Timothy Keller Sermons Podcast by Gospel in Life - Interview: Rebecca McLaughlin

Episode Date: August 22, 2023

In this interview from November 2019, Rebecca McLaughlin talks about some of the inspiration for writing her book Confronting Christianity and some of the insight she's gained in her life that led her to address the hardest questions that Christians face today. As she talks about her experiences, you will learn how and why she believes that Christianity is objectively the best hope for the modern world. Interview hosted by Chuck Armstrong. Today's podcast episode is brought to you by Gospel in Life, the site for all sermons, books, study guides and resources from Timothy Keller and Redeemer Presbyterian Church. If you've enjoyed listening to this podcast and would like to support the ongoing efforts of this ministry, you can do so by visiting https://gospelinlife.com/give and making a one-time or recurring donation.

For many in our culture today, Biblical Christianity is a dangerous idea, challenging some of their deepest beliefs. In her book Confronting Christianity, 12 hard questions for the world's largest religion. Dr. Rebecca McLaughlin explores the hard questions that keep many people from considering faith in Christ. Listen as Dr. Rebecca McLaughlin explores how we can share our faith in a way that is relevant, when some, in true. The co-founder of Vocable Communications, a firm focused on data and speech.

Rebecca McLaughlin has long been drawn to helping individuals tell their stories in the most compelling way possible. Her own story has seen her serve as the vice president of content for the Veritas Forum, going to Oak Hill College to study theology, and earning her PhD in Renaissance literature at Cambridge. In April 2019, she released the book Confronting Christianity,

Twelve Hard Questions for the World's Largest Religion. Rebecca, thank you so much for chatting today. It's great to be here. So I'd love to hear just kind of right out of the gate, why you released the book now. Why do you think the church and even culture needs this book in this moment? In 1994, the historian Mark Null published a book, The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind,

in which he made the bold claim that the scandal of the evangelical mind is that there is not much in the evangelical mind. I think since then, if that were true in 1994, I don't think it's true today. God has raised up thousands of Christian professors at some of the top universities in the world in all of the fields that are supposed to have discredited, disproved, or sort of blown apart the Christian faith. And the nine years that I spent at the Veritas Forum, I was able to actually focus on earthing some of these folks, getting to know them, learning from their assert,

cheering their stories. And so the book is very much an opportunity to showcase their work. I think these guys are the greatest untouched resource of the global church. And I guess my attempt in the book was to curate some of their work and insights. And I think that's something that's needed today.

So you don't think there's a scandal in at least in the way that NOL put it in 94 anymore today? I guess today the scandal is that we are not making the most of the evangelical minds that God has raised up. So was there something that was kind of a concrete moment where it clicked with you that this book needed to be written or was it kind of over the time of working with Veritas that kind of produced this desire to write this?

Yeah, I think there were two streams that came in to play and kind of flow together. So one was, as I say, spending nine years working with these folks and realizing that both in the university and outside, both Christians and non-Christians, there was a massive information gap between what the best Christian minds knew when it came to science or philosophy or history or the arts and what was trickling down to the rest of the world. And in fact, some of the very ideas that were discrediting Christianity on college campuses were ones where Christians were world leaders in those very fields. So there was that stream of feeling like, oh, there's this massive information gap and I don't

want to keep this all in my own head. I want to make this accessible to Christians and non-Christians. I think there was another stream which connected up for me I am a'r gydwch chi'n mynd i'n mynd i'n mynd i'n mynd i'n mynd i'n mynd i'n mynd i'n mynd i'n mynd i'n mynd i'n mynd i'n mynd i'n mynd i'n mynd i'n mynd i'n mynd i'n mynd i'n mynd i'n mynd i'n mynd i'n mynd i'n mynd i'n mynd i'n mynd i'n mynd i'n mynd i'n mynd i'n mynd i'n mynd i'n mynd i'n mynd i'n mynd i'n mynd i'n mynd i'n mynd i'n mynd i'n mynd i'n mynd i'n mynd i'n mynd i'n mynd i'n mynd i'n mynd i'n mynd i'n mynd i'n mynd i'n mynd i'n mynd i'n mynd i'n mynd i'n mynd i'n mynd i'n mynd i'n mynd i'n mynd i'n mynd i'n mynd i'n mynd i'n mynd i'n mynd i'n mynd i'n mynd i'n mynd i'n mynd i'n mynd i'n mynd i'n mynd i'n mynd i'n mynd i'n mynd i'n mynd i'n mynd i'n mynd i'n mynd i'n mynd i'n mynd i'n mynd i'n mynd i'n mynd i'n mynd i'n mynd ind i'n mynd ind i'n mynd ind i'n mynd i'n mynd i'n my the ways in which the church was messing up our witness on these questions. So it seemed to me that there were, broadly speaking, two ways people were going. There were well-meaning Christians who were repenting of the homophobia that they may well have been brought up with. And throwing out the authority of the Scriptures in the process. And then on the other hand, there were a lot of churches that seemed to be doubling down on a kind of culture wars, them and us mentality, which seemed to me to be subbiblical Mae'n gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweith that I had been talking about even to many of my closest friends at the time, but I felt something of a call from the Lord to be just a tiny little piece of the church's witness on those questions in particular, because I think what we desperately need on those questions

and what I think the Lord is increasingly giving us is actually more and more people who can speak from profound personal empathy because these issues are their issues. Right, absolutely. Is that hard? Has that been hard for you to engage that in a public way, writing about it? Yeah, I think my temperament is such that I tend, I've had friends say,

your head is about three miles ahead of your heart, which certainly can be the case. And so when that impulse first arose from me, I thought, there's part of me that just wants to start writing and speaking on these issues now because I feel the need, but there's also a recognition that there's probably a lot that I need to you know, work through more personally in terms of talking with friends and just figuring out how best to articulate these issues from my perspective within my immediate community in order to then be a tall equipped to speak into a broader

cultural setting. Well it's obvious that there's a tremendous amount of your own kind of personal faith trust, whatever you want to call it, poured it into this book, also in a tremendous amount of just work in general, right? And yet, as you mentioned, it's very accessible. I think it's going to be, it already has been, and we'll continue to be widely read by many people. As you put this together, as you work through this, as you did this research, did you find that, how did this affect sort of your own faith? You know, as I think about you writing about taking the Bible literally, this research, how did this affect your own faith? As I think about you writing about taking the Bible

literally and you have a whole chapter on that, which is really powerful. I'm curious, in that particular topic or any of these things, how did that deepen or deepen your faith, maybe challenge what you believe, that kind of thing. I think the chapter entitled, how can you take the Bible literally

was the most fun to write? Because my PhD is in Shakespeare and Metaphors, and particularly prison metaphors in Shakespeare, believe it or not. And when I went from grad school to seminary, one of the things I noticed was that the only person who seemed to like Metaphors even more than Shakespeare was Jesus. And people seem to have this wooden idea that we either take the Bible literally or we don't.

And that if we are looking at a verse or a passage and interpreting it metaphorically, then that is somehow undermining or selling out on the authority of Scripture. Sure. When, in fact, Jesus uses metaphors all day long, and some of his most challenging teachings are actually delivered through metaphors, like when he says, enter through the narrow gate for why it is the gate and brought as the path that leads to destruction and many find. I mean, that's no easy Scripture. And yet, it's encased in a metaphor.

And so I think we have many beautiful life-giving metaphors that come to us throughout the scriptures and from Jesus in particular, for example, when he talks about being the true vine. It's not that I lack faith enough to believe that he is actually a plant. But he is connecting with this incredible Old Testament metaphor of God's people as the vine.

But I think actually as we look at how Jesus uses metaphors and how the scriptures use metaphors, we can take things a step further and say that whereas when you and I are using metaphors, we're looking around the world and noticing connections between one thing and another and saying, oh, this is like that. Yeah, we're trying to compare what we see. Yeah, but when God makes metaphors, because he's the creator, he's actually doing it from the ground up. So if we think about the biblical metaphor that compares God to a breastfeeding mother, for example, Isaiah 49 verse 15,

kind of mother forget the baby at her breast and have no compassion on the charge she is born, those she may forget, I will not forget you. It's not that God looked at human mothers with their infants and thought, oh, that's a beautiful little picture of how I love my people. It's actually that God created motherhood in the first place and breastfeeding as an experience.

To reflect. So that we would get a little glimpse of how He loves us. And likewise, and I think this is particularly important for us to understand at any conversation around gender and sexuality, it's not that God found male and female and sex and marriage lying around and thought, oh, that's a little bit like how Jesus loves the church.

He actually created these things in order for us in our lived experience, you have some tiny echo of Jesus's love for the church. And that, as somebody who has always loved metaphors, just blows my mind. Yeah, well, and it takes these common things in our lives. You know, like you mentioned, when we make metaphors,

we're just taking common things in our lives. And it adds this whole divine supernatural experience to them, like the metaphor of marriage and the relationship of Christ with this church. It's just this unbelievable divine thing that we have no business understanding. And yet God has created this metaphor. That's so beautiful.

In the book, you mentioned that when you first moved to the US, you were bewildered by, I think that's the word you used. You were bewildered by the connection between evangelical Christianity with racism. So, I'm just curious, you know, when you move to the US, what did you experience to kind of bring up that, I guess, surprise and confusion and sadness with that connection? I think it's heartbreaking.

The New Testament is one of the greatest, perhaps the greatest, text against racism in all of history. Jesus broke through every racial and cultural barrier of his day and he commanded his disciples to go and make disciples of all nations. We see the first African Christian in the book of Acts, the Ethiopian Unic of Acts 8, and we have a vision in Revelation of people from every tribe and tongue and nation worshiping Jesus together. So this is our destiny as Christians and the fact that through human sin expressed in the cancer of institutional racism in the church, in particularly in America's history, I think that's heartbreaking and it's heartbreaking in ways that impact every area.

So it's heartbreaking because it tends against the justice that emerges from the heart of God. It's heartbreaking because it means that we are not living as one body and knit together in love as the New Testament causes to. And let's be clear, the racial and cultural barriers in the first century were at least as real as anyone's we experience it in our culture today. Christians were being thrown together across

all sorts of awkward social and experiential different sisters and expected not just to tolerate each other, but to love each other like brothers and sisters and like one body and like one family. So I think we mess out on all of that. I think it's also horrifically destructive to our witness. Well, we act today as if diversity is a kind of creation of the liberal left, when in fact, you could very well argue that Jesus invented the whole idea of diversity. And that's something that we should own and live into and be the first to experience and proclaim. I think that the one thing that was really encouraging

to me actually in this respect in terms of writing the book, well actually two things. One was just the miracle of the Black church in America. And the gospel witness that it is that, despite a history of slavery and a history of racial injustice, that God has called so many black Americans to himself across centuries now. And the other is the extraordinary blessing of immigration that the American church experiences.

So I think some white Americans worry that immigration is a roading America's Christian heritage. In fact, immigration is a much needed blood transfusion for the American church. And so I think we are beginning to see, or certainly have seen for decades, but seeing more and more, the vibrancy of Christianity coming in this country

from people of every tribe in Tanganyan nation from across the world. And that's a beautiful thing. Well, we could probably spend a couple hours on this topic, that be a separate chat. But I am curious, this book is so, it's such a powerful read, but it doesn't just leave you with a book

and like I just feel practical conviction and practical steps that we can take to once we confront these questions and what do we do with that and so in this particular topic in your own experience how do you think American churches can live up to the ideals of biblical diversity? I think one mistake that we make is thinking that our church experience on a Sunday ought to be comfortable. I actually think church should be quite uncomfortable in a funny way.

In one sense, we should feel like we are going home and that we are meeting with family on a Sunday and that that should be a deeply grounding and joyful and relaxing experience. So on the other hand, if we're not having conversations on a Sunday morning that are genuinely hard work for us because we are having to relate to people who are different from us because they're significantly older or because they come from another country or because they have a different racial background or because they have a different educational level or because they come from another country or because they have a different racial background

or because they have a different educational level or because they have different cultural experiences. If we're not doing that hard work, then we're actually missing out on the richness that God has is giving to us. I think it's so easy for us to default to talking to people like us, whatever that means. And it's not that there's anything wrong with me talking with another woman from the same educational background, the same Rocha background, the same cultural background, etc. But actually, if that's all I'm doing on a Sunday, I'm missing out on seeing how Jesus is at work

in the lives of my brothers and sisters from all sorts of other places. But let's be real about the fact that that's hard work for all of us and we're all going to make mistakes in that process. Yeah, well, and you say forming those bonds across differences is as intrinsic to community as or to Christianity as singing, which I love. You know, it's not, it shouldn't be this kind of tangential experience, but actually part of of what we're called to, as you mentioned, to be in one body and to be united across those differences. As you've written, released this book, talked about this book, shared it with so many people, I'm curious what kind of advice you might have to to those kind

of feelings of. This sounds great, but yeah, there's a lot of tension here and I just don't think I can do this. Yeah, I'm not equipped either, quite frankly. I think all of us, yeah, I mean, all of us in Christian community and all of us in Christian witness ought to find ourselves to be quite inadequate to the task very regularly. And I think Dietrich Bonhoeffer is very helpful on this where he talks about disillusionment.

And he says, if we're lucky, we will experience profound sense of disillusionment with Christians in general, and if we are fortunate with ourselves. And that is not the end of Christian community, but the beginning because we're not together as people who have it all together. We are together as depraved, useless sinners who've been brought together by Jesus. And so I think we need to recognize our inadequacy and appeal to the Lord for help in that

and recognize that we need each other for help with that as well. We need each other for challenge and encouragement. That's a lifelong pursuit, for sure. So that's tension kind of within the Christian community, forming bonds across differences, just with fellow believers. But I see this book honestly transcending

those differences between faiths and between people who don't believe what I believe or who are almost antagonistic to what I believe. What is this sort of response been as you've seen this book release and talked to so many people with that line between Christians and non-believers or whatever you want to call that? But I've really tried to do in this book is to only make claims that will stand up in court. Or at least, let me clarify. Clearly, this book is making the outrageous claims

of Christianity, which will always be outrageous, will always be offensive and will always look foolish. No question. However, I think we too often leave an obstacle course of barriers that our non-Christian friends need to clamber over before they even get to the offensive rock of Christ. What I hope to do in this book is to clear some of those barriers away. I think the opportunity to be able to sit down with non-question friends and to say, hey, you know, this chapter is actually drawing on research from Harvard or MIT on these questions.

And so we're kind of, we're looking at the same data together and maybe having very different interpretations, but we're at least looking at the same data. And it's been super encouraging. I mean, the book, thanks to a friend who's a MIT professor and also a Ted fellow was on the Ted Summer reading list. And I thought when my friend Rose suggested it to them, I was like, clearly, they're not going to catch that this is not the kind of book they want on their reading list. I honestly don't think they actually read it. They probably would have decided that if they had, but you know, they're at there it is. And I'm going to be speaking for the National Geographic

in February, which is just exciting to have any opportunity with non-Christian organizations to say, hey, here are some of the best Christian thinkers on some important questions that I'm trying to channel into the quite sort of secular bloodstream and it's been encouraging to see that as once. That's amazing. This book, I think, presents so much hope as you read it, as you sit with it, thinking about, you know,

Bible studies reading through it, or communities reading through a church is embracing this kind of tension and living into it. What is kind of, if you have, I'm sure you have multiple, but one kind of hope that you have how this might affect the broader church? I think we Christians in the West are spending a lot of time ringing our hands when we should be playing our cards. I think we have a lot more cards to play than we realize.

And again, none of this is to say evangelism is suddenly going to be easy, or everyone in Times Square at Sunday are going to give their life to Jesus. Though maybe, but I think we need to... But it's still outrageous, like you said. Yeah, it's still outrageous, but we need to recognize that Jesus is truly the best hope for the modern world. And that's actually something that, you know, we Christians take on faith,

but you could sit down with an atheist and explain to them why Christianity actually objectively is the best hope for the modern world. And I think we need to lean into that and recognize that, yeah, we have more to say than we might think and that Jesus is at least as beautiful now as he was two thousand years ago. Amen. Well, this book, I think, is a great step in that direction into leaning into that and living this out. Confronting Christianity, 12 hard questions for the world's largest religion, is there a need for a sequel for 12 more questions as you've been going to do this? There's actually already a sequel coming, which is a junior version. Aimed a 10 to 14 year olds.

Oh my gosh. It'll be 10 questions. Wow. And the idea is to make it accessible for that age group version of the book that will be more readable for those folks and also avoid some of the more harrowing parts of the back that just wouldn't be eduapropre. We'll be back with McLaughlin. Thank you so much for your time.

And for this book. GospelOnLife.com. Just subscribe to the Gospel On Life newsletter to receive free articles, sermons, devotionals, and other resources. Again, it's all at GospelOnLife.com. You can also stay connected with us on Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and Twitter. you