The Conquering Truth

Read this question carefully: How do you know that you know what you think you know? That’s the question that epistemology asks in a nutshell. While everyone doesn’t spend the time to stop and think about the it, anyone who claims to know anything is already living out some answer to that question. And we want to make the argument that in this day and age of confusion over practically everything – what is a boy?  what is a girl? how early can I murder a baby in the womb and it be good and acceptable in the eyes of the law? – it’s important to at least think about it a little bit. You don’t need to go and read long works of philosophy, and you don’t even need to be particularly intelligent (at least one or two of us on the panel wouldn’t be able to discuss this at all if that was a prerequisite). What is required, is a willingness to read scripture and to think about what it says. No more, no less.

We discuss Good Stewardship, Conservation, and Environmentalism and  where they overlap

Many leaders in our culture tell us every day how we need to save the planet. What if this is more than wise stewardship, and is actually the message of a new religion? We compare the environmentalist movement with some widely held markers of what defines a religion.

Both emotion and reason play important roles in our lives, so much so that anyone who tries to eliminate either of them is working against God’s fundamental design. But while both are important, our God is a God of order and he has framed the world in such a way that emotion and reason each have their proper place. This issue is important because we live in a day and age of constant emotional manipulation. From news, education, and entertainment, to work, relationships, and even Christian worship, it is hard to find a place in our lives where we are not being encouraged to feel strong emotions in an attempt to influence our thinking. But God made the world so that he would be worshiped and as it says in scripture, God is Spirit, and those who worship Him must worship in spirit and truth.

Since the beginning of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, there’s been a lot of talk about how evil Russia is, to the point where it can seem like they are unquestionably the most evil nation on earth. But, we’d like to push back against that idea a little bit - not for the purpose of arguing that Russia is righteous because they clearly are not, but instead, to ask, “Are we judging Russia by a different standard than the one we use to judge our own nation’s past military actions?” We’ve posted a previous episode (linked below) where we talked about war and the Christian concept of Just War theory, and one of the things that is really important to keep in mind is that once a nation steps away from God’s word and its standards for how it should act, it becomes very easy for that nation to let fear and national interests justify any actions needed to satisfy itself.

In this episode, we discuss how easy it is to hold other nations to a higher standard than the one to which we hold the United States. We talk about how national identity and patriotism can cloud our judgment and cause us to overlook our own injustices, and we walk through a number of recent and not-so-recent historical examples of American military actions, some of which are frighteningly similar to Russia’s attack on Ukraine.

We do want to be very clear here: there are many people who take a great delight in claiming that everything about the United States and its history is evil. That is not our goal in any way. America has been blessed in so many ways by God’s providence and by the influence of Godly men and women who have shaped our nation. But it is so easy to go from “We have been blessed by God” to “We are a city set upon a hill and are a light to the world that can do no wrong”. God says that to whom much has been given, much will be required, and America has been given much. We need to make sure that we do not judge others more harshly than we judge ourselves. If we do so, we should certainly expect our pride to invite the judgment of God. Please join us as we consider these important issues.

Episodes Referenced:

Is the Israel Gaza War Just?

#IsAmericaGood

If you ask ten different people what art is, you’re going to get ten different answers. We believe that there are fundamental objective principles that govern how we should think about and approach the subject. We also believe that as men have grown in their rebellion against God, they have twisted the very definition of art in a futile attempt to glorify themselves rather than their Creator.

No one likes to feel shame. And while we understand that shame is in the world because of the existence of sin, God has framed the world in such a way that shame can be used for good or for evil. The dictionary defines shame as “a painful feeling of humiliation or distress caused by the consciousness of wrong or foolish behavior”, but what happens when the church fails to proclaim the truth and allows the world to declare that good is evil and wisdom is foolishness? The result is a culture that labors to destigmatize evil and instead heaps shame on those who do good.

In this episode, we discuss the nature of shame, its connection to fear and service, and how the world attempts to use shame to silence those who oppose their sin. We discuss the importance of a proper view of shame in the church and society and what happens when that is absent, and we talk about how we can help to give our children a proper sense of shame for their sin.

If you were going to create a society from scratch, and you wanted it to have the best laws possible, how would you go about coming up with those laws? And what role would the Law of God play in determining what those laws should be? Would you just make the Old Testament laws the law of the land? Or would you skip those Old Testament laws that you feel no longer make sense and that perhaps don’t fit in our modern world?

This week President Biden delivered his State of the Union address to Congress and the nation, outlining his view of where the nation is and where he wants to lead it. And while it’s often easier to ignore what was said on the grounds that you’ll almost certainly disagree with it, we think it’s worth taking the time to think about what was actually said, what it really means, and how it is intended to shape public policy and discourse. Politicians are famous for lying to the people, but just as often, they say exactly what they are going to try to do and why. In this episode, we walk through a number of video excerpts from the President’s speech. We discuss some of the ways he attempts to influence the nation to “feel” rather than think about the Russian invasion of Ukraine, we talk about his plan to fight inflation, his focus on environmental justice, as well as his efforts to get more women back into the workforce and end with his support for children seeking gender reassignment. Through all of this, our goal, as always, is to encourage Christians to see the world through the lens of scripture, to take every thought captive, and to apply God’s word to every area of life, that God might be glorified in all things.

If you are like most parents, history is one of the more intimidating subjects to teach your children. This is partly because most of us don't know that much about history ourselves. But it's more than that; history is so vast and deep that we're often not sure where to start or how deep we should go. We worry about what books to read and how to avoid bias and wrong worldviews. And while we certainly can't resolve all of these problems, our goal in this episode is to try to lay down a framework and give some tips on how to approach the subject. We discuss the joys and complexities of teaching and learning history from a Christian perspective. We talk about the importance of history, and ways to communicate that importance to our children. We also discuss how to find good books to use and how to identify and avoid bad ones. At the end of the episode, we make specific book and resource recommendations.