Why Do Christian Institutions Compromise To Stay Alive?

00:00:00
Speaker 1: Hey, everyone, welcome to this episode of Thinking Christian and doctor James Spencer.

00:00:03
Speaker 2: I'm joined by doctor.

00:00:04
Speaker 1: Shish Pharma, and today we're going to be continuing our discussion of sort of our diagnosis of what's going on in Christendom or Christianity or.

00:00:12
Speaker 2: The Church or however we want to say that.

00:00:15
Speaker 1: Today we're going to be talking about this dynamic called transaction. And you can actually find all these diagnostic kind of things and even download a guide on our website Thinking Christian dot org backslash diagnosis if you want to look into it further. But by what we mean by transaction really is this notion about how institutions think about themselves and how we think about institutions. And so it's a question of are we so enamored with the institutions or the platforms that we've developed that we're unwilling to give them up because we so deeply believe that God is using them, or because we so deeply believe that we should be in this position. The narrative I go to to kind of illustrate this in scripture is jeroboem Jerobom is given half the kingdom, probably more than half the kingdom, really he's given the whole Northern Kingdom of Israel, and Rea Boham gets to keep the Southern Kingdom, so Benjamin and Judah, but Jeroboam, because he's in the Northern Kingdom, he doesn't have access to the cult and the Israel and he gets a little scared, and so he proactively sets up two pagan worship sites in Dan and Bethel.

00:01:34
Speaker 2: Dan in the north, Bethel in the.

00:01:35
Speaker 1: South, and the one in the south is on the route to Jerusalem, and so it's intended to cut ten to fifteen miles off the trip for the people who are traveling from the Northern Kingdom to the Southern Kingdom, so they can just go and worship at Bethel the ones in the north. Obviously, there's a whole set of people for whom it would be more convenient to go worship with Dan than it would be to travel all the way to Jerusalem.

00:01:56
Speaker 2: And so what he was trying to do.

00:01:57
Speaker 1: Explicitly in the text was to maintain the people's loyalty to himself. He doesn't want them going back down to Jerusalem, which is in Rae Boam's kingdom. What he wants is for them to remain loyal to him, and he's afraid if they keep going down and participating in the worship at the Temple in Jerusalem, or participating the feasts and those kind of things, that they're going to have more and more of an affinity for Raye Bom, and so he creates these two pagan sights. And the general idea of the narrative is just this that Jeroboam is so anxious to hold on to the kingdom that he is willing to sacrifice faithfulness to do it. That's part of what we mean when we're talking about transaction, and I would emphasize the part of what we mean. But when we talk about transaction, because there are a lot of different ways that this can happen, and there's a lot of different ways that institutional inertia, just this push for an institution to continue as opposed to end and die, tends to manifest itself. And so we're going to dive into that today and I'll let us She's jump in here and offer any thoughts after my introductory ramble there.

00:03:10
Speaker 3: Yeah, far from a ramble. I I appreciate the way you started. I think that there's some instructive points in the narrative as you described it, because one of the things that comes out of that narrative is that it's not as if, forgive me, I always confuse them as well.

00:03:30
Speaker 4: Jerebom in the north?

00:03:31
Speaker 3: Is that right?

00:03:31
Speaker 2: A jera Bom in the north the north?

00:03:35
Speaker 4: Why do their names have to be so similar?

00:03:39
Speaker 3: It wasn't as if Jeroboam was setting up an alternate god, right, correct. This isn't like the Canaanites with bal No. This is Jeroboam setting up an alternate site as the place of worship of Yahweh. And that that's something that's probably a little hard to grasp the significance of when we live in a time in which you could go to, you know, my own town, as I can think of one corner down the block that there's two churches kitty corner on the same block. Then you go down another block and turn right and there's another church, right yeah, And none of those churches are my church. There's just a lot of churches everywhere. Which one do you go to? Are these all all? Is this the same sort of thing at play? And the answer is no.

00:04:31
Speaker 4: But the question is why?

00:04:32
Speaker 3: And what's that play? Is that in Jerusalem there's nothing inherent about Jerusalem that makes it special, right, other than the God of Israel, the covenant God of Israel, who has named himself Yahwehs, the covenant God, has made that place the place where he will rest. And the idea is that this is then going to be the center of what is to be the nation that is to be the priesthood to all the world. Right. So what makes that nation is the presence of Yahweh. And what makes that nation geographically is it's encircling around.

00:05:09
Speaker 4: That presence of Yahweh.

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Speaker 3: And what Jeroboam has decided is that, well, yeah, Yahweh is our covenant God, but on our terms, right, So two alternate centers, so we don't have to go down to now this fractured half of the kingdom that's no longer part of us. But functionally, what he's doing is he's making the newly formed Israel, right sans Judah, the Kingdom of Israel the locusts, and it is the rest of or it is Yahweh who now encircles Israel is the center.

00:05:44
Speaker 2: Right.

00:05:45
Speaker 3: Israel sets the terms, Jeroboam sets the terms. And I think that's an apt way to start this because despite the rhetoric, I think oftentimes, and the sort of thing we want to talk about this idea of transaction is that we have Christian institutions that have a geography problem, a spatial displacement problem, and that's that they seem to have begun to think that their entity, their institution, their policies, their content, whatever it might be, is what is the savior of the world. Right, There's sort of a manifest destiny notion that's at play, to the point where you and I I won't name names, but you and I know of an institute that wasn't it didn't infrequently say things like God needs fill in the blank institution to be fill in the blank institution now more than ever. Yeah, and that always made me cringe. But the idea there is that the work of God requires or that this is the centerpiece. And that's very much the mentality of Jeroboam.

00:07:00
Speaker 4: Right. It doesn't matter.

00:07:03
Speaker 3: Where you worship God because the method of worshiping God has to pass through the divine sanctioning and the social sanctioning of this particular kingdom or in our case, this particular institution. Right.

00:07:21
Speaker 2: Yeah, I think.

00:07:24
Speaker 1: A couple of things that your comments sort of raised number one, just to clarify for everybody in the Old Testament context, there were times in Israel's history where there were multiple worship sites similar to what we would have had today, right. There wasn't always a centralized temple or place of worship where they would go once a year or twice a year, multiple times year, whatever they do in order to go and worship. They could actually worship at these different sites around And so it's even more complex what Jaron Bohem is doing because he's hearkening back to a time a different sort of system that would probably have been familiar to the Israelites. And so this has the appearance of not necessarily looking like it's completely wrong or heretical, right, But at the end of the day, what jere Boeham is trying to do is he's trying to leverage the cult, the cultic apparatus in order to retain the loyalty of the people and support his own political agenda. And so that's where we start to see this sort of deep transaction is the way I'm phrasing it. This deep transaction between what is done and what's done publicly, What structures are put out, what statements.

00:08:47
Speaker 2: Are put out what you know, what everything is built and.

00:08:53
Speaker 1: A we could call it a selfish motive. But what I mean by self fish is not there's a you know. I always think of the you know, mustache twisting villain or the you know, the evil James Bond, you know villain who's sitting there petting a cat.

00:09:11
Speaker 2: Right.

00:09:11
Speaker 1: I don't have that sort of notion of selfishness in my mind necessarily. I suppose that's one iteration. But by selfish it just means that it is self serving. That there's something that you're trying to preserve for yourself, and you may have a really altruistic reason for doing that. But either way, you're making a trade. You're making a transaction, and that transaction is undercutting something bigger than you. It's undercutting, let's say, the witness of the church. It's undercutting. In this case, it was undercutting the sacred social order that was to be coded in through Jerusalem in the United Nation of Israel that has now been split into two halves.

00:10:00
Speaker 2: But the way I usually try to.

00:10:02
Speaker 1: Get people to think about this narrative is, look, the division of the Kingdom was geographic and national to the extent of those terms aren't anachronistic, which they are, especially in the national one is to a certain degree. But the tribes are divided, They're truly divided, and they're divided under two different rulers. And that wasn't supposed to mean that there are two different gods. That wasn't supposed to mean that their collective witness as now two separate tribal organizations, was not supposed to come together. Still, in Jerusalem, jero Boeham is doing this not because he's received some word from God or because he feels like Jerusalem is corrupt or anything like that. He's doing it explicitly for himself and to maintain the loyalty to the people. And so it's just a really interesting narrative. I would say the last thing I just throw out there based on your comments, it's like institutional inertia I think is really real. And I think this is a point where I always come back to this, like language actually matters.

00:11:15
Speaker 2: So I have a bad habit of saying.

00:11:17
Speaker 1: Lucky, Oh man, that was lucky, Like, oh, you're lucky.

00:11:24
Speaker 2: Whatever. The reality is, there is no luck. Right.

00:11:31
Speaker 1: What we usually refer to as lucky is really blessed. It's God working something out in your life that seems serendipitous to us. We couldn't have seen all the different pieces coming together and getting you to a point where you have this beneficial outcome.

00:11:50
Speaker 2: Right.

00:11:50
Speaker 1: That's God's sovereignty working itself out, And so to call it luck undercuts something deeply theological about the structure of the reality that we live in. And I think sometimes when I hear institutions phrase as you noted, like you know, God really needs us to be this today, it's like, I don't know that God really needs us to do anything.

00:12:15
Speaker 2: Right.

00:12:15
Speaker 1: What probably the more appropriate phrasing is is we're really trying to discern who God wants us to be in this moment. We're really trying to understand how it is that God is trying to use us in this moment, and we're just trying to be faithful in the moment to do that.

00:12:33
Speaker 2: But when we.

00:12:33
Speaker 1: Start talking about God needing us, I think that creates this weird dynamic between us and God, as if there's something that he really needs us to do in order to advance his kingdom, but he doesn't need us for anything. There's not a sense in which he wants us to participate, I think, but I'm not exactly sure that that verbiage of need doesn't betray something about the transaction that's already taken place, right that, like, we are really important to God. We've been chosen not only for this moment, but probably for a lot of other moments into the future. And so we need to be who we are. We need to focus in on our branding. We need to be this, we need to be that. And that tends to lend lend itself, I think, to more narrowness. Right, It's an oddly market oriented logic that.

00:13:33
Speaker 2: Tends to focus.

00:13:34
Speaker 1: More on what the audience wants than on what God is requiring us to be. I'll leave it there.

00:13:44
Speaker 3: Yeah, I want to defend lucky language a little bit, go for it. Yeah, But and I don't want to do it for merely semantic reasons, but because I want to get to the same place you're getting, maybe in a slightly different way. Fair, and see what you say about it, Because I want to say that what lucky gives us might preserve an important feature of an alternate path. Okay, And I'm not saying in this that every use of lucky is the same right. Most of the time when we say lucky, it's it's just a thing that we say. There's not a lot of depth of thought in it, right, Yeah, But to the degree that we.

00:14:24
Speaker 4: Want to say that.

00:14:26
Speaker 3: Sometimes things that we perceive to be good happen, or institutions are raised, or groups of people gain a certain sort of prestige or power or able to do certain things that we might think to be have good results, that I think we would still want to draw a line between those things happening with conclusions that we might like to more or less degree and a direct move of God saying you therefore, or this right there, that this group or this mechanism is something that is what I want to happen. So I'm going to appeal to another Biblical UH storyline, and that's the Book of a Back. Abacca cries out to God, the richer oppressing the poor, please help. And he's talking about within UH, within biblical Israel. Right, He's not talking about Babylonians oppressing Persians oppressing. He means within Biblical Israel, the rich are oppressing the poor. And God's responses, Yeah, Babylon's on.

00:15:37
Speaker 4: Their way right right, and back responses Wait, what no, no, no, no, no, no no, that's not what I meant.

00:15:47
Speaker 3: Babylon's worse than are rich, and God doesn't say not true. God more or less is yeah, they'll get their own.

00:15:56
Speaker 2: Yeah.

00:15:59
Speaker 3: I want to be careful to say that the luck of Babylon, so to speak, that is able to accomplish the things that Tobaccoc wants done, even though not in the way that Backak wants. Is therefore God raising up this group that's even worse to do this. I'm not so sure that what we mean with the Biblical account means by God raising up Babylon to do this work means that God wants Babylon as it is to be these great shapers of the world. I want to say, alternative, alternatively, that God always works in from the margins, or primarily, I shouldn't say always primarily works in from the margins and in the margins in this instance, rather than work from within the power structure of the people group that we're supposed to be formed as a nation of priesthoods for the nations, for the rest of the nations, right the people that are supposed to be always people. God allows the rising powers outside that he might otherwise have held back, let's say, in an alternate universe where David been fully faithful, where Solomon's wisdom had transcended the entirety of his life and not given way to an honoring of the gods of the nations right and an oppression frankly of those around him, right, which is what Jerobohma is raising himself against. Ideally the nation, not the nation in the modern sense, but this idea of biblical Israel as a priesthood before the nations is supposed to would hold back the great might of Babylon right in the way that God has and in moments and the Old Testament opens Prophet's eyes to see these angelic hosts standing up in defense, right, And that same mechanism would mean that or that same reality would mean then that you don't have Habaka having to cry out to God saying the richer oppressing the poor, right right, But instead you have the removal of those gates, and the working of the margins is all right, fine. The course of things that are at play outside of this land of what was supposed to be sort of an Eden light to make way for a new Eden. The walls are broken Babylon comes in and that's gonna that's going to bring judgment, right, But that doesn't mean Babylon is good.

00:18:25
Speaker 2: Right.

00:18:27
Speaker 3: So I want to get back to lucky and say, sometimes sometimes what lucky can mean is that God works anyway, rather than.

00:18:40
Speaker 4: I keep saying institution, you know.

00:18:43
Speaker 3: Rather than an institution that raises up and accomplishes perhaps what seems like good things, but maybe it does so in bad ways and in terrible ways that it's hard to say that God approves of this or God is behind the raising up of this. Right, I suppose one could say that the message of Jesus did go out throughout the whole world and this colonial European colonial expansion movement from the fourteen hundreds through the nineteen hundreds, right, yep? Is that the same thing as saying God raised up colonialism? Right? The fact that the fact that you have a vibrant African American church populace historically at vibrant traditions doesn't justify the North Atlantic slave trade, doesn't justify the global carving out the world as if it was in the name of God and actually with people and cyclicals for the Catholic Church, Protestant affirmations from Protestant churches that this is God's will?

00:19:50
Speaker 2: Right?

00:19:50
Speaker 4: Does this make sense?

00:19:52
Speaker 2: It does so?

00:19:54
Speaker 4: But God works anyways. What I'm saying, yeah, and that might be what luck he's getting at.

00:19:58
Speaker 2: I think.

00:19:58
Speaker 1: So let me clarify I mean by it, because I do think it's it's an important point and we probably need to get a little deeper into it. But Daniel Kahman kind of alerted me to this. He's a economist. He wrote a book called Thinking Fast and Slow, and in his book he talks about, you know, the ascension of Google, let's say, and he said, you know, when you when you look at the you know, the founders of Google and the way that they did things, you always get these sort of how to books right where people are writing and they're saying, oh, look here are the moves that they all made or what have you? Right, And he said, but they never really account for luck, like all of these things happened because other things didn't happen. All of these things happened because you know, they they just got they just stumbled onto something that they didn't necessarily have to stumble on. There's no clear path that they actually took that you could have predicted beforehand without any sort of with any sort of accuracy, to say, if you want to be the biggest search in company in the world, here are the steps you'd need to take exactly. And he's he talks about these this sort of element of luck within the whole system. And so I think that's sort of where you're coming at it from, is to say, there's all of these different things that are moving around, and I would think of it more in terms of like God is orchestrating all of this. He's like the conductor and an orchestra, and these things are moving around, and there's not necessarily a control that's happening, but there's a there's a register in which God is sort of moving these pieces about and making these things come about even within their fallenness. That doesn't necessity or that doesn't necessitate authorization or legitimation. Jeremiah, even when God calls Nebukan or his servant, it's only a couple verses later, and I'm blanking on what those verses are exactly, but he says, you, Nebucanes is my servant. He's going to come in and then Israel is going to go into exile. But then set years later, you know, the Babylonians will be punished for what they do to my people.

00:22:06
Speaker 2: I don't take that as.

00:22:09
Speaker 1: The act of taking them into exile is the real problem, right, Israel has to suffer the consequences for the sin that it has against has committed against God.

00:22:20
Speaker 2: It's the way it's done. It's the brutality, it's the.

00:22:24
Speaker 1: It's the arrogance, it's the unwillingness to recognize that that Babylon is to a servant of the Lord. And so if we look at those passages, now, if we just fast forward real quick, and I know these are weird connections, but when Paul talks about the master and the bond servant in the New Testament, what we really see there, what we see is that God is above both, and that because God is above both, this should recalibrate transform your word, transfigure right the way that a master relates to a servant and a servant relates to a man, because neither of them are actually doing anything autonomous of God. And so when we go back then into the Old Testament, we're looking at Nebuzar as God's servant. God is wanting nebecanezer to do this. This is now he's doing this under the auspices of God's sovereignty, But the way he does it isn't as if he's sitting under the auspices of God's sovereignty. He's a lousy master, and lousy masters will be held accountable, right, And so I think there's this aspect I agree with you. I don't think God is, you know, sort of authorizing the entire colonial project because spreading the Gospel is a good thing, right, as if all of the bad stuff that happens within any given context is okay as long as we get to share Christ with someone, right, it's not. I don't think God is that sort of black and white about the whole thing. I think what's happening is we can look at it and go, yes, this is good that Christ is being proclaimed. And there are a lot of people who are going to be held accountable for the irresponsible and in moral ways that they have preached to Christ and the Gospel. They're going to be held accountable for the misrepresentations of lifestyle that have happened to allow Christ's, you know, the Gospel to be proclaimed. I think that's the tension we have to hold on to here, and that really is the transactional issue in a nutshell, it's for these institutions to think that they can.

00:24:35
Speaker 2: Just carry on forever.

00:24:40
Speaker 1: They have to focus on only the good things that they have done and ignore the negative consequences of their operation, right, And I think for most of us we have to do that. You can see us doing that on an individual level, right right. It's the reason most of us think we're pre to good people.

00:25:02
Speaker 4: Right for sure, right, Like.

00:25:05
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, I'm pretty good guy.

00:25:06
Speaker 1: But their negative consequence to a lot of the things that I've done in my life that you know, I think God sort of brings to mind and I end up having to work back through. Institutions have a different inertia than an individual most of the time, in my estimation, there are a lot more players involved, there's a lot more pressure in there's more stakeholders to that institutional life than there normally are to an individual person. And that's part of why platform or for me, platforms important to include in this sort of transactional mess, because.

00:25:42
Speaker 2: We do have figures who have deep, big.

00:25:46
Speaker 1: Platforms, right, just individuals whose ministries would no longer exist if they were no longer there, right, and if they did exist, they'd exist a much lower in a much lower profile than they do right now.

00:26:05
Speaker 2: And so I.

00:26:06
Speaker 1: Think in all that, I hopefully I think I'm agreeing with you and just saying what I think we need to get at. When I'm mentioning Luck, what I'm saying is I think that we need to recognize the hand of God here in both directions that God is at one time using, and at some point in the future is going to hold accountable. It's not as if you're being used by God exempt you from any of the negative consequences that will come along with you being with you irresponsibly bearing that name of being God's servant.

00:26:50
Speaker 3: Yeah, So I think that that raises a parallel theological issue, right if what we're really pushing against, and maybe this first part of the description is, in various ways, from various angles, this sort of presumption of manifest destiny. God has raised this up, whatever this is, in order to do X, Y and Z, whatever those things are.

00:27:17
Speaker 4: That's theological problem, let's.

00:27:19
Speaker 3: Say one, and maybe the more obvious one that maybe X, Y and Z happen in spite of this group being raised up right, because because nothing escapes the providential work of God.

00:27:32
Speaker 4: God is always at work.

00:27:33
Speaker 3: He's always massaging, it's always transfiguring, he's always working in from the margins, such that what God is doing is sort of a perpetual in my reading anyway, a perpetual. I can work with that mentality, yes, right, And I think that's what we see, for instance, in.

00:27:51
Speaker 4: The back of narrative.

00:27:51
Speaker 3: But then the parallel theological issue that's maybe more subtle that I think you're also getting at, maybe we can draw it out, is that.

00:28:02
Speaker 4: Whatever it is.

00:28:05
Speaker 3: That enables the market or the economic or the social rise of a group because of the nature of the way that the world is organized, right, the way that creation I want to be. Since we're talking about words here, I want to use. I want to take Norman Weirsba seriously, who talks about the need to say creation over nature, not because the word nature is inherently bad, but because creation gets an agency, right, it's specifically this sense of relationship with the God who is Creator. And so the organizing of creation as we.

00:28:41
Speaker 4: Know it is not in any sense the ideal.

00:28:44
Speaker 3: It's not the mechanism described either in the first couple chapters of Genesis, nor in the final chapters of Revelation, nor the various passages in the Bible that allude to those final chapters.

00:28:56
Speaker 4: Right, So what is it.

00:28:58
Speaker 3: That makes a particular group rise. It might be that God has said I can work with that, and he works anyway in the midst of something. But it also might be the case, and this is where the concern comes in, that a group rises for reasons that can be solely attributed to minding the social, economic, financial, whatever framework of what they're in, right, and perhaps they do something good in the middle of it, but that doesn't mean that they're rising was anything more necessarily right than these social forces at work and playing playing.

00:29:43
Speaker 4: The game with them.

00:29:44
Speaker 3: Right in the non explicitly theological arena, we can think of many billionaires, many billionaires billions over in the world who I have a hard time saying God wanted that person to be a multi billionaire, then use that to do who knows what, to control countries, to control media organizations, and so on and so forth. That strikes me as odd to claim that God is behind that. But even in the arena of those who would call themselves theological organizations explicitly often they're still wrapped up in social innovations and social pressures that you know, they're deeply intertwined with them, and their financial stability is often the result of being able to play these market games. Now, what I'm not saying here is you shouldn't understand how market works. It's not at all what I'm saying. What I'm saying is we shouldn't confuse.

00:30:43
Speaker 4: That as divine stamp of approval.

00:30:47
Speaker 3: Right, And so that parallel concern for me theologically is that often these institutions do confuse the two, and we'll say things like, well, you know, we're making this particular move for financial reasons, and that just is stamped with approval by God because this allows us to continue in existence. Whereas when I look at Scripture, those things that God wants to get done and very strange ways God gets done, right, whether it be first King seventeens, where this widow just has this never overly abundant in this particular scenario, but just has this coffer of oil and this coffer of grain that just is enough until the harvest comes.

00:31:29
Speaker 4: Yeah, right, go ahead.

00:31:34
Speaker 1: Well it brings up a few different narratives from me. So the obvious one is Tower Babbel. Right, there's a clear sense within the Tower of Babel narrative that these builders are taking advantage of the technology and their own human capacity to communicate with one another in order to build something that God is not involved with at all. So, in other words, they're getting an awful lot done without God. Right now, Ultimately he comes down and he confuses the language. He stops what they're doing. But as he does, so, what does he say? He says, if I don't do something, they are going to be able to do. Basically, whatever they set their mind to. There's no end to what they could do. And so I think that narrative is God admitting that, yeah, humans can do an awful lot without him, because of the capacities we've been given, because of the ingenuity we have with regard to technology, the raw resources of creation that we can sort of utilize for our own benefit. And so I think that there are these narratives where we could look and say, yes, this dynamic that you're painting, are absolutely right that there are times when when left to our own devices, we can be quite.

00:32:48
Speaker 2: Successful.

00:32:49
Speaker 1: And I'll do that in their quotes right, successful apart from anything that God is really wanting to have happen, and while that may occur for a certain period of time, there's no.

00:33:02
Speaker 2: Guarantee that it will last. Right.

00:33:05
Speaker 1: The other narrative I was going to go back to, it's a little more contested Deuteronomy six one through four, where we see a clear instance of boundary crossing the sons of God and the daughters of men, whoever you identify those characters as it's clear that there's a boundary crossing that the sons of God are not to mix with the daughters of men, but they accomplish what they want to accomplish, until, of course God wittles down the human population to Noah in his family.

00:33:32
Speaker 2: And so you do have these times.

00:33:36
Speaker 1: If we were to take a a if we were to look across human history and look at you know, a short like let's say one hundred or one hundred and fifty year span, you could probably make the case right that a lot of these things are being done apart from God, that somehow God isn't stopping them, that God is in some way pleased with them, or something like that. But ultimately, I think when we take the broader view, you sit back and you say no, God is.

00:34:03
Speaker 2: Patient, right.

00:34:04
Speaker 1: I always go to Genesis fifteen sixteen, Not Genesis fifteen six which is the one everybody knows, but Genesis fifteen sixteen where God tells Abram that his descendants will live in a land in slavery for four hundred years because the iniquity of the Amorites is not yet complete. And so this people group that's occupying the land of Canaan, he's not ready to move them out yet. They haven't gotten to the point where he's done with them there yet, but he will, and so that happens across four hundred years. So I think we have to avoid this sort of thought process to say, yes, everything that's happening around us is God ordained, right. I think what we have to think through is God is allowing certain things to happen.

00:34:51
Speaker 2: Within the world.

00:34:52
Speaker 1: But nobody is going to get by with doing something that they shouldn't have been doing. No one is going to get by with not a lot lining with God's sacred order. It just doesn't happen. It may look like it, it may outlive us, right, but at the end of the day, it doesn't happen. And so I think that there is a real sense in which as we think about this notion of transaction, that one of the questions we need to be asking ourselves is how much are we actually accomplishing apart from God?

00:35:26
Speaker 2: And what I mean by that apart.

00:35:27
Speaker 1: From God is using our own capabilities and resources to accomplish things that may not necessarily be evil, but that we may have just set on default and said I'm going to continue accomplishing this because I can not because I feel like God is particularly leading me toward this anymore.

00:35:51
Speaker 3: Yeah, So there's there's sort of two purposes. It sounds like that we want to get across, right, and that one is in either direction. Just on account of an institution running its course, you can't jump to moralistic conclusions, correct, right, because an institution may have risen in ways that are frankly really problematic. So to just sort of stamp divine manifest work of God on the side.

00:36:22
Speaker 4: Of it is problematic, yep.

00:36:25
Speaker 3: But also an institution can decline just simply because its course has been run. It might also decline. Others might also decline from for real moral failings.

00:36:35
Speaker 2: Right.

00:36:36
Speaker 3: We have plenty of examples of those, But that's not necessarily the case is what we're trying to get out here, right, correct, And so I think I think of.

00:36:43
Speaker 4: The example that.

00:36:47
Speaker 3: Jesus specifically is is but you also sort of see that metaphor and scripture frequently and that he talks about a seed and that the seed cannot bring forth new life unless it enters the soil and dies. So the seed itself eyes to give forth the new life. And the larger implication seems to be that old ways have served their purpose and sometimes they need to die to give life. But his larger purpose also seems to be to point to himself, right that as a member of the humanity in the line of atom, as a representation of those people of the earth who need redemption, he is entering the soil as to then be to die, right to then become the first fruits of a new creation. That's right, and sometimes that's just what needs to be the case. But additionally, one could say that sometimes institutions can die precisely because.

00:37:49
Speaker 4: They are faithful.

00:37:51
Speaker 3: Yeah, right, there, there is a real dynamic of persecution that can exist. I think it's overly sighted. Sometimes institutions can exist precisely because they're unfaithful sometimes, and this is what I wanted to preserve in the in the idea of lucky. Sometimes institutions can die or persist, persist in spite of being unfaithful or in spite of being faithful.

00:38:19
Speaker 4: Right. So the goal here is to say.

00:38:21
Speaker 3: You can't look at the institution's death and jump to automatic conclusions from it. Nor can you immediately say, well, they did X, Y and z, and we like that, therefore they continued to exist, or we like that, therefore their death is an active persecution. Right. There's just there's very little we can say, just as there's very little we can say about providential that God's providential work apart from God is providentially at work. Right. So what I think that means in the longer term is to is to begin to question the sort of high rhetoric.

00:38:53
Speaker 2: Right.

00:38:53
Speaker 4: The goal, the.

00:38:54
Speaker 3: Goal of an organization, the goal of a movement at its best, is to be honest about its past, for better or or worse, probably for both, right to press forth into the present faithfully heart stop.

00:39:12
Speaker 2: Right.

00:39:13
Speaker 3: That's certainly entailed being aware of financial pressures.

00:39:17
Speaker 4: Just money is real.

00:39:18
Speaker 3: We have to pay attention to money. But when money takes over the concerns, it's not uncommon for the reliance reliance upon God to be shown to be less than what it should have been.

00:39:34
Speaker 2: Right, that's right, No, And I always find it interesting.

00:39:39
Speaker 1: So slat voice Hieshek is one of my favorite sort of just oddreads. Right, most of the time, I don't really understand what he's saying. I'll be honest, it's pretty complex, but he's just he makes me laugh, honestly, and he makes me think, and so I like reading this stuff. He's got a lecture online called maybe we Just Need a Different Chicken, I think, is what it's called. And at the beginning of that lecture, he says that ideology is a problem, not because it doesn't address real issues. He says that ideology does address real issues, the deep problems that we have in our societies. But he says that the problem really with ideologies is that they begin to define the questions, and so then the questions become part of the problem as opposed to part of the solution. And so part of solving these issues is trying to get outside of these ideological boxes that we find ourselves in and asking ourselves what is it that we're really trying to solve for? And what questions or what arrangements, what new way of being in the world might really solve for those if we weren't stuck in these boxes, you know. So I work with a lot of higher ed institutions. Still I still do a fair bit of consulting or at least conversation with different CEOs or provosts or what have you. And a lot of times what you run into is they're stuck in a box. They have buildings to pay for, they have you know, lms's to support, you know, learning management systems, technology issues, all these different policies and all this different stuff. But really a lot of what the people I talk to want to do is they just want to educate the body of Christ.

00:41:34
Speaker 2: And once you.

00:41:36
Speaker 1: Step outside of accreditation, and once you step outside of buildings and dormitories and you know, faculty on staff and all these different things, you certainly get a different.

00:41:50
Speaker 2: Tone about what that education can look like.

00:41:53
Speaker 1: But it may be far more sustainable than we're capable of doing right now as a church in this context, given the prices that are available to us.

00:42:02
Speaker 2: Right.

00:42:02
Speaker 1: I mean, you mentioned, I agree with you. Money's real and we have to think about money. But I also think part of what we're doing constantly is we're trying to preserve a very specific model. And when we try to preserve that very specific model, we lose sight of what we're really trying to do in the first place. I don't know anybody who's gotten a PhD in theological studies or ministry or Bible or anything like that that says, you know, what i'd really like to do, I'd really like to work the rest of my life to preserve an institution. I don't really think that's what people want to do. I think that's a proxy for what they really want to do. In other words, it's the current vehicle that allows them to do what they really want to do, which is to form and educate young people. Form and educate people are going into ministry. That's what most of us who do this kind of education want to do. The structure is starting to get and I would say increasingly start need to get in the way of that, and we're starting to see institutions sort of tople.

00:43:05
Speaker 2: A little bit more, a little bit more, a little bit more.

00:43:08
Speaker 1: But I would argue that that's a contextual problem, not necessarily always a specific institutional problem, right.

00:43:17
Speaker 2: And the way we solve it, Oh, go ahead.

00:43:19
Speaker 3: Well, and to add into that not specifically a theological problem, right, which is not specifically interpreted.

00:43:24
Speaker 2: That's right, not specifically a theological problem. I think the way we solve it.

00:43:28
Speaker 1: Is we have to sort of step back and ask ourselves, have we substituted seminary education? Have we substituted this particular model for seminary education.

00:43:37
Speaker 2: Or what have you? For what we really want? Right? Like, is this what we really want?

00:43:45
Speaker 1: And if we've substituted that, then I would say a transaction has taking place, Right, That's what we really mean by that transaction, that there's something else that's substituted and it becomes sacro synct, not because we really care about it that much, but because it has now been substituted for the thing that we really do care about. And so you'll often hear it if you're really listening to people who care about these things, it's like, well, what would we do if all the seminaries blinked out of existence? They don't mean by that, what would be the next paradigm we would execute to train the people of God. What they're really saying is we wouldn't be able to train the next generation of the people of God.

00:44:24
Speaker 2: If these seminaries weren't.

00:44:25
Speaker 4: Here, right, it's doom and gloom.

00:44:27
Speaker 2: Right.

00:44:28
Speaker 1: I would agree with the first part of that question, like what are the possibilities of doing this beyond seminary totally agree with that. I very much disagree with the former now I happen to be I love seminary education. I would like to see it continue, but that preference can't drive. And I think that's part of what I've had to come to, just the more I work with and seminaries and Christian colleges and those kind of things, is that my preference can't drive it. There has to be something else driving. And for a while, I think I would say that was the reality of the money right for me was driving. But I think even now I would say that's been displaced. And I think the deeper question has to be asked, is what is God really wanting us to do in the moment in order to make sure that his people are well discipled, in order to make sure that his people are formed and shaped and continually conformed in the image of Christ.

00:45:38
Speaker 3: Yeah, So again, what I'm hearing about is that the goal is to be faithful in the moment, right, and it's to be innovative in the moment. It's to sort of take that posture that I'm wanting to say, is how providence works, whatever exactly God is doing in a moment, whether or not we can interpret it that, it's that God can work with what's there in the present. It's sort of that we need to have rather than the sort of mentality that this institution is God's savior of the world.

00:46:08
Speaker 4: No, actually, it's not.

00:46:09
Speaker 3: Anymore than you know, the Northern Kingdom of Israel was the thing that God needed, right, The existence of the Northern Kingdom Israel, as well as the Southern Kingdom of Judah was predicated upon the presence and work of Yahweh, not the other way around. The existence of filling the gap institution is predicated upon the desired good work of training people to be ministers in some way, shape or another, training people to be educators, training people to be you know, whatever it is that we need them to do. Times that's nurses, right, physicians, depending on the school and what their their larger mission is. And there's good reason often to preserve some of these institutions, sure, but it's the heavy handed interpretive, dynamic right of what this institution is and what its failure may or may not mean. What this institution must do, how it must compromise in order to continue to exist because of its larger divine mandate, the sorts of theological problems that it must marry itself to in terms of the formations of social capital that's right, or economic capital in order to just do you know, and justifying that based upon the greater good that it sees itself. There's where the problems are. Right, that's being tied to an institution as if its existence is is what solves beaning in the world. And the reality is is that that's just never been the case for any institution.

00:47:56
Speaker 4: No means faithfulness, Yeah.

00:47:59
Speaker 2: I Like we said at the beginning, you know, Israel and Judo were.

00:48:03
Speaker 1: Not going to be successful unless they were walking with God. That God's presence was the secret sauce. You put it that way, right. I tell this story about my son and I walking down Michigan Avenue occasionally we'd moved up from Central Illinois. He'd walk with my wife and I ond to be running ahead a block block and a half because there's no traffic and there's no people, right, So you know, little kid, you know, in first second grade, he.

00:48:32
Speaker 2: Can do that, no problem.

00:48:34
Speaker 1: But when we moved up to Chicago and he's trying to move down Michigan Avenue, that's a whole different beasts, right, And so he's like getting jostled around. You know, people are texting and walking, they're on their phones, they're doing it. You know, they're not watching for a little kid that's like down by their knees. And so he's getting shoved around, pushed around. And so I let him run ahead just for a few minutes, and then you know, kind of called him back to me and just said, hey, just walk with me. And when he walked with me, he could walk basically a straight line through the crowd. I'm not huge, I'm six foot to twenty something. Right at the time, I was about that size, I'm you know, and so it's not like I'm shoving my way through people. But I'm also more noticeable than a first grader, right, and so I don't I don't have to dodge, and I don't get jostled around as much. And it just it's a different experience for me walking down that sidewalk than it was for him. But when he walks next to me, he takes on that stature. He now becomes six foot to twenty right in a very real way. And I think that's what we're shooting for. And sometimes I feel like what we've done is it's an old Travis trip foot Travis Tritzong right, six feet tall and bulletproof, right, like he starts to feel that way, but he's not actually that way.

00:49:54
Speaker 2: And when we.

00:49:55
Speaker 1: Start to feel like we're six foot fall and bulletproof, either as individual Christians or His institutions, we start to think that we can just accomplish whatever we want, and that we actually God actually needs us to be here, and that we're the secret sauce. It's actually a really subtle, I think shift that takes place.

00:50:15
Speaker 2: We see it in places like Deuteronomy eight. God warns the Israelites to not forget.

00:50:20
Speaker 1: Him when they go into the land and they're eating, living in houses they didn't build, eating from fields to the implant, drinking from cisterns they didn't dig, and they'll say, my might and my strength have gotten me this well, like they become the center of the universe as opposed to God, and so part of it is when we say being faithful in the present, I think that's a good picture of what it means to be faithful in the present, is that we're constantly trying to be people who stand in the presence of a holy God and allow him to do the work through us, as opposed to starting to think that we're the ones who need to do the work and if God kicks in, that'd be great, because I think that's sometimes where we.

00:51:05
Speaker 3: Get Yeah, I'm with you and everything, But the Travis trit song, I don't know anything about that, but I'm.

00:51:11
Speaker 4: Assuming it fits.

00:51:13
Speaker 2: It does trust me.

00:51:15
Speaker 3: I'll trust you, And I think that that is the takeaway again. Right, Perhaps I'm a broken record at this point, but it's that the institution, the group, the whatever has to be receive its identity from Jesus, right, and the work that Jesus has called us to do, and not because we're human, because our institutions are created by humans. It means constant repentance, and I think that's part of what institutions seem to be afraid to do, right, because repentance means repudiating something that someone else perhaps loves. Yeah, but that's part of the process of constantly coming to God, displacing ourselves and our.

00:51:58
Speaker 4: Institutions from the center.

00:52:01
Speaker 3: Yeah, right, it's it's what enables us to be like your son as a first grader, having a stature that really isn't dar own. Yeah, while recognizing that it isn't our own, right, that's really the repunance part is important of that right, and recognizing that again, when when an institution or a group might meet its end, perhaps it's just to make way for something new.

00:52:26
Speaker 4: Right.

00:52:26
Speaker 3: I mean, I don't know how current we want to get. But recently Stephen Colbert's Late show came to an end, and I really appreciate that one of the things he said was regardless of what the reasons for that were, he refused to at least explicitly weigh in on that. He said, he's excited for what's the next. Right, Maybe he needed he needed this change in order to actually save his life. Right, so that he still while he while he still has the energy and the ability to do new things, he can try new things he wanted to try, right, Yeah, regardless of what you think about that show, whatever, regardless of what you think about any institution, the attitude there I think is spot on, right, And yeah, in his case, coming from someone who openly and probably professes as faith in Jesus, that's a good model.

00:53:18
Speaker 2: Right, Agreed.

00:53:20
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean, I think I think part of what we were trying to do in all these diagnosess and we've got two more pieces that we'll do in this series, but.

00:53:30
Speaker 2: I think it's just.

00:53:30
Speaker 1: Important to kind of recap this. We're really trying to get Christians to broaden their understanding, not narrow it down. And so if we think about I was trying to explain this to my son just the other day, we were walking through some of this stuff. He's doing a theology degree at Saint Louis University and so sometimes periodically we'll talk about some of this stuff like this.

00:53:55
Speaker 2: But I just told him, I.

00:53:56
Speaker 1: Said, if you just think about God's self disclosure as being additive to any perspective that we had before, it, subtracting that, discounting that, ignoring that, denying that whatever verb you want to apply to it, ultimately is going to give us a narrower perspective than we would have if we just embraced it. And I think that all of these we've done assimilation, we've done fragmentation, and now this one's transaction. What we're trying to get everybody to understand is that we're constantly narrowing our vision because we're not sitting under the authority of God's self disclosure. We're not thinking about it well, we're not allowing it to sort of govern our lives. And what that means is not here, here's the set of rules. Just do this and you're fine, right. It's more of an improvisational activity where we have to deeply know it, constantly circle back through repentance, confession, through basic investigation and try to understand these things. But ultimately the narrow incomes when we say, we really no longer need this. We've got enough of this figured out. There's enough of a clear and consistent story that we can adopt that we can live our lives without real reference to the Word of God anymore. And so the next one we're actually going to address is called what we call inversion, and it's this dynamic that talks about you know, when human leaders are communities sort of close interpretive questions prematurely, and then those interpretive questions become the authority for the individual or community's life as opposed to the Word of God on which they're based.

00:55:43
Speaker 2: God's word sort of gets enveloped.

00:55:46
Speaker 1: Within the interpretive community, as opposed to sitting atop the interpretive community, and so we call that inversion. But all of these are basically getting at very similar things like let's not narrow our vision, let's actually remember that we serve a God who is capable of doing abundantly more than we could ever ask or think. So I'll close out with that today and thanks to the conversation today, ASHIESH really appreciate it, and thanks everybody for being here.

00:56:14
Speaker 2: I hope you enjoyed this episode and we'll catch you on the next one. Take care,