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With Greg Ganssle
55 Plays4 years ago
Sometimes Christians focus on proving that Christianity is true, failing to realise that many people don't care that it's true. But what do they care about? Andy and Kristi are joined by Greg Ganssle to discuss how focussing our conversations on the deepest human desires can bring us right to the heart of the gospel. Greg also reminds us that "Any conversation that continues is a successful conversation."
Greg Ganssle is Professor of Philosophy at Biola University in Los Angeles. Greg worked in campus ministry before earning his doctorate at Syracuse University in 1995. He worked at Yale University for nine years before joining Biola. He is author of several books, including Our Deepest Desires: How the Christian Story Fulfills Human Aspirations (IVP, 2017)
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Transcript
Introduction to Pep Talk Podcast
00:00:08
Speaker
Hello and welcome to another exciting edition of Pep Talk, the persuasive evangelism podcast. I'm Andy Bannister and I'm joined as ever by my co-host, Christy Mayer. Christy, how are you doing today? Hey, Andy, doing very well indeed. Thank you. Greetings from London as ever.
00:00:24
Speaker
I was just asked, where are you down in London? And it's a lovely evening up here in Scotland.
Introduction of Guest: Greg Gansall
00:00:28
Speaker
But the temperature in London and Scotland is nothing I can imagine compared to the temperature where our guest comes to us today from, because coming to us all the way from California, we have Greg Gansall. Greg, welcome to the show. Thank you very much. It's great to be here.
00:00:42
Speaker
I won't ask you what the temperature is in California because all of our British listeners of whom there are many will hang up and discussed. But great to have you with us. You're a professor out there at Biola University, well known as an author and a communicator and a thinker on the Christian
Gospel and Deepest Desires
00:00:59
Speaker
faith.
00:00:59
Speaker
And I guess the question I'd like to sort of throw your way to get us started with, I think one of the things I've loved about some of your recent work, a big idea for you has been this idea of how the gospel, how the message of Jesus really connects to our people's deepest desires. I think sometimes as Christians we can feel that we've almost got to sort of wrestle people into a position where we can perhaps bang them over the head in arguments and then drag them through the front door of the church.
00:01:25
Speaker
But I love the approach that you've been taking showing that actually there's a really interesting conversation to be had showing people that the gospel makes sense of so many things they're already drawn to. Do you want to talk a bit about that?
Christianity's Relevance Today
00:01:37
Speaker
Yes, the idea struck me that many people in our secular culture have the notion that Christianity is false and it's a really good thing it's false. And I decided I was going to spend some time going after the second part.
00:01:54
Speaker
You know, apologists have been very good at defending the truth of Christianity, but it turns out that a lot of people don't care that much that it's true because they don't see it connecting to things that matter. The big objection, I think, to the gospel is that Jesus is completely irrelevant to anything I care about.
00:02:15
Speaker
But if we think about the Christian story, we see that's actually not true.
Universal Longings in Conversations
00:02:19
Speaker
So it's up to us to illuminate the Christian story for people so they can see that it connects to the things that matter most to them.
00:02:27
Speaker
This is wonderful. And this is something that you go into some detail in your latest book, don't you, Our Deepest Desires. How do we actually go about exposing these kind of universal longings when we're in a conversations with our friends? Because I think it's one of those things which I think, oh, yes, this is amazing. We all have these things, but it feels like quite an abstract thing to try and bring into the conversation or even expose. How might we go about that?
Beyond Superficial Conversations
00:02:57
Speaker
Well, I think what we want to do in a conversation is peel back the layers of the superficial. We begin conversations with people talking about superficial things. And of course, that's perfectly appropriate. But we want to peel back the layers. And some of the ways we can do that is to talk about our own desires, right?
00:03:20
Speaker
frame certain discussions around, you know, I'm trying to be a good parent. What does it mean to love my kids well or to love my spouse well? And this connects to what does it mean to be human? So I think by probing in that direction and doing it more confessionally first, we can move to a different level than the superficial.
00:03:48
Speaker
I think one of the things that struck me as I read that book, Greg, is I mean, I'm a kind of hiker and mountaineer as a hobby. And, you know, I've had numerous conversations with people over the years, particularly around, you know, one of the topics you talk about in that book is the idea of beauty.
Christian Faith and Beauty
00:04:04
Speaker
But actually,
00:04:05
Speaker
that actually the Christian worldview, the Christian faith makes more sense of that. And I found fascinating how many times I've said on mountaintops and people have gone, wow, what an amazing view, it's incredibly beautiful. And you sort of turned them, started the conversation around that. But help us think that one through, how is it precisely the Christian faith makes perhaps, you know, more sense of beauty? I mean, can't an atheist simply come along and go, well, yeah, you know, beauty is just sort of an evolved response to nature. How is it passed on that example of beauty that the Christian faith offers is much, much more than that?
00:04:35
Speaker
Well, beauty is a great way to get into this kind of conversation because it can be with your hiking and mountain climbing or as simple as music. Why does music move us so much? I think that what the Christian story brings to beauty is a sense that God is an artist.
00:04:52
Speaker
God's creativity in creation is artistic. We often think of God's creation only in the context of disputing about origins. But that is kind of a trivial discussion compared to the fact that God created for a reason and he creates with extravagant generosity. That's why there are so many billions of galaxies.
00:05:19
Speaker
And he is an artist. It's beautiful. He's not simply an engineer, but he's an artist. And the second thing is that God made us to be artists. Our artistic impulse is grounded in the fact that we're made in the image of God.
00:05:36
Speaker
So, in short, we don't have this artistic impulse to try to carve out meaning from a meaningless universe, but it's part of the meaning of being human that's been given to us.
Pascal's Idea of Desirability Before Truth
00:05:51
Speaker
Hmm. This really reminds me of Blaise Pascal, you know, when he says to present the gospel in such a way that good people wish that it were true and then show that it is.
00:06:01
Speaker
Exactly, exactly. Pascal was on to this a long time ago. I think since Pascal, we Christians have been fighting, so to speak, for the truth of the gospel, and we've allowed the goodness and beauty of the gospel to take a back seat, but the time is ripe for us to
00:06:26
Speaker
highlight those aspects. Because that's something else, isn't it, that you talk about is the longing, the human longing for freedom and how it is that this connects. And that's just, that's a topic which is, we just see this every day in society, don't we? These kind of questions of authority, power, the interplay between the two and then freedom, autonomy.
00:06:52
Speaker
How would we actually go about connecting the gospel to, I mean, sorry, these longings to the gospel?
Christian Story: Freedom and Purpose
00:07:00
Speaker
I mean, how do they find their fulfillment? Well, if we are in a conversation about freedom, we can say that the Christian story is a story of freedom, right? God made us for a purpose, and we are free when we live into that purpose.
00:07:16
Speaker
And the purposes for which God made us are the very things we want. We want to be a certain kind of person. We want to be virtuous. We want to be generous. You could take the pause list and the fruit of the Spirit and pull it out of the Bible and ask anybody,
00:07:37
Speaker
do you want to life characterize this way? Everybody's going to say yes. And so it's a very small connection to connect the dots between the life that Jesus calls us to and the freedom that everybody recognizes as a human being. So would that be kind of saying, here's the good life, here's the good life that you instinctively want, and here it is? Exactly. And then the Christian story explains
00:08:05
Speaker
where it comes from, why it's hard. And that's when we get into sin and our rebellion against God. But it has held forth as a vision of life. We see this in John's gospel. Here's another way we can talk about this. Christians normally think of the Christian story in terms of forgiveness, which of course is a central theme. But in John's gospel, the English word forgiveness is only found in one verse.
00:08:34
Speaker
30 times the word life is used to talk about who Jesus is and what he brings. And if we can say, you know, in the New Testament itself, the big word to describe the Christian story is life. And of course, everybody responds to a full and sane and whole life.
00:08:59
Speaker
I think what I love about this whole approach, Greg, I mean, particularly, you know, weaving back in that Blaise Pascal idea that you and Christie were just talking about there is I think when I kind of started out in evangelism, I kind of thought that my job was, you know, sort of bang somebody over the head with an argument, sort of almost, you know, sort of force them intellectually into realizing that the gospel was true and it never worked.
00:09:25
Speaker
And then I've now had the privilege of, you know, teaching evangelism. So many people are not wired intellectually. And I think what I like about the approach that you're outlining here is actually takes a lot of the pressure off, because people are already drawn to these things, right? People, as you say, are already drawn to the idea of life and to see into those other kind of things. And you have much more sort of connecting the dots of people and saying, you know, it's absolutely right. Those things you've seen are wonderful.
00:09:46
Speaker
And look, here's a suggestion that maybe the Christian faith makes more sense than it's almost a lower pressure approach, right?
Relational Discussions on Human Desires
00:09:52
Speaker
Exactly. And not only is that lower or maybe it's it is lower pressure because you were not entering a conflict of worldviews here. We're not saying, look, what you believe is false, what I believe is true. And that that can tend to put people in an adversarial relation.
00:10:12
Speaker
But we're coming alongside people because we're all human beings and we long for goodness and beauty and freedom and truth. And so we can say, let's think about these things together. So it's a much more relational kind of discussion that we can have.
00:10:31
Speaker
I also think there's a degree too to which the approach you're outlining here connects with your earlier book.
Fittingness Argument for Christianity
00:10:38
Speaker
And we were chatting before we started recording the show and I was sort of saying to you that I think, you know, your earlier book was really quite a big influence on me, a reasonable guard.
00:10:46
Speaker
in which you talk about the idea of the kind of sort of fitting this argument, I think you call it, which is in similar kind of territory, right? Of going, look at all these different pieces of evidence and all of these different pieces of the jigsaw in a sense, which worldview, which beliefs best explains them, where do they best fit? And then showing that perhaps Christianity is where they fit far better than atheism or Islam or whatever the other worldviews are out there. So I love the way these two ideas that you've been working with through your writing career kind of fit together so well.
00:11:15
Speaker
Yeah, I think that's right. The fittingness argument is called an inference to the best explanation. The reason it's fruitful to emphasize this, I believe, is that when we learn philosophy, we frame arguments as deductive arguments. That can be really helpful to analyze the structure of our thought.
00:11:42
Speaker
The real evidential case for any position, whether it's a historical theory or a broad scientific theory, the real case is evidential, not deductive.
00:11:54
Speaker
And the fittingness argument kind of is a way to capture this. I often use the illustration of a detective at a crime scene, right? The detective picks up a whole bunch of bits of information and some of it becomes evidence. And then the detective tries to figure out what is the story that explains all this evidence. And it might be the fingerprint, the eyewitness, there might be a threat.
00:12:22
Speaker
And you have all of these things and then you get this story that says, well, the best explanation is that Bob did the crime and Bob gets arrested and then your detective show is over. And so that's really how we think about these things more than individual deductive arguments.
00:12:43
Speaker
I was just thinking about that in such a good example of we find ourselves thrown into this universe, how do we best explain who we are, why we're here, purpose kind of things. But I was just thinking that, I've been reading a lot recently that today we're living in this post-truth society, people are really apathetic, arguably towards truth claims and appeals to kind of like the ultimate
00:13:09
Speaker
goals of things. How would we help those who would say, well, you know, yeah, I see the clues, but I don't really need to piece them together. I can just, you know, I could just leave them there. It's fine. My life is working for me. We don't need to talk about this journey towards the object of these ultimate longings. I'm fine as I am. How would you help provoke them?
00:13:36
Speaker
What we're doing in these conversations is we're saying every human being has a project. We're all trying to make sense out of our lives. We're trying to make sense out of the world. If someone is saying, look, I'm perfectly content with my life,
00:13:58
Speaker
It's not our role or job to say, no, you're not, or you shouldn't be content with your life. I think that's a point of conversation. You could say, well, tell me about that, right? How does your view help you think about your life of meaning? Or how does it give you hope for the future? And some of these points, I think the contrast between the Christian story and some kind of secular story
00:14:28
Speaker
will come out pretty well. For example, I think hope is a virtue whose time has come. We live in a situation, we have generations of people that are paralyzed with hopelessness. And so someone might be content with her life, but she might have made peace with a degree of hopelessness,
00:14:49
Speaker
We can pursue that conversation simply by asking, well, that's great. Tell me about what your grounds of hope for the future are. And I might elicit this sense that, well, I'm content, but I really don't have hope.
00:15:07
Speaker
One of the things I like about that approach, Greg, we've talked about this quite a few times on this podcast over the last few weeks, is that I think there's a real need for Christians to learn how to have good conversations about faith. Sometimes, particularly for those of us who are perhaps more drawn to apologetics and to argument, we get into a mode where we see non-Christian friends, their job is to sit there and say nothing, and our job is to download arguments onto them.
00:15:31
Speaker
But your approach, what I like is it leads more naturally to conversation. You know, so I mean, as you say, everyone's looking for hope.
Hope as a Conversation Starter
00:15:36
Speaker
And what a great conversation starter to somebody say, Hey, you know, we live in difficult times, politics, and challenges in the environment and so forth. Hey, where do you find hope? And then we can listen to our frame, we're going to be threatened. Because we know that the Christian worldview is a much more secure foundation. And then there's much more chance they'll turn to us, right? And say, Well, yeah, hope is difficult. Where do you find hope? And then you're away, right?
00:15:57
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, if I could leave your listeners with a slogan, it would be any conversation that continues is a successful conversation. I love that. And that's the goal.
00:16:11
Speaker
So obviously you've done as well as writing and so forth, you've done a lot of ministry, Greg, you've spent a lot of your time on university campuses before you were at Biola, you were out there at Yale. Have you found just practically, you know, we've talked a little about the ideas and the framework over the last kind of sort of 16 and a half minutes or so,
00:16:29
Speaker
How have you found some of this actually plays out in conversations on the ground? Perhaps particularly with university students and that age group who some people might say, oh gosh, they're so post-Christian, they're unreachable. I don't think that's true. I don't think you think that's true. How's some of this played out when you've actually gone out there as it were and put this to work on the ground?
00:16:47
Speaker
Well, I think it plays out very well. I mean, the university campus is a great place for ministry. You want to build relationships. I was an adjunct teacher at the philosophy department at Yale for about nine years. And I found a lot of these themes could come up in my classes. So I would write on the board the sentence, what kind of person should I be?
00:17:11
Speaker
And explain to the students, this is the most important philosophical question. It connects with metaphysics, ethics, political philosophy, because I wanted my students to lie awake at night and worry about that question.
00:17:24
Speaker
And actually, they did. It was helpful to see the students really beginning to wrestle with virtue and how do I become a virtuous person. And in these conversations, now this is in the classroom, so I'm not able to be as explicitly Christian as I can be in other contexts, although you can be fairly explicit in certain contexts.
00:17:52
Speaker
Students were attracted to virtue. When we began to talk about how do we become generous, they respond. And it's part of this vision of holding forth a Christian view as a compelling vision of life.
00:18:13
Speaker
This is so helpful to hear because it's one of the things that we just see every day, don't we? What does it mean to be a good person, virtue formation? We all have that deep hunger within each of us to want to be the best self that we can possibly be in the world. We keep coming up against that adage. How would you... I mean, going back to what you were saying earlier on about a good conversation, the success of it is based on if we continue that conversation.
00:18:41
Speaker
What is it like to continue that conversation in terms of the virtue formation with our friends, for example? So if one of my friends, she'd call herself, well, she is a vegan. And one of the things I'm thinking through is how do I best connect her desire for a life that's based on compassion and kindness
Affirming Desires and Values
00:19:03
Speaker
to Christ when the two seem completely incompatible. How do I best continue the conversation with her along these virtue formation lines that you've just suggested that you're experiencing with your students? Well, I think the first thing is we have a posture of affirmation.
00:19:20
Speaker
Any attempt that a person has, anytime they're thinking, boy, what should I be? What should I do? We want to affirm that. We don't want to criticize the content of their understanding of virtue. We don't put that under a microscope and dissect it because we're more interested in the journey they're on.
00:19:45
Speaker
So we affirm a person's desire to choose and live wisely and choose and live well. And then we come alongside and continue this conversation. So you might ask, okay, so compassion is very important to you. I agree with that. Where does compassion fit in your view of the universe?
00:20:06
Speaker
And if you've got a naturalistic person, it's going to be, it's not that there's no room for compassion in that view, but it's going to be much more of a shallow thing in the universe.
00:20:18
Speaker
Whereas in a Christian story, of course, compassion is very deep because the fundamental reality of the universe, God himself, is compassionate. So we can help capture a person's values through affirming them and then eliciting how they think in terms of their worldview and then hold forth that the gospel is a richer vision of the very life that they want.
00:20:47
Speaker
I think that's a great place to end. Greg, this has been an absolutely fascinating conversation. Thank you so much for taking the time with us today. Thank you, Andy. Thank you, Kristy. Thank you so much. And hugely encouraged listeners to just put some of these ideas into practice, talk to your friends, listen, find out what their deepest eyes are. And then as Greg has shared, find ways to show people how that just really
00:21:06
Speaker
beautifully connects to the gospel and see how those conversations go. Well, thank you for spending 20 minutes with us and Christy and I will be with you and another guest on the next episode of Hep Talk. We look forward to you joining us then.
Podcast Production and Support
00:21:23
Speaker
Hello everybody, I just wanted to take a moment to let you know if you weren't aware that the PepTalk podcast is produced by the Solas Center for Public Christianity. As an organization, we're committed both to sharing the gospel outside the four walls of the church, but also teaching and training and equipping Christians for evangelism with great resources like this podcast. You can join with us and help us do more of this hugely important work by supporting Solas.
00:21:51
Speaker
just visit the Solas website at solas-cpc.org, click on the donate button, and you can become a monthly donor for as little as three pound a month. And as a thank you for your support. We will send you a copy of my book, The Atheist Didn't Exist, or you can choose a copy of Christy Mayer's book, More Truth, and you can get behind the work that we do, both in terms of training and evangelism. Hope you enjoyed the show, and look forward to seeing you next time.