Upstream

Shane fields a host of questions from his producer, Wayne Stender, exploring the nature of symbolism in the Bible. The pair discuss the challenge it is to overcome stigmas around seeing everything as connected, while marveling at the beauty of God's design and the significance of the incarnation.

Shane welcome Seraphim (Thomas) Hamilton to explain how both Scripture and God’s creation are filled with symbols and typology—a language of meaning that was known and loved by ancient people, but has largely been forgotten in today’s world.

Shane invites Wayne Stender back on the show to ask probing questions on IVF (Invitro Fertilization) and where the Christian care and concern starts and stops on the issue.

Shane welcomes pro-life speaker and author Stephanie Gray Connors to expose the ethical problems with in-vitro fertilization and surrogacy, which she confronts in detail in her new book, Conceived by Science.

In my discussion on Upstream with my good friend Dale Stenberg, we talked about podcasts as the return of a more human form of communication. In place of an ever-intensifying focus on soundbites in the news, ten-second videos on TikTok, and 280-character zingers on Twitter, podcasts stretch our shrunken attention spans so they can again accommodate complete thoughts. But this benefit is the result of more than runtime. It has to do with the way extended conversations force participants to be earnest with one another, and actually listen in order to understand. That’s a sharp departure from typical behavior in the Internet age.

I recently saw someone on Twitter admit that “people come to this website mostly to misrepresent one another’s views on purpose for the applause of invisible strangers.” It’s painfully true. The description is reminiscent of Roman gladiatorial games, or at least portrayals of those games in popular fiction. Combatants slaying one another for no purpose other than the entertainment of an audience is certainly a fitting metaphor for the way Twitter encourages users to behave. We verbally skewer one another, play rhetorical “gotcha,” and tally “favorites” and “replies” to see whether someone has been ”ratioed”—a fate worse than death. We retweet with the sole aim of inviting our followers to dogpile someone whose opinions we dislike. Hashtags are sounded like trumpets to summon reinforcements who will crush our enemies beneath the weight of guileful one-liners.

In other words, many or most of the exchanges we have in the world of soundbites and text-bites are a kind of game. They’re not earnest. There are thick layers of pretense and subtext—a “conversation beneath the conversation”—a motivation very much in conflict with mutual comprehension and good faith. We read people on Twitter to retort or ridicule, not to understand. And when we reply, our real audience is not the other person, but invisible onlookers who validate us with their cheers. Twitter may not have “thumbs up” or “thumbs down” reactions, but when we open the app, we might as well be gladiators entering the dusty arena, looking to the stands for a vote on whether our opponents will live, or get “owned.”

Podcasts are a noticeable step back from this behavior, and that’s a big part of why I like them. When you talk with someone for an hour, one-liners just won’t cut it. No one is in the stands cheering or booing each play. You cannot try to create “soundbites” that will endlessly repeat on the nightly news or appear in social media feeds. You can attempt mockery, but it will quickly end in awkward silence. “Gotcha” tactics don’t work that well, either. Someone who has ample time to respond or explain further is tough to back into a corner. In other words, the very format of a podcast demands a kind of sincerity and hospitality. It doesn’t lend itself to playing games or trying to trap anyone. You have to level with your guest. In many ways, you are promising to level with them when you send the invitation. And in an age starved for sincerity, the results of this kind of earnest approach can seem downright magical.

Dale mentioned Dr. Jordan Peterson, who has become famous for his sincerity. A few years ago, Peterson won global admiration for refusing to back down from college cancel culture. Shortly thereafter, he was invited onto a British interview show by a host who was clearly set on playing gladiatorial “gotcha” games. The exchange that followed became an overnight Internet sensation. Again and again, this host misrepresented Peterson’s views, attempting to portray him as a bigot and a sexist,

or trap him with his own words. And time after time, he gently corrected her—even smiling for most of the discussion. In the end, the host’s traps were all sprung with nothing in them, and Peterson came out looking not only media savvy, but human. He seemed straightforward and decent in a way very few high-profile figures today are. Yet all he really did was refuse to play a game—a game in which the goal was to publicly humiliate a conversation partner, rather than understand them.

Podcasts work very differently, and not just because they’re hosted by better people than channel 4 news. The medium itself rewards humanity. It simulates a private exchange, more like what you’d have in a coffee shop than in the Colosseum. Real-time audience feedback is minimal, and there’s certainly no fight club voting system or buttons onlookers can smash to show their approval or scorn. The incentive to perform for the stands is accordingly low, and the kinds of soundbites unscrupulous journalists use to ruin careers rarely emerge.

But ultimately, it may be the mental investment hosts, guests, and listeners put into podcasts that often makes them so human and earnest. An hour is a long time, and scoffing is a lazy hobby. To “own” someone, to mob them, or to tear their words out of context takes very little effort. In many ways, that’s the whole appeal of Twitter. Winning moral or social points on the cheap is fun. But as a conversation gets longer and the subjects deeper, those unwilling to make the investment tend to drop out.

What’s more, participants in extended conversations can’t dismiss, discard, or block one another. They can’t “rage-quit” or go out in a blaze of glorious one-liners. The whole format requires you to ask good questions and listen to understand, and to give good answers, knowing you will have to explain yourself. The goal is usually to see the world through the other person’s eyes—to “get inside” their view of things and to sympathize, even if you don’t fully agree. This attitude is infectious. The audience, themselves, tend to catch it. And if they listen on with sincerity, a wondrous thing too rare in today’s world can happen: they can learn.

I hope you’ll check out my discussion with Dale Stenberg on Upstream. His friendship over the last several years has been instrumental in making me a better conversationalist—someone who listens to understand, rather than to retort. And his own podcasting work has enriched my thinking on a whole range of subjects I wouldn’t otherwise have studied. In all humility, I think the good habits I’ve picked up from Dale and other podcasters have made me a bit more human in crucial ways—none more crucial than the habit of treating conversation partners as if they’re human

Shane welcome Davenant Institute teaching fellow Dale Stenberg to explore why podcasts have become such a powerful medium in recent years, why they can be dangerous, and how Christians can glorify God by producing and listening to good podcasts.

Shane fields questions from Wayne Stender on the value of questioning answers and if that practice is something Christians should hold tightly to, especially as they fall under the leadership of the church and Scripture.

Move inland from our beautiful beaches here in Florida, and you’re bound to come across an attention-grabbing group of plants. Citrus trees grow all along the roadsides and woodland trails. These include oranges, grapefruits, tangerines, and even the odd kumquat. Though these trees beckon to hikers in the winter with flashes of low-hanging color, their fruit usually tastes nothing like what you’d buy in a grocery store. You might as well try to eat battery acid as these fruits, which are so sour that they make your eyes water and burn your tongue. They’re also packed with inedible seeds.

These citrus trees don’t belong here. They were introduced by humans. But almost all are the descendants of cold-hardy root stocks, rather than the sweet fruit-bearing limbs citrus farmers once grafted onto those roots. Those died in freezes years ago after most of the groves were abandoned. Such “feral” plants and animals are a problem worldwide, but Florida has more than its fair share. We’re also dealing with an invasion of feral pigs, which have interbred with Eurasian wild boars to produce hairy, tusked monstrosities. Like the feral citrus, these pigs are barely edible, but unlike the citrus, they’re sometimes dangerous to humans. According to Wikipedia, a feral animal or plant is “one that lives in the wild but is descended from domesticated individuals.” Such living things retain some features of their domestic ancestors, but they usually become ill-tempered or bad-tasting. They have become this way because they began existing on their own, away from the guiding hands of humans who are interested in sweet fruits and tender meat. The resulting plants and animals are something in-between wild and domestic. They have half returned to their natural state but are far from their natural environments. As a result, they are out-of-place, no longer benefiting humans but not belonging in nature, either.

I am reminded of feral plants and animals when I meet Christians who tell me they don’t attend or belong to a church, and don’t want to. As Dr. Jeff Myers of Summit Ministries explained this week on “Upstream,” such Christians often use a familiar set of cliches. They will describe their faith as a relationship, not a religion, and insist that as long as they love and believe in Jesus, they don’t need formal worship or membership in a local congregation to follow Him. These “feral Christians” have chosen a life away from the watchful eye and caring hands of ordained shepherds, instead expressing their identities through private practices like Bible study, prayer, and listening to worship music. There is, of course, nothing wrong with such practices. But the idea that they are a sufficient replacement for corporate worship would have struck virtually any Christian before modern times as unbiblical and dangerous.

American imaginations love the notion that Christianity is primarily a one-on-one relationship with Jesus expressed through private devotion. Our culture tends to take for granted that the most important actions and decisions in a person’s life happen in isolation, not in community. We value independence and pursuit of personal dreams, and even our popular media celebrates rebellion and singular acts of heroism. The greatest people, we imagine, are the ones who stand alone. And for any sentiment, belief, or act of devotion to be genuine, it must be spontaneous. To “speak from the heart” is synonymous with making it up as you go. Reciting or singing something pre-written with a group or performing choreographed acts can seem to us servile or insincere.

The problem is that such hyper-individualism is as alien to the Bible and historical Christianity as orange trees and hogs are to Florida. Feral faith cuts those who practice it off not only from our rightful communions in the here and now, but from the millennia-old organism which Scripture identifies as the earthly presence of Christ. And this is true in at least four ways.

As I’ve already noted, it cuts those who practice it off from the visible people of God, the organism which Scripture presupposes and everywhere describes using organic metaphors. The Church is “the Body of Christ” whose many parts need one another to live and thrive (1 Cor. 12:12-27). We are grape branches, which must remain in union with the Vine and with one another in order to bear fruit (John 15:1-8), and wild olive boughs, which were grafted into the domestic root of Israel’s Messiah (Rom. 11:11-24). We are adopted sons and daughters of God, and siblings to one another and to Christ—a family whose common life happens under a common roof. (Rom. 8:17, Eph. 1:5, Mark 3:33-35). To reject all of these organic unions in favor of private devotion is like cutting a branch from a tree and keeping it in a vase—or cutting an organ out of a body and keeping it in a cooler. Both may survive for a short time, but if they remain cut off from sap and blood flow, their ultimate fate is certain.

That life-giving nourishment, no matter what your sacramental theology, comes at least in part through visible acts in the church. In cutting believers off from the Christian organism, feral Christianity also deprives them of the means of grace. The New Testament speaks of baptism and the Lord’s Supper not as optional ad-ons or private acts of devotion, but as God’s way of giving His people what He has promised them (Gal 3:27, Rom. 6:3, 1 Cor. 10:16). The Westminster Confession speaks of them as a means of grace—a grace which is “not only offered, but really exhibited, and conferred, by the Holy Ghost.” As C. S. Lewis puts it in Mere Christianity, the sacraments are how God imparts “the Christ-life” to us—one of the chief means by which He spreads that “good infection” that is remaking the world. And as he warns, those who think such means crude or unnecessary are “trying to be more spiritual than God.”

What we do in gathering corporately to worship God in song, sermon, and sacrament isn’t an optional expression of private piety, but the climax of human existence—the very purpose for which we were made. As Herman Bavinck puts it, corporate worship is:

“the center point of the religious life, the source of spiritual power, [and] the inspiration for the work everyone is called to do, by the sweat of his brow, each weekday…Here alone do we find the ministry of God’s Word and the sealing of his covenant. Here, Christ himself lives in our midst and works by his spirit, here we taste the communion of saints, the forgiveness of sins, and the principle of eternal life. The Sabbath is the best of days; no other day is like it. And the church is the meeting of God with his people; no other gathering can take its place...”

In attempting a solitary faith in the wilderness, feral Christians forsake the purpose for which they were created and redeemed, and the main means by which Christ redeems them. But they also forsake the most important means by which Christ keeps his sheep domestic, and his fruit from going sour.

In places like Matthew 18 and 1 Corinthians 5, the Bible describes a process by which the institutional church confronts and disciplines members who are in sin. This solemn duty may be the most hated feature of organized religion, and the reason many Christians choose to go feral. And at times, it has certainly been abused and treated as a sword to wound the flock, rather than as a crook to retrieve strays. But it remains in Scripture, and Jesus clearly expects His people to practice it, forcing those in

serious sin either to repent or to leave the fold. Without it, there is no way to repel wolves. Without it, Christ’s Body has no immune system, and blight would consume His crops.

Those who avoid such accountability may have good intentions, and they may, in fact, be among His sheep. But here is where the laws of nature and spirituality meet: The caring hands of farmers, shepherds, and herders nourish and protect domestic things. But they also preserve that domestic identity. As with all feral plants and animals, there is a transition from cultivation back to the wild. For a time, they will continue to bear edible fruit and behave as before. Some of the oranges in the woods are still sweet, after all. But it will not last. Within a generation—sometimes less—changes begin to show, and not often for the better. The fruits sour, the tusks grow, and the faith dies. Cut off from the care of Christ’s ministers and the life of His people, what was once His becomes strange, what was once tame becomes feral, and the very relationship they thought could replace His religion dies.

None of this need befall any Christian who remains in Christ. He, after all, is the Vine, the Root, the Shepherd, the Firstborn, and the Head. It is Christ, not any earthly institution or communion, to whom we owe our ultimate allegiance and faithfulness. I believe this. But I also believe that our union with Him is corporate, rather than private. It is the type of union branches have with a vine, limbs have with a Root, sheep have with their Shepherd, little siblings have with their older Brother, and a body has with its Head. We must allow these corporate, organic pictures in Scripture to challenge our individualism, rather than the other way around, because our unity with each other is integral to our unity with Christ, and feral Christians don’t long remain Christian.

Shane welcome Summit Ministries president, Dr. Jeff Myers, to talk about his book, “Unquestioned Answers,” which identifies ten Christian cliches that mislead those inside and outside the Church.

If you're looking to register your student for Summit, use the promo code BreakPoint22 for $100 off, and receive a $200 off early bird special if registered before March 31.

Visit www.summit.org