Darrell Bock: 

Welcome to the Table Podcast where we discuss issues of God and culture to show the relevance of theology to everyday life. And our topic today is a completely new one. We've never worked in this area before. It is the area of criminal justice. And no, I am not under arrest and I'm not headed to jail. But our guest is Matthew Martens, who's a lawyer, author, and former federal prosecutor and author of a book entitled Reforming Criminal Justice: A Christian Proposal, and just the title itself might raise all kinds of questions for people. Can you put the criminal justice system and Christian together in a way that makes sense? So Matthew, welcome to The Table and we're looking forward to this conversation. 

Matthew Martens: 

Well, thanks so much for having me on. 

Darrell Bock: 

And let me begin by asking you, basically it's the standard question I ask everyone when they're on for the first time. What's a nice guy like you doing any gig like this? How in the world did you get involved with the criminal justice system and then attach it to a theological understanding of the space? 

Matthew Martens: 

Well, I've been a lawyer for almost 28, or more than 28 years, and most of that time I've been practicing criminal law. I, as you mentioned in the intro, was a federal prosecutor in Charlotte, North Carolina and also in Washington DC for about nine years. I've been a criminal defense lawyer for longer than that, both before and after being a prosecutor. And interestingly enough, while I was working as a prosecutor, I attended Dallas Seminary Extension campus in Atlanta as a part-time student from 2007 to 2010 and got a Master of Arts in Biblical Studies. And that just made me think more theologically, helped me think more theologically and put that together with the work I do. 

Darrell Bock: 

Okay, so you've been in this area for quite some time. I'm going to quote open with some statistics that are in your book that when I read it, I had to read it like three times and say, did I get that right? And here they are. 40% of the murders in the United States go unsolved. And since 2000, 1,039 men and women have been exonerated of murders for which they were convicted. Both of those sound problematic to me. Am I missing something? 

Matthew Martens: 

They are both problematic, and that's probably why I started the book with them because I wanted to first convince people that there's something worth fixing before I spent 350 pages explaining what needed to be fixed and how it should be fixed. And you quote the statistic about 40%, some years it's 50%, it runs between 40 and 50% of murders are not solved. So somewhere between half and 60% to state conversely of murderers are never caught. 

And so that should be concerning to everyone. If you're concerned about justice, we should want not half of murderers to be wandering about 40 to 50% of murderers wandering about free to commit crimes again and not experiencing justice for the crimes that they did commit. And then at the same time, we're running a system where we're convicting a thousand people of murder who didn't commit murder. So when I talk about exonerations, I'm not talking about people who later got off because of legal technicalities or because of some legal error. In their case, I'm talking about people we convicted who didn't do it. 

Darrell Bock: 

And who we discovered later were actually innocent as opposed to guilty. Correct? 

Matthew Martens: 

Correct. Factually innocent meaning did not commit the crime and yet at times spend 10, 20, 30, 40 years in prison for murders they didn't commit. And we've identified a thousand of those, as I mentioned, since 2000. So yes, I think that there's a real concern with how the system operates in both directions, both in under convicting and in over convicting. 

Darrell Bock: 

The interesting thing here on the over conviction is that that's probably a fraction of the total of what might be going on. 

Matthew Martens: 

Well, certainly there's been modeling that's been done to say, okay, if we know this number of wrongful convictions occurred and we know it takes X number of years to figure out those errors, usually about 15 years and given them a lot of crimes, haven't aged 15 years or a number of convictions haven't aged that long, we can model statistically how many convictions are probably occurring that were not legitimate. And so there's been efforts to do that and it's certainly significantly larger. It may be twice as large. The numbers that we know may be only, in other words, half of the wrongful convictions that actually exist. 

Darrell Bock: 

Okay. So your goal was, in the book I take it, was to tell people, one, how the criminal justice system works, how to think about it, some of the elements that are involved, some of the principles that are involved in the way we've structured it, and then ask and raise questions both from within a legal standpoint, but also from a theological standpoint how we should think about criminal justice. So tell us where you started. What do you think people, this is a horrible question to ask you to start off with, but what do you think people need to know that's really important that they probably don't know in thinking about criminal justice? 

Matthew Martens: 

Well, I'm writing primarily to Christians, though not solely to Christians. I've had any number of unbelievers read my book and write me about it and come to my talks and ask questions about it. But I'm writing primarily to believers because first and foremost, I want Christians to think Christianly, so to speak about justice. What are we even talking about when we talk about justice? What do we as Christians understand the role of the state to be in enforcing morality, achieving justice? What are the principles that should guide us in thinking about that? So that was one goal, maybe the first what I'd call the first half of the book. And then the second thing is I wanted people to actually get an understanding of how the criminal justice system actually operates. Not how you see it operate on Law and Order or in a movie A Few Good Men, but how does it actually function? 

If you read chapter 11, my chapter on plea bargaining, one of the things that people are often most surprised about is that somewhere between 94 and 97% of cases are resolved through guilty pleas, through plea bargaining rather than through trials. So that's not usually how TV portrays it, but then you have to ask yourself, how is it that in a country with a constitution that twice guarantees the right to a jury trial, we're getting 94 to 97% of people to give up that right to a trial? And should we want people to give up that right to a trial if we're concerned about justice as Christians understand justice? 

Darrell Bock: 

So let's do this in the order that you have introduced it, which is let's talk first about justice and think about justice from a biblical point of view. And you really root this conversation to some degree starting with Genesis 1 and the fact that we're made in the image of God and that we're supposed to manage the creation well, that that's one of the core assignments of what is sometimes called the cultural mandate that explains who we are and that you also connect justice to the idea of love, whereas many people will put justice in some other category. They might see it as an exercise or an abuse of power or some other kind of category. So talk about that a little bit. 

Matthew Martens: 

Well, it's interesting that in Genesis 1, the creatures given the authority to have dominion were the creatures made in God's image. It's only after we're told that we're made in God's image in Genesis 1 that He then says, have dominion over the earth. I take from that ordering and that unique assignment that our dominion should be exercised in accordance with our image and likeness of God. In other words, that we should reflect His justice, His character, His righteousness in our exercise of dominion. And that remains true after the fall that all authority is delegated as Genesis makes clear, as Christ makes clear when He says, all authority is given me on in heaven, on earth, and then He delegates some of it in the Great Commission. Our authority is delegated and it's delegated, meaning it's God's justice in this instance that we're exercising. And so we have to exercise God's justice is delegated justice in God's way. 

So we have to ask ourselves, what does God's justice look like? What authority do we have? We haven't been given all authority, we've been given some authority and we have to identify what authority that is and how we exercise it in accordance with God's character. Another important point you raise is that people often view love and justice as inconsistent as intention. And I don't think that's true though I acknowledge that our ability as finite people to reconcile them may be limited. But I go back to the doctrine of divine simplicity quite simply that God doesn't have parts. God doesn't do some just stuff and do some loving stuff and because He does some just stuff and does some loving stuff, He's a just and loving God. Everything that God does is just because God is just, and everything God does is loving because God is love. And so in God, justice and love are not in tension. They're entirely reconcilable. And so if we are exercising God's justice as with delegated authority and we're supposed to exercise in accordance with his character, then we should be striving to understand how justice and love reconcile. 

Darrell Bock: 

So I imagine some people might ask this question and you also address this that, well, but justice really doesn't have much to do with the gospel and the gospel is a completely separate category. Or another way to say it might be, well, justice is an exercise of a government that is secular. It's not in the church. And so why should I be concerned about it? And then alongside that, the question of, and what am I as a Christian doing, being concerned about something that seems to fall outside what the gospel is about? And I know you addressed this by suggesting the idea of the gospel may be bigger than you think and cover more space than you think. So help us with that topic. 

Matthew Martens: 

I think one of the, I start with I'm a firmly convictionally committed Protestant, but I worry that the protest that was a just protest, that was a correct protest launched by Martin Luther against the idea of salvation by works has caused us to overcorrect in a way to where we have reduced salvation to the doctrine of justification. We've reduced the gospel to the doctrine of justification. The doctrine of justification by grace through faith is critical. I believe it. I'm committed to it. I don't doubt that. But the gospel is more than the doctrine of justification. And if you just go back to for example, John Calvin in his institutes of Christian religion, he makes that abundantly clear. He talks about the double grace of salvation, which is justification and sanctification that the same God who declared us just in Christ is making us just in Christ. I was just reading this morning, my Bible in Ephesians, and I just kept reading as it was starting a new book. 

I started in one and I just kept going and going because the argument just kept flowing. And it just struck me that Paul couldn't have made that more clear that we are saved not by good works, but two good works. And that part of the salvation is the fact that we can live as new creatures. And so again, going back to the fact that when we exercise dominion, when we exercise authority in this earth, wherever we exercise it, we're supposed to exercise it in accordance with God's character. That's what we were created to do. That's what it originally meant to be human. And as new creatures as we are more and more conformed in the image of Christ, we're more and more able and hopefully more progressing more and more and living lives of justice, whether that's one-on-one with our literal next door neighbors or whether that's in a societal sense, in a structural sense, in a criminal justice system sense where we vote for people and we seek to have them enact laws that more and more reflect the justice that God himself embodies. 

Darrell Bock: 

So you talked about Ephesians. I like to explain it this way and that is Ephesians 2:8-9 is about as Protestant and gospel-focused as you can get salvation by grace through faith not of works lest anyone should boast. And then I say, and then you got to keep reading because verse 10 says, for we are God's workmanship created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand that we should walk in them. That's the point that you're making. And then I say, and what's the first good work we're supposed to be a witness to? And you keep reading in that same chapter and you see the new creation is God bringing together strange people. Jews and Gentiles did not get along in the first century. They were at each other's throats. And said, I'm going to make you family and I'm going to adopt all of you and you're all going to have access to the same benefits and you're going to image me. 

I tell people, we're made in the image of God so we can image God so we can reflect his character and his goodness. And that becomes a witness to the fact that God has changed who we are by grace, and so we're supposed to care about that witness in the world. That's the sanctification piece you mentioned. And as a result, this is not a sideshow. It's actually in the middle of where God is hoping to take us as people, as we live out the reconciliation we have with God, which should lead into the reconciliation we have with others, which is why the gospel's supposed to take us to a place called Shalom. Peace. And so I think Ephesians is in the middle of this conversation along with the reminder and revelation that when we get to heaven and we see the scene of who's going to God, it's going to be people from every tribe in every nation who've managed to get along. 

Matthew Martens: 

Yeah, I mean James, just reading recently in James and James says that the only thing that matters is faith working through love. A faith that doesn't work through love doesn't matter. 

Darrell Bock: 

So it's asking how I treat my neighbor and how I engage with people around and whether justice is taking place. We really haven't defined justice, but I'm assuming that one aspect of justice is the idea that it treats everybody made in the image of God in the same and in a consistent kind of way. How would you define justice? 

Matthew Martens: 

Well, I start more fundamentally than that actually. I mean, I think that where I'd start is, where Augustine starts, which is defining justice as giving to everyone they're due. And then we have to say, what's everyone do? And the scriptures answer that repeatedly, including in the two great commandments. Everyone is due my love. And so justice is giving everyone my love, that people have a claim on my love. When we use the word charity, we view it as discretionary. When scripture uses the word charity, views it as an obligation for the Christian, a duty. Everyone is due my love. And so then I have to say, well, what does it mean to love in the context of criminal justice? It's interesting when in Luke 10, when Jesus interacts with the lawyer about the… and gives the story, the Good Samaritan, He asked the lawyer, the lawyer says, "What do I have to do to inherit eternal life?" Jesus says, "You tell me. You're the lawyer." And so he quotes from Deuteronomy, love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind and strength. 

And he quotes from Leviticus 19, love your neighbor as yourself. And Jesus says, you're right. Do that and you'll live. What's interesting is we know the lawyers quoting Deuteronomy 19 because that's the only place in the Old Testament where that phrase, love your neighbor as yourself appears. And it's in a passage in Leviticus 19 that begins in verse 15, do no injustice in court, but then goes on to say in verse 18, but instead, love your neighbor as yourself, that the command to love our neighbors as ourselves first appeared in scripture in the context of doing legal justice to our neighbors. That that is a prime example, a prime context in other words in which we can do, in which we can love by doing justice. So again, getting back to the notion that they're not intention, doing justice is in fact an act of love. 

Darrell Bock: 

And I go on and mention some of the texts in the prophets which basically say things like, and Micah 6 is, and Amos 5 are the two examples of this. If you do not care about justice, I don't care about your worship. And then I tell people, we tend to view our worship as pretty important. We engage in it every week. So this seems to be pretty high on the ladder in terms of what God is concerned about. 

Matthew Martens: 

Yeah, yeah, exactly right. It's just another way of saying what James says that it doesn't count, where a faith that doesn't show itself in love, to use James words, doesn't count. Whatever you think, it's not something that matters. 

Darrell Bock: 

Yeah, and it's not something that God is pleased about when you shove it off to the side, it's something that's supposed to be a topic of our concern. Another set of issues that you brought up are the way in which race and fear play into the reality of the way criminal justice tends to get handled and viewed. You want to talk a little bit about that? 

Matthew Martens: 

Well, we're in the election season, so you can just look around. We're trying to… The goal is to scare people enough to get them to vote your way, pitch to them some horrible thing that's going to happen if you don't elect their party and is usually one of the things that all of a sudden there's a surge in crime every election season or so we're led to believe. And so I am trying to identify the reality that we operate at times more out of fear of our neighbors than love of our neighbors when it comes to the topic of criminal justice, that the emotion that's driving us is not the one that scripture says should motivate us. 

That doesn't mean that there's not reason to be fearful of crime. I mean, I'm not advocating that we just look the other way and allow it to go unchecked, but that what should be driving us is in addressing crime is love for our neighbors, both those impacted by crime and also love for those who commit crime because the story of the Good Samaritan is meant to convey to us that there's no one outside the neighborhood of love. Even the most despised in a culture are entitled to our love. 

Darrell Bock: 

Yes. And that parable does two things at once. It makes that point and then it exhorts us to be the kind of neighbor that the Samaritan showed himself to be, to the man who fell among the thieves. And so we're supposed to, it's interesting that Jesus takes a question about who is my neighbor, which I really think, and now I may slander lawyers for which I apologize, but my son's a lawyer and my wife was a paralegal, so I've got to have that caveat before I say this. But the question who is my neighbor was really a question about are there some people who are not my neighbor? That was really what he was pushing for and asking. You don't ask the question, who's my neighbor? If you know everyone's your neighbor. 

So in the midst of trying to do that, Jesus tells a story that makes the point, well, the question's not really to try and figure out who your neighbor is. The real question is can you be a neighbor and should you be a neighbor? And what does being a neighbor look like? And how do you show concern for the people who around you? In fact, I joke about that parable being the parable of the Indianapolis 500 because the priest and Levi come around the corner and they zoom right by the guy and pretend he doesn't even exist as fast as they can go buy him, whereas the Samaritan stops and then the text says eight different acts of compassion that the Samaritan shows to this person who fell among the thieves. And Jesus says, "Don't do what the former guys did. Do what the latter guy did." 

Matthew Martens: 

Yeah, I mean I love how it's after Jesus says, "Do this and you'll live." And I love what Luke writes next, he says, "And the lawyer seeking to justify himself says, and who is my neighbor?" That he was trying to figure out who can I exclude? I mean, okay, maybe it includes the guys who live on both sides of my house or maybe even a few houses down, but certainly it's not everybody. And you're exactly right that after Jesus tells the story doesn't say, he says, who was a neighbor? In other words, who acted like a neighbor? Not you want to exclude people from the neighborhood, you want to know who are they? I want to know who are you? What type of person are you going to be to those who you come across in life's path? 

Darrell Bock: 

Yeah. I joke that lawyers can't stop asking questions. So we get the second question. 

Matthew Martens: 

It is. 

Darrell Bock: 

Yeah, it's a wonderful passage and it does open up this entire space to think about it theologically, et cetera. But we have a whole other half of this conversation which deals with how the actual criminal justice system works. And I think I'm just going to throw out the list of things that you discuss in this area and then I'm just going to let you go in whatever order you want. 

 So you discuss accuracy and justice, which we've already alluded to in the statistics that we quoted at the beginning. You talk about due process, you talk about accountability, you talk about impartiality and you talk about proportionality, which is I think going to be important at some point to dive into a little bit. And then you exhort us to think differently about how those things interact with each other. So I've given you a big plate and a large pool, swim wherever you want. 

Matthew Martens: 

Well, fundamentally, I think that loving our neighbors as ourselves in the context of criminal justice means judging their cases accurately, that God is a God of truth, and that He judges accurately. He tells us repeatedly in Scripture that he'll render to man, to every man according to his works, not according to somebody else's works. He judges us accurately. I think one of the passages you see this most clearly is in Genesis 18, this story where Abraham is interacting with the three angels or God, depending on how you read the passage about judging the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah, and they tell them that they're going to judge. And Abraham says, but what if there's 50 innocent people? Would you destroy a city, whole two whole cities of wickedness if there's 50 innocent people? 

And God says, "I wouldn't judge it in that circumstance." Abraham says, "What about 40? What about 30? 20? 10?" And God says, "I would forgo punishing two whole cities full of wickedness if doing so meant I swept up 10 innocent people." I mean, that's a compelling point that's being made there about how concerned God is about judging accurately that He would forgo judging two whole cities full of sinners if that meant He had to judge 10 righteous people. God's concerned about accuracy. 

Darrell Bock: 

What's interesting about that is it's the opposite of the way sometimes we handle the space because the way we normally handle the space is there are two or three people who are what we might call bad apples who have done bad terrible things. And now I'm going to impute that to a whole group of people. And it goes the exact opposite way. 

Matthew Martens: 

The exact opposite, where God's willing to forgo judgment in order to protect the innocent. And I think at times we're willing to let the so-called, let chips fall where they may, even if that means they fall on some innocent people, even if they fall on those thousand innocent people who were convicted of murder in the last 24 years in our country. And so I think that you have to start with God's concern about accuracy. I mean, He says elsewhere in the Old Testament, stay far away from the false charge. 

God is deeply concerned about accuracy. And again, going back to where we started, if we're going to reflect His justice in carrying out the delegated authority, we need to be equally concerned about accuracy. And accuracy is how we love both our neighbors. In the criminal justice system, no one's loved by a false conviction. The victim is left with a lie, having been lied to, that justice has been accomplished for the wrong they suffered. The person who is wrongly convicted hasn't been loved, having been punished for something they can't repent of. Society isn't loved because society is left exposed to the wrong as the wrongdoer remains out there and the person who actually committed the wrong hasn't been loved because they've been denied the corrective force of the law that it's supposed to provide. And so it's a wholesale failure to love all our neighbors if we're not committed to accuracy. 

Darrell Bock: 

And out of- 

Matthew Martens: 

Accuracy- 

Darrell Bock: 

Go ahead, I'm sorry. 

Matthew Martens: 

No, no, go ahead with your question. 

Darrell Bock: 

I was going to say, then accuracy obviously leads into due process? 

Matthew Martens: 

You got it. Exactly. There's a flow there because as a finite person, you have to say, well, how do I accomplish accuracy? I'm not a mind reader. I don't have a time machine. I can't see through walls. I'm not clairvoyant. And so if I'm going to as a finite human being, achieve accuracy, I have to do that through a process that surfaces and tests the relevant evidence, and I can get to that point of due process through reason as a derivative of accuracy. I can also see it in scripture where it talks about he who's first in his own cause seems just, but then his neighbor comes and searches him out. Or you can see it in Deuteronomy with the commands to have the witnesses tested in the gate by the judges that you see in scripture, this concept or the idea of, on the testimony of two or three witnesses, and you test those witnesses. 

You see throughout scripture this idea that our accuracy depends on our commitment to process. And if we're not really committed to a process, then we're not really committed to accuracy. You can't just say, well, we only convict on proof beyond a reasonable doubt, but then describe a process perhaps that doesn't actually try to get to the truth. If I told you we only convict on proof beyond reasonable doubt, but the prosecution will have a lawyer, you can't have one and you can't cross examine any of the witnesses and the fact finder will be biased, you'd be like, "Well, I don't think you're really that committed to accuracy." You're like, "No, no, no. We only convict on proof beyond reasonable doubt." You're like, "Yeah, yeah, yeah, but your process belies your claimed commitment to accuracy." And so a commitment to due process is how we get to accuracy. But process would be useless if we then employed that process in front of biased fact finders. And so impartiality is critical that we judge cases not based on personalities, not based on who's being judged, but based on what they did. 

And then accuracy also entails the idea of judging proportionally. You mentioned proportionality. I could rightly identify who committed a wrong and then punish them disproportionately either too leniently or too severely, and in the process tell a lie about the severity of the wrong they did. If I convict somebody of murder and give them a traffic ticket, I have judged inaccurately. I have told a lie about the severity of the wrong. And likewise, if I convict somebody of jaywalking and execute them, I've told a lie about the severity of the wrong. And so proportionality is critical to judging accurately. And then lastly, you mentioned accountability. Accountability is just the idea that when those in authority judge inaccurately, when they abuse the authority they have that they too must be held accountable. As Irenaeus put it in Against Heresies, when the magistrate acts unjustly, he too must perish. 

Darrell Bock: 

So I'm thinking about the idea of someone being presumed innocent and their guilt has to be established. And established, you mentioned one standard which is beyond a reasonable doubt. And then I think in civil cases the standard is slightly different. There's a proportionality in how that- 

Matthew Martens: 

Proponderance. 

Darrell Bock: 

Proponderance of the evidence. And in saying that the person is presumed innocent until proven guilty, that's actually not a statement that they are innocent. It's just a question of can I show that someone performed the illegal act that I am examining? 

Matthew Martens: 

Yeah, the presumption of innocence isn't to deny those who are wronged a hearing. It's actually just the opposite. Provide them a hearing. We're going to hear you out. You claim that you were wronged in some way, that this person committed some crime. We're going to hear them out. We're not going to prejudge the matter for you or against you. We're going to give you an opportunity to be heard, and we're likewise going to give the person who's accused an opportunity to be heard. And I think again, that's bound up in the notion of due process. The process would be meaningless if we started with a presumption that the person did it and the person then is not getting the opportunity, they're not getting the process, we're not giving an opportunity in that instance for them to test the evidence. If we're starting with the assumption that they did it and no proof is necessary, then in that circumstance to convict them. The presumption of innocence means we have to have proof, people have to come forward with accusations and then we give you the opportunity to test them. 

And we weigh at the end of the day whether or not the crime has been proven. And again, I think going back to the Old Testament but also repeated in the New Testament is this idea of only on the testimony of two or three witnesses can you punish. You see that not only with regard to people who commit crimes in the Old Testament, you see it repeated as to allegations in the church in the New Testament. And there's an interesting concept in there which is that God hasn't given us authority to address all wrongs. God hasn't given us authority to address one witness wrongs. He hasn't given us the authority. He didn't give it. In Old Testament, Israel didn't give it in the church to punish one witness wrongs. Those, we have to trust Him with. And I think that there's an interesting concept there that the justice that we can accomplish in this world is intermediate, it's temporary, and it's ultimately pointing us to and probably and should make us long for ultimate justice in which the only just judge will set all wrongs right. 

Darrell Bock: 

So all this assumes the role of the state and overseeing this, the pursuit of justice, if I can say it that way. And what I'm hearing from you, which is interesting to me, because I don't think I've thought about it quite this way, is that the state is really representing the unlawful or unrighteous act that has taken place and is trying to determine who's responsible for this act. The state comes on behalf of the victim. I guess I could say it that way in ways what's going on while at the same time have a concern because of the accuracy that you've mentioned, that the case be legitimately adjudicated. And so both the person, the state is representing and prosecuting the case and the defendant who's put in the dock as a result of the charges are both, the attempt is to try and handle them with some level of balance. Is that the premise underneath our legal system? 

Matthew Martens: 

Well, I think I would say it a little differently, slightly differently. I would say that the state is coming on behalf of God. That's what I understand as a Christian, whether or not the state understands what they're doing. 

Darrell Bock: 

All right. Fair enough 

Matthew Martens: 

In Romans 13, Paul describes him literally as ministers diaconos of God that they are bearing his sword. This is just another way of restating what was in Genesis 1 is that the dominion is being exercised on a delegated basis from God to reflect his justice. And so they're coming as a terror to evildoers and as a protection of the innocent, but they're not presuming what happened here. They're not actually presuming whether the person to be protected is the accused or the accuser. They're going to sort that out. And when the state sorts that out, they're then going to bear the sword against the wrongdoer and the wrongdoer as we in Scripture, and again in the Old Testament could be the accuser if it's a false accuser. 

And Scripture talks about bearing the sword against that person. And so I think the Christian understanding is that the state is acting on behalf of God to accurately judge in that subcategory of cases that is delegated to the state to judge. And by that, I mean ones that have more than one witness in that subcategory, the state is acting as God's minister to render justice by accurately judging the case. 

Darrell Bock: 

Okay, so that's actually raises a good question because obviously, you've got people who think about this theologically and clearly you have people who don't. So you've got that. And I think what's being said by what you're saying, which is a good qualification is, is that God cares about good and evil about how we treat one another. That fundamentally when you're saying you're representing God and God's way of living, there's something about being a human being in the way human beings are supposed to treat one another that sorts out good from evil, if I can say it that way. And that means that the state is delegated as being an instrument of justice that is properly rendered. 

Matthew Martens: 

It is one of God's means of reflecting His justice in the world. It's not the only means. There's lots of other institutions, family and churches, other sources of authority, teachers, employers, professors who can be means that God uses to reflect His justice in the world. Whether we eat or drink or whatever we do, we do all to the glory of God and we glorify God by reflecting His character in whatever we do. And one of those means means explicitly detailed in Scripture, both in Genesis 9:6 and the Noahic Covenant in Romans 13 in Paul's writing on this and elsewhere is that the state, the governing authorities are one means of reflecting God's justice in the world. An intermediate means, but an important means. 

Darrell Bock: 

And because at the base of this is this relational treatment between people, this is where the issue of injecting love into the conversation finds itself. 

Matthew Martens: 

There you go. 100%. 

Darrell Bock: 

Because in the end we're asking, are we taking due consideration of my neighbor, both the person who's alleged to have committed the crime and the victim in the midst of trying to sort out where the good and the evil and the act actually lie? 

Matthew Martens: 

Yeah, exactly right. This is where love comes back in. I mean Martin Luther King Jr. said that justice is love ruling well, and I think that that's exactly right, that that's what… Let me strike that. I don't think it's Martin Luther King. I think it was actually Augustine. So I think that's exactly right that Augustine said that justice is love ruling well, and that justice is a manifestation of love. Ultimately, Jesus meant it when He said all the law and the prophets hang on the commands to love God and love our neighbors. And so one way in which we manifest love to our neighbors is providing them with the earthly justice that God has delegated us to provide. 

Darrell Bock: 

That raises another question because we're actually in part discussing the centrality of justice as a value in the scripture and how it relates to how God calls on us to treat one another. And so I'm thinking about when God holds nations accountable, He holds them accountable really for two fundamental things. One is idolatry, the idea that you're chasing after wrong gods. And the second, and it might be as discussed if not more discussed, is the issue of justice and whether you're treating people justly in the world. So if we were to ask, I almost hate to do this, what the mega sins are at a corporate level in our society, one is going in the wrong direction in terms of where the spiritual base of our activity lies. That would be idolatry. And the other would be in treating people so poorly or so unjustly that God is offended by the lack of concern that we show for those whom he has made. 

Matthew Martens: 

Yeah, I mean again, you could see that in Genesis and it's made clear through the rest of scripture. The first sin was refusing, was trying to put ourselves above God, elevating ourselves, inverting the created order by elevating ourselves above God, just another form of idolatry. And then the second sin was killing somebody else. It devolved quickly. It was a failure to love literally brother between brother between brother. 

Darrell Bock: 

Yeah. It was a devolution. 

Matthew Martens: 

Exactly. 

Darrell Bock: 

And with the effects still being with us because it helps to create a tribal world. I tell people the reconciliation of the gospel, we're back to how the gospel fits into all this. I tell people that the reconciliation of the Bible is an anti-tribal message in a tribal world. 

Matthew Martens: 

Yeah, sure. That's really true. 

Darrell Bock: 

And so there's a sense in which the transnational nature of the gospel is a very important part of its message. And because we tend to think so individualistically in the west, we tend to miss this corporate dimension of what it is that God is doing in reconciling peoples to one another. 

Matthew Martens: 

Yeah, I mean I think this is back to where I really think that too much of how we think about Christianity as Protestants is too narrow that we're offering good news. That's good. But there's actually great news. I feel like that we've… The great news is that God has not only just declared us to be just people, but He's reconciling us to one another as we were originally created to be. That won't be perfectly achieved in this life, but it should be. Romans tells us more and more achieved every day in this life. Romans 6 is every bit the Gospel as Romans 3, that He has given us new life. 

Darrell Bock: 

You're doing this as a lawyer and as a theological conservative, but you're messing with systems. And so I- 

Matthew Martens: 

I'm reclaiming systems. I mean, I'm citing Calvin on this. Calvin said that the double grace of salvation is justification and sanctification. I think we've moved away from that in a harmful way. 

Darrell Bock: 

Wonderful point. And actually you're going in the direction that my question was going to go, which is something that God designed to be together and seen as a whole got broken apart and in breaking it apart, we have done God's message and God's calling for us a disservice. I tell a story about how I still think we're now living in the shadow of the fundamentalist modernist controversy in which my story goes in the middle of the 19th century. As I look back on history, liberals came along and said, "We like the ethics of Christianity, but we don't believe the theology underneath it, and we're challenging the Bible as a part of that." And they broke it apart. Conservatives looked at that and they went, "I like that deal, but we're going to do it in the reverse direction. We're committed to anything that's about the Bible. Anything in social space and social gospel is problematic." And they both got divorced. 

And then my next line is what God has joined together? Let no man put asunder. So we need to put it back together. But the trouble in putting it back together is everyone sees it as an inherent divide. And so the ability to build the bridge to pull it back together becomes harder. And I think what you're doing in the legal area is to remind people, no, no, no, no. This all is connected. It belongs together. It doesn't belong separate. We should disavow any thinking that separates the two things and sees one as sacred and the other is secular or something like that. Or one as conservative and the other as liberal. No, if we're going to be biblical, we're going to keep these things connected to one another. 

Matthew Martens: 

That's exactly what I'm pressing at, and nobody asked me to say this, but Dallas Seminary more than anything else helped me see that. Glenn Kreider, more than anybody else, helped me see that the gospel is bigger. I remember sitting in his Doctrine of Man's sin and angels class in January of 2008. I write about this in the book. And I'm listening to him and I'm like, this sounds different than what I feel like I've understood the gospel to be. And there was a student who in the front row, I still remember where the person was sitting. I can't picture them. Maybe they're listening and remember who they are, but they raised their hand and said, "So what you're saying is that the gospel is about redemption." 

And Dr. Kreider walked over and he shook the person's hand and he's like, "You got it." And I felt like, yeah, it's bigger than just declared just. Not that that's not important. That was a central part of the reformation and important part, but the stories bigger than that. I'm also being made just. Things are being put back together. Dr. Kreider played in that class, the song, Everything Is Broken. And everything is broken, but he's going to fix everything. The curse went down to the dirt and all creation groans, but it's waiting for its restoration. Everything's going to get fixed. 

Darrell Bock: 

You ended up in Romans 8, which is where I was going to go next, which is that the redemption that we're participating in doesn't stop at Romans 4 and 5. It goes to Romans 6, 7, and 8. And in fact, it involves people. So it also puts us in Romans 9, 10, and 11, which people want to treat as a parenthesis, but it's actually a part of the argument. And so we see that God deals with individuals on the one hand, but he deals with peoples on the other. He seeks that people would treat people well, if I can say it that way. And that's what you have been contending for. 

Our time is running out. So let me bring up two other topics that I wanted to be sure we covered, and let me do them in the reverse order that I have on my list, which is you talked about bail and plea bargaining is an important part of the justice system, which most people don't appreciate. So I want you to take a few minutes so that we might appreciate it. And then the second part of it then is, and then you call on people at the end of the book to think differently. So why don't you tackle those two, bail and plea bargaining first? 

Matthew Martens: 

Well, as I said earlier in our discussion, about 95% of criminal cases are resolved through guilty pleas. And you say, how do we get all of those people to waive the right to a jury trial and plead guilty instead of going to trial and trying to, if nothing else play for fumbles. Even if you're guilty, why would you plead guilty? The answer to that is multifaceted. But part of the answer to that is bail. That by denying people bail before they are convicted, meaning we jail people before they've been convicted of anything, that's used as a mechanism to try to extract guilty pleas out of people. It's not the only method used, but it's one of the methods used because without sufficient defense counsel for the poor, it can be many months before their lawyer comes to see them. 

And because the right to a speedy trial has been whittled away such that you could wait in jail for, I kid you not, eight to 10 years at times before you get to trial on certain charges, that creates the enormous leverage for a prosecutor to say, to come to you and say, "I will give you a plea offer to a lesser charge and time served, but you have to admit that you did this particular crime and I'll let you out today." And so bail is used as a means to extract the sentence before a guilt is determined. That is part of how we accomplish 95% of criminal cases being resolved through guilty pleas. And what I raise is questions about whether or not that accomplishes accuracy. Maybe you think, well, the person admitted they did it, that means they did it. And that might be true if it was uncoerced, and it might be true if you believed in prosecutorial infallibility, but that was not one of the doctrines that I learned at Dallas Seminary. In fact, I learned just the opposite human fallibility. 

And so I think the American system of plea bargaining, as I explain in greater detail in the book, raises real questions about Christian Justice. But all of what I'm trying to accomplish, as you pointed out, is to encourage folks to think differently because that's what Romans 12 says. The gospel should result in a transformation of the mind, a renewal of the mind that we bring every thought into captivity to Christ. We might come to the Christian life with an ideological view about criminal justice that's been informed by our experiences or by our environment or by news stories or movies we've watched, or whatever the case may be. And Christ calls us to bring every thought captive to ask ourselves is what we believe about justice, what He believes about justice. And that's what I'm hopeful that I've maybe added something to that conversation to help us all think more like Christ in that respect. 

Darrell Bock: 

Well, Matthew I to thank you for your time and your willingness to talk with us about this area. I dare say most people, if they don't work in the legal profession and have a legal background and even a criminal justice background, probably don't think about this very much. And so you've given us categories that we need to think about, particularly those connected to our relationship with God as believers. And I found the conversation fascinating on the one hand and quite informative on the other. So I just want to express my appreciation to you for giving us your time. 

Matthew Martens: 

Well, thanks so much for having me on, and I'm grateful for my time at Dallas Seminary and hopefully people who are familiar with Dallas will see some of that influence throughout the book. 

Darrell Bock: 

Yeah, well, our motto is teach truth, love well, and we want to do both. I sometimes tease the seminary, do we have it in the right order? But nonetheless, it's an important point to say this touches every area of life. Sanctification touches every area of life, even the way we go about our legal business. 

Matthew Martens: 

For sure. Yeah. 

Darrell Bock: 

And I want to thank you, our listener for being with us. And if you like the show, please leave a rating or a review with your favorite podcast app so that others can discover The Table, and we hope that you'll join us again soon. On The Table, we discuss issues of God and culture to show the relevance of theology to everyday life, and we hope you'll join us again soon. 

Kasey Olander: 

Welcome to the Table Podcast where we discuss issues of God and culture to show the relevance of theology to everyday life. I'm Kasey Olander and I'm the web content specialist here at Dallas Theological Seminary. 

Bill Hendricks: 

And I'm Bill Hendricks, executive director for Christian Leadership at the Hendricks Center. We want to welcome you to the Table Podcast today. Today, we're going to talk about artificial intelligence, and particularly its use, and frankly potential misuse in what we might call ministry context. So if you're a pastor or a youth worker, you work for a para-church ministry, you're a missionary, perhaps you're a teacher at a private Christian school, all of these would be examples of what might be typically called ministry context. But of course, all Christians are called to ministry no matter where you work. If you're a doctor, a lawyer, a homemaker, a dental hygienist, you're going to find some relevance here because we're going to talk about AI, which is everywhere now. 

And you're probably thinking, well, how can we have one more conversation about AI? Hasn't everything been said that could be said? And the answer is absolutely not because this is a massively erupting sort of technology that by all measures it appears, will radically transform life as we know it in the future. But I want Kasey to introduce the two gentlemen who really have the expertise to bring to this. 

Kasey Olander: 

We have two esteemed guests with us here today. We're joined by Dr. John Dyer, vice president for enrollment in educational technology, and assistant professor of theological studies here at DTS. John, thank you for being here. 

John Dyer: 

Thanks for having me. 

Kasey Olander: 

We're also joined by Dr. Drew Dickens, founder of a ministry called Encountering Peace, and his doctorate is in a theological anthropology and he studied generative AI for his dissertation. Thanks for being here, Drew. 

Drew Dickens: 

It's an honor. Thanks for having me. 

Kasey Olander: 

I appreciate it. 

Bill Hendricks: 

So I want to roll the clock back, and both of you're younger than me so we don't have to roll it back as far as we would if I was talking about me, but about you. I'm thinking two little boys are growing up in this world. How could anybody have ever predicted that they would be talking about something called artificial intelligence? That sounds like a science fiction sort of thing. John, why don't you start, how did you come to first of all, be a part of Dallas Seminary, but also even before then, I guess your interest in just technology and this whole direction? 

John Dyer: 

Yeah, I grew up in the eighties and so there was a lot of technology I think, in that era, and dad would bring home computer parts and tell me not to touch them, but I couldn't help and I would touch them and make things and try to build whatever card he had brought for the computer. So I was always messing with those things, but I think in that era it wasn't very popular to do that, so it was always a little hidden thing. I was trying to act cool at school and never- 

Bill Hendricks: 

You didn't want to be a geek. 

John Dyer: 

Exactly. Yeah. Yeah, I couldn't help it though. So I've been playing with those things for a while ,and I think in that you're watching shows and grow up with Star Wars and there's all kinds of AI in there. And so, I think the assumption is that we would eventually get there, but it just maybe feels a little bit different to be on the path of getting there where we are today. 

Bill Hendricks: 

How about you, Drew? 

Drew Dickens: 

I'm still floored you think I'm younger than you, so thank you. I'm still processing. And thank you for that, by the way. I suppose because I am 65, so when you go back to me as a little boy, we're definitely predating a lot of this. But actually not really, because I was born in '59, but in 1955, Alan Turing is sort of one of the many grandfathers, it's quite a lineage, but one of the many grandfathers of artificial intelligence, John McCarthy actually out of Stanford about the same time coined the term artificial intelligence. So this does predate me, but barely. I suppose as a boy though growing up, just a fascination with science fiction Star Wars, Star Trek, robots, and, "Boy, wouldn't it be great if I could …" And as a rather reclusive an introvert growing up, wanting that imaginary friend, whether that's a robot or not, but somebody I could engage and talk with, that kind of thing. 

I had an early love for research in the library and studying, and so always wanting to know that one card in the card file that if I found this, then it would unlock this. And so, always feeling as though there's just one more question to ask that might reveal things. And so I guess growing up with that has always had an interest in technology and a fascination with it. And then merging that and having an opportunity to merge that with some of the work that John's done when I was at seminary here, that crossroads of theology and technology seemed real natural for where I've always had an interest. Fascinating. 

Kasey Olander: 

So bringing us back to the present day, could each of you talk briefly about what your experience is with AI now? 

Drew Dickens: 

Of course. So when I started working on my doctorate in this field, I always joked that I couldn't get a return phone call five years ago, but now everybody wants me on their podcast. So the timing has been phenomenal. I need to send Sam Altman a thank you note. The timing has been amazing. But it really exploded. It's been here since 1955, but really over the last five or six years have the advent of generative AI and transformers within, that's the T of GPT, and language models kind of teaching it to speak has really just happened over the last four or five years. And I mean speak metaphorically, although not anymore. Now literally as of a couple of weeks ago, or better. 

But how I use that in my research is what might a, and I have trouble with pronouns, calling it an it or an entity or a being or a system, but as I'm able to engage with it sometimes just on academic level and asking questions, coming up with two disparate points and help me connect Psalms 23 with Ephesians 4, it can find that. It's unable to not answer, so it will give you an answer to that. And so, I use it every day, multiple times a day, just as creativity sparks. Hadn't thought of this before, show me a list of five things kind of thing. It's just as a way to start a conversation. The days of the staring at a white page are gone, so give me five things. What are five suggestions? What are 10? Give me 50 verses that apply to. So I use it for that a lot. And then my interest is the impact on it spiritually as I'm able to engage with it as some sort of divine entity, what effect might that have on us in the future? 

Kasey Olander: 

Yeah, that's fascinating. You're talking about it as a starting point, a jumping off point for you to help you in doing your work. 

Drew Dickens: 

Absolutely, absolutely. 

Kasey Olander: 

How about you, John? 

John Dyer: 

In my own, I think there's a number of timelines you might look at. I think I got to do an AI chapel in 2016, and it was for our arts week. And so, at that point, generative AI, it was something that was out there, but it was more in the arts space, so generating kind of funky pictures, and they often had a real abstract look to them, not the hyper-realistic things for today. So it was really this question of is that creativity? That was the hypothetical question at the time. And then I think 2022 is when the ChatGPT comes out and more of just the common person is experimenting with this. So I think early on in my programming career, using forms of artificial intelligence to either create really complex rule sets or to analyze data in ways that are really more statistical. 

And then only in the last couple of years, more that generative sense. For my own generative, I've been trying different things using what Drew's talking about conversation partner starting point, but then also trying things where I say I really want to continue to develop my skill of starting things and then try using AI more on the back end of what am I missing? And having a look at what have I done, what points am I not still getting? And then seeing what difference does that do to me and what changes do I see in my own brain and thinking, depending on where I put AI in that. So I'm thinking about my own learning and my own development and not just what I can produce, but who I can become. 

Kasey Olander: 

Right. 

Drew Dickens: 

Can I ask you a question? 

Kasey Olander: 

Sure. 

Drew Dickens: 

So there's GPT-1, 2, 3, we're now 4, and they recent released 4O, which is a turbo version, just short of them, and I'm talking about OpenAI and their GPT platform, prior to them releasing what everybody's kind of on the edge of their sheets for GPT-5 and what is that going to be? So they did GPT-4o, and now they've released 4o1. That's more human capability on reasoning. Have you played with that yet at all? 

John Dyer: 

I haven't, no. 

Drew Dickens: 

So what's really fascinating is its ability to just take a bunch of data points and it's much more, instead of it being more subjective, more of an objective look at data and what am I missing in this? What are patterns within this that I don't recognize? And asking it for a conclusion sort of a yes-no binary response. And so, I think for a pastor, I think that's really interesting. Looking at just putting in attendance data, Baptism data, zip code data and cross matching all that, but asking it to make a reasonable expectation or suggestions based upon data is something that just came out a few weeks ago. 

Kasey Olander: 

And that's fascinating that John, you highlighted not just what am I executing, but who am I becoming? Can you speak a little bit more to how you're working with AI and what that does to you? Maybe if it suggests something for you, you're like, "Wow, I never thought of that. But next time I'm in a similar situation, maybe I could be the one to come up with it." Or yeah, can you speak a little bit more to that? 

John Dyer: 

Yeah, I think in this whole discussion, that probably is to me one of the most important parts of it because there will always be new features coming out that we can say what's a good use and a bad use of this thing? And those are important discussions for us to have. But I do think as we've seen new technology come out and we sort of cede that ability to it and we realize, so who have I become? And the example I always give is GPS. There's so many places I don't know how to get to and the places I've been multiple times, but my mind always goes, "I'm going to be able to rely on the GPS in this case to do that." And so, I'm sort of thinking about even here at the seminary and my own kids and all sorts of areas of what do I want to develop a skill to be able to do and what do I want to keep that skill to do? 

It's not that I don't want to ever use AI to do that, but I think there is a difference between someone, say for example in the coding sphere who's been developing the skill of coding for 5 or 10 years or something like that, and then can use AI as an Accelerant to that skill versus someone that's starting from that point and doesn't develop the skill at the beginning. And it's sort of like math tables or something like that. You learn all those math things and it seems sort of silly, but it forms some basic tools in your mind so that later on when you're doing calculus, you do use the calculator at that point, but you've been able to build up that skill set. So it's sort of what skills do I want to still have fundamentally underneath the hood? 

And those are hard questions to know because there are some things like GPS, maybe I really don't need to know where my sister lives, but that sounds terrible that I don't know where my sister lives. I don't know how to get to her. So I think that's the evaluation that we want to keep talking about is who do I want to become, not just what I want to produce, and then thinking what the balance of those things are. 

Bill Hendricks: 

Right. Drew, I know who do I want to become is a real question that you've thought a lot about. In fact, I think you said you worked on that in your dissertation, the use of AI relative to spiritual formation and discipleship. Tell us more about how might one consider using AI as a part of those functions? 

Drew Dickens: 

Well, I'll bridge off of what John just said, and I concur. Everything he said was right on point, and I think it's a broader sociological question of just the imago dei is what does it mean to be human at its foundational question. 

Bill Hendricks: 

That's key. 

Drew Dickens: 

And how is this affecting this? And of course it's going to affect it, but how? And how might we let it? You mentioned in your introduction, we use it every day without even realizing it now. If we go home tonight and you want to watch something on Netflix, Netflix has an amazing recommendation engine that is driven by AI, so it knows what I've watched in the past and it's making those recommendations and so does Spotify and whatever else. It's the way the Facebook or the Meta algorithm works as well, algorithms in general. 

And so, it's making us, I don't wanting to use the word lazy and I'm not sure that's appropriate, but I don't have to get on my bike and ride down to the library to find a list of movies that came out and whatever. I heard an interview with one of the executives of a Hollywood studio and their vision for the use of AI is my wife and I going home tonight and sitting there and going, I'd like to watch a movie. I've only got about 30 minutes, and I really like Tom Cruise and Scarlett Johansson. So a movie with them in this where there's some tension and a resolve when they're at a hotel in Italy or whatever, you just completely make this up. 

Bill Hendricks: 

And it makes it up. 

Drew Dickens: 

There it is. 

Kasey Olander: 

Wow. 

Drew Dickens: 

So what does that do? But again, back to the imago dei and what does it mean to be human? What does this do for our creativity? What does this do for, and again, theologically, I can hear my professors echoing in my head right now, but do I really have to memorize these verses in this and such? Meditate on the word both day and night, but now it can do that for me. And so I think it has tremendous potential to affect what it means to be human with respect to your question about some of the work that I did is. Is there a follower of Christ in the world who hasn't asked, "God, why aren't you answering me right now?" Why aren't I hearing an answer to this prayer or tried to get someone from the church to return a phone call because they're struggling with this and this and such? 

Now we have access to this system that will listen to me 24 hours a day, that will respond without judgment, that has access to the world's writings on whatever theological view that I agree with or embrace, hold to. And so, how does this affect me as a follower, as a believer? What does this do with pastoral training? And we mentioned it earlier, but I love the fact that we're discussing AI in an embodied group of humans around a table because that's not where this is going. And in fact, celebrating virtual relationships and in a world that has this epidemic of loneliness, I think it's only going to drive that further and further. So I think that's how it will affect us. 

Bill Hendricks: 

Well, it's fascinating. I mean the whole thing's fascinating, but it's fascinating. A lot of the early and still fears about AI is, "Oh, someday the machines, they're going to be so smart and they're going to say, 'let's wipe out humans.' And that's the end of us." And that is a prospect, I guess. But you're describing something that could be much more subtle is just we get so accustomed to these, like you called it an it. We don't yet really know what to call something that has at least faint stirrings of a person, but there's no body there. We are hesitant to say, "No, that's a person." So it, this algorithm. But we get so accustomed to engaging with the it, we're having conversations, it's doing a lot of creative things for us, solving a lot of problems for us that slowly but surely, we just kind of become a nothing. All we do is just speak into a machine and everything happens. 

Drew Dickens: 

To something John mentioned, again, back to what do I want to be, is I think we have to be mindful that it's happening. This won't be one day, this will happen. We're already utilizing it every day. Again, whether it's on Netflix or watching a movie or even with GPS finding a faster way to your sister's house. And the next time you get in the car, it will ask you, "Do you want to go to your sister's house?" So I think we need to be mindful that it already exists. It's only getting faster and smarter. And eventually the goal of every company out there right now is artificial general intelligence, which is a point where it exceeds human cognition. 

And so, I think we have to be mindful that it's happening and having an honest conversation with ourselves, how is this affecting me today? And to be aware of that, be aware of that within our community, have this conversation with other pastors, with your own family members. We have two grandsons. And I get chills thinking they're four and six, you can talk about the future when they're 10 or 12. Heck, when next year, how is this going to affect them in school and things like that. So I think having the conversations now is so important. 

Bill Hendricks: 

And I guess let me press into that chip. What do you think those conversations with our children should be about? 

Drew Dickens: 

I'm a grandparent, so that's not fair. I think it's spend more time with your grandparents is the answer to everything. I think it's being mindful of who their friends are and the influence that they're getting outside the home. I think it's being aware of how they're utilizing AI in the classroom, in their classes. I don't mean for this to be a toss away comment, but being aware of how they're using it on their phones and on their, I mean, our four-year-old is quite comfortable using an iPad. So just monitoring what they're using and how they're using it because it's all about collecting data, it's all about learning. 

I don't care if you're four years old or if you're 65, it's collecting data always. And so, just be aware of every time it's asking a question, is today the day you want to go see your sister? It's using that as a way to learn more about our habits. And so, just be mindful that even if they're playing a simple little game on mom's iPhone, it's collecting data and learning how to speak and interact. And that's what these language models have done and are doing is they're predictive agents. "If you like this last time, I'll give you more of that." And so, I think just being mindful and aware of what they're doing. 

Bill Hendricks: 

John, you have kids. 

John Dyer: 

Yeah, I mean I don't think you should have any restrictions. I had my five-year-old driving our car early on just because I thought these kind of restrictions are ridiculous and we should let them use the latest vehicles possible. No, I think we intuit that we shouldn't have young kids driving 3000 pound vehicles because we know that there's a lot of damage that could be caused to other people with those. It's a lot harder to see what the wrong would be of devices. And as a parent, it's just you realize how when you're at a restaurant how powerful it's to build a hand a device, just how that shuts everything down and makes your life easier. There's a lot of friction involved in not doing that. So I think we want to be really aware of that and sometimes be counter-cultural there. 

But I do think it gets to just the purpose of education. And kids always have a love hate relationship with school. "Why do I have to do this? Why do I have to learn facts that I'm never going to know or never going to have to use again?" That refrain that we all did when we were kids too. And so I think with education you can see that there was at least this informational aspect and maybe this skills part that we're trying to do of having information you can draw on knowing about history and society, not making mistakes, but also those are intended to form your mind in a particular way so that you're learning how to memorize and learning how to store things and learning how to do skills. 

If I think about say Maslow's hierarchy of needs, those basic needs at the bottom, just food, and then you've got shelter, and then you have relationships, and work, and kind of transcendent things. As tools and technology fill those and mean that we don't need to do them anymore and it keeps moving up there and it puts higher and more and more pressure up at the top, there's less desire to work on those lower things even if those could be important for us. And so I think with the industrial age, we got enough food that we no longer need to forage, but now we really struggle with that overabundance. So we're always eating too much and our bodies are really hard for us to work with. 

And then I think with the internet age, that information question, now we have all the information we need, but we are now battling misinformation all the time. And I think we're in that skills era now with AI tools of what skills do we want to have and what skills do we want to cede to a machine? And so, I think with our kids, that's just harder to conceive of going, what is this education thing supposed to do for you? And then where do you want to be in 10 or 15 years? Those are always hard questions to ask kids, but I think they're important to do. 

And so, just like we would do with sports, we'd say, "It's fine for you to be able to look up the length of a marathon, but if you want to run a marathon, you got to have to do particular things over time." And so, I think the same thing with skills of learning the basic things, learning the math facts or whatever they're called so that you can get to calculus and it'll be the same thing with these other skills, but it's moving so fast that I think a lot of the jobs will change. 

So keeping on those fundamentals and then at least being able have some sense of going back to Drew's question, what is the human, what does it mean to be human? How do I be human in this particular world? Because we can't ask our kids to go back to 1960 or 1980 or something like that. They're going to grow up in this world. And so, there's that balance of preparing them for this world and being in that world, but not of it in some sense. So I think there's a lot of conversations that we're having that I probably just shotgunned a million different things, but not looking at it straightforwardly and then encouraging them to do hard things and develop grit in a world that wants to make everything easier, that tends to not always actually be better for us. 

Drew Dickens: 

I love what you just said about hard things. Part of education is doing the hard work, and I think that's one area that we're seeing affected by AI is it's easy to skip over a lot of the hard work and what you said about the hierarchical needs. It's so interesting looking at articles about the jobs that this will affect. And I still don't think we know yet. It's easy to point to anybody that's doing more transactional kind of work, but even with robotics, it can lay bricks, so we don't quite know yet. But I think again, going back to what's it mean to be human, I think the fundamental ability to communicate with other humans, and one of the things that's expanding very quickly right now is OpenAI just came out with an enhanced voice level where I'm tempted to pull it out right now as the fifth guest on our podcast because it sounds, down to breathing and saying, "um", it's incredible how it's able to sound- 

John Dyer: 

Mimic. 

Drew Dickens: 

Mimic is the word. What are the applications of that for someone that's in a nursing home? Never has anybody visiting them. Imagine the effects of those that are home bound and the elderly. Well, the negative effect of it is you can actually interrupt it. So if you ask, what are your views on this? And a couple of seconds in you don't like where it's going, you say, well, no, no, no, that's not what I meant. I meant more this direction. It'll start again. So all of a sudden I'm the center of that universe. I can interrupt it in a way that would just be rude otherwise, and you're not going to continue the conversation if I stop you every five seconds and say, "That's not what I was talking about." And so, again, I think it will affect our ability to communicate in a empathetic, loving, caring way very soon. I think very soon it's easy to go to the dystopian route with killer robots and Schwarzenegger, but I think these are some of the more subtle areas that it will affect us very soon. 

Kasey Olander: 

If I get accustomed to demanding whatever I want instantly and taking it, then I come to expect that even from the people around me. 

Drew Dickens: 

And without judgment. So I can ask the dumbest questions and it's going to say, "Boy Drew, great idea. Let's explore." And so, I become the center of that universe, and that's not biblical. It's not healthy. So I think that'll be fascinating to watch very soon. 

John Dyer: 

It's interesting to think about trying to flip and have us imitate the device. And so here's what I mean by that. Most of us are not particularly good at listening to someone. We just don't have that skill of listening very well, whereas our AI tools are very good at it. They're just infinitely patient. And that can be really good in some ways. But I think if we could develop that skill, that would actually be really, really powerful to do and to be able to practice that just skill of noticing someone. And I think we some see that even in the little details in the gospels, you'll see these little throwaway comments where I'll say, "And Jesus noticed somebody." The guy at the Pool of Siloam. I don't think we're particularly attuned to being able to do that where we're always listening in order to speak back instead of listening to be able to listen. So I wish I was as good at AI as listening to different people. 

Bill Hendricks: 

Well, there's actually a psychologist out of Biola, I can't recall his name, but his wonderful quote in his book. And the thought here is that most people really do never, they feel like nobody ever pays attention to them. They see them, they interact with them, but it's like furniture, I transact with you, but I don't see you. I don't see you, your personhood, who you are. And then when somebody stops and attends and listens, something happens, something very profound happens. And this guy says, "For most people, the difference between being attended to and being loved is so slight that they can't tell the difference." And I love that phrase because I think that you both have raised the point, the real issue that AI poses for our world, and within that the church, is what does it mean to be human? 

Even apart from AI, our technologically-driven transactional cultures, it forces us to begin to lose our humanity. And so, we are not alive anymore. That's where it ultimately goes. And you talked about being sort of counter-cultural AI does sort create a counter-cultural question. Here's how people who don't necessarily believe in God have not necessarily any deep moral commitments or values-driven kinds of ways of engaging the world. And then here's followers of Christ who by definition are supposed to be bringing love, bringing the fruit of the spirit into all that they do. And so they both work with this technology, but one group does it differently than the other group simply because of what drives the way they use all other technologies, the way they use all other resources in the world. It seems to me that has to be thrown in here. 

Drew Dickens: 

I'm tempted to add the word should. These two groups that you refer to, I don't know that they're always that distinct to each other. 

Bill Hendricks: 

They're not. That's right. 

Drew Dickens: 

And again, it goes back to what I was saying earlier about being mindful of the effect that it's having on me. I created this platform called The Digital Shepherd, which allows you to engage with this it. And that it's been well-trained in Protestant dispensational theology. But one of the early, and I have a survey attached to it of just what was your experience. And so, one of the questions I added was, "Did you feel it was showing you empathy?" Now, of course, it can't show empathy. It's not human. But it's read every book on how to be empathetic. So one of the things that I had it do was, I don't know if you remember whether it did or not, but ask your name early in the conversation and I had it coded to every third or fourth response, mention your name. And the empathetic scores went through the roof. 

So if a response is, "Boy drew, thanks for sharing that. I appreciate your vulnerability in sharing that request." All of a sudden now I feel like it knows me, it heard me. It, again, it heard me. And so, I think that subtle line between being known and being loved applies to everyone, not just believers. And I think we're all easy pushovers for just someone knowing my name. I can't tell you how many times I've been into Starbucks and I've just referenced the baristas name emblazoned on the front of their apron. 

Bill Hendricks: 

Right? It's powerful. 

Drew Dickens: 

But they'll come to a dead stop. "How do I know you? How'd you know my name?" "Well, it's in a giant name tag you're wearing." He said, "No one ever calls me by name. No one ever says that." So it's just the power of the name. And by me adding that into that training, the empathetic scores went through the roof. So I think we're all easy pushovers for being noticed. 

Kasey Olander: 

Right. So as we think further about what it means to be human, what it means to desire love and companionship, we know that AI, the A is for artificial. If it were to move towards this physical robots being able to make decisions and to move around, would that be a step forward or would that be a step backwards? Because in some ways, would that mimic the embodiment? We know that being embodied creatures is such a crucial part of being human. Would a robot with that sort of embodiment be maybe a danger to be aware of just because it would more easily simulate community without actually providing it? 

John Dyer: 

I think the short answer is yes, of course. But I do think there's some fun examples there. I did see a computer scientist whose name I forget, but she says something like, "I don't want AI to write my poetry and novels so I have more time to do my dishes. I want it to do my dishes so I have more time to write my poetry and my novels." And so, I do think some of that physical labor would be nice that you could offload some of those things. Of course, that means you can't do the physical labor anymore. Right? So whatever you're ceding, you're choosing to not become a person who can do those things. But we all do that if we have someone who mows your lawn versus you choosing to do it and so forth. 

And then there's been some work done in elderly care with some type of maybe a cat looking type robot that you can interact with that reminds you about your meds and you can talk to and that stuff. They might do a six-month experiment and then once experiments over, take the robot away. And I think most of the people that were interacting with it really liked it because that was their most engaging thing they had. So I think people do develop attachments very quickly to these physical things. We probably all are aware of the Spike Jonze movie with Joaquin Phoenix, Her, where it was a disembodied Scarlett Johansson. I think what they embodied form now you're seeing a million movies in that people are going, "I think this is going to matter." And usually Sci-Fi is the place where you get, or now horror, where you get, "I think this is going to matter." Questions. So I do think that it will. 

And it seems like people form very quick attachments. They also have a lot of their biases toward women or lighter skinned robots are all built into these things. So a lot of those are coming out. I don't know exactly how it'll work out though. That's the real challenge for us to figure out. The smart revolution, it does seem like having a smart dishwasher doesn't really seem like it's that helpful to us. But I do think a machine that can simulate more human things will be helpful. And then all the other things that you can imagine will be there and already are there, all the really dark things. 

Drew Dickens: 

Meta, formerly known as Facebook, is coming out with their augmented reality glasses called Orion, I believe. And I think that's where we'll start to see some of the initial, it's not a robot, but if I'm with these glasses with the advent of some kind of physical device that I can wear carry with me, it's an extension of what the phone was. But if I'm able to view the world through, even if it's an augmented view of the world, I think we'll see that fairly soon. And in the effects of me being able to as I'm looking at you, seeing a scroll of verses over here would be an easy application of that or making suggestions as I walk down the street trying to find my sister's house. 

So I think wearable devices, before we get into the movies and Her, which is a distant future, it could be I guess next month. And it's interesting when you hear the effect that movie had on the current AI engineers that saw that as a kid. And I guess one of the things that they were accused of is using her voice on one of the initial releases of the language model, of the voice model. I think we'll see some wearable devices around your neck, something in your pocket that you're able to engage with and guide you, that will be able to, again, constantly listen to conversations around you, make suggestions, recommendations on whatever. All those things I wish I had known, "I'd forgotten it was your birthday today." Those kinds of things. So I think those devices will happen fairly soon and have a positive impact if it can help me remember someone's birthday for sure. 

Bill Hendricks: 

I can think of many of our listeners who are hearing all of this and recognizing this, it gives them back all this information, but they really have a strong distrust of what they're getting back because they feel that at the other end of it somewhere are people that have a different whole different set of worldview and politics and that somehow they're being played by all of this. Speak to that. How do we know what to trust and maybe we don't? 

John Dyer: 

Yeah, and I think the big things that were in the news over the last couple of years have been really when someone was over-correcting in a direction. So for example, if you have an AI read a bunch of stuff, it's going to learn that most nurses are women, most doctors are men. It's going to learn that bias that we have, even though that shouldn't be so, but that's just the way that all human writing has been. And so, when you try to over-correct for that, sometimes you can go in the wrong direction. So I think Google famously had an image generator where they were trying to over-correct from assuming that all presidents were men or something like that. But if you said, "Give me an Irish person." It would try to give you four different races at the same time. And so, people got up in arms about that and they pretty quickly corrected that. So it's correction and over-correction. 

I think really most of those engineers are trying to not have the bias that's been built into human civilization, and yet they then introduce other ones. So you can ask about various presidential candidates or whatever, and you might get two different answers depending on the background. So there is some of that in there, though. I don't think it's quite as extreme as we make it out to be, but I do think we should be aware of it. And this is one of those areas where there are some Christian groups trying to build some fundamentally Christian LLM so that it would have better answers. And I don't know how those projects will go. 

I do think this is where that machines are good at a certain level of information. And then I think having a trusted network of people is really important for you. And then having a diverse network of people is really important so you don't allow an AI to filter bubble you, and you don't filter bubble yourself with your own relationships, that you need to create breaks in both of those. And I think in theory, the church of Jesus Christ is the best place to do that because- 

Bill Hendricks: 

Well, it's a global church. 

John Dyer: 

So it should be Jew and Greek and slave and free and female and old and young should be there, and hopefully your church has some representation of that and that you're able to meet with people who don't shed their identity but hold that and yet are in Christ when we're together. And I think that should help. 

Drew Dickens: 

I think it's interesting with, I heard a quote several months ago that AI will achieve adolescence during this presidential election cycle with misinformation. I haven't seen that dramatically yet. We still have a month or so away. But where I'm starting to see it is really interesting is the phrase, AI has become a verb, "That looks AI'd." And I think its ability to immediately cast doubt on truth. So what does that mean for us, again, theologically? But now I can immediately dismiss a fact as, "Boy, it looks to me like that's AI." Or, "That conversation was generated by AI." Or, "That image was generated by AI." 

I think we're seeing a lot of people politically use it that way, just being able to cast doubt on it. A friend of mine that's an attorney, we were talking about that just the other day of how might you use AI to plant a seed of doubt in front of a jury? Could it be, is it possible? But is that reasonable doubt? So I think, again, we need to be aware that that is a thing. Occasionally it's called the beast in the box. The narrative is easy for us to understand that it is some kid in a basement at a cubicle hard coding biases into the language model, and that's not the case. But it's a narrative that's easy to grab hold of that they're against my worldview. I don't think that's inherent in the programming of these language models. 

In the beginning, I think they were just trying to find as much data as they could. They were downloading conversations off Reddit initially and things like that, which again, have a built in bias. Reddit's just teenage white kids. And so, early on it spoke like a teenage white kid. So I think as they're able to acquire more and more and more data, and now it's generating its own data, I think we'll see, as I agree with John a hundred percent, I think we'll see less and less of that. But I think the other question is how will we use it as a tool against truth? 

Because now I'm so easily able to dismiss it as, "You say that, but I've heard that AI can …" Now all of a sudden, you've dismissed an image. You've dismissed a … I can have AI create a granite stone showing something about Jesus and whatnot, and I guarantee if I did and post it on Facebook, someone's going to say, "Wow, sure enough, look what's going on." 

John Dyer: 

Oh yeah. 

Drew Dickens: 

And so, I think we need to be inherently curious about things that we see, but understanding, again, absolute truth and what will that do for us? 

Kasey Olander: 

You guys have highlighted a number of different dimensions, some positive, some negative about how AI might form us as we're human. So as we kind of wrap up here, how would you encourage our listener to cultivate a heart of discernment when it comes to new technologies? I noticed you haven't come out and said, "Every kid needs to limit their screen time to one minute." But how do we help whether parents or ministers or whoever, how do we help our listener to cultivate discernment when it comes to things like this? 

Drew Dickens: 

Well, don't ask John because he has no limits with his kids. 

Kasey Olander: 

That's right. That's right. 

Drew Dickens: 

Actually, for the first time, the other night I had AI speak a bedtime story, and it was so interesting watching them listen to this bedtime story, and they were able to create it. They came up with a prompt. Have it include zombies, have it include this and that and whatnot, and swords. And they had created the story and it was able to feed back a pretty exciting story. But I'm astounded at how little time people are spending. And again, I have a bias here, because it's my research, but I'm astounded of how little people know about it, and they're being exposed to it every day on Facebook and Netflix and Instagram. They're being exposed to it constantly, but how little time they've spent in reading about it and what's behind it. 

What is a language model? What is natural language processing? What is generative AI? What are these tools that are being used in our face constantly, but have not spent any time really researching and learning about it? So that's what I would recommend is to take a moment, just find a couple of podcasts like this one, find a couple of blogs to read, and there's no shortage of articles, and just take a moment and read up on what's going on. 

Kasey Olander: 

Sure, yeah, you're encouraging our listener to cultivate more understanding so that they can decide what's appropriate for them. 

Drew Dickens: 

Absolutely. Absolutely. 

John Dyer: 

Yeah, Drew, that's great. I think learning about that some is good. And I think I would say some negative things and some positive things. On the negative side, I would say I'm skeptical of myself and my own desire for ease and for just something that will benefit me. And I need to cultivate that of going, my instincts are usually wrong, and what I want God to do is to reform my desires. And so that's the deepest thing that I want, is to want the right things. And then I also need to be skeptical of anything that's free, I'm the product, and so really my data, my desires, my purchases, my advertisements, that's probably what's on the other end of it. So I probably want to cultivate that. On the other hand, I think I probably need to learn something about this in a tacit way, so I'm going to need to experiment with it a little bit. 

So learning about it, like reading podcasts or listening to podcasts is important, but doing some level of experimentation. So even in my own classes right now, I do have one assignment where I'm asking the students to use this in a way that they're trying to learn for the course of the class, but I made it optional. So we've got some, "Here's what you can't do, here's what you can do. Here's some gray areas. Here are people that you can go to instead of that gray area so you can be developing relationships." And that you're having opportunities to engage and learn that's not just in your head, but actually in a practical way. 

Drew Dickens: 

I love what you said about fighting against ease. I think that's something else I was just thinking of when you said that, is finding those areas of your life where you are relying on it to make something easier and be intentional to do the hard version of that, to do the hard work. So instead of finding a recipe on Instagram or whatever, is to actually sit down with someone and share a recipe that's handwritten and do the hard work of studying, do the hard work of writing with pen and paper, and so recognize those areas that you're falling into ease and being intentional to do the hard work. 

Bill Hendricks: 

Well, these guys have given us some great calls to action here, some real practical things that we can do around this topic. By the way, I want to let you know we recorded another podcast on artificial intelligence with Fuzz Rana back in July, 2023. So you can also access that at The Table Podcast and add it to what we've learned today. But I want to thank both of you guys, Drew, John for being here. 

Drew Dickens: 

Thanks. 

Bill Hendricks: 

And we just obviously just got a thimble full of all that we can talk about, so we're going to have to have you back. 

John Dyer: 

Sounds great. 

Drew Dickens: 

Love that. 

Kasey Olander: 

We want to thank you too for listening. If you like our show, make sure to leave us a rating or review on your favorite podcast app so that others can discover us. We hope that you'll join us next time when we discuss issues of God and culture to show the relevance of theology to everyday life. 

Jeremiah Chandler: 

Welcome to The Table Podcast where we discuss issues of God and culture to show the relevance of theology to everyday life. My name is Jeremiah Chandler and I'm the guest host for today's episode through my internship here at the Hendricks Center. 

When I say the word culture, what comes to mind? Is your relationship with culture more adversarial, friendly or apathetic. Well, no matter where you land, this podcast is for you. Today we are going to be discussing the role culture plays in the life of a Christian and how we do theology. 

Now, you may be wondering, what does culture have to do with theology? And if that's your question, you are not alone. Many scholars debate over how much weight culture should carry in theological studies. Some argue that theology should remain pure and separate from cultural influences, while others believe that ignoring culture leaves theology incomplete and disconnected from life. 

So how do we navigate this tension, and what role should culture play in the way we do theology? Well, to help me sort out these questions today I have with me two wonderful guests, Dr. Stephen Pardue and Heather Preston. Thank you guys for joining me. 

Heather Preston: 

Yeah, thank you for having us. 

Stephen Pardue: 

Yeah, it's a delight to be here. 

Jeremiah Chandler: 

Yes. Well, before we get started into discussing culture, would you mind just introducing yourselves to our listeners? And we can start with you Dr. Pardue. 

Stephen Pardue: 

Oh, okay. I was going to say ladies first. Yeah, why don't you go ahead, Heather. 

Heather Preston: 

Okay. My name is Heather Preston and I'm a freelance writer and I work mostly for churches and pastors, mostly behind the scenes, but I also publish my own work and really thoroughly enjoy academic collaborations. That's my heart and soul. So I'm just really thrilled to be here and discuss this incredibly important question. 

Jeremiah Chandler: 

Thanks, Heather. 

Stephen Pardue: 

Great. And I'm Steve Pardue. I teach theology and church history at Asia Graduate School of Theology, which is a school in Manila. It's actually a consortium of schools, and I'm particularly at one called International Graduate School of Leadership. My main job is to train leaders from all over Asia to help them as I do teach them and PhD work focusing on understanding God and culture and how those things come together. So I love it. It's a delight to be here with you guys. 

Jeremiah Chandler: 

Thanks Dr. Pardue. Well, before we get started, how would we define culture? We're talking about culture engagement and how do we interact with it, but for our listeners listening, how would we define it? 

Stephen Pardue: 

Yeah, great. I don't know. I'll jump in and just say I think this is a super important question. I remember somebody early on when the book came out was asking me, "Why is your bibliography so long?" It's really long. And what I realized is the reality is people have been talking about this problem of theology and culture for a really long time, and even before the modern era, we kind of had some similar discussions. 

And so I try to boil it down, and I'll give kind of two. One is a very brief way to say, which is, it is a historically transmitted pattern of meanings embodied in symbols that is inherited and then gets expressed in symbolic forms and that allows us to communicate and perpetuate and develop what we know and what we think is true. Okay, that's really complicated. Maybe a more simple way to say it is, it's the reservoir that we all draw from as we think about who we are, what we do, what's right and how the world works. 

Heather Preston: 

Well, and to piggyback on that, Dr. Pardue, because there was something that you actually wrote in your book that I found particularly helpful when it comes to kind of quantifying this thing we call culture, but you referred to it as pre-understandings. And that I found really, really helpful because oftentimes culture is something that I feel like we take for granted, and for me as a white person in western culture, it's something that I don't always consciously think of because I don't have to. And so I think that a lot of times when it comes to culture, we like to point out the differences that we see in other people, but our own pre-understandings kind of just are exactly that, they're pre-understandings. They're not something that we consciously think of. So culture can be a little bit slippery, it can be a little bit tricky that way, but I liked that term because I felt like it helped to kind of quantify what otherwise is like, "I don't know… You want a list?" 

Stephen Pardue: 

It's often invisible and in the background. And that's especially true if you are either in a place that is culturally homogenous. So that could be true in the West. It could also be true if you're in a village in Africa, maybe you don't think about culture much because you're in the middle of it and you don't interact with others who have different cultures. But it's especially prominent for those of us who are in what would be called situations of more cultural dominance or something like that. So in our region, that's Chinese or Koreans in Asia here in America often that's white folks, although it's always changing and it's going to be different in each place. But yeah. Jeremiah, does that answer the question enough? 

Jeremiah Chandler: 

That answers it perfectly. That's a good segue because you mentioned earlier how there is a lot of conversations and debates about, and this is not a new subject, Dr. Purdue, but what would you say to the people that are concerned about integrating culture and how would you validate some of those valid concerns but also still push forward? 

Stephen Pardue: 

Yeah, yeah, that's a great question. And that's really what really sparked the initial desire to write this up. And I'll say it came from two places. One place that comes from is I think in North America where I did my theological training, I think there are some fair concerns that say, "Hey, the study of culture can become a distraction from the primary thing that theology should be about, which is understanding God and especially hearing him well in scripture." And we can often sort of get sidetracked, and that's really important that theologians not get sidetracked. 

There's also a concern though, in my classrooms in Asia where I had students who would say things like, "Well, you know…" Actually they would answer, what is culture? Well, culture is the thing I'm trying to get away from. And this is many first generation Christians all over the world have this sort of instinct that what they're being saved out of is often sort of this mixture of things. I mean, of course theologically, it's the kingdom of darkness, sociologically, it might be family dynamics or cultural realities that are oppressive and really binding, and Christ brings them freedom from many of those things. 

And so it can be very easy to say, "Well, yeah, I'm becoming less…" Actually I had a student who said, "My goal is to be less Chinese and become more Christian." And the problem with that is that first of all, it doesn't exist. There isn't a Christian culture that is pure and unadulterated by any other culture. From the start, Christians have said, "You know what? We're not trying to escape our culture, we're trying to transform our culture and to use… We're not making a new language or something like that, we're going to use the language we already have, even though it's tied up to broken things and we're going to use that language to talk about God and his word." 

And we take that because God did that, we believe that God was the first person to say, "You know what? I know Abraham might misunderstand me when I come and talk to him in his language, but I'm going to do it anyway," because that's how God is. And we see that really all through Scripture with the people of God always kind of adopting a way to be distinctive, but to engage culture really in order to communicate well and really even to hear God well, we have to do that through language, through particular cultures. So that's the start of an answer that I tried to unfold in the book. 

Jeremiah Chandler: 

Thank you. Heather, did you have anything to add? 

Heather Preston: 

Yeah, I mean, I love the way that you articulated that Dr. Pardue because I feel like there is a tendency to want to avoid culture. And language can be a tricky barrier as well. Oftentimes, I'm sure you've experienced working in Asia, you're not necessarily going to always have the luxury of someone having grown up with the English language as their primary. And even when we go back in history and we read these early church writings, they weren't written in English. And there are a lot of things that end up that get passed down that we kind of have to sift through and go, is that actually biblical? And no disrespect, the original authors, their brilliance is quite significant. But sorting through a lot of that, a lot of my research in my work, a lot of it depends on that, depends on deciphering. 

And so I think it's something that is also fascinating when you look at just the philosophical end of things because then you have this trifecta. You have culture, you have language, and you have philosophy and it's shaping the way someone understands when they read scripture. And there's a tendency, I think, especially in an environment where I live, where this is the dominant culture to just kind of trust the way things are because they've always been that way and not question that. And that's something that I genuinely care about helping Christians who are stuck in an hermeneutical circle who kind of have found themselves reasoning with circular logic. Yeah, so that's something that I think that we can only approach with humility and with trying to detach from our pre-understandings, not to overuse the term, but to detach from those. 

Stephen Pardue: 

Yeah. Yeah. No, I think that's right. And yeah, part of the message of the book is that God designed the church precisely to accomplish this task, to get us out of the cultural idolatries that we all have. And the only way out is actually not just to reject culture entirely because you'll just create a new culture, you'll make a new idol. The way out is to join the whole church, which by virtue of being from all these various cultures can help each part of the body can help the other spot the blind spots and grow into the full maturity as Ephesians 4 says, "In the body of Christ." 

Heather Preston: 

And I wanted to ask you, because you mentioned Tertullian in your book and you mentioned him pointing out the holding onto of one's culture and advocating, letting go of that. Do you think that he had a unique perspective on that? Because although he was educated at Alexandria, he was a Carthaginian, and in a lot of ways, from what I've read of his, it makes me think that he had really a unique gaze when it came to the Greco-Roman tendency to connect scripture to mythology and to kind of draw on this idea that the Bible was always Greek, the Bible always was ours, and kind of pull away from the Judaic roots. So I wondered how much you saw that in Tertullian? 

Stephen Pardue: 

Yeah, yeah. I mean, I want to be careful here because I'm not a Tertullian scholar, but in the book, I think where I remember him especially coming up is in connection with a Ghanaian theologian named Kwame Bediako who had this really helpful idea that one of the ways we can understand the modern world where the churches finding its roots in new places is to compare it with the very early church. And so he has this interesting study where he sort of tracks all the different ways that Christians did that in the first two centuries of the church, and then tries to connect that with how African Christians in the 20th century are doing it. 

So I mean, just first of all, what an awesome idea. I love that sort of whole way of thinking. And, yeah. I mean, so Tertullian, yeah, I think you're right. He was sensitive to the worry of cultural idolatry as well as of sort of capitulating to whoever the elites are. And he didn't want Christianity or theology to get captured and imprisoned in this new thing. And so that's why he has this famous line, "What does Athens have to do with Jerusalem?" And Bediako sets him up as sort of a certain type, a certain way of trying to engage culture today. 

So getting back to your original question, Jeremiah, I think this really brings it back is, I would say many evangelicals, I try to argue in the book, they're right to be worried about cultural idolatry and allowing culture to shape theology the wrong way would really be disastrous. And so Tertullian was right about that. I think where I want to then nudge the conversation after that is to say, so then what do we do? We don't want it to shape it the wrong way, but one of the options is not to leave it out entirely. God didn't do that. Christians in history have never done that. If you try to do it today, you will end up, actually, I think just doing it in the back door, allowing culture in the back door, and then you actually don't realize what you're doing. So I would rather have the conversation and really focus clearly on what's going on there and have it in conversation with a variety of people and that's how you're going to keep culture in check. 

Jeremiah Chandler: 

Right. So that goes to my next question, what would you say is the best way or the best method forward? Because you talked about different models in the book, the incarnation model, the Trinity, and then also the church. So how would you recommend, or how would you explain the best practice or the best model for doing that? 

Stephen Pardue: 

Yeah. Well, let me first give the case for the first two, which is I think historically, especially in the 20th century when people have tried to find something in Christian theology to help them think about this culture question. The incarnation is the first place that they've reached, and that totally makes sense because the incarnation is the pinnacle of that pattern that I talked out before that starts with God talking to Abraham, and I guess really talking to Adam and Eve really. But with Abraham, there is a very distinctive sort of, he embodies and interacts with Abraham's culture in some very serious ways. Remember, after the covenant, he comes and appears as a smoking pot going between the halves of an animal. Very clearly he's using Abraham's cultural world to talk to him. And that happens all through the Bible and then it culminates in the incarnation where really here we have God in the closest possible way, dwelling among us, being born into a particular family in a particular place, speaking a certain accent even. 

And many Christians in the 20th century have said, "Well, there is a model for engaging culture, that just as God comes down to us and speaks our language, so also when we cross cultural boundaries or things like that, we also want to adopt that posture and even use that as a metaphor for understanding what we're doing." 

I actually think there's some real validity there, but there are some problems. When you start to think about it, the process of God who is above culture entering culture is very different from, let's say me, who is embodied and stuck in one culture, or a variety of them, and then learning about someone else's culture and trying to accommodate myself to them. And in fact, you really set yourself up for some, I think, problematic interactions if I were to approach that from the perspective of, I'm just like the pre-existent son of God coming down to save and engage this culture, that really is not where we want to go. 

So I argue in the book that this isn't actually the most productive analogy or metaphor. The other one people sometimes appeal to is The Trinity. And the idea there is that maybe in some way because in The Trinity, God is sort of unified, but also something multiple. The sun has an identity, the father has an identity, the spirit has an identity, and maybe somehow we could argue that in the same way we try to do theology that is unified but also diverse and pulling in different directions. Again, I think the analogy there just isn't so strong, it doesn't really get you very far. So what I argue in the book is, well, where does the Bible, where do the apostles go when they want to talk about these things? And I think where they go is the church. 

The church is actually the designed vehicle by which this incredible sort of multi-ethnic salvation plan is supposed to unfold. And the church is born at Pentecost, at this moment where culture actually jumps up to the forefront because all of these people are hearing and speaking in different languages, or at least hearing in different languages depending on what you read there. And it culminates, where does the church end up in Revelation? It's surrounding the Lamb, again, a church from every tribe, tongue, and nation. And that cultural reality seems to persist because John is looking and he's seeing people from everywhere and all over. And so I argue that if we want to do this well, then theologically we want to root our thinking here in the church and that unfolds in a couple of specific ways later in the book. 

Jeremiah Chandler: 

Great, thank you. That's great. Heather, I want to go to you real quick. What are some of the examples, as Dr. Pardue is pointing out how we engage culture, but what are some of the examples that you've found in your research of where we don't engage culture well and it ends up impacting the church negatively? 

Heather Preston: 

Yeah. So a lot of my research is around the Council of Nicaea, so early, early church, very formative years of Christianity, and it's also an incredibly tumultuous time in history. Rome was not exactly stable, and there was a lot of upheaval and persecution and reasons why people would maybe want to compromise or be afraid, or why the Christian Church might want to kind of separate from the Jews to avoid persecution. There's a lot going on, so there's a lot to unpack there. But what I have continually found in that research is that those writers, as brilliant as many of them are, those writers when they remain in an isolated worldview, a lot of their conclusions and their hermeneutical studies really suffer. 

And I've looked at the numbers and you look at things like at the Council of Chalcedon, of the 520 bishops present, only four were from outside of Eastern Rome, only two even represented Africa. And a lot of Christian history used that to suggest that there wasn't a thriving Christian presence in Africa. We know that to be entirely false now, but for many, many years, centuries even, it was thought that Christianity didn't come until Western missionaries brought it. 

And so there are a lot of things that end up altering our reality or our perspective of truth when we maintain a singular worldview. And that Roman Hellenistic worldview really dominated the scene for centuries. And a lot of the tragic things in our Christian history are a result of maintaining that singular lens. And I never want it to be suggested that I'm downplaying the significance of these forefathers or that in any way I want to put the church on blast, but I do think that it is so important for us to examine the mistakes of our mistakes, our communal Christian Church history, the errors that took place that ended up causing divisions. 

I mean, you look at how many schisms happened in those early centuries, and many of them are a result of really being scared of seeing something from someone else's particular worldview and losing the control or losing the upper hand, or just the natural human tendencies that we run to for security. 

I read one scholar recently, I believe his name is Luke Johnson, forgive me if I'm wrong, but he used the term, "A world of rhetorical hardball," and he was talking about the engagement between scholars in the early centuries. And there there's a lot that you read today and you go, oh boy, this was written to win, not to be understood, to win. And that's a loss. But I see it even today, some scholars who they're writing from a place of defense, a defensive posture. And one thing that I really appreciated about your book, Dr. Pardue, was that it wasn't defensive. And I've heard others suggest that, I know you were on, is it Theology in the Raw? He said the same thing. And I thought that's absolutely true about your book, is that it's not written from a defensive posture. And I think that's really crucial because I look at New Testament writers, I look at even Paul, and there are very few instances where his tone is aggressive. And most of the time where people read it and suggest that it is defensive, it's a misappropriation. 

Stephen Pardue: 

Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Well, and I don't know, what's the saying? You catch more flies with honey than vinegar, something like that. I think there's just a reality there that we're good news people and we want to embody that in our tone as well as the content of what we say, yeah. 

Jeremiah Chandler: 

That's good. Dr. Pardue, in your book, you had mentioned that when we don't have various cultural perspectives at the table, that can leave our theology incomplete. And Heather as you pointed out, sometimes that happens when we're isolated or when we're in our own echo chambers of our own culture. So what are we missing when we don't have other cultures surrounding us? 

Stephen Pardue: 

Yeah, that's great. Well, I mean, I think I would agree with what Heather was saying there that a lot of… When we look at history, whether it's far back or even just recent, usually when we make mistakes in theology, one of the contributing factors is what I would just call insularity, sometimes it gets called groupthink, I guess that's a specific form of it. So what are we missing? Well, let me put it in the negative first and then I'll put it in the positive. 

So I think what we often miss is, precisely, Heather brought up some examples there, I would add, I think… A great example actually is in the mid-20th century in North America, there's a very tumultuous sort of time post-World War II, well really sort of in the '60s especially, let's just take that decade in the U.S. There's a lot of things being renegotiated as a society, and then the church is trying to figure out, how do we respond to that? 

And one of the things that had developed earlier in the 20th century was what gets called the social gospel. And it was in certain cases, really a straightforward realignment of the church's focus away from spiritual kind of other worldly things into purely focusing on this worldly thing, so there were some people who were pushing in that direction. And that prompted a backlash, which is understandable. It was itself kind of an overcorrection. And part of that backlash was among lots of gospel-minded folks, the idea was anyone who talks about caring for the poor, ensuring that we pursue justice, things like that, would be labeled as part of that movement, or even worse, part of communism, which was of course at that time a huge threat to the American and sort of the western civilization, or it was perceived that way at least. 

And what happened over time is that… Actually churches were popping up in Latin America at this time. The missionary movement had sent really just a huge load of missionaries all over the world after World War II. As American Christianity really gained a missional vision in a way that it hadn't before. And it's an incredible movement for all of, there were absolutely problems and challenges there, but churches were planted, Bibles were translated. And in Latin America, this evangelical movement starts to bubble up and really gain steam. And one of the things that evangelical leaders in Latin America, as they were forming their own theological societies and seminaries and trying to think through, what does the gospel mean here? They were in a context of many people who were living in extreme poverty and they recognized, "Hey, the gospel has something to say about this." 

And the way they did it was they went to scripture and they said, "Okay, what does the Bible say? How does it speak to this?" And it wasn't until they did that and sort of considered it afresh that they said, "Whoa, wait a minute. There's a lot here about poverty, a lot about serving and seeking causes of justice." And what they started to point out to their brothers in the north was, "Hey guys, we understand your concerns about this movement. We have some of the same concerns, but don't you think that we need to really listen to scripture with fresh ears and really pay attention to it. When it speaks, we have to listen. We can't just turn it aside or say, 'Hey, that sounds too communist.'" And actually through their work, the whole global church was enriched because today I would say most local churches and most Christian organizations would agree that the gospel has important things to say about the way we treat the poor, about the way we interact with justice issues. 

Now, actually today, I'm aware that the North American Church is going through another reckoning with some of these issues and I guess I would just say it would be tragic if they did that alone. It would be really unfortunate. And so what I hope is that there will be a willingness to say, "Hey, we realize these things we're dealing with are complicated. We need help." And ask someone on the other side of the world or from a different cultural context, "Hey, what do you think about this? How do you think about it? What do you see in scripture?" And that's not to say that that other voice has to become the supreme one, but you will read the Bible better if you do it that way. 

Heather Preston: 

And that goes back to what you and I were talking about earlier, Jeremiah, where it's a public expression. There always needs to be that public component to faith, faith without works, what of that? And the true public expression of love is justice. And so I know that liberation theology has plenty of flaws, but at the same time, that social justice component is biblical, and we can't ignore that and still call ourselves valid theologians if we take up one element of scripture, but ignore the other. It's flawed practice for a theologian or theology. 

Jeremiah Chandler: 

That's good. Dr. Pardue, your title of your book is, Why Evangelical Theology Needs the Global Church, so what are you is a gap, or let me say it this way, what can evangelical theology gain from bringing in the global church into their theology? 

Stephen Pardue: 

Yeah, yeah. So I guess we sort of answered that question in part one, just in the previous one to say we gain important perspective that otherwise will leave us unable to hear the full witness of God. And maybe to put a finer point on that is to say that, God designed scripture like his revelation, his speech to us, he designed it to be heard by the whole church. And today, the whole church is a church of every tribe and tongue and nation. It is actually the most diverse that the church has ever been, although Christianity, even from the very early years, had this reputation for being very ready to cross cultural boundaries. It never associated itself with just one language or one city or one place. 

So we miss out on that, and that leads us to shortcomings. I guess what I would also say is we miss out on the full depth and breadth of the gospel. And people who travel and see the church and other places that are far from them, I think experience this. They say, "Oh, hey, I never read that text that way and now I understand it better." One of the things that happens to us in the West is that our cultural context is really distant from the world of the Bible, in certain ways. We live in a very modernized kind of secularized world. 

And so when we read certain metaphors, even the metaphor of atonement, we don't have atonement ceremonies of any kind in our modern world, but you know what, in Africa or Asia, a lot of times people do, they understand very well, they've actually done it or they've been part of ceremonies like that. And that just gives you a better sense of, "Okay, that's what the Bible was talking about there when it talks about Christ as being in our place as the lamb that was slain." Yeah, so I think what we miss is correction, where we are wrong and more positively we also miss depth where we have kind of a shallow understanding, or even we started just taking things for granted that we never really understand. Why is that there in my Bible? And one of the best cures for that is to hang around Christians who are not from the same cultural background as you, and that's how God designed it to be. 

Heather Preston: 

Yeah, absolutely. No, I love that. I think that what you say regarding Pentecost and it being almost like a reverse Babel, but God perfecting and not abolishing culture, I love that because it shows you how big God is. I get excited about that. I get excited about hearing the word proclaimed in other languages because God understands it just as well as he understands you and I talking right now, that gets me fired up because we should appreciate that. We should stop and take a minute to go, I don't have the mind of God. I strive to, but I don't have it yet and until the other side of eternity, I won't. And so I appreciate that perspective because I see humility in it, and that is a hallmark of Christ and the example that he set. 

Stephen Pardue: 

Yeah, no, it's exciting. It's super exciting. 

Jeremiah Chandler: 

So I'm thinking about the person listening to this and wondering, "Okay, we're talking about culture in terms of bringing in other people and understanding where they're coming from, but do you guys have specific examples of how does that impact how we read the Bible because in here and at seminary, and I took a cultural class and one of the things that we learned was the gospel, the way they called it was the three-dimensional gospel. So there's guilt, innocence, shame/honor, and then power/fear. And one of the most, I'd say the most, I guess impactful lecture that we had was going through the shame and honor passages in scripture and just seeing all of the… And I was like, I never really saw the gospel in terms of shame and honor, but there it is if you have the eyes to look for it. So I'm just curious, what other examples do you guys have about, or how can we actually apply some of the things about the culture that we're learning and how do we actually import that into our theology? 

Stephen Pardue: 

Yeah, that's a fantastic question and I think a very good one. One thing I would say at the outset of the conversation is sometimes people want to know like, "Hey, what's the huge new thing that this great new movement of global Christianity is going to give us?" And I want to always say at the outset, well, I want to have fairly low expectations of theology at any given time because theology is not supposed to be fundamentally an innovative enterprise. It is fundamentally a conserving and stewarding enterprise. And what we are doing as theologians is trying to refine and trying to fine-tune what has been passed down to us, what other Christians have recognized and heard in scripture. So I just want to always be careful not to overstate the expectations. We're not going to find some new conception of The Trinity that is totally revolutionary. We will find some expanded understandings. 

So we've talked about the fruit of what I would call the evangelical response to liberation theology in Latin America. So I didn't tell that part of the story, that part of the background there is evangelicals were the ones who took the insights of that movement that were correct and said, "Here's what fits with scripture, and here's how that is transforming for life and how we interact with society." So I think that's an example. 

Shame and honor is a really good one too. And that is one of the ones where once you see it, suddenly you can't unsee it, but before that, you never noticed it in the Bible. And so the fact that so many biblical stories are tied up with shame and the message that in Christ that shame has been borne by him, and in exchange we received his honor, not only his righteousness, which is what we usually talk about, but also his honor as the divine son is now given to us as sons and daughters of God. So those are some really good, ready to hand examples. 

I would add maybe one, just in the world of ethics is here in North America and in western cultures, we don't think very much, I don't think it crosses our mind very much that that commandment to honor our fathers and mothers, that is often taught or just thought about exclusively as something that you teach your kids. And then there's some magic thing that happens when you turn 18 and then you don't have to do it anymore. And one of the things I've appreciated living in Asia for most of my life is almost every Asian culture has an extremely high value on honoring father and mother until they're dead and even after they're dead. And in Asia that raises, we have actually even special questions around, okay, what do you do when your parents are not Christians? How do you honor them well when that means you can't maybe participate in certain rituals or things like that? But I think it's one thing the Asian church is speaking to the Western church is to say, "Hey, there's nothing in that commandment that says it's over when you- 

Heather Preston: 

You age out of this one. 

Stephen Pardue: 

… when you age out, or even when you get married. Yes, you leave your family, but those are still your parents. And so God's design is still for you to honor them. And I mean, I think that that could actually be transformative for American society if Christians were a force for saying, "Hey, we're actually going to persist in honoring father and mother, elders." What a change that would make in a society where those folks are often really marginalized and isolated. So that's just a very practical example. I guess that's not so theological. I'm sure Heather, you may have other ideas to add there. 

Heather Preston: 

Yeah, I mean, my thought goes to tensions that we see here in America, and I think about justice issues, I think about when scripture tells us to bear one another's burdens. And I think that oftentimes we see that as our immediate circle and the friend group that we currently have is all that that's referring to, but scripture is not just referring to that. And Paul is being really clear in that verse, and I'm totally forgetting the reference, but it is in there. But to bear one another's burdens. And furthermore, Jesus is the one that tells us that if your brother is holding something against you, you need to go make it right. And it doesn't say if you're holding something against your brother, it says if your brother's holding something against you. So if there's an issue, it needs to be addressed. And I think a lot of times the most hurtful thing that we can do as Christians is to be silent when a brother or sister is hurting, to be silent when there is injustice that is affecting our brothers and sisters. 

And I'm not saying that you have to join every picket, rally, line, whatever, I'm not saying that, but don't be silent. Don't be silent. And don't just be a bystander when it comes to your faith. It's too important, it's too important. And I know that's not deeply theological or incredibly profound. It actually is pretty simple. But I think that a lot of times we get a pretty simple command and we use a lot of fancy language to avoid doing it. And I think sometimes the Christian's responsibility is to just go and do right, do the right thing. And you know what that is? It's not that complicated. Tracing the origins of a lot of this stuff and weighing out the history and doing all the proper hermeneutics, that's all really important but if we're not living out the call to action that we've already gotten, then we're a poor representation of our faith. 

Jeremiah Chandler: 

Thanks Heather, and thanks Dr. Pardue. I'm going to ask probably one more question because we're running low on time, but I'm curious what you guys think, your perspective on this because this has been a huge passion project for me, just understanding culture. Being an African-American, one thing I've realized growing up in, I grew up in Iowa, so I grew up in a predominantly white environment, but my church I'd say was… In Iowa, we didn't have predominantly Black churches, but mine was 60/40, so it was close enough. 

But one of the things, I am curious of your guy's perspective when it comes to culture is, I guess me growing up, I felt like I needed to, you had mentioned it Dr.Pardue, that you had to lose some part of your culture. And one thing I've noticed though, the overcorrection now is we're getting told, at least in my circles when I do apologetics and just in my peer group, that now our culture is over our Christian values. And so what would you say to the person or how would you advise someone who wants to be like, "Hey, I hear what you're saying, I love culture too, but I also want to hold onto my theological convictions." 

Stephen Pardue: 

Yeah. Well, I would say you're doing well. I mean, that's a great starting point actually, just to say, I'm aware of culture, even, I'm thinking about it and I want to guard the deposit that's been entrusted to me. I don't want to get sidetracked like we talked about earlier, and I don't want to twist this thing to fit something else. That's sort of the definition of idolatry is to twist our idea of God into some other thing. And I would say, so that's a great starting point. That's a great starting posture. 

I think the next thing I would say is, think about how God has already designed the process of thinking and speaking about him. And remember, he didn't design it as sort of an acultural enterprise. He could have, he created some new language that only Christians or his people spoke, and he didn't. He took the cultural raw material that was available there and he used it to speak to us and Christians when they became Christians in the very early church, there's this beautiful quote from an old document called the Epistle to Diognetus, where he is trying to explain to someone, what are Christians like? And he's like, "Yeah…" Let me actually get it, I'll pull it up for you here. He says, "Christians aren't distinguishable from other people, either by country, language or customs. For nowhere do they live in their own cities, speak some unusual dialect or practice an uncommon lifestyle. They live in their native countries, but only as outsiders. They participate in everything like citizens and tolerate all things as foreigners. Every foreign place is their homeland and every homeland is foreign." 

And so I would just say to someone in that situation, you're in exactly the right place. You're struggling with the same stuff Christians have struggled with for 2,000 years. And the way they have always found a way forward is to not run from culture and not necessarily either run toward it, but to run toward Christ and to trust that as I do that, using my language, my culture in submission to the word of God, and in fellowship with other Christians, the whole global body of Christ, that he will be faithful. And as I seek to be faithful, actually, my job is to be faithful using that cultural material that I've been given, whatever it is. 

And one more thing I'll add is just that, your story references a reality that is true for most of us, that we often think about culture as sort of one thing. You're either in this African-American culture or white culture, or you are Texan or you're not. And the reality is all of us and most of us in today's world actually are participating in a lot of different cultures. And that actually, I think, is a way to remind us that we're never fully at home in one place. All of us are, as Diognetus says, we're all kind of foreigners in whatever culture we're in, but we're going to make the best of it and we're going to treat it sort of like it's our home so that we can bear witness in a way that makes sense to those around us, and in a way that is winsome to those around us in that culture. 

Jeremiah Chandler: 

Amen. Thanks, Dr. Pardue. Heather, did you have anything to add to close this out? 

Heather Preston: 

Yeah, I mean, I just think about the church. What is the church? And I think that a lot of times we run into problems culturally speaking in church when we look at it as our house and the church doesn't belong to us. The church, we represent it, but at the end of the day, it's God's house. We're going to God's house. And I see tension in a lot of different ministries, even ones that I'm a part of when it comes to, how do we do this? And I'll just use worship as an example. How do we worship in a way that represents the congregation? And a lot of times it results in kind of a tug of war, someone wanting to assert, "Oh, this is the way that we've done it, or this is the way that they want to do it," that type of a dynamic. 

But at the end of the day, we're not worshiping because we sound good, we're worshiping to honor and bring glory to God, and we're worshiping with our brothers and sisters. And so it should be reflective of that. It should be reflective of everyone so that everyone knows that they are welcome and that they are to a reflection of the Creator. We don't own this space, even earth, it's not our home. We're ambassadors, which means, like you said, Dr. Pardue, we're foreigners. Everywhere we go, we're foreigners. So that's just my two cents when it comes to the identity of the church and how we interact culturally. 

Jeremiah Chandler: 

Thanks, Heather and thanks Dr. Pardue. I appreciate you guys for joining me. As I'm listening, just you guys wrapped it up, I think you guys did it perfectly when it comes to culture, we're not supposed to be idolatrous, but we are supposed to take it seriously, mainly because that's how God created us. He could have made us all the same, could have made us all talk the same, but in heaven, we are still going to be talking in the same languages he gave us. And so for you listening, I pray that this episode was helpful for you and helps you understand how we can better engage culture. So thank you for listening. If you liked this episode, please leave a rating or review, and we hope that you'll join us next time as we discuss issues of God and culture, to show the relevance of theology for everyday life. 

Kymberli Cook: 

Welcome to the Table Podcast where we discuss issues of God and culture to show the relevance of theology to the everyday life. My name is Kymberli Cook, and I'm the assistant director of the Hendricks Center. And we are so glad that you have joined us today as we chat through why Christians need relational skills too. And we are joined by Ken Sande, co-founder of Peacemaker Ministries and current founder and president of Relational Wisdom 360, who is more than qualified to walk us through not only why Christians need relational skills, but how to develop these skills. So thank you Ken, for taking the time to join us and sit at the table today. 

Ken Sande: 

Well, you're welcome, Kymberli. It's always a joy to be here with you. 

Kymberli Cook: 

So if you don't mind, you've actually been on our podcast at least one other time, right? We talked about broken families and broken marriages and that kind of thing, but we haven't actually taken the full on relational conversation like you have in some of your materials. So if you don't mind sharing a little bit with our listener, how did you end up dedicating your life to helping people with their relationships? 

Ken Sande: 

Well, I started off actually as an engineer managing a medical research and development team and learned you can have great technical skills, but what makes or breaks you is relational skills, even in something like engineering. So I went on to law school and learned that even more so, that even though you need a lot of technical skills in that profession, what makes or breaks attorneys is relational skills. 

And shortly out of law school, God called me into a ministry of biblical mediation and arbitration, settling lawsuits between Christians outside of court, something we call Christian conciliation. And I worked at that for about 30 years and saw the Lord do some astonishing things, situations that seemed absolutely impossible with dramatic restorations. But after about 30 years of putting out the fires of conflict, divorces, church splits, abuse cases, lawsuits, you name it, I thought, I think I'd rather spend the next season of my life helping people to prevent conflict. 

So in 2012, launched a new ministry called Relational Wisdom 360, or just RW360. And what we've done, is developed some material. It's basically merging all of the good neurology of emotional intelligence, understanding how the brain works, how our emotions impact our lives with good theology. What does the Bible say about emotions, and relationships, and all those things? And so we developed a training paradigm called Relational Wisdom, which is a God-centered biblically-grounded, gospel-driven form of emotional intelligence. And one of our main goals is to help people learn better relational skills, not just emotional, but just lots of other things go into relationships, that ideally would prevent the misunderstandings and the offenses, the trigger conflict like a church split, divorce, lawsuit. 

But also these skills are useful if a conflict does come upon us, and life it's just going to happen, that we would more quickly harness the power of our emotions instead of getting angry, defensive, proud, bitter to realize those things will push us over the cliff. And really just pray for God to help us to take captive, not just our thoughts, but our emotions, our words, and our actions as well, and move toward reconciliation more quickly. So you could call it a CPR system at this point, Kymberli. Conflict prevention and resolution is what we're dealing today, both prevention and resolution. But I would far prefer to prevent a major conflict than I would to get involved in cleaning up the mess. 

Kymberli Cook: 

So how did that happen, or where were you? Do you remember the point where you were like, "I don't want to do…" I mean I know you still do a lot of conciliation and mediation and that kind of thing, but where you said, "We've got to get upstream of this." What was the point where that happened? 

Ken Sande: 

Well, it wasn't one single thing, but it was just sort of sitting back and just realizing, I mean, a big part of our mediation process, we want to know how people got to where they are in a divorce, church split, lawsuit, what have you. And so we'd want to know how did you meet? How did your relationship develop? What's it been like over the years? What brought you to this point? So it's sort of like hitting the rewind on a video and playing it forward. And again, and again, and again, these relationships started out wonderfully. Two men working together found a church, and it grows, and people are coming to Christ and all this is going great. And then some things start to happen in their relationship. And then there's often one meeting where one of them says or does something or one email someone sends. 

And as soon as I hear it, I go, "You did what? Didn't you understand how that was going to land on the other person's heart and ears?" So often Kymberli, people are going, "Oh yeah, I guess I can see that now." I just realize that people come to a fork in the road very often in relationships, and if they take the right turn and go in the right direction, which is the character of Christ, biblical wisdom, living out the incredibly wise principle God gives us on really, they can navigate those things and come out on the other side with an even stronger relationship. 

But if they make a foolish decision, which usually is not a matter of malice or wickedness, it's what I would call in many cases, clumsiness, especially in the church. Church leaders often, almost always are trying to do what they think is good and right, occasionally run into people that are malicious, but that's pretty rare. Most church leaders are really trying to do what they think is the right thing to do, but they are what I call, clueless and clumsy. They're just not thinking. And we get pastors who come to us, Kymberli, and they say, "My elders have told me they love my preaching, but if I don't improve my relational skills in the next six months, I'm losing my pulpit." 

And as one very prominent church leader told me about his denomination, he said, "Our denomination tends to attract men who are intellectual introverts, who are relationally challenged." And so they've got great intellect. They can do Old Testament, New Testament, Greek and Hebrew, but when they try to engage people, they have often never learned empathy, reading body language, putting yourself in the other person's shoes. A great preacher is primarily a sender of information. He's mostly concerned about how he's going to send the information. A highly relational person is concerned mostly on how that other person is going to receive the information. The focus is on the receiver, not the sender. That one shift can make all the difference in saving someone's career, all the difference in the world. 

Kymberli Cook: 

Or their marriage or their- 

Ken Sande: 

Or their marriage. 

Kymberli Cook: 

… job. 

Ken Sande: 

I'm dealing with some people right now, they haven't seen their grandchildren in about six months, and they have been estranged from their daughter-in-Law. And frankly, the grandparents are saying, "All we did was this." And I went, "Did you not understand how that would come across to your daughter-in-law?" And they go, "Oh, okay, now I can see it." So we just really want to help people learn things. Even just listening to a tone of voice, getting probably a little bit ahead of this, but an example. If you're talking to somebody, say you see them at church or in a coffee shop and you say, Hey, how you doing today? And they go, "Oh, I'm fine." That's one answer. But they might sometimes say, "Oh, I'm fine." 

Kymberli Cook: 

Mm-hmm. 

Ken Sande: 

Most people don't realize the second one is a completely different answer. That pause in there, "Oh, I'm fine," actually means "I'm not fine, but I'm not sure you care enough about me or have the time to get engaged. So I don't really want to tell you I'm having a big problem and have you just walk away, because that would hurt too much. So I'll give you a little hint and see if you pick up on it." And too often we've never trained our ear or our eyes to pick up on those little hints that people drop all the time hoping we will catch them and respond to them constructively. 

Kymberli Cook: 

Or training our schedule too, right? Allowing ourselves to have- 

Ken Sande: 

Yep. 

Kymberli Cook: 

… the margin to be able to stop and hear that in a coffee shop. 

Ken Sande: 

Well, one of the greatest ways to build passport with somebody is when you do get that answer. This happened to me one time in a coffee shop and a guy did give that hint, and I asked him a few more questions and he slowly put more cards on the table, so to speak. And after about three or four questions, I picked up my phone and called my secretary, said, Chris, "Would you please move that executive meeting this morning? Something important has come up. I'll be in a little while." And boy, that sent a message to this other guy. 

Kymberli Cook: 

Of course. 

Ken Sande: 

I care enough about you to change my schedule. And that's what made it safe for him to share some really fine China in his life. 

Kymberli Cook: 

So you outlined for us just the ways in which your program is thinking theologically through these things and biblically and character of Christ. There's the theology and all the way through. So the title of this podcast is a little cheeky in that of course Christians need relational skills too. We all recognize that. I really do think we all recognize that. Like you said, "We see the clumsiness in the church and in different kinds of our own relationships and in family, even Christian families. We recognize that all of that happens. But I think that there is a little bit of, I'll put air quotes, "a family conversation," amongst believers as to how we develop those relational skills. I think there's a camp that says if we do follow the image of Christ, if we do what the Bible says, then that all I should expect it to come in line, and all of these things are going to happen for me. 

And then I think there's another camp that might say, yes, we do recognize the transformational power of Christ and the power of the word of God, but there's also some intention that needs to be there. And it might be a little bit more complicated than just expecting it to kind of, I don't want to be pejorative. I was going to say wave a magic wand over it all and it works, but to expect that it's a little bit more complicated. Being familiar with your work, I am pretty sure that you would fall in the second camp of saying, "No, there's some intention that needs to be applied." So why is that? Why would you fall in that camp? 

Ken Sande: 

Well, I guess one thing you could do, you could talk about the difference between knowledge and wisdom. And knowledge is the acquisition of information. And so a lot of pastors especially go to a rigorous seminary like DTS, they're going to spend a lot of time acquiring information, systematic theology, organizing it, thinking it through, synthesizing it, etc. Very valuable necessary thing to do for pastoral ministry. But wisdom is knowing how to live out that knowledge in real life. Definition I often use is wisdom is responding to life God's way. The key word there, well, always God's way, but responding. It's actually putting that information into practice. 

One of the biggest pastoral train wrecks I've ever seen was with a brilliant pastor who actually taught seminars on relational skills. He was a brilliant teacher. He could organize the theology. He could explain the concepts, and yet he was stepping on toes right and left in his congregation, and eventually he lost his pulpit. So he had the knowledge, but he had never learned to really live that knowledge out, not only sadly with his parishioners, but in his family. And so there is this thing, Kymberli where we certainly want to know what the Bible says about things like forgiveness, and confronting, and rebuke, and negotiation. There's a huge amount of information in the Bible, which is a huge part of what our ministry is all about, is teaching that information. But we also want to give people practical illustrations and examples. I think frankly, it's one of the reasons among many others, I'm sure that there's so much narrative in the Bible. 

You can give these imperatives, "Do not commit adultery, do not steal, do not murder." But when you read the story of David, there's living color evidence of a man who in the early part of his life lived out those principles beautifully. And the people were delighted to have him be the king. And then he forgot about it and he turned away from the knowledge. He knew those principles, he had the knowledge. But in the middle of some passionate, emotional, uncontrolled, undisciplined things, he commits adultery and commits murder and brings incredible devastation on his people. So I am a strong believer that we do have to have the knowledge and the Bible has got a wealth of information for us we should be very well versed in. 

But what we try to do through our ministry is say, okay, what does it actually mean? How do you actually develop and enhance this God-given capacity for empathy? And one of the booklets I wrote is called Seven Steps to Empathy. How can you specifically deliberately cultivate it the same way you would learning how to play the piano? I could sit down a piano and just sort of go clunk, clunk, clunk, but I would need to practice to learn how to make a melody. And ideally I'd have an instructor helping me to accelerate that growth curve. So the same thing with relational skills. It takes practice and that's one of the things Paul tells Timothy, practice these things. Practice these things that others might see your example and follow you. That's the other big part of this is the most important way that church leaders actually teach this. It's not didactically from the pulpit or in the Sunday school class. It's how their people see them living it out day to day. 

Kymberli Cook: 

In going through some of the relational wisdom materials, I remember a point where, because of all of the intention that you're talking about, these specific steps toward empathy and that kind of thing, and maybe this tells more about me than I would like to technically share. But I remember thinking that is just so much work. Every interaction with a person, I have to think through all of these things and try to be doing all of these things. And then it hit me or somebody said it in a seminar or something. But that is one way the gospel can be applied in my life. 

And there's this part of me that is carved away and carved more into the image of the Christ who didn't consider equality with God something to be grasped, but laid himself down and humbled himself. And put other people ahead of himself even. And so something as simple as being intentional about how I have conversations, it is difficult. It is hard, it is taxing, but I'm doing it because this is part of how the gospel is applied in my life. And it is how I am shaped into his image, like you're saying, it has to be something that I actually do. Yes, I can be very aware of that need, and of the verse, and all of those things, and of what Jesus did, but it's different when I actually make myself do it. 

Ken Sande: 

Absolutely. And you hit the key word there. It's the gospel. The gospel gives us, number one, the motive to change when we realize all that God has done for us through Christ. Our motive is to respond to that. And for example in Paul says that to when you remember what God has done for you in Christ, then you respond to your brother without malice and you attend to heart, you're kind, you're compassionate. 

It starts with recognizing what God did for me in Christ, and that motivates me to want to be transformed into his image, to imitate him, to serve others, bring people to him. So the gospel is the motivation, but it's also the power for change. We have to say, "Lord, I can't make this change in my own. I need your help." And that's the power, the transforming power of the gospel in us, that we actually can change. We can actually grow. The other thing I want to emphasize, Kymberli is think about when you first learned to ride a bicycle. You had to really focus. You had to really work all of your attention and all of your… It took work to do that. But once you get that muscle memory, what happens? You're not even thinking about it. You're riding your bike down the street and you're thinking about something else going on. It's now become muscle memory. You've got I think a couple little girls. 

Kymberli Cook: 

Yes. 

Ken Sande: 

Okay. Think about the early phase of parenting. You're thinking deliberately about everything you do. I mean, do I do this? Do I do this? Do I buy this? Do I change this diaper? Do I do this? Very deliberate. But after you've been doing it for a while, what happens? You're on autopilot. You're doing all of that, getting your girls up and dressed and ready while you're also thinking about going to work and doing a podcast because it's become a habit. 

Most of the decisions we make every day are habit. They're not deliberate. It's like when you're thinking you're going to go down to the grocery store, you get in your car, something's on your mind. You don't even remember making the left turn here and the right turn there and the thing there. You're just on autopilot. So a big part of our training methodology is we give people some very simple acrostics like SOG, self-aware that we're God aware. Read, recognize an emotion, evaluate its source, anticipate the consequences, direct it constructively. Simple acrostics. We say just practice that every day for 30 days. Just put a little card in your dash or a little note on your computer, and as you go to work, just, "Lord, help me to read myself today and everything I'm doing." So you just maybe half a dozen times you're thinking about it during the day, guess what happens in 30 days? 

You're not thinking consciously about it. You're just interacting with somebody without even deliberately consciously telling yourself. You're asking, "What am I feeling right now? I'm a little bit anxious. Why am I anxious?" Well, I'm going to be late for a meeting. If I break off this conversation right now, what will that do? Well, I could really tell this person, I don't care. What's the better thing to do to say could I possibly, "Just a minute. I want to let my assistant know I'll be a little bit late for the meeting." And it just becomes an automatic process. And I think part of this is what it means to be conformed to the life of Christ. We no longer have to think, "Okay, now what would Jesus do right now?" We just start doing it. And that's the transforming power of the spirit. All our training does is assist tools to assist that transforming process. But you're right, it does take work up front. But I'll tell you one thing, it takes a lot more work to go through a divorce down the road. 

Kymberli Cook: 

Yeah, it's worth it. Yeah. Please don't hear me saying it's not worth the while. 

Ken Sande: 

I know you're not. 

Kymberli Cook: 

But yeah, absolutely. 

Ken Sande: 

But I appreciate you saying that because I always tell people you get out of our training what you put into it. 

Kymberli Cook: 

Yeah, well, as you're talking about things becoming a habit, it makes me think of some of the things that we even say about giftedness here, where once you quote, unquote, master, and please, none of us on this side of eternity and maybe even not on the next, are fully going to master these things. But once we take a step in familiarity and habit and that kind of thing, then we're also able to move on to another layer or another level of sophistication. So then you're able to perhaps walk into a situation of conflict that previously you wouldn't have been able to handle well. But having had a couple of these disciplines drilled into you all of a sudden, "Oh no, I am thinking through the other person's perspective here and I'm trying to serve them here, that kind of thing." And that's something automatic that will serve you in more sophisticated situations as well. 

Ken Sande: 

It's so true. Getting back to those two groups of people you described, it's sort of funny. Over the years, we've really tried to work with a lot of seminaries and we've done seminars that were hosted by seminaries. And I was always surprised how few students would come to those. And I know they're busy, they've got a heavy caseload, they don't have a lot of time. But very often when I was able to talk to some students, the attitude was, I know there's other guys out there that have problems, but in my church, we're going to preach Jesus, we're going to love each other, we're going to grow." 

And they just have this optimistic, and I would sadly say naive attitude toward what it's going to be like to lead a church. And those are the guys that call me back about two years later and say, "Hey, you know that training you did down at whatever, whatever, and I wasn't able to attend that. Where could I get it now? They've been in the trenches, they found out that sheep bite and now they're realizing those relational skills we try to teach them can really make the difference. And not only there, once they get into ministry, they start to realize the strain ministry puts on their families. Ministry is a very stressful career. 

Kymberli Cook: 

Absolutely. 

Ken Sande: 

And if you're not mindful of the impact it's having on your wife and kids, man, it can take a toll. So I'd much rather teach these skills to people right there in the seminary, so they hit the ground running with them. But I also know sometimes it's after they've been in the trenches a year or two that they finally realize how important they are. 

Kymberli Cook: 

For those who would say, "I'm there, I see the importance," or, "You've convinced me. I don't necessarily have a pain point right now, but you've convinced me that I need to be thinking through this." What are some ways or some tools that you could share for how Christians can develop? You mentioned read. What are a couple of the other acrostics? Can you walk us through those to help people think through how they might strengthen their relation or their relational muscles? 

Ken Sande: 

Good. First, I would say, Kymberli, there's a lot of free information on our website people can just go and download. And including if they go to what's called our RW Academy. They just go to RW360.org, or RW360 dot O-R-G. And they click on the training tab and go down to online training. There's a free two-hour course, and I give this course all over the country to pastors conferences, and it's called the Relationally Wise Leader. The Relationally Wise Leader. And it gives a 30-minute introduction to the concept of relational wisdom, biblical emotional intelligence, 30-minute introduction to Biblical Peacemaking, and then an hour applying those concepts to just some real practical, real-life pastoral shepherding situations. And there's about 25 links there to articles. You've got a divisive congregational meeting coming up, how can you keep this thing from exploding and destroying your church? So a lot of the issues we deal with, all that information is free. 

And so I would encourage a pastor to start with that. Those 30-minute introductions are appetizers, if you will, for our eight-hour online courses on those topics, but they can get a taste of what they're like. The other thing that I would encourage pastors to do or seminary students is if they go to our website, click on the Peacemaking tab and they go down to the Christian Conciliation drop-down menu. On that page, they can download a free 70-page e-booklet called Guiding People Through Conflict. And it is a summary of all the key peacemaking mediation arbitration principles we've developed over the years. It's a complete free summary of all those things. That alone, if a church leadership team went through that together, man could they turn a lot of situations away from the cliff and actually back toward restoration. So just want to let you know there's a lot… And in fact, one other free booklet on the website is Seven Steps to Empathy. Pastors should be the most empathetic people in the world, if we're going to imitate Jesus. 

And so there's seven practical little disciplines you can learn that when people approach you at church, you've got this brief window every week before the service and after the service to pick up on a look in someone's eye, tone of someone's voice. They're dropping hints, "I need help, I need help, I need help." And if you pick up on them, you can save a marriage. So those are all free resources. Beyond that though, in all of our courses in the Peacemaker, we've got quite a few acrostics like the Seven A's of forgiveness, Four Promises. So I always like to reduce… I'm an engineer and a lawyer, so I like to reduce things down. I like to understand the very complex background data and information, but then I know you've got to distill it down to something people can easily memorize and practice in day-to-day life. 

So in relational wisdom, for example, we've got four acrostics that we encourage people to work on. And just to give you one of those, I've mentioned the read across. If you want to get better at reading your own emotions and managing your own emotions, learn to read yourself, R-E-A-D. Recognize and name the emotion even mentally. You don't have to verbally name it. Something happens neurologically when you attach a name. Like if a pastor is in a meeting with his elders, he's feeling criticized and he's getting defensive. He starts to feel his stomach tighten up. He doesn't like having these people critique him the way he is. He's feeling threatened. If he doesn't realize that, and read that, and name that "I'm feeling threatened, I'm feeling fearful, I'm feeling proud and defensive right now." If he doesn't realize, that's like three big giants standing behind him, pushing him over a cliff. 

If he can read that and name it neurologically, what happens when you name it, your language skills are located in your neocortex. That's the part of the brain that has impulse control, reasoning, and logic. When you turn that on, you can say, okay, the next step is to evaluate why do I feel this way? "Well, I've never liked being criticized. My dad always told me, I never amount to anything. I'm too sensitive to criticism in life. And so I just don't like criticism. I still wrestle with pride." 

Anticipate, A. What happens if I give into this emotion? I'm going to get defensive. I'm going to raise my voice. I'm going to start shifting blame, and it's going to end up actually causing me to lose credibility with these people. They're going to think less of me if that's my response. That's my instinctive response. It's what I feel like doing. But if I do it, I'm going to lose the respect of these elders. This could go from bad to worse. 

D, how do I direct the power of that emotion? And it's like taking a sailor, harnessing the power of the wind. How do I take this power of these emotions in a constructive direction? What that pastor could do, and I'm actually recounting to you, advice I gave to a pastor struggle this very issue. And he had just said, when you're in those meetings and you start to feel questioned and somewhat criticized, and you feel your body tensing up, your heart starts to pound more and you just feel that tension. Just go, guys, time out just a second. 

I'm still a man struggling with sin. And right now I can just feel that my simple nature is feeling defensive. My pride is rearing its head, my self-righteousness, and I don't want to go there, because that's not going to be good for this meeting. It's certainly not good for the church. "Can we just take about a five-minute break? I need to just walk around the block, talk to Jesus for a few minutes and I'll be back in here about five minutes. I think I can respond more constructively." So he is taking the power. He's going to channel it in a good direction and time and time. And that pastor, I gave him that advice. He called me up a week later. He was so ecstatic. He said, "We just had the greatest meeting and they shared some things and I would've just exploded before, but I did exactly what you said. I walked around the block, I came back. I was actually humble. And I said, Now guys, I understand." 

Kymberli Cook: 

I was shocked, I was humble. 

Ken Sande: 

"And they just said, 'Wow, that's really cool, pastor. What a good example.' And we had the greatest conversation," because he was actually allowing time for the Holy Spirit to work and do it. So recognize a name, evaluate, anticipate, direct. R-E-A-D. It's a simple, simple process, but it actually takes into account some very, very complex neurology. A process called amygdala hijacking is what's going on when our emotions take control. It's operating in awareness of that phenomenon, the amygdala hijacking. But it's also bringing in good theology. God opposes the proud. He gives grace to the humble. A hasty or angry word stirs up strife. There's so much wisdom in the Bible. So that's what we do in our training is we marry what we learned about how God designed our brain with what God's Bibles, the Bible says about how He designed us as well. Put those things together. 

Kymberli Cook: 

That's wonderful. Okay, so if you are listening and you are a believer, we are here to encourage you that you need to intentionally work on your relational skills, no matter where you are. The Lord may have gifted you to be fantastic with individual relationships and socially and that kind of thing. And you navigate these waters like an expert. You still have been given a gift, quite frankly, that can be further harnessed to greater elements of sophistication. And we would highly encourage everybody listening to think really intentionally about that because like we said in the title, Christians need relational skills too. So thank you, Ken for being here. We really appreciate your time and all of the work that you've done in taking all of these complex topics and distilling them down for people to be able to try to live out in the middle of a tense situation and they can actually remember, okay, READ. What am I supposed to do, because I'm really mad right now? There we go. I just did the first one, that kind of thing. So thank you for your work. We really appreciate it. 

Ken Sande: 

You are so welcome, Kymberli. The neat thing, I'll just close with this. These skills are not things that people can not only apply in their work as a church leader, a shepherd, whether it's a women's ministry leader, or a pastor, an elder or deacon, what have you. But what's really wonderful is these are skills you take home at night. And you use them in your marriage. You use them with your children. Quick closing example, one of our acrostics called Self-aware, other-aware, God-aware, SOG. It changed my relationship with my wife when I finally came to grips with how much I was stressing her out when I made left-hand turns with another car coming at us in the other lane. I always thought that car was plenty far away to be safe. And yet my wife read that data differently and she got stressed out again and again. 

And when I just simply started practicing what I believe self-aware, other-aware, God-aware was stressing her out, I was just being proud and selfish. And God tells me to love my wife the way Christ loved the church. And I don't see anything in the Bible says Jesus says, get over it. And when I just live that out and take more time driving, I'm not as close to cars on the highway, I pay more attention. It's changed our marriage. It's changed our marriage. And I use that story often at Pastor Seminars. I get seventy-year-old pastors walking up to me with their wives, with the pastors, with their tears coming down their cheeks and said, "You just put your finger on the biggest problem in our marriage for the last 40 years." It's amazing how often our driving, not to mention all the other aspects. So I just share that with you, that these are skills that can not only really enrich your ministry, but they can also enable you to love your spouse the way Christ loved the church. 

Kymberli Cook: 

Absolutely, and establish his kingdom here. 

Ken Sande: 

Amen. 

Kymberli Cook: 

And we want to thank you, who are listening, for being with us. If you like our show, please be sure to leave a rating or review on your favorite podcast app so that others can discover us. And we hope that you will join us next time when we discuss issues of God and culture to show the relevance of theology to everyday life. 

Bill Hendricks: 

Hello, I'm Bill Hendricks, the executive director for Christian Leadership at the Hendricks Center at Dallas Theological Seminary. I want to welcome you to The Table Podcast where we discuss issues of God and culture to show the relevance of biblically-based theology to everyday life. 

My routine on the weekends is perhaps like you, do what I need to do on Saturday, and then Sunday mornings I look forward to getting up, having a nice cup of coffee, getting dressed with my wife, getting in the car, going to church, having a wonderful time of worship and fellowship and time around the Lord's table, time in his word, and then coming home and getting on with the Sabbath. And of course, at church it's a joy to hear about what we might call a modern-day Pentecost that's going on around the world. People by the millions coming to faith in South America, Africa, Asia, and what a wonderful thing that God, the Holy Spirit is doing in bringing people to Jesus. 

I want to point out that the word Pentecost actually ends with the word cost, C-O-S-T, and that for many of the new believers around the world, there is a true cost to their decision to follow Jesus. Literally a couple of days ago, I heard about 13 new believers in one of the states in India where they have a law that says you can't practice forced conversions, which essentially means you can't evangelize people. But these folks heard the gospel and they decided to commit themselves to Jesus. And then as they gathered, some neighbors who were mad about this had heard about it, they broke into the service, 13 were arrested, and now they're on trial. They're in jail waiting trial, which if they lose the trial, they may well be life in prison for their willingness to follow Jesus. 

They were asked, how can we pray for you? They said, well, we certainly want you to pray to be released. We want to pray that we experience joy rather than fear in the midst of our persecution. And then they said, we want to pray that our persecutors will come to faith as the result of witnessing the way that we take this persecution. And so today what we want to dive into is the topic of persecution facing the global church. And I can think of no one better to talk with today than our guest, Ryan Brown, who is the CEO of Open Doors International, I'm sorry, Open Doors US, which serves persecuted Christians Worldwide. Ryan, welcome to The Table Podcast. 

Ryan Brown: 

Bill, thank you. It's a real privilege to be here with you today. 

Bill Hendricks: 

Well, it's a privilege for us to have you and want to hear about this work that you're doing with these persecuted believers. But before we dive into that, which is a pretty sobering topic, I got to tell you, in all honesty, take this the right way. If somebody said, well, Bill, who do you think would be the CEO of Open Doors, which works with persecuted Christians? I might've imagined somebody who they grew up in some country around the world that's closed access or whatever, and somehow their family came to faith as they were a kid and as a result, they faced severe persecution and they fled the country and somehow as refugees, they got asylum in the United States and they grew up here. And this little kid, because of what he experienced as a kid grows up and says, I want to do something about the church that's persecuted out there. 

But that's not your background as I understand it. In fact, you have a business degree, a really dual degree business management in English from Arizona State. As I understand it, you worked as a stockbroker for a while. And the craziest thing is this whole background of music that I want to hear about as a songwriter, a performer, a concert promoter. You even had a Christian music record label for a while as I understand it. So I hear all that. I'm like, how in the world did Ryan get into the work he's doing today? Roll the clock back and walk us through your story briefly. 

Ryan Brown: 

Yeah, no, I think ultimately it's God that brings these things together. I will admit there were a number of years where it felt a little schizophrenic at times, even as far as didn't necessarily feel linear as far as what God was doing and how one thing led to another. But it is so often the case at times you can see God's hand and his providence and his working in retrospect, things we see in the rear view mirror rather than on the horizon in front of us. And so that's certainly been the case in how God has worked and woven the experiences together that I have opportunity to. I think one of the overarching threads that has run through all of that is just a love for the church and recognizing that Christ could have chosen to work any way he desired to. 

He spoke eternity and the universe into existence with the word, and he had ability to structure it and to build it any way that he wanted to, but yet he chose to operationalize the expression of his love so often through this at times dysfunctional at times broken the body of Christ, and Christ has a deep and abiding love for his bride, and it's been a real privilege for me to have these opportunities to come alongside the church in multiple different contexts, as you mentioned, whether it be through the music and providing encouragement and notification through song and challenge as well, whether it be through yours as a stockbroker, and even just how God utilized that, just to develop a theology, if you will, for fundraising and those types of things and engagement and recognize that it's not about the money, it's not. Price owns the cattle on a thousand Hills. Resources are not his concern, but he does recognize that the resources have a stranglehold on our hearts often. And so he desired to utilize that as part of a discipleship process with us. 

But I had an opportunity to, had honestly just marginal familiarity with the work of Open Doors, certainly knew of it by reputation and things in my previous context had opportunities to work in some of these countries where persecution is experienced and known. And we certainly had to operate with some sensitivities there. But as it began to dive in and walk a little bit more closely, I was just humbled to recognize and realize how much our brothers and sisters have to teach us as the church in the West through the power of their testimony and their stories and how transformative that can be. And so that's the way God works. He wove all those different things together and invited me to this opportunity to step into the work of Open Doors. 

Bill Hendricks: 

Now, I grew up, first of all, I grew up in a Christian home and went to Sunday school every week. And I well remember getting a little, was actually in comic book form, story about a guy named Brother Andrew who was taking Bibles into at the time the Soviet Union and other communist countries. And he became a hero for many of us. And that's really, I guess where Open Doors began is with the work of Brother Andrew. Tell us more about him and that- 

Ryan Brown: 

Yeah, it is. So in this coming year, it'll be 70 years ago really, that this work was launched. And Brother Andrew, a young man from the Netherlands and he was attending Bible college after coming to Christ, and he heard about a communist youth rally taking place in Warsaw. And he's recognizing that, gosh, here we're working so hard just to get handfuls of people to attend a Bible study, but yet there's going to be tens of thousands of youth that are gathered together under the banner of communism. And so he desired to learn a little bit more about that. And so he wrote the organizers and told them he was a Christian and asked if he could attend, and they extended an invite. And as he traveled there, he took that opportunity as well to break away from the pack and go to some of the back roads and engage with some of the churches there. 

And as he met brothers and sisters there and began to recognize their realities and recognize that there were entire congregations without access to the written word of God or with very limited access, perhaps a pastor that might have a New Testament or something along those lines. And so he felt the Holy Spirit convicting him that he needed to be part of the solution there. And so he began to smuggle Bibles behind the Iron Curtain and there was a little blue VW Bug that he was gifted, that he retrofitted. And literally thousands and thousands of Bibles and gospel tracts were taken across, and that really gave birth to this ministry. And so now 70 years, fast-forward, you're working in over 70 countries around the globe, and the context of persecution looks different. It has continued to evolve from 70 years ago in different geographical contexts. The way that persecution is felt and experienced looks much different. 

And so I think that the unifying theme is that what Open Doors seeks to do is to not necessarily try to import a solution, but rather to come alongside and recognize how Christ is at work in his church already, and how do we come alongside and support that. Brother Andrew brought Bibles because that's what they were asking for. In other parts of the world, Christians may have access to the word of God, but they can't read it because they've been denied access to education and illiteracy is 80% or higher in some of these communities. And so we have the ability to come alongside and provide literacy programs in those cases or livelihood programs to allow pastors to stay rooted in the areas that they are because they've been denied any other opportunity for gainful employment to provide for their family. And so we look to come alongside the church and support the church even within those contexts of persecution so they can be the hands and feet of Christ right there. 

Bill Hendricks: 

And I guess I just point out this is more than humanitarian relief in the sense that you're trying to do a good thing to people that are suffering, that the suffering itself is the result of this decision to follow Jesus, and that that's what really, as brothers, they're now our brothers and sisters. And so there's a motive to come alongside brothers and sisters who are suffering. I Corinthians, it says, when one suffers, we all suffer. And you're putting feet on that as I understand it. 

Ryan Brown: 

Absolutely. And as you said at the top of the conversation here in referencing these 13 believers from India and taking a look at their prayer requests, yeah, they obviously pray that they would receive freedom, but by and large, as we come alongside our brothers and sisters, they're not necessarily asking that the persecution end. They're not necessarily even asking that they be removed from persecution, but as those prayer requests [inaudible 00:13:25] very, very good evidence to so many of them are just praying that they will be faithful witnesses to Christ within the context of their persecution, that they recognize that Christ has put them there and allowed them to be there for such a time as this, and they see it as a ministry opportunity. 

Again, it has just humbled me to no end to meet brothers and sisters that as they have been imprisoned, have said that it was an incredible season of ministry, which they found themselves in prison, that outside of the walls of the prison, they were not allowed to share the gospel message of Christ inside the prison. They're already in prison. What else is going to happen? And so they've been free to minister to fellow inmates that are in desperate need of the gospel of Christ. And so again, it is humbling to see so many that the prayer is not that the persecution, and the prayer is not that they'd be removed from it, but that their prayer is how can I be a faithful witness to Christ right here within this persecution? 

Bill Hendricks: 

Well, and when we talk about this persecution, let me just for you the listener, let me just point out the scale at which we're talking both Open Doors research coupled with Pew Research shows that currently there are about 365 million persecuted Christians around the world. And you put that in context, Pew estimates there's something like 2.4 billion Christians in the world, but of course that's divided up among Catholics, Protestants, Eastern Orthodox. And so that's only like 15%. But then you also realize that many who are counted Christians are not necessarily what we would call Christ followers in the sense of discipleship. They're more nominal or it's a cultural thing or whatever, but these folks, obviously they're paying a price like their faith is something they're willing to forego safety or freedom or a job or food or it's a for real thing for them. And through 65 million people, that's a lot of people in the body of Christ. 

Ryan Brown: 

It is. It can be an astronomical number to even try to comprehend how large that number is- 

Bill Hendricks: 

In your research that's just are facing, I think you had three levels of persecution, harsh persecution, severe persecution, and then really, really hostile persecution, something like that. 

Ryan Brown: 

Yeah, you bring up a great point because there's not necessarily a universally recognized definition for the word persecution. 

Bill Hendricks: 

Yeah. 

Ryan Brown: 

And so we will often talk about it even in terms of persecution and discrimination because we recognize that persecution, we characterize it in general terms as it can be a smash or it can be a squeeze. And what I mean by those is a smash is typically what a lot of us tend to think of when we talk about persecution, is that that idea that physical violence or martyrdom or churches being burned, Christian schools or hospitals being destroyed, that type of thing. But yet there's also this idea of a squeeze in which Christians, again are denied access to education. Christians denied access to employment in areas, Christians even within their family structures, being forced into marriages or things like that with a person of a different faith trying to correct them. And all of these things that would seemingly make it very, very difficult to be a Christian within that geographical context. 

That's also a very real manifestation of what persecution looks like, even though it doesn't necessarily fit the description that a lot of us would immediately assume or gravitate towards. So when we look at persecution, we try to look at it more from a holistic lens, looking at both this idea of the smash but also the squeeze of persecution. 

Bill Hendricks: 

Well, I just want to point out too, Open Doors, among others, but Open Doors has done real research and I mean hard research to bring this to the awareness of the West. Every year you put out what you call your World Watch List in which you look at different countries around the world that are experiencing persecution among Christians and literally rank them in terms of a whole variety of factors. And it's a very sobering list to read through. And our listeners, you can go to the Open Doors website and it's easily found there among their list of resources. And what I love about the Watch List is yeah, it's analytics, but you've actually also arranged it in terms of a prayer guide that enables somebody to walk alongside people that are facing persecution. 

Ryan Brown: 

Yeah, absolutely. That World Watch List will be in its 33rd year of publication, was originally just started as an in-house research tool. If we're going to come alongside the church, we needed to understand how persecution was continuing to evolve or manifest itself in different geographies and different types of contexts. So through our networks, both at times over and more often than not covert, we were able to have access to a lot of data. And so it was about 30-some years ago we realized that, gosh, this could be a good resource for the broader church. And I think it really caught a lot of people by surprise where even people like the State Department or the UN will utilize this research because within that, the broader discussion of freedom and religious belief, it can be difficult at time to get information on specific minority groups. And like you mentioned, Christians are minority groups in so many of these areas around the globe. And so we're thrilled to be able to provide that. 

But again, if it was just an awareness piece, if it was just presentation of data, I think we've really missed an opportunity because hopefully for the church, this awareness it drives us to some kind of an action. And I think that that most appropriate first response is prayer. And so you're absolutely correct that woven throughout that Watch List, there are specific prayer points. And I'll be honest, at times it can be even difficult to know what to pray for in some of these situations. They can be so outside of our context of familiarity and normality that it can be difficult to know what to pray. 

I think for many of us, we would assume that, okay, our first prayer should be that, okay, Christians will be pulled out of the persecution, but again, that's not what they're asking for. And so these specific prayer points are prayer points that are actually originating from those on the ground that are dealing with or experiencing persecution. And so it's one of the things I always like to say, is it gives us the opportunity not just to pray for our brothers and sisters, but to pray with our brothers and sisters because these are the things that they're praying for. 

Bill Hendricks: 

Well, I found the 2024 Watch List to be quite fascinating, just for what it's worth, the top five, North Korea, Somalia, Libya, Eritrea, Yemen, and you've got 50 of them listed. And some of the things on the list, they're no brainers. There's no surprise North Korea is at the top of the list. 26.1 million people that live in North Korea about, 400,000 Christians estimated. So obviously a small minority, but it's so difficult to get information out of Korea is what's exactly going on there. Or I found Somalia number two on the list to be interesting, 7.3 million people and you had it, how many Christians? You said maybe a few hundred. And it just stunned me to think about a country that has virtually no Christians. 

Ryan Brown: 

Yeah, it is difficult. And just to North Korea, just for some that may not be familiar with all the context there of what that looks like, this is a country where if you're found to be in possession of a Bible that is likely a life sentence for you and your family likely in a work camp facing excruciating labor and that type of thing for the rest of your life. And again, not just for you, but it can be for your entire family as well, just for being in possession of the word of God. These are areas where there can be Christians even in close proximity to each other, but because of the need for secrecy that they don't know there can be Christians- 

Bill Hendricks: 

They can't even talk to each other. 

Ryan Brown: 

… from the same family, yeah, that don't know. It can be so difficult for us to contextualize that I'm a parent, I've got three beautiful kids that looking to raise in awareness and faith and love of Jesus. And you have to recognize that, my goodness, by teaching my kids these things, it can virtually guarantee that my children are going to be taken away from me if it's ever discovered or found out. There's a country that, I can't mention the name, but just I got the report in the last couple of weeks here that a little two-year-old out in the front yard playing and singing a song and the words of the song were something to the effect that Jesus is our Savior. And a neighbor heard that and came out with a machete and ended up taking that to the child, chopped off the child's fingers. The mom heard and from inside the house came running out to protect her child and she was attacked as well. 

But that's the type, whether it be from the official government structures or in cases like Somalia, where it is this idea of familial or cultural in so many places that the faith is so tightly tied to the cultural identity that when somebody of a Muslim or a Hindu background faith comes to faith in Christ, it's seen not just as a change in a belief structure or a change in faith, it's viewed as a rejection of a cultural identity. And therefore it's an incredible cost when somebody comes to faith in so many of these contexts. I always come back to Jesus talking about the pearl of great price. I think many of our brothers and sisters around the globe have a pretty keen understanding of what that scripture really talks about, what that really means to know that, okay, there's something of greater worth that I'm choosing. 

Bill Hendricks: 

Yeah, I had mentioned the 13 new converts from India for our listeners, India was number 11 on the list. Others may be interested to know China was down at 19 on the list. What I also found fascinating, obviously living in the United States, is that Mexico itself was down at, is at 37. I wouldn't have expected Mexico to be that high, but you said when you dig into that, it's not because they're heavily Catholic population, but it is not so much government persecution, but gangs, cartels that are engaged in activity against which Christians would speak out or oppose or whatever. And then they pay a price for that. 

Ryan Brown: 

Yeah. And also be very geographically concentrated as far as where those instances are most felt and experienced. But yeah, you're absolutely right and the risk of painting with a broad brush, we see that dynamic of what you're talking about in Mexico. You always see it Colombia, we see it in other places in Central America and in South America, the cartels and they see the church as being bad for business, as whether it be pastors speaking out against the drugs or the violence or those types of things, or whether it be pulling youth, potential customers or workers or things into discipleship programs where they're rejecting the ways of the broader culture, that's bad for business. And so many Christian leaders and their families, therefore at times are in the literal cross hairs of these gangs and looking to basically stamp them out because it's bad for business. 

Bill Hendricks: 

Yeah. Well, when we hear about some of these really desperate situations, you mentioned the little two-year-old that the guy cut off their fingers with the machete or people being thrown into prison. We who are believers in the West, we do throw up our hands going, well, what can we do? It's a country that we have very little, if any access to like a North Korea, just almost impossible to do anything from a human standpoint. What can we do? I would encourage every listener to think about, okay, Open Doors and groups like Open Doors, they have limited access, but they've got at least a little more connections, much of it covert than you or I would have, but we can get behind people like Open Doors with our resources knowing that they're going to translate those into various forms of coming alongside people with education that can't get education or with helping somebody find a means of livelihood because they can't get employment because they're a Christian, things like that. 

But I want to come back, Ryan, to the thing you mentioned earlier, because I think ultimately this is what we're called to do, which is prayer. And I think we forget that prayer is a spiritual category, but that's what makes it so powerful precisely because the situation these fellow believers are in is a spiritual war. The whole thing is ultimately a spiritual conflict. Ephesians six says that our real enemies are not other people. No matter how twisted or different or misguided their worldview might be, they're not the enemy, but we have a cosmic energy, if you will, enemy who is behind so much of this because he hates the church, he hates the bride of Christ. And that being the case, the most powerful thing we have are spiritual weapons. Ephesians six tells us what many of those are. And of course, one of the most potent is prayer. 

And I think about the believers in Acts there where Peter and John get hauled off and they're in prison and it looks like they're going to get executed like Stephen or James or John the Baptist. And so they pray, they got nothing else they can do, but they came alongside their brothers in prayer. And in that case, the Lord delivered those brothers. In other cases, he chose to use other means to glorify himself. And so this prayer guide that you've put together with the World Watch List to me seems like a really valuable tool, but it's only valuable if those of us who have the freedom to do so and the intentionality to do so, make prayer a strategy on behalf of people who cannot have a voice. 

Ryan Brown: 

Yeah, yeah. You mentioned Brother Andrew earlier, and he once said that our prayers go where we can't. And I think so often we do find ourselves either intentionally or unintentionally slipping into that mindset that prayer is a last resort, and certainly it is something that we should utilize when we are at that place of last resort, but ideally, prayer should be a first response. 

Bill Hendricks: 

Absolutely. 

Ryan Brown: 

That is, like you said, when people of God are attacked because of their faith in God, that is first and foremost a spiritual issue. And our first response should be one, a prayer. Again, like we talked about earlier, God can work any way that he so chooses to do. But amazingly, and I can't explain the mind or heart of God, but he does. He works through the prayers of his people. He talks about that. He calls us to that and he values that. And so prayer is something that we should be our first response as we hear these statistics, as we hear these types of stories that are coming. And I think one of the beautiful things is we do is that increasingly prayer is not just about the circumstances, but prayer also as we lift up these circumstances, prayer is a way of aligning our hearts to the heart of our father, and it changes us and it transforms us. And I've just been so humble to see how much our brothers and sisters who are experiencing persecution have to teach us as the church in the West. 

I don't think any of us argue that we are increasingly living in a post-Christian culture here in the United States. And for so many of us that is such new territory, but yet we have a savior that's called us to go and to make disciples. But yet so many of us have slipped into this place where rather than discipling our culture, we've become discipled by our culture. And as a result, as we approach our engagement in church, as we even the truth of scripture, so often we find ourselves engaging more so as consumers rather than as disciples. 

And in the midst of that context that we increasingly find ourselves living in, we've got brothers and sisters around the globe who have at great cost or are walking out this choice that they're going to utilize their faith to determine how they will respond to their culture rather than using their culture to determine how they're going to engage with their faith. And so that is, I think a testimony and a story that our brothers and sisters around the globe as we come to that collective table, as the body of Christ, that is something that they bring to this table, that they have to offer us and something that they have to teach us that we would be wise to listen and learn from. 

Bill Hendricks: 

That's very, very powerful. They do have an awesome amount to teach us, not with eloquent words and arguments, but with the currency of their very lives and how they're living their lives, showing really what it means to follow Jesus. 

Ryan Brown: 

These stories have power too. I go to Revelations 12 and talks about the dragon, the devil as he's overcome, he's overcome by the blood of the lamb and the testimony of the saints and those testimony of the saints, the power of God is at work in those. And that's what these stories are. Their testimonies of God's faithfulness, their testimonies of God's goodness, their testimonies of God at work in the midst of some of these circumstances that time are just really, really tough for us to process. We can say all the time that God is good, but I'll tell you what, and I don't mean to trivialize that or diminish that in any way, shape or form, but as I hear those same words coming from the lips of an individual that is experiencing intense persecution because of that faith in Christ, to say that God is good in this, even in this, that's powerful. There's a testimony in that. 

Bill Hendricks: 

Absolutely. I must ask in that context. I've certainly been in these circumstances occasionally. I'm sure you've been in them much more than I. You're in a situation with a fellow believer from a different culture and they're really in a rough, rough place. It could be through poverty, it could be through persecution, it could be through suffering of some other sort. And you're there and your hearts are knit together because you're brother and sister in Christ. And so you do what you can to encourage, to pray, to give them what you got as best you can. And then there's always this realization in the back of your mind, yeah, but tomorrow I'm going home and they're still here. I'm just curious as somebody who's in this world just constantly, how do you find yourself dealing with that? 

Ryan Brown: 

Yeah, because it could be a very natural tendency for us as we hear these stories and recognize the comfort that we live in, to have the first response be just the guilt and shame in that. I think that that's a twisting of an appropriate response. Paul talks about that the God of all comfort has extended us comfort, and I think so often we live as if he's extended his comfort so that we can be comfortable, but that's not the case. He's extended us comfort so that we can in turn extend his comfort to others. And I go back and often think of when I was a kid growing up and whether it be Sunday dinners or Thanksgiving, my grandparents had this, honestly probably a dining room table. It was too big for the room that it was in. 

And so when we sat down as a family to eat, you were committed. You weren't getting up during the meal to go to the bathroom. So as young kids, you had to make sure you go before because you were there all dinner. But because of that, when my grandmother would come from the kitchen and bring these dishes, they're always placed at one end of the table. But it was never assumed by anyone at the table that that was just so that they could eat. It was assumed that that would be passed around the table and we'd all share and we'd all participate in that. And I've equated that in my mind to this idea of these comforts that we've been extended, that the God of all comfort has extended his comfort, but it's not just for our comfort. It's not just for our end of the table, it's so that we can in turn be a blessing and a comfort to everyone there at the table. 

Bill Hendricks: 

It occurs to me, we're talking about Christians globally, but that includes where we live. And I'm thinking we all probably have perhaps at our church or at our workplace, we're in touch with people who are Christ followers and they're actually living with forms of persecution. I think for instance, of a woman who has come to faith and her husband is just beside himself, not because he understands what she's really committed herself to, really has very little interest in religious things, but there's something about her. She's too nice now. She's too holy. And so he beats her, he punishes her, he's mean to her, or a believer that we know in a workplace where they're like the one Christian and everybody else is like pulls practical jokes on them, belittles them, makes fun of their religion, this type of thing. And it's not life and death persecution, but it's like you say, that squeeze that. There's just that pressure. What could we do to help that person that we know? 

Ryan Brown: 

I think at one level, all of us will increasingly experience those types of things. The kingdom of Christ is counter-cultural to the world in which we live in. It rubs up against each other. And so the scriptures go so far as to say you will experience persecution. And so in all of these situations, whether they are dramatic or minorly felt, I think that one of the things that we can do is to recognize that Christ has called us into that as an identification first and foremost with who he is, with the sufferings that our Lord experienced as the full representation of his love and also his identity. This was an expression of who he was. And so again, it flies. So in the culture of what we so often look up and to the right as far as what we experience or what we feel. I said up and to the right, but pointed to my left, up and to the right, that again, the kingdom of this world is contrary to the kingdom of Christ. 

And so as we identify in those persecutions, first and foremost helps us identify with Christ. Second, I think it helps us to have a greater appreciation and understanding in a greater identification with our body as the scripture you mentioned earlier, when one part of the body suffers, we all suffer. Paul talks about these things as horrific as they are in the scale of eternity, they're going to seem like light and momentarily momentary afflictions, but yet these light and momentary afflictions are working within us in eternal glory that as we're being renewed into his image. And so that's how Christ can, it almost certainly audacious if not at times by our measures, the reason would seem foolish, but for Christ to say blessed are the persecuted. The blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness' sake. 

That flies in the face of our culture. And I think that many of us have a tough time understanding and truly believing that to be the case. But yet Christ says that these things are working in eternal purpose and eternal glory that we may not ever see that return on that in this lifetime, but in the frame of eternity, one, we'll look and say lighted momentary, but two, we will look in the face of our Savior and say, this was good. 

Bill Hendricks: 

That's powerful. Well, and maybe that's why in so many of the passages in the New Testament where persecution is found and talked about, the prayer is not, Lord, relieve our suffering. Take us out of this. The prayer is, Lord, give us boldness, give us courage. Allow us to be a witness. Allow us to bring glory to you. And of course, Stephen's ultimate prayer, Lord, forgive them because they don't know what they're doing, which is the prayer Jesus had prayed. And it's really a prayer of thy will be done, not my will be done. And yes, humanly, we don't want to see people suffer, but as you say, God's got something else going. 

And so when we don't know what to pray, there's some things right there that God has already given us we can pray. We also can take it to the bank that the Holy Spirit is praying with groanings too deep for words. So even when we're out of words and we just don't know the right thing, it's okay. We bring that to the Holy Spirit. And the Holy Spirit translates our prayers into the prayers that we know the Father then hears. And Jesus Christ himself is also praying with us and for us, and for those- 

Ryan Brown: 

Absolutely. 

Bill Hendricks: 

… pray for. So we've got the Trinity itself engaging with us in these prayers. So we don't see it humanly, but as I say, it's a spiritual power that there's nothing equal to it. 

Ryan Brown: 

Absolutely. And every once in a while, God does give us glimpses of the ways that he is working, and we're thankful for those. And like you said, at times we pray and the brother and sister is released from prison. Other times they're not. Sometimes they are placed in a situation where they're no longer under the same level of threat that they were before. Other times they actually lay down their life. But through all of those things, like you said, God's spirit and God's purpose and plan is at work, and he's working a redemptive story and weaving threads of those redemption in ways that often these eyes, this side of eternity won't be able to see. 

Bill Hendricks: 

Well, Ryan, this has been a very, at the same time, both sobering conversation and at the same time, I guess I would call it a joyful conversation in the sense that we do see that suffering is not in vain, that the persecution, as much as we don't like it and don't want it, it's nonetheless God's using it both to glorify himself and to refine his people. And I want to thank you for being part of The Table Podcast today to tell us more about this. 

Ryan Brown: 

Oh, well, the privilege is mine. I want to thank you for the opportunity to engage in these conversations because so often these conversations aren't happening and we don't always have an awareness of what is going on. I think one of the tools of the enemy as he looks to nullify the church like we talked about earlier, is certainly that idea of persecution. But at other times, it is comfort. Other times, it is just to lavish us in comfort to where we become so preoccupied with self that we are more concerned about our choice on the color of the carpet in the church lobby than we are about the eternal souls of our neighbors or brothers and sisters around the globe. 

Bill Hendricks: 

Well, I just want to end by pointing out what I learned in preparing for our conversation, Ryan. Every day listener, you and I are going to make choices about things like what we're going to wear to work or what we're going to have for dinner, or what we're going to put on our schedule, or what brand of gasoline we're going to buy, or what brand of coffee are we going to get and what shoes are we going to buy. And of course, all these choices have a certain cost to them. But as we do that every day around the world, millions of people make decisions to follow Jesus. And for many of those people, it's their first decision to follow Jesus. And that decision comes with a cost as well. Jesus says, to follow me, there's a cost to that. And that cost for many can be quite high, even to the point of their well-being and life and their death. 

And when I have this conversation with Ryan, I guess I'm left with a couple of questions that I'd encourage you to ask yourself. One is, what is the cost that Jesus is asking me to pay in order to follow him? And then the second question is, how is Jesus asking me to stand with my brothers and sisters who are paying a whole lot more than I am to follow Jesus? Sobering questions. Very, very profound and worth asking. I want to thank you for being with us today on The Table Podcast where we discuss issues of God and culture. If you found this podcast to be helpful, we would encourage you to subscribe on your favorite podcasting service. Give us a rating of any sort, and tell your friends about The Table Podcast. For The Table, I'm Bill Hendricks. We will see you next time. 

Darrell Bock: 

Welcome to The Table podcast, where we discuss issues of God and culture to show the relevance of theology to everyday life. And our topic today is Biblical Exposition, and I have a really special guest sitting next to me, Dr. Elliottt Johnson, who taught here for 46 years. Is that right? 

Elliott Johnson: 

47. Yeah. 

Darrell Bock: 

In Bible exposition, 47 years and he goes way back. I go way back, and at one point for three years I was his grader. So this is bringing together a very… How can I say? Deadly combination. But it's great to have you, Elliottt. 

Elliott Johnson: 

Thank you. 

Darrell Bock: 

Glad you could be with us. 

Elliott Johnson: 

Thank you. 

Darrell Bock: 

Now, our topic is Biblical Exposition and some people might ask, "Well, what in the world is that?" We're actually going to try and answer that question while we're together, and it is part of the uniqueness of Dallas Seminary that rather than having just an Old and New Testament Department to do biblical studies and to examine the Bible, that there is special attention given to the exposition of the Bible in a department called Bible Exposition. So can you connect that to the founding of the seminary and why the Bible Exposition Department exists here? 

Elliott Johnson: 

I thank you, Darrell. I look forward to that, by the way. And I wanted to start by saying I appreciate renewing our friendship, and also giving an opportunity to speak about Bible exposition. I understand that it goes back to Dr. Chafer, who in his day was a musician. And in his musical role, he supported many of the outstanding preachers of his day. And in doing so, he formed certain convictions on why some were more effective than others and they all revolved around exposition. So in his developing the seminary, he wanted to include a Department of Bible Exposition. Now, I understand the difference between the two as this. Exegesis is understanding in the near or narrow context. Exposition is understanding in the context of the whole book. 

And so you're understanding the same particulars, but you're studying them in different contexts. And going back to the Reformation, exegesis was very well-known, grammatical historical interpretation. As it became taking on a broader perspective, those writing in the field have written from a literary perspective and they would call the interpretation to be the meaning that the author intended as a willed type meaning, and type actually referring to the type of literature that we're dealing with. 

Darrell Bock: 

Right. 

Elliott Johnson: 

So in comparing the two, grammatical, historical as opposed to literary, grammatical, historical. You don't leave the last two. You include those, but you bring them and see them in the context, the literary structure of the book. 

Darrell Bock: 

Particularly today with so much emphasis on story and narrative and that kind of thing, that brings into dimension that has come, I would say back into some prominence. But this was something that the school was always concerned about. You mentioned preachers of the past, et cetera, just names for people who may not be connected with this is H.A. Ironside was associated with the school. On the theological side, you had Griffith Thomas, who actually was going to be the first systematic theologian of the school, but unfortunately the Lord took him early before the school really got off the ground. 

And so Chaffer was trying to wed both the academic work of what was going on with the Bible from a standpoint of trusting what the Bible had to say, along with its exposition in preaching and the delivery of that message to an audience. When I think of exposition, I'd love to get your reaction to this, when I think of exposition, I think of not only dealing with the book as a whole, but also thinking about how to expound that text so that it has a connection and relevance to where people are today and being able to cross that bridge as well? 

Elliott Johnson: 

Well, that's certainly the case. They were speaking to an audience then, and I would look at the Bible as being trans-historical. 

Darrell Bock: 

Okay. 

Elliott Johnson: 

In other words, it's not written with such specific historical ties that it can't be read in a later generation and see the broader message applying then as it did in the original audience. 

Darrell Bock: 

So that's actually a great observation because I think one of the tendencies, and now this may surprise you that I'll say this since I'm in New Testament, and that is sometimes the challenge of strictly staying in a historical context is you end up limiting what the passage is doing and saying. 

Elliott Johnson: 

That's right 

Darrell Bock: 

Because you limit it to the particular context in which it finds itself, rather than stepping back and asking, "All right, what's happening here?" In a larger, more principled way that I can then apply so that the Bible speaks not just to the particular time to which the book was written, but to all times and all places. 

Elliott Johnson: 

Exactly. 

Darrell Bock: 

Because when God put it in scripture, he had in mind, "I'm going to use this beyond the original setting." 

Elliott Johnson: 

That's right. And what I'm interested in, what I would like to see communicated today is how this can become a part of the local church. It's not that we're trying to instruct the preachers, that's the job of the seminary. 

Darrell Bock: 

Right. 

Elliott Johnson: 

But our lay people can read their Bibles, they can understand their Bibles, and they need that. They need that interaction with the scriptures, so that what Chafer brought to Dallas Seminary is a Department of Bible Exposition. We can now see and apply in the local church to where the local church believer is and they can participate in it as well. 

Darrell Bock: 

That's interesting. You've got one other technical term that you used earlier that we probably should fill in for people and that's the term, "Willed type." 

Elliott Johnson: 

Yeah. 

Darrell Bock: 

I'm smiling because that phrase and expression goes back to a figure known as E.D. Hersch in interpretation. So just to help people get located, Validity in Interpretation was the book. 

Elliott Johnson: 

That's correct. 

Darrell Bock: 

And the willed type has to do with… This gets us into authorial intent and that kind of thing, the goal of what you're after when you're pursuing the exposition of the scripture. So why don't you fill out the concept of willed type a little bit for us? 

Elliott Johnson: 

Well, the word, "Type," is a difficult word, but it's in order to try to land it in a meaningful way. But you're looking at the literature from its generic or genre point of view. Is this a historical writing? You can talk about a given subject from both a historical point of view or a hymn. 

Darrell Bock: 

Right. So that would make a Psalm. Right? 

Elliott Johnson: 

Yeah, that's right. 

Darrell Bock: 

Okay. 

Elliott Johnson: 

Or wisdom. 

Darrell Bock: 

Right. Proverbs. 

Elliott Johnson: 

That's right. So that the same topics are being discussed in the Old Testament as appear in the New Testament. 

Darrell Bock: 

But with traits that differ depending on the genre that you're dealing with. So if you're in apocalyptic, for example, dealing with a book like Revelation or sections of Daniel, you know you're going to get some symbolism that is symbolism because it isn't literal- 

Elliott Johnson: 

That's right. 

Darrell Bock: 

But it represents something. 

Elliott Johnson: 

That's right. Now, if we wanted to go to apocalyptic, I love the Book of Revelation. In fact, I'm teaching that to one of our groups in our church. And if I were to summarize what it's saying is that the revelation of Jesus Christ assures us that God has a plan which he's going to bring to a conclusion. 

Darrell Bock: 

Okay. So what you've just done, just to help people, you've taken the message of an entire book and basically said, "This at its core is what it's about." 

Elliott Johnson: 

That's correct. 

Darrell Bock: 

And so the ability to take many, many chapters and boil it down to, "Here's the hub point of the book," and then help people see how the book is structured to build that hub point and to show the elements of that hub point. Whereas Exegetes, just to again, do some contrast of work, tend to involved in all the details of the book and all the issues and debates associated with the book, et cetera. We tend to be down in dealing with the leaves and maybe even the veins in the leaves. Okay? Whereas you're taking a look and saying, "When I put this all together and I look at the forest as a whole that is this book, this is what this book is doing." 

Elliott Johnson: 

That's correct. And it's so helpful. The group that I'm working with, the number of couples that come, they have questions, "How is this related to current events?" Well, knowing that this period that it's talking about is not what's happening right now. 

Darrell Bock: 

Right. 

Elliott Johnson: 

And so we're not relating what John is describing that he has seen in vision, but we see these visions unfolding a plan that God is overseeing. Now, the analogy is in the way of applying it, that same plan, though not the content of the Book of Revelation, but that same God has a plan for today, and I can trust him. Even if I don't agree with the events that are going on, I can agree with him. 

Darrell Bock: 

I can rest in the assurance that there is a plan, that there is a hope that will be real one day, that shalom will come, that righteousness will be established- 

Elliott Johnson: 

Exactly. 

Darrell Bock: 

That evil will get dealt with et cetera. 

Elliott Johnson: 

Amen. 

Darrell Bock: 

And that does. That gives me a very different perspective and platform from which to view what oftentimes seems very chaotic about what's going on today and not over-evaluate what is going on around us as the dominant thing that I should be overly concerned about. 

Elliott Johnson: 

That's right. The Bible speaks in general terms to what's going on. It speaks about sin. 

Darrell Bock: 

Right. 

Elliott Johnson: 

It speaks about righteousness. 

Darrell Bock: 

Right. 

Elliott Johnson: 

And both are present today- 

Darrell Bock: 

Right. 

Elliott Johnson: 

But not fully in anybody. Do any of us have a full righteousness- 

Darrell Bock: 

Right. 

Elliott Johnson: 

Or a full evil? 

Darrell Bock: 

That's right. 

Elliott Johnson: 

And you get depressed by seeing such chaos, and yet that's what God wanted us to see because we're going to learn through that evil, both about ourselves and about him and about how we deal with the day in which we're living. 

Darrell Bock: 

Yeah, that's great. So just to put a bow around this, the willed type is the way in which the author chooses to present and express himself. He usually does it through genre and other means. And then the goal of Bible Exposition or a goal of Bible Exposition is when it's all said and done, I ought to be able to in, if not a sentence, a sentence or two or three, summarize what this book is really about, and also recognize how I got there. 

Elliott Johnson: 

That's right. Now, seeing what the book is saying, that helps me to understand the particulars of the book. 

Darrell Bock: 

Fair enough. 

Elliott Johnson: 

Some of which may be very obscure. 

Darrell Bock: 

Right. 

Elliott Johnson: 

Babylon, the great Mystery Babylon. 

Darrell Bock: 

Right. 

Elliott Johnson: 

It seems to be located geographically in Rome, but it's speaking in terms of an earlier world power. And how do we interpret that? Well, we may not get the same agreement, but what we do get is that God understands what's happening and allows the interaction of that day in the future to resolve its problem and righteous judgment will come. 

Darrell Bock: 

And if you put that in the totality of scripture, you could go back to say a Book of Daniel where at one time, it was Babylon. At one time it was Medo-Persia. At one time it was Greece. And now in the time of the New Testament is the time of Rome, which might suggest that what you're dealing with is this is the way the world is structured apart from God, and these are the powers and associations that are associated with a world apart from God. And the challenge of revelation is the battle between a world seen not just apart from God, but actually being driven by malevolent forces as well that come against God and that God's going to win a victory over those forces eventually. 

Elliott Johnson: 

Amen. Amen. 

Darrell Bock: 

That's ultimately where that imagery is taking us. 

Elliott Johnson: 

Christ is going to be the victor in the end. 

Darrell Bock: 

Right. And so I didn't know we were going to turn this into a podcast on revelation, but that's an example of how Bible Exposition works. But it works differently in different genres or in different willed types as you call them. 

Elliott Johnson: 

Yeah. Now, what I'd like to talk about is what happened in Bible Exposition at Dallas Seminary. 

Darrell Bock: 

Okay, go for that. 

Elliott Johnson: 

It has existed now for 100 years. 

Darrell Bock: 

Right. 

Elliott Johnson: 

I came into the department in 1960. It was about 36 years old, 35 years old. And at that time, they felt that bringing in the preacher to lecture about the book was what was essential to happening in the department. So we had the lecturers coming in twice a year and we'd have two weeks set aside where the chapels were devoted to these lecturers coming in. And then we would take a test and we would know the outline that the preacher gave us, how the preacher handled certain of the issues within the book. 

Darrell Bock: 

So this wasn't a through-the-semester class. These were guest people coming in and- 

Elliott Johnson: 

That's right. 

Darrell Bock: 

Connecting you through a book? 

Elliott Johnson: 

That was originally what it was. 

Darrell Bock: 

Interesting. 

Elliott Johnson: 

Now, they recognized that in doing that, even in a four-year course, having two books each year, you only covered eight books, and we have 66 books. 

Darrell Bock: 

Yeah, that leaves a lot of holes. 

Elliott Johnson: 

Well, that's right. And we needed to transition to a local faculty- 

Darrell Bock: 

Right. 

Elliott Johnson: 

That could have a greater responsibility in the extent of what scripture is. So we did transition and I think we learned really, two broad lessons. There were two figures that stood out in the history, at least as I look back at it. The first was Howard Hendricks. Howard Hendricks taught a course on Bible Study Methods. 

Darrell Bock: 

Which you helped teach with him for years. 

Elliott Johnson: 

I did. I did, but he so impacted my life that I came to the conviction that students to learn what the scripture is saying to them must first do the study. They can benefit what others have said. 

Darrell Bock: 

Right. 

Elliott Johnson: 

They can even agree with what others have said- 

Darrell Bock: 

Right. 

Elliott Johnson: 

But they need to read it through for themselves. 

Darrell Bock: 

The ability to handle it independently. 

Elliott Johnson: 

That's right. And they need to handle it the way you've said as well, independently. One of the great emphasis that Howie made was personal application. There was a saying at Dallas Seminary in those days, this is before they had women in the student body or women on the faculty, and it was this, "You could always tell the way a Dallas man preached, just couldn't tell him much." Along with his preaching came an arrogance that was not biblically based. 

Darrell Bock: 

Interesting. 

Elliott Johnson: 

And so Howie tried to address both issues with it, both how to understand the interpretation, and then how to deal with those personal problems of arrogance that often cropped up. 

Darrell Bock: 

And also, the different ways really sincere believers might read the text and be able to sort through that as well. 

Elliott Johnson: 

That's something that came later. 

Darrell Bock: 

Okay. 

Elliott Johnson: 

The other dominant figure is J. Dwight Pentecost. 

Darrell Bock: 

Okay. 

Elliott Johnson: 

Dr. Pentecost was a very careful reader of scripture, and as a result, he gave us the model of what exposition really is. It does involve that single idea that we've been talking about with revelation, but it also involves an argument that supports the truthfulness of that broad person. 

Darrell Bock: 

So how the particulars line up with the overall statements that you're coming to. 

Elliott Johnson: 

That's right. And that was the argument. 

Darrell Bock: 

Right. 

Elliott Johnson: 

And he helped us to do that. Now, the only difficulty was he never wedded that with what Dr. Hendricks was doing, and that's what the students wanted. So when I first came, we'd been missionaries in the Philippines and I was hired for one year and the students… 

Darrell Bock: 

One very long year. 

Elliott Johnson: 

It extended a while, but the students appreciated the chance to get involved in coming to answers for themselves. And that's introduced at a discussion that has continued through and we're doing that today as well. 

Darrell Bock: 

Sure. 

Elliott Johnson: 

So it seems to me that another aspect of what we were doing was something that we got involved in in our local church. If this was beneficial to the students to develop their spiritual maturity and to develop their use of the Bible, wouldn't this be good for all lay people? And one of the conclusions I came away with having taught in the Philippines for four years, the problem wasn't with the students. They were able. The problem was with the teachers. Could they help them give them enough insight to lead them to their own conclusions? 

So that it was about 1978 to '80. Randy Frazee was the pastor at our church and he had written a book on the connecting church, and he envisioned that the church ought to have three broad, distinct kinds of ministry. One is the pulpit, with the pastor preaching very necessary, very important. Another at the other end is the small group that meets in the home for personal fellowship. But between the two, you see, we're living culturally, this is a cultural podcast. 

Darrell Bock: 

Right. 

Elliott Johnson: 

It was true then, and it's true now that we're living in a day when we're biblically illiterate. So we together worked a plan where the pastor would preach on a given passage. Now, he would plan a whole expositional series, but he'd preach on passage after passage after passage. Then the laypeople and those of us on the staff working with the laypeople, we would write material that they could examine that same passage, not knowing what the pastor was going to say, but having the same passage. We could work on the passage, then the people could… We would write material, called it The Scroll, that led them to study the passage. On Sunday, they would come together and most of the classes met after the pastor preached. And then they could discuss both what does this mean and how does this affect our lives today? And it was largely a discussion. Now, you mentioned earlier that understanding of passages may differ. 

Darrell Bock: 

It just happens on occasion. 

Elliott Johnson: 

It just happens on occasion. Well, the irony is that the Protestant church has not solved it in the same way the Catholic Church did. 

Darrell Bock: 

Fair enough. 

Elliott Johnson: 

They have a leadership group that when they've decided, that's it. 

Darrell Bock: 

Yeah. The magisterium, at all. 

Elliott Johnson: 

That's right. And we understand it a little differently. In fact, it came up a few weeks ago, and I tried to explain it this way. I had gone through the passage. On Saturday, we meet with the teachers and the material had gone through the passage. I felt there needed to be a bit of clarity in terms of what the passage was saying. And so I developed that as well. And then one of the men said, "Well, I think that's wrong." And he disagreed with me. So what do I do? Am I the pope to correct him or to have him fall in place? And that's not our role. 

We are what we would call holy priests, biblical priests in the sense that we all have access. Seminary doesn't give us unique access to the Bible. All of us as laypeople have access to the Bible. So I respect his position. So now, how do we resolve this? I think we resolve it, number one, and I said to him, "I love you. I respect you. I want you to be able to be free to share your point of view. Now, I'd like the freedom as well to express my point of view." 

Darrell Bock: 

Exactly right. 

Elliott Johnson: 

"I'd like you to give me the reasons why you hold yours. I'll give the reasons why I hold mine." And all of the teachers that are gathered, we've been working on this for about 30 years- 

Darrell Bock: 

Right. 

Elliott Johnson: 

But we still have about 30 men and women who come together on Saturday morning at 7:30, stay for an hour and a half, and they have to reach conclusions that they can use in the Sunday School class the next day, but we don't tell them what conclusion to reach. We give them an opportunity to hear both, with the confidence that the Holy Spirit is working in us- 

Darrell Bock: 

In all of you. 

Elliott Johnson: 

In all of us. 

Darrell Bock: 

Yeah. Right. 

Elliott Johnson: 

It's not particular to the seminary. It's not particular to the pastor. 

Darrell Bock: 

Right. 

Elliott Johnson: 

We're all part of the body of Christ, and therefore we give the teachers the opportunity to resolve that. Now, they may come to us and say, "I need more help here. Need to talk more about this," but it doesn't go to the point where we tell them what to say. 

Darrell Bock: 

Right. Right. So this gets back to the independence idea, and of course, the Bible Study Methods course that all our first-year students still go through in one form or another, is designed to help people be able to read the Bible. We use the word, "Independently," that can be a good word or a bad word depending on what it means. So by independently mean to be able to get to the point where you can make judgments about what's going on in the text, not because you're shutting other voices out necessarily, but you really are concentrating on being sure you're being observant about the text. 

Elliott Johnson: 

That's right. 

Darrell Bock: 

And you're able to make judgment, and you're also able to wrestle with what it is you're hearing from other people as a result. You're not just simply saying, "Well, my authority is going to be person X." And so we developed that skill, which means you develop that ability also to converse. I actually think this is one of the values of a seminary education. The values of a seminary education is I not only understand and come to understand how to work with the scripture, but how I decide what it is that's going on in the scripture. 

Elliott Johnson: 

That's right. 

Darrell Bock: 

And in the midst of that, there are conversations that have to happen because people don't see things necessarily immediately the same way. 

Elliott Johnson: 

That's right. And this is where we were 35 years ago. 

Darrell Bock: 

When you were telling me how to grade the papers. That's right. 

Elliott Johnson: 

Before you went to Scotland,, we were working on the same problem together. I was just hoping that you would've come back. And this whole literary discussion is a very… So that you have a willed, in other words, an author wills to speak. 

Darrell Bock: 

Right. 

Elliott Johnson: 

Peter has a very interesting statement in Second Peter, chapter one, that, "No man ever willed to prophesy." 

Darrell Bock: 

Right. Right. 

Elliott Johnson: 

Because he has nothing to say about the future. 

Darrell Bock: 

Right. 

Elliott Johnson: 

He doesn't control the future. It's God whose wills. So all prophecy is willed by a divine author, and then having willed, he chooses a form to communicate it. Is he going to tell a story? Is he going to use a command? Is he going to write a letter? There are just various ways that the biblical leaders of the first century, apostles and prophets speak to us through scripture. And we want to take in consideration of what they're doing so that we can hear them. Because meaning, if you're going to have communication, I've got to use my language in the way you are choosing to use it, not the way I may want to use it. 

Darrell Bock: 

Because otherwise you're going to have to clarify what you mean. 

Elliott Johnson: 

That's right. And so much of today's discussions at a different range in the political realm, we're not using language to say the same thing. 

Darrell Bock: 

Right. Right. 

Elliott Johnson: 

And we're speaking past each other. And so the only way to deal with it then is to silence the other person. That's not our desire. Our desire is to have our lay people speaking, and then to interact with them. 

Darrell Bock: 

I'm going to close the loop on the Peter passage because it's important is so on the one hand you have the expression of the individual human author, and then you have God who's behind, and I'll say it this way, all the human authors of the scripture- 

Elliott Johnson: 

Amen. 

Darrell Bock: 

I tell people, the only group that can have a conservative canonical theology in one sense that is coherent, would be the conservative who believes that there's actually ultimately one voice behind all the books. 

Elliott Johnson: 

Amen. Amen. 

Darrell Bock: 

And so if I just make it a conglomeration of a couple of dozen authors or more, then I'm going to introduce an element of conflict and confusion in the process. If I say there's one mind behind the whole operation from Genesis to Revelation, then I'm in a position of saying the pursuit of coherence in this makes sense because ultimately, there's one mind behind it. 

Elliott Johnson: 

Amen. Amen. 

Darrell Bock: 

And of course, Bible exposition goes a book at a time, might joke. So you talked about the influence of Hendricks and the influence of Pentecost. Who's responsible for the development of charting? Because obviously in the Bible Exposition Department, charting out the argument is another element of what we teach our students. 

Elliott Johnson: 

That's right. Literary, development involves a number of things. One is genre. The other is the order in which these topics are addressed. The school from which Dr. Hendricks got the material, Biblical seminary no longer exists. The way they approached it, which was more of a scientific approach rather than a literary approach, that scientific approach put great stress on structure. Now, that was helpful because it did order your material, but it didn't say how that material is going to be treated. 

Darrell Bock: 

In other words, the themes and how they're woven together underneath the structure? 

Elliott Johnson: 

That's right. 

Darrell Bock: 

Okay. 

Elliott Johnson: 

And how that was going to happen. That became the framework for your argument. It would arise out of that chart or structure. Now, I thought it might be helpful. I asked some of the men at our church to give their testimony, what does this mean to them? These are laymen. They're no formal training, at least at a seminary level. 

Darrell Bock: 

Right. 

Elliott Johnson: 

They've had college training, but they haven't had any formal training. And the one I wanted to start with was a husband and wife who are raising their granddaughter. She's now in first year of high school. 

Darrell Bock: 

Oh, wow. 

Elliott Johnson: 

She's in music and they're raising her because their daughter is incapable of doing it. And here's what he said. "I'm thankful for the preparation of the scrolls," the material that's been written. 

Darrell Bock: 

Right. 

Elliott Johnson: 

"They have guided me to be in God's word consistently, to correctly understand its meaning." Again, of guiding. 

Darrell Bock: 

Right. 

Elliott Johnson: 

Given them the meaning, "How my life should be lived as a result of truth. Above all," and I love this conclusion, "It has helped me to know God better." See, we're not here because we know more about the Bible because we supposedly know the Bible better. We want the ultimate goal to be a personal walk with the Lord. 

Darrell Bock: 

Exactly. 

Elliott Johnson: 

And that they are maturing spiritually, and that's our goal. And clearly, that's not involved with only seminary trained people. 

Darrell Bock: 

No, it's not a strictly academic exercise. 

Elliott Johnson: 

That's right. And it's one of the shared tasks that the church has with the seminary, really. And the type of study that most naturally relates to them is exposition, reading in a translation. We've got some great translations today, as an American culture at least. 

Darrell Bock: 

Yeah, that's right. 

Elliott Johnson: 

And reading through books as a whole, and then allowing them to formulate ideas. Now, I don't think there's any problem with reading what someone else thinks it's saying. I love our pastor. He's a Bible reader. He's not a graduate from Dallas, but he reads the scripture and he leads in expositions of the scripture, and we disagree on points. This Sunday, we're going to be dealing with a passage in Second Peter, Three, where I don't know what he's going to say, but it may be different than what I… But I've learned one of the teachings that Paul gives in Ephesians Four is learning to walk in unity. How do we develop that unity? 

I'm the kind of guy that says, "If it's true, it doesn't matter if it's an important truth or less important. If it's true, it's true, and we've got to follow." And I still hold that conviction, but understanding truths differently doesn't necessarily make us enemies. Again, what Jesus said is, to his disciples, "What I want you to do is to love each other. If people can see that there's a love, they will appreciate that I have come and changed your behavior." So I'm learning to, but I really appreciate the fact that he's a Bible reader and has come to conclusions and is coming to conclusions from the scripture. So we can talk about the differences, but he does that. And then we… Well, I don't any longer, but one of the men at our church, one of the staff writes the scrolls. We'll meet Saturday and we'll discuss it. They have given this old man a chance to continue to contribute. 

If they've said it, and it's no better way to say it, let that rest. But if there is a way that some things haven't been considered, they give me a chance. And I try to say it in those terms, but not, again, as their elder, but as their equal. We're here to grow together. 

Darrell Bock: 

To serve each other. 

Elliott Johnson: 

That's right. 

Darrell Bock: 

To serve each other and to stimulate one another to love and good deeds. 

Elliott Johnson: 

Amen. 

Darrell Bock: 

And so yeah, ministry is an interesting game. And the ability to encourage one another in the study of scripture is an interesting game. I listened to what you're talking about happening in the local church. I'm very involved with BSF, with Bible Study Fellowship. 

Elliott Johnson: 

Okay. 

Darrell Bock: 

I actually proofread all their materials from year to year. And so I'm roaming around the Bible with them. I'm actually two years ahead of where my wife is when she meets in a Bible Study Fellowship group, but it's the same idea. It's, we're going to work through a book together. We're going to go passage by passage. We're looking to see what's happening with the Bible as a whole. And we're always asking the question, the "So what?" At the end. "What difference does this make for how I'm going to live?" 

And so the value of Bible exposition is important. There's a contrast that I want to paint, that I want to be sure we get in here that I'm afraid we've moved past. So let me go back and recover it, and that is the reason we're saying go book by book as opposed to say topically or studying characters or something like that, or even systematic theologically, is because that helps you to understand passages in their initial appropriate context. 

Elliott Johnson: 

That's right. 

Darrell Bock: 

And the danger of not doing that means that you'll tackle a topic and you actually won't use the passage with the sensitivity to how it's actually functioning. And it isn't to say that you shouldn't preach topically or you shouldn't preach by character or other ways to do it, but what we're saying is if you give people a basic knowledge of the actual structure and flow of the Bible itself and the way it presents itself, that can only help you deal with how to read the Bible when you're reading it in other ways. 

Elliott Johnson: 

Yeah. You see, I think what you're saying is tied together with what is verbal meaning? 

Darrell Bock: 

Right. 

Elliott Johnson: 

That fundamental question, which our culture is really struggling with. 

Darrell Bock: 

Right. 

Elliott Johnson: 

And I would understand, and I go back to E.D. Hirsch, who was a professor of English literature- 

Darrell Bock: 

Right. 

Elliott Johnson: 

And wrote about treating the literature consistently. He is the one that suggests the Bible along with literature, along with the Constitution, is trans-historical. It's intended by the creativity of the human author, but in the Bible, it's intended by God to have a continuing relevance and appropriateness in expressing the truth. 

Darrell Bock: 

So it's written with a specificity on the one hand, and yet with an openness on the other to recognize we're not singularly context-limited. We're not limited to 1776. 

Elliott Johnson: 

That's right. 

Darrell Bock: 

We're not limited to the original setting of Joel or Revelation, but that God is laying this out because he thought this material would be useful for a believer no matter when they lived. 

Elliott Johnson: 

That's right. 

Darrell Bock: 

And that challenge is the challenge of handling the scripture well, and then the backdrop for Bible Exposition is so when I appreciate the story, the way it is actually formulated and presented, when I get the whole of what's being said around particulars, I'm in a better place to understand how to see and apply the Bible, particularly in passages… This is something that I like to highlight, which is the Bible actually writes from a variety of perspectives sometimes. So I can have a passage. I almost hate to bring this up towards the end, but I have a passage like Romans 13 that tells me to be submissive to government, but I can also have a section of scripture from the prophets that's challenging what's happening around them by the leaders, that's doable. 

Elliott Johnson: 

That's right. 

Darrell Bock: 

And so being able to recognize, "Well, here's the angle that we're dealing with here. Here's the angle that we're dealing with over here." And then thinking canonically, "How do I put that together?" Then that moves you in a healthy way towards larger systematic theological conclusions and that kind of thing. 

Elliott Johnson: 

And even biblical conclusions. 

Darrell Bock: 

That's right. 

Elliott Johnson: 

We had a Zoom meeting this morning. Guys were attending in Alaska to Israel. We had a large group of variety. We're studying Genesis. They wanted to study Genesis and we're studying Abraham, Abraham's faith and how Abraham's faith is developing by the promises God gave to Abraham. 

Darrell Bock: 

Yep. 

Elliott Johnson: 

Well, he hasn't given us the same promises, but he's treating us in the same pattern. So in Ephesians, where we have what God is doing in our day, we have Ephesians Two, Eight, Nine and 10, "For by grace, so you save through faith, not of yourselves. It's a gift of God." So the work that God did in Christ now becomes the promises entailed in it are the promises we have. We learn from Abraham's experience, but we can apply what God is doing in Christ to today's world. 

Darrell Bock: 

Now, I almost want to have fun with this because when I think about this, I think, yes, Abraham is the receiver of promises, but the promises that Abraham receives ultimately talk about blessing on the entire world. 

Elliott Johnson: 

That's right. 

Darrell Bock: 

Which then comes back at us again when we see what God does in the New Testament, and that message goes out to the entire world in a way in which the entire world is blessed. 

Elliott Johnson: 

Through his descendant. 

Darrell Bock: 

That's exactly right. Through the seed. So everything goes through a Christological window- 

Elliott Johnson: 

Amen. 

Darrell Bock: 

Which is why the Gospel is at the center of all this. And again, what that's highlighting is the point I was making earlier, which is there are angles that the Bible undertakes. And what I need to do is to understand this is the original setting and this is the angle of this text. Here's the same topic being looked at with other elements in the context to take into consideration. And now how do I wrestle with pulling those together so I have a whole and coherent story? 

Elliott Johnson: 

And I would say that's a biblical theology. 

Darrell Bock: 

Exactly. And so out of Bible Exposition, the beauty of this is your exegesis helps you build to your understanding of elements of the text. The Bible Exposition helps you wrestle with the question, here's what's happening in the book as a whole. You put all those together next to one another and wrestle with all the variations that introduces because of the various angles, et cetera. And now you're building towards a biblical theology. And as you build a solid biblical theology, you eventually hopefully get also to a solid deductive expression of that which becomes your systematic theology. And so you're building this huge edifice of biblical reflection of which Bible Exposition occupies such a central part, because it's always asking us, "How does this passage function in relationship to what's around it?" 

Elliott Johnson: 

Fair enough. And Dr. Chafer was the one who recognized the significance of that in his day. We have the opportunity to develop that significance in our day. 

Darrell Bock: 

And the challenge that has emerged, I think in the lifetime of the seminary is that when Chafer was doing this, at least in the American culture, that was the initial focus I think, of the school, there was a shared cultural understanding and underbelly, if I can say it that way, that was rooted in the Bible and in what some people will call Judeo-Christian values. Although some people like to challenge that phrase today, but I think it has value in this conversation. Whereas now, the context in which we're operating in for a lot of people, they do not have that underground structure. You talked about biblical literacy earlier- 

Elliott Johnson: 

Yes. 

Darrell Bock: 

And we don't share that as a culture anymore, and that results in a terrific challenge for how do I now handle the Bible in which the alternative ways of seeing the world have expanded immensely, in part, not just because of the changes within our own culture, but the way we are interconnected globally anyway? And so the challenge on a student today and what they can assume going out in ministry as they handle the Bible, that has become more of a challenge because there are more options out there from which people out in the streets are choosing to live their lives. 

Elliott Johnson: 

And that's certainly the case. It's a different world. Our scrolls attempt to address some of that issue that comes from biblical illiteracy. We're just not living in that environment any longer. It wasn't that the environment was perfect in Dr. Chafer's day. 

Darrell Bock: 

No, not at all. 

Elliott Johnson: 

But it was a biblical environment. 

Darrell Bock: 

Right. 

Elliott Johnson: 

Ours is not a biblical environment. 

Darrell Bock: 

There was a respect for biblical environment that generally doesn't exist and can't be assumed today. 

Elliott Johnson: 

That's correct. 

Darrell Bock: 

That's why I had my job. Well, Elliott, thank you so much for coming in. This has been fun to reconnect on this level. These conversations for us, go back to lunches that we used to have on a regular basis when he was telling me, "All right, how should I help evaluate the students that were in the class?" And I learned so much from you in this area. So it's just a real privilege for me to be able to have you in. 

Elliott Johnson: 

Thank you so much. Could I also add that if there's someone watching the video that would like to learn more about how we as a church are using Bible Exposition at the lay level, not at the preaching level- 

Darrell Bock: 

Right. 

Elliott Johnson: 

But at the lay level, we'd love to be able to do that? And you can send me a text at [email protected]. 

Darrell Bock: 

There you go. 

Elliott Johnson: 

Even though I'm an old guy here, they've let me keep my email. So we'd love to make contact with you and get some of our staff to join me and coming and communicating and discussing it with you as an option that you might like to have. 

Darrell Bock: 

Oh, that's great. That's a wonderful offer. And my joke is that no one at Dallas Seminary knows the meaning of the word retire. So it sounds like you've been quite busy ever since. 

Elliott Johnson: 

Yeah. I'm even older than Biden. 

Darrell Bock: 

Well, thank you for joining us again. 

Elliott Johnson: 

You're certainly welcome. 

Darrell Bock: 

And we thank you, our listener, for being with us. And if you like our show, please leave some type of rating or review of your favorite podcast so that this helps people to discover us. We hope you'll join us again next time when we discuss issues of God and culture to show the relevance of theology to everyday life. We thank you for being with us, and we hope you'll join us again soon. 

Elliott Johnson: 

Thank you. 

Kasey Olander: 

Welcome to The Table Podcast where we discuss issues of God and culture to show the relevance of theology to everyday life. I'm Kasey Olander. I'm the web content specialist here at the Hendrick Center, and today our topic of conversation is board games. We have two esteemed guests with us. One of them is Dr. John Adair. He is a professor of theological studies here at DTS. John, thank you so much for being with us today. 

John Adair: 

Thanks for having me. 

Kasey Olander: 

Yeah. Our other esteemed guest is Travis Cook. He is a professor… Associate pastor of teaching. Sorry, I just promoted you to professor, but actually I think that you're associate pastor of teaching at Park Cities Baptist Church. 

Travis Cook: 

I'm glad to be here in whatever capacity. 

Kasey Olander: 

Thank you. Appreciate it. Well, board games is an interesting topic. It's somewhat universal. I feel like in a culture nowadays that is so dominated by screens and technology and devices, board games are something that have somehow still remained popular. So one of the things that we're going to talk about today is why are they so popular? What does that mean for us as Christians? And even what does that mean for us as humans? So I'm excited to jump into this conversation. So I want to start off with just, to set the table first, what do we mean by board games? Travis, I'll start with you, but how would you define what board games even are? 

Travis Cook: 

Yeah, so a board game probably implies that there's a board, and so that does maybe remove some card-based games. Are you including things like a role-playing game, like Dungeons and Dragons, things like that? And so I think what most people use now is kind of tabletop games. So games that you set out, you play on a table surface, a flat surface. And so I would say anything that is not… Obviously, there's even some board games or tabletop games that are screen-based as well. You can interact with an app. So yeah, I would say it's anything that you play on a tabletop with kind of a physical sort of interaction would be kind of how I would look at the tabletop game. 

Kasey Olander: 

That's a good point. Not to the exclusion of screens, but there is something physical that you're interacting with. It's not just computer-based usually, or at least that's not what we're talking about for the purpose of this episode. Anything to add to that? 

John Adair: 

I think that's a really good definition, being in a space with people and playing this face-to-face or there's something like that that's going on and there's something before us. But yeah, sometimes screens are part of it. They tend not to be the dominant feature. 

Kasey Olander: 

Yeah, that's a good point as well. So I think that we can identify some extreme reactions to board games. One of them being, "Oh, well, those are just frivolous. They're completely useless. We shouldn't engage with that at all. We should maybe only read our Bibles," or something like that. But then another extreme would be to get completely absorbed in, "I am this game," or, "I am this character," or something like that. And we can see how that would not be a healthy tendency either. So those are some of the polar opposites, but the hope is that through this conversation we can engage thoughtfully and Christianly with what is a huge subculture. So who is it that's playing board games? Is this just nerds? Who is it that plays board games nowadays? 

John Adair: 

I suppose it depends who you ask. Maybe people who don't play them say, "Nerds play them." And maybe people who do play them say, "Nerds play them," too. I don't know. I think everybody's playing… All walks of life. I mean, old, young, male, female, I don't think it matters. I don't think there's… Particular games might have particular audiences that might be a little more this or that. But I think in general, this is something that has been part of culture for a long time. I don't think even the oldest people among us, none of them were without board games as young people. So they were sitting around tables. Even if it was as simple as a card game, they had that. 

Kasey Olander: 

Yeah, that's a great point. 

Travis Cook: 

I think even party games, so things like Code Name or- 

Kasey Olander: 

Cranium. 

Travis Cook: 

Cranium, these games that… I'm trying to think of the one like Pictionary. Pictionary, these are party games that anybody can access. There's not a deep level of strategy involved, or maybe there is to master it, but not to engage with it. And so I think even my family or my wife's family has played a game where you have a screen on your head and then there's a thing you have to describe and people call it out or things like that. Even that which was popularized, I think, on the Ellen DeGeneres show… I think Ellen DeGeneres had an app that did that. People play those games. And so I think anybody in the right setting is willing to play a tabletop board game in the right circumstance. 

Kasey Olander: 

Right. Yeah. There's a lot of them that are really accessible to people, like you said, old and young, and it doesn't really matter if you're in a specific niche group of people because there's so many that are widely available and allow us to connect with people. So I feel like I married into board games. My family didn't do that a lot growing up, but my in-laws are always playing board games and card games and stuff. How did you all come by your interest in board games? 

John Adair: 

I was raised in it. We've been playing games for as long as I can remember. We always had games in our house. We had games that were age appropriate. I have a brother, a younger brother, and we were always playing things. We had games in our closet at home, and then with our parents, we would sit around the table, I think we played… We would play Uno a lot, we would play Dominoes. Those were regular at the table for the larger group, and that just blossomed into adulthood where it's like, "Oh, there's all these other options. How about this?" 

Travis Cook: 

Yeah, I think for me, I was not raised in it. I had a very, very serious working family. You're awake, you're working. But I was always interested in being able to engage in games and things like that. And so when I was in college, I had a group of friends that… We were into history and so we discovered Axis & Allies and that was kind of my first foray into it. And then I went to seminary where there are no games, it's work. But then during the pandemic, I was always on a screen, I was always looking at screens, and I needed something that was something else other than a screen to look at and to engage with and to be entertained by. And so there was a number of games that I got into at that point, and that's when I seriously started collecting and looking at and really kind of, I would say, probably investing too much money in tabletop games. 

Kasey Olander: 

We'll see what your wife has to say about that. I feel like each of those stories are not specifically unique to you. I feel like there's a lot of people who are either raised in board game homes or people who during the pandemic just needed something tactile to do. So what are some of the other things that are valuable? We talked about having something that's physical and not just another Zoom meeting or a virtual meeting, but maybe what are some of the other things that are valuable about board games, tabletop games? 

Travis Cook: 

I think for me, one of the things that is so cool about board games is the art. It is an opportunity for people to express their creativity. There are games that I've seen, that I've played that the mechanics, the gimmicks, the system is incredibly fascinating, but the art's not good. So the pieces are cheaply done, whatever, and I'm not as engaged with it. I'm not as attracted to it. I don't gravitate towards it. But then there are games that have beautiful art and I'm so entranced by them and their mechanics aren't very good, but I keep coming back to them. And then there are some games that manage to mesh them perfectly. 

Scythe is one of those games. This is a game I've played with Kasey's husband and play regularly. And actually this game, somebody made the art first. It was an artist that created this sort of post-World War I sort of steampunk world and somebody designed… Jamey Stegmaier designed a game around that. So I think it's the artistic ability. I mean, look at chess pieces. Chess is as old as forever and I have a Civil War chess set. The pieces all do the same thing, but it's the art that people find appealing. And so I think it's an artistic expression. So that's one of the things that I think is really wonderful about tabletop games. 

Kasey Olander: 

That's a good point. I think the game Wingspan is another example of that. 

Travis Cook: 

Same designer as Scythe. Same designer. 

Kasey Olander: 

Well, that makes sense. It's beautiful. 

Travis Cook: 

Yes. 

John Adair: 

My thirteen-year-old self is super jealous of you right now because you have a Civil War chess set. That's what I always wanted and I just dreamed about it. Never did get it. So the fact that it exists somewhere, I'm happy- 

Kasey Olander: 

If it goes missing from your house, then you know- 

Travis Cook: 

I got it as a groomsman gift. I was the best man at somebody's wedding, and my buddy got me a Civil War chess set in college. 

John Adair: 

Brilliant. 

Kasey Olander: 

Oh wow. 

Travis Cook: 

Yeah, it was a great gift.  

Kasey Olander: 

That's amazing. 

Travis Cook: 

It was. Still is. 

Kasey Olander: 

And I actually… I didn't even pay you to say this, but we have another episode about appreciating art and beauty. So if you want to listen to that, then thank you, Travis, for plugging The Table Podcast. 

Travis Cook: 

Happy to. Yep. 

Kasey Olander: 

I appreciate that. So that's huge. I think that people don't always realize the intentionality that goes into something like game design and the literal art that you see, but also the art of designing something like that is something that's worth noting as well. 

John Adair: 

Same, yeah. I love the art. And just to piggyback on that, there's a game that we've been playing recently called Hollywood 1947, which is kind of… Everyone has an identity, but it's based in Hollywood and it's around movie-making in the forties where communism was always on the lurk. People are like, "Who's a communist and who's making communist…?" And so some people are communists secretly and other people are patriots, and you're trying to make movies that are in accord with your values. 

But the art is so great. When you make a movie, it's done by genre and they've designed all these little posters for the game and it just brings you into this moment, the '40s. And they look so authentic to what those posters are like. And I'm kind of a film nerd anyway, so having all of that, it just draws you in. And it's been a great… The mechanics are really good too. So it's nice to see those things come together and draw you in. And then we have momentum in our family or our wider friend group that's like, "Hey, we should play this again. Let's do this." And it kind of keeps us coming back to the table. 

Kasey Olander: 

The Table. That's funny. 

John Adair: 

Sorry. 

Kasey Olander: 

That's fine. 

John Adair: 

That's my way of helping. 

Kasey Olander: 

That's good. I'm glad that you brought that up also, because I think that something that people also underestimate is how much you can learn something from a board game. So I mentioned Wingspan earlier, and I didn't even know how many species of birds there were. I was like, "Are there three?" But there's so many different species of birds. Are you talking about this…? You're learning about the time period or different things like that, things that are just outside of your normal world that a lot of times board game designers have explored and come up with some really accurate things that allow the participants to learn something about, something that's out of their usual element. 

John Adair: 

Totally. Yeah, one of the games that brought me into more serious gaming, I discovered in college, it's nerd level, top tier. It's called Advanced Squad Leader. And it is multi-module. You can be as into it as you want. But it's World War II-based and all of the scenarios are based on actual battles. Some of them are historical modules, so they've done the map to scale. They've got the Battle of Stalingrad. And you can play through the battle in the space that it took place in. Having a sense, so learning, just getting a sense of, we all have a sense of what Stalingrad was, but being in that space and saying, "Oh, there's this and these kind of movements that could be made." It really is enlightening to be able to be drawn into that. 

Travis Cook: 

Likewise, there's a game, again, I got as part of a wedding that I did. 

John Adair: 

A theme. 

Travis Cook: 

That's how I collect most of my games. I guess, now I'm realizing a theme. I need to do more weddings. Called Black Orchestra. And you are assembling conspirators to assassinate Hitler. And again, the characters you can play are all, you can be Dietrich Bonhoeffer, of all people. My wife was actually Dietrich Bonhoeffer and we did wind up successfully assassinating Hitler, I think through sniper rifle with Dietrich Bonhoeffer. 

But you learn the different plots and the different powers and the ways that it worked. Again, there's elements of counterfactual things that go on, but you are allowed to interact with the space and have this immersion that I think most people find history or something boring and you wind up, you can actually get in and manipulate it a little bit and it winds up becoming a little bit more realistic. 

Kasey Olander: 

And you learn it in a different way than just reading a textbook or even hearing someone talk about it, to actually participate in it yourself. It's very different. I think one of the professors here, I think it's Kevin Wong, who uses a game called Terraforming Mars, to teach apologetics and talk about how difficult it actually is or how unlikely it would be that a world like ours, that is okay for life to exist, to just happen by chance. There are a lot of examples of that where you can experience something in a different way through a game than you could by learning through a different medium. 

What are some of the other values of board games that come to mind? We talked about art, we talked about learning. 

Travis Cook: 

Probably the big one is the communal aspect of it. People sitting around the table with other people. There are a number of games you can play by yourself, solo games, or they have solo modes. I don't know if maybe my nerd level will go higher than Squad Leader here, but a lot of the games I play are solo games. It's a way to unwind or whatever. But the communal aspect, getting a group of friends together to play this game and to play it regularly or to go down to your board game shop and interact with people that you wouldn't normally interact with. And yeah, I think the communal aspect is a huge part of it. It's something peaceful that you can do. Hopefully, unless you're way competitive. 

Kasey Olander: 

I was going to say sometimes they're not peaceful. 

Travis Cook: 

Sometimes not. 

Kasey Olander: 

Sometimes it takes a turn. 

Travis Cook: 

That's why God allowed us to make the co-operative board game. 

Kasey Olander: 

There you go. 

Travis Cook: 

Work together. 

John Adair: 

I think there's two, though. And there's something kind of fundamental about the way games are because even if you're competitive, you are coming to the table with a common set of rules that you're playing by, and a common idea of what this is. And we're all subject to that from the beginning. So even in a competitive game, we are coming together to do whatever it is before us. That cuts against, makes the competitiveness a little, when it gets out of control, like this is kind of against the spirit of what we're actually doing here, because what we're doing is something that is, I think, at a fundamental level, oriented toward a more peaceful interaction. Where we're all in the same world together and we're doing this thing together. Don't be mistaken, I do like to win, but can I do that in a peaceable way? That'd be great. 

Travis Cook: 

I feel that very deeply in my spirit because my wife will often want to fudge the rules a little bit. 

John Adair: 

Oh, yeah. 

Travis Cook: 

Especially if we're playing a co-operative game. She'll be like, "Well, we're the only ones that are here." I'm like, "No. There are rules." And she'll be like, "Well, what about a house rule?" I think we have one game where we have a house rule. I'm very, no, this is the way it's intended to be played. We're going to play it this way. 

Kasey Olander: 

You're appealing to a higher authority. 

Travis Cook: 

Exactly. It's exactly what it is. I'm very rules-based in my gaming. 

John Adair: 

I love that. 

Travis Cook: 

So that's me. Yes, I agree that the idea of entering into a space and playing, no, we're going to follow these rules and these rules are not … these rules are timeless and stuff like that. I think that's very helpful. 

Kasey Olander: 

And you're agreeing to get invested in some sort of story. You're agreeing to a role or a character or something like that. What difference does it make to engage with a story in this way where you're more of a participant as opposed to watching a TV show or a movie? You're engaged and you're thoughtful, but it's different. You don't get to affect any change in it. I guess, what difference does that make? 

John Adair: 

It puts you into the mix. And part of what people are, we're decision makers. Everybody has the ability to make decisions. And so when you're sitting in a space like playing a game, everything you do is based on decisions you are making. But you're also impacted by the decisions other people are making, right? 

Kasey Olander: 

For good or for ill. 

John Adair: 

For good or for ill. And sometimes that could be quite distressing and other times be quite invigorating, depending on the decisions people are making. But being in that space I think is really helpful. And just as a person, I think, who's in a story, when I was a kid, I loved Choose Your Own Adventure books. 

Travis Cook: 

Yes. 

John Adair: 

These were my favorite. I would go through these in elementary school, late elementary or whatever, and I would just be all over it trying to find the path that I could read every page. That's what I was really trying to get to. But also to find a good end. And this feels a little bit like that when you sit down to play a game. It's like, how am I going to accomplish this task? Whatever it is. And it never quite looks the same. As you play with different people or people learn your strategies, it might be different depending on what day it is. 

Years ago I worked in an office, not at Dallas Seminary, but at another place, and I had a chessboard out at my desk for anybody to come by and people would come by and play with me sometimes. And I would play, and I had a strategy to win in three moves that I had developed. And I would always beat the person the first time in three moves. And some people would get beat multiple times that way. 

Kasey Olander: 

The same way. 

John Adair: 

Other people would figure it out and make the challenge, whatever. But it's like that was the kind of thing, it's like, "Okay, well they blocked my move. Now I've got to find another way to do this." And there's something really good about that that I think develops us as people. 

Travis Cook: 

I thinks there's different games. There's kind of a spectrum of immersion. If you're playing Sorry or Monopoly, I'm not a top hat in Monopoly. It just represents what I'm doing, but I'm not the top hat. But then you could do a game like Dungeons & Dragons or Gloomhaven or something else that's very immersive and very intense and you want to take on this character. And again, that's kind of where we started at the top. People can get lost in that. 

People can really identify to an extreme. You see that in video games as well. You see that in other things. But then there are some games where there's a certain level of immersion that you want. I have a game that is a card-based game that's called Marvel Champions. And each … it's a deck building game, but you're picking a Marvel superhero, Captain America, whoever, and they have a core set of cards, and then you can add in other aspects to make them kind of flesh them out, what kind of way you want to play them. 

But each character, the characters that are the most fun to play are the ones that make you feel like you are that character. So I feel like if you choose Iron Man, one of his things is you have to build his suit of armor, so you have to collect different things to do it. Or if you're Captain America, you have a shield and you can throw it and all this other stuff. And it's just, there are other characters. You're like, man, I don't really feel like I'm being this person. There's a certain level of immersion that helps you. 

But then there's also the idea of making decisions. There are games called legacy games where when you make a decision in the game, the game changes and the game changes permanently. The next time you play it, you are expected to play with that rule, with that set. There's this idea of permanence involved. And that's a fact of life. You make decisions and every decision you make in life reduces other decisions you can make. 

I married Kim. That means that I am eliminating many other choices. In middle school, I was well aware that many of those choices were eliminated for me, probably because of my love of board games. There's this idea of permanence, and when something's gone, it's gone and you can't get it back necessarily. When you're thinking through those decisions and living it out, you've got to recognize that when I make decisions that those are permanent decisions. 

Kasey Olander: 

Right. I feel like I have to think about that a little bit. Wow, that was a reality check. 

Travis Cook: 

Also, I don't play a lot of legacy games, I think because of, I don't like the idea of permanence. 

Kasey Olander: 

My real life has enough of that. 

Travis Cook: 

Yeah, no, I don't need any more of that. 

John Adair: 

Indeed. 

Travis Cook: 

I want to be able to flip the board over and start over again if I don't like the way things are going. 

John Adair: 

There you go. 

Travis Cook: 

I believe they call that a rage quit. 

Kasey Olander: 

That may be the term. 

Travis Cook: 

Yes. 

Kasey Olander: 

Well, that's interesting. Since you brought up immersion, is there an element to … I guess, how do we interact with the fact that sometimes in games you have to attack or kill or in some way harm somebody? In a way, you would never do this in real life. If my husband and I are playing a board game together, I would never attack him in real life. But in order to play this game, it is part of the mechanics of the game. 

And so is there, I guess any danger in that? Or how do we interact with that as Christians, the fact that it's enabling us to pretend do these things, but then also some games require actual lying. There's some of those games of deception. I think you mentioned, I don't know if somebody mentioned Secret Hitler or something like that. But Mafia, there's a lot of games like that that require actual deception. So fake, fake sins. And then I don't think that this lying in a game is actually a sin. But I don't know, what are your thoughts? 

John Adair: 

It's a great question. And one that I've had to wrestle with as well. Many years of doing college ministry and playing Mafia regularly and being good at it means you're a good liar. 

Kasey Olander: 

Mm-hmm. 

John Adair: 

And you're deceiving people that you love. And what are the consequences of that? And honestly, I think you have to navigate it in the community of people you're with. I never wanted to win the game at the expense of relationships. 

Kasey Olander: 

Right. 

John Adair: 

And I say that my best self never wanted to do that, whether that was actually the case or not. I let other people speak to that, but I definitely want to be on that space where it's like, yeah, I can do some of these things in good fun. We tell our kids sometimes things about what we might do for their birthday to protect the surprise or whatever, and so we're telling a little lie or whatever it is because there's something really cool coming on the back end of that. There's these spaces where we enter into and all of us together know this is what's happening here and we're all kind of okay with it, right? And I think that's good to remember. 

The other thing I would say is we tell stories all the time about these kinds of things as well. And the issue is always going to be how we frame what it is that we're talking about. If I'm playing mafia and I'm lying to win the game, am I framing that in a way? Am I thinking about that in a way? Are we thinking about this game in a way that says, "Oh yeah, lying's awesome and this is how we should be in the world." In our context that was obviously a no. And we're not doing that. So I think everybody kind of knows that going in and we can recognize, like stories, this is separate from who we actually are, and that's healthy to be able to think about those things in a different space. 

Travis Cook: 

Yeah, I think it's so important. I think you said it really well. What are you willing to sacrifice a friendship to win a board game? And as embarrassing as it may be to say, I've had people become angry at me over board games, I've become frustrated and angry with people over board games. And not just when I was a kid. These are grown up Travis. Grown man Travis. I remember … and one of the things I'm really bad about is I want people to go. Take your turn. Let's go. Let's keep moving. We're here to play a game. And I've had a couple of instances where people have gotten upset with me because I've pushed them. 

It's not just, you have to figure out who am I when I play a game, what kind of a player am I? And does this bring out the best in me or does this bring out the worst in me? And if it brings out the worst in you, then as a follower of Christ, you avoid that. There's some things you can't do. The alcoholic doesn't go to the bar. The hyper-competitive person doesn't play the game that brings out this dragon in you that ruins your friendships and your relationships. 

But to the same point, you do enter into those spaces where everybody agrees to the rules. In our society, in a marriage, we agree that lying is wrong. You do not lie to your spouse. You be honest and everybody, whether you were as pagan as the day is long or you were an ardent follower of Christ, you hold to the values of honesty and openness in a marriage. With that being said, there is no one more deceptive than a man who is trying to propose to his girlfriend. Good marriages are based on honesty. Good proposals are based on lies, deception and cheating. 

And that's just a fact. And typically it is the female, the prospective wife, she's on board with it. She wants to be surprised. She wants to be deceived to some extent. Santa Claus kind of the same way, right? You want to be surprised. If you enter into that space like Mafia or something where deception is a key part of the game … even a game like Rummy, Go Fish is based on deception to some extent. I'm hiding my cards from you so that you can't see them. 

Now, the expectation is when I ask you do you have any nines, then you're supposed to tell the truth. So you've got to follow the rules. And again, it's entering into, again, to use a nerdy theological term, you're entering into a covenant with people of an agreement. This is the way we're playing the game. These are the rules. And outside of this setting, I'm not going to do these things. When I play board games with my wife, my wife is an incredible engine builder, not like car engine, but a game where you have to build a city or build something and get a machine going that feeds it. Oh my gosh, she's so good. Games like Dominion. She's really good when she plays Scythe because of this. 

What messes her up more than anything else is when somebody does something to disrupt that and she gets really upset about it, because she doesn't want you messing with her little world that she's created. My strategy is to win. And I know that if I can just throw a couple wrenches in it, I can win. But ultimately I lose. I lose after the game is over. And so you've got to think through those things as to how can I make sure that the other people are having fun as well and enjoying the game. And maybe I don't do as well as I could, but the other people are enjoying themselves and I'm fostering community and I'm fostering an enjoyment. 

And more than that, I want people to come back and play the game again. I'm not going to crush somebody right out of the gate because … If I can, I don't mean I can all the time, because I want them to come back and play again. 

Kasey Olander: 

Right. Yeah, that's fascinating. We have all agreed to this certain set of rules, and so we've agreed to this when deception is okay. And frankly, we probably wouldn't be okay if somebody just outright showed all their cards or told the truth the whole time. You're like, that's not how you play the game. When deception is the key and you're trying to see who has the best poker face, so to speak, when that's part of the game, we all agree to come to that. And then like you said, it ends when the game is over, and we're not like, we lie to each other forever now. This is it. 

Travis Cook: 

And there's the merciless aspect. If you're playing a game with four or five people and there's somebody who's very much lagging behind and you realize, I can get really far ahead if I just attack this person, or I could take this person's stuff. And you're like, I can't do that. I'm not going to do that. It's not worth it. There is compassion and mercy even in the moments of the game and recognizing that there's a person behind those pieces and you want to love them well. 

Kasey Olander: 

Yeah, because a lot of times, most of us come to board games to have fun. As Christians our chief end should not be to win at all costs. But we're having fun and we're building community. This is a sort of a related question. Is there a sense in which … Well, let me back up. 

A lot of games have a good and evil. Most of the time where the good team that's trying to defeat the evil team. What about when the roles are flipped and we are for some reason, we're the villains and we're trying to take down the good? Is there anything that that does to us as believers? Is that something that we feel like is okay for Christians to engage in? 

Travis Cook: 

Yeah, there's a whole series of games, Ravensburger, I think is the company that puts them out called Villainous. And they take Disney villains and the Marvel villains, they've taken Star Wars villains because Disney now owns everything, and you play as the villain and you're trying to accomplish your task and stuff like that. It's not an uncommon thing. It's a mainstream. You can buy those games at Target. 

I don't know. I think it depends on maybe the gratuitousness of it, right? 

Kasey Olander: 

Sure. 

Travis Cook: 

This is a little bit of a leap. There's a computer game called Hearts of Iron where you can play as any nation during World War II. And the studio is based out of Sweden, I think is that makes it. And one of the things that they will not let you do if you play as Germany. There's no concentration camps, there's no genocide, there's nothing like that. Even though that was an intricate part of the story of World War II and one of the tragedies and also one of the redeeming elements of it, and it made it such a good versus evil, they won't let you do that. And even modifications that players make, they take them down. They are very active in destroying that element of it. 

They don't even let you have … They use a classic German flag rather than the swastika and things like that. I think policing that idea and then also having a sense of your own conscience. I'm not going to engage in that. I'm not going to be that kind of person or I'm not going to … that's too far for me to play that way. Dungeons & Dragons is one of those where you can do whatever you want. You can engage the story however you want. If you want to be this incredibly sexually driven individual character, you can do that and make everybody really uncomfortable around you. 

Or you can be incredibly violent or crude or whatever. But I think that's an element where people, especially as a believer, you perhaps go too far. Even if it's a character you're playing that says something about your heart that you want to play that way. That you want to engage in that. You want to put your toe in the water of what it's like to be that kind of person. There's danger there, I think. Just personally. 

Kasey Olander: 

Yeah. 

John Adair: 

Yeah, I would think in terms of attachment. How attached are you to the dark side, whatever that is. And so you're talking about gratuitousness, the level of detail that you put into that. Those are the things that I think are troubling and that you want to pull back from. I think it's fine in principle, you're going to have two sides. And the reality is whatever side I'm playing, the other side is the bad side. 

Kasey Olander: 

Yeah. That's good one point. 

John Adair: 

That's kind of where you're even in something like checkers, it's red and black. These are the colors of the pieces, and I'm the black pieces, those red ones are the bad ones, and I've got to find my way to vanquish the foe. And so I do that. That piece is always there. But I think if you're getting way detailed into that kind of stuff, it can be problematic. 

Kasey Olander: 

Yeah. And as Christians, we have convictions about what movies and television we should follow the spirit's leading and all of the things that we engage with where we draw boundary lines on, "You know what, for the sake of holiness or purity or my relationships or whatever it is then I follow Jesus instead." And this is where each of us has to draw our own lines and convictions. 

John Adair: 

Right. Honestly, my problems are less about being attached to the dark side of whatever game it is and really about my own heart and how I enter into games. The game is really ancillary. I could be a really bad good guy, because that's just the depths of my heart are wicked and I don't always want what is good. There's always this constant wrestling, but I feel like that's mostly coming from me, rather than from whatever the mechanism is out here in front of us. 

Kasey Olander: 

And I like that both of you have highlighted that. That as Christians, that's something that we're not just ignorant of, but something that we're actually monitoring is our own hearts and seeing what comes out of us and what, Like, "Wow, I'm a lot more upset about this than I thought I was." Or that sort of thing. That we can learn not just information or history or anything like that, but also we can learn about ourselves and learn about each other in a way that the Spirit can use to convict us and show us different areas that he still needs to work in us. 

Travis Cook: 

The litmus test for anything, particularly any form of entertainment is what do I become or what is this making me into be? If you're somebody that can't watch an athletic event without becoming a colossal rage monster or have your… There are people that I know that stopped watching college football because they're like, "I was tired of having my emotions on Saturday dictated by the way my team did." They were also an Arkansas fan, so they were very, very negative, most Saturdays. But that shows a sense of maturity and growth and saying, "I can't do this without it corrupting who I am or being more corruptive perhaps." And so if a board game or a video game or a sport or pickleball turns you into this Godzilla monster that's just destroying really, stop doing it. You can't do it. Limit yourself, find other things. Pick up something cooperative, perhaps. Go on a hike, find a way out of that would be my recommendation for sure. 

Kasey Olander: 

That's really good. Are there any other ways that y'all can think of that games could impact our spiritual lives? 

John Adair: 

Yes, I think they absolutely do, because everything you do impacts who you are spiritually. You're talking about entertainment, Travis, but anything, all the things that I'm engaged in are discipling me in some way. And so I can't not think about that. It's always part of what I do. I do think one thing that I've found to give a specific answer to your question is, one thing I really appreciated is the way that games create a space, not just of community, but of joy. And there's a real sense of there's goodness in the world that we're able to sit down and do something together and have a good time together. That's a real grace and a gift, I think. And those are things that I think we need to remember. The world's a hard place and we want to be people who are joyful. That's a fruit of the spirit and being able to sit at a table with people and play a silly game, play a strategy game, whatever, something in between that creates that space for that. And that's a really important aspect of us as spiritual beings, I think, and as Christians. 

Travis Cook: 

Friendship in our modern day is something that's difficult to cultivate. 

Kasey Olander: 

Thanks for plugging our episode, the Lost Art of Friendship. 

Travis Cook: 

You're welcome. And anything that can give you an excuse to sit down and develop friendships with people, particularly male friendship is difficult to cultivate. And I am like this as a person. It is embarrassing to say as a pastor, but sitting across the table from somebody and having a conversation is much more difficult for me than to sit shoulder to shoulder with somebody and play a game or work on a fence or something like that, do something side by side. You have those kind of conversations that happen in between turns, somebody else is going and you're able to talk. And so anything that can cultivate a friendship. And even to an evangelistic sense, going into spaces, going into places that you normally wouldn't go. I would probably never go and associate with some of the people at the board game shop, but I get to go talk to them. And on their name tags, they have things that say what their preferred pronouns are and things like that. And it's an opportunity to be like… Working at a Baptist church, I would not… We don't have that, let's just say. 

There are unbelievers that work at my church, but you don't have that element. And so getting to interact with culture and a section of culture that you don't normally get to is really great. And then there are some board games and there are some really good board games that actually interact with biblical theological ideas. Like actual, there's one called Anno Domini, we were talking about it before. And it's a work replacement game, and you are trying to get closer to the apostles at the Last Supper. And I don't know how I feel about that. I don't know that I want to make a game out of the Last Supper, it's such a solemn moment. There's another game called Ezra and Nehemiah where you're trying to build the temple and you're trying to build the wall around Jerusalem and it's really well-designed and things like that. And so there've been other less successful, more failed attempts to engage in biblical material. 

But again, it's an opportunity if you're trying to teach people about scripture, "Hey, this is just a work replacement game. Let's talk about the importance of why is the Last Supper so important? What was going on there?" And you could really have an interesting conversation if you're willing to spend $70 on this game and figure it out. I haven't yet. 

Kasey Olander: 

And that's one of those areas where people develop their own convictions about is this sacrilegious to make a game out of something that's actually a really critical moment? Or is it something that some Christians, I think are sometimes prone to be like, "Oh, I can only engage in Christian content, so it would only be Christian board games that I would ever play." But it seems like throughout the course of this conversation, we're talking about the value of building relationships with people, building friendships with unbelievers and the hopes of sharing Christ with them, but also strengthening relationships with our brothers and sisters in Christ. I am happy to say that my husband and I have played board games with both of you guys and our relationships are all intact, so let's celebrate that for a second. 

John Adair: 

Great. 

Travis Cook: 

Are they? 

Kasey Olander: 

We'll talk about it off-air. 

Travis Cook: 

I've been meaning to bring some stuff up. 

Kasey Olander: 

Okay. Any closing thoughts on our discussion today? I feel like it's been robust as we've highlighted board game art and being able to learn things, make decisions, build community, and even the power of engaging experientially in a story. 

John Adair: 

I don't know if this counts as a closing thought, but I've been thinking about just as you guys were doing this exchange here, this last exchange, and this has maybe come up a little bit before earlier in our conversation, but I think in terms of Christian stories versus not and all that, one of the things that games do is they are story oriented typically. Even a basic card game like rummy or versions of rummy that we play, it builds a story as you go through and it's like, well, that game took on this life of its own and it had this sort of ebb and flow or whatever. And I think there's something really helpful about that and really human about that. Even in a card game that has no words or characters or anything, we create a narrative around what's happening in this story. 

And that speaks to who we are and what we're looking for. And to me, this is why any game can be useful for thinking about us as spiritual creatures and as believers because we're people who are part of God's story. And there is a larger story going on. And so I'm always thinking about how do the stories that we tell related to whatever we're playing here, the stories that these games are telling, how are those stories, how do they fit into this larger story? And that's a productive space to sit in and to be able to think about, is this a story that's lifting up things that are good and that are oriented toward good things? And what I find is most of the time, yeah, they're telling a good part of the story here. It's a little piece maybe, but it's helpful. And so it's, I think, good to give us opportunities to do that kind of thing. Tell stories and participate in them. 

Kasey Olander: 

Something about us as humans find stories really compelling. 

John Adair: 

Right. 

Travis Cook: 

And you have an emotional response to those stories. The rummy game that you were really excited about. You're like, "That was the game that I did this, this and this." I'm sitting over and being like, "That was the worst game I've ever played in my life." And I have a depressive emotion about that. I would think as far as closing thoughts for me, I think because since Settlers of Catan, Settlers Catan blew the board game market back open. It's not just Monopoly and sorry, and games that make you want to just flip the table over. If you have an interest in something, there's a board game about it. And so I would encourage anybody to go down to a board game shop and just look around, you'll find something that can pique your curiosity. I like ships, I like naval stuff. 

I found a game where you can build ships. You can find a game that can do pretty much anything and give it a shot, try it and see if that's an area where, again, if it can get you off of a screen, get you around playing with other people, even cooperative, however it is, I think it's worth investigating. And if it's not for you, you can sell it, move on. But I think the board game world is a nice place that I think many people ignore but it's a really good excuse to get people around the table other than food and drinks or whatever it might be. You can have something that's maybe more tactile in that way. 

Kasey Olander: 

That board games can cultivate an environment where our relationships can flourish and we can be together and enjoy our embodiment as humans that we're doing something physical. Well, this has been a wonderful conversation, John and Travis, thank you so much for joining us today. 

John Adair: 

Thank you. 

Travis Cook: 

Glad to be here. 

Kasey Olander: 

And we want to thank you too, our listener, for being with us. If you like our show, go ahead and leave a rating or review on your favorite podcast app so that other people can discover us. And we hope that you'll join us next time when we discuss issues of God and culture to show the relevance of theology to everyday life.  

Kymberli Cook: 

Welcome to the Table Podcast where we discuss issues of God and culture to show the relevance of theology to everyday life. My name is Kymberli Cook and I'm the Assistant Director of the Hendricks Center. And we are so glad that you have joined us today as we talk through legal investigations in the ministry world and to help us jump into that world because it's definitely not the one that I live in. We are joined by Theresa Lynn Sidebotham, who is an attorney and the founder of an organization called Telios Law, and she's here to help us better understand this specific kind of part, this specific part of ministry. Thank you so much for being here, Theresa. 

Theresa Lynn Sidebotham: 

Oh, I'm delighted to be. Thanks. 

Kymberli Cook: 

So if you wouldn't mind, can you tell us just a little bit about yourself and how you ended up founding this practice, how you ended up kind of in ministry law more or less? 

Theresa Lynn Sidebotham: 

Yeah, so the ministry piece goes way back. I actually grew up as a missionary kid in Indonesia. Went to Wheaton College, met my husband there. Then he was in the military for a while and we did some ministry work for a while. So we have four sons. I actually went back to law school as they started to get a little bit older, middle school, high school, graduated from law school in 2005 and I think it was God leads us in these circuitous ways, but it seems like so much of what I've lived through in my life is actually relevant now in the practice. And we work with ministries and businesses to try to help them carry out their kingdom calling from the legal side of things. So it's pretty exciting. 

Kymberli Cook: 

No, that's so cool. I love what you're saying about the circuitous path. I feel like at this point in my life, I'm actually in the process of hopefully just finishing up a PhD and I feel like there's all of these threads all the way through my life that the Lord is just kind of bringing together at this certain time. And it's funny when you look back and you think, oh, all of these things seem so meaningless or just they were what they were, but then it all starts to make a little bit more sense. Well, that's awesome. So what kind of investigations do you all carry out and just how do you go about helping ministries and businesses do their kingdom calling? What does that look like? 

Theresa Lynn Sidebotham: 

So we do more legal work than just investigations. Some of it's litigation, some of it is helping organizations with policies and prevention, especially for employees, for child safeguarding, we really would love to see people prevent problems. And so on that side we help them legally. We have a training affiliate. It's a online learning management system called Telios Teaches that takes a lot of the HR and child safeguarding training from a scriptural perspective. So that's more the preparation prevention side. But I really think that how ministries or businesses respond when there's a problem sets the tone of their culture, really sets the tone of their testimony. So we're all human, we're all flawed, we're all broken, and we get together in ministries or businesses and things go wrong. Sometimes they go wrong in minor ways. Sometimes you get somebody involved who's really evil, a predator, an offender. 

So in a ministry or a business or actually anywhere that humans are, we have to be prepared for evil or for problems or for how to respond because we're not going to go on forever with everything going well. I mean, you know that from your own life. We live in a fallen world and Christ is in the process of redeeming it and us, but that job isn't finished yet. So we try to help businesses and ministries respond well when there's been an allegation. And that can look like a lot of different things. Sometimes it's just advising. Sometimes it's coming in and doing an independent third party investigation, but that's the point of it. 

Kymberli Cook: 

So it sounds like there's some pretty solid beliefs that you have and convictions that you have that really drive you as you jump into these really messy places. Like one of them you're saying is the recognition that we live in a fallen and sinful world, and so things are going to go wrong. And so that's one fundamental guiding principle. What other principles or drivers would you say you have that, again, help propel you into these really tricky, difficult kinds of places, especially once it goes wrong? Like you said, obviously you're doing prevention work as well, and we want to get upstream of any of that as humanly possible. But when it does get rough, what is it that you kind of go back to and you're like, but these are the things that I hold true and so it makes it worth it to jump in here. 

Theresa Lynn Sidebotham: 

Yeah, absolutely. And you're right, it can be a dark space and especially if you're dealing with children being harmed, child abuse, sometimes it's sexual harassment, spiritual abuse, almost always people who are feeling harmed, traumatized, sometimes very deeply. So it's a tough area to work in. And of course like a lot of other types of care providers, we're prone to secondary trauma from that. But if we think about how God is calling us as Christians in whatever our space in calling, he's calling us to redemptive work. And I think if there are any Christians who are saying, "No part of my life is hard and I'm not dealing in any way with human sin or brokenness and I'm not actually trying to make the world a better place." Then I would maybe at least question the person's maturity as a Christian, because that's our calling and interacting with a broken world and our broken selves in ways that align with Christ's redemptive work, we're all called to do that in some way. And this is our calling. 

And I love it because really in many ways we can speak redemptively into a situation. We hope that the things that we say and the things we find in the investigation can then be used by our clients to bring healing to the people who've been harmed, to make the organization a better and safer place. I mean, there's some really positive outcomes that we can have if we do this with integrity. 

Kymberli Cook: 

That's so beautiful that you say that. And as you were talking, I was thinking of the theological category of common grace and the idea that God is, even in the midst of the fallen world in which we live, God in His providential care is holding back sin to a degree from going as far as it could. It's not as bad as it could be. And I think law and the law profession is one of those means by which He does it. I think medicine is also how He does it. But in law you are holding back the sin of injustice and these particular predators and even wrongdoing and it doesn't even have to necessarily be as dark where it's just somebody is wronged and no, we're here to try to help. 

So that being said, we are still, even those who practice law are very much in a fallen state and things can go south. So how do you all protect your investigations and your kind of work from becoming what some people have labeled witch hunts or it's not even really something fair that's happening, it's that there's an allegation and then somebody has to pay. How do you work through that as the one who actually carries out those investigations and kind of couch it for those to whom you are delivering your work? 

Theresa Lynn Sidebotham: 

And you mentioned common grace. Many of our clients are believers, not all of them are. Sometimes it's what you might think of as a garden variety workplace investigation, and that's fine too. There actually are some pretty solid best practices around investigations. And one thing that law really focuses on, especially at its best, is creating fair processes for everyone involved. And you can look at the best practices laid out in the law and then you can look at what scripture says and you can try to devise processes that synchronize with both. So you mentioned the fear that there might be a witch hunt. So right at the beginning of investigation, usually what kicks it off is some kind of an allegation. It could be an allegation of sexual harassment, child abuse, spiritual abuse, bullying in the workplace, racial discrimination, you name it's some kind of wrongdoing that's alleged to have happened. 

Well, at that point, the perspective, the organizations go wrong in a couple of major ways and they intuitively do go wrong. That's an interesting point. One way that they intuitively go wrong is they say, "Oh no, this person who's been accused, they couldn't have done that. We know him well, we've been around him and his family for the last 20 years. That's just not possible." And they sort of dismiss the allegations, tell the person who's maybe saying that she's a victim, and it could be she or he in either case, "No, you're really not. We're not going to listen to this." 

And so that's dismissive towards somebody who may have been harmed. But sometimes you have the other problem on the other extreme where it's like, "Oh my gosh, somebody has said such and such about so-and-so and he must be guilty, and so we're going to fire him. We're going to make a public announcement." Well, that's also unfair, because at that stage it's just an allegation. You have to take very seriously that it might be true, but you also have to take seriously the possibility that it's not true. And so trying at that point to walk into a process where you're going to figure that out and do as little harm to everybody in the process as possible, that's the challenge. 

Kymberli Cook: 

You mentioned just a moment ago that you take the best practices that you learned in law school and those kinds of things, and you also put them alongside scriptures, I'm presuming that seem to correspond with similar ideas and that kind of thing. What are some of those scriptures and scriptural theological concepts that you help apply for the specific kind of work you do? 

Theresa Lynn Sidebotham: 

I'll just speak about scenes in the scripture, because I'm not amazing at the scriptural citations. 

Kymberli Cook: 

You're all right. Nobody's judging if you don't have the book, chapter, verse. 

Theresa Lynn Sidebotham: 

Lawyer, not pastor. So there's an enormous amount in the scripture about how employers need to treat employees fairly and create a just work environment, pay them fairly. There's a lot in the scripture about the voice of the poor and the vulnerable crying out and how they're entitled to justice and how deeply it angers God if people who are powerless are not given justice when they cry out. I mean, this is everything from the blood of Abel to Paul talking to Philemon. It's a theme throughout the scripture, the poor, the vulnerable, the children, the strangers, immigrants, the helpless, the women, you name it, God really cares about that stuff. 

But there's also scriptures about testimony and how testimony needs to be corroborated. And there's even scripture about if you bend justice in favor of the poor against the rich, you're also offending God. And so you're not allowed to bend justice either way, not for the powerful, not for the powerless, what you owe both of them is a just process. The poor and the powerless tend not to get that in this life, just the way the world works, so that's why there might need to be a little bit more emphasis on making sure they get it. But you also don't throw people with power under the bus just because they happen to be in power. They deserve a fair process too. 

Kymberli Cook: 

Fascinating. So how do you encourage, especially let's keep thinking about those, the poor and powerless, how do you encourage them when they perhaps feel like the whole thing is corrupt and justice really isn't going to happen? And how do you navigate that as somebody who's on the ground trying to make that happen, but also encountering all of the obstacles I'm sure you face along the way trying to make that happen? 

Theresa Lynn Sidebotham: 

So this goes back to organizational culture, and if you think each one of us can think of organizations that we've been in, and you can ask yourself the question, let's just say, take sexual harassment, you and I are both women and it happens to women a lot. If I had come forward in this particular organization, would that have been taken seriously? Would that have been well received? Would I have been punished in some way for doing that? Would they have investigated? Would they have taken action? And I think intuitively, most people have a bit of a sense how that is within a given organization. Now for the leaders of the organization, the responsibility is to make that the kind of environment where people would feel safe to come forward. And that even involves, again, it's a little bit being faithful with the little things. 

If leaders take seriously the minor stuff, maybe somebody younger or a woman is treated dismissively, maybe people make slightly off colored jokes or not so nice comments about racial minorities, well, if they're not dealing with the little stuff kind of as it happens, even if it's just as simple as, "James, we don't make comments like that here. I don't want to hear you say stuff like that." That sets the tone and it gives a sense of do the leaders actually care and are they going to respond well? Now, sometimes it's more that it's never been really dealt with in the organizational culture. That happens a lot with ministries, because bless their hearts, they think it's never going to happen or it's not happening. And so they never worried about the culture of people coming forward because they assumed there was never going to be anything to come forward about. 

And so suddenly they realize people are not trusting, people didn't want to come forward, people were afraid and they go, "Well, why would you be afraid? We really care." Well, nobody knew because you never said anything. So at that point, when you have an allegation, the best thing you can do as leaders is take it seriously and go through the process and show people that you really mean it. So however the investigation comes out, whether it's substantiated or not, taking the process seriously and taking the people seriously helps to show everybody else, "Hey, we really do care about this and we will listen to you too if you have something you need to come forward about." 

Kymberli Cook: 

So what is the point that youth, in your opinion, that perhaps people in ministry, like you said, I think there might be two camps at this point. I feel like especially after everything that's happened in the last 10, 15 years with the Me Too movement and everything that happened there and a variety of other allegations that have come out against pastors and within ministries, very public, I think there are still those who are surprised and horrified and caught flat-footed. And then I think there's also this other part of the ministry world that, pardon the colloquialism, but "lawyers up", quote, unquote, "lawyers up" really fast and it gets really legal and really non-disclosure and really all of that very quickly to the point that some people don't even know whether justice is even happening and it all seems very protective of the organization and perhaps not thoughtful toward the individuals. 

Especially any ministry leaders who are listening, but anybody who might end up in a situation like that, what do you think is the way to walk that tightrope of, no, we want to remain optimistic about people and an authentic community here, but there are certain points where this does get very legal and very technical, and there are places for closed doors. How do you walk those lines? 

Theresa Lynn Sidebotham: 

Well, in terms of our expectations, there's always going to be sinners, including the church and some serious sin. So they estimate that up to 10% of American male adults may be sex offenders in one way or another. Well, you're not going to keep that entirely out of the church. And so we shouldn't be, I mean, saddened of course, but we shouldn't be stunned and surprised when stuff comes up within a ministry. And then you mentioned lawyers, and I think this is important for the legal profession to consider, as lawyers, we do look out for our clients' legal interests, but our professional rules allow room for us to be counselors and advisors and guides. And I think sometimes we do a disservice to our clients if we don't think about what is their real overall calling and what are their broader interests, their spiritual, emotional, social, cultural interests? It's not just could this thing create this lawsuit? But it's like, where are we going with this whole thing? 

And if we don't think about that as attorneys advising ministries or businesses, we can get flat-footed. And I know exactly what you mean that, "Don't say a word because any word you say might incriminate you." Well, unfortunately, if people have been harmed, they probably do need some words said. So if we have an allegation, I think one thing we have to think about is at the beginning of the process is, who are the stakeholders who may have been harmed? How can we put in pastoral responses as well as investigative responses with different people? And it's not always the same role. There may need to be more than one role of person talking to different people involved. 

But I can promise you for people who are bringing an allegation and who are saying they've been harmed, for people accused, and for some of the other stakeholders, it's a very painful process. So we want to think about what do people need? Who needs to hear them? What kind of communication do they need? In terms of what we share in public announcements, that is tricky because there's a fine line. On the one hand, you don't want to overshare either about people who've been harmed or people accused especially too soon, because that can put them in a public spotlight, especially we've got minors involved, but even people who are victims who are not minors, they themselves might not realize how damaging long-term exposure could be to them. For persons accused at the beginning of the process, we don't know yet if they did it or not and so we don't want to rush to a kind of exposure that might destroy somebody who might actually happen to have not done it. 

So we have to be careful, but yet there may be people out there who need to have warnings. There may be public safety issues. We may need to see if there's been other victims. It depends partly how public is the scandal or their criminal charges. So we weigh all that very carefully, because if you need to know and you don't know, we might call that a cover-up, but if you don't need know and you're told, we might call that a breach of confidentiality or privacy, and where those lines fall in every situation can really be different. 

And it might be that you as the other people in the ministry who aren't directly involved or you as the general public, you might need to know, you might know there's been allegations, so you might need to know some basics. We're doing a third party neutral investigation, we're responding in this way, but very rarely do I need to know the garbage of a situation that I'm not directly involved with. It's rare that that would benefit me spiritually or that I would have a right to know or that it would be helpful for me to know. So there's that really tough balance of who needs to know what. 

Kymberli Cook: 

So walk me through, and I think because that seems to be what you're talking about, those deliberations seem to be a step in the whole process or I mean, several steps along the way in the process. So walk me through, you started a little bit earlier, what does an investigation, or let's say there's an allegation and then you go and you identify the stakeholders, you've also said that, and then what's the next step? 

Theresa Lynn Sidebotham: 

Well, we probably should back up, just to be clear, for anyone who's dealing with child abuse allegations, there's going to be a mandatory report and that's going to need to happen really fast. And so if we're in that space of child abuse allegations, the process goes in a somewhat different direction, and that's responsibilities that law enforcement and social services have. So I don't want to apply, I want to make sure everyone understands I absolutely support we need to do that and we need to make sure, okay, so that would be first step, making sure everyone's safe. And again, especially if we've got kids involved and whether it's minor on minor or adult on minor, but just thinking who might not be actually safe. And so we've got to get that into place, make sure that nobody would be exposed to further abuse. That could be true in a workplace type setting as well. 

Say it's sexual harassment, say someone's made an allegation about her supervisor. So we're going to need to have an interim safety plan because even though we're not going to make assumptions about is it true or is it not true, we need a safety plan in the meantime, because we're not just going to let bad things keep happening. So that's an important piece. And then we have to look at, okay, what as the business or ministry do we need to investigate? Sometimes you don't actually need to investigate. It's pretty crystal clear what happened. There's not any doubt about the facts so you may just move straight to disciplinary action or whatever it is. Sometimes you do because it isn't clear what happened or it's larger, it's more complex, that kind of thing. 

Sometimes, say you've got a ministry with a number of employees and it's a fairly low level allegation. One employee did or said something, say it was some new and young person who'd only been there six months, may have said or done something that wasn't the greatest. That could probably be handled internally by their supervisors. There might be some discipline, some training, that type of thing. But on the other hand, if you had serious allegations about the senior pastor or the CEO, then you might be looking at, wow, we need an independent third-party investigation here. So there's a lot of decision-making and evaluation at that stage that's important. And if it's okay if I mention it, I wrote a book called Handling Allegations in a Ministry: Responses and Investigations, and it's more like a handbook. So I've actually got it. 

Kymberli Cook: 

Yeah, please. 

Theresa Lynn Sidebotham: 

Here's what it looks like. So this talks about this whole process that we're in sort of step by step. If you're in this stage of the process, what do you need to be thinking about and walks you through it? And I designed it to be the kind of thing that a ministry leader, and it's four ministries, primarily businesses, is quite similar, but not exactly the same. So you would just pick it up and you'd say, "Okay, this is what we've done so far. This is what we haven't done. Where are we? What do we need to do next?" And also warns about some of the mistakes that get made. It is a very complicated process to get right, especially for people who are walking through it for the first time. So I wanted there to be a resource to help people. 

Kymberli Cook: 

Well, no, I think that that's huge, and we'll definitely include that in the links with our podcast so that if you're listening, you can access that and get access to the book. 

So you were describing at a certain point, you're having to make that third party decision. What are some of the things that go into that decision? You said essentially the rank or powers, probably power status of one or both of the people involved. So that I would presume… Yeah, go ahead and I'm not going to presume anything because this is not my area, but walk us through a little bit more of that decision. Because I think for anybody listening who may ever be in that situation and trying to think through that, at that point, they're still kind of on their own. If you're lucky, they've picked up your book, but they haven't brought in a professional. So how do they know when, I'm in over my head and we are over our head and just to be safe, we really should think about this option? 

Theresa Lynn Sidebotham: 

Yeah, so the power position is a really important piece of it. So if you have an accusation against somebody who's high enough in the organization that they have some power, or possibly if the person bringing the allegation, we're pretty high rank in the organization. So then you've got a double problem. One is, can people within the organization really do an investigation and not be influenced by that person? That person's signing their paychecks, that person hired them, that person's one of their best friends, whatever it is. And even if they could be unbiased, would anybody believe it? So I often say one of the worst things if a pastor or leader is innocent is not to have an external neutral investigation, because who's going to believe it? That's really unfortunate if you're innocent and your best friend tells everybody you really are, well, that's not super helpful. 

And so one of the first things that I'll help walk clients through is persons bringing allegations and persons who are accused, especially persons accused, they need to be recused out of that process. So they might need to be on administrative leave, they might need to be off the board for the time being. They definitely should have no influence on the investigation. And we are more concerned about that with people accused just because they often have so much power within the organization. I mean, I remember one investigation that I didn't do where the accused person, a pastor, wanted to stay on the board and help direct the investigation. I'm like, "No, I won't do it. That's absolutely not best practices, and we're not going to do that." But we do occasionally also see that people bringing allegations, people who are victims may be trying to unduly influence the investigation as well. 

So you really can't let any of those stakeholders say, "Well, we're going to do it this way, or it has to be done that way." Because it needs to be neutral, independent, unbiased, which means I'm not listening to the accused tell me how to run the investigation. I'm also not listening to the people who are saying that they've been harmed tell me how to run the investigation. I don't mean they can't ask for things. I mean, they're welcome to ask, "Hey, I really need a support person at the interview." Or, "Can I have breaks?" Whatever. There's a lot of ways of approaching it, and part of being trauma-informed is being gentle and considerate and considering what people need, but that's different from, "You will do the investigation this way and not that way." 

Kymberli Cook: 

So what other mistakes have you seen ministries making? You talked about just burying your head in the sand and sweeping allegations aside or jumping too quickly to accusation when somebody might truly be innocent, as well as people of power who are part of the investigation, not recusing themselves or stepping outside. What other mistakes have you seen made? 

Theresa Lynn Sidebotham: 

I think we're still pretty bad at ministering to people and hearing people who've experienced trauma. So I was talking about the approach in the investigative process, which needs to be fair and neutral, but at the same time, a person who's been deeply hurt, they need support. They might need counseling, they might need pastoral support. As ministries, leaders need to make sure that people who've been traumatized are getting support. And just getting that sense of, "Maybe we don't know right now exactly what happened to you, but we hear that you're saying this happened. We're deeply concerned. We're so sorry that you're hurting right now. How can we help you?" And sometimes something needs to be put in place. I think a lot of times we brush off deep trauma or we don't deal with it. 

,And of course it's hard for a ministry. They can feel very defensive about allegations. Similarly, I think we underestimate how painful it is for persons accused to go through this process, which is never as fast as we would like it to be. Maybe they're on administrative leave, maybe they feel like their reputation's been damaged, and maybe it has been. That's quite painful as well. So what I like to say to ministries, especially bigger ones is, "Can you get a pastoral support person for the people who may be victims and for the people who are accused and have it be in a sense independent? Sure people who are part of your ministry, but people who will not be making decisions at the end of this." And have that be their person who walks through it with them and get something in place. 

On these bigger investigations where maybe there's been some serious allegations or a lot of allegations or something happened over a period of time, even the people who work in the ministry can be pretty traumatized. They may need some support. And I think we don't give quite enough attention to that. I don't know if I would go so far as to call it a mistake, but it is something I like to raise to awareness. 

Kymberli Cook: 

Interesting. And I think of, yeah, I mean, none of us operates in a vacuum, in a bubble. And so everything that is occurring, and so there's two truths. One, nothing happens without it impacting having ripple effects. But also we are whole beings. We are holistic. If we're in a professional environment, it doesn't mean we're not psychologically and emotionally there. And there is true harm that can happen even from those ripple effects with people. So that's a really interesting observation. With the time that we have left, I would love for you, we've been talking about different types of suggestions and observations on some mistakes that are often happen, but what would you say to anybody in a ministry about what should be happening now, perhaps when it is quiet and there may or may not be things going wrong currently that nobody's just aware of, but where it doesn't seem like they're in the middle of a crisis, there isn't an allegation. What should ministries be thinking about now and putting in place now? You talked about the ethos, the culture of responding to little things. What else? 

Theresa Lynn Sidebotham: 

Yeah. Wow, there's a lot. So first, let's talk about child safeguarding. I want to mention a wonderful organization, the Evangelical Council for Abuse Prevention. I think it's ecap.net. And that's actually a certifying organization that helps ministries work through their child safety standards, make sure they've got all their policies and best practices in place. But even if you don't want to get credited or certified, go on the website and look at the standards, look at the resources. That's a great organization, whether you use… And they provide the standards, they're not directly doing the training and that kind of thing. Make sure you get your child safety training in place. There's a lot of good outfits that do that. We have that as well on Telios Teaches, but really take the policies and prevention and training seriously because so much of what happens could be prevented by getting all of that into place and really creating an environment that is a capable guardian for kids. 

A lot of the child abuse we're seeing now as child on child. And so I would say just make sure that you get the help that every kid involved in the situation needs. There's actually, I think we have an article on ecap.net about child on child stuff. On the adult side of things, again, having good policies and training in place, sexual harassment training, that's actually required in several states now for ministries. But all of the good workplace conduct, I think we tend to dismiss it. That's just legal compliance stuff or that's just woke or we don't really need it. But in our Telios Teaches training, we try to take the scriptural approach. How is God calling men and women to live together? How is God calling us as brothers and sisters of different races to live together? What is God's heart for persons with disabilities? 

And when we start there, we see that an awful lot of sound employment law principles absolutely are what we need to be doing. And that helps enormously too in creating a good culture in our testimony. So get all of that into place. If you go to telioslaw.com or Telios Teaches, you'll see pop-up pages, sign up for our free monthly newsletter because we'll link you with lots of great resources. We're starting to push out a series of self audits for ministries and businesses where you can kind of check and see how you're doing in different areas. So we'd love to share those. 

Kymberli Cook: 

Oh wow. That's really cool. I like the self auditing. So I'm hearing a lot of, and obviously when things are quiet, you want to be building up prevention elements and the ethos of safety for people to feel like they can come forward and it would be a meaningful action for them to come forward. And I'm also hearing you say that just being sure that we, especially if we are in ministries, communicate on a lot of levels what we even started, you and I started talking about, our fundamental core faith commitments and saying, "This is what we believe about God, and this is what God has revealed about Himself and what He thinks about certain kinds of injustices and that kind of thing." And so like you said, we take these things very seriously and I think some HR training and those kinds of things are often the sources, like people tend to make fun of them or take them lightly, that kind of thing, like you said, for legal compliance, and it just helps protect the organization. 

But if you frame it differently and say, "No, this isn't just to protect the organization, this is because we actually love people here and we love people like God loves people, and so that means that this is really important and we're going to take this seriously and we're really going to apply ourselves here." I love that idea of girding it theologically, and sometimes that serves it on a bit of a different platter, and perhaps people will respond a little differently. 

Theresa Lynn Sidebotham: 

So I want to thank you so much, Theresa, for joining us. It's been fascinating hopping into your world and hearing from the side where things do go wrong or trying to keep things from going wrong as much and the Lord's heart for justice and human dignity and all of those beautiful things. Thank you so much for being here and for the work you do. We really appreciate it. 

Well, thank you. I think if the church can get right how it responds to situations that have gone wrong, if it can really care for people who've been harmed and have accountability and have justice, that's a huge testimony. 

Kymberli Cook: 

Absolutely, absolutely. And we want to thank you who are listening for being with us. If you like our show, please leave a rating or review on your favorite podcast app so that others can find us. We hope that you'll join us next time when we discuss issues of God and culture. 

Darrell Bock: 

Welcome to The Table where we discuss issues of God and culture to show the relevance of theology to everyday life. I'm Darrell Bock, executive director for cultural engagement at the Hendricks Center at Dallas Theological Seminary. And our topic today is IVF. 

Now, if you don't know what those initials mean, in vitro fertilization, which has become a topic of discussion, especially since the Southern Baptist resolution on IVF that was passed earlier this summer in June. And with me is Scott Rae, who … Well, what is your current title, Scott? Because you've kind of shifted hats here. 

Scott Rae: 

It's dean of faculty and professor of christian ethics at Talbot School of Theology, Biola University. 

Darrell Bock: 

Very good. So, he's speaking to us from the wonderful place of California where they were shaking, rattling and rolling here recently. 

Scott Rae: 

Didn't feel a thing. 

Darrell Bock: 

I know. You're a veteran Californian, who goes, "Oh, that was just a little tickling of my toes." 

Scott Rae: 

Something like that. 

Darrell Bock: 

Yeah. So, Scott has done a lot of work in medical ethics and serves on, or did serve, I don't know if it's still current, on a couple of ethics commissions. I don't know what they're technically called in hospitals. And so, he brings expertise. He's author of a book on moral choices, which has gone through four editions. Anything that goes through four editions means it was either very, very good or needed lots of correction. I'm not sure which. And so- 

Scott Rae: 

Well, actually, I'm working on the fifth edition at the moment. 

Darrell Bock: 

Well, congratulations. 

Scott Rae: 

Basically what it means is that the field changes about every five years and the stuff needs updating. 

Darrell Bock: 

Yeah. Well, I was looking at the fourth edition today, and it's such a helpful resource that I would reccommend it to anyone who listens to us and says, "Ooh, I would like to know more." 

So, let's turn our attention to IVF. We did a podcast on IVF in general earlier, so we're coming back to the topic. But for people who don't know what IVF is and perhaps why it's a moral challenge to people, let's just start there with the basic question and you can help us. So, what is IVF and why is it such a topic for discussion? 

Scott Rae: 

Well, it is the most common, I think, reproductive technology used today for couples who are wrestling with the terrible ordeal of infertility. And I think that's where you start on this is, if you're one of those couples who's listening to this in the throes of wrestling with infertility, we feel your pain. My wife and I dealt with this. We had about a four-year stretch of infertility. It was easily the most painful part of our 40 years of marriage, and nothing else has even come close to that. 

So, it's the most common treatment used to deal with infertility, and it actually doesn't treat anything. It does an end run around it. And what they do is they use high-powered hormone treatments for the woman for about 30 days, that enable her to release as many eggs as possible in one cycle. Normally, she will release somewhere between five and 15 eggs. That's the norm. And then they are fertilized in vitro, in glass, literally, in a Petri dish. And you see how many eggs successfully fertilized. Usually, the attrition rate is about half. So, if they have 10 eggs, five will likely fertilize. 

And then, they will implant some of those in the womb, usually not more than two, maybe three sometimes, but that depends on other factors. And they will freeze the rest. And then, if the first implantation is not successful, then they will go back and thaw out the remaining embryos and implant those. It greatly helps reduce the cost, but also creates one of the main ethical dilemmas, because if that first time is a win and they have twins or triplets, chances are that their childbearing days are basically over and they're left with the dilemma of what to do with these embryos that are in storage. And they have several options, none of which are considered ideal. They can discard them or they can donate them to research, or they can donate them to another infertile couple, or they can implant them themselves. 

Darrell Bock: 

Okay. 

Scott Rae: 

Anyway. 

Darrell Bock: 

So, was the quick sprint-through, walkthrough. Let me ask a couple of questions. Once the eggs are fertilized in vitro, in glass, are they able to, I don't know how to ask this exactly, grade the quality of what's been produced? 

Scott Rae: 

Yes, they do. They grade it on a scale of 1 to 3. 3 being excellent and 1 being unsuitable, for a variety of reasons. It could be genetic abnormalities, could be some other abnormality in the embryo. So yes, they grade them and they only implant the ones that are of top quality, and they will encourage the couple to discard the others. 

Darrell Bock: 

So, I mean, that adds a whole other dimension to this. Right? 

Scott Rae: 

Right. And the freezing of embryos, I think, is another ethical issue because if we believe that embryos are persons, I would never freeze my two-year-old, no matter what the reason is. We say that's something that we say is intrinsically immoral. That raises other questions. 

Darrell Bock: 

So, let me back up and let's do some biblical groundwork. I mean, the belief that many Christians have that God is responsible for the creation of life and that personhood begins with conception. And then, at the scientific level, everything that you need to have a child at a biological level comes with conception, which I think are the two base ideas that inform the ethics of this conversation. 

The thing that strikes me in reading this, and this is not an area I'm very familiar with, so I'm coming in as a total novice, is the idea that an embryo by itself detached from a womb can be considered to be a life. Can you help us ethically sort through why that would be? 

Scott Rae: 

Yeah, because location does not make any philosophical difference to what kind of a thing an embryo is. 

Darrell Bock: 

Okay. 

Scott Rae: 

And so, whether it's in a Petri dish or in a womb is simply a change of location. And the fact that it can't flourish fully in a Petri dish is irrelevant to that, because if I decided to send you to the Moon, that's an environment that you can't flourish in, but that has nothing to do with your intrinsic value as a person. It's just simply a change of location and that location is morally neutral. 

Darrell Bock: 

I see. So, the idea of your being attached to a womb as being a basis for establishing at least the beginning of the nurturing of life isn't considered to be a moral factor in thinking through this? 

Scott Rae: 

No, because embryos, they are what they are based on what they are intrinsically. And you said it right just a second ago, that that single-cell embryo has all the capacities that it will ever need to mature into a full-grown adult. 

Darrell Bock: 

Yeah. I think one of the things that's confusing to people is the idea of you have everything that's intrinsic to life in that moment of conception, on the one hand. And yet, in one sense, you can't advance that potential, if I'll say it that way, without the sustenance of the mother to bring that child to gestation. Fair enough? 

Scott Rae: 

I would put it a little differently. 

Darrell Bock: 

Okay. 

Scott Rae: 

I would say that if it's not in the proper environment, there are certain capacities that are inherent to the embryo that are unable to be actualized. And so, it can mature to a certain point, but not beyond that. And all that means is that the capacities that are inherent in the embryo cannot come to fruition. But the fact that capacities can't come to fruition, that's no ontological comment on what kind of a thing the embryo is. Just because you can't bring capacities to actualization doesn't mean that you don't have them in the first place. It just means you're not in the right environment for those to come to fruition. 

Darrell Bock: 

And it is the case that if you left an embryo in a Petri dish to grow on its own, I don't know how else to say this, that it might exist for a time, but it would never go beyond that? 

Scott Rae: 

That's correct. 

Darrell Bock: 

Okay. 

Scott Rae: 

But that's the same thing … I mean, if you left the newborn alone, you could say the same thing about the newborn. In fact, I would say that the degree of dependence on the womb is only slightly different between a nine-month-old fetus and a newborn child. 

Darrell Bock: 

Okay. And the reason I'm walking through these various scenarios is because I think they raise some of the ethical distinctions that you have to think about in order to deal with the way people might raise responses to the circumstances that IVF generates. 

Scott Rae: 

Yeah. Agreed. And this is not a black and white issue. It requires a lot of nuance. In fact, I think some of the statements say, that the Catholic Church has made, that completely rule it out, I don't think give it the kind of nuance that it needs. And I think the Southern Baptist statement that you referred to a little earlier, that's better, I think, at providing some of that nuance. But I think there's still room for some conversation about how that applies. 

Darrell Bock: 

Okay. This is a nice setup for, before we get to the details of the Southern Baptist resolution, which has generated our conversation, let me go through and ask a question this way. If you were to list the outstanding ethical issues or buckets that one would have to think about in thinking about IVF, what would that list look like? 

Scott Rae: