Can a nation be "Christian" without Christ?

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Speaker 1: The world is becoming increasingly propicient at telling stories that deny God. As such, we need Thinking Christian to become as natural as breathing. Welcome to the Thinking Christian podcast. I'm doctor James Spencer, and through calm, thoughtful theological discussions, Thinking Christian highlights the ways God is working in the world and questions the underlying social, cultural, and political assumptions that hinder Christians from becoming more like Christ. Now onto today's episode of Thinking Christian. Hey everyone, welcome to this episode of Thinking Christian. I'm doctor James Spencer. I'm joined by doctor Ashish Varma, and today we're going to be discussing an article from It's a magazine journal First Things, and First Thing's been around for a long time and we're going to be talking about this article by James Wood, who is an associate professor of religion and theology at Redeemer University in Canada, and he wrote an article titled in Defense of Cultural Christianity. As some of you may know, I've written on my concerns with the use of Christian to describe things for which Christ is not essential, things like Christian nation, Christian nationalism. I find that descriptor to be highly problematic for a number of different reasons. And so this article really caught my eye and I sent it over to Ashish who also read it. And we've got some we've got some problems. So we're going to talk about those problems today in the podcast and uh, and see what we can do with it. Maybe maybe it'd be good if we can kind of start just having a dialogue and making sure that we outline appropriately his general argument.

00:01:43
Speaker 2: Ashish, what do you think like it's a good place to start.

00:01:46
Speaker 3: I think that's a great place to start.

00:01:47
Speaker 1: Okay, go for it. Let's uh what did you think he was trying to do?

00:01:54
Speaker 3: Yeah, Well, at his base, it was something of a defense for a particular kind of political theology. I was reading it in which our faith should enter into our public life. And on that baseline, I would say that's probably unarguable. Right if we say our faith is what it is, something that encompasses our very being, postures, our very ways of engaging with society, our families, with everyone and everything, then I suppose at that basic level he ought to make a case to that degree. Now I think he takes it, takes it further than just simply making a case for one's faith shaping one's public life to a particular rendering of public life following a political model. Right, So what I mean by that is that there's been I think it's worth putting meat on the bones ear to say that we live in a society in which we have a pretty clearly demarketed way of thinking about Christian political engagement. It doesn't mean everyone thinks the same thing, but there's a reason that a pretty standard eighty to eighty five percent of especially the evangelical population, votes in one particular way. Yeah, has one particular set of issues that has become the voting block, to the point where if someone violates those issues, you often hear it said that this is I'm a single issue voter on this point, and we know what the issues are. No need of getting into that just yet.

00:03:39
Speaker 1: But you have.

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Speaker 3: Also a very vocal group of people who want to say I'm a Christian. You can't take away from me that I'm a Christian and I vote very differently and I don't see things now. It's a vocal group. It's a consistently minority group. It's a group that you get the sense wants to be able to make headway and become a bigger group, but for whatever reasons, consistently remains in the under fifteen percent part of the Christian population publicly right, but because of their criticism that's pretty vocal, and some pretty prominent people, so that the author James would also among other people he references, Oh, I've suddenly, it's embarrassing, I've forgotten his name. Suddenly, the theologian with the Southern Baptist.

00:04:29
Speaker 2: Convention, El Mohler.

00:04:33
Speaker 3: No, no, no, the one who was the head of the Ethics Commission, Russell.

00:04:37
Speaker 2: Mooreus Russell Moore, Russell Moore. Yeah, so he.

00:04:40
Speaker 3: References him, and he clearly sets himself in opposition to someone like Russell Moore. But there's some prominent people like Russell Moore right where he wants to sort of posture against what you get the sense of it's a defense in some sense of that eighty to eighty five percent voting block, and I think there's a lot of assumptions that take place within that. But he's trying to draw in what good and benefit can we get out of being that voting block and being that political group who's tied to a particular political form of being, while at the same time acknowledging that doesn't mean that all the people that are represented by the group or that appeal to the group. And I think that the elephant in the room is very obviously to him President Trump. Sure, he mentions those leaders who may not live up to our moral standards, but still position themselves to be a defender of those standards. To me, it's pretty clear he's talking about people like Trump, especially where he's trying to say, can we continue to vote in this particular way and have a political identity in this kind of way that more or less aligns with a eighty to eighty five percent while acknowledging that we can still say, sure, Trump doesn't morally live.

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Speaker 2: Up to our expectations.

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Speaker 3: To me, that's sort of the that's my reading. Does that seem fair to you or do you think I'm being overly ungenerous?

00:06:11
Speaker 1: No? I think that's that's about where I land on it as well. I think that the only thing I would add is his what I see as his underlying thesis is this idea that the good, the true, and the beautiful are good, true, and beautiful on their own terms. They don't need to be justified by, for instance, conversion or revivalism or a you know, this sense that they should be able to conform people to a particular mode of not only behavior, but a being. And so I do think that's an undercurrent within the piece that he's writing. So for instance, he'll he talks about David French a little bit and his position to putting or his concerns about putting the Tank Commandments in schools. I would freely admit I've written pieces on this. I have concerns about putting the Tank Commandments in schools. I have concerns for different reasons than either French or would suggest. But ultimately, what he's playing with in French is that he's saying that French is arguing that when these ten Commandments are put up in schools, what they create is hypocrisy, people who are performing something that they don't really believe.

00:07:38
Speaker 2: Now, when I looked.

00:07:40
Speaker 1: For the article of French online, what I found was he's really arguing that, or at least in this piece, he argues that there is a Christian mysticism that he's concerned about, and that Christian mysticism involves this notion that if we put the Ten Commandments up in school, it will have such an aura that you know, conveys itself to students that they will automatically somehow become Christians.

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Speaker 2: Right. So this sort of magical aspect of the.

00:08:13
Speaker 1: Ten Commandments, like what conjures up in my mind is when the dude at the end of Raiders of the Loss Art touches the arc of the Covenant and his face melts off.

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Speaker 2: Right.

00:08:23
Speaker 1: So it's that sort of aura and magical aura that the tech Commandments put off and French seems to be arguing against that.

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Speaker 2: Would want to say, no.

00:08:32
Speaker 1: If you've got the Ten Commandments in the classroom, the students are introduced to these things, and that introduction can then lead them to recognize that the good of Christianity is not simply good but also true. He actually makes that point later in the piece, not necessarily about the Ten Commandments, but about Christianity in general. And so I think he's got a real concern that Christians not decouple themselves from the good, the true, and the beautiful, however partial and however I would say, non theological in public life, that they continue to recognize that.

00:09:11
Speaker 2: But ultimately I think.

00:09:13
Speaker 1: He then collapses what is a necessary distinction in my mind between the partial understandings of the good, the true, and the beautiful that we can gather from creation more generally, and the sharpening and further constraint of that that comes with the self disclosure of God and allows us to see as Christians and recognize that Christ is actually an authority. I don't think he does a good job throughout the article of really recognizing that there is a true distinction there and that collapsing that distinction, even in using something like Christian culture, is deeply problematic and doesn't do I think he argues that it tends to do. So that'd just be my sort of additional two cents to throw in there on top of what you noted.

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Speaker 3: Yeah, I think it's worth also mentioning the kind of narrative he's working with here.

00:10:14
Speaker 2: Yeah, there are.

00:10:15
Speaker 3: A number of authors. It's pretty common narrative that he's taking for granted, and it goes something like this. You know, there there was the Roman Empire, and in that Roman Empire, this thing emerged that we know of now as the Christian faith, and that Christian faith, though initially was in some sort of position of opposition right or some sort of position of minority not in power, and over time that Roman Empire becomes Christianized and becoming Christianized, this thing emerges that we can think of as Christen dumb, where there's this interesting interwoven reality between what's ultimately papacy and throne. There's a vying back and forth. But what emerges from that are these collection of Western and Northern European nation states that owe their identity especially to the working out of a particular logic of Christian culture. And that sets forth an idea that becomes the United States of America, and certain certain Christian principles form not just the moral fabric of what we think of as the Western world and the the USA in particular, but also a larger project that becomes something of a blessing to the world. He doesn't use the word blessing, but he speaks of the gains of this kind of civilization that are due to the effects of Christian moral reality. That's right, and that sort of thing, whether or not explicitly acknowledged, enables the Western world and especially the US, to become leaders in make the world in some sense a better place for everybody. But over time there's a degradation and you start to have a slipping from those moral Christian principles, and the result is the awakening of he actually uses the word awoke reality. And because that you have now a slippage from that better version of civilization where people thrived, and now you have a group of people, especially through media and political avenues, are trying to recover through policy, through political theological ways of being that image of the Western world and again particularly the US tied to that Christian moral framework. And sometimes that is meant an alliance with leaders who don't fit that in their active life, but they do fit it in terms of ideologically what they want to put forth. And he says, of course, the perfect is if the leaders both ideologically in the right place and morally.

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Speaker 2: Yeah, but if.

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Speaker 3: I only have to pick one, well, then we'll pick the ideological and deal with the fact of the moral. And that justifies a larger movement to re christianize the moral framework, because ultimately the good that comes out of that could be that people become followers of Jesus in the process. Then he has his anecdotes of people that have successfully become followers of Christ because of that moral framework, and that's very explicitly the narrative he's working with. I flushed it out a little bit more than he does, but he doesn't make any qualms about making sure you know that he's working with that kind of narrative.

00:13:47
Speaker 2: Yeah, and so I agree with that.

00:13:49
Speaker 1: I think part of the rupture of that narrative that I would sort of tease out and that I've been pretty actively working on but don't have, like.

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Speaker 2: I haven't done all the research on it. Right.

00:14:04
Speaker 1: But in the intellectual history of liberalism, I believe it's MiNet who wrote this.

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Speaker 2: He talks about the.

00:14:13
Speaker 1: Possibility of liberalism, liberalism principles, the notion of human rights being claimed by the church, particularly the Catholic Church, but Christianity more generally only really being an option after the church's political power has been broken. And so I find that to be a really interesting notion because it does so disrupt this sort of continuity that you describe in this narrative Ashish, right, where it's a linear move all the way through to America and now we have these Christian principles that have been inculcated into the governing system.

00:15:00
Speaker 2: What I am sort of.

00:15:02
Speaker 1: Finding as I do more and more research on this, is that it's possible that within that what otherwise seems like a contiguous narrative, what we've actually had happen is a new humanist philosophy has come into play that we would generally call liberalism.

00:15:24
Speaker 2: Liberalism is the notion that individuals have rights.

00:15:29
Speaker 1: What I mean by it is that liberalism is this notion that individuals have rights, that individuals have freedoms, and that there is a sovereign individual who sort of owns their destiny, let's say at times that has been couched as yes, they own that destiny within a certain ought right, that they ought to act in these certain ways. That there's a sort of either a theological or social obligation that constrains what that looks like. But ultimately the underlying philosophy of liberalism doesn't claim any of that. Those are things that are put on top of liberalism I think as restraining devices. But what we really end up with is something akin to what we see all the time in judges, is that the people are doing what's right in their own eyes, and they have to be pulled back occasionally to this sort of more yooistic understanding of what life is supposed to look like. The point is that that disruption in that continuous narrative that you've just laid out, I think is really crucial and highlights this notion that Christianity and Christian language, theology, biblical versus all those kind of things may have been, and I would say probably have been co opted into liberalism as not necessarily a means of control.

00:16:55
Speaker 2: But I like the way Robert Bella.

00:16:57
Speaker 1: Puts it when he talks about American civil religion is that he says that American civil religion wasn't necessarily anti cleric or militantly secular, but it's using and employing, co opting this Christian language and religious language into its articulations in order to avoid friction with religious groups and to advance national aims. Now, we could frame that as you know, in the conspiracy theory sort of approach, as you know, oh, we're all being manipulated and this is horrible, or whatever. I think the simpler way to put it is there's a counter discipleship movement, that is, government that has no particular vested interest in conforming people to the image of Christ, to the insofar as doing so would undermine its own authority. And so there's this weird dynamic that I think would really miss it, which is, yes, we can still identify the good, the true, and the beautiful in our everyday life. That's an appropriate thing for us to do as Christians. I think we're part of our calling is to recognize reality and goodness, truth and beauty would be part of that reality.

00:18:17
Speaker 2: But there's also a.

00:18:18
Speaker 1: Way that the narrowing, the partial recognition of the good, the true, and the beautiful becomes a counter discipleship movement that's forming people away from conformity to Christ and encouraging them to settle for a partial understanding of goodness, truth and beauty that Christians just simply can't embrace. We have to point beyond it. And so that's a little bit of rambling on this Ashish. I'll let you parse that out a little bit.

00:18:51
Speaker 3: Yeah, I don't see that as rambling. I think that sets up an important contrast. What you're pointing out, whether you're meaning to or not, sets up a real question as to whether his narrative, that this implicit narrative that what is working from yeah, is a correct narrative. Yeah, Because His version of it is is that we've had a slippage, right, and having that slippage from this otherwise good, good program has meant that there's been a need to have a certain alliance with those who might fail personally and their moral ability to live up to what is good and true and beautiful. But the policies that they have affirm those things. And so we compromise. And we compromise, not least because the long term is important, but also because perhaps that compromise for the sake of the ideological might bring about the come to Jesus moment, the real come to Jesus mond right, for those who are otherwise on the right side of the ideological boundary. Yeah, and I think what you're describing forces us to reckon with is that story. Is that narrative correct, because we can narrate this actually in a very different way. I don't think at the moment that's the time to provide the full scale alternative narrative. Yeah, but we'd have to ask why is this narrative or that narrative or some other narrative the correct one. And what we need to get into is the nitty gritty of is the story is the presumption is the optimism of what is the true, the good, and the beautiful? Really all that good, all that true, all that beautiful, right, And I think we can draw that into question YEA. For one, I think an anecdote that seems completely unrelated might be the way forward. And I both belong to a generation where our parents were the Beatles generation, right, Yeah, And I've noticed something over time. I've never really had an affinity for the Beatles. Please forgive me anyone listening out there. Yeah, And I don't know if you and I have ever had this conversation, but I've I've found that the vast majority of let's call them my light skinned friends have have this special place in their heart for the Beatles. A Beatles song comes on and they get excited. The mention of the Beatles comes on, they get excited. Or I love to ask my students this question just sort of as it get to know, you exercise if you had one song you could listen to for the rest of your life, only one song, don't have to listen to it every moment, but one song? What would it be? The Beatles frequently.

00:21:50
Speaker 2: Pop up in that list interesting, and I.

00:21:54
Speaker 3: Find myself in the position of I I don't dislike the Beatles. In truth, right, then, with the exception of a handful of really popular ones, if a Beatles song came on, I wouldn't actually know that it was a Beatles song. Yeah, yeah, now is my Could you interpret me as disliking the Beatles, Sure you could, yeah, But what would be more faithful of an interpretation of what's going on with me is that it just doesn't have the same sort of emotional existential pull on my heart, not least because even though I belonged to the same group who grew up having their parents listen to the Beatles, I didn't actually grow up listening to the Beatles. If I heard a Beatles song, it would have been on accident and I wouldn't have known it was the Beatles, right. And case in point would be I've known of the Yellow Submarine since I was very little. It wasn't until honestly, I was a grad student that I knew that that was a Beatles Beatles song, right. Conversely, what I grew up with was really the the popular people of the same variety in in Indian cultural music, right.

00:23:10
Speaker 2: Yeah.

00:23:10
Speaker 3: So if you come to my house. You'd, you know, my sister and I like to joke about this, you'd be hearing RODJ. Kapoor or Judged It sing. My dad had all of these albums that were he had just there were albums he made, especially when CD burners became a thing, and it was just Judgas Thing one, Judgus Thing two all the way up to like ten, and you'd see them randomly sitting around. So our joke ended up being, look, I found it judg just sing eight eight right. But truthfully, when I hear and it was my father's music. But when I hear that music, I do actually get that nostalgia today, whether it be him a RODJ. Kapoor or what really gets me ticking is the beauty of classical Indian music, you know. Now, I say all this to say that there's a very particular way of being in the world that all of us just experience by default. Right, We can't experience life in general. We always experience life in particular, and whatever is that goes into the formation of those particular ways of being in the world are going to have an emotional pull on us. Because again, we don't know things in general. We don't know things intuitively in the abstract, we know them through the formation in places, in time, with people contexts, right, and we call those things together cultural ways of being. Now, I bring all this to say that the way that what is describing his narrative reflects, I think a very particular cultural way of being in the world that actually finds itself quite an opposition to the ways that many other people have experienced the world. Yeah, I'll be specific with this one now, right. I remember when nine to eleven happened. Obviously for a majority of Americans, it was a very emotionally elevated experience, but the way that fallout came from that was very different from very different people. The very day of that, I was a student at the University of Iowa. I had a friend who was Indian like me, and he had that big thick beard. And we Indians we can grow big thick beards very young. Right. I was the guy in my high school basketball team with the full goateee like I was the envy of other people because of how I could grow facial are At this point in time, it was my friend who had the full thick beard. South Indian, which generally means a lot darker than me, but there were stereotypes built around that perception. Dark skinned, big thick beard, and he's on campus transportation and he's being yelled at by his fellow students, our fellow students to just go home, and he, you know, he was He was not one to back down from sarcastic moments, and so he'd reply in a way that I just kept telling him, Dude, you can't say that they're gonna they're gonna kill you. They might actually kill you. But his response was to Clinton, Iowa, you want me to go home to Clinton, Iowa? Why, you know?

00:26:21
Speaker 2: Yeah?

00:26:22
Speaker 3: And while I didn't experience that on the bus, I was clean shaven, so I didn't have some of those stereotypes that people were interpreting in certain kinds of ways. Every single time I would go and still to this day, I go through the airport by myself, I get randomly selected. Right now, why is that the case, Well, it's frankly, because there's a way of being in the world that is very much tied to our particularity, and it's tied to all these metrics for being in the world. And so I remember in this moment someone getting really rowled up about how America because lost its way and we need to go back. And one of my friends said, I just asked him, I just an honest question. What is this previous context you're talking about that we've slipped from? And he said, well, it's pre Obama. I said, okay, well this was during Obama's the Obama presidency.

00:27:19
Speaker 2: Yeah.

00:27:19
Speaker 3: I said, that's strange because pre Obama was still nine to eleven and ever since nine to eleven, this is my experience. And then I began to actually go through other sorts of things that were pre Obama and pre nine to eleven, which were not particularly good experiences, that were largely based upon people would look at me and have certain presumptions. Yeah, I was being refused service in businesses where was the person who's refusing service made no qualms about making it clear it's because she looked at me, and the way I look right. This is these are to get at Wood's thesis, or at least the undercurrents of a thesis that actually trouble me. That I want to say, for all of the things that he wants to point to, he wants to point to these particular moral values that come from particular ways of embodying Christian morality, Christian tradition, Christendom that represent a way of being in the world for him, that actually quite truncate reality. Right. What about those of us who, from that same supposed reality actually experience the exact opposite of what we want to claim the person a message of Christ is all about, right, whether that be racism, whether that be the malformation of gender politics, whether that be colonialism. Right, maybe the idea of Christendom is actually not what he makes it to be. In other words, the good is what I want to draw into question here that he represents in a particular kind of triumphalistic way that I'm not so quite sure is in fact the way we should be identifying the person of Christ.

00:28:58
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's good, and I think I see that in a couple of ways in this essay. The first one is his citation of Kuiper, where he talks about Christianity being a Christian culture, being one in which Christian ideas have had a significant influence.

00:29:18
Speaker 2: I really hate that definition.

00:29:21
Speaker 1: It makes no real sense to me because it gets at the way you've described it. That understanding of christian opens up all of these sort of deformations of christian It has no in other words, it's decoupled from any sort of governance that would preclude some of the negative practices that you're kind of gesturing to and talking about in your life. I think that what happens is when we talk about that Christian Christianity or Christian culture as a culture influenced by Christianity, what we're really saying is a culture that has decided that they're incomplete understanding of the good, true, and the beautiful is going to serve as if it's complete. In other words, there's an early closure of the question of what is good, and I think that in that early closure, what you end up with is you end up with something that This is a guy to my dissertation on Jeffrey Olic. He talks about this in terms of collective remembering, and part of what he's reacting to is an earlier collector remembering scholarship. They would refer to it as the collective memory, and he argues that this is a reification or freezing of memory. When memory is really something that's organic, it moves, we never quite capture it the whole way, and so he develops these sort of counter theses to help people understand cultural or collective memory in more of a process relational sort of a way. And I think that we need probably something very similar to that. When we're looking at the good, the true, and the beautiful, it is not that the true, the good, and the beautiful are changing. We don't determine the good, the true, and the beautiful. We recognize them. And so the process relational method that we use to sort of move through this, the particularities that we need to identify. The moment to moment realization that we don't have as strong a conception of the good, true, and the beautiful as.

00:31:30
Speaker 2: We thought we did.

00:31:32
Speaker 1: Is why we need the process relational method. It is not that the true, the good, and the beautiful are just up for grabs. It's that they're so expansive and complex that we can't grasp them in one bite. These are not in a moose boosh, they're you know, sort of a seven course meal, and so we're eating them across time. And I think again, to sort of push back up to that bigger claim, what does it mean for Christ to have authority over all things, including the determination of the good, the true, and the beautiful. This is even a prior question that would never quite I think gives due credit to in his conception is that, yes, these partial views of the good, the true, and the beautiful can produce good things. I think it's impossible for something that God has defined as good, true, and beautiful not to produce something that is that we could identify as a positive benefit. The difficulty is that as those partial understandings are coded back into a culture, what ends up happening is there's a negative influx or a negative pressure that's also created that deforms the way we understand the world simply because we're dealing with partial information. And so there's this ten that I feel and would that I think he's creating this sort of inappropriate closure, which I think is what you're pointing to to some degree.

00:33:09
Speaker 2: That's my summary, at least of an aspect of what you're pointing to.

00:33:13
Speaker 1: It's this inappropriate closure that then is used as a basis for everything else that comes after. And to my reading, what we're really left with here is we're left with a cultural construction. And this will draw on some of like Kevin Flat's work or Philip Rife's work, where culture is transliterating the sacred order into the social order. If that sacred order is not fully understood or understood in.

00:33:49
Speaker 2: A robust fashion.

00:33:53
Speaker 1: And recognized as being more than any culture could actually contain or transliterate, I think culture would work better. There's a humility in that sort of admission that we're not capable of understanding fully the sacred order, and so we have to keep adjusting ourselves to it.

00:34:12
Speaker 2: There's a fine tuning that happens across time.

00:34:15
Speaker 1: I think what I see and would is a tendency to say we understand the sacred order, our culture just needs to transliterate that, and then our social order would reflect it. And that's the part of it that I think is very problematic and why I have a lot of trouble. My entry pointed to this is a lot different than yours. My entry point is I have a lot of trouble calling that Christian. I do not understand how we can sit back and call any culture Christian or people cultural Christians right in the sense that they are have an affinity toward what he calls I think the the civilizational benefits of Christianity. I think I can enjoy the benefits of a lot of different things, I wouldn't necessarily attribute that description to myself, right, I enjoy the benefits of capitalism, What I really call myself a capitalist, I'm not sure that's the designation.

00:35:18
Speaker 2: That I want, even if other people would give it to me.

00:35:23
Speaker 1: Right, and so in that as a tension, it may describe certain aspects of how I operate, but it's certainly not my aspiration to be the greatest capitalist on the planet. At the same time, I do enjoy certain of the civilizational benefits of that system, same way I would say about liberalism. And so how can we apply that same logic to Christianity When to me, what Christianity is is a wholesale giving over of oneself to Christ. And so definitionally it doesn't make sense. And I think substantively it's not just a word game in my estimation, it's actually a substance problem that these that term in and of itself reflex of reality that gets lost in what Wood is saying here.

00:36:15
Speaker 2: So I absolutely agree with you.

00:36:19
Speaker 1: I think that the way I'm articulating at that inappropriate closure, that that closing off the good too soon, and assuming we understand what it is, is a big part of the problem that I have with woods Essa here.

00:36:35
Speaker 3: Yeah, I might use the word foreclosure to describe what you're talking about.

00:36:39
Speaker 2: Fair. Yeah, that's good.

00:36:41
Speaker 3: And just to be specific, let's use the example you just gave of capitalism.

00:36:47
Speaker 2: Yeah.

00:36:48
Speaker 3: I think the sort of move that what is making would be to say that capitalism is one of the cultural goods that come out of a particular, particularly Christian way of organizing society. Right. And the criticism that at least I'm wanting to make is that way of constring things already elevates capitalism to the good, and that would be the foreclosure, right, Yes, And so now any critique of that, and I think you have as well. But I've certainly seen where any attempt to criticize the sorts of programs that capitalism has created, the sorts of emphasies and loves that it has created, results in people saying, oh, well, you're filling in the blank, and that's just heretical, that's not Christian. But I want to say alternatively, and I think this goes in line with what you're saying, capitalism as a particular good, and I mean that in the sense of a thing that comes out of a program is not necessarily a good. Now, I'm not going to foreclose and assume that it's not good, but just to start, it's not inherently good, not least because the thing that it comes out of is not Christian. It comes out of a particular program that, actually, I would argue contra to the way that Wood is thinking. It comes out out of a cultural program of civility that actually undermines some of the key tenets of what the Gospel calls good.

00:38:20
Speaker 2: Yeah.

00:38:21
Speaker 3: Right, It foists itself upon another, it creates hierarchical versions of society. Now, does that mean I'm advocating being done with capitalism.

00:38:29
Speaker 2: No.

00:38:29
Speaker 3: I think there's a conversation to be had there. Sure, But I'm not going to assume that capitalism just is the good and that's what he's doing. That's the foreclosure. And I'm not going to assume anything that opposes capitalism therefore, which he would have to do, is therefore an attack.

00:38:46
Speaker 2: On the good.

00:38:47
Speaker 3: No, there might be real critiques to be made there, and that's where we have the beginning of a conversation that can now understand the good and plurality. And I think it's important to have the good and plurality, not because we're advocating this sort of thing in which we see say, well, now anything has the possibility to be good. No, absolutely not. There are things that are absolutely not good.

00:39:05
Speaker 2: Right.

00:39:08
Speaker 3: But what we can begin to recognize, and I think this is actually more biblical of a principle than what he's laying forward, is that the Book of Acts begins with this notion that the Gospel is something that is not a bounded set reality. The question that governs the Book of Acts is does Jesus as the Messiah that whether or not it was ready for it, whether or not it was recognizing of it belongs to the fulfillment of the covenant with biblical Israel yep as a blessing to the nations. Does it require people therefore to enter into the covenant specifically with Israel or is there a gentile aspect of fulfillment that's at play here? And if there is a gentile aspect of fulfillment, dear, does it create second class citizen right, which which gets you to temple imagery in the Old Testament, where you have courts that are available to different people, and that creates a far and a near dynamic.

00:40:11
Speaker 2: And the book.

00:40:11
Speaker 3: The message of the Book of Acts is first and foremost, No, it does not create a linguistic singular. That's really important, right chapter two, the miracle at players that everyone within their own tongue. Here's the message that the disciples are preaching in the power of the Spirit, which I take to be a really powerful message to begin to break down the sense that even Jewishness would be one singular thing, right, because all the people present in that moment are Jewish people in diaspora.

00:40:43
Speaker 2: Yep.

00:40:44
Speaker 3: But that leads the way into recognizing in the Book of Acts, the opening up of that covenant is actually meant also for the gentiles, not as second class citizens, but as people who can come on their own terms, which inherently then if I can use that musical imagery I had before, it makes it possible as a metaphor anyway to begin to say, people who grew up with music like the Beatles can recognize in the Beatles good music. Yeah, while people who grow up with judget thing right might think of Doublin music as good music. And it's okay that I don't really care one way or the other about the Beatles. I don't dislike them I just don't care. And it makes it okay that someone who grew up loving the Beatles couldn't care one less about Judge thing or Dublin music or Sitthoud music. Right that there's the possibility of good now to be realized in each as a particular way of being in the world, and neither can foreclose upon the other. Now, the very trajectory that what gives us actually does do just that that foreclosure not just in the present but historically. The very idea of Christendom is a magisterial, overpowering way of thinking that goes to the nations and says the role of uh, the role of Christendom is to colonize the nations to make them more like us. And the justification of it right down to Papal bull is to say that this is what enables us to be able to bring the grace of Christ wherever we go. Yeah, but that forecloses now even on the good in a way that contradicts the Book of Acts, and so at its heart, I think the very starting point that what is working from there presumes a certain kind of thing about the good that's foreclosed that causes him to miss why someone might actually say the cultural goods that he's referring to, that he wants to recover, that he's willing to compromise on the particular morals for the sake of the larger ideology, might itself actually not be a good Yeah.

00:42:54
Speaker 1: And I think the there's a couple of things I want to I want to throw in here. Number one, your point about acts, I think is absolutely right. I think is Stephen's speech in the way that he tries to you know, he's accused of speaking against the law of Moses in the temple, and then he narrates throughout Israelite history all these ways that God acts outside of the land, outside of the Temple, outside you know, with non Jews, you know, all these different areas. I think that's really crucial to understand what he's doing there. He's creating this sense that the Jews have closed off God to the Temple, They've trapped him there, as if he's a genie in a bottle and the temple they go and rub it and then ask God for wishes and he grants them. And Stephen's like, no, this is never how God has worked. You're missing it. You've narrowed it down too far, and in narrowing down too far, now you've lost the ability to discern these other things that God is doing. And that's why you're really missing Messiah, That's why you're missing the movement of the Spirit. And so that narrowing is really crucial. That foreclosure where is what we're calling it, we could also think of it in terms of narrowing. So I think that's a really crucial aspect here. I think the other side of this that I would say, and this is where I think would is maybe getting caught up in his polemic a little bit too much. I think what he's really genuinely trying to say is that.

00:44:21
Speaker 2: Christians need to recognize reality.

00:44:23
Speaker 1: Right, if I had to just summarize what I think is most basic underlying thesis is is that Christians need to recognize reality that's getting caught up in all of these other things that you're talking about, that's getting caught up in this idea that and when we recognize the reality, then we're going to see that liberalism is correct, or that you know, capitalism is correct, or that you know, we could really call this legitimately a Christian culture. And I think where I see that coming out is in his discussion of two things. One and I'll start with this one first because I think I want you to comment on the second one. But number one, there's this notion that the governing body should be opening space for the church to be the church, and that this like we would call this religious liberty in the United States, right, But this, this willingness for the governing body to in some way, shape or form protect the church is one of the functions of the governing body that it performs when it's performing well, and this is sort of a minimum standard for a governing body, right, you know, if you're going to have a quote unquote good governing body, this is just one of the things they have to do. My concern with that is obviously not that I hate religious liberty and I think we should get rid of it.

00:45:49
Speaker 2: But that.

00:45:52
Speaker 1: We're The way this tends to get framed is we're fighting awful hard for something that is evident is not going to hold. And so that notion of a government that is going to cede authority to the Kingdom of God and without ever acknowledging Christ is sort of it's very brittle, and I think we see this in something like the Book of Revelation, where you know the economic and political forces as well as the false religion combine in order to sway people away from.

00:46:25
Speaker 2: These are the peoples who live on.

00:46:26
Speaker 1: The earth, right, who dwell on the earth. These are the folks who are going to vehemently oppose and reject the Gospel. And this is that sort of negative formation that I think would doesn't give enough credibility to So can God use a Nebekinezer and a Cyrus in order to produce good things in the empire? Is it possible for God to intend something different than Joseph's brothers who sell him into slavery in Egypt?

00:46:56
Speaker 2: Of course it is, Of course it is right.

00:47:00
Speaker 1: God can do all of those things, and he can do all of those things simultaneously. I'm not sure how that's a defense of a cultural Christianity. So what I want to be careful to say is that I'm not saying that God can't use the cultural Christianity. I'm simply suggesting that assuming that we have a cultural Christianity does not mean that God is going to use it positively in every case, nor does it mean that there is not a negative feedback loop that we should be very wary of, because cultural Christianity has, in my estimation, a diminishing a way of diminishing the Church's witness.

00:47:39
Speaker 2: So I throw that in there sort.

00:47:40
Speaker 1: Of as a, I think, an extension of what your argument is. But the one that I really like to get to, and i'd like to hear your comments on, is he speaks of the idea of I'll say, faking it till you make it habituation with regard to virtue, right, And so the idea is that this is the way he argues it. I think I'm being fair that as people behave along the moral as people behave in moral ways, even if they don't believe that behanding in a moral way matters, or even that the moral that they're behaving toward is real, there's the potential for them to cultivate that virtue within them. So I can pretend to be courageous, and at some point down the road, the more I pretend to be courageous, I'll just become courageous. I don't necessarily disagree with that, right, but I also think, again, when I think of that notion of habituation, it's hard for me to get Pierre boards out of my head. Right, the habitist that is structured into a society that chases after a capital, and so the habituation to which we ultimately conform. It seems to me that we're very seldom conforming to a theological virtue, let's say, a full and complete understanding of that virtue, right, And I don't mean that in an absolute sense, but a full and complete understanding of that virtue that sits above our social structures and.

00:49:13
Speaker 2: That we can aim for. Right.

00:49:16
Speaker 1: What we're generally conforming to is some sort of a selected or nuanced understanding of a given virtue that still allows us to interact within the social constructs in which we're apart.

00:49:28
Speaker 2: Right.

00:49:29
Speaker 1: So there's a level of aggressiveness, for instance, that an NFL alignment has to exercise, and they can do that to a certain level. But if they were to take their helmet off and hit someone with it, that goes beyond the level of aggression that is habituated to the realm. And so that's what I mean by saying that there are these levels to what we see, and there's a structure within which we exercise these. To me, that's where we're habituated to.

00:49:57
Speaker 2: And to think.

00:49:58
Speaker 1: That that habituation will ultimately lead to something like acceptance of Christ isn't impossible, but it's certainly not something that I would argue in defense of a Christian culture. I think that's a leap for me. So really interested here in your comments on any and all that, But I know the virtue side of things, I'd really be interested in hear your comments on that.

00:50:26
Speaker 3: Yeah, So what is drawing upon Jennifer Hurt with his claims theological ethicist at Yale and particularly her book Putting on Virtue, where basically her argument really truncated. So not that Jennifer's listening to this, but in the case she is, I understand that I'm truncating, Please forgive me. Basically, her argument is that there's a continuity and that same sort of habitist Bordeo kind of way that you're talking about, there's a continuity that leads us from what historically one might call not that she's using precisely these distinctions, but the cardinal virtues, which are natural virtues, the formation of the habits onto proper motives and character into theological virtues, which traditionally are often seen as the work specifically of the Spirit through by work, through the Church and administering the Word and body of Christ and blood of Christ. Right, and that one then leads into the others. So why do we have traditions and cultural ways of doing things, for instance, for children in the church. We do them because we trust that polay acting of sorts gets us somewhere into beginning to habituate the right ways of being in the world that hopefully but doesn't necessarily lead to actually virtue for virtue sake, doing good for the sake of good. Right. I think that there's some basic things about what she's saying that are helpful in a right right. They speak to the ways in which we think about raising children that we can't guarantee certain results. They think about ways in which we'd like to see cultural values at play, right, even as there's something not automatic about them, and I don't think she sees them as automatic either. I do think there are levels of discontinuity also at play that she doesn't spend enough time affirming. If I'm reading her correctly, I think some of the discontinuities that the work of the Spirit does bring about an element of grace that can't be reduced to the formation of habitasts culturally, personally, socially, familiarly, or anything like that. But what he does is what does is he takes what she's doing and he wants to import that into rationale for creating a certain politically governed cultural Christian set of ideals. And I'm not sure that that move is one that Jennifer Hurt would be comfortable with. It's at the very least something I'm not comfortable with, and not least because of so sociologists who I believe is still at the University of Virginia. James Davison Hunter, for instance, wrote a book called To Change the World, and in that book he argues that one of the things that Christians actually in this country, especially those in the more evangelical vein, have tried to do, is to take upon themselves the notion if we change people's ideals, if we set up their right way of thinking ethically and doctrinally, we will begin to change who they are. The thinking there is very much what is arguing the habit forming reality of it. And his point that he tries to make, and he shows it with quite detail, is it's not clear that we can ever really point to whole scale to this happening, Right, So what has a couple of anecdotes, but they're just that they're anecdotes. Whole scale, it just doesn't work that way. Quite to the contrary, actually, right, think about the decades within which evangelicals, the conservative Christian movement, including Catholics, have worked to overturn Roe v. Wade, and when that finally happened, far from people saying, you know what, you were right after all, the policy is now what it is, and you were right and let's work with them. No, right, If anything, other movements were actually that were far less politically motivated, were far more successful. So, for instance, for all of the touting of Trump as the guy who was protecting the social ideas of Christianity, his first term as president saw more abortions per year than the Obama presidency does as the one who was a pro choice president, which is frankly begged to differ on the question of whether dictating policy was the way to begin to form habits within particular people.

00:54:54
Speaker 2: Right, right now, what was it.

00:54:56
Speaker 3: That caused fewer abortions in the Obama administration. I'm not sure about that, but I just know that the numbers say that apparently policy is not the actual way into it. So I think the Hunter idea is that policy has never been the way to change people's minds or hearts. If anything, it sets up reaction, right, It sets up election cycles, sets up political maneuvering, It sets up different ways of strategizing how to flip the script. So I'm not even sure, just on the practical level, that the sort of thing that Davison or sorry that Wood is arguing here is in fact correct. And I think that's for good reason. And I think that part of that good reason is that the sort of thing he's advocating as a cultural Christianity, I would actually argue is not very Christian if what we mean by that is the life and way of thinking of Christ. But in addition to that, I don't think the ways of Christianity and the ways that Jennifer heard is arguing can be grafted on to a social discourse, not least because and the words of Augustine, the loves are different.

00:56:09
Speaker 1: Right.

00:56:09
Speaker 3: The early Church recognizes us very quickly that the love of those who came to Christ was a love dictated by a person in a way of being, namely Jesus in his way of being in a kingdom that was so radically unlike the political motivations of empire building.

00:56:29
Speaker 2: Yeah.

00:56:30
Speaker 3: Yeah, that you had to recognize that being in that society meant living in some sense in distinction from its goals.

00:56:39
Speaker 2: Yeah.

00:56:40
Speaker 1: And I think Veronica Ogol actually captures us pretty well. In her book on Augustine, City of God. She talks about Augustine's conception as being there are political orders that can make a society sicker or healthier. Now I would amend that, I think that's the word she used, but I would amend that in just say, there are political orders that make society sick in certain ways that others don't, and healthy in ways that certain others don't. I tend to shy away from the healthier, sicker, better, worse kind of categories because I.

00:57:17
Speaker 2: Think they assume a little too much.

00:57:20
Speaker 1: But I think your point is still the same, and it's this idea that because the orders are different, And this is to me the crux of the problem with Wood's defense of Christian culture or even cultural Christians. Here, there is no such thing as a Christian that is not at the very least seeking to live under the full authority of Jesus Christ, under the full authority of the trying God.

00:57:47
Speaker 2: This is the shamah.

00:57:49
Speaker 1: This is you know, the greatest and the greatest commandment in the second which is like it. This is a a willingness to devote oneself fully without reserve to God.

00:58:02
Speaker 2: Now are there? I always like to bring this up.

00:58:05
Speaker 1: It's like old Testament guy, Right, You've got the law and it's like, Okay, you're supposed to obey the law perfectly. This is what it means to, you know, be fully devoted to God. And I would say, well, yes and no, right, like the Jews are not trying to obey the law perfectly. If that were the case, right, if you had to obey the law perfectly in order to be in covenant with God. This sacrificial system, now all of a sudden becomes unintelligible. Embedded within the laws the mechanism to fix the problems and mistakes that humans make over and over and over again. And this is why the human high priest must make This is Hebrews. This is why he must make restitution for his own sins, a toment for his own sins along with those of the people, and so what we see in this and I think this is more the framework that I wish would head you. What we do see in Hebrews is I think an interesting conception of something good gesturing towards something better.

00:59:09
Speaker 2: To use the Hebrews language.

00:59:11
Speaker 1: Right, But that goodness is not something that we sit back and say, Oh, I'm so grateful that we have a high priest who has to also offer sacrifices for his own sins, and I'm so happy that I get to be in the outer Court, not in.

00:59:26
Speaker 2: The Holy of Holies.

00:59:28
Speaker 1: No, these things were intended to push us beyond where we were. They were symbols given shadows and copies given to help us understand that there's a better reality that we're pushing for, and that this trajectory that we're on is leading us to something greater and better, more transcendent. However, we want to say that woods argument doesn't quite get there for me, in part because he collapses the distinction between Christian and non Christian and in so many ways throughout the throughout the piece. And so do I think that there is a sense in which any culture can exhibit or allow the good to come forth in ways that it would eventually lead people to Christ. Sure, I don't think that's unique to a Christian culture. I think that is embedded in every culture. That you can see goodness, truth, and beauty in every culture. And so I don't see that the idea of defending a Christian culture is necessarily different than defending the idea of any other culture. And that's why I want to try to get down to this other basis that I think would is really sort of trying to get to but doesn't quite make it in this article, which is that any time Christians can recognize the good, the true, and the beautiful within the world, that's a right and salutary thing to do, right, because we are supposed to recognize reality God's the self disclosure gives us a different perspective on what reality actually is. It does not mean that we are satisfied with that reality. It often means that as we recognize that good, true, and beautiful, we're supposed to point beyond that to its source, which is the Triyan God. And so I think we can't get caught up in these cultural patterns. I usually liken it not she used to. If you've ever played with a light right, you use the beetles, I'll use the light right, light right, Okay. Light Bright was the children's toy. It had a light box. You'd put a like a cloth sheet over it that would block the light, and then you'd have this peg board that you'd poke these colored pegs into and you could create different patterns and so like on the commercials when I was a kid, I remember, you know, they made these like cool dragons or a puppy or whatever, and wherever the wherever the colored pegs went in, the would shine through those pigs. Well, the pegs aren't the source of the light. They're just creating the patterns through which that light behind it is shining. And so I think of culture in the way that I think of a light bright. God is the source of the goodness, truth and beauty. That's the light shining through the back. Culture is creating the patterns through which aspects of that light come through. And so you can have all these different patterns.

01:02:31
Speaker 2: That you can make.

01:02:32
Speaker 1: You can make a rooster, you can make a windmill, you can make a dragon, you could pick a dog, you make whatever pattern you wanted to make, just a zig zig zag kind of thing. Once you start making that pattern. Some of God's goodness, truth and beauty is going to shine through, and it's going to be different than other cultural patterns. But the culture is not the source of those things. The culture is just opening up spaces for that to shine through. What we need to do as Christians is recognize, hey, this is a portion where God's truth is shining through.

01:03:06
Speaker 2: We need to now amplify that.

01:03:07
Speaker 1: Point people behind the colored peg to the light box that's actually making that light. Hopefully that makes sense to people if they've ever seen a light bright before, but it's very difficult to describe a light bight.

01:03:19
Speaker 2: On a podcast. That's what I'm realizing.

01:03:21
Speaker 3: Yeah, I'll have to look that up see if I have an image now of it in my mind. But I think what I'm understanding, it's fitting to me that this as its basic operating mechanism light. Yeah, because I think the sort of reality you're describing is about the transfiguring reality.

01:03:39
Speaker 2: Yeah.

01:03:39
Speaker 3: Right, when we think about the transfiguration of Christ, we can't lose the particularity of Christ that Jesus was the Messiah, meaning he was a Jewish man who walked on Jewish soil, eating the food that belonged to that area, inhabiting the customs and the ways of being of that area. It's non negotiable and irreducible to see Jesus in any other ways, and as the Jewish Man who was the Messiah who opens up his very flesh to the nations. But the process of opening himself up was itself a transfiguring of Jewishness. Yeah right, So it wasn't just simply I received Jewishness. I accept that Jewishness, and I now affirm it for everyone in the world. It's a transfiguring it to raise it above itself and to create the possibility of every place being able to be transfigured in light of the light that is Christ. In light of course, it is a prominent metaphor then, not just in that event, but in for instance, the way the Gospel of John talks about Jesus.

01:04:40
Speaker 2: Yes, yeah, well, this is good stuff.

01:04:45
Speaker 1: Where We've gone a long time on this and I feel like we've beaten James Wood up sufficiently.

01:04:52
Speaker 2: I will just say this.

01:04:53
Speaker 1: I came across this article and was excited to read it because I listened to the Civatas podcast and I think they do really great work on there. I've heard James would talk a good bit and I would say this article.

01:05:06
Speaker 2: I wouldn't have pinned this as his work.

01:05:08
Speaker 1: It doesn't seem reflective of a lot of what he talks about on the podcast, and so i'd encourage people This is not hey never read James wood stuff or anything like that. This is just one of those moments where we both really happen to disagree with him and feel like he needed to build more nuance and put more thought into certain areas, and so we're offering critique. But I really do appreciate a lot of what he does on the podcast, and I would encourage people to check out the Sypathos podcasts. They're interested in things like, you know, post liberalism in the role of the church, which I'm sure so many of you are.

01:05:45
Speaker 2: Right.

01:05:46
Speaker 1: Again, I'm showing that sort of level of geekness that only seems to come out on the podcast. But I do want to say that because I think that oftentimes, whenever we're critiquing the content, it can feel like we're critiquing the person and we're really not doing that.

01:06:00
Speaker 2: We're just interacting with.

01:06:02
Speaker 1: The ideas and hopefully being as collegial as possible. So that if James would wherever to listen to this, he could sit back and say I understand their arguments and could see how I can improve my thinking on these matters. So we'll leave it there, but encourage you to check out first things, I encourage you to check out the Civitas podcast.

01:06:25
Speaker 2: Obviously subscribe to Thinking Christians.

01:06:27
Speaker 1: Why will be having more of these conversations coming up, But ultimately this has been I think, a good conversation and an encouragement and so thanks Ashiesh for that, and thanks everybody for listening. We'll catch you on the next episode of Thinking Christian. I just want to take a second to thank the team at Life Audio for their partnership with us on the Thinking Christian podcast. If you go to lifeaudio dot com, you'll find dozens of other faith centered podcasts in their network. They've got shows about prayer, Bible study, parenting, and more.