The Nihil Rule

  (camera angle was too narrow to capture the hand motions, we'll get it right next time!) Good afternoon.\! This is Philip Hahn. I am the layman behind the Nihil Rule blog. It is nice to meet you face to face. So, those of you that have been following me for a while will remember that last summer we did a blog post on a video by WELS Southerner , who has been quiet recently, my friend. You should speak up more. But at the end of that blog post, I mentioned that if I ever got doxed, I was totally going to go to the comfy chair and talk to the camera mode. So, here's my first stab at it. I want to give you a bit of update on what's going on with the blog now and in the near future. Um so as I mentioned a month ago, I have a Substack with my own name on it. It's at The Other Dr. Phil . And over there I will be focusing more on the synthesis of things. Combining ideas, evaluating external ideas to the wells and trying to kind of build using the mind of Christ, build up a C...

( ~1h10m timestamp ): Christ, the true Israel, lives the history of Israel ... [the Gospel of] Matthew in particular is so cool to me because like you read it and the way it's organized is Jesus is recapitulating the entire history of Israel, right? So, right in the very beginning, he goes out into the wilderness for 40 days and 40 nights, right, just like Israel's in the wilderness for 40 years is tempted by Satan. He comes, right after he is baptized in the Jordan, is like [Israel] crossing the Red Sea, goes into the wilderness, then after that, right he is, he's preaching a sermon on a mountain, expounding the law, which is Moses on Sinai, right? And after this, he is telling parables of the kingdom, like he's David, or like he's Solomon, writing Proverbs, writing Psalms. And then begins all of these excoriations of the high priesthood and the Pharisees and all the leaders of Israel, well, what's that like? It's like the prophets, right? So, he's reli...

Pastor Andrew Isker - author of The Boniface Option , co-host of the Contra Mundum podcast - was interviewed by Tucker Carlson about a month ago (I'm fashionably late, as always - had three weeks of leading a test campaign in Buffalo at a facility that runs 24/7) which had a number of relevant insights. Let's start with the disconnect between the clergy and the laity, which I believe find application in our little Wisconsin synod. First, we have a description ( ~23m timestamp ) of figures like Tim Keller and the idea of "whispered/shouted sins": ... Isker: "And you had figures like Rick Warren or Tim Keller who sort of adapted these things. So Tim Keller is in New York City and he tries to adapt Christianity to your upper middle class, striver people in New York City, or to make it easy for them to come to church. So, he wouldn't ever talk about homosexuality or if he did, it would be, well, that's not so good for human flourishing, but we're not re...