#165 | The Thrill of Orthodoxy, Pt. 2 | Trevin Wax

A lot of what passes for Christian teaching in our day is just unhealthy junk food. And I think we got to help people to a better diet.

It's watering time, everybody.

It's time for Apollo's Watered, a podcast to saturate your faith with the things of God so that you might saturate your world with the good news of Jesus Christ. My name is Travis Michael Floyd, and I am your host. And today in our show, we're having another one of our deep conversations. Do you like junk food?

I mean, be honest. Do you. Do you ever find yourself just going to the fridge and grabbing a carton of ice cream with a spoon and no bowl? Have you ever done that?

Or maybe you have got a little bag of chips, like you get one of those Ruffles sample pack things. You know what I'm talking about, those lay's potato chips. Maybe I'm thinking of the wrong company, but it's got all the different kinds in it.

The Doritos, it's got the Nacho, it's got the Cool Ranch, it's got all of those. And rather than just eating one, you find yourself eating four or five. Have you ever wondered why?

I mean, it's because they design junk food to be addictive, and it makes you just want more and more and more. You know, what I've noticed is that our spiritual diets can be the same. We want those kind of quick calories.

We want those little easy, digestible things that everybody else knows about, something that might satisfy our spiritual appetite.

The problem is that you're constantly looking for something new and novel, something that will actually satisfy, because spiritual junk food will never, ever do that. When you stray from orthodoxy, you get into trouble. It is inevitable. But how do you know what's junk food? How do you know what's okay to eat?

Is there a difference between junk food on the one hand and a specific kind of cuisine on the other? How do you deal with people who are peddling junk food and just tell you all the time, hey, it's okay. Not a big deal. Let's, you know, it's all right.

Just a little bit. It's not going to. Just a little bit.

Just a little bit.

I mean, what do you do, you know? Today we're continuing our conversation with Trevin Wax about his book the Thrill of Orthodoxy.

And we're going to delve down deeper today as we talk about the connection of orthodoxy and secondary issues. We're also going to talk about ethnicity and culture and politics. So much fun. And we. What do we call a heretic, actually?

When do we call a heretic a heretic? When is it like, legit a heretic? I was on Facebook the other day, and people throw that word out way too much.

I mean, I've had some conversations where people are like, oh, they're a heretic. And it's like, well, no, you're within the realm of orthodoxy.

They just don't agree with your pet doctrines, where you've take secondary issues and you've made them primary. And that's the litmus test. How do we determine the difference? When do we call a heretic a heretic?

And what are some of the ways that we might be tempted to drift from orthodoxy? A little orthodoxy drift, you know what I'm saying?

And that's, that's all we're going to be talking about today as we get into the second part of the conversation with Trevin Wax. But before that, do you want to make a difference in people's lives around the world? You know, there's so much garbage out there today. There is.

There's so much spiritual junk food that's out there. We want to be able to give people the real water of life because there are some thirsty souls that are dying on the vine.

But we can't do this by ourselves. We need people like you to join with us. Simply click on your show notes or go to ApolloSweater.org and click the Support us button. Scroll down.

Pick the amount that works for you. Because we need some serious watering partners to help water water of the world for Jesus. God has blessed this. God has birthed this ministry.

He continues to expand it, but he's also made it clear that this isn't just us. We need you. And we need you to be a part of this so that we can water the world together.

But without further ado, let's get to my conversation with Trevin Wax. Happy listening. I had a church that I was serving on staff with that got asked to adopt another church.

And we came in and sat down and they were passing out their constitution. I laughed. First of all, I'm like, why are we getting their constitution?

It seemed like this was a preliminary discussion and this just seemed kind of a superfluous thing to do.

But as the culture starts becoming much more pluralistic, I'm noticing that the walls within Christendom are starting to crumble. In a good way. There's a good part to it because there's a unity that's being seen.

But how do we uphold the orthodox part of the essentials, as you say, when our brothers and sisters may have a different set of essentials that are much more arbitrary?

Yeah, that's a great question.

That's how it rolls here, Trevin. They're all great questions. They're all great questions, Trevin. They're never a bad one.

Yeah.

Next time you gotta go, that's it.

Bad one. I wouldn't. If you did have a bad one, I wouldn't say it.

You should say it just for fun. Why? I had Colin on. He's like, hey, great to be here. I said, that's not what you said. In the pre show walkthrough.

He goes, what happened to my life to this point to get me here? Sorry to interrupt your answer. Go ahead.

No, no, I. I think.

Okay, so I'm gonna answer this question as a Protestant and as an evangelical because obviously a Catholic or an Orthodox person is going to answer this question somewhat differently.

This is an aside, but, like, Roman Catholicism post Vatican II has been very open to the idea of separated brethren, ecclesial communities and whatnot, even though they want to maintain that the Roman Catholic Church is the only true church. But the challenge with Roman Catholicism is the amount of additional material they keep putting on in the deposit of faith. Like, you gotta.

Like, you gotta believe the bodily assumption of Mary and the Immaculate Conception and then, like that, you know, the papal infallibility.

And, like, it's just more and more over the centuries that, like, Orthodox people over here and Protestants are So, like, some of the stuff's not even in the Bible. Like, it's not. Not necessarily, like, okay, believe what you want, but, like.

Like to say that this is, like, necessary to believe for salvation, which the Catholic Church sort of says it on the one hand and then does it on the other hand because of the separated brethren, some of the outreach that they've done. So anyway, that's an aside. I'm answering this question as a Protestant, as an evangelical.

Those secondary issues are very, very important for the structural integrity of the house you're living in.

So instead of seeing Orthodoxy as that, we're all living in one house, I think it would be better if we looked at Orthodoxy, that we're all living in a neighborhood and different denominations and traditions, faith traditions are in different homes within that neighborhood. And there are times when, you know, for evangelistic reasons, for political reasons, for whatever, we are all going to have a huge block party.

We're going to all barbecue together. We're all going to be outside and we're going to enjoy it.

You know, I see as Lewis talks about, like coming out of the rooms into the hallway occasionally. That's wonderful. It's fantastic.

But at the end of the day, there are particular aspects that will matter as Orthodoxy, small o Orthodoxy for your particular house.

So for example, if you're a Baptist, is it a secondary issue that you can agree with other believers in Christ as to whether or not baptism of infants is the biblical command or whether it's baptism of believers upon a profession of faith? That is a, an agree to disagree aspect within Christendom writ large.

So Pentecostals and Assemblies of God and Church of God and even some Methodists, Baptists and others will all be on one side of that. And then you have your, your paedo Baptist on the other side of that there. And there are debates going way back over this.

So you can like, you know, go back and find, you know, debates all the way back to Tertullian about baptism. So if you're in a Baptist house, is it a secondary issue? Well, in terms of the neighborhood, yes.

Because it doesn't keep you from visiting the Anglican house or visiting the, you know, the Presbyterians down the street or being able to receive gifts from the other faith traditions.

But if someone were to come into your house and say, oh, you know what, it's not an essential doctrine of the faith, therefore you can take out this plank and we're just going to say, just be baptized however you want. It doesn't really matter in, in this house anymore. Well, for the Baptist house, that's a load bearing wall.

You remove the wall, you're not a Baptist anymore. Like at, at some level you, you become something else. But the, the structural integrity of the house is compromised at that level.

So there's a sense in which different faith groups, based on how they read the Bible within the overarching neighborhood of Orthodoxy, will come to see certain things as not essential for salvation, but essential for the integrity of the faith tradition that they are a part of. And at times they'll, they'll recognize that some things are not.

So the Evangelical Free Church, for example, recently revised their doctrinal standard to not make premillennial views, the only acceptable view within the E Free Church that had been a distinctive that they basically moved away from. To say the structural integrity of our house is fine if there's an agree to disagree with within that home.

But there are, there are other denominations where if you were to make that to make a move on a particular distinctive, you would compromise something of what makes the denomination distinctive and could at the same time actually rob other Christians of the particular gifts that come from the structural integrity of that home.

So at a second tier level, there are things that are not orthodoxy in the capital O like big time Orthodoxy sense, but are still matter for like the Reformed Orthodoxy or Baptist orthodoxy or the different groups that we have.

And I think it's important for us to be able to see those differences and recognize them in order to have a proper understanding of how this all fits.

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I have found that oftentimes orthodoxy, while it is a big umbrella for people to go under, it's more of the cultural expression that the differences and structures of power come in on who determines what is true and what's not and how we go about it, specifically within different ethnic groups. I mean, in the United States.

I remember someone, I was reading an article, I can't remember which one it was, but it was talking about Martin Luther King Jr. And they when he was criticized for one of the schools that he attended and they said, well, the problem was or no, his theology.

They were criticizing some of his theology. And this is. Well, what did you expect?

Because of the school that he attended, you wouldn't let him into that school, the school that you wanted him to go to, to determine that. So there is some of that aspect, that cultural part of it in our really, I don't want to say really divided.

I mean, from a media perspective, it seems that way, let's put it that way, that Christianity right now, especially in the west, there's a great division and we're seeing some denominations torn asunder because they have. I will go so far as remove themselves from orthodoxy.

How do we though, give room to the cultural expressions that we see, especially when it comes to matters of ethnicity and understanding of interaction with the political sphere?

Yeah, I think this is a part of a bigger problem and that's the conflation of particular political principles or particular political practices or prudence in the public realm.

How many P's can you do right there?

I guess you're right. I was like, that's a preacher proclamation, the propagation of the gospel. I mean, they're all coming to me now. Oh, no.

But I, I think it's been especially because we, we live in a, in a, in a more polarized area. We live in a more polarized era. This is a, this is one of the challenges we face right now, I think, in, in our society.

And this is one of the things I mentioned in the book, I think, is that whenever we don't have in mind that the sort of the epic stakes of what our choices are and what, and how they matter for eternity, when it comes to salvation and damnation and what it means for us to be, you know, saved and why, why we have an evangelistic task before us. Whenever you lower the earthly stakes and you're.

Or the heavenly stakes and you're no longer thinking really about people as saved and lost and wanting to reach people and whatnot, that's. Evangelism takes a back seat. What happens is generally not that everyone is more tolerant and more inclusive and wonderful toward each other.

What happens is that the earthly battles that are, that are happening in Washington D.C. or in Hollywood or in business or wherever you are, those wind up taking on the sort of epic eternal stakes.

They wind up being raised in significance. So when you lower the eternal significance of our choices, you raise the earthly significance.

And I mean, people have been writing about this, even non Christians are writing about this. That for some politics has become something of a pseudo religion. Like it matters.

But I mean, this is One of the shocking things I think to see more recently is that for a majority, I think I can't remember the exact numbers.

I've written about it somewhere, but there are more people in the United States today who would be upset if their son or daughter were to marry someone from the opposing political party than to marry someone from a different religion.

Did you write about that?

I, I have before. I can't remember where it was, but. But yeah, I feel like I just read that this.

I had him in your book. Anyway, keep going.

It's, it's just a shocking, It's a shocking stat because basically it'd be like I'm, I'd be better off if my daughter married a Hindu than a Republican or a Democrat, you know, so this is one of those areas where you recognize, oh, you can say, oh, that means, that means religion doesn't count for as much anymore. That's one takeaway from that.

The other thing to take away from that is that no politics has become the religion for people so that they, you don't marry a heretic from the other party.

And so I think, I think because of that, it makes a lot of the conversations that we have much more heated than they need to be, particularly within the church. And I think there are lots of churches that get compromised very easily from an over politicization.

And I think this happens actually on the left and the right.

In fact, you're much more likely to hear politics in a church that leans left politically than you are in a church that leans right politically, even though that's not what you would hear from the media if you actually look at the stats in the surveys. Mainline denominations, for example, are way more likely to talk politics from the pulpit, from a left center point than people on the right.

But it happens in both ways. And I'm not, I'm not saying that it's always wrong because I think there's a place for Christians need to be vocal.

You need to speak out on all kinds of issues.

I think what makes it challenging is when we take what we consider to be prudence or wisdom in matters of politics, in our posture in politics, or how we engage or how we seek to go about implementing what we see as, you know, a Christian influence perspective in society at some level, wanting to bring our values to bear on the political process as we should.

I think when we take some of those questions of the how to and the what and exactly and we raise those to levels, to level of orthodoxy, I think that's when we're in Trouble. And we've got to be careful. I think that's when we're not taking seriously. And I.

And I see this happen constantly on both sides of the political aisle. The very people who, you know, vote one way are. Their Christianity is called into question, same as people that vote another way.

When there's all different things that people mean by a vote and all different reasons why people vote a certain way, they do. They don't all vote for the same reason or to support the same thing. So I think.

I just think we've got to take that down a notch or two, and let's focus on those areas of essential orthodoxy, no matter our ethnicity, that being first and foremost. And then we can have lots of conversations, even heated debate over the best way forward when it comes to what does this look like in practice.

So when you have. I'm gonna. I'm gonna give a book title that you're gonna hate. A Generous Orthodoxy.

I've read that book.

No, I know what you mean, though, because there is too far. You go too far, you drift into heresy. How do we then define heresy?

Like, you mentioned orthodoxy, and you've defined it by the creeds, but there's a lot of stuff then that I would presume you would call heresy. Being a Protestant, Evangelical, Southern Baptist, how do we then. Or when. When is the proper way to call heresy a heresy?

Well, we. I think we got to be careful with the H word because people call people. I think people use heretics way too frequently.

And so that you don't actually have the. The. The gravity of heresy when you really need it. Like, you know what I mean? Like when someone actually is a heretic. If you.

If everybody that disagrees with you is already a heretic, then you don't really have the gravity of that. Of that word.

Heresy is when a fundamental truth of the gospel or Christian teaching is fundamentally denied or so obscured as to a functional denial of orthodoxy itself. So in between that are errors, and there's all kinds of errors.

There are minimal errors, and there are errors that grow in their significance, and they're very significant errors that are not necessarily heresy, but extraordinarily damaging. Right.

So I don't think we want to just say, oh, well, there are heretics over here and the orthodox over here, and all of us are in error in some way, so I guess we don't need to worry about errors. That's not the way it works.

Yeah, we all are in error in some way, and the Lord will have to straighten us all out because Otherwise we'd all be in agreement. But we should be on guard against errors because errors lead to heresy and they can also take us over the cliff.

There are positions though, when you basically go against something that the church has always taught and believed and practiced and has been basically the universal position of the church, the burdens on you to show how that's in line with orthodoxy, not the other way around. So, for example, today the big questions are over, you know, sexuality in marriage, like, can we agree to disagree on this?

Can we say it's an error or not or whatnot?

What you see in the denominations where that's being debate, it is, it's fascinating because 10 years ago the revisionists were the ones who were saying, we just need to agree to disagree on this. This isn't in the creeds, it's not a gospel issue. Why can't we just be inclusive enough to include both perspectives in our denomination today?

That's not what is seen today. It's the revisionist saying this is a gospel issue. If we're not inclusive, we're actually going against the fundamental teachings of Jesus.

This is what it means for us to be a Christian in our society today and whatnot. We've got to repent of our past and we have to change our position. So it's fascinating to see that shift in 10, in 10 years.

The burden of proof is on the revisionists because they're actually taking a position that goes against the unchanging witness of the church. Until about 50 years ago, all churches everywhere, and even now it's against the global church.

So it's generally a shrinking subset of predominantly white Western liberal denominations that is jumping on this bandwagon and the rest of the global church is saying, you know, that, that this is not so. Now you may ask the question, okay, is that a heresy? I would just take it one step below to say the presenting issue is the doctrine of marriage.

The, the heresy that is there is not the change in position on marriage, it's the underlying anthropology that leads to that.

So it's the question of humanity, what it means to be created in the image of God, male and female, good in his image, oriented toward a particular end. The heresy is a denial and obscurity and a fundamental distortion of that which is the iceberg underneath the surface.

So the denominations are wrecking on the iceberg of same sex marriage.

But same sex marriage in itself is not the heresy as much as it's the expression of the anthropological heresy that's underneath, which then connects to Christological heresies and other things.

This is why on this particular issue itself, one of the ways you can tell a spot of heresy is that generally other parts of Christianity, other parts of Christian teaching begin to crumble. It's why virtually any, almost everybody that jumps on and says, hey, I am completely orthodox.

I'm just going to tweak my understanding of marriage and sexuality. It doesn't work within 10, 15 years.

I mean we could, I could name names right now, go down the list of people who are suddenly, then they're universalists. Then they don't no longer believe in the atonement. Then they're suddenly, you know, questioning the existence of God as a person altogether.

You know, what the, the nature of calling God Father, things like that. So you, you wind up, you wind up like that particular thing that you think is not an essential.

It shows itself to be a load bearing wall in the house because of the way that the, the rest of the house crumbles after you remove it. We got to be more careful in how we use the heretic word. But then we also have to recognize when heresy does its damage.

Like you can watch it happen in real time and then you can and then together with the global church and the church throughout history, say, you know, bring additional clarification and definition to the question.

I often struggle in our market driven. I hate the term but evangelical industrial complex, where Christian is just the term.

Whatever you self identify, whatever you self identify and then you get people. I mean you.

And I remember James McDonald and he did the elephant room and he had TD Jakes in the Elephant Room whose denial of the Trinity or very heterodox view of the Trinity. And it brought a lot of people into question. Some people left and it started kind of the crumbling of what was going down in the edifice.

But in our cultural expression, when we have Christian magazines or websites or whatever, it's just the, it's a self identifying thing. We throw up.

Every single person who identifies as a Christian, no matter what their practice is, no matter what's going on, as soon as they say anything about God, we claim them. How do we respond to that? It's something that our own creation. It's not like these are, I mean, let's hope not.

It could be but unbelievers running the show. And we're looking at this going, all right, how do I know who's in and who's not? I go to Africa.

I mean, you travel around the world, you know just as well as I do. You go to a Conference. You look outside and there's. There's Benny Hinn book. You know, you just see it. You see the TD Jakes, you see the Joel Osteens.

I would say that they fall out of the realm of orthodoxy, but yet so many Christians that. I know the world, I know how you feel, but they tell it like it is. You know, you hear that all the time.

How do we respond in a loving way when even the media outlets that we go to favor these individuals and present them in front of our people day in and day out, that they think they're okay?

Yeah. So I think we got to be really careful when we talk about what constitutes heresy and orthodoxy. It's possible to be.

Just to be really off theologically and yet not actually fall under the particular definition of heresy. So, for example, the oneness Pentecostal understanding that is basically modalism is a heresy completely, Is a. Is heretical.

The question of whether TD Jakes affirms that or not is one that has been disputed and debated. And I, and I haven't really studied this, but from what I understand, I.

Put you on the spot.

Yeah, well, from what I've seen in this past, I, I think Jake's has come around to some kind of, you know, to a trinitarian affirmation at some level, and I hope he has, because obviously I'd rather him be teaching the truth rather than falsehood there.

But the question, like when you do, when you go to Africa, you go to different places and you see people whose teaching is false in this way or that, or is, you know, if not heretical, borderline. I think it's.

It takes a certain level of discipleship over time to be able to disciple people to a fuller understanding of Christianity so that they see through some of that. I think there's a lot of American Christians that could read a.

And I'm not saying Joel Osteen is a heretic because I don't know that he's ever denied fundamental aspects of the faith. But you read like a Joel Osteen next to a John Piper, and there are a lot of people that read both. And I don't really recognize.

I mean, like, seriously, you walk into some people's homes and you'll see both of them on the coffee table or something.

It's like oil and water.

But I think we're assuming a certain level of understanding theologically that in a lot of places isn't there. So what do we do in that circumstance? Well, a couple of things.

The good news is, you're saved by the God of orthodox doctrine, not by your understanding of orthodox doctrine. You're saved by the God that orthodox doctrine points to, not by your ability to articulate it perfectly. So again, now, this is.

I'm talking about ordinary Christians here. I'm not talking about teachers of whom there is a higher standard who are teaching certain things.

I'm talking about, you know, the person who you see, you know, you see the book on the coffee table and you kind of wonder what's going on.

You have a Trevin Wax book.

That's right. They need my book on their coffee table. That's the whole point of the podcast. That's the whole thing.

No, so, so I, I think, I think we, I think we have to be careful there because it is possible to be in error. And I mean, this is one of the things that, you know, that the reformers taught as well.

You know, Richard Hooker, for example, the great Anglican theologian, made it very clear, as did Luther and Calvin and others, that a Christian can be wrong on their understanding of justification by faith alone or on how they articulate the doctrine of justification by faith and still be justified by faith. And the same is true. The same is true. Like I, and I mentioned this in the book, like, I didn't realize that I had adopted the Apollinarian heresy.

Oh, yeah, I read that.

Yeah. I had thought that Christ was a divine soul and human body. It just makes sense to me.

And then I come across it in a class where I realized that's one of the heresies. I thought, oh, so. But, but I mean, but I was, I was already saved before that. Like, again, I am saved by Jesus Christ, fully God and fully man.

Not because I am able to pass a test articulating exactly how he is fully God and fully man. That doesn't mean the heresy is unimportant.

It doesn't mean we shouldn't seek to root it out, that we shouldn't teach against it, or that we shouldn't correct it when we find it. But I think, I think we've got to recognize it's like a lot of what passes for Christian teaching in our day is just unhealthy junk food.

And I think we got to help people to a better diet. And I think we do have to warn people when there's poison in the cabinet that'll kill them.

So when, when, when you got someone that's actually walking down a path where they're, they're, they're beginning to, to read and, or to listen to or to people that are actually dispensing poison because it's heretical teaching. I think that's when you have to do the warning. Some, some of the food that's out there is really bad for you.

It's not poisonous, but it's, it's going to be detrimental to your spiritual life. I think some of the prosperity gospel teachings and things like that are.

It, some of them are heretical like Kenneth Copeland and others like we're there, but, but some are not necessarily heresy. And yet it's, it's, it's, it's extraordinarily unsound, unhealthy teaching that is going to lead to, to unhealthy spirituality.

So, so I think we, I think there's a place to warn against that as well and to be able to say, look, this, this diet is going to leave you malnourished when you need sustenance, when suffering comes, or when this happens, or when, or it's going to deform your view of God, things like that. So I, I think, I think again, trying to keep things in proper categories. We want to keep people away from poison.

We want to discourage people away from unhealthy foods and we want to serve up the kind of feast and to make it tasty enough to where people recognize and they start to lose the appetite for the, the stuff that they've been, you know, the junk food they've been raiding from the pantry.

Hungry for the road all my life. Thirsty for adventure on my youth. Chasing all my freedoms down Liberty Avenue. I want to go back for a moment. Do as you.

You've brought out so many different aspects of different things.

Trying to, you know, define these contours of truth that have been there historically or helping us to see them in a greater way and how they relate to the modern expressions that we encounter all the time. You start off the book with four people at a Christian conference and you mention how they.

Each one has the potential of drifting into or drifting away from orthodoxy. Can you just give a quick brief overview of those four positions and why you chose those four?

Yeah, it just, it seemed like those were four common ways. I see that people start to drift. One is just the spiritual season of dryness or drought that can happen that just.

I think it's can happen either through sin or it can happen through suffering. And people can start to look for the jolt that they get from something seems innovative or fresh teaching wise. So that's one way we drift.

The other way is one way.

We've mentioned Already in this, in this podcast is talking about how some people are just like, I just want whatever works, just give me what's practical. I don't need to fool with theology. I don't need to really know theology, anything like that.

That person can drift easily into a no cult, like, it just would.

Would easily be taken in if people are doing the right things, it seems like, but are necessarily teaching something false or can drift into just a pragmatic understanding of the Christian life to where they. They start to see life as all about what they do rather than what Christ has done. So that's, that's one way to drift.

A third way, very popular today, I think, is just to. To always be unsettled and to be okay with being forever unsettled by some of the harder teachings of Christianity.

You know, just sort of that vulnerable sense of. I just want to, you know, I'm just wrestling through this and I really don't like this.

I wish that, you know, that the Bible taught something different, but this is what it teaches. I guess I got to go along with it, but I really, you know, would change it if I could. And so I just, I think that that sort of lack of.

I think if that's where someone is, they need to be honest and authentic about where they are in that and be.

But the goal is to work yourself out of that, to grow out of that, not to live in that forever, because if you do, it's not going to be attractive to other people in. First of all, like, you're not going to, hey, you know, come and be a Christian so you can be as unsettled in your faith as I am in mine.

Like, I just don't know that that really reaches people.

Like, people think, you know, So I think we want to get to a place where our heart actually wants, like, actually loves the truth, rather than just a sort of gritted teeth trying to hold on to whatever the truth teaches. And then.

Oh, and then the other way is just to, to replace Christianity with a cause, you know, the cross with a cause to be so involved in sort of the impact that Christianity is making on the world that Christianity becomes instrumentalized, becomes an end, becoming the end in itself, becomes a means to an end.

Well, with that along with that, we've seen a lot of press over the last five to 10 years on dealing with issues of social justice.

Right?

That's not a secret to anyone where. And you go into the Old Testament and you see justice. You see this idea of justice that is brought out.

I mean, you see it in different Old Testament books. Specifically.

It seems that it's been more in the late 19th, early 20th century, wherein the North American expression because of the social gospel became separated from many orthodox, and I would say even orthopraxy, this idea where the two became bifurcated and they shouldn't have been. How do we help people restore this aspect of justice within the proper understanding of justice within.

Under an orthodox umbrella or how do we get out of line? How do we get out of line? That might even be a better question. Which one ever you think is more profound?

This isn't. This is way more than we're. I know we gotta wrap up. This is gonna take.

This is gonna be number three. Trevin, that means you're gonna be back again. We gotta finish it up for number three.

Yeah, no, that's a. That's a really difficult question because. And it's.

It's interesting because in the American context, some things have been bifurcated that were not bifurcated in other. Either in our history or globally. If you go back to the sort of fundamentalist modernist controversies and things like they.

The debate over the social gospel and whatnot.

And so in the American context, it's there predominantly white denominations, I would say, not necessarily all the American context, but in those denominations where the fundamentalist modernist controversies were largest, there was a divorce between what was seen as social actions, the social work of the church, the social influence of the church, and historic or Christian teaching, orthodoxy and whatnot.

And that bifurcation is understandable historically, but also regrettable because it's not been the full witness of evangelicalism going back, if you go back centuries. And it's also not, certainly not where the global church is.

Look at, you know, the initial documents, for example, of the Lausanne conference and whatnot, of just global evangelical congress and whatnot. So, yeah, I, you know, how do we.

I mean, how is it that we get out of line here or how do we differentiate between sort of biblical social justice or like social justice? As you know, Basil the Great has a book called On Social justice from like the four hundreds.

They don't have a place for the transcendent that begin to. They're reductionist and that they reduce everything to economic class or in More recent cases like racial categories and whatnot.

The challenge here on, on unpacking exactly how we are able to navigate those waters is difficult because the church has been complicit in a lot of injustice through the years. So it's not as if the, the church is, is a, is a pristine place where we can keep polluted waters from coming in.

It's, it's a place where polluted waters have been in. And so it's possible to, to, you know, that you're trying to prevent secular ideologies from coming in and wreaking havoc today.

But you can only do that with, I think, some level of authority.

If you're also seeking to disinfect the water that you're in from the pollutions of racism that have been in the water for a long time to the point that some people don't even recognize that they're there. So anyway, that's a very short answer, short, beginning answer to a really long conversation we could have at some point.

Yes, we will have at some point, but I know we're running out of time here. We like to give people their water bottle to sip on for the week. I mean, Apollos water.

We want to water their faith and give something for them to hold on to. What's one little thought that they can hold on to this week as they're. They're trying to water their faith?

I just think about the eagerness that Jude had when he was writing that letter.

That's at the very end of the Bible where he, he said, you know, dear brothers, I was eager to write to you about the salvation we share, but I felt concerned and basically he feels concerned and then he is. He wants to write to urge him to contend for the faith once for all, delivered to the saints.

There's something about that eagerness in that he really wanted to just talk about the Gospel, but then he had to focus on these other issues. In all of the things that we do need to focus on.

Heresies, errors, challenges to the church, division, disunity, whatever it is that we may be facing even challenges in our own life, we ought to want to have that eagerness that Jude had to where that was why he sat down to write.

He had to focus on the challenges, but it's because he loved the truth so much and because he was eager to talk about that and to bask in that and to share that.

Some people may be prone to different dangers here, but I wonder if some of the people that are most sort of engaged in vociferous and like I'm going to root out all theological error, no matter wherever I find it. I sometimes sense in that, that I've. That I don't. I don't sense an eagerness and a thrill and a joy around the gospel.

It's more of a, you know, of combativeness that comes about from maybe just loving the fight more than loving the truth. I think there's something about that even. Yeah. When we do have to contend for the faith, and we do, that's what Jude tells us to do.

But he tells us that out of the. Out of a heart that is eager to bask in the glory of salvation. And I think that's the heart posture we want to have.

So if I were to, you know, water the souls of people that are listening, you know, do the heart. Check on yourself, you know, when was the last time you were eager to worship, to adore the living God, to speak of his salvation to other people?

Not eager to be in the fight, but eager about the truth that you're. You're wanting to contend for? I think that's an important word for us, especially after a long conversation about orthodoxy doctrine.

Oh, well, I would agree. I would agree. And I want to thank you for writing the book. I do recommend it to other people.

And I want to thank you again for coming on Apollo's water. Brother.

Thanks so much. I will be super courageous if I do it a third time. So.

I highly recommend Trevin's book. It's great. It's a practical guide into orthodoxy and why it matters. It's not too long, either, only about 200 pages.

And it goes into much more depth than what we could do in one short conversation, as you could no doubt tell from the last part of our conversation. And while I appreciate Trevin's approach, I want to ask you what you do with what he said. It's hard check time.

Do you have Jude's eagerness for the gospel? Are you eager to worship, to speak of your salvation, or are you more eager for the fight?

You know, there are four common ways that Trevin sees people drift. The first was dryness, looking for a jolt. Number two, always prioritizing the pragmatic, the whatever works approach.

Number three, deciding to be okay with always being unsettled in our belief. That's the never make a decision or never take a st. Or number four, replacing the cross with a cause.

And we must recognize that all of them are very real and can be extremely dangerous for each one of us. And maybe they are most dangerous because all of them have things in them with an element of goodness.

Sometimes that season of dryness stretches your faith. It helps you grow in ways you just couldn't get to otherwise. Remember, orthodoxy should be thrilling.

And you should have a desire to proclaim God's good news and Jesus to save people, to reconcile them to himself. And all of that fits into its proper place. And one thing that you can count on from us is that we're committed to orthodoxy.

Those creeds that Trevin mentioned, we affirm them all. The Nicene Creed is the basic form of our ministry's doctrinal statement.

We are evangelicals in the sense of Bebbington and Noel, not just an American political or ethnic sense. We are committed to the faith once delivered. We also know that our world is changing.

That just as every culture needs to wrestle with how to communicate the truths of our faith, orthodoxy in ways that make sense or can be understood in that culture, we have to do the same thing.

When a given culture changes, the reality is that our world is more global than ever, and in the west, it's less Christian, often quite hostile to Christianity. And that means, at the very least, we're going to have to rethink how we talk to the culture.

We need to ask brothers and sisters from the church around the world how they have addressed these questions.

And we need to reimagine what it might look like for the church to engage our culture, speaking truth boldly, yet with compassion, not shying away from the gospel, nor forgetting that Christ came for all because he loves us. When we have done that work of rethinking and reimagining, then we need to redeploy. We can't sit back. We have to truly love God and our neighbor.

That is the heart, the thrill of orthodoxy. Thanks to our Apollos water team for helping water your world. This is Travis Michael Fleming signing off from Apollo's Watered.

Stay watered, everybody.