MHB 123 – Elevating the Conversation

Welcome to The MHB Podcast. This is Michael Baun. And welcome to my 123^rd episode. In this episode I want to talk about elevating the conversation. When I say elevating the conversation, I mean we need to start having serious and sophisticated discussions about the things of God. We need to give Scripture the careful attention of our highest institutions the same way we do our financial and medical systems. I’ve heard many times from inside the church that compassion is more valuable than intelligence. Some Christians even spurn intelligence. Maligning intelligence inside the church is definitely the wrong thing to do. A well adjusted individual needs both intelligence and compassion. A well adjusted organization needs both intelligence and compassion. Compassion without intelligence results in moral relativism and the enabling of destructive behaviors. Intelligence without compassion results in tyrannical overlords and detached theorists. But when you have a good balance of intelligence and compassion, you produce competent individuals who are equipped to love their neighbors as themselves.

We have a problem in the western world. The problem is we’ve fallen into thinking the faith of the church is at odds with the intellectual discipline of the university. The consequence of this is that most of our brightest minds have steered clear of the church in favor of the university. The university, bereft of any intelligible worldview, has destabilized into a crisis of meaning. That’s why professors and students are so quick to adopt collectivist neo-Marxism. A pathological worldview feels better than a meaningless one. Inside the church, the congregation tends to reflect its leadership. So if we lack intelligent leadership in the church then we will also lack an intelligent congregation. A church that runs purely on compassion is effective in humanitarian pursuits but basically useless when it comes to influencing the culture. They might even be worse than useless in the culture because an unintelligent congregation is prone to spreading misinformation in the form of memes. These memes that wash across the culture cause people inside and outside the church to believe things about God that just aren’t true.

Let’s go over some common memes. When a person passes away you’ll often hear their friends and family say this person got his or her wings. This is a meme which has no Scriptural foundation. According to Scripture, human beings and angels are not the same entities and human beings do not become angels when we die. You might think I’m nitpicking over a trivial detail, but these kinds of misunderstandings become far more harmful than that. Many people believe that money is the root of all evil. They might falsely believe that all wealthy people are corrupt or they spurn possessions because of this misapprehension. Money is not the root of all evil. Scripture says the love of money is the root of all kinds of evil. It is greed that subsumes the love of money. So you can actually be a poor person who is greedy over what little you have and this greed will be the root of all kinds of evil in your life.

Another misunderstanding is that cleanliness is next to godliness. This probably emerges from the many Old Testament hygienic rituals the Levitical priests were instructed to follow. It’s definitely a good idea to be clean and to take care of yourself, but to suggest that makes you godlier than others just isn’t true according to Scripture. The idea that cleanliness is next to godliness can cause people to alienate others who don’t look as nice as they do. It can also cause people to venerate others who dress nicely even if their character leaves much to be desired. It’s likely that even Jesus Himself wasn’t clean all the time. Passages in Isaiah indicate that His appearance was very average and there wasn’t anything that made Him particularly desirable. He traveled many miles on dusty roads which would have led to a lot of sweat, dirt, and unchanged clothes. God is primarily concerned with what’s going on inside your heart – not about whether you smell fantastic every moment of every day.

Next is the false idea that God will not give you more than you can handle. I’ve seen people get tattoos of this thinking that it’s in the Bible. This misunderstanding likely emerged from the passage in 1 Corinthians which says God will not allow you to be tempted beyond what you are able, but with the temptation will also make the way of escape, that you may be able to bear it. This passage isn’t saying that you won’t be overcome with trials and challenges in life. It’s saying that you will not be forced into rebellion against God and He will always provide a means for escape – even if that means your own death. This is a dangerous misunderstanding because the truth is that many people are dealt more tragedy than they can handle. When this happens they probably feel abandoned by God because they always thought God wouldn’t give them more than they could handle. Instead of saying that God will not give you more than you can handle, it’s better to say I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me – which is in the Scriptures.

Probably the worst Christian misunderstanding of all is the idea that God helps those who help themselves. This false belief probably originated in the sacred texts of other religions. This idea is the exact opposite of Christianity. In Romans Paul teaches that Christ demonstrated His love for us in that He died for us while we were yet sinners. The heart of the gospel message is that you are not okay the way you are – and yet Christ gave His life for you despite the fact that you’re a fallen person. To suggest that God helps those who help themselves is to get Christianity reversed. It’s to expect unbelievers to be godly without yet having a relationship with God. Such a task is impossible. The correct way of thinking about it is to surrender yourself to Christ, and thereby allow the Holy Spirit to indwell you and sanctify you. Your will to improve and do better is a consequence of the Spirit sanctifying you. You do not sanctify yourself in an effort to earn the presence of God’s Holy Spirit.

So those are just a few examples of how unintelligent conversations about the things of God have resulted in dangerous misunderstandings. The other problem we frequently see is atheist types creating misrepresentations of Christianity and selling those misrepresentations to an ignorant populace. We’ve already watched the apostasy of two high profile Christians in recent years over elementary misunderstandings they thought had never been discussed. The truth is that these things have been discussed for two thousand years. One classic example is the claim that Scripture promotes slavery. Atheists often conflate Biblical bondservants with the atrocities of early American slavery. They ignore the fact that in the ancient near east many people had to choose between being a bondservant and being eaten by lions in the wilderness. Bondservants also carried social status and legal rights – something expressly denied under early American slavery. Scripture taught the masters of these bondservants the proper way to treat them and taught the bondservants the proper way to treat their masters. Contrast bondservants with the actual enslavement of the Israelites by Egypt and Babylon. When Israel was enslaved in Egypt God rescued them in the Exodus – clearly indicating that slavery is wrong. Why would God rescue His people from something He promotes? The example becomes even more clear with the Assyrians and the Babylonians. In both cases God used these empires to carry out judgment against His people for their defiance. Israel was taken captive and enslaved as punishment for their idolatry and evil. And both times God went on to rescue and restore them from these situations. Again, if God promotes slavery then why would He use it as a form of punishment to judge His people? If slavery is good then it should be enjoyed as a blessing, not suffered as a punishment to be rescued from.

You also hear opponents of Christianity suggest you must believe in a 6,000 year old earth in order to be a Christian. This isn’t true either. There’s nothing in the creation account that prohibits thousands, millions, billions, or however many years. The text simply doesn’t address that. This trope is part of the idea that Christians must be anti-science. The truth is that science and Scripture aren’t even operating in the same domains of inquiry. Science seeks to give us facts about the material universe. It does nothing, nor can it do anything, to tell us about how we ought to live and what we ought to value. How we ought to live and what we ought to value can only be apprehended by understanding our purpose. In order to understand our purpose we need to know where we’re from, why we’re here, and where we’re going. We need a story to provide the context of our existence or else we rapidly lose our sense of meaning and purpose. Scripture is written to give us the correct story – not to function as a scientific textbook. Because of this distinction, there is no conflict between science and religion. In fact science was ushered in by thinkers like Isaac Newton, Rene Descartes, and Francis Bacon – all of whom were Christians.

That brings me to my next point. There has long been a rich, intellectual tradition under-girding Christianity. Major figures in church history like Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, Irenaeus of Lyons, Hieronymus, Athanasius of Alexandria, and many more were intellectual powerhouses. They were the leading thinkers of their time. During the High Middle Ages it was likely the Catholic Church who built the first universities. The Catholic Church was the only institution in Europe that showed consistent interest in the preservation and cultivation of knowledge. They valued the pursuit of knowledge because they thought if they acquired enough of it they would grow closer to God.

So if Christianity has yet to be proven false, then why is it our own best thinkers stray from it? I think the answer has to do with narrow fields of expertise. The information age has largely done away with what used to be called polymaths. A polymath is someone who knows a lot about everything which is known. But with the emergence of computation we now have many lifetimes worth of study available in each field of inquiry. For example, you can spend your entire life studying evolutionary biology and still not learn everything we know about it. Since it’s largely impossible to know a lot about everything, many people have chosen lives of specific expertise instead. There are individuals out there who understand almost everything we know about the human heart. While this person makes a phenomenal cardiologist, he or she is no better than the average person at an unrelated field like philosophy. But when young people meet a person like this, the sense of awe which is inspired by the expertise leads them to think this person must know a lot about everything in life. At this point, if your expert is arrogant, he or she will feel perfectly okay pontificating on parts of existence he or she knows nothing about. That’s how you end up with legions of nihilistic college students who’ve derived their sense of worth, morality, and purpose from a professor whose area of expertise is the ecology of coral reefs. When it comes to answering the big questions in life, not all expertise is equal.

You might ask why you need to answer the big questions at all. What’s so wrong with not believing in anything? The problem is, when it comes to belief structures, there’s no such thing as opting out. To say you don’t know is to declare you that you believe you don’t know. Let me explain. If you consider yourself agnostic then you also very likely dismiss anyone who claims not to be agnostic. If you truly believe you don’t know then it’s actually impossible for you to believe that others do know. A cannot be A and B at the same time. This violates the logical law of non-contradiction. The closest you can truly come to agnosticism is being a seeker. A seeker is someone who doesn’t have the answers to the big questions but wants to find them. This is not the same thing as someone who claims to opt out of belief altogether. When you say you don’t believe in anything and you’re unwilling to have the conversation, that simply means you hold to a set of beliefs which you yourself haven’t identified and you’re unwilling to depart from those beliefs. These unidentified beliefs are dangerous because they are imposed on you externally which makes you subservient to the culture and ripe for the manipulations of the propagandist. Unidentified beliefs turn you into a puppet and they author the story of your life without your own awareness of it.

Many people fail to see the importance of this because they think perception leads to belief. That’s where the phrase seeing is believing comes from. But the truth is belief leads to perception. Let’s play a thought experiment to prove this. Close your eyes. Now tell me what color shirt you have on today. That’s probably pretty easy for you. Okay, with your eyes still closed tell me how many telephone poles you drove past the last time you were in your car. You can’t tell me that because you didn’t count them. You didn’t count them because knowing how many telephone poles is irrelevant to your values. And your values are predicated on your beliefs. So literally your very perception is governed by your beliefs. It’s incredibly important to know just exactly what beliefs are influencing your life choices.

If your structure of belief is warped and pathological, then the way you perceive reality is going to cause you pain that you don’t understand and that feels wrong. You’ll try to numb this pain with drugs, alcohol, or whatever other worldly pursuit you can find. But these things will never make it go away because the mistake in your code of belief is transcendental and not temporal. This pain is the emotional and physical manifestation of a spiritual problem. It is your spirit yearning for God. I think this is why so many young people appear sensitive to pain that older people can’t relate to. They’re being taught a set of beliefs that result values which are inconsistent with God’s purpose for them and this causes a crushing sense of meaninglessness. Having a sense of meaning can be defined as observing yourself move in the positive direction of satisfying that which you are designed for. You need meaning as much as you need food and water. Without meaning, nothing else you acquire will make you feel okay. You can have all the health, wealth, and prosperity the world has to offer but if you lack meaning you will be depressed to the point of suicidal ideation and eventually suicidal intent and actuation.

But the power of belief doesn’t stop there. Your beliefs also play a vital role in whether or not you will experience psychological trauma that causes neurophysiological changes. This is why children who suffer abuse are more prone to PTSD than adults who suffer abuse. Children have yet to develop a framework for understanding their own experience. If you don’t have a philosophy for good and evil and someone who is evil touches you, then your brain pathways will literally be damaged by the experience. This is the creation of an unmastered memory and unmastered memories cause pain that will stay with you for the rest of your life until you master them. Psychotherapy is an attempt to retroactively interpret your memories correctly while desensitizing yourself to them. Your memory functions to prevent you from falling into the same pit twice. If evil touches you and you have no idea what evil is let alone that evil exists, then your brain is going to store that memory in such a way that causes you tremendous anxiety around similar but unrelated things in the future. These similar but unrelated things will become your triggers. So going into a traumatic experience, your absence of a proper belief structure will cause you to interpret your experience in such a way that does real physical damage to your brain. That’s how important your beliefs are. There is probably nothing more imperative to your quality of life than learning everything you can about what you believe. Remember that the next time you sit through a sermon.

Saying you don’t believe in anything is either disingenuous or ignorant. The same thing goes for Christians who claim to be incapable of learning a worldview beyond what they were taught in Sunday School. It’s true that there are people who are developmentally disabled or who have learning disabilities and need extra attention. But for the vast number of individuals who claim the convenience of being simpleminded – the truth is they are uninterested in learning. It’s not uncommon for churchgoers to consistently fail in retaining a single-point sermon, yet many of these same churchgoers are readily able to retain a 16-point, complex plot of juicy gossip. You often hear people complain of being required to learn more than they are able. But imagine if you offered $30,000 to anyone who could accurately summarize your sermon back to you at the end of it – almost of all of these people would become scholars. This lack of interest in learning things is not a human universal. It’s actually concentrated in the western church. And that’s the church’s fault for failing to be an institution of robust teaching as it once was in the past. The church has focused too much if its attention on the compassion ministries of humanitarian work at the sacrifice of the intellectual ministries of worldview development. If this doesn’t change then the culture will descend into collective psychosis and this will become manifest in governmental law that brings down the hammer of tyranny onto your house and onto your neighborhood.

So what do we do about it? The first thing we need to do is educate people on the importance of understanding their worldview. If we can do that maybe we can awaken their interest in learning about the things of God. Where do we go when we want to learn about the things of God? Scripture. I’m convinced that most Christians and many pastors aren’t aware of the immeasurable value of Scripture. Psalm 19 says it is more desirable than fine gold. But if most the population fails to recognize the power of belief, then why on earth would they recognize the power of Scripture which is designed to inform belief? The answer is they wouldn’t and they don’t. It’s not uncommon for Christians to attend church every Sunday but never open their Bibles at home. This isn’t much of a problem if your pastor is faithful to teach the Scriptures, but many pastors are veering dangerously far into topical, Ted-Talks style sermons that are light on Scripture and heavy on opinion. Worse yet are the churches who lack any teacher at all. Churches who are headed up by a pastor who himself is uninterested in the Scriptures and primarily interested in relationships with the people. These kinds of churches are no different than hanging out at your local social clubs. They inevitably become echo chambers of misguided belief and incubators of gossip.

Whether your pastor is topical, expository, or both, the most important element is that he is teaching the Scriptures. A competent teacher of the Scriptures won’t need gimmicks to make them interesting. Additionally, a competent teacher of the Scriptures can teach literally any passage of the Bible in light of the entire Bible. Here’s what I mean. For those who are watching this on YouTube or Facebook, I’m showing you a graphic that illustrates an estimate of the number of times Scripture references itself. If you’re listening to this on audio just pause it and look this up on Google Images. Type in: bible 340,000 cross references. The Bible is a hyper-linked text. This means it interprets itself and the depth of any given passage is made deeper by how much you know about every other passage. The more you know your Bible the deeper it reveals itself to you. Increasing your knowledge of God unlocks even more knowledge of God.

But it doesn’t end there. In the beginning of John’s gospel there’s an emphasis on how Christ is the Logos, or the Word made flesh. This idea of embodying the Word is a necessary part of your understanding Scripture. For example, if your understanding of Scriptures prevents you from loving your neighbor as yourself – then it’s likely that there’s an error in your understanding. This is one of the absolutely vital ideas that early Christian thinkers understood but has been lost in recent history after the Protestant Reformation and the ensuing plethora of denominations. I think denominations are a consequence of theologians arguing abstract ideas and failing to embody the Word of God. The reason why theologians arrive at conflicting interpretations of Scripture is because they are missing a crucial part of the hermeneutic. A hermeneutic is a tool or process by which you interpret text. The crucial part of the hermeneutic they are missing is the embodiment of the Word. It’s not enough to simply study the Scriptures, you must also live them out if you wish to arrive at the deepest level of understanding. This is why your understanding of certain Bible passages has changed as you’ve gone through the experience of life.

So imagine it like this. You saw the graphic of the hyper-linked Bible. That means the more you know your Bible, the deeper each passage will reveal itself to you. Then when you embody the word in reality your understanding of the word deepens even more. Soon enough you have a belief structure through which to perceive reality as it actually, objectively is. This is what it means to know the truth. This is what it means to have the mind of Christ. And that is how you make sure you conduct yourself in such a way that is consistent with ultimate reality. Conducting yourself in such a way that is consistent with ultimate reality is like putting gasoline in your car. Imagine I convinced you that your engine runs on chocolate milk. Believing this would be equivalent to believing a pathological worldview. If you truly believe that your engine runs on chocolate milk, then you’re going to put chocolate milk in your gas tank with the belief that you’re doing the right thing. But even if you believe it with all your heart, your engine is still going to break down. If the engine of your life is breaking down then that’s a symptom that something you believe about it is wrong. You might know absolutely nothing about what’s under the hood of your car, but now you know that whatever it is it can’t run on chocolate milk. Ultimate reality is the same way. To view the world with the mind of Christ allows you to see the world as it really is and therefore react to it properly. I cannot stress enough how important it is that we teach our congregations to view the world with the mind of Christ – and the only way to do that is by teaching the Scriptures.

It’s time for us to elevate the conversation. In America, many of our conversations about God are being driven by emotions and uninformed speculation. The culture is a meme machine that is pushing misguided beliefs into the church body. Atheist polemicists are causing Christians to fall away by selling them misrepresentations of Christianity. Primitive, tribal ideologies are taking the place of civilized, sophisticated religion. Good faith conversation is being abandoned for propaganda and censorship. Church services are more about meeting felt needs and less about developing rich, high resolution worldviews. The consequence of all of this is an entire generation that flirts on the edge of bringing down the West. There is a growing segment of the population who cheer at the idea of tearing down the civilization that was paid for by the blood, tears, and absolute struggle of our predecessors. Everyday there are people who face evil completely unprepared to handle it. Everyday families fall apart because no one knew how to save them. None of this has to happen. The church is what stands in the way. The church has done a great job in the compassion ministries of humanitarian work – and thank God for that. But it’s time to get serious about the intellectual ministries worldview development. As Biblical literacy declines, so does the civilization. If we can retain what we’ve learned in the success of our compassion, and then resurrect what we’ve forgotten in the area of intellect, then we won’t fall into the trap of blind compassion or cold intelligence. We’ll march forward into a broken world as equipped, prepared, goodhearted Christians. And when the world sees us they won’t think we’re ignorant or judgmental. They’ll think we’re competent. They’ll think we can lead them on into a better life. And that really is what Christ the Good Shepherd does isn’t it? He leads us on into a better life.

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