All Things New

We continue our discussion about Herman Bavinck's book The Christian Family during this Third Wednesday Theology conversation. In this episode, we engage chapters five and six: The Family In the New Testament and Dangers Confronting the Family.

40 million Americans have stopped attending church in the past 25 years. This represents the largest concentrated change in church attendance in American history. In this episode, we discuss why people are leaving — and the main reason is far less dramatic than you might think.

Article: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/07/christian-church-communitiy-participation-drop/674843/

In a recent article published in Harper's magazine, Pepperdine professor Jason Blakely writes about the impact of scientism—the overextension of scientific authority. In this episode, we discuss his findings as well as the separation between hard science, social science, and political decision-making—and how conflating the three can (and did) damage public trust.

Article: https://harpers.org/archive/2023/08/doctors-orders-jason-blakely/

Part of being a joyful Christian is being a joyful human. So every once in a while, we take a break from theological and cultural topics to just talk about the things we're enjoying as human beings. In this episode, Bethany Gilbert leads the discussion with some “check-in” questions that explore the things we're reading, watching, and celebrating this summer.

For the last three years, we've been discussing the work of Herman Bavinck on our Third Wednesday Theology episodes. This week, we're privileged to have Bavinck's biographer, Dr. James Eglinton, join us for a special interview.

Eglinton is the Meldrum Senior Lecturer in Reformed Theology at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland. He is a lifelong Scotsman, raised in Inverness and holding degrees from Aberdeen, Glasgow, and Edinburgh. He's also given much of his time and effort to translating Bavinck's writing into English. In this wide-ranging conversation, we talk to Dr. Eglinton about his life, his work, and what makes Bavinck unique among modern theologians.

Links:
https://www.heritagebooks.org/products/bavinck-a-critical-biography-eglinton.html
https://www.crossway.org/books/christian-worldview-hcj/
https://www.crossway.org/books/personality-and-worldview-hcj/

Freedom. Liberty. Rights. Democracy. These are the stock terms of our American political lexicon, and they come to us from the tradition known as liberalism. Whether right, center, or left, we’re all liberals in our political philosophy. However, as Christians, we need to embrace both the good and the limits of liberalism.

In a recent essay at Mere Orthodoxy, Bob highlights the major problem with a view of freedom that places individual rights and autonomy at the center. What David Brooks calls "autonomy-based liberalism" is, in fact, the only kind of liberalism there is once we abandon a Judeo-Christian framework.

Articles:
https://mereorthodoxy.com/david-brooks-and-the-limits-of-liberalism
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2023/06/canada-legalized-medical-assisted-suicide-euthanasia-death-maid/673790/

Judith Butler is perhaps the most important academic professor you've never heard of. A book she wrote in 1990, asserting that sex and gender are both social constructs, has totally reshaped the way our culture thinks about gender. We're all downstream from Judith Butler, and we're worse off because of it.

If you're troubled by transgenderism, saddened to see the destruction of healthy bodies, and wondering how we got here... you need to be familiar with Judith Butler. And you need to understand how the Bible critiques and counteracts her paradigm of human sexuality.

https://www.firstthings.com/article/2023/05/judith-butlers-trouble

The Free Press reported in May 2023 that Critical Social Justice ideology is beginning to transform the mental health professions. If you doubt that claim, you'll want to listen to this episode as special guest Audrey Conrad narrates her journey into and out of a clinical master's program in marriage and family therapy. Since she was a woman of faith, her supervising professor told her she would be unable to celebrate LGBTQ identities and, therefore, was unwelcome in the profession. She now works as a biblical counselor on staff at her local church.If you're a Christian who cares about helping people, you'll want to ponder the questions raised in this episode. It turns out that seeing people as members of an identity category just isn't as helpful - or transformative - as seeing them as individual human beings made in the image of God.

https://www.thefp.com/p/how-therapists-became-social-justice-warriors

During this Third Wednesday Theology conversation, we continue in Herman Bavinck's book The Christian Family as he works his way through the Old Testament. In this episode, we discuss chapters three and four: The Family Among the Nations and The Family In Israel.

We're not talking about real porches; we're talking about metaphorical ones. Abraham Kuyper once spoke of Christendom as a "forecourt" that prepared people to enter into the church. In one of the last articles he wrote before his death, Tim Keller observed that since the forecourt of Christendom has mostly disappeared, Christians need to be intentional about building porches. In Keller's opinion, hospitality, apologetics, and forgiveness provide three good starting points.

In this episode, we discuss a yet-to-be-published article from Keller Center fellow James Eglinton that explores these ideas.