Episode Transcript
[00:00:05] Speaker A: This is the Return, a podcast about religious reconstruction in a world of deconstruction. I'm Jordan Maddox.
[00:00:13] Speaker B: And I'm Dustin Maddox.
[00:00:14] Speaker A: We are not related.
[00:00:16] Speaker C: Different spell.
[00:00:28] Speaker A: Today's conversation is about slowing down on purpose in a world that rewards speed, certainty, and hot takes. Our guest is Dr. A.J. swoboda, a theologian, pastor, and author of Slow Theology, whose work invites Christians to rethink what faithfulness looks like after deconstruction.
We talk about why so many people are drawn to slow right now, the difference between intentional slowness and spiritual stagnation, and why churches often fail people by rushing belief, conversion, and certainty.
AJ helps us think about deconstruction not as something to fear, but as something that, when practiced with care, can actually deepen faith rather than destroy it.
This episode explores questions at the heart of reconstruction. How much doubt is too much, why virtue and restraint matter, what it means to live with mystery, and how churches might become more hospital spaces for people who are asking hard questions without demanding easy answers.
Doctor Swoboda, thank you so much for joining us on the Return. I wanted to start with a random question. What does it feel like to sit.
[00:01:42] Speaker C: On butter over time? It gets pretty messy if you leave it there too long. The principle sitting on butter. Somebody's read my book. Yeah, yeah. Sitting on butter. More important than you'd think. And if you want me to talk about it, I can, but yeah, yeah.
[00:01:55] Speaker A: I thought it was a fun, fun, crude metaphor for a process. I wouldn't recommend it to the audience without precautions, but I think more of us should sit on butter, which is another way of saying taking things slowly, which is what your book is called Slow Theology. And I, I, I find it fascinating as a concept.
And I was just this past week talking to someone in the journalism space, another world, that, and there was a kind of a conference where they were talking about slow takes and slow takes are coming back as opposed to hot takes. And so what do you think is the energy in the ether around slow? Where do you think that's coming from?
[00:02:38] Speaker C: Yeah, you know what I do. Yeah. So you would not have to work hard to find in the last 15 years a whole cottage industry of Christian books on that have the word slow in the title. Slow church, slow theology, slow spirituality, slow. There's all these kind of John Marks book, the Ruthless Elimination or Hurry, all these books that are on this broad theme of slowing down. Certainly I suspect part of that is that we are now finally coming to terms with the tyranny that has been life post post industrial revolution, where we no longer use our bodies, we no longer walk, we no longer loiter. We. It's funny, the word loiter is a bad word now, but it turns out like all of life was loitering before the Industrial revolution. Yeah, Yeah. I think your question why is this in essence, why is slow the new hot take? Because we're reacting, I think, against a world that we know is viscerally dangerous to the human soul. And we need to find a different way because it's killing our bodies, it's killing our souls, it's killing our kids, it's killing our culture, it's killing it all.
[00:03:49] Speaker A: Let me ask you one follow up on this because I think about this a lot, at least in the political world. There's a book that came out this year called Abundance. It's by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson. It's the it book of the year.
And really what they're addressing is sclerosis, which is the total inaction in our housing markets, in our Congress, everywhere. And so I guess in my head I'm thinking like, how do you know you're doing something slow or you're just in a place of stasis? And so how do you think, Just so we can have some definitions of terms before we jump in, how do you think about the difference?
[00:04:22] Speaker C: Yeah, I mean, there's a. There's a fundamental difference between meditation and death. And the difference is that in one, you're still breathing, but you're doing it intentionally, and the other one, you've ceased to cease to be a living entity. I guess the difference between meditation and death is that intentional slow is a choice of the will and one that takes, mind you, a ton of restraint and intentionality and mindfulness. You never, at least if you live in our world today, slowing down has to be a wild you. You have to choose to do it. It's not something that naturally, for most humans does not naturally come. The difference would be with stasis, you're dead. With slowing down, it's an intentional choice. And I'm struck, part of my, I don't know, heart as a theologian and somebody who spends a lot of his life reflecting on the Bible and the Christian tradition is that as far as I can tell from the very first pages of our creation story, that is the whole.
That's God's way of operating. The God who can create all the stars with the flick of a wrist takes seven days and doesn't do it quickly. It is God's nature to take his time and to not do things as fast as God could do them.
[00:05:37] Speaker A: Fascinating. I want to start by talking about deconstruction. So this is a podcast about reconstruction, but you've both written a book, but also have comments early on in Slow Theology about deconstruction.
And you use the metaphor of good poison or chemotherapy. I think we've had a lot of deconstruction conversation on here. Let me quote from you. You said deconstruction in the proper dose can save one's faith, but the wrong dose can be fatal. Now, what I find interesting is, you know, when I am, if I were to have seen oncologist to get my dose of chemotherapy, they would prescribe it. But oftentimes people in deconstruction prescribe their own dosage, if you will. They're going through their own process. And so I guess the question that's good will be because churches don't do a good job of shepherding people through doubt and deconstruction. How do you determine dose?
Would you think about arriving at a dose and is that something you can observe personally, or do you need someone with you in that process to determine that dose?
[00:06:42] Speaker C: Yeah, I have a family member who's a physician and got himself into some trouble a couple years ago because he was prescribing himself some medication and became his own doctor and in the end almost killed himself over not doing the work with another. With another person. Yeah, yeah. It's a metaphor. And the metaphor of chemotherapy is from the life of my co author, Nijay Gupta, whose child had cancer as a kid. And, you know, this idea that giving her the way to love a child is to put poison in their body. What a wild right. What a metaphor for a lot of things. But the idea that he suggests that I think has a lot of wisdom is that that sometimes the way that we actually deepen our faith is by intentionally inculcating in our lives things that are very difficult. I'll give you a case in point. And this might be an illustration that I. Or a real life illustration that I think is helpful. So I teach at a Christian university, teach a lot of Bible classes. And one of the things that I will always try to do for my Protestant students is I will get them to read Catholics.
And the reason I do that is for most Protestants, they have been raised. Most evangelicals have been raised in environments where they have been taught that Catholics are evil, demonic, don't love God, they worship the Pope. They have these all these just very funky ideas about what Roman Catholics do and think. And I will have Them read Catholics that have deep faith in Christ and that simple experience of showing them how their trust in something does not match reality. I'm creat what I'm a philosophy. What would you say? I'm problematizing their false assumptions, so I'm introducing problems.
So I think most of us who are raised in like evangelical churches were taught that youth group is you go where you play video games and you're protected from the hard stuff. And that has raised a whole generation of people who have thought that the church is a place that you run away from the difficulties rather than the place where you run to them. And I think, Jordan, I'm long winded here. I apologize about that. But my response is that has not served a generation of people very well and it has treated. It is essentially taught a whole generation of people that the Christian faith is largely the sand that we hide our head under rather than the telescope through which we view the universe. And the universe has many questions that it brings to us. And I think Jesus invites us to look at those questions from the perspective of grace, grace and mercy. So I actually really do believe that putting ours introducing difficulties through the metaphor of chemotherapy introducing difficulties in the end can actually make our faith significantly stronger.
[00:09:31] Speaker A: So I'm thinking about this and destiny. Love to hear your comments. What that what it looks like to intro because a university is designed for that kind of thing in origin and construction and structure. A church is more complicated. So how do you think about what he's describing Destin as a. In a practical theology sense?
[00:09:50] Speaker B: Yeah, I think the.
[00:09:53] Speaker C: There's, there's.
[00:09:56] Speaker B: I think pastorally in a church context, we gotta hold the tension between both of those things of problematizing and introducing ideas and concepts and things to folks to help produce resilience in them and. Or it goes back to the. The. You have to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable. We're constantly trying to do those things in, in the ways in which we, we pastor people and are formed as followers of Jesus. I think A.J. you, you and N.J. brought up a. An interesting concept in the book in, in the notion that it's not these problematized realities or just the fact that we face suffering, death, massive existential questions is like really baked in from the beginning in that Eden doesn't have walls and there's the serpent is just there among God's people in the very beginning. And so how do we. What does that mean for both the process of deconstruction and then slow theology?
[00:11:03] Speaker C: Yeah. As you Were as you were talking, Dustin, I had this mem I was drawn to.
So you mentioned the idea of the garden. The Garden of Eden. So we traditionally, when we will think about the Garden of Eden, we imagine it like a holy biodome. It's like this. Like this that's good, sanctified, perfect environment, free of any of the influence of evil and darkness. And when we meet the serpent in Genesis 3, God is right there.
They're going to have a conversation with God because they're going to run into the trees after they ate from the tree and while I was getting them. But God is in the garden. He's walking around. He's described as walking the latter part of Genesis 3. So God is there and the serpent shows up.
One can only wonder. I think we're invited to consider this question. It almost seems as though God is intent on creating an environment where other voices are welcome to be present and other voices that are dangerous voices.
I was drawn here. It's interesting. The last. It's funny.
I do teach a seminar on political theology and I actually think that's a setup for the concept of free speech. I think It's a Genesis 3. God creates an environment where he is not canceling the serpent.
[00:12:30] Speaker B: Interesting.
[00:12:31] Speaker C: God could have canceled the serpent. He could have ended the whole process, but willingly chose not to. That's Genesis 3. And I was struck as you were Talking Genesis Revelation 22, which Are the lasting words of the New Testament. It's not the last writings of the New Testament, but the last canonical, the last listed writings in the New Testament. Jesus says to the church, or one of the angels says to the church, I should say, do not seal up the words of the prophecy of the scroll because the time is near. Let the one who does wrong continue to do wrong. Let the vile person continue to be vile. Let the one who does right continue to do right. And let the holy person continue to be holy. And I'm just drawn to the fact that the word let is the same word that God used.
[00:13:12] Speaker B: Ah, that's good.
[00:13:13] Speaker C: Let. This is a God who allows. Like, this is a God who permits. And as a dad, that means that the theological parental applications of this mean I'm not to be better than God.
Like I need to let my son live in a world where he is going to be exposed to other voices that are very.
That are problem.
[00:13:38] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. What do you think?
[00:13:40] Speaker C: That doesn't mean you give the pulpit to the heretic. You don't give the microphone to the heretic of the church. I'M not saying that, but the space of the church is a sacred space, for sure. But we also need to learn to make room for people in our churches that have perspectives, views and ideas that don't maybe align with the person who's preaching or teacher. Yeah.
[00:14:02] Speaker B: So that makes me think of the parable of the prodigal and how the father lets the son take the inheritance and lets the son go to the far country and then lets him return. Right. This gracious permissiveness. And so we could. I wonder if that's a way that we can reconceptualize Deconstruction is. Is allowing the pursuit of.
Of ends that will. That can end you, while simultaneously the. The Father lets the elder brother stay outside, but pursues him in a way to try and bring him back in. And so how would you think of that imagery in terms of deconstruction and reconstruction?
[00:14:53] Speaker C: There are different moments for different things. So we have, for example, the parable of the prodigal and the son runs away and the dad lets him run away.
So that is certainly at times in life, that is one of the ways in which we steward the relationships with individuals that we have who have made the choice to say, I'm stepping away. That is absolutely. I think at times the church should never. I don't think we should say, don't let the door hit you. Like we bless as people go. When Jesus says, if somebody, you know, is caught in sin or whatnot, or they. The whole thing about a person who, you know, rejects it all. And Jesus says, treat them as you would a tax collector sinner. Matthew said that. And that's an interesting thing for a tax collector to say, because Jesus knew what it was like to be treated like a tax collector. And it actually turned out it was treated really well.
[00:15:45] Speaker A: Is there a deconstruction benediction in the Book of Common Prayer? So I think that would be a Maybe a wonderful addition. Blessing on your way out.
[00:15:52] Speaker C: I can certainly say that the New Testament has nothing akin to what we would call a sinner's prayer, but it does have what we would call the doubter's prayer. Lord, I believe. Help me in my unbelief.
[00:16:01] Speaker B: That's good.
[00:16:02] Speaker C: So there's actually more, I feel like more language in the New Testament for one or the other. But I was going to say, on the other hand, there's another parable where Jesus tells the story of the person who leaves the 99 for the 1 and leaves to go seek. I think the point is that there are Moments where we discern that the right thing is to say there's room to go, and we bless you as you do. And there are moments where we say, I'm coming after you. Yeah. But here's the deal. When we check, when we go after somebody who really doesn't want it, what ends up happening is they tend to run harder and faster.
Yeah. So there has to be a discernment. Are they.
Is there a door open for this or not?
Yep.
[00:16:47] Speaker A: Yeah. And that really. That taps into this kind of Venn diagram where we looked at people's individual process through their development as adults. But we've also looked at the environment of a church and how that can be more hospitable. All of this really reminds me of that famous aphorism that kind of comes from the military. I think it's in the aphorism goes, good judgment comes from experience, and experience comes from bad judgment, which is you need the tandem of those things to facilitate. Facilitate learning. And as a lifelong educator, you know that. I know that's how it works. I want to jump into kind of more reconstruction now, given what we've done with this podcast so far, has been really emphasizing the kind of. The first half of this process.
And I want to push you on slow, because I often wonder, and you can just look at the history of the Roman Catholic Church. I wonder if slow works. For me, slow is describing how we do something, but oftentimes people leave for the what, not the how. And there you just look at going back to our Congress. Sometimes deliberation can result in nothing more than a prolonged process at reaching an end goal that is not an end goal that is built into virtue. And so I guess what I'm asking is slow enough.
[00:18:15] Speaker C: There were five just gem questions in that.
[00:18:19] Speaker B: I'll just.
[00:18:19] Speaker A: Sorry. Sorry. I just. It was a monologue almost.
[00:18:22] Speaker C: No, no, it's great. But let me. I'll. I just. If I don't hit it all, then it's because there were just. They were flying at me like pieces of Tatooine, and I don't what part to take. Okay.
[00:18:33] Speaker A: Why?
[00:18:34] Speaker C: There's a really cool. There was a really cool Roman Catholic or really cool Roman Catholic theologian named hers Ans von Baltazar. It's. You have to get a PhD just to learn how to say his name. But he was a brilliant theologian. Some of his stuff is just whack. But one of the things that he talked about a lot was that when you look in the creation story in Genesis 1 and 2, between the human, when you juxtapose the humans and the animals.
So the animals in the creation story were made at the same time, so that they were made in pairs.
They were always made in pairs. They're always made in pairs. The ark story, they're in pairs. They're pairs of pairs. Whereas with the humans, when you look at Genesis 2, they are not made at the same moment. The man is created first and then the woman second in this, in Genesis 2 it's different Genesis 1, but in Genesis 2 the man is created first and then the woman. And Balthazar has this one just throw away paragraph.
That to me is a game changer. He says that the reason the text does that is to show us that the creatures who were given the most power in the garden made in the image of God bore the power, the ruling, reigning power of God.
The most powerful creatures in the Garden of Eden were the ones who had to cultivate most intimately the discipline of restraint.
And his point is that man had to wait because he had as much power as he did. And if you have power without restraint, you will destroy the garden. Yeah, he had to wait for the woman to be created. But if you'll notice, when they are talking to the serpent, they do not wait to make the decision to listen to what he says.
So that the restraint is found in Genesis 2, but there's no restraint in Genesis 3.
You made a line. You said slow doesn't work. You're right, it doesn't work.
But it doesn't work pragmatically in the kingdom of this world. My spiritual director would tell me it is never a sign of emotional health for you to be well adjusted to a sick society.
And of course it doesn't work in this society, but in God's society it does work. And in the kingdom of God it does work because it is the way we were intended to live. So I would agree with your assessment. No, it doesn't work. But the problem is we're trying to become well adjusted to a really sick society. So in our society, you're right, it doesn't work.
[00:21:05] Speaker A: Can I interrupt and ask a follow up?
Do you think there are? Because I was getting Alastair McIntyre vibes in your book where I was assuming that there was some kind of virtue going on in there. How am I supposed to do slow if I'm a bad person or I've not developed the tools of. So is there an inherent virtue that's needed, needed in order to do this kind of slow process?
[00:21:27] Speaker C: Yeah, if you ask the orthodox all the way back to Theophilus of Antioch or in the early Orthodox tradition. There is a long tradition that actually when God told the humans they could eat from the Garden of Eden, the Tree of Knowledge, that they could not eat from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, which is the one tree they're permit not permitted to eat from. The Orthodox have taught for centuries that it was not that the tree was off limits, it was that they weren't allowed to have it yet, and that there would be a moment that they would be allowed to eat from it. And their point is that God was intentionally creating.
Intentionally creating character in them by telling them they can't do something.
Now, I don't know if I agree with the interpretation that they could have eventually eaten from the Tree of Knowledge good and evil. I don't know. But I know this, that when I say no.
Okay, here, I'll put it this way. The. I have noticed that my most emotionally healthy friends are the ones who practice the Sabbath.
And I think I figured out why. Years of thinking about Sabbath. I think you figured out why because people who honor a day of rest get really used to saying no to people, and they've got good boundaries.
[00:22:36] Speaker B: Interesting.
[00:22:37] Speaker C: I 100% believe that slowing down requires a counterproductive, counterintuitive, countercultural way of existing that just puts you at odds with the world around you and you go against the grain of your world.
It does take virtue.
Whether the virtue is developed or virtue is a grace is up. We could have an interesting debate about that, but I am 100% convinced that slowing down Sabbath, like all of these things that we're talking about, are evidence of one's sanctification process. And I'm not really entirely positive it is a reality without the grace and mercy of God doing that in our lives. So that's good. You're picking up, MacIntyre. It's a rare moment for Pentecostal to channel McIntyre, but definitely. Do you think there's a connection between virtue ethics, A.J.
[00:23:38] Speaker B: Do you?
So I love that you apply like Sabbath as a posture really, to our theological sort of formation. Not. It's not just a. It's not. It is the practice, but it's not merely a practice. It's a posture.
Do you think that there would be as much deconstruction? People took a Sabbath, a weekly Sabbath from social media.
[00:24:10] Speaker C: Ah. Oh, that. Okay. You ended it right. Very differently than I thought you were going to. Okay, so let me. Let me say first of all about what happened during COVID because Because everybody. I feel like even. I feel like it felt like even the Pope was deconstructing during COVID It was like universal, man. It was.
[00:24:27] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:24:28] Speaker C: Everybody was just so tired watching Twitter for two straight years.
Okay, so I do think underneath what we're experiencing.
In the Venn diagram between classic evangelical conversion formulas, we tell people at the end of the service, raise your hand if you want to follow Jesus when we give him invitations, that's fine. It's great. I love it. And then after that, we're like, hey, we're going to do spontaneous baptisms.
So we do everything fast. We want you to believe and get baptized in the same Sunday. And then the story's all done and it's good.
[00:25:08] Speaker B: That's it.
[00:25:08] Speaker A: Okay.
[00:25:09] Speaker C: It's all done. Nothing else. I appreciate our revivalist impulse, but I want to share the dark side of that.
So the dark side of that approach towards salvation is that we are asking people to make the most fundamental decision about their entire existence. A, without knowing what they're really doing and baby, not fully explaining it, and C, asking them to have really deep roots when there's. You can't do that. In a minute. In a minute. Catholics, I think, get this. And the early church gets it. In the early church, you went through a three year process. If you became a Christian before you get baptized. Yeah, three years.
Three years. And you would have to memorize things and learn how to pray. You would have a sponsor who would get into your sin and be like, bro, you're a narcissist and this is the first century. Like they. They were. They would get into your stuff.
[00:26:00] Speaker B: Three years, cast out demons, all of it.
[00:26:02] Speaker C: You'd spit to the east, all this stuff. Three years. When you are in the process for three years, there is no way in the world you come out on the other side not knowing what you've decided to do. I think immediate conversions and immediate baptisms have led to immediate deconversions and immediate deconstructions. And because we have done the immediacy on the front end, we do the immediacy in the back end.
The people who are turning to the Lord in our churches are doing so because very often they feel the emotional pull to the gospel, and they should, but we need them to. They need to know what they're signing up for. Yeah, you are being invited to die, to carry your cross for the rest of your life. To be a person of generosity and mercy and kindness, where. Whereas most of the time we just think the gospel therapeutically is just about Making me feel better and it's very dangerous.
[00:26:54] Speaker A: There was this, there was. Sorry to interrupt. There was this kid that would go to church camp with me growing up and every summer he would get converted and I remember talking to him and he said that wait for Dustin to finish here. He said that the being a Christian during the rest of the year was less fun, but it was more fun to have that experience each year. So the actual conversion experience was the most tasteful part of Christianity which I think indictment of a number of things. But I. You're gesturing at this so I'm just going to ask because we. Dustin, I were talking this. What is an anti fragile Sunday school look like?
[00:27:29] Speaker C: Oh, we just have them read Richard Dawkins seems to be the start that.
[00:27:35] Speaker A: Fourth grade, fifth grade. Where do you start?
[00:27:37] Speaker C: Yeah, that's the debate our Sunday school is having is at what point do we let them read the Shack and.
[00:27:43] Speaker A: Because we can look at this at the front end. Right. In preventative terms and then we can look at it as a triage approach later on. Yeah.
[00:27:49] Speaker C: So there is a reason you will very rarely meet a Jew who is allergic to peanut butter and honey. And the reason that they are rarely allergic to it is because their liturgies include those elements that they, they take from their earliest years. That is to say exposure early on actually inoculates later on.
Right.
The healthiest thing you can do for a baby if you're going to have an infant. I was reading research on this.
It's so funny when scientists come up with the most just mind numbingly simple thing. The simplest thing you can do to have a baby who has a great immune system is own a dog.
Because the dog licks the baby's face all the time.
That's all it does.
[00:28:34] Speaker B: That's awesome.
[00:28:34] Speaker C: The baby is just, just constantly being faced with these things. So does that mean again, are we having 3 year olds listen to audible versions of Richard Dawkins? No, but it certainly challenges our assumptions that youth groups and children's ministries are places where we go and get a sterilized version of the world. I want my son. My son is 14 years old and we have done so many things that I know he will need therapy over. I'm sure of it.
But the one thing we've done that I look back over and I go that was the best move ever was that we started talking about sex with him when he was 6, like 5.
So that he was never grossed out by it. It was normalized. It was like, oh, that's just what parents do, that's what humans do.
And what I loved about that is because we normalize those conversations early on.
He does not bear all the weird shame and guilt that so many other kids do in his Christian school. They don't even know how to say the word sex or S E X. They're like so scared to say it.
So I'm not saying. I'm not saying we read Richard Dawkins to kids when they're three years old, but I certainly would ask that we are intentional.
Let the dogs lick their faces.
[00:29:57] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:29:58] Speaker C: It's important that our kids have to wrestle with hard stuff early on.
They are resilient beings. And if we don't treat them as resilient beings as babies, they're not going to be as adults.
[00:30:10] Speaker A: Yeah. I was educated in public school until high school, and then I went to a Christian high school and they brought in every carnival barker style apologist to come in and shore up our faith to protect it. What do you think?
Because I know Christian apologists, they're trying to do the right thing, but it's clearly not working in the way that they think it is. What do you think's going wrong there in that capacity?
There was one that he would. I forget his name. Dustin, you probably remember because I've told you the story, but he showed up in like a yellow jumpsuit. He was in front of the whole high school. He ran around a microphone and he said, why are you a Christian? And someone would answer with some facile answer, and then he would interrogate them and deconstruct their faith in front of the whole auditorium or show the fragility of their ideas. And so it feels like we're talking about that, but we're not trying to do it in that way. So what do you think's going on there with the world of Christian apologists? What do you think's wrong and is there opportunities?
[00:31:13] Speaker C: Me or Dustin? Do you want Dustin?
[00:31:16] Speaker A: Yeah, sure.
[00:31:16] Speaker B: I want you to.
[00:31:17] Speaker C: Yeah, yeah. Oh, okay. Okay.
I'm a sucker. I'm a sucker for good apologetics, and I'm not gonna. At the end of the day, I do think our faith needs good intellectual responses, just as a person who is a secular person should have good intellectual responses for why they believe and I don't believe or what they do believe. I don't believe in having a dumb faith, and I certainly don't think that we should check our brains at the door when we walk to worship the Lord. So I do believe in apologetics, but I Do think. And I was largely persuaded, admittedly, by a book written in the early 2000s by Dallas Willard called the Allure of Gentleness, which is basically his book on apologetics and mission is basically. His point is this. It actually turns out being a kind, generous, loving person actually is the greatest apologetic.
[00:32:09] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:32:10] Speaker C: And that being a gentle person, people are wooed by that, and I would say even more now after Willard passed away. In a world where winsomeness is a completely lost category, we have whole sections of the church that are saying that empathy is a sin.
These sorts of perspectives. We basically think that the way to win now is that we've got to be cold hearted spocks who don't have hearts.
And I think Willard was right. I think apologetics are fine, but your kindness will make a lasting dent on a human person's existence.
The greatest apologist I say this to, it's a vulnerability and it's actually very painful to say this publicly. I don't know if I've ever said this before, but I am still to this day, I would say, probably one of the most foundational voices in my entire Christian life.
I've been walking with Jesus for 25 years and I don't know if anybody had a deeper impact on my faith than Ravi Zacharias, who, of course, after his death, it was discovered that he had been abusing women. He literally owned massage parlors, sexual exploits, Evil, evil, evil stuff.
And the number of people in my generation who placed their faith in Ravi and then found out Ravi was not what he was, their faith is done now because that they, of course the problem was that they placed their faith in what Ravi was saying rather than in, in the Gospel and in Jesus.
[00:33:40] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:33:41] Speaker C: But boy, oh boy, do I wish, and I'm not saying this to shame Ravi, but I just wish at some point early in his year he got into therapy and he got the work done that he needed to do to develop the character that went alongside his brilliant arguments. Character matters, I think I'm trying to say to your question about apologetics, character really matters. Being kind, loving, merciful, gentle. Those are, in our world, very, yeah, very powerful apologetics.
[00:34:07] Speaker A: Dustin, coming to faith later in life, what was your perception of apologetics and did it have value for you?
[00:34:15] Speaker B: No, I wasn't really even exposed to traditional apologetics until I came to faith.
And other than the like, bullhorn guy and that's just shouting into the wind, like, I'm sure people have come to faith from that type of apologetic mode, but I feel like what's the ROI on that has to be really small. I admire people's faithfulness in doing but I think there are more strategic and personal and personable ways to do that and yeah it wasn't until I came to faith that I was exposed to apologetics as we know them and then I think as I became acquainted with them I'd be curious your thoughts on this AJ it just seems most of that assume is the fruit of the enlightenment and a post industrial what people are looking for is answers and we're going to provide answers when yeah I think that just assumes a Christendom default setting that isn't necessarily the case and yes and people like who've been more influential to me would be the not on the whole but on this approach would be somebody like Tim Keller who's going to start the conversation without the assumption of Christian faith where I think the church fathers and mothers like that type of apologetic is fascinating to me reading what they were the theo the theology of the first three centuries is yes who where has this been this whole time? Yeah and because it's assuming a pre Christian paradigm that it we're now it rhymes a little bit more with where I think we are now and I think that gets to one of one of your postures in the book AJ is answers aren't always the answer and holding mystery in ways that are not your mystery isn't just like you're not going to have an answer but or something is unknowable. But I think you I think you would probably agree that mystery is something that's endlessly knowable that you can know in just a bunch of different ways. So I don't know if there's a.
[00:36:35] Speaker C: Question in there but yeah assumption you're I think correct critique and I our critiques of Western enlightenment in society can be overstated. We have right largely the medical system or we have medicine we know it today because of the enlightenment. There are elements that I think we'd.
[00:36:51] Speaker B: All go back and go don't want.
[00:36:52] Speaker C: To get rid of that yeah I'm glad we have hospitals that's or sewer systems or whatever yet at the same time I think that you are exposing a very valid and important element to this conversation that apologetics assumes that the goal of Christian spirituality is attaining acceptable reasonable answers.
I'm convinced when you look in the early church of the first 400 years the church is wrestling with how do you articulate the Christian faith in a world that's very hostile? Nobody has Christian category nobody has the Christian language And in. In that context, the church is holding forth these mysteries, the mystery of the Trinity, the mystery of the dual nature of Jesus, the mystery of Christology, the mystery of atonement, the mystery of the church is holding these forward. And as the church holds these forward, you have these alternative voices, the early church would call them heretics that were basically trying to take the mystery and rationalize it and try to make sense. So, for example, you have, for example, like Arius, who could not conceive of God both being human and divine. So he has to swing on one side and say he was an exalted human.
Then you got on the other side, people like the descetics, who can't accept that Jesus was divine, who can't accept that he was a human. He was only divine. He seemed to be human. So wait, notice. I think the answer to the question is this. Notice that the culture around the church and these voices, it's almost like they had an allergic reaction to mystery. They couldn't handle it.
I think if you go and look at all the early church mysteries, paradoxes, all of the heretics have one thing in common, and that is that everything that the church eventually would say was heresy was eventually, it was stuff that made sense. That is to say, one of the signs that it was a heresy in the early church was that it made sense. That is to say, they tried to rationalize mystery to make it understandable. Yeah. And I think our apologetics, we do need to have good intellectual cases for what we believe.
But some of our apologetics, to me, feels a little like the rationalization of mystery.
[00:39:22] Speaker A: I think that's a great stopping place right there. Our last question for you before we let you go is we're creating this ad hoc reconstruction library, if you will, or book recommendations for people, because some of our listeners might be in places where they don't have a church community that would be equipped to guide them through a reconstruction process. What are a book or two you'd recommend to listeners that are. Maybe have left church but are thinking about coming back and need an entry point?
[00:39:47] Speaker C: Yeah, I don't. I want to be careful to not overplay this. I did write a book called after doubt back in 2000, something that 2020 or something that deals with doubt and deconstruction. That's certainly there. But actually, the book I would most recommend, and I just. Absolutely. It's one of my favorite books, is a book by a theologian named Thomas Odin called A Change of Heart.
He was a. He was essentially a theologian who deconstructed everything and in the midst of deacons, world class theologian and deconstructed everything and at the bottom of his deconstruction, realized how much he missed God and experienced the grace of God in, In. In that experience. And it's a, it's called the Change of Heart by Thomas Odin and it's. I think it's out of print, but it is just beautiful. Just beautiful. Perfect.
[00:40:42] Speaker A: Thank you, AJ for doing this with us. We really appreciate it.
[00:40:44] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:40:45] Speaker C: Grace. Grace and peace, you guys. Thanks for having me.
