Exegete the Culture | Ep. 1

Yeah, and so I think oftentimes preachers are good at that. You know, we're trained that way in seminary that you've got to pull out the original meaning of the author's intent.

Draw that out. Don't read your stuff into the text. Right. Right. So you want to exegete what's in the text.

But I think we wrongly diagnose the culture sometimes, or we don't at all. So exegeting the culture is when you look at the world, reality as it is, and you're drawing out a right interpretation of what is happening here.

And now you take the scripture, what you've exegeted here, apply that to what's going on in the world.

And this be our lens to evaluate things. So it's being very relevant to what's going on around us.

Hey, hey, welcome to Off the Cuff. Joe, Average Joe Gordly here.

That's my new moniker. Just because I'm going to be asking a lot of questions that I hope the average

Christian wants to hear. And later on, we'll be giving you access to send in some questions.

But I'm here going to be asking the questions of Pastor Jeff. Hey, Jeff. How's it going? Thanks for having me.

I have no clue what we're going to talk about today, but I guess that's the point. Off the Cuff. We're just going to, whatever, wherever the spirit blows, the wind blows, we go.

Yeah. And I think that's great. And because you're so good off the cuff and yeah, but you're usually very prepared in all your sermons though, aren't you?

Yeah, but I do preach extemporaneously. So I'll have about four pages of notes and then I'll get to the end of the sermon and realize

I haven't looked at them because it's just sort of a guide and things that queue in my brain.

So, yeah. And so what do you think about having other people sending in questions that we can look at?

I love that because that's where we're going to keep it real and relevant and kind of unscripted. Just whatever comes to mind that people are wondering about, that's where we go.

Yeah. Yeah. So, and I think one of the phrases that I love that I was listening to when

I was in the Daniel 1 sermon, you were talking about exegeting the culture.

What a great phrase. And I expect us to have lots of cool words that we're going to learn. So what is exegete?

Right. Exegeting scripture I know about, but how do you, you're pulling out of the text, right?

Yeah. And so I think oftentimes preachers are good at that. You know, we're trained that way in seminary that you've got to pull out the original meaning of the author's intent.

Draw that out. Don't read your stuff into the text. Right. Right. So you want to exegete what's in the text.

But I think we wrongly diagnose the culture sometimes or we don't at all. So exegeting the culture is when you look at the world, reality as it is, and you're drawing out a right interpretation of what is happening here.

And now you take the scripture, what you've exegeted here, apply that to what's going on in the world.

And this be our lens to evaluate things. So it's being very relevant to what's going on around us.

Yeah. That's exegeting the culture. Does, is the culture or is our church culture driving the fact that most pastors don't do that?

Or what's driving that? Well, I think that's gone back and forth in church history. So you've had pietistic movements like German pietism where it was explicitly taught not to mess with the culture, which the famous example there is the

German pietists were sitting in their churches on a Sunday morning singing hymns while the rattling of the box cars as Jews were being taken to the

Holocaust shook their building. And there they are just singing and plugging their ears and just ignoring the culture around them.

That's pietism. That's pietism. Okay. And there have been more proactive political engagements in church history.

And I think that's one of the things that we want to do. We want to find that appropriate balance that we're not letting the headline drive us.

Like our sermons aren't just whatever happens to be in the headlines. We let the text drive us, but we execute the culture too.

That we're relevant to what's going on in the world around us because that's what the scripture is.

It speaks to all areas of life. When Paul in Acts 20 is saying goodbye to the

Ephesian elders, he says, I did not shrink from teaching you the whole counsel of God.

So that's kind of the idea here. The whole counsel of God. The word of God speaks to all areas of morality, which then touches on politics and all...

Theonomy. There you go. Is that where we're going? Not today. Episode one. I would love to go that way because, you know,

I've been accused of being a Christian nationalist. And what is that? And what is theonomy? And how does the law of God apply to our culture?

Right. That's a great one. So we'll do one. That's going to be a whole, that's going to be a whole thing. But let me ask you this though.

So since we're talking, we're talking about exegeting the culture and you just explained something about pietism.

And when you said German pietist, I wasn't sure what part of the history you're talking about. So maybe we got to do some church history.

Because I thought you were, when you said Germans, the first thing that came to my mind was right after Luther. Right. Oh yeah.

No, this is in that middle period. So what happens is after Lutheranism and then the reformation coming out of Geneva, you have some counter movements.

You have Amaraldianism in France. You have the Armenianism, which

Dort addresses. But then there's a movement called scholasticism. And scholasticism.

This is in the late 1600s. It's so meticulous about every fine point of doctrine, every

T cross. And I actually think that's good because God is orderly. But the reaction there is that very often people could be scholastic, but not spiritual.

Now that's Calvin's time. Is that the same? After Calvin. That's after Calvin. Yeah. Okay. Calvin wouldn't really be part of that scholastic school.

That comes later. Calvin is... Did he influence it though? Well, yeah, Calvin is very orderly in his thinking.

I've got institutes up here on the shelf and it's a orderly arrangement of Christian doctrine.

So that is the concept there. But the criticism of scholasticism is that it's not pietistic.

However you live, as long as you have the intellectual stuff right, pietism reacts to that.

Okay. Pietism is basically saying what we need is devotion. We need the simplicity and purity of devotion to Christ.

And it focuses on the life. How do you actually practically live before the

Lord? And that also became very privatized. So it was you and God.

And therefore pietism, you hear the expression like he's so pious or pietistic.

And the idea is kind of holier than thou, almost like other world that you've made a break from the world. And now you're the super spiritual one.

You're pious, but the German boxcars are rolling by.

So pietism, in that sense, I'm using it negatively. Well, I mean, if more people knew about that, they might say, well, yeah, we better ask our pastor how to interpret politics, how to interpret the culture.

Right. Because how else are you supposed to? I mean, the average Christian. How's the average Joe Christian going to understand?

Maybe not even how to interpret, but who can I trust? Well, if you look at the culture at large right now, how do you know what is a significant issue to make a stand on the word of God?

So how big of a deal is abortion? If somebody is promoting abortion, is that disqualifying?

Right. Can a church member support abortion and not come under church discipline?

Right. Well, doesn't you got to exegete the word for that? Like how serious is murder? And other churches have that problem right now.

Yes. Big time. Yeah. And so, you know, I would say that, yes, you have to deal with those things like what's happening in our culture.

If you rightly exegete the culture, you're seeing that the quote unquote transitioning of children, the mutilation of children, that's such a big deal.

You can't just say, oh, well, that's just, you know, one side thinks this and another side thinks that.

No, this little boy will be mutilated and changed for life and reduces life expectancy by 10 years and all of these kind of things.

And the Christian has to defend this child, you know, whose parents are the ones that have led him into this very often.

And we have to be that voice of reason and conscience and a defender of the weak.

Wow. Yeah. Right. So you're exegeting the culture, you're exegeting the scripture, and you're saying, no,

I actually do have to speak to that one. That's one we got to talk about. Yeah. Yeah. So, so you mentioned the pietist, was

Bonhoeffer a pietist? No. So Bonhoeffer is against that because he's like kind of the extreme other end of the cost of discipleship.

He tried to assassinate Hitler. Right. He's like, he's like, he's a war criminal and he's saying, okay,

I'm in the war against Hitler and you know, I'm going to try to kill him. Yeah. So that's right.

The opposite of certainly pendulum swing, but was he for that at the beginning?

Was he aligned with them? You know, you'd have to read Eric Metaxas' book on that. This is off the cuff, but Bonhoeffer, I'm not an expert on him.

Yeah. But you brought up the Germans. I mean, there's so many weird things come out of Germany.

I think at one point we're going to have to talk about psychology. Oh yeah. Kind of influence. I just met someone at the church whose husband,

I'm going to have to bring him on. Okay. He's, he apparently studied under Jay Adams and, uh, and does some, uh, counseling, does some writing.

Oh, does some writing. In psychology. Like, because all of all the psychology students, this is what

I just heard yesterday. Yeah. All the psychology students have to use secular books. Hmm. Well, gosh,

I'd love some helps, uh, exegeting psychology. What can you look at?

What can't you look at? Right. Aren't we afraid to even send people to psychology because, because we don't know what they're going to get.

Oh, they're most of the psychologists in the world are going to be influenced by Jung and Sigmund Freud and just that therapeutic, um, worldly nonsense.

So that falls into exegeting the culture too. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. And, and we would just say to that, like in the counseling world, we're part of the biblical counseling movement.

Yes. So Jay Adams, Newthetic, which it comes from the Greek, which means to exhort.

Yes. So yeah. Oh, so you know. Yeah. I switched to the wrong language.

You're supposed to be Average Joe. I am Average Joe. You know Average Joe if you knew Newthetic Counseling. Well, that was a lot of fun, but really short, only about 11 minutes.

And you can really just go to the next episode, but I got a couple of things

I want to share with you first. So we're going to talk more about exegeting the culture in episode two, right?

So, but we did, we've kind of recorded it out of sync and we're going to talk a lot about blood red church.

That's one of pastor Jeff's 11 books that he wrote and blood red church is really about how three different types of churches exegete the culture differently.

So once you read, well, read that book, I encourage you to read blood red church, but once you go through episode two, which is about blood red church, you'll really have a good idea about what this podcast is going to be about.

I'm going to post the, I'm posting up a picture of the book if you're interested in getting it on Amazon or somewhere else.

Blood red church argues that the redeemed of the Lord do in fact have a responsibility to stand for certain non -negotiable ethical positions.

And that's what we're talking about here off the cuff. We're doing it in a live unscripted way.

So you'll hear me mostly stumble over words, but I'm sure we'll get pastor

Jeff once in a while, although he's pretty sharp, man. So, you know, so I'll be asking him questions that I think average

Joe Christians want to hear. And we hope that you'll send in questions via email to offthecuffatcornerstoneSJ .org.

So that's the email site email for the show. So send in any questions, any ideas for topics, any way we can serve you, send in prayer requests.

Love to see it. Off the cuff, O -F -F -T -H -E -C -U -F -F at cornerstoneSJ .org.

So go on over to episode two now, watch our episode about blood red church, then go to episode three, which is really the continuation that we started in, in this episode.

So it was about 11 minutes and then we had another 20 minutes. It was all in one topic. It was on egalitarianism.

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