Theology in the Raw - 851: Disagreeing without Dividing the Church: Dr. Tim Muehlhoff

Episode Date: March 22, 2021

Is it possible for Christians to maintain unity when they are so divided over hot-button issues like politics, race, and points of doctrine? Do you have to sacrifice conviction for the sake of unity? Is it possible for a zealous Trump-supporter and an ardent Biden-supporter to worship together in the same church without thinking the other person is evil? There is no better person to help us navigate these issues than Dr. Tim Muehlhoff.  Tim Muehlhoff (Ph.D., University of North Carolina) is the co-author (with Rick Langer) of the recent book Winsome Conviction and is a professor of communication at Biola University's Department of Communication Studies in La Mirada, California, a speaker and research consultant for the Center for Marriage and Relationships, and an author of several books on communication. In addition to being an educator and author, he is the co-host of a podcast entitled, The Art of Relationships which is produced by Biola University and is currently heard in 100 countries. Tim and his wife, Noreen, are frequent speakers at FamilyLife Marriage Conferences. For more information, visit timmuehlhoff.com. Check out the Winsome Conviction Project at: https://www.biola.edu/blogs/winsome-conviction Buy Tim’s book: https://www.amazon.com/Winsome-Conviction-Disagreeing-Without-Dividing/dp/0830847995 Support Preston Support Preston by going to patreon.com Venmo: @Preston-Sprinkle-1 Connect with Preston Twitter | @PrestonSprinkle Instagram | @preston.sprinkle Youtube | Preston Sprinkle Check out his website prestonsprinkle.com If you enjoy the podcast, be sure to leave a review.

Hello, friends. Welcome back to another episode of Theology in the Raw. Do you miss the Q&A podcast? If you've been a longtime listener of Theology in the Raw, you will know that this podcast started primarily as a question and answer podcast. Y'all, y'all would send in your questions. I would do my best to respond to those questions. And that was the Theology in the Raw podcast. And some of you are like, where did those podcasts go? I like the Q&A podcasts. Well, they still exist. Unfortunately, they're behind a support wall. So if you would like to get access to my monthly, my bi-monthly, really, I release two podcasts every month addressing questions that my supporters sent in. every month addressing questions that my supporters sent in. I just recorded two separate one-hour episodes that were Q&A podcasts for my support group. And that support group is called

Patreon. No, it's not called Patreon, but it's part of the Patreon-only theology in the raw community. So if you do want access to those Q and a podcast, then you would, you can go to patreon.com forward slash theology in raw and support the show for as little as five bucks a month and get access to those Q and a podcasts along with other, um, other, uh, premium, premium material. Is that the right phrase? Um, get access to premium stuff that I put out that's behind that support wall. So patreon.com forward slash geology and raw, or you can go to the show notes and check it out. My guest today is Tim Muehlhoff. I talk about how we got to know each other at the beginning of this episode.

But Tim is, he has a PhD from University of North Carolina in communications. He is a professor of communication at Biola University's Department of Communication Studies in La Mirada, California. And he, together with, oh, is it Rick Langer? Together with, I'm just going to say Rick Langer. Rick, I'm sorry if that's not your first name. I'm pretty sure that's your first name. Together with Rick Langer, Tim Muehlhoff have authored two books. The first one is called Winsome Persuasion, which was released in 2018. And they recently released a book called Winsome Conviction,

which came out in December of 2020. And this book is... I have not read it yet. Okay. I've not read it yet. Full disclosure. But if it's anything like the conversation you're about to listen to, then I can't wait to read this book. So please welcome to the show, the one and only Tim Muehlhoff. Oh, and also I almost forgot. We did have some technical difficulties during the show. Now I have the most amazing, brilliant, super cool audio engineer who was able to clean up some of these glitches, but toward the end of the show, around the 45 minute mark there, it just flat out cut out. It just bombed. My internet bombed. And I explained that a little

bit at the end of the show, what happened. So we got cut off mid sentence, just as I was talking about smoking pot. You know what? I'm just going to let that linger. I'm just going to let that linger. It wasn't me that was smoking pot. It was part of a discussion we were having. And anyway, yeah, I'm just going to let it sit.

You can listen to the whole episode and figure out what in the world we were talking about, but it had to do with theology and all that good stuff. So anyway, sorry about the glitches, but there was so much great content here. I didn't want to just trash the episode. So anyway, let's again, welcome to the show. Be one and only Tim Buell. All right, we're back for another episode of Theology in the Raw. I'm here to welcome my friend, Tim Muehlhoff. Tim, your name's familiar to me. Your name goes way back in my journey because we have a really good mutual friend, Ed Uzinski,

who's been on the podcast two or three times now. And when I first met Ed in Ohio, he would always talk about Tim Muehlhoff. And I was like, I got to meet this guy someday. So anyway, thanks for being on the podcast for the first time. I'm super excited to talk about your latest book that came out, which is obviously so needed in this day and age. Well, Preston, you rocked it when you came to Biola last year, man. You talked about gender and you challenged us in great ways. And we had you on our podcast, Winston Conviction podcast right away. So we're a huge fan of what you're doing. And it's just great to be a part of this. So thank you for that. Yeah, that was a memorable experience being at Biola.

Just, man, there's just so many cool things going on there. No school's perfect. I know Christian schools, especially in this day and age, the intersection between mainstream evangelicalism and Gen Z and politics and sexuality questions and all these things are not easy to navigate, but you guys seem to be doing it really well. And I think from my vantage point, a big part of what you're doing well is the topic of your book, this whole idea of engaging with the broader culture, engaging with other ideas in a winsome way, and just being kind about how you go about it while holding to your convictions and presenting, you know, a solid case for what you believe. So why don't you give us the elevator pitch for your book? And I'm sure that could take us in many different directions. Well, Preston, the first book I wrote with my co-author, who is also the co-director of the Winsome Conviction Project,

Rick Langer, was called Winsome Persuasion, Christian Influence in a Post-Christian World. It was how do we talk to non-Christians in a way that's civil, compassionate. Well, we wrote that book and then realized we do a crappy job as Christians talking to each other. So many pastors literally read that book and said to us, you need to write a book, not for how we talk to non-Christians, but how do we talk to each other? Because this is killing my church. So Rick was a former pastor for 20 years. So we stepped back and said, okay, let's write a book, Winston Conviction, how to disagree without dividing the church. And so the books are kind of a nice two book set,

how to talk to non-Christians, how to talk to each other. And we kind of think we're not doing great on either level. Okay. Okay. Oh, so this is written for the church to be able to talk to the church. Okay. Yeah. Winsome Persuasion is if you're interested in how to talk to a secular culture, that would be Winsome Persuasion. And it's done well. It got a couple awards. But then again, pastors came up to us and said, man, we're not even thinking about engaging culture because our church is so divided on Black Lives Matter, critical race theory, how to vote, whether to wear a mask. And these things are just keeping us from having an impact because we're not rowing in the same direction. So you're a communications specialist. So what is it that prevents Christians from having constructive dialogues across some of these, I guess I would say, secondary issues? Maybe that's part of the problem. Some people see them as not, or just things that Christians should be allowed to disagree on, even things like politics or whatever. What's going on there? Why can't

Christians do this well? Well, I love to remind my wife when we're having an argument, yes, I'm a communication expert and have a PhD in communication. It never goes over well, Preston, but I like to remind her of that. Well, let me pick out two things from the book that I think is just killing us in our communication with each other, Christians. One, we did a whole chapter on groupthink. I mean, groupthink was the 1960s. There was a man named Janice who came up with the idea. But Preston, here's what we find.

You go into a church and they have all of these different echo chambers. Like we belong to this small group, we belong to this adult fellowship and these churches are broken into subgroups and these subgroups never talk to each other and that's where stereotypes develop, negative attitudes develop. Group think is based on one simple idea,

your fidelity to the group, your loyalty to the group is the most important thing. Yeah. So never challenge the group, how you talk about other people. And we find that groupthink is really embedded into a lot of churches in their small groups. I mean, this exists outside the church for sure, right? But you're saying it's almost like the church should do better, but it's not. It's kind of adopting what we see in the broader culture. Oh, totally.

And we have a whole chapter in the book on how do conflicts start and how do they gain momentum. And the way they gain momentum is, Preston, so I'm in a group that is just ticked off about, let's say, worship music. Right. We just don't like the current. We think it's worldly. OK, so all we do is talk about that. We never have outside voices come in to challenge that. And if you're in the group and you start to realize, wow, people really feel passionate about this. I'm not going to say anything to disagree because these are my friends. These are people I do life with. So I'm not going to say anything to disagree because these are my friends. These are people I do life with. So I'm not going to say anything, even though I don't

know if I fully agree. That gains momentum and pretty soon you're demonizing other groups within your church. You never have anything positive to say about them and you never consider arguments for the other side. Wow. When you say groupthink, is that another way of saying like an echo chamber? I know that's kind of a popular way of saying it. Is that kind of the same idea? Yeah. And we give the chief characteristics of an echo chamber. One, you never invite people outside the group to come in to challenge the group. Second, when you do internally challenge it, you get pretty hard looks and nobody joins in with you to support you. So the message is pretty clear. Hey, we're not talking about that.

We're not representing them. Why are you defending them? Why are you believing the best about them? They want to hurt this church. Yeah. Is it very similar to what Jonathan Haidt talked about in The Righteous Mind? I'm sure you're familiar with that. And he's drawing on what seems to be very well known among psychologists that we are tribal. I think he calls it like, oh, he talks about us being independent, but then also very like hyval, like a beehive. We're very much drawn to we need a tribe. We need some kind of group identity. And our ideology, our ideas or whatever will kind of push us into one tribe.

Then we feel safe there. I mean, it's everything you're saying, but he gives kind of a lot of psychological backing for it. And here's what's killing us. So we started a podcast, and I'm sure you experienced the same thing. It's called the Winsome Conviction Podcast. We want to bring on people that disagree with us. We want to bring on non-Christians. We want to bring on Christians that hold beliefs that conservative evangelicals don't hold, right? Here's the pushback we get. Why would you give the microphone to that person? Why would you give him that platform? And Preston, that kills us because

then we never hear from people who disagree with us because we equate acknowledgement with condoning. Yeah. And I couldn't disagree with that more. Yeah, I couldn't. I really. OK, I want to I want to dive into this a little deeper here because this has been I can't quite put my finger on it. But that yeah, that that pushback against giving a platform for people. Why would you get a platform for ideas? And it almost always is like these ideas are harmful. It's going to lead people to do really bad things. Why would you platform Hitler? And right there, I'm like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. It sounds like everybody who has an idea you don't like is now a Nazi,

and you're comparing everybody to Hitler or David Duke. Would you give a platform to David Duke? I'm like, well, his ideas are so bad, and I guess my faith in humanity is much better than yours that, yeah, go ahead and stand up there and say, I think people of color are intrinsically less human. And watch everybody roll their eyes and say, what an idiot. This idea isn't even. But until you are exposed to that really, really bad idea, then it's like then we just have all these assumptions about what people are saying and believing. And maybe that's a bad example.

So while I can acknowledge that some ideas are so aggressive, so horrific that they could lead to violence, what I'm seeing in society is I don't want to give a platform to anybody that I simply disagree with. Right. And also, I'm sure you get this too. I'm sure Biola gets this all the time. Your teaching is dangerous. It's harmful. It's leading to harm. Your view of sexuality is leading to harm. Your view of politics, if you allow a student to possibly vote for Trump, then he's a white supremacist, racist, and all these things. Where are we connecting? The fact that we're connecting all those dots so quickly and so haphazardly, to me is part of groupthink, right? I mean, it's... Yeah. So let me give you a great illustration that I think

really crystallizes this. So when I first got to Biola University, I did all my training at UNC Chapel Hill. Okay. And can we just for a second give a shout out to God's goodness that UNC just beat Duke in Cameron. And Duke is not going to the NCAA tournament for the first time since 1960. God is good. Righteousness reigns. Okay. I don't even know what sport you're talking about. Basketball.

Basketball. And it was a bit of a tangent. And I'm just mortified that you did not know sport you're talking about. Basketball. And it was a bit of a tangent. And I'm just mortified that you did not know what I was talking about. It's not baseball. I'm just like, I don't know. I found out who was in the Super Bowl. Yeah, we're the day after the Super Bowl right now. And I found out on Friday before Super Bowl Sunday who was in the whatever.

And yeah, anyway. Sorry. So I teach a class on engagement. How can Christians engage? OK, so Preston, it just makes sense to me that my students are going to read the Koran. They're going to read it cover to cover. And when they finish, Preston, they'll be part of one percent of American Christians who ever read a book of another faith tradition. Okay. And by the way, give me props. I did this before tenure, right? I did not have tenure. And so I get there,

I do it and I assign it and I get calls from parents. Okay. Now listen, this is very instructive why they're calling me. One woman said to me, I did not send my daughter to Biola to read the Koran. And I said, why did you send her? And she said, I want her to be a Christ follower. And I said, well, the Great Commission is part of that. And one out of five people in the world self-identify as Muslim. I think we need to understand where they're coming from. A second parent, Preston, called me and said, and I think this is really insightful,

will you be able to live with yourself if one of your students reads the Quran and walks away from the faith? Think about that, Preston. So it took one book to have a student walk away from the faith. That's a fragile, fragile faith. It's destined to crumble. And by the way, Preston, our students pick up on this. So I say to my students, why is it that nobody wants you to read the Quran? And we had a great conversation. And what really came out is nobody trusts the upcoming generation of evangelicals. None of us trust them. We all think they're this close to walking away from the faith. And why would I ever put something in their hands that might challenge them? And so we are

protecting the younger generation from really hard conversations. And I think it's going to from really hard conversations. And I think it's going to hurt these students after they graduate. We need to have these hard conversations right now. And hard conversations are messy, but let's get into the messiness. What a better community to have a hard conversation than a place where you have space to think

and ask questions and have people that have read the Quran five times and ask them questions about it. I mean, what happens when they go out into the real world and meet their Muslim, they're working alongside a Muslim and the Muslim says, I'm, I'm, I'm a Muslim, you know, and, and, and the Christian, the Christian says, well, no, I believe in Jesus. You know, Islam is wrong. And the Muslim says, well, how do you know? Have you ever read the Quran? And they're like, no.

And like, Hmm. Okay. Yeah. Wow. Really? You're just going to denounce something, even though you have no nothing about it. Like, and then there could, then the Christian is thrown into confusion and now they don't have leaders and guides and mentors around them to be able to process this with. It's going to be a referendum on how we view Christian education. It's really going to be a referendum on, do we do Aristotle's method of the dialectic, right? Which was, I can argue both sides of an issue, right? I learned to argue both sides of the issue equally passionately. I think a lot of parents would say that, yeah, I'm not sending my student to the Biblical Institute of angeles to learn how to argue both sides

i want you to spend four years cementing that this side is right yeah and and i'm saying okay but the way to do that is they've got to explore both now how we're talking right now because preston you and i really you know we're on kind of the same page when it comes to this. But the reason we wrote Winsome Conviction is can I live with a Christian who thinks what I'm doing is crazy and maybe borderline sin? Can we still be part of the same congregation where I think that person is out to lunch and they think that I'm dangerous? OK, so let's still be together. Let's go there. Why don't we use politics as an example? Because that's really hot right now.

It still is. Yeah. I did a podcast a few months ago called, you know, Being a Christian in a Post-Trump Era. And the pushback I got was, are we ever going to be in a post-Trump era? And by the time this releases, who knows? Maybe there'll be another coup or something.

But what pieces of advice would you give to two Christians? They go to the church. One voted for Donald Trump, and he thinks that Biden and anybody who voted for Biden is a neo-Marxist and a baby killer. And then the one who voted for Biden says that Trump-Marxist and a baby killer. And then the one who voted for Biden says that Trump is a white supremacist, a Nazi and a racist. So very, very, and you're complicit. Like if you voted for him, you're one of the 74 million people who were basically being represented in, on January 6th, marching to Capitol with horns coming out. Like that is you, that there's no,

if you voted for him, then you were marching on the Capitol, you know, kind of surrogately, if you will. And then on the other side, again, I mean, I can keep going on, but like you're going to steal all of the religious freedom away from Christians. You're going to, you know, elevate the abortion rate on and on.

It goes, you know how I'm trying to set it up. What would, if you, and they came to you and says, Tim, okay, we, how can we even have a conversation across such huge divides? What would you, what would you say? Buy her a book.

Spoken like a, spoken like a true Christian author that. Well, you know, but in fairness, that's the long answer, right? The book really is the long answer to that really important question. So let me just jump in and say a couple things real quick. Paul says to the church at Ephesus, above all, I want you to protect unity. Above all, I want you to protect unity. Okay. So I would say to these two Christians, what Paul was saying to the church at Ephesus, they lived in a very volatile situation that there's only the church at Ephesus, right? I mean, there's no other church to go to. You're the church at Ephesus. So you guys got to hunker down because this is not a conducive atmosphere to

what you're trying to do and you have to be unified. So my first thing is Paul would say, be unified. And then in Romans 14, he talks about days and diets. You couldn't pick a more volatile topic for Jewish and Christian and Gentile believers than days and diets. The Jewish believers were saying, this is sacred territory. And the Gentiles are saying, yeah, not so much. So real quick, because we always say Romans 14, these are secondary issues. That's us looking on after the fact to a first century Jew. This divided, as you know,

the Essenes from the Pharisees, like different calendars, like this was not a secondary issue in first century Judaism. But Paul takes a middle road. It's, he says, I want you to go according to your conscience, but don't fault the other person for going with their conscience. So, so Preston, I'm going to have to look. So I'm not, I didn't vote for President Trump. Okay. I couldn't do it. So if I look at a person who did, and I didn't vote for Biden, I did a protest non-vote. I voted for everything else. I voted for all the props, all the issues, everything. I just couldn't cast a vote for either one. It was a protest non-vote.

OK, which, by the way, when I've shared that in the past, lights up a radio keyboard faster than anything you can imagine that nobody likes that response. So I need do I believe the best about my Christian brother who voted for President Trump? Now, if my answer is no, I don't believe the best. That's what Daniel Goleman calls emotional contagion. Those negative feelings I have about you actually bleed out and sabotage the conversation before it even begins. So my job as a Christian is to say, do I trust this fellow believer? And if I don't, I need to deal with that, right? But I need to have goodwill towards my fellow brother in Christ, that I believe he's following the Lord. This is days and diets that you're following the Lord. I just can't go with you. And by the way, we can't do catastrophic thinking. So I don't believe you're wrong about

everything. And by the way, there's some things about President Trump that he did that I am so grateful that President Trump nominated conservative Supreme Court justices because the Supreme Court just ruled in California that churches are being negatively targeted and they expanded that we can now meet indoors up to 25%. And that was President Trump's Supreme Court that intervened in California and now protected churches. So not everything about President Trump is bad. I can't demonize a person. So I've got to see where do I agree with your support of Trump and where could I not agree? So find points of connection. And you just have to mentally muscle up and force yourself to believe that this person is well-intentioned. Because again, going back to

the political illustration, I know a lot of people in the church that are simply incapable of that, to actually say, okay, this person voted for Biden and the motives were good. This person voted for Trump and maybe they're not a white supremacist. Maybe they're not voting for Hitler. Some people are just, it's like there's a wall there. I mean, so I wouldn't say mentally muscle up. I would say spiritually muscle up. Okay. So these are where the spiritual disciplines happen, right, Preston? So if I look – let's say you and I really disagreed with each other on a political issue, okay?

And I just am angry at you the way that you voted. at you the way that you voted. So when I had that thought come that I'm demonizing Preston, I need to stop and submit that to God. I need to say, God, Preston, you love Preston. He's a child of God. And by the way, I wrote a book on spiritual battle. This was a couple of years ago called Defending Your Marriage, the Reality of Spiritual Battle. You better believe Satan is in the church mucking things up and using politics, immigration, sexuality, gender, political issues, social issues to divide the church. He's using it to get us to be weak. us to be weak. And so I need to realize, Preston, probably a lot of this is spiritual battle I'm experiencing because I want to believe the worst about you and I want to let you have it. And if I'm mature enough to know that I can't do that when we're together in church, I let my mind do it.

Right. I've had these horrible conversations with you in which I demonize you. Well, Paul says, take every thought captive. That's good. See what I mean? To me, it's a spiritual enterprise. I'm not called to tolerate, Preston. I'm called to love you. Yeah. And I need to embrace the fact that there are some people, and I won't use you anymore.

This is all hypothetical. But there are people I don't love in the church. I really don't. And I'm pretty ticked at them. And that's between me and the Lord. I need to deal with that. Yeah, that's good. Have you seen churches, or I'll just say more broadly, communities, groups of Christians across various divides, implement some of the principles you talk about in the book and have seen success? Can you talk about that? Yeah. So the Winsome Conviction Project is a fully funded project for five years, two generous donor families. We just finished our first semester. So let me just tell you two things we did. We really want to get at the upcoming generation, Preston. So we work with

Christian high schools. So we went to a Christian high school, one of the largest ones in Southern California. All the faculty and staff came and we had a conversation about the election. This was in August. And we allowed people to speak. They had to use a format that we created. They were allowed to say things, but you had to do it in a certain formula. And later people said, you know, that formula was like a speed bump.

I really wanted to weigh in, but you made me say what I heard that person say, find commonality, how it touched me emotionally. And here's one thing I want to add. And a lot, one time, one guy said to me, can I just say what I want to say? And I'm like, well, actually, that's what's gotten us in trouble. So we worked with them. It was super positive.

Now we're working with other Christian high schools. Then we had two Christian leaders come up to us who really disagreed about Black Lives Matter. Okay. And they had gotten into a heated argument in front of people. And they asked us to work with them individually. So we worked with them. We took four weeks, Preston, to work with them before we had the conversation about Black Lives Matter. OK. See, this is the book of Proverbs. A word spoken in the right circumstance is compared to fine jewelry. So that right

circumstance, when you have two people who are like this, it's going to take four weeks to spiritually be there, to mentally be there. And we did a bunch of exercises where they wrote a one page narrative of why they feel like they feel and then they swap the narratives. And then they lived with each other's narratives. then here's the wild part when they got together they shared each other's narratives but they did it in the first person so i would share your narrative and you would share mine but we did it in the first person as if it's my narrative was that so hard for them i guess maybe that's toward the end of the four weeks, so they had some momentum. Yeah. And you know what? It was, Preston, you could have heard a

pin drop, man. Now, this is based on my master's thesis at UNC Chapel Hill, where I sought to open the gay Christian dialogue. And so I wrote a book called I Beg to Differ. If people are interested in this, then it's in a book I wrote called I Beg to Differ. It's basically the model I used to try to get people. You do it when you're stuck. We try talking about this. It makes it worse, not better. Okay, then let's try something totally different,

and that's what this method is. So we did it with these two church leaders. It wasn't magic. But they both felt like, okay, I know you care about me. And that helps a lot. And now you know how your words hurt me. So it changed the relational level, Preston, which is made of the amount of compassion and respect we have for another individual. That's what it changed was not the content, but the relational level. And so what's the aftermath of that specific relationship? Obviously, they probably still agree to disagree or how would you describe it?

They agree. They so disagree. But there were certain things that were like shots across the bow that they were doing that they agreed to stop doing. I don't know. If you equate the other side with not just wrong, but evil and unjust, for instance, if somebody owned slaves today, we don't apply winsome conviction to that. We don't try to understand. I wouldn't walk with this person. Or maybe, I don't know. You've got a blank face, so I'm curious what you're going to say. Or David Duke.

David Duke comes to the church. He is blatantly racist. Just conflicts with a Christian worldview up and down. Do we try to engage with him and win some conviction, understand where he's coming from, live his narrative? Or are there certain views that are just blatantly wrong and evil and unjust? And the reason why I'm framing it that way is because that is what people believe about a lot of these hot button issues. There are 74 million people who voted for Trump and they would be very happy owning slaves today is what I almost hear some people say. Like that is there's 74 million KKK members in america white supremacists blatant racists because they

voted for trump and so that if if that's true then i could see where they're like why would i dialogue with a blatant white supremacist with a guy wearing a kkk hood like there's no dialogue there so so here's what we would say, I think. Jesus's table fellowship was scandalous. Jesus's table fellowship, if you read books about it, Daryl Bach's book called Contagious Holiness. These were public. He's out in public with notorious sinners.

The Pharisees are going crazy, passing by going, this is ridiculous. How can you say you're a holy man and be sitting there having fellowship? And it's not just a meal. It's fellowship. I say to my students, okay, who would be at the table that today that you would walk by, see Jesus with this person and grab Jesus and say, Jesus, come here. You cannot be at the table with this person. It looks, the optics are horrible. And my students say, David Duke, some say Trump, David Duke. Some say Trump. Some say Secretary Clinton. Some say pedophiles. Some say terrorists. Right. Here's Jesus's response. Based on what? And the book is right here. I'm sorry. So it's not Bach. It's Bloomberg. Craig Blomberg. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Contagious holiness.

Jesus's meal with sinners. Here's what he says. Jesus's answer is, I don't care. I don't care. Jesus, it looks horrible. I don't care. I came to save sinners. who is off the list that Jesus wants to impact? Who is like off the list? Now listen, should David Duke be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law? Sure, if he's committed certain crimes. Should Adolf Hitler be part of the human rights violation, the Nuremberg trials? Absolutely, he should be prosecuted for a state of law. But Christians, we don't give up on people. We don't give up on them. I'm haunted by, remember when Dobson got together with Ted Bundy? Remember those famous interviews?

This is when Bundy was- Before my era a bit, but yeah, I've heard about them. Yeah. OK, here's Ted Bundy, a serial killer. And you can imagine all the parents who desperately want this man to be executed. And I'd be one of them. Right. If he if he raped and murdered my daughter. Hey, I'm sorry. I believe in justice. And it's just that that he forfeit his life. OK, but Dobson meets with him, and Dobson claims he led him to the Lord. Wow.

Now, Dobson said, I'm not saying he shouldn't be, I mean, he's been convicted, and whatever your view of the death penalty is, but that man has been convicted. I'm not wiping any of that under the carpet. I'm telling you, he prayed to receive Jesus. We get the same thing with Jeffrey Dahmer, who killed, had sex with, and then ate in that order. Right. 17, 18 people went to prison. I wrote a book on grace many years ago,

and I opened with this illustration just to keep people on their toes a bit. But yeah, it seems... open with this illustration just to keep people on their toes a bit. But, um, yeah, it seems. And, and a pastor went and same thing, like said, Hey, I have no reason to doubt his salvation. Um, if we base salvation on your previous actions, which Christians that's called heresy, like, um, then yeah, of course, like there's no chance in hell this guy you know is not going there but based on the last six months he's showing every signs of genuine conversion and christians were really upset like they did not they really did deep down believe grace has a stopping point it can go only so far. That's a great... I could still see people say, okay, for somebody who's not a believer or not yet a believer,

I can see, yeah, there's no barrier. But for those who are in the church, especially leaders, I could name some names, but I won't. People who are still actively promoting an idea that they see is not just harmful, but leading to all kinds of injustice. I mean, I get this all the time, not all the time, but there's a certain group that say, yeah, Preston, you're a leader. And because you hold to an oppressive view of sexuality, you are responsible for the suicide of gay teenagers. And I'm like, I, I, it's hard because the second I even opened my mouth,

I've been in response to that. Now I'm defensive and whatever. So it's like, I just, what do you do? You know, just keep, keep doing what you feel the Lord has called you to. And you,

you take the, you know, all the stories where that's just absolutely not the case. And you, you just, you have to kind of brush off simplistic kind of critiques that just aren't rooted in scripture, theology, ethics, or even reality for the most part. So let me share with you the illustration

we closed the book with, with some conviction. And we did this at Baylor. We were invited into Baylor. Baylor had some issues that arose because of a chapel speaker. OK, so they asked us to come in and talk to faculty and student leaders. Here's what we shared with this group. OK, Preston. And this comes to my co-author, Rick Langer, who's just brilliant. OK, so go back to pre-World War II. And some pastors are seeing what's happening. The rise of Hitler.

And they have none of it. Like we're fighting this in the beginning. We're not going to wait. We're going to fight this man. So Hitler, when he rose to power, you had to give the Nazi salute when the anthem came on and you had to take off your hat. Okay. This pastor, and I'm blanking on his name, I'm so sorry, refused to take his hat off and give the salute. I'm not doing it. Well, eventually he's arrested. He's put into one of the earliest iterations of a concentration camp, right?

And he walks in a circle and all you have to do is take off your hat when you pass the Nazi symbol. That's all you have to do is take off your hat when you pass the Nazi symbol. That's all you have to do. And he, Preston, utterly refuses to do it. And he is beaten to death. Okay. Now, Hitler rises to power. And here's the situation we had our Baylor students imagine. Imagine the widow of this Christian is now in a pub in Germany, and World War II is happening, and the German anthem comes on, and a preacher who has just preached in your church stands up with everybody and gives the Nazi salute. And this woman is looking at this Christian leader, young Christian leader, saying, my husband died because he wouldn't give that salute. And you

give that salute? So then we say to the students, Preston, what do you think of this young preacher? Uniformly, everybody says he was wrong to do that. And maybe even in sin to do that, then we say, okay, then we say this, Preston, who was this young man? And we say to him, it's Dietrich Bonhoeffer. It's Bonhoeffer. The preacher who took his hat off is Bonhoeffer? The preacher who gave the Nazi salute is Dietrich Bonhoeffer. And in his letters, Preston, he makes an argument. Listen, I am absolutely, we're going to defeat Nazism. But there's a lot of battles ahead of us. And if I don't give this Nazi salute,

then I won't get to fight any of the battles, any of the battles. And so we are going to fight it, but I'm not going to be, my battle against evil isn't going to stop because I don't give the Nazi salute. I don't mean it. It's a means to an end to defeat Nazism. So then we say to the students, well, what do you think of Bonhoeffer who is revered? And now they're all conflicted. say to the students, well, what do you think of Bonhoeffer, who is revered, and now they're all conflicted? And I said, by the way, what would you think of this, the widow would think that you're now conflicted on this? What would she think? My husband died, and now you're conflicted? But our point is, can the two live with each other? Can you both want to defeat Nazism, but one makes a radical stand and the other decides I'm going to be shrewd and I'm going to pursue this in a very different way, but we you did is you opened the door for somebody's heart and emotions to experience the complexity. If you didn't smuggle it in the back door with Bonhoeffer and everything,

but you did that so that their hearts, their experience was there. And then you kind of open it up to the kind of rational reflection. And I think that's what made it so complex for them, right? I mean, because, yeah, me too. I'm like, oh, my gosh. Like, wow, that's – and maybe part of it too is understanding some of the complexity of the situation. This is where – I mean, I'm with you. I didn't vote for either candidate. But I'm more Mennonite.

So voting for me, that's a whole ethical discussion. But, and so there are some people who vote for Trump that I would say, yeah, they're racist. I've heard the jokes. They're blatant racist. Other people who are like, no, I actually don't like a lot about Trump, but I think Biden is more destructive for society. I actually don't like a lot about Trump, but I think Biden is more destructive for society. And I do see, you know, a neo-Marxist kind of theme going on here. And I read 1984 and I've seen the beginnings of that.

And I think that's going to be ultimately more destructive than anything Trump could possibly do. So it's kind of lesser to evils. Those are two very, very same person, same vote, same president that they voted for. Two very, very different complexities going on. Can we not appreciate the wide diversity of people, why they might vote for one candidate or the other? But that's exactly what you did. Can we not appreciate some of the really virtuous complexity that surrounded Bonhoeffer in that moment? And the Holy Spirit just brought it to mind. I'm so glad.

The guy's name is Paul Schneider. Paul Schneider is the pastor who gave his life early on to say, I'm not going to allow this to have traction. I'm going to try by giving my life to nip this in the bud. So the reason we use that, Preston, is how quickly we judged Bonhoeffer, right? How quickly we judged this young German preacher without knowing any of the complexity of his perspective and strategy. It's days and diets. We're back to days and diets. So we're going to have to live with each other that I firmly believe the way you voted was wrong.

I firmly believe and it's dangerous and you damage the church. And another person believes, man, I cannot believe how naive you were that you couldn't see the bigger picture. And somehow at the end of the day, can we protect unity as we seek to be Christ's ambassadors to a secular culture? That's the project we're trying to work with. So your book came out in December. Lots happened since it came out. Have you seen it get some attention and people going through it? And have you gotten some good positive feedback and wins that are happening in the church from people reading it? Yeah, we're slammed, as you can imagine. The insurrection at the Capitol was a tipping point moment. It's one thing, and I've said this a ton, life and death is in the power of the tongue, right? And I mostly

mean death metaphorically, which I believe is true. I can do death to your self-esteem. But listen, rhetoric caused death. It caused people to lose their lives. And now I don't think I'll ever share that verse in the same way ever again, and not at least qualify to say, no, it can actually cause physical death. So so I think we've been slammed with interviews. People are nervous about the direction of the United States. A new survey came out just before the book came out. Ninety eight percent of Americans believe incivility is a major issue in the country. 68% believe it is at crisis levels. And 48% of Americans, I don't feel safe sharing my perspective.

That is a horrible communication climate, and we can't ignore it anymore. I've heard that, and I don't know where this came from. I can't verify. I don't even know the exact percentage, but it was a disturbingly high percentage of people, maybe 30, 40% believe that where we're at now will lead to an actual civil war or something like that. Yeah, we've seen that as well. We've seen that as well. Our country will never recover. This was the narrative. And again, think if this is the narrative, Preston, how can you have a conversation? A large number of Republicans and Democrats believed if the other person won, our country will never recover.

We call that weaponizing a belief. You weaponized your belief in such a way that this conversation can go nowhere. Yeah, yeah. We're arguing against weaponizing our beliefs. Well, and also I heard somebody say, you know, there's a massive difference between believing the other side. I don't care whether it's a doctrinal issue, a political issue, a moral issue. side, I don't care whether it's a doctrinal issue, a political issue, a moral issue, but once you believe the other side is not just profoundly wrong, but intrinsically evil, that changes everything, right? But that's where we're at in the last couple of years, or maybe it's even more, maybe it's been brewing for 10 to 20 years. But I hear people talk about politics back in the 80s, 90s, and know, and like they disagreed with each other and believed each other were profoundly wrong. But now it's it's the other side is intrinsically evil and is, again,

leading to harm, destruction. And that that's a game changer once you have that mindset. So I wrote a blog. I write for the Christian Scholars Review. I'm one of their authors for blogs. We actually have this posted on our website, winsomeconviction.com. I make the argument that we need to pivot to G.K. Chesterton, that Chesterton had this innate ability to argue with Rudyard Kipling, a noted humanist, H.G. Wells, a Bernard Shaw. humanists, H.G. Wells, Bernard Shaw. But what was different, Preston, is after they bitterly debated each other, they went to the pub. And I'm making the argument today, where's our pub? Where's the place we go that we can be Americans together? We can be neighbors together. We can set aside the division and go have a drink or a smoke or something like that.

Yeah. In California, you can go share a joint, right? And unfortunately, that is where my internet cut out yet again. I really apologize for that. Just so you know, I have done everything I can to rectify my ongoing internet situation. I actually got a hold of Elon Musk. Actually, not him personally, but I bought the whole Starlink satellite internet thing that he's got going on. I got the beta version, and it's been amazing, really, but it happened to cut out for about 15 minutes during our interview, so I apologize for that. And it happened to cut out right when I brought up smoking pot

in the context of working out our theological and or political differences. So yeah, interesting. Thank you for that, Starlink. Anyway, I wanted to still post this conversation because I thought it was amazing, honestly. I mean, the stuff that Tim talks about is just so needed in the church today. And he is the right guy to do it. He's got a great posture. He's a super level-headed person. He has the communications background. And as you've heard, he's actually implementing some of these things in the church and seeing some good success. And so I encourage you to get his book, Winsome Conviction.

But his last point about where is our pub today? I thought that's a great point. where is our pub today? I thought that's a great point. And I kind of want to bring it back on the show to ask of where is that pub? Where is that location, that social location where we can go to build and strengthen our relationship with one another? Because it's not happening online. It seems like these social media avenues, whether it's Facebook or Twitter or sometimes Instagram, less so, it seems like these online avenues work against our desire to want to build unity, to listen, to humanize each other. And so, yeah, we need to find a place where we can meet up in person.

I mean, honestly, one of the reasons why I virtually stopped engaging people through social media platforms, at least if it's like a debate kind of context or somebody's challenging me, or even if they say something that I said that's just flat out false, I just, I don't, I don't respond. I don't engage that. I'm not going to get sucked up into that because rarely does anybody leave a better person. And so I want to focus my energy on those embodied contexts where we can engage in a long form face-to-face conversation. those these days. I wish we did have the local pub in our neighborhood where we can get together with people that we're actually engaging in. I also do like long, if you are going to go to a more online platform, I think long form conversations are much, much better than these

kind of Twitter wars back and forth, which rarely if if ever, help anybody in those contexts. So, yeah, I think having longer form, one, two, three hour conversations with people across the divide can be helpful. It's obviously much more nerve wracking and more difficult. even if he can have like a Zoom chat with somebody, not just an audio, but an actual face screen, face-to-face conversation that's better than the Twitter wars back and forth. So I hope you enjoyed this conversation with Tim Muehlhoff. And sorry again for the internet cutout.

We're working on it. Hopefully as Elon keeps throwing up more and more satellites in the atmosphere, my internet connection will be strengthened. So Elon, please keep your game up, man. We'll see you next time on Theology in the Raw. Thank you.