December 15, 2025 • 55 mins
Every two years, Ligonier Ministries and Lifeway Research release The State of Theology—a massive survey that reveals what Americans (including evangelicals) actually believe about God, the Bible, Jesus, and culture. The 2025 report is out, and some of the numbers are… surprising.
In this episode of Thinking Christian, Dr. James Spencer is joined by longtime friend and theologian Dr. Ashish Varmafor a wide-ranging conversation about what the data shows—and what it doesn’t show—about the theological landscape among evangelicals today. Rather than panicking over headline-grabbing statistics, James and Ashish analyze the deeper trends beneath the numbers.
Together they explore:
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Why young evangelicals differ sharply from older generations on questions like the Bible’s literal truth and whether science conflicts with Scripture.
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Why nearly all evangelicals still say the Bible is their highest authority, even when their answers elsewhere seem to contradict that claim.
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How access to information, cultural context, and community shape belief—for better or worse.
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The surprising power of church attendance and affiliation in reinforcing core doctrines (and where that influence seems to break down).
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Why political theology may be quietly distorting how Christians answer moral questions—especially younger believers.
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Which troubling survey results actually matter—and which ones may simply reflect fuzzy categories or ambiguous wording.
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How churches should respond: not with panic or doctrinal hammering, but with thoughtful discipleship, richer community life, and deeper formation.
James and Ashish also dive into the complexities of interpreting theological surveys at all—how beliefs are shaped by cultural habitus, how people understand (or misunderstand) terms like myth, literal, or love, and why surveys often reveal more about our formation than our formal theology.
If you’re curious about what evangelicals really believe—and what the church can do about it—this episode offers a hopeful, nuanced, and deeply thoughtful guide through the data.
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To read James's article on this topic, check out his author page on Christianity.com.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hey, everybody, welcome to this episode of Thinking Christian On.
Speaker 2 (00:03):
Doctor James Spencer and I'm joined by doctor Ashish Varma
today and we've known each other for a long time.
Speaker 1 (00:08):
So we're going to have a conversation.
Speaker 2 (00:10):
About the State of Theology report and some of the
things that we've noticed as we've kind of played around
with the report.
Speaker 1 (00:16):
It's a really interesting.
Speaker 2 (00:17):
One and so we're looking forward to a good conversation
today about maybe something like generational differences amongst evangelicals on
certain theological perspectives.
Speaker 1 (00:27):
So Ashish, welcome to the show. How you doing, man,
Thanks good to be here.
Speaker 3 (00:31):
I'm doing all right, a little cold, but doing all right.
Speaker 2 (00:35):
You're in the frigid Lombard Library and I appreciate you.
Speaker 1 (00:39):
I appreciate you hopping on to do this well.
Speaker 2 (00:42):
So we had a previous conver we had a conversation
before the show. But the State of Theology report just
kind of give everybody a sense of it. And you
can actually just google the State of Theology or the
State of the just go to the Stateoftheology dot com.
It's a report that Liganier does, I think bi annually,
and so they came out with the twenty twenty five
results earlier this year and just been playing around with
(01:06):
this report for a while.
Speaker 1 (01:07):
Now.
Speaker 2 (01:08):
They rank and they give you different filters on this,
a lot of different filters on this, and so what
we're going to be doing today is just kind of
playing around with those filters a little bit and you know,
waxing philosophical, making some hypotheses about why the different results
might come out the way that they did.
Speaker 1 (01:27):
So that's kind of where we're at.
Speaker 2 (01:29):
The report doesn't actually give us a lot of the
things that we're going to talk about. It gives us
some raw data to kind of play off of. So
I don't want to give the impression that the report
gives us all this information that we're going to talk
about today. It just is a jumping off point for
some of our scholarly investigation.
Speaker 1 (01:48):
Fair enough.
Speaker 2 (01:55):
So, just in case anybody wanted to look at this report,
like I said, you can go to the state of
the dot com and what we're going to do. We're
looking at the data explore just so people can find
the information we're looking at, and we're going to filter
this out for two stable variables, and then we're going
to look at the different generational or age demographics as
(02:16):
we go through some of these questions. So the two
stable ones are going to be affiliation and belief. We're
marking both of those evangelical. We did find that as
we played around with some of those others, if we
put in not evangelical belief or if we put in
something like, you know, mainline affiliation, the results do change
pretty drastically, and so it's kind of interesting to watch
how these things change. But for the purposes of this conversation,
(02:38):
we're just going to make it a little simplified and
talk about evangelical beliefs across different age ranges. So that's
what we're going to start, and we'll start with what
is statement sixteen. The Bible, like all sacred writings, contains
helpful accounts of ancient myths, but is not literally true.
So that's the statement. And then people are asked, do
(02:59):
you agree with this, do you someone agree with this,
are you not sure about this, do you somewhat disagree,
or do you strongly disagree.
Speaker 1 (03:05):
It's kind of that five point scale.
Speaker 2 (03:08):
So I'll be looking over to the right because I've
got the report pulled up, and so if you see
me looking off camera.
Speaker 1 (03:13):
That's what I'm doing.
Speaker 2 (03:15):
I'm adding quickly in my head agreement numbers. So we
looked at this and for statement sixteen, if we filter
for the two evangelical and then you do eighteen to
thirty four, we have twenty four percent agreement that the
Bible is contains helpful accounts of ancient myths but is
not literally true. Versus if we factor in all the
(03:38):
other age groups, which run from you know, thirty five
all the way up to sixty five plus, we have
a pretty big disparity. There's only seven percent agreement amongst
all the rest of the age groups, and so that's
a pretty big difference between the eighteen to thirty four
range and then all the other age groups. When you
say ashij.
Speaker 3 (03:57):
Yeah definitely maybe one of the starker different says that
we see in this report.
Speaker 2 (04:02):
Yeah, it's they're obviously the biggest category at twenty four
percent versus even if we factor them in lump them
in with everybody else, the whole agreement is only ten percent.
So factoring by age really does make a difference on
this one. What I found interesting is when I looked
at some of the other statements, like let's say statement eighteen,
(04:25):
modern science disproves the Bible. Right, you see a very
similar trend there. The eighteen to thirty four year old
age group really does agree more frequently with that, so
twenty seven percent agreement versus let's say the sixty five
plus which was only ten percent agreement. So again a
pretty big disparity between these are between these ages higher
(04:49):
percentage of younger people believe modern science disproves the Bible
and that the Bible is not fully literally true. Now
that would be disturbing in my mind if it weren't
for some of these other stats that we look at.
So if we move to question I'm getting there twenty
(05:12):
or question thirty, excuse me, statement thirty, The Bible has
authority to tell us what we must do, and you
filter it. All the age groups agree with this to
a level of ninety six percent. The eighteen to thirty
four year old age group is actually at ninety six percent.
The sixty five plus age group is slightly higher than that,
(05:34):
or as slightly lower than that, actually ninety three percent.
And so there's this interesting variation. And if we just
go too statements more, the Bible is the highest authority
for what I believe it doesn't matter which age group
you pick, you get one hundred percent agreement. And so
these things don't seem to fit together. Right now, I'm
(05:56):
in that middle age group of thirty five forty nine,
and so maybe it shouldn't fit together for me.
Speaker 1 (06:01):
But I don't know. What do you make of this man?
What do you think?
Speaker 3 (06:06):
Well, one, that it's super interesting and you you you
tend to hear a lot. You know, it's sort of
the thing that we do as we get older. I
think I find myself looking at my kids saying, we
used to do things this way, right. You know, in
my day, we didn't have streaming services. You just had
(06:29):
watch what was on and get over it, right. Or
I said, this is my class yesterday because they were
talking about fighting fighting among their siblings when they were
kids between the remote control, and I finally just piped
up and said, you know, our TV didn't have a remote.
It just had buttons for each channel on top of it,
(06:49):
so there wasn't really much fighting except who got to
the front of the TV first. It's a thing that
you do as you get older, right. We have this
sense of what's normal that comes from when we were younger.
Speaker 1 (07:00):
Yeah, so.
Speaker 3 (07:02):
Part of it you expect, and that's as you get older,
your sense of normal is phased out. Right. But the
part that is odd about it, or at least that
seems to contradict that way of looking at this, right,
This this notion of as you get older things look
(07:22):
different because things are changing. Is that this last question
thirty two that you're talking about, it doesn't matter hold
you are, if you're an evangelical or you identify as
an evangelical, you say the Bible is the highest authority
for what I believe, and it's not even like so
they divide it up. Agree strongly agree.
Speaker 1 (07:42):
Is right?
Speaker 3 (07:44):
Strongly agree? Which is interesting and to me that raises
other questions. Is the issue here with some of these
other questions of the relationship to the Bible to the sciences,
the relationship of the Bible to myth, relationship of what
we believe the Bible says, to questions of gender and
so on and so forth.
Speaker 1 (08:06):
Yeah, is this really a.
Speaker 3 (08:08):
Question of lack of trust and belief or is there's
some other factor that is entered into play in which
we're looking at the Bible as saying different sorts of things.
Speaker 2 (08:22):
Yeah, Yeah, yeah, when I would just say one thing
before we move into that kind of conversation, just to
give people a reference point. If you mark not evangelical,
and then you mark the different affiliations that are not
evangelical churches, that percentage the Bible is the highest authority
for what I believe. The strongly agree goes down to
(08:43):
fifteen percent one to five, and the somewhat agree goes
down to twenty eight percent.
Speaker 1 (08:49):
So the evangelical.
Speaker 2 (08:51):
Belief and the evangelical affiliation, it's actually really strongly correlated
with this particular belief. This is not just something that
you know, Like you could ask any Joe schmol on
the street. They're going to go, oh, yeah, I strongly
agree with that. This is a uniquely evangelical belief. And
so I do think that as we get into some
of the more granular questions, does modern science disprove the
(09:14):
Bible as the Bible.
Speaker 1 (09:15):
Fully and literally true?
Speaker 2 (09:17):
Probably part of what we're running into is the I
think I would say the access to information is just
getting more and more open. In other words, as we've
gone into a digital age, we're all seeing more information
and being less able to integrate it into our faith paradigm. Right,
(09:40):
So what do you do with some of these things?
I mean, there are books written on, for instance, like
climate science. I have known nothing about climate science. I
haven't looked at it at all, But this is one
of those areas. Part of the reason I haven't looked
at is because I don't feel like I have the time.
I don't know that to get up to speed to
understand all of that would be a really long process.
(10:02):
And so as you're looking at some of these scientific theories,
looking at some of these scientific studies and things that
are coming out, you have to actually have the time
to not only gloss them, but to really deeply understand them.
And then once you've deeply understood them and critically analyzed them,
then you've got to integrate them back into your faith.
(10:24):
And my guess is that what's happening is that that
sort of old analytical style of processing information just isn't
happen as much.
Speaker 3 (10:35):
Yeah, if I can offer an analogy, I know you
love analogies.
Speaker 1 (10:39):
There, go for it.
Speaker 3 (10:41):
So I played basketball. I won't get into the weeds
of what all that entails, but the game has changed
a lot.
Speaker 1 (10:48):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (10:48):
Now, personally, I'll make comments every now and then again
if I think this era was better than that era. Yeah,
but I just love the games. I'm going to keep playing.
I'm going to keep watching. But i play pickup ball
with the group, and I'm on the older side of
the guys that play. And one of the big things
that's changed. And it's not important to understand the ins
(11:11):
and outs of this, but there's a rule that's a
current way that an offensive player can move with the ball,
called the step through. You could not do a step
through when I was growing up. In fact, what we
call a step through now would have been called a travel,
a travel back in my day. I've always prided myself
on being a good defender. I think it's important not
(11:34):
just to be able to shoot, but can you make
things hard on the other team. The step through changes everything.
So I'll be guarding these young guys and in my mind,
that's just not a move you make. It's not part
of my repertoire. So I'll try to lock them down
on defense and they'll slip through suddenly with a step through,
(11:56):
and it's annoying. It's definitely annoying. My inclination is to
say travel, and then I have to remember, no, it's
not a travel anymore.
Speaker 1 (12:03):
It used to be a travel.
Speaker 3 (12:04):
It's not a travel anymore.
Speaker 1 (12:06):
Right Now, what do I do with that?
Speaker 3 (12:08):
The game has changed? Right? I want to keep playing.
I could throw a fit about the fact that in
my day there was no step through, right, I don't
know that that gets me anywhere. They're just going to
call me old man and keep playing. And they're not wrong,
right if they if they turn on the TV and
watch the NBA or college or high school, the step
(12:33):
through is allowed. So what I have to do is
I have to be able to adjust. My defense has
to take into account that what might have been a
lockdown defensive play before now has to be able to
account for this step through motion. It makes being a
defender harder, but you got to do it well. My
analogy in this is that to your point, things have
(12:56):
changed just in terms of access. Yeah, whether it was
right or wrong to make blanket judgments in the absence
of access thirty years ago, we'll leave that to the
side unless you want to.
Speaker 1 (13:10):
Get into that.
Speaker 3 (13:12):
The reality is just simply access has changed, and complaining
about it isn't going to change that access has changed. Right,
Having taught college students and grad students. I don't think
the way it's specifically in theological studies. I don't think
the way forward is to spend all this time talking
or bemoaning the access that comes to various ways of
(13:35):
thinking about the Bible, various ways of thinking about theology.
And it's more about, Okay, access has changed. Now, what
does that mean for how I engage as a professor,
how I engage in theological education. To me, that's got
to be the way forward. Sure, we can have our
moments of griping on the side in our in our
old man corners, just the same way I do with
(13:56):
my fellow old man basketball players. But when you get
on the court, you know, you've got to adjust. And
I think this sort of dissonance that might seem at
first when we look at this kind of report, we've
got to move quickly by and ask the questions that
you just asked.
Speaker 2 (14:15):
Yeah, because I think the other thing we were talking
about before this, and I appreciate the basketball analogy. I
think that makes a lot of sense. One of the
things I would say has changed. And you you know,
as we talked before the podcast, we both agree on
this is that the liberal conservative thing is not the
way to solve this problem. Those categories aren't going to
be as helpful in describing this data. And so some
(14:35):
people might look at this and go, well, there's eighteen
to twenty four year old or eighteen to thirty four
year olds. They're going liberal. They think science just proves
the viable. They don't think the Bible is literally true, right,
and so this is a liberal drift. I as I
look at the whole of the report, and obviously we're
not covering every question on this podcast because that would
be a lot, but I would say, as I've looked
(14:58):
at the whole report, sure.
Speaker 1 (15:00):
That's exactly the conclusion I would come to.
Speaker 2 (15:03):
I think you have all of these different intersecting beliefs
that are being brought to bear on different generations of people,
and that those intersecting beliefs can tend to skew how
they answer something. In other words, if we were looking
at this just from a you know, a straight theological perspective, right,
(15:25):
we might say, well, there is a right answer to that, right,
we might have to simplify it down a good bit, right,
you know, remove a lot of the complexity of these
conversations because even you know, ancient myths, but is not
literally true. Literally is difficult for me to get my
head around, right. I would have just preferred it to
(15:47):
be said, but it is not true because I'm not
sure what the difference between literally true and true actually is. Right,
But that's probably more granular than most people are reading
that question. So the point is is I think that
and I'll give it. For instance, when I looked at
the question about whether or not Christian beliefs or one's
(16:07):
religious beliefs should influence their political activities, there were a
higher proportion of eighteen to thirty four year olds who
said that it shouldn't. They agreed that their faith should
not influence their politics. And then you go to some
of the moral questions, you know, transgenderism, homosexuality, some of those,
(16:29):
and you're like, how are these not going to be
skewed by that particular perspective? In other words, if they
think that their beliefs, their Christian beliefs shouldn't skew their politics,
and they view these as political issues, they're going to
answer those differently than someone who actually does think that
their faith should influence politics. And so I think there's
(16:51):
just a lot there that we when we're looking at
how do we correct maybe some of these views, how
do we cultivate more agreement on some of these use
We can't just go straight at and go well, we
need to get back into bibliology, and we need to
teach inerrancy, and we need to teach inspiration, we need
you know, maybe I mean those are always good things
to understand, I suppose, but there are these other areas
(17:14):
I think coming around the side that if we're not
addressing this is only gonna get worse.
Speaker 3 (17:20):
Yeah, to the to the question you just raised about
should should Christians allow their religious beliefs to influence their
political decisions? As we were talking about before, there are
interesting trends when you when you take the evangelical population
and then you remove that filter and put on the
non evangelical population. So generally speaking, we've noticed that with
(17:46):
the evangelical box checked, there does seem to be a
movement as you get younger in these age backits. But
when you remove the evangelical and you go to the
non evangelical, the movement is far less fluid. In fact,
you have a strange commonality and most of the categories
(18:07):
between the young and the old. So the eighteen to
thirty four being the young plus sixty five plus being
the old tend to be in similar positions. So with that,
with that pattern in front of us, what I think
is interesting on this particular question, Christians should not allow
their religious beliefs to be influenced to influence their political decisions.
(18:30):
Strongly agree. The highest population here is the youngest eighteen
to thirty four, but the next highest, not far away
from them, is that sixty five plus. So this time
a general landscape question whether evangelical or not. And that's
fascinating to me. You know, maybe maybe it shouldn't be
(18:52):
as surprising to me when I look at other sorts
of statistics. So, for instance, we have we have a
late late night talkshow ecosystem on many of the major networks,
and the age group that dominates the ratings for those
are the sixty five plus people because they're the only
ones who seem to watch TV live anymore. But then
(19:15):
you go to the YouTube population and that tends to
be a younger group and they're getting millions of views
per clip, So maybe there's some correlation there as well, right,
But I think that's an interesting thing to note on
this particular question that for the evangelical population, it breaks
the otherwise noticeable trend of younger means different, and this case,
(19:41):
younger doesn't necessarily mean different.
Speaker 2 (19:43):
Yeah, they were much closer on a lot of these measures.
When you just bracketed just the evangelicals versus the whole population,
there was a big difference. The other thing I would
say there were some difference is is I looked at
different questions in the density, which I found fascinating. Density
refers to whether you live in a large city or
a rural area, a suburb or a small city, or
(20:03):
what have you. And I was kind of going through
some of the questions with those that filter on as well,
and you did see pretty big differences. The way that
people in large cities thought about these things was different
than the way people thought about in rural areas. Now,
all these are just percentage differences, right, and so at
some point you're getting probably too granular in your sample size.
(20:25):
In fact, if you put too many filters on the website,
will pull up a little note and say there was
under fifty you know respondents in this filter. These results
probably aren't going to be accurate, But just again as
sort of a thought experiment for us. What I think
we're seeing is that some of these community aspects actually
really matter. So even when I was doing my little
(20:49):
experiment and I took off, you know, you'd just use
evangelical belief. An evangelical belief alone apart from other factors
didn't seem to really get it done. But if I
put evangelical belief and then evangelical affiliation, then that percentage
would lower. And if I put evangelical belief, evangelical affiliation
(21:10):
and church attendance several times a week, it would lower again.
And So while we tend to and I'm definitely guilty
of this, I tend to think in terms of headspace, Right.
Speaker 1 (21:22):
What do you actually believe? What do you know?
Speaker 2 (21:24):
I mean, I think it's just the academic geek thing, right,
you sort of like to think about these things. But
the reality is, if we were looking at this survey
and we follow some of these trends, community and time
spent in community is actually crucial to holding some of
these beliefs more strongly and obviously others less strongly.
Speaker 3 (21:49):
Yeah, well said, What I think is especially interesting in
that equation. If we can dig into this a little
bit as the church attendants. Yeah, you spent more time
with that filter than I did. Do you mind sharing
what you shared with me earlier in terms of kind
of the more granular elements there. One of the ways
(22:11):
they divided is it's not just church attendants, but it's
frequency of church attendants. Do you go religious days? Do
you go once or twice a month, or once tw
twice a month, once a week, which probably is the
most that's right, the most obvious place that people would
think of, will you go to church every Sunday? Right?
Speaker 1 (22:30):
But then there once a week times that changes things, right?
Speaker 2 (22:35):
And so I looked at this specifically with a question
on the report, does God accept or God accepts the
worship of all religions including Christianity, Judaism, and Islam? Right,
So this is the question I was looking at, but
just to illustrate how some of these filters actually work.
So if you look at evangelical belief there was only
(22:56):
forty seven percent agreement on that either strongly or somewhat
right or there was forty seven percent agreement, So forty
seven percent of people with evangelical beliefs said that God
accepts worship from all religions. If I then go down
and say, okay, but if you're combined with if you
combine that with evangelical affiliation. So now I've got evangelical
(23:18):
belief and evangelical affiliation that goes down from forty seven
percent to thirty one percent thirty percent thirty one percent agreement.
And then if I say, well, what about church attendance,
it drops another ten percent to twenty one percent if
I add in several times a week a church.
Speaker 1 (23:38):
And so that's sort of the tear that I'm talking about.
Speaker 3 (23:41):
It.
Speaker 1 (23:41):
It's like, you see this, the belief aspect, the.
Speaker 2 (23:45):
Evangelical belief aspect I hold, the evangelical beliefs is not
as strongly correlated with what I would consider to be
a right answer on this one. I mean, I think
that should be stated right. I would have said strongly
disagree to this question. I think there's ample reason, And
I'm writing an article for Christianity dot com, so if
you guys want to check that out, you can find
it there. But basically, what I would say is God
(24:08):
doesn't accept false worship. If we think about worship as
the reverential homage toward God, recognizing the worth of who
God is. There has to be an understanding, a matched
identity between what the worshipper thinks they're worshiping and who
the you know, who is actually being worshiped. And we
see this throughout scripture. I think, so I'll be making
(24:30):
that argument in a little bit more of a robust case.
But my point is for this, as we go down
from belief to affiliation to attendance, you see this agreement
shifting pretty drastically. I mean you're talking twenty some more
than twenty five percent decline decrease in that percentage from
(24:50):
just belief all the way down to church attendance. So
it's a fascinating trend to look at. I wouldn't have
expected that drastic a drop.
Speaker 3 (25:01):
Honestly, what do you make of thinking specifically about this question?
God accepts the worship of all religions, including Christianity, Judaism,
and Islam. In terms of strongly disagree, I suppose, somewhat predictably,
(25:21):
several times a week of church attendance, that number of skyrockets, right,
most people disagree. What surprises me within it is the
next category down is you go once a week to church,
and that group is more likely to agree with the
statement than those who only go once or twice a month.
Speaker 1 (25:40):
That's right, that's funny to me.
Speaker 3 (25:43):
I don't know what to make of that.
Speaker 2 (25:44):
I'm not sure either. I don't know what to make
of it either, But yeah, I noticed that trend too.
I would just say.
Speaker 1 (25:54):
If we infer from which it's difficult to do, like,
what are we doing for with church attendants? Right? Like?
Speaker 2 (26:04):
What are we How are we supposed to understand that?
Are we supposed to understand it as a commitment to
a bigger commitment to I think certainly I didn't even
know you could attend church several times a week at
this point, right, Like I just didn't realize that most
of the churches I've ever attended have that once a
(26:24):
week service.
Speaker 1 (26:25):
And that's kind of it, and.
Speaker 3 (26:26):
And so the Wednesday thing is kind of flittering away.
Speaker 2 (26:30):
Yeah, And so it's interesting to think about even just
when you're answering this question, are you talking about your
worship service in a small group, or are you talking about,
you know, your worship service and another church function like
I used to have when I was a kid. We'd
go on Wednesday nights, right, Or you'd have maybe a
Saturday night service or something like that, Like, there were
(26:52):
multiple opportunities for you to be at church, right, not
in a small group, but at church. And so I'm
wondering if some of this has to do with just
church structure or not necessarily a comment on the dedication
of an individual to be there several times a week,
but the availability of multiple service times per week at
(27:13):
a local congregation doing a better job of educating, like
that could be it. Because once a week at church,
you know, you're listening to a sermon usually, and so
if the sermon doesn't address the exclusivity of Christian worship
and the uniqueness of it and how God responds to
worship of other groups, maybe you just don't get that
(27:35):
question right. You know, you're inferring a lot of different things.
So I don't know that we have enough. I mean,
I could speculate on certain things, but yeah, my gut
is to say, if if several times a week of
church attendance doesn't mean small groups, or even if it
does mean small groups and some other things, that maybe
there is a gesturing toward better training, right, a different
(28:00):
understanding of this than what what a Sunday worship service
would really do for you, which wouldn't necessarily help you
answer this question.
Speaker 3 (28:10):
Yeah, so maybe that's the takeaway that there's a certain
level of investment within the larger operation of church training,
church teaching that if you're involved in multiple facets of
church life, that you're not getting on a Sunday morning
just by nature of what a Sunday morning is, right,
(28:32):
I wonder so that to me, that raises the question
of causation versus correlation. Sure, so does the multiple Is
it the attending of multiple days or multiple events during
the course of a week that's giving you the training
to answer the question in this particular way, or is
it you're already inclined towards that. So it becomes sort
(28:53):
of an in group.
Speaker 1 (28:56):
Here.
Speaker 3 (28:56):
I say. I don't mean this in a negative way,
but group think sort of mental If you're the ones
who think this way, and that's why you're the ones there,
and the self selection of the others are not the
ones who think this way, that's why they're not there.
Speaker 2 (29:10):
Yeah, I mean I think there's something to that. You
can view it as maybe it's better training. You could
also view it as the more time I spend around
people with similar thoughts as I do, the less likely
I am to think that people with different thoughts than
we have different beliefs than we have different religious practitioners
belong with us. And so that's not necessarily a bad thing.
Speaker 1 (29:34):
Right.
Speaker 2 (29:34):
That development of a strong in group identity, particularly if
it's forged in discipleship, that in Christ's identity, is actually
pretty crucial, right. You can identify who's in and who's out.
You see this happening like First John, for instance. Right
the first chapter of First John, he provides some markers
the true Christian community, right, and says, if they had
(29:55):
been of us, they would not have gone out from us. Right,
So if they really have been part of our community,
they'd still be here, they wouldn't have left. We see
this in probably First Corinthians, where Paul is trying to
circumstribe and say, hey, don't have all these divisions, You're
one in Christ. And so it's just there's a crucial
aspect to this in group identity that I don't want
(30:16):
to I don't want it to be polarized and be like, oh,
they're just an insular community that doesn't reach out or
something weird like that. I think there's a really healthy
way that we understand ourselves as being different from other
religions and that there are clear boundaries between us and
other religions. So I think that could be cultivated in
a more frequent interaction within the Christian community and with
(30:39):
a group of Christian folks that may be the impetus
behind this. Whereas people who are like kind of once
a week, if you think about how little time that
actually is versus what you may be doing for the
rest of the week. Right, who you may be interacting
with the rest of the week, So you're co workers,
you're you know, you know, maybe members of your family,
(31:03):
maybe some of your friends, your bowling league, whatever it is. Right,
You're now not interacting solely with Christians. You now have
friends who may be of different faiths, and that may
very well condition the way that you're answering this question.
And so time is a factor. I think that we
shouldn't minimize in this because the more time we're spending
within the church, I think obviously we're going to pick
(31:26):
up a i don't know, for lack of a better term,
of cultural awareness of what the church actually is and
be more inclined to feel a part of it as
opposed to it being something that I attend weekly.
Speaker 1 (31:38):
Does that make sense?
Speaker 3 (31:39):
It does. It raises more questions if you're willing to
try it on us. So it's fresh. I'm fresh, it's
fresh in my mind. This John seventeen dynamic just from
class be in the world but not of the world. Yeah,
which is really interesting. It's not entirely clear what that
(32:07):
dynamic looks like. If anything, one could argue it's deliberately
a dynamic full of tension, no easy answers. And I
hear what you're saying. I wonder if this is also
one of those no easy answers. Right, where's the line
between what I think you're helpfully describing and on the
(32:27):
other side, you're not in the world. You don't know
what's going on, and so there's no ability you know that,
there's a there's a hermeneutical entailment to not getting the
full dynamics of it or right, So what we don't
want is an echo chamber, and I think that's dangerous
(32:48):
for any community and the group in any place. But
there is on the other side, I think something right
as you're describing to this iron sharpening, iron sort of
way of thinking, and maybe the line is intentionally blurry
and that's where our where our discernment has to come in.
(33:09):
What are your thoughts on that?
Speaker 1 (33:11):
Yeah, I agree number one. Yeah, I agree with the
one hundred percent. I don't want that to come off
as like, here's the only narrative that would work. I
think there are.
Speaker 2 (33:19):
A variety of factors here that we're not able to
get any real clarity on from the survey. We're just
trying to give some broad picture of what this could
be and what factors are involved. I think you're right,
there is that healthy a group aspect, but then there's
also this dynamic where we're supposed to be going out
and I think the challenge for Christians generally. We see
(33:40):
this almost in the Book of Ezra. I've always found
it fascinating when Ezra is bringing the exiles back from Babylon.
One of the things he tries to institute is the
elimination of for is the returning exiles with people of
the land, like, don't intermarry with the people of them land.
Speaker 1 (34:00):
And part of what I.
Speaker 2 (34:01):
Think he's trying to do there is he's trying to
preserve the purity of the Israelite returnees, right, so that
they can reconstitute and be a part of the restoration
of the nation of Israel as a whole. So if
we view the exiles as the Judeans largely who are
coming back from Babylon, they still need to reach up
(34:22):
into some of the Northern Kingdom or even out into
the Assyrian Empire and know that these other Israelites, the
Northern Kingdom, Israelites have a place to come back to.
So he's trying to do is sort of circumscribe this purity.
Ultimately it does. None of it works, right, It's all
sort of a disappointing failure. But I think that we
can get into that sort of mindset of this has
(34:44):
to be as pure as possible before we go out,
And I think what you're pointing to is it's never
going to be as pure as possible. There's always going
to be this sort of tension of push and pull
of we're going to pick things up.
Speaker 1 (34:56):
From the world that need to be.
Speaker 2 (34:59):
Re formed when we come back into the church, and
we're ultimately going to probably spend too much time reforming
in the church instead of going out into the world. Right,
And so I think, yeah, that that dynamic. To me,
We're never going to balance it perfectly. It's always going
to be really sloppy, messy line. And this is what
(35:20):
repentance is for, This is what forgiveness is for, This
is what the encouragement of the community is for. Where
I think the challenge of this question and a couple
of the other questions, honestly, because I think we probably
shouldn't view this one in isolation to like, let's say,
statement six, God loves all people the same way. This one,
(35:41):
no matter what you filter it with, let's say evangelicals,
evangelical belief, evangelical affiliation, church attendance several times.
Speaker 1 (35:51):
A week, you still have eighty four percent.
Speaker 2 (35:58):
Agreement, eighty one percent strongly three percent someonet agree to
God loves all people the same way. It's difficult not
to correlate those two. You know, God accepts the worship
of all these other religions and God loves all people
the same way. Now, I would admit that's a fairly
opaque statement, But I guess my point is there may
(36:19):
also be these other intersecting beliefs that are influencing some
of these other responses, and so we can't we can't
lose that one either. So Yeah, overall, I'd say the
survey doesn't give me a lot of It gives me
some hope to say, Hey, being in community and participating
in church can help some of these things. But then
(36:41):
you come to a question like this, you know you're
filtering that the exact same way as we just did
for the previous question.
Speaker 1 (36:47):
You're not getting much better result, right.
Speaker 3 (36:49):
If anything, you're getting counterintuitive results for this one. It
is because the moment I suppose this says more about
my expectations, I would expect this answer to be higher,
a higher agreement from non evangelicals, but it's actually lower
from non evangelical.
Speaker 1 (37:06):
It's actually lower for non evangelicals. Yeah, I mean that's yeah.
Speaker 3 (37:12):
Some of that is you hinted at definitions. What are
people thinking? What are they meaning?
Speaker 1 (37:17):
Yeah?
Speaker 3 (37:18):
Then biblical understanding, it's a complicated understanding. On the one side,
we have God is love, greater love has no one
list mainly laid on his life for his friends, which
is clearly an allusion to the ultimate love of Jesus.
Speaker 1 (37:29):
That's right. And then we have.
Speaker 3 (37:32):
What on the surface anyway, are hard to square with
the Jacob I have loved he saw I've hated, right, right,
So it's a complicated question and you're not getting that
in these questions understandably, also educational questions.
Speaker 1 (37:48):
Right right.
Speaker 3 (37:49):
You could even like that you have to educate, and
that's not how these things work.
Speaker 2 (37:53):
Yeah, you could even get into the conversation about what
is love? Right, you know, are we talking about God's
covenant loyalty? Because then you have a unique case where
God is especially loving Israel a unique way because they're
in covenant with him, and so if we view love
is equally loyalty, then there is a unique and special love.
(38:14):
The election of Israel, I think plays into that. The
choice of Israel plays into that. You know, all these
different things kind of play into that. Whereas we're just
talking about a general sort of yeah, God loves his creation. Okay,
maybe there's a generic way in which God loves everybody
in sort of the same way, but there's obviously specific
examples we could look at, Like you said, Jacob, you know, Jacob,
(38:36):
I loved you, saw I hated. That's not a the
traditional love hate that we often think of, but it
is balled up with these other concepts that are kind
of difficult to deal with.
Speaker 1 (38:48):
And so yeah, overall the survey, I think, I will say.
Speaker 2 (38:55):
I looking through all the survey answers, looking through all
the demographics I have, I'm not there aren't a ton
of alarm bells for me in the survey, other than
some of them that I just find quite puzzling. This
one where we see, you know, God loves everyone the
(39:18):
same way. There's a question statement seven on Jesus was
a great teacher, but he was not God. You're getting
a pretty I mean it's not it's a relatively low percentage,
but twenty eight percent of evangelicals agreeing with that statement,
regardless of age group.
Speaker 1 (39:38):
Like, that's all of them.
Speaker 2 (39:40):
And so the eighteen to thirty fours are a little
higher on it than any other age group, and so
they skew that data a bit.
Speaker 1 (39:49):
But that's a pretty fundamental belief.
Speaker 2 (39:54):
And you've got twenty eight percent of Christians of evangelicals
and you know, agreeing that Jesus is not God. So
there are these counterintuitive results, I think in a lot
of these different places.
Speaker 3 (40:11):
Yeah, and again I think not to be the dead horse,
you have to take some of that with a grain
of salt. What are people understanding when the question is
being asked. I think evangelicals fairly consistently point to the
importance of the Bible, and so we're not shocked when
(40:33):
we see one of the respondence, regardless of age group,
the Bibles the final authority, or however exactly it was worded.
But then we throw in the dynamic that we've discussed
here in terms of what are we understanding the Bible
to be saying materially. Now that gets more interesting, especially
(40:53):
when you factor in more data. Right, we can be
just just to to draw out the sort of thing
we're talking about, the extremes of if you live in
a pre Galileo pre Copernican society, you're reading language like
the setting of the sun and the rising of the
sun in different sorts of ways.
Speaker 2 (41:15):
We still say the rise of the sun, right, but.
Speaker 3 (41:21):
A pre Galileo pre Copernicus person's thinking about it. So
that changes the way you read the Bible. But then
there's a there's the further dynamic of from where are
you reading it? You know, not to get into murky
(41:42):
waters here, but.
Speaker 1 (41:42):
If you.
Speaker 3 (41:44):
If you live in the United States with all the
social social sorts of things and political unrest, that are
going on, right, and you read it from a place
of of historic that's the best way to put it. Oh,
it's historic sense of what the Church ought to see
(42:05):
in the making of the American government. You're reading the
Bible in a certain kind of way if you live
in the same setting and you come from a historic
setting into which things like slavery and Jim Crow were significant,
you're reading it. And yet another way, if you're reading
it as the children of immigrants, in which you're the
(42:28):
first person who is a Christian in your family, you're
reading it yet in other set of ways, and maybe
to a point that you made earlier, but just starting
to highlight it. The agreement is there in terms of
the significance of the Bible, Yes, but the things that
(42:48):
you're noticing maybe aren't the same. Yeah, yeah, and that
that's going to change the way that you shade things. Right.
We have these in terms of historic doctrinal disputes. Not
my favorite doctrinal dispute, but one that has a lot
of airtime. So it's a good example, I think, is
(43:09):
Calvinism versus our Minianism. Sure, there are different different textual
starting points, you know, and how one then reads certain
passages is going to be shaded by those different textual
starting points, and who gets to decide which one started
at the right place?
Speaker 1 (43:27):
Correct?
Speaker 3 (43:28):
That that's just a genuinely and generally historically Protestant problem,
right of authority, yes, but authority for what We're not sure. Yeah,
that's why we have so many denominations. Right, So all
these things go into those sorts of questions. So similarly,
I don't have the same kind of alarm bells. I
(43:50):
did some perusing online just to see what some of
the talking heads were saying about this report, and there's
a lot of alarm bell sort of things going off
in a way that I didn't shared the same kinds
of concerns. To me, It was more a marker of
the landscape is shifted in the same sort of way
as the landscape of playing basketball shifted. So what are
we going to do to adjust accordingly? Right, it's not
(44:13):
good enough to just simply say, well, our pastoral and
theological education in the nineteen sixties was X, therefore it
should be that today, Well, no things have changed. Yeah,
obviously Jesus is who Jesus was. We're not saying that's changed.
But the sorts of ways in which you address issues,
the sorts of issues themselves they need to be addressed,
(44:35):
are right.
Speaker 2 (44:37):
Yeah, you might not need to call together a Creedle
council to correct some sort of abarrant heresy, you know.
I mean those worked really well early on in church history,
or worked fairly well and early on in church history,
but they may not work now, you know. And I
think that that is really crucial to understand. I'm not
(45:00):
saying that I'm exactly happy with all the responses on
the report, and some of them are a little more
troubling than others. It's just there's no reason to get
so agitated about it that you jump back in with
the response that says, let's hammer these.
Speaker 1 (45:15):
Doctrines home one more time, right, we need.
Speaker 2 (45:18):
To start teaching systematic theology in churches, you know, like
maybe we need to do that, but there may also
be all these other things that need to be massaged
into place, and so it's it's like we can't just
you know, you we're looking at a jigsaw puzzle. There's
all of these different pieces that are laying out on
the table in front of us, and if we only
(45:39):
focus on putting together one little corner. None of these
other pieces are going to get placed. And so we've
got to at least broaden our vision enough to sit
back and say, look, where would all these other pieces fit,
and how would they contribute to a.
Speaker 1 (45:52):
Reorientation of some of these beliefs. How would that help
us if we understood better.
Speaker 2 (45:58):
I go back to the church in politic question, largely
because you know, when I was a dean at Moody,
I had this question come up. There was a disagreement.
Some of the students were celebrating a law that had
just been passed and it happened to be about, I
think about homosexual marriage, and some students were celebrating that.
(46:20):
And so then you get certain people are saying, oh,
the students are going liberal. But when I talked to
the students, they weren't really. They weren't really going liberal.
They still believe that, you know what we would have
believed about the Bible and homosexuality.
Speaker 1 (46:34):
But they were off or I would say they were confused.
They hadn't thought about it.
Speaker 2 (46:39):
They weren't integrating in how does government fit with faith?
Speaker 1 (46:45):
What's a very different thing than saying they've gone liberal.
Speaker 2 (46:49):
Right, They're disintegrated maybe, and so there's some education that
needs to go into this. But we didn't need to
plow into, hey, let's go through all the Bibles that
condemn or let's go through the Bible passages that condemn
homosexuality or something. What was necessary was some additional exploration
into what does a political theology look like, how does
(47:10):
the church and the state actually fit, What does it
look like to be a Christian in a democracy? How
can we celebrate the rights that other people are getting?
How is this good for? Like all these different questions
that you could ask and reframe in terms of Christianity
as opposed to just reacting to it and saying no,
we have to now preach on this specific doctrinal issue.
Speaker 1 (47:32):
We have to make them read these things.
Speaker 2 (47:35):
Like if once we understand why people are believing what
they're believing, why they're thinking this way, then we can
come up with some solutions to help move them in
a different direction. But I think if we just look
at this report and go, okay, you know, one of
the questions that I found interesting was like, let's say
(47:56):
I'm going to find it here in a minute. The
Holy Spirit is a force, but is not a personal being. Okay, Uh,
forty three percent of evangelicals agree with that. Well, obviously
that's not a trinitarian belief. But how much of it
is it conditioned on the way that we tend to
(48:16):
ignore the Holy Spirit in our churches?
Speaker 1 (48:18):
Yeah?
Speaker 2 (48:19):
Right, Like I mean, it isn't It isn't necessarily solved
by going Okay, let's explain the Trinity. It could very much,
very well involve a number of different practices that we
need to draw in. So I think that's sort of
the My impression of the report is it just gives
us a lot to think about and probably a lot
more to explore.
Speaker 3 (48:41):
Yeah, fully agree, it's the direction of travel, so to speak. Right, Yeah, everyone,
If a large number of people think the Holy Spirit
is an impersonal force, that's probably says more about the
way we talk about the Holy Spirit of God, right.
(49:04):
But equally significant to me is when you put that
one next to the statement about trinity. Yeah, got his
father's son in Holy Spirit, Hi by in.
Speaker 2 (49:16):
The board, right, And that's those are the difficult things
like these.
Speaker 1 (49:21):
Some of these feel like.
Speaker 2 (49:24):
They may not be And I know this is strange
to say, because they're asking questions about belief but I
don't know that there are actually questions about belief I
think what you're getting is sort of maybe some top
level agreement on main doctrines, but then once you get.
Speaker 1 (49:38):
Into the.
Speaker 2 (49:41):
Nuances of it, people are like, I don't know, Like
you know, there's just not a depth there. And these
are not things that we sit down and say, well,
let's have a class on the Holy Trinity. Like some
of these things are things that we just need to embody,
we need to practice in differently. So there's a roundness
(50:02):
to this that I think we need to keep in mind, right,
that we've got to figure out how it is that
we go about reinforcing certain beliefs. If we're looking at
this report and I'd say, okay, forty three percent agreement,
then the Holy Spirit is a force but not a
personal being that one stands out. So if I'm going
to solve that though, it's not just a question of going, well,
(50:23):
that's not true. There have to be layers to analysis
to this to figure out I think what you would
do in order to sort of rehab let's say, the
views of the Holy Spirit within the church. Right, So
interesting stuff, man, I don't know. This report is always
(50:44):
fascinating to me. I enjoy kind of talking through it
and fiddling around with the data. But ultimately, I think
when I walk away from my takeaway at this time
around was I was really encouraged to see that church
affiliation and a tendons did have a positive effect in
certain instances. At the very least, I think that's that's hopeful.
(51:07):
That's hopeful. Right in an age where we maybe think
that church is sort of optional, it does now feel like, no,
the church can actually have a really good influence on
some of these things, and maybe it can have more
influence in other ways. I know the data isn't fully consistent,
but I just really I felt like that that trajectory
(51:30):
I thought was really helpful.
Speaker 3 (51:33):
Do we dull that a little bit though, when we
see that the spirit does just diforce in that sense?
Speaker 1 (51:40):
I sadly, yes, that's what I mean.
Speaker 2 (51:43):
The data is inconsistent, but I it's like, if it
works for one, maybe it can work for the others.
You know, it at least pushes us to look at
what does our community of practice look like, and maybe
we maybe it has an influence that we're just not
realizing yet. My hope again, you know, there's a lot
(52:03):
of inference going on here because the data is what
the data is. It just doesn't lead us anywhere necessarily.
It just shines a spotlight on certain of these things.
Speaker 3 (52:12):
For sure. One thing I'd like to see from this,
so when you go into this data Explorer model, it
gives you the previous reports as well. Yes, And what
I would have loved to have been able to do
is say, let's compare this. So they did this every
two years, it looks like except for this time it
(52:33):
was three years ago.
Speaker 1 (52:34):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (52:35):
I would love to go to the previous report or
the eleven years ago report and see what the researchers,
the surveyors found for the same questions, but they're not
the same questions, right, That would actually help making more
sense of some of this data. Has there been movement
or could we have gone back eleven years ago? So
(52:58):
I tried to find some that were roughly the similar,
roughly similar, but there were different adountfas that I don't
know that I can say very much from that.
Speaker 1 (53:05):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (53:06):
Yeah, So if you're listening out there and you're one
of the surveyors of this, maybe give us the same questions.
Speaker 2 (53:12):
Thanks time, give me the same questions, Oliver. I will
say I appreciate it on this one. They had one
that I dealt with a couple of years ago when
this came out. It was I believe the statement was
God can learn and change, and this time they changed
that to just one of those you know, God is unchanged,
(53:33):
And I think it's the way they phrased it, which
I think is a more appropriate way to phrase it. Yes,
because when you have the and in there, God can
learn and change. I understood what they were doing right,
I could get it, but it does add an element.
Speaker 1 (53:48):
Confusion there and so many.
Speaker 2 (53:52):
Yeah, I think they did have some good clarifications in
this one, but it does mean you can't compare the results, so.
Speaker 1 (53:59):
Not as well as you might want to.
Speaker 2 (54:01):
God accepts the worship of all the different religions was
the same as the in this one as it was
the last one, and the results haven't changed that much
from what I remember. So that was that was interesting.
Speaker 3 (54:14):
And modern science disproves the Bible to another one that
does carry over. Yeah, and again it's actually not. Actually,
what I'm surprised to see is that the number of
strongly disagrees up on this one. Yes, maybe I'm less
surprised than I should Maybe I'm more surprised than I
should be because we do have a little bit more
(54:35):
of a polarized The data gives me what I want
to see, if not, I disagree. Yeah, sort of a dynamic.
Speaker 2 (54:42):
But well, I know we talked a lot about the
meta report kind of stuff today. I'd like to have
you back on to discuss some of the specific questions
like and and really dive a little deeper into some
of them.
Speaker 1 (54:59):
But will we'll that another time.
Speaker 2 (55:01):
We've been going for about an hour, and I think
that that's probably overkilled. But it's an interesting survey and
I just encourage listeners to go check it out, play
around with it. My encouragement would be not to be
alarmed by some of the results, but to be thinking
through it in the way that Ashish and I have,
just trying to figure out, Okay, how does all this
(55:22):
fit together? What does this really look like? And how
might our church, my local congregation me as an individual Christian?
Number one, how do I think about these issues? And
number two? What might what might we need to do
to sort of move people toward a more orthodox belief
So be my two cents, but thanks all she's for
(55:46):
participating in this man.
Speaker 1 (55:47):
It was good to have you. Thanks for having me
absolutely all.
Speaker 2 (55:51):
Right, everybody, we're going to call it a day there
and we'll catch on the next episode of Thinking Christian.
Speaker 1 (55:56):
Take care, everybody,
Hey, everybody, welcome to this episode of Thinking Christian On.
Speaker 2 (00:03):
Doctor James Spencer and I'm joined by doctor Ashish Varma
today and we've known each other for a long time.
Speaker 1 (00:08):
So we're going to have a conversation.
Speaker 2 (00:10):
About the State of Theology report and some of the
things that we've noticed as we've kind of played around
with the report.
Speaker 1 (00:16):
It's a really interesting.
Speaker 2 (00:17):
One and so we're looking forward to a good conversation
today about maybe something like generational differences amongst evangelicals on
certain theological perspectives.
Speaker 1 (00:27):
So Ashish, welcome to the show. How you doing, man,
Thanks good to be here.
Speaker 3 (00:31):
I'm doing all right, a little cold, but doing all right.
Speaker 2 (00:35):
You're in the frigid Lombard Library and I appreciate you.
Speaker 1 (00:39):
I appreciate you hopping on to do this well.
Speaker 2 (00:42):
So we had a previous conver we had a conversation
before the show. But the State of Theology report just
kind of give everybody a sense of it. And you
can actually just google the State of Theology or the
State of the just go to the Stateoftheology dot com.
It's a report that Liganier does, I think bi annually,
and so they came out with the twenty twenty five
results earlier this year and just been playing around with
(01:06):
this report for a while.
Speaker 1 (01:07):
Now.
Speaker 2 (01:08):
They rank and they give you different filters on this,
a lot of different filters on this, and so what
we're going to be doing today is just kind of
playing around with those filters a little bit and you know,
waxing philosophical, making some hypotheses about why the different results
might come out the way that they did.
Speaker 1 (01:27):
So that's kind of where we're at.
Speaker 2 (01:29):
The report doesn't actually give us a lot of the
things that we're going to talk about. It gives us
some raw data to kind of play off of. So
I don't want to give the impression that the report
gives us all this information that we're going to talk
about today. It just is a jumping off point for
some of our scholarly investigation.
Speaker 1 (01:48):
Fair enough.
Speaker 2 (01:55):
So, just in case anybody wanted to look at this report,
like I said, you can go to the state of
the dot com and what we're going to do. We're
looking at the data explore just so people can find
the information we're looking at, and we're going to filter
this out for two stable variables, and then we're going
to look at the different generational or age demographics as
(02:16):
we go through some of these questions. So the two
stable ones are going to be affiliation and belief. We're
marking both of those evangelical. We did find that as
we played around with some of those others, if we
put in not evangelical belief or if we put in
something like, you know, mainline affiliation, the results do change
pretty drastically, and so it's kind of interesting to watch
how these things change. But for the purposes of this conversation,
(02:38):
we're just going to make it a little simplified and
talk about evangelical beliefs across different age ranges. So that's
what we're going to start, and we'll start with what
is statement sixteen. The Bible, like all sacred writings, contains
helpful accounts of ancient myths, but is not literally true.
So that's the statement. And then people are asked, do
(02:59):
you agree with this, do you someone agree with this,
are you not sure about this, do you somewhat disagree,
or do you strongly disagree.
Speaker 1 (03:05):
It's kind of that five point scale.
Speaker 2 (03:08):
So I'll be looking over to the right because I've
got the report pulled up, and so if you see
me looking off camera.
Speaker 1 (03:13):
That's what I'm doing.
Speaker 2 (03:15):
I'm adding quickly in my head agreement numbers. So we
looked at this and for statement sixteen, if we filter
for the two evangelical and then you do eighteen to
thirty four, we have twenty four percent agreement that the
Bible is contains helpful accounts of ancient myths but is
not literally true. Versus if we factor in all the
(03:38):
other age groups, which run from you know, thirty five
all the way up to sixty five plus, we have
a pretty big disparity. There's only seven percent agreement amongst
all the rest of the age groups, and so that's
a pretty big difference between the eighteen to thirty four
range and then all the other age groups. When you
say ashij.
Speaker 3 (03:57):
Yeah definitely maybe one of the starker different says that
we see in this report.
Speaker 2 (04:02):
Yeah, it's they're obviously the biggest category at twenty four
percent versus even if we factor them in lump them
in with everybody else, the whole agreement is only ten percent.
So factoring by age really does make a difference on
this one. What I found interesting is when I looked
at some of the other statements, like let's say statement eighteen,
(04:25):
modern science disproves the Bible. Right, you see a very
similar trend there. The eighteen to thirty four year old
age group really does agree more frequently with that, so
twenty seven percent agreement versus let's say the sixty five
plus which was only ten percent agreement. So again a
pretty big disparity between these are between these ages higher
(04:49):
percentage of younger people believe modern science disproves the Bible
and that the Bible is not fully literally true. Now
that would be disturbing in my mind if it weren't
for some of these other stats that we look at.
So if we move to question I'm getting there twenty
(05:12):
or question thirty, excuse me, statement thirty, The Bible has
authority to tell us what we must do, and you
filter it. All the age groups agree with this to
a level of ninety six percent. The eighteen to thirty
four year old age group is actually at ninety six percent.
The sixty five plus age group is slightly higher than that,
(05:34):
or as slightly lower than that, actually ninety three percent.
And so there's this interesting variation. And if we just
go too statements more, the Bible is the highest authority
for what I believe it doesn't matter which age group
you pick, you get one hundred percent agreement. And so
these things don't seem to fit together. Right now, I'm
(05:56):
in that middle age group of thirty five forty nine,
and so maybe it shouldn't fit together for me.
Speaker 1 (06:01):
But I don't know. What do you make of this man?
What do you think?
Speaker 3 (06:06):
Well, one, that it's super interesting and you you you
tend to hear a lot. You know, it's sort of
the thing that we do as we get older. I
think I find myself looking at my kids saying, we
used to do things this way, right. You know, in
my day, we didn't have streaming services. You just had
(06:29):
watch what was on and get over it, right. Or
I said, this is my class yesterday because they were
talking about fighting fighting among their siblings when they were
kids between the remote control, and I finally just piped
up and said, you know, our TV didn't have a remote.
It just had buttons for each channel on top of it,
(06:49):
so there wasn't really much fighting except who got to
the front of the TV first. It's a thing that
you do as you get older, right. We have this
sense of what's normal that comes from when we were younger.
Speaker 1 (07:00):
Yeah, so.
Speaker 3 (07:02):
Part of it you expect, and that's as you get older,
your sense of normal is phased out. Right. But the
part that is odd about it, or at least that
seems to contradict that way of looking at this, right,
This this notion of as you get older things look
(07:22):
different because things are changing. Is that this last question
thirty two that you're talking about, it doesn't matter hold
you are, if you're an evangelical or you identify as
an evangelical, you say the Bible is the highest authority
for what I believe, and it's not even like so
they divide it up. Agree strongly agree.
Speaker 1 (07:42):
Is right?
Speaker 3 (07:44):
Strongly agree? Which is interesting and to me that raises
other questions. Is the issue here with some of these
other questions of the relationship to the Bible to the sciences,
the relationship of the Bible to myth, relationship of what
we believe the Bible says, to questions of gender and
so on and so forth.
Speaker 1 (08:06):
Yeah, is this really a.
Speaker 3 (08:08):
Question of lack of trust and belief or is there's
some other factor that is entered into play in which
we're looking at the Bible as saying different sorts of things.
Speaker 2 (08:22):
Yeah, Yeah, yeah, when I would just say one thing
before we move into that kind of conversation, just to
give people a reference point. If you mark not evangelical,
and then you mark the different affiliations that are not
evangelical churches, that percentage the Bible is the highest authority
for what I believe. The strongly agree goes down to
(08:43):
fifteen percent one to five, and the somewhat agree goes
down to twenty eight percent.
Speaker 1 (08:49):
So the evangelical.
Speaker 2 (08:51):
Belief and the evangelical affiliation, it's actually really strongly correlated
with this particular belief. This is not just something that
you know, Like you could ask any Joe schmol on
the street. They're going to go, oh, yeah, I strongly
agree with that. This is a uniquely evangelical belief. And
so I do think that as we get into some
of the more granular questions, does modern science disprove the
(09:14):
Bible as the Bible.
Speaker 1 (09:15):
Fully and literally true?
Speaker 2 (09:17):
Probably part of what we're running into is the I
think I would say the access to information is just
getting more and more open. In other words, as we've
gone into a digital age, we're all seeing more information
and being less able to integrate it into our faith paradigm. Right,
(09:40):
So what do you do with some of these things?
I mean, there are books written on, for instance, like
climate science. I have known nothing about climate science. I
haven't looked at it at all, But this is one
of those areas. Part of the reason I haven't looked
at is because I don't feel like I have the time.
I don't know that to get up to speed to
understand all of that would be a really long process.
(10:02):
And so as you're looking at some of these scientific theories,
looking at some of these scientific studies and things that
are coming out, you have to actually have the time
to not only gloss them, but to really deeply understand them.
And then once you've deeply understood them and critically analyzed them,
then you've got to integrate them back into your faith.
(10:24):
And my guess is that what's happening is that that
sort of old analytical style of processing information just isn't
happen as much.
Speaker 3 (10:35):
Yeah, if I can offer an analogy, I know you
love analogies.
Speaker 1 (10:39):
There, go for it.
Speaker 3 (10:41):
So I played basketball. I won't get into the weeds
of what all that entails, but the game has changed
a lot.
Speaker 1 (10:48):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (10:48):
Now, personally, I'll make comments every now and then again
if I think this era was better than that era. Yeah,
but I just love the games. I'm going to keep playing.
I'm going to keep watching. But i play pickup ball
with the group, and I'm on the older side of
the guys that play. And one of the big things
that's changed. And it's not important to understand the ins
(11:11):
and outs of this, but there's a rule that's a
current way that an offensive player can move with the ball,
called the step through. You could not do a step
through when I was growing up. In fact, what we
call a step through now would have been called a travel,
a travel back in my day. I've always prided myself
on being a good defender. I think it's important not
(11:34):
just to be able to shoot, but can you make
things hard on the other team. The step through changes everything.
So I'll be guarding these young guys and in my mind,
that's just not a move you make. It's not part
of my repertoire. So I'll try to lock them down
on defense and they'll slip through suddenly with a step through,
(11:56):
and it's annoying. It's definitely annoying. My inclination is to
say travel, and then I have to remember, no, it's
not a travel anymore.
Speaker 1 (12:03):
It used to be a travel.
Speaker 3 (12:04):
It's not a travel anymore.
Speaker 1 (12:06):
Right Now, what do I do with that?
Speaker 3 (12:08):
The game has changed? Right? I want to keep playing.
I could throw a fit about the fact that in
my day there was no step through, right, I don't
know that that gets me anywhere. They're just going to
call me old man and keep playing. And they're not wrong,
right if they if they turn on the TV and
watch the NBA or college or high school, the step
(12:33):
through is allowed. So what I have to do is
I have to be able to adjust. My defense has
to take into account that what might have been a
lockdown defensive play before now has to be able to
account for this step through motion. It makes being a
defender harder, but you got to do it well. My
analogy in this is that to your point, things have
(12:56):
changed just in terms of access. Yeah, whether it was
right or wrong to make blanket judgments in the absence
of access thirty years ago, we'll leave that to the
side unless you want to.
Speaker 1 (13:10):
Get into that.
Speaker 3 (13:12):
The reality is just simply access has changed, and complaining
about it isn't going to change that access has changed. Right,
Having taught college students and grad students. I don't think
the way it's specifically in theological studies. I don't think
the way forward is to spend all this time talking
or bemoaning the access that comes to various ways of
(13:35):
thinking about the Bible, various ways of thinking about theology.
And it's more about, Okay, access has changed. Now, what
does that mean for how I engage as a professor,
how I engage in theological education. To me, that's got
to be the way forward. Sure, we can have our
moments of griping on the side in our in our
old man corners, just the same way I do with
(13:56):
my fellow old man basketball players. But when you get
on the court, you know, you've got to adjust. And
I think this sort of dissonance that might seem at
first when we look at this kind of report, we've
got to move quickly by and ask the questions that
you just asked.
Speaker 2 (14:15):
Yeah, because I think the other thing we were talking
about before this, and I appreciate the basketball analogy. I
think that makes a lot of sense. One of the
things I would say has changed. And you you know,
as we talked before the podcast, we both agree on
this is that the liberal conservative thing is not the
way to solve this problem. Those categories aren't going to
be as helpful in describing this data. And so some
(14:35):
people might look at this and go, well, there's eighteen
to twenty four year old or eighteen to thirty four
year olds. They're going liberal. They think science just proves
the viable. They don't think the Bible is literally true, right,
and so this is a liberal drift. I as I
look at the whole of the report, and obviously we're
not covering every question on this podcast because that would
be a lot, but I would say, as I've looked
(14:58):
at the whole report, sure.
Speaker 1 (15:00):
That's exactly the conclusion I would come to.
Speaker 2 (15:03):
I think you have all of these different intersecting beliefs
that are being brought to bear on different generations of people,
and that those intersecting beliefs can tend to skew how
they answer something. In other words, if we were looking
at this just from a you know, a straight theological perspective, right,
(15:25):
we might say, well, there is a right answer to that, right,
we might have to simplify it down a good bit, right,
you know, remove a lot of the complexity of these
conversations because even you know, ancient myths, but is not
literally true. Literally is difficult for me to get my
head around, right. I would have just preferred it to
(15:47):
be said, but it is not true because I'm not
sure what the difference between literally true and true actually is. Right,
But that's probably more granular than most people are reading
that question. So the point is is I think that
and I'll give it. For instance, when I looked at
the question about whether or not Christian beliefs or one's
(16:07):
religious beliefs should influence their political activities, there were a
higher proportion of eighteen to thirty four year olds who
said that it shouldn't. They agreed that their faith should
not influence their politics. And then you go to some
of the moral questions, you know, transgenderism, homosexuality, some of those,
(16:29):
and you're like, how are these not going to be
skewed by that particular perspective? In other words, if they
think that their beliefs, their Christian beliefs shouldn't skew their politics,
and they view these as political issues, they're going to
answer those differently than someone who actually does think that
their faith should influence politics. And so I think there's
(16:51):
just a lot there that we when we're looking at
how do we correct maybe some of these views, how
do we cultivate more agreement on some of these use
We can't just go straight at and go well, we
need to get back into bibliology, and we need to
teach inerrancy, and we need to teach inspiration, we need
you know, maybe I mean those are always good things
to understand, I suppose, but there are these other areas
(17:14):
I think coming around the side that if we're not
addressing this is only gonna get worse.
Speaker 3 (17:20):
Yeah, to the to the question you just raised about
should should Christians allow their religious beliefs to influence their
political decisions? As we were talking about before, there are
interesting trends when you when you take the evangelical population
and then you remove that filter and put on the
non evangelical population. So generally speaking, we've noticed that with
(17:46):
the evangelical box checked, there does seem to be a
movement as you get younger in these age backits. But
when you remove the evangelical and you go to the
non evangelical, the movement is far less fluid. In fact,
you have a strange commonality and most of the categories
(18:07):
between the young and the old. So the eighteen to
thirty four being the young plus sixty five plus being
the old tend to be in similar positions. So with that,
with that pattern in front of us, what I think
is interesting on this particular question, Christians should not allow
their religious beliefs to be influenced to influence their political decisions.
(18:30):
Strongly agree. The highest population here is the youngest eighteen
to thirty four, but the next highest, not far away
from them, is that sixty five plus. So this time
a general landscape question whether evangelical or not. And that's
fascinating to me. You know, maybe maybe it shouldn't be
(18:52):
as surprising to me when I look at other sorts
of statistics. So, for instance, we have we have a
late late night talkshow ecosystem on many of the major networks,
and the age group that dominates the ratings for those
are the sixty five plus people because they're the only
ones who seem to watch TV live anymore. But then
(19:15):
you go to the YouTube population and that tends to
be a younger group and they're getting millions of views
per clip, So maybe there's some correlation there as well, right,
But I think that's an interesting thing to note on
this particular question that for the evangelical population, it breaks
the otherwise noticeable trend of younger means different, and this case,
(19:41):
younger doesn't necessarily mean different.
Speaker 2 (19:43):
Yeah, they were much closer on a lot of these measures.
When you just bracketed just the evangelicals versus the whole population,
there was a big difference. The other thing I would
say there were some difference is is I looked at
different questions in the density, which I found fascinating. Density
refers to whether you live in a large city or
a rural area, a suburb or a small city, or
(20:03):
what have you. And I was kind of going through
some of the questions with those that filter on as well,
and you did see pretty big differences. The way that
people in large cities thought about these things was different
than the way people thought about in rural areas. Now,
all these are just percentage differences, right, and so at
some point you're getting probably too granular in your sample size.
(20:25):
In fact, if you put too many filters on the website,
will pull up a little note and say there was
under fifty you know respondents in this filter. These results
probably aren't going to be accurate, But just again as
sort of a thought experiment for us. What I think
we're seeing is that some of these community aspects actually
really matter. So even when I was doing my little
(20:49):
experiment and I took off, you know, you'd just use
evangelical belief. An evangelical belief alone apart from other factors
didn't seem to really get it done. But if I
put evangelical belief and then evangelical affiliation, then that percentage
would lower. And if I put evangelical belief, evangelical affiliation
(21:10):
and church attendance several times a week, it would lower again.
And So while we tend to and I'm definitely guilty
of this, I tend to think in terms of headspace, Right.
Speaker 1 (21:22):
What do you actually believe? What do you know?
Speaker 2 (21:24):
I mean, I think it's just the academic geek thing, right,
you sort of like to think about these things. But
the reality is, if we were looking at this survey
and we follow some of these trends, community and time
spent in community is actually crucial to holding some of
these beliefs more strongly and obviously others less strongly.
Speaker 3 (21:49):
Yeah, well said, What I think is especially interesting in
that equation. If we can dig into this a little
bit as the church attendants. Yeah, you spent more time
with that filter than I did. Do you mind sharing
what you shared with me earlier in terms of kind
of the more granular elements there. One of the ways
(22:11):
they divided is it's not just church attendants, but it's
frequency of church attendants. Do you go religious days? Do
you go once or twice a month, or once tw
twice a month, once a week, which probably is the
most that's right, the most obvious place that people would
think of, will you go to church every Sunday? Right?
Speaker 1 (22:30):
But then there once a week times that changes things, right?
Speaker 2 (22:35):
And so I looked at this specifically with a question
on the report, does God accept or God accepts the
worship of all religions including Christianity, Judaism, and Islam? Right,
So this is the question I was looking at, but
just to illustrate how some of these filters actually work.
So if you look at evangelical belief there was only
(22:56):
forty seven percent agreement on that either strongly or somewhat
right or there was forty seven percent agreement, So forty
seven percent of people with evangelical beliefs said that God
accepts worship from all religions. If I then go down
and say, okay, but if you're combined with if you
combine that with evangelical affiliation. So now I've got evangelical
(23:18):
belief and evangelical affiliation that goes down from forty seven
percent to thirty one percent thirty percent thirty one percent agreement.
And then if I say, well, what about church attendance,
it drops another ten percent to twenty one percent if
I add in several times a week a church.
Speaker 1 (23:38):
And so that's sort of the tear that I'm talking about.
Speaker 3 (23:41):
It.
Speaker 1 (23:41):
It's like, you see this, the belief aspect, the.
Speaker 2 (23:45):
Evangelical belief aspect I hold, the evangelical beliefs is not
as strongly correlated with what I would consider to be
a right answer on this one. I mean, I think
that should be stated right. I would have said strongly
disagree to this question. I think there's ample reason, And
I'm writing an article for Christianity dot com, so if
you guys want to check that out, you can find
it there. But basically, what I would say is God
(24:08):
doesn't accept false worship. If we think about worship as
the reverential homage toward God, recognizing the worth of who
God is. There has to be an understanding, a matched
identity between what the worshipper thinks they're worshiping and who
the you know, who is actually being worshiped. And we
see this throughout scripture. I think, so I'll be making
(24:30):
that argument in a little bit more of a robust case.
But my point is for this, as we go down
from belief to affiliation to attendance, you see this agreement
shifting pretty drastically. I mean you're talking twenty some more
than twenty five percent decline decrease in that percentage from
(24:50):
just belief all the way down to church attendance. So
it's a fascinating trend to look at. I wouldn't have
expected that drastic a drop.
Speaker 3 (25:01):
Honestly, what do you make of thinking specifically about this question?
God accepts the worship of all religions, including Christianity, Judaism,
and Islam. In terms of strongly disagree, I suppose, somewhat predictably,
(25:21):
several times a week of church attendance, that number of skyrockets, right,
most people disagree. What surprises me within it is the
next category down is you go once a week to church,
and that group is more likely to agree with the
statement than those who only go once or twice a month.
Speaker 1 (25:40):
That's right, that's funny to me.
Speaker 3 (25:43):
I don't know what to make of that.
Speaker 2 (25:44):
I'm not sure either. I don't know what to make
of it either, But yeah, I noticed that trend too.
I would just say.
Speaker 1 (25:54):
If we infer from which it's difficult to do, like,
what are we doing for with church attendants? Right? Like?
Speaker 2 (26:04):
What are we How are we supposed to understand that?
Are we supposed to understand it as a commitment to
a bigger commitment to I think certainly I didn't even
know you could attend church several times a week at
this point, right, Like I just didn't realize that most
of the churches I've ever attended have that once a
(26:24):
week service.
Speaker 1 (26:25):
And that's kind of it, and.
Speaker 3 (26:26):
And so the Wednesday thing is kind of flittering away.
Speaker 2 (26:30):
Yeah, And so it's interesting to think about even just
when you're answering this question, are you talking about your
worship service in a small group, or are you talking about,
you know, your worship service and another church function like
I used to have when I was a kid. We'd
go on Wednesday nights, right, Or you'd have maybe a
Saturday night service or something like that, Like, there were
(26:52):
multiple opportunities for you to be at church, right, not
in a small group, but at church. And so I'm
wondering if some of this has to do with just
church structure or not necessarily a comment on the dedication
of an individual to be there several times a week,
but the availability of multiple service times per week at
(27:13):
a local congregation doing a better job of educating, like
that could be it. Because once a week at church,
you know, you're listening to a sermon usually, and so
if the sermon doesn't address the exclusivity of Christian worship
and the uniqueness of it and how God responds to
worship of other groups, maybe you just don't get that
(27:35):
question right. You know, you're inferring a lot of different things.
So I don't know that we have enough. I mean,
I could speculate on certain things, but yeah, my gut
is to say, if if several times a week of
church attendance doesn't mean small groups, or even if it
does mean small groups and some other things, that maybe
there is a gesturing toward better training, right, a different
(28:00):
understanding of this than what what a Sunday worship service
would really do for you, which wouldn't necessarily help you
answer this question.
Speaker 3 (28:10):
Yeah, so maybe that's the takeaway that there's a certain
level of investment within the larger operation of church training,
church teaching that if you're involved in multiple facets of
church life, that you're not getting on a Sunday morning
just by nature of what a Sunday morning is, right,
(28:32):
I wonder so that to me, that raises the question
of causation versus correlation. Sure, so does the multiple Is
it the attending of multiple days or multiple events during
the course of a week that's giving you the training
to answer the question in this particular way, or is
it you're already inclined towards that. So it becomes sort
(28:53):
of an in group.
Speaker 1 (28:56):
Here.
Speaker 3 (28:56):
I say. I don't mean this in a negative way,
but group think sort of mental If you're the ones
who think this way, and that's why you're the ones there,
and the self selection of the others are not the
ones who think this way, that's why they're not there.
Speaker 2 (29:10):
Yeah, I mean I think there's something to that. You
can view it as maybe it's better training. You could
also view it as the more time I spend around
people with similar thoughts as I do, the less likely
I am to think that people with different thoughts than
we have different beliefs than we have different religious practitioners
belong with us. And so that's not necessarily a bad thing.
Speaker 1 (29:34):
Right.
Speaker 2 (29:34):
That development of a strong in group identity, particularly if
it's forged in discipleship, that in Christ's identity, is actually
pretty crucial, right. You can identify who's in and who's out.
You see this happening like First John, for instance. Right
the first chapter of First John, he provides some markers
the true Christian community, right, and says, if they had
(29:55):
been of us, they would not have gone out from us. Right,
So if they really have been part of our community,
they'd still be here, they wouldn't have left. We see
this in probably First Corinthians, where Paul is trying to
circumstribe and say, hey, don't have all these divisions, You're
one in Christ. And so it's just there's a crucial
aspect to this in group identity that I don't want
(30:16):
to I don't want it to be polarized and be like, oh,
they're just an insular community that doesn't reach out or
something weird like that. I think there's a really healthy
way that we understand ourselves as being different from other
religions and that there are clear boundaries between us and
other religions. So I think that could be cultivated in
a more frequent interaction within the Christian community and with
(30:39):
a group of Christian folks that may be the impetus
behind this. Whereas people who are like kind of once
a week, if you think about how little time that
actually is versus what you may be doing for the
rest of the week. Right, who you may be interacting
with the rest of the week, So you're co workers,
you're you know, you know, maybe members of your family,
(31:03):
maybe some of your friends, your bowling league, whatever it is. Right,
You're now not interacting solely with Christians. You now have
friends who may be of different faiths, and that may
very well condition the way that you're answering this question.
And so time is a factor. I think that we
shouldn't minimize in this because the more time we're spending
within the church, I think obviously we're going to pick
(31:26):
up a i don't know, for lack of a better term,
of cultural awareness of what the church actually is and
be more inclined to feel a part of it as
opposed to it being something that I attend weekly.
Speaker 1 (31:38):
Does that make sense?
Speaker 3 (31:39):
It does. It raises more questions if you're willing to
try it on us. So it's fresh. I'm fresh, it's
fresh in my mind. This John seventeen dynamic just from
class be in the world but not of the world. Yeah,
which is really interesting. It's not entirely clear what that
(32:07):
dynamic looks like. If anything, one could argue it's deliberately
a dynamic full of tension, no easy answers. And I
hear what you're saying. I wonder if this is also
one of those no easy answers. Right, where's the line
between what I think you're helpfully describing and on the
(32:27):
other side, you're not in the world. You don't know
what's going on, and so there's no ability you know that,
there's a there's a hermeneutical entailment to not getting the
full dynamics of it or right, So what we don't
want is an echo chamber, and I think that's dangerous
(32:48):
for any community and the group in any place. But
there is on the other side, I think something right
as you're describing to this iron sharpening, iron sort of
way of thinking, and maybe the line is intentionally blurry
and that's where our where our discernment has to come in.
(33:09):
What are your thoughts on that?
Speaker 1 (33:11):
Yeah, I agree number one. Yeah, I agree with the
one hundred percent. I don't want that to come off
as like, here's the only narrative that would work. I
think there are.
Speaker 2 (33:19):
A variety of factors here that we're not able to
get any real clarity on from the survey. We're just
trying to give some broad picture of what this could
be and what factors are involved. I think you're right,
there is that healthy a group aspect, but then there's
also this dynamic where we're supposed to be going out
and I think the challenge for Christians generally. We see
(33:40):
this almost in the Book of Ezra. I've always found
it fascinating when Ezra is bringing the exiles back from Babylon.
One of the things he tries to institute is the
elimination of for is the returning exiles with people of
the land, like, don't intermarry with the people of them land.
Speaker 1 (34:00):
And part of what I.
Speaker 2 (34:01):
Think he's trying to do there is he's trying to
preserve the purity of the Israelite returnees, right, so that
they can reconstitute and be a part of the restoration
of the nation of Israel as a whole. So if
we view the exiles as the Judeans largely who are
coming back from Babylon, they still need to reach up
(34:22):
into some of the Northern Kingdom or even out into
the Assyrian Empire and know that these other Israelites, the
Northern Kingdom, Israelites have a place to come back to.
So he's trying to do is sort of circumscribe this purity.
Ultimately it does. None of it works, right, It's all
sort of a disappointing failure. But I think that we
can get into that sort of mindset of this has
(34:44):
to be as pure as possible before we go out,
And I think what you're pointing to is it's never
going to be as pure as possible. There's always going
to be this sort of tension of push and pull
of we're going to pick things up.
Speaker 1 (34:56):
From the world that need to be.
Speaker 2 (34:59):
Re formed when we come back into the church, and
we're ultimately going to probably spend too much time reforming
in the church instead of going out into the world. Right,
And so I think, yeah, that that dynamic. To me,
We're never going to balance it perfectly. It's always going
to be really sloppy, messy line. And this is what
(35:20):
repentance is for, This is what forgiveness is for, This
is what the encouragement of the community is for. Where
I think the challenge of this question and a couple
of the other questions, honestly, because I think we probably
shouldn't view this one in isolation to like, let's say,
statement six, God loves all people the same way. This one,
(35:41):
no matter what you filter it with, let's say evangelicals,
evangelical belief, evangelical affiliation, church attendance several times.
Speaker 1 (35:51):
A week, you still have eighty four percent.
Speaker 2 (35:58):
Agreement, eighty one percent strongly three percent someonet agree to
God loves all people the same way. It's difficult not
to correlate those two. You know, God accepts the worship
of all these other religions and God loves all people
the same way. Now, I would admit that's a fairly
opaque statement, But I guess my point is there may
(36:19):
also be these other intersecting beliefs that are influencing some
of these other responses, and so we can't we can't
lose that one either. So Yeah, overall, I'd say the
survey doesn't give me a lot of It gives me
some hope to say, Hey, being in community and participating
in church can help some of these things. But then
(36:41):
you come to a question like this, you know you're
filtering that the exact same way as we just did
for the previous question.
Speaker 1 (36:47):
You're not getting much better result, right.
Speaker 3 (36:49):
If anything, you're getting counterintuitive results for this one. It
is because the moment I suppose this says more about
my expectations, I would expect this answer to be higher,
a higher agreement from non evangelicals, but it's actually lower
from non evangelical.
Speaker 1 (37:06):
It's actually lower for non evangelicals. Yeah, I mean that's yeah.
Speaker 3 (37:12):
Some of that is you hinted at definitions. What are
people thinking? What are they meaning?
Speaker 1 (37:17):
Yeah?
Speaker 3 (37:18):
Then biblical understanding, it's a complicated understanding. On the one side,
we have God is love, greater love has no one
list mainly laid on his life for his friends, which
is clearly an allusion to the ultimate love of Jesus.
Speaker 1 (37:29):
That's right. And then we have.
Speaker 3 (37:32):
What on the surface anyway, are hard to square with
the Jacob I have loved he saw I've hated, right, right,
So it's a complicated question and you're not getting that
in these questions understandably, also educational questions.
Speaker 1 (37:48):
Right right.
Speaker 3 (37:49):
You could even like that you have to educate, and
that's not how these things work.
Speaker 2 (37:53):
Yeah, you could even get into the conversation about what
is love? Right, you know, are we talking about God's
covenant loyalty? Because then you have a unique case where
God is especially loving Israel a unique way because they're
in covenant with him, and so if we view love
is equally loyalty, then there is a unique and special love.
(38:14):
The election of Israel, I think plays into that. The
choice of Israel plays into that. You know, all these
different things kind of play into that. Whereas we're just
talking about a general sort of yeah, God loves his creation. Okay,
maybe there's a generic way in which God loves everybody
in sort of the same way, but there's obviously specific
examples we could look at, Like you said, Jacob, you know, Jacob,
(38:36):
I loved you, saw I hated. That's not a the
traditional love hate that we often think of, but it
is balled up with these other concepts that are kind
of difficult to deal with.
Speaker 1 (38:48):
And so yeah, overall the survey, I think, I will say.
Speaker 2 (38:55):
I looking through all the survey answers, looking through all
the demographics I have, I'm not there aren't a ton
of alarm bells for me in the survey, other than
some of them that I just find quite puzzling. This
one where we see, you know, God loves everyone the
(39:18):
same way. There's a question statement seven on Jesus was
a great teacher, but he was not God. You're getting
a pretty I mean it's not it's a relatively low percentage,
but twenty eight percent of evangelicals agreeing with that statement,
regardless of age group.
Speaker 1 (39:38):
Like, that's all of them.
Speaker 2 (39:40):
And so the eighteen to thirty fours are a little
higher on it than any other age group, and so
they skew that data a bit.
Speaker 1 (39:49):
But that's a pretty fundamental belief.
Speaker 2 (39:54):
And you've got twenty eight percent of Christians of evangelicals
and you know, agreeing that Jesus is not God. So
there are these counterintuitive results, I think in a lot
of these different places.
Speaker 3 (40:11):
Yeah, and again I think not to be the dead horse,
you have to take some of that with a grain
of salt. What are people understanding when the question is
being asked. I think evangelicals fairly consistently point to the
importance of the Bible, and so we're not shocked when
(40:33):
we see one of the respondence, regardless of age group,
the Bibles the final authority, or however exactly it was worded.
But then we throw in the dynamic that we've discussed
here in terms of what are we understanding the Bible
to be saying materially. Now that gets more interesting, especially
(40:53):
when you factor in more data. Right, we can be
just just to to draw out the sort of thing
we're talking about, the extremes of if you live in
a pre Galileo pre Copernican society, you're reading language like
the setting of the sun and the rising of the
sun in different sorts of ways.
Speaker 2 (41:15):
We still say the rise of the sun, right, but.
Speaker 3 (41:21):
A pre Galileo pre Copernicus person's thinking about it. So
that changes the way you read the Bible. But then
there's a there's the further dynamic of from where are
you reading it? You know, not to get into murky
(41:42):
waters here, but.
Speaker 1 (41:42):
If you.
Speaker 3 (41:44):
If you live in the United States with all the
social social sorts of things and political unrest, that are
going on, right, and you read it from a place
of of historic that's the best way to put it. Oh,
it's historic sense of what the Church ought to see
(42:05):
in the making of the American government. You're reading the
Bible in a certain kind of way if you live
in the same setting and you come from a historic
setting into which things like slavery and Jim Crow were significant,
you're reading it. And yet another way, if you're reading
it as the children of immigrants, in which you're the
(42:28):
first person who is a Christian in your family, you're
reading it yet in other set of ways, and maybe
to a point that you made earlier, but just starting
to highlight it. The agreement is there in terms of
the significance of the Bible, Yes, but the things that
(42:48):
you're noticing maybe aren't the same. Yeah, yeah, and that
that's going to change the way that you shade things. Right.
We have these in terms of historic doctrinal disputes. Not
my favorite doctrinal dispute, but one that has a lot
of airtime. So it's a good example, I think, is
(43:09):
Calvinism versus our Minianism. Sure, there are different different textual
starting points, you know, and how one then reads certain
passages is going to be shaded by those different textual
starting points, and who gets to decide which one started
at the right place?
Speaker 1 (43:27):
Correct?
Speaker 3 (43:28):
That that's just a genuinely and generally historically Protestant problem,
right of authority, yes, but authority for what We're not sure. Yeah,
that's why we have so many denominations. Right, So all
these things go into those sorts of questions. So similarly,
I don't have the same kind of alarm bells. I
(43:50):
did some perusing online just to see what some of
the talking heads were saying about this report, and there's
a lot of alarm bell sort of things going off
in a way that I didn't shared the same kinds
of concerns. To me, It was more a marker of
the landscape is shifted in the same sort of way
as the landscape of playing basketball shifted. So what are
we going to do to adjust accordingly? Right, it's not
(44:13):
good enough to just simply say, well, our pastoral and
theological education in the nineteen sixties was X, therefore it
should be that today, Well, no things have changed. Yeah,
obviously Jesus is who Jesus was. We're not saying that's changed.
But the sorts of ways in which you address issues,
the sorts of issues themselves they need to be addressed,
(44:35):
are right.
Speaker 2 (44:37):
Yeah, you might not need to call together a Creedle
council to correct some sort of abarrant heresy, you know.
I mean those worked really well early on in church history,
or worked fairly well and early on in church history,
but they may not work now, you know. And I
think that that is really crucial to understand. I'm not
(45:00):
saying that I'm exactly happy with all the responses on
the report, and some of them are a little more
troubling than others. It's just there's no reason to get
so agitated about it that you jump back in with
the response that says, let's hammer these.
Speaker 1 (45:15):
Doctrines home one more time, right, we need.
Speaker 2 (45:18):
To start teaching systematic theology in churches, you know, like
maybe we need to do that, but there may also
be all these other things that need to be massaged
into place, and so it's it's like we can't just
you know, you we're looking at a jigsaw puzzle. There's
all of these different pieces that are laying out on
the table in front of us, and if we only
(45:39):
focus on putting together one little corner. None of these
other pieces are going to get placed. And so we've
got to at least broaden our vision enough to sit
back and say, look, where would all these other pieces fit,
and how would they contribute to a.
Speaker 1 (45:52):
Reorientation of some of these beliefs. How would that help
us if we understood better.
Speaker 2 (45:58):
I go back to the church in politic question, largely
because you know, when I was a dean at Moody,
I had this question come up. There was a disagreement.
Some of the students were celebrating a law that had
just been passed and it happened to be about, I
think about homosexual marriage, and some students were celebrating that.
(46:20):
And so then you get certain people are saying, oh,
the students are going liberal. But when I talked to
the students, they weren't really. They weren't really going liberal.
They still believe that, you know what we would have
believed about the Bible and homosexuality.
Speaker 1 (46:34):
But they were off or I would say they were confused.
They hadn't thought about it.
Speaker 2 (46:39):
They weren't integrating in how does government fit with faith?
Speaker 1 (46:45):
What's a very different thing than saying they've gone liberal.
Speaker 2 (46:49):
Right, They're disintegrated maybe, and so there's some education that
needs to go into this. But we didn't need to
plow into, hey, let's go through all the Bibles that
condemn or let's go through the Bible passages that condemn
homosexuality or something. What was necessary was some additional exploration
into what does a political theology look like, how does
(47:10):
the church and the state actually fit, What does it
look like to be a Christian in a democracy? How
can we celebrate the rights that other people are getting?
How is this good for? Like all these different questions
that you could ask and reframe in terms of Christianity
as opposed to just reacting to it and saying no,
we have to now preach on this specific doctrinal issue.
Speaker 1 (47:32):
We have to make them read these things.
Speaker 2 (47:35):
Like if once we understand why people are believing what
they're believing, why they're thinking this way, then we can
come up with some solutions to help move them in
a different direction. But I think if we just look
at this report and go, okay, you know, one of
the questions that I found interesting was like, let's say
(47:56):
I'm going to find it here in a minute. The
Holy Spirit is a force, but is not a personal being. Okay, Uh,
forty three percent of evangelicals agree with that. Well, obviously
that's not a trinitarian belief. But how much of it
is it conditioned on the way that we tend to
(48:16):
ignore the Holy Spirit in our churches?
Speaker 1 (48:18):
Yeah?
Speaker 2 (48:19):
Right, Like I mean, it isn't It isn't necessarily solved
by going Okay, let's explain the Trinity. It could very much,
very well involve a number of different practices that we
need to draw in. So I think that's sort of
the My impression of the report is it just gives
us a lot to think about and probably a lot
more to explore.
Speaker 3 (48:41):
Yeah, fully agree, it's the direction of travel, so to speak. Right, Yeah, everyone,
If a large number of people think the Holy Spirit
is an impersonal force, that's probably says more about the
way we talk about the Holy Spirit of God, right.
(49:04):
But equally significant to me is when you put that
one next to the statement about trinity. Yeah, got his
father's son in Holy Spirit, Hi by in.
Speaker 2 (49:16):
The board, right, And that's those are the difficult things
like these.
Speaker 1 (49:21):
Some of these feel like.
Speaker 2 (49:24):
They may not be And I know this is strange
to say, because they're asking questions about belief but I
don't know that there are actually questions about belief I
think what you're getting is sort of maybe some top
level agreement on main doctrines, but then once you get.
Speaker 1 (49:38):
Into the.
Speaker 2 (49:41):
Nuances of it, people are like, I don't know, Like
you know, there's just not a depth there. And these
are not things that we sit down and say, well,
let's have a class on the Holy Trinity. Like some
of these things are things that we just need to embody,
we need to practice in differently. So there's a roundness
(50:02):
to this that I think we need to keep in mind, right,
that we've got to figure out how it is that
we go about reinforcing certain beliefs. If we're looking at
this report and I'd say, okay, forty three percent agreement,
then the Holy Spirit is a force but not a
personal being that one stands out. So if I'm going
to solve that though, it's not just a question of going, well,
(50:23):
that's not true. There have to be layers to analysis
to this to figure out I think what you would
do in order to sort of rehab let's say, the
views of the Holy Spirit within the church. Right, So
interesting stuff, man, I don't know. This report is always
(50:44):
fascinating to me. I enjoy kind of talking through it
and fiddling around with the data. But ultimately, I think
when I walk away from my takeaway at this time
around was I was really encouraged to see that church
affiliation and a tendons did have a positive effect in
certain instances. At the very least, I think that's that's hopeful.
(51:07):
That's hopeful. Right in an age where we maybe think
that church is sort of optional, it does now feel like, no,
the church can actually have a really good influence on
some of these things, and maybe it can have more
influence in other ways. I know the data isn't fully consistent,
but I just really I felt like that that trajectory
(51:30):
I thought was really helpful.
Speaker 3 (51:33):
Do we dull that a little bit though, when we
see that the spirit does just diforce in that sense?
Speaker 1 (51:40):
I sadly, yes, that's what I mean.
Speaker 2 (51:43):
The data is inconsistent, but I it's like, if it
works for one, maybe it can work for the others.
You know, it at least pushes us to look at
what does our community of practice look like, and maybe
we maybe it has an influence that we're just not
realizing yet. My hope again, you know, there's a lot
(52:03):
of inference going on here because the data is what
the data is. It just doesn't lead us anywhere necessarily.
It just shines a spotlight on certain of these things.
Speaker 3 (52:12):
For sure. One thing I'd like to see from this,
so when you go into this data Explorer model, it
gives you the previous reports as well. Yes, And what
I would have loved to have been able to do
is say, let's compare this. So they did this every
two years, it looks like except for this time it
(52:33):
was three years ago.
Speaker 1 (52:34):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (52:35):
I would love to go to the previous report or
the eleven years ago report and see what the researchers,
the surveyors found for the same questions, but they're not
the same questions, right, That would actually help making more
sense of some of this data. Has there been movement
or could we have gone back eleven years ago? So
(52:58):
I tried to find some that were roughly the similar,
roughly similar, but there were different adountfas that I don't
know that I can say very much from that.
Speaker 1 (53:05):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (53:06):
Yeah, So if you're listening out there and you're one
of the surveyors of this, maybe give us the same questions.
Speaker 2 (53:12):
Thanks time, give me the same questions, Oliver. I will
say I appreciate it on this one. They had one
that I dealt with a couple of years ago when
this came out. It was I believe the statement was
God can learn and change, and this time they changed
that to just one of those you know, God is unchanged,
(53:33):
And I think it's the way they phrased it, which
I think is a more appropriate way to phrase it. Yes,
because when you have the and in there, God can
learn and change. I understood what they were doing right,
I could get it, but it does add an element.
Speaker 1 (53:48):
Confusion there and so many.
Speaker 2 (53:52):
Yeah, I think they did have some good clarifications in
this one, but it does mean you can't compare the results, so.
Speaker 1 (53:59):
Not as well as you might want to.
Speaker 2 (54:01):
God accepts the worship of all the different religions was
the same as the in this one as it was
the last one, and the results haven't changed that much
from what I remember. So that was that was interesting.
Speaker 3 (54:14):
And modern science disproves the Bible to another one that
does carry over. Yeah, and again it's actually not. Actually,
what I'm surprised to see is that the number of
strongly disagrees up on this one. Yes, maybe I'm less
surprised than I should Maybe I'm more surprised than I
should be because we do have a little bit more
(54:35):
of a polarized The data gives me what I want
to see, if not, I disagree. Yeah, sort of a dynamic.
Speaker 2 (54:42):
But well, I know we talked a lot about the
meta report kind of stuff today. I'd like to have
you back on to discuss some of the specific questions
like and and really dive a little deeper into some
of them.
Speaker 1 (54:59):
But will we'll that another time.
Speaker 2 (55:01):
We've been going for about an hour, and I think
that that's probably overkilled. But it's an interesting survey and
I just encourage listeners to go check it out, play
around with it. My encouragement would be not to be
alarmed by some of the results, but to be thinking
through it in the way that Ashish and I have,
just trying to figure out, Okay, how does all this
(55:22):
fit together? What does this really look like? And how
might our church, my local congregation me as an individual Christian?
Number one, how do I think about these issues? And
number two? What might what might we need to do
to sort of move people toward a more orthodox belief
So be my two cents, but thanks all she's for
(55:46):
participating in this man.
Speaker 1 (55:47):
It was good to have you. Thanks for having me
absolutely all.
Speaker 2 (55:51):
Right, everybody, we're going to call it a day there
and we'll catch on the next episode of Thinking Christian.
Speaker 1 (55:56):
Take care, everybody,
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The Burden
The Burden is a documentary series that takes listeners into the hidden places where justice is done (and undone). It dives deep into the lives of heroes and villains. And it focuses a spotlight on those who triumph even when the odds are against them. Season 5 - The Burden: Death & Deceit in Alliance On April Fools Day 1999, 26-year-old Yvonne Layne was found murdered in her Alliance, Ohio home. David Thorne, her ex-boyfriend and father of one of her children, was instantly a suspect. Another young man admitted to the murder, and David breathed a sigh of relief, until the confessed murderer fingered David; “He paid me to do it.” David was sentenced to life without parole. Two decades later, Pulitzer winner and podcast host, Maggie Freleng (Bone Valley Season 3: Graves County, Wrongful Conviction, Suave) launched a “live” investigation into David's conviction alongside Jason Baldwin (himself wrongfully convicted as a member of the West Memphis Three). Maggie had come to believe that the entire investigation of David was botched by the tiny local police department, or worse, covered up the real killer. Was Maggie correct? Was David’s claim of innocence credible? In Death and Deceit in Alliance, Maggie recounts the case that launched her career, and ultimately, “broke” her.” The results will shock the listener and reduce Maggie to tears and self-doubt. This is not your typical wrongful conviction story. In fact, it turns the genre on its head. It asks the question: What if our champions are foolish? Season 4 - The Burden: Get the Money and Run “Trying to murder my father, this was the thing that put me on the path.” That’s Joe Loya and that path was bank robbery. Bank, bank, bank, bank, bank. In season 4 of The Burden: Get the Money and Run, we hear from Joe who was once the most prolific bank robber in Southern California, and beyond. He used disguises, body doubles, proxies. He leaped over counters, grabbed the money and ran. Even as the FBI was closing in. It was a showdown between a daring bank robber, and a patient FBI agent. Joe was no ordinary bank robber. He was bright, articulate, charismatic, and driven by a dark rage that he summoned up at will. In seven episodes, Joe tells all: the what, the how… and the why. Including why he tried to murder his father. Season 3 - The Burden: Avenger Miriam Lewin is one of Argentina’s leading journalists today. At 19 years old, she was kidnapped off the streets of Buenos Aires for her political activism and thrown into a concentration camp. Thousands of her fellow inmates were executed, tossed alive from a cargo plane into the ocean. Miriam, along with a handful of others, will survive the camp. Then as a journalist, she will wage a decades long campaign to bring her tormentors to justice. Avenger is about one woman’s triumphant battle against unbelievable odds to survive torture, claim justice for the crimes done against her and others like her, and change the future of her country. Season 2 - The Burden: Empire on Blood Empire on Blood is set in the Bronx, NY, in the early 90s, when two young drug dealers ruled an intersection known as “The Corner on Blood.” The boss, Calvin Buari, lived large. He and a protege swore they would build an empire on blood. Then the relationship frayed and the protege accused Calvin of a double homicide which he claimed he didn’t do. But did he? Award-winning journalist Steve Fishman spent seven years to answer that question. This is the story of one man’s last chance to overturn his life sentence. He may prevail, but someone’s gotta pay. The Burden: Empire on Blood is the director’s cut of the true crime classic which reached #1 on the charts when it was first released half a dozen years ago. Season 1 - The Burden In the 1990s, Detective Louis N. Scarcella was legendary. In a city overrun by violent crime, he cracked the toughest cases and put away the worst criminals. “The Hulk” was his nickname. Then the story changed. Scarcella ran into a group of convicted murderers who all say they are innocent. They turned themselves into jailhouse-lawyers and in prison founded a lway firm. When they realized Scarcella helped put many of them away, they set their sights on taking him down. And with the help of a NY Times reporter they have a chance. For years, Scarcella insisted he did nothing wrong. But that’s all he’d say. Until we tracked Scarcella to a sauna in a Russian bathhouse, where he started to talk..and talk and talk. “The guilty have gone free,” he whispered. And then agreed to take us into the belly of the beast. Welcome to The Burden.