Truth Unites - Is Spirituality A Greater Threat Than Atheism? With Michael Horton

Episode Date: May 13, 2024

Gavin Ortlund and Michael Horton explore the origins of "spiritual but not religious" as an ideology. See Dr. Horton's Book: https://www.amazon.com/Shaman-Sage-Spiritual-Religious-Antiquity/dp/0802877117 Truth Unites exists to promote gospel assurance through theological depth. Gavin Ortlund (PhD, Fuller Theological Seminary) is President of Truth Unites and Theologian-in-Residence at Immanuel Nashville. SUPPORT: Tax Deductible Support: https://truthunites.org/donate/ Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/truthunites FOLLOW: Twitter: https://twitter.com/gavinortlund Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/TruthUnitesPage/ Website: https://truthunites.org/  

What we're seeing today, the phenomenon of spiritual but not religious, is actually an alternative religion that seethes beneath the thin crust of Christendom. It's nothing new. This surging mysticism, pantheism, erupts at different points along the line in history. Hey, everyone. Welcome or welcome back to Truth Unites. I'm here with Dr. Michael Horton, who is the J. Grusham-Machin professor of systematic theology and apologetics at Westminster Seminary, California. and he's the founder and editor-in-chief of Sola Media. So if you've heard of the White Horse in radio show and podcast, Modern Reformation Magazine and so forth,

he's written or edited more than 40 books, many of which I've benefited a lot from personally, the books on justification, for example. He has a systematic theology called The Christian Faith. Fantastic. But today we're going to talk about shaman and sage, the roots of spiritual but not religious in antiquity. and I was just saying to you, Michael, that I read this on an airplane and found it absolutely fascinating

for earlier this week for thinking about our culture. So our sort of angle of approach here will be, how does this book help us think about evangelizing our friends, responding to the huge de-Christianization of our time? So I'm really excited to get into this. Thanks for taking the time and how are you doing? Thank you, Gavin. I'm doing fine and really appreciating the work that you're doing and continuing to be impressed with your output. And so it's really a pleasure to be on program. Yeah. I've been looking forward to this for several months now.

Let's just start with some questions about our culture. What are you seeing right now in our culture that makes you interested in this idea of spiritual but not religious? You know, I've been interested in this idea for a long time. I've gobbled up all of my sabbaticals since I started teaching here, 25 years ago, to work on this project that's now coming out as three volumes. Mike, one of the things that really has, the main reason is because I want to understand not only the context in which I, along with other Christians, engage non-Christians, but also the cultural soup I'm in to be able to better to interpret

it, you know, how, what it means to take every thought captive to the obedience of Christ. And it can't be all bad because of God's providence, common grace, but it can't be all good because of our sin and suppression of the truth and unrighteousness. So what I'm trying to do here is less, it comes from a theological point of view, but it's much more sort of the history of ideas. and it's basically this idea of, I've come to the conviction that what we're seeing today, the phenomenon of spiritual but not religious is actually an alternative religion that seethes beneath the thin crust of Christendom throughout the centuries. It's nothing new. It's this surging mysticism, pantheism erupts at different points along the line in history.

And it's a spiritual utopianism. And at least in Christendom, it takes the form of a rejection of monotheism, a rejection of monotheism, a rejection of one God who created the world ex-Nilo, who is qualitatively distinct from the world. So in other words, it's kind of a pantheistic or panentheistic approach. And it's not, this kind of mysticism is the other side of the coin of rationalism. And it's often, you know, B. B. Welfield made the point that if you scratch a rationalist enough, he bleeds mystic. And that's really what I've been finding. And then you look at the statistics of spiritual but not religious, that whole phenomenon.

And the more people reject Christianity and this God outside of us, who is our creator, judge, lawgiver, redeemers. and we identify the divine with something within us, the more people do that, they don't become more scientific, they become more superstitious. And even scientists become more superstitious. So I'm fascinated by how many scientists I've come across who are deeply influenced by this pantheistic mysticism,

just not the Christian god. but you know this this kind of this kind of divinity that we all have that that pervades the universe and and I have a spark of it inside of me yeah in a few moments I'll ask you more about the history and we'll get into some of that but just to um set this up a little bit more as we look at our culture right now. It is true. When you see the number of people leaving the church or leaving Christianity, most of them aren't going to a kind of Richard Dawkins-type atheism. Right. So I wonder, maybe we can just talk about the implications of that for our evangelism, or our witness as the church. Would you say that as, when we're doing apologetics, I'm very interested in apologetics? Yeah. When we're doing apologetics, do you think we focus too much on atheism? And do you think we

need to focus more on the whole spiritual but not religious category. And could you just share a little bit about why that's so important? Sure. Well, according to the best surveys I've been able to find, one and a half to two percent of American adults reports as atheist or agnostic. but we typically pour all of our apologetics energy into that one and a half to two percent. And yet really the phenomenon that's taking place right now, what with the secularization is de-Christianization. That's really what secularization is. It's not that secularization, people are less, are less, are less, spiritual. They're less Christian. So people are leaving Christianity for this kind of broader

amorphous. Some people call it New Age, but it's broader than that, this kind of amorphous spirituality. You hear it in interviews on NPR. You know, someone's, well, are you still, are you still religious? Someone, you know, writing a book about eat, love, prayer, whatever. Are you still consider yourself a Christian or do you still consider yourself Jewish? And typically the answer you hear is, well, I know I'm absolutely certain that there is something besides matter and that there is a great divinity at the heart of everything. I'm absolutely sure of that. And those are the people we're really talking to on the airplane. Yeah. One of the things that's been sobering for me recently in trying to grasp the cultural moment we're in is seeing the rise in interest in witchcraft and sorcery and

things like this. And then another kind of different but maybe related phenomenon is the amount of superstition right now. You mentioned that in the book early on, pages two and three right out of the gate. And you mentioned it a moment ago. What are some things you see specifically that give you the sense of an increasing superstition in our time? Yeah. I mean, I am document it, as you say, at the beginning. You know, it's really amazing when you see the statistics that when people leave Christianity, and this is true also in Western Europe, when people leave Christianity, the further they get away from it, the more they start believing in New Age tenants, they start believing

in witchcraft or some kind of, you know, Wicca is the fastest growing religion in America right now. People start getting interested in lucky numbers. Of course, lucky numbers, not unlucky. Nobody has unlucky numbers. And people start playing around with astrology and magic. it becomes an alternative to religion. It's a technology. But you know, a lot of times, even in Christian circles sometimes, you hear a kind of spiritual technology, you know, steps, principles, knowing the secrets of the universe so that you can you can name it and claim it or you can have some kind of control over your situation. That's magic. That's not a Christian worldview. That's a magical worldview. But it's deep. It's deep in our

culture. It's deep in ourselves, in our churches, in our conversations with non-Christians. Yeah, it's sobering to think about, you know, I think it's in the book of Acts that just comes into my mind right now, but somewhere, maybe chapter 17 or so where when people are coming to Christ, they're burning their sorcery books. And I always thought of that throughout my life as thinking, thinking, oh, you know, what would it be like to live in a time where you're on the front lines of the gospel advancing? And there's this sort of more explicit clash between the light and the dark. And yet, as we look at our world today, we recognize as we bring the good news of Jesus Christ forward, we are facing hostile powers. We are facing spiritual darkness. And where I think

your book is really helpful is helping us understand the history of this spiritual but not religious idea and that actually this is not a brand new thing in the modern era, but it has ancient roots. So maybe we could talk about that a little bit and maybe a good entry point would be you talk about the importance of the 6th century BC as kind of a turning point in human religious history and the so-called axial age. And maybe that'd be a good point to start to get into kind of the historical backlog of this idea of spiritual but not religious and that this isn't just a modern movement, but it's an ancient idea. So maybe you could, why the 6th century BC?

What's going on there that is so important? Yeah, why go back that far? Well, what happens in that 6th century BC is so fascinating. It's all kinds of debates about how seriously this axial age thesis can be taken. How far do you take it? But everybody agrees that something big happened in 6th century BC. that coincided with the rise of the Persian Empire. And it covered the whole area of the Persian Empire

all the way stretching from India to what is now Ukraine, Black Sea, all the way down to Egypt. And it was a huge phenomenon. on. And it even affected, you know, Babylon, this is the time of Babylonian captivity, the Hebrew prophets, the warning about divination and magic because it was all around them. And this was the time. So in the Bronze Age, religion was all about having your best life now. It was all about how do you not offend the gods?

How do you give the gods their due in public? There's no private worship. Everything was public religion, ritual-based, and all of the rituals are state rituals meant to make sure that this earth, that this capital, which is the center of the world, whatever it was, corresponds to the world of the gods and the gods are happy. So we can be happy. What happens to the 6th century BC is a move away from that kind of poetry, that kind of, you know, the Vedas, that kind of, that kind of, you know, the older religion that I've just described to a philosophical religion.

So it's the rise of Hinduism, Buddhism, Zoroastrianism, late period Egyptian religion. And these are all movements that are happening in the 6th century BC. They're happening all the same time. And Greece gets it about 100 years later comes out of the dark ages. after these other cultures did, mainly through them, mainly from the East. And so that's why we have some really similar ideas in Western philosophy to Eastern philosophy. A lot of it came from the East during the 6th century BC Axial Age movement. And it's basically a movement from a one sociologist calls it a locative environment where you feel embedded.

You feel nurtured. You feel like the individual is in the family. The family is in the clan. The clan is in the city. The city is the city of God on earth. And the king is the representative. He's divine. and he's the representative mediator between heaven and earth.

People in the 6th century BC are starting to reflect on that and become critical of that and say, what if the gods are actually principles like air and water? And they're just metaph- they're pictures of natural things. And they've become more. reflective and more utopian. So J. Z. Smith, who has this, the paradigm of locative versus utopian, makes a great case, I think, for that happening, being a good description of what happens

here in what we're talking about. It's not so much, my take is it's not so much that the 6th century BC changed everything. It's that it was the first real rush of something that happens all periodically throughout history. Instead of a line, it's zigs and zags. You go from a utopian movement like Gnosticism, and that gets put down, suppressed, but it's still in the cultural memory, and you go to a more locative environment again,

Middle Ages. And then you have the radical Anabaptists, and spiritualists and radical pietists, you have another upsurge, another utopian expression, my inner light becomes my God. And it's really, it's striking that the first Bible critics were Anabaptists. They were radical Anabaptists who wanted to shift the authority. authority from scripture to the inner light. And so they wrote up the first critiques of so-called contradictions in the Bible. They were the first to write. So the biblical criticism, in fact,

arises out of the kind of heterodox movements, especially in Protestantism. So it's It's been a fascinating investigation. I'm not polemical in this book. I'm really trying to just be, or yeah, in this series, I'm trying to understand it. And as I do wrestle with different interpretations and takes on it, I hope to take the reader along with me on this journey. Yeah.

And as you mentioned, so the people will know, this is the first book in a series, several others coming out, and it is a deep dive into history, so people should be prepared. They're going to get a lot of background. And so maybe just extending this a little bit in terms of the similarities between ancient spirituality and what we're seeing in our day. So this is really helpful for us to think about. As we think about evangelism, we think about apologetics today. Maybe I'll throw out a couple of terms that you get into in the book and just ask you to define these and reflect on these real briefly, and this will help us understand, oh, the things we're facing today, they're not completely new and unprecedented. So one of the phrases you use is

natural supernaturalism. I hope that triggers enough memory for you to be able to talk about that. And the other is orphism. Capital O, R, P-H-I-S-M. Can you define those? And then this will help us and just explain what they are. That'll help us reflect upon how, again, what we're facing. today is very common in the ancient world. Sure. Natural supernaturalism I got from M.H. Abrams. He wrote one of the definitive books on romantic literature. And I thought it was such a brilliant term and description of that encompasses this phenomenon that, I also call Orphic, and I don't invent that either. There's plenty of history for that.

So Orpheus, first of all, natural supernaturalism just means that nature is filled with divinity. It is pulsates with the divine, which means really that there is no God. there are divine forces, but the tendency to speak of divinity, not a personal God. And so nature itself is divine. Nature itself is miraculous. Orphism is a specific historical tradition that teaches that, basically. So Orphism goes back to the 6th century. BC, when Empedocles and Pythagoras, early pre-Socratic philosophers call themselves and were worshipped as gods and first taught reincarnation and lots of other doctrines that we associate with quote-unquote new agey kind of things.

actually that was their religion and the even those who were considered the first quote unquote scientists natural philosophers like talies and axi mander and the whole crew they were all searching for the one the one the unity of divinity what unites all nature and they started telling stories. And these stories became called Orphic. Now, the reason they're called Orphic is because of Orpheus. Orpheus, who is said to have reconciled the brothers Apollo, the gods Apollo and Dionysus. Apollo was the rational God.

He was the God of order. and you go to Delphi and you get rational prophecies. But his crazy brother, who was in the tomb during that time when he was presiding, would come back to life every spring while his brother was on holiday in the north. And Dionysus would sting his followers with divine madness. and so he's the god of wine he's the god of revelry the party god he's the god who is the father of the Greek theater tragedy all the plays that that come out of Athens during the classical period are built around Dionysus and it in fact it was it was called the season of

the plays were called the Great Dionysus. And so you have these two brothers who really represent the two sides of the Western self. On one hand, rational and searching for order. On the other hand, Woodstock. And that has always lived within us, the brothers vying for control. and Orpheus, the legendary Orpheus, was said to have reconciled the brothers. And so out of that legend of Orpheus, this whole tradition of Orphism is basically a synthesis, an attempt to synthesize the Western soul between these two folks. one of the greatest

interpreters of this is Friedrich Nietzsche, who was first and foremost a classic scholar. His book, The Birth of Tragedy, goes through this. I don't agree with everything in it, of course, but he really, he has a way of exploring how our whole Western history has been sort of the vying between these two brothers and Orpheus's attempt to unite them. And Anitia himself said he was a Dionysian.

He was on Dionysus' side. So one of the questions that comes up for me where I realize I may need to adjust a little bit of my own thinking about the nature of secularization is to what extent now, if there is this kind of baseline spirituality that we can see in the contemporary world and the ancient world, to what extent is this idea of the modern world as disenchanted? Not the most helpful way to think, because a common narrative, of course, is that, you know, and it's usually the Protestant Reformation that is blamed as one of the key dominoes leading to this, but modernity, the problem with modernity is disenchantment and a falling away from the supernatural

and so forth. And one of the things your book, one of the questions your book, I, the, one of the questions your book raises and makes us wrestle with is to what extent is that really the helpful framework, at least as the dominant way we look at the modern world. So maybe, well, how would you, how would you think about that? How do you feel about the word disenchanted to describe the modern world? And how would you push against this common way of framing the narrative of modernity so that especially it's, you know, Protestants introduced certain things that sort of detached us from the transcendent and the spiritual and so forth? And so now we're in this hard. hardly secular, sort of more leaning in a nihilistic direction age.

And yet from the sociology we recounted at the beginning, it doesn't really seem like that's too authentic to the most human beings around us right now. So maybe you can reflect a little bit upon that. Yeah. You know, a lot of this Gavin is a Roman Catholic polemic. you know the the the the Protestant Reformation was so focused on justification by faith and on knowing the right doctrines and and so forth that that it it undermined the sense of of the sacred everything being sacred and

the rituals that are so important to confirm that that worldview. Charles Taylor is a good example of that, I think, making that case. I mean, he basically blames the Hebrew prophets. The Reformation he acknowledges was carrying on the message of the Hebrew prophets. In a certain sense, yes, in a certain sense, the Bible is, the prophets and the apostles are are rejecting this idea of natural supernaturalism. It's true. They're rejecting the idea that there's something divine, there's a divine force in nature itself, or that our souls are a divine part of us. There's no part of us that's divine. There's no part of us that isn't moved by God's creative and providential and redemptive work.

And of course, our own will and action doesn't relieve us of our agency, but it's not because we have something divine within us. Okay, if that's secularization, so be it. If that's disenchantment, so be it. If idolatry is enchantment, then don't want any part of it. If enchantment means enchantments, then Christians can't have any part of it. So there is a kind of, you know, early Christians were called atheists because, you know, they weren't spiritual enough. They only believed in one God.

That's been a perennial criticism of Christianity. It's not fun enough. It's not spiritual enough. It's not mystical enough. It's not ritualistic enough. That's a longstanding criticism. But here's the thing. I think where that's a real point at which we can take a step back and say, and Paul Recurur, I think is a philosopher brilliant on this, actually what happens both with the Hebrew prophets and in the Reformation is, the sacred is, is all focused. All of that was spread out and into 18,000 different feast days and so forth. All of this, pilgrimages and all of that magic, if you will, quote unquote, all of that sacred is focused into the preaching of the word baptism in the Lord's Supper. And so it's really, it's the word and the sacraments that are the means of grace. not a thousand other things. If that's, you know, so what that means is we have to go to church. We have to participate in the public worship of God.

We can't be utopians. We have to be locative. We have to be, you know, part of part of the body of Christ. And, you know, it's not called the souls of Christ. We are the body of Christ. and so I think we have to really kind of change our worldview and recover, frankly, the Jewish roots, the Hebraic roots of the Christian faith, and be really aware, really conscious of the pressure points where our culture at this particular time and place wants us to give up a little bit,

surrender a little bit of that earthiness and of that clear distinction between creator and creature. The more you distinguish the creator from the creation, the more you hear the outcry of many Neoplatonists, frankly today, in the church and outside of it, that Christianity is basically disenchanted. One thing I have to add is liberalism, did disenchant. Liberalism did disenchant by getting rid of the enchanting doctrine, the great doctrines, the mysteries of the faith. But they just turn to other mysteries. And Protestant liberals, I document in the third volume, I'm working on that right now, I document pretty thoroughly that almost all of the Protestant liberals were radical pietists.

They weren't Orthodox. They were not raised in a Lutheran or Reformed Orthodoxy. Most of them were raised in in pietist circles. And so they turned inward, not to the external, not to the Jesus of history, but the Christ in me. That was their, so it doesn't matter what happens to the Jesus of history. What matters is he lives in my heart. Interesting. I want to ask you two more questions. The last one will be about the creator creation distinction, which you just brought up because that was something that came up for me as I was reading that I thought maybe that's worth exploring about why that's so important as a way of responding to these other sort of blanket amorphous forms of spirituality right now. But first, let's just think about what you've mentioned a couple times and it comes up a lot in the book, this idea that I am divine, but I'm just trapped in a body.

So this is something you see in the ancient world, and you see it today. People, you know, I have the spark of divinity within me. I am part of the divine, this kind of way of thinking. Let's suppose we're talking with one of our friends, and they, you say, you know, it comes up, you know, do you believe in God? And they say, well, yeah, I'm a part of God. God, I am, we are all divine. Conversation could play out, you know, various ways from there.

But how would you start to think about evangelism at? that point in the conversation, and I guess it's helpful to think about how could the gospel, the true gospel of Christ be good news for someone who is thinking like this, that the gospel can invite them to something better than what is offered to them in that way of thinking? Ooh, yeah. Big question, I know. Big question. You could answer that better than I can probably.

I think, first of all, you know, you are not your own, but we're bought with a price. There is such a burden being your own God. Autonomy is a devastating doctrine. It's also the core of this Orphic religion that is very much at the heart of today. people only think about, well, it's an idea, autonomy, self-rule, that I basically create myself, craft myself, decide for myself, who I am, what I am. That whole idea of autonomy, people don't think it has a history, that it's just one story. They think it's the metanarrative. It's not even questioned. That is the key driver of secularization.

by the way, autonomy, the doctrine of, it's a dogma, like for us, the incarnation. It's, but autonomy is at the heart of a lot of evangelism, a lot of, a lot of stuff we do in the church as well, appealing to human autonomy. I think, really, what a release it is when it's not up to me to Christ, craft myself, to create myself, to manage myself, to determine myself, to harness the divinity within me. And, you know, there is a God outside of me who created me, who judges my worth, which is condemned, but so loved the condemned that he gave his only begotten son. And so we are bought with a price. We are doubly gods in creation and redemption. He owns us, and he's a good

owner. It's good to be owned by him. If we're not owned by him, we'll be owned by other lords who don't liberate, who will try to convince us that they're appealing to our autonomy, but they're actually making a surrender to them as our lords, the market, you know, oh, you can have whatever you want. You could, you know, you're in the driver's seat. Really? When they, you know, Google has all my information and I have all algorithms that tell people what to mail me, I don't think that I'm really as autonomous.

as I am a prisoner of my own choices. Yeah. It's so well said. And to me, it's maybe for viewers, we could encourage them. Maybe people watching this video who themselves are kind of uncertain about some of these things, we can encourage them that there's a happy refreshment and freedom and release in the sheer otherness of God. The fact that I'm not God is really good news. It means I don't have to be my own savior.

Right. And, you know, in my own life, I think about, Ty, as a Christian, there's things about Christianity. I never would have made up. And for years, I struggled with, the doctrine of hell, the doctrine of the Trinity. There's so much about our faith that involves my submission, because I'm saying, if I believe in Christ, so I'm just going to submit to these things, which are part of this religion. And to me, that's like any authentic relationship. So I would encourage people if they, you know, think of relationships in your life.

if you never submit to someone when you don't unless you already agree, then it's not a real relationship. And it seems as though our relationship to truth is the same. And it's a happy thing that we have a God who is able to correct us and call us out of ourselves, out of our inclinations, out of our ways of thinking. And maybe that's something you could comment on two here to finish is several times in the book.

I think it was the last chapter on, and I don't actually know how to pronounce his name. He's the early medieval theologian, John, is it Ariagina? Yeah, some say Irrigina. I say Irrigina, but yeah. He's one of those guys I read about more than I talk about, so I don't actually know how to pronounce that. Right, no, exactly.

You had a chapter on him, and this came up that basically the creator creation distinction and how at the nerve center that is for how we need to respond to spiritual but not religious mentalities. And I think it'd be helpful to hear you talk a little more about that if you're willing to do that. Sure, but first of all, you really put your finger on it, Gavin, when you pointed out

that there is a real joy in having a God outside of you, who, of course, sends his spirit to endwell us. So it's not, you get that that in the bargain. But a God who comes to us from outside of us, my good friend, the late Rod Rosenblot used to say, turning inside ourselves, going deeper into ourselves

is like a minor. The deeper he goes, the dirtier he gets. We think the deeper we go, the cleaner it gets. Well, deep down, I'm a good person. No, deep down, you're worse than your behavior. My heart has done things. My hands haven't gotten around to yet. So I'm the problem. That little whatever is beeping and shining inside me, that thing is the problem, not the solution. And so we're really giving people the gospel when we tell them there's a God outside of us who created us and redeemed run outside of yourself. Don't go deeper into yourself. Run outside of yourself and cling to him. That's really great news. And yeah, Origina definitely a ninth century theologian set the course for a lot of the radical mysticism, which is also philosophical in the Middle Ages that was on the edges. He was declared a heretic. He was declared a heretic. He was declared.

a Pelagian and a pantheist. And indeed he was both. And so good on the church for recognizing that. But he lived on the edges. See, all these guys, they live on the edges of traditional Christianity in monasteries, mainly. And they're fine living on the edges. And like the shaman was.

in, you know, the Bronze Age. But they, they, in living on the edge, you get people who kind of leave the mainstream and take some classes with them, hang out with them, and become part of their sect. He's one of them, one of the very important figures contributed to a very long tradition of, Gnosticism and radical Neoplatonism in the Middle Ages.

Yeah, and maybe building from that final question would be, as we think about responding to the panoply of spirituality is out there right now, many of which would be well described by this phrase, spiritual but not religious, and it's very vague. But you talk about in the book, the creator creation distinction as a key part of how we respond to that as followers of Christ. And one of the things we've got into here is just the fact that you have a God outside you who loves you. I mean, here's something I'd love to encourage our viewers with. Think about this, that the God who's outside of you is not just a concoction of yours or something flowing in and out of you, but he's other than you loves you. Well, that's a

happy thought. To be loved by, if God is just, you know, within, then the doctrine of the love of God will land upon you in a very different way. So that's the kind of thing I'm thinking of right now, but let me give you a chance to develop this a little bit. How is the creator creation distinction in a Christian worldview? How does that help us as we respond to these forms of spirituality we're seeing in our world right now? Yeah, well, you just said it.

I think you could go through how it affects our doctrine of creation, how it affects our understanding of sin, how it affects our view of Christ and redemption. Look, a Christ in me cannot save me. I can't be saved apart from the work of Christ by His Spirit within me. But that alone, a Christ who, you know, the theologian Rudolph Boltman said, the Jesus of history is of no matter to me. It's the Christ that I encounter in,

the here and now, that kind of approach. Look, if you're only worshiping a Christ within you or your own spirit, confusing your own spirit with the Holy Spirit, then you can't be saved. The whole point of being saved is that you're rescued by somebody else. and and just, you know, underscoring your point, it's good to be rescued when you are, can't help yourself. You can't save yourself. And what a burden it is to put on people to create themselves and save themselves. And that's exactly what you have to do when you're your own God.

That's a, that's a, that's a burden. And I venture to say, we're, pretty much failures at that have been ever since Adam and Eve tried to pull it off. We're not very good at being gods. We're not even very good at being humans. So that's the bad news that underscores the beauty and wonder of the good news. Why would a God who created us in his image and watches us try to become him? and take his place so love us that he gives his only begotten son to save us from that from that autonomy from that raging rebellion what a good what a good god we have no what a good

god has us yeah well that's a great note to finish on and and we can just leave that for an encouragement. That's a good, it's always wonderful when we're reflecting upon evangelism, but we're also able to, what this often happens to me, I'm able to apply it to my own life in the process because, of course, these problems in our culture, we are not immune from as followers of Christ. So as we think about this, it's a reminder to for myself, to submit myself wholly to the God who is other than me. And it's, it's the bad news, just as you said, the bad news and then the good news. The bad news is, I am accountable and guilty before, accountable to and guilty before the God who is other. But the good news is, he's acted in mercy. And so I don't need to experience

him as a threat as I come in penitence because of the work of Christ. And so we can encourage our viewers with that. Dr. Hardin, thank you for the time. It's a fantastic book. People can check it out in the video description to get a link to it and see where they can buy it. Is there anything else you want to leave us with in terms of where to find the book, other things you're working on, any final words you'd like to share? Nothing I can think of, Gavin. I really appreciate you having me on. And again, your work is such an encouragement.

I guess people can get it on Amazon. It comes out, well, it should be out, you know, fairly soon now. And then the other volume will be out a year from now. and then following year, the third one. Fantastic. Okay, so for viewers, check out the video description. There'll be a link to the book and then keep your eyes peeled for future years

for the subsequent volume. So thanks for watching, everybody, and we'll see you next time.