Latest / The Speak Life Podcast / Glen Scrivener @ Responding to the Rebirth: We've Gone From Pro-Jesus to Anti-Hitler — What Now? || SLP625

Transcript

Glen Scrivener @ Responding to the Rebirth: We've Gone From Pro-Jesus to Anti-Hitler — What Now? || SLP625 · The Speak Life Podcast

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_00: Well, hello and welcome back to the Speak Life podcast.
• 0:03
  SPEAKER_00: My name is Thomas Thurrogood, Media Producer at Speak Life, and a very Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year to you, listeners, from all of us at Speak Life.
• 0:14
  SPEAKER_00: This episode is Glenn's talk from the conference that we put on in partnership with Justin Briley, Think the Faith, on the 22nd of November at All Souls Church, Langham Place, London.
• 0:28
  SPEAKER_00: And Glenn's talk kind of came in the middle of the day.
• 0:32
  SPEAKER_00: If the morning was about what's happening in terms of this quiet revival, rebirth in belief in God that we're seeing at the moment, Glen's talk kind of came in the middle of the day, and it was about why is it happening?
• 0:44
  SPEAKER_00: And so in this short talk, Glen uh diagnoses some of the things that are drawing people to church at the moment.
• 0:54
  SPEAKER_00: So I hope you enjoy this episode.
• 0:56
  SPEAKER_00: And if you would like to get access to the other talks from the conference, you can go to rebirthconference.net.
• 1:04
  SPEAKER_00: That's rebirthconference.net.
• 1:08
  SPEAKER_00: And by paying a small amount, you can get access to all the talks from the day.
• 1:13
  SPEAKER_00: But without further ado, I will hand straight over to Client Scrivener.
• 1:18
  SPEAKER_01: We have such good news.
• 1:20
  SPEAKER_01: Wherever people are coming from, from the left, from the right, from Islam, from diaspora, immigrant populations, from the New Age, from nihilism.
• 1:31
  SPEAKER_01: We have people coming from so many different directions.
• 1:35
  SPEAKER_01: But we alone have the rock.
• 1:38
  SPEAKER_01: We have Jesus, the source of all that is life-giving and true.
• 1:43
  SPEAKER_01: And he is our refuge.
• 1:47
  SPEAKER_01: Matthew chapter 7, from verse 26, Jesus says, But everyone who hears these words of mine and does not put them into practice is like a foolish man who built his house on sand.
• 2:02
  SPEAKER_01: The rain came down, the streams rose, and the winds blew and beat against that house, and it fell with a great crash.
• 2:12
  SPEAKER_01: We thought long and hard about what image to put on the front of our programs.
• 2:19
  SPEAKER_01: A single individual, and as soon as you think about a single individual, because we're not talking about hordes of people banging down the door, we're talking about ones and twos and threes and fours in most instances.
• 2:33
  SPEAKER_01: And as soon as you have to pick an individual, you have to pick a gender and you have to pick an age, and so we went for younger and male.
• 2:41
  SPEAKER_01: But it's not just men and it's not just young people.
• 2:46
  SPEAKER_01: But there does seem to be a significant minority of people who are significantly more open to all kinds of spiritual stories, and Christian faith is back on the table, perhaps, as the very first option that should be checked out.
• 3:01
  SPEAKER_01: And so we've got the image of the man at the doorstep.
• 3:07
  SPEAKER_01: It's not the image of crowds coming to the door, it's not the image of crowds of Christians marching on the city to bring about Christian values, but it is the story of the ones and the threes coming together.
• 3:22
  SPEAKER_01: And what are they seeking?
• 3:23
  SPEAKER_01: I think they are seeking refuge from a storm.
• 3:26
  SPEAKER_01: To go back to Matthew chapter 7.
• 3:29
  SPEAKER_01: The rains blow on everybody, right?
• 3:32
  SPEAKER_01: The rains fall down and the winds blow and the streams rise for everybody, whether your house is on sand or whether your house is on rock, the rain always falls, the storm always hits.
• 3:43
  SPEAKER_01: And we seem to be going through some kind of a storm at the moment.
• 3:49
  SPEAKER_01: How do we name this storm?
• 3:51
  SPEAKER_01: Well, uh, Alec Ryrie says we are living at the end of a narrative.
• 3:58
  SPEAKER_01: And the narrative for the last 80 years has been we've been living through the age of Hitler.
• 4:03
  SPEAKER_01: Not a pro-Hitler story, very much an anti-Hitler story, but since World War II, we have considered that the great mythology that has shaped us is less the Jesus narrative, the greatest story ever told, as Bear Grizzles would have it, right?
• 4:20
  SPEAKER_01: Less the Jesus story, but instead of being pro-Jesus, we're now anti-Hitler.
• 4:26
  SPEAKER_01: Instead of saving sinners from hell, we're saving societies from authoritarian regimes and ruthless cruelty.
• 4:35
  SPEAKER_01: We are less sure of what we should do and much more sure of what we should avoid.
• 4:43
  SPEAKER_01: We've abandoned a pole star up above, but we know what the pit is that we must avoid, and that pit's name is Auschwitz.
• 4:52
  SPEAKER_01: It's very interesting that the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the preamble in 1948, is written in the aftermath of barbarous acts which have offended the conscience of mankind.
• 5:08
  SPEAKER_01: And very much that vision of life that has more or less sustained us over the last 80 years, it is starting to fade.
• 5:19
  SPEAKER_01: It is still powerful, though.
• 5:23
  SPEAKER_01: This Halloween, lots of people would dress up as devils, nobody would dress up as Hitler.
• 5:32
  SPEAKER_01: And you think, well, why?
• 5:33
  SPEAKER_01: Why wouldn't you dress up as Hitler?
• 5:35
  SPEAKER_01: Of course you can't.
• 5:36
  SPEAKER_01: You cannot dress up as Hitler because we are in the anti-Hitler age.
• 5:43
  SPEAKER_01: And that anti-Hitler age has a lot of overlap with the pro-Jesus age, which for the previous 1900 years held sway, but they are different.
• 5:53
  SPEAKER_01: A century ago, the most potent moral figure in Western society was Jesus Christ.
• 5:57
  SPEAKER_01: Now it is Adolf Hitler.
• 6:00
  SPEAKER_01: And I think Alec Ryrie is naming something, naming something about the changing of the guards.
• 6:06
  SPEAKER_01: There was a changing of the guards from the pro-Jesus story to the anti-Hitler story.
• 6:11
  SPEAKER_01: And we are, I think, starting to lose some of the anti-Hitler story, actually.
• 6:20
  SPEAKER_01: And people are seeking refuge.
• 6:23
  SPEAKER_01: It was a sensational day.
• 6:25
  SPEAKER_01: A thousand people gathered together to respond to the rebirth.
• 6:28
  SPEAKER_01: This is just one of the talks from that very special day.
• 6:32
  SPEAKER_01: You can get all three and a half hours of content from that day by going to rebirthconference.net.
• 6:38
  SPEAKER_01: There you will find talks from Rihanna McAlear and Al Gordon and Mike Royal and Elizabeth Oldfield and Justin Brierly and the poetry of Die Woolridge and many, many other videos besides.
• 6:48
  SPEAKER_01: Go to rebirthconference.net to get the entire day.
• 6:52
  SPEAKER_01: You won't want to miss it.
• 6:53
  SPEAKER_01: My book, The Air We Breathe, sort of charts the pro-Jesus story and how it has affected the values that we all take for granted.
• 7:02
  SPEAKER_01: If you believe in something called human rights, well, you might want to look at the Bible and page one and the image of God there for why we believe in equality.
• 7:11
  SPEAKER_01: We take it for granted that compassion is king and that kindness is a superpower.
• 7:18
  SPEAKER_01: Well, you might want to thank the Good Samaritan and the one who told the story, the Good Samaritan, for that.
• 7:25
  SPEAKER_01: We take it for granted that consent is right at the heart of the sexual relationship.
• 7:32
  SPEAKER_01: I take us back to the sexual revolution of the early centuries of the church.
• 7:37
  SPEAKER_01: And on and on it goes.
• 7:40
  SPEAKER_01: The different values that we take to be natural and obvious and universal, that has come from a pro-Jesus vision.
• 7:48
  SPEAKER_01: And so we've got the pro-Jesus and we've got the anti-Hitler, and there is massive overlap, but they are not exactly the same.
• 7:55
  SPEAKER_01: So if we think of the equality and the compassion and the consent in the Christian vision, I think on the anti-Hitler side of things, we have a discourse around rights.
• 8:07
  SPEAKER_01: And we're all very thankful for human rights, or we're all very thankful for the intellectual genealogy that has given rise to that concept of human rights.
• 8:16
  SPEAKER_01: It's a profoundly Christian thing, but are they now rights divorced from responsibilities, divorced from obligation, divorced from relationship?
• 8:26
  SPEAKER_01: Are they rights kind of used as protections, as shields, or are they now rights that are used as swords against other people?
• 8:35
  SPEAKER_01: We're profoundly grateful for true social justice.
• 8:40
  SPEAKER_01: But sometimes, as with all virtues, when you divorce the virtue from its source, you start to get the sort of hypocrisy that Jesus named, you know, back in the first century, Matthew chapter 23.
• 8:53
  SPEAKER_01: Those who had a vision for justice in their own day, Jesus was able to say, ah, there is whitewash over the top of some tombs.
• 9:02
  SPEAKER_01: Is social justice always being reflected not only at the level of the slogan, but at the level of substance?
• 9:12
  SPEAKER_01: A book I've loved Musa Al-Ghabi, we have never been woke.
• 9:16
  SPEAKER_01: He says the problem with whatever we will call progressive liberationism or whatever we will call it, for the sake of brevity, you can say woke, but he says the people who are most concerned about racialized or gendered inequalities are actually the primary beneficiaries and perpetuators of those same inequalities.
• 9:35
  SPEAKER_01: His argument is not that we've gotten too woke.
• 9:40
  SPEAKER_01: His argument is that whatever we mean by woke so often has just lived at the level of slogan and not of substance.
• 9:51
  SPEAKER_01: And there is a deep suspicion now that actually there is hypocrisy underneath the purported virtue.
• 9:59
  SPEAKER_01: Perhaps the virtue that was purported is in fact virtue signaling.
• 10:03
  SPEAKER_01: There is that suspicion, and it leads to another movement that I'll talk about in a second.
• 10:08
  SPEAKER_01: So the anti-Hitler vision, the progressive liberationist vision, camps out on rights, camps out on social justice, and camps out on sexual choice.
• 10:19
  SPEAKER_01: Sort of the one aspect of the Jesus Revolution that the modern West is happy with in the sexual realm is consent.
• 10:26
  SPEAKER_01: But now consent is the only virtue when it comes to sex.
• 10:30
  SPEAKER_01: And now sexual choice is actually elevated as almost the thing that identifies us.
• 10:37
  SPEAKER_01: The rise and triumph of the modern self by Carl Truman.
• 10:40
  SPEAKER_01: He talks about a long history over centuries, but he says over centuries our self was first psychologized, and then psychology was then sexualized, and now sexuality is politicized.
• 10:53
  SPEAKER_01: And here we are in this narrative, right?
• 10:59
  SPEAKER_01: The progressive liberationist narrative.
• 11:01
  SPEAKER_01: Wesley Yang calls this the successor ideology.
• 11:06
  SPEAKER_01: He says there was this pro-Jesus vision for 1900 years.
• 11:11
  SPEAKER_01: Now we kind of have this anti-Hitler vision which has overlap with the Christian thing but is distinctive and different.
• 11:20
  SPEAKER_01: And now what else do we have?
• 11:23
  SPEAKER_01: Well, we have the anti-woke movement.
• 11:26
  SPEAKER_01: Now we have those who perhaps have suspected that underneath calls for social justice there is just virtue signaling without the substance.
• 11:39
  SPEAKER_01: And if a phrase, a slogan like trans rights are human rights, leads to places that are non-intuitive for modern people, then perhaps not only do they question trans rights, they also question rights more generally.
• 11:57
  SPEAKER_01: And maybe we just need to give up on human rights and get back to the individual.
• 12:02
  SPEAKER_01: Maybe if social justice has been wielded more as a slogan than something that's led to actual compassion, then maybe we just need to shut up about compassion and go for competence.
• 12:17
  SPEAKER_01: And maybe in a lot of the swirls that happen at a cultural level, we want to reassert the manosphere, right?
• 12:28
  SPEAKER_01: In that realm.
• 12:30
  SPEAKER_01: And so what do we what do we have?
• 12:32
  SPEAKER_01: We've got this these two different stories that are going on on either side of the Jesus story.
• 12:40
  SPEAKER_01: And really, you've got sort of two prophets who are at least on the fringes of church or at the very edge of church that are pointing towards Christianity.
• 12:52
  SPEAKER_01: You've got Tom Holland on the left saying to people, hey, you know those human rights that you like?
• 12:58
  SPEAKER_01: Pull at that thread.
• 13:01
  SPEAKER_01: You might find what Tom has found, at least some plausibility.
• 13:06
  SPEAKER_01: Let's let's go back to church and look at the roots of the fruits that we like.
• 13:13
  SPEAKER_01: And on the right hand side of the diagram, not coincidentally, on the right-hand side of the diagram, you might have a Jordan Peterson saying to people, yes, there is the concept of the individual.
• 13:27
  SPEAKER_01: And you might want to pull at the threads of that concept.
• 13:31
  SPEAKER_01: And perhaps the psychological significance of the Bible will explain to you some of how we got to where we got to in the West.
• 13:40
  SPEAKER_01: And certainly in the churches that I go around and speak in, there are there are people who have come from one side or another.
• 13:48
  SPEAKER_01: And the message really to both is very similar.
• 13:51
  SPEAKER_01: It's a kind of a yes but no but yes kind of message, isn't it?
• 13:56
  SPEAKER_01: It's yes, I see why you resonate with secular humanism so much.
• 14:03
  SPEAKER_01: There's glorious stuff here.
• 14:07
  SPEAKER_01: But no secular foundations will never give you this.
• 14:14
  SPEAKER_01: It's a Jesus thing or it's nothing.
• 14:17
  SPEAKER_01: Yes, but no, but yes.
• 14:20
  SPEAKER_01: In Christ there really is compassion.
• 14:24
  SPEAKER_01: A true sense of it.
• 14:25
  SPEAKER_01: In in in Christ there really is a sense of human rights and dignity and worth and value.
• 14:31
  SPEAKER_01: There really is.
• 14:31
  SPEAKER_01: It's a yes but no, but yes kind of story.
• 14:35
  SPEAKER_01: And and on the right of the diagram, similar again.
• 14:42
  SPEAKER_01: Yes, there is a structure to reality, yes.
• 14:48
  SPEAKER_01: Out there, there there might be rules to life that really do help you, yes.
• 14:54
  SPEAKER_01: But no.
• 14:55
  SPEAKER_01: Did you hear Toppy's no on the video earlier?
• 14:58
  SPEAKER_01: But no.
• 15:00
  SPEAKER_01: There is no life in you being the source of that competence.
• 15:06
  SPEAKER_01: There's no life in you simply being the one who tidies your room and shoulders the burden and marches up the hill.
• 15:11
  SPEAKER_01: It's it's Christ, or it's nothing, right?
• 15:14
  SPEAKER_01: It's and there is uh a repentance and faith movement.
• 15:20
  SPEAKER_01: And the things that you came to church seeking, there's a there's a massive yes.
• 15:24
  SPEAKER_01: You seek structure and tradition.
• 15:27
  SPEAKER_01: You you you seek something that is deep and ancient and rich.
• 15:32
  SPEAKER_01: You seek a true sense of being a man if you're man, if you're a man, and being a woman if you're a woman.
• 15:37
  SPEAKER_01: You you really do seek that, but there is a repentance and faith, there is a subversive fulfillment of those things in Jesus.
• 15:44
  SPEAKER_01: And there is a journey to take people on.
• 15:46
  SPEAKER_01: Yes, but no, but yes, in Christ.
• 15:50
  SPEAKER_01: Now with him, there's all sorts of competence, and the world needs your competence.
• 15:53
  SPEAKER_01: And sure, read those 12 rules for life and fill your boots and do it all, right?
• 15:58
  SPEAKER_01: But it's a yes, but no, but yes story.
• 16:01
  SPEAKER_01: And let me just finish with this.
• 16:04
  SPEAKER_01: There has been a storm.
• 16:07
  SPEAKER_01: There are many refugees coming from many different directions into the church.
• 16:14
  SPEAKER_01: But what does Jesus say?
• 16:16
  SPEAKER_01: He says, Everyone who hears these words of mine and puts them into practice is like a wise man who built his house on the rock, the rain came down, the streams rose, and the winds blew and beat against that house, yet it did not fall.
• 16:31
  SPEAKER_01: How could you ever have a successor story to the Jesus story?
• 16:38
  SPEAKER_01: How could you?
• 16:40
  SPEAKER_01: How could a successor ideology ever succeed if it is not the source story?
• 16:48
  SPEAKER_01: If it is not the Jesus story.
• 16:51
  SPEAKER_01: We have such good news.
• 16:52
  SPEAKER_01: Wherever people are coming from, from the left, from the right, from Islam, from diaspora immigrant populations, from the New Age, from nihilism.
• 17:03
  SPEAKER_01: We have people coming from so many different directions, but we alone have the rock.
• 17:10
  SPEAKER_01: We have Jesus, the source of all that is life-giving and true.
• 17:16
  SPEAKER_01: And he is our refuge.
• 17:19
  SPEAKER_01: We're gonna have some time for QA.
• 17:21
  SPEAKER_01: And Justin, I think, is going to lead that.
• 17:23
  SPEAKER_01: Thanks, Justin.