Let's Talk about Tim Keller & TGC | Collin Hansen

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00:20

Colin Hanson, welcome to the Room for Nuance podcast. I am excited to be here physically.

00:27

Oof, yes, not via Skype, not via Zoom, you're here. No, I mean, your setup is so much better than my setup.

00:35

Hey, thanks for saying that, man. I'm gonna cling to that. Hey, before we get started, would you just open us up in prayer?

00:42

Yeah, let's pray. God, everything we have, all that we are, is by your grace alone.

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I pray that you'd bless this conversation. Let it be fruitful to us and to anybody who might be listening by your spirit.

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In Jesus' name, amen. Amen. So, you have like 15 different jobs.

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Can you just tell us briefly? I wish I didn't. You run an apothecary, no, no.

01:08

Yeah, brother, just. I do a soda shop. Yeah, that's right. Tell us who you are and what you do. My name is

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Colin Hanson, and I serve as the vice president of content and editor -in -chief of The Gospel Coalition. Also as executive director of the

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Keller Center for Cultural Apologetics. I teach cultural apologetics as an adjunct professor at Beeson Divinity School, which is part of Samford University, and I co -chair that advisory board.

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And sometimes I write books and host podcasts. That's right. And you teach pre -K

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Sunday school? I do. So, yeah, my daughter is just about heading to kindergarten, and so I get to teach her

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Sunday school class. Wow, praise God. Thank you for being here, brother. I've valued your work over the years and the work of The Gospel Coalition.

01:56

So, let's just dive right in, okay? So, we just got through having a luncheon with 30 local pastors here in North Alabama.

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And the essence of that lunch was me trying to get you a figurehead for The Gospel Coalition, not the figurehead, right, but a figurehead, a representative of The Gospel Coalition, in front of these pastors so that they could hear you talk, so that you could answer their questions, so that there could be more trust, more capital, so that The Gospel Coalition can continue to serve the local church.

02:31

Can you just speak to how The Gospel Coalition relates to the local church, how you hope that it can serve the local church?

02:38

Yeah. Yeah, so when I came to The Gospel Coalition in 2010, my desire was to be a pastor.

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In fact, Don Carson had recruited me year after year while I was in seminary, saying, I'd love for you to come join this thing, we'd love to have you.

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And I just said, let me be a pastor. Like, that's what I want to be able to do. But my background was pretty varied.

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Another one of my seminary professors really wanted me to go to get my PhD in history and come back and be a professor.

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My background was also in journalism as a news editor of Christianity Today. So I had these kind of worlds together, and I didn't quite know how they were all gonna fit together, but through a very different things,

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I brought them together through The Gospel Coalition to serve pastors, and also by translating a lot of academic work, but doing it in a journalistic context.

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And so, especially compared to my experience at Christianity Today, my hope was always very simple for TGC's content, that we just exist to serve church leaders.

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Like, they tell us what they need, and we're kind of like resource quartermasters, or just supply chain engineers or something like that.

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We meet with pastors, they tell us, hey, here's what we need, here's what I'm struggling with, here's what people are asking me, do you have any resources on that?

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And it could be a podcast, could be a video, could be a conference, could be an article, or a journal article, or a book review, or something like that, but we just try to fill that gap.

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There's only so many different things that you can cover in your sermon, and that should cover in your sermon, or even your small groups, or Sunday school classes, but we try to help to fill in a lot of those digital gaps, and do that through a variety of different ways.

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So in that luncheon with those pastors, I asked the guys to raise their hands if they've ever used the

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Gospel Coalition as a resource, either for themselves, for their elders, for their church on any number of different issues, and everyone raised their hand, right?

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In that meeting, you said something really interesting. You talked about the way in which, because the way you just described it to me just now, is like, oh,

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I sit down and have lunch with a pastor, I hear what they need, or in that meeting, you said the search engine kind of tells us what churches want and need to hear about.

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Can you elaborate on that? Yeah, so just to give you a specific example of that, often our phones or our search engines, they know us better than we seem to know ourselves.

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These algorithms, well, I get a report on what people come to the Gospel Coalition looking for, not what people find on social media and then end up on our site, but people come,

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I want help on this topic. I'll just type that into the search bar on the upper left, and going all the way back to about 2014, 2015, the number one search topic there was transgender.

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And so even before a lot of pastors were talking about that broadly, they must have privately been dealing with these kind of counseling situations.

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Not just pastors, though, this would have been parents as well who were coming directly saying, I don't know who to talk to about this.

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I don't know who to ask. And so, yeah, we can see pretty clearly what people are interested in, what they're asking for, what they need, and you don't have many other opportunities like that in the aggregate to be asking tens of millions of people what they need help with, but that's what our search bar and our analytics help us to do.

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Yeah, are you at all worried about letting that sort of drive your ministry, as in we're sort of beholden to what people are most intrigued by or interested in in the moment?

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Yeah, I think that definitely can be the case. Now, we're insulated from that for a couple different reasons.

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The simplest is that we don't have a business model that depends on page views. Oh, wow.

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If you go back to the early days of Facebook, and you remember places like BuzzFeed and things like that that we haven't talked about in a long time, you get paid by clicks, you get paid by advertisers, things like that.

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It doesn't really have a business model. The Gospel Coalition works, so we don't have a lot of those incentives.

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So we're not sitting there saying, we have to keep our traffic up, therefore we should talk about X topic on social media.

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Instead, we only use it to say, we wanna publish things that people are actually asking for, that they're trying to help with.

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And we also don't want to supplant anything that the local church should be doing. So we're not coming here saying, hey, read our devotionals instead of going to church, or listen to our music instead of worshiping with your local congregation.

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We're not trying to do anything like that. We're just trying to say, what's the helpful stuff around, beside, under, behind the church that they might need, and just trying to provide that in an efficient manner digitally.

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Yeah, so an example of that might be, you're a pastor, you're doing a counseling session with a couple in your church, and they tell you that they've begun

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IVF treatments. You ask them, have you thought about that biblically?

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Are you ethically? You're trying to figure out if they're ethically informed from scripture or from the world. And maybe you as a pastor, haven't really thought about that as much as you would like to.

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What you would like to see is, they just check the gospel coalition, because they know the gospel coalition is the kind of place where they will have subject matter experts,

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Christian ethicists, who think well from scripture on those topics. Good example? Yeah, that's a great example.

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And we might have a couple different views on that topic, but at least we want to be able to provide an alternative to what most people are going to get, especially from their doctors or the medical community.

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But we also want to have people, as you mentioned, who are experts in thinking about this, but not only from the medical perspective, but also from the scriptural perspective and theologically.

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So that's a good example of one where we've had a back and forth in that case, Matt Anderson on one side,

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Wayne Grudem on another side. So we at least want to give people some sort of Christian grounding to think through that.

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I'll tell you an example here though, of where we've tried to do that, and it has not turned out.

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We've had a hard time finding resources, birth control. Oh yeah, go to the

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Catholics if you want to talk about birth control. Yeah, well, I mean, exactly. So there's not a lot of Protestant thinking on that, but what you consistently hear from many different women is that not my doctor, not my parents, not my spouse, no one talked to me either about the biology or the actual effect of this or any of the ethics behind it.

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It was all just assumed. And so I feel like I've spent years trying to ask somebody to think that through, but I've had a hard time finding anybody who's even thinking about that much outside of Catholics.

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Exactly. So we just did a sermon series going through Genesis 1, thinking about everything that you need to think about from Genesis 1.

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We did it in light of the fall of Obergefell, not Obergefell, Roe v. Wade. Yeah, and we did it because we realized that a lot of the

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Christians in our church, the members of our church, they were sort of minimally pro -life, right?

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Abortion is bad, right? That's kind of it. But they hadn't thought about things like adoption, foster care, vasectomies, birth control, what it means to image

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God as you multiply and so on and so forth. But when it came time to have this application where we were talking about birth control, our people were pleasantly surprised.

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I mean, listen, we've talked about race stuff, we've talked about COVID stuff, we talked about politics stuff.

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By and large, I don't think I've been as nervous as a pastor to talk about anything as much as I've been nervous to talk about birth control, particularly because I'm not super pro -birth control.

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I'm actually pretty anti in many ways. And so, but I tried to handle it with nuance, right?

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And brother, we had women, women were coming up saying, thank you so much. This is just so helpful, so useful.

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I had some women ask me, and do you have any resources on this? Now, here I am as a pastor, do

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I give them some Roman Catholic book on it, which is gonna be laden with a bunch of other unhelpful stuff, or maybe one of the best books that I've read on it,

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I don't wanna say the name here, but it comes from an author who has one chapter that is supremely helpful and the rest of it's like, oh, look at the wonders of natural selection and what can't it do and evolutionary theory.

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I mean, just can you even believe the genius of mother nature? And by the way, it's good to be a feminist. But now here's a chapter about the dangers of birth control.

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Really? Yeah, I mean, just study after study, really useful stuff. Well, it's a good example of a specific issue where when you're talking to people in a church environment or even with your spouse, you'll see that a lot of things surprise women.

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They surprise men too. They say, wait a minute, I didn't know I was going to gain weight. Oh, I didn't realize this was gonna suppress my sex drive.

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Yeah, or even change who I'm sexually attracted to. Exactly, so there's a lot of questions out there where you're thinking, these are important changes.

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These are important things to talk about. Sometimes the internet, we know all of the dark corners of the internet, but sometimes it's also a safe place to be able to go, oh, here's a trusted website, a trusted organization where I can ask these questions that I'm not even really sure how to ask anybody else about.

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So now I know who's gonna write my article on birth control, it's Sean DeMars. Let's follow up on that.

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It just blows my mind, if I may real quick, go on a little rant, that we don't even stop and consider what pumping exogenous hormones into our body at the most fruitful stages of our lives, that we just think it's sort of this morally neutral thing.

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Yeah, and I think a lot of that, you could look back historically and see why that is.

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And it's the nexus of a couple of different things. One - Insert Karl Truman. Yeah, exactly, and one of them is because like abortion, this was seen as a

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Catholic issue. That's one thing. And yes, you'd go all the way back to Sanger, who produced the birth control pill.

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I talk about this in my class on cultural apologetics. It was Planned Parenthood, originally facilitated the development of it.

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But then also there's in Protestantism in America, at least there's generally in the past,

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I think less so post COVID, there's a kind of techno utopianism, kind of a scientific utopianism of progress.

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It's deeply rooted in the American Protestant psyche that we've used medicine to solve every problem.

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And so it's hard to kind of get out of that mentality. So you combine those two things and you can see why there wasn't a lot of thought given to it, but you're right when you stop and just look at it, even if you might support it still, it is a weird how little we actually talk about what happens in that process.

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Again, my wife and I haven't experienced that same thing ourselves. Well, let's go from one easy topic to another, from birth control to wokeness.

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Oh, great, yeah. So one of the things I wanted to ask you in that room full of pastors was about the accusations being leveled against TGC that you guys are woke.

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Let me just use an illustration, okay? So I did the TGC good faith debates with Rebecca McLaughlin. And thank you for having me to do that, brother.

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And in the dialogue portion of that debate,

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I said, people who think that Tim Keller is woke, I didn't say they're ridiculous. I said something to that effect, like it is ridiculous, right?

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Like Tim Keller is not woke. To this day, I'm still catching flack for that, flack in person, flack online.

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How could you say that Tim Keller is so woke? And so in this sense,

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Keller probably, Dr. Keller, probably stands as a representative of TGC as a whole and how maybe if we're doing

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DeYoung's taxonomy, all the fours hear that and they go, absolutely. And the threes go,

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I don't know if that's true, but maybe. But I've seen some things that maybe I really disagree with. Yeah, I'm concerned, right?

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So speak to that, brother. Sure, yeah. So I think when you go back, and this is related to my work on Tim and a specific study of him, when you go back and look, he came of age in the 1970s at a time in the aftermath of the civil rights movement.

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So if your definition of woke is somebody who was awakened to the challenges of race in America and specifically inside the church, then

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Tim Keller has been woke since 1970 or 1968. That's very clear. One of the things

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I wrote about and found actually a parallel in Philip Yancey's life who grew up in Atlanta.

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Both of them had this experience in the post -civil rights, kind of post -King assassination period.

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Tim went to college the fall after King was assassinated. So they had this experience of, wait a minute, my church and my family taught me that the civil rights movement was just a bunch of evil communists.

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And they have this awakening of, ooh, maybe that wasn't the case at all. So, and maybe there's more to see here with that.

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So in that sense, if that's what woke means from Tim's perspective, from the gospel coach's perspective,

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I guess then we definitely are woke. We're not woke in the sense that Tim has written very critically about critical race theory, specifically very negative.

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Kathy, his wife has written very critically about churches that have adopted large aspects of critical race theory.

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Or critical theory in general. Critical theory in general applied to a lot of different subject matters in there. And I don't think if there were room for nuance with Ibram Kendi or somebody like that,

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I don't think he would recognize Tim Keller or the gospel coach as any kind of ally, especially with the way that in critical theory, a lot of different oppressions are linked related to gender, sexuality.

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Intersectionality. Intersectionality, exactly. So in that sense, no, absolutely not.

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Just not buying the whole program on all these other different diversity, equity, inclusion issues just would disqualify you there.

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So in that sense, absolutely not. That's what's so difficult about this conversation. And in some ways, part of the reason why my debate with Rebecca was not as fruitful as it could have been, because she was defending a concept of wokeness that I was not arguing against, right?

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It's also interesting to sort of trace an etymology, right? The way that the words... To initially, wokeness derived from purely a

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Marxist thought it's to elevate the consciousness, to be aware of the oppression that's consuming you.

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And then sort of through black feminism in the 70s, it was kind of adopted and then popularized to just sort of mean become awake to injustices about real injustices related to race in the

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United States. And now, whereas someone like Rebecca, that's probably the main way she thinks about it.

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The vast majority of people, when they use the word woke, that's not what they mean. What they mean is beholden to critical theory, whether they even understand what that means, right?

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Beholden to this idea of sexuality, gender, race, so on and so forth. Yeah, no, that's exactly what

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I mean. And most of the people using the term woke now are only the critics. That's right. So even now there's that transformation as well.

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And then there is a very deliberate attempt now from some on the right wing to use woke to apply to anything that's not

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Republican or anything that's not something the Daily Wire is talking about or that they don't support something like that.

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So, and then all of a sudden it's woke to even acknowledge racism at all. So you're right, that is a moving target.

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And that's why it's, you have to, just like many questions, you have to ask, what do you mean by that?

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Because if you ask it one way, I guess Tim Keller and The Gospel Quotient definitely are woke.

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If you ask it most of the ways that people would mean it, not remotely. Now what we're gonna do to get as many views as possible,

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Colin Hansen says, Tim Keller is definitely woke. I knew as soon as I said it what was gonna happen to me.

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Oh man, our TikTok is gonna go crazy. Hey, Luke, do we have a TikTok?

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No, okay, all right. All right, let's just keep following this Tim Keller because you wrote a book, right?

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Tim Keller, his spiritual and intellectual formation. Don't worry, Sean, if I live long enough,

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I'll do one of you. Hey, the church can only hope, brother. So in this pastor's luncheon, which yes,

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I'm gonna keep referring to because you just gave me so much fodder. I may not even use these questions that I have here for you. You said something that I thought was really profound.

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It's something that I heard Mark Dever say years ago. Maybe he stole it from you.

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He said that what people don't understand about Tim Keller is that he was steeped in conservative, evangelical

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Presbyterianism for decades before he sort of emerged in New York City as this cultural apologist, which leads some people to think of him as being squishy in certain areas.

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Can you just speak to that? Because there are a lot of guys out there who are doing their best

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Tim Keller impersonation. They're trying to evangelize like him. They're trying to do apologetics like him.

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They're trying to preach like him. But they have not been steeped in the gospel and in scripture.

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I mean, when he was in Virginia, how many times did he preach through the Bible? 1 ,500 sermons. Yeah, 1 ,500 expositional preaching before he ever sort of came onto the world stage, if you will.

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So anyways, can you just speak to that dynamic? Yeah, so there's also something interesting where Kathy has discipled plenty of women herself,

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Tim's wife. And Kathy's formation theologically, if I were doing the same thing with her, which

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I do cover her in there, but she's not been reading all of the same things that Tim has forever.

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She went to seminary with him. And one of the things you notice is that the main thing she uses for discipleship is she uses

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Puritan paperbacks and especially the letters of John Newton. And there's nothing better for me out there apart from scripture than letters of John Newton.

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They're just absolutely amazing. And so what you'll notice is a fairly significant difference sometimes in the disciples coming from even the

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Kellers themselves because like you said, somebody might get really thrilled about Tim's social criticism, but they might not realize how many years he was reading

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Charles Spurgeon or George Whitefield just to be an evangelist in there.

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And so that's one of the major motivations I had of the book was to give that holistic picture to see that Tim grew over time, but he always has kept that core.

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He's always kept that core right there. And I think that's something that I've been getting a lot of good feedback about as well in the book.

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And there is another reason though, Sean, why people get confused about that with Tim, and it's because of an evangelistic strategy he adopted when moving to New York.

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Now you can disagree with him, anybody can disagree with him about this, but specifically he said, in such a significantly post -Christian environment, even in 1989 in New York, we are going to choose to emphasize the areas that Christians disagree with non -Christians on, not the things that Christians disagree with other

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Christians on. Now, if you're pastoring in Birmingham, Alabama, or Decatur, Alabama, or places like that, you have a lot of churches, the differences between Baptists and Presbyterians and Anglicans and Pentecostals are a really big deal, but there are far fewer percentage -wise

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Christians in New York, and they feel more of a sense of solidarity. I don't mean necessarily between Catholics and Protestants.

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I'm primarily speaking even between evangelicals, exactly. And he had a background with that from Gordon Conwell, as well as InterVarsity.

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So one of the reasons why people think Tim is not outspoken enough in certain areas is because a lot of the hot -button issues that have been a major thing in the last few decades, he might have his own views on, does have his own views on, they tend to be fairly conservative, but he's not outspoken on them.

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And he's also very ironic, and in this cultural moment, that automatically makes someone think that you're left -leaning.

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Jonathan Lehman's a great example of that. I mean, not a squish in any way. Very kind, loving, gentle, patient, desiring to build bridges, even with those with whom he's debating.

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And in our context, it causes people to view you in a certain light. Yeah, that's absolutely right.

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And also just being an evangelist. If you're an evangelist, your goal is to try to persuade somebody.

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Our media and our politics today do not spend much time at all trying to persuade. It's all about rallying your base.

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Well, Tim is not a rallying the base kind of personality. He's always been kind of a cosmopolitan in the sense of him being an outspoken evangelical

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Christian in a largely non -Christian environment, but holding that conviction with a desire that the gospel would appeal, not by changing the gospel, not by compromising the gospel, but by putting on its best face in an effort to try to persuade them to become

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Christians. And you're right that that's significantly out of favor with a lot of the church in this media and political climate.

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So let's talk a little bit more about Tim Keller, the evangelist. So when

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I was reading this book, which is fantastic, by the way, thank you so much, it really grew my appreciation for Tim, which was already there, but it just, it increased it.

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The thing that I walked away most sort of chewing on in this book is how much of an evangelist.

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I don't think people understand. Leading people away from hell into a loving, saving relationship with Jesus Christ is the heartbeat of Tim Keller's ministry.

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It has been since the day he got saved. Exactly right. Now, Christians are always gonna have disagreements about what is the best, most faithful methodology to lead people to Christ.

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But I mean, I think a lot of the people who, going back to Moody's quote, you don't like the way that I'm evangelizing.

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I don't, what did he say? I don't like the way you're not. I don't like the way you're not. Yeah, it's better than the way you're not evangelizing. That's right, yeah. A lot of the people who critique

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Keller and his methodologies of whom, I've been one of those people in the past. I haven't appreciated certain things here and there, but I think he's done more evangelism than the vast majority of his critics, perhaps even combined.

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Yeah, absolutely. I think what we need to understand, though, is in my classes on cultural apologetics,

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I write an equation on the board. I say - Yes, exactly, I do math. We're gonna do math here, okay?

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This is evangelistic math. Evangelism plus pragmatism equals liberalism.

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Evangelism plus pragmatism equals liberalism. The math checks out on that. Many of the movements toward liberalism in the past have been evangelistically motivated, including in New York.

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Now, the difference with Tim is that he's not a pragmatist. He's not a pragmatist. Now, he does want to be very intentional.

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He wants to be very thoughtful. He wants to be very planned as much as possible, but he's a revivalist.

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I mean, at his core, he's an ecclesial, a church revivalist. And in that sense, and not a

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Finney, right? We're talking the Edwards -Whitfield tradition of revival in there that he learned from Richard Loveless at Gordon -Conwell

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Theological Seminary. And so he very much believes in getting the gospel out and contextualizing it, but not compromising.

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His view of contextualization is that we are clarifying the offense.

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We don't want people to be offended because we're jerks. We don't want them to be offended because we're adding a bunch of other things on top of the gospel.

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We want them to be offended by the gospel itself. Now, of course, we ultimately want them to be saved, but he's very clear in his contextualization.

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It's clearing things away so that people will have to confront the gospel itself. And if that's what's offensive to them, so be it.

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We're not going to change that, but there's not a Finneyite bone in his body.

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Well, I got to tell you, if I don't take anything away from our time together today, it's going to be clearing the offense away.

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Wait, say it one more time. Yeah, clearing everything so people can be confronted by the offense of the gospel.

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Yeah, you just know what that's like. If you're an evangelist and you're just mean, you're a jerk, all that sort of stuff, people look at you.

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They're not thinking about Christ and his finished work and his claims. Or if you're saying, hey, become a

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Christian. And to do that, I need you to put on a suit and put on a tie and vote for this party and do that and like this music, people sit there and say, well,

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I guess I can't be a Christian because I don't like organ music. Well, I mean, that's not what you should be offended by.

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Like we're trying to present to you the claims of Christ himself. So yeah, that's what he means by that.

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But you really have to clarify that because others do use contextualization in pragmatic terms, which tend to result in that equation with liberalism.

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Okay, so before we, this book has been called not so much a biography, but a bibliography, which is very accurate.

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And we're gonna talk about some of the influences that have shaped Keller. But before we do that, we have Colin Hansen, right?

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Oh, he's the managing editor and vice president and all this stuff. And here we are just sitting talking about Tim Keller.

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Why should we be sitting here spending an hour talking about Tim Keller? Is this hero worship? Is this what's wrong with him?

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Are we what's wrong with evangelicalism? Well, I think that the beautiful thing about Tim is that personality wise and conviction wise, he doesn't let you dwell on him.

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First of all, I think we take for granted the fact that he's pastor. That's just who he is and what he, just like he said, he'd been called to ministry basically from the moment that he became a

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Christian. What do we do in ministry, Sean? We're pointing people to Jesus all the time, like not to ourselves, but to Jesus.

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When I was trying to figure out how to close that book, I thought, yes, when I read Tim's books and I listen to his sermons,

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I come away with an appreciation of him. But my affections toward Christ, that's what is happening there.

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He doesn't end his sermons and you think, oh my gosh, that was so eloquent. Maybe you think some of that, but you're thinking, oh,

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Christ is amazing. Look at the work of Christ here. That's true of all the best preachers.

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Exactly, so that's one thing. The second thing is that personality wise and by conviction, when you talk to him, he's always going to deflect.

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He's always gonna deflect. He's gonna say, hmm, let's kind of think of that from an analyst perspective and say, well, this is what

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I learned from Jonathan Edwards. This is what I learned from C .S. Lewis. This is what I learned from Barbara Boyd, from Elizabeth Elliott, from John Owen.

30:52

He's just always deflecting you toward others. And so that's why I felt comfortable and why he felt comfortable working with me on that book was because it's a book about Tim, but ultimately it's pointing you to Christ, hopefully.

31:07

And also it's introducing you to all of these other people that you might already know well, like Lewis or Edwards, other people like Elizabeth Elliott or people like Barbara Boyd or even

31:19

Ed Clowney that you maybe haven't heard of before. And so that's what makes it easy,

31:25

I think, for me to talk about it as well as for him because I've been a student of evangelical history for a couple decades now.

31:34

And that book was an amazing adventure for me of being able to tell that story just through the lens of one particular person who experienced a lot of it.

31:47

So, sorry, let me put a finer point on this question. How influential is

31:53

Tim Keller? Well, I mean, I think that's a great question and probably in our lifetimes, we won't be able to answer it.

32:01

Hopefully Jesus comes today or tomorrow and none of that'll matter. But if the

32:06

Lord should tarry, I think we're kind of in a situation there where we'll probably remember him along the lines of J .I.

32:14

Packer or John Stott. Usually when somebody is remembered among us, it's because we can still read their books.

32:22

I think Tim has left us quite a few books that can still be profitably read for years to come.

32:30

One of the interesting, okay, so I agree with you and that's true. Having said that, because so many of his writings have been so contextually situated, does that mean that perhaps they're gonna have a shorter lifespan than say someone like John Piper?

32:45

Yeah, well, the thing that's common about Tim and John is they're both voluminous in their writing.

32:51

So it's a wide range. So some of Tim's work is that way.

32:56

In fact, as the executive director of the Keller Center for Cultural Apologetics, one of the specific things he said to me is,

33:04

I don't think you're gonna be able to go back and just rehash my stuff. You're gonna have to do this own, so the

33:10

Keller Center doesn't exist to perpetuate all of his old stuff, but in that spirit to try to do the same thing in our day.

33:19

And the generation after us is gonna have to do the same thing. But in talking to my friend, Kevin DeYoung about this, we've both agreed that that's not a problem with his work on prayer or on suffering or on forgiveness.

33:36

They're all situated in a specific moment in time, but they're universal or marriage even.

33:42

Yeah, maybe the situation in 25, 50 years will be different in terms of the challenges people face in marriage, but the truth of what he's getting at, that doesn't change.

33:51

I probably have more confidence that something like Center Church will still be valuable a while later, just because very few people have done a textbook exploration of that many different things.

34:03

True. But by his own admission, his concept of theological vision is one that's not like a doctrinal confession.

34:10

It has to be revisited. Right, and reimagined in every new context, yeah.

34:16

Yeah, so he'd be the last person to say, oh yeah, you need to be spending your whole lifetime regurgitating stuff that I said.

34:22

Yeah. That's just not the way he is. Okay, so let's talk about some of his influences.

34:28

You ready? Yeah, let's do it. Here's the list. You see here, as I was reading. Oh, you wrote it down. I wrote.

34:33

Okay, I thought you just had the table of contents. Clowney, Packer, Luther, Stott, Lewis, Bonhoeffer, Schaefer, Bruce Henderson, maybe less known there.

34:42

Dick Merritt, Barbara Boyd, Martyn Lloyd -Jones, Ender Varsity, Kathy, Christie. That's his wife.

34:49

That's his wife, maiden name, yeah. Sproul, Schaefer, Gordon Conwell, and there's a whole bunch of people there. Lincoln, Lane, Klein, Elizabeth Elliott.

34:57

Roger Nicole, Richard Loveless, Kennedy. Kennedy Smart, a pastor. John Owen, Whitfield, Mottyer.

35:03

I don't know if I'm there. Mottyer, Alec Mottyer. If I would have gone to seminary, would I know how to say that? Yes. Okay, okay.

35:09

I also say Karl Barth, if anybody's wondering. Dick Lucas, Harvey Kahn, Jack Miller, Richard Lentz, The Big Four.

35:18

I don't even remember what that is. And that's the social critics. That's Charles Taylor, Alistair McGrath.

35:24

Yeah. We're gonna come back and talk about them in a minute. Alistair McIntyre, I'm sorry, I meant to say there. Totally fine. Tom Holland, Michael Horton.

35:31

So that's a lot. How many hours are we gonna be here? Can you, maybe you can't.

35:37

Can you try to pick three? Is that a challenge? I bet you can't do this. You're probably not smart enough or handsome enough or godly enough.

35:45

Could you just talk about maybe three that even as you worked on this, stood out to you as the most significant in his life?

35:51

Well, that's kind of an easy, that's actually a softball because he defines it himself in reason for God.

35:58

His three are clearly Lewis, Edwards, and then his wife, Kathy. Okay, riff on it, brother.

36:04

Take it away. So Mako Fujimura was an elder at Redeemer in the early 1990s and mid -1990s.

36:13

The artist. And he's the artist, the visual artist. He said, we always knew when Tim did not have time to prepare his sermons because he would just quote

36:22

C .S. Lewis. And he said, not that it was bad, it was actually amazing.

36:28

But Lewis is the one person outside of scripture where if you just told

36:34

Tim, you've got to talk about something and you have no time to prepare, he was just going to start rattling off Lewis.

36:42

He's significantly different from Lewis in a lot of different ways. He's not an academic. He's not a novelist.

36:49

He's not a fantasy writer, things like that. But when it comes to engaging public intellect and especially apologetics, mere

36:58

Christianity was one of the first things that Tim ever read on his path toward conversion.

37:04

So that's Lewis. Edwards comes in as one of the closest role models for Tim because the terminology that Tim himself used that I grabbed out of center church is the terminology of an ecclesial revivalist.

37:20

Just trying to think who, and I'll just ask you this question. You can stew on it for a little bit. Who can you think of as a parallel who as a pastor, has to be a pastor, as a pastor was heavily engaged in the work of cultivating revival, but also public intellect engaging with a lot of the most contemporary ideas, even outside the church.

37:45

That's not a prominent role in evangelical history in the United States. You probably would have,

37:52

I mean, you can keep thinking about it, but it really is that Edwardsian school. You could locate his own offspring, his own descendants, his own students.

38:04

Some of them would fit in that category, but as Tim himself acknowledged following Noel and Marsden, those groups have tended to splinter off.

38:13

Sorry, Mark Noel, George Marsden. Exactly, as historians of reformed theology in the United States, some will veer off into cultural apologetics, some into confession, some into revivalism, but they don't tend to cohere in the same person.

38:27

They did for Edwards and they do for Keller. They cohere together in the same person.

38:34

And then third is Kathy. I don't think the Kellers are necessarily a model for how every ministry marriage should be, but I would simply point out that they are unusually close, unusually collaborative in ministry, and probably owing largely to the fact of two different things.

38:54

One, that Kathy was very accomplished in ministry well before she met

38:59

Tim, even as a youth. Let's just connect two of the dots in there. Tim also says that Kathy's the biggest influence because she introduced him to the others, reformed theology, as well as to C .S.

39:11

Lewis. She even edits his books. I mean - She edits Tim's books, but I mean, look back on Lewis. At 13 years old, she's one of the last people to ever correspond with C .S.

39:20

Lewis. Yeah, those stories are amazing. As she's 13. So that's well before she meets Tim when Tim's in college, going to school with Kathy's younger sister, and well before they're at Ligonier Valley Study Center together with R .C.

39:32

Sproul, who then does their wedding. That's crazy. And then they're in school together in Gordon -Conwell, the

39:39

Edmund P. Clowney fan club. So she takes that role. And there was also, this was just a very human element.

39:48

I would have their friends, and most of their friends are, they're a couple friends from their history, and especially through Kathy's relationships with them.

39:57

And multiple of them told me Tim would forget to drink water unless Kathy reminded him.

40:04

And I thought, that's a wonderful metaphor. They said, there's nothing metaphorical about it.

40:10

Literally, he would forget to drink water. And I was doing an interview with Tim, and there comes Kathy reaching over his shoulder, handing him some water.

40:18

Like, so there was just a, not only an intellectual melding there, but also, and even a leading in some of those ways early on from Kathy just because of her own study and her own, she was at Reformed Theology before Tim was, but also just a very human element there between them.

40:36

And so those are the three primary influences. What a powerful testimony to the influence in the way that God can use a godly woman to bear fruit in the life of the church.

40:47

It's a, I mean, and their unique approach to complementarianism was pretty fun to explore for the book as well because you've got this momentous decision about going to New York to plant this church.

41:00

Huge uprooting of their family, three young boys. Tim knows that Kathy is worried about this.

41:06

She's scared about this. She doesn't know about this. And, you know, he comes home apologetic, like, you know,

41:13

I think we should go, but I won't go unless you say so. And she just erupts with like, how dare you?

41:23

You make the decision. You're the man. I'll deal with God. And she does.

41:30

Yeah. I felt like it was such a wonderful encapsulation of the way their relationship works.

41:38

You've probably, I don't know, if you drive down the highway here between Huntsville and Decatur, you see billboards with like these

41:44

Pentecostal, for these churches with the husband and the wife. They're even on like vans.

41:49

Like they have a van, church van with like it's polar bear rug and the husband's laying down and the wife's laying in front of him.

41:55

Come down to agape love, you know, Pentecostal church. First couple. Yeah, for the first couple, yeah.

42:01

When I think about Tim and Kathy Keller, I think, oh, that's a reformed version. It's a good, healthy reformed version of that.

42:07

They are, Kathy very famously, especially as I talk about it in the book, decides not to go on the ordination track because of her conviction about women in ministry, which would not have been controversial from her mainline

42:22

Presbyterian background, but she decides not to do that. I mean, she's influenced by a number of people in her own reading of scripture, but among them

42:30

Elizabeth Elliott in that process. But they are very accurately described as co -founders.

42:39

She doesn't go over Redeemer Presbyterian church. Like she was a staff member for a long time. She was definitely not a co -pastor, but if Tim was doing one of his

42:49

Q &A sessions at the end of a Redeemer service, which he did throughout much of the 80s and 90s, you would not be surprised if Kathy was sitting there in the front row and she didn't like Tim's answer, she would interject.

43:00

She'd jump up and she'd give her own answer. I mean, as a pastor's wife, she clearly had been very studied on these things and they have the kind of relationship where they talked through everything.

43:12

So she was fairly conversant with a lot of those ideas. And keep in mind, by the 1980s and 90s, they had been doing that all the way back in the early 1970s at their church in Virginia on the model of R .C.

43:26

Sproul's Gabfests. His Q &A sessions at Ligonier Valley Study Center. So it was just part of a lifestyle of ministry that they both shared.

43:34

Finding out about Tim Keller's connection to the Ligonier Study Center, I mean, that was one of the best surprises.

43:41

I didn't know that, it was, yeah. Or that, I'm a little surprised this hasn't gotten more attention, but that Tim as a student was part of the team that produced the first copy of Table Talk, which was initially a protest, not only of evangelical feminism at Gordon -Conwell, but also of a deficient biblical theology and hermeneutics among the

44:06

New Testament faculty there. So one of the first published articles, maybe the first published article from Tim or one of them was this like staunch critique of his professors.

44:16

That's probably not what a lot of people expect from the ironic Tim Keller. I wonder if many people who read

44:22

Table Talk are critical of Keller, thinking that he's more of a squish than he is.

44:28

It's like, you don't even know this dude started this ministry to fight for the Bible. Yeah, no, that's exactly right.

44:34

And it proved to be true. Like both of those professors that he criticized, his critiques were borne out.

44:42

We have a lot more to talk about. I really enjoyed this book. I recommend all of our viewers and listeners to check it out,

44:49

Timothy Keller, His Spiritual and Intellectual Formation by Colin Hansen. Before we move on, last question about Keller and his ministry and his legacy by God's grace.

45:00

What do you think will be, if you could sort of summarize in one sentence, or what is the key element of his legacy, the most significant enduring lasting?

45:12

Focusing your entire ministry on the gospel and taking it to global cities.

45:18

And that's just sort of the tagline that I would say. Remember, I'm a journalist. And so if I were thinking someday, hopefully a long time from now,

45:27

I'm writing Tim Keller's obituary, I would say this is the person used by God more than anyone else to encourage

45:36

Christians to re -engage, and evangelical Christians in particular, to re -engage with global cities, especially city centers.

45:45

And again, a lot of people don't like that because of all the negative associations with cities and things like that, and the populism and politics and all that kind of stuff.

45:55

But there's no one has been used by God since the 1980s. And it's not like he did it alone.

46:02

He was building with and along a lot of other people, but no one has been used more than Tim of calling

46:09

Christians toward that urgent engagement. And as the globe, not just the United States, but the globe becomes increasingly urban, that we need a lot more churches in those places.

46:20

But it's not just churches, but churches that are gospel -centered. They are driven by the proclamation of the gospel, but also the application of the gospel to all of life.

46:31

So I think that's the best summary. So before we talk about the Center for Cultural Apologetics, you've probably spent more time studying

46:40

Tim Keller than anyone else alive. What's one thing that you disagree with him on?

46:45

Well, obviously baptism. Oh, that's an easy, that's too easy. Something that he's well known for and that emphasizes that you think, you know,

46:52

I'm not sure. Well, you know, I clearly disagree with him about this, but I don't know what

47:00

I would have done in his position. We don't have the same position. We're not in the same location.

47:06

I think he should have been more outspoken on abortion. Yeah. I mean, that's just, that's what

47:11

I think. He clearly opposes it. He clearly does. He has preached about it. He has talked about it. He has written about it.

47:18

It's not that his own view is not there. I would just say to the scale and scope of the problem, especially in New York, I think it probably should have played a more prominent role in his public speech.

47:32

Yeah. But like I said, I wasn't there in that situation and I wasn't in that role.

47:40

So I don't know all of that went into that decision. All I know is that as somebody working for him and with him at the

47:47

Gospel Coalition, I have felt personally compelled and institutionally compelled to be extremely outspoken on that issue, unapologetically so as the great moral crisis and great moral evil of our era.

48:02

I don't think, maybe Tim agrees with that, but I don't think you would look back in his ministry and be able to cite that in the same way.

48:13

So I think that, I don't know if we would disagree, but I would certainly say, I don't think we have the same kind of emphasis on that.

48:20

Gotcha. So let's start talking about the Keller Center for Cultural, say that three times fast.

48:25

The Keller Center for Cultural Apologetics. Nice. You are the director. Executive director. Ooh, is there a difference there?

48:32

It just means I'm in charge of the management of it. That's all. Nice, okay. Cultural apologetics.

48:38

You ready for this? I'm about to blow your mind. Okay, let's do it. Cultural Marxism. Am I not sniffing?

48:46

Same thing. Same difference. Same thing. I read a blog recently and they said cultural apologetics is just cultural

48:56

Marxism and TGC is pumping it straight into our veins. No, seriously, tell us about the mission.

49:03

And by the way, you and I did not talk about this in advance. Like, hey, we're gonna promote this thing.

49:11

Yeah, I just, this is part of your work and I think it's fascinating one. I think it's needed too. So yeah, tell us about it.

49:19

So apologetics, that's just defending the faith. We've been doing this from the very beginning as Christians.

49:27

There are apologetics that would be defending the canon of scripture. There'd be apologetics defending the historicity of the resurrection.

49:35

Great stuff. But Augustine, the great theologian of the late

49:41

Roman Empire was also an apologist and a defender of the faith. And specifically, what he did was bring the gospel to bear on the great crisis of his civilization, the decline and ultimately the collapse of the

49:55

Roman Empire. And specifically, the accusations that Christians and Christianity itself were the primary catalyst in the end of this glorious empire.

50:07

But he wrote the City of God, which is one of the most magnificent writings in all of Christian history to be able to give a defense of the faith in that moment.

50:18

That's cultural apologetics. That's defending the faith in light of that sort of cultural, civilizational situation.

50:27

What Tim? Yeah, sorry. The cultural challenges, the cultural hostilities. Yeah, that's right. Exactly. And so I find that most people do not want to argue with me about the historicity of the resurrection.

50:40

In fact, I'm more likely to see people say, sure, whatever, if that makes.

50:48

But I still wouldn't believe it. Yeah. I still don't think it's good. Somebody recently said, nobody really asks, is it true anymore?

50:57

They ask, is it moral? Or is it good? Is it good? Exactly. And so the work of cultural apologetics is to show the goodness of the gospel, even while maintaining that it indicts us in our badness, in our sin, in our evil, that it's not some sort of concept that's abstract to us, but is actually inherent to us or original, or that comes from us.

51:24

So that's the work of cultural apologetics, is to be able to help people see the goodness of the gospel in a culture that has decided, especially in the post -Christendom

51:34

West, that Christianity is the problem with our society.

51:40

This is what the sociologist Charles Taylor describes as the subtraction story of the

51:46

West. We are on the up and up, everything's getting better and better and better.

51:51

There's just one problem. We just got to get rid of this Christianity. If we got rid of this

51:57

Christianity, we would be just fine. The growth would be exponential, probably. We would just be amazing.

52:03

You can take any issue you want. The most prominent today would be trans issues.

52:09

You know, just imagine. Gender and sexuality altogether. Exactly. We would be so free, happy, liberated, hopeful, kind, generous, if it just weren't for that evil

52:21

Christianity that continues to hold us back. The work of cultural apologetics is to explain the absolute inverse of that, that the goodness and the beauty and the hope is in the gospel and the gospel alone in Christ himself, not in all of our efforts to try to recreate ourselves.

52:39

But in fact, all of that leads to misery and pain and horror and ultimately eternal judgment.

52:46

So that's the work of cultural apologetics. It's very much in that Augustinian mold. And it's the kind of apologetics that Keller, especially in the last 10 years, is particularly known for.

52:57

Yeah, he's had a shift since The Reason for God to the sequel, less successful.

53:03

Making sense of that. Many more footnotes though. Yeah, making sense. I was reading it and I said, okay,

53:09

I get it. You have a research assistant, right? But I mean, it's a very significant shift in the way he writes those two books.

53:16

And that shift is really behind everything we're trying to do with The Center. It's not that somebody couldn't read

53:22

The Reason for God, which was a New York Times bestseller in 2008. And if somebody told me today,

53:28

Colin, I'm reading The Reason for God, I say, wonderful, I'm so glad that you're doing that. But there was one thing in the course of this book that completely shocked me.

53:39

Tim's assistant, Craig Ellis, said to me, you know, Colin, there's no chapter on sexuality in The Reason for God.

53:45

And I thought, I was so prideful and stupid. I said, of course there is.

53:50

Like that can't possibly be true. Who hired this guy? And there's not.

53:57

Yeah. And I thought, what a change there was between 2008 and earlier than that when he was writing the book, and 2012.

54:06

And the situation, you mentioned Obergefell before, that we then ended up in by 2015 or so.

54:13

And so, yeah, making sense of God is a way of dealing with those kinds of changes, but not with just saying, here's what the

54:20

Bible teaches about homosexuality, which is an important thing to be able to say, but to question the assumptions of our culture that make homosexuality instinctive and plausible.

54:32

In fact, they make the Christian ethic seem utterly impossible and actually actively hostile.

54:39

Right. So one of the things that you also see is that if you were to wind back the clock, 60 years in New York City from the time

54:48

Tim Keller planted Redeemer, you would have seen that in the Upper East Side where Redeemer started, that there would have been a view 60 years earlier that Christianity's miracles, the virgin birth, the original conception, the resurrection, are completely embarrassing in this scientific age.

55:08

But holding to Christian ethics on divorce, on homosexuality, on gender, are just, of course, that's what everybody believes and has to believe.

55:19

You got to the point by the time Tim is starting it, and especially in our own day, of an inversion of, hey, if you wanna believe that the

55:27

Holy Spirit conceived by the Virgin Mary, by the Holy Father or by the

55:33

Heavenly Father, whatever, man. I believe in, I worship crystals.

55:38

I mean, I do kind of weird stuff myself, but if you dare tell me that some sort of ancient religion tells me who to love and who not to love, then get out of here.

55:50

That's horrible. That's the kind of transformation that we're talking about. And by the time Tim is publishing

55:55

The Reason for God, he's already realizing, I gotta get back to helping people to recognize that without the modern conception of identity, none of the rest of this stuff makes any sense about sexuality.

56:09

So we've got to get Christian leaders on the understanding of identity and to uproot that before we're probably gonna see much progress in our discipleship.

56:21

Wow. Okay, so that was very helpful. So at TGC, you guys, your ministry is blogs, articles, book publishing, local chapter, regional gatherings, national gatherings.

56:37

What does that look like at the center? What are the sort of hubs of your ministry there? Most of what we do is private.

56:45

So most of what we do is just bringing people together, encouraging them, supporting them financially as we're able, as people donate to the center in their own work, is to be able to bring in training, but also a lot of these folks are in ministry context doing evangelism and apologetics that are very hostile.

57:05

Sorry, who are these folks? So I work with 24 different fellows for the center.

57:10

They are pastors, they're professors, they're in Australia, they're in England, they're across North America, Western context, where we're focused primarily on Western apologetics because you've got a different dynamic in a lot of the different other parts of the world, at least at this point.

57:27

I mean, that gap is closing because of the internet, because of media, but those are the primary issues that we face.

57:34

And so my job is, and the center's job is just to connect them, support them. I mean,

57:39

I'll describe it in three terms, three categories. So think about the

57:44

American Cancer Society. You think, what do they do? They look for a cure for cancer. What does the

57:50

Keller Center do? We're trying to find a cure for this massive de -churching, 40 million

57:56

Americans have left the church in the last 25 years. That's one of our problems. Our second problem is related.

58:05

Think about it, Sean. The early church was pre -Christendom. Then you've got

58:10

Christendom for a long time. We're the first generations who are on the other side, post -Christendom.

58:18

There's no historical analog that works for us. You can borrow from Augustine, you can learn from these, but. And you can't even say that we're going back to, because once you go through Christianity, paganism is no longer the same.

58:29

No, so you have some people who have tried to revive aspects of paganism, but the challenge we face with our neighbors is that they think

58:37

Christianity is the problem, but even all the arguments that they use against Christianity are

58:43

Christian arguments. They're not pagans, they're not Romans, they're not Muslims. They are instinctively

58:50

Christians when it comes to the morals. You're all downstream from all this Christianism. You're all downstream from assumptions about the dignity of the oppressed.

58:58

That's one of the things about communism and about Marxism is that they are clear perversions of Christianity, but they only make sense in a

59:06

Christian environment. Democracy is not equated with Christianity, but it really doesn't make a ton of sense outside of the rights of the oppressed or the dignity of the minority.

59:18

Otherwise, they just get trampled by majority rule, which is one of the problems with ancient Greece. So that's kind of the challenge that we're dealing with there.

59:26

So that's our cure that we're trying to work toward. So we just do three things. One, we raise awareness.

59:32

We raise awareness through me doing a podcast with you or publishing books or doing conference messages.

59:39

We just need to get church leaders on the same page of recognizing the nature of the problem.

59:44

It's number one. Number two, we network together and we financially support the practitioners and the researchers.

59:51

These are the pastors and the professors who are trying to do this evangelism and apologetics in their local environments and help them to produce resources in a variety of capacities.

01:00:02

One of the main things we do is continuing education for pastors and church leaders.

01:00:08

So I teach in cultural apologetics in my seminary at Beeson Divinity School, but 20 years,

01:00:14

Sean, my class is probably gonna be totally different because the issues will have changed dramatically.

01:00:21

Well, what am I supposed to do? Do I go back and have a reunion weekend with everybody from the previous 20 years and say, hey, come on back y 'all and we're gonna cover it all in two days.

01:00:31

No, you have to have continuing education, online learning cohorts, working through these topics together.

01:00:39

So that's a lot of what we do. Then the third thing we do is then we publish findings. It's like the Cancer Society would say, hey, here's some wellness things or awareness of different treatments that are working.

01:00:50

That's what we do. We publish the results. We say, hey, here's something over here that's working super well.

01:00:56

You could try that in your own church. You can try that in your own ministry. Here's a resource that's really insightful. We'd love for you to know about that.

01:01:03

So through book reviews, through podcasts and things like that. Those are the main areas of what we do. Would you say is a think tank?

01:01:11

It's definitely a think tank, but it has a few more. Yeah, I mean,

01:01:18

I would say basically. Yeah, I mean, not much. They call themselves an ecclesiological think tank. Yeah, and I would say there's a lot of overlaps between that.

01:01:25

If you think of like an American Enterprise Institute and their work on capitalism and the family and whatnot.

01:01:32

Yeah, they do a lot of the same things, raise awareness about their issues, support the researchers, publish their findings.

01:01:39

Yeah, I think the only reason I shy away from the think tank is that when a lot of people imagine that they're like, so you just sit around and think.

01:01:46

Right. No, it's more accurate to say, we go talk to the person who's been thinking very much, thinking a lot about parenting and a post -Christian environment.

01:01:58

And are publishing research and giving gospel -centered counsel on how to talk to your children about sexuality in an age when their teachers might be pushing them in androgynous directions.

01:02:14

That's not exactly what people think about as a think tank, but somebody out there has to be doing the writing, they have to do the researching so the rest of us can read it or listen to it or watch it and converse about it and then apply it to our kids.

01:02:28

So that's the only reason I - We need subject matter experts, yeah. Yeah, that's the only reason I shy away from the think tank. And it's kind of political language and that's not what you guys are doing, it's more ministry.

01:02:36

No, but I think if that's definitely an inaccurate way to describe us. Slight rabbit trail from my own line of questioning here, but are you familiar with Hartmut Rosa?

01:02:47

I'm not, go ahead, tell me. So, German sociologist, really a critical theorist, boo, but no.

01:02:54

See, that's why I don't know about him, because I'm not dabbling. You only read, yeah. I'm not dabbling. Critical theory, Sean.

01:02:59

But he has a book, which I'm not really smart enough to comprehend, but the gist of it, it's called

01:03:05

Social Acceleration. Ah, okay. And the gist of it is that society is constantly having to adapt to changes in technology.

01:03:14

And there's usually a time of lag and struggle and crunch.

01:03:20

You think we go from this to the printing press, printing press to whatever you think the next thing is.

01:03:26

You kind of addressed that even a little bit today, right? I did, yeah, the internet. That's right, internet. And what he's arguing is that the thing that defines modernity is that there is so much technological change happening so fast that we never really quite have the time to settle into this new technological space where in society really is adapted.

01:03:49

We sort of become slightly malformed, almost adapt, but guess what? The new thing is here.

01:03:54

So we never really settled in. And so then all of those maladaptations kind of cluster.

01:04:00

Anyways, his thing is that also because of the high rate of technological change, society itself is changing so fast that no one can keep up with it, right?

01:04:12

And I think all that to say Keller's example, right? He spent 20 years thinking, writing, praying, reading about these things.

01:04:19

Comes out with what I think is like a silver bullet book. And it's - It's already outdated.

01:04:25

It was outdated within a decade, right? And so that, it also speaks to a potential challenge with your guys' ministry, right?

01:04:33

Hopefully, obviously you've built it in such a way that it can adapt with the times, but what you think the biggest issue that you need to do cultural apologetics with today may not even be on the register in five years.

01:04:45

Well, that's very true. And so let's take the trans issue as an example. If based on the political environment about drag queen story hours or something like that, or our work was primarily focused on, well, this is what the trans activists are saying, but the

01:05:01

Bible disagrees with them. So make sure you stick with the Bible. Okay, well, that kind of passes fairly quickly with the headlines.

01:05:08

They move on, the media move on, politicians move on. But the real work of cultural apologetics is to figure out how are the instincts of a culture shaped such that transgender identities make sense.

01:05:24

So now you're pulling from the Charles Taylor social imaginary. You're pulling from that most of what we act on today is intuitive and instinctive.

01:05:35

You're also pulling here from Jonathan Haidt's social psychology. And you're recognizing here that the challenge of transgender identities and whatnot is related to a couple of different dynamics.

01:05:48

One is Jonathan Haidt's moral foundations theory of it's positive in some ways, but it's negative in some ways.

01:05:55

Like we're not sure how much this is gonna take hold. That's gonna change over time. But the basic idea that the digital revolution facilitates this platonic separation between the body and the mind,

01:06:10

I don't think that's going away any time. And so this sense of - Insert Elon Musk, his transhumanist aspirations, and it just gets worse.

01:06:19

Yeah, so if we're just talking about the fleeting issue that is occupying talk radio today, that's not gonna be very relevant.

01:06:28

But we're talking about the intuitions of a digital civilization that make us disregard the body, which is actually the same thing the

01:06:38

Christians ran into in their encounter with the platonic world. And that Augustine was synthesizing as a neoplatonist philosopher for hundreds of years.

01:06:47

Later, after the rise of Christianity, that stuff's not gonna go away anytime soon, or even getting back to the basics of Genesis, of the human effort to try to overcome our limitations, whether it's the

01:07:00

Tower of Babel or other, with Adam and Eve, the sense that we are shackled by what we've been given.

01:07:08

We're always trying to overcome those creaturely limitations. Those are basic human expressions and struggles and manifestations of sin that are not going away anytime soon.

01:07:23

So that's the kind of stuff that we're trying to focus on with the Center. Very interesting.

01:07:30

Can we go back to TGC for a second? Can we talk more about TGC? How long have you been working for them now? I'm working with them for 13 years.

01:07:39

By the way, let me just add one more thing. Sure. I wanna go back to that previous thing, because I just forgot to mention this.

01:07:47

You and I did not rehearse this going in, but - We rehearsed literally nothing. Literally nothing. I don't know if you could tell, but...

01:07:54

So I just wrote on my phone and my notes app a bunch of things were coming to mind.

01:08:01

And this is, I'm preparing for a meeting with all of our fellows for the Keller Center. And I was trying to think through the ways that this digital revolution undermines the intuitions of religion.

01:08:15

So it just makes religion not like wrong or bad. We have talked about that, but just makes it feel -

01:08:21

Implausible. Implausible, irrelevant. Okay. It's not resonant with what we think reality is.

01:08:28

It doesn't. And I realized one of the main reasons why is because the speed of social change affected by the digital revolution means that, apart from what we as Christians know to be true, that human nature doesn't change.

01:08:45

When you look to your grandparents or even your parents' life, you feel like it's a different world.

01:08:52

Right. It just doesn't seem relatable to you. I just watched with my kids, It's a

01:08:57

Wonderful Life. We can never make a movie like that again. It feels like a completely different universe.

01:09:03

Exactly. And then when you think about your grandchildren, you really can't conceive the kind of world that they will live in.

01:09:11

The speed of social change affected by the digital revolution is impossible for anybody to really imagine.

01:09:18

So this is what I was stoked by your mentioning of that book, which you need to send me the link. I will, yes, sir.

01:09:24

So I can go ahead and read that book myself. But that is a complete anomaly in all of human history.

01:09:32

Now we've had generations like, oh, the Great Depression generation, the World War II generation, look how much the world changed there.

01:09:40

We've had some examples like that before. But it's very hard to pass along any kind of civilization or any kind of culture, including religion, when you don't feel like wisdom comes from your grandparents or your parents, and you don't feel like you have anything to offer for what your kids are going to do.

01:10:05

And so I wonder if, Sean, that's behind what I think is the headline of our entire world right now, which is the world outside of a few corners, especially in Africa, has kind of just decided to not have babies anymore.

01:10:21

And it transcends different cultures. This is just as true of Japan and Korea as it is of Scandinavia and the

01:10:30

United States, of Italy and Israel. It's true, all these different places. And you're thinking, what's big enough to explain what makes everybody suddenly decide,

01:10:41

I don't feel like passing on humanity? Well, I think it's the digital revolution.

01:10:48

It's the only thing that's big enough to be able to encompass all of those transformations. And we could have 20 podcasts talking about all those dimensions.

01:10:57

But my point is, in the work of cultural apologetics, we're trying to help church leaders reckon with that difficulty, not because we think it's impossible, but because if you're informed by that expectation of our challenge, you can adjust your church ministry.

01:11:16

So all of a sudden, what I'm talking about here with cultural apologetics is upstream from my book with Jonathan Lehman, Rediscover Church, which is the physical embodiment of the body of Christ, the congregation, doesn't become less important in a digital age.

01:11:34

It becomes more important in a digital age. So far from this rush toward engagement with the digital age, which my whole job is largely engaged with the digital age, our churches should be prioritizing being the place that is in touch with the physical.

01:11:53

And just think about this. This is an example I use in the book, but Jesus gave us these ordinances.

01:12:02

He gave us the bread, he gave us the wine, in part as a reminder of the physical nature of his own sacrifice and his own ministry, the incarnation, the atonement, all these physical things.

01:12:13

Takes this conceptual reality and brings it down to tangible. And he connects it to your ongoing sustenance.

01:12:21

The bread and the wine are the sustenance of your life. It's one reason why we see Jesus come back as a physical body and he eats.

01:12:30

Like this is not - It literally embodies the gospel in you. Exactly. So this is, we're going to stand out in a digital age in whatever this looks like as the physical people, as the embodied people, as the people who still prioritize that.

01:12:47

Just think about this, Sean, and we're getting in a whole different rabbit trail now. I don't wanna take us all the way down there. No, go, go, go, keep going.

01:12:53

We're gonna be the people who still have sex. Right. Like other people are just gonna stop having sex because it's inefficient.

01:13:01

It's tied up with relationships and emotions and obligations that are constraining.

01:13:09

And also in an era that's heightened to the dangers of abuse, it's dangerous.

01:13:15

Like you could be sexually assaulted, but you could also be accused or even falsely accused of that.

01:13:22

It's one of the things - We live in the age of the incel. Exactly, that's especially, we've seen that, especially in far Eastern cultures.

01:13:27

But what we've seen is that this whole 1990s friends Seinfeld notion of the unencumbered sexual self of endless sexual conquests, or even of sex in the city, that feels like 10 generations ago.

01:13:44

It's so implausible to our reality today. But what does the digital do? The digital gives you an ability to be able to experience all of these sort of sexual satisfactions without any of the obligations.

01:13:58

Yeah, ostensibly. Ostensibly, exactly. But we're gonna be as Christians, the ones who say, no, no, no, no, you don't understand.

01:14:04

Within the covenant context, the physical is always connected to the spiritual, is connected to the emotional.

01:14:10

You can't replicate that. It's not just about your feeling this physical expression, but the whole unity there.

01:14:18

We're seeing sexual rates go way down. And contrary to what media have told us, the people who have way more sex are married couples.

01:14:26

Yeah, and they're the happiest. And they're the happiest. So that's just, in our apologetics, in our witness, we're gonna be the people who get married and have sex and have babies and go to church.

01:14:40

Not a bunch of wild and crazy things, but they will become even wilder and crazier to a world that is just enraptured with this digital escape from the physical.

01:14:52

So that's just, I mean, thanks for letting me just wander into that territory. Hey, did we record that?

01:15:00

If we did, we were gonna clip that and use it often. Thank you for that rant. It was a good, useful rant.

01:15:08

TGC is very similar to THC. Coincidence? Never thought, profound.

01:15:14

This is what I bring to the interview. This is, I'm an expert interviewer. You went on a rant earlier that I think was really impactful.

01:15:22

The impactful rant, a podcast by Colin Hansen. Can you just speak to what, can you say again what you said about a family member and Tucker Carlson?

01:15:34

Yeah, well, I think one of the things that is difficult about media, and we've got to remember that this is not a universal human experience.

01:15:44

This immersive, ever -present media that is facilitated, especially by our smartphones, but it's connected to 24 -hour cable news, which is not that old.

01:15:55

We're talking like 1991. The first Gulf War was when, before that, people didn't think, they thought that was crazy.

01:16:01

Yeah, when CNN started doing 24 -hour news coverage, it was very revolutionary. That's the same thing about ESPN, around the same time there.

01:16:08

And then connected to that, you got talk radio. Read Neil Postman. Yeah, that doesn't, yeah, exactly. That doesn't really take off till Rush Limbaugh in the 1990s, especially.

01:16:17

Yeah, Mahiresh and Peace. That's right. So you just don't see those things until relatively recently.

01:16:23

We have very little concept of how utterly immersed we are in media by comparison to other generations.

01:16:30

And what I've found with loved ones is that the intimacy that is created in those environments, just imagine this.

01:16:41

Your congregation might be listening to you for 30 minutes at most a week, but they might've been listening to Rush Limbaugh for four hours a day, every weekday.

01:16:52

Now, I grew up on a farm, and you got a lot of time out there to be listening to talk radio as you're working on whatever, driving to the tractor or fixing a fence or something like that.

01:17:02

And so what I've found is that the aura of intimacy that's created through this media, through a podcast, through videos, or through cable news, in this case,

01:17:12

Fox News and Tucker Carlson, is such that it's basically impossible to convince that other, to convince even somebody that you have a strong personal relationship with, even a family member, that that person that they have this attachment with on media could be wrong, cynical, manipulative, play acting, all these sorts of things, even if it's a subject matter that you are intimately acquainted with.

01:17:48

That's how powerful that attachment is. And I hear these, you hear this a lot about kids, they'll say,

01:17:55

I lost my mom to Fox News, or hear somebody say, I lost my child to Twitter, or who knows.

01:18:04

Tumblr, trans stuff. Yeah, exactly. Or I've lost a church member to YouTube before.

01:18:12

It was amazing. I could not sit across from a member in my church and do anything to convince him that what he was learning on YouTube about me was not true.

01:18:26

That was impossible. And then I would even take a step to say, do you know anything about that person that you're learning from on YouTube?

01:18:37

And the answer would be no, other than what I hear on YouTube. Well, it might be somebody I actually know personally, or somebody whose background

01:18:44

I know in a lot of detail in not very flattering ways.

01:18:51

But the amazing thing is I haven't been able to see, I've not been able to see people come back from that.

01:18:59

Like once you get down that YouTube rabbit hole, once you get locked into that cable news broadcast, once you've been in that four hours a day of talk radio, it is so compelling that it seems to triumph over even intimate, long -term, personal, familial, or ecclesial relationships.

01:19:25

Yeah, so let's just, let's talk about that in the context, in my context as a pastor. I've had people come to me and say, hey, you partner with this person in ministry.

01:19:36

I've been doing my research, okay? This person is woke, okay? Now I will say,

01:19:42

I'll say this actually happened. I know that person intimately, right?

01:19:48

Good, close friends. I had lunch with him last week, okay? At this lunch, this person spent 20 minutes ranting against this woke agenda in this place.

01:19:59

And I'm sitting here pleading with this person who's been reading these discernment blogs, right? And I'm saying, you're wrong, right?

01:20:06

But it doesn't matter, right? There's nothing I can say, right? I could have, I could bring, I could put the person on FaceTime and be like, hey, are you woke?

01:20:13

And they'd be like, no, I hate wokeness. And they'd be like, that's what I would expect you to do, right, counterinsurgency stuff here.

01:20:19

Yeah. So for example, someone can, you can be dealing with a controversial subject in your ministry, maybe in a

01:20:26

Sunday school class or just a church -wide conversation, and someone will have done their research on the internet, show up, and there's nothing you can do as their pastor to persuade them.

01:20:37

They've agreed in the Lord to let you shepherd them, and yet they're really letting other people on the internet shepherd them.

01:20:44

Now, I'm not saying everyone has to agree with their pastor about everything all the time, but I'm talking about this fundamental impulse.

01:20:50

It's similar when we go to a doctor, right? I've been Googling my symptoms, right?

01:20:55

And I'm here to tell you that I have lupus, right? And the doctor's like, you don't have lupus.

01:21:01

Same thing, right? It's very similar. I think what would be helpful for church leaders to understand, but also church members to understand is that we are 20, so I think the first year that a majority of American homes had the internet was 2000.

01:21:22

Okay, so we're not that far into - Oh, I still remember putting in the AOL, brr, brr, you know, dial -up disc.

01:21:27

So we're not far into this. No, yeah. And I just, I don't think we've really begun to grasp how revolutionary that is, and just let me give you an example.

01:21:38

So I asked my class in cultural apologetics that when they look, when historians look back someday, what will they remember?

01:21:48

Will they remember the invention of the internet, the personal computer, or the smartphone?

01:21:55

And my personal answer is, I think it'll be the smartphone. Now, the only thing that, and they'll remember the other two as well, but the smartphone is like this generational leap forward in terms of the ubiquity.

01:22:07

It, the smartphone basically reinvented podcasts like this.

01:22:13

They wouldn't exist without that technology, that prior technology in there. So -

01:22:18

They reinvented everything, really. Absolutely, and I've got a whole other lectures on that, we'll save for a different nuanced podcast.

01:22:27

But what you've seen is that as recently as 2000, you would have had a lot of authority figures, teachers, professors, pastors.

01:22:39

I think they're all in basically the same, doctors, okay? All basically in the same boat of,

01:22:46

I'm the person who's been studying this, and no, I don't always get it right, but I'm the person who's devoted my life to doing this and studying this and going through a lot of qualifications to do this.

01:22:58

And people would look at them and say, fair enough, you have a knowledge advantage over me.

01:23:05

And I also am here because I'm wanting to learn from you. Tell me, doctor, these are my symptoms, what's going on with me?

01:23:15

Okay, that's now flipped because of the smartphone. You're going to the doctor saying, confirm for me what

01:23:24

I already know that I have. It's very similar to what pastors face. It's pastor,

01:23:30

I've got this podcast over here. I've got this discernment blog. I have this

01:23:36

YouTube channel. I have this talk show host. I already know what

01:23:42

I believe. The question is, do you agree with me, i .e.,

01:23:47

do you agree with them? That's a really dangerous and problematic place for us to be.

01:23:55

We are just beginning to reckon with that challenge. And this is why I keep going back to the primacy of the physical.

01:24:04

And people will ask me fairly often, yeah, but isn't what you do at the Gospel Coalition kind of like drawing people out of that?

01:24:12

It's like, well, this is where they are. I'm trying to say, why do I do a books podcast?

01:24:19

To say, so glad you're listening to podcasts. Go read books. You're meeting where they are and trying to drive them back.

01:24:25

Thank you for reading this article. Go worship with your brothers and sisters in Christ at church.

01:24:31

That's what we're trying to do in there. But it's not easy because the,

01:24:38

I just think about it economically. There are a lot of people who are unfortunately, believe it or not, way smarter than you and I are, way more highly paid.

01:24:48

I believe that. I believe that. And well -studied in human psychology who don't want you to ever put down that phone.

01:25:00

And they will do anything necessary to make sure you don't. Yeah, again, go read more Jonathan Haidt.

01:25:06

Exactly, and they will make you angry. They will make you depressed. They will, of course, try to sexually stimulate you.

01:25:15

They will do whatever necessary. They will make you afraid. That's more of the medicine side of things is all of a sudden we have this consciousness of all the different things that could be going wrong with us when we have something and we feel something go wrong.

01:25:31

It stokes these fears, these anxieties, these hatreds. And the body of Christ is what is designed by God to call us back to worship of hopefulness, of a vision for eternity, of a respect for ages past, of wisdom that comes from the ages.

01:25:53

It's increasingly counter -cultural, but in my view then, so much more increasingly relevant and necessary, especially in a digital age.

01:26:05

So I'm just hoping there'll be that kind of revival, but it's not gonna happen without us coming through pretty significant confrontation of media ecology.

01:26:14

The thing, like you mentioned Postman earlier, the thing I'm hoping for is that maybe the first generation comes through and says, here's an awesome idea.

01:26:25

Let's get my eight -year -old daughter a smartphone. Maybe the first generation comes through and does that and just has no clue.

01:26:32

Then they start reading a bunch of Gene Twenge articles and Jonathan Haidt studies, and they say, depression rates have skyrocketed at exactly the time around the world that a lot of young women specifically were getting smartphones.

01:26:51

Maybe this wasn't a very good idea. And we could even see changes in our own children.

01:26:57

These are the kids who didn't, and these are the kids who did at different ages. I mean,

01:27:03

I'm just imagining what could possibly, I mean, I understand it's peer pressure, but handing a young boy a smartphone.

01:27:14

It's insanity. I'm not even thinking here so much about all the stuff and all the pornography and everything like that that you're exposed to.

01:27:23

I'm also thinking of the sexual abuse that comes through different apps. I'm also thinking of all the different corners that you can escape to in terms of shootings and violence and all sorts of different things, not to mention simply the sheer distraction of that.

01:27:40

We could go on and on and on and on forever about that. I'm just hoping, like you were saying earlier about these adjustments, that the first generation perhaps over adapts by adopting these things too rapidly.

01:27:52

And then there becomes a correction of, oh no, now that we've seen that. And I do wonder, Sean, if COVID will be that for physical church gatherings.

01:28:03

We could look around and see, okay, there's still places that do multi -site campuses.

01:28:13

We've got some friends who do that and some do it better than others. But there was a real rage about that, like just fascination with that in the early 2000s.

01:28:25

And it's dying. And it's dying out in part because we're looking and saying, every major church

01:28:31

I know that did that route, it was really difficult. And they're now getting out of it.

01:28:38

So maybe the similar thing is going to happen with smartphones and with media at some point in here.

01:28:44

Maybe we'll look back and say, well, that was the boomers who struggled with these things, but maybe Gen Z won't.

01:28:50

They'll have their own things. I'm not sure. But certainly when I think about the church, I'm hoping, yeah, let's just get a priority there on those physical gatherings.

01:28:59

And I'm not just being Sunday. I just mean - Or just the physical in general. Exactly, just the physical in general. I think I'm encouraged by what

01:29:05

I think is an adjustment in trajectory, but it's also hard to know how much to lean into that encouragement because one of the things about this digital age is that we do live in the world of algorithms where we're sort of sorted out into bubbles.

01:29:21

And so what you think might be a positive trend in one direction, that could just be in your little bubble, right?

01:29:28

Even we talk, we can't even say the American culture anymore, right? America is 15 different subcultures with 15 different Venn diagram overlapping points, right?

01:29:39

So I guess the most that I can do as someone who's not particularly present on social media, other than what

01:29:45

I put out, not really much in the way of consumption, is I just go based off of what

01:29:50

I see in my local church, what pastors are telling me from other local churches. And I think I'm seeing a good trend, maybe not as sharp of a boomerang as I might like.

01:29:59

But do you ever run into an encounter where you're thinking, why did a bunch of people start asking me about this all of a sudden?

01:30:08

What did I miss on Twitter? Oh yeah, it's like once every six months.

01:30:14

Right now, the thing is theonomy making its way, oddly, into Baptist circles.

01:30:21

That's pretty confusing. It's pretty confusing. What's even more confusing is Scott Swain, who wrote a really great little primer against it.

01:30:28

And he's like, and what else would you expect from Baptists? I'm like, hold up, dude. This is not coming from us.

01:30:34

It doesn't make sense with our biblical theology. But yeah, so I mean, for me, like eight years ago,

01:30:40

I know critical race theory was like three years ago for a lot of people, but that was a very hipster way for me to say that.

01:30:46

But it was like critical theory, and then it was this, and now it's theonomy. And who knows what it's gonna be in six months when that's what the next big thing is.

01:30:55

Yeah, and those things never quite go away. They kind of become part of the stream in different ways.

01:31:00

And your church sort of adapts to it. You realize what you, yeah. I didn't anticipate you saying theonomy, but that makes perfect sense.

01:31:08

I think just without going deep into this, the reason Baptists tend to be attracted to it is because as we know, especially in the

01:31:16

South, there's a strain of our Baptist identity that is connected to our broader culture, like our cultural cohesion, history and all that sort of stuff.

01:31:26

So Baptists in the South have often operated more like state church people and have a kind of populist bent toward that, as opposed to their

01:31:36

Baptist forebears who are being killed by the civil magistrates in places like Virginia or England or Switzerland or wherever else in there.

01:31:46

So no, I agree with you that in the sense of, theologically speaking, this is kind of the opposite of our thing.

01:31:53

Yeah, I mean, it certainly should be. And yet culturally, it actually does seem resonant with this sort of solid South mentality that you can sometimes see.

01:32:00

I think one of the things that it's doing with evangelicals is it's giving them, particularly the theologically thoughtful evangelical, is that it's giving them a theological basis upon which they can continue their cultural project.

01:32:14

Right. Well, absolutely. I think more broadly, what we're seeing in general is that cultural and political cohesion is far stronger than theological.

01:32:24

I don't think I could have said that in the early to late 2000s, but it does certainly seem to be that way today.

01:32:31

People are willing to dismiss any number of different substantial theological distinctions because they feel as though they are political or at least cultural allies.

01:32:42

I think that is really problematic in a lot of different ways.

01:32:47

And you're right, I don't think that trend will probably continue forever either, but that is where we are right now.

01:32:53

I think it is a justification for a certain cultural project, but I think we should expect that in, going back to the

01:32:59

Keller Center, in an increasingly post -Christendom society, you will have people going in 25 different directions about what they think the next thing is because the fact of the matter is we haven't seen democracy or republicanism work, particularly well, outside of Christian environments.

01:33:24

Well, in a post -Christian environment, how does it hold without a moral foundation there?

01:33:30

And so I think - It doesn't. Exactly, and then combine that with a post -Enlightenment era.

01:33:37

One of the things that Keller talks about quite a bit and that I've picked up on and the center picks up on is the essential difficulty for a young person today is that you are supposed to be completely tolerant and always to act justly.

01:33:54

How are you supposed to be completely like, tolerant of everybody else relative, but also fixated with justice?

01:34:03

Which requires a verdict. Which requires a verdict, which requires a moral standard because you need to do something.

01:34:10

The reason we just have so many people going in different directions is because we don't have a solution, culturally speaking, to either one of those problems.

01:34:20

And so it's not a surprise that some people would say, well, one of the most common ways that a lot of human civilizations have done this is they've just gone back to cultural, theological, and political control, all consolidated into one.

01:34:38

And that's where you get a lot of interesting questions of, hmm, I guess in some ways

01:34:43

I can see the appeal of that, but I don't think you're fully reckoning with where that has gone wrong in countless ways through history and why we got to this system in the first place.

01:34:54

Different conversations, you probably wanna have that conversation with Lehman. Yeah, I mean, yeah, good self -control cutting that off because I was about to lead us down another long path.

01:35:05

Brother, as we wrap this up, you've written a lot of books. Have we uncovered the next book from Colin Hansen dealing with the -

01:35:17

No, I'll take any ideas. I mean, the way that you have been riffing on this technological age and the way that it has impacted and is impacting the church, that might be a good place to go.

01:35:30

Thankfully, we've got some good people working on that right now. Brett McCracken, his Wisdom Pyramid. Also Samuel James, his

01:35:36

Digital Liturgies. So Jason Thacker's work, ERLC. You've got some good people focusing on it, but the scope of the problem is such that we're not gonna run out of need.

01:35:46

I wanna get Jason Thacker here to talk about AI. Oh, that would be - He was ahead of the curve. Yeah, he definitely was.

01:35:52

And that is a curve that is seemingly impossible to get on the front. We thought the curve was like this, now it's...

01:35:58

Yeah, and the smartest people you'll find are just doing their best to guess, kind of keep up with that.

01:36:05

But that's what I mean of, I alluded to this earlier, somebody that I picked up on said that the internet is not so much like invention of the printing press, but by the invention of language itself.

01:36:16

That's kind of what I mean with AI is that you don't really know how rapidly that next thing is or what the implications.

01:36:25

So people can speculate, but it's kind of like speculating about the internet in 1994. You're kind of just gonna sound dumb.

01:36:31

We just know that, oh, this is like a rapid acceleration from some of the basic conceptions of what a search engine had kind of done.

01:36:40

That's kind of our analog there, but this is so much more. You're talking about AI. Yeah, so I'm talking about with AI.

01:36:46

So generally speaking, we're kind of like, okay, how far away are we from, we will never use Google anymore because AI will be 5 ,000 times more powerful in what it can conjure up.

01:36:59

I'm gonna get Tony Reinke on this. Yeah, Tony would be great too. That's what I mean though. We've got some good people working on that.

01:37:06

All right, so as we wrap up, I wanna, first of all, brother, I wanna encourage you. We tend to shout our criticisms and whisper our encouragements, right?

01:37:16

And that's why a lot of pastors are burnt out and leaving the ministry. It's the reason why a lot of people are going into the secular world and just sort of giving up on serving the church.

01:37:26

But I wanna shout my encouragement to you. I think the best thing I can say about you is that after the whole

01:37:35

COVID thing, Christians responded differently for different reasons, but you and Jonathan Lehman wrote a book and gave it away for free.

01:37:42

How many thousands of copies? I was like, oh, I don't remember. It was like 300 ,000.

01:37:48

Yeah, 300 ,000 copies. And that was all crossway. I mean, praise God for that ministry.

01:37:53

But brother, you did it, you know, and you did it to serve the church. You saw that COVID was affecting the health of the church.

01:37:59

You wanted to get people back into the embodied nature of our worship together as the body of Christ. And when

01:38:06

I think of Colin Hansen, that's what I think about, a servant of the church, faithful to the gospel. And I love you, brother.

01:38:12

Thanks, Sean. Yeah, man, that's great. Now onto the deep stuff as we wrap it up. What is your least favorite candy?

01:38:18

Least favorite candy. Runtz is what came to mind there.

01:38:24

Just not a fan. Not good, not good. Mine would be black licorice. Okay, I'm not a fan of that either.

01:38:30

I think there were a lot of candidates here. The only person, I mean, when you have Matt Smethurst on this show at some point, he will answer none.

01:38:37

That man loves candy. Anything with sugar. Anything. And he's the size of this pen. He's way skinnier than me.

01:38:43

Favorite candy. Oh, I'm a Snickers guy. Like, just keep it solid. Classic.

01:38:49

Keep it classic. I also like Chuckles. You ever seen Chuckles before? No. They're like these jelly candies, multi -colored.

01:38:57

Big fan. Anybody else? No. Is that from like England or something? No, maybe just from South Dakota gas station in the 1990s.

01:39:07

What are you reading? What one thing, maybe the best thing that you're reading right now outside of scripture? I just started

01:39:14

Garrison Keillor's 2020 memoir. It was a gift to me for my birthday from Justin Taylor.

01:39:22

And it's a unique combination of his history with the church, his work as an entertainer and as a writer, but then also his cultural observations of Minnesota.

01:39:32

Justin and I share a common heritage. I'm from Southeastern South Dakota. He's from Sioux City, Iowa.

01:39:38

They're basically the same region right near each other. So it was a kind gift from him.

01:39:44

And he was like, I can't put it down. And I just started that. And has it been good? Can you put it down?

01:39:49

Well, Garrison, yeah, he's a really good writer. So I'm reading that. I'm reading through James Michener's old novel,

01:39:54

The Source. I'm reading a book about an Alabama civil rights case.

01:40:01

And I'm also listening to a book about the Pacific Theater and World War II. Well, I mean, there are certain genres that I really like on audio books, and especially history that I love.

01:40:12

Don't try to do a John Piper book on audio. No. It's brutal. It's brutal. Very true.

01:40:18

I hope my book works okay. I got to read it on Tim Keller. But yeah, generally speaking, I stick to certain genres of like,

01:40:25

I don't have to listen to every word. But yeah, John Piper would be hard. Going back to that Garrison Keillor, right?

01:40:32

You know, I'm at the place in my reading life right now where I'm less concerned even, obviously, in many ways,

01:40:38

I do care about the subject matter. And as a pastor, most of my time is dedicated to reading things that I need to be reading.

01:40:46

But I just want to read somebody who can write, man. Like a Williams listener, you know? I mean, like, it's kind of like,

01:40:52

I don't really enjoy sports, but I can sit and watch the Olympics because, oh, you're so good at what you're doing, right? And sometimes it's like, oh, here's a book about horticulture, right?

01:41:03

Like, I don't care about that. Oh, but you're writing so good that I'm just going to read it and enjoy myself.

01:41:08

Well, I think one of the things that Garrison Keillor points out is that his first major book was very financially successful.

01:41:19

And he was able to do a lot of things, would build a house, things like that with it. But then now, even with successful books, he doesn't make much money.

01:41:27

A lot of people don't realize how much the publishing industry has changed. And they don't realize that we are saturated with books, unlike anything that we've ever seen before.

01:41:37

So the difficulty is that so much gets published that there's a lot of stuff that just never would have gotten published before.

01:41:45

And it's not necessarily well -written, not necessarily well -researched. It might still be edifying, which is wonderful, but it really helps to have a guide through certain books.

01:41:57

And that's just one of the things that I've adopted in my ministry is I read a lot of books that aren't that great.

01:42:04

So hopefully other people don't have to, because I'm trying to figure out what's good. And so when

01:42:09

I say something like, if you have any opportunity, read Biblical Critical Theory by Chris Watkin, that will be better for you.

01:42:19

I mean, you don't have to agree with all of it, but you'll learn more from that. I'm 300 pages in right now. It's so good.

01:42:24

Yeah, exactly. And by the way, I knew you liked Critical Theory, and there's the proof. That's one of those titles that's very memorable, but also very confusing.

01:42:33

Yeah, it's pretty clever, if you stop and think about what he did there. Yeah, I'm just kind of inverting the whole concept of using the

01:42:38

Bible to criticize the culture. But yeah, I mean, it helps to find those trusted sources on a

01:42:46

Goodreads or in a podcast or something that can point you to those books. Well, okay, in that vein, let's close.

01:42:52

Let's have you be our guide. Okay. Your favorite writer in history.

01:42:58

Writer in history. Oh, well, I mean, I think as, this doesn't mean

01:43:04

I endorse every single one of his views on different things, but that's gotta be Shelby Foote. The novelist turned, kind of best friend of Walker Percy, novelist turned

01:43:13

Civil War historian. I started a group called the Shelby Foote Society to study Southern literature and Civil War history.

01:43:20

The reason I say that is because I love history, but I think most people don't because they imagine that everything's inevitable.

01:43:31

From that omniscient narrator perspective, he writes history as a novelist. You are looking at the historical event through the eyes of the people who experienced it.

01:43:40

There's contingency, there's drama. You don't know how it's going to turn out.

01:43:45

That's more of how people lived it. It's not historical fiction, it's actually history. But you just, and a lot of real historians don't like him, one, because he's popular, and number two, because he brings a lot of -

01:43:58

Yeah, because he's fun. He's popular, he's fun. Exactly. But I think when people, you know,

01:44:04

I was just, I listened to another World War II book the other day and I didn't like it. And I realized, oh,

01:44:11

I just didn't like the perspective that it had on there. But Foote's is, you can read thousands of pages of him and still just be fascinated.

01:44:22

But, you know, if it's not Foote, Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall, she's brilliant. No, that is historical fiction.

01:44:28

But it is fantastic. That's historical fiction in that case. But as a writer, she is hard to, she's hard to tell.

01:44:34

Her stuff on the French Revolution, not so much. I can't quite get into it. I can't speak to that. But the

01:44:39

Thomas, the Cromwell series is amazing. Absolutely fantastic. Okay, I forgot the question

01:44:48

I was going to ask because I got so consumed with your - Hilary Mantel. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay. One book, only one on cultural apologetics.

01:44:56

Something in that vein that you would want to recommend to our viewers. Well, I mean, the easiest one here is, we've alluded to it.

01:45:02

We're talking a little bit about making sense of God from Tim Keller. If you're not interested in all those footnotes, just go read

01:45:08

How to Reach the West again, shorter book by Tim. That's something every single person in your congregation could read.

01:45:16

Certainly your church leaders and officers and small group leaders could read. I read it last year, fantastic. Yeah, I think

01:45:22

Rare is the little book that you could metaphorically chew on for years and years and years to come in terms of implementing that vision.

01:45:33

It's built broadly off his Newbigin, well, his engagement with the Newbigin and how he's different from him in missiology.

01:45:42

He's more reformed, obviously, more evangelical, but that engagement in there, but just what it means to live and be faithful in proclaiming the gospel and living it out in a post -Christian era.

01:45:53

So both those books by Tim are great. I mean, you can also toss in, I just said one, Rebecca McLaughlin's The Secular Creed.

01:45:59

There's a great little engagement with that as well. Favorite, hmm, fiction author or fiction book?

01:46:08

I know it's hard to pick just one, so maybe take that however you want. Oh, goodness, why am

01:46:13

I having such a hard time with this? So I'm going to be a true Alabamian here.

01:46:20

To kill a mockingbird? Yeah, so Harper, she's hard to beat, but here's why

01:46:26

I say that. The book itself is amazing. The audio book is also really well done.

01:46:31

Oh, I've heard. Oh, it's so well done. Trying to remember who, I remember, was it Reese Witherspoon who reads one of the versions?

01:46:37

I think so, that's right, yeah. Yeah, so the reason though I say that is because the study of the book is actually way more fascinating,

01:46:46

I think, than even the book itself. Second, it's because of Go Set a Watchman, which is the other book that Harper Lee wrote, and then specifically

01:46:55

Joseph Crispino out of Emory has a biography of Atticus Finch, of course, the main character, a biography of a fictional character.

01:47:04

He synthesizes all of it together to help us understand that To Kill a Mockingbird is an idealized

01:47:11

South told through the lens of a child. And Go Set a

01:47:16

Watchman is the mature reflections that indicate Harper Lee's own views, not as a child, but as kind of a late teenager into her 20s.

01:47:27

Go Set a Watchman is way more realistic, it's way grittier, it's way darker. It was the book she wrote before To Kill a

01:47:35

Mockingbird. Really? Her editors sent her back and said, this doesn't work, rewrite it as a child.

01:47:41

And she came up with To Kill a Mockingbird. Absolute brilliance. Thank God for good editors. Right, so it's an amazing book, but the reason

01:47:48

I love it as a historical student of history is that it wasn't the way it really was in the

01:47:56

South. Some of the grit was clearly there, but Atticus Finch himself, when you read him in Go Set a

01:48:02

Watchman, built obviously on Harper's father, is a far more complicated figure.

01:48:08

And as a church leader in the South, Go Set a Watchman helps me to understand so much more.

01:48:14

To Kill a Mockingbird is almost an idealized sense of Christian -inspired courage.

01:48:20

Almost like Uncle Tom's Cabin. That's a good example from Harriet Beecher Stowe, exactly, of sort of like, this is amazing.

01:48:27

Beautiful, moving, compelling. But it's not very realistic. Almost like propaganda. Exactly, and so, yeah, that's why it stands out to me is like the actual, the story behind it is even more fascinating than that.

01:48:39

It tells us a lot about the development of our region, of our state, and specifically on these issues we're there to raise.

01:48:47

But as a vision of what could be, and of godly courage, still inspiring on its own.

01:48:54

Last question, Lewis or Tolkien? Well, you know, I... Man, just say it, man.

01:49:03

Don't pontificate. I mean, Lewis's apologetics are obviously unmatched, but Tolkien's fiction

01:49:11

I far prefer. I guess I'm gonna follow Tim in that regard. I just,

01:49:17

I feel like I can still read the Lord of the Rings series now. Yeah. I'm just not as compelled.

01:49:24

I tried to make it through the first Lord of the Rings. It was just, this elf, the king, and this elf in that language, and I'm just...

01:49:30

I gotta say, this is not my primary genre, so I'm not the biggest fan of either one of them.

01:49:36

And I only read Tolkien recently because I figured I can't write the Tim Keller book without having read the

01:49:41

Lord of the Rings series. So I can't say I'm a huge fan of either one, so I don't blame people.

01:49:47

But the general theory, I was just talking earlier with a dear friend. She doesn't like the Wolf Hall trilogy.

01:49:53

She doesn't like Mantell. She said I tried three times with Wolf Hall and it didn't work. The thing that we have to retrain ourselves on with fiction is it's slow burn.

01:50:04

It's like major payoff at the end, but you have to spend a lot of time.

01:50:09

I don't think, Sean, we're very conditioned for that kind of reading anymore. That's why I like The Hobbit.

01:50:15

The Hobbit was very fast -paced. That's a good point, but you're right that I don't think, even though each one of those books in the

01:50:22

Lord of the Rings trilogy stands on its own in effective ways, you really don't get the full effect unless you've read the whole thing.

01:50:29

Another series, three -book series, Christian Laverne's Daughter, Norwegian, or Scandinavian, I should say, literature came out early by Sigrun Undset.

01:50:40

So another one of those where you're thinking, oh man, do I really care this much about 12th century or 13th century medieval

01:50:47

Scandinavia? But you gotta commit to it, and then there's a payoff. You realize

01:50:53

Tolstoy's the same way, Dostoevsky's the same way. If you're gonna make through any classics, you gotta commit to the long haul, which is not easy.

01:51:02

It's so funny you say that, because I love Anna Karenina. I've made it halfway through War and Peace like twice, but I love

01:51:08

The Death of Ivan Ilyich. That's a good short story. And it's so pungent, it's so powerful.

01:51:13

You can use that as a sermon illustration all the time, but then you've gotta go back to my professor,

01:51:19

Saul Morrison, in Slavic literature. He's the expert on Anna Karenina and Tolstoy. You've gotta, it really helps to have a guide.

01:51:27

And then all of a sudden, he's drawing out, as he describes it, the only two realistic conversions in all of fiction.

01:51:34

He identifies one in Anna Karenina and one in War and Peace. And he talks as a Jewish writer about the kind of compelling aspects of sacrificial love, of Christ -like love that are demonstrated.

01:51:46

And then as a skeptic of Christianity, he comes back and says, and of course in the books, it doesn't work very well, and thus, that's why

01:51:52

Christianity is completely unrealistic. He's got just this fascinating take of like, Christianity is too good to be true.

01:52:00

And I found in apologetics, that's where we're trying to get to, is where people are like, wait a minute, this story is too beautiful, wonderful.

01:52:07

Don't you want this to be true? Don't you want this to be true? And so he shows how Tolstoy was able to do that.

01:52:14

Tolstoy has some really wacko views and lifestyles later in his life, especially, so I'm not endorsing that.

01:52:20

But yeah, I'm just, one of the areas that I'm a little bit different from Tim on my apologetics is

01:52:27

I do a lot of work with literature, especially Russian and Scandinavian literature, because I think it gives us a unique vantage point of being, he likes fantasy literature because it imagines worlds that are different.

01:52:39

I like the realist fiction because it gives us character studies that would be hard to aggregate otherwise.

01:52:47

So that's why I like to do that. But yeah, so anyway. We're ending on a high note,

01:52:55

Scandinavian literature and Tolstoy. Every conversation with me, it all comes back to Scandinavian fiction.

01:53:00

It's pretty obvious. Well, let me close this in prayer, brother, and then we will wrap it up. Lord God, we asked you for grace at the beginning of our time together, and we rejoice because we have received it.

01:53:12

We pray that even as we've been edified in this conversation, meditating on you and the gospel and the way that you've worked that out in the life of the church and servants of the church, we pray that our viewers and our listeners will also be edified.

01:53:25

Lord, we're not doing this to serve ourselves or to serve any carnal purposes. We're doing this to serve the church, to see it built up into the fullness of the image of your son,

01:53:35

Jesus Christ. And so we pray that you'll bless us, that it'll bear much fruit, perhaps the extent of which we'll only be able to see one day in heaven.

01:53:44

But we ask all of this with hearts full of great expectation because of the many promises that you've given us in your word.

01:53:51

And so we pray this in the mighty, glorious, beautiful name of Jesus Christ. Amen. Amen.