Dial In with Jonny Ardavanis - Grant Horner - How do we live in the world and not be worldly?

Episode Date: October 28, 2021

Jonny Ardavanis is the Dean of Campus Life at The Master’s University, a Camp Director at Hume Lake Christian Camps and hosts the podcast Dial In with Jonny Ardavanis. He is passionate about the Gospel and God’s Word and desires to see people understand and obey it. Dial In with Jonny Ardavanis: Big Questions, Biblical Answers, is a series that seeks to provide biblical answers to some of the most prominent and fundamental questions regarding God, the Gospel, and the BibleIn this episode Renaissance scholar, rock climber and Professor Grant Horner answers the question: “How do we live in the world and not be worldly?”Subscribe to stay up to date with each episode! Watch on YouTubeFollow on InstagramVisit Our Website

Hey guys, my name is Johnny Artavanis and this is Dial In. In this episode, I sit down with professor, renaissance scholar, mountain climber, and a good friend, Professor Grant Horner, and I ask him how the believer can live in the world but not be of the world. Let's dial in. Well, thank you, Prof. Hornerner for sitting down. I have been so impacted by your life and you've just been a huge example to me. So can you introduce yourself briefly, what you do, who you are, what do people need to know about Grant Horner? Sure, my name is Grant Horner. I've

been a believer for just about 40 years. I was converted out of very, very heavy drug use in my teenage years, got married, had a bunch of babies, got saved before that, and have been part of God's gracious family for coming on four decades. And for the last 21 years, since 1999, I've been a professor working the humanities here at the Masters University. I teach a variety of courses in literature and historical theology, visual arts, cinema arts, things like that. I teach courses in Shakespeare and Calvin and Luther and Milton and medieval and Renaissance literature.

I'm the founder and director of the Masters University in Italy, study abroad program. My wife and I and a bunch of students and a colleague live in a 600 year old villa in Florence in the mountains just above the city of Florence in Italy, and study all things humanities. And I'm also the founder and director of the Classical Liberal Arts Degree Program at the Masters University, which trains people in Socratic pedagogy and classical Western civilization

content and theology in order to prepare them to teach in classical Christian schools all over the country. This is the real most interesting man in the world. Oh goodness. That's great. Hey, so I have been, you know, so cool to watch you as a teacher and just to even be able to read what you've written over the years. From a Christian perspective, so many people grow up hearing the phrase, we are to live

in the world but not be of the world. And there's this idea that we are to be somewhat involved, but separated from the context of the culture. But for so many people, they either overdo that and become like reclusive and they are monkish, or there's this idea on the other side of the spectrum where we can become worldly. So how does the Christian think through in a wise and intelligent fashion, in biblical fashion, how to live in the world but not be worldly? What would you say? Wow. Yeah, that's a great question. It's very practical. All theology ultimately has to become biography, right? I mean, if your theology does not translate into your life and transform who you are, then it's just head knowledge, and it's actually going to condemn you instead of helping you.

Everything kind of comes back to grammar, right? In the world, not of the world. When you're talking about prepositional phrases and various kinds of genitive phrases, in and of, you really have to understand what's being said there and what is not being said there. And Christians throughout history have always found it rather difficult to struggle, this is part of being a human, have found it rather difficult and rather struggle to understand what it means to be in the world but not of the world. And the two extremes of course would be a legalism where you basically set yourself up a bunch of rules and laws and behaviors

and ethical structures in order to protect yourself so that you don't look like you are at all worldly or sinful. And then the opposite would be to say, hey, I'm under grace. My conscience is free. And to move into what theologians would call an antinomian or anti-law position, which is, yeah, I can do whatever I want because Jesus died on the cross. Both of those are errors. Christ and the apostles go after both of those problems.

There is a middle ground, which is a biblical Christianity that is informed by Scripture. And you understand that if God had wanted to, if the Father had wanted to, He could have saved us and then immediately translated us into the kingdom, and moved us into the heavenly sphere. But He saves us and over time sanctifies us, and he does that by leaving us in the world. So he says, now I'm going to leave you in the place where you were born, and that represents your true fallen nature.

But I've given you a new nature. Now I want you to learn over time how to live that out in the world where I've left you. So let's say if we're thinking biblically on all things, and I like the phrase you use, all theology should at least drive our biography or it has a result or effect on it. So you've also written a lot about how we interact with culture and movies and television and the arts. So right now, if I'm being practical, the average teenager adult spends four to five hours on their phone a day and at least another handful of hours watching Netflix. You would say, well,

movies are not a bad thing. They're a demonstration of- Not inherently. Yeah. So then how does the Christian then think shrewdly about how they participate in the arts? Let's say it's a Netflix show. What would you say if I was just sitting down with you going, hey, I watch Netflix. How do I do that in a biblical way? What do I need to think through? What are the questions I need to ask? What should I be concerned about or cautious of? What would be your wisdom there? Yeah. Another great question. You must have had a good professor when you were... Yeah, I did.

Yeah. No, questions are important. First of all, God is not afraid of your questions. God is not embarrassed by your questions, and He is not offended by your questions when they're asked sincerely when you want to learn from Him. And He will answer the questions that you need to have answered. He won't answer all of them, but He will answer the ones that He knows that you need to have answered in this lifetime. And so human beings have always had a struggle since the fall with a desire to have something to give our attention to, right? The word worship actually goes back to an Anglo-Saxon word, a very, very old English word we would say, that really means to ascribe worthiness to something,

to give attention to something. Worship is giving attention, right? So in a medieval university, for example, right, the two most important buildings were the chapel and the library. And I will ask students, what is the difference between the two things that go on in the chapel and the library? And the immediate response is, well, in the library you study, and in the chapel you worship. And the answer is no. There is no difference or distinction between those two things. Both of them are giving attention. You might be giving attention to a poem, or you're studying Latin, or you're studying theology, or you're learning about history in the library.

You're giving attention. In a certain sense, you're giving worthship. You're ascribing worth to what you're studying. In the chapel, your attention is focused specifically on God. But in the great classical Christian Orthodox tradition, smaller Orthodox, what you actually see is that wise Christians have understood that study is an act of worship, as much as prayer, as much as service, as much as studying scripture. Study is an act of worship. Athletics is an act of worship.

Eating and drinking and fellowship and talking with people, sleeping, even though you're not conscious, should actually be an act of worship. We are like machines designed to do one thing, which is to be attentive to God and to be worshipful and attentively worshipful towards Him. And I would apply that to entertainment as well, right? If you can listen to a piece of music, if you can read a poem, if you can read a novel, if you can watch a movie in such a way as to please and glorify God, then you're doing what you were made to do. The problem is all of those things, poems, music, movies, they're all made by sinful human beings. They're going to

sometimes have explicitly sinful content. They are sometimes going to have implicitly sinful content. Sometimes that subtle worldview that comes in under what looks like a very wholesome Disney movie is more dangerous than a scene of violence in a gangster movie, right? Because you might see that and go, I shouldn't shoot people while I'm eating spaghetti, right? You don't want to be a gangster, right? But then you can have a horrible worldview and what looks like a very wholesome kids movie and so the key to all of this is what in the New Testament is is referred to as diacrino which is the which is the act of discernment okay it's the ability to make moral distinctions and then follow those up

with good choices even classical pagan philosophers like Aristotle talk about this in the Nicomachean Ethics, for instance. Aristotle talks about how once you move from what we would call puberty to adolescence, adolescencia, you move into a place where you're no longer a child. This sounds Pauline, right? You are no longer a child. You become an adult and you have to learn how to think and act like an adult. And one of those things Aristotle calls pro-irises, which means the ability to make moral distinctions. Little children understand right and wrong inherently, but they lean towards the bad because they're born totally depraved. But as you become older, you need to move beyond simply making a distinction to where you're making finer and clearer and more careful moral distinctions,

and then following those up with good actions. So then you're talking through how we think discerningly through the context of entertainment, which we need to biblically, because all of our time is under the watchful eye of God, we're going to give an account for every idle word and for every idle moment. And then I also am curious, because we live in a context now where people have maybe flipped from the other side of the spectrum of we need to work, work, work. And now what's being highlighted, especially by people of younger generations,

we need to find rest and Sabbath and chill time. How would you define the difference between entertainment and rest? Because sometimes they're probably incorrectly viewed synonymously, but even if I look at your life and your habits, you would say you're finding rest by climbing a mountain. So what's the difference between rest and entertainment, and what does God endorse more than the other, or does He? Sure. Well, what we know for sure is that God does not endorse sin. And so if there is sin involved in your participation in something,

then you shouldn't do it. Now, there are some variations in conscience. You might be able to watch a movie that I couldn't because your conscience will respond to it differently than me. I may be able to read a philosopher that would not be good for you because our conscience, our minds are structured differently. We're more sensitive to different things. We may be susceptible to one thing that the other person is not susceptible to. But with that said, I like the distinction that you made at the beginning, which is for the vast majority of human history, human beings had to spend almost all of their waking hours and all of their calories looking for food, digging up roots, herding cattle,

trying to catch wild animals, trying to not be eaten by wild animals. And as culture and society develops and becomes more complex and stratified, and we begin to divide labor and people become urbanized and they live in these more efficient places called cities, and you need to farm out in the country and they need to bring the food into the country and people from the country into the city. And people begin for the first time to have some actual leisure. If you stop and think about it, the average poor person in America lives better on the whole than a king in the Middle Ages. You eat better, you sleep better, you're safer, all kinds of things. And now we have these little machines we can hold in our hand where we can have constant streaming entertainment of any kind. It's inconceivable what people have in front of them, both good and bad. And what's really interesting to think through is how is it that we are supposed

to make the distinction between rest and entertainment? Because anyone that has streaming movie services has had this moment. You finally, oh, I'm sick of it. You just spent an hour looking through all the options. You're at a buffet five miles long and you're just like, I'm sick of it. And you turn it off. And you just have a cup of tea and talk to your spouse. So entertainment does not provide rest. Entertainment does not provide rest. Now, for a person who works all day out in the fields, their rest might be just laying down and relaxing. For someone who sits and reads and writes all day like I do, my entertainment might be something athletic up in the mountains. So different people will do different things. But rest is an entirely different thing than entertainment or leisure.

Here's another interesting thing. The Greek word for school, skole, we get our word school from that, actually means leisure. So education, really reading and talking, was a result of people getting their society to a point where you were no longer in danger of starving all day long, and you could take the time to do things that weren't directly productive of food or of safety. You could read books, right? So school is actually a leisure activity. This is why I never use the word, do your schoolwork, right? And so, as you said, every moment of our lives is something that we give accountable for because we've been bought and purchased if we're believers. And so every entertainment choice, whether it is reading, whether it is athletics or sports or watching sports or watching a movie or a television show or listening to music, all of those things should be

participated in only when our conscience tells us freely that this is not something that is going to lead us into sin. And we also want to be sensitive to wise people around us because we can burn our conscience and think if something is fine, but a wiser person will say, you think that's fine, but you're making a mistake. So we want to be sensitive to each other's conscience. But there is a moment you need to perhaps say to your kids or your friends, this is not a good thing for you to be participating in. But if your conscience is free in that area and there is some benefit, you can learn something. You can laugh. You can grow in empathy for a person that you might not have understood if you'd met them in real life because you've watched a well-crafted movie or read a really good

novel by Jane Austen or something like that. Then it can have value because everything you're doing every day, every decision you make is forming your soul, right? You are the sum of your choices. And so every decision you make to watch this or not to read that, to listen to this music or not to listen to that, to go to this football game or to play that baseball game, or to teach your daughter chess or to learn how to water ski, all of those decisions need to be made with an eye towards how does this form my soul? And again, you don't want to become

a legalistic person who tries to run everything through such a tight theological grid that you sit paralyzed because you can't justify it. But there is a balanced place in a Christian life that is wise that will help you to make those decisions. So you need to surround yourself with wise people. You need to listen to them and learn from them. And you need to have your mind saturated with Scripture to such a degree that your choices begin more and more over your life as a follower of Jesus to resemble the choices that Christ would make. Even as we think through that realm of entertainment and rest, we are also called to be stewards of our time.

So what would be, just in closing, your exhortation to people that are growing up in a world and context where people waste so much of their time, how would you cause them to consider just the brevity of life? Psalm 90 says that the Lord just please teach us to number our days. How do we participate in entertainment, enjoy rest, but also be a steward of the brief life God has given us? I have very few clear memories between about 14 and 18 and a half because I started smoking pot when I was 14 and I got heavily into amphetamines and LSD and I was just a classic stoner and I missed a lot of the second half of my youth. I really did and then when I was converted it took several years for my mind to

kind of clear to where I could you could process thoughts of any level of complexity, where I had any follow-through. I would say I was going to do something and I wouldn't do it, or I was a pathological liar, or I had no work ethic. And over time, God clarified my mind and began to sanctify me and help me grow through things. So I look at that not as time lost. I no longer, I did for a while, I no longer look at that as time lost. I look at that as a hard-won lesson not to waste a minute. I am right now 57.

I might live six more months. I might live 40 years. I don't know. It doesn't really matter in the long run, right? If your years are three score and ten or thereabouts, yeah, I've got some time left. Probably starting around 50, every year I started rereading some of my favorite things, Ecclesiastes by Solomon, or even pagan works by Cicero, De Senec Tutte, on growing old,

to get the biblical perspective of what it means to become an old man and to get a pagan perspective on what it means to be an old man. And Solomon leaves us with hope. It doesn't look like a hopeful book until you get to the end, but then it's hopeful because it says, fear God and keep His commandments. That's everything. And Cicero, very hopeful in a lot of ways, but in the end, no, you're a lost guy. You're just a pagan philosopher. You have very, very limited wisdom to offer. Not no wisdom, but very limited. And I, you know, since I turned 50, I have regularly kind of sat down and meditated through, okay, suppose I have 5, 10, 15, 20, 25 years. What do I want to be like? What do I want to accomplish? What do I want to do? And I will make plans. I'm going to do these things. These are my goals.

Now I know I make my plans and God will ultimately direct the steps and he'll decide what I do and do not do. But what I want to do is I want to be able to walk away from my life saying that after I learned those hard lessons when I was younger and as God grew me and sanctified me over time, I eventually learned to maximize even my rest when it looks like I'm doing nothing. To absolutely maximize that for the good of others and in a way that will please God and make my life something that people would look at and go, that is something to aim for. Now I am the worst follower of my own advice. And I'm the worst man I know. And I don't know myself nearly as fully as I could. If God actually revealed to me

the depths of my darkness, I would collapse like a black hole. But I am the worst man I know. Even the worst people that I know, I look at them and I'm like, I wish I had those qualities. Because I know what's in my heart and it's all blackness and darkness. But what God calls us to do is to measure those moments and maximize them around growing our souls under the tutelage of the Holy Spirit and guided by the parameters of Scripture with whatever we're doing. And Paul says, do everything you do to the parameters of Scripture with whatever we're doing. And Paul says, you know, do everything you do to the glory of God. He means that. Everything for meeting... That's not hyperbole.

Not at all. No. I mean, it's hyperbole that's true. Do everything, right? The way you eat a tuna fish sandwich and the way that you ride a bicycle and the way that you, you know, care for your kids and the way that you speak to people. All those things should be done with an eye to ultimately the judgment seat of believers, which is a judgment of reward and loss, and you want to stand before Him and have Him say those words. That's so helpful because I think we hear that idea of living for Christ completely, and you said do everything for the glory of God, but I think I want to eliminate from my life as many empty platitudes of Christendom as possible so I can say yes and amen at four years old my life is You know God's will for my life is to enjoy God and to glorify him forever

but if I don't understand what that means it's never gonna be the reality of my life and so what you said is helpful because Even our rest needs to be strategic and not responsive. It's not just flippant. It's how can I actually rest to recharge, to maximize my output for the glory of God and the input of his wisdom and insight into my life. So that's so helpful, Prof. Horner, for just what you've said. And I'm thankful for your time. Think about all the people who suffered and died, lost, when Jesus went away from the public to rest, but he knew what he was doing. That's helpful. No, yeah, we don't really think about those elements. Why didn't he just keep working? Yeah, because he had a mission to do,

but he's also mindful of other things. I always think about the key word in the Gospel of Mark, as I've done your plan, as I started circling the word immediately, 44 times in the Book of Mark, immediately, immediately. Stotting, stotting, stotting. But he was doing something else. He was also resting.

He withdrew himself. So we have to be able to think through that biblically. So I'm thankful for just the help that you've provided in this arena