#234 | What Are Christians For? with Jake Meador, Pt. 1

I was doing history, like 20th century history, which is full of all of these tragedies and horrible wars and genocides and injustices. And so I was.

And I don't know that I could have put it this way at the time, but I really needed a Christian faith big enough to address that and actually have something to say.

It's watering time, everybody.

It's time for Apollos 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.

Is your faith big enough to handle the very complex issues that you face day in and day out?

I think one of the reasons that so many people are deconstructing is that they're looking at their faith and it's simply insufficient to face the modern world because they haven't been taught the full counsel of God's word and what they're to be doing in the world. I mean, we all know kind of the obvious answer that we're disciples who are to make disciples. We're to go and make disciples of all nations. Right?

That's the Great Commission. But there is so much more involved.

I don't think many of us realize that because we haven't taught that, because we've relegated the message of Jesus down to this small discipleship component. And that is huge. It really is huge. And many people don't even know that.

But when you start delving into the word of God and you start seeing just the wonderful nature of the story of God and what he's doing in the world and how he invites us to be a part of it. I mean, making disciples is a huge component, but it's not the only one. A better question might be this. What is a person getting saved to?

Is it only to make disciples, or is there more? I mean, after we become Christians, what's our point? What are we to be doing in the world? How do we go about our jobs, our roles within society?

How do we deal with the complex questions of politics and government and all of the different subjects which we face and find ourselves? Or do we simply just get trapped into ways of thinking that we don't even realize?

It's like some of those memes that you see, or you see them online, where you have, like, a picture and depending on what you see, tells a lot about you. Like, do you see the young woman or the old Woman, do you see the old man or the rabbit? You know, that kind of question?

Those things are around all the time. We do see things one way and sometimes someone else sees something entirely different.

But it takes coming alongside another person to help them see your perspective or you listening to their perspective to see what they see. It's not until we look at our own assumptions that we can take a step back and ask the bigger questions. What are Christians for?

See, that's the title of the book that we're going to be talking about today by Jake Metor. The first time I saw the title, I thought to myself, what a stupid title for a book. Just being completely honest.

Because we all know what Christians are for, right? I mean, we are to glorify God and enjoy him forever. We're to make disciples who make disciples.

But the more that I thought about the title, more frustrated I became and I realized that there was more there than I realized. The first time I realized that I had a series of assumptions about that question. And there was and is more.

Again, making disciples is huge, but there's more going on and that's what we're going to be talking about today.

But before we get to that, I want to let you know that we will be having our first ever course for the Apollos Academy and it starts this Monday, April 22, and it's going to be going on for five weeks. If you can't make it this time around, then simply look for the next time. We'll have a sign up, but I hope to be able to see you there.

Each class will last about 90 minutes. There's going to be discussion. I'm going to be talking as we're talking about God's greatness is our mission.

But what are the contours of that mission? I'm looking forward to chatting with you about that and having you in the class. But until then, this will have to suffice.

So enjoy this first part of the conversation that I had with Jake Meador as we discuss what are Christians for? Happy listening. Here's a question you've probably not thought about before. What are Christians for?

We have so many different competing ideas out in the public square. But who can help guide us as we're trying to understand and discern what are Christians for?

That's why I've invited today's guest, Jake Meador onto the show.

Jake is a writer and he's written about place, politics, culture and the ways that Christian faith speaks to all of the various questions that these topics raise.

His writings have appeared in First Things, Books and Culture, Christianity Today, Common Wheel, Front Porch Republic, National Review, and Fair Forward. His primary online home is Mere Orthodoxy, where he serves as the editor in chief.

He's the author of two books, In Search of the Common Christian Fidelity in a Fractured World and what Are Christians For? Life Together at the End of the World, the book that we're going to be talking about today. So today it is my joy to welcome Jake Meador.

Jake, welcome to Apollos Watered.

Thanks for having me on.

All right, are you ready for the fast five?

I think so.

Okay, here we go. It's easy. Nebraska is the best place in the world because.

Oh, falls in Nebraska are wonderful. The farmer's market downtown Lincoln. Apple orchards along the edge of town. Husker football. Fall Saturdays in Nebraska are magic.

You know, I spent some time, I almost had a job in Nebraska and I ended up going there to interview and ended up being there on a Saturday. I went into the grocery store and it had the game being broadcast over the grocery store.

Yep.

Never encountered that before.

Yes. Yes.

Well, we don't have professional sports teams and there's a lot of things about football that align very well with the kind of traditional values of a heavily agricultural state.

So that's a good way of putting it.

Yeah.

But you don't just stay in Nebraska. You travel quite a bit. So the place that you enjoy traveling.

To most island where the place I'd most like to get back to would be Lusaka, Zambia, where I went when I was in college. The place I most enjoy that I've been to more recently would be New York.

Why do you want to go back to Zambia?

It was just a really amazing time. There was a missions trip with an American campus ministry, but I had a really small team and I was actually the only guy on the team.

And so the last like six weeks of the time I was there, there was another team. They were from interns before that. But like the last six weeks, there were no white dudes that I saw for like a month and a half.

And so I just had to.

And I wanted to do this so it was easy, but I just tried to learn everything I could about the country and the history and the various ethnic groups that make up this country because there's 70 some languages spoken in the country and it's not that big crazy. So I just learned a ton. I heard so many just delightful stories. I was treated with such hospitality and generosity by the people there.

And I just remember we at one point our team went down To Livingston, which is a little town along the border with Zimbabwe where Victoria Falls is located. And I remember just being there and just was like one of the more kind of delightful moments of my life.

I was with these Zambian guys who had become very good friends very quickly seeing this incredible waterfall. We bungee jumped while we were there and the whole thing was just wonderful.

Have you seen that video, by the way, of guy bungee jumping? He's in a chair and they're going to push him up and he's from, I think, the Middle East.

Have you seen this video where the guys are going to push him and he's wanting to do it and he's laughing with him, but he's like, let me tell you something.

Let me tell you something.

And they're like leaning back. People have used that clip. It's just funny. Every time I think of bungee jumping, that's exactly what runs through my head.

He's like, let me tell you something. He's off the chair, let's say something. And they bring him back and he's like, let me tell you something. And then they push him off again.

It's really funny because his friends are doing it to him. But okay, so you write a lot and even reading about your master's thesis, if I remember right.

Undergrad.

Undergrad, yeah. So because you have this kind of eclectic. I mean, even reading your book, you have a lot of people that you draw upon.

Out of all these people that you've read and really accumulated their thoughts over the years, who's one person that you'd really like to learn more about.

Or learn more about? I would probably say Martin Bootser. He's not the one who's probably influenced me the most. That's probably Wendell Berry or Tolkien or maybe Lewis.

But with all three of those guys, I've actually had the chance to meet Mr. Barry. You feel like you have to say Mr. Barry when you're talking.

I've had the chance to meet him twice and I've seen him give interviews and I've heard him speak and I can imagine what a lot of the kind of day to day life looks like for him. I've read, I think, just about every biography I've been able to get my hands on of Lewis.

I've spent so much time with Tolkien books that I feel like I. They're just closer figures historically, and we have pictures of them and I've spent time with them intellectually.

But Bootser's 500 years removed from us today, and we don't really know what his day to day life looked like. I mean, there's a really touching letter a Catholic priest sent him once.

The gist of it was, if I were to change my mind about clerical celibacy, it would be because of my experience in your home with your family. So we know a little bit about what his family life must have been like and what his demeanor was like and how he carried himself.

But there's just so much we don't know. And so I would love to be able to somehow like observe a day in their family's life.

So he and his wife, we don't know exactly how many kids they had, but we know at least 8. So early reformation days, the local pastor also had basically a seminary in his home because they didn't have seminaries built yet.

Like, this was all brand new.

And so they had ministerial students staying with them who were all German speaking Germans because they were in Strasbourg, which was part of the Holy Roman Empire at the time. But then Strasbourg was also right on the border with France. It's actually part of France today, right on the border with France.

And they had French refugees coming in all the time and they hosted the refugees. So it's this home that had refugees. It had ministerial students, it had a bunch of little kids. And at the center of it all is Martin and Elizabeth.

And Martin's also kind of playing quarterback for the Reformation in all sorts of ways. So I'm sure just observing a few days of their life would be remarkable and very instructive in all kinds of ways.

It is interesting when you get to read outside of your own time. I honestly didn't know much about him. You write about him in the book.

It's just interesting that you learned more about him and you're talking about Tolkien and Lewis and Wendell Berry. I just find all of those fascinating. The fact that you got to meet Mr. Barry, I think is pretty cool.

Have you read Holly Ordway's bio, spiritual biography of Tolkien?

I have not read that one. Actually.

I got it right here.

Actually, we've published Holly and she's wonderful. She had a great essay on Tolkien for us. Okay.

Little Kids Faith came out in October.

Okay.

It's really good.

Is that a World Fire thing?

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It's good.

Oh, I'm sure it is really good. But he's wonderful.

I didn't know how Catholic he really was. Oh, yeah, like way Catholic.

I was like, wow.

I think the Pope is questioning his own Catholicity after reading this. That's what I think.

Yes.

Anyway, let's get to the next question. Because you traveled. I always like to ask those who have interacted with different cultures and have a love for culture. Culture.

What's your funniest cross cultural experience?

Oh, it's definitely got to be something from Zambia. But now I'm. Oh.

This your face. I'm looking forward to this.

Yeah.

So before I went to Zambia, I went to the health center at the University of Nebraska where I was studying, which the students referred to as the death center because of the quality of care that one received there. Which means I probably shouldn't have gone there to get my anti malarial prescription, but I did because I was a poor college student.

And so they gave me an anti malarial prescription. And then like a month after I got to Zambia, I got malaria. And so I was in bed for about five days. I was either in bed in the bathroom or asleep.

Like in bed awake, reading Tolkien, actually, because my roommate had a single volume, Lord of the Rings. So I was either reading Chapo's copy of Tolkien or I was sleeping or I was in the bathroom. And after, like five days, I was not getting better.

And I actually found out later I'd lost like £25 over that time. And so Chapo was like, we need to take you to the doctor. So he like, loads me up in the car. I'm like, it's my first time outside in like five days.

And he drives me. It's this little health clinic on the edge of Lusaka. The doctor was actually a Coptic guy.

And Chapo must have told them my symptoms because I was, like, barely communicative because I was feeling so horrible. So Chapo walks me back to the waiting room and the doctor comes in and he's just incredibly jovial, Big belly, mustache, Coptic doctor.

And he goes, well, is this your first time with malaria? And I'm like, yes. And he's like, well, your symptoms are so obvious, we're not going to do any tests. You have malaria. Okay.

So then he goes, so tell me what the Americans put you on. And I tell him, whatever drug the health center put me on. And he looks at me and he stares at me and tilts his head.

And he goes, you stupid Americans. And he writes out a prescription and it's like, here, take this. You'll be better in a couple days. So I left with Chapo.

We were able to get the prescription filled, actually, at the clinic. I went back, slept that day.

The next day, we actually had to leave for a Missions conference that we were all supposed to go to, where I just moved from spending all my time in my bed at Chapo's house to spending all my time in the bunk that I had at the missions conference. And then actually the next day, as we were leaving the missions conference, I was fine.

And then a couple days after that is when we went to Livingston and I bungee jumped. So the email home, because we didn't. This was 07, so none of us had smartphones.

So you had to go to Internet cafe at a little mall called Arcades in central Lusaka to send email updates back home. So that was a fun email update to send home because it was. Well, I had malaria. Then I got better, Then I went bungee jumping.

I've been up to lost £25.

Yeah.

At one point, after I had recovered, our neighbor, who's this really kind man named Nelson, he kind of walks over and he's coming over to check on me and he goes, well, you've had a genuine African experience now.

Thank you. Well, that's. That's really good. I like that. Okay, last question. If you could visit one store in the United States, what store would it be and why?

It'd be a bookstore, and it doesn't exist anymore. But there used to be a little bookstore on the main drag in Stillwater, Minnesota, called Loom's Theological Booksellers.

Just the most random, like, best theology bookstore I've ever been in. And it was this little suburb of the Twin Cities half an hour east of St. Paul.

But there was a Catholic scholar who had accumulated quite a collection and maintained a bookstore there, though there doesn't exist anymore, sadly. But I would love to be able to go back there.

Failing that, it'd probably be the Strand in New York, which is just giant bookstore in the heart of Manhattan that has everything. Like, last time I was there, I got the Hauerwas Letters to his godson Virtue book that he did.

And then there was a book by a food journalist about spending a year in Tuscany and learning to cook. Like traditional. Like, not restaurant food from Tuscany, but like food that Tuscan people eat at home.

And I think there was one other, but it was just like, it's like three or four floors and there's just great stuff everywhere. So it'd be one of those two, probably.

I like those. I always love going to different bookstores. Problem is, I never have enough money.

That's the problem.

Or space. Or space. I remember hearing Warren Worsby was saying one time when they were moving out to Nebraska to take over back to the Bible.

And is that they told the realtor when they were looking for a house, they said, we're looking for a library with a house attached.

I've heard about his library. I have one of the other pastors here in the presbytery in Nebraska knew him somewhat well. So he has some books from Weirsby's library, I believe.

I think it was like a hundred thousand volumes. Yeah, it was quite. Quite big.

He only died a few years ago.

Yeah. Yeah. Actually, I talked to him on the phone once, actually, because I was interviewing for the presidency of Back to the Bible.

Oh, wild. Okay.

Back in the day. And I called him, Somebody had his number, and I was like, can you tell me? Just tell me more. I didn't get the job.

But, yeah, that's more of the story of my life. What jobs that I couldn't get. So I have to go make my own. That's just the way that it is. Let's talk about your book.

Speaking of books, what Are Christians For? It's been out for two years now, and I've had it probably that entire time, and I've only read it recently. So.

Sorry, sorry.

But I want to talk about the title first. What Are Christians For? Life Together at the End of the World. Let's be a little bit provocative.

I mean, honestly, when I first saw the title, I went, what do you mean, what are Christians for? Of course, it's easy to know what Christians are for. And then I thought about it, and I'm like, he's really onto something. What are we for?

What are we doing? So let's talk about the title. What Are Christians For?

Yeah. So the title is kind of a riff on Barry's what Are People for volume.

The thought was I was writing it before the pandemic started, but then was revising during the pandemic and just seeing a great deal of loneliness and anxiety and uncertainty kind of everywhere around us in the church and outside the church, and just was trying to think through, like, what does it mean to follow a God who calls us to live a life of love, of service, of care in a culture and society that's fragmenting as much as ours is? So that was kind of this, like, initial kind of thought, and it just built out from there.

You hit a lot of different areas in this book. I want to read the chapter titles. You do. An Immense Inheritance, A Christian Account of Nature. The Great Uprooting Race and the End of Nature.

The Unmasking of Unmaking of Places the fruit of industrialism, the unmaking of the body. I mean, it's very diverse, the stuff you're hitting on. Sexual revolution, institutions, Christian social doctrine, Christianity, land and animals.

And I was like, okay, what? When you have the Earth is our mother. I went, okay, where are we going, Jake? What is going on here? Then you said, a vision of Christian belonging.

The household in the sexual revolution. The world and cracked icons, wonder, death in the end, end of all things. And then politics beyond accomplishment Toward a politics of care.

So I went, this is going to be a very interesting book. And it is actually how you put it together, I think is pretty good.

But you begin by setting up the problem with a series of quotes and insights from global Christianity. You tell a story of the man that you met on the plane. I don't want to give that story away. It's actually a really good story.

But you also quote Frederick Douglass and then you go to the Dutchman Herman Bavink and then you talk about the Internet month, which I, I haven't seen his name quite some time. Michael Spencer, to shine a light really into the state of American Christianity. And then you state the problem.

I'm going to read this just because I think it's so good for our audience to hear. The problem is mostly not with ordinary Christian people half heartedly following Jesus and willfully choosing to ignore certain commandments.

The American church is filled with ordinary people who love Jesus and seek to serve him and their neighbors in their daily lives. I have benefited from their kindness and generosity on many occasions. The problem is much more complex than that.

It's the way our vision of the Christian life has too often been implicitly conditioned and defined to leave the characteristic idols of the Western world untouched, unscathed and unchallenged.

This is how Christian people often, without even realizing it, are denied access to the life giving power of Christian piety and discipleship by the very institution that ought to introduce them to it, the church. I could not agree more with your statement, I'm going to steal it and use it in my own book and give you no credit.

Your publisher might have something to say.

I think, though we often talk on this show of the cultural idolatry involved in our church that we don't realize because they don't fit within the traditional categories of the acts of the sinful nature. They're much more good things that become those God things and then they become those bad things. What do you see? Some of these idolatries.

Can we just name some of them?

I'm not asking for an exhaustive list, but name some of these cultural idolatries that you see at work within our culture today, within the church, actually.

Yeah, I want to actually start kind of back a step and say that I think that the root here is an idol around control, I think, and I'm getting that.

Like when I was writing the book, I was getting it from Hartmut Rosa, who's a German sociologist, kind of writing in the same general ballpark as a Charles Taylor type. But one of Rosa's shorter books is called the Uncontrollability of the World.

And his argument is that basically there's lots of various sorts of harms and damages that we do to ourselves, to each other, to the world, when we seek to control it in ways that it's not meant to be controlled.

More recently, actually, there's a book called the Genesis of Gender by Abigail Favale, who's a Catholic writer, scholar, and she has an excellent chapter on control in there. So I think that's the backdrop. And then a lot of the problems kind of grow out of that.

There is a sense of needing to have a certain amount of control over our wealth, over our private property, that makes it difficult for us to then feel as if we even have the ability or the resources to give because we feel like, well, we have to have a house of this size, new cars, these opportunities for our kids. And if we don't have those things, then we just are failing as humans.

But then what ends up happening is you spend so much time working to acquire those things that there's very little left in your schedule, very little left of your life, of yourself, to give to others, to open your home to others. And so that's something I feel like it'd be around.

Property and wealth, I feel like would be the chief place I see those problems arise particularly in Lincoln, where I think for a lot of evangelicals here, there's a certain kind of lifestyle that is seen as non negotiable, as in a strange way, even as proof of one's kind of Christian faithfulness that I've worked this hard, I've been able to maintain this standard of living, and God's blessed me with all these things. When the functional reality is, well, but you have to work insane hours to obtain all those things.

It makes you so stressed and tired that you're not able to be available sometimes even to your family, let alone others from your church. This is something a good friend of mine and I talk about a lot. We end up losing our first Love and becoming more concerned with other topics.

And the thing that's funny is I think that one actually cuts across political divides. It's like, I have one friend here in southeast Nebraska who kind of mentors lots of young men in the church.

And the thing he sees out here, where our evangelicalism in Lincoln is mostly downstream of either Willow Creek or MacArthur for the most part. And so he's more in kind of the MacArthur world.

And a lot of what he sees here is he's like, you know, I talked to these young guys in churches, and they're going to Bible study, they're at church. But if I ask them, how's your prayer life? How's your Bible reading? What's God teaching you? I can't get a word out of them.

But if I ask them about a Second Amendment thing, or I asked them about what they saw on Tucker the other night, maybe not so much Tucker these days, but they'll go forever. And then I have another friend. She's in a deep, deep blue area, but she kind of runs into the same thing she was telling me not that long ago.

She was talking to someone who is actually. They're a campus missionary with a evangelical outreach group that works on college campuses.

And they were asking her, like, is it okay to share my faith with people, or is that white supremacy? And my friend was like, hold up now. How did we get here?

And she's just found that when she tries to talk to people in those parts of the country about their faith, it often seems to function as a kind of, like, mental health asset rather than something that's calling them to repentance and another way of life. So I think we have these kind of idols that almost are kind of a screen between us and the life of Christian discipleship.

And it can be hard to get super specific naming, like, it's this one thing, because all of these idols, especially, I think post Covid in the Trump era, they're so politically coded that I could answer that question in one way, and your readers in more blue states would be thinking, well, we don't have those problems here. Or I could answer it in another way, and red state people would be thinking the same thing.

And what I want to say is, like, no, there's maybe you could say kind of a certain cultural status is what it is, and what that looks like in practice is gonna vary from place to place.

But, yeah, there's elements of Christian discipleship that kind of get sidelined or marginalized in the quest for that level of kind of control over my lifestyle, control over how I'm perceived. I'm thinking about this now, as you said, a couple years after the book, and I've been continuing to think and read.

So, yeah, I'd stand by all of that. And now I just wanna also press deeper on a couple other things as well.

I think I'm writing an article right now in some respect of what you just said. But it's, it's. I, I titled the article this. These three remain. Platform, control and power. And the greatest of these is power. And it's.

It's because I think within Western evangelicalism, we have so often in that MacArthur stream, focused on the chapter and verse that were biblical but were not theological. And, and what I mean is, is that if there's a chapter in verse, then we know what to do. I. I had a guy that I was on staff with for a little bit.

He was a MacArthur guy. He'd gone to his school. And theologically, we were on the same page on a lot of things. I mean, it was a huge overlap.

And you look at the doctoral statement of the church, we both agreed to it, but I started to see, like, what is it? For one, I dislike him. Just his personality, the way he perceived things, the way he talked about things. It didn't seem to be loving.

It didn't seem to be. It seemed to be like, control. And even how he treated his wife. I was in a conversation where his wife started to talk.

He put his hand up in her face to shut her down. And I was like, that's so demeaning. It's. It's demeaning. My wife looked over and she was, like, livid, you know, to see someone treated like that.

Yeah, but within the church, it seems like we imbibe the scripture, but we missed the essence and the idolatries that have formed around it, because there's not a chapter and verse about them. I mean, there is, but there's not. Like you said, in some respect, we are the product of the Protestant work ethic.

You work hard, you achieve, you build. There is a degree of prosperity, of honesty, of fidelity, you know, civic responsibility.

But then they become an object of status themselves till they almost are, quote, unquote, the fruits of the spirit rather than actually the Spirit itself. And then that becomes a mark of pride and a spiritual and upmanship where people that did not follow the.

As they mentioned in the Brady searching, the success track, and then we alienate. It's about posture to me, culturally, that we have taken and we don't think we need anything. We don't have the spiritual disciplines anymore.

For a while we did. I mean, we do.

But the thing. That's the thing that puzzles me about it, I guess there's two different pieces.

So one of them is that conservative American evangelicalism hasn't always been like that.

Right.

If you read Francis Schaeffer Church before the Watching World, or Church at the end of the 20th century, or death in the City, True spirituality, and that's what you're describing as the world you've come out of. Those books will blow your hair back. Elizabeth Elliot, actually, early Elizabeth Elliot thing.

I remember years ago, I made some comment about Eliot, and one of our editors said he's like, you should read her more closely because there's more going on in her work than you, than you're giving her credit for. And so I went back and read Through Gates of Splendor and some of her other early stuff.

And it was actually quite radical in ways not unlike the Shaffers. And what I think made both of them, especially for me, the Schaeffers were the bigger impact for me.

What made the Shaffers so disorienting is precisely how biblical they are, because there actually are lots of biblical texts that deal with these things. How many parables does Jesus tell? Or like, I remember my mom. So my parents became Christians in the fundamentalist church I grew up in.

And then as I was starting to ask questions and kind of having some struggles with it, they started to as well. And so one day, my mom was volunteering in the church bookstore, and the senior pastor came down. And this senior pastor, he was there for 52 years.

He was kind of like, he was senior pastor. Right. They would say, like, it's the most anti Catholic congregation I've ever been around.

And yet their posture toward authority was the most kind of ultramontanist Catholic thing imaginable. It was just that the senior pastor was. He was the pope, he was the magisterium, he was the all in one.

And so my mom was talking to him, and she had been reading Proverbs, which has lots to say about wealth and generosity. And then she was reading the minor prophets.

And to read the minor prophets is to realize, like, wow, one of the main reasons Israel sent into exile is because of the way they treated the poor.

Yeah.

And of course, the fact that the prophets were condemning Israel for that also is indicative of the fact that the Mosaic Law has lots to say about the poor.

Yeah. Yeah.

When I was writing the first book and I was thinking about property rights.

One of the real eye opening things for me was to read the book of Ruth and realize that the simple act of having laws around gleaning is a relativization of private property rights.

Because it says once that crop that you paid to plant that is in your land that you grew, if that crop falls to the ground as your workers are gathering it, it's not yours anymore. It belongs to the poor. And so there's biblical texts all over the place like this.

And so my mom was talking to the pastor and was asking him about like, so we, we talk so much about following the Bible and being serious about the Bible and reading the Bible, but there's all these texts that talk about how we relate to the poor and I just don't see us doing those things. And my mom, this was like early enough in the kind of like asking questions process that it was a genuine thing for her.

She was like wanting to understand.

And the pastor's comment we were extremely dispensational was, well, all those texts are in the Old Testament and they're intended for Israel rather than the church. So my mom then goes, well, but then why do the women always go through Proverbs 31?

And so it just captures this very ad hoc relationship we have to scripture and to, I think not only to scripture, but also toward the historic thought of the church, where there's a posture to it that's not unlike what evangelicals will mock as cafeteria Catholicism.

And that again, I think can be used to cut both ways because there's many things that more kind of progressive Christians would also marginalize in scripture that are also very clearly there.

And so I think part of what has been a puzzle to me about the last 10 to 15 years, I think we actually have the resources in scripture, we have the resources in church history. We even have the resources in the last like three generations of evangelical authors to make sense of a lot of this stuff.

And it just mostly has not happened. It's rather been a kind of fracturing along politics as religion lines that's been very disheartening.

I'm actually still fairly hopeful about the medium term future, but the last few years have just been very rough and disorienting for all of these reasons.

I think there's so much of what you just said. I always cry when I think of how you do focus on one part at the exclusion of the others.

I had the missionary Nick Ripken on who, if you've ever heard his story, the Insanity of God the insanity of obedience. He had planted three churches in Somalia and they came in and they killed everybody. So he got to 100 people, they came in and they killed them all.

He was in Kenya running because he had to like fly in and he. They killed everyone and then he replanted and it got to about 100 people and they killed everyone again.

Then his 16 year old son dies on like Good Friday of an asthma attack or Easter Sunday, something just horrific.

It gets down basically to the last four believers in Somalia sometime later and they have communion together and then he leaves to go to work and then they come in and they kill all four of them.

And he tries to replant and then of course no one wants to come, which is confusing to him because he's like, I was taught that the blood of the martyrs is the seed of the church. And then it doesn't happen. And he ends up going on this journey to understand the persecuted church, especially in Muslim majority cultures or.

And various cultures. He ends up going to, I want to say 100 and I mean, he goes to like 70 some countries where Christianity is like legal.

And he ends interviewing all the leaders there. It's like James Bond stuff, interviewing them. Anyway, he comes out of it writing this book called the Insanity of God.

And I'm talking to him about it. And he was even talking about how he. He always gives a missions challenge where he speaks.

And he said, I had some young men come up to me and they said they would go, but they can't because they would have to give up their guns. And at first I was like, what world are you in? And then I moved into a place where that's a huge deal.

But it's amazing to me that idea of that unbridled autonomy, like I won't cede control. It's exactly what you're talking about. But he also said, you'll see a lot of preaching in the churches that he is involved in.

He goes, they all preach on Paul, but they very rarely preach on the parables of Jesus or any of the Old Testament prophets. And it's. And that's what I mean, it's like we have a tendency to, rather than focus on the whole counsel of God, we focus on a certain peace.

And part of that is that premillennial dispensationalism frame that we talked about. I was talking with Tom Wright yesterday and he is not at all.

He actually was quite angry with premillennial dispensationalists because I think he sees it as the Theological mess we're in.

It's really messed it up, but I'm surprised by Hope. Is that the title?

Yeah, sounds like it.

A long time now. I read that, I think, back in college.

But yeah, we also yesterday talked about Andrew Lynn's book, Saving the Protestant Ethic, which was by Oxford. And in it, he actually chronicles how economics have been affected by certain theological movements. And one of those is he mentions, actually, C.I.

scofield, one of the fathers of dispensationalism, and how he said, Scofield said that the Sermon on the Mount was not for today, so Christians didn't need to think about it. And it's like, how do you just cut that?

I mean, we all cut the Bible in a certain way, but how do you miss something that's so obviously there in the New Testament on how to live?

And if you cut it out, I mean, you're no different than Thomas Jefferson picking and slicing and dicing what he wants, and you get your own little humanistic religion at the end of it that already justifies what you see. But it is to have more of the whole counsel of God to influence and help us to think through how we live in our world as Christ followers.

I mean, we do offer a better humanity, how that affects the greater world.

And that's not something that we're used to thinking about, I think, as Christians, especially those that have grown up in those streams, whether it is the Willow Creek stream you mentioned or the MacArthur stream, if it's not chapter and verse, an individualist salvation, that it doesn't influence anything else. And that is toxic to me. I mean, what do you think of that?

Is that part of the reason why you've written this book, to help us think more holistically?

The book started because I. I used a lot of Catholic social teaching in the first book, In Search of the Common Good.

And I found when I was in college, I was coming out of this fundamentalist background. I have a friend who once used.

She used the phrase because she grew up in a similar kind of world, that her faith was privately engaging and publicly irrelevant. And that's what I was struggling with in college. And I was also struggling with it because I was an English and history major.

And so I was reading these great books that deal with challenging human and existential and social problems. And I was doing 20th century history, which is full of all of these tragedies and horrible wars and genocides and injustices.

And I don't know that I could have put it this way at the Time. But I really needed a Christian faith big enough to address that and actually have something to say.

Like, I remember I got so angry in high school about stuff with this church I grew up in.

And I would have people tell me, because I was reading Shaffer and Schaeffer is constantly citing these avant garde filmmakers and existentialist novelists. So I was going down to the library and checking out novels and plays by John Paul Sartre and Albert Camus and guys like that and reading them.

And I had these youth workers in our ministry that would get so mad at me about what I was reading. And finally I just kind of snapped. I was kind of a brat.

But I was just like, at what page in Nausea by Sartre as I'm reading, at what page, what page do I need to get to where Christianity is not true anymore? If Christianity is true, it will still be true after I read this book.

And if it's not true, then my reading this book has no bearing on that whatsoever. And so it was just such a struggle that I had.

And so I had found Catholic social teaching really, really helpful because it was speaking to these things in a broad way that was trying to consistently apply the teachings of Scripture and then, of course, teachings of the church down through the ages to these new kind of problems that were emerging.

And so as I was sitting down to write the second book, I was initially trying to think, is there a way I can try to create that draws on Protestant sources to help people who maybe, like typical evangelical, probably is not going to pick up quadrigesimo anno on wages and workers to try and understand what, like, just worker relations look like? But are there things I can bring to bear from a Protestant perspective that will feel a little more close and familiar and can be helpful to them?

And so that was the start of the book. And then as I was working on it, it was so funny to me because I was reading Gruen van prinstrer, who's a 19th century Dutch Calvinist.

He has a book called Unbelief and Revolution. People are familiar with Kuyper and the way Kuyper talks about the revolution in his work that's coming out of Gruen.

Gruen is actually developing the idea of the revolution for the Dutch Calvinists before Kuyper gets there because he's younger than Kuiper, and Kuiper picks it up from Gruen. What Gruen means by the revolution, though, is this kind of spirit that basically says, the world is whatever we want it to be.

We are kind of as Humans, we're kind of the lords of creation, and we can make the world whatever we think it ought to be. And Gruen's specifically talking about politics, but it has broader application.

So I was thinking about that and thinking about what it means to live in a world where we basically think the world is kind of infinitely malleable. And really, the only constraints we have are what our tools allow us to do and what we are willing to do ultimately.

But once you recognize that that kind of mentality just touches so many things. So in contemporary discourse, one of the obvious places to go would be sexuality issues.

Again, I'm reading Favale right now, and Favale talks about how the idea of transitioning genders kind of evolved across the 20th into the 21st century.

And the thing that really was crucial in that developing was developing hormones that we could give people to help them transition without those tools, we couldn't do that social project, as it were. And yet, the funny thing was. So that's an example that's going to cut really hard toward the left. But the funny thing was, I was also.

While I was reading Gruen, I was reading Willie Jennings, who's a theologian at Yale who does a lot of work on race and Christianity.

And Jennings roots a lot of his ideas about race in early colonial exploration and conquest in the Americas, where he's constantly sourcing and he just lays it out in his work.

He's constantly finding these early colonial explorers that come to North America or South America and see it as this place that's kind of ours for the taking, ours to make of what we will. And so that kind of the world is plastic, and we can shape it to whatever we want it to be based on our abilities and our willingness.

That's a spirit that just kind of pervades much of the modern Western.

And if you're talking about land use and at least in older discourses, race, it's going to function in ways that, if you criticize it, the right's not going to be very happy with you. If you talk about it as it relates to sexuality issues, you're going to be alienating the left.

But part of the argument I was trying to make in the book is that all of this is revolutionary. All of it is built on an idea that kind of lifts the kind of individual great man above creation so that he can shape it however he wants.

And all of it is founded in an idea that's quite hostile to Christian teachings about the good life, about virtue, about the call to live under the Law of Love, as Schaeffer described, was starting with this interest in Catholic social theory. And then Gruen's idea of revolution just kind of kicked in and framed all of it for me.

And, yeah, I'm trying to help people conceive of their life in the world in a way that isn't built on the idea that reality is just infinitely plastic and can be shaped to my desires however I want.

I remember you writing in the book about Nietzsche and the Ubermensch, because both he and Bavink had noted how Europe had largely been shaped by Christianity teaching and thought. And whereas Nietzsche wanted to liberate and rise above that. You're trying kind of on that revolutionary idea.

But Nietzsche saw it totally different in that Uber mentioned we're going to have this superhuman kind of idea. Whereas Bobink said, no, there's an alternative that doesn't work. What was Bhavik's alternative that he offered up?

Gosh, now you're asking me to remember something I read four years ago. So it's in Bavinck's Christian Worldview book that I think it was crossway, put out a few years ago.

It's a really nice little orange hardback, pretty short. So Bavinck is working with the idea of kind of organic versus mechanical as kind of a mainframe in Christian worldview.

And so mechanical is premised on control.

I don't think Bovink uses the language of technique because technique really comes along about 50 years later with Elliot, Jacques Elliot, the French theologian. But that's basically what Bovink is talking about there. And actually, if I recall correctly, I think his nephew J.H.

Think of all the things we can do to remake the world. Bavink looks at that and says, it's actually.

Again, this is a later concept, but it's kind of the Iatrogenesis critique where the cure is worse than the disease. And so he looks at it and says, well, but the world isn't a machine. People are not technicians.

We live in an organic relationship with the world as created beings in the world. And if we just go around uprooting everything around us in the pursuit of progress and accomplishment, we're going to do a great deal of harm.

I remember there's a passage in Eglinton's bio of Bavank, which is a wonderful book by the way, just astonishing research. Some of the details that Professor Eglinton works in are just like.

As a former history major who did a hundred page thesis, I appreciate the amount of work that he had to do which is so far beyond anything I ever did.

But he had this passage in there where Bavinck, who I think was a member of parliament at the time, actually was speaking about colonialism and he was fearful because he was of the view that what the Dutch are going to bring to our colonial holdings in Africa and Asia is actually more free trade and markets than Christianity. And in doing that we are going to obliterate ways of living that have shaped the life of those places for centuries.

And if all we give them in exchange is capitalism, that's going to be devastating for everyone because capitalism is not enough to build a life around. And we're going to uproot everything that they've relied upon traditionally for meaning and identity and belonging.

We, we uprooted all of these things and at the end of it what you had was the chance to go punch a time clock for X number of hours and get a paycheck. We all need to work. We're called to work. Work is good.

But good work particularly, I think is embedded within communities of love and care and is intended for the flourishing of human persons. And a lot of the work, this is part of the Industrial Revolution chapter in the book.

A lot of the work that was being created by this revolutionary society was mostly just there to make the capitalist class really wealthy and keep all of these people who had been uprooted occupied. And Bavink was warning about it, gosh, 115 years ago.

It's quite amazing to see how these ideas have trickled down and into churches.

I mean, whether it's the idea of, as you said, some type of success or status by my work and what I have in my house and all these different pieces, if I work hard enough, if we do it fast enough, and I even see that within certain staffs where we work a certain way and the product is Jesus and we're getting it out. But Jesus is not a product nor can he be governed by the rules. Of productivity in that regard, because it's.

It's dehumanizing the very people that you're meant to use to shepherd.

One of the discussions we've had as a team is the oft quoted story, apocryphal or not, of ask a man in Africa or India to describe a pastor and they say a holy man. But if you ask someone in the United States to describe a pastor, they would say a manager.

It's just a very different conceptualization and how much that is affected us. What are Christians for? What do we bring to the world we live in? Jake's a very interesting thinker. He's younger than me.

I mean, he has a lot more hair than I do. He's honest. But he's also interacting with a vast array of thinkers, something that I appreciate very much.

Some of the regular kind, the people that come from our tribe. But you no doubt heard some unfamiliar names. There are secular and Catholic thinkers.

He's bringing you the very best, those who are beneficiaries of common grace, people who may be outside our stream, but they need to be appreciated and understood nonetheless.

All the while, I think that you caught just how much he was seeking to be true to the scriptures, to discern what God calls us to be and do as Christians. And what Jake is doing is trying to work out his faith, our faith in the real world of our everyday lives.

That's what we're all trying to figure out how to do.

Sometimes that means we have to challenge our own assumptions, and sometimes we have to challenge the assumptions of the people around us, including both those who are on our team and those who are opposed to us. Because sometimes, as Jake said, people on the left and the right, to put it in contemporary political terms, have the same underlying assumptions.

They may work those assumptions out in very different ways, but they're still at work.

Christianity does have the resources to answer the big questions, to avoid the reactionary ways of viewing the world and the people around us, to see the world we live in not just as some plastic thing to be done with whatever and however we want, but a gift from God to be stewarded. Well, the question for us as we move forward is are we willing to engage those resources to live out a holistic faith in the world we now live in?

Are we willing to go to the scriptures, the whole scriptures, and not just the parts we like?

Are we willing to do the hard work to understand how those things fit together, to look at how Christians have answered these kinds of questions in the past, and to see what wisdom they can offer today. Sure, the church has always gotten some things right and some things wrong. We have to come to grips with that.

That's why we are always looking to the scriptures but also looking over history and listening to the global voices around us to make sure that we're doing this correctly. The situations that were faced in the past aren't identical to the ones we're facing today, but they still can offer wisdom and help.

They can challenge us and our assumptions so that we can be holy in a world that isn't, so that we can live out our faith for the good of all. Join me next time as we continue this fascinating and insightful conversation.

As we talk about the simplicity of God and why that's important as well as suffering in today's world and as we have to continue to wrestle with this, our political engagement, I want to thank our Apollos water team for helping us to water the world. This is Travis Michael Fleming signing off from Apollo's Watered. Stay watered everybody.