Culture, Apologetics, and the Danger of False Narratives | Dr. Paul Gould

In this episode, Mike engages in a riveting discussion with guest Dr. Paul Gould. Paul is an esteemed author known for his influential book on cultural apologetics and his role as the director of the MA in Philosophy of Religion at Palm Beach Atlantic. Their conversation focuses on the troubling trend of younger generations drifting away from the church. They delve into the myriad of cultural and societal narratives that contribute to this shift, exploring the complex interplay between faith and culture.

Mike and Paul also unpack the transformative power of storytelling and its potential to impact one's life profoundly. They discuss how narratives within our culture can shape beliefs and behaviors, particularly in the spiritual development of young people. The episode doesn't just highlight problems but also offers tangible solutions, discussing what parents and pastors can do to connect with and fulfill the spiritual needs of this generation. It's an enlightening dialogue filled with insights and practical advice for anyone looking to understand more deeply and engage with a spiritually hungry generation.

Episode Transcript

(00:00):
I was drawn to this because I saw it as a helpful tool to help other people
find an abundant life in Jesus Christ and to resist all of the ideas that are
floating around in our society today.
These ideas that promise life, but ultimately just imprison us.

(00:22):
Well, hello, everyone. One, recently I got to have a conversation with a friend
and colleague, Paul Gould.
Paul is the director of the MA of Philosophy of Religion at Palm Beach Atlantic.
He's written a couple of books, Cultural Apologetics, particularly helpful to me.
And we talk about that book in this conversation.

(00:44):
Cultural Apologetics is an approach to demonstrating the truth,
goodness, and beauty of Jesus Christ through reason, but also through appeals
to conscience and imagination.
A cultural apologetics approach recognizes that human beings aren't merely rational,
and so we ought not engage people as purely rational people.

(01:06):
So we talk about what does that mean like? What does that look like in the home, in the church?
How should that influence our approaches to evangelism and and apologetics?
And what does it mean to be good storytellers and to tell the grandest story
of all that would capture the hearts and the imaginations of people that are

(01:27):
looking for something more?
We had a wonderful time exploring all of these things, maybe raised more questions
than even provided answers, but it was well worth my time and I hope it is for you too.
Well, Paul, I picked up your book, Cultural Apologetics, again,
and not just because I'm interviewing you.

(01:47):
I pick up this book a good bit. It's been very helpful to me.
But I hadn't read the foreword in some time and was reminded about what J.P.
Moreland said there in the beginning.
And J.P. talks about, he cites some of the reasons why the younger generations
are abandoning the faith and the church.

(02:08):
Church, you know, ever since I've been in this line of work,
you know, 20 years or so, statistics have been showing kind of the same thing,
that a large number of people that grow up in the church are leaving it.
And you've seen numbers as high as like, you know, two-thirds,
you've seen 50%. And, you know, even not needing a statistic,

(02:28):
my experience has borne that out, that I've seen a number of people growing
up in the church walking away.
And Moreland cites six Six reasons.
He cites that the church is overprotective and fails to expose people to anti-Christian ideas.
The church's teaching is shallow. And these are the self-reported,
there was a poll done by Barna and asking these millennials that are walking

(02:50):
away, why are you doing it?
And these are the six reasons they give. So the church's teaching is shallow.
The church is antagonistic to science, fails to help believers interact with scientific claims.
The church treats sexuality simplistically and judgmentally.
The church makes exclusivity claims which I always find that funny because I
just imagine asking the pollster or the one being polled so is it wrong to make

(03:12):
exclusive claims and then just yeah there's irony there but.
The church is dismissive of doubters. So it's funny to ask you about something
that's in your own book, but what do you think about these reasons?
Do you still think these reasons are holding true?
Because Moreland wrote that way in like 2018 and times change really fast.
Yeah, I haven't looked at the forward for a long time. So it was actually nice to listen to those.

(03:36):
And as you were reading them, I was sort of checking off in my mind. Yep, yep, yep.
One of the things that's interesting. So, the book came out in 2019,
and since then, and in there, one of the sort of starting points is that Christianity
has this image problem, you know, that it's no longer seen as reasonable and or desirable,

(03:58):
and that was kind of the central problem to be addressed.
But the more that I've done research since 2019, I've realized it's gotten worse,
and the image problem is much worse, right?
We've got this backdoor problem where people are leaving, like you referenced in Rose,
We've got not just all the statistics of just sort of everyday people that are

(04:21):
deconverting, but we have prominent deconversions that have wide cultural impact.
We have a front door problem. We're no longer sharing our faith.
And the statistics show that for Gen Z and millennials and Gen Z that there's
even this idea that it's not only is it not our responsibility to share our
faith, but it's actually morally wrong to try to convert someone to another,

(04:45):
you know, to your point of view. And so that's an interesting trend, right?
And then we have like this, the house, right? Our internal house is on fire,
right? It's burning down.
We're just fragmented in all the ways that you can be fragmented politically,
socially, intellectually, morally, you know, you can kind of go down the list.
So yeah, those six still resonate with me.

(05:06):
And I think that it's, in some ways, it feels more pressing the problem today.
So very much a live question.
What do we do given the trajectory today?
And that's what I want to talk to you about today. What do we do about this?
There's a number of people that are interested, concerned, feel maybe hopeless.

(05:29):
What do we do about this? And that's why I'm in this line of work.
When I was awoken to just that apologetics was a thing. I mean,
I always was around people that gave reasons for their faith,
but it wasn't until probably college that I was like, wait, apologetics is a
discipline? It's a field of study?

(05:49):
And I wasn't drawn to learning how to defend the Christian faith and provide
good reasons for my hope because I had a crisis of faith myself.
For whatever, not to get into a long discussion about why maybe I think that is true of me,
but I was drawn to this because I saw it as a helpful tool to help other people

(06:12):
find an abundant life in Jesus Christ and to resist all of the ideas that are
floating around in our society today.
These ideas that promise life, but ultimately just imprison us.
Us so you know when i got started in
this the the four horsemen of the atheist apocalypse

(06:33):
were the hottest ticket in town right richard dawkins dennett
harris and the late christopher hitchens and so a lot of the the business of
the apologist then was like what are these guys saying how do we challenge their
ideas and how do we refute them and so a lot of work was spent on that i don't
know if you found this to be the case too and and fast forward a little bit in in our history here

(06:55):
because I think the new atheists kind of went out of fashion and I think they're
actually resurfacing now, but in a different way.
And I'm curious about that and maybe we won't get to that, but back to this point.
So over the years, you know, early on when I was doing this work and preparing
these arguments and response and whatnot, I'd meet a lot of atheists.
And what I found from them was very few of them.

(07:15):
I mean, they all knew of Dawkins and Harris and whatnot. I actually never met,
at least in my memory, I never met an atheist who cited any one of those as
influential, really, even in their life.
They hadn't read many of their books, and it wasn't their ideas or their arguments
that turned them into atheists.

(07:37):
So did you ever see that or how would you gauge even the impact of that new
atheist movement and all of those arguments that apologists seemingly readied themselves against?
Did you experience anything like that or what do you think about what I experienced
anyhow? Yeah, no, that's interesting.
I was in grad school doing my PhD in philosophy during the heyday of the new atheism.

(08:02):
So, like 2006, 2008, 2010, this kind
of timeframe, those books were being published. And so, I actually did.
I was teaching undergrad philosophy at Purdue, and I did run into a few,
which is interesting, that were reading Dawkins and Dennett in my philosophy class.
But what was interesting is they were also, at least I'm thinking of one particular

(08:26):
student in particular, he's one of my best students in one of the semester classes.
I spent like six or eight weeks looking at the God question.
We look at all the traditional arguments for God and all the traditional arguments
against God. And he was very conversant with, I think, some of the things that
Dawkins and maybe Dennett
We're saying, but he didn't have the ax to grind that Dawkins and sometimes

(08:47):
Dennett has to grind against the rationality of the faith.
So, yeah, it was kind of, but I would say their impact was more,
yes, they were New York Times bestsellers.
So, someone was reading them, right? I don't think it was all Christians.
But it was more also, it was kind of in the air, right?
It's just this air we breathe that belief in God is delusional, right?

(09:07):
Or irrational and dangerous and things like that. So I think the impact is more
subtle because when you read Dawkins' chapter on the God hypothesis in his book,
it's embarrassing for a trained philosopher, right?
It's just recycled old 19th century atheistic arguments.
Yeah, and so I think that there is a reason why we've moved beyond new atheism,
especially given the four horsemen that you referenced.

(09:30):
But there is, and we can maybe go there, there is an interesting permutation
going on today, not just with Dawkins' recent claim to be kind of a cultural
Christian, but also the debate has moved, right?
It's for a while there you had like this new, new atheism of like the Alex Rosenbergs
of the world who say we're going to move on beyond the God question and just
figure out how to live in an atheistic world.

(09:53):
You had the kind of godless religious movements where you want everything,
which is kind of what Dawkins' expression is a part of, where you want the religious
worldview without the God behind it, right?
So, you've got Tara Isabel Burton and her book, Strange Rites,
that talks about all these kind of, in my view, new quasi-religions that are

(10:13):
like the logical conclusion of elevating the self as, you know,
kind of the sole authority. already.
But then you've got this interesting move, and I'll stop here,
Mike, but you've got this interesting move now where you have this middle view.
So, you have Thomas Nagel, who wrote in 2012, this book, Minding Cosmos,
and the subtitle to that book is why Darwinian materialism is almost certainly false.

(10:36):
And maybe another way to say that is why the naturalistic atheism of like a
Dawkins is almost certainly false.
And so, you have important works that are coming out in the last couple years
that are more in this middle non-naturalist but non-theist lane.
And sometimes it goes by the word panpsychism, and we can talk about that.
So, it's not like there's a total return to, hey, Christianity,

(10:58):
you're just looking for some other option, right, that still doesn't give you
deity or the kind of deity that impinges on your life.
But, you know, yeah, interesting moves going on in the apologetics world.
Well, I'm very interested in everything thing you just
said and there's a number of different ways we can
go there but i'm curious about this new kind of

(11:20):
spirituality that is emerging right now and you see people like jordan peterson
leading the way i think in this and these interesting alliances where peterson
is very much interested in people like john lennox and os guinness and daniel
dennett and richard Dawkins and Sam Harris,
and he's trying to create seemingly a new religious experience.

(11:46):
And maybe this is how we can get into talking about that, because going back
to one of the things you said about it being kind of in the air we breathe.
I think that's it, right? A way of saying it anyways, that these books are being
sold, but it's not like they're being read and digested.
We know how book reading goes, but it just kind of permeates.
And so maybe this is how we can get into this and talk about this idea of plausibility structures.

(12:12):
This notion that every person is shaped in their culture by things like a collective
mindset or like a social imaginary.
And of course, Truman in his Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self talks about social imaginary.
Truman didn't invent that phrase, but really used it to capture the sense of
people that live in an environment and culture,

(12:34):
they share these ideas and they are breathed in, in a sense,
more than they are rationally produced.
And so this idea that the fundamental way that we orient ourselves in the world
being through story, is that another way of saying that, explaining that notion

(12:57):
of collective mindset or social imaginary,
meaning that the way that we try to make sense of ourselves in this world,
really more than anything else, is through a story.
And just to give maybe an example of a story that gives somebody the ability
to orient themselves in the world. You think of something like the American dream.
You know, I grew up American dream. It's in all films. You hear it all the time.

(13:18):
The American dream being this story about involving a character that doesn't
matter where you came from, doesn't matter who you are, who your parents were,
doesn't matter your past, doesn't matter the obstacles in your way.
You have the ability to overcome them all and become something great.
And that vision, that story is a way of you now orienting yourself in the world,
How you treat other people, decisions that you kind of make.

(13:40):
And so just using that as an example, what do you think about that notion of
the fundamental way that we orient ourselves in the world being through story?
How does that relate to things like collective mindset, social imaginary,
and how does this relate to...
We're talking about here. No, that's good. I just, in my class,

(14:01):
was talking about a theology of story. So, it's all kind of in my mind right now.
And it is true, like, that literary critics, philosophers, theologians,
sociologists have all noted this interesting feature of humans that we're,
as they would say, narratival animals,
that we live our lives according to some story, right?
And so, empirically, this does seem to be right.

(14:22):
And I would consider myself a narratival realist, right? I think that we do
live our lives and we ought to live our lives according to a the story.
And that sort of belays this idea that I think deep within the human heart,
there's this intuition, right? That reality is coherent.
And so, one of the central metaphors for the human life is the idea of quest, right?
You kind of actually alluded to it, that we have this sense that we're headed somewhere, right?

(14:45):
And you can really read the story of our lives by the kind of life we live.
You can determine whether someone's a pilgrim, right? Or kind of a wanderer,
whether they view that story as something that has a kind of compelling end
or they're just wandering, seeking for the true story.
So, I do think that there's a deep connection between plausibility structures, right?
This idea of the set of ideas that one is willing to consider as plausibly true

(15:10):
and our social imaginary or the story that we imagine ourselves a part of, right?
And this bears out like, you know, in the philosophy world, like you have Alistair
McIntyre, who in chapter 10 of his book, After Virtue, he says things like this.
He says, you can't even decide what you ought to do, right, your actions,
until you understand which story you find yourself a part of, right?

(15:34):
And so, our actions don't have meaning and we can't really determine how we
ought to behave until we understand the story.
Hannah Arendt famously said in her book, The Human Condition,
that when we ask who someone is,
the only way we can answer that is by determining what story they're a part
of in which they conceive themselves as the hero, right?

(15:56):
And so, yeah, I think that the idea of story is closely connected to plausibility structure.
It's closely connected to this idea of social imaginary.
And it's also closely connected to the idea of worldview that is so often talked about.
And partly, and I'll just end here, this This is what has led me often in my
discussions with others to ask these questions of all the competing stories out there, right?

(16:20):
Because that's what stories are. They're competing for our allegiance,
and they're seeking us to locate our lives within that.
Of all the competing stories, which one actually understands you,
right? Like, which one's alive?
Which one satisfies or gets to the deep longings of the heart?
Not just for truth, but for goodness and beauty.
And that's where the Christian story, I think, and imaginary and worldview and

(16:44):
all of that, you know, comes into play.
So that idea from McIntyre, and I just read After Virtue for the first time
this year and thought it was very, very helpful in a number of ways.
But that finding, you know, knowing what story you're a part of.
Do you think there is a dominant story that people in the West think that they are a part of?

(17:05):
Or maybe if there's not a dominant like
the dominant what are some of the more gripping stories
that you think are capturing people's
imagination and they feel like they are characters in that story yeah so let
me give two answers to that and you know my first thought that pops into my
mind when you ask that question is is back going back to alvin planiga's claim

(17:27):
which he made like he first made it in 1991 but then he's repeated it other
places is that there's three competing stories,
basically, that are vying for our allegiance.
And those three competing stories... So this is like... Gosh,
I feel like I should be taking notes, Paul. I really feel like I should be taking notes.
These are things that will be familiar to you, right? This is good,
man. Yeah, these are very familiar. But these are like your broad answer,

(17:49):
and then I want to give a more fine-grained answer.
But the broad answer, according to Plantinga, the three competing stories would
be like perennial naturalism or scientific naturalism.
And then he called... That's the first one, right? So any version of just this
global naturalistic view. The second one, he calls it creative anti-realism,
but we could just call it post-modernism, right?
And then the third one is theism, or to be more fine-grained there, Christian monotheism.

(18:12):
And so, he kind of puts the interplay as those three worldviews,
and in some way, they could boil down to those three.
A more fine-grained answer to that, though, and I'm mindful of,
we just read in one of my classes,
Tara Isabel Burton's book, Strange Rites, and there she goes through these,
she calls them quasi-religions, but you can think of them as stories that animate

(18:32):
the disenchanted mind in the secular age that we find ourselves in.
And there you could kind of trace out these more fine-grained stories,
the three that I just mentioned, especially with naturalism and postmodernism,
you have a lot more fine-grained versions of that.
She talks about like this wellness narrative or wellness culture narrative or
the social gospel or social justice narrative or the Jordan Peterson stuff you referenced earlier.

(18:57):
She calls it atavism, the new atavism. And atavism, I had to look it up,
is this word like returning to the old way, right?
Where there was hierarchy and biology was, you know, and things like that, but not God, right?
And so, and then you have like this, another fine-grained version of scientific
naturalism that she calls as technoscientific utopianism, right?
Where science is going to save us

(19:19):
and things like that. So, maybe your transhumanism and your posthumanism.
And I think all of the new quasi religions, though, that are probably expressions
of naturalism and some version of postmodernism, those more fine-grained stories
that she references there, in my mind, all of them, as I mentioned earlier,
I think are the logical conclusions of one of the chief dominant values of the

(19:41):
secular age we find ourselves in.
And that's this rampant individualism and this idea of the autonomous self, right?
So many people talk about that concept in various ways.
But you're really seeing the logical conclusion of when we make ourself the
sole authority, all these new religious or quasi-religious movements that are
really just iterations and expressions of naturalism and postmodernism are flourishing today.

(20:05):
And Tara Isabel Burton, in that book, she ends it with Where we will go and
where things will go, no one knows, right?
And that's kind of where I think we are.
So, anyway. Where do you think the...
I've heard a number of people putting forward that the dominant story right
now is the oppressed oppressor kind of story.

(20:27):
Is that an outworking of a postmodern, you know, some of the strains,
the quasi-religious strains of the postmodern?
What do you think about that story, its influence, or how would you phrase it? Yeah, no, that's good.
I would put that within the postmodern strand broadly.

(20:48):
And that's where Tara Isabel Burton sort of locates it within the social justice
kind of movement or story.
Or she actually calls it the social justice gospel, right? Or maybe I called
that in explaining it, but that's the kind of idea, right?
And the oppressed-oppressor binary there is one way of making sense.
So, and this is a nice contrast with like the new atavism of like the Jordan Petersons, right?

(21:12):
So, the oppressed-oppressor binary begins with this presupposition that there's
no essence to what it means to be human, right? And so, we begin with culture.
In the beginning was culture, and the fundamental problem was the oppressor, that we were oppressed.
And so, the apex of that narrative is liberation, recuperation, right?
And so, it sort of begins with culture, and that's where I would put that binary

(21:36):
within the postmodern mindset.
And then the Jordan Peterson sort of new atavism is a kind of rejection of that binary.
In the beginning was nature, and the nature had hierarchy.
And in that hierarchy, you have male and female, right? And you have generic
human and things like that.
And so, it's going to begin with a different story, a different origin account.

(21:58):
But yeah, Yeah, that's where I think I would at least begin to put that.
So I'm really captivated by this idea just because I know, and this leads into
your book and cultural apologetics, that this is just how humans make sense of the world.
They don't just make sense of the world through lectures and arguments.
They really absorb these things more. And whether you want to use the phrase

(22:22):
worldview to describe this, social imaginary, or orienting yourself in the world through story.
This is what it is to be human. You just kind of develop this outlook.
So maybe before getting into a way to be advocates for the truth of Christianity
in light of that truth, how do certain stories become dominant?

(22:45):
Because it's not simply film, right? It's not simply any one thing.
So how do some stories really become these these dominant stories that capture
people's imaginations and they thus find themselves to be characters therein.
That's a really good question. And it's a really hard answer.
And this is a question I've wrestled with.

(23:07):
I think the answer that I have to give is that, at least on one sense,
is that there's nothing purely logical such that we can maybe provide a causal answer,
like how did we arrive at this cultural moment?
And I would do that by pointing to not just ideas and how culture has been shaped

(23:28):
over the history of the world by various ideas, but I think that would be part of it.
But we would also need to give an account of individuals, because ideas never come bare, right?
And institutions, because, you know, on the interplay, the interesting interplay
between ideas, institutions, individuals, and just quirks of like contingent

(23:49):
facts of history, right?
So, the reason why I'm kind of hedging on like this is a really great question
is I'm convinced, where was it?
I guess it was James Davidson Hunter, his book, To Change the World.
He talked, you know, in that book, he's talking about like the common view that
Christians go about trying to change the world is like this bottom-up approach
where we think if we'll change individual lives, we'll eventually change culture,

(24:10):
right? And that's a bottom-up kind of view.
And he says culture never changes bottom-up. It always changes top-down, right?
From individuals in institutions that are culture-shaping institutions advancing their ideas, right?
So, he says, you know, there's this aphorism, ideas have consequences.
He says, well, that's not exactly right, and I agree with him.

(24:31):
Some ideas have consequences, namely those propagated by people in culture-shaping
institutions that have a kind of symbolic capital.
So, all that to say, there are causal stories, and Charles Taylor and I tried
to do some in my book, and many others have given, like, interesting causal
stories of how we arrived at this cultural moment.
And that's why, like, you know, you read like Tara Isabella's Burton's book,

(24:54):
which came out the same year as mine, I think, 2019. It's she's more of a descriptive work there.
She ends, you know, like with this where we will go. No one knows.
Right. In some ways, that's because culture is not logical.
Right. Because it's composed of these all these various forces.
I don't think I did. I miss your question.
I definitely didn't answer your question, but did I miss at least why I'm not answering it or can't?

(25:17):
Yeah. I like messy answers or answers that are with a little bit of a shoulder
shrug because I think far too often complicated things are oversimplified.
And why is the world the way it is, I think we should expect it to be a little

(25:39):
bit of mystery and to have a little bit of distrust for the person that says, here it is,
because that person probably has something to sell you that's directly related
to their diagnosis of it. And that's good.
And I would say like, there are things that we can say. And like I said, people have said that.
I've even given some descriptions, but I think what you just said is really

(26:01):
important, right? There's no simple answer, although we can trace out lines
within the trajectories.
But yeah, that's where there's a... Yeah, I mean, it moves me towards intellectual humility.
I want to know and I want to do the best we can, and I think we need to.
There's this call, I think, to understand our culture that I think I could ground

(26:24):
that biblically even, if not just common sense and philosophically.
So we need to be doing those kinds of things. But I think your original question
was something like, how do we get to this story?
And I'm like, I have no idea why this is the one that captured people's hearts.
Except that there is something in it, right? Whatever the emerging stories are,
there's something in it that they think will satisfy.

(26:45):
And whatever it is that they think will satisfy that deep longing,
it's going to grab some aspect of the true story of the world, right?
The true story of the world is the gospel, right? And all of these competing...
So, let's get into... Yeah.
The last thing is all these competing narratives are going to grab some aspect
of that true story of the world, but it's just not going to fully satisfy.
So we need to continue to encourage people who tether to these false narratives

(27:08):
to untether and continue that sort of journey to find that true story of the world. So, yeah.
Yeah. So let's get into how to tell that true story that is deeply satisfying.
And this is one of the things that I just found very helpful in your book,
Cultural Apologetics, is to to show that giving an account for the Christian

(27:30):
faith and explaining our hope therein isn't just about showing why it is true,
but it is also showing why it is deeply satisfying.
So I am, yes, convinced that the Christian story is true and it is satisfying.
And as I orient myself in light of that reality and follow the teachings of Jesus.
It doesn't equal happiness, but it does lead to joy and deep satisfaction.

(27:56):
So even if we don't understand fully why other stories are capturing people's
minds or being able to really put our finger on all the reasons why we are where
we are, I think we can still figure out a way forward.
So I don't know if this is a fair way to get into it. It's pretty broad.
But what's some of the keys here for Christians moving forward in being able
to tell the true story and to demonstrate how good it is in this world.

(28:21):
Good. Yeah. So, the broad answer, four words pop into my mind.
Be, live, show, and create.
So, one of the, and I'll just say a little bit about each and we can then go
wherever you want, but one of the surprises of writing that book,
Cultural Apologetics, was I realized so many of the cultural ills or this image problem,

(28:46):
you know, like the six things that JP listed in that forward,
the image problem that Christianity has right now with culture,
I kind of lay them at our feet, namely the church, Christians, us, me, you know?
Like, we need to be people who are like Christ, right? And we're just as fragmented,
right, as our non-believing neighbors.
We're just as anti-intellectual as the general culture, right?

(29:10):
We have just as unbaptized and imagination as the rest of the world, right?
So, we need to be the kinds of people that God has called us to be,
right? And there's a whole lot that we could say there.
And I guess the live would be that we need to live the kind of life that's attractive, right?
That it's true to the way the world is, but true to the way the world is,

(29:31):
that it's actually a kind of, like, think of, is it 1 Corinthians 4,
like, you know, the aroma of Christ kind of life.
So, right, we need to work at telling and helping people see the goodness,
truth, and beauty of the gospel in a way, in a culture that's no longer biblically illiterate.
And so part of the project of my book is to help expand the resources and the

(29:53):
kind of planks that we can walk as we build bridges to Jesus and the gospel.
Not just the rational plank, right? Giving arguments, but doing them in a way
that engages the imagination and the conscience. We can talk about that.
And then lastly, create.
I've been thinking a lot about this last piece. One of the fun things in the
book was talking about the plank of the imagination on its quest toward beauty,

(30:13):
which ultimately terminates in Christ, the source of beauty.
And a lot of people have been asking me about that kind of plank and this connection
between beauty, art, and the imagination.
And I'm just convinced the more that I've been thinking about this and this
idea that we're narratival animals that locate our lives within a story,
that we're moved by the aesthetic currency, right?
Why? Partly because we're created in the image of a creating God.

(30:35):
And so, we're to have a posture toward culture of creating and cultivating the
good, the true, and the beautiful.
As Annie Crouch puts it, if we want to change culture, you need to make culture.
And we make culture by creating in the derivative mode, in the image of the creating God.
And so maybe those four words could be a good, you know, many places we can go from it.
That's what I, that's what I. It's as good of a framework as I know of to think

(30:58):
through this be, live, show, and it was create, right? It was the last one? Create.
So that the be and the live one, you know, obviously closely related, but I remember a.
Years ago, I was a high school teacher once upon a time, and it was the best of times.
It was the worst of times.

(31:19):
And I had this one student. There's always like a student that's the atheist. Every class.
And not that like there's literally only one person that's not a follower of
Jesus Christ, but one who really owns it and wants that to be the first part
of their identity or whatnot.
I love this kid. He was funny. He was intelligent.

(31:41):
We had a number of really insightful and helpful conversations.
And I'll never forget one day I asked him, I said, so what is the biggest reason
why you don't believe in God?
He's a smart kid. I mean, he knew a lot of objections to Christianity.
But he said the biggest reason was that he knew a ton of Christians and he thought

(32:06):
they were all jerks. Yeah, I knew where that was going. Yep.
We hear that all the time. And we hear that all the time. And it's often, sometimes it's easy.
It's just dismissed under, you know, put under the rug by a pastor that jokes
and says, yeah, the church is full of hypocrites, but what a better place for a hypocrite to be.
And it's kind of like, you know, just accepted, like, you know,
what are you going to do about it? All people are going to be hypocrites to some degree.

(32:28):
And okay, sure, that's true enough. But let's consider the Christian claim.
The Christian claim is not, I've just mastered, I got the right answers to the test.
It's no, I've encountered the one who made all things.
Christianity also claims that his spirit has been given to his followers and dwells within us.

(32:50):
I think a non-believer who understands Christian theology, even in the slightest,
and then wonders how is it that our lives demonstrate such poor quality? it's a fair reason to.
Question at the very least if not outright reject but then
i followed up i asked him another question well first i

(33:11):
just said fair enough i said but is your argument christians
are jerks therefore god doesn't exist that's good
too he says well of course not of course that'd be a terrible argument
but it's a reason not so then i asked him i said what
well is there anything that makes you
think christianity might be true like have you completely slammed the
door shut or is it cracked open just a a little bit what's stuck

(33:32):
in the what's keeping that door open and it's the
weirdest his answer is just crazy you
know he said he said well it's yeah i i i do sometimes wonder and i have doubts
about my atheism and whether or not god exists and he says it's the fact that
there are so many christians and what he was just struggling with he's like

(33:53):
how are they all wrong are they all wrong.
So just here to your be and live part, what if it wasn't just that there were so many Christians,
but the quality of their life reflected the goodness that is inherent to Christianity
and our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ,

(34:14):
what a tremendous witness that would be.
Yeah, yeah, there's so much that you said there that I wanna comment on, I mean.
You know, the comment, the flippant and true comment, well, of course,
Christianity entails that we're all hypocrites because we're sinful, right?
True, right? And so, it doesn't affect the, it might affect the plausibility

(34:36):
of Christianity that there's hypocrites, but it doesn't directly, right?
But it definitely affects the desirability, right? I don't want to be like these
people. These guys are hypocrites.
And so, that's the first thing that says, well, that atheist student of yours
was more theologically consistent than the Christian in terms of the whole picture, right?
Even go back to MacIntyre and after virtue. There's this traditional distinction

(34:58):
that's deeply rooted not just in the philosophical tradition,
but the Christian tradition of this distinction between human nature as it is
and human nature as it ought to be, right?
And we're such flat-footed, ahistorical, anti-intellectual people that we don't
understand that there's an ongoing story about the importance of the virtues,

(35:19):
right, To help us journey the journey life well, right?
And that we're on a journey toward fulfillment in God, and it requires a certain
kind of secondary nature, right?
We're not just bare humans fallen, we're being formed, right?
You know, in one direction or the other. And so, yeah.

(35:41):
I mean, there's other things you said that were really, really helpful,
but just a couple things that popped into my mind.
So, we've got to care about, and this is the conviction, right?
If we care about showing not just the truth, but the goodness and beauty of
the gospel, we've got to live joined-up lives.
And again, isn't that just the point of the gospel? We're not just saved from

(36:02):
our sins. We're saved for union with Christ.
And that's a transformative journey of faith that requires so much more of us
than just assent to propositions.
I think just in this notion of story and smaller stories under grand stories
or whatnot, this This notion of not just saved from, but saved for is a story
that has to grip our imagination.

(36:24):
So, you know, it's somewhat easy, almost fun for people.
It seems to just bash the church and Christians and talk about hypocrisy and
this, that, and the other.
And it can tend to be just spoken in this nebulous, vague way.
What should a true follower of Jesus look like then? You know,
if this, from this being and living standpoint, what are, in your mind, are there some,

(36:49):
I don't know, defining characteristics of what we're talking about here.
Like if someone were to hear us and say, okay, fine, fair enough.
What should my life look like?
What are there some central ideas, behaviors, practices?
What, I don't know, what comes to your mind? What do you think? Yeah, there's a quick.

(37:09):
Simple answer. And then there's more long, of course, drawn out one.
But really, that's surprising coming from you. I know, I know.
But so, we're not saints, right? We're not moral saints.
So, of course, maybe some of us are, but there's very few.
But we're progressors, right? All of us need to be progressors, right?
And so, each day, this is something that we actually, in our MA in philosophy

(37:32):
here at Palm Beach Atlantic, we Skype in or Zoom in different philosophers for
these little mini talks that we do with our students.
And one philosopher that we had in is a virtue ethicist. She works on the virtues
and she's also like this Olympic runner, endurance, high endurance runner. She's super cool.
And she said to our students, and it's always resonated since she said it,

(37:53):
that she gets up each day and says, Lord, help me just lean in the direction
of the kind of person you want me to be, right?
And I love that posture, right? It doesn't mean that we need to be perfect, right?
We are fallen, but Lord, can we lean in the direction of the kind of person
you want me to be? So, notice just
the posturing there, where progressors leaning in a certain kind of way.

(38:14):
And then, the more detailed answer, that will entail a whole host of,
which you already alluded to, ways of life, right?
There's a sort of art to living the Christian way of life that includes ritual,
includes habits of the mind, it includes, you know, just the spiritual disciplines
of the Christian faith, and so much more.

(38:35):
But that fundamental leaning in the direction of the the kind of person you
want to be to me is like the whole game after that. I don't care.
Of course you're not perfect because I'm not perfect, but we're leaning day
after day and you know, and sometimes we mess it up too, but that's okay.
That's, that's where I would want to start. I think that's really helpful.

(38:55):
It's easy to be buried underneath a sense of shame.
And just hearing that Christian hypocrisy is a deterrent to faith doesn't really get you anywhere.
And then when you think, okay, I got to live like Jesus. Well,
how the heck do I do that? How do I get to that? Yeah.
How do I get to that? And when you deal with some real big issues like,
you know, and our fallenness therein, things like love and forgiveness,

(39:18):
people that, I mean, Jesus talked about, you know, our unity and our love for
one another, what kind of sign that would be.
So going back to what we said, what if Christians really lived and loved like that?
Well, it's easy to say that, right? It is hard to live that out because love requires sacrifice.
Love always, sacrificial kind of love anyhow, like the enacting of your will, not just romantic.

(39:41):
You know, not eros, just romantic feelings or whatever, but love in that sense,
the orienting of the will towards the good of another and seeking their good,
it's going to come at cost. It's going to be hard.
Forgiveness when you've been wronged in a real way, it's hard.
And so this helpful posture of just lean that way,

(40:03):
Lord, give me the grace and the strength for this day to lean in that direction
and to love sacrificially,
to forgive those who maybe don't deserve it any more than I deserved it when
I was forgiven and to help us do that.
I think that's a really helpful, really helpful posture.
So what about this show piece? Let's dig into that a little bit and elaborate

(40:26):
on that because right, it's the quality of our lives, who we are,
how we're living that, that can really help to convey the desirability of Christianity,
but you still have to explain it.
And I'm guessing that's what the show piece is, or maybe there's more to it,
but maybe unpack that just a little bit.
Yeah. So, I wouldn't want to, you know, there's sometimes that aphorism that's

(40:47):
thrown out there, you know, I share the gospel always, but I use words like
rarely, I forget how it goes, but I wouldn't subscribe to that, right?
I just think it's super clear that we're embodied humans that communicate through
language as well as through our lives.
And we've got to communicate the truths of the gospel with our words.
So, with that, though, I mentioned earlier that we live in an increasingly biblically illiterate culture,

(41:11):
and so part of our challenge as apologists, as evangelists, it's just people
that want to share the good news of the gospel that we've discovered,
is helping people understand the meaning of the gospel.
And so, like C.S. Lewis, for example, called the imagination the organ of meaning,
and we've got to engage in the imagination perhaps more now than in days past,

(41:34):
because people just don't understand.
If I say your soul needs to be saved from sin, I've just said at least three
words there, soul, saved, and sin, that mean nothing to many people in our culture.
And so we've got to help them understand, and that requires the imagination.
And so just as Jesus used...
The language of art, metaphor, story, hyperbole, layers of meaning,

(41:57):
and so on to engage and help his hearers understand, we too need to be like that.
And so, Holly Ordway and others who write on the Christian imagination and apologetic
talk about this use of imaginative reasoning.
And I think we've got to do that on the show part.
And so, what that's going to require of us as cultural apologists, right?
People actually who are engaging real live people in culture is a really,

(42:20):
it's a high calling because we need to, number one, have a robust theology ourselves.
Number two, we need to understand culture and what's going on in culture.
And then number three, make connections.
And that's a lot of work, right? It's a high call.
But that's the show part. We've got to continue giving arguments.
We've got to continue to make the case for the truth, goodness,

(42:42):
and beauty of Christianity.
But it's going to require of us, I think in this day and age,
more than just merely, and I'm a philosopher, I love syllogisms,
but that's going to work for some people, but not for everyone, right?
And so we've got to be a little more creative. And that's the showpiece that
I'm trying to expand on and open up some new avenues.
The showpiece, right, so the showpiece for philosophers, academics,

(43:04):
pastors even, what would the showpiece look like for moms and dads?
Or is part of your argument that really really, this is heavy lifting and has
to be done by professionals.
Or what does this mean for you? No, definitely not. Yeah, it can be for all of us.
All of us, I think, are called, just at the level of our individual lives,

(43:25):
to share the gospel and the truths of the gospel in such a way that our kids,
our parents, our peers, our coworkers, whoever, can understand it, right?
So, it involves a certain kind of intellectual life where we have,
you know, learned to listen and learned to speak to our audience,

(43:47):
like whoever it is that we're trying to reach, in a way that they can understand.
So, if we're all just talking heads using academic words, we're not really connecting
and loving our neighbor well, right?
Like I say, I love syllogisms, and I love working through them as a philosopher,
but I'm probably not going to give a premised argument to some child.

(44:08):
Because they're not going to understand that. And so how do I communicate in
a way, and I, for all of us, how do we communicate in a way that our hearer
can actually grasp what we're trying to say? And that's going to take work.
Well, tell me if you think I'm right about this. How do you like it set up for that, right? Right.
Is it really fun just to say, no, you're right. Yeah. Well, just for fun. But anyway, go ahead.

(44:34):
This show piece, I think probably from the academic on down,
I think the expectation is we have to build, it's going to take,
it's going to take time, not even just hard work. It's going to take time.
The use of the imagination, you got to have, I mean, think about how your imagination
works, right? You got to have like the.
You get taken by it. You get captured by it. You've got to process it.

(44:59):
You imagine yourself in it. I guess I bring that up because we're so conditioned
in our age to just soundbite everything and to think, it's true.
I said it. Well, if you don't believe it, you're the idiot.
Idiot right you think about i love the trolls
by the way all the trolls do is help my posts

(45:19):
and things get seen by more people
although it may just be more trolls that are seeing it but the
you know the the simplicity of i
just said i just typed out this sentence and if
you can't agree to it well it's because you're so
stupid and you're such an idiot and you're an evil awful person so
i don't i don't know necessarily any probably doesn't matter much to

(45:41):
get into the why are we now so conditioned to think in soundbites
and if somebody hears my soundbite and doesn't instantly agree with
they're an idiot not bothering with why we're there we i think we are there
and i think christians are just as bad about this as anybody else and we can
treat our kids with it they ask a question we give an answer we use religious
language and then that's the end of it and we often will even show frustration

(46:04):
in it because these the kids their
imaginations are kicking in and they're trying to make sense of this.
Getting long-winded here, but funny thing on the ride to school this morning,
my 10-year-old and my 12-year-old were in an argument about whether the future exists.
Oh, nice. There you go. My daughter was like, of course it exists.
I will be at school in 10 minutes.

(46:26):
And then my conure of 10 wrote, it says, yeah, but when you're there,
it will be now. You'll never be in the future.
So anyways, just this, but their imaginations are kicking in,
right? And it's so So easy as a parent, just be like, shut up.
I'm trying to listen to the sports right now.
Spencer Strider just went down. Is it going to be out for the rest of the year?
Here's the soundbite answer. Deal with it.
Grapple, you know, make sense of it. And if not, you're an idiot and just move on. So.

(46:50):
I got carried away there, I think, a bit. I think part of this show piece,
go ahead. You said something. So, notice what your kids are doing, though.
They are filled with the wonder of it all, right?
How do I make sense of the metaphysics of time and the future and the present?
And this is what kids do so well, right? And this is what philosophy does,

(47:11):
but I think theology should do this too, right?
Because they're super connected. impacted is wonder is like the beginning and
the lifeblood in the end, as one of my friend Ross Inman puts it,
of the intellectual life, right?
And so the viciousness of that soundbite culture that shuts people down with,
you're just stupid, this is how it goes, is they've lost the sense of wonder
that your kids, I love what your kids were doing there.

(47:33):
They're wonderful and they haven't been conditioned by the adults in the social
media as much yet, right?
To move on from wonder, we've got bills to pay. Yeah. And so,
showing can be soundbites.
We can show the goodness, truth, and beauty in a 10-second soundbite.
But the show connects to the create, too, to go to the fourth one.

(47:54):
Because in creating culture, in creating things that embody the good,
the true, and the beautiful and awaken those longings, we're helping awaken wonder.
And we're setting them on that journey that terminates in the true story of
the world, right? And so, to me, all four of them are connected,
but the show and the creator are connected.
The soundbites are fine as long as we're also cultivating and creating these new, literally, stuff.

(48:20):
As Annie Crutch says, we create in two ways. We create meaning and we create
things that embody the good, the true, and the beautiful, that help people imagine
a world full of possibility.
Full of the cross-pressure of that atheistic student you mentioned.
He's haunted by his doubts. This is the cross-pressure of the disenchanted age, right?
The atheist or the unbeliever is haunted by doubt, and the believer is too, right?

(48:44):
But our doubt is, we're told, you know, what if we're wrong, right?
But there's something about this world that we have the sense that it's deeply
meaningful, that it's deeply spiritual, right?
And I think your kids are tapping into that and that wonderful question.
I'm getting ready to teach metaphysics, and that's where we're headed.
We're going to talk about time travel and time and all that fun stuff. because it awakens

(49:06):
right what is the nature of this world we find ourselves in so
i'll stop but love that i was just so
proud listening to this art it
was an argument they were getting frustrated with each other that's all but
living in the this wonder and i lament the loss of wonder in our time even the
simple ways like how many home runs did so-and-so hit you don't have to wonder

(49:29):
and argue you just google it so it's this funny thing how i'm trying to keep
wonder alive in my life in small and stupid ways.
Remember that movie if you ever saw it, The NeverEnding Story?
You ever see that movie? I don't think I have. It's a wonderfully terrible 80s movie. So.
And at the end of it, he, it comes where this, this dude just has to say the

(49:51):
name of this girl and he shouts it. It's like the whole movie has been building to this point.
I, to this day, don't know what he said. I could Google it.
I've watched it a hundred times when I was a kid, never could figure out what he said.
I live in a Google world. I could get an answer to that. And I'm not going to,
because I want something left to wonder about.
And of course that's an overly simplistic way to say, not like I figured everything

(50:11):
else out about life, but I think in In this modern tech age,
we're almost conditioned to think that wonder is a sign of weakness.
Wonder is a sign of stupidity. Wonder is the same thing as doubt,
and doubt's always bad, and you can't have it.
So I really like this, this wonder.

(50:33):
So what does it look like to create? I love this. I mean, what does it look like to create?
And especially, you know, the creative process isn't simply at the straightforward
path. I want to create something that makes people wonder.
Creativity has its own life will even.
Dave Chappelle said it almost best to me.

(50:53):
He said, when I'm really hit by creativity, I'm thrown into the trunk of the
car and it takes me wherever it wants to go.
When I'm in the driver's seat and I try to put creativity in the passenger seat,
we end up going nowhere that's any good.
So there's this element, but trying to bring maybe something concrete to this,
what does does it look like for Christians to be culture makers,

(51:14):
you know, to create these things?
So, you know, what does it mean to create the philosophy of creativity?
Surprisingly, there's a lot that people are exploring on that.
And you hit on one of the key features of the creative act, right?
Is that you bring something into being that's novel and valuable,
and there's a kind of surprisingness to it, right?
That you're thrown in the trunk and it takes you wherever. You don't even know
where you're going to go.

(51:35):
That's the creative process. And the product is something of deep value that's,
you know, novel in some sense, too. So, I would just say...
The discussion about creativity is embedded in a discussion about our posture toward culture.
Just to take you back to Andy Crouch, because I'm convinced that he's right
on this. He says, you know, Christians always debate, like, how should we,

(51:56):
what should our posture be toward culture?
And by posture, I mean, like, your learned stance, right?
And he talks about four ways that Christians have kind of postured themselves
towards culture, and those four ways, real quick, are just that we either condemn
it, that's just our posture of always condemning everything,
or we critique it all the time, or we consume everything in culture,
or we copy it, right? Those are the four.
And he says, none of those, all of those, one problem with all of those is that

(52:20):
they abdicate our active potentiality to be creators of culture.
And so, Crouch grounds these other two postures, creators and cultivators of
the good, the true, and the beautiful, in the fact that we're created in the
image of a creating and cultivating God.
So, how do we create?
How do we become creators? I think we just pick up this call to be active participants

(52:43):
in the triune God, to make things of our lives, to make a beautiful life,
to make things in what we do, whether it's making.
PowerPoints or as an academic, you know, try to create with beauty in mind, right?
Or whether it's making landscapes as a homeowner or omelets as a cook,
you know, whatever, bringing beauty back into our lives and the things that

(53:03):
we do and the stories that we tell.
For some, we're called to be artists, right? For others, we're just called to
make our lives. So hang on real quick.
So just to clarify, when we talk about create, we're talking about a calling
that all people have, not just artists.
Right. Because we're called to create our own, to make our own lives,
right? And to make a beautiful or create a beautiful life. I think we're all called to that.

(53:23):
Well, I think it's especially helpful and empowering.
I don't know what your upbringing was like and, or the, not strictly like parents,
but just your Christian subculture, or even if you were even a part of one.
I don't remember if I know that about you or not, but the kind of christian
subculture i grew up in there was this dichotomy between the sacred and the
secular that real christians the real followers of jesus became pastors missionaries not a politician.

(53:51):
Not a get a secular job and it's always said with like this a secular job as
if but no is that there's something wrong in that but i guess what we're talking
about is to be an image bearer of god is to be you know what tolkien said or
subcreated i don't know if that idea is original But he propagated it,
of course, this notion of, no, I honor God.
I fulfill my calling of having subdominion or having dominion over this earth through creation.

(54:17):
And that can be through banking and business and math and science and art.
And so this is, again, capturing, having the imaginations captured by the followers
of Jesus in this country.
To be a faithful steward of God and to live up to the calling that he has for
us doesn't just require a quote-unquote sacred career as a pastor or whatever.

(54:41):
It's to be lived out in everything that we do. Yeah, and Tolkien...
Tartus, go ahead. Oh, I'm just going to say real quick, Tolkien said it best.
So I'm always encouraged by Ephesians 2.10, where it talks about how we are
literally a divine work of art, all of us, a poemia. and then it says,
created in Christ Jesus to do
good works, which God prepared before the foundations of the world, right?

(55:02):
And this was encouraging to me, but it's encouraging to our students,
my students, when I talk to them, that God has created each of us for a work, right?
And so, my last class, we're having our last class in cultural apologetics next
week, and we're going to read Leaf by Niggle, which is a little story by J.R.
Tolkien that kind of models and kind of plays out the points he was making in

(55:24):
his essay on fairy tale that he wrote.
But Leaf by Niggle is a story about this painter.
And basically, there's this leaf that he painted, and that was his life's legacy, right?
And so, the question that that story pushes us to, back to your question about
are all of us called to be creators, is like, what is the leaf that God has
called us to paint, right?
What is that work that God has called us to do? That's what I mean broadly construed about creating.

(55:49):
I know you're getting ready to ask about artists, and that's an important discussion
too, but the broad point is all of us have a work to do, and that's the creative
impulse that God has made in us to make meaning and things in our lives.
Here i am trying to push us on
and going back but one of the examples that
i love the story to tell it's personal of course and involves my my wife here

(56:10):
but this notion of creating something that is beautiful and this has an entrepreneurial
piece to it not all creation is entrepreneurial per se but there was a time
where she stayed home she's a school teacher master's green school
counseling but decided we decided for her
to stay home and in part of that she

(56:31):
had this desire to help people
run whether it's a 5k or marathon who are the kinds of people that like i could
never run terry's a runner she knows the joy of it so she started to create
individualized running plans for a number starting with some friends and then
it grew into really a small

(56:52):
business thing, it couldn't have been big because of how she did it.
And, but what she created was something very beautiful and meaningful and helpful,
personalized plans and coaching for this group of 20 people that like I could
never run and then them be able to run their first 5K. That's,

(57:13):
to me, that's what we're talking about.
Creation, bringing something into existence that didn't exist before.
And that's not to say Tara's the first person to invent something like this,
but she did it in a very specific kind of way.
And it was a beautiful thing that enriched the lives of so many people.
And I think this was an act of honor and glory to God.
So at the risk of moving too fast, I am really interested for artists here because

(57:36):
I, well, if you, you probably can't see because of the narrow shot,
but I got guitars all over my office here.
I love creating and I love that element of creating that is this,
you're discovering what you're creating at the same time.
And you've got some idea, some aim, but then you get lost in it and it has its
mind of its own. So I love really good music. I love really good books.

(58:01):
And there's such bad stuff out there.
I often find, quote unquote, secular music to be more enriching and of a higher
quality than a lot of the stuff that is Christian music.
So, a lot of different ways to go here, and I know our time is coming to an end.

(58:22):
What's some helpful things to talk about for artists, and particularly people
that are artists who are followers of Jesus?
That's good. I mean, I think the first thing that I would want to say is that
the church needs you as an artist. The church needs artists.
Of course, as I say in my book, Artists Need the Church, right? We need each other.
But the important thing is that, like you said earlier, there's no sacred-secular split, right?

(58:48):
And art, we need to affirm the artist within our midst, because I think one
thing that's special about art is that they help us, you know, see reality, clearly.
It's as if artists pull back the curtain and give us a glimpse,
right? You mentioned music, right?
And there's a sense when we have these moments of.

(59:09):
Exhale, right? Where all is as it ought to be. This is the glimpse that art
and music and painting and dance or whatever, you know, whatever it is literature provides for us.
Jeremy Begbie, who is a musician and an artist, writes on this intersection
of theology and the arts, and he talks about arts are uniquely evocative of the divine, right?

(59:31):
And so, the artist, I think, and then G.K. Chesterton famously said that art is the signature of man.
You know, Alone does man create art. And so, there's some deep spiritual connections,
I think, between art, the artist, the Imago Dei, and what it means to be human.
And so, yeah, we need artists. That's why there were artists in the midst of
Israel, even after 400 years of slavery, you know, to build the tabernacle.

(59:54):
God cares about art. God, you know, and one last thing I'll say,
not all art is beautiful, right? I understand that.
I could say a few things about this.
This is an area I've been studying and working on a lot, but I adopt something
called aesthetic cognitivism, and that's the idea that the chief value of art
is to communicate understanding, right? So, go back to our discussion about how do we show.
Well, art uniquely communicates understanding about the human experience of

(01:00:18):
the world or about the world or about God or what it means to be human in general.
That's one of the functions of art, right? So, if we want to help people understand,
let's create good art that embodies and helps communicate these deep truths.
I was going to say something else, but I forgot, but super important.
We need to inform the artists within our midst that statement needs to be oh

(01:00:41):
needs to be heard in the church it needs to come out of the mouth of preachers
we need artists and not just to write mind-numbing mantras that we sing.
Right not just have to check our brain at the door yeah and i'm mocking so many
of the worship songs that we sing.

(01:01:02):
That is not the only value of artists.
When we say we need artists, it's not to write more of those songs. We need less of them.
We need more good songs, but fully what we're talking about here to create good art.
Tell me what you think about this. There are some people that say every artist
should have, the gospel should be explicit in all forms of art.

(01:01:30):
What's What's your take on that? Yeah. I mean, no, I don't think so.
There's a huge debate, right? What is the purpose of art? Is it art for art's
sake or art for the sake of some propaganda? I think it's.
But no, I don't think that it needs to be distinctly religious, right?
Because good art, just like good stories, they're good because they point to

(01:01:50):
some truth about prime reality, right?
And think of the contrast between Lewis and Tolkien, right? For Lewis,
he was explicitly writing about Christian themes.
And so, you see, you wonder, why is Father Christmas in the story?
And why is Aslan just so obviously the Christ figure?
Whereas tolkien says i didn't set out to write a

(01:02:11):
christian story or allegory but it just sort of bubbled up within
me right so you still see the same things right so in
any good story nature of reality it's going to plumb reality
and so you can find deep glimpses in
like for me i talk about this in cultural
apologetics i was awoken to the beauty of the gospel story
or the longing for a significant life when i was

(01:02:33):
nine years old watching luke skywalker stare at the
binary moons in that movie right there's
nothing explicitly well there are there is some religion there's nothing explicitly
christian about it though but it awoke this
deep longing in my heart that set me on a journey that terminates
ultimately in christ years later right so
no it yeah that's all i would i would i agree with you and what it was george

(01:02:57):
mcdonald right for c.s lewis his sci-fi writing that awakened something and
loser contributed yeah fantasy yeah yeah i think good good like Like,
you know, this is another Lewis idea that when Christian started to be used
as an adjective, it lost some value.
We already had appropriate adjectives like good and bad.
So like Christian music is unnecessary.

(01:03:20):
It's just, there's good music and there's bad music. There's good art and there's bad art.
And I think good music and good art are things that accurately reflect the world
that we live in that God has made.
And so I say this all the time, like a lot of times I find music.
A truth and a wonder in eddie vetter
songwriting that i wish i could find in many

(01:03:43):
christians even when vetter's using the f-bomb he's lamenting the brokenness
in this world without a lot of rock and roll it celebrates the brokenness better
very consistently laments it and that's to me good
songwriting, allowing you to process and wrestle.

(01:04:06):
And there just needs to be more Christians that are making good art.
And I just desperately wanted myself even in a selfish way.
Well, Paul, we didn't even get to one of the things that's really interesting
to me, and maybe this will be a conversation for another day.

(01:04:26):
I'm really interested in the formation of what we were talking about,
this new kind of spirituality or quasi-religion or whatever the way to describe
it, I don't know what it is.
But it's here. It's not even coming. It is here.
And the work of the apologist, cultural apologist, is to understand what's happening,
what's influencing, what's competing for the hearts and the minds and be able to speak into that.

(01:04:48):
So maybe that's something you and I can talk about another day.
And not every time we talk has to be on a podcast.
Maybe I just need to come down to Palm Beach and hang out. Yeah.
Yeah. Just know that we have much work to do in this area. So, yeah.
Well, thanks for your work, brother. Thanks for your time. Enjoyed hanging out
with you today. Thanks, Mike. Yeah. Good to be with you. Have a great day.
Music.