The Spiritual Formation of the Apologist

Revealed Apologetics

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All right, welcome back to another episode of Revealed Apologetics. I'm your host, Eli Ayala, and today

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I have another special guest. I've been reading his books for quite some time, but I just learned right now how to properly pronounce his name, and I hope

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I don't butcher it. But today I have with me Dr. Douglas Grothuis. Okay, I think that's it.

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He's gonna correct me again. He just told me, I hope I don't forget. Dr. Grothuis, who is a

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Christian apologist. He is a philosopher. He's written a number of books. If I can just give a quick little summary of who he is.

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Dr. Douglas Grothuis is a member of the Evangelical Theological Society. He's also a member of the

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Evangelical Philosophical Society and Society of Christian Philosophers, and he's authored a bunch of books, some of which include,

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I have kind of an old one here, but Unmasking the New Age. And if folks are interested in kinda how to do apologetics and engage the perspective of new age philosophy and perspective, you might wanna pick this up.

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I think you could pick it up on Amazon. It's a pretty good book. There's a nice little recommendation there by Dr.

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Walter Martin on the top. He says, this well -researched book convincingly articulates the spiritual and social dangers inherent in new age thinking.

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Dr. Walter Martin, of course, is the father of cult apologetics, and he has a lot of good things to say about this book.

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So Dr. Grothuis has written this one, and of course his classic dictionary, encyclopedia -size book here.

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He has authored the book Christian Apologetics. Now, this is my first time meeting

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Dr. Grothuis, so I don't know if he knows this, but we typically do presuppositional apologetics on this channel.

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However, folks who follow my channel know that I greatly appreciate a wide range of apologetic traditions, and while Dr.

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Grothuis probably doesn't associate himself with a kind of a Vantillian approach, there's a lot of helpful information in this book, and I've gone to this book many times as a wonderful resource.

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So folks, you might wanna pay attention to this book, and maybe I'll ask Dr. Grothuis a little bit about his new edition coming up.

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So I'm super excited. So without further ado, let me invite Dr. Douglas Grothuis, and I'm gonna call you

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Doug, is that okay? Very, very good. It's easier, too. All right, that's right. I'm like, how many times do I have to say his last name?

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You said it correctly on the intro, so good for you. Okay, well, thank you very much. Is there anything you'd wanna say by way of introduction that I did not mention that you'd like to tell the audience?

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Yes, I'd like to say that I've been a professor of philosophy at Denver Seminary since 1993, and that has been my primary place of ministry, but I really thrive interacting with unbelievers, or especially on college campuses, where I can engage students and help them think through their faith better.

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Excellent, excellent. And as I mentioned just a few moments ago, because people who watch my channel are interested in issues of methodology, and not for the purposes of dividing the camps, but what apologetic tradition do you associate yourself with?

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Well, I've gained a lot from Van Til and Gordon Clark and Greg Bonson and Carl F .H.

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Henry, who are all in a presuppositional camp. Their methods vary somewhat. Sure.

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But my way of doing apologetics is what is called the cumulative case method.

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This was used by E .G. Carnell and Gordon Lewis, although the way

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I use the method is very strong on natural theology. Sure. So basically, Christianity is a hypothesis to be verified through various lines of evidence from science, history, human experience, the wisdom of scripture itself, and so on.

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Would you say that a cumulative case approach is kind of like presuppositional -ish in the sense that it also asks the question, which worldview kind of makes sense out of the wide range of human experience?

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Exactly. Yeah. Yeah, I view it as a hypothesis verification. Okay. So I use a lot of negative apologetics, which

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I think presuppositionalists are quite good at. If you're a naturalist, you can't explain the validity of human reasoning.

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You can't explain the basis of morality. You basically can't explain anything on the basis of philosophical materialism.

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And Christianity explains all these things. God is the basis of morality. God gave us reason because he is the divine

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Logos. So you present Christianity as this worldview, and then you have various ways of testing a worldview.

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And Christianity comes out on top as opposed to all the other worldviews that you test according to various criteria.

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I give eight criteria in chapter three of my book, Christian Apologetics. So really,

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I think I have a lot in common with the presuppositionalists, and sometimes it depends how you state it.

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So the way you stated it, I would agree entirely. All right, wonderful. Now, your book here, which has been out for a while.

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10 years. I don't even remember when I bought this one. I've had this in my library for quite some time. And I understand,

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I was looking on Amazon and I saw the name of the book, your name under as the author, and the cover looked completely different.

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And when the cover's different, I'm like, oh, new edition's coming out. And I love updating books.

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And I know that new editions include some new content. You wanna take a few moments just to share what's going on with your edition?

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Sure, I'd be happy to. Well, the book came out in 2011, and I've been teaching through it at Denver Seminary and other places now for years.

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And as I taught through it, I kept thinking I left that out, or maybe I could revise this a little bit.

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It's only 752 pages as it is. So I figured I better beef it up a little bit for a second edition.

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Yeah, right. I mean, listen, apologetics can help you engage atheists, but this one, you could assault an atheist with this.

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Pretty violently, it's a good weapon. Yeah, you definitely can. Sometimes I call it the doorstop.

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But I've added, I think, six new chapters to it. Wow, okay. I have two chapters on the atonement, which

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I realized I did not say enough about at all. And the atonement is attacked sometimes today as being something like divine child abuse and all this ridiculous stuff.

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So I spent two real meaty chapters, worked very hard on that, explaining the atonement, defending the atonement against some of the classic attacks like Socinus and others, and have a chapter defending original monotheism, when

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Cordewin's done a lot of good work on that, have a chapter on doubt and skepticism and the hiddenness of God, and a chapter on the argument from beauty.

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Maybe even another chapter. I can't even remember all the things I added to it, but this time it'll probably be about 1 ,000 pages long, probably.

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Wow, that last part there, an argument from beauty, I think that's such an underdeveloped area. I'm very much looking forward to checking that out.

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Well, it is. And I realized that over the years, because usually when you think of a design argument, you think of something like the fine tuning of the universe or how our minds are designed to know the world by a rational

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God, but people are often very taken by beauty. They feel a sense of reverence before something extremely beautiful, whether it's in nature, whether it's a painting or a piece of music.

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I think they get kind of a signal of transcendence through that, to use a term from Peter Berger. But I've developed it out into an argument.

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And the conclusion is that it's more reasonable to believe there is a divine author and artist behind the world than either the naturalistic account or the pantheistic account.

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Well, very good. Well, when is that coming out? And I'll probably pre -order it, so. Well, it should be out in March.

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Wonderful. All right, excellent. So hopefully folks will go check that out. Again, I highly recommend Dr. Doug's book.

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I highly recommend his book. And I know that when we talk about the different competing apologetic methods, things can get pretty rabid on the internet, but let me tell you something.

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Ultimately speaking, okay? I mean, we might differ on various points of theology and apologetic methodology.

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Ultimately, we are on the same team and we do take different approaches. And I think all of us can learn from engaging the materials, some good work that's coming out from folks like you and others.

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And so I do highly recommend folks check that out. Yeah, if I could just add to that a little bit.

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Sure. It's important to figure out what your apologetic method is, but it's more important to do apologetics with unbelievers.

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I agree. So I have a whole chapter on apologetic method and then I apply it. And I tell my students over and over again that you really want to spend more time talking to unbelievers about the truth of Christianity and why they should become

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Christians than you do arguing with other believers over apologetic method. I agree.

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We need to get the word out to the streets. That's right. Presuppositionalist can do it.

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Evidentialist can do it. Cumulative case people can do it. The only people who can't do it are fideists because they don't think there is any argument they can use.

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And so I do argue definitely against fideism. Absolutely. All right, well, thank you very much for that.

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Well, let's jump right into the topic. Now, when I have read your work in the past, I've actually listened to many of your lectures.

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I don't know if you know this, but you have actually had, there's a whole series of your apologetics course that's available on Apologetics 315, which is another excellent resource for people to check out.

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There's just tons and tons of audio material and things to read there. And so when

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I think of you, I think of a Christian intellectual, someone who is, obviously you're educated, you have experience teaching, using apologetics and things like that.

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And when folks like myself or you or anyone else who does this sort of stuff regularly, we got our books in the background, people get the impression, man, we're always reading and studying.

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Well, my topic that I wanted to cover today was the importance of the spiritual formation of the apologist.

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How do you balance a life that has a great emphasis upon the intellectual side?

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And I don't wanna create a false dichotomy. I know that there's an intellectual foundation to our spiritual experience, but how do you balance the issue of study, thinking critically, and also being able to step back and say, read the

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Bible for edification as opposed to always reading it for coming up with a defense or some argument or something like that?

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Right. There's a lot to be said about that. I think of something C .S. Lewis said. He said, you can't just defend the faith all the time.

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You also have to enjoy being a Christian. So we want to remember who our

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Lord is and who we are in Him, that there's no condemnation for those in Christ Jesus, that there's this very strong language of the wonder of Christ in us, like in Ephesians 1 and 2.

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So we need to really sink, we need to let skin the truth of a gospel into our being.

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Now, all Christians are called to defend the gospel. We know that, 1 Peter 3 .15. Some of us spend more time at it than others.

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And I'm a professional philosopher. My degrees are in philosophy from secular schools.

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But I think the person that really helped me put things together well early on in my

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Christian life was one of the biggest influences on me, which was Francis Schaeffer. I read his book,

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The God Who Was There, in the fall of 1976. I was a new Christian at the time.

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And of course, Schaeffer was taking on the world of ideas, philosophers, liberal theologians, painters, musicians, poets, everybody fearlessly.

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But he had compassion. You could tell that he would say that when we are commending the

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Christian faith, that we're not in a game. And we're not out to score points with people.

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In fact, he said, if you're really winning an argument with a non -Christian and you're intimidating them or overwhelming them, just pull back because you're dealing with another human being.

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You're not here to bludgeon them into accepting what you believe.

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So I think early on, Schaeffer's emphasis on the intellect, but also on loving the person you're trying to convince has been extremely significant for me.

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And what we need to do is develop a good spirituality of the intellect that of course,

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Christ called us to love God with our heart, soul, strength, and mind, and to love our neighbors as ourselves.

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So there is such a thing as the intellectual love of God, the one true

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God. And I have found in my Christian life that intellectual satisfaction is a part of my sanctification.

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If I really see the truth and the power of the Christian perspective, and I can make that known to other people, and I can write about that, then

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I feel a sense of God's pleasure when I do that.

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So I think we need to realize that biblically we should be loving

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God with all of our being, not merely our emotions or our willpower or volition, but in terms of knowing who

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God is and knowing enough about our culture and enough about history to bring that to bear to the world.

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So I guess early on, I had this idea that study was an intellectual discipline.

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And Richard Foster says that in celebration of discipline. I don't agree with everything

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Richard Foster has said over the years, but I think a chapter on discipline is fairly good in celebration of discipline.

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And there's a lot in scripture about teachers needing to be studious, to really take seriously the life of the mind.

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And I have a couple of scriptures here that have really helped me on this. Here's one from 2

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Timothy 2, 24 through 26, Paul says to Timothy, and the

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Lord's servant must not be quarrelsome, but must be kind to everyone, able to teach, not resentful.

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Opponents must be gently instructed in the hope that God will grant them repentance, leading them to a knowledge of the truth and that they will come to their senses and escape from the trap of the devil who has taken them captive to do his will.

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Now, this is really interesting because in our social media driven society, there's so much combat, so much conflict.

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And Paul is assuming that this is serious. He says, opponents.

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So we do have intellectual opponents. Opponents though, must be gently instructed in the hope that God will grant them repentance.

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So he says, you're dealing with opponents and you're dealing with people who are entrapped by the devil, but you have to realize that it's

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God who grants them repentance and to gently instruct them and hope that they will be freed from their captivity to the devil and to lie.

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So it's fascinating that you have this highly combustible, combustible, dramatic situation, truth and error, life and death,

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Christ and Satan. Paul says, don't be quarrelsome, be gentle.

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But you're gentle with a real focus, like a laser to get to the truth of the matter.

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Now, how do you differentiate? Okay, here's the thing, because when we do apologetics, I mean, we live, as you said, in kind of this social media context, a lot of apologetics is happening on the internet.

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And so you have this kind of depersonalization of human interaction where folks will say things to people that they would never say face -to -face to someone.

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And then you have the other issue of the appropriateness of being a little more firm. How do you differentiate between the gentleness of scripture and a biblical firmness when you're engaging with an unbeliever?

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Let's say perhaps within the context of a debate or something like that, where people tend to be much more back and forth.

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When is it appropriate to kind of take that more stern approach? I think if you're in a formal debate, then everyone knows it's head -to -head.

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Okay. You know, it's A and non -A. So you're there to defend your views. And in that case, you can be very direct.

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And in any kind of debate, you wanna stick to the point. You wanna be logical, be factual, not get angry about anything.

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But if you see some master debater like William Lane Craig debate, he never gets angry, but he holds people to their statements.

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And when they dodge a point, he'll say, you never answered my argument as to, and then he says it again.

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Well, he's really good at reminding the opponent. He's the great master.

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So if you're in a formal debate situation, everyone expects you to go head -to -head.

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Sure. Now, a lot of apologetic interactions are more conversational, even online.

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So I think you wanna be gentle, but firm. And a good way to think about this would be

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Ephesians 4 .15 about speaking the truth in love. So if you speak the truth out of hostility or anger, it's still the truth, and God may still use it to convince someone.

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But it comes off often. It comes off many times as harsh. But if you have love without truth, then you're just kind of emoting on people.

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And that attitude is good. But really, what

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I like to say is you need to have truth in your mind, love in your heart, and fire in your bones.

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The fire in your bones is Christianity counts. The gospel matters. We have to bring this message to the world the best we possibly can.

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We need to be as smart and as knowledgeable and as winsome and courageous and creative and compassionate as we possibly can be.

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I like that, creative. You don't really hear that in terms of apologetics. We tend to think strict logic, you need to argue and refute.

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There's actually very creative ways we can go about doing that because we so strongly desire to get the truth across. So we might have to take different approaches with different people.

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Do you wanna follow up on that? I'm teaching two classes right now on C .S.

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Lewis, one at Colorado Christian University and one at my school, Denver Seminary. And of course, he's the great master of being creative in apologetics.

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He did the straightforward, more didactic apologetics, like in mere Christianity, miracles, the problem of pain.

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But of course, he also wrote the Screwtape Letters and Narnia and the Space Trilogy and so on.

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And he was a great master of using literature to illustrate Christian viewpoints. I can't touch him in those areas at all, but I think of different ways that I could get the point across in one way or another.

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I sometimes write dialogues, wrote a dialogue between Jean -Paul

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Sartre and Soren Kierkegaard, a fantasy dialogue. To make some apologetic points.

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And I got it published in a secular magazine called Philosophy Now, which is -

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Great, that's awesome. Yeah, so I'm always thinking about how can I get the Christian message into a venue where it's typically not heard, like with Philosophy Now or some other secular magazine or journal or a radio program or lecture.

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Paul said, I don't wanna bring the gospel where it's already been preached. I wanna break new ground. Sure. And I challenge people all the time is where could you bring

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Christianity where it typically is never heard? Because you may have an entry point that no one else has.

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Now, I teach global history and I often bring up Alexander the

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Great when I'm talking about how his conquests and exploits kind of created a context for the

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New Testament era. And so you think in terms of Alexander the Great's passion to just conquer the world and go beyond the boundaries,

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I see the Apostle Paul as kind of the Alexander the Great of the gospel.

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I mean, just having this vision. I mean, he wanted to go as far as Spain. Some people believe he might've gotten there to have this kind of all -encompassing vision of conquest for the kingdom of God.

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And I think that's something that we really, really much have to recapture in the church today, I think. Yeah, I think so.

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And a passage that encourages me quite a bit is in Ecclesiastes 11, one through six,

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I believe it is where the writer speaks of, in the old King James, it talks about cast your bread on the waters and see what comes back to you.

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And the idea of that is invest in many ventures because you're not sure which ones will pay off.

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It's probably more of a financial reference, but I think it applies to life in general and especially to apologetics because if you wanna bring the gospel where it's not typically heard or defend it in places where it's not usually taken seriously, then you have to risk a lot.

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You have to take a lot of chances, meaning you might present yourself as a possible writer of an article or a speaker, or you wanna do a debate and no one gets back to you or they say no or whatever it may be.

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I mean, right now I'm trying to get a trial log going with an atheist,

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I won't say who it is, an atheist writer who just came out with a book about wokeism and a friend of his who is a

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Christian and me. And so I don't know if this will gel or not, but I contacted the

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Christian who has a podcast with this fellow. And I said, could you ask him if we could do some kind of a trial log because we're all critical of wokeism, so to speak, or critical race theory.

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The one guy's an atheist, the other guy's a Christian, of course, I'm a Christian apologist. Maybe nothing will come of it.

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But basically I was reading this book and it's excellent about critical race theory, but it's terrible about Christianity.

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So I got fired up. I was kind of like Paul in 1816. He saw the idols of Athens and he was greatly distressed in spirit.

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So I'm listening to this book in the car thinking, oh, come on, you can't make that comparison.

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And so who knows, but that's bread thrown out on the water. So sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't.

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But let's break new ground, be creative, take some prudent risks and not just sit on our hands.

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I mean, we are accountable for what we know. More you know about scripture, apologetics, ways of communicating, the more accountable you are to use your knowledge to extend knowledge of God to a rebellious world.

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Very good. Well, let's get back to this issue of spiritual formation. When we talk about the intellect and spirituality or the heart and the head, do you think that's an appropriate dichotomy to set or you think that's kind of a misuse of terminology as I do understand that some people would associate the heart with the head, that the heart refers to the mind.

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So there's not really a true dichotomy there. They're really one and the same. What's your understanding on that?

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And then I have a follow -up question, but maybe you could address the heart and the head issue. Yes, I think biblically the heart is the center of the person that encompasses everything, the will, the feeling, the reasoning.

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There may be a few biblical passages in the New Testament where there's a bit of a distinction between heart and head, but I don't really wanna make much of a distinction.

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I always am concerned when people talk about, well, that speaks to the heart, but not to the head.

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I think truth is what should matter. Especially truth about the nature of God, the plan of salvation, what is a good society?

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What does it mean to be a godly citizen? Truth is what matters and truth should light your fire.

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Truth should give you fire in your bones to proclaim the gospel.

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So I don't like to make a big dichotomy between heart and mind.

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And we're to love God with heart, soul, strength, and mind. So that's the total package right there.

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And I think the truth of Christianity should ignite a passion within us.

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Now, some people have this problem. I mean, I'm thankful to the Lord. I've never had this problem. If you think that you're studying something very difficult and you have to invest hours and hours into it, then somehow this is not a spiritual discipline.

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Now, I think if you're studying in a way that fits in with your calling, then you could be studying anything.

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You could be studying Immanuel Kant, as I did in graduate school. And I'll tell you what, critique of pure reason doesn't get any harder than that.

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Yeah, that's right. Critique of pure reason, you have a chance of figuring it out. With Heidegger and being in time,

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I don't know that you ever figure that out. Anyway, I'm more of a Kant scholar, not a Heidegger scholar, but even then it was hard.

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And I was fearful sometimes about what grade I would get, but I never viewed it as something unspiritual because I was there to become a

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Christian philosopher to serve God. So years ago, one of my students said,

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I spent hours studying Hebrew, just hours and hours on this

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Hebrew text. And I don't know what kind of spirituality that is. I don't feel close to God.

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It was hard. And I asked him one question. I said, did you learn more about the truth of the

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Bible by studying that Hebrew text? And he said, yes. I said, well, there it is. That was spiritual. You learn more truth from God.

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So it doesn't matter if you had, Holy Spirit goosebumps or not. Right, that's right.

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You hit it on the nail. A lot of people associate spiritual activity with a feeling as opposed to just acquiring, knowing

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Him better. Yeah, excellent. Okay, so my follow -up question is kind of getting back to this spiritual formation.

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We talk about how there needs to be a balance, but it's kind of like when someone says, hey, if you wanna be a stronger

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Christian, you need to pray more and read your Bible. And that's kind of true, but it's very ambiguous.

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What does that look like? So when we speak of having balance in the Christian life, especially within the life of the apologist, someone who's engaged in this activity very heavily, what does it look like to strike that balance?

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What should a Christian apologist spiritual, I know our spiritual life isn't personal only, but there is a personal element.

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What should that look like? Or what does it look like for you in the midst of your field, all of the thinking and the writing you're doing?

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What does it look like personally for you as to how you stay closely connected with God, whether it's through scripture or prayer?

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Yeah. Well, one thing that's absolutely vital is that you're involved with a local community of believers, a church that is a

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Bible believing church that teaches and preaches the scripture that takes worship seriously, that takes outreach seriously.

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And sadly, a lot of Christians think that they can be

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Christians without deep involvement with the church. Sure. And that's not a biblical view.

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We're part of the body of Christ. We're part of the temple of God, the family of God. In fact, the chapter

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I forgot to mention in my revised apologetics book is a chapter called In Defense of the

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Church. Because I realized teaching my own book for years that I said almost nothing about the church.

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And that is a fault of a lot of Protestant apologetics books. Catholic apologetics books usually don't make that mistake.

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But I added this chapter where I go from Christology to ecclesiology.

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And it's pretty simple. Jesus said, the gates of hell will not prevail against the church.

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So if Jesus is God incarnate, if he died for our sins, he rose from the dead, and he said, the gates of hell will not prevail against the church, then you better take the church awfully seriously.

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That's right. And I think sometimes evangelicals are not as serious about involvement with the church and having regular fellowship and communion and so on.

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And then certainly the knowledge of scripture is vital. And I came up as a

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Christian before the internet was available to most people. And so I'd learned the

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Bible by reading the Bible, reading a book and studying it and then teaching it and preaching it.

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And so I think it's significant to study the Bible as a book that it's not just a collection of data points that you can find on your phone or find on your computer, but it's an unfolding story and different types of literature and so on.

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And I've been a Christian now for over 45 years. And I continue to study scripture, ponder it, teach it, read books about scripture, consider how the

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Bible relates to contemporary issues. I've been thinking a lot about questions of race and justice because I'm writing a book on that right now.

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So there's fellowship and personal Bible study, a life of prayer, learning how to pray the

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Psalms is very significant. The Psalms is our prayer book and it expresses every human emotion, joy, gratitude, fear, anger, sadness, but all those emotions are lifted up to God.

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So that's very important as well. All right, well, thank you for that. Just a real quick reminder for those who are listening in.

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I am speaking with Dr. Douglas Grothuis. Grothuis, I got it now, right? There we go.

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Douglas Grothuis. And we're talking about the issue of the spiritual formation of the apologist.

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If you have a question, we'll take some time toward the back end of this episode. Just as I always say, preface your question with the word question so that I can differentiate between the question and the generic comments in the comment section.

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All right, well, I have a question now being a little bit more specific. If you don't mind sharing.

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So you need to be a part of a congregation, a healthy church, right? You wanna engage in Bible reading, prayer, these sorts of things.

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Do you mind kind of unpacking what a day for you looks like in terms of what you do to upkeep your spiritual health?

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Like when you wake up in the morning, are you spending a significant amount in scriptures? What do you read? What does that whole process look like for you in a day?

33:04

Yeah, well, it varies for me. One thing I do when I get up is I typically say out loud or to myself, this is the day the

33:13

Lord has made. Let us rejoice and be glad in it to try to set my mind in the right place.

33:21

Now, I'm not a morning person. I'm kind of a grouchy person. So I'd say, this is the day the

33:27

Lord has made. Let us rejoice. It's kind of an act of the will. Okay. Some mornings

33:33

I will start out by reading scripture and so on. Some days I just get right to work, working really hard on a book right now.

33:42

But my wife and I try to read a chapter of scripture after dinner and talk about it.

33:50

We pray before meals, we pray before we go to bed. And then other times, especially if I'm gonna be teaching a passage of scripture,

33:58

I preached on Psalm 11 recently. And so I really got back into that and meditated on it and thought quite a bit about the passage.

34:10

And if I'm writing something and I think of a scripture, then I'll go back to it and really try to ponder it and see if I'm understanding it correctly.

34:19

Now, there've been other times in my life where I've been much more regular in terms of Bible reading and so on.

34:28

And I think that's a good thing. I'm not saying it's optional, but when I was a younger Christian, I needed to learn a whole lot more because I didn't know much of anything.

34:38

Now I continue to grow and learn certainly. And there are books that I go back to over and over again, like Francis Schaeffer's book,

34:50

True Spirituality. Read that as a young Christian. I've reread that many times. I often take quotes from that book and put that into lecture outlines and into my own books.

35:00

What was the name of that book? Yes, it's called True Spirituality by Francis Schaeffer.

35:07

Yeah, that is extremely good. It's strong reform theology with respect to the

35:13

Christian life. So what is justification? What is sanctification? What is clarification? What has

35:19

Christ done for us? What does it mean to deny yourself, take up your cross daily and follow

35:24

Christ? He has a chapter in that called the centrality of death. And he says that death is central in scripture.

35:32

The sacrifices have to be dead. Christ had to die to atone for our sin. And we have to die to ourselves to follow

35:40

Christ. He said this 50 years ago, but we live in a generation that doesn't say no to anything.

35:48

Anything that you want that you can have, you just get it, you deserve it. And Schaeffer points out that even things that are not sinful, we often need to say no to given what our calling is.

36:04

So he doesn't pull any punches in that book. And he was a man who knew how to say no to the flesh and had a sharp focus of ministry and reaching the lost.

36:16

Schaeffer you're referring to? Francis Schaeffer, yes. What I appreciate about Schaeffer, he does come from a kind of a presuppositional perspective and some might debate the kind of the details as to whether he was

36:31

Vantillian or whatever. But what I really do appreciate is that Schaeffer doesn't just pick apart or focus on one little thing.

36:39

He is very broad and all encompassing. So he kind of helps you to put things within a perspective and show how

36:45

Christian truth applies to a wide range of things. So if folks who like presuppositional apologetics and that sort of thing, they tend to be stuck in just Vantill and Bonson.

36:56

Schaeffer is an excellent reader. He gives a lot of great things to say despite various disagreements that folks might have with other aspects of his thoughts.

37:04

So thank you for that recommendation. Yeah, let me read a quote from Schaeffer that I love.

37:09

This is from his short but very profound book called Art and the Bible. This is the last part of the book.

37:16

It might be the last paragraph. He says, no work of art is more important than the Christian's own life.

37:22

And every Christian is called upon to be an artist in this sense. He may have no gift of writing, no gift of composing or singing, but each man has the gift of creativity in terms of the way he lives his life.

37:36

In this sense, the Christian's life is to be an artwork. The Christian's life is to be a thing of truth and also a thing of beauty in the midst of a lost and despairing world.

37:48

That's good. Yeah, and Schaeffer ranged over so many topics, philosophy, theology, painting, culture, cinema.

38:00

And he died in 1984. So if we wanna continue to do that work of cultural apologetics, understand the culture we're in and the themes and the issues that are going on and then try to find redemptive parts of culture and critique the sinful parts of culture, we have to update what he did.

38:20

If you read The God Who Was There, that came out in 1968. And you get the basic skills of cultural analysis, worldview critique in that book.

38:30

But now we've got to apply it to things that didn't even exist at that time. Hip hop and whatever else is out there, the new films.

38:39

But you see, you're able to flex the muscle of the intellectual side of Christianity in applying it to these areas that you would never have imagined.

38:50

That's the beauty of Christianity, I think, is that while it is rigid in that it has specific doctrines, there is this beautiful flexibility for which it can be applied to all of the messiness of life.

39:02

And I think that's an excellent observation there. Now, when we talk about spiritual formation and we highlight the importance of going to the scriptures, being part of a healthy congregation, reading your

39:15

Bible, prayer, all these sorts of things. And folks, they'll come away watching this video, say, you know what, maybe

39:20

I need to read my Bible more. Maybe I need to put that apologetics book down and really be in the scriptures for a little bit to kind of clear my mind.

39:27

There's something that folks really struggle with. I know I've struggled with this in the past and maybe you've experienced this as well. It's this issue of going through that dry spell where you just don't feel like you're connecting with God in the way that you think you should be because you're reading the scriptures or whatever.

39:43

As part of a spiritual formation issue, when we're engaging in these spiritual activities, how do we survive the dry spells?

39:51

How do we survive that moment of kind of feeling so disconnected with God, even when we're picking up our

39:57

Bible, even when we kneel down to pray? Yeah, I think you have to come back to the fact that Christianity is true, however we feel about it.

40:06

And one of my books is called, Walking Through Twilight, A Wife's Illness, A Philosopher's Lament. And that is about my first wife's struggle with dementia.

40:18

The really horrible times that we went through. I mean, it's not just spiritually dry.

40:23

It feels like you're in a storm and you're going to capsize.

40:28

You're not gonna even get through it. So there's so much sorrow and dread and so many things.

40:35

And let me give you one example. Becky and I were driving to go out to eat and she was lamenting her fate.

40:44

She had a rare form of dementia. She was actually testably a genius.

40:50

She was in Mensa and she had written two books, poet, wonderful, very gifted woman.

40:58

And she was losing all these abilities from this disease. And this was at a time we could still go out to eat.

41:06

And she said, she was just so sad. And I said, well, Becky, one day we're promised the new heavens and the new earth and we'll be dancing and singing.

41:15

There'll be no more tears, no more curse. And she said, but is it really true? And Rebecca had been a follower of Jesus ever since she was a little girl, but dementia really wreaks havoc with your brain, with your emotions and everything.

41:30

And I said something that kind of surprised me and it may sound weird when I first say it. I said,

41:36

Becky, do you think I'm smart? She said, yes. I said, do you remember that big apologetics book that I wrote?

41:43

I said, you edited every word of that book. You know how good the arguments are for Christianity.

41:50

So I assure you that what we believe is true. She said, yes.

41:56

Yeah, that was not the last time she struggled. Sure. Basically we knew too much to go back.

42:04

So dryness, I mean, dryness would have been an improvement for some of the things that we had to go through. So I was asked by one of my students years ago who had been going through some struggle and he knew that I was suffering a lot trying to help

42:19

Becky. And he said, how do you keep your drive through all this? You know, how do you keep going?

42:25

And I said, basically to him, what I just said to you that, well, what we believe is true and it's the most important truth that you could ever imagine.

42:34

So I want to serve God even when I'm not very happy with him, you know?

42:40

It's not ideal spirituality, but you know, there were times and I thought, God, can't you make this a little bit easier?

42:48

Can you lighten the load a bit to get us through this? And he did, but I couldn't say, okay, I may have had a few seasons like this, but I could not say for very long, you know, you're not worth serving.

43:00

It was like, you're worth serving even if my life is horrible. If I've got something I can still give,

43:05

I can teach, I can write, I can preach, I can mentor somebody. You know, basically what

43:11

I go to so often is John 6 where Jesus said, unless you eat my body and drink my blood, you can't be my disciple.

43:20

And a lot of people left at that point. And he said to Peter, Peter, will you also lead me?

43:26

And Peter said, to whom else can we go? You have the words of eternal life. So what am

43:34

I going to do? Become a Buddhist or a Baha 'i or an Urduist or a Gnostic, you know, there's no other option.

43:41

And I would think of Christ giving himself on the cross. That shows the love of God better than anything we could ever imagine.

43:50

And it's followed by the resurrection. And I know enough that there's solid historical evidence for the resurrection of Jesus.

43:57

So you're saying that to survive spiritual dry moments is to rely upon the truth of the

44:06

Christian faith, not so much on the feeling of the dryness. Right, and don't stop going to church.

44:15

Don't stop interacting with other Christians. I know some people that go through not only dry times, but really seasons of doubt.

44:24

And they'll think, well, I don't think I should go to church because I'm not sure if I believe completely or am

44:31

I being a hypocrite? And I say, no, you continue to associate with Christians, continue to offer yourself to God, and God can work through your church and through your friends.

44:43

Sure. But don't start to stiff arm God. You know, I have not been able to do that. Some people, when they get really angry or really sad, they'll just sort of, in a sense, try to ignore

44:56

God. And I've never been able to do that. Even if I'm angry with God, I mean,

45:03

I know he's right here. So the ignoring part or trying to do something else doesn't really last very long.

45:10

Man, that's so encouraging. Cause that's a big one. I just spoke to a youth group and youth groups tend to be very kind of overly emotional.

45:20

They got a lot of the music and a lot of the things that they do to keep the young people engaged.

45:26

And I made that same point. And I think it very much resonated with them. It's that, you know, a young person asked the question, what do we do when we feel as though God is far away?

45:37

And I told them that you need to make a distinction between the feeling of being abandoned and the truth of actually being abandoned.

45:44

If the Bible is true, we are not abandoned even if we feel abandoned. Exactly, that's what I say in my book.

45:50

Maybe I got it from, maybe it was kind of a - You steal it from me? I probably stole it from you. That's right.

45:56

Feel free, take what you want. Frank Turk has a book, Stealing from God. I'll write a book, Stealing from Grotesque.

46:01

Stealing from Grotesque, yeah. That's awesome. Now, you did make mention of the fact that you are not a morning person, okay?

46:10

But perhaps you could make a comment on the practice of Jesus getting up early in the morning when it was still dark.

46:18

Maybe you don't wake up early yourself unless you have to, but do you think you could comment on the value of waking up early kind of like Jesus as a way of kind of maybe taking a more extreme route and spending a long time with God?

46:33

What is the value in doing something like that? Well, I have a very good friend. He's a young scholar. He's adjunct at my school.

46:40

Okay. And he has the discipline of getting up at 5 a .m. every morning. And he gets an incredible amount of work done in a lot of different areas.

46:49

The way that I tend to view it is how much total work can you do in a day to pace yourself well?

46:58

So I tend to think of it more in terms of how much do you sleep? How well do you sleep? I do lots of work in the evening.

47:05

Okay. Especially writing. I mean, I'm doing some teaching now. I write a lot after dinner.

47:13

Sometimes I'll spend three, four hours writing after dinner. A lot of people are out of energy by that time and they do all their work.

47:20

They're crazy. They get up at 5 a .m. and they get all this work done. So, you know, there's certainly that scripture in the example of Jesus.

47:28

The scripture, one of my least favorite, early in the morning while I rise up and seek faith. I'll do that if I have to.

47:35

But I think the real issue is what is your total productivity? And some of us are really night people.

47:42

We're almost nocturnal. And we get a lot of work done in the evening. But probably we'd rather stay up late.

47:50

In fact, when my wife and I were in Alaska this summer and the log home that we have up there was about 1130 at night.

48:00

And I was up in the loft typing away. And my wife, Kathleen said, honey, what are you doing?

48:07

I said, I'm working on my book. She said, do you think you're manic? And I said, yes. And I just kept writing.

48:15

I drag them away from the keyboard and make them go to bed. So that's where I get my work done.

48:21

So typically, I don't get a lot of work done in the mornings, but I do get quite a bit of work done the rest of the day.

48:27

I think it's the issue of finding your productivity zone. Of course, that requires discipline.

48:35

If it's 10 o 'clock at night and I know I can write another hour and a half and I'm tired, my eyes are dry and my back hurts.

48:43

I'm an old guy. I'm 64. So I'm sitting here for three, four, five hours. It takes some discipline to keep going.

48:49

Sure, sure. I think it was Dr. Craig who said, cause I think he was, someone asked him a question related to this.

48:57

And I think he was talking about the importance of getting to bed early. And so he said that if you sleep, if you sleep with the, or if you're up with the owls all night, you can't soar with the eagles by day.

49:09

Kind of highlighting the importance of waking up early. But I kind of like what, I mean, the way he said it sounded pretty cool, but actually

49:16

I'm resonating very much with what you're saying. Well, okay, compare his career to mine. So follow his advice.

49:23

He's not normal. He's a different breed of human or superhuman.

49:30

Right, right. I actually had the pleasure of interviewing Kevin Harris, who is the interviewer of Dr.

49:38

Craig. And I asked him about his kind of his study habits and he described Dr. Craig as a machine.

49:44

He takes his health very seriously. He's very intentional about his schedule. And I think that's something very difficult for Christians in general to do in terms of just, not to the extent that Dr.

49:55

Craig does or yourself, but it's just very hard to develop a discipline for setting time aside for these sorts of activities.

50:05

Well, one thing that I can speak to is be very careful not to waste your time.

50:11

We have so many opportunities to waste time in our culture, to divert ourselves from the things that really matter.

50:20

Blaise Pascal wrote about this in the 1670s.

50:25

And he talked about how we can divert ourselves from the realities of life in any number of ways.

50:31

And this is before radio, television, the internet. So I often go back to something like Psalm 90, where Moses says, in verse 12, teach us to number our days that we may gain a heart of wisdom.

50:45

Or Ephesians 5, 16, redeem the time for the days are evil. So we only have a certain amount of time on this earth to serve the

50:53

Lord. And we all need recreation. We need a Sabbath. And I'm a big advocate of a literal

51:01

Sabbath, one day a week where you try to rest and not expend a lot of energy.

51:08

But it's so easy to waste time, especially on the internet, especially with entertainment.

51:14

And I read this very profound book many years ago by Neil Postman called

51:19

Amusing Ourselves to Death. And I still recommend everybody read it. I think the title, Amusing Ourselves to Death, the idea was that everything is televised amusement.

51:29

He was writing this in 1985. How much more can we amuse ourselves into oblivion now?

51:36

Sure. So I have to ask - We have these things. We have these things. Exactly, right.

51:42

I wrote a book many years ago. It was one of the first books about the internet called The Soul in Cyberspace.

51:49

It sold about seven copies. But there are a lot of books now that have come out about not letting the internet rule your life.

51:59

You have to be very careful because it's so immersive, so involving. So I think if you get that sensibility that my time matters,

52:07

I only have a certain amount of time. Lord, teach me to number our days that I may gain a heart of wisdom.

52:14

Redeem the time. Some people like Bill Craig or my colleague,

52:20

Craig Blomberg, who's a fantastic New Testament scholar, are really regimented, really disciplined.

52:27

They've got it all figured out. I'm half Italian, I'm sorry. I just operate in a different zone than these guys do.

52:35

I don't look Italian, but I'm just not that organized and I'm a night owl.

52:41

So somehow I get the work done. What I tell people is, people ask me sometimes, well, how do you write these books?

52:47

And I say, well, I get upset about something and about a year later, a book comes out. That's about, or eight years later, if it's my big apologetics book.

52:55

Yeah, yeah. Well, thank you so much for that. That's excellent. I wanna kind of transition now to kind of take some questions and read some comments here.

53:03

Dylan says, this is just a comment. He says, Doug is talking about something that's been on my mind a lot. I've been so distracted lately and not using my time wisely.

53:11

Lord, forgive me. Yeah, I think a lot of people can resonate with that. The amount of time,

53:18

I think, I don't know the statistics, but the amount of time we spend scrolling through our phones, you kind of add that up at the end of the year and you're like, oh my goodness,

53:25

I could have wrote like 10 books with the amount of time it took for me to scroll through Facebook. So yeah, thank you for that comment,

53:33

Dylan. I think a lot of us can resonate with that. All right, let's see. Here's another comment by Scott Terry.

53:40

He says, Dr. G mentioned Winford, is it Cordon, Cordon?

53:46

Cordowan. He said that he met him. He was speaking about evangelical mysticism.

53:52

He's not just a great scholar, but a dear Christian gentleman. Thank you for that. Yeah, very cool. Yeah, Win is a tremendous scholar.

53:58

He's done a lot of work on comparative religion. He's got a book called Neighboring Faiths that I've used as a textbook for years.

54:06

And he's got a book also on original monotheism, which is terrific.

54:12

And I relied on that book quite a bit in my chapter on original monotheism. And he's done quite a bit of writing on religious experience, world religion, many topics.

54:24

Yeah, he has helped me so much over the years. Excellent. Here's a question by Jose Rivera.

54:31

He says, does Dr. Grotice have any works or refer anything on dealing with suffering?

54:37

Anything related to what he has just described with his late wife? Yes, well,

54:42

I have my book, which is a memoir, which is called Walking Through Twilight. Another memoir that's very well known is by C .S.

54:50

Lewis called A Grief Observed. Now, you have discrete books about suffering.

54:56

They're not really stories of individuals living through suffering. There's a book by Glenn Pemberton, who was an

55:05

Old Testament scholar, called Hurting with God. And it's about the

55:10

Psalms of Lament. And Dr. Pemberton has had a lot of struggle and suffering himself.

55:16

He has chronic pain and so on. That's very good, Hurting with God.

55:23

And then Michael Card has two books out on lament. One is called

55:29

A Sacred Sorrow. That's quite good. And another one I think is called

55:36

The Hiddenness of God or something like that. And he has a recording out on that too, about The Hiddenness of God.

55:42

I'm not coming up with the exact title. There are a lot out there. Excellent.

55:49

Yeah. All right, well, thank you for that. Scott Terry has a question here. He says, has Dr. G thought about Francis Schaeffer's book,

55:56

Christian Manifesto, an application to contemporary debates about social justice? I certainly have.

56:03

I read that book when it first came out 40 years ago. Oh, wow. I probably read it four or five times.

56:10

I've listened to it three or four times. And I wish it was on Kindle because I'm finding that when

56:16

I write, it's so easy to capture text on Kindle and put it into my writing.

56:22

And many publishers now are allowing Kindle citations. So in fact, just today, I was thinking about that.

56:28

I was thinking about some of his comments about the founding of the United States. Because when we talk about critical race theory and social justice concerns, some people say that America was actually based on slavery.

56:41

And so it's rotten to the core. So we have to fundamentally transform it, tear it down because it's systemically evil and racist and so on.

56:50

And I don't believe that. And I will be writing on that in my book,

56:55

Fire in the Streets. So I go back to Schaeffer over and over again, but he has so much good to say about authoritarianism in politics, about the nature of America, what it means to be an

57:08

American citizen. And I think the man was so balanced. Like he realized what was great about America and how it needs to be conserved, but he said, we should never wrap the

57:19

Bible in the flag. We've got to keep the Bible as central and the Bible above us.

57:25

Be patriotic Americans, but you don't wrap the Bible in the flag. I think a lot of people in America need to hear that.

57:34

Yeah. All right. Here's a good question. You did talk about the need to be creative.

57:40

And so Jose has a question. He says, what being creative entail contextualizing the gospel? So not so much changing the gospel, but contextualizing it, being flexible in terms of how to apply it.

57:50

Is that? I think so. That word is really loaded. And in a good sense, it simply means make the gospel understandable to whatever audience you are addressing.

58:02

We always need to do that. Now, I don't want to talk about making the gospel relevant because it is relevant.

58:08

Okay. It speaks to our human condition as sinners before a holy God, as creatures made in God's image, but needing redemption.

58:17

So we don't sort of spice up the gospel to make it interesting. It is true and cogent.

58:26

But there are so many ways of getting the gospel or getting key elements of the

58:33

Christian worldview into places where they would not normally be heard.

58:40

An excellent book on this is by Oz Guinness called Fool's Talk. Oh yeah. I don't know if you've interviewed

58:47

Dr. Guinness, but he is one of our great Christian statesmen apologists.

58:54

Is he still, I mean, I don't know how old he is. He's late seventies.

59:00

He's still alive and kicking. I just saw him a year and a half ago. And we knelt back and forth. He's still around.

59:05

You should try to interview him. Yeah. Okay. You know what? Maybe I will. Yeah. But he's got a book out called

59:12

Fool's Talk, which is called Rediscovering the Lost Art of Christian Persuasion.

59:18

Okay. He says, evangelicals tend to be good at reaching people who are pretty close to the gospel.

59:25

So we're not so good at people who are a million miles away. We just have no interest in Christianity.

59:32

Don't care about God, but they need Christ as well. And many of those people come to Christ.

59:38

So he's talking about creative ways of interacting, asking questions, maybe using indirect communication, ways of engaging people like the prophets did in scripture where they'll surprise people like Nathan did with David.

59:55

You remember Nathan tells this story and it indicts David. Yeah. I get the chills when I read that man.

01:00:00

Empower the man, you know? That's right. So we want to bring the gospel and bring the

01:00:08

Christian worldview into every context we possibly can, but we don't want to deform it in the process.

01:00:16

We don't want to make it worldly to reach the world and it's not the gospel anymore. Sure. And I also want to encourage people.

01:00:24

I know apologetics is very important online. Some people say the internet is the new mission field and I get that.

01:00:30

But I do think it's really important that we do sometimes step away from the laptop or the phone and really interact with like real people.

01:00:38

You know, there are unbelievers all around. And so I think apologists today need to have a little bit more courage, step away from the anonymity of the laptop and really just talk to people face to face.

01:00:51

And it's amazing to see what God will do when you're actually able to see a living, warm -blooded person in front of you and really interact and speak into their lives.

01:00:59

Oh yeah, and especially, of course we're hampered to some extent with COVID, but especially bringing people into your home, showing hospitality, maybe having a meal with someone, having a discussion group in your home where people are free to ask questions, raise objections, and they feel the warmth of your space.

01:01:25

Sure. And so the environment, I talk to my students about this a lot, the environment of apologetics is just as important as the content.

01:01:34

So if you're in a situation that's very distracting, there are screens everywhere and music blaring everywhere, you could have a great apologetic conversation.

01:01:42

And I have, you know, I have, but it's better, I think, and more conducive to deep thinking and good questions and answers if you're in a quieter setting.

01:01:54

So for example, I work in Littleton, Colorado in downtown

01:02:00

Littleton. Old Littleton has two places that I like to go. One of them is more noisy, but a lot of people

01:02:09

I know go there and I know the people that work there. And the other place is really quiet. One of them is actually a pub, that's a little noisier.

01:02:18

And the other one is a tea shop, which is quiet. So I think sometimes what would be the best place to talk with someone?

01:02:26

And I had a tremendous apologetic conversation in the pub several years ago with a man who was very close to coming to Christ.

01:02:35

And a friend of mine and I were talking with him and eventually he did come to Christ. But be ready, as Paul says, be instant in season and out of season.

01:02:45

That's right. But hospitality, inviting people, listening to people is very significant.

01:02:51

So I have an assignment. Can we keep going? Are we over time? No, I mean,

01:02:57

I don't have a cap time. I just, it just depends on the person. So if you wanna keep going for a couple of minutes,

01:03:03

I have a question I wanted to ask that's unrelated. I wanted to sneak it in before we finished, but feel free, we're not going over any boundaries here.

01:03:11

Okay. And we don't have to take a commercial break to hear a word from our sponsor, which is - That's right. The beauty of YouTube, there's no commercials here.

01:03:18

We're good to go. Okay, so just one thing. I have taught a class for many years at Denver Seminary on apologetics.

01:03:25

And every time I teach it, I have an assignment called an apologetic interaction. And the students need to interview a non -Christian and ask them several questions about their worldview.

01:03:36

And then I say, you don't have to interact with them apologetically, but you can. And if you get the opening, definitely do it.

01:03:43

But the purpose is to listen to someone else's worldview, write up a report, critique the worldview apologetically, and talk about how you acted as a

01:03:55

Christian. Were you angry? Were you impatient? Were you loving? So, do a gut check on yourself.

01:04:02

And what I tell my students is, try to find an environment that's conducive to a deep discussion.

01:04:12

Yeah. You can have apologetic discussions anywhere, but it's better,

01:04:18

I think, if there were not a whole lot of distractions and where you can make eye contact and really have time to respond.

01:04:26

You're not battling all the other stimuli out there. Apologetic encounters don't always have to happen on accident.

01:04:32

I mean, if you have a relationship with someone, you could set something up and be like, hey, I'd love to have you over for dinner and talk about that thing we talked about,

01:04:39

Jesus or the Bible or that question you had. Why don't you come over for some dinner or something like that? Apologetics doesn't always happen when you're kind of out and about and you get into a conversation with someone and they're always have to be ready.

01:04:52

Sometimes you have a lot of control over these specific conversations. And I think we should be really intentional about having them.

01:04:58

Yeah, and here's something that's really important for the spirituality of the apologist is ask the Lord to bring you non -Christians to talk to.

01:05:05

That's right. Ask him to bring you people that are interested or even if they're not interested, just people who will listen to you.

01:05:13

Sure. Whatever it is, whatever the medium is. I'm a writer, so I'm always trying to get the word out into these different venues.

01:05:21

I'm a speaker, so if I can speak in any kind of a non -Christian setting, I just eat it up.

01:05:26

I do it as much as I can. And I'm trying to be sensitive and ask the Lord, well, okay,

01:05:33

I've got 45 years of study. I mean, look at these books. This is like 100th of all my books. So look at all these books and all the stuff in here.

01:05:39

My wife says my head is heavy because there's so much knowledge in here or so many facts in here, right?

01:05:46

So I have a big responsibility to make as much of what I know known to other people as I possibly can.

01:05:53

And sometimes, I just have so much fire in my bones. I just thought I want more and more and more opportunities, but right now

01:06:01

I've got to really channel a lot of that into writing. But for example, I gave a talk

01:06:06

Sunday at Colorado School of Mines for two different campus ministries,

01:06:12

Crew and Ratio Christi. And the topic they gave me was evangelism and the problem of evil.

01:06:19

So I think we had, oh, I don't know, 50, 60 people there. Excellent questions, stayed afterwards for half an hour.

01:06:27

You know, that's just my sweet spot. I absolutely love doing that. But anybody, whether you're a professional philosopher, apologist, author, ask the

01:06:35

Lord to bring people into your life who will listen to your story and listen to the gospel.

01:06:42

And be sensitive to the fact that God answers those prayers. I know people who say, Lord, Lord, please send people in my path.

01:06:48

And then, you know, you wake up Saturday morning, you hear that knock on the door. It's like, it's Jehovah's Witness, lock the door. It's like, no, no, that's not how it works.

01:06:55

You know, you have to look for those opportunities. But not yet. That's right, that's right. We have to be willing to respond to the answers to the prayers, yeah.

01:07:04

All right, well, I have one more question for you, but just real quick, just wanna remind folks, I'm talking to Dr. Douglas Groteis.

01:07:10

He's a member of the Evangelical Theological Society, Evangelical Philosophical Society, the Society of Christian Philosophers.

01:07:16

He's an author of a number of books, of which his most popular, I think, is Christian Apologetics, this one that we mentioned before.

01:07:23

He's coming out with another edition. And he's also a professor of philosophy at Denver Seminary. Well, I have a question.

01:07:33

Would you be interested in some undefined, we don't have to set a date, would you be interested in coming back on to kind of talk a little bit about the argument from beauty?

01:07:43

I'd be very interested to do an episode. I'd love to connect with you again. Yeah, I'd love to, and then we can tie in a theology of culture, cultural creation by Christians, creating beauty, recognizing beauty.

01:07:55

I'd love to do that. Excellent, well, before we get off, maybe we can nail a general timeframe.

01:08:01

That'd be excellent. Now, you do mention that you like to write. Now, I love to write, but I am a perfectionist.

01:08:09

And it's one of the banes of writers where I feel like it has to come out a certain way. I'll write a paragraph and be like, oh, that's terrible.

01:08:16

How do you, what is your process for writing a book? How do you collect your material?

01:08:21

And how does what is up here get onto the computer screen? And how do you overcome that itching feeling of like, oh, it's just not perfect.

01:08:31

That's one of the biggest struggles I have with writing. Well, my story is that I wrote my first book at the urging of my first wife,

01:08:40

Rebecca. Okay. Who was an excellent editor as well as author. And she said,

01:08:46

Doug, you've been thinking about this book about the new age movement, which you held up at the beginning, which is interesting.

01:08:51

It was my first book. It came out in 1986. Wow. And that's been my best -selling book actually for many years.

01:08:58

I was three. Well, I was 29. So she said,

01:09:04

Doug, you need to write this book and I'll help you edit it. So up until the big book,

01:09:10

Christian Apologetics, Rebecca edited every word of all my books and she made me such a better writer.

01:09:18

And then when she got ill with dementia, she couldn't edit my work anymore. I wondered, well, how do

01:09:24

I write without her? And I did. And I asked the

01:09:29

Lord to guide me and to give me her sensibility. What would

01:09:35

Becky have done with this paragraph? Would she have cut a word out? Sure. And it was kind of funny because I wrote this book called

01:09:43

Philosophy in Seven Sentences, which is an introduction to philosophy. And she was not able to edit it.

01:09:49

It came out in 2016. And I read part of it to her and she just rolled her eyes.

01:09:56

And I said, too cutesy? Yeah. It's like, I would have edited that out so quickly.

01:10:05

But at this point in my ministry, I have to work not to write because I write constantly.

01:10:14

So on Sundays, you know, it's hard for me not to sit down and write for a few hours. So at this point in my life, ideas come to me very quickly.

01:10:23

Of course, there's so much to research all the time, but I'm always, especially if I'm thinking about a book,

01:10:28

I'm just thinking constantly about this idea goes here and I can include this idea here.

01:10:35

And it comes out pretty quickly with books you work with editors.

01:10:42

So my book, Fire in the Streets, will be with Salem Books. And that's a new publisher for me.

01:10:50

So I'll work with that editor. I don't know exactly how it'll work out. But let's put it this way, it's a discipline.

01:10:56

So I teach a class at Denver Seminary called Writing for Publication that I've done for many, many years.

01:11:04

And we talk about what good writing is, mastering the grammar, the style, the discipline, the documentation.

01:11:13

But one key thing about writing is simply to do it. Make yourself do it.

01:11:18

And when I started writing and publishing was before word processors. So we had to get it right on typewriters.

01:11:26

That's right. I was scared. I never use a typewriter. I'd be too scared to do that. Once I mess up,

01:11:31

I'll be like, no. It's a very different sensibility. Yeah. And mistakes cost you a lot more with a typewriter on a keyboard.

01:11:41

It's so easy. You can erase anything, move anything around. Of course, sometimes you can erase big chunks of things accidentally.

01:11:48

Sure. With a typewriter, you'd have to lose two pages to lose all that material. Sure. A couple of weeks ago,

01:11:54

I lost 2 ,500 words. Just, I still don't know how I did it. It was on a previous keyboard, which

01:12:01

I threw across the room. And I now have a new keyboard that will not disobey me like the previous one.

01:12:07

So you took your anger out on the keyboard? I did. It still works, but I don't think

01:12:14

I'll be using it anymore. Okay. I have about three keyboards, so. So how long does it usually, so if you're looking at a blank document now and you're about to write something, how long does it usually take you to kind of fill a page?

01:12:26

Or does it, or when I read a paragraph of Dr. Groteis' book, is that a paragraph that you just typed up really quickly?

01:12:34

Or was that kind of a long process of making sure it's just right? What does that look like for you?

01:12:41

Well, you held up my first book and I wrote more slowly earlier on. I write more quickly now.

01:12:48

But, and that book, half of that book was written on a typewriter and half of it was written on a sort of prehistoric dinosaur computer called a

01:12:57

K -Pro, which are not made anymore. It really depends. I tend to write fairly quickly.

01:13:04

Okay. And I've been writing so much for so long that I don't labor over things too much.

01:13:10

But, you know, I'm an old guy and I've been writing for 40 years, over 40 years. Sure. So people who are more starting out,

01:13:18

I'd say discipline yourself. For one thing, make yourself write grammatically.

01:13:24

Write complete sentences. Know the difference between a semicolon and a colon and a comma and when to use a dash and when to use parentheses.

01:13:34

So get elements of style by Strunk and White and just memorize it and follow their instructions and get the form down and then write what you need to write within that form.

01:13:45

Don't use any unnecessary words. Be succinct, be clear. And writing philosophy and apologetics does not have to be ponderous.

01:13:57

Somebody, this is kind of strange, but somebody got my big apologetics book and she told her husband that she read 50 pages of it and it was painful, was painful.

01:14:12

And I said, well, learning can be painful, but I assure you that my apologetics book is not as painful as a lot of other ones.

01:14:21

This is true. You know, it's - I was just, actually before you came on, I was flipping through it.

01:14:27

I mean, folks, don't be intimidated by the thickness of this book. It is remarkably clear and easy to follow, which

01:14:34

I thought was actually really fascinating. I was thinking, I was like, man, I wish I could write like this. I mean, he says it so simply,

01:14:39

I'm all over the place. And so I think that's actually a virtue of your book. I think you're able to simplify a lot of these difficult - these difficult concepts.

01:14:47

That's the goal. Yeah, and you can write sophisticated arguments in very clear and compelling and interesting ways, but it doesn't happen overnight.

01:14:57

It takes time. And some people are more gifted than others, but the whole point of apologetics is to get the truth out to the world, to do so in the most pleasing, truth -conducive, persuasive way that you possibly can.

01:15:13

Sure, and to make a roundabout connection with spiritual formation, because, you know, we want to make sure we end on topic.

01:15:19

There is something to spiritual formation and writing. When you are writing, maybe writing out a prayer, writing something that's devotional, those are ways that we can kind of channel our spiritual activities.

01:15:34

You know, maybe we have trouble kind of just praying silent, maybe just writing something out. Those are creative ways to engage in various spiritual formation.

01:15:43

Something like journaling. Sure. A lot of people grow a lot spiritually through journaling.

01:15:48

I did more of that when I was a younger man, but that's a way of expressing your ideas and your experience in words before the

01:15:57

Lord. So you're developing your writing, and you're also airing your being before the

01:16:02

Lord by putting it into words. And sometimes you don't even know exactly what you think about something until you write it or teach it.

01:16:11

So it helps clarify your own soul when you do that sometimes. Very good. Well, once again, this is

01:16:17

Dr. Douglas Groteis, PhD philosopher, apologist, and author of especially this book, which he is coming out with a second edition.

01:16:27

Do we have a date on the second edition for folks who might be interested? It should be March of 2022. Okay, all right.

01:16:33

I think you might even be able to pre -order it on Amazon now. All right, excellent. Well, folks can definitely check that out.

01:16:39

Dr. Groteis, I am very grateful for your time, and thank you so much for everything.

01:16:44

This was super helpful. And, you know, as I asked the questions, and I know people who are watching benefit from what you're saying, but it's definitely edifying for myself as well.

01:16:52

So thank you so much. Thank you. All right, well, everyone else who has been listening and leaving comments, thank you so much for listening.

01:16:59

I'll see you guys soon. November 2nd, I'll be having Anthony Rogers, who is an apologist, predominantly in the area of Islam and the defense of the

01:17:10

Trinity. I'll be having him on to talk about the philosophical problem of the one and the many and how Christianity solves that problem with its doctrine of the

01:17:19

Trinity. If you are into philosophy and presuppositionalism, you definitely won't wanna miss that episode.

01:17:24

Well, that's it for this episode. Thank you so much, guys. Take care, God bless, and until next time.