe to do according to all that is written in it. For then you will make your way prosperous, and then you will have good success.

Yeah, a lot of times I'm guilty of reading the Bible in the morning, like doing my devotion, and then instantly being like, OK, cool, got it, done, on with my day. But you also have to sit and you have to meditate on those things, which means you have to set aside time where you do nothing. And here in 2024, with our hyper fixation on productivity, that's difficult. That's hard, and it's undesirable for us.

We don't want to do that. That's right. And you've got to creatively build those times into your day. Set aside those times where you can just sit and really just meditate on God's Word. I mean, yes, it's important to read it.

Yes, it's important to study it. But you've got to have time to sit and soak in it, sit and think about it, sit and dwell on those truths. One thing that I taught my students to do is—this is not meditating on God's Word, but it can help lead you to that—is make up the lock screen on your phone. That's right. That's going to be in front of you all day long. I mean, it's just a quick thing, a quick glimpse. But if you keep that one verse or that one truth in front of you all day long, you're going to meditate on it as you are able to throughout the day.

And every couple of weeks, pick a new verse. Talking about reading, I was asked something that made me mad. I hated it, and it made me mad. You've had a lot of frustration related to reading this week. Well, this has nothing to do with Tom Bombadone, so we can go ahead and kick that as far as the East is. Kick him back to the Old Forest.

This was something that was asked to me by David, our engineer on The Clearview Today Show. He asked me a question that when I heard it, I got angry. And I want you to hear the question, and you try to ascertain why it made me angry. David, I want you to ask Ryan and all of the listeners what you asked me. You read books, right?

From time to time. Okay. I've been known to enjoy a good book. A good tome, if you will. The way that you read is important. It matters because it will increase, decrease your reading speed, your comprehension. If you read and you're all distracted, you're not going to get as much. Sure. If you focus in and you actually sit there and read, normally you can get through it and then comprehend.

My question is... Can I interrupt for one second? I'm so sorry. I want you to ask it the way that you asked me.

I am. Okay, okay. The question is, how do you read? When you read, do you vocalize the words in your head as you read them? Or do you chunk words together so that you can get the phrases at a time?

I'm trying hard to understand this question. Exactly. Do you vocalize the words? Do you vocalize the words? If I'm reading in my head, it would sound like, This book of the law shall not depart from your mouth. Yes.

Rarely. If it's difficult to understand, probably, yes. But most of the time, I'm not sounding the words out of my head, if that makes sense. I'm not reading the words in my head.

I'm just absorbing the information. That's what I'm saying. But that's not the way you phrased it. You said, do you vocalize the words or do you just look at the words and understand?

That was what you said, and I said, what do you mean? And I think what you're asking is, do I just read slow or fast? No. Okay, all right.

Let me see if I can spin it. Do you, as you are reading, this is like an inner monologue kind of question. Do you hear the words in your head as you are reading them? Or are you conceptually understanding what it is that you're reading? Right.

What is the difference? So when you walk, when you're out in the road, right? Say you're walking down the street, you see a stop sign. You don't look at it and think, stop. What? Yes, I do.

You understand what that sign is. Here's the difference. Here's the difference. It's the difference in watching a movie and there being a narrator as opposed to watching the movie.

I think that's maybe an unfortunate way to phrase the question, but what he is after is what you do naturally. What I want is to be able to, one, increase my reading speed so I can read more. And in doing that, when you look at the page, you can look at the word in chunks and see these three words and then make this phrase so that it makes sense conceptually. But you're still taking in the words individually.

Right, but I'm not reading it in my head, is what I'm saying. Do you- I'm not saying, like, Clearview Today show notes. I just see this- Is that what you do now?

No. So what is your goal? To get better at the other one. But you're already doing the other one.

But to be better at it. Food just arrived, so I say, let's halt this for now. Let's ask Dr. Shaw how- Put a pin in this discussion for now. Let's put a pin in it because I'm getting- I'm not angry, but I'm getting confused. I'm not angry, but I am getting very angry.

Which is going to lead to frustration. I'm going to get huffy. I'm going to get huffy. Let us know how you guys read. Write it and let us know. I didn't even know this was a thing. Yeah, write it and let us know.

It's natural for some people to read one way or the other, some people can kind of turn it on and off. Write it and let us know. 2-5-2-5-8-2-5-0-2-8. Or you can visit us online at ClearviewTodayShow.com. Stay tuned. We'll be back after this. Hey, what's going on, listeners? My name is John.

And I'm Ellie. And we just want to take a second and let you know about Dr. Shaw's new book on the market, right now, called Can We Recover the Original Text of the New Testament? Boy, that is a long title. True, but it's a very simple message. The original text of the New Testament is not only attainable, but there are lots of different ways that scholars go about discovering it. There's a lot of people out there saying that the original text is lost forever, or that it's hopeless to actually try to find it, or that there's many texts of the New Testament. But alongside Dr. David Allen Black, Dr. Shaw has actually compiled papers from some of the world's leading experts in textual criticism, including one written by himself on various methodologies for extracting the original text. And listen, if you're interested in textual criticism, this book is a great introduction to the field. You can pick up your copy on Amazon, or you can buy it from our church website. That's ClearviewBC.org. We're going to leave a link in the description box so you can get your copy today.

Love that. Ellie, let's hop back in. Let's do it. Welcome back to Clearview Today with Dr. Abbadan Shaw, the daily show that engages mind and heart for the gospel of Jesus Christ. You can visit us online at ClearviewTodayShow.com.

If you have any questions or suggestions for new topics, send us a text at 252-582-5028. That's right. And we are here with Dr. Abbadan Shaw, who is a PhD in New Testament textual criticism, a profession that does a lot of reading, I would assume. But, Shaw, when you read—and here's the big question. I mean, the nation is tearing them apart trying to figure this out.

The question heard around the globe. Okay. No, seriously. When you read, do you verbalize words? Do you—I don't remember how we put it—it's so abstract and so weird, and it's not even my question, but I got to pretend to this. Do you verbalize the words, or do you just take in the information? Well, it depends on what I'm reading. There are theological, philosophical books that I will just stop, and I'll just try to then think through how this pans out. But then there are books that I'm reading, like biographies and autobiographies, which don't require that much thinking, other than, like, huh, I wonder what that must have been like.

But that's more just putting myself in their shoes or something like that, but not really struggling with the philosophy or the theology behind it. So it depends on the subject. Yeah.

Yeah. I can imagine, like, if you were to parse every single word in some of the works that you work through, it would just be, like, I'm going to read this book for the foreseeable future. But I think, like, the founding fathers, like, I think we talked about this on Monday, when they were, like, drafting the Declaration of Independence, like, the language they used. It's certainly not written plainly. It's not written in, like, plain, blunt, straightforward language. So I wonder if they sit there and they read through it, and they're like, hold on, hold on, hold on, let me see.

OK, so, where to for all men, OK? OK. Like, you know what I'm saying? But I think they did that.

I think people like Madison, who was—I don't think he did everything on that constitution like people make it out to be, but I think there were others involved in that process. I believe that they spent a lot of time thinking over those words, those phrases that they were using. And so I think there's a place for that. That wording, especially in law, is very intentional. And that's, you know, that's actually what we're talking about today. Today marks the anniversary of the final version, I guess?

Final ratification? Final revision of a document that impacts our lives literally every moment of every day. And we maybe have never even heard of it. If we have heard of it, we probably don't know what it means. I don't want to put a number at anything, but guaranteed 80 percent of Americans have never heard of this document. Until we started planning for this episode, I hadn't heard of it. You learned about it in school, for sure, but I doubt you've remembered it.

Tell them what it is, Dr. Shah. Oh, you want to do it? No, go ahead.

You can jump the gun if you want. I just want to— It's the final revision of the Monroe Doctrine. Wow. Yeah, this was in the seventh annual address to Congress, that this was given December the 2nd, 1823, but then I believe it was revised on January the 17th. So we're not quite sure exactly the date, but that's about the time. That's what it took on, as we would say, its final form. Yeah, I guess so. So there are some people who are listening and they're like, oh, yeah, the Monroe Doctrine. I remember learning about that in school, but that was important for some reason. You think that has something to do with the Cold War, something like that? Yeah.

That's important for some reason. So it's like World War III? Something? No. No.

Well, there are many doctrines when it comes to our nation's history. So I just want to give people a little bit of information about that. Like William Safire. I mean, have you heard of William Safire? No. Okay.

He was a conservative writer, just an amazing newspaper columnist and all that. But he put it this way. He said, policies that have hardened with acceptance, okay, policies that have hardened with acceptance. When the word is applied in retrospect, it usually sticks. When it is announced with a policy, it usually fades.

Wow. That's a good point. So if it's announced like this is going to doctrine, what Safire is saying is it's going to fade away.

But if it's usually applied in retrospect, like this is what happened 20 years ago. And so also with the Monroe Doctrine, at the time that it was given, it was not called this is the Monroe Doctrine. There was no title to it.

No title to it. Now, there are many of the doctrines out there. And again, I'm taking this out of Bill Safire's book called The New Political Dictionary, which is not new anymore, has been out since 1993, it's a long time. And he actually wrote it sometime in 1968, revised 72, 78. So it's a good one to have in your library if you want to.

I had this for like maybe 15 some years. And he gives many doctrines in the nation's history. For example, the Truman Doctrine. There's the Eisenhower Doctrine, kind of dealing with the containment in the Middle East. Same with the Truman Doctrine, was an aid to Greece and Turkey to fight against communism. Then there is the Freeport Doctrine of Stephen Douglas, dealing with slavery prior to the formation of a state constitution. There is a doctrine of non-interference. There was a doctrine, here's an interesting one, One Glass of Water Doctrine. Ooh, that's got a catchy title. I can imagine it was not given that title upon announcement, I suppose.

No, no. In what used to be the communist world, it is still remembered, according to Safire. But anyways, that's one. The Brezhnev Doctrine, talking about the Soviet arms situation there. So these are the various doctrines. There's also one called the Nixon Doctrine.

Ooh, I didn't know that. We talked about Nixon. Yeah, we did.

So we'll talk about that as well. But yeah, John Quincy Adams and James Monroe were responsible for this, what we know today as the Monroe Doctrine. Do you want to just kind of lay out for listeners who probably have heard of the Monroe Doctrine or haven't thought about it in years and years and years, essentially what it does? Well, basically, it was a statement or a, I would call it a decree. If we were in Roman times, we would call that a decree. The royal decree. Yeah, this was a decree. This is what the king says.

Yeah, which is, to all the European nations, do not meddle and try to advance your agenda any longer in the North or the South America. As a Southern mom would say, don't bring that over here. Don't bring that over. That's what my mom used to say.

I'm not one of your little friends. Yeah, right. When my sister and I, we used to be bickering and stuff, I'd be like, all right, I'm going to tell mom.

She'd be like, don't bring that in here. Whatever y'all got going on over there, do not bring it over here. Period.

The end. That's the Monroe Doctrine. That's the Monroe Doctrine.

Pretty much. I see America sitting on the couch watching TV and they look over their shoulder and they see Napoleon just absolutely ravaging Europe. They're like, do not bring that over here.

Keep that over there. And it happened and not over here. I mean, we take that for granted because it's hard to imagine a nation coming in and colonizing in America now. Which at that up until a few decades at that point in the 1820s was like, okay, this is whatever, whoever can get there and are able to fight off everybody else that's yours. But now America is a nation. These are the United States. And now, even though the Army and Navy is not as powerful as it needs to be to back up their doctrine, this decree, still they're trying to stand up for themselves and say, this is our nation now.

You like it or not, that's no problem, but you cannot come over here and start claiming land. Yeah. And it seems like that wouldn't be relevant to us today because we feel like, well, today everything's kind of settled. But I mean, even think back to like, when, when was the cold war? Like in the sixties, like when, who was it? They put missiles in Cuba or whatever. And they were like, uh-uh. Yeah.

You're not bringing that over here. That's part of the Monroe doctrine. It seems almost like at that point with all the nations, I guess in North America, like, but the United States having been independent the longest and I would get, I would assume the strongest nation. They almost became a shield for underdeveloped nations that were coming under Europe's influence, I guess. Right. Right.

They were, they were standing up for them. That's awesome. So that's, that's part of Monroe doctrine.

Wow. And I think it's still important because right now it's sinister forces are trying to interfere with our country. That's true. They're trying to interfere with our border nations. They are, they are. Isn't it interesting that we're talking about the Monroe doctrine today in 2024 and yet our borders are still in dispute, our borders are still like, do we have a hard and fast cutoff?

Do we, you know, make some allowances? Like this, this thing that we talk about in history as being settled is for some still up for debate. Right. So one thing I'm thinking about is like, I take the Vietnam war for example, like how it was, it wasn't really a proxy war, but it was something that the United States supported one and the USSR supported the other. And it was sort of symbolic of, like you said, those forces, those idealistic forces coming into conflict. Do you see that still happening today? Even with this Israel, this like, um, Israel conflict, like the nations are raging, even though us and other forces may not be directly involved, they're still idealistic principles, I guess. Yeah. And this is when most times people talk about it under the Monroe doctrine.

Okay. They discuss these matters of U.S. involvement in places other than North and South America. How is that now? How do you justify that? Don't you think we should be more, they won't say the word isolationist, but that's what they're saying. We should mind our own business.

Right. Take care of us, America first. And that is in a sense an isolationist mentality.

And I disagree with that. I don't think America should be an isolationist country. I don't believe we should sit back and let other people work out their problems or destroy themselves. Uh, or if some nation wants to take over some nation, that's their problem. Why should America get involved?

I believe that goes fundamentally against who we are as Americans. Now let me read to you, can I read to the Nixon doctrine? Is that now Monroe doctrine is usually invoked as the foundation for America's involvement in world conflicts, but I think it's really the Nixon doctrine. So let me read that for you.

Again, Will Safire does a great job in laying it out for us. He said a Nixon doctrine is a foreign policy that sought to maintain U.S. involvement in the affairs of the world in a way that required allies to bear the manpower burden of their own defense. So America will get involved, but you gotta put out your money and your manpower. Yeah, America will come fight with you, but not for you. Yeah, like you need to make it plain that you're also involved.

We're not fighting this for you. Right. Yeah, that's a good way to put it. On November 3, 1969, President Nixon talked about this and he said, let me briefly explain what has been described as the Nixon doctrine, and he was sort of, he didn't want to say it with his name in it, but that's what he was talking about. And he explained it, but then this is what it says, there are three principles in it. The first one is this, the United States will keep all of its treaty commitments. Second, we shall provide a shield if a nuclear power threatens the freedom of a nation allied with us or of a nation whose survival we consider vital to our security. Third, in cases involving other types of aggression, we shall furnish military and economic assistance when requested in accordance with our treaty commitments, but we shall look to the nation directly threatened to assume the primary responsibility of providing the manpower for his defense. That is the heart of the Nixon doctrine. So yes, in a sense, the Monroe Doctrine also comes into play here, but our involvement in world affairs is a sort of a mixture of Monroe and Nixon doctrine.

So I'm seeing, if I can summarize, tell me if I start to stray off course, but the Monroe Doctrine is basically, there's two major facets of American thought, which is don't come over here meddling, messing up what we've worked so hard to achieve. Also, if we see something that we know can't stand or contradicts the good of mankind, we will get involved. Even if you don't like it, or if it seems to be working for you, we will stand up and do what's right. Because, ultimately, it will come back to us.

Somehow it always makes it back to America. It has, it always will. I'm seeing parallels for the church. I was just about to say, you can really see biblical values in there woven through the Founding Fathers and through the Monroe Doctrine and through the Nixon Doctrine of how we're not going to give ground. And unfortunately, we have seen that in the church. We have seen that seeding of ground and allowing the world to push further than it ever needed to. But the church stayed uninvolved, and in the end, the church ended up paying the price for it.

Because now the church is not the authority that it once was, or it doesn't have the influence of the hearts of the people. As an outsider, now an insider, I am shocked when I hear Americans say, why do we need to get involved? America should just mine our own, but we've got plenty of problems. It's such a naive understanding of how politics and world governments and wars and conflicts happen. Such a naive understanding, because no one just leaves America alone. It doesn't work like that. If there's a battle going on and you don't step in and say, hey, hey, hey, what's going on?

Who started this? Okay, you get over there and you get over there. Somebody will step up and do that. But they will not do it the way America does it. America does it more in the sense of, I'm here, we're here to save everybody, and sometimes it costs us.

Sometimes you have to end up paying for that. But other people step in, nations like Russia and Iran and China and other countries in the Middle East, they will step in and do that. But they always end up turning it towards some kind of benefit for themselves. In the process, nobody wins but them. It's not about democracy. It's not about freedom for the people.

It's about whoever stepped in now takes the mother load of whatever resources were there, land was there, whatever. I mean, think about Russia and Afghanistan, what do they do? They're going to get in here and bring about peace. They didn't bring no peace.

No, not at all. They left that country just as, in fact, worse than they found it. Well, I'm even thinking about the argument that you were talking about that people make. America should just mind its own business, not get involved, and then people will leave us alone. I'm like, think about World War II, how involved was America before the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor? I don't remember America really sticking its nose, so to speak, in anybody else's business. They still attacked us because they knew the threat of what would happen, but they still made the first strike. They wanted America to get involved. America tried to stay out of it, and you know how far that went. They said, America's not coming? How can we get America to get involved?

Well, let's find a way. Why don't we just attack them? That's when Churchill said, okay, now we're going to win.

Yeah, true. Now, it's like when you're in a fight, but then you see your big brother come out of the house. All right, now you're done. Y'all are in trouble.

Y'all goofed up. So, and James Monroe, I've been to his home near Charlottesville, Virginia. Oh, wow. Yeah, that's where you have Jefferson, Madison, and Monroe's homes. So you have Jefferson's Monticello, you have Madison's Montpelier, and you have James Monroe's home. It used to be Ashlawn Highland, but now it's simply Highland. Ashlawn was a family that had, I think, bought that house from the Monroes, or somebody bought it from somebody who bought it from the Monroes, and then they made it Ashlawn Highland. But since then, since we went in 19, I'm sorry, in 2008, we went there, yeah.

Since then, they dropped their Ashlawn, and now it's just Highland. Wow, that's really awesome. But that was not his presidential home.

This was the home where, I think, he grew up. Yeah. Wow. When you think about this, and there's plenty more applications we can make to the Christian life, like I'm even thinking about now, we talk about how, if you stay uninvolved as a nation, these opposing ideas and these opposing cultures start to spread, and it's a lot like the way sin works, you know what I mean, where I allow just a little bit of ground. This suddenly becomes okay. It's no longer a sin that I allowed, it's now the goalpost has moved, and then I allow a little bit more sin, and suddenly my standards lower even more, to where now what I once would have considered a pretty serious sin is now standard, and I feel like I see that in our nation, the things that we would have never allowed, Christianity and the church would never have allowed years ago, now it's like, of course, this is the way life is.

This is the norm. God has called us, or Jesus more specifically has called us to be the salt and the light. Salt. Salt has to flavor the food. Salt cannot just sit in a shaker, salt shaker, it has to come out and then flavor the food.

That's how the food tastes better. When the church stops impacting the culture, then the culture becomes tasteless, and the culture is tasteless today because the church is uninvolved, the church is ineffective, the church is not standing on the gospel of Jesus Christ, so we're seeing the impact. So also with America, if America truly, I believe, is a Christian nation, and we get involved with the right mindset, with the right heart, we'll make this world a better place. It may not be for long, sin is always going to be there, the enemy will always try to wreak havoc. But if we try to use America as a force for good in this world, we may see a few more years of peace.

That's right. I think about all the times that you've said everywhere that Christianity has gone, it has elevated that society, it has benefited the people there. And so if we are a nation that's founded upon biblical values, if we are one nation under God, albeit have we wandered yes, have we strayed from that yes, but we are still that that the foundation is there, the core principles are there.

So for us to not be involved on a global stage, for us to not be involved, like we talk about in the Monroe Doctrine and the Nixon Doctrine, for us to not do that is, I mean, it's really irresponsible. Yeah. Well, I love that's the perfect word, because I think even here at Clearview, we're adopting a new, it's not really a new mindset, because we've always thought this way, maybe not always, but we've thought this way for a long time. But we're starting to change our language, the way we talk to our people, which is, this is not an opportunity for you to serve. This is your duty. This is your responsibility. And I love that.

Especially the men. Exactly. This adoption of responsibility for Christians, to say that I have an obligation to be involved, whether it's in politics, in the church, in the community.

It's not that I have an opportunity to do something for myself and to serve and to feel good. I have a responsibility. That's right. I agree. Couldn't agree more. So important for us. So helpful. I love episodes like this where we get to dive into history, but then also apply it to our life and ministry today. That's so important for us. Oh, it's perfect.

Yeah. If you guys enjoyed today's episode, maybe you learned something about history, about the Monroe Doctrine and about the history of our nation, write in and let us know, 252-582-5028. You can visit us online at ClearviewTodayshow.com, and you can partner with us financially at the bottom of that webpage. Scroll down, click that button, and become part of our Clearview Today Show family.

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