Hello, my name is Jesan Sorrells, and
this is Leadership Lessons from the Great Books podcast,
episode number 175.
People who live in both the secular world
in America and other places, and the world, and
in the world that attends the Christian church every Sunday like
clockwork, are equally struggling in our
current era with theology.
The American journalist and blogger many years ago, Andrew Breitbart
once and many years ago, infamously quipped that,
quote, politics is downstream from culture.
But on this podcast, we hold more to an
expansion of that maxim that politics is actually
downstream from theology. Or if
you are more of a secular mindset,
the term would be worldview. What a
person believes in or doesn't believe in impacts
how a person does everything. Thoughts and beliefs
precede actions. I can know what you believe with some
relative certainty by watching what you do,
but the question is not, can I know what you believe? The question is, quite
frankly, do you know what you believe?
And if challenged, questioned, or confronted, can you mount a
defense, an apologetic, if you will, of
your beliefs? The
sad fact of our current era is that many people, secular and
Christian alike, do not know what they believe, and even fewer can mount a
robust defense of such beliefs if they are challenged, confronted, or
questioned. And this is not a problem that is, quote unquote, solving
itself with people's access to more information
via the Internet. Instead,
collectively, we seem to be opting secular and Christian alike,
to sticking to the platforms, the influencers, and the ideas we know
without taking the time to burst our cognitive and emotional bubbles
and go to neighborhoods where there might be people who
might not agree. Theology,
the study of the headwaters of reality itself,
has always presented challenges for the thinking and the unthinking, the
serious, the unserious, the agnostic, and even the
believer. And so today, in this episode
of the podcast, we will address themes from a book listed
25 years ago as one of the 100 Christian
books that changed the century by William J. Peterson and Randy
Peterson. We will be looking at the book Mere
Christianity by C.S. lewis.
Leaders. We are deeply enmeshed in an era where
not only are leadership decisions being questioned, but
also the very fact of leadership itself
is on trial.
And today we will be joined by. In our
final episode of this, I believe it's
our fourth season of the show. We'll be
joined today by Kristen
B. Horn, rejoining us from episode number 165.
So look at that, 10 episodes later, she's back. Hi, Kristen. How you doing?
Hello. I'm well. How are you? Good.
Here we've Moved from. From science fiction into this.
Right. So I don't. And very. Two different
worldviews. Oh, radically different. Right, Radically
different worldviews. Like H.G. wells and then C.S. lewis. Forget it. Those
just. Those two guys couldn't even have a conversation, but they knew they
couldn't have a conversation. And so it was going to be very
polite, but it was going to be very formalized because they were both English.
Very formalized. They were going to have stiff upper lips and all that.
And then they were going to get the hell out of there. But at least
they'd be civil, right? Exactly. They had. They had. They could
be in the same room. Right? Civil. Right. It's only the alighting
of a civil society, which I did just see
something very briefly before I came on to. Came
onto the. Onto the show, before we started
talking, um, somebody was writing something about
Gen Zers not owing any. Saying that they don't owe
anything to anybody, and thus they don't have to be like, polite or
something like that. Like, that's a thing now. I didn't know that was a thing.
Okay. And. And that's fine, except interesting
perspective. Right? Except that when, like, when, like you take that
perspective, then okay, now the rules of
social norming have all, like, shifted. And so I'm free
then to download on you, and then you can't cry or,
or like, call me names or anything, like, because now we're in. Now we're in.
We're in this whole, like, weird, like, thing of man against man
and all against all. It's very Hobbesian.
Very interesting. Very, very like man. Not even
man in the arena, because that was a. It was a positive thing from Teddy
Roosevelt. It's very much. It's very much like a gladiator match.
And like all of life can't be a gladiator match,
which I think C.S. lewis would probably agree with that. Right.
Okay. So we've got this book. We've got
this thing here, Mere Christianity. We had our open
there. We did not do an intro episode
on Mere Christianity. And we will be
revisiting C.S. lewis's books. He's one of
the folks who. I've been sort of
not really hesitant. That's not really the term
I sort of want to treat with the respect
due the. The. The material.
But I also want to. Because he wrote
so much, I want to take the time to like, actually figure out
what the things are that we. That we want to discuss. And so in a
couple years, we'll do the screwtape letters. I will. I will. Probably
screwed my courage to the post enough to do that one. And I keep wandering
around in vicious circles. That hideous strength.
His science fiction was not that good.
It just. It just wasn't. Clive, I'm sorry. I could do
Chronicles of Narnia. And then that's.
And that's the other thing. So, like, if we do Chronicles of Narnia, though,
I gotta do it before that Netflix thing drops. Whatever abomination
that's gonna be. Well, or around the time. Around that time.
That could work. Yeah, because the lion is the
whole thing. Yeah, Like, I've always said that. Like, when
they were doing the movie a few years ago, many years ago now. Yeah, yeah,
yeah. I remember the old.
I told my kids this and they didn't. They didn't believe me that it was
a thing. But remember, the old Chronicles are on your show that was on pbs,
and. I did not watch that one, but my husband did. Okay. All right.
So, like, I watched that when I was a kid on the random Sunday
afternoon on PBS when we actually. Actually had the. Had the
television on. Right. Which was kind of amazing. Right. And like, the
lion looked like, quite frankly, trash.
Not to be too. Not to finer point on it is. A potato sack
painted orange. It wasn't. It wasn't Jim for
the main. It wasn't Jim Henson's workshop. They weren't. They weren't hiring that
guy. It was pbs. I was like, well, we can't get Jim Henson.
We get the intern down the street.
And so, you know, and. And I read.
I read Chronicles of Narnia all the way up to.
I believe I stopped. I tapped out of this at the Silver Chair when I
was a kid. Now my son
and my daughters all have read all of the books, which is kind of
amazing. Through no help of my own. Well, I shouldn't say through no
help. Like, I'll read. I read. Like
my. My youngest boy, he's 8. So when he was like 7, he went through
all of them in like a year. Like, we bought him like, the big, like.
Yeah. Volume or whatever. And my wife started reading them and my daughter started reading
them to him. And then I was like, well, I have no idea what's going
on in any of these books, so I'm just going to read it. And I
didn't. I'll just move the narrative along for you. And I would always tell him,
I have no idea what's happening in this book right now. And he's like, oh,
yeah, yeah, yeah, I know. You have no idea. Just read. Just shut up and
dance. Shut up and dance, Dad,
I don't want to hear your problems, but we did get to the end of
all the books, so he's done the whole series. Yeah.
And then the movies are interesting. They're
an interesting phenomenon because, again, you got the
Lion. Right. But then I don't think anything else worked after that. They did.
Yeah. I felt like lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe was done very
well. And then did they do Prince
Caspian next, which was atrocious.
And then they did Voyager, the Dawn Traitor, which was my favorite.
That's my favorite book. Also atrocious
because they had lost Disney's money. So,
yeah, lion, the Witch in the Wardrobe was one of the. The only one they
did. Well. Well, now you got that. That. What's her name who did
the Barbie movie, Gerwig or whatever. Oh, okay.
She's the one that's involved with the Netflix show. I have no hope. I. I
have no faith. Like, I heard her name was attached to it, and I was
like, oh, no, this is going to be. I just
don't. I don't know. I. Yeah,
it's. I don't know anything about Greta, but if you're not.
I almost feel like if you're not willing to take
this material in. I'm trying to figure
out how to say this. If you're not willing to acknowledge the
beliefs that are so clearly underpinning this
fantastically, fantastical children's story
and you're not willing to keep those in your representation of
this material, don't do it. Right. It would
be like taking an Islam folktale and trying to take
all of the. All of the Islam faith out of it
so that you could secularize it. Like, don't. Don't do that either.
Don't do that. I'm gonna. I'm gonna. I'm gonna make the point that Bill Maher
would make if a Westerner
did that. Well, okay, so. So the reason
Westerners won't take all the Muslim pieces out of an Islamic
tale and will bend over backwards to
make sure that that Islamic tale is actually told in an Islamic.
In a manner that honors the Islamic culture
is because Salman Rushdie had a fatwa quote on
his head for writing a book that tried to do that.
And by the way, people have tried to actually kill him. And so
creatives will bend over
backwards because Islam, well, as a
religion, believes that if you don't bend over backwards,
we will kill you. Whereas
Christians stopped killing people for
not bending over Backward represented Christianity
probably about 300 years ago. We pretty much knocked
that off. Like, we're pretty much done with that now. Don't get me
wrong, people will kill in the name of Christ, and people will
still kill people for whatever, but at a. At a
mass level. Like, no, no, Greta Gerwig is not
worried for as much as she may say. And I'm sure she hasn't said
anything. I'm sure they put in. I'm sure Netflix has put a gag on her
like nobody's business. But I'm sure that if she were ever
interviewed, she would never actually be worried about some
radical pastor coming and actually blowing her up,
because we stopped doing that as a religious
entity body right about 300 years ago. We just, we
just knocked that off. Islam,
say what you will, continues to do that
for a whole variety of reasons that we don't need to get into now.
Kristen didn't say any of that. I said that if you want to come for
me, that's fine. It's my show. But this is the
facts. And by the way, I'm not the first person to point this out as
I preface my entire commentary there. Bill Maher has
also made the exact same point, so go bother him.
That's one. So they're going to strip all the stuff out.
Glenn Close, or what's your name, one of those older actors is going to
be the voice of the lion or whatever. Is this going to be.
Yeah, it's going to be that. Yeah, it's going to be her. Okay. I love
Glenn Close. But.
To your point, it doesn't honor the source material. No, it doesn't.
It reminds me of. This was actually. I don't know how long ago it was,
but they made a movie about Tolkien,
like a sort of biography biopic sort of thing. And I
was like, no, there's no way that they're going to actually honor
Tolkien's, like, beliefs and his, his history, and they're
just going to talk about the war and they're going to secularize it completely.
The man was deeply Catholic, and that's. Yes, completely.
Like Lord of the Rings is riddled with it. You just can't. You can't
get away from it. So. So that. Yeah. Anything.
I also have no. Long story short, I also have no
faith in this, in this new iteration
of C.S. lewis's work, which is why you should cover it.
Because there's totally.
If you, if you think. And this is why I think.
What is. What's it called? Chronicles of Narnia. Is actually good
children's stories is because it doesn't talk down to them.
Right. Yeah. And adults are still gleaning and
learning so much from these stories.
Like, I. I have no doubts whatsoever that
once we start reading it to my daughter and my children, that will
be like, I forgot this was in there. Like, oh, my gosh. Can you believe
that? That's right there. Yeah. You just.
Well, it. Well, okay, so that goes into our first question here, which
is like, what do you know about Mere Christianity? Right, so CS Lewis wrote a
lot, as I said in the opening there. And he wrote a lot
in a lot of different genres because he had a lot of different interests. He
was. He was multifaceted in that
sort of way with his talent. It's just sort of. It was like mercury. It's
spread all over the floor. And a linguist. Right. Is that what he taught
at Ox? Was it Oxford? So, again, I did not go into the
background of him. I probably should have gone a little bit in there. I do
know that Tolkien was a linguist, and a File for sure was a linguist.
Yeah. But as far as. As far as Lewis goes
and, you know, you can look that up while you're. While I'm rambling incoherently
here. It's fine. I do need to get one of those Joe
Rogan setups where we, like, bring the screen in with, like, the details. I
do need to get that. And then, like, flip between the two while we're actually
recording live. I do need to do. Okay, yeah. English Literature at
Oxford. There you go. English Literature, right. And so an Oxford guy, by the
way, HG Wells would have respected whole Oxford thing
because that would have been English class, you know. So Lewis was Irish.
He was born in Ireland. Well, okay, anyways. I mean,
part of the United Kingdom. Sorry. I mean,
I know y' all fought, like, a lot, and you held it against
English for a long time, but still, like, you
gotta understand, for all the rest of us out here, we don't know the difference.
Tragic, but we don't know the difference. We know that you, like, have, like, an
Irish lilt or Scottish brogue or whatever, but that's about as much as we.
We're Americans. Well, I don't know. I know that Irish, if you. If you're
speaking English with your, like, normal Scottish
rogue or Irish wilt, you can't understand the English.
I know that much. Did you ever see the movie. Did you ever see the
movie Train Spotting? No. Go
watch that movie. There's a great sequence in there. With Ewan McGregor.
Talking about the Scottish and the English while they're,
like, walking around outside trying to get fresh air. Because they're drug addicts,
so they don't care about fresh air. They're
heroin addicts just walking. Oh, my God. Outside trying to get fresh air.
Okay.
There's a whole rant that he goes on about, like,
other people hate the English. I don't. Because they're just
wankers. We were colonized by wankers. Like, come on,
Scotland, for God's sakes. So I think there's a lot of that in that
sort of part of the world that goes along with that. But I don't. I
don't necessarily think back to Lewis. I don't necessarily think that he held that,
you know, against the English. I mean, clearly he didn't. He went to Oxford. Like,
yeah, yeah. I don't know how culturally Irish he was. Right.
So. But yeah, I guess back to the question as for how much
I know about or what do I know about mere Christianity. I
grew up. I was, you know, born and raised Protestant. We were
non denominational, and so I always kind of knew about mere Christianity, but I
actually never read it. I remember we read it as. As a church,
but then again, I. I don't. I'm sure
my youth group did something like, did like a sermon series or something
about it, but I didn't actually get to read it. My copy is my
dad's. Oh. And he bought it. Oh, my gosh, the
stupid camera's not working. Anyway. Oh, there it is. My dad. Oh, was it there?
It was a little bit there. Yeah. Come on. Anyway, it's my
dad's and it's. It has like the name of our church on it.
And it was for 10 bucks. And I was like, what the heck? This is
crazy. So it has some of his notes and questions in there. So I thought
that was funny. Other than that, what I know is that. Oh. And I always
held it kind of on a pedestal of like how
remarkable it was and how amazing it was and how clear
and. And very clear and
helpful. But this is actually the first time I've read
it. And then mine has a forward again that
was talking about how originally it was delivered as a series of talks. And I
think I had heard that before over the radio. Yep.
Right after the war. During the war, actually. During
World War II. Yeah. 1942, I believe. When he's
talking about the war in the past, he's talking about World War I. Even more
devastating for English than World War II was, if you correct, which is if you
can imagine that to think about. Well, yeah, my, one of my
music professors was one of the first people to tell me that that World War
I basically eradicated a
generation of English men. So we just covered a whole
bunch of books around war and warfare and war making. We
just came off of that on this, in this season.
And one of the books that we covered was John Keegan,
the English historian. He wrote a book called the First
World War. And one of the points that he makes,
and it's a one volume sort of gallop through
first through the First World War. One of the points, not one of the points.
The, the casualty numbers, if you ever read that book, are
insane. They lost. The British lost 60. The British
Expeditionary Force lost 60,000 men at the Somme
at one battle. 1
60,000 guys. And this is because of a combination
of the machine gun,
barbed wire. They weren't using gas quite
just yet at the first battle of the Somme, the second battle of the song
they did, but not the first one. So it was a combination of sort
of the trench warfare, the embedding of the
Germans in the cliffs and in the trenches on the
Western Front, and then
the, the,
the belief that had been held by a certain class
of people in, in, in Europe overall, but
in England in particular, that in
order to be successful, one must honor one's
commitments, even to the point of
death. And so
C.S. lewis was part of that.
Tolkien, who we just mentioned, was part of that.
Both those guys saw things in the trenches of World War I that,
to paraphrase from no country from old men, it made an impression on them,
sure as hell did. And along with Ernest
Hemingway, we covered A Farewell to Arms. And it
was a generation, you're right, it was a generation of young men. Who.
Just didn't quite know where to put all that.
And then 20 years later to see it all come back around
in the form of somebody else who had also
been a messenger between trenches in Germany where
the death rate for being a Messenger was like
90% and somehow Hitler made it.
And to see that that guy was the guy who made it and just kind
of be like, and by the way, that's why Churchill,
a lot of people on the alt right now, this is one of their pin.
I'm going to put my pin in, in this argument for next year, but
right now are like yelling about Churchill basically being the worst person in World War
II. Da, da da da. Right, Tucker Carlson
at all. Y' all need to shut up. I, I don't I don't. I don't
care. I do not care. I don't care what conclusions you come to from Churchill's
decisions. Dave Rubin, Tucker Carlson, all you guys,
all of you.
Churchill was at
a number of different battles, including Gallipoli.
So was Hitler at a number of different battles on the Western Front.
So were a lot of other guys that eventually became big boys
later on during World War II, including Harry Truman,
by the way. Charles de Gaulle was in World
War I. All of these guys all saw
the war up close and they knew exactly what it meant to have a war.
So I don't want to hear from Dave Rubin, who's never shot anybody in his
life or this entire generation. Now we're into three or four
generations, actually, of grown men that have never actually picked up a gun or stood
a post about how horrible those guys were and the decisions that
they made. So that's my rant. Rant over rant. But.
But it drives me crazy because you go back and read the actual history of
World War I, and it is probably the most documented
war other than World War II, that we know anything about. And the documentation
is clear. I mean, people wrote stuff down. Like we could actually
go back and read what they said, and
it was amazingly traumatic. So, yes, to, to, to your point about CS Lewis.
Yeah. When the BBC asked him to go on the radio to kind of calm
folks down, he was more than willing to do that because he was too old
to go march and stay at a post. But he knew what it. He knew
what it actually meant to go to war. He was
serving again, though. He was helping something with the Air Force. I remember reading.
I think it was in my forward or something. Yep. He was doing what we
call it Air patrol, Civil Air Patrol, because he was too old to go. He's
too old to go to the front. Right. But, yeah, 60,000 guys,
the Somme, in one battle. Just insane
things. We would just, we would never tolerate now. Never.
By the way, just as an, as a, as a comparison,
over the course of 20 years between Afghanistan and Iraq, I
think we lost 8,000 soldiers total in 20 years.
And I'm not saying those values weren't valuable. I am merely saying
that in comparison
to what we lost in the past, we got away with. We got. We
got away with quite a bit. And partially that's due
to technology, better tactics, better learning, better training.
One of the books we covered was Sebastian Younger's book that he wrote
called War about the guys in the Korengal Valley in 2000. 7
and 2000. Between 2007 and 2009 in Afghanistan, we lost
50 guys in the Korengal Valley. And we killed
countless numbers of Taliban fighters who they were shoveling into the
Korengal Valley, a valley that the British
never went into when they were trying to take over Afghanistan. They didn't go in
there. The Russians lost two helicopters in
there and they just, they were like, nope, we're not going in there. Back in
the early 80s and the Americans looked at the Coral Valley, went,
oh yeah, we'll go in there, it's fine. And we lost 50 guys in
two years. That's the American mindset. That's. That's the
American military mindset. That's what it is. That's where we're at. Our military is
insane. Well, well, well, just.
I mean. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Funding and, and effort and energy
and. You still, you still have an 18 year old guy on a 50 cal
that can disassemble and reassemble a 50 cal.
50 cal machine gun. Yeah. In the
middle of a firefight, which is again,
training material, equipment are just better
than they were. Yeah. And so we kind of. Yes. I mean you can kind
of whatever. Apples to apples. But in an apple apples comparison of death to death.
Yeah. Like, I mean C.S. lewis would have, would have loved
to have had those numbers even like what, what do we. Okay.
8,000 people. That's a cakewalk.
Not supposed to find a point on and every. Right. And everybody hates that
term. You know, I don't want to talk too much about war because that's not
where we're going here today. But like everybody hates that term. George Bush probably shouldn't
have used it in talking about Iraq. I don't think our political
leaders should use those terms in referring to war. I think we should always make
it as serious as, as possible. Yeah. And we
should also understand that
just like everything else in the world, warfare has advanced.
What's interesting to me is you get somebody like C.S. lewis, who
was an atheist, who saw the horrors of World
War I up close, lived them, came out,
saw another war that was shaping up to be about
as horrific, if not more. Like when you
think about the consequences of the. Yeah. Because the entire
civilian like front opened up. Yeah. Yeah.
And you see him driven deeper and deeper into faith
instead of away from faith. Because I feel like a lot of people, a lot
of secular stories are like, if you experience
what C.S. lewis experienced, that's when people lose faith.
Right. They're driven the other way. And CS Lewis
is this Great, logical thinker. And admittedly, when I was reading this book, I
was like, man, I do not feel smart. I
feel like he's just going, there are so many if
thens, if thens, if thens, then this follows, and this follows, and this
follows. And after about the second this follows, I
was like, I think I'm
still following. I'm fairly intelligent.
I think maybe I'm starting to question that.
I think it all makes sense, but it is. It is very clear and logical.
But, man, it's just he. He discusses this at. At
such a higher level than so much of the masses
today that are like, our current modern
level. It feels like it has fallen so much. Granted, again,
he was a professor at Oxford. That's always been, like, kind of the.
The top of the top even of English at his
time, English culture at his time. But. Right.
Yeah. Anyway, so that was. That was. That was. That's an interesting.
Well. And you talk. You talked about how you got to him from Protestantism.
So I was born and raised
Catholic, Eastern Orthodox and Western Catholic.
I won't say the Catholics have no truck with CS Lewis,
but I will say that the Catholics will claim Reinhold
Niebuhr and G.K. chesterton
as the two sort of really mountainous,
you know, apologetic theologians of the 20th
century. Right. Now, Chesterton,
interestingly enough, who also did know H.G. wells, by the way,
and used to argue with him all the time. Right.
Chesterton writes from much more
of a sort of rumpled, acerbic
wit kind of perspective, which,
to your point, about. About Lewis being an Oxford
educated, you know, not Oxford educated, but an Oxford
professor. And coming up in the English class system,
Chesterton was so, like, totally, like, over here
with all of that. And
so the ways in which. And I think this is something
that you see, by the way, in Tolkien in Lord of the Rings. Interesting enough
for Tolkien. So Tolkien has the Catholicism, but he also has the class system,
the English class system embedded on top of all of that. And
that makes for an interesting mix, like, with the Hobbits
and with, you know, Aragorn and how he talks about, like, His
Majesty or how he addresses,
you know, the evil in. In Mordor and all these other sort of
the sort of elements. By the way, we're also reading Lord of the Rings, almost
reading Lord of the Rings with my boy. So, like, we just read like.
So Sam just found
Frodo at the top of the tower of Cirith Ungol. We're going to Mount Doom.
We're headed around the corner now. So, and we just came off a bad
negotiation with, with the
assembly from Sauron. He kind of, as I told, as I told my
8 year old, I said, well, that was significantly less of a
positive interaction than he thought he was going to have with Gandalf.
Don't worry, you'll see the movie soon. Yeah, right, you'll see it.
I'm giving you the book first. Yeah, right.
But you know, but again, you know, you sort of see it in the way
that Tolkien describes the English countryside and those sort of elements. You see the, the,
the battle happening between those two. Whereas
Chesterton sort of goes away from that in the opposite direction is like, no, we're
just going to go fully into, into the, into the Catholicism.
And then to a certain degree, Lewis. And this is why I think Catholics don't
really, at least not until the late 20th century, didn't really get their arms around
C.S. lewis. He seems to.
Protestant for lack of a better term.
But I really appreciated how he opened it up because I'm Catholic now. I was
born and raised Protestant and I
went to a Christian college, was Nazarene and I
actually had a Bible professor who my dad was,
was, I think now that I have converted, he
softened a little bit on Catholics. But when I was growing up
he was very anti Catholic and
it was actually a Bible professor. Did he call you a pap? He didn't say
papist. No, he has never called me a name
because I did. I did hear that. I did hear that. I have, I have
actually heard that before. But anyway, go ahead. No, so, yeah, my, I had a
Nazarene Bible professor who we were doing a Christian
tradition class, so getting into the history of the early church and all that. And,
and he was actually, actually, you know, the Catholics
that there's a lot more merit here than a lot
of Protestants will give them credit for it. It's like, oh, that's interesting. Like, but
anyway, so all that thousand. Years of Western history were held together by these people.
Just something. And so
my. Oh my gosh. I mean, this is getting really into like Christian
culture, theology. Oh yeah. Personal friend who, who
is, is still Protestant. I guess their church has like a missionary
movement to convert Catholics. And I was
like, we're
Christians too. No, no, it's okay, it's okay. And, and
my friend was like, yeah, I know, it's. I was telling them it's
like they still follow the Nicene Creed. And I was like,
we wrote the Nicene Creed. What are you talking about?
But anyway, all that to Say, I really appreciated when I was reading through
the book, you know, C.S. lewis is Anglican. I knew that. I knew he was
besties with, with the Tolkien who's Catholic. I was
like, I doubt he's gonna start picking fights.
No, no, no, no. I really appreciated how
even handed he was. Even with all the disagreements and. Well,
I. There's a question, you know, if we get to it, there's a question down
below, you know, we're talking about. But
he like, what, what are the. What are the important things? Or
something like that. Like, and I just, I just really appreciated how he was like,
hey, don't waste time arguing
about all the little. There are. There are some
little nitpicky differences here
that don't matter. And I remember like Protestant,
they'll say like, is this a salvation issue? Yeah, yeah, that's. That's like the big
question. Yes, right. And so what I appreciated is that I feel like
CS Lewis sticks to the
absolute core of like, this is what
every Christian believes. This is probably.
I mean, actually I think there are some Protestants that would read this and be
like, we don't believe that anymore. Like,
there's certain, like little things in here. Not little things. Actually.
They're not little. But. But they're not. But they're. But, but they're
not salvation issues. Calm down. But they might be.
I don't know. Anyway, it is.
Where you wind up. He's not attacking. It's so clear that he's not attacking anybody.
He's like, here, this is, this is, this is, this
is the, the thing as I see it, if you want to believe it, cool.
There's even a couple of things in there where he gets real deep into the,
the theology. He's like, if this isn't useful for you. Right.
Skip it. Just skip it. Exact. Exactly. Yes. Which, which I do,
I do admire. That good down to earth
Christian. Without knowing this,
you don't need to know that God, like the particulars
of God being outside of time. Right. And if that hurts
your brain, which I used to watch Doctor who, so
that's kind of thinking like, I'm like, oh, fun. But. But
you know, for some people there's like, that hurts. I'm not gonna think about that.
It's like, okay, fine, no, you don't have to. So let me, let me pick
up from laws of nature. Hit the law of human nature. So because this is,
this goes directly to what you're talking about here. And then I want to jump
into like Christians in America because we,
we're gonna talk. We're gonna talk about some intramural fights here. We're gonna get signature
mural fights. Here we go.
Now, this law, by the way, this is from your Christianity. The law of human
nature, by the way. You can get this. There's publicly available copies floating around
throughout the entire Internet. You can go, go grab your. Go grab a copy if
you want to read this. All right, And a quote from Lewis.
Now, this law or rule about right and wrong used to be called the law
of nature. Pause. Yes. Throughout the entire
Enlightenment, from Thomas Jefferson all the
way to freaking David Hume, they all knew about the law of nature. The
agnostics, the skeptics, the believers, they all knew about law of nature.
Lewis is pulling on something that's a deeply European,
enlightened, pre Enlightenment idea. Okay, back to
the book. Nowadays, when we talk of the laws of nature, we usually
mean things like gravitation or heredity or the laws of chemistry. But when the
older thinkers called the law of right and wrong the law of nature, they really
meant the law of human nature. The idea was that just as bodies are governed
by the law of gravitation and organisms by biological laws, so the
creature called man also had his law, with this great difference that a body
could not choose whether it obeyed the law of gravitation or not. But a man
could choose either to obey the law of human nature or to disobey
it. We may put this in another way. Each man is at
every moment subjected to several different sets of law. But there is only one of
these which he is free to disobey. As a body, he is
subjected to gravitation and cannot disobey it. If you leave him unsupported in
midair, he has no more choice about falling than a stone has.
As an organism, he is subjected to various biological laws which he cannot disobey
any more than an animal can. That is, he cannot disobey those laws which he
shares with other things. But the law which is peculiar to his human nature,
the law he does not share with animals or vegetables or inorganic things,
is the one he can disobey if he chooses.
This law was called the law of nature because people thought that everyone knew it
by nature and did not need to be taught it.
They did not mean, of course, that you might not find an odd individual here
or there who did not know it, just as you find a few people who
are colorblind or have no ear for tune. But taking the race as a
whole, they thought that the human idea of decent behavior was
Obvious to everyone. And I believe they were right.
If they were not, then all the things we said about the war, meaning World
War I, were nonsense. What was the sense
in saying the enemy were in the wrong unless right is a real
thing, which now he's switching to World War II, which the Nazis at
bottom knew as well as we did and ought to have practiced. If they had
had no notion of what we meant by right, then though we might still have
had to fight them. We could no more have blamed them for that than for
the color of their hair. I know that some people say the idea of
a law of nature or decent behavior known to all men is unsound because different
civilizations at different ages have had quite different moralities.
But this is not true. Oh, look at that.
There have been differences between their moralities, but these have never amounted to
anything like a total difference.
That right there, that entire paragraph I read right there,
paragraph and a half, two paragraphs, actually, that sums
up. No, that presents a challenge to the
secular worldview of relativism, which we are now
wallowing in in the West. And
I would even go far, far beyond wallowing. We have drowned in relative.
Drowned in relat. And it also puts
paid the idea of individuality, which Americans in
particular is. If. If countries are to have sins, America's
particular sin is not pride of nation. That ain't that. Every country's got
that. America's particular sin is individuality,
the idea that we can decide which laws of nature we are going to follow
and no one can tell us what to do.
Right. Lewis would object to all of
that, and he would say that that is
foolish and would lead to the death of a civilization. And he might
be correct about that.
Where this is important, I think, for Christians.
Now let's get to intramural fights, because we have a lot of intramural
fights. At least I see intramural fights so on on the Internet
between Christians. So the various Christian accounts I follow, the various intramural fights I
see that secular people never see. It's
very interesting to me because I interview a lot of different people on this show.
I have a lot of different conversations with a lot of people with a lot
of different backgrounds on this show, some of whom are more
agnostic or atheistic in their worldview, some of whom may be more
Christian, but we've never actually had the opportunity to talk about that. And then others
of whom are just like, I don't know, I'm floating through the world, okay.
And it's interesting when I talk to the people who are in those last few
categories, the agnostic, the skeptic, floating through the world.
When we touch on, as we invariably do, either the Bible or
theology, which invariably we will, because we are talking about human
beings. And as I said in the opening, reality, how you
think about reality really does matter. When I talk with those people.
What is interesting and what pops up is
when I talk about the intramural fights that Christians are having with each other in
America right now, the people. As a matter of fact, I just had this
conversation with John Hill, interestingly enough,
another guest of ours on our episode
about war, because you can't talk about war without talking about religion. You just,
you can't. And I was talking a little bit about some of
the intramural fights and he was like, I don't, I didn't know that any of
that was going on in the world of Christianity. It's like, well,
no, because you're not in the thing.
It's also not spread out throughout our culture in the way that
it was even like 30 years ago,
even before that, 50 years ago. So, like, you went to Nazarene
College, right? That entire system
of Christian
based learning and Christian colleges and universities
has been totally and completely, from a Christian's perspective,
infiltrated by secular people at all levels.
I read a book, I have a book actually, that my wife got me
where a person, whoever the author was, researched
what the actual beliefs are of folks who are teaching and who
are deans and who are administrators at Christian colleges and then the
kinds of people that they are graduating from, not just Christian colleges
but also seminaries who are then going to serve in churches. And the number of
those people who hold beliefs that are closer to those of the secular
world than are those that are closer to a religious worldview
is well over 50%. It's overwhelming. And so they
are going to these congregations where the vast majority
of people in the congregations still hold worldviews that are more biblically based
on. And this is part of the collapse,
internal collapse of the American Christian church
that has been going on in a slow motion collapse ever
since. Well, ever since Rick Warren
stopped being relevant at the end of the 90s.
And I say that. And did you smile because you know exactly what I'm talking
about. Oh, my dad, left, led the, the purpose driven
movement at our, at our, at our. All those secret sensitive
people. Oh, yeah, yeah. Don't get me started on the secret
sensitive movement. And please don't ask me anything
about Billy Graham or about any of the Jesus revolution. Don't ask me about
anything about any of that because again, it's intramural fights. It's
intramural fights. And the reason why there's
intramural fights, it took me a while to sort of understand this is because Christians
in America, for those of you who are not Christian and who are listening to
this or maybe listening internationally and have no idea about any of this,
there's just a little education. And then I'm going to ask Kristen a core question
here. We can sort of get going. So there's five groups
of people, five divisions, I would say, of not only
Christians in America, but I think this applies to other religions as well.
And I got this, interestingly enough, credit where credit is due.
I got this from the guys who host the Bema podcast, which was on from
like 2017 to like probably
2022 and was part of the
Hebrew Roots movement that is occurring in, or
was occurring at the time in the, in the American
Christian church. And basically the Hebrew Roots movement, it was an attempt by
certain Christians in the American church
to return or take the church back to
the Old Testament understanding of
who Jesus was and to acknowledge
Jesus's Judaism and to try to understand
Jesus through a Judaic lens and also to try to
understand Paul and the other apostles through a Judaic
lens, which is closer to what the kind of, I
think the kind of Christianity that Peter would have advocated for in Jerusalem
versus what Paul was advocating when he went to Corinth and the rest of the
Gentiles. Okay. And again, that's another intramural
fight. I'm not going to get deep into that. But the podcast that I
got this idea from is the Biba podcast. If you're interested in the Hebrew Roots
movement, go listen to Will frustrate you. By the way, if you are Christian,
just fair warning, depending upon how deep you are into your own theology and your
own understanding of the text, it will kind of drive you
crazy, both in a good way and a bad way. Anyway,
so what are these divisions? So the divisions
include. There's five divisions. So you have the Herodians, right? And these are
people who, in the American Christian church, in the context of the American Christian
church, they really like the things of this world and they're looking to
syncretize. That means join the world in Christ.
They're the people who go to the non denominational churches and sing the
Bethel songs and have the iPhones and the devotionals
and they think they're doing fine. Those, those would be the Herodians
or the Herodian types. Then you have the Sadducees.
Sadducees are folks who really like worldly power and influence. And they
like the way the Christianity sort of affords them that
in the American Christian church, the Sadducees will show up as
Joel Osteen. That's who I think of. Or
Kenneth Copeland. And you can come for me about
all of that if you would like. Then you have the
Pharisees in the American Christian church, by the way, this is the one that
everybody, believer, non believer alike, hates. But there's something important
to value in the Pharisee worldview. Pharisees really like
the New Testament and they really like arguing over what it means. They really like
arguing over who's in and who's out of the church
in capital letters and in air quotes.
And they will use the other types and they will unite with the Herodians and
the Sadducees and the Essenes and the Zealots. They'll unite with all those other types
to pursue their goals. So when you think about Pharisitical folks,
think about every big Eva church you've ever seen, every big Eva megachurch
you've ever seen. Those churches are filled with folks that
would be defined as Pharasitical, by the way. Not only
by people outside the church, but as I said before, people also inside the
church. These would traditionally be like your
church lady types. You're going to follow the rules.
Because I know the rules. Now. The thing is, and this is
a point that I want to make that was also made on the BIBA podcast.
I think it's relevant to this. Pharisitical
types. No, Pharisees. Jesus hung out
with the Pharisees and he argued with the Pharisees
and they didn't touch him, not one bit.
He hung out for a week with the Sadducees and he was dead.
Important thing to understand. And the reason Jesus hung out
with the Pharisees. And by the way, he said this in the red letter parts
of the Bible of your New Testament. You have everything but
mercy. The church ladies have everything.
They have the law, they have the Word. Some of them know the Word better
even than I do. They know the hermeneutics and they know how to argue the
apologetics, but they don't have the mercy.
That's the thing that Jesus wanted to get to the Pharisees, the Pharisee
mindset that the Pharisee mindset tends to miss. Okay,
then your last two types are sort of minority types in the American church.
But they are still here. You got the Essenes, and those
are the folks that really like being away from all this worldly crap. And
they look anxiously to the end of the material world.
Think of like Tim LaHaye and the left behind people. It's
those kind of people, the people who are consumed with whether or not they're post
millennial, amillennial, a millennial
dispensationalist, preterist. They're very consumed with what is happening in the Book of
Revelations. They're always trying to tie the Book of Revelations to things that are happening
in current headlines because the reason why
is because they want Elon Musk and his humanoid robots
and all the secular atheist people to get in their ships, to rock their SpaceX
rocket ships and fly away. That way they can inherit the Earth. That's,
that's what they want. They just desperately want them to all leave
because they can't make a person who is in the mindset of
a scene can't make,
can't make, can't shake hands with a secular person.
They just, they, they can't. They don't know how to do it. Think about a
survival, Think about every survivalist type you've ever had who's like storing gold
or guns or gasoline. There's those kind of people. And by the way, how do
I know? I grew up with those kinds of people. I know exactly who
those people are. I understand exactly their mindset. And I have a lot of empathy,
by the way, for those people because they are the ones actually that write down
all of the things that happened. And they're the ones that document the history.
So when the world blows up, they're the ones that get the last word because
they're the ones who wrote it down. The final group of folks you have in
the American church is the zealots and the
zealots. By the way, Jesus had a few
zealots around him. Simon the Zealot and some others.
Zealots really like pushing Christianity onto others. They really like pushing
Christianity onto fellow believers and unbelievers alike. Zealots
can be, and they will make, what do
you call it, allies with all of the other types as well.
They're not like the Essenes. They don't want to go off in the mountains. They
just really have a lot of passion, a lot of zeal for the Word.
And they are the people who will sit in the coffee shop.
They're the guy that will sit in the coffee shop nursing a cup of coffee
and he just. He would have a sign that would say, come and talk to
me about Jesus. And he'll talk to you about Jesus all day. Matter of fact,
he'll walk down the street, talk to you about Jesus. Matter of fact, when you
tell him to go away, he'll still talk to you about Jesus. That's
the zealot type. So these are the five types you have in the American
Christian church, updated for modern
sensibilities. And Lewis's writing appeals to all these groups and really
has something for all of them. I think the way in which
he writes secures the power of belief in Christ within a framework that each
type will accept. There's something here for people who are more of the
Herodian, you know, iPhone types and the
Sadducees types and the Pharaoh cytical types and the
Essene types and even the zealot types. And Lewis also
understands something fundamental. And I think this is at the core of Mere Christianity, and
this is probably our whole conversation right here. But he understands that
these folks are the material that God has to work with in building the
kingdom of heaven. Yes. Here on Earth.
And by the way, in Genesis, God
said it was good. And I know that's tough for us as
humans because we put all of our stuff and project all of our stuff onto
all these types, and God created
them all. God allowed space for all of them, and God said that it
was, what? Good.
So this frames some of the ways I see the themes in Mere Christianity, this
thinking. Kristen, this is the first time I'm laying this framing
on other people. So congratulations, you're getting the brunt of all of this.
Yeah. What do you. What do you think of this framing? I was watching your
face as I was going through this, and it's okay to disagree. That's fine. I
mean, please disagree. Please tell me I'm off my rocker completely. Well,
I don't know if this is a millennial thing, but I'm definitely one of those
people that is like, oh, it's like a personality test. Which one am I?
And I'm reading these. I'm like, I have no idea.
I don't know. Maybe my. Maybe. Maybe my husband could tell me.
I don't know. Like, I. This is. This is your.
What's your. What's your. What's your American. American church
type? I. But what. I'm buzzfeed.
Buzzfeed. That I actually followed into the Catholic
Church. I just. Every time you said the American
Church, I kept hearing him because he actually does
a lot of apologetics. And I will say, you know, your intro was talking
about how a lot of modern Christians can't really handle apologetics.
I'm one of those people. I'm working on it, you know, now
in my 30s, after being born and raised a Christian. But
unfortunately, I felt like my. My role model
was not great. But
so. So I'm working on it. But I'm one of those people that gets that,
like, gets really defensive and emotional. Almost
immediately, something is challenged. So I'm having to. To
unlearn that. But my friend, back to my
friend who, you know, does now apologetics, Catholic
apologetics, as also someone who. Who converted from Protestantism,
he's like, there is no American church. We're too
busy fighting with each other. There's.
He might have a point there. There's no unity. There's no unity. Yeah. There's no
unity. There's no unity in the American church. It's just all,
well, so. So give him. Give him these two ideas. There's two ideas here. Because
my wife and I have been talking a lot about this because we're in the
middle of a church search. A church search. Right. And
that's a whole kind of thing. It's hard. It's very difficult.
My family is all but excommunicated from my home. But the
church that I grew up in, and it was. Took a long time.
Right. Especially because of all the. I hesitate to call
it drama because. Very painful. It was a very painful break.
And we, the family, definitely felt like we were wronged.
Yeah. And pushed out of this place that was
my home. Right. So many of my
formative experiences, where I met my husband,
where I got married. So it just. When we were
forced out, and so it was very difficult to find,
or when we were looking just even. Or even to want
to find a new church, because then it was just an opportunity for someone
to do that again. Well, and that's. And that
gets to sort of the three things that I would tell your. I would
say to your friend, the reason we don't have an American
church, there's really only three reasons. One,
geography. Geography is the big thing. We're just too
damn big. Correct. And. And. And that ties into
number two, which is individuality. Remember I said, you're a youth. American
sin is individuality. I don't need this community. And this is where
geography then kicks in. So I can pack up my wife and kids in my
Conestoga wagon, say, I saw something in some plates
in a mountain that no one else can see. And I'M just going to go
right there. I'm going to, I'm going to screw off to Nebraska and you're not
going to find me. And I can get 12 other people around me and congratulations,
now I have a community and I don't need anybody. And by the way,
not minimizing Mormonism and what's almost the entire history of
Mormonism. Well, think about it, think
about it. The last truly revolutionary religious
attempt with Scientology by L. Ron
Hubbard. And, and the only reason
that worked is because California was far enough away
from people who would have check jacked L. Ron Hubbard. And even
people did then, but would have stopped that thing
and strangled it in its cradle. But because we're
so big. Yep. Geography sort
of mucks us up. So it's geography, individuality. And then the other thing is,
this is, this is the third thing that everybody misses. Believer and
unbeliever alike. When you have religious liberty
and you actually take that seriously. Yeah. Right.
There you go. Dot, dot, dot. There's the ellipsis. I know
millennials don't like the ellipsis. I probably shouldn't have left it that way. But like,
but like that, that's the thing. Like, anything will fill
in those dot, dot dots every, from everything from
the Nvidia cults to the Branch Davidians in the, in Waco
in the 1990s. Like, that'll. That's going to get filled in, in there. Because
who's to say we've decided to take religious liberty to
its radical end?
Yeah. Now, I would push back on your friend and I would
say as the big evangelical
churches break up in America, and this is in a sec, that the part
that the other part of here that we're going to talk about as the big
evangelical churches break up in America, I
do think that we are at a point where
we don't need an American church, but I do
think we will get in the next hundred years, and it might take 150
if we're around as a polity that long, but
I think we're going to get an America, a uniquely American theology
that I think we will absolutely get. I think we will. We are
groping our way towards that. For better or worse, I suppose.
I mean, considering what the American culture
idolizes. Correct. At American theology
may or may not be a good thing. Well, so
Jonathan Edwards, the great theologian, sermons in the hand of the
angry God who died at like 49 of like a mysterious disease.
He was groping towards that back in the seventh, back in the 18th century, because
he was even seeing it then. And there were only like 100.
100 and some odd years. Not even 100 and some odd years. 75 to
80 years outside of the Puritans. Like, there were still people walking
around who could remember when the Puritans first showed up. And by the time
Jonathan Edwards came along and was born, the fracturing
was already starting. And Jonathan Edwards was like,
we gotta get a hold of this. Right. And we can't do it from a
European perspective, because the problems that are in
Europe are not the problems here. Right.
And so it's interesting to your point, C. S. Lewis,
Irish, came out of a long, long,
long culture of
European Christianity. But if you
go out and Google the great American theologians, let's just stick to the 20th
century. Great American theologians of the 20th century. You
get R.C. sproul. And I'm not knocking R.C. sproul. R.C. sproul was a giant. I
mean, my God, like, ridiculous. But
I mean, after that, you go all the way to the. You go all the
way to the 19th century. So
I think.
I think American, not the American church, necessarily.
To your friend's point, there's too many intramural fights going on right
now. But I think the American culture
needs a theology that comes from someone in the American church.
And I don't know who that will be. I don't know who the someone is.
A unifier. Well, I always think of the scene in
Braveheart when all the Scottish lords are, like, yelling over their titles and
they're waving their papers around, and then the big guy that was with Mel Gibson
in there picks up the ax and slams into the table. He's like, shut up.
We're all just going to unite. We need the guy who's the big guy who's
going to slam the ax in the table in the American church and say, we're.
Shut up. We're all going to unite. And in
the mid 20th century, the person who sort of had that
most weight was Billy Graham. Mm.
But even then, there were people who were opposed to Billy Graham
because they looked at what he was doing and they went, yeah, you saved a
Stadium, like 70,000 people, maybe. But,
like, to what end?
What are you doing there? That was Rush Dooney and all the guys from his
right, political right, but his theological right, who are like, no, you're
foolish. And he ignored, of course, ignored all those guys because he was big enough
to ignore all them. But they didn't. I mean, they were publishing and they were
writing and they were putting down books and they were saying like this is not
sustainable. This is not what you do to like
build a functioning theology in America.
I also think that we don't have a theology and this gets into some of
the other things, but we don't have a theology that actually
addresses the cultural problems we have in America.
We just don't have it.
Like what's, what's, like what was, what is the biblical application
for? Okay, here's an easy one. We,
we, we were talking about marriage, right. And Lewis
addresses marriage in here. Great. Not a problem.
If you've been married more than five for
five to 10 years, Lewis will absolutely be helpful for you. The chapters
on Christian marriage and sexual morality, all that stuff will be absolutely
helpful for you. If you are between 18
and 34 and you are in college, none of those chapters will
make sense.
And maybe I shouldn't say makes sense. Maybe I should say they won't encourage you
to go out and, and make
better choices on Tinder,
Which is, by the way, where the Herodian gen zers are. They're on Tinder
trying to find, try to find a mate. Right,
right. Who they could be married to for. Because if they do these, they sell
the human biological drive, the law of nature drive to be married. Right.
And the thing that God put in them to be married. Right.
But the tool they have is Tinder
and there's no theology around that. Well, what's interesting is
that even though, you know, C S Lewis doesn't pick any fights. No, he doesn't.
Has and has, like you
said something for every, every kind of,
what did you call them? Five types. Every time, every, every type of
Christian.
There are still things that he lays down and he's like, this is what
we believe as Christians. And one of those is, you
know, till death do us part.
And yes, the American church
doesn't agree on that anymore either. So that's, I didn't
touch. And from my perspective, that's one of the issues.
That's one of the reasons American theology doesn't have answers for the issues
of Americans culture is because we can't agree. We
don't. The, the American church does not agree till death
to us part. Right? And he, he got into
the. And, and part. Part of this, you could think about it like, you know,
the Anglican church is very close to the Catholic Church.
It was just like the king wanted to get divorced. And so
they was like, right, here's my own church. It was like, but you can keep
believing basically the same thing. But also we're gonna Try to kill all the Catholics
later. But. Yeah, yeah, yeah, later on. But then put that aside for a second.
Anyway, the history.
So anyway, he gets into, you know, the Christian
belief is that, you know, man, wife, one. One
person, and tearing them apart is like ripping a person in
half. And you don't do that. Sure. Yep. And. And
churches don't teach that anymore, so.
And they almost. You probably feel like you can't. And. Well, I get it
because my mom got divorced, her husband
cheated on her and using her. But. And so
that's. That's one of those, like, okay, if the belief is
no divorce and the man is unfaithful and the man is
abusive now. But there is. But there is a theological
answer to that. There's a biblical response. There's a biblical response to that, right? There
is, but it's difficult. It's harder. Oh, the
tragedy. Oh, I get it. I get it. But this is why
America theology. Oh, the tragedy that you would be a
pastor that had to say something difficult and half your congregation might walk
out. But Hasan, you're making my point. I know. This is why the American
church has no answers because they don't want to teach anything. That's
hard. So. Well, no, I think the American church has. I think the American
church has. No, I think the American church has no answers because they don't.
There's. There's. Well. And just like in all areas,
I mean, we talk about leadership on this podcast, just like in all areas that
are impacted by leadership is a failure of leadership, which fundamentally means
it is a failure of courage. So here's the thing. If you are
willing to be unliked. So I'm going to. I'm going to name a person here
who I. Who I believe has stated those things from his
church because he stated those things on his YouTube channel, his blogs, every podcast
you will actually get him on. He was just on with Sam Harris and said
a bunch of the same things that he's been saying for the last 30 years.
He went into debates with Christopher Hitchens
and Richard Dawkins and the other new atheists way back in the year, back in
the year 2000, and defended himself successfully and defended Christianity and
apologetics. And by the way, he's from the right of Billy Graham,
Doug Wilson. So if you go Google Doug
Wilson and you look at him, he comes out of a
specific Reformed, Presbyterian,
Calvinistic line
that believes that men are the head of the household,
that when divorce does occur, it can only
occur for a very narrow, specific
number of things that Marriage is for life.
That both men and women have sins
that are specific to them and their gender,
and that it's not just men that need to change,
but also women, women that need to change.
And by the way, he also believes.
Well, and he also believes that if we're actually going to be a nation
that actually is going to put Christian
ideals into our documents,
maybe sort of, it might be a good idea kind of
to actually acknowledge Jesus is Lord. Oh,
and he is not popular. He is not well liked. He
scares the hell out of everybody, from progressive, secular,
leftist, Marxist, communists all the way to, to your
point, the squishy pastors in big evangelical churches
that won't say anything. And he has his own books.
He does. He. He started his own school, St. Andrew's
College. He's done things in his community in
Idaho. And now in his 70s, he's getting more
play because Pete Hegeseth
joined his church, who's the current secretary of War,
not defense, war. And he is being
put into all of these spaces now.
And people are, of course, clutching their pearls.
But the problem is, you can go back to 30 years on his blog post,
and he's been saying basically the same thing and publishing the same thing since the
mid-1990s. He hasn't changed his tune one bit.
You may not like the tune, you may disagree with the
tune, but he's saying the things. And
by the way, there have been people in his church that have gotten divorced. There
have been people in his church who have suffered abuse at the hands of
spouses. And he has dealt with that underneath church discipline.
And those people, some of those people have come out and have spoken. Others have
kept their mouth shut. It's individualized, right, because we live in
America. So there are those kinds of people floating around. There are those.
But you have to be willing to be unlike, not liked. You have to be
willing to like. He's been. He started his, I think
he started his church back in the, in the mid-70s, and it took him,
what, 50 years to get here? What
big evangelical church leader do you know that runs a
mega church in the state in which you are in? Who'd be
willing to wait 50 years and grow? Well.
I mean, John MacArthur maybe. And he just died in California. I mean, he was
big. And, and he was big enough, by the way, when COVID 19 came
along to tell Gavin Newsom to go pound sand, which was kind of amazing
because most church people, mostly big
evangelical churches, were more afraid of the people leaving than they were
telling the civic government no, you stay in your school spot, Caesar. Which
is, by the way, is a constant question for us on this podcast. We get
to this part of our year, who tells Caesar to sit down?
And that's got to be also a core of American theology, I would assert,
is there has to be an idea in there that
Caesar takes a second seat to God. And right now, we don't have
that. We have the church and the state together. People like to talk a lot
about separation of churches. Say, da, da, da, stop. We
have church in the state and the state in the church, and actually, I would
say more state in the church with all that goes
along with that. So you do have those kinds
of folks, but they're very tiny. They're very tiny minority. And by the way, they
don't get invited to conferences, and the polite people don't like talking to them. Well,
one of the reasons I had trouble parsing your question was
like, who. Which. Which pastor of a mega church? Well, hold on.
Like, yeah, you almost have to stop. Because the idea of a
megachurch. Right. Implies money,
a lot of it. It implies Sadducees, doesn't it? You don't get a lot
of money by being unpopular.
Well, you can, but it takes a long time. It takes a long time.
Takes a long time. So, yeah. And
so I don't. American church,
maybe 500 years from now, if America's still around. But American
theology, Ah. A way of contemplating reality.
I think that's an easier. I think that's an easier get. Oh, that's fair.
That's fair. Making that distinction. But. And then something else that I was thinking about,
because to you, almost, this guy that you were talking about, this
one pastor who now has been put into the spotlight. Yeah. Doug Wilson.
Reminds me. It almost like the question in my head
was like, okay, how do you say all of these unpopular things and not
be one of the people that's picking a fight? It's like, well, that's easy. Like,
you. You stand by what you believe. You say all these things, and
then to CS Lewis's point, you just don't go pick a fight. You don't go
at people. No. You act still in
love. And, you know, you behave the way Jesus told you
to. The. The challenge that we also have in America, though,
is freedom of speech. So
if I. Reactions to freedom of speech, it's almost now like,
oh, if you exercise your freedom of speech, you're attacking me. And
it's like, no. Right. So if I say
there will be some people might not
be this year, might not be next year, might be 10 years from now.
Who will listen to my show, will find
this episode and will say, will think that I have said
something that is incendiary or hurtful.
By the way, I'm more than prepared for that. That's one of the reasons why
we don't have sponsors on this show. And I find other ways to make money
around this show. Now, one or two things will happen at that point.
Either it will be buried by the algorithm,
or it will be resurrected by people looking for a problem.
And then they will come to me and they will start in
with me. Now, I'm
from Gen X. I'm the later end of Gen X. So my attitude
is always, I said what I said. I didn't stutter.
Like, I don't know what you want. Do you want me to apologize? I'm not
doing that. Oh, oh, you're going to try to take away, like, food out of
my mouth or whatever. Good. Okay. Well, the paraphrase
from the. The hostages and taken to Liam Neeson, well, good luck.
There's more than one way to make money in this world. There's more than one
way to do something. And if I haven't said anything that is, to our point
earlier, a salvation issue or sin issue. If I've merely stated reality as
it is. You don't like that I put it in that way.
That's really not, as my daddy would say, a me problem.
That's really a you problem. And you might want to go off and trundle off
and go deal with that. But not. But. And
the Internet world we live in now, which is again, the reason why we did
an American theology, the theological
framework that existed for the last 2000 years in the
west hasn't struggles when everybody can have
a voice. And radical free speech is the thing,
because radical free speech sure doesn't mean radical freedom from
consequences. I'm not talking about that. What radical free speech means
is that people have to decide to our point about civility earlier.
Right. That we made way earlier in the show. What
it means is we have to choose what to be civil about
and what to not be civil about. And so Doug Wilson went
on Sam Harris's podcast. Now, I know Sam Harris.
I. I don't mean no personally, but I know who that guy is. I know
atheism inside and out. I've, I've heard all the arguments.
I've, I've looked at all of the assertions and
I know what the counter arguments are to atheism. And I've listened
to the Richard Dawkins and the Daniel Dennets and the Sam Harris's and the Christopher
Hitchens of the world and all of their little acolytes running around on the
Internet.
And at the end of the day, atheism is for fools.
Sorry, it just. Actually, I'm not sorry. No, I said what I said, I'm a
Gen Xer. No, I'm not sorry. It's for fools. You're foolish. Yeah,
not sorry, actually, not sorry at all. There's no mealy mouth about any of this.
I want to be very clear. I'm not sorry atheism
is for fools.
But guess what? You can go very far being foolish.
So I'm not going to get in your way. You can go very far, make
a lot of money, have a lot of influence being foolish. There's a lot of
people who do.
I struggle with, of course, what not
I struggle with. My only thought is I hope that
you have a really good explanation for your foolishness when you get to wherever it
is your ineffable soul is going to. That's my only caution.
But I'm not an evangelical type. I'm not going to try to convince you
because the evidence is already here. You've got everybody from
CS Lewis to the Church Fathers and if you won't even, as Paul
would say, if you won't even listen to them, why would you
listen to me?
So I'm not here to evangelize, I'm here to, yes, dismiss you as
foolish. I know your arguments. You don't need to come and convince me or persuade,
move on. But Doug Wilson is evangelical
and so he's going to go on Sam Harris's podcast and he's going to say
everything that he would normally say and Sam
Harris is going to make the faces that he makes with his non verbal, you
know, skepticism. And then I'm going to look because. And I
shouldn't, but I'm going to look at the YouTube comments below that interview
and I'm going to see all of the people with weak theology,
weak worldview, no worldview,
a differing worldview or your confused worldview
pop out like, well,
like all of the legion of demons on Twitter and
they're just going to come out and we don't have again a
theological proposition for how to deal with that communication,
interaction. And that's what I where I think a uniquely American
perspective would be helpful because how do you forgive
people who are, you know, how do you forgive.
Dumpyman45mail.com
who said something hurtful, you know, below, you know,
some video you posted, like, what's the theological framework for
dealing with. Dealing with flavor girl55
that like posted a Nazi meme underneath your. Your
com. Right. Like the church has. The American
church has no theology for how to deal with that. And I don't see
it getting better because AI allows you to do
all of this and more at scale.
Yeah.
And so that's why I say American theology might be a better, easier get as
far as the church that will come out of that. Well, I mean, I would
hope it wouldn't be the church of Elon Musk's robot.
I would also hope that.
But I think we have to. We're still going to have those same five divisions.
We're still going to have the Herodians and the Sadducees and the Essenes and the
Zealots and the Pharisees. But where their
theology will be warped, that
will be the challenge. But we're still going to have those same five types.
We're still going to have the people who love the world and they love the
fight and they love the technology and
they love the tinder to go back to the Gen Z or for just a
minute. And we're going to have the Pharisee
Karens, crazy Karens, who will be,
you know, stripped of the theology but will have all
of the need to correct is like, that didn't go
away. It just needed to be funneled in a particular direction. Right.
We'll still have the Essene types who will be your genuine believers who want to
go hide in the mountains. And of course, you will have your zealous types
who will be incredibly passionate about you coming to the Church of Elon Musk
because they believe they found the key. They found the thing,
you know, the Gnostic secret knowledge that has been hidden from us. By the way,
most people are also conspiracy theorists, by the way, on the Internet. That's also like
those people. All the Venn diagram overlaps.
Right. They're the ones who are going to ask you, when did you sell out
to Big Pharma? If they ever have to go to therapy,
those people, and God bless them, by the way, like, we need those people.
And then you also, of course, will have your Sadducees. And
BIG is going to be a different thing. I think in the next 50 to
100 years, big isn't going to be a megachurch with 3,000 people every Sunday.
I don't think that model is going to survive. I Think that model is breaking
up in real time. And that's part of the other chaos that we're experiencing right
now. Like, I don't know how big your church is, but the churches
that I've been looking at for my family are between 150 to 300 people,
max. Yeah.
As you can't know. You can't know. You can't build relationships with anybody
beyond, I mean, Dunbar's number. Beyond 100 people.
Yeah. I mean, Arch, the parish that we go
to is probably one of the bigger ones in San Diego, but
even then, it's. It's not. It's definitely not 3,000 people.
But even with the number, even 100 to 300 people is hard, hard to
build relationships. So, like, it is point of making. Sure. Like, hey,
let's. Let's get small groups. Let's get you
into small groups. Let's get you into home groups. And I think that that model
on a 300 and lower, you know, kind of
level works.
And, and part of the. The collapse of big evangelicals, just like the collapse of
everything else big that came out of the 20th century, mass media,
mass industry, mass whatever, mass church, all of that is, is.
Has collapsed in the last 25 years. And that's the other part of the chaos
that we're in right now. So. So again, your friend can listen to this entire
little segment here, and then he can contact. Feel free to contact me and we'll
look up a conversation. I'm sure you guys would have a fascinating
conversation, and I want to listen to it.
Okay, back to the book for just a moment. I want to. I want to
take a moment and talk about a little bit about the structure of the book.
So the book is divided up and does come from
C.S. lewis's recorded. Oh,
radio broadcast talks that were. That were
done in the. In the, in the 1940s. And,
you know, book one talks about right and wrong is a clue to the meaning
of the universe. Then we have what Christians believe in book two.
Then we have book three, which is Christian behavior, which covers things like
morality, cardinal virtues, social morality, forgiveness, hope, faith,
charity. And then we have a fourth book which is Beyond
Personality or the First Steps in the Doctrine of the
Trinity. Now, if you've never heard of the doctrine of the Trinity, let me sort
of lay this on you. So Christians believe,
fundamentally, I believe this, that
the Godhead, God as.
Whether you decide to describe God as an existential entity
with no body, which. Okay. Or you decide to
describe God as a person
walking around. Okay. Christians hold to the
belief in a triune God. This is what separates Christians
from Muslims. There is no God but Allah and
Muhammad is his prophet. Or Jews, where
there is no God but Yahweh, period, full stop.
And he said multiple prophets and other kinds of people wanted to work with him.
Okay, so Jews and Muslims
and Christians are all part of the big three monotheistic
religions. Where Christianity separates from Islam
and Judaism is. Christianity makes a bold claim.
Christianity claims that God not only created
the earth, but that God stepped into history
and stepped into creation and stepped into the material
world in the form of. And we're recording this right around the
time of Christmas in the form of the baby Jesus in the manger.
And that Jesus lived a life
where he experienced or was tempted by everything
that man was tempted by and experienced, everything that man and
experienced died, was
crucified, died, was, was buried in
a tomb and three days later was resurrected in
fulfillment of the scripture, as they say in the Catholic
Mass.
And that upon his ascent into
heaven, by the way, bodily
wrap your brain around that the Holy Spirit
was then sent down as a comforter, spoken of
specifically in Matthew 24, but was sent as a comforter.
And that in Acts 2, the comforter
fell on 3,000 souls at Jerusalem. And
thus began the spread or the collapse, if you will. As
Paul Johnson, the historian Orient of Christianity and many other
history books that he wrote, he wrote a great book called the History of Christianity.
He basically traces the beginning of
God working into the world in a more
material kind of way than just with the law, as was during the
time of the Old Testament. He traces that. And I believe
theologically this does align with Christianity. And by the way, Paul Johnson, I believe, was
also Catholic, if I remember correctly,
aligns with the idea or not lines, but it matches with
the idea that God is in the world and
God cares about the world and that the
triune God, God the Father, God the Son and
God the Holy Spirit are all engaged with
or have been engaged with creation and continue and will continue
to be engaged with creation all the way to the end of the world.
Which may or may not, depending upon your perspective, be
described in the book of Revelation. A really wild book
at the end of Bible. Real wild.
Oh, would not recommend start at the beginning. Start,
begin with Genesis. Don't start at the end, don't start at the end.
So Christian eschatla, Christitology, Christian theology.
Is. Built around the concept of a triune God.
A triune God that exists not only in spirit, but also in
body and throughout creation. All at the
same time, all operating equally and
all being equally God.
I believe I've covered everything in there. And Lewis.
Well, it was a lot there. 10,000 foot review. I
believe I've covered everything in the 10,000 foot review. And so Lewis covers a lot
of that in book four, with
chapter titles such as Counting the Cost, let's Pretend,
Two Notes, the New Men.
But also in Making and Begetting, which is one of
his seminal chapters coming out of
this book, and he says this.
This is specifically about theology. Now,
theology is like the map, merely learning and thinking about Christian
doctrines. If you stop there is less real and less exciting than the sort of
thing my friend has got in the desert. Doctrines are not God,
they are only kind of a map. But that map is based on the experience
of hundreds of people who really were in touch with God.
Experiences compared with which any thrills
or pious feelings you and I are likely to get on our own are very
elementary and very confused. And secondly, if you want to get a
little further, you must use the map. You see, what happened to
that man in the desert may have been real. It was certainly exciting, but nothing
comes of it. It leads nowhere. There is nothing to do about it.
In fact, that is just why a vague
religion, all about feeling God in nature and so on and so on,
is attractive. It is all thrills and no
work, like watching waves from the beach. But you will not get
to Newfoundland by studying the Atlantic that way. And you will not get
eternal life by simply feeling the presence of God in flowers or in music.
Neither will you get anywhere by looking at maps without going to sea, nor
will you be very safe if you go to sea without a map. In other
words, theology is practical, especially now. In the old days, when there
was less education and discussion, perhaps it was possible to get on with a very
few simple ideas about God. But it is not so now. Everyone
weeds, everyone hears things discussed. Consequently,
if you do not listen to theology, that will not mean that you have
no idea about God. It will mean that you have a lot of wrong ones,
bad, muddled, out of date ideas. For a great many of the
ideas about God which are trotted out as novelties today are simply the ones which
real theologians tried centuries ago and rejected. To
believe in the popular religion of modern England is
retrogression like believing the earth is flat.
For when you get down to it, is not the popular idea of Christianity
simply this, that Jesus Christ was a great moral teacher and that if we only
took his advice, he might be able to establish a Better social order and avoid
another war. Now mind you, that is quite true, but it tells
you much less than the whole truth about Christianity. And it has
no practical importance at all.
By the way, I recently
had a discussion with somebody who had muddled theology.
And in reading, not in
reading, because I. I knew this before Lewis, but in listening to what they were
talking about,
it occurred to me, oh my gosh, everything that this person is talking about
comes out of gnostic heresies and they don't even know that term.
All things old become new again. Was
it that book, that hoary book, Ecclesiastes and that horror Horry old thing, the Old
Testament. A horri Old Testament, you know, there is no new
thing under the sun.
Okay, a couple of other areas I would like to cover. I know we got.
We're short on. Short on time here. I'm going to cut out a whole section
about American theology because we already kind of covered that. Although I will say this,
I will make one point about this.
COVID 19 was a seismic event for the
American church. It was a seismic
moment where the American church could have really established itself as a unified church.
And it missed the moment
dramatically.
And I think that's why folks like yourself, folks 10 years
younger than me, are struggling to find churches now.
Because COVID 19 exposed that for people who
are like half a generation younger than me in real ways
and people a full generation younger than me, the gen zers
are in total confusion, total theological
confusion. And that can be fully laid at the feet of
pastors and denominations. Not theology, but pastors and
denominations in the American Christian church.
Why do we struggle with the simplicity of sin? Switch to that.
Let's close. Let's. Let's close out with that one. Why do
we. I mean, so, so perfect penitent, right. That whole entire
chapter on which is on sin. Right? And
he points out in that chapter that a couple different things.
So Lewis talks about the three going into the three parts of morality
and trying to figure all that out. And he talks about
repentance and he talks about, you know, sort of what kind of what a
penitential sort of posture is towards.
Towards. Towards Jesus in the New Testament. And
he says this in my, in my book, it says this. The
central Christian belief is that Christ's death has somehow put us right with God and
given us a fresh. A fresh start. Theories as
to how it did this are another matter. A good many different theories have been
held as to how it works. What all Christians agree on is that it
does work.
Okay. How do you even have that
conversation with people who don't
even believe in sin in the first place
or when you give it to them? I'll put this to you because I've done
this before. When you give it to them as an explanation for why things are
upside down, they look at you like that's too simple.
The simplicity of that explanation underwhelms,
to say the least.
Yeah, I have a couple. I have lots of thoughts.
Yes, I have lots of thoughts. I don't know if any of them are good
or credible or whatever, but I had a couple
flashes. Yes, the simplicity of sin.
But simplicity of sin still
presupposes, that's the word,
An actual true moral right, wrong. So I think it
goes back to the point we made a lot earlier, is that we're drowning in
moral relativism. And so that's why
I think the simplicity of sin can boggle the mind. Because
with the, with moral relativism, we're
so consumed with the question why?
And trying to answer it in all sort of very
complicated ways. And it's not that the pursuit of
the answer to that question has not led
to some very useful discoveries of information.
Right. Because I feel like it's helped, like, helps
us understand the brain better. And there's been like,
psychologies and, and, and all that. I,
I think that's been.
But when you steep yourself in all of that,
because it is very intricate and it's, it's like. It's
like you're taking apart a person and trying to
analyze and dissect, even mentally, just the brain. There's
so much going on. It's very complicated. Then, of course, when
you say, well, this is what underpins
all of this chaos, they're just like. But,
no, that's my perspective anyway.
But, but then, yeah, that it just. The big
disconnect is the, the. We just believe in
a strict moral right and wrong.
And the pursuit of the answer
away from that, I think, has just.
Is the pursuit of the answer away from that.
I could hear. I could hear that. I could hear this being asked. So I'm
just going to ask it, ask it. Is the pursuit away from that simplicity
sinful in and of itself, or is that just merely deception?
I don't. So I think.
That the pursuit is obfuscating. The
simplicity is the work of the enemy.
But the pursuit in and of itself,
I think, because it's a pursuit of knowledge and truth, even
if it's predicated on a bad supposition,
the pursuit of knowledge and truth is always a good thing
because I think that's what God has instilled in our souls and our
nature. And so, yes,
that's, that's my. Okay. I don't think the suit itself is
bad, but I think that things have gotten cloudy and
confusing. Like, I think, I think there's a verse. I don't, I don't know
what it is, but I think there's a verse like the enemy is the. The
source of confusion. Yep. And so
just that, that, that's happening from that pursuit.
Totally. That makes sense to me. So the, the
ability to make that distinction. Do you need a.
This is gonna be an atheist. This is an atheist. Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins question.
So here we go. Just prefacing it so, you know, you know, the, you know,
the pool this, this bubbles up out of. Do you really
need
the belief in a triune God in order to make these moral
distinctions?
This might be heresy. I don't know. I'm not an apologetic,
Apologetic person. Apolog.
Apolog. Apologist. Apologist. Like, what is the word?
I am not an apologist, but my brain goes back
to your average medieval peasant
who was going to mass every morning before they got to
fields. They went to mass, they went to work, they
went to sleep, they went to mass, they went to work, they went to sleep.
They're probably. If they knew about the triune God,
they weren't spending a lot of time contemplating it or
figuring out what it meant to believe that, but they were still doing
their best to be
the. A good Christian as they were taught the Bible said.
Yeah. So I.
That being said, you know, with the information now, especially in American
theology and American church, the triune God there, that's really in your face.
We, we talk about that a lot. So for
us, the answer might be different, maybe, but for
someone who is just. But
I don't want to. I don't want to say necessarily a normal person, but like
someone who's not feeling like they need to
contemplate these things. I think the answer might be
no. But I think, And I think C.S. lewis gets into
this where it's like some of
these intricacies of the theology
and. Oh, sorry. That the answer, as much as we don't believe in moral
relativism, that God always meets everybody where they
are. Right. And so if,
if grappling with a triune God is
breaking your brain, don't worry about it.
Just be like, okay, this is what. This is what we
believe. I'm gonna go do the thing that Jesus told me to
do, which is, you know. Right. Love everyone. Love your enemy
as yourself. I was,
yeah. Love your neighbor as yourself. And well, actually love
the Lord your God with all your heart, all your soul, all your mind and
all your strength. And love your neighbor as yourself. Yeah.
Upon these two things hang all the law and all the prophets. There you go.
That, that's just like, that's. If that's all, you know,
do that. Right. Okay. Now.
And maybe for those of us would see that, that as a failing. I don't
know. But I don't. I just. I. It's one of the. I've got to remember,
Remember I. I slammed the wall as fools. They've all left the chat. They're not
listening anymore. Yeah. I dismissed them. It's fine.
Well, but I think, I think, I think so. I think the seduction of.
I think of the parable of the sower, right? In, in. In
Matthew, right? So Jesus is
a good rabbi, told his disciples
the parable of the sower, right? You know, see, that fell on good ground, seed
that fell on rocky ground, and then
seed that fell on ground that was full of thorns and thistles, right?
And the seed that fell on rocky ground
was unable to get roots deep enough.
And when, you know, wind, wane, weather, whatever came along, it
came up and it didn't last, right? Thorns and
thistles, obviously the seed gets choked out,
right? Very much an agricultural metaphor. And of course, then the seed that
falls on good ground produces, you know, 100 fold, 60 fold, 30
fold to. To the glory of the
farmer and the harvest, okay?
And when the disciples heard this, when they were standing among the people,
they later on then came back and they were like, what are you even
talking about? Right? And yeah, they were fishermen, but
they also lived at a very agricultural way world. And so they knew
what they knew. I mean, they knew what seed was on ground. And of
course, Jesus says to them, you know, I'm going to speak to
the people in parables. But to you it is given the mysteries. I'm going to
give you the mysteries to sort of understand this. And here's the interpretation of the
parable. And of course, Jesus says that
the seed that falls on rocky ground is the seed that
basically is. Is the seed that the word that falls on
ground that does not sustain the believer,
right? And so the things of this world
come along and, and scorch it out or take it out or whatever,
right? Because the roots weren't deep. Like they didn't go into
the word or they didn't go into, to the conversation right now.
They didn't go into the theology whatever. Then you know, there's
the seed that falls on thistles and that's the seed that gets
choked out by the carers of the world. Right? You know, your,
your bills and the kids dentist appointment and
cruelty the world. Cruelty. Exactly. Yeah.
And then you have the seed that falls on good ground,
right? And the good ground, of course is ground that gets watered, it gets
cultivated and then it produces. And in some folks it produces a lot.
A lot of people get, get influenced
some influences a little and then others influences a huge
number. Okay. Now when most
American Christians hear that, they think about the Word
being something that they have to go out and harvest and spread around, right?
And that the unbelievers will be the ground that the Word falls on.
And while I do hold to that as one potential interpretation,
I also hold to an idea. And this is something. This really the reason why
I brought this up is it relates directly to what you were talking about, about
holding on to just like one thing without holding on to the triune God.
We don't even think about ourselves as ground as believers
and what we can hold on to. And
so we as ground as believers, are we being choked out by
the cares of this world? Are we we
being blasted away by nonsense? And our roots didn't
go that deep because like we spent
however many years avoiding actually reading the Bible. And then finally
towards the middle or the end of our lives, we finally started reading it, but
it never really landed for us or it didn't really land as deep. And so
we're going to struggle and we're going to try to get those roots deep, but
they're only going to eventually, you know, it's going to hit a bedrock and we
can sense when that's going to, when that's going to happen. And then of course
there are those of us who are consumed with the Word.
And I would put myself humbly
in that category. I mean I've been through the Bible,
I did the Bible app, I do the Bible app. So I go through the
Bible in a year basically once every couple of years I go through the Bible
in a year. And I've been through the Bible probably 10 or 12 times already.
And now I'm at the point where, okay, I got to actually like start to
write, sorry to write down, not scriptures, not specific
one off things, but like I have to look at the contextual Bible and relate
the context of things here to the context of things there.
Because, you know, Paul is talking in a particular way. But Paul was
trained by Gamaliel, which means he knew the Torah and the Old Testament. So when
he talks to the Corinthians, he's not talking to the Corinthians because
they're Corinthians. And then in Corinth, he's talking to them because he comes
out of an entire Jewish tradition. That's the Hebrew roots idea. He comes out of
an entire Jewish tradition. He's trying to make a new thing. But what influences that
tradition? Because there's a method of argumentation that he's employing. So I got to go
back, and I got to write out, like, all the references in Esther that he
uses, and then I got to go right out Esther, Right. So, like, I'm going
down this path, right. Will that yield 30
fold or 60 fold or 100 fold? Well, I don't know. Like, I only
do, really three really good things in my life. I write good. I talk good.
I kind of show up on camera good. I don't really do anything else really
well. Everything else, I. I'm fair to middling at or I suck.
So.
Like, what did the Lord give me? Well,
those are the. Those are the. Those are the three things. So, okay.
Oh, and I kind of sort of think, good. Maybe. Kind of,
sort of, maybe. So what is the.
So if I'm the ground and the seed sower,
and I'm the product of what falls on the ground,
then I can't really worry too much about the unbelievers.
I do worry about the believers that don't know about the triune
God. But to your point, and this, I guess, is a long way of supporting
your point. To your point, I don't know what ground they're on.
I have no idea. And I think about this a lot as a person who
is, weirdly enough, my wife and I have been tagged as mature Christians,
but we don't feel like we're immature, like, at all. Like,
there's no. No. Are you kidding me? There's so much more to learn.
Is the bottom is just the bot. The bis just keeps going down.
There's no bottom here. Turtles all the way down.
Turtles all the way down. That's right. And we. I can't even see the bottom
of the turtles.
Yep. So I don't know if you need a triune
God. I would say my first instinct in answering that question or when
I think about it, when, like, Sam Harris poses that question or Richard Dawkins gets
frustrated and gets argued Into a Corner by Jordan
Peterson. The first, first thing, you
know, the first thing I think is, yeah, you do need to believe in
a try you got. But that might be for those guys.
Right. You need to believe in a tri. God. Big
brains. Your big brains need to wrap around that mystery and figure
that out and come to that humbly but to your point.
Maybe the medieval peasant, the simple folk. The simple folk,
maybe. Maybe the simple folk don't need it. Well,
and kind of you were talking about had gone through the.
The Bible so many times. So many times. And my dad is. And it's just
now. It's just now landing. It's just now landing right for me.
I, I'm not, I'm not. Well, you know, I
grew up my dad, you know, because that was my dad always
reading the Bible. I tried to follow that
example. Yeah. And got very quickly that I did
not understand it at all. That just something was
missing and I would fall asleep trying to read it. And so
definitely as a young person I just gave up and
I, I definitely would put myself closer to the medieval
peasant that just needs a pastor. Like I'm doing my best to
ask good questions and be discerning, but I'm the kind of person
that needs someone to tell me what it means kind of what you're
talking about. Like, what's the tradition that this was written in?
What's the context? Like? Like, it blew my mind when I,
when the, when I first learned about like the rabbitic
interpretation of Genesis. Oh yeah. And I was like,
that's amazing. That makes so much more sense.
But me going and reading Genesis over and over and
over and over without any of that context.
I maybe, and maybe this is wrong, but Rudolph
is useless. Like there's no. That didn't. I didn't see
any point in that. It felt like a waste of time and felt like it
was just going to build a lot of frustration in me. And
being the people of faith that we are, God uses that.
Yeah, well. And that was the critique. That was. That was the critique that the
Catholics had against Luther during the beginning of the process of
Reformation, which of course accompanied the printing press. They were like, well, okay, if you
give everybody, everybody. This was basically the Catholic Church's objection. If
you give everybody access to the book, that's fine. I mean
the Catholic Church was even. This is what people don't know about the history of
all that. Even during the time of Luther they were starting to loosen up on
not only printing more books, but also allowing more
the lay people to read, but even medieval
peasants couldn't read. So there was a whole other kind of problem they had to
solve. Right, right. So. But literacy
was spreading and the Catholic Church recognized that it was coming.
The, and it wasn't really to Luther. It was mostly to Calvin, Calvin
and Zwingli, those two guys. But their
objection was, okay, you give the Bible to everybody. Let's take
it at face value. Fine, give the Bible to everybody. There's no mediator,
there's no pastor, no priest. Everybody can access it,
which means everyone will come up with their own interpretation.
And so we will have mass chaos. And that's what the Catholic Church objected to
in the Protestant Reformation. That was actually at the core of it. It really wasn't
about the, the indulgences that was even going out. It
wasn't about the, the, the Pope. It wasn't about any of that. It was about,
oh my God, the utter, the utter theological confusion that we will
then engage in. And the Catholic Church had no system for how to handle
theological confusion. I guess one of the reasons that I want to bring that up
is if you're listening and you're, you hear
Hasan and you're like, oh, that's the ideal. Like, I want to read the, you
know, the Bible in a year, every year for 12 years, and then start
to, you know, do all the, the, the research yourself. But if that's
not where you're at and, or God has put you somewhere else, or
your strengths lie somewhere else and you just need somebody to tell you what it
means, that's where I'm at
and it's okay, it's fine. That's still the spectrum.
Yep. And God can use it all. And again, if
you're, you're, I don't know, I don't know how to put, give this a secular
twist. But. Well, and let me be very clear,
if you need to be number one, I don't think you should be reading the
Bible by yourself in a room trying to bang through that. You
know, I think, and particularly now, again, with technology, I have knocked technology
on this podcast, but with technology you can.
Absolutely. The number of resources is unbe friggin leavable.
Even between like the time I was a kid to now, it's unbelievable, the
explosion, the number of videos you can watch, the number of
resources you can access, the number of people who are explaining the
Bible on YouTube. Now, are they all to the Catholic
Church's Objection. Careful. Right. Do they all have solid
theology or even information
or accurate information? Check the resources Check the references. Good
God. You don't even believe. Don't even believe the Wikipedia entries that you may read
to. To talk to on just like the Trinity. Don't even believe those.
Look at this. Look at the resources and then go, anyway, whatever.
If you don't want to do the research, there's plenty of resources out here. The
problem is not information. No. The problem is community.
Yes. Because at the end of the day, yes.
Kristen may want someone to explain it to her and give her an
interpretation. And here's the other thing I
suspect you probably want, even though you didn't say it, I suspect you want
somebody where. Wherein you have enough of a relationship with them
so when they give you the interpretation, you could have a conversation with them.
Yeah, yeah. And test that with them.
Right. Versus the idea that
sometimes, sometimes Catholics have about Protestants
or about various Protestant denominations, that we all just sit in a room
reading our Bibles and then we all just sort of like, float
off like atoms, figuring it out for ourselves. No, no, no,
no, no. We're in community and we're yelling at each other and we're, like, fighting.
And we're. Intramural fights. We're having intramural fights and
denominations. The Methodists would like to enter the chat
recently. I mean, they're the most recent one. You know, like,
we're having. We're having those intramural battles because we're
in community with each other and in a community.
And this is something for those of you who may be a little bit younger
than me, who are listening to this show, if you've made it this far and
if you have, congratulations, you have to be in community
with other people to understand, I believe, to understand Christian
things. Because Christ was in community with his disciples
and he came out of it. Yes. And he stayed in that community.
And he stayed in that community. That's correct. So that is one
of my big issues and one of the reasons I was like, all right,
yeah, this doesn't make sense,
is the constant splitting, splitting,
splitting. Stay in community. If you disagree,
stay sharp. Iron sharpens iron. Like, have good, good
faith discussions and.
And above all else, stay in love.
Right. Well, having a disagreement
with somebody.
Is not a salvation issue. No. Disagreeing is
not sin. Right. Now,
the motives underneath, that might be sinful,
the consequences in how you react or respond,
that might be sinful, but
the disagreement in and of itself, the
confrontation in and of itself is not a
sinful act. And I
think there's, along with all the rest of the moral and theological confusion
We've got even, even an even larger problem which feeds
downstream from theology into societal
confusion about how to handle differences and,
and all that. And so it's just easier to go off and be individualized and
atomized. But the devil can pick you off. Kristen said the
enemy. I'm gonna say the devil. The devil can pick you off individually. Devil can
pick you off individually. I'm going to name the oppressor. I'm going to name the
enemy. Absolutely. I'm going to go old school Baptist
here in a minute. Old school Baptist preacher,
Southern Baptist preacher preaching a hot gospel.
And so you need to be in community. I would recommend being in community. So
yes, read your Bible and read your Bible in community with
others and get in groups. As far as the role of
tradition or rights or creeds,
that is a whole, I had a whole conversation with my wife about this this
weekend. That's a whole other intramural thing. I'm going to leave that aside. But just
know that whole other animal. Whole other animal and know that
not blood and know that creeds exist.
I think fundamentally something that Christian said actually clicked this together in my head.
Just, literally just now I'm thinking on the fly with this, but creeds
exist so that people
can have an anchor. If the book is too complicated, that's one
of the reasons why creeds exist. And if you're in
a non denominational church, you're probably going to
struggle with that because non denomination churches tend to be allergic to creeds.
However, more Reformed churches, whether they're Reformed, Baptist, Reformed,
Presbyterian, Reformed, Methodist
and Catholic churches, tend to focus
on and tend to be anchored by
creeds. And that could be an incredible struggle for people who are
individualistic and don't want to be anchored to anything other than
and even don't even really want to be anchored to the book. But other than
the book, other than. You know what's so interesting? That you know,
there's, there's. I don't know if I could find it fast enough because I know
we need to wrap up. It's right here. It's because it's, it's like the very
end of the book. Yeah. Is. Is if there's a
concern of being worried about anchored to creeds because
due to individualism. Is, there's. I. And this is. I've known
this quote. I don't remember when I, I've known this quote for so
long, I don't remember when I first heard it. But it's how monotonously
like all the great tyrants and conquerors have been, how gloriously different
are the saints? So even anchoring yourself
into a creed and into Christianity, it doesn't
make you a cookie cutter. It almost makes
you more brilliant. Not almost. It makes you more brilliant, the
individual, than anything else.
I think just full stop. I think that's a good place
for us to stop. I want to thank Kristen Horn
for coming on the show today. This was radically different than
any of the other conversations that we have had with her, but it was great.
And. And so I would like to wish you all a happy holiday
and a very merry Christmas and a happy
New Year from all of us here at the Leadership Lessons from
the Great Books podcast. So with that, well,
we're out.