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With Paul Gould
107 Plays4 years ago
Is there room for imagination, romance, even enchantment, in our evangelistic endeavour? In this episode we speak with Paul Gould about the concept of cultural apologetics and how it deals with the desirability of the gospel as it connects with deep-rooted cultural ideals.
Paul M. Gould (Ph.D. philosophy, Purdue University) is the author or editor of ten scholarly and popular-level books including Cultural Apologetics, Philosophy: A Christian Introduction, and The Story of the Cosmos. He has been a visiting scholar at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School’s Henry Center, working on the intersection of science and faith, and is the founder and president of the Two Tasks Institute. He speaks regularly at Summit Ministries, the C.S. Lewis Institute, and the Evangelical Philosophical Society’s annual apologetics conference.
https://www.twotasksinstitute.org
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Transcript
Introduction of Hosts and Guest
00:00:09
Speaker
Well, welcome to this edition of Pep Talk, the persuasive evangelism podcast. I'm Andy Bannister, and I'm joined by my co-host, Christy Mayer. Christy, how are you doing down there in London today? Oh, not only surviving, but thriving. Thank you, Andy. Not only surviving, but thriving.
00:00:24
Speaker
Oh, you should write tweets or something like that. Well, we've
Paul Gould's Work in Cultural Apologetics
00:00:29
Speaker
got a great guest for you today. By the power of technology, not merely do you have myself in Scotland and Christie in London, but we're joined all the way from the US of A by Paul Gould. Paul, welcome to PepTalk. Thanks, guys. It's great to be with you. And whereabouts in the USA are you coming to us today from?
00:00:48
Speaker
Yeah, we're coming from just outside of Dallas, Fort Worth in Texas. Well, it's great to have you on the show, not envious about your climate at all. And Paul, you're a visiting scholar at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, which is quite a mouthful.
From Gospel Credibility to Desirability
00:01:08
Speaker
Got a PhD, kind of written many, many books and thought very deeply about many, many things. But one of the things that you have a kind of passion for and have written books on and also done a piece on the so last website for is this whole idea of cultural apologetics. And to many people, that will be a phrase they haven't come across before. Paul, in a nutshell, what is cultural apologetics and why is it important, especially as we think about evangelism in today's age?
00:01:37
Speaker
Good, yeah, let me begin with why it's actually important and then I'll tell you what it is But so for about 16 years my wife and I were campus ministers working on the college campus and and I just realized that you know we're in this environment where as Christians truth is on our side, but
00:01:53
Speaker
But the gospel was regularly ridiculed and people just didn't think that Christianity was true or even reasonable. And so I began to ask this question, you know, how does the gospel get a fair hearing in our culture today, given all the sort of obstacles before us? And so.
00:02:09
Speaker
Long story short, years later basically wrote this book called Cultural Apologetics to address that question. And then in there, this is how I define Cultural Apologetics. It's working to reestablish the Christian voice, the Christian conscience, and the Christian imagination so that the gospel will be viewed as both true and satisfying.
00:02:31
Speaker
In other words, that Christianity is not only true to the way the world is, it's reasonable, but it's good and beautiful as
Imagination and the Gospel
00:02:38
Speaker
well. It satisfies every longing of the human heart for happiness, for peace, for beauty, for goodness, for justice, for love, and things like that. So that's a little summary, I guess, of what cultural apologetics is.
00:02:51
Speaker
One of the things I really love about that, Paul, is you mentioned that not only are you engaged in cultural apologetics, but that you've been also involved in college campus ministries. And I've been involved in that for about, well, about 10 years, but formally I was with UCCF for about eight. And I wonder what you think about this at the moment.
00:03:09
Speaker
On campuses, I was speaking at a couple of university mission weeks earlier on in February, and there seems to be this kind of move from going from talking about the credibility of the gospel, which is very much like a baby boomer question. You know, if you die today, how do you know that you'd be with God tomorrow kind of thing?
00:03:26
Speaker
to actually thinking more about the desirability and tangibility of the gospel, like leading with that first. And that sounds like that's what you're doing with this cultural apologetics and establishing a voice, you know, the conscience and the role of the imagination. How have you seen that
Disenchantment and Sacred Perception
00:03:41
Speaker
at work at the moment in live situations?
00:03:45
Speaker
Yeah, I think that's a really good observation, Christy, actually, because I think for years, I mean, really since the Enlightenment, the main objection that was pretty prominent was that Christianity is irrational. So you have, you know, these Enlightenment thinkers like David Hume saying the biggest miracle is that anybody believes that the resurrection actually happened, you know, tongue in cheek and things like that.
00:04:07
Speaker
And then you have, you know, maybe 10 or 15 years ago, the new atheists that are writing folks like Richard Dawkins and books that are with titles like The God Delusion and, you know, Breaking the Spell of Religion, this is Dan Dennett, and so on, or Religion is Not Great, this is Christopher Hitchens. And really, the objection is still that Christianity is irrational, but there is this new component, you know, but it's not only is it irrational, but it's undesirable, you know, and that
00:04:34
Speaker
So we regularly hear things like the Christian ethic, for example, is unloving or repressive or archaic or things like that. And so there's all these objections. They've always been there, but I think they're more prominent today, not just to the truth of Christianity or the reasonableness, but just we don't want it. And so I can remember
00:04:56
Speaker
You know, there's this famous philosopher named Thomas Nagel who wrote this book in 1997 called The Last Word. And I'm always struck with this where he says, basically, he says, you know, I'm struck with the fact that all these very intelligent people are Christians. And then he says this, you know, I don't want there to be a God. I don't want the
Pandemic and Human Longing for Transcendence
00:05:15
Speaker
universe to be like that. And there's this idea that it's not just the objections aren't just to the reasonableness, but sometimes we just don't want it.
00:05:22
Speaker
And so I think if we really want to have a full-orbed apologetic, we've got to address not only the truth question, of course we have to address that, but all these objections to the goodness and the beauty or the desirability. See, I think there is a big shift that is taking place and we need to address all of those worries.
00:05:39
Speaker
You know, as you unpack that, Paul, the thought that's occurred to me sometimes is that on the one hand, as Christians, it's very easy to look at the culture and sort of critique it and say that it's moved away from concepts of truth and so on and so forth. And we see that coming through in these new kind of questions that people are asking. But I also wonder, I wonder to what extent it's also because at times as Christians in our evangelism and our apologetics that we maybe have shared a sort of shallow version of the gospel, we've forgotten about the
00:06:06
Speaker
the imagination you know i remember that you know that's uh that famous line of blaze pascal you know preach the gospel in such a way that good people wish that it were true and show that that it is and the back of my mind is you know one of my great uh apologetic heroes is c.s lewis because i think i think lewis
00:06:22
Speaker
had this great ability to connect the reason and the imagination and do those two things together. And I know you've talked about Lewis and his sort of use of the imagination. Can you sort of talk a little bit more about perhaps why the imagination and appealing to some of these other things, not putting truth aside, but as well as talking about reason and truth are so important? And more particularly, how might the ordinary person begin thinking about doing that as they talk about Jesus with their friends?
00:06:47
Speaker
Yeah, that's a great question. And actually, Lewis, I think, brings this out so well, is that what you have with Christianity is this really perfect blend of, to use Lewis's phrases, of reason and romance. Of course, Christianity is reasonable, and any apologetic ought to defend the reasonableness of Christianity. But as Lewis put it, we also long for romance. And what he meant by that wasn't this sort of base sentimentality, but this idea that the deepest longings of the heart
00:07:16
Speaker
for home will be satisfied." You mentioned Pascal. There's this wonderful quote in his Ponce where he basically says that deep within the human heart, he actually uses the phrase, there's this whiff of a trace of a memory of a time when man, capital M, so all humans were truly happy.
00:07:34
Speaker
You know, that deep within the heart, we have this memory of a time when the world was as it ought to be. And I think that in cultural apologetics, we kind of reawaken these deep longings of the human heart for justice, for a world made right. And of course, the imagination is so critical today because
00:07:53
Speaker
You know, we live in,
Linking Transcendence to Jesus through Acts
00:07:54
Speaker
sometimes people talk about how we live in a post-Christian nation and the idea there, whether or not we do or not, there's an interesting debate. But the idea is that we at least live in a maybe a biblically illiterate culture. And so when we throw out phrases like, you know, Jesus needs to save your soul. Well, first of all, what do you mean by Jesus? What do you mean by soul? And what do you mean by save? And so the idea is that we need to re
00:08:19
Speaker
We need to help people imaginatively understand what these phrases mean. And that's why for Lewis, he talked about imagination is the organ of meaning, right? That we have to help in fresh ways people understand the meaning of these terms that we use so that the gospel will actually be understood and get a fair hearing so people can understand what it is we're even talking about.
00:08:40
Speaker
Because one of the things that the words that you use is reenchantment. What does that mean for us? How do we go about reenchanting towards reality? Basically, if you would ask the question. So here's a favorite phrase of mine. Leslie Newbegin, who perhaps you guys are familiar with. I figured you are. So he went away as a missionary. You love Leslie. Oh, good. Well, then I'm going to give you my favorite quote from his book, Foolishness to the Greeks.
00:09:06
Speaker
But he goes away to India for 40 years or whatever, comes back to his sending country there in Great Britain, and realizes that in the time he was away, as he described it, that the nation had become post-Christian and that he needed to have a missionary encounter with modern society. And so in the very first page of Foolishness to the Greeks, he basically asked this question, which I think is our crucial question.
00:09:27
Speaker
And that's the question, what would be involved in a genuine missionary encounter between the gospel and the whole way of thinking, perceiving, and living that we call modern Western culture? So in that question, there's this phrase, what is the dominant way of thinking, perceiving, and living? And I think that the dominant way of perceiving today is the word disenchantment.
00:09:51
Speaker
And what I mean by that is that, by and large, we no longer view the world in its proper light. So, for example, we use words like this. We say that the world is ordinary
Cultural Narratives as Bridges to the Gospel
00:10:00
Speaker
or everyday or mundane. But in reality, that's not what the world is like. The world is deeply mysterious and it's beautiful. And to use the proper word, as Lewis would say, it's holy, it's sacred, it's gift.
00:10:13
Speaker
And so the idea of reenchanting our lives and, you know, is perceiving the world in its proper light so that we would learn to enjoy all things as gift and then enjoy them in creaturely response. That's actually how Lewis would put it. That's the idea of reenchanting, seeing and delighting in the world the way Jesus does and then inviting others to do the same.
00:10:37
Speaker
Paul, I love that idea of sort of enchantment and wonder and disenchantment. As we were talking before the recording, one of the things that the three of us were chatting around is the fact that when you start thinking in those terms, the sort of signs of the fact this is an enchanted world, a world full of wonder and something other than just that sort of base material level comes through everywhere. That idea that although we may live in a secular age to
00:11:01
Speaker
quote Charles Taylor's famous book. There are these sort of ghosts and signs of transcendence everywhere. One of the things I was being thinking about in the last few days, actually, would love your kind of thoughts on perhaps sort of pulling on this thread of it. As we're recording right now, people may be listening to this in the future, but as we're recording right now, the whole coronavirus thing is everywhere. It's turning societies and economies and everything upside down.
00:11:25
Speaker
And it occurs to me, a friend said to me the other day, they said, isn't it interesting that although we live in a secular age that says, you know, human beings are nothing more than the sum of their parts, you know, sort of neo Darwinism, survival of the fittest and so on and so forth, we are, you know, literally, countries are on the verge of crashing their economies because we're pouring billions of pounds into keeping the weakest alive.
00:11:46
Speaker
because we know there's something precious. We know that it's not acceptable to say, hey, why don't we just euthanize everybody over the age of 70 and just let the virus run its course? We instinctively know that's wrong, even though the biggest or secular story we're living in can't explain why it's wrong. And I think there's an incredible opportunity right now, actually, around the way that societies were responding, that are screaming and shouting if we listen to that sort of sign of transcendence, that the human life is much more than just the material.
00:12:15
Speaker
That was a sort of long, sort of rambling kind of comment, but I'd love your sort of take on it, because I think there's a cultural apologetics opportunity right now in this moment.
00:12:23
Speaker
That's right, yeah, I mean, so think of it this way, you know, the intelligentsia have been telling us for, I don't know, a long time that there's nothing beyond this world, right? That it's just mundane, there's no supernatural reality. But what's so interesting is that our longings betray us, you know, and that we're fascinated, I think, as a culture with, I mean, the extra mundane. And I was just struck, I guess it was a couple years ago, I don't know how it was in your country, but here in America, there's this like 15 minute
00:12:52
Speaker
fascination with Pokemon Go a couple summers ago. Okay, you had it too. So everybody's walking around with their phones, you know, staring at this augmented reality. And it's so interesting. That's a kind of like, you know, we want there to be more, whether it's virtual realities, whether it's escaping into movies, or there's this obsession with the occult, and there's a obsession with, I mean, just, you know, the paranormal, all these things are really interesting because they betray
00:13:19
Speaker
The world, the intelligentsia say there is nothing beyond this world, yet our longings
00:13:24
Speaker
you know, long for something more. And so I think that moments like, you know, we're speaking in the midst of this coronavirus pandemic. Again, it just, it reminds us to go back to Taylor that we're not buffered, right? You know, Taylor talks about how we want to be these buffered selves that insulate ourselves from all of the ravages of the world around us. But no, we're actually vulnerable, right? And I think I feel this and I see this
00:13:50
Speaker
It's amazing how quickly things crumble and amazing how fragile we actually are. The truth is that we're always in the loving hands of God, but it's moments like this when those things surface. And so I think you're right, it's a real moment for us as Christians to love our neighbors, to point them to the hope that we have in Christ and the truth that God holds us in His loving hands and cares for us even in the midst of suffering. So yeah, real important moment, but absolutely.
00:14:18
Speaker
were haunted, I think, by transcendence, this longing for more. And that's part of what we ought to do is just poke and point and ask questions in these moments that help people sort of set them on a journey to see that they're ultimately longing for the only true transcendent reality, which is Jesus Christ.
00:14:38
Speaker
Amen. One of the things that I loved about what you said here and earlier is talking about reality in such a way that people see and delight in the world as Jesus does and inviting others to do the same. What do you think that might look like for us now connecting that longing for transcendence with the person of Jesus Christ in our time right now of COVID-19? Yeah, I think
00:15:03
Speaker
Initially, the two times in the book of Acts where Paul engages a culture different than himself are found in Acts chapter 14, where Paul engages the God-fearing Greeks in Lystra, and then in Acts chapter 17, where Paul engages the Greeks in Athens. And what's so interesting about both of those encounters, for example, go to think of the Acts chapter 14, where Paul says something really interesting there, where he basically, as he's engaging with these God-fearing Greeks, he says,
00:15:34
Speaker
look at all the good things that you have. You know, you have wine to drink, you have food, you have seasons, and so on. And then he basically challenges them to consider the giver of all good things. And so one thing that we can be doing in a time like this is just pointing to all the things that we take for granted that we're no longer taking for granted, you know, food and
00:15:54
Speaker
and toilet paper and the necessities that we have. So that would be one thing. And then the other thing, in terms of the fear and the genuine suffering that is taking place, to point to the fact that God is there too and to really press into these areas of fear and then to bring hope and to bring the fact that God does care, that God is with us. These are really critical times where I think the God
00:16:23
Speaker
the Christian God really does comfort. And it matters that Christianity is actually true because we're not just, as the secular worldview would say, the universe is indifferent to us. Well, no, actually the Christian perspective is quite different, that God cares about every hair on our heads and the very things that we care about, God cares about. And so pointing to those truths, I think in these times is really helpful.
00:16:48
Speaker
But one last kind of question, I think, as we sort of head towards the, to wrap things up in a few minutes time, you know, you mentioned Acts 17 there, and one of the things I love in Acts 17, for those who know that passage, that's Paul there, is there an Athens, he sees the altar to the unknown gods.
00:17:05
Speaker
And he uses that as a bridging point to present the gospel and Jesus to the Athenians. And once they always interested me in that passage, normally he's able to use this cultural bridging point rather than critique them for their idolatry. He uses it as a connection. He also quotes their own poets.
00:17:21
Speaker
And I wonder, is there a lesson there for Christians as well as knowing our scriptures and knowing the gospel story? Is there a lesson there that we also need to be listening to the story of the culture so that we can do as Paul did, that we can find the connecting points rather than just being aware of what we know, what goes on in the forwards of our churches, but not perhaps aware of what our friends out there in the world are thinking about? How can we use, I guess, culture to build bridges to the gospel a bit better?
00:17:46
Speaker
Yeah, that's a great question. I think, you know, what Paul did, so to use NT Wright's language here, Paul's speech in Athens, he does three things. He, as NT Wright would put it, he first affirms what he can affirm in Athenian culture. And so for Paul, that was affirming the religious impulse behind all that idolatry and using that as a starting point to build that bridge to Jesus and the gospel. And then secondly, though, Paul outflinks their thinking, and he does that in a brilliant way. And then third, he confronts the rank idolatry.
00:18:15
Speaker
And so I think, you know, you see him outflanking their thinking, and that's where he, in the midst of that, as he's building a bridge from this God that they worship who is unknown, you know, and then, well, actually, this God who heals the plague and whom you worship is unknown as your creator and your sustainer and your ordainer. And then you get to verse 28, which is this great, you know, in him we live and move and have our being.
00:18:37
Speaker
where Paul is quoting Epimeneides, who's one of their poets, and actually Epimeneides said this about Zeus, and so Paul's basically agreeing with it up to a point, but reinvesting it with new meaning, new fresh meaning, and he's basically tapping into this question that the Greeks have been asking since the beginning of Greek philosophy, you know, what is change? What is reality and what is life? And he basically says, it's him whom you worship as unknown, who heals the plague, who is your creator and sustainer and ordainer,
00:19:06
Speaker
And then, of course, he quotes Aratus, the stoic philosopher, you know, as he says, and some of your own poets have said we are all his offspring. And so I think it is actually a great illustration of how it'd be like me quoting, I don't know, Drake or Taylor Swift or whoever, I don't want to date myself.
00:19:21
Speaker
I wanted to say pro jam, but it'd be like us quoting from the aesthetic currency of our day to make a point to build a bridge to Jesus and the gospel. And I think that we're people of the book as Christians, but we live in an age of image.
00:19:37
Speaker
And we live in an age where we're driven by the aesthetic currency, the things that awaken our longings for beauty. And so we should use that, right? I love how St. Augustine, who is an ancient church father, wrote this book called The Confessions. And in there he says of Jesus, you are the beauty of all beautiful things and then the good of all good things. And I would just add the truth in which all true things point. And so everything, all that is good and true and beautiful is ours, right? We own it. And so our job is to point to that
00:20:06
Speaker
in culture, even, as we see it, and then connect it to the source, which is Christ. And in doing that, we set them on a journey which, if faithfully followed, ends in Christ. Thank you so much, Paul. We've been so encouraged, and I'm really just struck by what you said that Jesus is the most beautiful of all beautiful things. Thank you for your time today. Thank you so much for listening to PacTalk. We'll be back again shortly with our next guest.