Off The Wire by Matthew Wireman

January 25, 2024 The Good Life is The Virtuous Life

00:00 Introduction and Background

03:53 Challenging False Dichotomies

08:06 The Journey of Deconstructing Sectarianism

10:27 Moving from Rigid Beliefs to Charitable Living

16:12 Understanding Virtue Ethics

21:57 The Change in Definition of Freedom

28:05 The Role of Authority in Virtue Ethics

32:21 Virtue Ethics as a Way Forward for the Church

34:17 Addressing Deconstruction and Hypocrisy

37:41 Virtue Ethics and Political Engagement

43:07 Navigating the Political Landscape with Virtue Ethics

48:17 Closing and Prayer

Welcome to another episode of Off the Wire. And I am really excited to be able to have Lee C. Camp here in the interview space, at least through Zoom. And I was telling Lee earlier that I am thankful to be able to have him on the podcast because my wife and I have been avid listeners of his podcast, which is called No Small Endeavor. And we were listening to that. We've been listening to that the

past couple of years, but he has done a great job of helping us think through how to get rid of, or at least challenge false dichotomies. Because a lot of times, as we've talked about on Off the Wire, that there are a lot of times that we think this, not that. And a lot of times the answer is in the gray space or in the this and that. So the both and is what is helpful. And so I'm really grateful to have you on the podcast, Lee. Thank you for your time. And

And you are hailing from the great city of Nashville, Tennessee, where you're a professor, right? That's correct. Yeah. So can you tell us a little bit about how you got into that space and what you teach and everything like that? Sure. Yeah. Thank you, Matt. Pleasure to be with you and appreciate the invitation to be on your show. Yeah. So I live in Nashville. I've been in Nashville starting my 25th year of college teaching at Lipscomb University in Nashville. I teach theology and ethics. And, um,

So, you know, I got into that line of work by some, not terribly circuitous, but a little bit circuitous route. I, when I was in, started college, I intended to be something in science or technology, engineer, physicist, something like that, and started in engineering and then moved to computer science and actually did my undergrad in computer science.

But somewhere along the way, I had kind of a nagging sense of calling of some sort towards either pastoral work or teaching. And I finally kind of yielded to that sometime between my junior and senior year in college. And did you go to Lipscomb for college? I did. I did undergrad there. Yep. And, um, but while I was doing my computer science degree, I also did biblical studies and Greek along with a math minor. So, um, so those different minors gave me access to a lot of different stuff.

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So then I went on to seminary. In seminary, I kind of fell in love with the very notion of the history of ideas and intellectual history, and then the way theology fits into that. And that kind of piqued my interest in doing PhD work. So after a brief stint, my wife and I went to Nairobi for six months between seminary, and then I got into Notre Dame to do my graduate work and did my PhD there, was there for five years, and then came to Nashville and started teaching. So that's kind of a...

That's a quick snapshot of how I got into the world I'm in. Well, that's great because, I mean, obviously that's going to inform what you're doing right now. I mean, how do you move from an engineering type mind of being very definitive in things? And obviously theology and systematic theology works at trying to say, you know, Jesus is this, he's not that. So how do you move into the space where it could be for a lot of people?

very scary or very shaking to their foundations to say, okay, I'm going to move from these very hard lines of what is true and place those in areas of conviction to where someone can still be a Christian and disagree with me and still be a brother or sister in Christ. Can you walk us through that journey of where you're seeking now to help people demolish strongholds, namely, false dichotomies?

Yeah, that's a big and can be a complicated question, but it's a super important one. So just, I guess some of the things that are important in my own history or thinking about that is that I certainly was raised in a highly sectarian church context in which, you know, not only were.

was it that we were the only ones going to heaven, you know, but that we weren't so sure about the people sitting on the P with us either. And so, so that that was kind of the, the world I was raised in, as far as thinking about who's in and who's out. And then so it was, it was a long process of realizing that the world is big, that the Christian world is big, and that the world is big. And that there are a lot of ways that people have tried to

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be very serious about their Christian faith in ways that I originally had no idea about. And then with regard to the question like about an engineering mind, I think that there were certainly, I was laughing about this at church Sunday morning with kind of the social visiting time. And I don't remember how it came up, but, oh, was someone talking to me about,

someone mentioned a famous Saturday Night Live sketch from when I was a kid. And they said, Lee, you probably didn't get to watch Saturday Night Live, did you? And I said, well, actually, we actually weren't permitted to watch the Love Boat, but we could watch Saturday Night Live. And I said, but I never watched Saturday Night Live because I didn't get it. And it just didn't, I didn't understand it. And then I laughed and I said, I think it's because...

I was raised in such a literalist context and where we looked at everything so literally that that really does, you can't be very funny and you can't understand comedy and humor when you're that literalist. gotta explain the joke, you've lost the joke. That's right, right. And so think like satire and so like that. I just didn't get it. I didn't find it interesting. And so learning to have different ways of reading texts, of thinking about the world and all that kind of stuff, not only does it give you a better sense of humor, but it gives you a better sense of...

the beauty and the wonder and the mystery of life and the mystery of the universe and so forth. And so that then brings me full circle to the last thing I'll comment on at the moment about that is that I recently got to spend a day with a well -known writer, Parker Palmer, and he talks a lot about paradox. And he quotes the famous physicist, Niels Bohr, who Bohr once said, the opposite of a true fact,

is a falsehood. But the opposite of a profound truth may be another profound truth. And I just find that super helpful. Clearly there are things that are true and things that are false. I was born in 1967, that's true. And any other assertion to the contrary is false. But there are certain profound truth claims.

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that there may be, and it's important that Bohr was careful there. He didn't say the opposite of a profound truth is another profound truth, but that it may be another profound truth. And so this capacity to hold onto paradoxical claims, I think is terribly important and enriches our lives in numerous ways. Was there a certain author or certain school of thought that started to get you to go down a path of saying,

maybe I don't need to always question the person down the pews salvation. Like, were there certain, for my experience, it was reading the early church fathers who were going back and forth about the person of Jesus, right? And they're arguing about these very fundamental doctrines. And then I'm like, well, I guess that particular extension of that isn't as important as maybe the fundamental Orthodox beliefs. So that's my genesis of coming to a place of, okay,

I can listen to people who I strongly disagree with and I can learn something from them. Was there anybody, any author that you could direct somebody to that was helpful for you? For me, it began to be challenged. My sectarianism began to be challenged by a mentor of mine as an undergraduate. And he was actually the vice president of our college. And for whatever gracious, generous reason,

he began to connect with me and a good friend of mine and would visit with us once a week. And he would begin to ask us questions that we couldn't answer. And so it was just kind of basically asking us questions that stood in tension with what we had taken for granted and showing us this doesn't hold up necessarily as well as you might think it does. And he did it in a non -threatening sort of way. But then he upped that.

by one evening, I'll remember this night the rest of my life, he invited me to this ecumenical gathering in which we sat in a circle, there were probably 15, 20 people in this circle. And people were asked to talk about their life of late and the way their faith had been informed, challenged, growing in the last season of their life.

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And so that was really the first time I had ever sat and listened to devoted Christians who didn't share all of my convictions. And I remember sitting with this mentor at a break and me expressing, I've never gotten to hear people that are different than me talk about their faith this way. And clearly there's something to this faith that they have. And so that began a long process of kind of deconstructing my sectarianism and helping me have a much bigger...

more compelling vision of a Christian faith and practice. Yeah, no, that's great. Because even within my, in my own journey, and I don't know if you can, would resonate with this or not, but I found that I grew up in a more mainline Protestant denomination. And then I was converted in college and I became very adamant with beliefs and like, okay, I'm going to walk through this passage. I'm going to get the meaning of the text, which is there is one meaning.

and all those who don't agree with that. And so I became very rigid in my approach to not just theology, but others in life in general. And as I started looking at my own life, I said, the path that I'm on, I'm going to be a really bitter person in 30 years. If everybody is suspect and I'm not really being able to hear somebody say, oh, you talk about Jesus.

and I'm going to take you at your word as opposed to looking at them as though they're not really talking about the same Jesus. So that was part of my journey as well, is being challenged with what kind of person are you being charitable? Are you being loving? Are you being kind? Are you exhibiting the fruit of the Spirit? And quite frankly, I had good doctrine, but I didn't have good living. And would you find that like within your sectarian upbringing that that was a large...

or was that visible in how you exhibited your life and the people that you observed in church? Well, I think that there were certainly a lot of people in my childhood church community who did subscribe to a lot of sectarian presumptions, but they also had beautiful lives.

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along with it. But at the same time, I'll also say that even though sectarian presumptions, I think it is important to challenge some because, and I'm not a child psychologist and don't know a whole lot about child development, but one thing I do understand that I think is commonly presumed about growth in childhood,

is that when we're younger, we have a much more black and white vision of the world. And a lot of times we might not be able to see that there's a lot more nuance around us as children because all we have is the scales, lenses that see things in very black and white terms. And so I've learned to try not to presume that my interpretation of things that I had as a kid of my church context were actually in fact true. It was my childhood experience of that.

And so I can look back on some of those settings and realize that even, you know, there was this one preacher that I had during my adolescent years that was very sectarian and was highly legalistic and was really good about the shaming and the blaming and all that kind of stuff. But there were other preachers that I had even when I was younger and then preachers that came later that they weren't that way, you know, and they had a much more charitable.

gracious vision of the world and what their faith meant. And then there were people sitting in the pew that I'm sure a lot of times they were just trying to figure out what in the world do I do with this stuff that I'm hearing that I may or may not agree with, you know, and doing their best to try to live a life that they thought honored love of God and love of neighbor. But yeah, I mean, I can look back at some of those beautiful people that were in the pews around me and think those were wonderful human beings that I was really grateful to get to be in community with.

Even though sometimes I was having to struggle with some of the presumptions of teaching and so forth. I'll say too that, you know, there did come a time where I would feel a sort of sadness about the fact that, for example, after my first book came out when I was young, I was in my thirties, I guess, and my first book came out, you know, it was, it was another denomination that invited me to come back to my hometown and lecture on the book.

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and very few people from my home church showed up to be with me. And so there's sadness about that kind of reality is that because even the bare fact that I was lecturing at a competing denomination that a lot of folks wouldn't see as Christian meant that they would just wouldn't come hear me. And so there's genuine sadness about those facts and it definitely gets in you and affects you as you have to process what you do with all that kind of stuff.

Even as you're talking, I was thinking about in my own experience that I wonder how many times the life that I lived has actually changed multiple times. Meaning, as I look back on it 20 years down the road, I remember when I first started walking with Jesus that I used to say, well, I don't remember hearing the gospel. I never heard the gospel at the church I grew up in. And the fact of the matter is, more than likely I did. But I wasn't listening. I didn't have the ears. Right.

Spirit, right? And along with those same people, there were a lot of amazing people who were very charitable, who exhibited the fruit of the Spirit. But because I was so black and white in my thinking, I was unable to see that. I was looking at everybody through a certain lens that compromised literal interpretation of Scripture, and they didn't really believe the Bible was inerrant or any number of things. And because of that, everybody was written off. And I could really see the beauty.

that was there until 20 years later. Right. Yeah. So you, you, and I mentioned this at the beginning when we first started that you've given a lot of your energies and thinking to virtue, what is called virtue ethics. For folks that aren't familiar with that term, can you explain exactly what virtue ethics is and why that could be a way forward in not only how we think in nuance, but then also how we just,

quite frankly, live our lives. Can you talk some people through them? Yeah. Well, certainly when I do this with classes, I have to take two or three or four full lectures to try to begin to answer that question or those series of questions. But prior to the... So taking... I'll summarize briefly, for example, the philosopher Alistair McIntyre, who's one of the most prominent virtue ethicists, a Scottish American.

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philosophers who's still living. I think he's in his nineties now. But, you know, McIntyre would talk about how prior to the enlightenment, moral theory had three basic elements. It was humankind as it is or untutored human nature, and then humankind as it could be if it realizes its essence or if it realizes its telos, what it means to be a human. And then there are virtues or moral practices or habits, skills, dispositions.

that constitute a way of life that can help us realize that excellence. And so with Aristotle, the classic example was, one of the classic examples Aristotle used was think about a musician. You've got a master musician who epitomizes the essence of what it means to be an outstanding musician, an excellent musician. And then you have an untutored child who wants to be that master musician. Well, there are certain dispositions, skills, habits, practices.

that have to be put in place to move from one to the other. And so what McIntyre says is that's the way until the Enlightenment that we thought about morality, that morality was not some arbitrary capricious rules to squelch joy or to squelch pleasure. It was instead a way actually to be free. If you want to be free as a musician, you have to undergo all of this discipline, all of this work, all of these practices. And then you can have this incredible liberty.

to be free as a musician that's wonderful and masterful and delightful. And so similarly with the virtue traditions, we're asking what are those skills, habits and dispositions that are indispensable to being a human being? And apart from those, we will experience bondage or inability to be what we were created to be or what we were designed to be. And so for example, going back to Aristotle,

Aristotle would talk about there are four cardinal virtues and by cardinal that word is taken from the Latin cardo and cardo means hinge. And so these are four key practices that are the hinge on which your life will turn. And this is common sensical, right? So for Aristotle, it's the four cardinal virtues are courage, prudence, temperance, and justice. So courage, for example, if we don't have any courage and we're

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constantly living under the lash of cowardice. Clearly that's not going to be much of a life that's a life worth living. You know, it's just, it's just not, it's going to be a pretty sad life to have to live. Similarly with temperance, if we have no temperance with regard to pleasure, then we fall into another sort of bondage, right? Prudence or wisdom is the capacity to choose the best way to do the right thing. And you know, you can be super, um,

moral, if you will. But if you have no prudence about choosing the best way or the better way to practice these things, you're just going to be very difficult human being and probably cause a lot of harm. And justice for Aristotle, justice has to be one of the four cardinal virtues because we are social creatures. And, you know, no man is an island, the poets would say later. And because we live in community, then we have to be attending to justice. We have to be attending to relationships.

So somebody like Thomas Aquinas, the great Christian thinker in the 13th century, he picks that stuff up from Aristotle. He says, Aristotle is right about this. And he said, however, there are three so -called theological virtues or three infused virtues which we receive as a gift that are faith, hope, and love. And so apart from things like the four cardinal virtues plus the three theological virtues, faith, hope, and love, then we can't be the human beings that we were created to be.

And so that's the quick framework. The last quick note I'll give about that is that in following the Enlightenment, we completely reconstitute what freedom means. And this is so crucial, right? Because prior to the Enlightenment, in various virtue traditions, and so this could be going back to the Greeks, it could be the biblical tradition, it could be various medieval virtue traditions.

For all of them, freedom is found on the other side of discipline, going back to the musician, right? You have a freedom that is unbelievable as a musician. I know a lot of world -class musicians here in Nashville and see them do what they do. It's because they've given their lives to this and then they have a freedom to do things that mere mortals cannot do. It's just amazing to see what they can do and to hear and to watch them do what they do. So freedom is over here on the other side of discipline.

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So you're to have the unschooled person say, leave me alone. I want to be free. I want to be free to do what I want to do. And the ancients would have looked at that and said, that is not freedom. That is bondage. So it's crucial for us to see that after the Enlightenment, we have taken what we call freedom. The ancients would have said is not freedom. It's the opposite. It's slavery and it's bondage. And so this is a huge reality that I think, generally speaking, a lot of modern people are oblivious to.

And so once we began to reframe this, it allows this profound new vision for thinking about our lives, this profound new vision for thinking about why we care about things like morality, why we care about habits, why we care about giving attention to our lives, because we can then begin to say, okay, there is a possibility for me living a life that is beautiful and true and good.

but it means I got to give attention to it and it means I've got to do what I can. So, and then the last, I said that was the last thing, but let me do one more thing real quick. For Aquinas, as I noted, you know, you've got the things like the cardinal virtues and the cardinal virtues typically are seen both in the Greeks and like Aristotle and in the Christian tradition as virtues that we really can work on ourselves.

Whereas the theological versions are seen as a gift to us from God that we receive that we cannot manufacture ourselves. So this is kind of one way of thinking about faith and works. You know, there's their courage. Aristotle says one becomes courageous by doing courageous deeds. The only way you're going to become courageous is by practicing. And if you don't ever practice being courageous, you're going to be a coward. No, no getting around it. That's just the way life is. So there's no escaping the discomfort.

There's no escaping the fear. There's no escaping the anxiety that you have to go through to learn to practice courage, faith, hope and love. Well, these are gifts. We can still cultivate ourselves to be open to receive those gifts, but they are gifts. But again, this kind of gives us a frame to think about what can I be giving attention to? What ought I'd be giving attention to? So that I can really take seriously my own life and the life of those people around me, the life of my community to foster.

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some sort of vision of what it means to live a good life. I threw a lot at you there, Matt. No, it's wonderful. There's a couple things that stirred my thinking. First of all, do you think the change of definition of freedom at the Enlightenment and post -Enlightenment, is it lumped in with a throwing off of authority? Do people say, no, true freedom is you not telling me what to do, church, and authority figures. Is that?

What happens is very much related to authority for sure. Yeah. So following the enlightenment autonomy, the word autonomy becomes actually the marker for what it means to be a moral person. And so so there's this famous line from Immanuel Kant, one of the great modern enlightenment thinkers who says he quotes the slogan, have the courage to use your own reason.

And then he said, then his commentary on that is this is the motto of the enlightenment, right? Have the courage to use your own reason. And so autonomy, self -rule is seen as the marker of what it means to be a human being after the enlightenment. And then being under the authority of another is derogatively, pejoratively called heteronomy.

But if you go back to the virtue traditions, this reconfigures the notion of authority. So that, again, go back to the example of the musician. Now, what I need to do if I want to become a master at a given craft, such as a musician, I want to find some sort of...

authority who can actually help me become that. And I can sit over here and say, I'm just going to do this on my own. And what I do is I become a hack at it. And I might get pretty good at it, but not in the same ways I can get good at it. If I get the privilege of having rightful, I don't want to say rightful authority. I want to say healthy authority. I want to say fruitful authority.

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that can show me how to do this, right? It's not imposing. It's not an imposing authority, but it is a exemplary authority. It is an inviting authority. It is an authority that says, this is the way you do this. This is the way you hold the boat. This is the way you play a scale. This is the way you practice. This is the way you memorize. This is the way blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

And then I can become something I couldn't become otherwise. And so you're pointing to authority is crucial there. And so again, the point is not any authority is good. That's obviously patently false. And I would be super cautious of anybody that is going to have this un -nuanced celebration of authority. I'd kind of run from them, frankly. Yeah. Yeah.

But the notion of looking askance at every authority is just as problematic. It doesn't help us either. So this virtue tradition shows us a different way to think about authority and frame it up in a way that can be immensely fruitful and helpful for our lives. Yeah, because there is a bit of truth to having self -law in the sense of, by extension, the four virtues are you having governance over yourself, right? Yes, right.

don't do this in excess and know when to do this and not that. So it takes it in by extension, but makes it a law into itself. Always you need to be the authority, but then you have to ask, what is the objective lens, the objective truth in which we need to be moving towards to be able to say, okay, this is what is just and this is what is unjust. Right. Yeah. And with the Enlightenment, the autonomy typically focused not so much upon

character as much as it focused more upon rationality. And so, you know, the, in the enlightenment, the focus moves much more towards intellect and rationality as opposed to embodied habits and embodied practices. And so the virtue traditions are much, they're going to care about rationality, but they're also caring about rationality in relation to bodies and embodied habits and practices.

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But in the Enlightenment, we're just caring mostly about minds. And so autonomy is construed in terms of you use your own reason, you use your own mind. Whereas the ancients would have said, yes, of course, use your own mind, but you have to learn how to use your mind in conversation with under helpful, useful authority while you're also working on the ways in which you have a sort of rightful governance of your body and of your appetites.

Last thing, another thing that comes up with that, you pointing to that, it's super helpful, is another thing I like about the virtue traditions is that they'll talk about the use of the word continence. And of course, when we hear the word continence, we think about the capacity to control your bladder, right? But it's an interesting word to think about with regard to the moral life, because there's a sort of, it's interesting that,

Protestants and there's a Catholic writer, I'll think of his name here in a minute, who's written on the Cardinal Virtues and he's got this great book on leisure. But he talks about how in, and I can't remember if he calls that Protestants or not, but I'll call us out because I think it's important for us to be thinking about. A lot of times we will think that the harder something is for us to do, the more virtuous it is. And we'll look at Jesus and say, well,

And Jesus is calling us to this high standard, for example, of love of enemies and how hard that is to love our enemies. But what this philosopher points out is that that completely misconstrues what the virtue traditions are trying to get at. Because, you know, his point there is that who's more virtuous and who's more Christ -like, the person for whom we're greeting our teeth, thinking I have to love you, you SOB, and so I'm going to love you.

or the person who with some sort of grace can acknowledge the pain and can acknowledge the hurt and can acknowledge the sadness, but they still have a gracefulness about loving that other person. And so the notion of continence is I can restrain, I can hold it. But beyond that is the goal. And that is I'm not just holding it, continence. I actually have a freedom to be this kind of person.

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in a maturity that is beautiful and graceful. And I just love that vision, you know, and we're all always in progress towards that sort of vision of life, right? But to have that sort of vision is very compelling to me. Yeah, I mean, Jesus seems to put an emphasis on the actual act of obedience and it's not devoid of a heart, right? That's part of the problem is you don't just obey because you're supposed to, but obedience is an actual outworking of what's already taking place in your heart. Right.

Yeah. So the son who says, I'm not going to do it, but then he goes and does it is actually in a better pathway than the one who says, I'll do it, but never does it. Yeah. I can agree with you cognitively. And I think what you were saying reminds me of Jamie Smith's, uh, who, where he says that we oftentimes as Protestants are just, uh, heads on a stick, right? Just these cognitive being like, give me the truth, but the truth is not devoid of action. Like it's not really.

and it's not real obedience in what God's called us to do. So within that same vein of self -rule, and you look at our cultural landscape right now where everyone has a law unto themselves and I'm doing right by me, I'm living my truth and those kinds of things, how could virtue ethics be a way forward for the church to be able to speak into the life of our culture right now? Do you see there being some kind of bridge of what?

virtue ethics can afford us if we were to come back to reclaiming the action that is needed of courage, temperance, and so forth? I think it may be really the only way forward. And I think that the more I have studied it and the more I see it and envision it, the more I think that some sort of framework like this is the only way to be true to what the biblical vision of life is, of what the

biblical vision of what it means to be human is. And then I think that it gives us a lot of nuance to speak both to excesses on the American political right and excesses on the American political left. And so it's just, it's so nuanced and it's so holistic that I don't see how we can make a significant contribution.

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or do very compelling culture making, to use Andy Crouch's phrase, apart from some sort of vision of the moral life like this. Yeah, you know, I've often wondered with a lot of conversation about deconstruction of people's faith in the current cultural milieu that we're in right now, it seems that as people are deconstructing their faith, it isn't necessarily about

proves that they find more compelling as much as, oh, look at what happened again. Look at how that person is a hypocrite or that youth pastor would teach and then he abused that person. Can you draw some connections between that issue of deconstruction, people's problem with how people are living and how there might be a way forward in helping people?

reconstruct their faith as it's connected to virtue ethics.

I don't know that I've thought a whole lot about that quite in those terms. I definitely think that what a virtue type approach is going to do can help us undercut

the various forms of legalisms against which that fuels a lot of deconstruction. But we can look at certain legalisms and they finally just break, you know, like that just doesn't fly because it leads to so many problems and so much grossness. And so people finally just say, I'm done with that. If that's what this Christian faith is all about. Yeah.

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Whereas the virtue approach is going to ask a different set of questions and is not going to let us settle for any various forms of legalisms. For me, a legalism is a moral rule or some doctrinal rule that has lost sight of the end. So going back to the three -part thing, there's humankind as it is, humankind as it could be if we realize it's telos, and then...

rules or virtues or habits of movement that constitute moving from one to the other. Well, a legalism is just, it's insisting upon the rule, but without any vision of what we're trying to be and the kind of people that we're trying to be. And so by removing the goal and the telos, but insisting upon the rule, that is this deeply perverted way of thinking about the moral life. And so what happens is that rather than there being freedom over here,

We've lost the over here. And instead, what that rule does is it now restricts us and it's seen as a restriction of freedom and a restriction of our desires and a restriction of what it means to be human is the way that ends up feeding us a thing of what we have to do. And it's like that's a very non -compelling vision of what it means to be a human being or to be a Christian. And so, and again, I'll note very quickly that you can find legalists on the right,

and legalists on the left. And you can find deep shaming stuff on the right and deep shaming stuff on the left. And so it's a virtue approach will keep pushing us and saying, isn't there a different vision than that sharp legalism or that sharp shame based approach to living on the right or the left? That's a different sort of way forward. Yeah, you said that virtue ethics.

causes us to ask a different kind of question. And as we're looking at some of the political landscape, right, and we want to be Christ -like, what kind of questions ought we to be asking so that we aren't co -opted by the right or co -opted by the left, but we actually are following after Jesus? Are there certain kinds of questions we can be asking to right the ship, as it were, on both sides of that equation of, no, if you really love people, you'll do this. No, if you really love people, you'll do this.

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the other side of the aisle. As we think about the political landscape right now, just so bifurcated between you're a Christian, you can only be a Christian if you vote this way. And you hear a lot of people saying, Christians can't vote for this person and that person. What is a way forward? And as virtue ethics asks us a different middle way type question. Yeah. Well, I've got a...

a book that I published, unfortunately, that came out, it came out the week after the pandemic came down, which is really terrible timing on my part, you know, scheduling on my part, but I called Scandalous Witness and it's subtitled A Little Political Manifesto for Christians. And so what I'm doing in that book is I'm trying to make a case for how Christian faith could inform the way we engage the world and think about politics.

And I really love the book and I wish a lot of people would read it. And because I think it can make it one more time. It's scandalous faith, scandalous witness witness. Yeah. And then the subtitle is a little political manifesto for Christians. And so I try I try to take up that question that you raised at great length and try to ask if not, as far as books go, it's a it's a pretty.

not a terribly long book, but I think I've tried to set forward a number of propositions to think about how we could frame thinking about that. And one of the things that I keep coming back to in that is avoiding ideological commitments to American partisanship, which I want to rush to say that doesn't mean that we don't have opinions and strong ones about the things that are.

happening in our cultural setting. But that.

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It comes with an awareness that all political systems known to humankind fall short of the kingdom of God and that the kingdom of God is grounded in a sort of radical grace and a radical freedom that eschews violence, that eschews coercion, that eschews imposition of its will. And that the most radical, one of the most radical claims about God is a God of love.

which allows us to reject God and even kill God when made incarnate in Christ. And that this is the politic actually to which Jesus invites us to participate. Is this what God's way of being in the world? We're invited to that kind of politic. It's not a spirituality devoid of, and it's not even a spirituality that has political implications. It is itself a politic, right? So when we ask what does the word politic mean, traditionally it meant,

And going back to the Greeks, it's grounded in the word etymologically, polis, which is a word for city state. And so politics is the art of arranging the affairs of a community. And so politics classically asks questions about power. It asks questions about money. It asks questions about offenses. It asks questions about marriage. It asks questions about reconciliation. And like, well, who talks about that? Well, duh, you know, Jesus talks about that stuff all the time.

And so Jesus is calling us to an alternative politic that's deeply, that's radically grounded in the love of God and love of neighbor. And for us to say that Christianity is not political just means we don't have the slightest idea of what Christianity is. But we can't then run to say, well, then we have to identify, am I going to be X or Y? Because the facts are, is that...

There are going to be things about the right that I find, well, let me rephrase this. There are going to be things about classical American conservatism that I'm going to find to be true and helpful. And there are things about classical liberal politics in America that I'm going to find to be true and helpful.

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And if I can't look at the, I think it's imperative upon us to try to figure out what are those things that we find true and helpful and what are things about that that we find not true and not helpful and have what I would call an ad hoc approach. And so we're always looking for what's the issue right in front of us that the Christian faith has a lot to say about.

and then us try to find a way in a compelling, winsome way to bring the Christian tradition and Christian faith to bear upon whatever that issue is in front of us. So rather than thinking ideologically or partisan, we say what's something that we can genuinely bring that could be helpful to our community? Bring that forward. would that look like? What would that look like as it relates to this very thorny issue in your view?

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There's so many issues I'm trying to think of, which ones we want to stick our foot into. Yeah, either way, there's going to be a bear trap. I do think that's part of the fear, right? And the church is becoming very silent on things, or they're being too bombastic, and they don't sound a whole lot like Jesus to where he cuts both ways. And you're either going to be in this camp, and if you...

critique that camp, then you aren't really one of us. And I just find like there's such a vacuum right now of a prophetic voice in our culture because the church sounds so much like the culture, either right or left, as opposed to cutting it in half and saying, oh, the Pharisees don't like him, and those who are loving their licentious life don't love him either. And so how can the church find a way forward and how...

how could virtue ethics be that answer? I mean, I think, so let me just speak from my own context for a minute. If anyone's paying any attention to local state politics in the United States of America, everybody knows that Tennessee is crazy right now. And literally, people, one party walking out of the state house this week because of.

one member being silenced, which appears to be related to a personal political agenda. But a lot of this stuff goes to the immense frustration that we're experiencing about a refusal of a state house to take seriously common sense gun reform. And because of the horrific shooting that happened,

two miles from my house this spring, or six people were, seven people died, six were shot and the perpetrator was killed. And so what you have in this particular case is people who want to talk about Christianity and act as if they are purveyors of the traditional

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conservative values and want to ally themselves with Christianity and a lot of them claim to be Christian. And yet they refuse to take seriously any sort of, you know, it's a particular interpretation, I won't put it that way. It's a particular interpretation of the second amendment that then triumphs every sort of thing that the Christian witness has a lot to say about. Christian witness has a lot to say about violence. Christian witness has a lot to say.

about our notions of the right to protect ourselves or the right to use violence against other human beings. And so, you know, I think Christians are quite right to be standing up and saying, this is outlandish. And it appears to be a sort of bowing down to the power of the gun lobby, where if you're serious about Christian faith, you're going to have to quickly get uncomfortable.

readings of, you Russell Moore, who's no liberal, right? Russell Moore's editor at Christianity Today. But ironically is considered a liberal by folks that are very far right. Correct. Right. But he was on NPR a couple of weeks ago talking about how he was hearing from preachers.

And if I remember the story correctly, he said he'd heard it more than once. He was hearing from people who were saying that the preacher's saying that they're citing the Sermon on the Mount, turn the other cheek and love your enemies and stuff like that. And they're having people come up to them after the sermon and saying, where are you getting those liberal talking points? And they're saying Jesus. And then Russell said, what's interesting to know is that these preachers are reporting that the people...

that are pushing on that don't then apologize and say, oh, I'm sorry, I didn't know that that was Jesus. Instead, what they're going on to say is, well, that's weak and that's irrelevant to the world today. And it's like, oh, okay, well, here we see what's happening, right? Is that what purports to be Christian is not Christian. And it's not taking seriously Jesus. And so I think that...

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Yeah, we have a lot of sorts of things before us that require us to be savvy and courageous and prudent and attend to justice. And we'll throw some temperance and it's going to have to have a huge dose of faith, hope and love to maintain bearing such a witness. And unfortunately, I'm going to have to go. Yep. Yep. Yep. And I wanted to ask you just very quickly, if anybody wanted to follow...

your work and where you're going. Of course, you mentioned your book that I would love to give out to folks as they share this podcast with others. I've got several that I'm going to be buying and sending out to folks. But if they wanted to follow you, that your podcast is called No Small Endeavor. No Small Endeavor, yes. You can also find more about us on our website, nosmallendeavor .com. Sign up for our email list as well. And we're also now being distributed through PRX to public radio stations around the country. So if you're

people in your area wanted to call your local radio station and ask them to pick up No Small Endeavor on public radio. PRX could help them with that. Lee, could you do us the favor of just closing us in a brief prayer before you hop off? Sure thing. Gracious God, we give thanks for the gifts of this day and your mercies and your call to be your people. Grant us such grace, O Lord. In the name of Christ, we pray. Amen. Amen. Amen. Thank you so much. Thank you, Matt.

Thank you for listening! If you want to find out more about Matt and how you can get coached toward your better self, visit www.matthewwireman.com and check out his Instagram account @matt.wireman

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