#208 | The Story of God & Idolatry in Western Culture, Pt. 1 | Mike Goheen

The biblical story is the shape of the Christian faith.

And if you allow the Christian faith to become a set of ideas and beliefs, those beliefs are going to be absorbed into the powerful Western story and be carried along by the stream of the Western story.

And what you need is an equally comprehensive and powerful vision of story and vision of the Christian life to be able to counter and to walk upstream against that story.

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 Fleming, and I am your host. And today on our show, we're having another one of our deep conversations.

What story are you living out of? You know, it might be the American Dream. I think that is for so many of us.

We don't even realize how much that has influenced how we think, how we live, how we compare ourselves to other people. You know, oftentimes when we start off, we start to gain a little traction, whether we're entering into adulthood.

We want to become financially independent, we're starting to grow, we want promotions, we want to be able to travel, get new things, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And I've noticed, though, over the years that we have this kind of nebulous idea of happiness.

Most of the time, it's about material prosperity, getting a house, having a car, a good job, something that makes people envious about who we are. And this idea of this American Dream isn't just for America. In fact, we've exported it all over the world. So I want to ask you this question.

How is the American Dream working out for you? Now, I don't need statistics to tell me this. I see it. I hear it when I talk to people. People are stressed.

They're just trying to keep their head above water. And it's true. We're killing ourselves just trying to keep up.

And somehow those of us who live in this Western culture have bought into the idea hook, line, and sinker. It's a story I bet you didn't even realize you were trying to live out.

I know I didn't realize it until I started delving into the lives of the people in my church. We've all bought into it in one way or another. I know I did. And I bet you have, too. And you probably may not even realize it.

I didn't until I started reading and studying it and wondering why I had this feeling of being stuck and Seeing the people around me feeling stuck. And I realized we've been co opted. You've been sucked in. I have too. And we started living out of that story and not the biblical story.

And that's important to distinguish between those two because when we look around at the church today, it doesn't look like the church in other cultures. I don't know if you've noticed it. I bet you have, because I think you're a pretty smart person.

But Christians have largely become, if you haven't noticed, marginalized and ineffective and in many ways just completely disregarded in a culture. Do you feel that way? I know you do because we talk about it all the time. The question is why?

What's going on in our culture to make people think that we're no different, that we can be completely disregarded. Now there's a lot of factors to that.

And Mike is actually going to show us many of the things that have happened that have got us in this cultural moment that we're in right now. And lately you've probably heard us talking about a missionary encounter.

Well, that's the new language we exist to equip and encourage Christians, leaders and churches and their missionary encounter with Western culture.

We talk about mission identity, we talk about a missionary ecclesiology, which means like how the church is to orient itself to the world as like missionaries to reach the world. And I know they can sound like buzzwords or jargon, but they aren't, not for us.

I mean, this is who we are because we really are missionaries, not just on the other side of the world. But imagine being from India and being from this small village.

You get off the plane and you see everything that America is and you start to wonder, what are the idols? What are the false gods that are here? We do have them everywhere and they influence us. And those stories actually can pick us up and carry us along.

Now these terms, missionary encounter, they're not original to us this term. Mission identity or missionary ecclesiology.

In fact, Tim Keller, the former pastor of Redeemer Presbyterian Church in New York, talked about it a lot. And he got it from a guy named Leslie Newbegin. And we wanted to share a bit about him and his thinking on the church because it's so important.

Matter of fact, I think he was a prophet for today. And that's why I've invited my friend Mike Gohen back because he is a Leslie Newbegin scholar.

When we first started this show, we would say, come and drink from the fire hose, right? This really kind of Larger in life personality.

And I have to warn you though, there are some people that I get around and I'm like, okay, I'm just going to give them all the information and they're overwhelmed. This guy makes me look like a squirt gun. I mean he knows so much. I can just listen for hours. And I'm not joking.

If you're used to listening to the show on one and a half speed, I'm going to suggest that you slow it down this time and honestly strap in because these are some deep but crucial and eye opening and illuminating waters. I mean, you want to know why you're so stressed out? He's going to show you that.

Because if you don't realize what it is that's stressing you out, it can't be fixed. And really this conversation, I want you to see it as start of a process. Okay?

You may not grab everything right away, but if you start to listen in and you start to replay it, you're going to see that there is a lot of stuff there. And I would also encourage you to check out our newly revamped Apollo's Watered website.

We're going to have many different resources that we're going to be putting up there and I wanted to tell you that we want to serve you. That's what God has called us to do, to serve you in your missionary encounter with Western culture.

And that's why we are now offering what we call watering weekends. Now they don't have to be on the weekend, it can be through the week.

But we want to go to your church, your leadership team, your organization and help talk about many of these things that have helped challenge or change our thinking and our perspective and so how we can get back to the Word of God so that the word of God might show us how to live fruitful, victorious and effective lives for the kingdom. So I would encourage you to sit back and listen in to my conversation with Mike Gohin. Happy listening. Mike Goheen, welcome back to Apollo's Water.

Thank you. Good to be here.

Are you ready for the fast five?

I guess as ready as I'm ever going to be for an old guy.

Here we go. So you go back and forth between Phoenix and Vancouver, but Phoenix is most known for this kind of food. And why?

Well, that's. I'm probably not the right person to ask about this in a fast way.

Oh, that's right. You're not a foodie.

I am the opposite of a foodie. I'll tell you one thing, I love In Phoenix, I love Texas barbecue, so that's crazy.

It's a Texas barbecue in Phoenix and you can't get that in Vancouver. Vancouver, it's British fish and chips, but for me, Phoenix, it's Texas barbecue. Sorry about that.

Well, this is. My other questions are going to be terrible.

My second question, it's also a food question, but because you're Canadian, I want to know what the best kind of poutine is.

I didn't know there are many kinds of poutine, so you just caught me.

There's poutineries. I learned about poutineries. I had no idea there were many different kinds.

Again, I'm not, not being a foodie. I enjoy poutine. I just had it about a week ago before I came down here and enjoyed it. But are there many kinds? I suppose.

Different cheeses, different kinds of gravy? I don't know.

Okay, so poutine is not the best question. All right, how about this one? Since you're in Phoenix, what's the best part of living in Phoenix?

Because I'd like to know, considering you've had how many days of 100 degrees in the high here right now.

My favorite thing about living in Phoenix, I do like the heat. So I'm the raw again, I'm the wrong guy to say it's bad to be hot. I like the heat. My wife does not. I love the heat.

I love getting up every morning and jumping in my pool. I like that kind of thing. I guess what I like most about it is I, to be honest, it's the cohorts that I teach 15 leaders.

And they have become some of the most nourishing small groups, if you can put it, that I've ever had in our academic environment. I love the people here. I love the people that are the leaders in the church. They are just wonderful.

I like that. Well, how about this one? Since it is a little odd, by the way, that you like heat and you're from Canada, but I guess that does exist.

So let me ask you this.

Some people like heat because they are from Canada.

That's true. All right, how about this one? I like to ask this one. What people don't get about being Canadian.

Is what, what don't they get? Well, for me, it's just about everything. When I, when I get start to realize that we are Americans and Canadians are so different.

But the subtleties and sometimes you start to realize, okay, I think they're hearing me, but I think they're hearing me through a different Grid. But I think that. I think Americans are much bolder and much more aggressive. And I think that can be good and it can be bad.

And I think that sometimes the approach of Canadians and not being aggressive and bold can be seen as being timid, as being. Being too passive, being nice. Kings are nice. And I think they. That's a misunderstanding of Canadians.

Okay. I mean, I think the whole world would be surprised if Canada led a war just because that flag is not intimidating.

Yeah. We don't have any tanks. And if we did, we'd have three. Three gears in reverse and one.

Okay. Number five. Now this is a little different question.

If you could pick one year to go back to in time non biblical and be a biblical, what year would you go to and why?

I would love to go back and sit in on the discipleship programs of the early church under Irenaeus. Oh, I would. To me, that model that Irenaeus has been using, that Irenaeus spells out, that has been. That was worked its way through the early church.

That to me in many ways defines what I'm trying to do here at mtc. And I see them, I see them doing that and I would love to know how they did it.

How is it that they were able to help new converts go through two years of this kind of rigorous discipleship? And how did they do it? How did they help them understand the biblical story? How did they help them understand the Western story?

I mean that was critical. That you have to understand that the Western stories that are shaping you and you got to be. Have be detoxified from the idolatry of those stories.

I'd like to see how they did that. I'd love to see their practices and how they did it. That'd be probably one of the times that comes to mind.

They have two years of intense discipleship.

Yep. Before. And then on the final. On the end of two years, they would be in. On Easter, there'd be a great baptism.

And so those, you know, that, that lengthy time period that was quite intense. The idea was you're. You're going to get to know the biblical story. You're going to what you're.

And you're going to get to know the Roman story that's been shaping you. And what you're going to do is you're going. We're.

If you don't not only come to know these stories, but start living in such a way that you look like Jesus and are making the biblical story attractive to people, you don't do that. We don't baptize you. I mean, it was pretty. It was.

There's a lot of stuff that's been that I've appreciated that's been written recently on some of that whole catechetical process.

I want to learn more. What year is that about?

Well, Irenaeus wrote his. His in the second century.

Okay.

So, yeah, his. Yeah. If you're interested, the person that's written two or three books on this just died recently.

Church historian named Alan Kreider, K R E I D E R. And he's the one that's really been showing that the vision of that early church catechism involved the biblical story. Yes, that's it. That's it.

Yeah.

Yeah, that's one of them. There's one or two other smaller books that I don't have the title right now, but smaller books that actually focus even more on some of this.

But they're saying these catechisms are saying you got to live into the biblical story with Christ as the fulfillment. You've got to understand the Western culture and story that's been shaping you.

And all this for the purpose of being good news, looking like Jesus for the sake of the world.

I have talked with other people. Scott Sundquist talked a bit about this book and I actually had it. But I keep hearing more and more people refer to it.

I mean, of course he died, so I wouldn't be able to interview him. But I love the. I love what I've read so far in the book. And I think we need those type of counter.

Those catechesis methods that you talked about, which leads us to your book. I want to talk about the church and its vocation. Leslie Newbiggin's Missionary Ecclesiology.

Now, this is a book that most people are going to go, what are you talking about? I have no idea. So let's start a bit with learning about Leslie New Begin. Who. First of all, who is he and how did you get into Leslie Newbegin?

The guy named Leslie? I mean, that's a little bit strange there, but.

And. And with two S's.

With two S's, too. It's like, what, What. Where is he from anyway?

Many scholars spell his name with one S and then put two GS in Newbiggin. And he always wondered if they're compensating or something. But anyway, who is he and how did I get into our good. Are great questions.

Here's how I got. I was teaching my first worldview course and I asked a worldview scholar who had been teaching for years. What are you using?

He was using his own book, as you might expect. He was using another fairly well known book by Niebuhr called Christ and Culture.

And then he's reading and then he using this third book called Foolishness to the Greeks by Leslie Nubian. I said, what is that book and who is Leslie Nubian? Well, this came at the end of about seven years I'd been a church planter.

I planted the church and I was pastoring it. It was in the Toronto, Canada area, very neo pagan. And I am trying to understand what it means to bring the gospel to this area.

And then I read this book by Leslie Newbegin called Foolishness to the Greeks.

I'd love to tell you more about this, but for the first 20 pages of that book I read over and over and over again and I was saying this guy is onto something and I don't know what it is, but he's onto something that is speaking to me as a church planter that is frustrated. I'm frustrated because I'm being offered a confessionalism that is conservative on the one side.

It's wonderfully biblically, biblical and theological, but not relevant. And the church growth movement on the other side. This wonderfully relevant but not rooted in scripture and theology.

And I don't know a way forward other than balancing on both feet. And here is someone that is bringing me into a new paradigm, a new vision that's going to help me understand what I've been doing for seven years.

And so I'm reading these 20 pages over and over, trying to make sense of them. In the meantime, running down to my wife about every hour saying, you got to hear this, you got to hear this. This is resolving so many of my issues.

You got to hear this. And I tried to figure out what he was doing.

To make a long story short, I started realizing that here is a man that was one of the best known Christians of this time, one of the best known authors. This is in the late 80s. I began church planting in the early 80s. I'm reading his book in the late 80s and I'm starting to realize that this is one.

The books of this man are some of the best selling books going on right now. He's written two or three books that are exploding on the scene. And I realize I'm not the only one that this is happening to.

I'm one of many that this is happening to. And so I find out who is this man and I realize, here's who he Is in a nutshell. He's a fellow that has a long history in, in India.

He's been 40 years a missionary in India. He's been a public figure for long through that period, but he's been a missionary in India for 40 years.

He has now returned to England after 40 years, and he's now looking at England and the whole of Europe and for that matter, the whole of Western culture through a new set of lenses.

It's almost like his 40 years of experience has given him a new set of glasses to look at the culture in a mission way, the way a missionary, when it goes to a Hindu or a Muslim or a Buddhist culture and the way they have to understand how that culture deeply affects everything. Now he's coming back to a culture that is claiming to either be Christian or neutral, and he's realizing it's neither. What it is is neopagan.

It's deeply humanistic, and it is a religion that is just as dangerous, if not more so, than Hinduism or Islam. And so he's coming back and he's with his new missionary eyes, he's asking huge questions about how the church is to live faithfully in that culture.

And he writes an article that is an article that has become quite famous where he says that the Western church is, quote, an advanced case of syncretism. An advanced case of syncretism. Now, what is syncretism? Syncretism. Here's one of his stories. Syncretism is when he goes into a Hindu temple.

And that Hindu temple has many figures around the temple.

And over here on this one side is a picture of Jesus with an altar before it, where on Christmas Day you come before the altar of Jesus, offer food to him and you pray and worship Jesus on that day among many other gods. He said missionaries would recognize quickly that's not Christianity, that's not a foothold for Christ in Hindu culture. That's syncretism.

Christ has been absorbed into the idolatry of Hindu culture. And he says he started to realize that this is exactly what was happening in the West.

The west, because they thought the culture is neutral or Christian, had allowed the gospel and their lives to be absorbed syncretistically into the idolatry of humanist neopagan culture.

And so he mounts a challenge to that and starts writing books that start to expose the idolatrous roots and the way it's beginning to shape the Western church.

And so here am I, a young, not quite 40 something, I guess, pastor, kind of turning towards the academy at the time, starting a PhD work starting to say, oh my goodness, he's speaking my language. He is speaking what I have seen in the Toronto area. He is speaking to the exact things.

And I'm starting to realize that this church growth movement is deeply syncretistic. And the problem is with this confessionalism, it's got great stuff from a contextualized past that's not speaking to the present.

What I need is somehow to bring that tradition and the gospel forward into the present in a way that begins to challenge the syncretism of the Canadian church. So that was my exposure, my coming into newbegin. And he's using this language of a missionary encounter with culture.

And I'm saying, what in the world is that? What is a missionary encounter with culture?

And what he's saying is, it's basically what a missionary does when he goes to Hindu culture and he realizes the categories he uses, the way he lives, all of it is being shaped by the idolatry of the culture.

And somehow he's got to find a way forward that faithfully communicates the gospel, faithfully allows him to live the gospel in that culture and make the good news known without allowing it to fall prey to the idolatry of Western culture, of Hindu culture. And so that really began a journey for me. The journey affected me deeply.

Very quick, just I'll let I know you want to get in here and ask some questions. So I'll stop in a moment. But here the journey it started, I'm the end of the 80s. I'm into my PhD work.

I'm realizing probably being a pastor is not my main vocation. I need to be in the academy. I'm into my doctoral dissertation and I'm studying systematic theology, specifically the work of Herman Bobink.

And then I started to realize I don't want to study Western systematic theology. What I want to study is the. I want to study missiology.

I want to study theology from the standpoint of missiology, because this is where Neubigen has got his insights. He's got it from this long tradition of missiology that's been narrowed to a very small part of the theological curriculum.

And I realized that this area of missiology has a lot to say to the church today, has a lot to say to theological curriculum. And so I do something that. Travis, if you do a PhD, don't you dare do this. What I did is I switched horses in midstream.

I finished all my doctoral classwork and orals in systematic theology, and I'm ready. I'm working on BAVINC and I realized, no, I want to do missiology.

And so I had to spend another 10 years studying missiology and reading all the reading through the whole 20th century of missiology to get to know this era area. And I had to get to know Newbegin. I had to get to understand how he fit into this bigger story.

And in doing that, through those, it wasn't quite a decade, but little less than a decade, I started, it started to reorient me and then I was ready to write a dissertation on Leslie Newbegin. And so I almost got fired from my university because it took so long to get the PhD. But it wasn't because I was being slack or lazy.

It was just that I had to get into this whole new area of study and I had to get into it from a different angle. Not as someone who wanted to be a cross cultural missionary in the colonial era, in the colonial paradigm, but missiology.

That spoke powerfully to what we needed to hear today. So that's my origins in Leslie Newbiggin.

So with Newbegin, you're right about his though missionary ecclesiology. You also talk about a missionary identity. So what does he mean by a missionary identity and a missionary ecclesiology?

Yeah, good question. The problem with the word mission is it's not a biblical word, it's a theological word. And theological words are like suitcases.

You pack a bunch of stuff into it and then with that little one suitcase you, you're able to communicate a lot quickly. And if you want to know what's in that suitcase, you got to unpack it.

And the suitcase, mission suitcase that's been used for many years has been the idea of going from home base to the mission field. It was first used in the 16th century. But the word mission is a theological word like trinity, like providence.

They're not in the Bible, but they're trying to pack biblical stuff into it. So one word. And so when you start unpacking it and you start saying, okay, mission is about cross cultural missions in the colonial paradigm.

You say, well, that that's marginal, if it's even faithful anymore in light of the colonial paradigm. And. But I started realizing that there's a lot more. It was very different suitcase for Newbegin and for many others. What they.

So I start with a mission missionary encounter with culture, a church being faithful, not being syncretistically absorbed. So my next step back is, well, what's the church anyway? And that's what New Begin was talking about, a missional church.

And what he meant by that forget what maybe others do. What he meant by that is that the whole biblical story has a missional direction. Meaning by that the Bible moves from one man to all the nations.

It moves from Abraham to all the nations in the book of Revelation.

And that missional direction of moving from one man through one nation, through the one man, Jesus, through the Jewish, the church in Jerusalem, out to the nations and using the community, God uses that community, Israel, then the church, to accomplish his purposes, to bring the good news to the nations, that that is a missional direction. And the people of God have a missional vocation or identity. Meaning what?

That they have a role to play in this story, that God is restoring the blessing of creation in them, but not only in them, through them to the world. And so this missional identity is not simply doing evangelism or going overseas.

It's about being the true humanity that God intended human beings to be for the sake of the world. So basically, God creates Adam, Adam thwarts God's purpose for the creation.

God chooses Abraham and he's going to form a new humanity out of the old humanity to be, be what Adamic humanity failed to be. And he begins to create this new humanity that will be what Adamic humanity failed to be. And that is going to be the people of God through the story.

And they're to be that new humanity as God works in them, but not just for their own sake, but so that they can be a light to the nations, so that their lives can be attractive before the nations. Deuteronomy 4 speaks, Where Moses speaks to Israel, says, now you're going into the land.

And if you live out this Torah, this law that shapes you in a way of love and justice and wisdom before the nations. They will ask the question, who is your God? Where is this law? And they'll be attracted to me as the living God. That's what missional is all about.

But the problem with today, and I won't continue the story, is that now that people are not an ethnic people defined by politic, political community. They're now communities in every idolatrous nation of the world, whether that be India, whether that be the United States, Canada, Britain, Korea.

And now they're called to be what Israel failed to be, the new humanity in every part of the world. And so their vocation is to be that new humanity. Said, this is God's purpose for humanity in the midst of the world.

This is the new humanity that one day will inherit and populate the new Earth. Don't you want to join us and become part of this new humanity?

Only to the degree we're offering a new way of being human and inviting people into that, not allowing the idolatry of our culture to dehumanize us. Only to that degree are we being faithful.

So I realized that his whole concern for encountering the idols of culture was bound up with his view of a missionary church, a missional church, being in their identity of being the new humanity, living into the story and calling others into it. So that's what that language would try to convey.

You have mentioned numerous times the idolatries of a culture or a nation and even in the church. What are some of the idolatries that you see? You referred to syncretism that, that we have combined in the American church.

Being Canadian, coming in, seeing it, a little bit of an outsider's eyes, what are some of the idolatries that you see that are at work in the American church?

If I go to the deepest level, the Canadian church is bound up in many of the same idolatries because we're part of a bigger Western civilization complex with the same idolatrous roots. On the other hand, it takes a different form.

And in many ways you can look at the different forms the way Europe, it's an older Western culture, the United States, that was a culture formed during the Enlightenment, and then post enlightenment cultures like Canada, New Zealand, Australia, that have a different shape yet, but all of them have the same kind of idolatries, but have expressed them differently. So what idols then would I see in the United States and many of them in Canada as well, but in the United States?

Well, I think one of the major ones is freedom.

The whole notion of liberalism in its old 19th century sense of the free, autonomous individual that undergirds the whole shaping of American culture. I am free to be and do whatever I want.

And that expresses itself in the right wing and in the left wing, it's just a matter of what you're free to do and be whatever you want. And so I think freedom, the whole is which. I think that's misusing a biblical word. It's not freedom. A much better word is autonomy. Autonomy.

I am a law unto myself. I don't have to be live under God's law. I'm a law to myself. My freedom is about the individual.

I was struck between the difference between Canada and the U.S. and the whole area of COVID When Covid hit in the US And Canada, I was both countries. Canada.

There was some, still some sense of British Common law of the common good. And Canadians kind of said, well, of course you do these things to take care of one another, this part of what it means to live as community.

Whereas there's this sense of individual autonomy. You can't tell me to wear a mask, you can't tell me to get these vaccines. You can't tell me to social distance.

Now, whether there are good reasons or not behind those, what underlay it is a sense of autonomy. I can be what I want as an individual and no one's going to tell me what to do. So there's no sense of the common good.

And so I think that freedom, I think secondly, I think the biggest. One of the biggest idols is consumerism.

We've lived for decades, for centuries now, by making the economy central to our culture, a growing economy, and we've moved from a sort of a producing industrial society into one where the goods are now being consumed. Consumption has become more than a consumption of goods. It's become a consumption of experiences.

And I think that we're now consuming everything from marriages to missions, trips to worship. And so consumption, I think a consumerist worldview that begins to engulf everything in consumption is a big, huge idol in the West.

I think political ideologies are enormous. I think the ideologies of the right and the left are idolatrous.

They're focusing and taking one aspect of public life, whatever that might be, and they're building whole stories and whole political visions around that without being able to listen to the other person. And so I think you've got the different political ideologies, right, that are ripping apart American culture. Both of them are deeply idolatrous.

I think this would be part of the freedom. But I think we have made idols out of sexuality. This is what's led, I think, to a lot of the gender issues and the sexuality issues.

I can make my body and I can do with my sexuality what I want. And I think all that has come from the sexual revolution of the past and making sex very much of an idol, not keeping in its. In its place.

So I think in post modernity, there's a number of idols at work there. They rightly recognize that reason and technology are not going to build a better world.

And I think it's led to a number of idolatrous movements that are showing themselves both in the woke movement and the Trumpist movement.

And I suppose if I could just think of one more, I mean, I could go on for a while, but technicism, I think technology is an enormous and I think technology is ruining our lives in all kinds of ways. And if it's not ruining it, at least we can say it's emptying it.

And I think we desperately need to ask how our cell phones and computers and social media, the way it's affecting us so deeply, we put our trust in technology a couple hundred years ago or 150 years ago, start building a better culture. And the way idolatry works is you put your trust in me, great, I'll give you some benefits, and I'll own you very quickly.

And technology has done just that. It's given us tremendous benefits, but it's increasingly owning us as well. So I'd say technology is one of those idols as well.

You and I share a same vision for that we see the idolatries at work. And I know right now many of our people are listening, saying, what did you call an idol? How are these things breaking down?

I think you've given us a pretty good description. I think, though, it's very difficult for many of our people in the churches to see that as an idolatry.

How do we help people to see that's an idolatry when they're already divided so much, and we know that we're going to be inundated with emails, possibly called to an account, maybe even fired if you're a pastor of a church, because you and I both know that's where the fights, where people will fight to the, to the death to make these positions known.

How do we help convince our people that these are idolatries and that they really have combined these ideas with the Christian faith, and it's not the Christian faith.

I wish I had a silver bullet for you, Travis. I wish I could just say. I wish I could say, here's how you do it. But, but I, I, I, I'm so, I'm just gonna just say a few things.

I'm saying basically that is, that is what I've been giving my life to, my whole academic life to. So that's a huge, that would be a huge answer. But for many years, I taught in the university, I taught worldview studies.

And in the worldview studies, I was trying to help students understand their idolatries, how it affected their public life and vocation. So for me, one of the ways of doing it was opening up the meeting of the gospel, opening up the meeting of the biblical story.

And it was then a lot of it was just helping them understand their story, helping them understand how the Western story had so deeply shaped us today. And A lot of them just said we had no idea about the story and how we'd been shaped by it. So a lot of it is just telling the story.

That's what I used to do in the university. Now in the last 12 years, I've been doing that with leaders and pastors and trying to help them wrestle through these issues.

And what I do is I start. I just started a new freshman group yesterday of leaders, or actually Tuesday. And what I did in there is I always start with the gospel.

What is the gospel? What was this gospel Jesus proclaimed? Well, the gospel he proclaimed wasn't what a lot of Americans say it is already.

That's been syncretistically absorbed into individualism. But the gospel that Jesus proclaims is good news. The kingdom of God has come. That is God's power to renew and heal the creation.

And all of human life is broken into history in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus. That already begins to open eyes to these leaders, that this gospel is much bigger than simply individual salvation in the future.

It's about Christ ruling our lives. Now. Then secondly, I take them, spend a long time taking them through the biblical story and why it's so urgent.

The biblical story is the shape of the Christian faith.

And if you allow the Christian faith to become a set of ideas and beliefs, those beliefs are going to be absorbed into the powerful Western story and be carried along by the stream of the Western story. And what you need is an equally comprehensive and powerful vision of the. Of story and vision of the.

Of the Christian life to be able to counter and to walk upstream against that story. I mean, that was a view that, that was a vision Nubigan had. And that's a view that Abraham Kuyper had.

Both of them said, how do we get a comprehensive vision to stand against this powerful cultural stream? Well, Newbiggin said, and I believe it's the biblical story. It's the only way.

If you don't have a story, your beliefs are going to get absorbed into this powerful cultural story. And then the third step from gospel to story, the third step is to help people see this is their missionary identity.

The people of God are not a religious institution catering to individuals to help them nurture their individual salvation for the future.

The church is the community called to be the new humanity for the sake of the world, to live out the gospel in every area of their lives for the sake of the world. And then thirdly and fourthly, rather, it's encountering the culture.

And that's what most I would say, most leaders would say that's the most revolutionary part. The first three Gospel story and missional identity. Click. In the fourth section, when I begin to talk a missionary encounter with culture.

I take them through the Western story from the pre Socratics right through till today. And as I take them through the story, I'm indicating at various points where our different beliefs have come from and why they're now shaping us.

And by the end of that first year, I know I've heard it so many times, their heads are spinning and they're realizing, my goodness, I never understood our culture from that standpoint till all of a sudden. Understanding that story has helped me see what is there.

And then the rest of the four years to continue with this, answering your question, the rest of the four years are then okay, within that story. Let me help you see where technicism, consumerism, liberalism, racism, sexual identity and gender, the problems with issues with gender, economism.

Let me help you see where those come and how they're shaping the whole of life and what is creationally good about these things and what's idolatrously twisted about these things so we can seize and embrace what's good and say no to their cultural distortion. So it's a long process. There's no silver bullet, Travis.

You know, it's a long process of a deepening discipleship into the Gospel, a deepening discipleship into the story of the Bible, a deepening discipleship into our. What it means to be the people of God, and a deepening discipleship into knowing our culture and its religious core.

So it's a long process, telling the story, wrestling with its individual, Its. Its religious core, and then seeing how that core has affected institutions and practices within culture and then learning how to live within them.

Oh, my. I just have spill out a whole.

Agenda that is like several classes, as you've already alluded to. And I know some people.

No, it's. No, it's. No, it's not several classes.

It's years.

It's a whole life of discipleship. You know, this deep.

I know many of our people that are listening are still. Their heads are still spinning.

But when you said it's not just an individual is salvation and getting into heaven, but getting really that heaven into you.

Now, this idea, and I think it goes back, if we were to look at it biblically, just as one verse where Jesus comes preaching and teaching that preaching the gospel, the kingdom of God is at hand, but it says gospel there. And the question is, what was he preaching? If he hadn't died yet.

And that's where you get the understanding of the kingdom and the fact that the New Testament talks about kingdoms so often. It's something that many evangelicals have largely lost, and it's affected so many different areas of our lives in our Christian faith.

And like you said, it's because of the Western cultural story. We've imbibed that speaking of that story, what is that story for our people? So that they might understand it.

They're like, I've never heard this Western culture story. What are you talking about here? What do you mean by the Western cultural story?

How long do you want?

I want. Just give it, give it.

Well, this. I'm not sure where to start, because if I start back in the Presocratics, we're going to be here for a while.

If I start at the Enlightenment, that has begun to deeply affect American culture, that's a good place to start because that's the place of a real conversion in many ways, in Western culture. But the trouble is to understand that conversion got to know what's gone before, what led into it. So this is. Let me. Let me see if I can.

Let me see if I can do it this way.

Michael Polani has used an image, and he says that the explosion of Western culture is lighting the flame of Western pagan Greek humanism in the oxygen of the gospel. See a light, this pagan humanism that came from the early Greeks in the. The oxygen of the gospel. Now he's talking about a late explosion.

But the reality is that it's been the gospel and it's been the pagan humanism of people like Plato and Aristotle that have formed a syncretistic alliance and shaped European culture. Now, I would love to talk about that, but I'm going to let that go.

But as we move into the modern era, what begins to happen with the Renaissance and on into the scientific revolution, the Enlightenment, is that humanism begins to separate itself, as it were, from the Christian faith, no longer forming this nice partnership. The way you might say it to children is there was a marriage of people that were incompatible through the Middle Ages.

But now all of a sudden at the Renaissance, they start realizing they're incompatible and they start to push away. And so what we're talking about is secularism here.

As the humanist worldview starts to push itself away more and more from the Gospel, it continues to be deeply shaped by the gospel. But now humanism is beginning to exert its freedom that paganism is going to become a neo paganism by the time we reach the late 20th century.

And so what happened between the Renaissance, where the Christian faith was still very strong with humanism and the Enlightenment, when finally there is this conversion to humanism, what happened in between? Well, there's two main theses that historians talk about.

First was in the scientific revolution, they were given a choice, and you're given a choice between the Christian faith and science. Either the Christian faith was true and the earth was at the center of the universe and so forth, or science was true.

And more and more people rejected the Christian faith, saying we can see what we can see. And so that led to the diminishment of the Christian faith.

But the second thing that was probably even more problematic was after the Reformation, there were all these religious wars. Calvinists were killing Lutherans, Lutherans were killing Catholics, Catholics were killing the Lutherans, Everybody was killing each other.

And the thing is that everybody was killing the poor Anabaptists. And so what you've got is Europe being soaked with the blood of Christians.

And you see people like Voltaire and people like Descartes saying, oh, if this is the Christian faith that holds culture together, we want to reject it because this is what it leads to. And so there's this growing rejection of the Christian faith because of what it leads to, this kind of hostility.

And so in the next century of the Enlightenment, there is the conversion of Western culture to a humanist vision. That humanist vision holds onto a lot of Christian stuff, but now reshapes it.

And that Enlightenment vision is we will build the new creation, but we're going to build it. God will not build it. And the way we are going to build it is by science coming to understand our world.

And as we understand that world, we apply it to the world, first of all through technology that enables us to control the non human creation.

And then we're able to control it by applying it to the social area, by forming economic and political and digital and media systems shaped by science. And when we get a good economic system, let's say capitalism, and a good political system, let's say democracy, that's deeply shaped by science.

And we are rigorous in making sure that scientific science undergirds those institutions, will shape a society where we can build this better world.

That was my generation. I used to actually have hair down to here. You'd never believe it.

But in that hippie generation, you had a whole generation of people growing up saying, this worldview's not working. Look what it's leading to. And you see this enormous revolution in the 60s that are saying, this is not working.

And this is the origins and the beginning of post modernity that is saying that story didn't work. It's led to more oppression, more injustice, more destruction of our world. And he says, that is not working.

And in many ways, what you see in the United States back in this time is really, really polarization. Let's hold on to our humanist past, but of course that's considered to be Christian. Let's hold on to our humanist past.

And you see people saying, no, no, these godless liberals are saying, that's not working. You know, that, that, that, that story, that history is not working. It's destroying our culture. And that's evolved.

And we could talk about its evolution in the late 20th, early 21st century, but now you're in a situation where in many ways, you've got a culture that's at culture wars precisely because that vision of life did not work.

That vision of life that was embodied in the Founding Fathers of the United States, that Enlightenment vision that's embodied in the Founding Fathers United States, it did not work. It wasn't a Christian vision. It was an Enlightenment vision, and it did not work. And the fragmentation is, what do we do how in the world?

What do we do now in a culture where we see its failure? Well, that's probably way too general, probably raises all kinds of red flags. But I think that that has to be worked out concretely.

And showing that this is. We're in. We're in the midst.

The way I like to put it, we're in the midst, in our culture at this moment of the failure of idols that idols, as my friend Chris Wright says, idols never fail to fail. Idols never fail to fail.

And the good gift of science, the good gift of technology, the good gift of economic freedom, the good gift of democratic visions, of. Of. Of.

Of politics, the good understandings of justice that came from all that under all that is failing to deliver the new creation that we want to see. And so those gifts have become idols. And what idols do is they say, give your heart to me.

When you give me your heart, I will give you something in return. Because they're powers of creation, technology, science, they'll give you stuff.

But soon as I give you some of these gifts from creation, I'll soon take over your heart, and I will dominate you and I'll dehumanize you. That's the way idolatry works. I think. We're seeing so much of that in our culture today.

I told you that this was a deep conversation. I mean, it's deep stuff, important stuff that we need to wrestle with, and it can be uncomfortable. All right, I know that.

And we don't like to hear that the story we've been a part of, this Western story, has ultimately failed. I don't like that. It makes me feel like what? Like I don't like that feeling. And that's this enlightenment dream. Just can't deliver.

And you may not even think about that. You're like the enlightenment. I haven't thought about that since high school.

But it's time to zoom in, because those ideas are having ripple effects up till this moment in time. As an American, a Canadian, talking about this, it seems a little off, almost treasonous.

But he's got insights that I don't even realize in my own cultural seat right here. Because there's a deep truth that as Christians, we need to recognize that any culture, any story apart from God, is destined to fail.

Oh, and it may get farther. And next time, we're going to talk about some of the really great things that the west has brought us.

Not everything was bad, but when we still delve down into it, we're going to see that it still can't solve the fundamental need we all have, because only Jesus can.

And when we start to look at our own culture this way, we start to realize that we have to look at it with missionary eyes, that if we want to live out our faith and share it with others, we need to recognize that we need to shift our thinking. We need to see what we actually get to be a part of. And it's a bigger story. Your story is not just this American dream. It's a bigger story.

God has invited you to be a part of that. Yes. You where you are with your experiences, with all your backgrounds. He wants to break you free and get you out of that rut.

And not everything that we've known is completely wrong, but it's that God is inviting us to a bigger story. He's opening our eyes to see something much more grand than we ever thought about.

Next time, I continue my conversation with Mike about some of the good things of Western culture, how we can handle these dangers and cultural idols that we encounter. We also talk about the central place of discipleship, the bigness of the Gospel, and much, much more.

Again, I want to encourage you to go to our website to check out the newly launched website. Feel free to sign up for our newsletter and become one of our watering partners in the process.

If you or your church or organization would like to invite us to come to your church for a watering weekend, please sign up today. We would love to be able to come to you and help you in your missionary encounter with Western culture.

I want to thank our Apollos Watered team for helping us to water your world. This is Travis Michael Fleming signing off from Apollo's Watered. Stay watered everybody.