Welcome to the MHB Podcast. This is Michael Baun. And welcome to my eighty first episode. Tonight I want to address an issue that I’ve long suspected inside the church. The past couple weeks have seen events that have highlighted this issue – so now is a good time to deal with it. The issue is church leaders and Christians teaching a worldview that is based primarily on feelings and emotion. Recently, there were two prominent Christians who publicly renounced their faith. Both of them based their decisions not on reasoned arguments – but on emotion. But it gets worse than that. When these two believers publicly renounced their faith they were actually attacked by other Christians. Attacked so much that one of them had to take down his pronouncement. This happened because the Christians who attacked them also have a faith that is based on their emotions – not based on reasoned understanding.
If these Christian attackers had a faith based on reasoned understanding then they could have helped these two believers by trying to answer their questions. Instead they attacked them because when your faith is based on feelings, it doesn’t feel good to see someone call out your faith. This same sort of thing happens in marriage. Two people get married because of the sentimental feelings they experience together – and then they get divorced when these feelings go away. Sentimental feelings are not love. Sentimental feelings often accompany love, but they are not love itself. In the same way, feelings often accompany a religious experience – but these feelings are not God.
So why am I talking about feelings? It’s because many church services are built to inspire these good feelings inside of you. The music is written and performed with the aim of making you feel good. The sermons are written and preached with the aim of making you feel good. The primary motivation of many church leaders is to make their people feel good and the primary motivation of many church goers is to makes themselves feel good. Is there something wrong with feeling good? No. Isn’t it supposed to make you feel good that Jesus died for you so that you may enter into heaven when you die? Yes. But the problem occurs when something happens to you in this life that takes away your ability to feel good. And it’s not even a matter of if these things will happen – it’s a matter of when. So when you lose your ability to feel good – maybe your loved one dies or you lose your job – your faith actually can’t help you because your faith was founded on these good feelings.
If you believe that God is the good feelings that flow through you during a worship service, then you won’t be able to find God anywhere when you need Him most – in the midst of your suffering. That’s the first major area the church is failing to address properly – the problem of suffering and evil. This failure is evidenced by the fact that most pastors are woefully unequipped to deal with psychopathology and victims of trauma. In many cases, they actually do more harm than good because they give bad advice by misapplying Scripture. They can’t help but misapply Scripture because they have no idea what kind of problem they are trying to solve when it comes to psychological abnormalities. They don’t know about these problems because they’ve been misguided to think that all human knowledge is foolish and wrong. Many of them believe you don’t even need the aid of human thinkers to effectively understand Scripture – you just need the Holy Spirit. Saying that all you need is the Holy Spirit would be fine if by the Holy Spirit they meant God and not the ephemeral feelings inside of them. So you end up with counselors who are a lot like Job’s friends: instead of recognizing the need for psychotherapy they tell you to have more faith and pray harder.
You know this is true because when you have a real problem you go see a specialist. You might pray that God helps you make your next mortgage payment – but when you wake up with severe chest pain you go see a cardiologist. Many Christians have far more faith in these experts than they do in God or the church. And that’s not the Christian’s fault. Christians are participating in worship services whose main goal is to make them feel good about worshiping God. Not to equip them for navigating life by understanding the nature of reality and the nature of their problems. Reality is full of suffering and evil and many Christians have absolutely no reasoned framework for understanding suffering and evil because their church leaders do a terrible job at dealing with reality.
There’s this unbelievably prevalent misunderstanding that human knowledge of reality cannot be trusted and so therefore we should hide in our sanctuaries with our Bibles. There are several problems with this. First is that you use your knowledge of reality to understand the Bible. When the Bible calls Jesus a door, it’s only because of your experience with real doors that you can know the Bible is using a metaphor and not calling Jesus a door that is made of wood or plastic. The second problem is that the Bible itself is a set of injunctions as to how you can be reconciled to God and live a Christ-like life. No where in Scripture does it claim that your faith should be confined to prayer or religious ceremony. In fact, Jesus Himself condemned the Pharisees for doing this very thing. James says that faith without works is dead. So if we have to work in the world to be Christ-like – we need to have a good understanding of the world outside of the Bible.
It really is shocking to me that so many Christians resist this. Take the second great commandment which is to love your neighbor as yourself. 200 years ago, if your neighbor had an infection, then loving your neighbor as yourself would have meant bloodletting to get the infection out. Today, if your neighbor has an infection and you attempt to bleed them instead of taking them to the doctor to get medicine – you would be committing a sin. So the only thing that has changed in that scenario is our knowledge of the nature of infection. And so the command to love your neighbor as yourself comes packaged with the command to do everything you can to understand the nature of reality. Not shun it because you think human knowledge is worthless.
When the Bible says human knowledge is worthless, it’s saying that you can never discover the Gospel through merely human inquiry. You must accept revelation on faith in order to see the Gospel. Science can’t answer our eternal questions of origin, meaning, morality, and destiny. Science can tell us what the world is made of, but science itself cannot tell us how to act. For example, science tells us that medicine will help our neighbor if he has an infection. But science can’t tell you why you should care at all about your neighbors well being. That’s what Scripture is for.
You might ask: Why do we need Scripture at all? Why can’t we just be good people? These questions are a consequence of the fact that many individuals in the west still have the Judeo-Christian framework of morality baked into them from generations past. We fail to understand that this sense of right and wrong has been passed down to us and does not reside within us naturally. If you don’t believe me, spend some time reading about the Holocaust or Soviet Russia. As you’re reading, understand that if you had been a German or a Soviet during this time – there is a 90% likelihood that you yourself would have participated in the torture and death of millions of people. These events were propaganda induced collective psychoses and the people who participated likely believed that they were doing the right thing or doing what they needed to do to make themselves feel good.
We can’t set up churches whose primary interest is in making us feel good as we worship God. These churches will not reach out into secular society because doing so means exposing the vulnerability of their faith in dialogue with people who disagree with them. If your faith is based on emotions, then even bad arguments against the existence of God are going to sound to you like good arguments. And this is going to hurt your faith and make you think it’s not reasonable. So to avoid this pain you’re going to set up echo chambers where you refuse to have a discussion with anyone who doesn’t share your beliefs. Your confirmation bias might even be so bad that you refuse to read any books that aren’t published by Christian authors. This type of behavior prevents you from growing because growth requires resistance. Pain makes you tougher. Lifting weights makes you stronger. Failing makes you smarter. There is no growth without resistance.
If your worldview never grows and matures then it is going to be oversimplified. It’s true that the Gospel is simple enough for a five year old to understand it. But if you’re an adult whose understanding of the world is equivalent to that of a five year old’s – then you don’t have a worldview, you have an ideology. An ideology is a low resolution understanding of life that claims to solve its problems completely. An example is Marxism. Marxism teaches that all of life’s difficulties can be reduced to class struggle and economic oppression. There’s no mention of disease, evil, natural disaster, psychopathology, the finite nature of mortality – none of that. It’s a low resolution understanding of the world that even a five year old could dismantle. If you spent as little as ten minutes thinking about the Marxist proposition, it falls apart in your hands.
You don’t want to be someone whose Christianity is oversimplified like that. If you are, then you are going to run into all sorts of problems that your faith cannot answer because your faith is underdeveloped. Your sensitivity is going to be elevated because you’re afraid there are a million ways to prove Christianity wrong. This sensitivity is going to cause you to tend toward totalitarianism. This is like the cult leader who refuses to let anyone from the outside come in to speak. And anytime you see someone making a proposition that runs counter to your low resolution ideology – like two prominent Christian apostates – you’re going to attack them and try to silence them instead of talking with them and trying to help them.
But the problem doesn’t end there. If your faith is underdeveloped then arguments against God are not going to be the only things that hurt you. Life itself is going to hurt you. I’ve used this analogy before but it really works here. Imagine you are at the gym lifting weights. Your muscles are burning and your heart is pounding. It’s okay because you are at the gym and that’s supposed to be happening there. But imagine you wake up one morning in your bed and your muscles are burning and your heart is pounding. Or imagine there is some kind of disease that causes these symptoms. The pain would be intolerable and you would call 911. It’s the same exact sensation at the gym as it is in your bed – but the contextual framework has changed.
The Bible is meant to give you the proper contextual framework for life itself so that when you encounter pain and suffering – you will know why it’s there and how to respond to it. But if you’ve spent all of your time in worship services that are designed to validate your infant version of Christianity – then you are not going to be equipped with the contextual framework you need. So when bad things happen to you – and they will happen to you – you’re not going to understand why they are happening, how to respond to them, or why your god of good feelings isn’t with you anymore.
So what am I proposing that we do about this? The first question we need to ask is why we cling to a faith that is self-oriented. I believe there are two causes for this. The first is that we are afraid to look at ourselves for the fallen, twisted sinners that we are. We are afraid to see the reality of ourselves because we don’t believe we will be forgiven. Sure, we sing about being saved and being forgiven all the time – but we also hide our sinful nature from everyone else at the church. I’m not saying that we need to be bringing everyone headfirst into our private lives – I myself have sins that I would rather keep private. But acknowledging the fact that we are broken sinners doesn’t require that we give up our privacy. That acknowledgment can happen between each individual and God Himself. But I think many people are afraid to acknowledge it because they are terrified of admitting that they have not yet arrived and they have a lot of work to do still. Virtue signaling and making yourself look better than you are is the hallmark of a person who is afraid of adopting the real responsibility of getting better.
But this pride doesn’t have to come in the form of being holier than thou. It can come in the form of being proud of how humble and broken you are. You can walk around touting the fact that you are nothing but a fallen sinner and so nothing you do is good. That’s not humility, that’s pride. It’s also a fear of responsibility. If nothing you do is good and you’re just a broken sinner, then there is no expectation on you to get better. Sure, you can live this way and still go to heaven – our eternity is not purchased by our works, but by the free gift of God. But that doesn’t mean you won’t go through hell while you’re still alive here on earth. Think of all the ways you’ve suffered so far because of things you didn’t know. Think of how if only you knew those things you could have been so much better off. The person who stumbles blindly through life as a self-proclaimed broken sinner who has no hope of achieving wisdom is going to hit every single one of these pits of misery full force.
Right now churches all over the western world are singing songs about how nothing they do matters because they are saved by their faith in Jesus. Right now churches all over the west are failing to be thought leaders in their communities because they’ve dispensed with the world altogether as corrupt and not trustworthy. Right now churches all over the west are saying that political problems are not their problems. But these churches are failing to see that every aspect of our politics is informed by our structure of belief – so the problems aren’t political, they are theological. Right now the reality is that many churches in the west are full of people who mostly only care about getting themselves into heaven and how good that makes them feel. The churches turn a blind eye and let the postmodern moral relativists lead our population into deep confusion. The churches refuse to challenge the atheist thinkers who continuously attack straw-man versions of the faith – because many of these churches can’t even tell the difference between the straw-man and the real thing.
And I think at the bottom of all of this there are hearts that have given up and refuse to grow. Hearts that don’t really believe Scripture contains the wisdom needed to solve real world problems. Or maybe hearts that don’t care to solve them. At the bottom of this there are hearts who fear their own sinful nature because they do not trust in God’s power to cleanse it. They think they have to do it on their own. And so when they get stuck in a sin and struggle with it, they think they are not good enough for God. And so they attempt to say the sin is not a sin. I think at the bottom of all of this there are hearts that fail to understand science does not defeat revelation – but science is not even possible without revelation.
If the church is ever going to restore the worldview that built the west into the most prosperous, most free, most peaceful society humanity has ever known – they are going to have to get serious about understanding that worldview. No more simplistic Sunday school versions of the faith that come up empty when challenged by the complexity of life. No more hiding in the wake of tragedies and allowing the confused secularists to attempt diagnosing them. We need to be there with the answers that God has given us. We need to study life with the seriousness of the ancient church fathers: Saint Thomas Aquinas, Ignatius, Justin Martyr, Origen of Adamantius, Athanasius of Alexandria. The list goes on. These men were the geniuses of their time. Today, most of the geniuses go off to the secular universities where they are trained in the art of propaganda and ideological authoritarianism. This should terrify all of us. But these people shuffle off to university because the church has no desire for deep thinking. The church has been satisfied with it’s low resolution faith rooted in good feelings and the church has done almost nothing to combat the straw-manning on the outside.
Now most of you listening to this are probably from a generation that is still steeped in biblical values. So for you it seems as simple as loving God, loving your neighbor, and trying to live a good life. For you, it is that simple. But for those who come after you – for those who are stuck with nothing on offer but cartoon Christianity – it is likely that they are going to lose the biblical values that you currently hold. And with the loss of those values they are going to lose their ability to recognize the person of God in Jesus Christ. And with the loss of God they are going to lose the ability to know how to love their neighbor as themselves. They are going to lose the contextual framework that allows them to make sense of the suffering and pain of this life – and so their sensitivity to this pain is going to be increased one hundred fold. They aren’t going to understand it and so they will fall victim to the manipulation of propaganda that convinces them their pain is caused by those people. And they’ll be taught to believe they can get rid of it if only they fall in line behind the dictator.
You see, when we lose the truth of God, everything goes from being so simple a five year old can understand it to being so complicated it brings down entire universities. That’s where we are now. The church has to deal with the complex in order to return to the simple. If you’re listening to this and you feel like it’s too much – like it’s too daunting. That’s because it is too daunting. Ultimately it is God’s job, not yours. But you are alive so you have to aim somewhere. You are called to aim up toward the city of God and do everything that you can do to bend the world up toward that ideal. That’s how you win at life. That’s the narrow gate. Loving God and loving your neighbor. Jesus said all of Scripture is encompassed by that command. We as church leaders need to do everything we can to make sure the next generation does not forget how to do that. If our love for God and our love for our neighbor is ever forgotten, the world will become so terrible that if it’s not hell we won’t be able to tell the difference.
I want to conclude by saying that everything we do here matters. It matters for you, your family, your community, and your nation. So check the motives of your heart – and if your heart is right – then it’s likely that you are doing the best you can. If your heart is right, then have no fear because there is an all-powerful, all-loving, everlasting God who is by your side in this life and will not abandon you in the final analysis.
If you find this content valuable, feel free to share it and to use it in your own studies. If you’d like to support this podcast, you can do so at http://www.patreon.com/michaelhbaun. There is a link in the description. Your generosity goes a long way to promoting the growth of this enterprise and the cause of free speech. Thank you all for joining me this evening, and I will see you in the next episode.
The MHB Podcast 