The Lineage Journey Podcast 2022

Sebastien Braxton

Adam Ramdin

Lineage Journey

Doctrine Restored

As an atheist myself, in the past, this was the 1 argument I would always bring to Christians.

You know, you come to them, and I was in the religious south, in the Bible Belt.

So every time you talk to me, but how are you doing?

Do you know your Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ?

We don't have to get into a religious discussion.

And we would get into these debates, and I would say, listen, Cain killed 1 person at the beginning of the war.

Stalin kills 50 million of his own people.

And you're telling me Kaine's been burning since the beginning of time, and Hitler and Stalin have only been burning since the 1930s, 40s, 50s.

Sebastian Braxton is the founder of Fiat Lux, a UX design agency based in North Carolina, and the CEO for the New Life Challenge, a mobile app designed to make keeping the laws of health social, fun, and easy.

He is a UX design researcher with a BA in entrepreneurship and finance and an MA in communication.

His current passion projects involve mental health, mentorship and EG White audio recordings.

Hi guys, welcome to our Lineage Journey podcast.

Today we have a guest on our podcast whose name is Sebastian Braxton.

I've known him for several years going all the way back over different continents and places where we've met and ministered together.

Just a little bit about yourself before we go into the subject that we're going to look at today.

Oh man, well my background in ministry, I was brought into the church through public campus ministry in Atlanta, Georgia.

Young lady gave me a Bible study on Daniel 2, changed my life, fell in love with the scriptures, Ellen White.

Then I served as a missionary for 2 years to secular universities.

Pretty much from there, I decided to go back to school to a secular college that didn't have a campus ministry, hoping to start 1 up, finish my business degree in finance entrepreneurship, Graduated from there, started a program in Harvard, a missionary program, and then we planted a church at Harvard.

Several churches actually in the Boston area.

And then from there, I decided to launch out into the unknown, did a lot of development work and different types of ministry in the 1040 window, refugees in the Middle East, on and on.

And then after that, I just kind of got weary of waiting on donors and depending on people to give money to the vision.

And so I decided to pursue, go back to my entrepreneurial roots.

Started 2 companies, the New Life Challenge, bought that with an investor and then started a company called Fiat Lux, which is consulting.

And basically we're a design creative agency.

Okay, so you've got a varied background in ministry.

Yeah, sometimes I get the privilege to speak.

Okay, so we're going to look at the subject today of how doctrine was restored.

And so in order to do that, we've got to first look at what the Dark Ages is and what's the terminology of the Dark Ages.

As you know, this is the Lineage podcast and Lineage did a whole series on the Reformation.

Basically, how, which people and events took place that brought back this understanding that had been lost.

It's a term that's for a certain period of history.

It's also a term that's seeped into general language of society across the world.

But what would you say is the dark Ages and why that terminology?

So, you know, a lot of philosophers have kind of been attributed to this term.

And now in modern times, a lot of historians don't like the term.

They feel like it's misinformation, but generally it was representative of the period during the decline of the Roman Empire until the Renaissance in the 1500s.

It represented ultimately a time of ignorance and confusion, which is why people usually say when you are counter-science or you're counter-intellectual development, you're trying to take us back to the dark ages.

But during that time, literacy was very uncommon.

People used reliefs and visual pictures to communicate in the church.

There was economic deterioration, the gap between the wealthy and the poor was extreme, and also cultural deterioration.

You had no respect for personal boundaries, you had no respect for your neighbor, the values of society just were completely devoid of any sort of respect for the individual, the community, or any ultimate values.

And Petrarch, who was an Italian scholar, he's the 1 that's really been attributed historically with coining the term.

He kind of borrowed this sort of imagery of light and dark based upon the absence or the prevalence of historical record.

So if there was records of what was happening, there was history being recorded, he considered that to be light, right?

And then you have the dark ages where nothing was recorded.

And so in those middle ages, which typically you're talking about, you know, 500 BC, you know, Roman Empire fell in 476.

And then you go from about 500 AD all the way to about 1, 000, 1, 200, 1, 300.

That's when most scholars are like, we'll give you it for that period.

But during that time, we don't have a lot of history.

We don't have any sort of referent to say, oh, that's what life was like.

And so a lot of it is considered a time of ignorance and confusion.

That's kind of the time period when you had the Crusades as well.

I mean, the barbaric nature of how religion was spread.

When you go into Constantine, when you go into the Catholic, the Bishop of Rome having political influence, not only in terms of policy and law, but even in the courts, and how certain cases were decided, they would consult the Pope.

Well, if the person was Catholic, then there was a certain legacy, right?

But if he was not a priest, he was just a lowly common man.

So this was also the time period when there's a strong union between the Holy Roman Church in Europe and the various kings and states in Europe as well.

And when you look at that, Christianity was generally united, right?

I mean, you have Valdez with the Maldonesians and other people that were obviously removed before the Reformation.

They were already kind of departing, seeing what was happening and staying true to the word of God.

But by and large, yeah, I mean, it was just kind of like, what is going on and why is it that we're paying so much homage to the church but there was no other option?

If you weren't a part of the church, you didn't have salvation.

So like anybody interested in damning themselves?

Suki Goonatilleke

Women of the Reformation

The issue at stake was not so much that Henry wanted to kill her because she was Protestant.

The issue was more that, you know, she was part of this elaborate...

She just she didn't deny her fate but she just told him I'm you know I'm not I'm not trying to do you know you're smarter than me I'm not trying to dispute with you.

You know, you're my husband, you're in charge.

She kind of just struck his ego and he backed down.

The Lineage Journey podcast, unscripted conversations that aim to help you on the journey of discovering your lineage.

Sukhi lives in Melbourne, Australia with a husband and 2 daughters, combining her duties as mother and wife.

She is also a formidable writer and historian and has been a part of the lineage team since the first year that we launched.

She has written hundreds of articles and scripts for lineage and other media ministries and has a passion to share how history shapes identity and how our identity defines our mission and purpose in life.

Suki is a valued member of the Lineage team and we're glad that we can interview her today.

Just where are you joining us from today?

I'm at the Faith FM Studios in Melbourne, Australia.

You are, I don't know, 13 hours ahead of me right now, but thank you for taking the time out of your busy schedule as a wife, a mother of 2, an author, a script writer, and many, many other things that you do.

And for this Lineage Journey podcast, we're going to be discussing a subject I know that's dear to your heart and I think to many, many of our listeners as well as we talk about the women of the Reformation.

The women of the Reformation, oftentimes the men get the spotlight and the highlight and maybe they did play a bigger role.

We'll discuss about that as we go on, but I believe the women played a key role, maybe 1 that has not been focused on as much in the past, but you're recently an author.

Could you share a little bit about the book that you published and a little bit behind that, and then we'll go from there.

Yes, so 2020 was really exciting for me, even though we were in the middle of COVID, I wrote a book.

The background to the book really is fairly straightforward.

I've always been interested in the Reformation.

I've always been interested in that period of time.

I remember when I was really young, I must have been about 12, I read The Great Controversy for the first time with my mother and I was just really fascinated with the stories of Luther and Calvin and Zwingli and then a couple of years ago I got, I just connected with Lineage because at that time we were doing season 1 and I reached out and connected with you guys and since then I've been writing content and managing the website and in 2018 we decided to do a series of blog posts on women of the Reformation.

And I started digging into the history of some of these women that I had found really fascinating and I was really blown away.

And I was blown away also by the fact that I'd never heard about them.

And I was thinking if I haven't heard about them, well, I mean, how many other people have heard about them?

I wrote the 4 blog posts and then over time as I continued to populate the blog, I wrote more about women from that period of time.

And I thought, hey, it'd be good if I could turn this into a book.

And not just a book of facts, but a book of stories.

And I thought that a lot of the information that I was reading about these women, just had like really good stories tacked on to them as well.

And so, yeah, that was that's really the background for the book.

It was the time that I spent wading through reams of information from my work for Lineage.

I had the chance to read it a few weeks ago.

I know several people have bought it already and have been blessed by it as well.

So I mean, as you said, it wasn't necessarily always a passion that you had, but you know, there was circumstances of the moment that caused you to research and write these.

And then it, you know, what started out as a blog for a website has now turned into a book.

And I think that's often the case in life with many projects.

We start them out with 1 thing and then the Lord has something bigger for them than what we originally started them out as.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, I think, yeah, that's really true.

Do you think, I mean, I mentioned this slightly in my introduction, you know, we've got, you've got 8 women that you highlight in your book.

Obviously, there's a lot more women than that that you could have put in there.

And maybe you can share a bit later on how you decided on which 8 to put in.

But do you think that the role of women was equal to men or it just wasn't recorded or is still a key role, but you know, what's your thoughts on that subject?

I think in the early modern, in early modern Europe, because that's, you know, that's the period of history that the book is about.

The women are, you know, part of the Reformation.

And so most of them are, you know, live during that period of early modern history.

They weren't even perceived as being equal.

I think at that point in history, and for many, many years later, women were looked on as commodities, really, like regardless of your station in life, whether you were a peasant or whether you were a queen, you really, as a woman had 2 roles.

If you were a part of the nobility, then you were expected to marry well, because, you know, whoever you married would give your family some kind of leverage, political, financial.

And so you were a commodity to be traded on the marriage market.

And then you were just supposed to have kids because you know, that was really the role of even the queen.

OK, even the Queen of England was just there to produce the next heir.

And if she couldn't do it, well, then she needed to be removed and somebody else needed to be given her job.

And so I think that That was the view of women for just many years during that period of early modern history and later.

And you see that reflected in the literature of the time in how few, you know, how few female narratives there are.

And so the few female narratives that we do have or the little bits of information that we do have are women that really rock the boat.

They had to make a big splash in order to get noticed.

And so that that's something that I noticed when I was first researching.

What would you say are some of the key points that your book tries to address?

When I was writing the book, I really wanted to look at the idea of religious liberty, because I feel like the Reformation and the period immediately after it, this was a big, big issue, you know, a social issue.

Because during that time, they had this idea of the divine right of kings.

They had, you know, this concept of how the king was basically almost in control of the minds of his his subjects.

And then the king in turn was controlled by by the church, by the Pope.

And so I just found it really fascinating, this idea of how religious liberty, freedom of conscience, independent thought was something that was basically censored during that period of time.

And so that was 1 thing that I really wanted to look at.

But the other thing that I really wanted to look at was the courage that these women had, you know, being women during this period of time for them to make the choices that they made, for them to act the way they acted, took an enormous amount of courage.

And I thought that that was worth talking about, you know, worth highlighting, because I don't think even now, you know, we would fully comprehend their courage.

And the third thing that I wanted to talk about is the idea of faith.

How willing we are to choose to stand for what we believe in, even when things are hard.

You know, how willing are we to make hard choices for God?

And so those are really the 3 key points, religious liberty, faith and then courage.

I think those are all things that are relevant to women today.

Like if we could learn those lessons today, whether women or men, Those are all key things.

Understanding the importance of religious liberty, courage, and our faith needs to be integral to who we are as people.

A couple of, maybe let's kind of delve into a few characters of the book.

I mean, your first chapter in the book is Katharina von Bora, and she's a fascinating character.

And just, you know, I can't remember when it was a few years ago and I found out that she was a nun who escaped and then marries Martin Luther.

It's like it's a type of thing you would write about in a fiction story, but then you realize that this is the real life of 1 of the greatest reformers that there is.

So in what ways was, I don't know, was she a role model for a Protestant home or a pastor's wife?

I mean, because we didn't have pastors wives before this.

She was kind of the first 1, really, wasn't she?

Don Mackintosh

The Celtic Church

Everybody that came to Nicea was like missing a limb or an eye or something because they had been persecuted for the church and at that council they kind of loosened things up.

They said let's incorporate this and let's incorporate that.

Maybe we could bring some more pagans in.

We could get a larger group and this is why Patrick did not like that.

And so, yeah, syncretism is the name of the games for Roman Catholicism, all the saints used to be pagan entities.

Unscripted conversations that aim to help you on the journey of discovering your lineage.

Join us as we take a deeper look into past lineage episodes and see the lessons we can learn for today.

Don McIntosh is a man who wears many hats.

He is an ordained minister and currently pastors the Weimar Seventh-day Adventist Church in California, though formerly he pastored in Kansas where I had the opportunity to work with him.

He runs the health program at Weimar, is a professor of religion, he lectures on mental health, and is also a qualified nurse.

He also was formerly the director of the Amazing Facts Center of Evangelism.

He performed a wedding and has strong Scottish roots and is passionate about unearthing the lessons from the past for our learning today.

Pastor Don McIntosh currently works at Weimar Institute and holds many hats here, about 7 or 8, if I'm correct.

Yeah, well, you know, sometimes when a place is growing and then you hand stuff off.

So there's a lot of stuff I've handed off, but right now I teach in the religion department and I do some spiritual counseling for the Natalie Depression and Anxiety Recovery Program that's focused here on the campus.

And then there is a health evangelism school that is supposed to spread principles around the world, kind of like what we're gonna be talking about today.

Great, so but your name is McIntosh and you don't need to understand much about names and people to understand that Macintosh name comes from a particular part of the world.

Well, you know, it's Scotland and Wales, that area.

Inverness is a lot of Macintoshes, not too far from Inverness.

And my particular family came from a place called Killin, which is near Inverness.

And I went over there and it was kind of unsettling to see Donald Macintosh on multiple tombstones with green covered moss.

And then my family, there was a, you know, there were a number of famines and different things that happened there in the old country, but they migrated down to a place in Wales that's Watresant, I think it's called, It's not too far from Bristol, but it used to be in an area that used to be Wales, but then used to be England.

You can go visit it and I can see where my ancestors lived.

And my great-grandfather was the person who came to America.

He came over to America in the 1800s and converted to the Adventist faith in around the 1880s, 1890.

So yeah, and yet a lot of Scottish history, and I've been over there several times to visit the family.

Not too many of the family are still there.

They don't live there in that particular area.

I haven't looked them up specifically, but the people that live there, they knew a lot about, of course, our history there living in that house.

Well, I understand you went to a place we're going to talk about in this episode on your honeymoon, if I'm correct.

It was kind of hard to talk my wife into this.

She didn't know what she was getting into.

And that was a great place for a honeymoon.

Very good, I've been to Iona a few times.

It's a lovely place, really on the edge of the world.

But we're going to get into the Celtic Church.

Maybe in a nutshell, do you mind sharing when we talk about the Celtic Church, what are we referring to?

Well, I'm not an expert in the Celtic Church, but there is a great book by Leslie Harding called The Celtic Church that is probably the definitive study on the Celts.

And he wrote that book for his PhD at the University, I think of London.

And it talks about how the Celts were many different places.

I don't know exactly their origin, but let's just say it's, people would say it's Scottish and Ireland and Scotland, but they went as far afield as down in Turkey or down to the Galatia area.

In fact, the epistle to the Galatians was addressed to a Celtic church community.

So if you wanna get an idea of some of the issues they were dealing with in 1 of those areas, read the book of Galatians.

So yeah, I don't know if that answers your question, but it was kind of a fusing of an exist.

There was an existent Druids, have you ever heard of Druids and whatnot that were there in Scotland and Ireland and then they went other places.

You can see the Celtic cross which has a circle as well as a cross together.

And the circle is somewhat hinting towards the Celtic worldview.

And there's not, I haven't read a lot on that.

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