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Ep. 15 - The Gospel According to Sam: A Damnation Story w/ Pastor Mike Ruel
80 Plays4 years ago
Hey! Yeah, you. Do you know where you're going to spend eternity? If you should die before you wake, did you pray the lord your soul to take, or did you fall asleep watching The Office for the 7th time through because you can't commit to watching a new show even though people won't stop asking if you've seen "The Vanishing at the Cecil Hotel," and now you're just avoiding it out of spite? I feel ya, pal...
This week, we're joined by Mike Ruel, who is the pastor of a Highlands Bible Church in New Jersey, and a frequent listener to the show. Mike reached out to us after hearing several episodes, and expressed a mutual distaste with mainstream evangelical culture. Mike wasn't always a pastor. In his 20's, he strayed from the faith, and focused his attention on more "worldly pursuits." He eventually made his way back to Christianity after living through 9/11 in New York City. We spent some time discussing the pursuit of meaning, the nature of faith, and the what is wrong with the church in America.
Look, I'd be lying if I told you that we found much common ground. In fact, we arrived at a philosophical or spiritual impasse on more than one issue. It was a good conversation, though, and we appreciated Pastor Mike's willingness to discuss sensitive topics, and the patience he showed us throughout the episode. I think all of us would describe each other as good guys that are wrong about almost everything hahaha! If you would like to continue this discussion with Mike, you can reach him by email (michael_ruel@yahoo.com) or through his website: www.MikeRuel.com.
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Transcript
Introduction and Identity
00:00:00
Speaker
If I was just a guy saying these things, am I a Christian? Yeah, gosh, that's like a heavy question. I've always wanted to ask somebody that. It doesn't seem you are. It doesn't seem you are as the Bible would define a Christian.
Podcast Theme and Guest Introduction
00:00:37
Speaker
Hello and welcome to Growing Up Christian. I'm Casey. And I'm Sam. And we're happy to talk to you today. We got an interesting episode for you. I think some of you are probably going to have a hard time with this one.
00:01:00
Speaker
And some of you might just be like, I'm out like the 15 minute. We'll just have to see. I think that's the beauty of podcasts is like, there's no podcast. There's, there's a couple, there's almost no podcast that I listen to like every episode of.
00:01:18
Speaker
You know, yeah, I kind of tune in for the ones that I'm interested in. And then, you know, some especially like the Jerry, there's some of his guests that I'll start in on it. And I'm like, I don't care about this. I'll just quit. Yeah, it's definitely going to be. I thought the conversation was a lot of fun, just because that's the kind of stuff that's up my just up my alley, I guess.
00:01:45
Speaker
But you might as well just do the breakdown of it now. We talked to Pastor Mike, Pastor Mike Rule. So he's an evangelical pastor and he's a great guy. He's been messaging with us kind of since we started the podcast. I've emailed back and forth with him a little bit. He's listened to every episode. He's kind of along for this ride and I think he's just interested in
00:02:08
Speaker
what people are going through and where they're at, especially because his experience was different, kind of coming full circle back to being an evangelical pastor.
Leaving and Revisiting Faith
00:02:20
Speaker
So we get into a kind of a lengthy conversation, I would say, about just evangelicalism. I turn to do a little bit more of a back and forth than I think maybe we've been originally expecting. And it's weird because we haven't like
00:02:39
Speaker
Almost.
00:02:41
Speaker
It's not like we go out of our way to have these arguments and conversations with people. We know why we stopped believing in these certain things. But you just fizzle out of those spaces, or if it was you grew up in your parents' church or whatever, and then you move on, and then that's when you start falling out. You don't have to really have those conversations with people. Maybe they come up with your parents, but it seems like most people's experience is
00:03:10
Speaker
it just doesn't get talked about. And if it does, they're not having like a thoughtful debate about the merits of their beliefs. So I know that's not something I would get into with my family. So like to have someone to have that argument with, that kind of represents the belief system that I shed. But
00:03:31
Speaker
but isn't someone who's part of my immediate family or an old pastor or something like that. It's like makes it a lot easier to have that conversation. So it was fun for me. I found it entertaining, but it makes it a lot easier for you to be a douche to him. Is that what you're saying? I think I did all right. Well, he didn't seem too bothered by my approach.
00:03:59
Speaker
Pastor Mike was very gracious, I think, because I feel like we were abrasive at certain points. I think if you came from this environment like we did, there's certain things that
00:04:16
Speaker
trigger a response regardless of where you hear them. You turn on the news, there's an evangelist on there that's talking about a given subject, certain keywords and stuff make your hair stand on
Criticism and Openness in Faith
00:04:28
Speaker
end. I think that if you're aware of that and you realize that you do that,
00:04:37
Speaker
this conversation was probably about as good as it gets in most cases when it comes to two parties that fundamentally disagree on pretty much everything. Like I said, Mike was really gracious and took the time to flush out some of his ideas about things and where he sees some of the issues with modern Christian culture.
00:05:07
Speaker
I think if a reasonable, polite conversation can be had about these things, I think this is it. So hats off to him. We really appreciated him coming on and discussing some of this stuff. So we'll see. Let us know what you think, OK? Because we do occasionally get requests from people who are
00:05:36
Speaker
more of that traditional viewpoint and worldview and religious leaning that want to come on and talk to us about their view of some of the things that we discuss all the time on the show. And we're still trying to figure out where
00:05:54
Speaker
You know, what's the best way to handle some of those things? Because, I mean, I like the idea of being able to hear both sides of the aisle on certain issues and just, you know, a conversation. Right, I like being able to, even having this, you know, I know a lot of people in my life who are not listening to this, simply because they don't care what I have to say about these things, and that's fine. But these are the types of things where it's like,
00:06:22
Speaker
I feel good about being able to put something like this out and say, like, it's kind of something for people to be able to listen to that aren't going to actually tune in to a podcast like this. Like, if you're still part of the evangelical culture, you're just not really outside of Mike, who is actually taken to the show. Like, most people aren't really just going to look for podcasts. It's about people who
00:06:51
Speaker
fundamentally disagree with everything they believe in and find it entertaining, like the jokes or viewpoint. It's not really for those people. So but I think this episode is good enough to like be able to it kind of bridges that gap where I would be like, if anyone who I haven't had these conversations with is concerned or interested in knowing where we're coming from or what people in our situation in our shoes are coming from, this is about as good as it's going to get for kind of like a way to peer into that conversation.
00:07:21
Speaker
So I think that felt, I think it just kind of felt a little therapeutic for me to be able to have that conversation knowing that I think we did in a way that I'm, I'd be more than happy for people who are like, don't want to have that conversation with me, but are interested in what I think and where I'm coming from. Mostly just at a pure curiosity, it'd be like, just listen to this.
00:07:47
Speaker
Yeah. Pastor Mike wanted to make his email address and stuff available. If there's any of you that want to continue this discussion with him, he's more than happy to talk to you about him. We would ask that you just be respectful.
00:08:05
Speaker
I know as this goes on, we're gonna have guests on once in a while, and Mike is not one of these people, but we're gonna have guests on once in a while that say controversial things or that have controversial opinions about stuff.
00:08:20
Speaker
Just, you know, let's, let's just try our best to, to keep these conversations respectful and, and at a high level. Yeah. So no hate mail. Yes, please. Uh, we'll put, we'll put pastor Mike's, uh, email address in the show notes. And so you can contact him, let him know how you feel. If you, if you want to continue the discussion, I'm sure he's more than happy to do that with you. So, um,
00:08:49
Speaker
In other news, we talked a lot on the Discord this week and just in text message streams about a similar conversation that's been going on regarding someone who's not quite as gracious and well-spoken as Pastor Mike. Really disappointed, but John Cooper from Skillet seems like a tool.
00:09:15
Speaker
Yeah, God, I really hope this makes its way to him. I don't know. At him, I guess. Maybe not. I would do anything to talk to him. Absolutely anything at this point to have a conversation with him because I think the stuff that he's saying is wild for one, but it's the most preached to the choir kind of
00:09:43
Speaker
nonsense like it to the alien youth yeah like what what was it a couple years ago i remember he put out his whole um like what in god's name is going on with christianity or something like that it was like this long blog piece maybe he did it on like instagram or facebook but i remember getting shared around a good bit and like wow this is really great and he's basically just calling out anyone who's uh
Morality and Faith: Are They Interlinked?
00:10:12
Speaker
progressed in their faith or lost it. And he seems to take issue with people changing their mind about things. And he finds Christianity in his evangelical message so clear cut and obviously true that he comes off as arrogant and dismissive of anybody else's personal experience.
00:10:31
Speaker
Yeah, I would say I would say that's accurate and that so that's what I uh, the first thing that I watched with him it was a podcast and It was in regards to that original post. I think it was like a year after the fact or something, but he did a podcast with Lady who is I think she was in Zoe girl. Yeah It's uh
00:10:59
Speaker
Child, children, someone, children, Alyssa Childers. OK, yeah, it seems like an isolated. But the echo chamber effect in that interview is so ridiculous, just like making statements that are so ridiculous that would never stand up if you were in an audience that wasn't just full of, you know. You're just completely like minded people trying to protect their their worldview. Yeah.
00:11:29
Speaker
And, uh, there was a lot of, um, you know, bashing people who have quote unquote, deconverted, or like you said, like change their stance on some of the aspects of the faith and everything. And there was a lot of really interesting things in the interview that made your, you know, like I said, got your hackles up. But one of them that was funny was, uh, just Alyssa was saying that.
00:11:55
Speaker
You know, in these posts when people, you know, come out as no longer believing in God or being an atheist or whatever. So they always end it the same way. It's always like, be kind, forgive your enemies, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. You know, this like, send off, you know, touchy feely send off. And she's like,
00:12:16
Speaker
The crazy thing is that those are all values that they've adopted from Christianity. They don't even have a basis to say those things anymore.
00:12:26
Speaker
Like you don't have a basis to say be kind, like to forgive the people in your life. It's just so ridiculous to say those things. And, you know, when you're in that type of an environment, everybody around you is just going, yeah, I know. I mean, that's crazy. Yeah, because we're like we were convinced that the only basis for any form of like moral epistemology is like that you is Christian faith, like
00:12:56
Speaker
that that's all the types of all that type of moral being comes exclusively from it and without it that you lose any grounding or basis and I find that fascinating one because you know there are other faiths that are older than Christianity that have that have messages like that I mean Judaism being like every one of them yeah like literally every one of them so yeah it's really dismissive but that's that bubble of like
00:13:24
Speaker
maybe they've been convinced or not only want to say convinced, but they just so strongly believe that outside of Christianity, you just lose any moral grounding. And I don't understand. I mean, I do understand that to be true. Yeah, I understand it a little bit. Because I remember thinking like that was like the end all be all of like,
00:13:47
Speaker
of belief like oh you can't if you don't have if you're if you don't believe in god and your baseline is like who knows nothing it's like i think nothing matters like uh if you can't confidently state the origins of the universe then you'd
00:14:06
Speaker
have no real moral high ground that you could just go around raping and killing and it doesn't matter. And obviously we heard that argument countless times. A lot. And it's just like, you know what a good reason is to think that you can find your message or your ethos from something other than the Christian faith is that
00:14:28
Speaker
just people who don't have it don't do those things and also the people who do have it also do those things too sometimes and there's a lot of rape and murder and pillaging and just so much violence done in the name of religion that it's like not really a I don't know sound for like two or three things yeah a couple times
00:14:56
Speaker
And I don't think that's a good reason to just like carte blanche, I guess dismiss it completely too.
Cultural Critiques and Faith Perspectives
00:15:01
Speaker
I'm just saying like, no, it's something to consider and think about that. Like when you look at humanity as a whole, you don't see a huge difference, generally speaking, in whether or not people are doing awful things or not based on whether or not they have God. Right. Well,
00:15:24
Speaker
Yeah, it was a very irritating interview. I haven't finished it yet. I will. I'm committed at this point. But you may be mad because like I told you, I have a like butt rock and new metal. I have an attraction to it, like an affinity for it that I can't get rid of. It's like a kink. I don't kinkshame you.
00:15:49
Speaker
And, you know, Skillet's definitely in that mix of their older stuff. I don't know their newer stuff very well, but dude, I listened to like Invincible and Alien Youth and Collide until they almost like melted in the CD player back in the day. I don't know anything about Skillet. I would hear Skillet maybe on like a youth group trip or something like that, but I never took to that kind of music. That one missed me pretty hard. Oh, man. I was in it.
00:16:19
Speaker
So what would be fun about talking to John Cooper is it's not even as a fan. I barely even knew what he looked like. It would just be a conversation with another person as far as I was concerned. As affiliation with a wildly successful band means very little to me based on my personal experience with it.
00:16:42
Speaker
Dude, after listening to that, it was like I couldn't get away from Skillet this week. If you don't know me, I work in car dealerships all week long. I'm in car dealerships and repair shops and stuff, like back where the mechanics are and everything. And Skillet is just a staple on every one of those stations. It's butt rock, right? Yeah. It's like every station that has that intro that's like,
00:17:11
Speaker
60 minutes of commercial free, nothing but rock. That's skill it's bread and butter. They're playing like 2001 Disturbed and Lincoln Park and then whatever skill it's put out in the last two months, you know? But we were cooking, we cooked like steaks for one of our customers this week on Friday and like 45 steaks. So I,
00:17:39
Speaker
Definitely, like, contributed to some hackney, for sure. And global warming, thanks, asshole. It's raining. This is the time of year in Kansas where we get...
00:17:54
Speaker
We get a year's worth of rain in three weeks. Oh, really? It happens every year. Yeah. Like it'll barely rain all year long. And then in a course of like one month or a month and a half, we'll flood out like crazy. This week was like the start of it. So my partner and I are heading up there in this big box truck and we got a big grill. The grill's like,
00:18:17
Speaker
you know, six foot of cooking space and stuff. And it's just pouring rain the whole time. And we're like, God, what are we gonna do in this rain? So we get up there and the guy's like, well, you know, if you want to, you can just grill them in the shop. Like you don't mind if we cook inside? No, no, no, just, you know, open the door and grill them inside. So we set this grill up and it's, you know, it's used, it gets used a lot.
00:18:44
Speaker
And so they started up and it starts like smoking, right? So we push it outside and we're cooking these baked potatoes, you know, kind of because they take a long time. It stops smoking so we push it back in. Well, they start putting the steaks on the grill and I go out to the truck for a minute. And when I come back in, the whole shop is full of smoke.
00:19:06
Speaker
Like they had like literal open flame on the grill and they had to like spray it down with a water hose because there was so much like grease and stuff down there. I would never clean out my grill. I deal with that every year at the beginning of the year. It's like oh my God. It's the worst. It's so gross.
00:19:25
Speaker
But yeah, like we cooked there for like three hours and one of the technicians that was close to us, skillet the entire time. What? It was like some sort of skillet anthology playlist, like one of those, the ones they used to sell on TV, like, you know, four cassettes of Lynyrd Skynyrd. Only three payments at $29.95. Yeah, dude, I forgot about those.
00:19:51
Speaker
Yeah, so I can't get away from the guy. We would like to talk to, if you as an audience would like to just harass that prick until he agrees to come on the show and duke it out, that'd be the coolest. Just, oh my God, it would be so cool. Dude, it's funny because I, you know, so Alyssa Childers, she recently made some waves too. I don't know if it was, I think it was an interview she did with somebody else, but she just talked about,
00:20:21
Speaker
all the problems of liberal Christianity, which I'm like, and honestly, she was fun. Sounds fun. Yeah, but what's funny, though, is, you know, I, I heard her breakdown of it in a shorter clip on on another podcast and and
00:20:42
Speaker
she was kind of fair. Like, I'm hearing her explanation of liberal Christianity and she's saying it as though, I mean, with a tone of, and it like, then this is a huge problem. Like this makes it like worthless kind of tone, but I'm hearing her description of it. I'm just like, yeah, no, that's exact. I mean, that's pretty spot on. I think there was some like a couple of pot shots thrown in here there, but listening to her explanation of why how liberal Christians maybe look at the Bible or, um,
00:21:11
Speaker
how they develop their beliefs and theologies. I was just like, I mean, that's, that is it. So if you can say all that, and then think that there's a problem with it, like I, then at least you're not at least it wasn't a misrepresentation, you know, she actually under seems to understand where these people are coming from on a academic level. And she just can't buy into it. But I was like, that's fine. I
00:21:38
Speaker
That is less annoying to me than someone who's like deliberately misrepresenting what's going on in the people who have drifted in that direction. You know what I mean? Sure. Well, there's problems with everything. You know, if you fairly represent the problems and talk about them, then, you know, by all means. Right. I had a conversation like this this week with one of my co-workers
00:22:05
Speaker
He's in seminary, so we get to talking about this kind of stuff all the time. We talked a lot about the Bible as being inerrant because that was such a cornerstone belief in my church and stuff. It's something we're going to have to elaborate on further in an episode or whatever.
00:22:27
Speaker
we're discussing all of the issues with the Bible being in Aaron and being interpreted literally. And I was just kind of asking him like, why does it need to be in Aaron? Like would that affect the principles that you pull from it? Would it change your faith if you like came under the belief that maybe the Bible while it is God's word,
00:22:56
Speaker
Maybe it hasn't been interpreted completely perfectly over the years. Maybe some things aren't to be taken literally. They're just, you know, all the same things. Guy living in a fish and all that. Right. And the answer just kept, I mean, that he kept throwing out was basically like, you know, everybody needs a foundational belief. Like everybody needs like a cornerstone of truth in their life. If they're gonna,
00:23:25
Speaker
I don't even know. I mean, I guess just an anchor point. Right. You know, and and we kind of went round and round. I don't think either one of us really saw what the other person was trying to say. But yeah, it is funny how those are just like constant talking points, constantly debated things, because there's real problems with.
00:23:48
Speaker
interpreting the Bible literally. There's real problems with saying, like, this is the inerrant word of God and everything and it is true. Like, there's some really problematic stuff in there by today's standards. Yeah. And that's hard to write off as, well, it was a different time, you know, kids got married when they were 12. It's hard to do that when you're talking about a God that's supposed to never change, that's supposed to be perfect. Right.
00:24:16
Speaker
Yeah, I think that's, I mean, we get into some of that stuff with Mike coming up, so I think that is kind of a, yeah, the problem with some of the things in the Bible, it's always those things that kind of are what trigger it for people, I think, is just like trying to reconcile how it could be, when we're told that it's inerrant and perfect.
00:24:43
Speaker
And then you read through the problematic aspects of it and you're told like, well, you know, that was, that was for a certain time and place. It's like, yeah, but that doesn't like, I've, I was always told morality doesn't change. Like it's not like it was okay then and bad now. Like it hasn't been that long. The time span hasn't been that long, which I think is honestly a pretty good argument for, I don't know. I guess it's, we should get into this a different time because it's kind of close out here and jump into her.
00:25:12
Speaker
conversation with Mike, but when you look at people who say, if you don't believe in a God, then you don't
00:25:24
Speaker
then you're just kind of making it up as you go. You don't have any baseline, but it's like if you believe in what you're reading in the Bible, too, you still kind of do have the requirement is still the same. We're still required to to dig through what's in this book and figure out what sticks and what doesn't for today. And that's that's the exact same thing. We're just you know someone like me would just be trying to
00:25:49
Speaker
work through that by reading this literature and seeing the themes of what people wrestled with in their understanding of God over a lengthy period of time. But if you don't have that grounding and your conversation isn't based around that book, and those
00:26:11
Speaker
writings, then you're just moving the conversation to different things. Maybe you get into some of your philosophers and maybe you're gravitated towards certain poets. But humans, the requirement is the same for all of us, which is like,
00:26:28
Speaker
figuring out what that looks like. If God doesn't exist, and we're still saying 2,000 years ago, having slaves and treating women like property was wrong, even though nobody thought so at that time, except for maybe women and slaves. They might have been like, this is not great. This sucks. But everyone's just, yeah, this is the way it is. It took society and
00:26:56
Speaker
progressing, it took social evolution, it took a lot. And God or not, like the responsibility and the requirements have been the same on every individual since the beginning of time, which is to work out what the fuck it means to be like a person in this world and how to make it better. And they're always people are pushing back against that I can still use a Christian narrative and grounding my conversations around a biblical narrative. And
00:27:23
Speaker
to work towards that. And I prefer that, but it's like the responsibility on all of us is still to do that, to figure out how to have these conversations as a whole, as a community, as a country, and figure out where to go. And I don't know, I don't really know how to break that down anymore, other than I think saying that God and the Bible to get to that is just a
00:27:49
Speaker
a poor suggestion given what you have to sift through and work through in order to come to certain conclusions. Well, this is definitely something that we need to talk more in depth about in an episode coming up. But yeah, before we send you off here,
00:28:08
Speaker
Again, if you haven't joined the Discord, jump on there. It's getting to be a lot of fun. We got quite a few people in there now. I wanted to give a couple of shout outs from the Discord. So last week we mentioned our buddy Motar. His wife released a book called The Last Apothecary.
00:28:29
Speaker
As of a couple of days ago, it was number seven on New York Times bestseller list. So congratulations to her and definitely check that out on Amazon and everywhere else that you find books. Also, our friend Sarah started an Instagram page called Deconstructing Purity Culture.
00:28:50
Speaker
And it's a good follow. She's talking a lot about some of the common tropes of purity culture, things that a lot of us went through, but specifically if you're a woman, I think that this stuff will resonate with you and she's got some great perspectives on it. So follow her on Instagram at DeconstructingPurityCulture.
00:29:13
Speaker
So yeah, other than that, we got some great guests coming up. We're sitting on like several episodes that we've recorded now and we've kind of, you know, journalists, prominent, you know, speakers about Christianity, atheism, religion in general, some, you know, personal friends that have interesting stories. We got some cool stuff coming up that I think you're gonna like, something a little bit for everybody.
00:29:43
Speaker
So yeah, thanks for listening. If you could leave us a review on iTunes or wherever you listen to podcasts, that'd be great. And share with your friends. If you got somebody that you think would benefit from listening to this, we would greatly appreciate the
Pastor Mike's Faith Journey
00:30:00
Speaker
share. Thanks to everybody who's messaged us too on Instagram and wherever's telling us some of the things that have gone on in their lives and stuff.
00:30:10
Speaker
All that being said, man, enjoy our conversation with Pastor Mike. All right, we're back with Pastor Mike Ruhl, pastor of a church in Northern New Jersey, working on his doctorate. And, uh, also has pretty great beard, beard envy.
00:30:32
Speaker
We were talking about how you can't actually pastor a mega church anymore if you don't have a beard, and that's why I had to leave the ministry. Yeah. Because he's a baby-faced boy. You do have quite a smooth face going on there. It's good. I do. But thank you for that.
00:30:52
Speaker
the Toki war tooth, you know, like the two little catfish strings. I think I can grow those. Do you ever try the soul patch? I mean, that could be an option for you as well. I've tried a few different things. Like whenever we go on vacation, I usually like, I'll stop shaving, at least like my mustache. And when my wife refuses to have sex with me, I have to shave it. She's very anti-mustache. They're so trendy now though.
00:31:23
Speaker
I know. I just want to be cool. They are. They are. Yeah, the cheesier and more 70s-ish they are, the better. Absolutely.
00:31:32
Speaker
So everyone, we got talking to Mike through, actually through our Instagram when we started, when we kind of first started getting this thing going. We've been going back and forth a little bit ever since then we started, you know, emailing back and forth. And just kind of, we were interested in talking to Mike because he was, you know, we don't have a whole lot of evangelicals listening to this podcast. I know of a couple that are doing it for research.
00:31:59
Speaker
but generally that's not our audience. I mean, even if it's still people who still maintain the version of the Christian faith, most won't consider themselves evangelicals. So his interest in his engagement was of interest to us. So he's kind of trying to see what's going on with people who have maybe been burnt by it or whatever. So he's keeping his
00:32:28
Speaker
keeping stuff like this on his radar, but he's also just interested in having a good conversation. So we thought we would take some time to hear from him, hear his story, because he kind of left it for a bit and came back. And while many of us are leaving it, something struck a chord with him and just being an easy guy to talk to who's just kind of opened the conversation, we thought this would be a fun person to have the conversation with and maybe get into some of the issues and nuances of
00:32:57
Speaker
evangelicalism and what he likes about it, what he doesn't, and maybe the different things that we've experienced through at KCI and as what we know our listeners have too. But maybe just to get us started, Mike, why don't you give us your backstory, a little snapshot of your life and how you got to where you are now. Yeah. Thanks so much guys for having me on. I really appreciate it.
00:33:23
Speaker
Yeah, so your podcast title just kind of grabbed me immediately because I just resonate with the title of Growing Up Christian because that was me. My dad, when my parents weren't married, was not a believer and became a believer when I was like,
00:33:40
Speaker
10 or so and then so things swung very very quickly in our house and I was the oldest of three so you know church became a huge part of our lives immediately it was that that quintessential just like a lot of your other guests that you have on like
00:33:57
Speaker
I did everything. I was there every single time the doors were open. I did the VBS thing and every single youth group and vacation, Bible school, youth retreat, throw the stick in the fire, rededicate your life to Christ six times a year and all of that stuff. I was thankful for that environment.
00:34:22
Speaker
But I kind of walked away from that environment just thinking like that was it. Like this is the sum total of Christianity was this churchy bubble, you know, where we spoke a certain language and we all kind of, you know, I went to a huge public high school and I was not cool.
00:34:43
Speaker
But then in youth group, like I was the cool kid in youth group, which I'm not sure what that says for the rest of the members of youth group. If I was actually the cool kid, but they all.
00:34:57
Speaker
Yeah, I'm older than you guys, though. So homeschoolers back when back in the 80s got that was they were weird. They were like, why would anybody do that? And so there was only like two or three kids in the whole church that were homeschooled and they were by far the weirdest kids. And so now it's like seems like with co-ops and everything else, it's a whole different whole different ball game. Yeah. Yeah. Seems like it's shifted a good bit from what it I mean, I'm actually I'm in the middle of reading something about, you know, the
00:35:29
Speaker
why homeschooling kind of took off and became a thing. And they're definitely attracted a certain type of people with certain ideologies. And of course, they're still prevalent amongst homeschoolers. As a homeschooler, it's mostly just, you know, let's take the kids out of public school and give them a good Christian education. But there was, I mean, there's plenty of good, plenty of weirdos, but there's also, you know, there are, as much as I'll joke on it because of just funny to do, but there's plenty of regular,
00:35:57
Speaker
uh regular people and now it's getting big amongst people who aren't even religious it's just like if you live in an area where they don't like the school district parents are like i think i can do this better right you just basically like summarize the whole book is like uh you're not so bad yeah it's uh it's definitely uh evolved over the last 20 or 30 years for sure but yeah so i i um
00:36:25
Speaker
Make a long story short, in my 20s, I didn't have the church in my life anymore. I got married pretty early and my wife and I both came from kind of that same background of just church kids. And when we didn't have somebody telling us that we had to get up and go to church every Sunday or go to Wednesday night Bible study or whatever the heck it was,
00:36:46
Speaker
we didn't do it. And so I had this kind of revelation like, wow, you mean Sunday's just like another day of the weekend? Like there's a bonus day that we can do stuff with and it was, it just blew my mind. And so we, uh,
00:36:59
Speaker
We definitely were away from the church. I kind of like to say that I was an ex-fangelical, you know, before it was cool, because I was running away from the church, you know, on a mission. And, you know, obviously did those things that I was a musician. And so I played in clubs and bars up and down the East Coast and did everything that you would expect somebody to do, you know, lived a very sinful lifestyle for over a decade.
00:37:28
Speaker
you know, eventually started having kids and realized like, wow, um, I don't really have a morality system right now. And what the heck am I supposed to teach my kids? You know, parenting kind of has a way of kind of snapping you around. Like I'm responsible for these children's lives. Like what am I, what am I supposed to be doing with that? And so it kind of gave me the initial
00:37:54
Speaker
inklings to come back and think about that even a little more. But I knew what was there. And I was reacting to that culture. I was kind of like, well, I don't want to go back to that. I don't want to go back to that bubble. I don't want to go back to that language. I don't want to go back to all of that stuff that I was kind of running away from. And so I was really fighting it. And
00:38:18
Speaker
think what actually happened was when 9-11 happened, it kind of snapped me out of that mentality. And frankly, it was like, just was, I was living a very selfish life. And I knew now that everything in this life was temporary. I mean, I still think about that, like 3000 people went to work that day.
00:38:40
Speaker
I'm a Burton County kid of New Jersey. And so I stared at those Twin Towers like my whole life. And to see them fall down, it's like something that was never ever going to go away, went away. And then all those people died. And it's like, there's got to be something going on here. And so I kind of ran back to God with everything that I was running away from God with. But I did it not by embracing the church. I did it really on my own spiritual quest, so to speak.
00:39:09
Speaker
in reading God's word and diving into, I'm like, all right, God, who do you say you are? Like, forget who the church says you are for a minute. Like, who do you say that you are? And that's what led me to discover that, wow, maybe a lot of things in my background in church culture wasn't actually what the Bible actually says about some of these things. And some of that was really jacked up. Yeah. Go ahead, Casey. Like, uh,
00:39:39
Speaker
I kind of glanced over some of the emails that you guys have changed and stuff and it sounds like you're not particularly proud of that time in your life when you were in New York and parts of that. What aspect of that is something that troubles you now? You mean like my church background or you mean like
00:40:02
Speaker
No, like when you left the church, you kind of refer to that as almost like going astray, like you went and lived a different lifestyle. What about that lifestyle made you feel – did it make you feel shameful or did it just – you didn't like where it took you? Well, you know, it's kind of that – it's a little of both, right?
00:40:29
Speaker
It's fun, right? I mean, let's face it, getting drunk and trying to sleep around and all of that stuff is fun for a season. And there were years where I was like, this is the greatest thing ever. Like the church has, you know, you're trying to keep kids from doing this in youth group. And now I know why you're trying to keep kids from doing this in youth group, because this is freaking awesome, right? And that was like, that probably took up a couple of years worth of that.
00:40:55
Speaker
But eventually, you just hit bottom. Eventually, you just kind of grow up. Eventually, you're just kind of like, it's not there. You know it's not there. And so there were a couple of years, and maybe you sense that in the tone, where it's, there are a couple of years where it just kind of went through those motions, much like maybe a kid would go through the motions at church, but I was kind of going through motions in the world, living a life of sin, where I'm like, yeah, this isn't really fulfilling me, but I'm still out here doing it.
00:41:24
Speaker
And it just kind of bankrupted me. It just kind of, it slowly eats away your soul, I think. And so I realized I was coming up empty and, you know, I needed more. So those, so I guess that's, that's what I'm curious about is like.
00:41:45
Speaker
Those things are fun. Did the lifestyle, did it just catch up with you? Like did it start to negatively impact like your work or your personal relationships or something? Like what part of it made you go, I gotta stop doing this. Like this is bad for me.
00:42:02
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, there was there was definitely many moments along the way. I'd say in a couple fronts. Certainly, I think my own soul, knowing that I was going, I was looking, you know, like the song goes, right? I was looking for love in all the wrong places. But I was looking I was looking elsewhere for what and it wasn't providing it. But there were definitely moments of
00:42:28
Speaker
hitting rock bottom, drinking way, way, way too much, getting out of a lot of close calls, all of that stuff. There were smoke signals on the horizon and sometimes it just came too close and it kind of snapped me into a reality like, I'm not gonna be able to sustain this. This is not a good long-term plan. I'm gonna end up dead or a DWI or divorced or something.
00:42:58
Speaker
I think what's interesting to me about the decisions that people make after that kind of life.
00:43:07
Speaker
You know, I don't know, maybe because of your involvement in the church beforehand, like that was kind of the default thing to run back
Biblical Coherence and Interpretations
00:43:15
Speaker
to. Not saying it wasn't thought out, but I'm just saying like, you know, a lot of people, it's not uncommon for people in college, like, I mean, a lot of my friends, I was kind of a straight-laced guy, so I never really, when I discovered that getting drunk was fun, you know.
00:43:33
Speaker
I didn't turn into anything out of control it's just like I do this sometimes with my friends and it's still fun and I still do it sometimes with my friends so it's like I mean I know I've never experienced any like destructive I haven't had any like
00:43:46
Speaker
and it hasn't damaged relationships and I haven't had any negative repercussions from it in that sense. But I think what's interesting is, I mean, there's a lot of times that people are in their 20s and they have those, oh, I'm taking this too far, this isn't good for me, experiences. And sometimes they find,
00:44:11
Speaker
AA or sometimes they, I don't know, maybe they just find a new group. I'm not really sure what pulls people out of it, but sometimes just that realization that that's not who they want to be. So it's not like a super uncommon story. So the connection between that and going back to faith as opposed to
00:44:31
Speaker
Finding a hobby or doing something like a different like finding a different way to like pull yourself out of it Which is what some other people might do who don't have a church background I mean and it's also incredibly common for people to go through moments in their life Most of us are familiar enough with religion. Well, they'll go I'm not happy with where I am what's gonna fix it and the cultural conditioning might say maybe look to God So I guess what was it?
00:45:01
Speaker
I think this kind of jumps on what Casey was saying about was it shame or guilt or maybe anything about your upbringing about what was it maybe that you learned about God or were drawn back that was kind of drawing you back in after that time in your life when you felt like you needed something to assist pulling you out of that or something with more substance to build a life on. Yeah.
00:45:32
Speaker
Yeah, to me, I would have to go back to, I really have to go back to the Bible because I had never read the whole Bible. I had never, you know, as a youth group kid, as a church kid, you know, we would always have those one-off lessons or the sermon that's, you know, three jokes, a poem, and, you know, a life lesson or something like that. And it just, I never actually got the whole concept of what was trying
00:46:02
Speaker
to be communicated in all of the Bible. And so that's probably the first thing that I did was read the entire Bible and saw, whoa, like this whole thing, like actually is saying something from cover to cover. There's, I know there's some super weird parts in Leviticus is freaky. And, you know, there's some crazy, crazy things in here from several thousand years ago in a completely different culture than I live in now.
00:46:27
Speaker
But the overall meta-narrative of it, the overall big storyline of the Bible, hung together for me. And it really came together as a worldview, as a way for me to interpret life. And that's really what grabs me and still keeps me in it, is that Christianity as a worldview just makes more sense to me. It just adds up to me.
00:46:55
Speaker
way more than any other worldview that I've experienced or looked at, or it has the answers that I'm looking for in that sense. And it's robust enough. That's what really got me excited was once I realized it's not just, again, the evangelical culture, which I know we're gonna get into in a little while, there's a depth to it. There's a depth to God's word. And that doesn't always,
00:47:22
Speaker
I would even say more times than not does not come out in evangelical culture. It's just shallow and it's unintellectual and it's, you know, it's not robust. It's more emotionalism. It's more, you know, all that stuff. And once I realized that there was actually a depth to that story, that's what really got me.
00:47:43
Speaker
So what is that depth? Because for a lot of us, for many people, it's actually reading the Bible from cover to cover that makes them go, what? I don't think I'm on board with most of this. And of course, there's different ways to look at why things are written the way they are. But correct me if I'm wrong, because I don't want to understand where you're coming from.
00:48:12
Speaker
When you're talking about reading the Bible from cover to cover and hearing the story, it sounds like there's this idea that there's a meta-narrative from beginning to end, that this is an overarching meta-narrative of the Bible, and you can find these markers along the way that reinforce that.
00:48:31
Speaker
If to me, that feels like something like what was difficult for me is when doing that. I would say, yeah, if you pick certain markers, you can find the through line to those markers, but you have to dodge and miss a lot of stuff in between those markers in order for this meta narrative to line up. So I was raised with the belief that from beginning to end, this is God's story, this is what God's doing, and this is where you can see it.
00:49:00
Speaker
I just don't hold that anymore. So I'm interested in the depth that you're looking at. What's the depth that you're speaking to and what's the story that you're seeing that kind of pieces it together for you and then provides you those answers. And then I guess... And if I could just jump in. Yeah.
00:49:24
Speaker
I just wanted to congratulate Sam on the use of the term metanarrative. Thanks, Casey. Very good. Absolutely. I concur with those. Congratulations. Yeah, I think the depth to it is that the Bible
00:49:48
Speaker
provides the or provided the answers for me to those same big basic questions that kind of every other philosophy or religion or anything else in and of themselves are trying to answer, right? Those questions like, all right, who am I? Where did I come from? What am I here for? Why can't I do it? What went wrong? And how do we fix it?
00:50:13
Speaker
You know, those things that, you know, all of those other worldviews are trying to provide, the Bible answered those for me in that way. And they answered it in such a way, when you talk to the depth, no other religion or worldview has that, both a transcendent and an imminent God, one who transcends where he is and is over and above everything.
00:50:42
Speaker
and control of everything, but also yet, imminently personal and involved in our daily lives. So that's what really got me as far as the depth. And it just kind of, I don't know how into philosophy you guys are or whatever, but it's that kind of classic illustration of the two-story house, where it's you have the material things on one floor of the house, and then you have the spiritual things or the
00:51:12
Speaker
the more emotional things on the top floor of the house. And Christianity is both of those things, you know, as opposed to other religions or worldviews that maybe one or the other in that. So again, it just kind of, it makes sense. And as far as like, you know, nobody can ever prove God. When I get into conversations with people, it's just like, well, if you give me enough evidence, I will believe in God.
00:51:39
Speaker
It's like, okay, well, I can't do that. Like intellectually, you just can't prove God. But this is what makes the most sense to me. And this is what, when you look at what's going on in the world, when you look at where we are now and how it can be fixed,
00:51:56
Speaker
It's just, it's kind of the easiest answer to me that there's all these gymnastics to avoid it. It's like, well, it can't be God. It can't be the Bible is true. So we have to, we have to invent something else that is like, it can't be that because we don't want to let, we don't want to let that be right. You know what I mean? So from this side of the fence, for instance,
00:52:24
Speaker
I'm like, he's getting ready to make a really big point. This long, awkward pause is getting pretty... He's coming in big. No. Yeah, I had the same feeling in question. I feel like listeners will be screaming at us if they don't hear us jump in and say, what is it?
00:52:50
Speaker
Because I don't see that. I don't see people as saying, looking for something else, looking for literally anything else. I think that it's so I'm not I guess. So when Casey says, for instance, I think Casey, are you looking for like maybe specific examples of why people or what people are doing to avoid? Yeah, if you could give me a couple of meta narratives to work with, you know, to illustrate that point.
00:53:23
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, there's a couple that comes to mind, right? And they're all kind of the big ones that we might think of, right? What's the actual answer to when bad things happen to good people, like evil and suffering in the world? Like, what's the paradigm for that? You know, the Bible has an answer for that. Otherwise... It does? It does. I'm going to need you to expound on that.
00:54:06
Speaker
I should say that the Bible has answers towards that as opposed to a nice and neat and tidy, here's why evil and suffering. There's the logical problem of evil and then there's the personal problem of evil.
00:54:18
Speaker
It's a fallen world. Does that sum it up?
00:54:24
Speaker
Like, as Casey said, right, if you buy into that, that's that's the fallen world. I get it. That's why there's people out there that do terrible things to kids. And that's why Justin Bieber exists. And that's why other weird things in the world happen. Now he's never going to be a guest in the podcast. Michael Adele. But then what happens to us, like then how I guess that's what I guess that's the the kernel here when it happens to us.
00:54:52
Speaker
When the logical problem of evil and suffering happens to us, how do we make sense of that? That's where the Bible is like, okay, well, for you personally, when it happens, we've all had banner 2020s.
00:55:13
Speaker
You know, 2020 was terrible here. I'm losing you on... You're saying that in response to what do we do when it happens to us and when it becomes personal that the Bible... I guess I'm looking to know what your understanding of that... What is that answer? Or what are the answers? Or what are the Bible directing us towards that helps...
00:55:41
Speaker
Helps you work through that problem because that's what I think I'm still missing I'm hearing that the Bible has the answer or has answers, but I'm not I'm missing what the answers that the Bible is providing to the problem of evil are Right, right, right. So if we look at it from the perspective of
00:56:05
Speaker
Again, this worldview making sense, right? The biblical worldview making sense. Nobody's going to deny that evil is here. Nobody's going to die that actual evil and suffering exists. But then how, how do we interpret that in light of our worldview and what Casey said? That's got to be kind of the building block for us. One of the foundational blocks that, yeah, if you look at the metanarrative of the Bible,
00:56:34
Speaker
that God did create the world perfectly, right? And that evil did enter the world, right? But it's not, it is the fallen world narrative, but it's not that God's up there going, oh, well, I hope that works out for you guys. He's personally involved in the solution to that evil.
00:56:59
Speaker
in our lives. Not only that, he's personally walking with us as we walk through the evil that is in our lives. And then not only that, the end of the biblical narrative is that there's one day where he's going to restore that back to its perfection. There's nothing else to me that
00:57:20
Speaker
Otherwise, I honestly don't know. I want to ask you guys questions, but I think I was listening to your last guest, and she tried to ask you a question, and Sam smacked her down and said the guests aren't allowed to interview you guys. That's a joke. That was hilarious, by the way. It's kind of like what Casey said a minute ago. We didn't know if he was serious or not. Is he actually yelling at our guest? I don't know. I honestly don't know how else you would make sense of,
00:57:49
Speaker
Like I'll give you a real concrete example, right? So January 7th, 2020, I'm diagnosed with cancer and I can't get ahold of my wife because my wife is in Florida next to her dad who literally just passed away at the exact moment that the doctor is telling me I have cancer. So it's like, what do you do with that? What do you, you know?
00:58:13
Speaker
What do you do with that outside of, to me again, right? It's because I'm the guy representing the other side that people are screaming at their windshields right now that, you know, but apart from a biblical worldview, I don't know what to do with that. It just seems like there are no answers to me. Well, I think that's, and sorry to hear about your diagnosis, man. I think that's where,
00:58:42
Speaker
I guess I get lost in all this because I feel like we're representing some of these things as if
00:58:53
Speaker
There's a there's a narrative involved in it as if this is something that's you know, and that's that's the that's the Christian Foundational worldview right that that God has a purpose in all of this This is part of his plan and there's an answer at the end of it You know, there's a purpose for why this is happening and stuff and I get it and I I understand the the talking points around like why there's a child soldiers in the world and why
00:59:23
Speaker
you know, 500,000 people died of COVID this year. If God's all powerful, why can't he stop that? Like I get all of that. But I don't, it just doesn't, it doesn't mean anything to me. And I think some of this stuff is just, you know, we're looking for, we're looking to assign a reason to things that this might not be any reasons to.
00:59:51
Speaker
We're looking for answers to things that there just might not be any answers to, you know? Where did the world come from? Where did, you know, if the Big Bang is true, then where did that initial, you know, super packed ball of mass come from? There might just not be an answer to that. Doesn't mean that one's correct and what's not. It's just, I guess that's where I, it feels to me like religions of all varieties.
01:00:20
Speaker
there's a point at which you just have to kind of choose to buy in. And that's what I guess I miss in a lot of these things. Yeah. And I think that evangelical culture does very little, I should say popular evangelical culture does very little to help
01:00:43
Speaker
answer that question intelligently, right? Because what you said, Casey, is I would agree with. You know, the quest of the Christianese, right, to be able to get an answer for something, or why is this happening, or what lesson is God trying to teach me in all this?
01:01:03
Speaker
it may not be there. There is, but we might not get to know it. And that's where we have to trust who God is as opposed to just what's going on.
01:01:16
Speaker
there's depth in that. There's real depth in that. Because what Christianity is saying, are we really just trusting God because he's going to make my life easier, or he's going to give me answers, or he's going to make me feel good, or he's going to make me successful, or are we just trusting God because God is God? It's different. It almost sometimes it feels
01:01:38
Speaker
Like it's less about finding an, you know, in practical terms, it's less about finding an answer to why a bad thing happens or a good thing happens and more about like trusting that there is an answer and using that trust as a coping mechanism for what is happening and is probably, and is going to happen.
01:02:00
Speaker
I don't know if I'm explaining myself very well. Yeah, no, I think you are, except that I would say that the trust, again, is not only someone who's sovereign over all things, but personal in all things. The Bible tells us who he is, and so we trust his character in that. It's not just kind of a hoping that there's a reason for everything, but I'm hoping and trusting in a person, in a God who's
01:02:28
Speaker
who's with us. And we know who he is. He's good. He's kind. He's slow to anger. He's forgiving. He's not going to clear the guilty. He's just all that. I think Casey's point in that when he mentions that at some point you just have to choose to buy in is, I mean, I hear, so like, I think a lot of what you're saying is very familiar. And
01:02:55
Speaker
And I understand that perspective really, really well. I'm not even so far removed from it. And of course, as I've mentioned, I still maintain what I would call a Christian faith. That's up to other people to decide whether or not they think I count or not. And that's fine.
01:03:25
Speaker
But a lot of it has very little to do with the Bible having answers and going back to like this man. So the conclusions you're coming to about what God's like and that you can trust that is, I guess, is a, I mean, it kind of just gets you into a conversation about metaphysics, I guess, and how you would even know that. You know, that's not like,
01:03:52
Speaker
And that's where I think some of that got lost on me was just like, and that wasn't one of the first things to go by any means. It was probably one of the last and I don't, I'm not even calling to the floor to anything like, I don't really care about criticizing that for people.
01:04:16
Speaker
If that's the belief that you maintain and you feel a connection to a close and personal God, then that's okay. I'm not interested in taking that from people. A hundred percent. I'm more like trying to provide context to
01:04:34
Speaker
a position that would have moved away from that more than I'm trying to argue with it. So I just want to make sure I'm being understood when I say that. But that was one of the things to go for me a little probably later on in my journey was that
01:04:51
Speaker
that the Bible provides us with who God is. To me, what I get out of it is that it provides us ideas of what people have thought about God over thousands of years and they haven't been consistent and they've changed significantly. And it's not that, you might argue that God's revealed himself more clearly over time. I would argue possibly that people have, maybe through
01:05:20
Speaker
Um,
01:05:23
Speaker
you know, psychological, social evolution, they've come to, and we've drifted out of, oh, unfortunately not entirely, but as we drift out of like tribalistic mindsets where our group of people consists of our family, or then our group of people consists of our village, and now your group of people consists of a state, and a city, and a country, and as it expands and you have to bring more people in and try to, I mean, really the end goal is like all these people trying to
01:05:51
Speaker
who are trying to manage all of it convince people that they need to care about other people. And of course, you can't really, I mean, you can look at our whole political system right now, and that's kind of the argument we're still having is, you know, whether or not you do this social program or that, and trying to have these conversations about whether or not, you know, some people's lives are worth you paying an extra 10 bucks a year in taxes. Great.
01:06:17
Speaker
I'm getting probably a little off my original topic, but back to the concept of God having these characteristics that are clearly portrayed through the Bible and then that that's the answer. That's only the answer if you choose to believe that the Bible's even giving that as an answer amongst other possible options.
01:06:43
Speaker
that it's true, because you could easily kind of go in another direction. It's just like when you're talking about God providing comfort or being there on the journey with you through difficult times, it's like some people found their comfort in not believing that there was a God next to them through those times, knowing that that God wasn't really doing anything about it for them.
01:07:11
Speaker
Yeah, and I guess that's kind of why I want to have these conversations because I honestly don't understand that. I would like to talk to people that have that perspective and learn more about that. Like, how is that possible? Because, you know, to me, it's so far from my own worldview understanding and, you know,
01:07:32
Speaker
not that I'm in danger of deconverting, but I just generally don't understand how that hangs in there, like how that holds water, how that makes sense. Yeah, I think it makes sense because, well, I don't know how to speak for everybody's personal experience, and I'm not going to try, but I think it, I think, I think an admission of there, I think
01:08:01
Speaker
believing that maybe you can't know and not hanging your entire life on a conclusion to something that you don't feel like you can know is easier for people, especially when A, maybe the religion that they were part of felt more harmful to them than helpful.
01:08:25
Speaker
I really understand the perspective because there's a lot that goes into choosing to believe all that because just saying that it provides you comfort. Therefore, it's hard for you to understand how anyone could find more comfort without it. But to me and many others, there was a constant anxiety of like,
01:08:47
Speaker
trying to feel that God was there and like trying to make it real and trying to force something inside of yourself. And I know the counter would be, you don't have to force it. You just need to open yourself up to God. But I mean, that's something I've been trying to do my entire life. And there are certain... Let go and let God. Yeah. And you let go and you're like, I just don't see it still. Like... Yeah, I know. Not biblical. Yeah. No, I feel that. Okay.
01:09:17
Speaker
That helps. But yeah, again, I don't want to misrepresent either that I think that's part of what I react to in the evangelical world is it's not just about
Emotional vs Doctrinal Faith
01:09:30
Speaker
the feeling. It's not just about the comfort. I mean, sure, it is there, but sometimes we don't feel it. And that doesn't mean it's not there. And that doesn't mean it's not true. And that's where you've got to go back on, OK, well, even when God is silent,
01:09:45
Speaker
you know, either you're trusting in who he is or you're trusting in how he makes you feel. And when we start basing our worldview on our feelings, we're in a lot of trouble. At some point, doesn't it all go back to feelings though? Because I mean, it's, there's a lot of things we're talking about here that again, you just can't know. You can't provide evidence as to why God exists. And that doesn't mean he doesn't. It just, it just means that, uh,
01:10:13
Speaker
you're taking the sum total of your experiences and weighing those against the possibility that maybe there's some sort of deity that's got a hand in everything that's happened to you. And I think that's where I, yeah, I'm in the same, and we've talked about this quite a bit over the past couple of months here is just that without the feeling, this is just like,
01:10:43
Speaker
continually reaffirming your commitment to a bunch of like stated principles. If you don't feel anything about those principles, then are you, I mean, it kind of felt to me like I spent a lot of my life just going through the motions.
01:11:03
Speaker
I had no connection to them other than that like, this is what I know is real. And this is what I think. And I have an answer to this problem and an answer to that problem. But like, there wasn't any sort of they didn't hold any weight in my life, other than just the the guilt of like doubting those things and continually trying to push myself back to them. Yeah, yeah. And that's why again, I go back to it's got to be both.
01:11:32
Speaker
And when I said, we don't always feel it, that doesn't mean we never feel it, right? And one of the things that I realized when I really embraced the truth of the gospel is that this has made me more fulfilled and more happy and more joyful and more whatever than I've ever felt.
01:11:55
Speaker
But that doesn't mean you feel like that every single day, because we all have ups and downs in our lives and everything. And so, again, I say this a lot from the pulpit. The answer is never in the extremes, right? It's never just one side or the other. Christianity isn't just, oh, Jesus makes me happy all the time, because we all know that's BS, because nobody's happy all the time. And we also know that it's not just all intellectual snobbery,
01:12:21
Speaker
and Christian culture and looking down on everyone else, right? And there are answers and there are doctrine. It's both. It's solid doctrine that is truth. And it's also what that truth actually does to us in our lives. Okay. Do you feel it's appropriate to use the term BS? Because I'm on the fence.
01:12:50
Speaker
Is he concerned about his heart, Casey? I'm going to do my best just to not get hung up on it. Go ahead, Sam. Yeah, no, Casey, keep me honest, OK? Appreciate that. We're accountability partners now, you and me. Oh, there you go. Got to go. Oh, my god. So I think what you just said is a good way to, I guess, maybe segue out of running circles around the topic we're on is
01:13:22
Speaker
You said how it affects your life and how it affects the lives of the people who believe it. And I think this is where we get into where the biggest problems lie and why we're seeing such a high number of people, especially now, in such a divided climate, just go in all different directions.
01:13:53
Speaker
we were taught that you know that the bible is true whatever that means i don't think that's even a statement that's worth uttering because it just doesn't i i think that statement actually doesn't mean anything saying the bible is true it's essentially not communicating anything of importance that just requires like i don't know probably a 10-page essay on what that means in order to like
01:14:19
Speaker
When you're in an evangelical circle and you say the Bible is true, everyone goes, amen. But then it only works if you're talking to people who are understanding it from the same perspective and are using the same vocabulary. But if you understand, as being taught that the Bible is true and what it means to live a good Christian life, I believe that I was taught good principles on how to live and care for people as a kid.
01:14:46
Speaker
And I've had these conversations with my parents, mostly my dad, where it's like, I might not believe in things the way that you do anymore. And I might disagree with your understanding of religion and politics. But I learned a lot more than that from my parents. I learned how to be a productive member of society and what it looked like to care about the people that you are around.
01:15:11
Speaker
But when we look at things now and in such a globalized world and you look at what evangelicalism has turned into in the past six years, growing up always hearing that the fruit that what you produce is important
01:15:32
Speaker
You know, where I'm seeing people who don't believe in anything produce good fruit. And I'm seeing people who believe, who subscribe to Evangelicals and producing really some of the most rotten fruit I've seen in my life at this point. And I'm, if Jesus was so concerned about the fruit that people were producing, then I think the people who are in and participating in the kingdom he was trying to build are the ones who don't even believe in God most of the time at this point. Could be.
01:16:00
Speaker
So I guess loaded question. Yeah, I want I do want to unpack that. Yeah. What does this mean for evangelicalism? Even what does evangelicalism mean to you? But in light of the fruit that it's producing? How do we wrap our minds around that from your perspective? Yeah. I always ask multi part questions. I need to stop doing that. So sorry.
01:16:30
Speaker
It's all good. Answer these five questions. Go. I'll try to unravel that. Yeah, I mean, when we even start to talk about current evangelical culture, right? I almost don't want to use that word anymore because, you know, that word, just like kind of your statement about, you know, the Bible is true. It's kind of like, once you say that word, evangelical, you're going to get a reaction from people immediately. And most of the time, I'm embarrassed about what that reaction is going to look like.
01:17:00
Speaker
And it's just become so far removed from, frankly, again, what I would say is how we're supposed to be. And I think you hit it on the head, Sam, but a lot of the fruit that you see coming out of the evangelical world is rotten, spoiled fruit, right? And there are
01:17:22
Speaker
really, really, obviously common grace, right? There's really, really smart people who aren't Christians and there are people who aren't Christians who are doing amazing things for the society, for themselves, and they're good and they're kind people, right? So it's like, so what is that juxtaposition and why is that happening? And again, I come back to it's like, well, where's evangelicalism basing their foundation on?
01:17:50
Speaker
And I'm going to say we're getting away from the Bible, and we've gotten away from the Bible. Like most people in America, if you say, what's an evangelical, they're going to think something close to those people that took over the Capitol building and wanted to burn it to the ground with their Trump t-shirts and their Bibles on their flags or whatever else.
01:18:13
Speaker
or any number of horrific news stories about this evangelical pastor that flamed out, or this person that took money from the church, or crazy Kenneth Copeland, who
01:18:28
Speaker
you know, wants to dance and blow away the COVID germ, which all those memes are absolutely hilarious. Like I chased every one of them down. Did you guys see the one? What's her name? Paula White. When she was, when she was speaking in tongues, and then they overdubbed this cat in front of it doing this rap video. You have to find that. That's what people think evangelicals are. Like,
01:18:54
Speaker
And so when I hear people deconverting and running away from that, I'm going, yeah, I get it, but you're not deconverting from it. You're running from.
01:19:06
Speaker
a misrepresentation of it. That's why I was so chapped growing up, because it's like, this is fake, this is emotionalism, this is shallow, this is all just an internal culture that doesn't really hold any water. And so when I ran away from it, I wasn't really running away from Jesus necessarily, I was running away from evangelical culture, which was wrong.
01:19:33
Speaker
Yeah, it's a big tent and the people holding the microphone right now inside the tenor, the Kenneth Copeland's and whatnot.
01:19:48
Speaker
You know, Sam kind of asked you earlier, but like why, why Christianity when you decided, you know, you needed to make changes and stuff like that. So did you maintain like some semblance of Christian beliefs, like through that time in your life where you weren't really involved in any of the church stuff anymore? No, none at all.
01:20:10
Speaker
I didn't pray, I didn't read the Bible, didn't go to church at all.
01:20:19
Speaker
I didn't, I guess it was probably upwards of a decade where that was radio silence. And it's weird and I never, I'm not saying I heard an audible voice because I'm not into that stuff either, but I had this pull and it was kind of always this pull and it was a pull that was intentional that was kind of like,
01:20:42
Speaker
Are you sure? Are you ready yet? Are you sure you want to keep living like this? And I would keep pushing it away and stuffing it down and say, nah, I'm fine. I don't need you. I'm done. And then it would come back, and it would come back, and it would come back. And so finally, with everything, like I said, with 9-11 and looking for answers, I'm like, all right, what do you got? What are the answers? What is this?
01:21:10
Speaker
investigated it from there. And that's what I would say to people that are deconverting is like, have you ever really just looked at it for yourself? Like if there was a way to turn off your brain from all of the crap background that you experienced and just read the Bible with a blank slate,
01:21:30
Speaker
And I know that's really hard because I know things have been, people have been through some really crappy things and gotten hurt by the church and had really terrible examples. So it's, it's really hard to do that. But that's what I would, that's what I would say is just, have you ever really investigated it? Honestly, for yourself, are you just rejecting evangelicalism? I have a friend who's a, uh, who's a Mormon and he didn't grow up a Mormon, but, uh,
01:22:00
Speaker
met a lady. He wanted to marry her. Her family was pretty involved in the church. And so that was you're going to be a Mormon if you're going to bury my daughter, right? So he talked about, you know, going through all of the different Mormons are very organized about that kind of stuff. They've got a good, like hierarchical system of like bringing in new people and everything. But
01:22:26
Speaker
He was saying that it just, it wasn't, he was doing it. He was going through the motions. He was doing all the exercises and doing the activities and everything, but it just wasn't, there was just, it just wasn't clicking for him. So he talked about going and talking to like one of the leaders in the program and just saying like, basically that like, dude, I'm doing all this stuff and I just, I, there's nothing. I just don't feel anything towards this.
01:22:54
Speaker
And the guy said, look, I know that I know that you're going through the motions here, but do you want but do you want to believe? And he's like, and that made the difference for me. I mean, I realized that like I was doing it, but I didn't want to believe. And he's telling me this as if like this is a this is a revelation. And it's it's, you know, kind of ties the story together.
01:23:24
Speaker
but it feels like it kind of goes back to the same stuff. It's like, you know, are you, are you honestly evaluating what's here or do you want, do you want this to make sense to you? Do you want to assign this meaning to the, you know, the, the stuff going on in your life? I mean, how is, how, how do you,
01:23:47
Speaker
How is that different? What about that is a shallow explanation of the principle that you're trying to convey?
Personal Evaluation of Faith and Crises
01:23:55
Speaker
Because I know that's not what you're saying when you say evaluate it for yourself. Right. I hope I'm understanding what you're trying to say correctly, but to me, it seems like you're going back to, again, a desire of the heart or a feeling, but also
01:24:18
Speaker
It's a very honest question. Are you just in this for what it can make you feel like, or what it can do for you emotionally? Because, I mean, there are plenty of those Christians. And then when they hit those hard times, or like we all do, when life punches us in the soul, if your whole,
01:24:45
Speaker
Faith is built on emotionalism. There's nothing there. There's nothing to fall back on. And that's when you have a crisis of faith. But I think, Casey, what your story illustrates is that are we just propping this all up because maybe somewhere deep down inside it doesn't make sense to us, but we want it to be?
01:25:07
Speaker
Is that what you're... I think it just... No, no. It's not that it doesn't make sense or anything like that. It's just that it feels like the onus is on you to make this make sense for you.
01:25:20
Speaker
Oh, OK. So to lean in to to like this, like it's not so much a look, I'll hold, you know, objective evaluation of what's here in this book. It always seems to come back to like, do you want this to be the underlying principles for your life? Like, are you are you really looking for a way to make this make sense to you or are you
01:25:49
Speaker
I'm not, I'm not given a good explanation. It's almost like if it feels a lot like, it's like a commitment to finding the answer in the, in the book, you know? Like, are you committed enough to this to believe it kind of thing? Or are you committed enough to make sense for you? Uh-huh.
01:26:14
Speaker
like I think what I want maybe I can help clarify is I think what he's trying to say is like like from I'll use myself as an example is I'm so I went to Liberty University and got a Bible degree I what I'm sorry you what I'm very sorry yeah well I'd be interested to know what like that I would be interested know some of the theological differences between maybe they're they're stuck Liberty was a
01:26:40
Speaker
they have a plethora of problems. But theologically speaking, I think that they're probably in this camp as a lot of other like Southern Baptist theology. So you're going to get, which I don't agree with, but you're going to get that from a lot of decent professors, you know, the institution of liberty is horrible.
01:27:02
Speaker
and deserves to be heavily investigated. But you know, when I was a student there, I really liked my professors and they were well-meaning Southern Baptist theological type guys. So I go there and Southern Baptist is basically like what I grew up in, even though it's a non-denominational church. So I'm
01:27:26
Speaker
One of the things you said is that if you rely too heavily on the emotional aspect of it, you're going to end up with a crisis of faith. Sure, that's probably true to some degree, but I think a lot of times the crisis of faith isn't because they were so emotionally invested, it's because they find what they were being taught academically deficient and
01:27:45
Speaker
When I'm at Liberty, and I'm, I mean, I was all in. I went there to learn these things and be taught the right things. I was like, and it was important to me to pick a school who's going to teach me a good theology. So I, in that, what was good theology based on? What was my, I mean, that grounding, that was just laid for me. It was like, I was taught what good theology was by people who told me what good theology was. It's like all circulatory reasoning that got me there.
01:28:16
Speaker
the stuff that just started pulling me out was again like you know for you it was going you go back and read the bible all by yourself and for yourself with a new understanding that's what kills it for most people like because the bible has been built up as this book that holds has all the truth and has all the answers and and provides the story that you need that from beginning to end and and provides you with the understanding of what salvation is which i would i'd like to dispute the term salvation as being anything other than
01:28:46
Speaker
being literally anything other than what we were told it was but it's like
01:28:53
Speaker
I couldn't keep reading that and keep listening to it. I'm reading the Bible and I keep listening and hearing all these people's explanations. I mean, the entire book, I mean, there's libraries filled with people trying to make it make sense for everyone else. And if you're gonna fill an entire fucking library with books that are explaining to people why this all works and you can wrap it up with a neat little bow on it, I just started to come to the conclusion that
01:29:22
Speaker
If the Bible can bring people to hundreds of thousands of different conclusions, then the intent of the Bible isn't to provide people with theological certainty or answers in any way.
01:29:35
Speaker
So that confusion I have around the Bible being the go-to book for bringing people back to faith or that there's something that's going to be happening. Because you just start in the first book of the Bible and it doesn't make sense. The creation of the world doesn't make sense. There's two narratives that tell different stories about the order in which it was created. I mean, you start out with inconsistencies and then you get to genocide and then you get to women being property. These are the things that when you read through it,
01:30:05
Speaker
You can't just keep ignoring that if you're progressing in any way morally in your life.
01:30:19
Speaker
Create the theological excuses for why that worked at that time or God didn't stop it or God moved people past it, but you really just can't keep looking at those as someone who's progressed in ethics and morality and want to make excuses for a God like that.
01:30:39
Speaker
I think that's why it does. I don't think it's emotionalism. I don't think it's the fact that these people aren't reading the Bible for themselves. I think they're taking a really good hard look at what the Bible is for themselves and they stopped responding emotionally because a lot of us had that good emotional experience. You're just going to
01:31:02
Speaker
I don't think that's what people are fizzling out on and I want to be the advocate for the listeners in that.
01:31:11
Speaker
Like a real authentic try. And some, of course, some just as well. It's a mixed bag. Yeah. I mean, it's, there's people on both sides. There's definitely people that like the minute it's not fulfilling my needs where I'm out, you know, which is, is pretty easy to poke holes in. Sure. But like, is it, is it your, I'm sorry, go ahead.
01:31:33
Speaker
Yeah, there's a couple of big buckets we could put that into. We could put emotional needs. We could say, I was deeply hurt by the church. Something else went wrong in the church. I had this pastor or this guy. There's usually turned out to be a dirt bag and everything else. And so you could put a lot of some people in that bucket. But yeah, Sam, I think what you're driving at is that's part of why I want to have these conversations too is
01:31:58
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, how many of the deconverters or progressive Christianity or whatever else are reacting to the Bible itself? I get what you're saying. I read the Bible and it clicked for me and that made it all work, but that's what turns
01:32:18
Speaker
a whole group of other people away because they read the Bible and they're like, this is, this doesn't make any sense to me. And it's offensive. And all those things that you said, you know, which, you know, those, all those things you said are, of course, conversations in and of themselves, you know, whether or not it's genocide and creation narratives and all of that stuff. Right.
Biblical Interpretation and Inerrancy
01:32:41
Speaker
But I think we, in this discussion, we can't remove
01:32:47
Speaker
the necessity of a faithful biblical church in that, right? And what I mean that we should leave the Bible for ourselves.
01:32:59
Speaker
Yeah, so you say biblical. I don't even know what biblical means. Biblical means whatever the person extrapolating from the Bible means to them, I think. I know what biblical means when I hear it like when my parents wanted to find a good Bible-based church. Like, oh, I want a Bible-believing church. I know people who say that, and I know what that means. It means I want a church that's going to
01:33:26
Speaker
You know, come from my perspective of what the Bible is. So like when you say biblical, I'm like, biblical can just mean so many things. What is, I don't even know what that means to you. So let's get that, I guess. We probably should have hammer away some of these definitions earlier on. Is it your belief that the Bible's inerrant?
01:33:46
Speaker
that it's the inerrant word of God? Yes. In its original writings, it is inerrant in its original writings. It is spirit-breathed in its original writings that God worked through ordinary human beings to speak those words. And they knew that's exactly what he was doing as well in that process. And people recognized it as such very, very quickly.
01:34:13
Speaker
Right. And then that, of course, touches on the whole area of textual criticism and translation and all that stuff, which is why it's super important. And so when I say getting back to kind of the biblical aspect of things, you know, a church has to include somebody who has been trained in the original languages and trained in biblical theology systematically and all of that to say, like, OK,
01:34:37
Speaker
This is what this passage means, not this is what the passage means to me, right? But I'm one of those crazy people that would say that the Bible has, in its authorship, the Bible has an intended meaning. And where we apply it is differently.
01:34:58
Speaker
but the meaning we should be able to pull out. The kind of preaching that I do is called expositional preaching, which the point of my sermon should be the main point of the passage.
01:35:13
Speaker
It's not what I want it to mean. And I stay in that one passage. I don't pull out. I don't start with the concept of how to have a happier Monday. Right. And then pull out 67 Bible verses out of context to then, you know, whatever send you out the door with a smile. I think that touches on what Sam's asking, though, is that. Yeah. Like to say this is what the passage means is making a really muddy thing out to be clear cut.
01:35:43
Speaker
Cause we've all sat through sermons where the guy, you know, I had a youth pastor for a while that loved to like talk about Greek and Hebrew and he'd be like, well, let's just break this first down here. You know, this, the usage of this word can mean this and this. And I think in this passage, what it's referring to is this, well, that's, that's not clear cut. You know, I think that's, that's where Sam's hitting is like, even if your goal is to
01:36:12
Speaker
have a direct interpretation of what is absolutely 100% intended by that verse. I just, I don't know that we can do that. I don't know that even well-intentioned objective people can pull that meaning out of, you know, even the original concept. And that kind of touch, like, do you think that any of the interpretations that we have available to us now, like the translations are any of those,
01:36:40
Speaker
Have any of those protected the original intent of those verses or do they have errors and stuff in them? I think to use the term we said a second ago, I think it's a mixed bag. I think that there are some translations that are more faithful to the original language than others. The message Bible, I believe, has its place. It might help you understand
01:37:09
Speaker
in a little bit different way, but some of the things are gonna lead you away from what the original language was saying, because they're not intending to translate it word by word, they're intending to translate it thought by thought and wrap it up in a nice little bow for you. But, so yeah, I mean, go ahead. One of the things that like, so again, one of the things that drifted me away from that is, and I was just trying to pull up the, like trying to say that,
01:37:39
Speaker
the Bible and because if it's going to be that well let me let me before I make any assumptions be if it is if it is divinely inspired it is the errand word of God I'm assuming that you believe a proper reading of it would wouldn't allow for discrepancies or differences between the like different authors and different books is that am I correct in understanding that that it would all line up in some way if read correctly
01:38:12
Speaker
Yes, I would agree that, and again, you've got to understand a little bit about how the Bible was written and the different genres that are in the Bible and that sort of thing.
01:38:26
Speaker
Yeah, you run into the gospels or something and you have the synoptic problem where it's like, you know, people say, well, Matthew, Mark and Luke are saying all different things and what's the deal? It's like, but they're actually not because they're all different shades of the same picture, right? They're all supposed to be.
01:38:44
Speaker
unless you're talking about putting new wine into old wineskins and you get a little bit of a difference. So I think one of the things that I want to jump off that one of the things that was a big shift for me was
01:39:05
Speaker
I don't know if you're familiar with the juxtaposition of 2 Samuel 24 and 1 Chronicles 21, but David takes the census, you know the story.
01:39:18
Speaker
Yep. So like in Second Samuel, it would say that, I'm just going to read it because I pulled it up. It's like the anger of the Lord burned against Israel and he incited David against them saying go and take a census of Israel and Judah. So here we have God telling David to take a census of Israel and Judah. But when you get to First Chronicles, it says that referring to the same point in history, the same exact census, it says Satan rose up against Israel and incited David to take a census of Israel.
01:39:47
Speaker
So David, he did that and then afterwards God gets really mad at him. So like, I mean, even just there right there, it's like, when I read, when I was like reading through the Bible and I'm, and I start kind of doing some of my own research and I come across like, you know, the difference of, I mean, that's not a slight difference. God told you to take a census or Satan told you to take a census and the outcome equals,
01:40:12
Speaker
But God was mad at both outcomes, which is interesting. God told him to do it and then was mad at him for doing it in 2 Samuel. Between looking at 1 and 2 Samuel, 1 and 2 Kings, and 1 and 2 Chronicles, this happens
01:40:28
Speaker
constantly. Constant different retellings of the same stories, which is one of the things that brought me back into paying attention to and caring about the Bible. It's one of the things that made me fascinated by it. It's one of the things that kind of woke me up to a realization that there's an idea about the Bible that says,
01:40:51
Speaker
This is what it looks like for people to try to tell their story and grapple with their past and try to make sense of it over a couple thousand years.
01:41:01
Speaker
and that's generally what they're trying to do. And whether there's mistakes or they're trying to reinterpret certain scenarios through a new lens based on where they are or what they think God's doing, it's like, that's all we're all still doing, if you're a Christian or not. We're all trying to look at our story, look at our experiences, and try to figure out what the fuck's even going on in this crazy world. So that's the stuff that brings me back into it. That's why I still go to,
01:41:28
Speaker
like a church and participate in Christian faith because I'm part of a community where I get to have these conversations and some people think there's plenty of people in my church that would come from your perspective or a more traditional evangelical outlook and then we but we get to sit and have these conversations without it being a bother so that's why but
Open Discussions on Faith Complexities
01:41:50
Speaker
And we should have those conversations. I think that's part of what has gone wrong with the church, that we have to have these conversations and just telling a kid to just have faith or just believe it or, oh, don't worry about that.
01:42:07
Speaker
It's counterproductive. The Bible and faith is rigorous enough to press in and ask these questions and have these discussions because there aren't a lot of neat and tidy answers. And just where you are right now, you might have one guy that comes down on one side and another guy that comes down on another side of this. But to me, if I'm preaching 2 Samuel 24, I can't preach it without 1 Chronicles 21. I have to go back to that.
01:42:36
Speaker
because, again, there's a word here that's in play that I haven't used yet, but it's orthodoxy. It's what has the Christian church believed
01:42:47
Speaker
over the years about who God is and the nature of Him and evil and things like that. And so if you look at 2 Samuel 24, right, it says He incited David, the Lord incited David against them to do this census, right? But then 1 Chronicles says that Satan incited David, right? And of course you look at that and go, what the heck?
01:43:15
Speaker
Why can't it be that the Lord knew in his sovereignty that Satan wants to get David any cost and he knew that David was prideful and he was also going to use whatever was going to come about about this and redeem it for good instead of just waste it for whatever is going to happen and allow that to happen and allow that and stand indirectly behind evil and say, OK, Satan, you know, you did it.
01:43:44
Speaker
but I'm the one that's gonna redeem it for good because I'm more powerful than you and I have my plan that's working. So in the end, God's allowing it, but God didn't do it, right? And God's still responsible for all things, but it's an indirect use of sin and evil that exists. Other than that, you know, that's again where it's like, okay, if that's not true, then what's the purpose of evil? It's just evil.
01:44:09
Speaker
I mean, I think that's an interesting take. That's not one I wouldn't be unfamiliar with. That's just not what it says. And as an inerrantist, if it says that God incited David to take the census, then God incited David to take the census, right? So for me, this is what pulled me out. That's going back and saying it needs to fit the framework that we've constructed.
01:44:36
Speaker
So this goes back to what I think Case has been saying from the beginning. It feels like to some degree, and this is something I would argue anybody does to a lengthy degree, is they have the framework that they've built and they pick the things that help prop that up. So this isn't even a criticism of evangelical culture or biblical interpreters or Democrats or Republicans. This is just a human condition. So just
01:45:04
Speaker
I think we can all level that we're doing that frequently. So the point is, with your perspective, that feels to me like
01:45:19
Speaker
a reinterpreting or retelling to fit the evangelical framework is all. And as opposed to just saying, this is just what the text says, which is frequently a response to more problematic things like that nuance will get lost when you're talking about whether or not it's okay to be gay in the church, because there's no nuance for those passages there. Well, this is just what the Bible says. So the nuance will come in when it's convenient and it goes out when it's inconvenient. And it's all kind of feels like it's built around propping up a
01:45:47
Speaker
like just some scaffolding that needs to exist in order to maintain. I don't always want to make it sound like it's so insidious, but that's my experience of it for sure. Yeah. Let's face it, that's a reasonable perspective. Of course, I wouldn't agree with it, but I see where you're going with it.
01:46:13
Speaker
The concept, one of the other concepts I go by is using scripture to interpret scripture. Let the clear parts of scripture help us understand the unclear parts of scripture. And when you get down to it,
01:46:28
Speaker
the reality of the gospel of who Jesus claims to be and what he did and why and what it means for us. Like the gospel itself, that's crystal clear. And I would say it's crystal clear in the Bible, right? And some of these other things that people want to focus on, we can shed light on, right? Through the other parts of the Bible.
01:46:50
Speaker
But as an inerrant, what did you call me? Inerrantist? I think that's a stretch of that term. To me, that wouldn't include that. I have to say that it leaves no, you would use nuance to prop up a scaffolding, as you said.
01:47:18
Speaker
But I would use nuance to say that there has to be nuance in the translation of intended thought. I mean, we do it all the time with the words that we say and the things that we say. It's like, well, what did you mean by that? Well, it's not what I said. It's like, what am I actually trying to get across? What am I actually doing? And that's the work of biblical interpretation and hermeneutics and all of that. Casey's loading up. All right. That was a big, big, big deep breath.
01:47:49
Speaker
Here he goes. Well, I think that all of that all of that makes sense. All of that is fine. And I think it's easy to. I don't know, it's it's I think Sam put it pretty well in that. Well, it's it's, you know, representing like those problematic parts of scripture.
01:48:16
Speaker
is, you know, like, it's almost sometimes it's almost represented, like, people are nitpicking these, these problematic parts of Scripture and these things that are, you know, frequent, like, atheist Reddit forum, talking points about inconsistencies in the Bible as like, they're, they're gotcha questions, right? I never heard of that one. You guys are both Bible nerds. But
01:48:43
Speaker
I think that's true. That's true, man. I'm impressed, Sam. That was a good job. That's true. That is nitpicking. That's picking apart small parts of scripture that may not be completely central to the message. But I think when you couple that with the fact that like, you know, you've said a couple different times throughout today that
01:49:07
Speaker
this provides something that other religions can't and that the Bible is an errand. And I think that's where it becomes hard for me to follow along with some of this stuff. Because I can totally accept the fact that like, hey, there's some of this stuff that we as imperfect humans just can't understand. God and his divine wisdom will reveal the meanings of these things eventually to us and stuff. Like all that's fine.
01:49:34
Speaker
But when we're on the one hand, we're saying that, and on the other hand, we're saying, well, you know, those guys are wrong, and those guys are wrong, and no other religions have any answers that are meaningful. Christianity is the only way to, you know, peace and happiness, eternal life, all that stuff. It is just tough to stomach. Yeah, and that might be an overstatement, right? And I think there are definitely
01:50:03
Speaker
worldviews, religions, or whatever that can provide some measure of happiness and fulfillment. But at the end of the day, to me, it's going to be temporary because I think where we need to really stand, a guy like me is going to say no other religion is going to tell you how you can be
01:50:26
Speaker
justified in the sight, if you're gonna accept the existence of a God, you're gonna accept that he's not like us and he's all powerful and he's perfect. That goes along with accepting that there's a God. And we all know that we're not. We all know that this world is obviously not perfect either. So then what's the answer? Then how could we ever be accepted by this perfect God?
01:50:54
Speaker
And I would stand on the ground and then say, definitely exclusive, that there is no other religion that could tell you that, how we are accepted by that God. They could provide, to your point, Casey, they could provide some sort of comfort along the way or some sort of fulfillment or something. But in the end, it's not going to answer that question. Right. So I don't want to paint with too broad a brush, but I do have to stand on some ground that says, you know, sure.
01:51:21
Speaker
Sam's just got a good way of putting all this stuff, but it feels on the one hand like Christians in general.
01:51:27
Speaker
point at the structure in their lives and the good things that just having a good moral backbone and a framework to live your life by, those are the things that I think religion at its best does really, really well. Sure. Is to help people provide structure to their life, to help them cope with difficult situations and to get them through. I mean, it's life's hard, right?
01:51:56
Speaker
But I think that and those are the things that are tangible that we can look at and we can say yeah for a lot of people Christianity is great for them because look at these things But then to point at other religions and say well, they might be able to offer you that But they don't have like this eternal security that comes with them it's
01:52:21
Speaker
I don't know. It's like the proof of why Christianity is great is this, but that's over there. Yeah, but that doesn't matter over there because this over here proves that the rest of this stuff that's abstract that you can't really prove or provide evidence for is true. Yeah, and I'm not sure I'm totally understanding where you're headed with that.
01:52:48
Speaker
I guess it goes back to the fruit analogy, right? You'll know them by their fruit, right? By their fruit, we can deduce that Christianity… You know sheep and goats, Mike. Absolutely. But other religions yield good fruit.
01:53:09
Speaker
So to point at fruit as the evidence that this mindset has eternal consequences, but then to see fruit coming from branches of Islam and Buddhism and all that kind of stuff and to ignore that and so that's inconsequential.
Salvation: Faith vs Good Deeds
01:53:28
Speaker
And simply because they lack the academic assent to a principle that says, Jesus Christ died and saved us and it only works if I recognize it is true. Yeah, those words. The words that he said. That's what feels so simple about it is like, you can look at fruit, which is how you'll supposedly know them. They would say on the other hand, the fruit doesn't matter. It's only academic assent to these theological principles.
01:53:57
Speaker
And it can't be, it's just. But I don't, what do you mean by that? The fruit doesn't matter. Like, so, you know, if you're talking Jesus saying, you'll know people by their fruit, or the reason I joked about sheep and goats is because the great divider and the story that Jesus tells about who's going to like make it into the God's kingdom is either like, and it's the people who like.
01:54:19
Speaker
You either cared about people, visited the imprisoned, did all these, or you didn't. And then you're separated. You're on the outside of that. So when you're looking at what Jesus is trying to teach people how to do and where to live and how you'll recognize people by that fruit and then
01:54:38
Speaker
And then you reduce it to that's like that the fruit only matters so in so far as you accept the principles that say Jesus died on the cross to save you from your sins because God owed you like jack shit otherwise. And then it's just the soul recognition of that.
01:54:57
Speaker
that is what saves you, because that's what it comes down to. I mean, that's how you get people saved. That's how you convert people. You convert people by getting them to accept Jesus Christ in his work as salvific, as opposed to just a more universalist approach to Christianity. Accepting that work as a founding principle, as would
01:55:17
Speaker
you know, first I would say Christ slain from the foundations of the world. It's like, except that concept has been true throughout all of human history and that like just understanding that the fruit that people are bearing are showing their connection to this God that we're all trying to find. Whichever name you would, whatever vocabulary words you would pick or whatever words you would choose based on the language you speak, whether it be Allah, God, whatever.
01:55:48
Speaker
Yeah. So from this worldview, I'm pointing to myself, from the biblical worldview, you don't want to minimize fruit as fruit. We see somebody, whoever they are, whatever religion there are, and they're doing good things. They're caring for widows and orphans. They're feeding, they're hungry. Those are good things.
01:56:18
Speaker
But it's good because it's attached to the whole, right? We only know what good is because it's attached to something that's ultimately good, which is God, right? And so because they're doing those good things, we recognize them as good things. And I would look at that and say that those are good things and they need to celebrate it. And they're so close.
01:56:50
Speaker
The people love me though. It's really hard to stomach. Like more intuition about a good God is what tells me that that doesn't work.
01:56:58
Speaker
If we understand what good is because of God, and the moral intuition of tens of billions of people is saying, what good God would send people because they were born in another country, in a place where they did it. There's just so many factors into what people believe and why they believe and how they think and the way that they live and breathe in this world.
01:57:21
Speaker
Yeah.
Eternal Damnation and Divine Justice
01:57:22
Speaker
To, you know, to minimize, I mean, to me, that's like, if you want to believe in a big, all powerful God to minimize that God to someone that'll just damn someone for an eternity simply because of he can't, he's not good, like, there's no control over where they were born. No access to Christianity. So wild to me that, like,
01:57:42
Speaker
we claim about what it means to know good and that we can recognize this fruit is good because you're saying it's disseminated down from an all-powerful good God. But it's not
01:57:58
Speaker
So why does it seem so bad? If we're using that moral intuition that God gave us to then say, yeah, that makes no philosophical sense no matter which way you strike it. So that's the problem. That's why I'm like, the fruit really doesn't matter if they're damned in the end and nothing happens and God comes back and destroys his world and rebuilds his kingdom.
01:58:25
Speaker
I don't know. I don't want to say it's worthless from that perspective because that's speaking for you. But it feels it to me. It feels just like a trite. Well, it's nice that you found something while you were here. But in the grand scheme of eternity, what is the 50 years you live here really matter? Why couldn't that truth, and I already know what you're going to say to this, but why couldn't that truth
01:58:52
Speaker
be there for God or that goodness, right? When you see someone showing goodness to someone that is the least of these, doesn't deserve anything, whatever, why can't that be something that God uses to make people think deeper about who God is?
01:59:08
Speaker
Right, I think it can be. I'm just making the argument that you don't need to then recognize Jesus Christ as your Lord and Savior who died on the cross to save you from God's wrath and judgment. Like, to make that leap is what is like, doesn't, it just doesn't compute anymore. I got it. Yeah.
01:59:34
Speaker
One of the things that evangelical culture has done a horrific job at is trivializing the ridiculous seriousness of hell and what it actually means. And I say it often, I am not okay with the concept of hell. I'm really not. And we really shouldn't be. There's a sense of us that shouldn't be. Like for any Christian to kind of look at the concept of hell and be like, oh yeah,
02:00:02
Speaker
and then lay their head down at the pillow at night and think everything's okay. Like there's something wrong.
02:00:07
Speaker
Like, if we're really talking about the eternal destination of billions of people that will end up in eternal torment for eternity, that should bother us. It should, and we should never really be okay with that in the sense. But God is also somebody who's not us, right? Scripture says that all the time. One of my favorite little passages about that, I think it's Psalm 90, where it says, your mistake was that you thought I was like you.
02:00:34
Speaker
We're not, we try to anthropomorphize God. We try to make him like us, but he's completely holy and apart from us. And so, you know, to trivialize that, you know, we've got to slow down and we've got to think like, oh, whoa, like what does that really actually mean? And the Bible does actually say that there's a hell and it actually does say that it's eternal. And that should make us realize the reality of what we're called to as Christians to bring that hope
02:01:04
Speaker
because the reality is people don't have to go there. My puppy has just entered the office. That's the reason that Jesus came and left heaven to go to the sin infested world and to be spat on and tortured and killed in order
02:01:31
Speaker
to say, look, you don't have to go there because I'm providing the answer, the solution. We're kind of coming full circle now that this is the answer. It's the answer to sin and suffering. And that's the reason that God
02:01:50
Speaker
We haven't spent a lot of time on God's love, right? But we should. That's the reason that God loved us, to provide that way. Like, we're the ones that offended God, right? We're the ones that rejected Him. I know, I know. I keep hearing that. To me, that's so like...
02:02:07
Speaker
I don't I guess I didn't realize what triggered I am by stuff like that. It's been a long time. A long time. That was a physical seat. So your listeners don't get the joy. When I when I saw that was like a dry heaved. Yeah, if if I could, and this is I'm not trying to be rude. But it's I feel like it's going to come off as that.
02:02:33
Speaker
You've drawn several lines in the sand between your Christianity and evangelical culture that we come from, the traditional Liberty University, et cetera, brand of evangelical Christianity.
02:02:53
Speaker
But I think there's very little about what we've talked about today where you would be out of line with most of the principles that those guys taught. What's different about your Christianity and your interpretation of it than the rest of evangelical culture that we've discussed so far?
Historical and Modern Christianity
02:03:21
Speaker
That's a broad brush. It is. I think a lot of it. When I get that shutter reaction that Sam had there, you know, what makes me do that convulsion
02:03:42
Speaker
is again at the risk of painting with a broad brush and saying that this is not everybody, right? But what appears to be plaguing modern evangelical Christianity is a shift in the focus of a me-centered Christianity as opposed to a God-centered Christianity. And maybe some of the things in liberty and everything else would be
02:04:10
Speaker
biblically or doctrinally agreeing with what I just said, especially in the gospel and all that. But in the end, I think that we are producing Christians that have a misunderstanding that God exists to make them comfortable and happy. And that's not the reason God exists. And so I think that's a difference between when you get back to historical Orthodox Christianity, right?
02:04:41
Speaker
That wasn't a thing. That wasn't a thing. God is separate from us and God is holy and we serve Him and that's the best possible thing for us. He's not holding out on us. He's actually showing us the way to life in serving Him and loving Him. That's the Joel Osteen brand of Christianity. The motivational speaker, I'm here to fix you sort of thing.
02:05:06
Speaker
Yeah, he's not even in the arena of Christianity as far as I'm concerned. There is none. He has a nice arena. He certainly does. It's only open when the weather's nice.
02:05:21
Speaker
And that's one thing that I think people are reacting to when we get into COVID and we had the 2020s that some of us have had, is you start to see that and it's just like, this year is the year of your breakthrough. It's like, no, no, it wasn't. Did you look at 2020? Like you just can't sell that narrative anymore. It's not gonna work. Like people are seeing you for who you are. You're a charlatan. You're not a preacher of God's word. You're trying to sell stuff and people see it now.
02:05:48
Speaker
So I hope that people stop giving him money. Give it to you instead. No, no, no, no. Just kidding. So God centered rather than me centered. Yeah.
02:06:08
Speaker
I guess just what does that mean in practicals and like what, what difference if I'm a person on the street and your church is on one side and there's a typical, you know, Thomas road Baptist church on the other side, like what's the difference between the two? Why would I, why should I go to yours rather than theirs? Because they're kind of the poster child for a lot of the icky things that we've talked about so far.
02:06:34
Speaker
Yeah, and I don't know them, so I, of course, have heard of them. I actually did spend a year and a half at Liberty Seminary online before I was like, I don't think I want to be here anymore, and then jumped out to Southern Baptist Theological Seminary to finish up.
02:06:59
Speaker
I think the most honest answer, Casey, is I don't know. I don't know what would be the difference without seeing who they are. I'm suspect of a lot of that. I think we should be because, again, what is it? To go back to where we were saying it, what is the fruit? What do the Christians look like that are being produced out of there? And I'm not saying that Christians who go to Highlands Bible Church are perfect and mature and all of that, but I hope that they get
02:07:28
Speaker
a view of God that this life is, our lives are supposed to be God-centered as opposed to God existing for me, right? And that's what you'll get from Osteen is that God exists to give you that promotion or bring you to the next level or get you richer or whatever, give you a nice spouse or whatever the heck it's supposed to be. And that's just not it.
02:07:54
Speaker
Maybe we all just like different fruit. I think that's the problem here. Could be. Yeah, I think I feel like the clarity Casey's trying to get so like the things that I think some of the things that we've talked about are some of the and we should probably, you know, be wrapping this
Christianity's Image and Politics
02:08:15
Speaker
up soon. But I want to close it out with maybe one more question in the same line of what Casey's getting at is we've been
02:08:26
Speaker
On top of what people are seeing politically, that has been a major turnoff as far as looking towards Christianity as being any sort of moral guiding force in this country. At least in its loud public, Republican co-opted brand.
02:08:49
Speaker
watching the behaviors of the people that they've been elevating and saying that these are the right kinds of people we need to be leading. It's those behaviors that have been a particular disgust to a lot of people. And it's been, I think, particularly painful because we know that they never would have tolerated that from any leaders when we were kids. The battle cry against
02:09:13
Speaker
against Clinton was character counts after having an affair so it's like we we understand we we of course we've all watched all that yeah so but that's all part of it you know and i think even i think even going back to you know the summation uh your summation of how you understand the gospel versus is
02:09:38
Speaker
I gotta push on that just a little bit because that's not how I understand the gospel, right? And I know you're going to roll your eyes and maybe even have your other reaction again, but I don't know how you can read. How can you read John 3 any other way?
02:09:53
Speaker
I mean, I don't know. I don't really think anything in the Bible is crystal clear, but also I'm not coming from the same perspective of you are that if even if you could pull one verse out and say that the first is crystal clear that that's that's indicative of what the entire book is saying as all like all the books of it are saying, you know,
02:10:13
Speaker
So I do think, I think the way you surmised the gospel, I'll continue to call it your understanding of it, because that's an evangelical understanding of it. That's as evangelical as it gets, especially when it comes to the concept of atonement and what Christ did. I mean, you can look through Christian history and find totally different theories of atonement, and you can find Christian universalism from the beginning of Christianity. Like, this isn't... Sure. So what you were saying...
02:10:43
Speaker
Well, by who? And that's what I'm getting at. These ideas have existed and persisted. If you want to get into the conversation about what the
02:10:59
Speaker
about historic Christianity. I mean, if we want to really care about that, then we should all still be Catholic. And we never should have separated ourselves from the Catholic Church. We should have just fixed it. We should have like, but so like, don't you dare when you're looking at like, I think historic response, like going back to in referencing historic Christianity or beliefs that have been held throughout Christian history as a reason to continue to uphold certain things and reject others that might have not been popular. It doesn't
02:11:28
Speaker
isn't a great argument to me. It's not holding a lot of water. So I think there's plenty of other ways to read the Bible that will come out with different understandings of
02:11:42
Speaker
Atonement I mean even your your understanding that hell is this clear thing in the Bible I would say it's it's not clear at best and Even if it was I mean I'm in the particular advantage of being able to say that it's cool if they used to think that I don't have to like it and then believing it and writing it down or writing down a word that then got translated into it and
02:12:04
Speaker
centuries later, doesn't make it real or true. You don't have to force that to line up with the character of your understanding of God, who's the highest form of morality, in order to have that gospel message. You know what I mean?
02:12:22
Speaker
But that's what a lot of people are reacting to and leaving as well. Like hearing that message, it's not, it's just like some really, it's just to us, like some of the shittiest news we've ever received is that there's a God who loves us so much, he's happy to watch us burn in hell for all of eternity because we offended him somehow. So like, I mean, I go through my life wildly unoffended by the behavior of others because, and I'm not equating myself to the concept of the highest goodness, but.
02:12:51
Speaker
I'm just saying, if God's better than me, if God's better than us, if God's more loving and more kind, like we keep extrapolating these things from God, but then we get to this idea that he could reject you into a turtle damnation, and then we throw our hands up and go.
02:13:10
Speaker
Well, we just aren't like God. We don't know God. But all that's trying to be explained to us is what God's like. And then when it comes to eternal damnation, it's like, well, God's holier and bigger and different than we are. We can't know that. And we can't understand that. And the assumption that we should be offended by the concept or be bothered by the idea of people going to hell.
02:13:33
Speaker
more than we should be bothered by the idea that there can be a God that can simultaneously exist with something so horrific. That was definitely one of the first things to go for me. And we can thank everybody's favorite heretic, Rob Bell, for that one. Oh my gosh. Yeah. Yeah. So I think that's...
Exclusivity and Truth in Christianity
02:14:00
Speaker
When Casey's talking about what's different, it's like maybe you didn't support Trump, whose actions and words were problematic. But the people who did came from, I mean, they're still coming from, I would argue, the same biblical worldview.
02:14:20
Speaker
when they're in their understanding and interpretation of the Bible, they might make the stakes a little bit higher when it comes to trying to reproduce their version of the biblical worldview for the rest of the country and sit and try to make people fit into that through legislation or presidential power or whatever.
02:14:38
Speaker
It's like, to me, you can dress up these ideas with love and kindness, but to me, they just don't represent it, which is why I think a lot of people have been like, I mean, if that's God, then I guess I don't think that that can be, and then it's not true. And then you have that group saying,
02:15:04
Speaker
Well, that's the only God there can be, or that you may be taught that's the only understanding or concept of God that can be. So now people just shed it all together. I'm sure our definitions of what God is is very different too, but I'll still use the word to communicate something bigger than myself. No, you're probably right. And yeah, no, I know how you're using that. So I think it's just commonality in that.
02:15:33
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, I think one of your other guests, it was something that I was reacting to the other day, and it was somebody who was saying something, if this is the body of Christ, then I don't want to be a part of it. Or, you know, if this is Christianity, then I don't want to be a part of it. Or when did, I think she said, when did Christianity get to be about believing only one thing?
02:16:01
Speaker
and nothing else or something like that. And it's like, I mean, again, I had one of those moments too where I shuddered, you know, just like you did be like, but just like, I don't know, since Jesus, like it just, since he said it, like sometimes we pin it on evangelical culture that the church is making it about this, but maybe they are, maybe they aren't. But again, it goes back to kind of what I said, if you read the Bible, like that's what it's saying.
02:16:31
Speaker
in its clearest possible way. Like, again, I'll go back to John 3 as that passage. Like, how can you read John 3 and say that that's not exclusive? It's completely exclusive, but then what do we do with that? And how do we live in light of that? And who does that make God to be? Or how would you read it in light of something that's more inclusive written elsewhere by a different apostle or...
02:16:58
Speaker
I think that's what I come back to. I think what I'll come back to is I'm not going to argue that you can't read certain parts of the Bible as exclusive. My belief is that when you look at it as a whole, you'll find a mixed bag and that
02:17:16
Speaker
like you would in a church. So I think I'm just putting a little bit less on it being, it's people's experience of God, but it's less a dictation of God's perfect truth and more about our struggle to find it. So I wanna ask you one more question before we go. Am I a Christian? Wow, are you a Christian?
02:17:42
Speaker
Based on what I've said and what you think it means to be a Christian and zero offense at all. I'm not worried about what vocabulary words people use to define an entire belief system. So no feelings hurt, but I'm just curious. Outside of the personal conversation and us getting to know each other a little bit and liking each other, if I was just a guy,
02:18:11
Speaker
saying these things. Am I a Christian? This sounds like a very me centered Christianity. Well, I see what you did there. Very nice. Yeah, gosh, that's like a heavy question. I've always wanted to ask somebody that.
02:18:33
Speaker
Based upon, you know, when you say a Christian, right? Obviously someone who believes that Jesus was the Christ, Jesus was the Messiah, right? And then all that goes along with it.
02:18:47
Speaker
And are you going to say that you would believe that He is the one that the Old Testament pointed to and fulfilled the prophecies and did what the Old Testament said He would do? And the one who lived a perfect life, the one who is God incarnate in the flesh here as well as human, would you believe that He died in our place for the atonement? And would you believe that He resurrected again and is coming again?
02:19:17
Speaker
You know, that's historically orthodox what a Christian would be. I don't know if we know each other well enough for me to say one way or the other. If I said no to any one of the things he said, go ahead, sorry, I shouldn't have interrupted.
02:19:36
Speaker
No, that's where I was going anyway, because I think you have said no to some of those really important things. And I think that there are things that are non-negotiable in the Gospel because they are so clear in Scripture, and then there are things that are not so negotiable, or are more negotiable. Sorry.
02:19:57
Speaker
Things like, did God create the world? Yes. How did He create the world? I don't know. Is it a couple days? Is it millions of years? Those are things that are negotiable. But when you talk about who Jesus is, I don't think that's so negotiable. And based upon some of the things you said, it doesn't seem you are. It doesn't seem you are as the Bible would define a Christian.
02:20:21
Speaker
And so I guess that's as clear as I could say. You know what, guys? It seems to me like we got conflicting meta narratives. That's what I think. Oh, meta narratives. Word of the day. You didn't realize it. We should have spelled it out at first, but this was really a conversation between you and I and first Sam's soul. Casey wins. I feel like I'm winning. I don't know.
02:20:49
Speaker
You heard it here first, everybody. I am not a Christian. I've been wrong. I've been wrong about myself, I guess. I don't know. This was a really stressful way to spend your Saturday, Mike. It is. It is. And maybe, Sam, I don't know where you are geographically, but maybe someday you and I could meet up for a cold beer and we could continue this conversation about what a Christian is and what that looks like.
02:21:13
Speaker
I think that sounds like fun. I could do this stuff all day. I am actually in Massachusetts. It's not too, too far, depending on where, if you're in Northern New Jersey, it's not that bad of a trip. I'll be halfway for a couple of years sometime. There you go. I would like that. All right, everyone. I think that's a good place to wrap it up with me being called an apostate. God damn it.
02:21:37
Speaker
This is a hard way to find out. Thanks for coming on, man. I know we peppered you with questions and stuff and talked way too long, but we appreciate you sharing your thoughts with
Conclusion and Appreciation
02:21:51
Speaker
us.
02:21:51
Speaker
Yeah, no, and I really appreciate you guys having me on, but I also appreciate, I'm sure I pissed off a lot of your viewers or listeners, but I really appreciate you guys having the opportunity to have the other side kind of on this because it shows you guys are trying to do a balanced thing and I really respect that, so thank you. Yeah, absolutely. All right, well, thanks everybody for listening. We will catch you next time.