#235 | What Are Christians For? with Jake Meador, Pt. 2

I think people lose faith in systems and processes and even, sadly, in Christian character when they feel anxious and frightened. But, like, that's. That's a failure that we repent of and we.

We learn to recognize in ourselves and we ask God to help us grow and strengthen us, rather than a kind of, like, guiding approach that should shape how we do public life.

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.

What shapes how you do or go about your public life? Is it your family? You want to make sure that you represent them well? Or is it maybe just finances?

Whatever is going to get people to.

Like me, to get me ahead. Maybe it's an excitement for the future and what awaits.

Maybe it's your friends and how you go about living your life, or maybe it's about your fears because you don't want to feel less than. You don't want to go through pain mentally, emotionally, spiritually. It could be your fears.

But what it should be, and I think any one of us would agree with, primarily, it should be our faith that shapes us in every which way, by the way, because oftentimes, when we dig down into it, it's not always our faith, even though we say that it is. Oftentimes we use that as a trump card, but it's really actually disguising something far less virtuous, and that would be our fears.

It's easy to let our fears help influence our decisions. Sometimes those fears are legitimate and other times not so much, because those fears can override what we believe. We can explain it away.

I mean, we can rationalize it.

We can make all things kind of fit the narrative of what we have in our head to make ourselves feel better to the point where we override the character that we say is so important to us. And once we do that, that leads into some very dangerous territory.

Today I'm continuing my conversation with Jake Metor about his book what Are Christians For? I told you last time, that was a question that really bugged me because I took it for granted.

But when I started delving down deep, I saw that there was a whole.

Lot more that I didn't even realize. It is a fascinating conversation. It's thought provoking and it's challenging.

It's a work that gets at some of the assumptions that we have about how we see the world. And Jake seeks to help us to live out our faith better precisely by looking at what needs to be challenged. And I appreciate that about him.

If you haven't listened to part one.

Of the conversation, then please go back and listen to that one first, because it really does tee this conversation up so that we can just continue on in the trajectory that's been set.

And if you want to listen to any more of our episodes, please check us out online, share these episodes with other people, go to our YouTube channel, and you can watch the entirety of the interview in one sitting. But without further ado, let's get to my conversation with Jake Nidor. Happy listening.

I want to change gears and talk about something else that you had brought up in the book, that when you first brought it up, I thought, why bring this up? And it's the simplicity of God. Why do you want to talk about the simplicity of God? First of all, what is it? Why is it important?

And what effect does that have on us today?

When I, when I talk with people about divine simplicity these days, the thing that I usually am trying to camp out on. So the doctrine of divine simplicity means that God doesn't have parts.

And so it's not like sometimes we'll talk colloquially about God and you kind of get this idea that, like, well, one part of God is his wrath and one part is his love. And there's some kind of way in which God, like, internally synthesizes these separate parts of himself. And that's not the best way to talk about it.

And the reason is because if God is made up of parts, then there's these different things that can kind of act on God and influence him. Maybe there's even something outside of God that can act on one part of him.

And so you're losing the notion of God as this kind of Lord, as creator, as all powerful, because you're now positing that there are certain things that somehow can, like, be outside of God and act on him from outside, which we don't want to say.

But I think part of the reason that's comforting is that when we are suffering, when we are dealing with something painful, difficult, hard, it can be easy.

And you see biblical figures doing this, which I think is a sign that, like, God wants us to know that this is a normal way people struggle, that kind of turn against God.

When we talk about God being simple, when we talk about him being outside of creation, one of the elements of that is that God's internal life is perfect and it is consistent and it's not changeable.

It's not one thing one day and another the next day, such that, like, maybe one day God's going to be really mad at you and get you and you'll never know when it's coming. That's not the Christian account of God.

And so what that allows us to be able to do, I think, pastorally, is be able to say, like, God is consistent, he is simple, he is perfect.

His emotional life, if you want to speak of it that way, is perfectly calibrated to what is good and true and is not being manipulated and acted against by other things. And this is where Christianity is very distinctive because we have the incarnation. If you want to know what God is like, you can look at Jesus.

And so I think the teaching of divine simplicity is incredibly powerful pastorally because it helps us when we're facing pain and difficulty, uncertainty.

All the things that many of us are dealing with regularly, particularly, I think, in this moment, the thing we don't need to do is question God's heart for us and his care for us. That's something that you can reliably bank on even when you're suffering. And so I actually don't remember where it comes.

But, like, one of the things that I know, I talk about in the book, where I think this teaching is very important, is, like, when it is a situation like what my family experienced when my dad had his brain injury, it was very good and helpful and reassuring and comforting to feel that there was never a point there where we needed to question God's care for us. Like, that was never a question.

There are plenty of other questions of how much my dad was going to recover, where he was going to live, where the money was going to come from for the care that he needed, what my parents were going to do financially. Since my dad was the primary income provider. There are plenty of questions that were really hard and painful that we had to figure out.

But there was never a point where I think either of my parents, I mean, I know they've both said this.

Actually, there was never a point where they were angry at God or felt like they were questioning God's judgment because they were confident in God's love and care for them and confident that he's unchanging.

And so the God who loved and cared for us when we were looking for a house, I mean, my mom had cancer when I was very little, when my mom was going through cancer, that's the same God who's with us now, and his feelings toward us are the same as they were back then.

And so that gives you a certain kind of grounding, I think, that allows you to endure suffering and maybe to tie it into some of the political conversations.

I think one of the things that has been exposed in recent years is that there are a lot of evangelicals who have no place for martyrdom as a Christian calling.

And so when it looks like kind of the walls are closing in on us, culturally or politically, the response is not to say, perhaps God is calling us to suffer for him in this way as we continue to live faithfully and do our various things that are right and good to pursue. The thought is not, perhaps God is calling us to a season of penitence and suffering for him.

The thought is, well, we can't lose xyz, and so we need to do this to protect ourselves. For your Narnia readers, it's a very Nico Brick kind of thought, which Gina Delfonso made this point in First Things eight years ago. Prince Caspian.

There's a dwarf who eventually gets tired of waiting for Aslan to send hell. And he's like, what we need is power. What we need is the ability to defeat our enemies.

And we can get that from Aslan or we can get it from the White Witch. And if Aslan isn't coming, let's get the White Witch. And so that's what nearly happens in Prince Caspian.

I think when we lack confidence in God's care for us, we lack confidence in the idea that sometimes God in his goodness will call us to a season of suffering. That's when we start making compromises in order to dodge the suffering that we don't want to experience.

Pete Wehner, in a conversation that I had with him, we were talking about that power element and how do we incorporate not only the message of Jesus, but the ways of Jesus. And as we go about things, oftentimes we focus on the message without the ways.

And he said, when you capitulate to whatever culture it is to get that power, he says the means are actually damaging the message and in its communication of it, while we often think that it's actually accomplishing a greater good and we'll use evil to the greater good. It's the whole Cyrus kind of principle.

But he had mentioned this, and he mentioned, actually maybe God is calling us to suffer more for doing what is right, rather than the lowest common denominator or the, you know, the lesser of two evils, but just to do what is Best. I'm still struggling to know how that works out within a democracy. And part of the conversation that I had with Tom Wright was on that very thing.

He elaborates on that within his book. How do we. How do we respond in the midst of this? How do we. When our idols are. And again, they don't look like idols. We want to stand for life.

I mean, even I talked with Albert Mulder about the Constantinian temptation, and as I did with Russell Moore, Russell Moore had written on that in his book, whereas Al Mohler did not like it. He said, I'm so sick of the argument, it's foolish. He said, if you have the opportunity to help save life, you do it. I don't care what you need to.

Do to do so.

And that leads to a lot of different questions.

As leaders who are talking in front of churches each week in and week out, and we talk about the Sermon on the Mount and how to behave and how to go about things. It means then suffering. But when do we stand up and say there's a revolutionary idea that comes into it?

And that's even what Tom had said in my conversation with him. He had written in the book that applying these principles of revolutionary worship never happened. Which is a person who.

I mean, of course he's British, so you wonder what his. His. His impetus is behind it. But if you play those categories in some respect, that's true. In some respect to. To obey the king, to. To listen.

Because my question as I go through all of this, Jake, is you and I interact in circles where we're talking to Christian leaders all the time, Christian thinkers who are wrestling with these higher concepts of what we're to do. And oftentimes the people that I'm talking with are Christians who desire the flourishing of society. The argument is how we go about it.

That, to me, is that the battle lines are not between the unbelieving world and the Christian world, although we want to make it that way. But the more infighting I see is with Christians themselves.

And I mean, just like you do, and you mentioned this at the onset of your book, there are so many good people out there that want to do what God wants them to do. They want to obey, they want to do what the word of God says. They sacrifice, they give. They're trying to order their lives according to these things.

And it's so confusing. It's confusing for us who are dealing with this subject day in and day out.

This is why I'm not trying to pull away or depress people, but this is, I think, why your book is important, because it puts it in a greater frame, in different fields or spheres almost. I mean, I know you're not. You're not trying to be Kuiper here, but you're. You're examining how do we offer a better humanity.

Yeah.

And how do we live in the midst of that?

So multiple layers here. And we. It's really important that we be able to walk and chew gum at the same time.

There's nothing in what I've said that excludes us from political participation.

Oh, no, not at all.

And if we are going to participate in politics, that is going to include participating in the work of legislation. And our understanding of law is going to be shaped by the fact that we're Christians.

Six out of seven reps in the unicameral are Democrats, six out of seven or seven out of eight. There's only like two citywide races that Republicans have won in the last however many years.

So the city council passed this fairness ordinance that was nutty. Like, they made it pretty hard to find online, which is in itself a little telling.

But when I actually was reading it, the ordinance concerned what they called public accommodations.

And they defined public accommodations in such a broad way that literally anything other than a private home was pretty much a public accommodation, including a church.

And the acts that violated the fairness ordinance included speech that had the effect of giving offense to protected classes in the ordinance, which was LGBT people, amongst others.

And so by the letter of the ordinance, and I've checked this with multiple lawyers, by the letter of the ordinance, if a pastor stood in the pulpit on Sunday morning and read Romans 1 and somebody in the congregation was offended by that, we would have been in violation of the Lincoln City Council's fairness ordinance. So what happened after that is we got a petition campaign together.

We got the number of signatures we needed, and then the City Council, because of the number of signatures we got, either had to put the resolution to a vote for the city or. Or they had to withdraw it. And they ended up withdrawing it.

I think that was like the right way of handling, was using the means of liberal democracy to express our concerns about a law and ask the city council to respond in some way. I mean, they were obliged to by the city code, to our Democratic action. So I think that's fine.

Like that's, I think, good public participation by Christians.

Now in this case, if the council had tried to enforce it, they would have got laughed out of court at the first trial because it's such a blatant First Amendment violation.

So, yeah, there's nothing here that excludes participation in public life and even using liberal Democratic means to support, I think, recognizably Christian goals.

I think what's hard is that particularly now when everybody is kind of in this state of fear and anxiety for valid reasons, quite often we don't have the patience for, to go back to what you were saying, kind of trying to do the Lord's work in the Lord's way. Like we don't have the patience for that. We want something more radical and we think decisive.

So in some cases, I just have a question, depending on the radical action in view, if it's licit at all for Christians. But also, even if you decide that something is licit, often it's not very productive to go about it that way. I believe I have to check.

I was looking at it yesterday. I think we have more abortions happening in America right now than we did before the Dobbs, really.

So we were positive about the Dobbs ruling at Miro when it came out. We've always been very firmly pro life at Miro.

And if anything, it's entirely possible that the pro life movement is weaker now when we keep losing in red states. I mean, Kansas had an abortion resolution just south of me, where the pro lifers lost by like 17 points in Kansas.

And so there's a very large part of me that feels like, I think the, the more radical anti Democratic steps that a lot of Christian conservatives have been interested in, especially in recent years, they are incredibly counterproductive. And so I think that'd be, that'd be the question I would have for your account of how Dr.

Mohler thought about that question was like, I get that argument. But I also think there are certain ways that America works as a political community, that we've always worked as a political community.

And so when you try to do really top down radical transformation that in many cases isn't even really Democratic, I don't know that that's a durable change.

And I think the upheaval you create, again, to go back to the concept of iatrogenesis, sometimes the cure is worse than the disease in the first place.

So, yes, I think one of the problems we have right now is that a lot of politically engaged Christians on the right view Christian character as a political liability. And so that has all kinds of really pernicious effects on just their ability to do their jobs because they alienate all their colleagues.

And it teaches ordinary Christians in the pews who ostensibly should be able to participate in fruitful, constructive ways in democratic life. It teaches them that democratic life isn't really for them and we need to do more radical things to win.

And at the end of it, they're worse off and they end up losing because the style doesn't work in the first place.

Sorry, I'm rambling, but I mean, even like, there's a state senator in Oklahoma that the Christian nationalists are really excited about now, named Dusty Devers, and he's gotten some mainstream news attention because he has a bill to ban porn and a bill to ban sexting and ban abortion and all these different things. And the Christian nationalists love it because finally it's a Christian who's really getting serious about these things.

The thing that none of them are acknowledging is that they have Republican controlled committees and he can't get his bills out of committee because his colleagues don't like him and they don't want his bills coming to the floor. And so he's got Republican committee chairs that are shutting his stuff down in committee before it even gets to the floor.

So it's all just so tragic because we buy into this way of doing politics that in itself is problematic because it is indifferent or even hostile to Christian character. And then at the end of it, we've made these enormous missteps. We've left the way of Jesus in all sorts of pretty egregious ways.

They don't even get the thing they're going for because the style is ineffective. So the layers here are just so frustrating. And really we can just back up and slow down and like we are called to a certain way of life by Christ.

Some of us are going to be called to working in politics and that's going to be complicated and hard. But you can do it living in a democracy. We all have some stake in public life and we can be faithfully, pervasively Christian.

We can be marked by service and care to neighbor. And we can do all of this without Having to make the kind of compromises that are constantly being made these days.

There's so much to what you just said. I go back to the conversation that.

I had with Pete Wehner, and he was telling about how he had interacted.

With a guy who basically said, the nice way doesn't work.

This is a Christian man.

It's not about being nice. It's about the character and the posture you take. I think this is why I find David Brooks's work so interesting.

He's written on the Road to Character, his other book, the Second Mountain, where he talks about developing a moral ecology. That's what I find to be so frustrating.

As I'm talking to people within the church and I look at the world, and the world is like, why would we ever want to listen to you? I'm not talking about pro life. I'm not talking about all those different pieces.

But it's like, you are people I don't like and how you go about things. You're arrogant, you don't listen, you. You don't think, you don't dialogue. There's just this lack of humility in how you go about things.

And maybe I say that as a person who's not been engaged at any really meaningful level in that regard in those. Those debates, but the vitriol, when you add to that, the Internet encourages it and rewards it.

I was chatting with Sheree Harder of the Trinity Forum.

We were talking about fundraising, and she's like, it's really easy to raise funds if you're outraged about some moral issue and you're definitive about what it is you're wanting to do. But it's very hard to get funds if you're actually trying to have a healthy, nuanced conversation that will really move the needle.

Yes, well, and that's the thing about the whole, like, the nice way doesn't work thing. I always want to say, like, I kind of want chapter and verse on that.

So I know what we're actually talking about, because I'm sure that there are examples that people who say that could provide me that I would have some level of sympathy to. And yet when we followed the city code and followed liberal democratic norms, as we did here in Lincoln with the Fairness Ordinance, that worked.

I think part of what's hard is that when the lawful normal processes work, it's kind of boring. It's not going to trend on Twitter, it's not going to get a spot on the news, it's not attention grabbing.

And yet that doesn't mean that these things aren't working.

It means that we have a kind of media environment where negative emotions and negative stories and extremism play much better than healthy, sane ways of going about things. Just two different stories that come to mind even as you were talking here in Lincoln.

The group that organized that petition drive here in town actually has reasonably good relations with a lot of progressives. Now, the progressives can't always acknowledge that publicly because it would be bad for them politically.

But they've worked very, very hard to build relationships with progressives in Nebraska politics.

And that's anything from like knowing what's going on in their personal lives and caring and asking questions, sending them flowers when they're going through something hard.

But it makes a difference in being able to actually accomplish things because you do have trust and a shared relationship with people, even if they find some of your views odious. The other thing, a friend of mine has shared this story before. So there's a unicameral rep in Nebraska who's kind of a legend.

If you Google him, you'll find stories named Ernie Chambers, first black unicameral rep in the state's history. So he's from north Omaha and he was in the unicameral for 40 some years. They created term limits for the unicameral specifically to get rid of him.

And then he came back after he was gone for four years and he came back and now he's been gone for four years again. And the dude is 86 years old and he's talking about running again. He's just a machine. But Chambers is a bomb thrower.

He knows the rule book better than anyone else in the unicameral. He knows how to use it and he loves to make his point.

And so you can talk to some conservatives who just hate the guy because he's this progressive atheist from Omaha that ties up all these things in the unicameral.

But a friend of mine who had a, I think it was his father was in the unicameral years ago and there was a contentious bill being discussed and Ernie got up to speak and everybody was kind of bracing themselves for like the blow dryer. Ernie was going to get going and he was going to filibuster and we were going to be here for a while.

But then at one point as he was speaking, he said, actually, I'd be willing to yield the floor and hear what my colleague. And he said, my friend's father's name, what he thinks about this, because I would like to hear his thoughts.

And this guy was a Conservative evangelical farmer from central Nebraska.

But Ernie wanted to hear what he thought and it was because this guy had always made a point of trying to be the best friend he could be to Senator Chambers and Ernie respected him. And Ernie didn't respect a lot of people in the unicamel, but he respected this guy because this guy had done the work of building bridges with him.

And you're not going to find a more obstreperous can be very hard to work with Rep. Than Ernie Chambers for his district he was phenomenal.

So I don't mean that as a criticism, but he knew the rule book and he could make your life really miserable if he wanted to because he knew the rule book. I've seen kindness and following norms and care and relationship. I've seen these things work.

And so when people say nice doesn't work, I'm just like I, I really wish you'd be more specific because it's possible that what you have in mind doesn't actually work.

But also that's not really what I mean when I'm talking about trying to treat people with kindness and care and gentleness, all these things that Jesus calls us to. It's not what I mean when I talk about like submitting to the norms of liberal democratic self governance because I've seen that work. I've seen it.

I mean our country's history is proof that this works, right? Like we've been doing this for over 200 years. So it does work.

I think people lose faith in systems and processes and even sadly in Christian character when they feel anxious and frightened.

That's a failure that we repent of and we, we learn to recognize in ourselves and we ask God to help us grow and strengthen us rather than a kind of like guiding approach that should shape how we do public life.

I think the hard part for many Christians. I was actually in New England when gay marriage became legal. I was in Boston Commons across from the State House the day the verdict came in.

And what was frustrating is that there was a series of hoops you had to jump through in order for that to happen. The first was of course, they just declared it legal and then the citizens responded and they gained.

They petitioned with more signatures than ever before in Massachusetts history to get the issue on the ballot for the people to vote for.

But in order to get the issue on the ballot they had to pass through two, if I remember right, Constitutional conventions or congressional conventions, something along that line.

There were two things they had to pass through and the first one, it passed through which was under then Governor Mitt Romney, a Republican Mormon governor in Massachusetts, is something that is. Is. Is quite the norm. But then you had Deval Patrick, who came up, whose daughter was lesbian, and he vetoed it.

And I was there the day that that happened. And it.

On one level, the posture that was taken that day was disheartening because the LBGTQ community came out en masse that day and took over the steps of the building, and they were singing Bible songs and waving rainbow flags, which was the most bizarre thing I'd ever seen. And there were police mounted on horsebacks with barriers and separating the road. They were on one side of the steps of the courthouse.

We were cross the street, which was right on Boston Commons. And I went with a friend, felt, feeling that I wanted to do something. To me, this had massive ramifications.

But so many Christians I found were like, it's not that big a deal. Just let them do their thing.

And I felt the same that day at the courthouse steps. What bothered me though, for one, was how the Christian community came out was very small.

And when the Christian community did quote, unquote, I put that in quotes.

When the Christian community did finally come out, because there were so few of us and many did not have a posture of humility, it was bombastic and definitely antagonistic. And you felt like some were backed in a corner and they were crying out in anger, and I was just being very quiet, trying to watch.

And they passed out stickers and they even put like a. A poster. It was actually like one of those things you march at the beginning of a marching band.

It's got like a pole and like a flag in it kind of thing. And they. They just put it on our hands and it was like we were asking for the right to vote. That's what this we were asking for.

That was the kind of the hill that we hit rather than say, hey, G, marriage is evil. We want the opportunity as citizens to respond to this. That's what we want. And I got nervous because the police presence was there.

People were driving down the street, honking their horns in support, giving them everybody on that side the thumbs up, and then flipping us the bird. And you felt like you were in a hostile environment that could go violent any moment. But not, oddly enough, not from the gay community.

It was more of the people that were in this vote group.

And I remember being nervous, just very, very nervous, because, for one, I didn't want to be with the people that were screaming such derogatory things. So a friend of mine, we needed a bathroom break, so we go to the bathroom, and then we. They'd given us these pins to wear, that kind of.

Or stickers that indicated kind of the side that we were on, like, let the citizens vote. And it was, like, in this green. But then there was only one bathroom in the area.

So you had people from the LBGTQ community and then us in the bathroom at the same time is very tense, Just very tense. I remember walking out and I was so frustrated because the Christian community did not appear.

It.

It seemed to me it was just apathy. And I. I lamented. I remember looking up to the heavens saying, lord, where is your church? And then I did, and I heard a trumpet.

I look over, and it's all this group of people marching toward me, carrying another pole with a banner in front. I'm like. And I. And I see 30 churches United is the first part of it. That's all I can see. And I'm like, the church has showed up in mass.

You know, the Calvary's here. And then it said, poor gay marriage.

Yeah.

And then I just. I looked at my friend and I went, it's time to go home. You know, like this. We are outnumbered 10 to 1.

Even though the citizens had asked for the right to vote and we had more. I mean, seriously, I want to say it was six or seven times as many signature they had ever gathered in.

History to get the issue on the ballot.

But when you. Like in your situation, it worked well. In ours, it was the opposite. And it felt like we were. I mean, we were denied what the citizens wanted.

I mean, granted, it was still the process that had been set up to accomplish it, but you felt like you were railroaded. And, of course, the culture was already headed this way anyway. Not that the battle is in the political realm.

For me, it goes back further in a lack of Christian teaching on an understanding of the value of the body and its purpose. Yeah, because I think we were so focused on the spiritual nature that the body was given secondary status, gender had no being.

I remember reading an article during that same period of time where one woman said, you know, I'm not my genitals Are you saying my genitals define me? And I'm like, well, in some respect, yes, because your genitals represent the essence of who you are.

And you are an engendered human being that dictates things.

Favale is really good on, because Favale.

And she's just surfacing quotes from Margaret Sanger and Simone de Beauvoir, where both of them just very clearly do not like the natural functioning of a woman's body.

Like Beauvoir has a quote in Second Sex about how in her fertility, a woman is either riveted or chained, depending on how you translate it to her body, like an animal. And this is like the key intellectual figure at the start of second wave feminism.

So, yeah, I mean, that's not surprising to me because that's pretty hardwired in there since Margaret Sanger, because Margaret Sanger was like de Beauvoir. And then, of course, they're both influencing Betty Friedan and Feminine Mystique. I'm sorry about that experience that.

No, nothing to be sorry about.

No. As soon as you said the thing about the churches, I was like, I know where this is going.

It was disheartening.

Oh, yeah.

It was also a wake up call. And it made me stop and go, why is it that.

And again, that privatization idea where you said early on that question that your friend had said that it's privately good and publicly what?

Irrelevant.

Irrelevant. And that's what I have found as I've gotten further into this. And I'm amazed at how many people still hold that idea.

And again, I still have right fresh in my mind where that very much frustrated him and the understanding of the kingdom not affecting greater public life. And I felt the same thing when I talked with Os Guinness.

Oh, yeah, yeah, extremely.

But this is where I go back to your book. You helped people see many of the areas like myself. You talk about institutions and trusted institutions.

You talk about industrialism, you talk about the sexual revolution. You even talk about understanding of land. And I think.

And this is where so many Christians just kick it to the curb when you talk about animal suffering. And they're like, you've lost me.

I'm just done.

But I mean, even. Even the Proverbs mentions that a man.

Giving his, like, donkey, basically, you know, treat it well. We don't even think about that anymore.

That's why I like your book, is.

That I feel like you give us.

A holistic vision of how Christianity plays out to create a better humanity, which I think. And I. And again, I go back to New Begin and even Wright, where the church.

Is to be a sign and symbol.

Of what a redeemed humanity looks like and assigned to the world and to the powers of the reality of who God is. And rather than just a propositional truth to get you into heaven.

Well, and I, I think there's a need to become comfortable with a certain degree of ambiguity and incompleteness in this life. Like one of the topics kind of along the edges of our conversation the last few minutes is licit political resistance.

One of the things that's interesting in the Reformation tradition is if you read like Calvin and Calvin talking about the authority that the state has. Calvin doesn't seem to have any room whatsoever for any kind of resistance of political authority.

Like, you submit to the state, if the state tells you to do something that goes against God's law, you don't obey. And when the state arrests you, you submit to that judgment. Like, he's pretty hard line on that.

What ends up happening though is eight years after Calvin dies, there's the St. Bartholomew's Day massacre in Paris in France, which is basically this.

They got all of like, think red wedding, but wars of religion, Catholics killing Calvinists. And that's what Bartholomew's Day is.

It's this meant to be this meeting kind of for a meeting between the Calvinists and Catholics to talk about the governance of France because France actually had a huge Calvinist population at the time and then they just slaughtered all of them. That is when a lot of Protestants began thinking more seriously about just resistance, of tyranny because of Bartholomew's Day.

And so I think one of the lessons of that story is that if we are glib about persecution, we kind of invoke that blood of the martyrs quote in a lazy, thoughtless way. That's actually not the best thing to do because there's many examples throughout church history of regional churches collapsing due to persecution.

And so we shouldn't be glib about that.

And I think a lot of times there's a very kind of comfortable American, kind of suburban middle class mentality about this that says, oh well, the blood of the martyrs is the seat of the church. It'll be fine. That's true in some sense. But it's also true that regional churches die throughout church history. Philip Jenkins has written lots of.

Yeah, we actually talked about that when he came on the show. That was one of the things that we focused on.

Yep. So yeah, we shouldn't be glib about that. And yet we also, I think, should be able to recognize that our Moral horizons are broader than the world's.

And so there are worse things than political defeat or martyrdom. And if you're operating within a kind of imminent frame, there really isn't. But if you're a Christian, you don't live in an imminent frame.

You live with the assumption that we are eternal beings.

And I mean, I love the kind of mental experiments Lewis does, particularly in Great Divorce, where he's kind of asking like, okay, if we're eternal beings, the virtues that we cultivate in this life with the aid of Christ, like we continue in some sense to grow toward God even in the eschaton.

On the other hand, the vices and hatreds and evils that we kind of cultivate and nurture in our own hearts in this life, if we don't repent, there's some reason to think those just continue to consume us forever. And so there's these images Lewis has of people in hell.

Hell's like this crack in the sidewalk in heaven, because as people become more and more lost in their sin, they're unmade in some sense, and they get smaller and smaller and smaller. And the genius of it is you can always get smaller. And so they just also grow further and further and further away from each other.

So there's a line in there about how one of the people that Louis's character talks to remembers once seeing Napoleon, but now he's so small it's impossible to see him, or something like that. Kind of amusing, very British humor it feels like to pick on Napoleon in particular. But I think there's something to that.

And so the warning for Christians, I think, is to say, like, if you allow anger and mistrust and hatred and these other vices to take up a place in your heart, and you don't repent of those things, but you actually see them as being somehow necessary for your politics, even necessary for the like spread of the church in some perverse way. If you take those things in and you don't repent, there's reason to wonder, do you know God?

And if you don't know God and you take those things into your heart and you exist on into eternity. I mean, think about a bad habit that somebody has. Let me put it this way. Like, I remember my.

My brother in law used to be a pastor and he was an RUF guy. First PCA campus ministry, and then he was a church pastor at a church he planted.

And I remember talking to him a few years into his parish ministry and he made the comment to me, he said, you know, when I did ruf, I used to think that pastors in normal churches deal with totally different issues than I do. And what I know now is that it's all the same issues. It's just they've had time to kind of curdle, as it were, for the adults in church.

So he's like, you know, when I did Rufus and I was meeting with a young guy who was struggling with sexual sin, the young guy had a porn problem and I needed to help him deal with it. And it might just be a matter of like, you should just cancel your home Internet.

And if you need Internet to do work for school, go to a coffee shop or really just come to my house and use hours, but don't have Internet at home. And that's the way you deal with it. But now you're a pastor in a parish church and you're dealing with a guy in his 40s who had an affair.

That's a lot harder to untangle because now his wife is implicated, his kids are implicated, there's financial things, and there's also just an enormous amount of pain that is created by that. It's the same sin, but it's a different thing than the 20 something kid looking at porn in his dorm room.

I think you can stretch that same kind of thought process out into eternity when we're dealing with sin and people who die apart from knowing God. And so there's a warning here. Like, there is. And this is, this is just basic stuff Jesus talks about in the Gospels.

Like there are worse things than losing an eye or losing a hand. Like, that's a pretty plain application of what Jesus says in the Gospels.

And so I think one of the warnings for us is on the one hand, like, yes, it's perfectly licit to participate in politics and seek to see good laws passed, good laws as understood by Christian moral teachings. And yet there is a great spiritual danger in all of this that you would.

I'm trying to remember what the biblical text is, but the idea of taking fire into your bosom and not being burned, I think that is where a lot of people are now, because we, we've allowed our horizons to become smaller than they are. And so we struggle to think of something worse than four more years of Democrat presidency. And it's like, I can think of worse things.

Four more years of a Democratic presidency. For much of Christian history, Christians have dealt with far worse political realities than American democrats in the 21st century.

And God has seen them through it. And they are now with him and I would desire that for us as well, rather than us becoming lost in Machiavellian political intrigue.

You're the second person to mention Machiavellian Christianity in the last week. Just so you know. That's just kind of funny that you mentioned that means that people are thinking along the same lines, right?

Yeah, that's showing that.

And that's what I'm finding in a lot of different organizations, like what I see you guys doing, what I see us doing when I talk to the Trinity Forum.

Forum, When I talk to the folks at Comment, other ministries that are trying to engage in some respect, we're all doing something similar, just slightly different, talking to the guys at Cardis or Comment, they're using Christian social teaching to revive institutions. Whether you talk to the Trinity Forum, which is using Christian thought to renew the discussion of faith in the public square.

And in some respect, I was talking to our editor and I said, well, we're trying to actually do that, except for the church. We should have the word of God. But I'm finding that pastors are sometimes the most resistant because there's not either a chapter or verse.

And they've got a lot of ramifications.

They have the people that they feel comfortable with that have spoken to them and fed them over the years, and they want to know if they can trust you. The hard thing that I'm finding, though, is a lot of these different voices that they've been listening to.

While they might be really adamant about the understanding of the faith and certain issues, it's not always. It might be faithful, but it's not always fruitful.

And I find the other side, there's those who are fruitful in that they're making some type of difference culturally or engaging people, but they're not faithful necessarily to the biblical text. So how do we remain faithful and fruitful in this cultural moment?

And how do we view our life through that comprehensive lens where all of life is under the lordship of Jesus and offering a better humanity to those around us? I know we've talked a long time today. I mean, we had so many different places we've hit today.

And we often in this show ask for our guests to give a water bottle to our people to drink from a spiritual truth, because we are Apollos watered, so we want to water their faith. What's one truth that can nourish our audience throughout their week?

Mentioned Tolkien before. There's a line at near the end of Return of the King.

So it's after the ring has been Destroyed, and Sam is waking up in the tents on the fields of Cormallen. And Keller would always quote, though, is everything sad going to come untrue line that Sam has in that passage.

But there's another line in that passage I almost like better than that one where Gandalf tells them that I need to just memorize it so I can whip it out on these occasions.

But the gist of it is that the ring has passed away, the king has returned, he has tended you, he has healed you, and now he wishes for you to dine with him. Obviously that is.

I mean, it makes sense within Tolkien's story, but it's also true, as a Christian sin has been defeated, King has tended you, he's healed you, and now he wants you to dine with him. And so most immediately you do that when you receive the Lord's supper at church.

Like we have weekly communion at our church every week we dine with our king. That is also what we will do at the end of all things.

And so I think that that's the hope that the king has healed us and now he means to dine with us. And if you have that vision in mind, I think you can endure a lot.

A really good picture. It's one I think we all need to keep in front of ourselves.

But, Jake, it's been a delight to talk about this, talk about your book. I do recommend people going out and getting it and if they want to learn more. How can people follow more about what you're doing?

I have a basically dormant Twitter handle, so that's not very helpful anymore. You can sign up.

I have a personal email newsletter that you can get to on my personal site, jakemeter.com I bet if you googled Jake Meter Button down, you'd find it that way. Button down is the email provider I use for it. It's kind of like substack. I just prefer button Down. And yeah.

Otherwise, basically, I spend far more time on Mere Orthodoxy than I do my personal site or the email newsletter. So that's the best way to keep tabs on what we're doing. And that really is an institution we're trying to build that I hope will outlast me.

So that would be the primary way. But if they're particularly interested in whatever I'm up to, the personal website and the email newsletter are the way to go.

Awesome, Jake, thank you for coming on.

Apollo's watered having me. It's been fun.

The darkness has passed, the king is here, and he wants to dine with you.

That is a tremendous image, one that we need to hold on to in days like these days, when we are challenged to live out our faith consistently, when we are tempted to compromise in order to maintain comfort on the one hand, and tempted to compromise our character on the other in order to win. As Charles Haddon Spurgeon, one of my heroes, once said of two evils, choose neither.

I know that can sound more than a little trite, a little too idealistic, but the point is that we are called by Christ not to just believe certain things in our heads, but to live them out. And the fact that God is who he is, that he doesn't have parts, means that we can trust him to be with us, to care for us no matter what.

We have to come to the realization that we might suffer in the here and now. We may even be called to martyrdom, as unthinkable as that might seem. But through it all, we need to be doing the Lord's work in the Lord's way.

And this is where it gets confusing, because sometimes it's the religious people that put up the greatest, greatest reservations and obstacles in front of us.

That's what happened to Jesus.

He was battling the Roman Empire, but he was also battling the religious elite. And it hasn't changed any in our day.

The church is to be assigned to the world of a better way of living, of being reconciled to God and to one another. Our moral horizons should be bigger than the world's, even those who seem to be on our team.

When we compromise and make the choice to assume the moral horizons of our culture, we give up something far more important. We lose sight of the kingdom that we really belong to. We lose sight of the King who has healed us and wants to dine with us.

We catch a glimpse of this now as the Church when we come to the table together in communion or the Lord's Supper, when we remember who he is and what he has done for us, that he can sustain us, that he can help us to stand when compromise seems the better path, because we are his, both now and forever. I want to thank you for listening to this episode and if you have any questions or things that you want.

To talk with us about, go online.

Email me travispollowswater.org or simply go online chat with us on one of our social media pages, whether that's Facebook, Instagram, or on our YouTube channel where you can watch this and many more conversations.

I do 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.