Racism, Misogyny, and the What the Bible Really Teaches | Abdu Murray

In this insightful episode, we delve into the historical and modern perceptions of Christianity, specifically addressing the accusations of it being oppressive and a "white man's religion." Our guest, Abdu Murray, an author, apologist, and former litigator, shares his extensive knowledge and perspective on these critical issues.

We explore the antebellum Southern slavery, the transatlantic slave trade, and how religion has been misused to justify evil. Abdu discusses his latest book, More Than a White Man’s Religion, which tackles the attacks on Christianity’s morality and truthfulness. We also examine the shift in cultural questions from "Is Christianity true?" to "Is Christianity good?"

Through engaging dialogue, we address whether the Bible advocates for equality and how it has historically been misrepresented. Abdu provides compelling arguments and evidence that Christianity, when understood in its full context, is the foundation for concepts of equality and justice.

Finally, we discuss the way forward, emphasizing the importance of listening, acknowledging historical pains, and embodying the sacrificial love of Jesus Christ to bring hope and reconciliation in our communities.

Join us for a thought-provoking conversation that challenges preconceived notions and offers a hopeful vision rooted in the Christian faith.

Visit embracethetruth.org for more on Abdu.

Episode Transcript

(00:00):
You take a look at antebellum Southern slavery, the transatlantic slave trade.
People know something, human beings know this, that if you can baptize your
evil in the garb of religion, you'll get a lot of people to follow it.
Does that mean religion's inherently bad? No.
Well, hello everyone. Today I get to talk to a new friend and colleague, Abdu Murray.

(00:23):
He's an author, an apologist, former litigator, and just a wealth of knowledge.
We talk about a number of things, including his most recent book,
More Than a White Man's Religion.
One of the attacks on Christianity today is not just is it true, but is it good?
And of course, the attack is that Christianity is bad for this world,

(00:45):
not just that it's false, but that it's immoral, that it's oppressive,
misogynistic, sexually regressive.
And that in its past, it even facilitated slavery and made slavery a reality
and made it possible in the South.
And then if you look at the Old Testament, it doesn't condemn slavery and Sam
Harris saying things like, if it wouldn't be that hard to write a better book

(01:07):
than the Bible, just take out the parts on slavery and it would be a better book.
So how could you believe in a God that wrote that kind of book? So a lot here.
And of course, if people are moving away from Christianity because they view
it as a white man's religion and that it's oppressive, what is the cost of that?
What does that mean for our hope and the belief in things like equality and justice?

(01:31):
Is our moral outrage even legitimate if Christianity is not true?
So we talk about that and more. Hope you enjoy.
So, Abdu, how long have you been an apologist? And do you even like that term?
Or does it feel like a dirty word to you or something?
How long have you been in this line of work?
Yeah, so this actually marks the 20th year of Embrace the Truth's existence.

(01:56):
I would say that I've been in apologetics for slightly longer than that.
I got saved in the year 2000.
So, it's easy for me to remember how long I've been saved for because I just
have a simple math, which is the best kind of math for me.
So, I've been saved since 2000, in the year 2000.
I was doing apologetics in the sense of working through some stuff and participating

(02:16):
in my church for a few years before we started Embrace the Truth in the year 2004.
So, we're celebrating 20 years this year. So, in a capacity of part-time ministry
and then eventually full-time ministry. It's been 20 years.
So tell me, in that 20 years, so I'm terrible with numbers, not numbers,

(02:37):
math per se, but just dates. I'm horrible with dates, especially on the other side of COVID.
Everything feels like it was seven years ago to me, and it could have been just two months ago.
Well, it's funny because I have the opposite. I sort of feel like everything
happened like last year, but it really happened four years ago.
So COVID, it's the great time killer. Yeah, it really is.
My sense of time. Anyway, so I've been doing this kind of work roughly the same

(02:59):
amount of time in various capacities.
And I'm wondering, I'm curious if you've seen some of the same things that I've seen.
You know, when I got into this line of work and started having the opportunities
to speak and do kind of apologetic ministry, you know, I was ready for,
or I felt at least ready for questions like, why should I be able to trust the Bible?

(03:20):
And it's not like people aren't asking those questions anymore at all,
but they're asking different questions now.
And it's not just, why should I trust the Bible?
It's, is the Bible even moral if it's good?
And if I were to characterize maybe to be a shift.
It's been a shift away from these kind of classic intellectual,
skeptical, can I trust the Bible? Is there any evidence for God's existence?

(03:45):
And it's moving to, is Christianity even good? Much less, is it true?
Are you seeing some of the same things or what are you seeing out there?
That's exactly what I'm seeing. I've said it quite often, especially a recent
vintage where I think people are not asking primarily, is the Bible true?
They're asking primarily, is the Bible good?
Now, it's funny because people are coming along their sort of epistemological

(04:07):
journey in terms of like, how
do I know what's true and what's worth my beliefs in a backwards sense?
I mean, you think about it logically speaking, you should first ask the question, is it true?
And then wrestle with what does it morally mean?
But we're doing the opposite. Now, I'm not saying it's illegitimate.
I just think it's not necessarily the logical way to look at it.
But it is the way of the moment right now is looking at the morality of something.

(04:32):
And partially that's because I think media and social media have harped on not
the truth of the Christian faith.
I mean, every Easter, so right around now, as of this recording. Mm-hmm.
We're talking about Easter in lots of ways, and right about now,
all the sort of obligatory.
Secret gospels the church doesn't want you to know about, or,

(04:53):
you know, what really happened to Jesus, those will all come out,
and those are questions about the truth and the veracity of the scriptures,
but what is the pervasive view right now in the media is the politicization, the polarization,
and the social justice issues that are surrounding the Christian faith.
So really, those are the issues du jour.

(05:15):
Here's a good example of what I mean. So I go to, I was speaking at MIT.
I know that Alicia spoke at MIT recently as well.
And I was speaking at MIT and my topic was dangerous and delusional.
Is Christianity good for the world?
And as a part of the delusional conversation in my talk, I brought up the science issues.
Now I'm at MIT, right? The most advanced technical college probably in the world,

(05:35):
where the best and brightest from all over the world go to wrestle with deep
engineering and science issues and this kind of thing.
I presented a bit of a science case. It wasn't the primary thing,
but it was part of it. But I also presented the moral stuff.
Not one question was about science and the veracity of scripture in terms of history.
It had to do with the morality of it. Comparative religion, sure.

(05:57):
But most of it had to do with social issues, sexuality, race,
gender, the existence of morality as an actual concept, all of these things. So you're quite right.
That's exactly where the culture is right now. And I don't think that's just
a Western, you know, American, European thing. Oh, really? I think that's everywhere.
And why? So why is that?

(06:20):
I'm always curious by when we find places of common ground in a world that seemingly
is growing more and more divided.
If it's true that all of us seemingly are around the world, there's this movement
to understand morality, meaning and morality, what grounds it,
what justifies it, where is it?

(06:41):
How is this happening all at
the same time? Why are so many people experiencing this and why is that?
Why are those the questions again, not the truthful questions,
more the goodness kinds of questions? Yeah.
Well, I think part of that is because this is ironic, I think.
I think there's several factors, but the first one is the most ironic of the
two, is that we're no longer asking propositional truth questions primarily,

(07:03):
and we're asking moral questions, which are, by the way, just as much about
truth as anything else is.
But they're not propositional truths in terms of philosophy or history or science.
Because of the information age.
I think because of the sharing of information. And what I mean by that is those
things which capture the imagination and the ethos of what's happening are those

(07:27):
things that stir emotion.
And I think social media is really good at this. When you look at all the various
studies that are done on why it is people can't stop scrolling.
And I remember hearing Dan Wallace do a joke one time, the New Testament scholar
Dan Wallace, where he said that the invention of the book was either a Christian
invention or Christians were the ones who popularized the invention of the book.

(07:49):
And then of course, we've gone right back to scrolls again, because that's what
we do. We don't paginate anything, we scroll everything.
I think what keeps you scrolling is that which incites your emotion and gets
the neurotransmitters firing.
And so that plays into why the moral stuff bubbles to the surface and why social justice movements,

(08:11):
whether good or ill, by the way, whether it's the Arab Spring or it's Black
Lives Matter, whatever it happens to be, something bubbles to the surface.
And then religion is, one, it makes itself an easy punching bag because of the
way religious people act.
But two, I think religion, because it can incite such good, but also such bad
in people at that point, is an easy way to do that.

(08:35):
So I think the information age, ironically, has steered us away from propositional
factual information questions and more to moral questions.
And that's sort of a weird sort of irony in the whole thing.
I think the other thing, though, is that religious people, I think,
have helped move this sort of.
Public perception of Christianity and religion in general, but Christianity in particular is bad.

(09:01):
In an age where we're getting more spiritual and less religious,
labels to religious movements become very divisive because they're religious movements.
And so, you know, how often do Christians say, why I love Jesus but hate religion?
So, you use the word religion in a negative term and you're religious.
And James doesn't use it in a negative way. He talks about good and true religion.

(09:24):
So I think we've contributed to this both by our bad behavior,
but also, and our bad behavior, not just in terms of spiritual leaders who fall.
That's one thing. That's a big part of it. But it's also the politicization
of religious movement, the way the word evangelicalism has come to mean a certain
thing to certain people.
And it's got a political connotation more than a spiritual connotation.

(09:48):
So it feeds into the idea that religion is just a hustle. It's a way to to get
your political sort of move across.
And I think that we've fed it quite a bit. Christians have fed it.
Other people from other religions have fed this whole thing quite a bit as well.
So I think that's how we've gotten to those two things at least.
So there's a lot there. It's already enough to make someone's head spin and start to feel like.

(10:12):
Well, where's the closest commune that I can just join and just let all this
stuff, you know, rot or implode or whatnot.
So there's a lot of different things we could talk about here, but maybe one way to get,
at this, you know, pretty specifically referencing your latest book.

(10:35):
Interesting title. I've got it right here in front of me. More than a white man's religion.
Interesting title, provocative, perhaps in a sense, it certainly speaks to one
of the issues. Yeah, right.
But if, and for people that maybe were just listening and not watching it, you're not a white man.
You're an olive skinned Middle Eastern man from a Muslim background.

(10:59):
So what are you doing in this book?
Why write a book like this? And how does this book relate to even the topic
that we're talking about right now?
Yeah, and it relates so well to it. In fact, the whole conversation we're having
feeds into the impetus for why I wrote it is because I thought people are asking
the moral questions more than and they're asking the propositional truth questions.

(11:24):
But it occurred to me that the moral questions are propositional truth questions
when you think about them in a logical way, but also in an existentially relevant way.
So I began, the book started actually in, it developed because I was writing
a chapter in another book altogether, and I was talking about Jesus as our eternal
contemporary, sort of to quote from Leslie Newbigin.

(11:46):
And, you know, Jesus is this ancient figure that kind of, for whatever reason,
becomes eternally relevant.
He's not, to quote an atheist who spoke to a colleague of mine one time who
says, I don't believe in Jesus, but one thing you can't say about Jesus is that
he's a product of his time. He's not a product of his time.
He is relevant to his time and to all others as well. This is an atheist talking.
So it occurred to me that he would speak to our current issues in a relevant

(12:09):
way. And so you explore that.
And what are the current issues? I mean turn on the turn on the news on your
device or whatever medium you watch the news on and what are the issues of?
The day sexuality gender and race and
And I started writing the book before George Floyd died.
And then all COVID happened, of course, but then the eruptions of all the unrest

(12:34):
in 2020 highlighted for me that this book is on the right track because this
is the issue that captured the mind of the world.
You know, it's funny, this thing happens in America, and it happens in Minneapolis,
and you'd think that it would be limited either to Minneapolis and then maybe
the surrounding environs to a certain degree,
kind of like, you know, with stuff that happened in Ferguson years before that,

(12:57):
where it became national attention,
but eventually it stayed essentially localized,
though it garnered national attention.
Well, George Floyd didn't. George Floyd was, in some senses,
literally an explosive thing that happened all over the world.
And I began to ask myself this question, why?
Why is this all over the world in the way that it is?

(13:17):
And then things started to happen in saying, this is the book where we talk
about, does the Bible advocate for the equality of all people,
even those who have been historically marginalized,
whether because of ethnicity or because they're women?
And the Bible is often blamed for the inequities in the world.

(13:38):
And so what I set out to hopefully prove in the book is that the Bible is actually
the cure for the very things it's being blamed for.
And hopefully we've done that to show that the surge away from Christianity
is not based on the propositional sort of unbelievable ability of it,
but rather it's the moral reprehensibility that is perceived.

(14:00):
And if you can stem that, then maybe you get people to actually consider it's truth.
And the very reason, of course, for writing a book like this,
right, is if Christianity is viewed as simply a white man's religion, it will be pushed aside.
It's a barrier to belief. And I think as you put it in the book,

(14:25):
that if Christianity then is abandoned because it's perceived just as a white man's religion,
then the only remedy for our brokenness, both personally and culturally,
will be lost.
So it's, though there may be political implications and in a canceled culture,
you know, especially in a political season like this, notions of racism and

(14:47):
white man, it's going to feel very political.
And again, there's obvious political implications of this.
But fundamentally, if people start moving away from Christianity because of
this perception, what they're moving away from is the one cure that we have
for what ails us. Yeah, absolutely.
And it always harkens back to me to, I believe, John chapter six, where.

(15:11):
You know, the crowds follow Jesus and he gives them their stuff.
He gives them food and they keep following him and he knows what they want.
They don't want him. They want the food he gives.
And it's so funny when you read the scriptures, you know, I might pause for
a moment here just because I can say the scripture is so impressive to me over and over again.

(15:32):
I read it and I'm like, oh my goodness, look at how delicately woven the language
is, but also in the sense that this is as an eyewitness account at the same time.
It's not dry police statements of what happened, but it's a narrative that could
not be the concoction of a handful of fishermen and some shepherds.
So you take this incidence where Jesus miraculously feeds a bunch of people,

(15:54):
and then they follow him around so they can get more food.
And then he says, look, I'm the one, I'm the true food you need.
And then they basically try to manipulate him by saying, well,
if you are who you say you are, and they of course know that he is because he
just got done healing the blind and the sick and feeding them miraculously.
So they know, they have all the evidence in the world, propositionally,
that he is the one that he says he is.

(16:17):
But they still want more. They don't want more proofs. They don't want that.
What they want is more stuff.
In fact, they say to him, Moses is the one who brought forth manna from heaven. He fed us.
Feed us. We want more food, actual literal food. What a manipulation tactic.
You know, he just got done saying, that's not what you need.
I'm like, oh, no, that's what we need.

(16:38):
And then he says the hard thing, you know, eat my flesh and drink my blood.
He doesn't mean it literally, but of course they use any excuse they can to
not follow him. And they say, this is ridiculous.
We're not cannibals. And they basically turn on him.
And all this points to the last question Jesus asks someone in that thing.
Jesus loses the entire crowd of thousands who are following him.

(17:00):
And he turns to the 12 and he says, are you guys going to leave too?
And I think he knows the answer. I just think he wants Peter to say it.
And Peter says, where else would we go? You alone have the words of life.
And so I think that the culture is a little bit like that right now,
is that you can have luminaries like Frederick Douglass and Phyllis Wheatley

(17:21):
and all these folks who were slaves back in the time of actual antebellum Southern slavery.
And they can see that Christianity is not the white man's slaver's religion.
These brilliant people. And yet today, thousands of years later,
and hundreds of years since the end of slavery, or not hundreds,
but getting close to it, the end of slavery, we suddenly think we know better.

(17:44):
And we think we can go somewhere else. And these voices are crying out from
history and saying, where else are you going to go?
There's nowhere else to go. No, secularism doesn't provide you any basis whatsoever
for the idea that across species and within a species, any of us is actually
equal in any sense of the word.
Social Darwinism, I know it's been poo-pooed as saying, no, Darwinism doesn't

(18:08):
lead to social Darwinism. I beg to differ.
If the strong dominate the weak and that's how we progress, then that will always
be the case. And you can use any justification.
I'm not saying if you're a Darwinist, you're inherently a racist.
I'm not saying that. What I am saying is that it becomes very hard to fight
against this evil if that's all you have.
And the Bible, I think, is the greatest expression of equality.

(18:29):
Does it have some challenging passages in it? Yeah. And we have to tackle those.
But ultimately- Let's get into that.
Because the objection is that Christianity is the problem wrapped up in this
white man's religion, is that it's oppressive, it's immoral,
it's supported slavery, it does not promote equality.

(18:52):
You argue it's the opposite. What is the biblical justification then for a belief
in equality? And what is it about the biblical message?
That leads to equality or justifies a belief in equality as opposed to what
the opponents are saying that Christianity robs of it all?
Yeah. Well, absolutely. I think that there's two bases for this.

(19:14):
The first one is more of a philosophical and theological that's not unique to
Christianity, but I think eventually finds its unique expression in Christianity,
which is the existence of moral values in the first place and moral obligations.
I remember sitting across, I talk about this in the book quite a bit,
actually. I was sitting across the table from a young African-American guy who
had left his faith altogether because he identified with somebody from his past

(19:36):
who was an atheist and a black man who is an atheist because Christianity was
the quote-unquote slaver's religion. And he bought into this.
And I asked him the question about objective morality. And he tried to quote
Sam Harris to me and all this.
And I read Sam Harris's book and The Moral Landscape, where he tries to basically
justify that science can tell us what's moral based on flourishing and based on suffering,

(19:58):
when And of course, you still have to borrow from the ideas that science can
give you the data of what accounts for flourishing, but it can't tell you why
human flourishing is any good outside of the human preference for flourishing
over that of rhesus monkeys or the H1N1 virus or whatever it is.
So I asked him that question about objective morality, and essentially he had
to agree that his sense of outrage at racism, as justifiable as it is in my worldview,

(20:25):
and as admirable as it is in his expression of it, makes no sense in a naturalistic framework.
It just, there's no hook to it because morality is an inherently personal thing.
You know, I'm not a Platonist. I don't think that love just exists or that compassion
just happens to like, sort of like move along.

(20:46):
And even if it did exist, it would violate itself because love,
because it's a feat, doesn't love.
And compassion, because it's just a concept, can't be compassionate and therefore
would violate itself and would make no sense in that sense. rather objective
moral values like equality, justice, fairness, love, kindness, compassion.
These are personal, but if they're transcendent and they go beyond human opinion,

(21:09):
and they have to, if you're going to be mad at slavery and mad at racism,
and you have to believe that the morality upon which you're basing that outrage,
is beyond human opinion, because at one point, and it's still in many countries in the world.
Thinking someone is lower than yourself because of their ethnicity is perfectly permissible.
And in some countries, it's legal. And in this country, it was perfectly legal

(21:31):
to own a person as property based on their race.
And that was human opinion. But it was wrong then and it's wrong now.
So he had to eventually agree that his outrage had no basis because if morality
is personal and morality is transcendent, then it has to be based on a transcendently
moral person. I have the hardest time understanding.

(21:53):
I mean, I get how there are some really deep questions in life that aren't simple.
And I can appreciate opposing views.
And at the end of the day, you kind of walk away with some mutual respect, even if you don't agree.
I really have a hard time with those that think you can ground morality in any

(22:17):
kind of objective sense without a creator guide.
You find some people that have forsaken that.
You'll find someone who has kind of an intellectual honesty like Nietzsche,
who saw himself that we must abandon any hope in objective morality and then
look within and create tables of value for yourself.

(22:39):
But you would, I don't know, to me, I want to be careful about sounding so arrogant
or whatever here, sound like a punk wearing a baseball hat, like I am,
but people have been trying for a long time now to find some kind of objective,
rational basis to ground morality,
without the transcendent.

(23:00):
It's not going to work. And I have a, I have the hardest time seeing how people see that.
And they're desperately trying to do it. Sam Harris is still trying to do that.
I think Jordan Peterson is trying to do that himself, too.
There's so many people that are trying to find because of what we're talking about here.
If we're going to have legitimate moral outrage, not just I don't personally
like that. Like, why did you give me chocolate instead of vanilla?

(23:23):
You know, like true moral outrage. There has to be some true purpose being violated,
some true standard that isn't simply dependent upon human flourishing or subjective
preferences. differences.
I don't know how you get that outside of what you'd said, a personal transcendent
being, not just something platonic.

(23:44):
And that's a really interesting way that you, you friend that I don't think
I've ever heard anybody put it like that, but there's a really interesting way
to talk about compassion.
If it existed somewhere as compassion, it would violate itself without the personal component.
Yeah. And it has no ability to do anything. Right. So it can't be,
it can't be what it is and it's violating its very nature. That's such interesting.

(24:04):
You're such a clever guy there.
I'll take you down a couple of pegs later. Don't worry. As you should.
But I just, this is, so to me, right, so wrapped up in your book and in these
issues, this is why Christianity cannot be pushed to the margins because it's
our only hope for any sense of objective morality.

(24:25):
And so, sorry, I cut you off. You had a point one and though,
that not only can we not, we can't even afford to.
We think we can afford to because, and I'm not the first one to say this for
sure, but many of the moral outreaches that we take for granted are things that
are so soaked in a Christian message that we don't even notice it.

(24:47):
It's like asking a fish what does it mean to be wet? They have no concept of wetness.
Well, one, because their brains don't allow for it. But even if they could, they swim in it.
So it's like asking you and me what a non-temporal being would experience.
Well, I can conceptualize non-temporality, but I can't experience non-temporality.
And I think that right now we are borrowing even Steven Pinker's book, Enlightenment Now.

(25:11):
You know, when he said, well, we can come to all these conclusions on our own.
We don't need, you know, sort of religious hokum to tell us this stuff.
And John Gray, the other atheist who every time Steven Pinker writes a book,
John Gray decides to criticize it, which is actually great because some of those
things need criticism. He's saying, look, you're borrowing from the Enlightenment
concepts that weren't actually part of the Enlightenment.

(25:31):
And what it was, it was largely the Christian Enlightenment thinkers who were thinking these things.
We can't get away from it. Every time we talk about equality.
We're borrowing from something.
You know, to paraphrase from David Bentley Hart in his book,
Atheist Delusions, he has this wonderful quote where he basically says,
these ideas of caring for the indigent and treating other people as equal were

(25:53):
not so much laughable to our pre-Christian ancestors as they were unthinkable.
They never would have occurred to these people. They wouldn't even laugh at the idea.
They wouldn't have known what you were talking about. It was the Christian message
that basically brought on the idea that we're all equally sinners,
but all equally valuable in God's eyes because we are made in His image.
And therefore, we're all equally offered redemption.

(26:15):
And he says, it was this kind of message that transformed the Roman Empire from
a place that was of barbarism and inequality inherently.
Even if you were a person, you
know, a being born did not qualify you for personhood in the Roman Empire.
That word person comes from the Latin word persona, which means mask.
It's an artificial construct put on you by the state because you had enough

(26:38):
property or you served your duty in the army or whatever it was that caused
you to have worse that wasn't intrinsic.
It was the Christian message that changed everything for the better where equality
became an idea in the minds of the Romans in the first place.
And then Tom Holland, not Spider-Man,
but the historian. I make that same comment joke every time too.

(27:01):
Yeah, exactly. Right? Because people don't know. They don't know.
I actually had a Summit student, after giving an entire lecture on this,
he comes up to me afterwards, because I didn't clarify.
He comes up to me afterwards and goes, dang, I didn't know Spider-Man was a historian.
I was like, why couldn't he be a historian? Of course he is. Yeah, exactly.
Exactly. Peter Parker was smart. That's right. But he set out in Dominion to

(27:24):
try to prove that everything good in the West came from the Roman Empire,
only to find out that everything good in the Roman Empire came from Christianity in the first place.
I mean, I'm simplifying. the argument, of course, but... No,
but what a contrast, right?
Because that's what Holland talks about, you know, as he's studying this,
is he has this, he describes himself as feeling like an alien.
And his moral sensibilities clearly did not come from that world.

(27:48):
You have Rome, and it would use all of its power...
To put its enemies on a cross, and this was all public, and this was a way to
display their might and to warn anybody who would cross them,
don't cross Rome or you go to the cross.
And in that world, Jesus, in the very nature being God, all power that there

(28:12):
is, surrendered that and went to the cross for his enemies.
And then he told his followers to love like that.
The world had never seen anything like that. And as Holland talks about the
ethics that flowed from the belief in the resurrection and the cross,

(28:32):
he said it was like a death charge that went off beneath the surface and we're
still feeling the ripple effects today.
So going back to this biblical message and even the philosophical idea here,
what basis is there for loving your enemies? Why should you love your enemies?
You can maybe develop some, well, it's just better for everybody,

(28:53):
you know, when we all just don't fight. Really?
Really? Okay. Even if that's the case, why ought I be, why am I obligated to live that way?
If I have power, if I have intelligence, It's if I can convince a number of
people to join my cause, why shouldn't I exploit?

(29:17):
Outside, and this is where Christianity is so important, right?
It's this notion of a creator God, objective moral facts and values rooted in
his very nature, coming forth from him.
Human beings made in his image, thus we are things of intrinsic worth.
We're valuable because of what we are, not what we do. do the Lord

(29:37):
who's made all this there's inherent purpose there's intrinsic value he gives
he loves us in such a way and commissions us to love other people this way all
of these ideas as you're talking about it's like the water that we're we're
swimming in them here in the west and we haven't we don't know it and it's.
It is very dangerous and concerning to think that people are trying to drain that sea.

(30:03):
Yeah. And think that it's going to be okay.
And they don't even realize that if you drain away the very thing that forms
the basis for the morality you're trying to enforce.
I mean, you think about the moral outrage against Christianity is based on the
fact that Christianity allowed you to morally be outraged at it.
That's right. All right.
You're sawing off the very branch you're sitting on, as George Orwell wrote

(30:25):
in a great essay called Notes on the Way.
So, yeah, we're not the first people to talk about this. Atheists have even been pointing this out.
Nietzsche, of course, that's his whole parable of the madman.
He literally uses the phrase able to drink up the sea.
Now, he wasn't using it in the context that we were using it,
but he's describing this death, the death of God in a cataclysmic way,
like the earth being unchained from the sun. This is a big deal.

(30:48):
Don't underestimate what we're doing here from a moral and meaning standpoint.
It's going to be catastrophic. And this is what Orwell, so Orwell,
who also wasn't a believer in this essay, notes on the way, he's lamenting the
horror of the 20th century.
And he doesn't really offer a solution, but he has this really poetic piece

(31:10):
in it. And I always forget it. I always misquote it.
It's poetic as it is. I feel like I should memorize it better, right?
But he's talking about this, the context here is the movement to secularize the West, if you will.
And he said, for 200 years, we'd been sawing on this branch,
the branch being like religion, belief in God.

(31:31):
And he said, much more sudden than anyone was expecting, We succeeded and we
cut through and down we fell.
But the thing at the bottom wasn't a bed of roses.
It was a cesspool full of barbed wire, which is just this horrifically beautiful
imaginative language, of course, written in the context of the bloodiest century of them all.

(31:57):
Barbed wire, machine guns, blood everywhere.
And Orwell is talking. This is one of the consequences of killing off the heavenly father.
You're you have destroyed the metaphysical basis for morality and even in using it in this analogy.
So when you've killed off the heavenly father, what reason is there for me to
view you as my brother? Mm hmm.

(32:18):
Yeah. And I think this goes beyond this. To me, this goes beyond just the let's
believe in God because it's a useful fiction to keep us in line.
It goes beyond that because not only is it, I think, beneficial and all the
studies that I've seen show that people who are religious,
generally speaking, but I would even say Christians in particular,
tend to have happier lives and can cope with despair and the vicissitudes of

(32:41):
life better because they have this sort of moral or this hope-filled anchoring to something. thing.
It goes beyond the wishful thinking thing, because it actually has a mooring
in reality and in not just, I hope there's objective morality,
but there is an objectivity to the whole thing.
You know, you look at this and you compare it to other religious systems.
Okay, we're talking about naturalism and comparison of this kind of a thing.

(33:03):
But now let's look at other religious systems as well and ask ourselves,
okay, believing in religion is good.
And, you know, to quote David David Foster Wallace, who wasn't a Christian either,
at his speech at Kenyon College, when he was talking about believing in something transcendent.
And he said, whether it's JC, meaning Jesus, or Allah, or the Four Noble Truths,

(33:24):
or whatever it is, he says, these things are better than believing in yourself.
Because if you worship beauty, every wrinkle will be one more cut before they finally plant you.
If you worship intelligence, you'll find it incredibly disappointing as you
lose your memory as you get older and older. You worship power and you realize
that it can't actually save you and you worship money and you realize it can't buy you even a minute.
He's right, of course, but he's saying generally speaking, believing in something transcendent.

(33:48):
Let's get specific though, because if I were to look at the various worldviews
that I've studied, almost all of them hinge some level of subjectivism, you know, Buddha,
when he says, look to my Dharma, look to the wisdom of my teaching,
Muhammad in saying, look to the wisdom.
The beauty of the Quran as if that were an objective proof of its truth and its divine origin.

(34:13):
You have these various subjective ideas, but you have this fundamental idea
in Christianity where Jesus says that I am the way, the truth,
and the life, not because I speak truthfully or I speak wisely,
although he did do that, but because I'm going to die and rise from the dead.
And they asked him a question, who do you think you are? By what authority do
you do this? And he says, this is the authority.

(34:34):
You'll know I do this by because I can do what I say I want to do.
And that is I want to die on the cross for the sins of the world and then rise
from the dead to prove that I could do it.
And then I paid your debt. That's either true or it's false.
And that then goes back to if Jesus thought there was an objective morality,
if Jesus thought that all people are inherently equal and we believe it,

(34:57):
not just because it helps us, but because it's actually true because he rose from the dead.
As I've often said, I believe Jesus because guys from the rise from the dead
tend to have credibility.
Then I have an objective basis for believing in objective morality outside of its convenience.
Because here's the thing too, objective morality isn't always convenient for me. It's not.

(35:18):
There's times when, yeah, overall it's convenient.
That's great. But if I really wanted to get my way, and I was really smart,
and I can get away with a bunch of stuff, that would be more convenient.
It, but it's not, in the end, convenient for everybody because,
of course, morality is good, but that truth of it is the ultimate good.
And I think that his resurrection points to his existence beyond this world.

(35:41):
To wrap this part, just to write my comment up here, I think when I was having
a conversation with an atheist just a couple of weeks ago, actually last week, in fact.
Talking about objective morality and young guy. And we talked about this and
he loved Nietzsche. He loves Nietzsche.
And I said, well, you realize Nietzsche agreed with me, right?
That if there's no God, there's no objective morality.

(36:04):
I said, so where do you get? And he started talking about his objections and
all these things. I'm like, see, all these objections are moral objections. And he agreed.
And I said, well, do you believe in objective moral value? And he basically, these are his words.
If I did, then I'd have to believe in God. And it suddenly occurred to me that
the question to ask him wasn't, well, how do we justify moral values without God?

(36:26):
The question was, why do you want there to not be one?
Because you're willing to go to a place that I don't think you're comfortable
going intellectually, just to avoid this conclusion.
Now, is that every atheist? No, I don't think that's every atheist.
Was that this particular atheist? The answer is yeah. And he knew it. And he told me so.
So I think sometimes we get it frustrating to people who can't see it or want

(36:49):
to argue out of it because there's implications.
Yeah. So, I want to ask how we got here.
I'm always curious about these things. I think understanding how you find yourself
in a situation is helpful for moving forward and engaging.
And by here, I mean, in light of everything we've talked about,
that the importance of the biblical message and the ethics that flow from the

(37:12):
truth of the gospel and the resurrection changed Western civilization.
Atheists have seen this. It seems like people have forgotten about that.
It's not even just Christianity is true anymore.
It's, is Christianity even good? So that's what I mean by how we got here to
the point where Christianity is being marginalized and viewed as an oppressive thing.
I always, so I hedge when I say, should we talk about how we got here?

(37:36):
Because I often find a lot of people go, Mike, I don't care how we got here.
Just tell me what to to do about it, right? Let's move on to, let's fix this.
So you feel free to push me along here, but what, how would you,
how, why are we here then?
And just, I am really curious how we got here in that short amount of time,
if that's a, not too of a naive way to say it short of a time,

(37:59):
but what, what are your, what are your thoughts there?
Yeah. So I think a couple of things on that. I think it is an important question.
I think that how do we fix it? It has to, You have to know what's wrong.
You go to any doctor and you tell them what you're feeling like and they do
a differential diagnosis where they start to read away the things that it could
be so they can get to the thing that it actually is.

(38:20):
And they'll ask you, how did you hurt yourself?
You know, how did you, what did, what did you come in contact with?
What did you eat? Did you, you know, all that stuff. That's a history lesson, right?
And now it's more of an immediate history lesson, but I can't know for sure
what's wrong with you until I know how it happened.
And yeah, they can fix it, but they have to know what happened first.
And I think we have to diagnose the situation properly.

(38:41):
And I think the church hasn't been doing that well enough to know how do we
offer answers to the questions the culture is actually asking,
unless we know how we got to the point where the culture is asking these particular questions.
So you have to do this diagnosis. So I'm really glad you asked the question.
So I think a couple of things on this.
The first thing is this, when I look at how we got to the point where the things

(39:01):
that you were talking about just now, Mike, were, you know, how do we get to
a point where a sexual ethic where we're trying, whether it's a good idea or
a bad idea, isn't the point.
They're not mocking the, it doesn't make any sense to not be in a car with a
woman who's not your wife.
They're not doing that. They're saying it's a stupid idea and it's a bad idea.
And you're a bad person for having it.

(39:22):
That's what's going on. You might disagree with the idea, but you don't have
to mock the person's morality for it because they're trying to do something.
Thing. And so how did we get to that point?
I think a big part of this is sort of a it's a long arc, but there's an acceleration
point. And I think it's more recent.
And it comes back to another book I wrote. Sorry to like hawk my books, but.

(39:44):
You write books, you write books so people can read them. Yeah.
There is no shame in hawking a book. If you're not going to hawk your own book,
you shouldn't have written it in the first place.
Exactly. I still don't want to be an opportunist, but at the same time,
it's like, here, it's an opportunity.
It's called Saving Truths. And it talks about the post-truth culture that we're currently in.
And I think it's very different than a postmodern culture. I think we're not

(40:04):
postmodern anymore. I mean, I think we still use that word, but I think we're post-truth.
Postmodernism, in a nutshell, was the, among many things, the idea that truth
doesn't necessarily exist as a category that's useful.
And so we have to start talking about it. That died its death, I think.
And now we are in a post-truth world that says truth does exist,
but I still care because it conflicts with my sense of autonomy.

(40:28):
And I think that's a big part of this is that we have, for a number of reasons
culturally, entered into a phase where we've morphed the the word freedom into the word autonomy.
And autonomy and freedom are not synonymous.
Autonomy is from the two root words autos meaning self and namos meaning law.

(40:48):
When you are a law unto yourself, again, to quote David Foster Wallace,
you become the god of your skull-sized world.
And the problem is, is that when I'm an autonomous god of my own skull-sized world,
and feelings and preferences in the post-truth world matter more than facts
and truth, When I bump into another god of his or her own skull-sized world,
and truth and preferences of their own matter more than facts and truth,

(41:12):
and our preferences conflict,
the person who wins is not the one with truth on their side,
because truth is put in the closet.
It's the one who has power. And so, what I think we're seeing is essentially
the very power plays the postmodernists were trying to get us away from playing
back out again because truth, again, has become secondary.

(41:35):
When truth prevails, power becomes exercised, hopefully, responsibly.
But when truth doesn't prevail, it's just rampant. I mean, that's why atheists
like Yuval Noah Harari in his book Sapiens can say that, you know,
humanity is on the verge of becoming a god with the power of destruction and creation.
And with AI's advent, we're even more so like that.

(41:57):
And then he has this phrase at the end of it where he says, we have little idea
with what to do with all that power and we don't even know what satisfies us.
And then he has this phrase, is there anything more dangerous than dissatisfied
and irresponsible gods who don't know what they want?
And I think that was the long arc of it though, is that our post-truth culture

(42:17):
that values preferences and feelings over facts and truths.
Is actually started in the Garden of Eden because Adam and Eve were given the truth.
You are meant to be with God in communion and their preference was to be God.
And then when the serpent took advantage of that and they gave into their preference
over the truth, the world we have today is the world that resulted.

(42:40):
So the post-truth fruit we're eating so readily now was planted in the seeds
of the very first garden. So it's a long arc, but it's accelerated point now.
On the religious issue in terms of Christianity being a white man's religion,
I think a big part of it is media. I think a big part of it is of our own doing.
You take a look at antebellum Southern slavery, the transatlantic slave trade.

(43:04):
People know something. Human beings know this, that if you can baptize your
evil in the garb of religion, you'll get a lot of people to follow it.
Does that mean religion is inherently bad?
No, because science can do the same thing. If I can sort of science-ize,
to quote, to make a word up out of random syllables, something and make it sound

(43:28):
scientific, then somehow it's good.
And it becomes a moral thing, even though, you know, I mean,
right now we're making things because we can, not because we should.
We're not even asking the should question.
If we're assuming that because we can, then we should.
Because science has become like this weird moral arbiter when it's never meant
to be that. we're good at twisting things because of our inherent sin nature to suit our evil.

(43:50):
And so Christianity has become this evil thing because people had come up with
the constructs of different races within the single race of humanity in order
to justify how I'm treating a certain number of people because their appearance makes it an obvious,
it's an obvious way for me to make it look like they're a different race.

(44:12):
And so we justify this using the Bible and it's illegitimate.
Here's one evidence for why it's illegitimate.
The slavers had to create the slave Bible, which you can buy on Amazon right now.
You can buy a slave Bible, and it's an edited Bible where whole portions of the Bible were removed.
If the Bible was so pro-slavery, why was it being edited so much?

(44:35):
You wouldn't need to edit it at all if it was pro-slavery.
But they did edit it heavily in order to keep the idea of liberation and equality
out of the minds of the slaves who they knew would eventually get a hold of
the Bible. So I think slavery helped quite a bit in getting us this perception.
I think the politicization recently of Christianity,

(44:59):
of religion in general, but Christianity in particular in the West has,
and because white males tend to be president more often than non-white males,
or even non-males for that matter, you start to get this perception.
This is what's happening. Plus, you have a concerted effort.
And I just read an article recently about the whole thing with Gemini and Google's

(45:21):
AI system with the imagery, where some of the people who were at Google said, this was not a mistake.
They're playing it off like it was a mistake, like we didn't train the algorithm
right for the AI to generate all these non-white images and make whiteness look as bad as possible.
It's like, no, no, no, that was on purpose. We did it on purpose.
So, you couple all those things together, and then you get this perception that

(45:42):
Christianity is a white male religion that was intended to be a colonial effort
to subjugate people of color and women,
when the reality is, right now, demographically, Mike, most Christians aren't
white and most Christians aren't male around the world, and it's not just because
of birth rates, it's because of conversions.
Yeah. So there's, this is a really simple way to put this.

(46:07):
I think part of it, it's in line with what you're saying.
People just don't, they don't know, they don't know the Bible.
They don't know what Christianity is about.
I mean, we've seen those, the numbers of like a Christian worldview and biblical
literacy rates from people that track that, like Barna and Gallup and Pew and all that.
And it's getting gone real, it's just going down and down and down and down.

(46:28):
Something where like Like I saw something, Gen Z, less than 4% have a biblical
worldview or something like that, something crazy.
And whatever the actual number is, it's our lived experience.
Our people just don't know anything about Christianity anymore.
And you combine that with the advent of the internet and the smartphone,
and every idea that exists is in your pocket.

(46:52):
It makes sense to me why you have some clever people that have an agenda.
They want to convince you of what's not real relating to Christianity.
It's easy pickings at that point, as you would say here, maybe in the South.
And I just, you know, one of Jesus's common phrases that he would use,

(47:14):
or as a question, he would say, have you not read?
And I love that response. Yeah. You know, when he would have someone trying
have you not read? I think that's a fair point for us.

(47:49):
Christianity is oppressive and that it doesn't support equality.
Even think about the story in Acts recording the birth of the church.
And you mentioned this in your book too.
At Pentecost, this is the birth of the church, right?
And this story is about all the nations and not literally all,

(48:11):
of course, but all the nations coming together.
Hearing the gospel in a miraculous way in their own language and people from
all tribes and all nations coming to faith in Jesus Christ.
The church was born in an ethnically diverse way.
And then, and that's just one story. I mean, among so many others.

(48:34):
And there's so many, there's so many good ones, you know, and hopefully I covered
quite a few of them in the book.
I didn't cover all of them because, you know, space doesn't permit necessarily
necessarily going on to all of those things, but you look at it and you think
to yourself, okay, look,
someone might say, and I've heard this many times, I just debated an atheist
or had a dialogue with an atheist at a public venue where she said that she

(48:54):
became an atheist because she read the Bible.
I'm like, okay, I think sometimes that's true. I think most oftentimes people
aren't Christians or think Christianity is bad because they read about the Bible
as opposed to reading the actual Bible.
And so they'll take the critiques and take the cherry picked verses and say, okay, that's bad.
And some look bad when they're cherry-picked. And some even might look bad because they stand out.

(49:17):
It's funny because you look at something and it stands out to you because there's
a sense of outrage you already have, again, because of your Christian morality
that you don't even know you have.
And it stands out. You're like, oh my goodness, really? Why would that be the
case? Why would a woman have to wait twice as long if she's unclean than a man would?
And all that kind of stuff. And you read the whole context.
And if you go with that that discerning mind of, let me give it the benefit

(49:40):
of the doubt for a moment.
And if it still fails, then I'll reject it. We don't do that.
We have a visceral reaction. What I hope to do in the book is go through and
say, have you not read that, okay, the word slavery exists in the Bible,
but when you see it regulated, it's not about chattel slavery.
It's about indentured servitude. And have you not read that every seven years,

(50:01):
the debts are to be forgiven so that the person who is in debt
goes free of their debt? Have you not read that every 49th year,
the year of Jubilee happens, and the person, whether they've been seven years
in debt or less than that, they are to be set free?
Have you not read that you can't prohibit giving loans because Jubilee is going to come up?
You have to actually give those loans and not try to avoid them because Jubilee

(50:26):
will result in a forgiveness.
And have you not read that when a servant is actually set free from their debt,
that the master who owns the debt has to give liberally of their own property
and money and cattle to the one who's now free of the debt so that the one who
is in debt can never go into debt again.
And I asked myself, have you not read? I love that you brought that up,

(50:47):
Mike, because that's beautiful.
And I think I'm going to use that. I'm going to borrow from Jesus slash Mike Gerard.
Do not ever say that again. You can borrow from me, not Jesus slash Mike.
Follow me as I follow Christ, maybe I can take that compliment. Okay.
So there's a scriptural word for this. So have you not read these things?
And the answer is usually no, they haven't.

(51:10):
And I think it's because we ingest information in bite-sized chunks such that
it takes, and this is going to sound super arrogant,
but I really mean this in the sense I want to encourage people,
read it in its context, read it in its depth and its richness,
because maybe you'll come away with a different picture.

(51:31):
Let me give you a quick example of something you read in the Bible and you think
you have this familiarity with the story because we hear it all the time.
And you don't realize some of the depth of it. So the example I want to give,
several popped in my head just now, but one of the ones that comes to mind,
especially on the equality issue with regard to sex and gender,

(51:51):
is the story of Esther, right?
So the whole book of Esther is written, it's titled After a Woman, for heaven's sake.
And then you read it in depth and you realize it opens up with a story that
it really shouldn't open up with if it's not interested in non-Jewish women.
But it starts with a non-Jewish woman, Vashti.

(52:12):
So Vashti is the non-Jewish queen of Persia, and the king wants to parade her
around because of her beauty in front of all of his guests like a trophy.
And she refuses to do it. She refuses, knowing there's going to be consequences.
And she suffers those consequences, knowingly suffering those consequences.
Then he needs a new queen because she suffered those consequences. She's gone now.

(52:35):
If you were going to tell a uniquely Jewish story and only a Jewish story,
why start with Vashti at all?
You could have started the whole book with, in the reign of thus and such at
thus and such a time and thus in such a way, the king needed a new queen.
You could start with that. You don't have to give any context,
but the Bible gave the context and made the first strong woman who stood up

(52:56):
for herself a non-Jewish Persian woman.
That's why, because I think the Bible values this stuff. And if you read the
whole thing, you'll actually see some nuggets that you might not have seen before.
So moving into what practical, what's the way forward?
One thing to point out real quick that I'm really becoming a champion.

(53:18):
It's to read the Bible in large portions.
It's funny, I think one of the unintended consequences of hermeneutics being
taught in our seminaries and the rise of exegetical preaching is we've shrunk
the Bible down into smaller, smaller, smaller pieces.
And in the hope and in the proper pursuit to understand the meaning that is in the text,

(53:44):
so you again understand the reaction and the postmodern emphasis and the liberal
Christianity and is there actual meaning in the text? You have this rise.
No, there is meaning in the text.
Here's the science and discipline, how to get the meaning out of the text.
But then the homiletic preaching practices that followed that were now we're
going to take five years to preach through the book of Romans or take a book

(54:05):
like the book of Hebrews, which many scholars say was probably put together as an actual sermon.
If you just read the book of Hebrews in its entirety, it would only take 30
minutes to read it out loud.
Shorter than any given sermon that you might preach in that series. Yep.
Yeah. And just get on a soapbox here real quick.

(54:26):
Yeah. I love what's happening in, well, all of my kids' lives, but my oldest daughter.
She had some friends, has some friends, and they want to go through the book of James together.
And my daughter's a freshman in high school. And their idea was they'll split
up a chapter at a time and then they'll talk about it. And I'm encouraging them saying, that's great.

(54:48):
But at least at one point, individually
and together, you all need to read the book all in one sitting.
The book of James is shorter than the essays you're writing for school right
now. Now, and can you think of the absurdity of taking one of your essays and
breaking it up over six weeks into the paragraph by paragraph?

(55:12):
I mean, now I'm not saying that the word, you know, the word of God is simply,
you know, these letters are simply an essay and there's not a depth to it.
But at the same time, when Paul's writing something, he's making an argument,
he's communicating something clearly that unfolds over, you know,
what we put as chapters, but but really over 1,500 words, 2,000 words.

(55:33):
So it's the same thing, whether it's an epistle in the New Testament or the
narrative and the story that's unfolding in the Old Testament,
we've got to be able to see it more fully.
And one of the ways we do that is we just read more of it at one time in one sitting.
Book of Esther, you gotta read that story from start to finish at one point.

(55:54):
And again, that's not to say you can't do a sermon series and break that up,
But it's a beautiful story that has an arc to it, and you need to see it all.
Same thing is true for all of the Old Testament.
And so when it comes to these challenging passages related to genocide or slavery,
I don't want to oversimplify some of those challenging passages.

(56:15):
But when you read it in the fullness, and you see the fullness,
you definitely come away with a different understanding of the biblical story. Oh, so much so.
I'll tell you, the thing you're talking about is a spiritual discipline,
and maybe even a way, and I've said this phrase quite a bit,
and I really believe this, is that when you view the Bible as an encounter to

(56:39):
be had, not a chore to be completed.
I think you're going to see something different. And sometimes you won't want to stop.
It's a page-turner in many, many ways. And yeah, there are some phrases we don't quite understand.
And Well, isn't that everybody? You know, and there's a lot more to it than
that. And sometimes you have to stop and say, what does that phrase mean?

(57:01):
But you read the whole thing at once, for example, and you get the full arc.
Esther is a great example because of the tremendous use of irony about what
happens to Haman. It's just beautiful. It's like, oh my goodness, that's so amazing.
And then you look at, I think about even the genealogies and stuff that people
don't like to read in one sitting.
I mean, you know, I say the Bible is an encounter to be had until you get to

(57:23):
like Leviticus and you're like, is it really?
But I'll tell you that there are things that I've seen that popped into my mind.
I'm like, oh my goodness, look at this.
So, the example I have is in the description of how to make the tabernacle.
You know, you have this thing, and the Bible tends to do this,
is that God gives a lot of detail about how things ought to be built.

(57:46):
Or what should go on your clothes, and what the emblems that are inside the
symbols and the things and the elements you use for worship should look like.
You know, this high and no higher, this wide and no wider, this thick and no
thicker, this kind of wood and no other, this kind of color and no different,
this many pomegranates. And pomegranates, it's always hilarious to me.
I don't know why pomegranates have to go on things, but there you have it.

(58:07):
And so you're thinking, because there's a lot of detail, do I really need to
know? I'm not building the thing tomorrow. What do we need to know all this for?
And then you realize there's something else that attaches to the biblical record
where in the middle of all these incredibly detailed constructions, you have God say,
now bring your skilled craftsmen, those in whom God has planted an artistry

(58:28):
and have them make stuff.
And there's no detail at all. Just have them make this kind of thing.
How? Just you figure it out. And then the people bring their freewill offerings,
their gold in order for them to make it.
Now, why do I put all that out? Because here's the thing. This has nothing to
do with, you know, more than a white man's religion or anything like that,
but it's the beauty of the Bible that we can look into and see these sort of

(58:50):
beauties effervescent from the page of the scripture.
Is a big objection I get all the time.
It's an objection from the skeptic and it's a question from the believer.
Does belief in God make any sense if God is sovereign and he controls everything
yet we're judged for a free will that we don't actually have.
And so this is a philosophical objection from the skeptic, but also a theological

(59:12):
question from the believer.
But then you see in this passage that God is sovereign in saying,
build the tabernacle. And this is exactly how you do it.
There's no deviation from my very specific instructions, but then human free
will enters. And he says, now do this thing, but do it like you like.
Use your free will. And so you see God's sovereignty and human free will happening

(59:33):
in the details of the construction of the tabernacle.
And you'd never get that if you just said, I have to get through this.
And I think that is one of the biggest missed points in the biblical story, that do it as you like.
I think that's inherent to the call that God gave us as having dominion over
the earth as these sub-creators, as Tolkien would say, these image bearers.

(59:59):
There is a component to our lives that is the do it as you like.
Not for selfish gain, ultimately for the glory of God and the good of your neighbor,
but it is still do it as you like.
And from an ethical standpoint, Christianity is the freest of all the ethical

(01:00:21):
systems that there could be.
And within this order, there is endless creativity.
That's a really good story there to illustrate that.
That's really good. All right. So with, you know, just a little bit of time
that we got, we have left, like you had said before, our problem is going to
be knowing when to get off the exit here.

(01:00:43):
Not, are we going to have enough stuff to talk about?
But like, what's, you know, just plotting the way forward?
What's some of our hope and what can we do? You know, I say this even,
I was watching last night an interview between Elon Musk and Don Lemon.
And I love Elon Musk, man.
He is quirky and funny and brilliant and incredibly honest and open and makes for a great interview.

(01:01:09):
View and lemon was doing his best to not
appear to be on a witch hunt
or whatever but it was obvious he was out to get musk and
a lot of it was on what we're talking about just racial tensions and social
justice and whatnot and and lemon was really pushing musk on like what's the

(01:01:30):
way forward here and musk really had nothing to offer other than we just have
to move on race can't be the center of attention. We just have to move on.
So what would a Christian response be to,
moving forward and not just as simple
as musks well let's just move on it's
in the past let's forget what's a more i don't

(01:01:53):
know what the way to put this is maybe almost even compassionate answer to moving
forward acknowledging the the brokenness of the past and the present but offering
hope through the biblical message as we've been talking about yeah i think it's Terrific question.
And I do address this a little bit in the book as well. So I'm going to give

(01:02:15):
the advice that I heard from somebody else.
So there's a great pastor here in the Detroit, Michigan area.
His name is Pastor Christopher Brooks, African-American guy,
brilliant guy, and very wise, wise beyond his years.
And he was asked a question about this. We were doing a panel on race and faith, actually.
And someone asked him a question on this. And basically it was,
why can't African-Americans just seem to want to move forward?

(01:02:36):
They got to dwell on the past and bring of the past.
And he said, you know, I counsel a lot of people in marriages,
marriages that are on the verge of breaking up because one person has betrayed the other.
He says, and the betrayed person wants to dwell on the past.
The betrayer wants to be forgiven and move on.
And the betrayed feels like you're dismissing my pain. The betrayer feels like

(01:02:58):
you can't seem to let me ever get forgiven.
And so there's this tension of you can never move forward.
Rather, he says, there's got got to be a careful balance that's struck.
And the best resolution to these situations is when you can convince the betrayer
that you aren't really seeing the pain if you are saying, move on,

(01:03:18):
and we need to let the full expression of it come out.
Recognizing some people can abuse that, of course, but you need to be able to
recognize that someone needs to be able to be fully seen and heard in their
pain and in their anguish.
And some of that anguish is ongoing.
I I mean, racism still exists in this country. Let's not fool ourselves.
But at the same time, some things are better than they've ever been in lots of ways too.

(01:03:42):
So we have to understand that there's still a level of pain and we have to talk
about these things and let that be talked about.
On the similar vein, the one who was betrayed, the one who was hurt in the marriage
needs to recognize that if we obsess and never talk about what we can do now
in the future, we will never actually move on. And the pain becomes a way to identify.

(01:04:04):
Your identity becomes the pain. Your identity becomes all of this.
And so it becomes, in other words, the inequalities become definitional.
And then you end up trapping yourself in a bondage that you never intended for yourself.
Not even the betrayer intended for you necessarily in this instance.
So I think we need to listen and also, but listen with an air toward hope.

(01:04:27):
And I think there is something to a message that says, I hear you.
And I want you to know that I hear you.
Are you willing to hear in the cacophony of pain? Are you willing to hear this one voice of hope?
I'm going to recognize this and I want to move on. There's a biblical idea of
justice and forgiveness, and they balance each other pretty well.

(01:04:51):
We can't have so much forgiveness that we perpetuate injustice,
but we can't have so much justice that we never get to the forgiveness part.
You know, I remember a friend of mine talking about the idea of justice in the
Bible being an issue of vindication.
And vindication is when you see someone, you see the victim in their value and
recognize the harm done to them.

(01:05:11):
Then it occurred to me, so you have this word vindication, which is a part of
justice and seeing someone for the value of who they are vis-a-vis the way they've
been robbed of that value or that value has been tarnished.
Then you have the word vindictive and it's really fascinating to me that the
word vindication, which is justice and vindictive, which is vengeance, sound so very similar.

(01:05:36):
And they come from the same root words, which means that the line between vindication
and vindictiveness is extremely thin.
And only the Lord can see the distinctions, and so we have to be ever careful.
So we take this listening attitude of hearing people's pain,
but we also take this vindication attitude where, okay, I've been vindicated,

(01:05:58):
now can we move forward and see those two things working in in tandem and harmony.
And that's a biblical message.
So I think that's one way to do it. We have to recognize, but we also have to,
the past, but also look to the future.
That's going to be hard. It's very hard. It's easy to say. I know. It's very hard to do.
People don't listen. And there's a number of reasons. One of them is,

(01:06:23):
it's who wants to take on the pain?
Who wants to take on the pain? So I get that. Just, just,
I didn't do, there's a number of people that are like, I didn't do this to you.
I don't want to, I can't take on your pain. I got enough pain in my own life,
right? And I'm not saying that's right.
I'm recognizing maybe how hard this is going to be for we as a country or even

(01:06:49):
Christians to lead the way in this, because listening,
what it involves is being able to take on the pain of another. other.
I've got a handful of friends who have experienced profound tragedy in their
life. Some of them, this meant that they lost a child.
They've lost a number of friends. Friends just abandoned them basically simply

(01:07:10):
because they couldn't take the pain.
They wanted to act as if that dear child never existed before.
Because if you act as if they existed, then the parents talk about it and that
pain has to be absorbed and you just can't do that.
But if there is ever, if there is anybody that has to lead the way in listening

(01:07:35):
and being willing to take on the pain of others,
it must be the followers of Jesus Christ, who their Lord and Savior suffered
immensely on our behalf on the cross and told us to love likewise.
And if there is going to be any hope moving forward
in this country and for racial reconciliation but that's

(01:07:57):
not i don't even want to put it just there but even just leaving it there have
to listen and being willing to take on other people's pain yeah yeah i think
that and this isn't to say that any one particular area of you know.
Fixing the problem. I'm not advocating for any one of those in particular,

(01:08:19):
but I love the way you said, you know, people and people often say, I didn't do this to you.
Okay, you didn't, but it has been done. The person is in fact in pain.
The person is in fact, now there are grifters and there is, I get all that.
I totally get that. People will take advantage of your compassion, your kindness.
Wise as serpents, gentle as doves. I get all of that, but we can't have a knee-jerk

(01:08:42):
reaction of, I didn't do this to you.
I know you didn't, but it has been done. You know who else didn't do this to me?
Jesus didn't do this to me, and he took my pain.
And if we are to look more and more like him, then we have to judiciously and
with God's wisdom examine those situations where it's appropriate to say,

(01:09:03):
I know I didn't do this to you.
How can I help you anyway, even if it's uncomfortable for me?
And I think that That sense of self-sacrifice can be something we can do in
the future because we have that in the past.
The Christian message has changed entire civilizations.
The emperor Julian, the pagan emperor Julian writes to his generals and he says,

(01:09:25):
the insipid atheists, meaning the Christians,
are the ones who are winning the hearts and minds of our own populace because
they take care of not only the indigent and the infirm amongst their own ranks,
but they take care of those in need amongst ours.
Worse. And we're persecuting them.
And it changed everything. If we did it before, we can do it again.
I think that's a perfect place to end.

(01:09:48):
It's interesting how a bunch of apologists inevitably end up talking about things like this.
Arguments are important.
The philosophical nature of christianity
its truthfulness in a
simpler way to put it i mean all these things it's really it's

(01:10:11):
important for us to talk about and at the end here what we're talking about
is loving in a sacrificial way like we've been loved it changed the world once
it certainly can change the world again there's no i mean you think about it man man,
going back to the first century and the birth of Christianity in that environment, and then it spread,

(01:10:36):
the movement of Jesus' followers that spread around the world.
How many Christians are just in this country? Millions?
Millions, at least professing, right?
Millions in still a very free country.
What if we loved like Jesus loved?

(01:10:58):
What if we read the Bible and understood what was in it?
What if we developed a simple, small basis of knowledge where we could answer
reasonable questions to the hope that we have?
Do we not think we could see massive change, both in a political sense,

(01:11:19):
but something of of much more ultimate value in the spiritual sense.
See, many people come to find the forgiveness of their sins and the abundant
life that they were made for in Jesus Christ.
The world is a lot of hardships going on right now, but there is no reason to
despair and to live in that kind of pessimism. Yeah.

(01:11:43):
You know, the last thing I think I, you know, in the time we have,
I just want to quote, you know, the recent convert to Christianity,
from atheism, from Islam.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali, who wrote the book Infidel and Nomad and all this stuff,
I had the privilege of being at an event.
I wasn't speaking at it, but meeting her and being at an event that she was

(01:12:05):
speaking at on the hope of Christianity, actually, as a former atheist among the new atheists.
And in her testimony about why she became a Christian, she has this line.
She says, but I have recognized in my own long journey through a wilderness
of fear and self-doubt that there is a better way to manage the challenges of
existence than either Islam or unbelief have to offer.

(01:12:27):
And she's found that hope in Christ. And if this African, former atheist,
former Muslim woman can see it, it's all of her brilliant gifts.
I hope others can see it too.
Amen. Amen. Hey, appreciate your friendship and appreciate your work.
Until next time, man. Thanks. Thanks, Mike.

(01:12:49):
Music.