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2022 in Review - A Year of Speaking Life || SLP440 · The Speak Life Podcast

• 0:06
  SPEAKER_10: Hello and thank you so much for downloading this episode of the Speak Life Podcast.
• 0:10
  SPEAKER_10: My name is Thomas Thoroughgood.
• 0:12
  SPEAKER_10: I'm the media producer at Speak Life, and it is my great pleasure to bring you this year in review episode, a year of Speaking Life.
• 0:21
  SPEAKER_10: We're gonna look back at 2022, because we're now at the end of 2022, can you believe it?
• 0:27
  SPEAKER_10: And we're gonna look at some of the conversations, just some of the conversations that we had uh throughout the year um on the Speak Life podcast.
• 0:37
  SPEAKER_10: So if you've been following Speak Life for a while, this will be a bit of a trip down memory lane.
• 0:41
  SPEAKER_10: If you're new to Speak Life, you might hear snippets from conversations in this episode and think, oh, I want to check out that full interview.
• 0:50
  SPEAKER_10: Well, you can absolutely do that, just continue scrolling down on your Podcatcher of Choice through the growing back catalogue of Speak Life podcast episodes, and you will find all of these conversations there.
• 1:04
  SPEAKER_10: But without further ado, let's get going, shall we?
• 1:07
  SPEAKER_10: Remember back in January, Novak Djokovic, tennis player, tried to get into Australia for the Australian Open.
• 1:15
  SPEAKER_10: But as an unvaccinated sportsman, he was eventually ejected from the country.
• 1:19
  SPEAKER_10: Some saw him as a devilish figure, prioritising personal autonomy over the safety of the community, but others saw him as a Christ-like figure, standing on principle no matter the cost.
• 1:30
  SPEAKER_10: So here Glenn, Nate, and Paul discuss why sports stars can take on such huge cultural significance.
• 1:53
  SPEAKER_11: He whacks a ball over a net.
• 1:55
  SPEAKER_11: And and and he is a polarizing figure, and maybe he's Christ, maybe he's Satan.
• 1:59
  SPEAKER_11: But like maybe he's a tennis player.
• 2:01
  SPEAKER_11: And and part of what the problem is, is there's been a power vacuum at the top of our society where where after the death of God, so-called, we don't have a religious dimension, we don't have a proper object of adoration and worship.
• 2:17
  SPEAKER_11: And so what's happened is politics has now gone to number one in our lives, and politics is now heaven or hell, which is makes everything supercharged.
• 2:26
  SPEAKER_11: But then underneath politics, you've got entertainment and sport is now elevated to the political.
• 2:32
  SPEAKER_11: And suddenly so many of our debates uh uh about politics are involving sportsmen, you know, and sportswomen.
• 2:40
  SPEAKER_11: And like these people, you know, they get up at six in the morning, if they're a swimmer, they just they just follow a black line, you know, down the if they're a rower, they they get up at silly o'clock and just and and we we look to them for why?
• 2:53
  SPEAKER_03: Like But within the g within the rules, like it's the most it's the greatest drama, right?
• 2:59
  SPEAKER_03: It's the unscripted, right?
• 3:01
  SPEAKER_03: Hopefully, right?
• 3:03
  SPEAKER_03: Not according to you.
• 3:06
  SPEAKER_03: Um but because within the confines of the game, once they're agreed, it is it is the greatest drama.
• 3:18
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 3:18
  SPEAKER_03: And and the the one we want to see, right?
• 3:21
  SPEAKER_03: The greatest drama we want to see is the team that are, you know.
• 3:25
  SPEAKER_03: I mean, that's why the great comebacks, right?
• 3:27
  SPEAKER_03: That's the story that everyone wants to say.
• 3:30
  SPEAKER_03: I was there when, yeah, not when you thrash someone, you know, 15 nil, yeah, right.
• 3:35
  SPEAKER_03: Or 3-0, just saying or 15 love.
• 3:38
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 3:40
  SPEAKER_03: One point game over, right?
• 3:42
  SPEAKER_03: But not because you, you know, you what triple bageled someone, six love, six love, six love, but when you were down match point.
• 3:51
  SPEAKER_03: Oh yeah.
• 3:52
  SPEAKER_03: And you had nothing left, and somehow you have managed to win that game.
• 3:57
  SPEAKER_03: 2019.
• 3:58
  SPEAKER_11: Headingly, Ben Stokes on the Friday, England were down and arts on Sunday morning.
• 4:02
  SPEAKER_11: Yeah.
• 4:03
  SPEAKER_03: And and that surprises again.
• 4:06
  SPEAKER_03: So to say that it I appreciate there's an elevation because these people, why if you're good at sport, should you have the right understanding of anything else, right?
• 4:15
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 4:16
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 4:16
  SPEAKER_03: But because we're looking for the hero to embody the full hero, we are we do want the the sporting hero to have moral virtue and to have courage and to have everything else.
• 4:30
  SPEAKER_03: And so they're gonna be loaded with this because they're heroic, right?
• 4:35
  SPEAKER_11: And because we are messianic and we have messianic hopes.
• 4:38
  SPEAKER_11: Yeah.
• 4:38
  SPEAKER_11: And we're always trying to find a place to put them.
• 4:40
  SPEAKER_11: And then when we put them in the wrong place and they fail us, like we crucify them and we like we do, you know, cut them down massively.
• 4:48
  SPEAKER_11: Um it's yeah, it's part of human nature, isn't it, to to to be tribal and to identify with your champion and to yeah.
• 4:56
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 4:57
  SPEAKER_03: So within the game, it's you know.
• 4:59
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 5:00
  SPEAKER_03: It's you are in one sense you are the Christ, right?
• 5:03
  SPEAKER_03: Once you once you score that goal, right?
• 5:07
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 5:08
  SPEAKER_08: So who do you say he is?
• 5:09
  SPEAKER_08: That's the question.
• 5:11
  SPEAKER_04: Yes, I say on the battle.
• 5:15
  SPEAKER_10: On the 24th of February, Vladimir Putin's Russia invaded Ukraine.
• 5:21
  SPEAKER_10: Paul, Glenn, and Nate discuss.
• 5:25
  SPEAKER_08: We are talking about events that have unfolded over the last few weeks in uh the U in Ukraine, and for a number of weeks Russia has been massing military forces along the border of Ukraine.
• 5:34
  SPEAKER_08: Uh, but Russian President Vladimir Putin assured Ukraine and other nations they were simply carrying out military exercises.
• 5:40
  SPEAKER_08: However, a few days ago, Russia launched a devastating attack on Ukraine, a democracy of forty-four million people, and its forces are now on the outskirts of the capital of Kiev.
• 5:51
  SPEAKER_08: Uh Putin has stated that the reason for this is that Russia could not feel safe, develop, and exist because of what he claimed was a constant threat from modern Ukraine.
• 5:59
  SPEAKER_08: Claims his goal was to protect people subjected to bullying and genocide and to aim for the demilitarization and denazification of Ukraine.
• 6:07
  SPEAKER_08: Uh, this has been condemned as Russian propaganda, um, as Ukraine is a democratically elected government and is in even governed by a Jewish president, uh, Vladimir Zelensky, who many of us have probably seen quite a bit of in the last few days.
• 6:21
  SPEAKER_08: And the Ukrainian people have responded with heavy resistance to the Russian military incursions, and other nations around the world have levelled uh heavy sanctions against Russia, cutting off its access to financial transactions as well as freezing assets.
• 6:34
  SPEAKER_08: And they've also been providing weaponry for the Ukrainians.
• 6:37
  SPEAKER_08: Um we've also seen many Ukrainian families attempting to flee the country and begin to flood into other parts of Europe.
• 6:43
  SPEAKER_08: Um, and it was reported in the last few days that Putin has placed Russian nuclear forces on high alert, uh, something that Western nations have taken quite seriously.
• 6:52
  SPEAKER_08: Um as Putin had previously said, um whoever tries to hinder hinder us or threaten our country or our people should know that Russia's response will be immediate and will lead you to consequences you have never faced in your history.
• 7:06
  SPEAKER_08: So it's been quite a week of events really.
• 7:09
  SPEAKER_08: Like I don't think any of us Well, I was gonna say I don't think any of us saw this coming, but maybe we did see it coming.
• 7:14
  SPEAKER_08: I don't know.
• 7:14
  SPEAKER_08: What do people think?
• 7:16
  SPEAKER_11: Well, yeah, the the reaction has been universally kind of one of shock.
• 7:20
  SPEAKER_11: How can this be?
• 7:21
  SPEAKER_11: Um, which is often the response of affluent Westerners when when events that would not take anyone else by surprise down through history around, you know, around the world happen.
• 7:32
  SPEAKER_11: Um, you know, it's always the case when the when the bomb goes off in the third world, um, you know what people do.
• 7:38
  SPEAKER_11: People cry, people wail, there's mourning in the streets, when the bomb goes off in the West, what is the look on everyone's face?
• 7:44
  SPEAKER_11: It's shock.
• 7:44
  SPEAKER_11: You know, how can this happen to me?
• 7:46
  SPEAKER_11: How can this happen now?
• 7:47
  SPEAKER_11: Um and tragically, this this is kind of the way things have always been, really.
• 7:55
  SPEAKER_11: Um you know, Plato and Aristotle would used would would used to talk about just wars.
• 8:01
  SPEAKER_11: Um, but one of the things that you could do in order to wage a just war is if you wanted some more slaves, that was a just cause for war.
• 8:08
  SPEAKER_11: Also, if you liked stuff, if you wanted somebody else's stuff, that could also be a just cause for war.
• 8:14
  SPEAKER_11: Or, you know, Cicero for the Romans, uh again, they had a just war tradition that was sort of pre-Christian.
• 8:20
  SPEAKER_11: Um but but again, if you wanted to bring people into the Pax Romana, the peace of Rome, then of course you could go to war and you could civilize the barbarians and bring them because they're idiots, right?
• 8:33
  SPEAKER_11: And so but you bring them into the civilization of Rome at the point of a sword.
• 8:39
  SPEAKER_11: Um and so much of uh Putin's speech last week sort of reminded me of that that kind of just war.
• 8:46
  SPEAKER_11: Kind of, you know, Ukraine, you've always kind of been like one of us, and we're going to make that we're gonna make sure that that happens, you know, at the at the point of a gun.
• 8:55
  SPEAKER_11: And and so it's a it's a very kind of pre-Christian um I idea of a just cause for war that that is to enlarge your borders and bring people into the Pax Romana.
• 9:08
  SPEAKER_11: You know, often Moscow's been called the third Rome, you know, Constantinople was the second Rome, Moscow's the third Rome, and it's kind of this orthodox Rome, and and Putin speaks in spiritualized language about extending the borders and and and bringing people in.
• 9:21
  SPEAKER_11: So tragically, this is the way you know the world has been, you know, down through the ages.
• 9:28
  SPEAKER_03: But I suppose most people haven't, when they've thought about this, gone back to the Pax Romana, right?
• 9:34
  SPEAKER_03: Most people are saying, oh, this is like this is like Hitler and the Nazis and in the Second World War.
• 9:40
  SPEAKER_03: And so they've seen that because this is the first time there's been It's very difficult to define what Is is this the first time there has been a military conflict in Europe with these groups of countries also since the Second World War.
• 10:00
  SPEAKER_11: Yeah.
• 10:00
  SPEAKER_03: Leaving out Yugoslavia and getting about all the others.
• 10:04
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, that's right.
• 10:05
  SPEAKER_03: But people are feeling as though this is this is since the end of the Second World War, this is now the first time nuclear powers are in armed conflict and Russia's invasion of And they both have McDonald's and all those sorts of things.
• 10:21
  SPEAKER_11: And you know, they both have dominoes.
• 10:23
  SPEAKER_11: But but a lot of people it brings it closer to home when you see a kind of a a column of tanks and behind it there is a dominoes.
• 10:31
  SPEAKER_11: And and it and it feels like, oh, so war is a thing.
• 10:36
  SPEAKER_11: War is actually a thing.
• 10:37
  SPEAKER_11: And I think that takes everybody by surprise.
• 10:39
  SPEAKER_11: You know, uh outside the church it takes people by surprise.
• 10:42
  SPEAKER_11: Inside the church, you get people saying, Oh, because there's wars and rumours of wars, it must be the end times.
• 10:48
  SPEAKER_11: When that is precisely the opposite of what Jesus says in Mark 13.
• 10:52
  SPEAKER_11: You know, there will be wars and rumours of wars.
• 10:55
  SPEAKER_11: This isn't the end, people.
• 10:56
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah.
• 10:57
  SPEAKER_03: But also we are kind of culturally, we are in sort of perpetual shock mode.
• 11:04
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 11:04
  SPEAKER_03: So I mean, I don't know how you c if you just take it back to 2016, right?
• 11:09
  SPEAKER_03: You do tr Brexit and Trump, these were like, Oh my goodness, can you believe it's happened?
• 11:13
  SPEAKER_03: Oh, this has happened.
• 11:14
  SPEAKER_03: Like this is totally ridiculous and unprecedented.
• 11:18
  SPEAKER_03: Whoever thought this would happen.
• 11:20
  SPEAKER_03: Then you get to 2020 and and the pandemic, and now we've got to the point where Russia is invading Ukraine, yeah.
• 11:27
  SPEAKER_03: And uh Putin is suggesting that there could be nuclear consequences if NATO countries sort of join in.
• 11:37
  SPEAKER_03: So it it does feel as though we we've had a series of shocks to the system culturally, uh and yet we still seem surprised in a way.
• 11:49
  SPEAKER_08: I should say that as we as we talk about this, uh there's a good crowd of you watching.
• 11:53
  SPEAKER_08: Um it's great to have you with us.
• 11:54
  SPEAKER_08: Please do let us know your thoughts down in the comments there, um, because we will be kind of monitoring that and we will kind of uh hopefully be able to engage with that as well.
• 12:02
  SPEAKER_08: Um Yeah, I mean the the issue of kind of how surprised people are, um I think is a bit like you said, it it's it's it's in some ways, I mean I said to you earlier, I didn't feel that surprised by it because uh it it it's I think we've talked so much about kind of um the idea that we've lived in this blip.
• 12:22
  SPEAKER_08: Like I think when we talk about the COVID pan, you know, about the pandemic, we said the the time without suffering and the time of comfort, that is the blip in history.
• 12:31
  SPEAKER_08: Um I think it's it has taken a lot of people by surprise because we've had sort of 75 years of relative peace.
• 12:39
  SPEAKER_08: My generation, you know, I'm 35, so I don't remember the Soviet Union at all, really.
• 12:46
  SPEAKER_08: I mean it obviously it was still there, but it was in its crumbling at by then.
• 12:50
  SPEAKER_08: So people of my age and younger probably don't have the idea that just war can just be breaking out at any point.
• 12:58
  SPEAKER_08: Um but I think it didn't surprise me so much because I guess I've always had this thing in my head that well of course it could happen.
• 13:06
  SPEAKER_08: I mean, and you used a good phrase earlier today, Nate, when you said you know, in some sense people thought maybe we've grown out of this.
• 13:12
  SPEAKER_08: Yeah the idea that nations would invade other nations for land, we're a bit beyond that now because we're so civilized.
• 13:17
  SPEAKER_08: Yeah.
• 13:17
  SPEAKER_08: And that seems to have been almost kind of Western modern day pride, you know, to think that we're above all these things.
• 13:24
  SPEAKER_08: But I think it's always been there.
• 13:26
  SPEAKER_08: And and you see, once once Putin, you know, Putin obviously has decided to do this, just shows you how easy it is for the things to change very, very quickly.
• 13:34
  SPEAKER_08: So yeah.
• 13:35
  SPEAKER_11: Yeah.
• 13:36
  SPEAKER_11: And so we we thought that pestilence was a a thing of the past, and we thought that war was a thing of the past.
• 13:41
  SPEAKER_11: We think that famine is a thing of the past, but I I think with energy prices going up and and recession kind of waves of recession are about to hit, I think we're about to see that you know we're living in biblical times, we're not living in end times, we're living in biblical times, which is just war, famine, and pestilence are the norm.
• 13:58
  SPEAKER_11: And yeah, the the bubble has been the the little slice of time that we've lived in.
• 14:03
  SPEAKER_11: I was thinking today.
• 14:04
  SPEAKER_11: I was thinking today.
• 14:05
  SPEAKER_11: Um I I was born close as close to the election of Adolf Hitler as I am to my own birth.
• 14:14
  SPEAKER_11: Like we you know, we we are as close to my birth as my birth was to the elec election of Adolf Hitler.
• 14:20
  SPEAKER_11: Um which uh as Christoph Keating has said in the comments, you know, Hitler equals the devil, and World War II is the national religion, so every time we have an enemy, they are the new Hitler.
• 14:29
  SPEAKER_11: That's the 21st century just war if your enemy is Hitler.
• 14:32
  SPEAKER_11: Um so on on that topic of hit of just war, um people like Augustine started to frame, you know, the the true just causes for war.
• 14:42
  SPEAKER_11: And you can't just go and nick people's stuff, and you can't just go because you want some slaves, and you can't just go because you want to bring people into the Pax Romana.
• 14:48
  SPEAKER_11: Um August Augustine, you know, said Um if your goal is peace, if you don't start it, and if your goal is peace, and if you don't um execute prisoners, um what was some of some of the other um uh cool you know um stipulations for for a just war, then then you can sort of have one.
• 15:09
  SPEAKER_11: What's interesting about uh the just war tradition is it's pretty much you pretty much never had an experience of a just war.
• 15:16
  SPEAKER_11: Like there's pretty much never been a war that actually ticks the five boxes that Augustine has.
• 15:21
  SPEAKER_11: Maybe World War II is your best shot at it, and yet the bombing of Dresden or or you know dropping of bombs on Nagasaki, I mean, how do you justify any of any of that kind of stuff?
• 15:33
  SPEAKER_11: So we we kind of cling on to the just war tradition.
• 15:36
  SPEAKER_11: The only alternative really to the just war tradition.
• 15:39
  SPEAKER_11: Well, there's one there are two alternatives to the just war tradition.
• 15:41
  SPEAKER_11: One is the Putin route, which is just like um I always kind of liked Ukraine, I wanted it for myself.
• 15:48
  SPEAKER_11: So that's that's you know, there's there's the realist position where you just go and take stuff because you can.
• 15:53
  SPEAKER_11: But the pacifist position is is a really particularly sort of Christian position.
• 15:58
  SPEAKER_11: And I guess the the problem with the the the pacifist position is you then rely on other people to bear the brunt of your scruples.
• 16:08
  SPEAKER_11: I don't want to defend the country against a Putin who's coming in to, you know, to do evil.
• 16:16
  SPEAKER_11: And I th I've got I've got all the time in the world for the pacif pacifist position.
• 16:21
  SPEAKER_11: But I guess at the stage when the tanks are rolling in, you it it can be a very principled thing, the the non-violent resistance kind of thing.
• 16:31
  SPEAKER_11: But you also rely on other people bearing the brunt of your moral position, which is often that's the that's the tricky part of being the pacifist.
• 16:42
  SPEAKER_10: Back in April, Glenn interviewed Marcus Honeyset, author of Powerful Leaders, a book about the ways leadership in Christian circles can and has gone wrong.
• 16:55
  SPEAKER_11: One of the things that I think is eye-opening is to consider the ways in which we have power already.
• 17:01
  SPEAKER_11: I remember uh hearing Diane Langberg speak at uh ELF.
• 17:05
  SPEAKER_11: When would that have been?
• 17:06
  SPEAKER_11: 2018, 2019, and uh and she spoke about the the real issue, especially with pastoral leadership, is that none of the pastors think they have power, and yet they have incredible amounts of this thing called power, and it's a new thought to leaders that they in in fact have it and therefore must steward it in a Christ-like way.
• 17:26
  SPEAKER_11: And that was sort of that was news to me.
• 17:28
  SPEAKER_11: It was like, wow.
• 17:29
  SPEAKER_11: Um and and I wonder whether that is because it's invisible to us because it is so much the soft power of family, church is family, and we're brothers and sisters in Christ, aren't we?
• 17:41
  SPEAKER_11: And everything is very informal, not very much is scrutinized.
• 17:45
  SPEAKER_11: Uh we we read books like Brothers, we are not professionals, um, which is true, right?
• 17:52
  SPEAKER_11: We are not professionals, and yet, therefore, that can become a cover for very unprofessional and then unchristian behavior, um, because of the the nature of the kinds of power that we have.
• 18:03
  SPEAKER_11: So can you convince us, Marcus, that in whatever Christian leadership role that we have, A, we have power and and what kind of power it is that we have?
• 18:14
  SPEAKER_07: Oh, yeah, well that's a great question.
• 18:16
  SPEAKER_07: So we have two kinds of power, I think.
• 18:18
  SPEAKER_07: We have formal, legitimated.
• 18:21
  SPEAKER_07: Oh, let's just distinguish terms first.
• 18:23
  SPEAKER_07: When I say authority, I mean having the right to act.
• 18:26
  SPEAKER_07: And when I talk about power, I talk uh I mean having the ability to act.
• 18:32
  SPEAKER_07: And I believe that we have essentially two kinds.
• 18:35
  SPEAKER_07: We have formal, legitimated authority, which is the authority given us by the organization that we work for to carry out the responsibilities that we have.
• 18:44
  SPEAKER_07: And that has the benefit usually, not always, but usually, that it is transparent, it is circumscribed, everybody knows what it is, it is accountable, it's plural, it's in the light.
• 18:58
  SPEAKER_07: And then we have uh soft power, which is much, much harder to think about because it is relational, it is exemplary, it is um, I've been really struck over the last year with just how much the New Testament talks about leaders being imitable.
• 19:16
  SPEAKER_07: Now, just imitation gives you a huge amount of power.
• 19:19
  SPEAKER_07: I want somebody to be able to imitate me, but if they therefore trust me, that means that the temptation is that people will do what I say just because I say it, regardless of whether or not I'm right, and regardless of whether that leads to their maturity or not.
• 19:35
  SPEAKER_07: We have power by dint of um uh long-term trust and credibility.
• 19:40
  SPEAKER_07: We have power by dint of the platforms that we have and the fact that people just automatically trust people on platforms, although maybe that's changing at the moment.
• 19:48
  SPEAKER_07: We have power by dint of um uh our credibility um that goes with personality and personableness.
• 19:57
  SPEAKER_07: Now, nobody wants a non-personable church leader, but it does mean that the people who are attracted into church leadership tend to be very, very good at gaining people's trust.
• 20:08
  SPEAKER_07: And under normal circumstances, when everything's going well, all of this is highly positive.
• 20:14
  SPEAKER_07: But the flip side of the positive is that when it's going badly, you know, when when family is going well, brilliant, isn't it?
• 20:21
  SPEAKER_07: When family is going badly, uh, the the bad things are maximum as well.
• 20:25
  SPEAKER_07: It's very, very, very toxic.
• 20:28
  SPEAKER_07: So these things are um really important, they're they're they're critical.
• 20:34
  SPEAKER_07: Everybody in ministry knows that um after a while, after say five years in a ministry, your soft power, all these things that I'm talking about here, dramatically outweighs your formal power.
• 20:50
  SPEAKER_07: You can get things done by influence that you possibly can't get done formally, and the temptation therefore is to use your influence to get things done that you can't get done formally.
• 21:04
  SPEAKER_07: If I just maneuver that person into that position or maneuver that person out, if I just ring that person before the meeting and say, you are going to support me, aren't you?
• 21:16
  SPEAKER_07: Um, if there's a dodgy vote coming, or you know, whatever it is, all of a sudden you think you're able to use your soft power to buy hard power, if I can put it that way.
• 21:29
  SPEAKER_07: If you have enough of it, it's convertible.
• 21:32
  SPEAKER_07: The trouble is this that uh that you use the soft power, you use your influence, you use your personableness and your credibility in the first instance because you think you're getting a good end for for Jesus.
• 21:47
  SPEAKER_07: You don't use it selfishly, and therefore it's easy to justify to yourself that I'm doing Jesus' work, maybe not quite Jesus' way, but it's okay because there's a good outcome.
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_07: And everybody likes the outcome.
• 22:02
  SPEAKER_07: And when there's a good outcome, nobody questions it.
• 22:06
  SPEAKER_07: So it's exactly the point that you can also well, well, two things happen.
• 22:09
  SPEAKER_07: Firstly, you can leverage the outcome to get yourself more formal power.
• 22:15
  SPEAKER_07: And uh secondly, what you've done is you've established a precedent that you can use your soft power to get something illegitimately, and nobody questions it.
• 22:27
  SPEAKER_07: So all of a sudden it's become the moodus operandi of the church.
• 22:31
  SPEAKER_07: This is now what happens?
• 22:35
  SPEAKER_07: I I have a lot of sympathy.
• 22:36
  SPEAKER_07: So somebody said to me recently, um, I've been parachuted into a small church by the bishop.
• 22:42
  SPEAKER_07: It's going to fail unless I do some radical things.
• 22:45
  SPEAKER_07: And I have been given all the authority, all the power, and told to do whatever I think is necessary.
• 22:51
  SPEAKER_07: So how on earth do I not abuse that?
• 22:54
  SPEAKER_07: And I think that that's a very, yeah, I'm I'm really glad the person was asking the question because that means they're less inclined to abuse it.
• 23:02
  SPEAKER_07: But it's not always that somebody is rubbing their hands in glee saying I can become an abusive leader.
• 23:09
  SPEAKER_07: We step into this kind of territory, uh, we cross the boundary almost unwittingly at first.
• 23:17
  SPEAKER_07: Right.
• 23:19
  SPEAKER_10: On the 24th of June, momentous news came from the United States.
• 23:24
  SPEAKER_10: The abortion law, Roe vs.
• 23:26
  SPEAKER_10: Wade, was overturned, and that judgment was leaked in May.
• 23:30
  SPEAKER_10: And Speak Life put out a couple of podcasts and videos at the time.
• 23:34
  SPEAKER_10: In this one, Paul Feesey interviews Debbie Mountford, a speaker and advocate for the unborn in the UK.
• 23:40
  SPEAKER_10: Here, Paul asks her the most fundamental question in the whole abortion debate.
• 23:50
  SPEAKER_08: If you would be able to kind of make your sort of your best case, I suppose, for um the humanity of the unborn, you know, the personhood of of the child in the womb.
• 23:59
  SPEAKER_08: Because I I suppose, although there are lots of lots of objections and questions around abortion, often it comes back to this being the root root thing of, you know, when is someone a person and a valuable, valid life that we cannot end.
• 24:13
  SPEAKER_08: Um so yeah, do you have any thoughts on that?
• 24:16
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, absolutely.
• 24:17
  SPEAKER_01: And um, whenever I'm speaking and I'm making the case for life, I always I always look to three things, and that's science, philosophy, and scripture.
• 24:24
  SPEAKER_01: Um and please don't think I'm putting scripture last because it's least important.
• 24:28
  SPEAKER_01: Obviously, for us, obviously for us, it is of paramount importance.
• 24:31
  SPEAKER_01: But I tend to find it helpful to kind of understand the science and the philosophy first.
• 24:36
  SPEAKER_01: So uh and then it comes to scripture.
• 24:38
  SPEAKER_01: So the case for life really is is really simple, and there's a little three-line argument that sums it up, and it's one I use all the time.
• 24:45
  SPEAKER_01: So it is wrong to intentionally kill an innocent human being.
• 24:49
  SPEAKER_01: Abortion intentionally kills an innocent human being, therefore, abortion is wrong.
• 24:54
  SPEAKER_01: And and that is the case for life.
• 24:56
  SPEAKER_01: We are we're basing everything on the fact that the unborn are human beings and therefore we cannot kill them.
• 25:03
  SPEAKER_01: So I always talk about asking questions in the pro-life movement, always ask a question if in doubt.
• 25:07
  SPEAKER_01: And the biggest question we have to resolve is what are the unborn?
• 25:12
  SPEAKER_01: Because when we answer what they are, that determines what we can do with them.
• 25:16
  SPEAKER_01: And in fact, even in the Rule v.
• 25:17
  SPEAKER_01: Wade opinion that was ruled in 1973, um, interestingly enough, the the justice who wrote the majority opinion that time, I'll just quote him, he said, if prenatal personhood is established, the case for abortion collapses, but the fetus's right to life would then be guaranteed specifically by the 14th Amendment.
• 25:35
  SPEAKER_01: So even in Roe, they they they agreed that if we can establish fetal personhood, then we we can't have abortion.
• 25:43
  SPEAKER_01: So this question is really key.
• 25:44
  SPEAKER_01: What are the unborn?
• 25:45
  SPEAKER_01: And when we look to science, we get a very, very definitive answer.
• 25:49
  SPEAKER_01: There's not an embryology textbook out there that will tell you that human life begins anywhere other than fertilization.
• 25:55
  SPEAKER_01: We know that in that moment, a genetically distinct, biologically living, unique, new whole human being comes into existence.
• 26:04
  SPEAKER_01: You know, ethnicity, gender, hair colour, eye colour are all determined in that moment.
• 26:08
  SPEAKER_01: And that new human being looks and acts exactly like a human being of that age is supposed to look and act, just as embryos do, and fetuses, and newborns, and toddlers, and preschoolers, and adults.
• 26:19
  SPEAKER_01: You know, these are all terms that tell us how old that entity is, not what it is, is grounded in its genetics and the fact that it is biologically living and growing.
• 26:30
  SPEAKER_01: And if you think about it, we know that when we're talking about a baby in the womb, when we're talking about anything other than abortion.
• 26:36
  SPEAKER_01: You know, we never hear a woman say that her fetus is kicking her, it's always the baby.
• 26:41
  SPEAKER_01: Even when when we're dealing with medical professionals, when it's a wanted baby, right from the beginning of the pregnancy, it's it's always baby, not fetus.
• 26:49
  SPEAKER_01: So we understand that at a like a deep intrinsic level, and science just backs that up.
• 26:54
  SPEAKER_01: But we do come to the point now of personhood rather than okay, so it's a living human being, we grant you that.
• 27:00
  SPEAKER_01: But pro-choice argument might be, okay, it might be a living human being, but it's not a person.
• 27:05
  SPEAKER_01: It's not a living human being with any moral value yet.
• 27:09
  SPEAKER_01: You know, it's a fetus, not a baby, it's a clump of cells, you know, it's it's it's not a life, it's a potential life, etc.
• 27:16
  SPEAKER_01: It doesn't matter what language you couch it in, what they're claiming is that abortion isn't wrong because it's not killing, because there is nothing there to kill yet, because it's not a person.
• 27:26
  SPEAKER_01: So even though we can establish it's a scientifically living human being, we're saying this particular human being doesn't have personhood yet.
• 27:35
  SPEAKER_01: So again, we ask a question: what makes a person a person?
• 27:38
  SPEAKER_01: What is personhood?
• 27:40
  SPEAKER_01: Who gets to decide that?
• 27:42
  SPEAKER_01: How do they?
• 27:42
  SPEAKER_01: How do we know it's fair?
• 27:44
  SPEAKER_01: And if you ask, or or I have asked, you know, a room full of um maybe a hundred people who have a pro-choice perspective, what makes a person a person?
• 27:52
  SPEAKER_01: You will get many different answers.
• 27:54
  SPEAKER_01: You might get a heartbeat, pain capability, the ability to move, viability, birth, being rational, conscious, and self-aware.
• 28:02
  SPEAKER_01: Uh there's lots of different things that they think or people can interpret as making up personhood.
• 28:09
  SPEAKER_01: But the point with this is that personhood cannot be subjective.
• 28:13
  SPEAKER_01: We are either a person or we are not a person, and that must be the same for everyone.
• 28:18
  SPEAKER_01: It cannot be dependent on what someone else thinks of us.
• 28:21
  SPEAKER_01: So, whatever the line for personhood is, it has to be the same for everybody.
• 28:26
  SPEAKER_01: Otherwise, we are discriminating based on age and based on what someone else thinks of us, which we simply can't do.
• 28:34
  SPEAKER_01: And again, in any other circumstance, we know that very clearly.
• 28:38
  SPEAKER_01: We don't even try and make the argument.
• 28:40
  SPEAKER_01: But the personhood argument here because the pro-choice lobby do not agree, and the pro-choice worldview doesn't have a consensus on what makes a person a person, the best thing they can argue is that we don't know what makes a person a person.
• 28:55
  SPEAKER_01: And indeed, that was stated in Roe v.
• 28:57
  SPEAKER_01: Wade, we don't know when personhood begins.
• 29:00
  SPEAKER_01: But the idea that that's an argument for abortion is false.
• 29:03
  SPEAKER_01: It's an argument against abortion.
• 29:06
  SPEAKER_01: Because if we don't know when personhood begins, then we can't take a chance that we might kill a person by aborting someone at the wrong stage.
• 29:14
  SPEAKER_01: If you're driving home one night and you see a coat in the road, it's rainy, it's dusk, it's autumn, and there's this coat, and you there's a whole lot of leaves smooshed up in this coat, and you're fairly certain it's just an old coat with some autumn leaves in it.
• 29:28
  SPEAKER_01: But you might be wrong.
• 29:29
  SPEAKER_01: It might be someone who has fallen down unconscious in the road.
• 29:32
  SPEAKER_01: So can you run it over?
• 29:34
  SPEAKER_01: No, of course not, because if you're not certain, then you can't take an action that might kill a person.
• 29:39
  SPEAKER_01: So this personhood debate really is a bit of a red herring.
• 29:43
  SPEAKER_01: It's it's a false premise because the only line in the sand we have is the one that science and indeed the Bible has given us.
• 29:49
  SPEAKER_01: And that's conception.
• 29:51
  SPEAKER_01: That's first.
• 29:52
  SPEAKER_01: That's when we absolutely know a new human being comes into existence.
• 29:57
  SPEAKER_10: In July on Twitter, Alistair Roberts stirred up a bit of a Twitter storm when he suggested that churches could do with having shorter sermons.
• 30:07
  SPEAKER_10: We got him on the Speak Life podcast to ask him why.
• 30:12
  SPEAKER_03: A Twitter storm has been created by a bloke in Stoke, and that bloke in Stoke is called Alistair Roberts.
• 30:19
  SPEAKER_03: Alistair, hello.
• 30:21
  SPEAKER_03: Thank you for having me on.
• 30:23
  SPEAKER_03: Well, it's great to have you.
• 30:24
  SPEAKER_03: Now, um, I've I don't do very much on the Twitter sphere.
• 30:28
  SPEAKER_03: What is it like to be um at the centre of a Twitter storm?
• 30:33
  SPEAKER_03: What's that experience like?
• 30:35
  SPEAKER_02: Um it didn't really feel like being at the centre of a Twitter storm that much.
• 30:40
  SPEAKER_02: I spent most of the weekend um in York and then spent some time in Trentham Gardens on Sunday afternoon.
• 30:47
  SPEAKER_02: Actually, going to hear a sermon on Sunday morning.
• 30:53
  SPEAKER_03: It's really good.
• 30:54
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 30:54
  SPEAKER_03: Wow.
• 30:55
  SPEAKER_02: So I didn't feel like I was in the middle of a Twitter storm, which I think is the best way to do it.
• 30:59
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 31:00
  SPEAKER_02: Um, if you get over preoccupied with it, you will just find you get caught up by the winds of it, and it's very hard to think very clearly.
• 31:09
  SPEAKER_11: Is there a little adrenaline buzz though?
• 31:11
  SPEAKER_11: Like you see 20 plus notifications in that little thing, and you think, oh, it's on, it's on.
• 31:17
  SPEAKER_02: Occasionally.
• 31:18
  SPEAKER_02: But yeah, I I try and be careful in my response to that because it's very easy to get caught up in the adrenaline, and I think to get waylaid by that, to think very much about the animus that people are directing at you and focus on that rather than upon the issues that you're concerned about.
• 31:37
  SPEAKER_02: So I've been increasingly mindful of the effect that Twitter has upon me and upon others within it, and a lot more careful about how I handle it.
• 31:47
  SPEAKER_03: Okay.
• 31:47
  SPEAKER_03: Well, we let let's rather than getting too kind of uh gentle, let's keep some of that storm going.
• 31:53
  SPEAKER_03: Glenn, why don't you read us these incendiary tweets?
• 31:57
  SPEAKER_03: Yes, yes.
• 31:58
  SPEAKER_03: Um, on a subject known as the worship wars.
• 32:01
  SPEAKER_03: That's it.
• 32:02
  SPEAKER_11: And you can ask yourself at home, whither the animus?
• 32:05
  SPEAKER_11: Whither?
• 32:05
  SPEAKER_11: Okay.
• 32:06
  SPEAKER_11: So it it all began on the 7th of July, and uh Alistair tweeted out, would love to see more churches cut sermons down to 10 to 15 minutes, while relocating most of their teaching to alternative formats and contexts.
• 32:18
  SPEAKER_11: Ideally, more interactive in character, over dependence upon the Sunday morning sermon is a straitjacket upon Christian instruction.
• 32:24
  SPEAKER_11: Now, were you ever thinking at that point that you would leave the tweet there?
• 32:28
  SPEAKER_11: Um because that that's a perfectly solid tweet all by itself.
• 32:32
  SPEAKER_03: It's it's short and it's sweet, and we knew it complete.
• 32:35
  SPEAKER_02: And it would be out of character on the full thread.
• 32:39
  SPEAKER_02: Okay.
• 32:41
  SPEAKER_11: Because then Tom.
• 32:42
  SPEAKER_11: He went on.
• 32:43
  SPEAKER_11: A greatly shortened sermon has the added benefit of allowing more time for the public reading of Scripture, confession of sins and absolution, passing of the peace, confession of the creed, celebration of the Eucharist, etc.
• 32:53
  SPEAKER_11: Instead of doing lots of teaching in a long brackets and typically repetitive sermon, uh, divide the congregation into all age Sunday school classes and give instruction designed to stretch people at whatever level their understanding might be.
• 33:06
  SPEAKER_11: A shorter homily surrounded by a strong liturgy and several readings leading to celebration of the Eucharist can deliver a far more effective punch than a rambling sermon.
• 33:15
  SPEAKER_11: So we've had repetitive and we've had rambling sermon, surrounded by hymn prayer sandwiches.
• 33:22
  SPEAKER_11: In short, he said prayer sandwiches.
• 33:24
  SPEAKER_11: Did you say that?
• 33:25
  SPEAKER_11: He went for it.
• 33:26
  SPEAKER_11: He went there.
• 33:26
  SPEAKER_11: And then I I believe this is the fifth, the fifth tweet.
• 33:29
  SPEAKER_11: In short, he begins, in short, focus on using the sermon for that which it is best, and use more suitable means for much of the excess pedagogi pedagogical duties which it has become burdened with which it has become burdened in many contexts.
• 33:42
  SPEAKER_11: And then as a follow-up note, uh my proposal is not extra meetings to carry the burden of teaching, which would be unrealistic, but reorganizing our Sunday mornings with time redistributed between the liturgy and a much shorter sermon and more tailored teaching in different formats and groups.
• 33:58
  SPEAKER_11: Later on you go on to elucidate with five other threads, elucidating the first thread.
• 34:04
  SPEAKER_03: But first talk about short-term sermons and long threads.
• 34:08
  SPEAKER_03: Fifth ten to fifteen minutes, it was thirty-five minutes reading those threads.
• 34:13
  SPEAKER_03: That was the thing.
• 34:15
  SPEAKER_03: Just let me do my Kathy Newman bit.
• 34:17
  SPEAKER_03: So what you're saying is that you're when people see the ten to fifteen minutes, they're thinking, oh, he wants less Bible, he wants less scripture, and he wants to go up and jump off into a liberal, you know, swimming pool or something.
• 34:32
  SPEAKER_03: No, it's it's I don't know why I said swimming pool.
• 34:35
  SPEAKER_03: Anyway, that's not the only option.
• 34:37
  SPEAKER_03: But you're arguing for more scripture, more more biblical engagement and hearing from the word and and the particular role of preaching.
• 34:46
  SPEAKER_03: Let me ask you, Glenn, what is the role of preaching within the worship service?
• 34:52
  SPEAKER_03: Well, that's what I was gonna do.
• 34:54
  SPEAKER_11: That's what I was gonna ask Alistair in in in terms of um if there's a s if there's a specific thing that the sermon is for, if the whole of the liturgy is is shaping us.
• 35:04
  SPEAKER_11: And uh I mean I I wrote a thread off the back of Alistair's um thread, which was kind of based on a sermon which I preached 15 years ago, which I still think is the best sermon I ever preached, and it was eight minutes long.
• 35:15
  SPEAKER_11: So, you know, maybe maybe this.
• 35:17
  SPEAKER_11: I didn't even get to ten.
• 35:18
  SPEAKER_11: I couldn't get to ten.
• 35:20
  SPEAKER_11: Um so it was about David and Goliath, and it was at a Bible college, and at the end of my time at the Bible college, I kind of said, Well, guess what?
• 35:29
  SPEAKER_11: Preaching is like being a war correspondent heralding the victory of David against Goliath.
• 35:35
  SPEAKER_11: Two troops that are making shipwreck of faith and running away from Goliath and dismayed and despondent, and you say, Look and live, go and plunder the go and plunder the Philistines, go in war to love and serve the Lord.
• 35:48
  SPEAKER_11: Um, that's that's what preaching is.
• 35:50
  SPEAKER_11: But I said, Um, too much preaching I hear is basically a drill sergeant telling other soldiers, telling David's brothers, you know, get a firm base with your feet just like David has, and make sure they're shoulder width apart, and then it's all with the wrist, and and top tips for how to do it like David did it.
• 36:10
  SPEAKER_11: And what's interesting about that is if you really are in the mode of being a drill sergeant trying to form other soldiers to do it like David, then you really ought to take quite a long time.
• 36:21
  SPEAKER_11: Like you don't throw people into battle after a 10-minute like little but you can declare the victory in 10 minutes.
• 36:32
  SPEAKER_11: You can't you can't train people to to get their own victory in 10 minutes, but you can declare the victory in 10 minutes.
• 36:38
  SPEAKER_11: And so what's interesting to me about some of the the length issue is lying behind it is the question of what is a sermon.
• 36:45
  SPEAKER_11: And I'm I'm all for understanding the scriptures at great depth, and there are there are all sorts of um opportunities to do that, but I really want to hear the victory, I really want to hear 1 Corinthians 15, verse 57, thanks be to God who gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ.
• 37:03
  SPEAKER_11: So that I go to I go to the table gratefully receiving the Lord, you know, not not simply having because the other thing about having a 35-minute sermon is that feels like work.
• 37:15
  SPEAKER_11: You know, we we're gonna do hard work on the text.
• 37:17
  SPEAKER_11: I hope you're you know, I I hope you've brought your thinking caps, gotta screw them on, and and that feels like work.
• 37:23
  SPEAKER_11: Whereas what Alistair's saying is we're in receiving mode.
• 37:26
  SPEAKER_11: It's it's the doctrine doctrine of justification by faith, so that we're receiving, receiving, receiving.
• 37:32
  SPEAKER_11: Um, so I I guess that's the frame that I would put the sermon in.
• 37:35
  SPEAKER_11: It's it's the heralding of the victory of your of your Christ.
• 37:38
  SPEAKER_03: And is that a are there any differences between that and exhortation, which was a word that you're using uh quite a bit, Alistair, in terms of exhorting a direct address to the congregation within that?
• 37:53
  SPEAKER_02: Yes, I think the description of the word of God as something that is living and active, as something that divides and something that pierces to the heart of matters.
• 38:04
  SPEAKER_02: I think that's something we need to feel within the context of a sermon.
• 38:08
  SPEAKER_02: And I think often what we have is an attempt to deal with the text on the one hand that gives us all the different points about what the text is saying, and then tries to have an application and a force to that.
• 38:20
  SPEAKER_02: And those two things don't necessarily go well together.
• 38:23
  SPEAKER_02: They can often be done better separately than in the same um rhetorical event.
• 38:29
  SPEAKER_02: And so part of my concern is to stop treating the sermon as a sort of general dog's body of um Christian catechesis and instruction, and to actually allow it the space within the liturgy to really do what it's best at.
• 38:47
  SPEAKER_10: This next one is from late July.
• 38:50
  SPEAKER_10: Louise Perry is a columnist for The New Statesman and other outlets.
• 38:55
  SPEAKER_10: She describes herself as a materialist feminist, and she has written a book that's been causing a massive stir, The Case Against the Sexual Revolution.
• 39:04
  SPEAKER_10: It's our best viewed piece of content this year, and here is the beginning of the interview with Glenn.
• 39:12
  SPEAKER_11: You have written a book that makes me so curious.
• 39:16
  SPEAKER_11: Um, and the the first time that I was curious was on Twitter, where your publisher just released the uh the chapter headings for the book.
• 39:25
  SPEAKER_11: And I wondered, is Louise just a is she a Christian in disguise?
• 39:30
  SPEAKER_11: Has she been a sleeper cell working for the New Statesman and now she is uh outing herself?
• 39:36
  SPEAKER_11: Because your your chapter headings are sex must be taken seriously, men and women are different, some desires are bad, loveless sex is not empowering, consent is not enough, violence is not love, people are not products, marriage is good, and then the conclusion is listen to your mother, and obviously you mean mother church at that stage.
• 39:58
  SPEAKER_05: Nice try.
• 40:01
  SPEAKER_11: Are you noticing some synergy between what you're saying and what what sort of Christians have traditionally said?
• 40:06
  SPEAKER_05: Yeah, okay.
• 40:06
  SPEAKER_05: So that so on some points, yeah.
• 40:10
  SPEAKER_05: On some points, yeah.
• 40:12
  SPEAKER_05: I mean that the thing is with this book is that because I I guess because I'm coming at the topic from a slightly unusual perspective, in that um I come originally from the left and I work for the New Statesman, which is a left-wing magazine, and uh I went to super left-wing university, and you know, that's kind of my intellectual foundation.
• 40:35
  SPEAKER_05: But also, in some ways, I'm in agreement with social conservatives on some issues, but the the the the way that I've kind of got there is via different priors, if that makes sense.
• 40:48
  SPEAKER_05: I've started with some fundamental feminist ideas about, I mean, I'm defining feminism in an extremely broad way, just to mean protecting the interests of women, however, how like wherever that leads.
• 40:59
  SPEAKER_05: And I have, and and I've I've kind of followed my I've followed my intuition, I've followed the research on that front, and I've ended up possibly coincidentally, possibly not, reaching reaching some conclusions which many people perceive to be conservative.
• 41:15
  SPEAKER_05: Although, you know, it's a bit patchy, and I say sometimes, and I'm joking, but I'm also not really joking, that there's something, something in the book for everyone to hate.
• 41:23
  SPEAKER_05: And I have been criticized from every angle you could possibly imagine, but also praised, you know.
• 41:28
  SPEAKER_05: I think that there's there's a lot of different stuff in there in it, and I think regardless of your own perspective, it does tend to provoke thought, provoke challenge.
• 41:39
  SPEAKER_11: Yes.
• 41:39
  SPEAKER_11: Do you still um identify as a feminist?
• 41:42
  SPEAKER_11: I know in Britain, um, like a vanishingly small proportion of people actually like I identify like like 10-15% or something identify as as feminist over here.
• 41:52
  SPEAKER_11: Um, is that is that a label that you wear?
• 41:54
  SPEAKER_11: And if so, do you add other adjectives to it?
• 41:58
  SPEAKER_05: Yeah, interesting question.
• 41:59
  SPEAKER_05: So yeah, I do call myself feminist.
• 42:01
  SPEAKER_05: I think that uh the the the subcategory of feminism is contested.
• 42:07
  SPEAKER_05: So I um would sometimes call myself post-liberal feminist because I'm kind of coming out of um the post-liberal political movement within within Britain, which is its own very specific thing, um, which tends to combine a combination of cultural conservatism and also um being left on economic issues, um, which is one of those in Britain, I believe in in many other parts of the West as well, is a an area where a lot of voters are to be found, but not very many people in positions of power.
• 42:42
  SPEAKER_05: Um, so that's a you know, that's a kind of um intellectual scene which I'm swimming in locally.
• 42:48
  SPEAKER_05: Um, I mean the thing is with feminism in Britain is it is it's it's a little bit of a broader church than in other parts of the world.
• 42:56
  SPEAKER_05: It is true that um only a minority of women actually call themselves feminists.
• 43:00
  SPEAKER_05: That's all I think that's always been true.
• 43:02
  SPEAKER_05: Um feminism has always been a bit of a um perceived to be a bit of an elite concern, even if it sometimes has kind of um uh delved into the grassroots as well.
• 43:16
  SPEAKER_05: But uh there is there is kind of more room for manoeuvre in Britain on the whole.
• 43:22
  SPEAKER_05: There's there's there's um more space, for instance, for gender critical views than in America, for instance.
• 43:29
  SPEAKER_05: And there's more um I think what's happening to feminism at the moment in Britain and possibly elsewhere is it's detaching a bit from the left.
• 43:40
  SPEAKER_05: Because historically, of course, feminism is almost synonymous with the left and and it does come out of certain left wing movements of the 1960s and stuff, but it's always had a very vexed relationship actually with the left and a lot of conflict with men on the left and you know, radical feminists and Christian conservatives, for instance.
• 44:00
  SPEAKER_05: Have have been in agreement on many issues down the ages, you know, whether it be prostitution, pornography, whatever, um, often sometimes to the chagrin of radical feminists.
• 44:11
  SPEAKER_05: Um, but there has always been that kind of interesting way in which feminism is quite hard to categorize in political terms.
• 44:18
  SPEAKER_05: And I think that actually that's that's something that we should pursue more.
• 44:23
  SPEAKER_05: I think that actually trying to disentangle ourselves from that kind of left-right binary is a is a is a good thing and something that we should be doing very deliberately.
• 44:32
  SPEAKER_05: Because I think actually that um what is good for women and and children or families, and you know, because like we can't just think about women on their own, right?
• 44:40
  SPEAKER_05: Women are women women are entangled with other with other people in all sorts of ways, and doesn't necessarily have that much to do with what we might consider to be left and right in a strict sense.
• 44:51
  SPEAKER_11: So right, and that's where the post-liberal stuff comes in, doesn't it?
• 44:54
  SPEAKER_11: That that you've got this sense, you know, John Rawls thought about this atomized individual behind the behind the veil of ignorance, and let's build up a society based on that person, that individual, and you just think, oh, that that sounds like a frat boy, a 20-year-old frat boy.
• 45:10
  SPEAKER_11: Like that that's that's the dream of very much a male psychology.
• 45:14
  SPEAKER_11: Yes.
• 45:15
  SPEAKER_11: To to want to be a little atom by myself or by himself, not entangled, as you say, with your biology, not entangled with society, not entangled with family and reproductive, you know, systems and and things like that.
• 45:29
  SPEAKER_11: And so post-liberal feminism, I guess, is taking seriously nature, really, and taking taking seriously biology, yeah.
• 45:39
  SPEAKER_11: Relationships.
• 45:40
  SPEAKER_05: Yeah, absolutely.
• 45:41
  SPEAKER_05: So another term that um is sometimes used, and I think is Kathleen, Kathleen's Doc, great My Forward, um, the philosopher, her preference I think is for materialist feminism, which is quite good.
• 45:53
  SPEAKER_05: Yes because that that does that does kind of strike at what is what it is we're talking about, even if it does sound a bit academic, I think that it's a good descriptor.
• 46:01
  SPEAKER_11: Yes.
• 46:02
  SPEAKER_11: Well, let's press into that because um one one of your um chapter headings is men and women are different.
• 46:09
  SPEAKER_11: And I guess like coming from a Christian point of view, like first page of the Bible, you've got male and female in the image of God, both of them equally having dominion over the world.
• 46:19
  SPEAKER_11: And I guess there's that dimension, there's that sort of vertical dimension of both equally kept in the image of God.
• 46:26
  SPEAKER_11: If you've got a materialist kind of conception of male and female, um I can understand why sort of a third-wave feminism would uh third wave feminist would say, Ah, if you press in too much to the differences between men and women, you're going to lose the equality.
• 46:43
  SPEAKER_11: Now, I I think if you've got a spiritual dimension, there's a little bit of a backstop there in that men and women can be equal before the eyes of God and different in their sort of material reality.
• 46:53
  SPEAKER_11: But if you're gonna have a materialist feminism, how do you both uphold the equality of the of the sexes and the difference between them?
• 47:02
  SPEAKER_05: Well, I mean, I think you can still say, I mean, it's all derived from Christianity in the end, isn't it?
• 47:07
  SPEAKER_05: I mean, this is the thing with with with so much um secular ethics and politics, and you know, everything, everything in the end comes um comes back to Christianity.
• 47:18
  SPEAKER_10: At the beginning of September, Tom Holland came to Oak Hill Theological College, North London, England, to take part in an event Speak Life put on called Mission and the Meaning Crisis.
• 47:30
  SPEAKER_10: Christy Mayer spoke, Paul Vanderclay spoke, and Tom Holland answered many questions, including this one.
• 47:40
  SPEAKER_09: And I think the risk for for the for for for for the Christian churches in the post-60s Western order is that they just become they blur in and bec and and and become part of the kind of hegemonic ideology, which is liberal, secular, sceptical, progressive.
• 48:05
  SPEAKER_09: And you know, it's it's it's the thought for the day curse.
• 48:12
  SPEAKER_09: You never hear anything on Thought for the Day that you know, there's nothing particularly ever anything distinctive about anything that anybody says on Thought for the Day.
• 48:22
  SPEAKER_09: It's always coming from the same kind of, you know, you know exactly what everybody who goes on thought for the day thinks about pretty much every single issue.
• 48:30
  SPEAKER_09: And it doesn't matter whether they're Catholic, Anglican, Methodist, Muslim, Buddhist, you know that they're all going to be basically articulating the same liberal nostra.
• 48:41
  SPEAKER_09: Because that's that is the hegemonic doctrine.
• 48:44
  SPEAKER_09: Everybody thinks that.
• 48:45
  SPEAKER_06: And and and I think the thought of the day to remind me to say what the thought of the thing is.
• 48:53
  SPEAKER_09: The thought of the day is the God's plot on the radio news that is, I think, part of the charter that you have to have someone come on and talk about God for five minutes every just before the eight o'clock news.
• 49:04
  SPEAKER_09: And the B2C hate so much that they find people who will say nothing distinctive at all.
• 49:14
  SPEAKER_09: I think it I think along with uh the religious studies GTSC, which is what they used to happen until 15 or 16, it's the single fastest motor of de-christianisation.
• 49:28
  SPEAKER_09: Um I think the danger for for for Christian leaders in this country is that they just they think the way to be popular and the way to get a hearing is to sound like everybody else.
• 49:43
  SPEAKER_09: But it isn't, because because why would anyone pay any attention to a bishop who is who is saying exactly what everybody else is saying?
• 49:51
  SPEAKER_09: But if a bishop is is coming out and and and banging on about, I don't know, crossing the Red Sea or angels or something, then that's really interesting.
• 50:01
  SPEAKER_09: And to go back to the talking thing, and the you know, the the the the the huge excitement around this new TV series.
• 50:11
  SPEAKER_09: People love all that stuff.
• 50:13
  SPEAKER_09: Elves and you know darkness and orcs and things.
• 50:18
  SPEAKER_09: And and and and it's all drawing on, you know, it's it's it's deeply, deeply Christian.
• 50:22
  SPEAKER_09: If people are into the into into kind of you know the Erzat version, I think people would be very into the original version as well.
• 50:30
  SPEAKER_09: It's I mean it's it is the best story ever told.
• 50:33
  SPEAKER_09: Christianity is the most popular explanation for why we're on this planet that humanity has ever devised.
• 50:41
  SPEAKER_09: I mean, whether it's true or not is a different matter.
• 50:44
  SPEAKER_09: But but as a matter of historical record, it is the most compelling story.
• 50:50
  SPEAKER_09: More people have found it thrilling and moving and exciting and believed in it than in any other comparable conglomeration of stories.
• 50:58
  SPEAKER_09: But it it it often seems as though people involved in the churches are somehow embarrassed about these stories.
• 51:08
  SPEAKER_09: It seems to be insane because they're kind of like you know, being you know, cutting the blue and never putting on Shakespeare.
• 51:27
  SPEAKER_10: Seven years ago, Stephen Fry made a famous reply to the question: What would you say to God if he asked you, Why should I let you in?
• 51:37
  SPEAKER_10: Stephen's answer was an outraged, How dare you?
• 51:41
  SPEAKER_10: addressed to God.
• 51:42
  SPEAKER_10: Here, Glenn pleads with Stephen, have more of a problem with evil.
• 51:50
  SPEAKER_11: This clip keeps on doing the rounds.
• 51:52
  SPEAKER_11: Gary Lineker uh shared it online just yesterday and got many, many more views for this.
• 51:58
  SPEAKER_11: And what I want to say about this clip is that Stephen Frye has a problem with evil, and for that he should be celebrated.
• 52:04
  SPEAKER_11: The reason why this clip has gone viral is that he is pressing into the reality of evil.
• 52:10
  SPEAKER_11: And what I want to say to Stephen Fry, I want to plead with him, have more of a problem.
• 52:16
  SPEAKER_00: Suppose what Oscar believed in as he died, in spite of your protestations, suppose it's all true, and you walk up to the Purley Gates and you are confronted by God.
• 52:26
  SPEAKER_00: What will Stephen Fry say to him, her, or it?
• 52:31
  SPEAKER_00: I will basically what's known as theodicy, I think.
• 52:34
  SPEAKER_11: I Theodicy.
• 52:36
  SPEAKER_11: So uh Theodicy is the word for what Stephen Fry is going to do.
• 52:39
  SPEAKER_11: It's a word that refers to the justice of God, the rightness of God.
• 52:44
  SPEAKER_11: So uh John Milton, he wrote Paradise Lost to justify the ways of God with men.
• 52:50
  SPEAKER_11: And uh, theodicy has been this attempt to talk about how can God be right when there is a world that is so wrong.
• 52:57
  SPEAKER_11: And I want us to hold on to that word right.
• 53:00
  SPEAKER_12: I'd say bone cancer in children?
• 53:02
  SPEAKER_12: What's that about?
• 53:04
  SPEAKER_12: How dare you?
• 53:05
  SPEAKER_12: How dare you create a world in which there is such misery that is not our fault?
• 53:09
  SPEAKER_12: It's not right.
• 53:10
  SPEAKER_11: He goes straight for the suffering of innocence, and that's where all of us go.
• 53:14
  SPEAKER_11: I don't know if there are particular people uh Stephen Fry has in mind when he mentions the cancer among children.
• 53:20
  SPEAKER_11: There are many people that I think of, and uh it makes me cry just to think of the suffering of children, the suffering of innocence.
• 53:28
  SPEAKER_11: It's actually the place that the Bible goes.
• 53:30
  SPEAKER_11: Um, historically, the first book of the Bible written down is the book of Job.
• 53:33
  SPEAKER_11: It's an epic poem about suffering, 42 chapters of Job going through suffering that is not his fault.
• 53:41
  SPEAKER_11: And twenty times in the book he asks the question, why?
• 53:45
  SPEAKER_11: And he never gets an answer.
• 53:47
  SPEAKER_11: The suffering of the innocents is the question that humans really have to wrestle with.
• 53:52
  SPEAKER_11: You you turn the page in the Bible, and after the book of Job comes the largest book in the Bible, and that's the book of Psalms, 150 songs that are prayers to God.
• 54:01
  SPEAKER_11: A third of them are Psalms of Lament.
• 54:04
  SPEAKER_11: Psalms of lament where where people say, How long, O Lord?
• 54:07
  SPEAKER_11: How long do we have to cry out?
• 54:09
  SPEAKER_11: How long do we have to groan?
• 54:10
  SPEAKER_11: Psalms that that say, We are like sheep to be slaughtered.
• 54:14
  SPEAKER_11: Psalms that say, My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?
• 54:18
  SPEAKER_11: Uh the Bible is full of this very question.
• 54:21
  SPEAKER_11: Before we came to know this as protest atheism, the very impetus behind it is a thoroughly biblical impetus.
• 54:30
  SPEAKER_11: It's it's the impetus to say, suffering that is unearned, undeserved, is outrageous, it is wrong, and therefore the feelings that are stirred by protest atheism are incredibly biblical feelings.
• 54:46
  SPEAKER_11: Thoroughly biblical.
• 54:47
  SPEAKER_11: So what Stephen Fry says and the foot that he gets off on is an entirely biblical foot, and I commend him for it.
• 54:54
  SPEAKER_12: It's not right.
• 54:55
  SPEAKER_12: It's utterly, utterly evil.
• 54:57
  SPEAKER_11: Now that's interesting.
• 54:58
  SPEAKER_11: It's not right, it's utterly, utterly evil.
• 55:00
  SPEAKER_11: And this is why I said, listen out for the language of right in this video.
• 55:05
  SPEAKER_11: As Stephen Fry answers this question, as he unpicks a theodicy, um, questioning whether God is right to preside over a world that is so wrong, Stephen Fry calls the world as we know it utterly, utterly evil, and it's not right.
• 55:23
  SPEAKER_11: Um and and this is at the heart of my critique of Stephen Fry's answer here.
• 55:29
  SPEAKER_11: By what standard is he going to say it's utterly, utterly evil?
• 55:33
  SPEAKER_11: It's it's not right.
• 55:35
  SPEAKER_11: He can certainly point to the evil in this world and say it's painful, it's grotesque, it's maladaptive to su to survival.
• 55:43
  SPEAKER_11: Um can he say that it is wrong?
• 55:46
  SPEAKER_11: And my real plea to Stephen Fry is to say, have a problem with evil.
• 55:52
  SPEAKER_11: Really own the problem with evil.
• 55:54
  SPEAKER_11: The trick with the problem of evil is to actually have a problem.
• 55:58
  SPEAKER_11: And my issue with Stephen Fry is he can say that bone cancer in children is unlucky.
• 56:04
  SPEAKER_11: He can say that it's painful, he can say that it's tragic.
• 56:08
  SPEAKER_11: Can he say that it's wrong?
• 56:09
  SPEAKER_11: Wrong according to what?
• 56:11
  SPEAKER_11: He calls it utterly, utterly evil.
• 56:13
  SPEAKER_11: E evil by what standard?
• 56:14
  SPEAKER_11: Well what is the good standard by which we judge that to be evil?
• 56:18
  SPEAKER_11: And and this is what brought C.
• 56:19
  SPEAKER_11: S.
• 56:20
  SPEAKER_11: Lewis from atheism to theism, from disbelief in any kind of God to belief in some kind of God.
• 56:26
  SPEAKER_11: When he discovered when he when he pressed into the problem of pain, he said it was a bit like looking out at uh a whole bunch of crooked lines.
• 56:35
  SPEAKER_11: And he said, You look out at crooked lines and you know that they're crooked, why do you say that they're crooked?
• 56:40
  SPEAKER_11: Whatever gave you the idea they were meant to be straight.
• 56:43
  SPEAKER_11: You have to have some notion of straight line in order to believe in crooked lines.
• 56:48
  SPEAKER_12: Why should I respect a capricious, mean-minded, stupid God who creates a world which is so full of injustice and pain?
• 56:56
  SPEAKER_11: Why should he believe in a God who creates a world full of this kind of injustice and pain?
• 57:02
  SPEAKER_11: Um now there's a problem here.
• 57:04
  SPEAKER_11: Stephen Fry is not entering into the thought experiment fully.
• 57:08
  SPEAKER_11: He's entering into a thought experiment in which there is some kind of God at the pearly gates and he's having a conversation with him, but he's not conversing with the God of the Bible at this stage, because the God of the Bible does not create a world full of such pain.
• 57:20
  SPEAKER_11: The God of the Bible, whether you believe this or not, if you're going to enter into the thought world of Christians, what Christians believe is the all-good God makes an all-good world.
• 57:29
  SPEAKER_11: Okay, and you think it's a fairy tale, it's a nonsense, okay, we can get into that later.
• 57:33
  SPEAKER_11: But in order to step into what a Christian believes, in order to do the thought experiments, you've got to believe in the good God who makes a good world, which then falls into suffering and death and evil.
• 57:47
  SPEAKER_12: That's what I would say.
• 57:48
  SPEAKER_12: And you think you're going to get in on that?
• 57:50
  SPEAKER_12: But I wouldn't want to.
• 57:52
  SPEAKER_12: I wouldn't want to get in on his terms.
• 57:55
  SPEAKER_11: Um so gay Byrne here, um he is still of the paradigm that Stephen Fry has to justify himself to God, right?
• 58:03
  SPEAKER_11: That's that's um Stephen Fry is answerable and accountable to God.
• 58:07
  SPEAKER_11: That's the world that Gay Byrne is living in, and and fair enough, you know, we are dealing with God, after all.
• 58:13
  SPEAKER_11: And Stephen Fry is doing something that has us all grabbing our popcorn and watching because it's extraordinary, that he is saying, no, no, no, God must justify his ways to me.
• 58:23
  SPEAKER_11: God is answerable to me.
• 58:25
  SPEAKER_11: And and it's like, you know, the clever sixth former having a go at the the head teacher and showing him up to be a fool.
• 58:32
  SPEAKER_11: You know, it's and and everyone's watching, and this is again why it's so delicious.
• 58:37
  SPEAKER_11: He is championing the side of humanity against a capricious and arbitrary reality that is dark and diseased and and and hellish.
• 58:49
  SPEAKER_11: And Stephen Fry is sticking up for humanity, and at that point, he is an absolute hero.
• 58:55
  SPEAKER_11: And um in in this thought world and in this experiment.
• 58:59
  SPEAKER_11: No wonder this video has done um so incredibly well.
• 59:02
  SPEAKER_11: It it it resonates with everybody.
• 59:03
  SPEAKER_11: I'm a Christian and it resonates with me.
• 59:05
  SPEAKER_11: Absolutely.
• 59:07
  SPEAKER_10: And here's the last clip we've chosen.
• 59:09
  SPEAKER_10: In a video in December, Glenn responded to the 2021 census data about religion in the UK.
• 59:16
  SPEAKER_10: The headline finding was that Britain, for the first time, has had under 50% of the population identifying as Christians.
• 59:23
  SPEAKER_10: In 2011, 59% of Britons identified as Christians, now it's 46%.
• 59:29
  SPEAKER_10: Should those numbers worry us?
• 59:32
  SPEAKER_10: Glenn does a little study in the Book of Numbers and shows the census data from three millennia ago, and it actually shows that the priestly tribe, the Levites, were only a very small proportion of the population, less than 4%, and yet their job was to be a priesthood for the whole population.
• 59:51
  SPEAKER_10: So here Glenn traces the story through to the New Testament, and he shows how a church, even if it's small and despised, can have an outsized effect on the world.
• 1:00:05
  SPEAKER_11: 1 Peter chapter 2, um, Peter absolutely underlines the priestly character of the church, and he says to these bedraggled, this bedraggled mob of um exiles, these strangers, these refugees, he says, 1 Peter 2, verse 9, you are a chosen people, a royal priesthood, a holy nation.
• 1:00:26
  SPEAKER_11: God's special possession, that you may declare the praises of him who called you out of darkness into his wonderful light.
• 1:00:31
  SPEAKER_11: Once you were not a people, but now you are the people of God.
• 1:00:34
  SPEAKER_11: Once you had not received mercy, but now you have received mercy.
• 1:00:37
  SPEAKER_11: Dear friends, I urge you, as foreigners and exiles, to abstain from sinful desires which wage war against your soul.
• 1:00:44
  SPEAKER_11: Live such good lives among the pagans, that though they accuse you of doing wrong, they may see your good deeds and glorify God on the day he visits us.
• 1:00:52
  SPEAKER_11: What is Peter expecting about the mission of God?
• 1:00:55
  SPEAKER_11: He's expecting that a bedraggled mob of refugees is the chosen people, the royal priesthood, the holy nation.
• 1:01:04
  SPEAKER_11: And so as we put the name of God onto people, baptizing them in the name of the Father and the Son of the Holy Spirit, and teaching people to obey all that Jesus has commanded, so we will be derided in the eyes of the world.
• 1:01:17
  SPEAKER_11: But on the on the final day, there'll be many who will say, Ah, I didn't have much time for the Christians, but actually I have trusted the Christ they proclaimed, and I'm so glad of it.
• 1:01:28
  SPEAKER_11: Now, let's ask the question.
• 1:01:30
  SPEAKER_11: What what percentage of the population do you think Christians ought to be in order to be in order to do the job that God has for us?
• 1:01:40
  SPEAKER_11: Do we do we need to be 59%?
• 1:01:42
  SPEAKER_11: Do we need to be 46%?
• 1:01:45
  SPEAKER_11: What percentage would be a good percentage to aim for in order for us to do the work of the people of God?
• 1:01:52
  SPEAKER_11: Well, the the Levites were well under four percent and they had this outsized effect.
• 1:02:00
  SPEAKER_11: They were able to shine the light of Christ into dark places.
• 1:02:03
  SPEAKER_11: And you know, if you're in a dark place, you only need a a very flickering candle in order to have an outsized influence.
• 1:02:10
  SPEAKER_11: The Church of Jesus Christ should not be worried about the numbers.
• 1:02:15
  SPEAKER_11: It really shouldn't.
• 1:02:16
  SPEAKER_11: In fact, back in the book of Numbers, that first census did not include the Levites because we're not meant to be concerned about the numbers.
• 1:02:23
  SPEAKER_11: And if you do count up the numbers of how many Levites there are, you recognize they are a very small minority having a very outsized influence.
• 1:02:32
  SPEAKER_11: And when I look out at the Church of Jesus Christ in Great Britain, uh I see a small minority having a very outsized influence into the culture, into the nation, shining the light of Jesus, being that river, not that reservoir of his blessings.
• 1:02:46
  SPEAKER_11: So do not be discouraged by census figures.
• 1:02:50
  SPEAKER_11: Or in fact, do not be discouraged by the 2021 census.
• 1:02:55
  SPEAKER_11: Be very encouraged by the Numbers chapter 1 census, and go back to a biblical vision of priesthood.
• 1:03:02
  SPEAKER_11: If we understand that we are to be priestly, then it really doesn't matter how big we are.
• 1:03:09
  SPEAKER_10: Well, we have absolutely loved having your company this year.
• 1:03:13
  SPEAKER_10: If if no one listened to this podcast, then we'd kind of be talking to ourselves.
• 1:03:18
  SPEAKER_10: So we're so grateful that you have chosen to listen to this podcast.
• 1:03:22
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• 1:03:31
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• 1:03:36
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• 1:03:39
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• 1:03:43
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• 1:03:46
  SPEAKER_10: Well, I think that's all from me.
• 1:03:48
  SPEAKER_10: God bless, happy new year, and we will be back in 2023 for more fascinating conversations which all seek to view all of life with Jesus at the center.
• 1:04:02
  SPEAKER_10: Thanks for listening.