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Why Do Christian Institutions Compromise to Stay Alive? · Thinking Christian: Bible, Theology, and Culture

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  Speaker 1: Hey, everyone, welcome to this episode of Thinking Christian and
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  Speaker 1: doctor James Spencer.
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  Speaker 2: I'm joined by doctor.
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  Speaker 1: Shish Pharma, and today we're going to be continuing our
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  Speaker 1: discussion of sort of our diagnosis of what's going on
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  Speaker 1: in Christendom or Christianity or.
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  Speaker 2: The Church or however we want to say that.
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  Speaker 1: Today we're going to be talking about this dynamic called transaction.
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  Speaker 1: And you can actually find all these diagnostic kind of
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  Speaker 1: things and even download a guide on our website Thinking
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  Speaker 1: Christian dot org backslash diagnosis if you want to look
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  Speaker 1: into it further. But by what we mean by transaction
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  Speaker 1: really is this notion about how institutions think about themselves
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  Speaker 1: and how we think about institutions. And so it's a
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  Speaker 1: question of are we so enamored with the institutions or
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  Speaker 1: the platforms that we've developed that we're unwilling to give
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  Speaker 1: them up because we so deeply believe that God is
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  Speaker 1: using them, or because we so deeply believe that we
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  Speaker 1: should be in this position. The narrative I go to
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  Speaker 1: to kind of illustrate this in scripture is jeroboem Jerobom
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  Speaker 1: is given half the kingdom, probably more than half the kingdom,
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  Speaker 1: really he's given the whole Northern Kingdom of Israel, and
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  Speaker 1: Rea Boham gets to keep the Southern Kingdom, so Benjamin
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  Speaker 1: and Judah, but Jeroboam, because he's in the Northern Kingdom,
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  Speaker 1: he doesn't have access to the cult and the Israel
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  Speaker 1: and he gets a little scared, and so he proactively
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  Speaker 1: sets up two pagan worship sites in Dan and Bethel.
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  Speaker 2: Dan in the north, Bethel in the.
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  Speaker 1: South, and the one in the south is on the
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  Speaker 1: route to Jerusalem, and so it's intended to cut ten
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  Speaker 1: to fifteen miles off the trip for the people who
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  Speaker 1: are traveling from the Northern Kingdom to the Southern Kingdom,
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  Speaker 1: so they can just go and worship at Bethel the
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  Speaker 1: ones in the north. Obviously, there's a whole set of
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  Speaker 1: people for whom it would be more convenient to go
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  Speaker 1: worship with Dan than it would be to travel all
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  Speaker 1: the way to Jerusalem.
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  Speaker 2: And so what he was trying to do.
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  Speaker 1: Explicitly in the text was to maintain the people's loyalty
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  Speaker 1: to himself. He doesn't want them going back down to Jerusalem,
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  Speaker 1: which is in Rae Boam's kingdom. What he wants is
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  Speaker 1: for them to remain loyal to him, and he's afraid
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  Speaker 1: if they keep going down and participating in the worship
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  Speaker 1: at the Temple in Jerusalem, or participating the feasts and
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  Speaker 1: those kind of things, that they're going to have more
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  Speaker 1: and more of an affinity for Raye Bom, and so
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  Speaker 1: he creates these two pagan sights. And the general idea
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  Speaker 1: of the narrative is just this that Jeroboam is so
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  Speaker 1: anxious to hold on to the kingdom that he is
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  Speaker 1: willing to sacrifice faithfulness to do it. That's part of
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  Speaker 1: what we mean when we're talking about transaction, and I
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  Speaker 1: would emphasize the part of what we mean. But when
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  Speaker 1: we talk about transaction, because there are a lot of
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  Speaker 1: different ways that this can happen, and there's a lot
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  Speaker 1: of different ways that institutional inertia, just this push for
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  Speaker 1: an institution to continue as opposed to end and die,
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  Speaker 1: tends to manifest itself. And so we're going to dive
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  Speaker 1: into that today and I'll let us She's jump in
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  Speaker 1: here and offer any thoughts after my introductory ramble there.
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  Speaker 3: Yeah, far from a ramble. I I appreciate the way
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  Speaker 3: you started. I think that there's some instructive points in
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  Speaker 3: the narrative as you described it, because one of the
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  Speaker 3: things that comes out of that narrative is that it's
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  Speaker 3: not as if, forgive me, I always confuse them as well.
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  Speaker 4: Jerebom in the north?
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  Speaker 3: Is that right?
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  Speaker 2: A jera Bom in the north the north?
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  Speaker 4: Why do their names have to be so similar?
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  Speaker 3: It wasn't as if Jeroboam was setting up an alternate god, right, correct.
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  Speaker 3: This isn't like the Canaanites with bal No. This is
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  Speaker 3: Jeroboam setting up an alternate site as the place of
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  Speaker 3: worship of Yahweh. And that that's something that's probably a
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  Speaker 3: little hard to grasp the significance of when we live
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  Speaker 3: in a time in which you could go to, you know,
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  Speaker 3: my own town, as I can think of one corner
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  Speaker 3: down the block that there's two churches kitty corner on
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  Speaker 3: the same block. Then you go down another block and
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  Speaker 3: turn right and there's another church, right yeah, And none
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  Speaker 3: of those churches are my church. There's just a lot
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  Speaker 3: of churches everywhere. Which one do you go to? Are
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  Speaker 3: these all all? Is this the same sort of thing
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  Speaker 3: at play? And the answer is no.
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  Speaker 4: But the question is why?
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  Speaker 3: And what's that play? Is that in Jerusalem there's nothing
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  Speaker 3: inherent about Jerusalem that makes it special, right, other than
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  Speaker 3: the God of Israel, the covenant God of Israel, who
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  Speaker 3: has named himself Yahwehs, the covenant God, has made that
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  Speaker 3: place the place where he will rest. And the idea
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  Speaker 3: is that this is then going to be the center
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  Speaker 3: of what is to be the nation that is to
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  Speaker 3: be the priesthood to all the world. Right. So what
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  Speaker 3: makes that nation is the presence of Yahweh. And what
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  Speaker 3: makes that nation geographically is it's encircling around.
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  Speaker 4: That presence of Yahweh.
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  Speaker 3: And what Jeroboam has decided is that, well, yeah, Yahweh
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  Speaker 3: is our covenant God, but on our terms, right, So
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  Speaker 3: two alternate centers, so we don't have to go down
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  Speaker 3: to now this fractured half of the kingdom that's no
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  Speaker 3: longer part of us. But functionally, what he's doing is
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  Speaker 3: he's making the newly formed Israel, right sans Judah, the
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  Speaker 3: Kingdom of Israel the locusts, and it is the rest
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  Speaker 3: of or it is Yahweh who now encircles Israel is
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  Speaker 3: the center.
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  Speaker 2: Right.
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  Speaker 3: Israel sets the terms, Jeroboam sets the terms. And I
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  Speaker 3: think that's an apt way to start this because despite
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  Speaker 3: the rhetoric, I think oftentimes, and the sort of thing
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  Speaker 3: we want to talk about this idea of transaction is
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  Speaker 3: that we have Christian institutions that have a geography problem,
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  Speaker 3: a spatial displacement problem, and that's that they seem to
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  Speaker 3: have begun to think that their entity, their institution, their policies,
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  Speaker 3: their content, whatever it might be, is what is the
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  Speaker 3: savior of the world. Right, There's sort of a manifest
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  Speaker 3: destiny notion that's at play, to the point where you
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  Speaker 3: and I I won't name names, but you and I
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  Speaker 3: know of an institute that wasn't it didn't infrequently say
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  Speaker 3: things like God needs fill in the blank institution to
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  Speaker 3: be fill in the blank institution now more than ever. Yeah,
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  Speaker 3: and that always made me cringe. But the idea there
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  Speaker 3: is that the work of God requires or that this
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  Speaker 3: is the centerpiece. And that's very much the mentality of Jeroboam.
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  Speaker 4: Right. It doesn't matter.
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  Speaker 3: Where you worship God because the method of worshiping God
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  Speaker 3: has to pass through the divine sanctioning and the social
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  Speaker 3: sanctioning of this particular kingdom or in our case, this
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  Speaker 3: particular institution. Right.
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  Speaker 2: Yeah, I think.
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  Speaker 1: A couple of things that your comments sort of raised
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  Speaker 1: number one, just to clarify for everybody in the Old
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  Speaker 1: Testament context, there were times in Israel's history where there
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  Speaker 1: were multiple worship sites similar to what we would have
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  Speaker 1: had today, right. There wasn't always a centralized temple or
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  Speaker 1: place of worship where they would go once a year
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  Speaker 1: or twice a year, multiple times year, whatever they do
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  Speaker 1: in order to go and worship. They could actually worship
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  Speaker 1: at these different sites around And so it's even more
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  Speaker 1: complex what Jaron Bohem is doing because he's hearkening back
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  Speaker 1: to a time a different sort of system that would
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  Speaker 1: probably have been familiar to the Israelites. And so this
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  Speaker 1: has the appearance of not necessarily looking like it's completely
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  Speaker 1: wrong or heretical, right, But at the end of the day,
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  Speaker 1: what jere Boeham is trying to do is he's trying
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  Speaker 1: to leverage the cult, the cultic apparatus in order to
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  Speaker 1: retain the loyalty of the people and support his own
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  Speaker 1: political agenda. And so that's where we start to see
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  Speaker 1: this sort of deep transaction is the way I'm phrasing it.
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  Speaker 1: This deep transaction between what is done and what's done publicly,
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  Speaker 1: What structures are put out, what statements.
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  Speaker 2: Are put out what you know, what everything is built and.
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  Speaker 1: A we could call it a selfish motive. But what
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  Speaker 1: I mean by self fish is not there's a you know.
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  Speaker 1: I always think of the you know, mustache twisting villain
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  Speaker 1: or the you know, the evil James Bond, you know
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  Speaker 1: villain who's sitting there petting a cat.
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  Speaker 2: Right.
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  Speaker 1: I don't have that sort of notion of selfishness in
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  Speaker 1: my mind necessarily. I suppose that's one iteration. But by
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  Speaker 1: selfish it just means that it is self serving. That
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  Speaker 1: there's something that you're trying to preserve for yourself, and
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  Speaker 1: you may have a really altruistic reason for doing that.
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  Speaker 1: But either way, you're making a trade. You're making a transaction,
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  Speaker 1: and that transaction is undercutting something bigger than you. It's undercutting,
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  Speaker 1: let's say, the witness of the church. It's undercutting. In
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  Speaker 1: this case, it was undercutting the sacred social order that
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  Speaker 1: was to be coded in through Jerusalem in the United
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  Speaker 1: Nation of Israel that has now been split into two halves.
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  Speaker 2: But the way I usually try to.
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  Speaker 1: Get people to think about this narrative is, look, the
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  Speaker 1: division of the Kingdom was geographic and national to the
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  Speaker 1: extent of those terms aren't anachronistic, which they are, especially
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  Speaker 1: in the national one is to a certain degree. But
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  Speaker 1: the tribes are divided, They're truly divided, and they're divided
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  Speaker 1: under two different rulers. And that wasn't supposed to mean
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  Speaker 1: that there are two different gods. That wasn't supposed to
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  Speaker 1: mean that their collective witness as now two separate tribal organizations,
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  Speaker 1: was not supposed to come together. Still, in Jerusalem, jero
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  Speaker 1: Boeham is doing this not because he's received some word
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  Speaker 1: from God or because he feels like Jerusalem is corrupt
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  Speaker 1: or anything like that. He's doing it explicitly for himself
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  Speaker 1: and to maintain the loyalty to the people. And so
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  Speaker 1: it's just a really interesting narrative. I would say the
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  Speaker 1: last thing I just throw out there based on your comments,
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  Speaker 1: it's like institutional inertia I think is really real. And
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  Speaker 1: I think this is a point where I always come
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  Speaker 1: back to this, like language actually matters.
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  Speaker 2: So I have a bad habit of saying.
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  Speaker 1: Lucky, Oh man, that was lucky, Like, oh, you're lucky.
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  Speaker 2: Whatever. The reality is, there is no luck. Right.
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  Speaker 1: What we usually refer to as lucky is really blessed.
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  Speaker 1: It's God working something out in your life that seems
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  Speaker 1: serendipitous to us. We couldn't have seen all the different
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  Speaker 1: pieces coming together and getting you to a point where
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  Speaker 1: you have this beneficial outcome.
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  Speaker 2: Right.
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  Speaker 1: That's God's sovereignty working itself out, And so to call
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  Speaker 1: it luck undercuts something deeply theological about the structure of
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  Speaker 1: the reality that we live in. And I think sometimes
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  Speaker 1: when I hear institutions phrase as you noted, like you know,
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  Speaker 1: God really needs us to be this today, it's like,
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  Speaker 1: I don't know that God really needs us to do anything.
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  Speaker 2: Right.
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  Speaker 1: What probably the more appropriate phrasing is is we're really
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  Speaker 1: trying to discern who God wants us to be in
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  Speaker 1: this moment. We're really trying to understand how it is
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  Speaker 1: that God is trying to use us in this moment,
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  Speaker 1: and we're just trying to be faithful in the moment
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  Speaker 1: to do that.
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  Speaker 2: But when we.
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  Speaker 1: Start talking about God needing us, I think that creates
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  Speaker 1: this weird dynamic between us and God, as if there's
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  Speaker 1: something that he really needs us to do in order
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  Speaker 1: to advance his kingdom, but he doesn't need us for anything.
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  Speaker 1: There's not a sense in which he wants us to participate,
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  Speaker 1: I think, but I'm not exactly sure that that verbiage
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  Speaker 1: of need doesn't betray something about the transaction that's already
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  Speaker 1: taken place, right that, like, we are really important to God.
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  Speaker 1: We've been chosen not only for this moment, but probably
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  Speaker 1: for a lot of other moments into the future. And
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  Speaker 1: so we need to be who we are. We need
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  Speaker 1: to focus in on our branding. We need to be this,
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  Speaker 1: we need to be that. And that tends to lend
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  Speaker 1: lend itself, I think, to more narrowness. Right, It's an
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  Speaker 1: oddly market oriented logic that.
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  Speaker 2: Tends to focus.
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  Speaker 1: More on what the audience wants than on what God
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  Speaker 1: is requiring us to be. I'll leave it there.
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  Speaker 3: Yeah, I want to defend lucky language a little bit,
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  Speaker 3: go for it. Yeah, But and I don't want to
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  Speaker 3: do it for merely semantic reasons, but because I want
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  Speaker 3: to get to the same place you're getting, maybe in
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  Speaker 3: a slightly different way. Fair, and see what you say
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  Speaker 3: about it, Because I want to say that what lucky
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  Speaker 3: gives us might preserve an important feature of an alternate path. Okay,
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  Speaker 3: And I'm not saying in this that every use of
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  Speaker 3: lucky is the same right. Most of the time when
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  Speaker 3: we say lucky, it's it's just a thing that we say.
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  Speaker 3: There's not a lot of depth of thought in it, right, Yeah,
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  Speaker 3: But to the degree that we.
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  Speaker 4: Want to say that.
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  Speaker 3: Sometimes things that we perceive to be good happen, or
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  Speaker 3: institutions are raised, or groups of people gain a certain
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  Speaker 3: sort of prestige or power or able to do certain
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  Speaker 3: things that we might think to be have good results,
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  Speaker 3: that I think we would still want to draw a
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  Speaker 3: line between those things happening with conclusions that we might
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  Speaker 3: like to more or less degree and a direct move
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  Speaker 3: of God saying you therefore, or this right there, that
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  Speaker 3: this group or this mechanism is something that is what
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  Speaker 3: I want to happen. So I'm going to appeal to
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  Speaker 3: another Biblical UH storyline, and that's the Book of a Back.
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  Speaker 3: Abacca cries out to God, the richer oppressing the poor,
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  Speaker 3: please help. And he's talking about within UH, within biblical Israel. Right,
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  Speaker 3: He's not talking about Babylonians oppressing Persians oppressing. He means
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  Speaker 3: within Biblical Israel, the rich are oppressing the poor. And
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  Speaker 3: God's responses, Yeah, Babylon's on.
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  Speaker 4: Their way right right, and back responses Wait, what no, no, no, no,
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  Speaker 4: no, no no, that's not what I meant.
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  Speaker 3: Babylon's worse than are rich, and God doesn't say not true.
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  Speaker 3: God more or less is yeah, they'll get their own.
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  Speaker 2: Yeah.
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  Speaker 3: I want to be careful to say that the luck
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  Speaker 3: of Babylon, so to speak, that is able to accomplish
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  Speaker 3: the things that Tobaccoc wants done, even though not in
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  Speaker 3: the way that Backak wants. Is therefore God raising up
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  Speaker 3: this group that's even worse to do this. I'm not
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  Speaker 3: so sure that what we mean with the Biblical account
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  Speaker 3: means by God raising up Babylon to do this work
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  Speaker 3: means that God wants Babylon as it is to be
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  Speaker 3: these great shapers of the world. I want to say, alternative, alternatively,
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  Speaker 3: that God always works in from the margins, or primarily,
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  Speaker 3: I shouldn't say always primarily works in from the margins
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  Speaker 3: and in the margins in this instance, rather than work
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  Speaker 3: from within the power structure of the people group that
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  Speaker 3: we're supposed to be formed as a nation of priesthoods
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  Speaker 3: for the nations, for the rest of the nations, right
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  Speaker 3: the people that are supposed to be always people. God
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  Speaker 3: allows the rising powers outside that he might otherwise have
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  Speaker 3: held back, let's say, in an alternate universe where David
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  Speaker 3: been fully faithful, where Solomon's wisdom had transcended the entirety
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  Speaker 3: of his life and not given way to an honoring
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  Speaker 3: of the gods of the nations right and an oppression
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  Speaker 3: frankly of those around him, right, which is what Jerobohma
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  Speaker 3: is raising himself against. Ideally the nation, not the nation
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  Speaker 3: in the modern sense, but this idea of biblical Israel
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  Speaker 3: as a priesthood before the nations is supposed to would
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  Speaker 3: hold back the great might of Babylon right in the
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  Speaker 3: way that God has and in moments and the Old
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  Speaker 3: Testament opens Prophet's eyes to see these angelic hosts standing
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  Speaker 3: up in defense, right, And that same mechanism would mean
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  Speaker 3: that or that same reality would mean then that you
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  Speaker 3: don't have Habaka having to cry out to God saying
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  Speaker 3: the richer oppressing the poor, right right, But instead you
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  Speaker 3: have the removal of those gates, and the working of
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  Speaker 3: the margins is all right, fine. The course of things
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  Speaker 3: that are at play outside of this land of what
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  Speaker 3: was supposed to be sort of an Eden light to
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  Speaker 3: make way for a new Eden. The walls are broken
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  Speaker 3: Babylon comes in and that's gonna that's going to bring judgment, right,
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  Speaker 3: But that doesn't mean Babylon is good.
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  Speaker 2: Right.
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  Speaker 3: So I want to get back to lucky and say,
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  Speaker 3: sometimes sometimes what lucky can mean is that God works anyway,
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  Speaker 3: rather than.
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  Speaker 4: I keep saying institution, you know.
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  Speaker 3: Rather than an institution that raises up and accomplishes perhaps
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  Speaker 3: what seems like good things, but maybe it does so
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  Speaker 3: in bad ways and in terrible ways that it's hard
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  Speaker 3: to say that God approves of this or God is
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  Speaker 3: behind the raising up of this. Right, I suppose one
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  Speaker 3: could say that the message of Jesus did go out
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  Speaker 3: throughout the whole world and this colonial European colonial expansion
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  Speaker 3: movement from the fourteen hundreds through the nineteen hundreds, right, yep?
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  Speaker 3: Is that the same thing as saying God raised up colonialism? Right?
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  Speaker 3: The fact that the fact that you have a vibrant
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  Speaker 3: African American church populace historically at vibrant traditions doesn't justify
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  Speaker 3: the North Atlantic slave trade, doesn't justify the global carving
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  Speaker 3: out the world as if it was in the name
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  Speaker 3: of God and actually with people and cyclicals for the
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  Speaker 3: Catholic Church, Protestant affirmations from Protestant churches that this is
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  Speaker 3: God's will?
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  Speaker 2: Right?
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  Speaker 4: Does this make sense?
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  Speaker 2: It does so?
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  Speaker 4: But God works anyways. What I'm saying, yeah, and that
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  Speaker 4: might be what luck he's getting at.
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  Speaker 2: I think.
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  Speaker 1: So let me clarify I mean by it, because I
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  Speaker 1: do think it's it's an important point and we probably
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  Speaker 1: need to get a little deeper into it. But Daniel
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  Speaker 1: Kahman kind of alerted me to this. He's a economist.
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  Speaker 1: He wrote a book called Thinking Fast and Slow, and
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  Speaker 1: in his book he talks about, you know, the ascension
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  Speaker 1: of Google, let's say, and he said, you know, when
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  Speaker 1: you when you look at the you know, the founders
• 20:20
  Speaker 1: of Google and the way that they did things, you
• 20:22
  Speaker 1: always get these sort of how to books right where
• 20:25
  Speaker 1: people are writing and they're saying, oh, look here are
• 20:28
  Speaker 1: the moves that they all made or what have you? Right,
• 20:30
  Speaker 1: And he said, but they never really account for luck,
• 20:35
  Speaker 1: like all of these things happened because other things didn't happen.
• 20:38
  Speaker 1: All of these things happened because you know, they they
• 20:41
  Speaker 1: just got they just stumbled onto something that they didn't
• 20:44
  Speaker 1: necessarily have to stumble on. There's no clear path that
• 20:48
  Speaker 1: they actually took that you could have predicted beforehand without
• 20:52
  Speaker 1: any sort of with any sort of accuracy, to say,
• 20:57
  Speaker 1: if you want to be the biggest search in company
• 21:00
  Speaker 1: in the world, here are the steps you'd need to
• 21:02
  Speaker 1: take exactly. And he's he talks about these this sort
• 21:06
  Speaker 1: of element of luck within the whole system. And so
• 21:09
  Speaker 1: I think that's sort of where you're coming at it from,
• 21:12
  Speaker 1: is to say, there's all of these different things that
• 21:15
  Speaker 1: are moving around, and I would think of it more
• 21:16
  Speaker 1: in terms of like God is orchestrating all of this.
• 21:20
  Speaker 1: He's like the conductor and an orchestra, and these things
• 21:23
  Speaker 1: are moving around, and there's not necessarily a control that's happening,
• 21:28
  Speaker 1: but there's a there's a register in which God is
• 21:30
  Speaker 1: sort of moving these pieces about and making these things
• 21:33
  Speaker 1: come about even within their fallenness. That doesn't necessity or
• 21:39
  Speaker 1: that doesn't necessitate authorization or legitimation. Jeremiah, even when God
• 21:46
  Speaker 1: calls Nebukan or his servant, it's only a couple verses later,
• 21:49
  Speaker 1: and I'm blanking on what those verses are exactly, but
• 21:54
  Speaker 1: he says, you, Nebucanes is my servant. He's going to
• 21:56
  Speaker 1: come in and then Israel is going to go into exile.
• 21:59
  Speaker 1: But then set years later, you know, the Babylonians will
• 22:03
  Speaker 1: be punished for what they do to my people.
• 22:06
  Speaker 2: I don't take that as.
• 22:09
  Speaker 1: The act of taking them into exile is the real problem, right,
• 22:14
  Speaker 1: Israel has to suffer the consequences for the sin that
• 22:16
  Speaker 1: it has against has committed against God.
• 22:20
  Speaker 2: It's the way it's done. It's the brutality, it's the.
• 22:24
  Speaker 1: It's the arrogance, it's the unwillingness to recognize that that
• 22:29
  Speaker 1: Babylon is to a servant of the Lord. And so
• 22:32
  Speaker 1: if we look at those passages, now, if we just
• 22:34
  Speaker 1: fast forward real quick, and I know these are weird connections,
• 22:36
  Speaker 1: but when Paul talks about the master and the bond
• 22:39
  Speaker 1: servant in the New Testament, what we really see there,
• 22:44
  Speaker 1: what we see is that God is above both, and
• 22:47
  Speaker 1: that because God is above both, this should recalibrate transform
• 22:53
  Speaker 1: your word, transfigure right the way that a master relates
• 22:58
  Speaker 1: to a servant and a servant relates to a man,
• 23:01
  Speaker 1: because neither of them are actually doing anything autonomous of God.
• 23:05
  Speaker 1: And so when we go back then into the Old Testament,
• 23:08
  Speaker 1: we're looking at Nebuzar as God's servant. God is wanting
• 23:12
  Speaker 1: nebecanezer to do this. This is now he's doing this
• 23:15
  Speaker 1: under the auspices of God's sovereignty, But the way he
• 23:20
  Speaker 1: does it isn't as if he's sitting under the auspices
• 23:23
  Speaker 1: of God's sovereignty. He's a lousy master, and lousy masters
• 23:28
  Speaker 1: will be held accountable, right, And so I think there's
• 23:31
  Speaker 1: this aspect I agree with you. I don't think God is,
• 23:34
  Speaker 1: you know, sort of authorizing the entire colonial project because
• 23:39
  Speaker 1: spreading the Gospel is a good thing, right, as if
• 23:43
  Speaker 1: all of the bad stuff that happens within any given
• 23:46
  Speaker 1: context is okay as long as we get to share
• 23:49
  Speaker 1: Christ with someone, right, it's not. I don't think God
• 23:53
  Speaker 1: is that sort of black and white about the whole thing.
• 23:56
  Speaker 1: I think what's happening is we can look at it
• 23:59
  Speaker 1: and go, yes, this is good that Christ is being proclaimed.
• 24:02
  Speaker 1: And there are a lot of people who are going
• 24:03
  Speaker 1: to be held accountable for the irresponsible and in moral
• 24:07
  Speaker 1: ways that they have preached to Christ and the Gospel.
• 24:11
  Speaker 1: They're going to be held accountable for the misrepresentations of
• 24:14
  Speaker 1: lifestyle that have happened to allow Christ's, you know, the
• 24:20
  Speaker 1: Gospel to be proclaimed. I think that's the tension we
• 24:24
  Speaker 1: have to hold on to here, and that really is
• 24:27
  Speaker 1: the transactional issue in a nutshell, it's for these institutions
• 24:34
  Speaker 1: to think that they can.
• 24:35
  Speaker 2: Just carry on forever.
• 24:40
  Speaker 1: They have to focus on only the good things that
• 24:42
  Speaker 1: they have done and ignore the negative consequences of their operation, right,
• 24:51
  Speaker 1: And I think for most of us we have to
• 24:53
  Speaker 1: do that. You can see us doing that on an
• 24:55
  Speaker 1: individual level, right right. It's the reason most of us
• 24:59
  Speaker 1: think we're pre to good people.
• 25:02
  Speaker 4: Right for sure, right, Like.
• 25:05
  Speaker 2: Oh yeah, I'm pretty good guy.
• 25:06
  Speaker 1: But their negative consequence to a lot of the things
• 25:09
  Speaker 1: that I've done in my life that you know, I
• 25:13
  Speaker 1: think God sort of brings to mind and I end
• 25:15
  Speaker 1: up having to work back through. Institutions have a different
• 25:19
  Speaker 1: inertia than an individual most of the time, in my estimation,
• 25:23
  Speaker 1: there are a lot more players involved, there's a lot
• 25:25
  Speaker 1: more pressure in there's more stakeholders to that institutional life
• 25:32
  Speaker 1: than there normally are to an individual person. And that's
• 25:36
  Speaker 1: part of why platform or for me, platforms important to
• 25:39
  Speaker 1: include in this sort of transactional mess, because.
• 25:42
  Speaker 2: We do have figures who have deep, big.
• 25:46
  Speaker 1: Platforms, right, just individuals whose ministries would no longer exist
• 25:54
  Speaker 1: if they were no longer there, right, and if they
• 25:58
  Speaker 1: did exist, they'd exist a much lower in a much
• 26:02
  Speaker 1: lower profile than they do right now.
• 26:05
  Speaker 2: And so I.
• 26:06
  Speaker 1: Think in all that, I hopefully I think I'm agreeing
• 26:09
  Speaker 1: with you and just saying what I think we need
• 26:13
  Speaker 1: to get at. When I'm mentioning Luck, what I'm saying
• 26:16
  Speaker 1: is I think that we need to recognize the hand
• 26:22
  Speaker 1: of God here in both directions that God is at
• 26:26
  Speaker 1: one time using, and at some point in the future
• 26:32
  Speaker 1: is going to hold accountable. It's not as if you're
• 26:36
  Speaker 1: being used by God exempt you from any of the
• 26:41
  Speaker 1: negative consequences that will come along with you being with
• 26:44
  Speaker 1: you irresponsibly bearing that name of being God's servant.
• 26:50
  Speaker 3: Yeah, So I think that that raises a parallel theological issue,
• 26:56
  Speaker 3: right if what we're really pushing against, and maybe this
• 27:00
  Speaker 3: first part of the description is, in various ways, from
• 27:04
  Speaker 3: various angles, this sort of presumption of manifest destiny. God
• 27:08
  Speaker 3: has raised this up, whatever this is, in order to
• 27:12
  Speaker 3: do X, Y and Z, whatever those things are.
• 27:17
  Speaker 4: That's theological problem, let's.
• 27:19
  Speaker 3: Say one, and maybe the more obvious one that maybe X,
• 27:23
  Speaker 3: Y and Z happen in spite of this group being
• 27:28
  Speaker 3: raised up right, because because nothing escapes the providential work
• 27:32
  Speaker 3: of God.
• 27:32
  Speaker 4: God is always at work.
• 27:33
  Speaker 3: He's always massaging, it's always transfiguring, he's always working in
• 27:36
  Speaker 3: from the margins, such that what God is doing is
• 27:42
  Speaker 3: sort of a perpetual in my reading anyway, a perpetual.
• 27:46
  Speaker 3: I can work with that mentality, yes, right, And I
• 27:49
  Speaker 3: think that's what we see, for instance, in.
• 27:51
  Speaker 4: The back of narrative.
• 27:51
  Speaker 3: But then the parallel theological issue that's maybe more subtle
• 27:55
  Speaker 3: that I think you're also getting at, maybe we can
• 27:58
  Speaker 3: draw it out, is that.
• 28:02
  Speaker 4: Whatever it is.
• 28:05
  Speaker 3: That enables the market or the economic or the social
• 28:09
  Speaker 3: rise of a group because of the nature of the
• 28:15
  Speaker 3: way that the world is organized, right, the way that
• 28:17
  Speaker 3: creation I want to be. Since we're talking about words here,
• 28:20
  Speaker 3: I want to use. I want to take Norman Weirsba seriously,
• 28:23
  Speaker 3: who talks about the need to say creation over nature,
• 28:26
  Speaker 3: not because the word nature is inherently bad, but because
• 28:29
  Speaker 3: creation gets an agency, right, it's specifically this sense of
• 28:34
  Speaker 3: relationship with the God who is Creator. And so the
• 28:38
  Speaker 3: organizing of creation as we.
• 28:41
  Speaker 4: Know it is not in any sense the ideal.
• 28:44
  Speaker 3: It's not the mechanism described either in the first couple
• 28:48
  Speaker 3: chapters of Genesis, nor in the final chapters of Revelation,
• 28:53
  Speaker 3: nor the various passages in the Bible that allude to
• 28:55
  Speaker 3: those final chapters.
• 28:56
  Speaker 4: Right, So what is it.
• 28:58
  Speaker 3: That makes a particular group rise. It might be that
• 29:04
  Speaker 3: God has said I can work with that, and he
• 29:07
  Speaker 3: works anyway in the midst of something. But it also
• 29:10
  Speaker 3: might be the case, and this is where the concern
• 29:12
  Speaker 3: comes in, that a group rises for reasons that can
• 29:17
  Speaker 3: be solely attributed to minding the social, economic, financial, whatever
• 29:22
  Speaker 3: framework of what they're in, right, and perhaps they do
• 29:26
  Speaker 3: something good in the middle of it, but that doesn't
• 29:31
  Speaker 3: mean that they're rising was anything more necessarily right than
• 29:39
  Speaker 3: these social forces at work and playing playing.
• 29:43
  Speaker 4: The game with them.
• 29:44
  Speaker 3: Right in the non explicitly theological arena, we can think
• 29:49
  Speaker 3: of many billionaires, many billionaires billions over in the world
• 29:54
  Speaker 3: who I have a hard time saying God wanted that
• 29:56
  Speaker 3: person to be a multi billionaire, then use that to
• 30:01
  Speaker 3: do who knows what, to control countries, to control media organizations,
• 30:05
  Speaker 3: and so on and so forth. That strikes me as
• 30:08
  Speaker 3: odd to claim that God is behind that. But even
• 30:11
  Speaker 3: in the arena of those who would call themselves theological
• 30:15
  Speaker 3: organizations explicitly often they're still wrapped up in social innovations
• 30:20
  Speaker 3: and social pressures that you know, they're deeply intertwined with them,
• 30:27
  Speaker 3: and their financial stability is often the result of being
• 30:31
  Speaker 3: able to play these market games. Now, what I'm not
• 30:34
  Speaker 3: saying here is you shouldn't understand how market works. It's
• 30:37
  Speaker 3: not at all what I'm saying. What I'm saying is
• 30:39
  Speaker 3: we shouldn't confuse.
• 30:43
  Speaker 4: That as divine stamp of approval.
• 30:47
  Speaker 3: Right, And so that parallel concern for me theologically is
• 30:50
  Speaker 3: that often these institutions do confuse the two, and we'll
• 30:54
  Speaker 3: say things like, well, you know, we're making this particular
• 30:57
  Speaker 3: move for financial reasons, and that just is stamped with
• 31:00
  Speaker 3: approval by God because this allows us to continue in existence.
• 31:04
  Speaker 3: Whereas when I look at Scripture, those things that God
• 31:07
  Speaker 3: wants to get done and very strange ways God gets done, right,
• 31:12
  Speaker 3: whether it be first King seventeens, where this widow just
• 31:18
  Speaker 3: has this never overly abundant in this particular scenario, but
• 31:22
  Speaker 3: just has this coffer of oil and this coffer of
• 31:26
  Speaker 3: grain that just is enough until the harvest comes.
• 31:29
  Speaker 4: Yeah, right, go ahead.
• 31:34
  Speaker 1: Well it brings up a few different narratives from me.
• 31:36
  Speaker 1: So the obvious one is Tower Babbel. Right, there's a
• 31:41
  Speaker 1: clear sense within the Tower of Babel narrative that these
• 31:44
  Speaker 1: builders are taking advantage of the technology and their own
• 31:48
  Speaker 1: human capacity to communicate with one another in order to
• 31:52
  Speaker 1: build something that God is not involved with at all. So,
• 31:56
  Speaker 1: in other words, they're getting an awful lot done without God.
• 32:00
  Speaker 1: Right now, Ultimately he comes down and he confuses the language.
• 32:04
  Speaker 1: He stops what they're doing. But as he does, so,
• 32:07
  Speaker 1: what does he say? He says, if I don't do something,
• 32:10
  Speaker 1: they are going to be able to do. Basically, whatever
• 32:12
  Speaker 1: they set their mind to. There's no end to what
• 32:14
  Speaker 1: they could do. And so I think that narrative is
• 32:18
  Speaker 1: God admitting that, yeah, humans can do an awful lot
• 32:21
  Speaker 1: without him, because of the capacities we've been given, because
• 32:25
  Speaker 1: of the ingenuity we have with regard to technology, the
• 32:28
  Speaker 1: raw resources of creation that we can sort of utilize
• 32:32
  Speaker 1: for our own benefit. And so I think that there
• 32:36
  Speaker 1: are these narratives where we could look and say, yes,
• 32:39
  Speaker 1: this dynamic that you're painting, are absolutely right that there
• 32:42
  Speaker 1: are times when when left to our own devices, we
• 32:46
  Speaker 1: can be quite.
• 32:48
  Speaker 2: Successful.
• 32:49
  Speaker 1: And I'll do that in their quotes right, successful apart
• 32:53
  Speaker 1: from anything that God is really wanting to have happen,
• 32:57
  Speaker 1: and while that may occur for a certain period of time,
• 33:01
  Speaker 1: there's no.
• 33:02
  Speaker 2: Guarantee that it will last. Right.
• 33:05
  Speaker 1: The other narrative I was going to go back to,
• 33:07
  Speaker 1: it's a little more contested Deuteronomy six one through four,
• 33:10
  Speaker 1: where we see a clear instance of boundary crossing the
• 33:12
  Speaker 1: sons of God and the daughters of men, whoever you
• 33:15
  Speaker 1: identify those characters as it's clear that there's a boundary
• 33:18
  Speaker 1: crossing that the sons of God are not to mix
• 33:20
  Speaker 1: with the daughters of men, but they accomplish what they
• 33:24
  Speaker 1: want to accomplish, until, of course God wittles down the
• 33:29
  Speaker 1: human population to Noah in his family.
• 33:32
  Speaker 2: And so you do have these times.
• 33:36
  Speaker 1: If we were to take a a if we were
• 33:38
  Speaker 1: to look across human history and look at you know,
• 33:40
  Speaker 1: a short like let's say one hundred or one hundred
• 33:42
  Speaker 1: and fifty year span, you could probably make the case
• 33:48
  Speaker 1: right that a lot of these things are being done
• 33:50
  Speaker 1: apart from God, that somehow God isn't stopping them, that
• 33:54
  Speaker 1: God is in some way pleased with them, or something
• 33:57
  Speaker 1: like that. But ultimately, I think when we take the
• 34:00
  Speaker 1: broader view, you sit back and you say no, God is.
• 34:03
  Speaker 2: Patient, right.
• 34:04
  Speaker 1: I always go to Genesis fifteen sixteen, Not Genesis fifteen
• 34:07
  Speaker 1: six which is the one everybody knows, but Genesis fifteen
• 34:09
  Speaker 1: sixteen where God tells Abram that his descendants will live
• 34:13
  Speaker 1: in a land in slavery for four hundred years because
• 34:16
  Speaker 1: the iniquity of the Amorites is not yet complete. And
• 34:20
  Speaker 1: so this people group that's occupying the land of Canaan,
• 34:23
  Speaker 1: he's not ready to move them out yet. They haven't
• 34:27
  Speaker 1: gotten to the point where he's done with them there yet,
• 34:31
  Speaker 1: but he will, and so that happens across four hundred years.
• 34:36
  Speaker 1: So I think we have to avoid this sort of
• 34:38
  Speaker 1: thought process to say, yes, everything that's happening around us
• 34:42
  Speaker 1: is God ordained, right. I think what we have to
• 34:46
  Speaker 1: think through is God is allowing certain things to happen.
• 34:51
  Speaker 2: Within the world.
• 34:52
  Speaker 1: But nobody is going to get by with doing something
• 34:56
  Speaker 1: that they shouldn't have been doing. No one is going
• 34:58
  Speaker 1: to get by with not a lot lining with God's
• 35:01
  Speaker 1: sacred order. It just doesn't happen. It may look like it,
• 35:06
  Speaker 1: it may outlive us, right, but at the end of
• 35:11
  Speaker 1: the day, it doesn't happen. And so I think that
• 35:14
  Speaker 1: there is a real sense in which as we think
• 35:17
  Speaker 1: about this notion of transaction, that one of the questions
• 35:20
  Speaker 1: we need to be asking ourselves is how much are
• 35:23
  Speaker 1: we actually accomplishing apart from God?
• 35:26
  Speaker 2: And what I mean by that apart.
• 35:27
  Speaker 1: From God is using our own capabilities and resources to
• 35:33
  Speaker 1: accomplish things that may not necessarily be evil, but that
• 35:37
  Speaker 1: we may have just set on default and said I'm
• 35:42
  Speaker 1: going to continue accomplishing this because I can not because
• 35:47
  Speaker 1: I feel like God is particularly leading me toward this anymore.
• 35:51
  Speaker 3: Yeah, So there's there's sort of two purposes. It sounds
• 35:56
  Speaker 3: like that we want to get across, right, and that
• 35:59
  Speaker 3: one is in either direction. Just on account of an
• 36:04
  Speaker 3: institution running its course, you can't jump to moralistic conclusions, correct, right,
• 36:11
  Speaker 3: because an institution may have risen in ways that are
• 36:14
  Speaker 3: frankly really problematic. So to just sort of stamp divine
• 36:20
  Speaker 3: manifest work of God on the side.
• 36:22
  Speaker 4: Of it is problematic, yep.
• 36:25
  Speaker 3: But also an institution can decline just simply because its
• 36:29
  Speaker 3: course has been run. It might also decline. Others might
• 36:33
  Speaker 3: also decline from for real moral failings.
• 36:35
  Speaker 2: Right.
• 36:36
  Speaker 3: We have plenty of examples of those, But that's not
• 36:37
  Speaker 3: necessarily the case is what we're trying to get out here, right, correct,
• 36:41
  Speaker 3: And so I think I think of.
• 36:43
  Speaker 4: The example that.
• 36:47
  Speaker 3: Jesus specifically is is but you also sort of see
• 36:50
  Speaker 3: that metaphor and scripture frequently and that he talks about
• 36:53
  Speaker 3: a seed and that the seed cannot bring forth new
• 36:56
  Speaker 3: life unless it enters the soil and dies. So the
• 36:59
  Speaker 3: seed itself eyes to give forth the new life. And
• 37:02
  Speaker 3: the larger implication seems to be that old ways have
• 37:05
  Speaker 3: served their purpose and sometimes they need to die to
• 37:09
  Speaker 3: give life. But his larger purpose also seems to be
• 37:12
  Speaker 3: to point to himself, right that as a member of
• 37:17
  Speaker 3: the humanity in the line of atom, as a representation
• 37:20
  Speaker 3: of those people of the earth who need redemption, he
• 37:24
  Speaker 3: is entering the soil as to then be to die,
• 37:27
  Speaker 3: right to then become the first fruits of a new creation.
• 37:32
  Speaker 3: That's right, and sometimes that's just what needs to be
• 37:36
  Speaker 3: the case. But additionally, one could say that sometimes institutions
• 37:45
  Speaker 3: can die precisely because.
• 37:49
  Speaker 4: They are faithful.
• 37:51
  Speaker 3: Yeah, right, there, there is a real dynamic of persecution
• 37:55
  Speaker 3: that can exist. I think it's overly sighted. Sometimes institutions
• 38:00
  Speaker 3: can exist precisely because they're unfaithful sometimes, and this is
• 38:05
  Speaker 3: what I wanted to preserve in the in the idea
• 38:07
  Speaker 3: of lucky. Sometimes institutions can die or persist, persist in
• 38:14
  Speaker 3: spite of being unfaithful or in spite of being faithful.
• 38:19
  Speaker 4: Right. So the goal here is to say.
• 38:21
  Speaker 3: You can't look at the institution's death and jump to
• 38:25
  Speaker 3: automatic conclusions from it. Nor can you immediately say, well,
• 38:28
  Speaker 3: they did X, Y and z, and we like that,
• 38:30
  Speaker 3: therefore they continued to exist, or we like that, therefore
• 38:36
  Speaker 3: their death is an active persecution. Right. There's just there's
• 38:38
  Speaker 3: very little we can say, just as there's very little
• 38:40
  Speaker 3: we can say about providential that God's providential work apart
• 38:44
  Speaker 3: from God is providentially at work. Right. So what I
• 38:48
  Speaker 3: think that means in the longer term is to is
• 38:51
  Speaker 3: to begin to question the sort of high rhetoric.
• 38:53
  Speaker 2: Right.
• 38:53
  Speaker 4: The goal, the.
• 38:54
  Speaker 3: Goal of an organization, the goal of a movement at
• 38:58
  Speaker 3: its best, is to be honest about its past, for
• 39:02
  Speaker 3: better or or worse, probably for both, right to press
• 39:07
  Speaker 3: forth into the present faithfully heart stop.
• 39:12
  Speaker 2: Right.
• 39:13
  Speaker 3: That's certainly entailed being aware of financial pressures.
• 39:17
  Speaker 4: Just money is real.
• 39:18
  Speaker 3: We have to pay attention to money. But when money
• 39:22
  Speaker 3: takes over the concerns, it's not uncommon for the reliance
• 39:30
  Speaker 3: reliance upon God to be shown to be less than
• 39:33
  Speaker 3: what it should have been.
• 39:34
  Speaker 2: Right, that's right, No, And I always find it interesting.
• 39:39
  Speaker 1: So slat voice Hieshek is one of my favorite sort
• 39:43
  Speaker 1: of just oddreads. Right, most of the time, I don't
• 39:46
  Speaker 1: really understand what he's saying. I'll be honest, it's pretty complex,
• 39:50
  Speaker 1: but he's just he makes me laugh, honestly, and he
• 39:53
  Speaker 1: makes me think, and so I like reading this stuff.
• 39:56
  Speaker 1: He's got a lecture online called maybe we Just Need
• 39:59
  Speaker 1: a Different Chicken, I think, is what it's called. And
• 40:02
  Speaker 1: at the beginning of that lecture, he says that ideology
• 40:06
  Speaker 1: is a problem, not because it doesn't address real issues.
• 40:11
  Speaker 1: He says that ideology does address real issues, the deep
• 40:14
  Speaker 1: problems that we have in our societies. But he says
• 40:18
  Speaker 1: that the problem really with ideologies is that they begin
• 40:21
  Speaker 1: to define the questions, and so then the questions become
• 40:25
  Speaker 1: part of the problem as opposed to part of the solution.
• 40:29
  Speaker 1: And so part of solving these issues is trying to
• 40:33
  Speaker 1: get outside of these ideological boxes that we find ourselves
• 40:37
  Speaker 1: in and asking ourselves what is it that we're really
• 40:42
  Speaker 1: trying to solve for? And what questions or what arrangements,
• 40:47
  Speaker 1: what new way of being in the world might really
• 40:52
  Speaker 1: solve for those if we weren't stuck in these boxes,
• 40:58
  Speaker 1: you know. So I work with a lot of higher
• 41:01
  Speaker 1: ed institutions. Still I still do a fair bit of
• 41:04
  Speaker 1: consulting or at least conversation with different CEOs or provosts
• 41:09
  Speaker 1: or what have you. And a lot of times what
• 41:12
  Speaker 1: you run into is they're stuck in a box. They
• 41:16
  Speaker 1: have buildings to pay for, they have you know, lms's
• 41:20
  Speaker 1: to support, you know, learning management systems, technology issues, all
• 41:24
  Speaker 1: these different policies and all this different stuff. But really
• 41:28
  Speaker 1: a lot of what the people I talk to want
• 41:30
  Speaker 1: to do is they just want to educate the body
• 41:32
  Speaker 1: of Christ.
• 41:34
  Speaker 2: And once you.
• 41:36
  Speaker 1: Step outside of accreditation, and once you step outside of
• 41:41
  Speaker 1: buildings and dormitories and you know, faculty on staff and
• 41:47
  Speaker 1: all these different things, you certainly get a different.
• 41:50
  Speaker 2: Tone about what that education can look like.
• 41:53
  Speaker 1: But it may be far more sustainable than we're capable
• 41:56
  Speaker 1: of doing right now as a church in this context,
• 41:59
  Speaker 1: given the prices that are available to us.
• 42:02
  Speaker 2: Right.
• 42:02
  Speaker 1: I mean, you mentioned, I agree with you. Money's real
• 42:04
  Speaker 1: and we have to think about money. But I also
• 42:07
  Speaker 1: think part of what we're doing constantly is we're trying
• 42:10
  Speaker 1: to preserve a very specific model. And when we try
• 42:14
  Speaker 1: to preserve that very specific model, we lose sight of
• 42:16
  Speaker 1: what we're really trying to do in the first place.
• 42:20
  Speaker 1: I don't know anybody who's gotten a PhD in theological
• 42:23
  Speaker 1: studies or ministry or Bible or anything like that that says,
• 42:26
  Speaker 1: you know, what i'd really like to do, I'd really
• 42:28
  Speaker 1: like to work the rest of my life to preserve
• 42:30
  Speaker 1: an institution. I don't really think that's what people want
• 42:34
  Speaker 1: to do. I think that's a proxy for what they
• 42:37
  Speaker 1: really want to do. In other words, it's the current
• 42:40
  Speaker 1: vehicle that allows them to do what they really want
• 42:42
  Speaker 1: to do, which is to form and educate young people.
• 42:47
  Speaker 1: Form and educate people are going into ministry. That's what
• 42:51
  Speaker 1: most of us who do this kind of education want
• 42:54
  Speaker 1: to do. The structure is starting to get and I
• 42:58
  Speaker 1: would say increasingly start need to get in the way
• 43:01
  Speaker 1: of that, and we're starting to see institutions sort of tople.
• 43:05
  Speaker 2: A little bit more, a little bit more, a little
• 43:07
  Speaker 2: bit more.
• 43:08
  Speaker 1: But I would argue that that's a contextual problem, not
• 43:11
  Speaker 1: necessarily always a specific institutional problem, right.
• 43:17
  Speaker 2: And the way we solve it, Oh, go ahead.
• 43:19
  Speaker 3: Well, and to add into that not specifically a theological problem, right,
• 43:22
  Speaker 3: which is not specifically interpreted.
• 43:24
  Speaker 2: That's right, not specifically a theological problem. I think the
• 43:27
  Speaker 2: way we solve it.
• 43:28
  Speaker 1: Is we have to sort of step back and ask ourselves,
• 43:30
  Speaker 1: have we substituted seminary education? Have we substituted this particular
• 43:35
  Speaker 1: model for seminary education.
• 43:37
  Speaker 2: Or what have you? For what we really want? Right? Like,
• 43:42
  Speaker 2: is this what we really want?
• 43:45
  Speaker 1: And if we've substituted that, then I would say a
• 43:47
  Speaker 1: transaction has taking place, Right, That's what we really mean
• 43:51
  Speaker 1: by that transaction, that there's something else that's substituted and
• 43:54
  Speaker 1: it becomes sacro synct, not because we really care about
• 43:57
  Speaker 1: it that much, but because it has now been substituted
• 44:02
  Speaker 1: for the thing that we really do care about. And
• 44:05
  Speaker 1: so you'll often hear it if you're really listening to
• 44:08
  Speaker 1: people who care about these things, it's like, well, what
• 44:10
  Speaker 1: would we do if all the seminaries blinked out of existence?
• 44:14
  Speaker 1: They don't mean by that, what would be the next
• 44:16
  Speaker 1: paradigm we would execute to train the people of God.
• 44:20
  Speaker 1: What they're really saying is we wouldn't be able to
• 44:22
  Speaker 1: train the next generation of the people of God.
• 44:24
  Speaker 2: If these seminaries weren't.
• 44:25
  Speaker 4: Here, right, it's doom and gloom.
• 44:27
  Speaker 2: Right.
• 44:28
  Speaker 1: I would agree with the first part of that question,
• 44:30
  Speaker 1: like what are the possibilities of doing this beyond seminary
• 44:33
  Speaker 1: totally agree with that. I very much disagree with the
• 44:36
  Speaker 1: former now I happen to be I love seminary education.
• 44:40
  Speaker 1: I would like to see it continue, but that preference
• 44:45
  Speaker 1: can't drive. And I think that's part of what I've
• 44:49
  Speaker 1: had to come to, just the more I work with
• 44:54
  Speaker 1: and seminaries and Christian colleges and those kind of things,
• 44:56
  Speaker 1: is that my preference can't drive it. There has to
• 45:01
  Speaker 1: be something else driving. And for a while, I think
• 45:04
  Speaker 1: I would say that was the reality of the money
• 45:09
  Speaker 1: right for me was driving. But I think even now
• 45:13
  Speaker 1: I would say that's been displaced. And I think the
• 45:16
  Speaker 1: deeper question has to be asked, is what is God
• 45:20
  Speaker 1: really wanting us to do in the moment in order
• 45:26
  Speaker 1: to make sure that his people are well discipled, in
• 45:30
  Speaker 1: order to make sure that his people are formed and
• 45:34
  Speaker 1: shaped and continually conformed in the image of Christ.
• 45:38
  Speaker 3: Yeah, So again, what I'm hearing about is that the
• 45:43
  Speaker 3: goal is to be faithful in the moment, right, and
• 45:45
  Speaker 3: it's to be innovative in the moment. It's to sort
• 45:48
  Speaker 3: of take that posture that I'm wanting to say, is
• 45:51
  Speaker 3: how providence works, whatever exactly God is doing in a moment,
• 45:54
  Speaker 3: whether or not we can interpret it that, it's that
• 45:57
  Speaker 3: God can work with what's there in the present. It's
• 45:59
  Speaker 3: sort of that we need to have rather than the
• 46:03
  Speaker 3: sort of mentality that this institution is God's savior of
• 46:08
  Speaker 3: the world.
• 46:08
  Speaker 4: No, actually, it's not.
• 46:09
  Speaker 3: Anymore than you know, the Northern Kingdom of Israel was
• 46:15
  Speaker 3: the thing that God needed, right, The existence of the
• 46:19
  Speaker 3: Northern Kingdom Israel, as well as the Southern Kingdom of
• 46:21
  Speaker 3: Judah was predicated upon the presence and work of Yahweh,
• 46:25
  Speaker 3: not the other way around. The existence of filling the
• 46:29
  Speaker 3: gap institution is predicated upon the desired good work of
• 46:37
  Speaker 3: training people to be ministers in some way, shape or another,
• 46:41
  Speaker 3: training people to be educators, training people to be you know,
• 46:44
  Speaker 3: whatever it is that we need them to do. Times
• 46:47
  Speaker 3: that's nurses, right, physicians, depending on the school and what
• 46:51
  Speaker 3: their their larger mission is. And there's good reason often
• 46:58
  Speaker 3: to preserve some of these institutions, sure, but it's the
• 47:02
  Speaker 3: heavy handed interpretive, dynamic right of what this institution is
• 47:06
  Speaker 3: and what its failure may or may not mean. What
• 47:08
  Speaker 3: this institution must do, how it must compromise in order
• 47:11
  Speaker 3: to continue to exist because of its larger divine mandate,
• 47:18
  Speaker 3: the sorts of theological problems that it must marry itself
• 47:24
  Speaker 3: to in terms of the formations of social capital that's right,
• 47:32
  Speaker 3: or economic capital in order to just do you know,
• 47:36
  Speaker 3: and justifying that based upon the greater good that it
• 47:38
  Speaker 3: sees itself. There's where the problems are. Right, that's being
• 47:41
  Speaker 3: tied to an institution as if its existence is is
• 47:46
  Speaker 3: what solves beaning in the world. And the reality is
• 47:50
  Speaker 3: is that that's just never been the case for any institution.
• 47:56
  Speaker 4: No means faithfulness, Yeah.
• 47:59
  Speaker 2: I Like we said at the beginning, you know, Israel
• 48:02
  Speaker 2: and Judo were.
• 48:03
  Speaker 1: Not going to be successful unless they were walking with God.
• 48:10
  Speaker 1: That God's presence was the secret sauce. You put it
• 48:14
  Speaker 1: that way, right. I tell this story about my son
• 48:16
  Speaker 1: and I walking down Michigan Avenue occasionally we'd moved up
• 48:20
  Speaker 1: from Central Illinois. He'd walk with my wife and I
• 48:23
  Speaker 1: ond to be running ahead a block block and a
• 48:25
  Speaker 1: half because there's no traffic and there's no people, right,
• 48:28
  Speaker 1: So you know, little kid, you know, in first second grade, he.
• 48:32
  Speaker 2: Can do that, no problem.
• 48:34
  Speaker 1: But when we moved up to Chicago and he's trying
• 48:36
  Speaker 1: to move down Michigan Avenue, that's a whole different beasts, right,
• 48:41
  Speaker 1: And so he's like getting jostled around. You know, people
• 48:44
  Speaker 1: are texting and walking, they're on their phones, they're doing it.
• 48:46
  Speaker 1: You know, they're not watching for a little kid that's
• 48:48
  Speaker 1: like down by their knees. And so he's getting shoved around,
• 48:51
  Speaker 1: pushed around. And so I let him run ahead just
• 48:54
  Speaker 1: for a few minutes, and then you know, kind of
• 48:55
  Speaker 1: called him back to me and just said, hey, just
• 48:57
  Speaker 1: walk with me. And when he walked with me, he
• 49:00
  Speaker 1: could walk basically a straight line through the crowd. I'm
• 49:03
  Speaker 1: not huge, I'm six foot to twenty something. Right at
• 49:08
  Speaker 1: the time, I was about that size, I'm you know,
• 49:11
  Speaker 1: and so it's not like I'm shoving my way through people.
• 49:14
  Speaker 1: But I'm also more noticeable than a first grader, right,
• 49:20
  Speaker 1: and so I don't I don't have to dodge, and
• 49:22
  Speaker 1: I don't get jostled around as much. And it just
• 49:25
  Speaker 1: it's a different experience for me walking down that sidewalk
• 49:28
  Speaker 1: than it was for him. But when he walks next
• 49:30
  Speaker 1: to me, he takes on that stature. He now becomes
• 49:34
  Speaker 1: six foot to twenty right in a very real way.
• 49:38
  Speaker 1: And I think that's what we're shooting for. And sometimes
• 49:41
  Speaker 1: I feel like what we've done is it's an old
• 49:44
  Speaker 1: Travis trip foot Travis Tritzong right, six feet tall and bulletproof, right,
• 49:50
  Speaker 1: like he starts to feel that way, but he's not
• 49:52
  Speaker 1: actually that way.
• 49:54
  Speaker 2: And when we.
• 49:55
  Speaker 1: Start to feel like we're six foot fall and bulletproof,
• 49:57
  Speaker 1: either as individual Christians or His institutions, we start to
• 50:01
  Speaker 1: think that we can just accomplish whatever we want, and
• 50:03
  Speaker 1: that we actually God actually needs us to be here,
• 50:06
  Speaker 1: and that we're the secret sauce. It's actually a really subtle,
• 50:12
  Speaker 1: I think shift that takes place.
• 50:15
  Speaker 2: We see it in places like Deuteronomy eight. God warns
• 50:18
  Speaker 2: the Israelites to not forget.
• 50:20
  Speaker 1: Him when they go into the land and they're eating,
• 50:22
  Speaker 1: living in houses they didn't build, eating from fields to
• 50:24
  Speaker 1: the implant, drinking from cisterns they didn't dig, and they'll say,
• 50:29
  Speaker 1: my might and my strength have gotten me this well,
• 50:33
  Speaker 1: like they become the center of the universe as opposed
• 50:36
  Speaker 1: to God, and so part of it is when we
• 50:38
  Speaker 1: say being faithful in the present, I think that's a
• 50:41
  Speaker 1: good picture of what it means to be faithful in
• 50:44
  Speaker 1: the present, is that we're constantly trying to be people
• 50:49
  Speaker 1: who stand in the presence of a holy God and
• 50:52
  Speaker 1: allow him to do the work through us, as opposed
• 50:55
  Speaker 1: to starting to think that we're the ones who need
• 50:58
  Speaker 1: to do the work and if God kicks in, that'd
• 51:01
  Speaker 1: be great, because I think that's sometimes where we.
• 51:05
  Speaker 3: Get Yeah, I'm with you and everything, But the Travis
• 51:08
  Speaker 3: trit song, I don't know anything about that, but I'm.
• 51:11
  Speaker 4: Assuming it fits.
• 51:13
  Speaker 2: It does trust me.
• 51:15
  Speaker 3: I'll trust you, And I think that that is the
• 51:19
  Speaker 3: takeaway again. Right, Perhaps I'm a broken record at this point,
• 51:22
  Speaker 3: but it's that the institution, the group, the whatever has
• 51:27
  Speaker 3: to be receive its identity from Jesus, right, and the
• 51:34
  Speaker 3: work that Jesus has called us to do, and not
• 51:37
  Speaker 3: because we're human, because our institutions are created by humans.
• 51:40
  Speaker 3: It means constant repentance, and I think that's part of
• 51:45
  Speaker 3: what institutions seem to be afraid to do, right, because
• 51:47
  Speaker 3: repentance means repudiating something that someone else perhaps loves. Yeah,
• 51:53
  Speaker 3: but that's part of the process of constantly coming to God,
• 51:56
  Speaker 3: displacing ourselves and our.
• 51:58
  Speaker 4: Institutions from the center.
• 52:01
  Speaker 3: Yeah, right, it's it's what enables us to be like
• 52:05
  Speaker 3: your son as a first grader, having a stature that
• 52:09
  Speaker 3: really isn't dar own. Yeah, while recognizing that it isn't
• 52:15
  Speaker 3: our own, right, that's really the repunance part is important
• 52:18
  Speaker 3: of that right, and recognizing that again, when when an
• 52:22
  Speaker 3: institution or a group might meet its end, perhaps it's
• 52:25
  Speaker 3: just to make way for something new.
• 52:26
  Speaker 4: Right.
• 52:26
  Speaker 3: I mean, I don't know how current we want to get.
• 52:29
  Speaker 3: But recently Stephen Colbert's Late show came to an end,
• 52:34
  Speaker 3: and I really appreciate that one of the things he
• 52:36
  Speaker 3: said was regardless of what the reasons for that were,
• 52:39
  Speaker 3: he refused to at least explicitly weigh in on that.
• 52:42
  Speaker 3: He said, he's excited for what's the next. Right, Maybe
• 52:45
  Speaker 3: he needed he needed this change in order to actually
• 52:50
  Speaker 3: save his life. Right, so that he still while he
• 52:53
  Speaker 3: while he still has the energy and the ability to
• 52:56
  Speaker 3: do new things, he can try new things he wanted
• 52:58
  Speaker 3: to try, right, Yeah, regardless of what you think about
• 53:01
  Speaker 3: that show, whatever, regardless of what you think about any institution,
• 53:07
  Speaker 3: the attitude there I think is spot on, right, And yeah,
• 53:10
  Speaker 3: in his case, coming from someone who openly and probably
• 53:15
  Speaker 3: professes as faith in Jesus, that's a good model.
• 53:18
  Speaker 2: Right, Agreed.
• 53:20
  Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean, I think I think part of what
• 53:23
  Speaker 1: we were trying to do in all these diagnosess and
• 53:26
  Speaker 1: we've got two more pieces that we'll do in this series, but.
• 53:30
  Speaker 2: I think it's just.
• 53:30
  Speaker 1: Important to kind of recap this. We're really trying to
• 53:34
  Speaker 1: get Christians to broaden their understanding, not narrow it down.
• 53:41
  Speaker 1: And so if we think about I was trying to
• 53:44
  Speaker 1: explain this to my son just the other day, we
• 53:45
  Speaker 1: were walking through some of this stuff. He's doing a
• 53:48
  Speaker 1: theology degree at Saint Louis University and so sometimes periodically
• 53:52
  Speaker 1: we'll talk about some of this stuff like this.
• 53:55
  Speaker 2: But I just told him, I.
• 53:56
  Speaker 1: Said, if you just think about God's self disclosure as
• 54:00
  Speaker 1: being additive to any perspective that we had before, it,
• 54:06
  Speaker 1: subtracting that, discounting that, ignoring that, denying that whatever verb
• 54:11
  Speaker 1: you want to apply to it, ultimately is going to
• 54:14
  Speaker 1: give us a narrower perspective than we would have if
• 54:17
  Speaker 1: we just embraced it. And I think that all of
• 54:21
  Speaker 1: these we've done assimilation, we've done fragmentation, and now this
• 54:24
  Speaker 1: one's transaction. What we're trying to get everybody to understand
• 54:28
  Speaker 1: is that we're constantly narrowing our vision because we're not
• 54:33
  Speaker 1: sitting under the authority of God's self disclosure. We're not
• 54:38
  Speaker 1: thinking about it well, we're not allowing it to sort
• 54:42
  Speaker 1: of govern our lives. And what that means is not here,
• 54:46
  Speaker 1: here's the set of rules. Just do this and you're fine, right.
• 54:51
  Speaker 1: It's more of an improvisational activity where we have to
• 54:54
  Speaker 1: deeply know it, constantly circle back through repentance, confession, through
• 55:00
  Speaker 1: basic investigation and try to understand these things. But ultimately
• 55:04
  Speaker 1: the narrow incomes when we say, we really no longer
• 55:07
  Speaker 1: need this. We've got enough of this figured out. There's
• 55:11
  Speaker 1: enough of a clear and consistent story that we can
• 55:14
  Speaker 1: adopt that we can live our lives without real reference
• 55:18
  Speaker 1: to the Word of God anymore. And so the next
• 55:21
  Speaker 1: one we're actually going to address is called what we
• 55:22
  Speaker 1: call inversion, and it's this dynamic that talks about you know,
• 55:28
  Speaker 1: when human leaders are communities sort of close interpretive questions prematurely,
• 55:33
  Speaker 1: and then those interpretive questions become the authority for the
• 55:38
  Speaker 1: individual or community's life as opposed to the Word of
• 55:41
  Speaker 1: God on which they're based.
• 55:43
  Speaker 2: God's word sort of gets enveloped.
• 55:46
  Speaker 1: Within the interpretive community, as opposed to sitting atop the
• 55:49
  Speaker 1: interpretive community, and so we call that inversion. But all
• 55:53
  Speaker 1: of these are basically getting at very similar things like
• 55:57
  Speaker 1: let's not narrow our vision, let's actually remember that we
• 56:00
  Speaker 1: serve a God who is capable of doing abundantly more
• 56:03
  Speaker 1: than we could ever ask or think. So I'll close
• 56:07
  Speaker 1: out with that today and thanks to the conversation today,
• 56:11
  Speaker 1: ASHIESH really appreciate it, and thanks everybody for being here.
• 56:14
  Speaker 2: I hope you enjoyed this episode and we'll catch you
• 56:16
  Speaker 2: on the next one. Take care,