Cantus Firmus

I had the opportunity to speak with Josh Larsen about his thought-provoking new book Movies Are Prayers. Josh’s career began in the newspaper business, where he started out as a beat reporter for a weekly community newspaper and went on to become the film critic for the Chicago-based Sun-Times Media for more than 10 years.  In 2011, he joined the Christian media landscape as editor of Think Christian, and in 2012 he joined the long-running weekly podcast Filmspotting, aired on WBEZ in Chicago.

Music:

Music:

Notes:

In a recent podcast which I titled “Make Christianity Weak Again,” I talked about the approaches which the church in the United States has used in interacting with the political realm. The place where I landed is that the church should look at the state with suspicion, view its relationship to it as an uneasy one, and not seek to consolidate political power but to emphasize its spiritual power.

In this podcast, I want to give the biblical theory behind my practical application. Why should the church not seek to align itself with the state?

The biblical answer, in short, is that the world is in the hands of demonic forces and God’s kingdom is a spiritual one–not a physical one. In other words, there is a fundamental incompatibility between church and state. It is God’s will that both exist in this age, and both serve a divine purpose, but they are two very different kinds of things. We are called to pray for the peace of the state where we find ourselves and for its leaders–particularly that they would be persuaded to leave us alone–but not to conquer it for Christ.

Deuteronomy 32 provides the most basic outline of the notion that the nations are under the control of demonic forces. Verses 8-9 inform us that, “when the Most High gave to the nations their inheritance, when he divided mankind, he fixed the borders of the peoples according to the number of the sons of God. But the LORD’s portion is his people, Jacob his allotted heritage” (ESV).

The term “sons of God,” in Old Testament usage, refers to angels. In other words, God has placed spiritual forces over nations. The passage goes on to speak about God’s sovereignty to judge Israel and the nations, even those nations whom God’s angels have authority over, so this notion is not a challenge to God’s sovereignty.

Elsewhere in the Old Testament, we have more explicit testimony that the angels placed over the nations are corrupted beings which mislead the people under their authority. For instance, in Psalm 82. Asaph describes the scene. It is one of judgment over these corrupted angels:

The picture painted for us by scripture so far is of many nations with fallen angelic forces over them. This picture is confirmed in Daniel 10 where an angelic messenger claims to have been held back from reaching Daniel by a contrary angelic figure described as “the prince of the kingdom of Persia”:

These themes continue between the time of the Old Testament writings and the time of Jesus. Walter Wink, in the first volume of his book series Naming the Powers, gives a few examples.

In this episode my special guest Lenny Esposito and I talk about two movies made in the last year that deal with issues of God and the problem of evil and suffering–The Shack and Silence. We had a great discussion where we analyzed the underlying theologies of these films and the problem with “Christian movies.”

Author and speaker Lenny Esposito has been spreading convincing Christianity across the globe by stirring the hearts and minds of the lost and the church for twenty years. A pioneer in online apologetics with his popular www.ComeReason.org web site and podcast, Lenny has also contributed to books such as the award-winning Apologetics Study Bible for Students (B&H, 2010), A New Kind of Apologist (Harvest House, 2016), and True Reason: Confronting the Irrationality of the New Atheism (Kregel, 2014). His articles have appeared in the Los Angeles Times and the Southern California Christian Times.

Audio:

Music:

Keith Giles, author of Jesus Untangled: Crucifying Our Politics to Pledge Allegiance to the Lamb, was my guest to discuss two approaches that he sees commonly applied to reading scripture–a Jesus-Centric approach (where the words of Jesus are the standard) and a Flat Bible approach (where all scripture is equally authoritative and applicable for Christians). We had a great conversation with lots of friendly disagreement.

Music:

My guest “Tim the Atheist” and I discussed Jonathan Haidt’s The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided By Politics and Religion. The topics discussed ranged from sociobiology to polarization to psychopaths to atheistic versus Christian conceptions of morality. A very fun and thoughtful episode!

Music: