Truth Unites - Rainn Wilson's Religious Views Are Fascinating

Episode Date: December 16, 2024

Gavin Ortlund discusses Rainn Wilson's recent comments about religion and the Baháʼí Faith in his interview with Alex O'Connor. Rainn's book: https://www.amazon.com/Soul-Boom-Need-Spiritual-Revolution/dp/0306828278 The original interview: https://youtu.be/0LWEeaSFhP4?si=jlZI10XSoZ_EgS7W 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: Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/truth.unites/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/gavinortlund Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/TruthUnitesPage/ Website: https://truthunites.org/

Rain Wilson recently wrote a book called Soul Boom, Why We Need a Spiritual Revolution. Fascinating book. Check it out. I'll put a link in the video description. And he was talking about this recently on Alex O'Connor's podcast. And I love listening to him. Part of that is Dwight Shrut is my favorite character from the TV show The Office. My friends know that. And so sometimes people, I don't buy stuff, but people will send me stuff or buy me stuff. So I have a Dwight Shrewt mug that I keep my pens in here on my desk. And I had, this is a true story, I had a Dwight Shrewd bobblehead. And it was on my bookshelf in Ohio, California, where we used to live. There was an earthquake in Ohio. The one thing that was damaged in my office was the bobblehead.

His head just completely fell off from the jolt of the earthquake. So Esther and I joke and quote Michael Scott where he says his capa got detated from his head. And I'll have my favorite droid shrewd quote at the end of this video. If you're not fan of the office, stick around for that. If you don't know what the office is, I realize that now I'm getting older. Some people, but most people know that. TV show. Anyways, if you clicked on this video, you probably do. Let me start by just saying how much I appreciate this discussion that these two had, Alex and Rain and especially, you know, there's so much I could say about my admiration of Rain Wilson and how he approaches these questions, his sincerity,

his vulnerability. One thing that's very clear is he's seeking to speak respectfully of other people. I admired that so much. I also appreciated his answer to the question of why he's not an atheist. Essentially, there was something that just didn't make sense about it. It just as a try as I might, and I tried for years to just embrace the fact that there was just stuff. There's just stuff. There's 11 billion years ago. There was something the smaller than the head of a pin. And then there's a universe and there's, you know, billions of galaxies, and there's physical laws and there's chemistry. And then for some reason, creatures are born out of chemistry and chemistry becomes biology.

No one knows why. It's just like, oh, it maybe came from an, you know, an asteroid or a, yeah, lightning hit the ocean and created paramecium. And it's like, okay. Sure. And try as I might at that time in my early mid-20s, I just couldn't, it just didn't make sense to me. And I don't even mean like philosophically. I mean like just on a gawking emotional level.

What I hear him saying there is that there's something about atheism that just didn't make sense to him, not just intellectually, but intuitively. And I know what he means. I feel the same. I also just appreciate the sense of respect for religion that came out in this discussion. In some ways, it feels like this is a sign of the times, like the new atheism is kind of passe, and people are just more interested. I have said this many times. I think the world is better when religious people and irreligious people can speak to each other

without any scorn, but even with compassion in the best cases. But I also think we need to talk and engage and work through our differences and be able to talk through and so forth. I thought Alex also made a great point about the unavoidability of religious questions. We are spiritual beings in the bodies of, you know, pasty monkey boys. And we're, and we've got 80, 90, 100 years in this physical realm. To me, it just makes total sense. But, you know, I don't know. There's a, what do I know?

There's an analogy. I'm just a sitcom actor. I think if this interview can prove anything, it's that that is not the case. What's that? That you were just a sitcom actor. I think people are... Well, I hope people will be pleasantly surprised if they didn't realize that you've sort of taken this spiritual arc

and have been talking about this. Like you say, I think that no matter where you are, no matter what you do, at some point you get confronted with these questions. The matter where you are, no matter what you do, at some point, you will get hit with these questions. I think that's true. Blaise Pascal, the philosopher, used to say that there are two big questions to life, meaning and death. What are we doing here? What happens when it's over? And if you stop and think about it,

it really is true that those questions are about as important as it gets. But here let me articulate some, if I ever had the immense privilege of talking with Rain about these things, two of the areas where I'd be asking him questions or giving some pushback. And if he ever watches this, I hope he'll feel treated with respect and with love and affection in how I unfold my comments here. So Rain talks a lot about the oneness of religion. This is one of the tenets of the Baha'i faith. I'm not an expert on the Baha'i faith, but I've read enough to know some of the basics. And the Baha'i faith emphasizes the oneness of religion along with the oneness of God and the

oneness of humanity. And so at, I'll quote here from Baha'i.us, you can go and read this. It's talking about this idea of this sort of, it's basically a kind of pluralism, where you have a progressive revelation through these different religions, a kind of successive unfolding of religious truth through Jesus and Buddha and Muhammad and Moses and Zoroaster and so forth mentions here, the Bob and the Bahua'u Allah, who are 19th century figures who are pivotal in kind of the founding of the Baha'i faith. So the metaphor that comes up throughout the interview with Alex is an iPhone having different upgrades. And this is a metaphor for the different religions of the world.

This religion, because it's really just one religion, it's a being updated religion. When you say one religion, you mean all the world religions? All the world religions essentially are one. There's different. You can, we can get into it and you say, well, Buddhism doesn't have a conception of God. And in Islam, it's all about God. and how can you rectify those two differences, but that this ever updating,

it's like an operating system on your phone. It's like when you get, you know, the iPhone 11.3 and the, you know, Mountain Sierra update or whatever. It's building on the previous updates. And it's not wiping the phone and putting a whole new update in there. So the Baha'i Faith views itself as a continuation of, of this, what Bahá'u'llah calls the changeless faith of God, eternal in the past, eternal in the future.

So two observations I want to throw out on the table here. First, exclusivity, and second, the law of non-contradiction. First, it seems to me that whether the oneness of religion is right or wrong, it's just as ambitious as traditional religious claims. And I think it's important to point out because it can sound very liberal and accommodating to say, look, all these religions have some truth to them. But at the end of the day, if you think about it, it's still advocating for one highly specific portrait of reality that excludes the alternatives. Tim Keller used to say it's no more narrow to claim that one religion is the right one than to claim

that your one way to think about all religions is the right one. And that seems right to me. Like if you were to take some of these figures, Buddha, Jesus, Muhammad, they did not think of themselves as offering merely one iteration in the same religion, like upgrades to the iPhone. So this perspective, the oneness of religion, is partly affirming them, but it's also partly correcting all of them. And the result of that, the reason for that is these religions do make exclusive claims. And we could point this out in various cases, but since I know my own religion, which is Christianity the best, let me document it from this religion in the early church. So Rain talks a lot about the early church, and he praises the early Christians for their inclusivity.

He says Christianity was originally about peace, love, and unity. He says it's the first big tent movement in human history, and then it sort of fell away from that later. For the first two, three hundred years of Christianity, Christianity was all about peace, love, and unity, accepting everyone and everyone going to the same place, right? So it was, in fact, I think the first big tent experiment in human history. And I think it's not often respected as that. But if you are walking around the earth at 200, 250 AD, whether you were a slave, whether a woman or a man, whether you were a centurion, whether you were a, you know, a Pharisee or a Samaritan or an Egyptian or whatever, you were welcomed to a church service where you accepted Jesus Christ as you. your Savior and you believed in the glory of the Father and that your sins would be washed away, and everyone was welcomed. That changed over the next centuries in a lot of different ways. Now, it's true that Christians were radically inclusive in the sense of welcoming everybody,

but they were also exclusivists in insisting on the worship of Jesus alone. They said, Jesus is Lord. And for that, they were literally crucified, burned alive, fed to wild animals, and so forth. So they would not have been down with the iPhone upgrade metaphor. Okay, they were saying, Jesus is the Lord, and we worship no one else. Let me just give an example of this, because I think of it make it a little more concrete and clear what I'm trying to say here. The early Christian polycarp, one of my great heroes, he's a second generation Christian right after the apostles. So, you know, he was born around 70 AD, and he's reported to have been a disciple of John. he was killed for his faith, according to the martyrdom of polycarp, he was burned at the stake and then stabbed,

and the reason is he insisted on worshipping Jesus only. He wouldn't burn incense for the Roman emperor. And the rationale is Jesus alone is the Lord. When he was enjoined to reproach Christ, he's reported to have said, 80 and six years have I served him and he never did me any injury. How could I blaspheme my king and my savior? So it's not this, early Christianity was not just one iteration among others of a kind of movement about peace and love and so forth. It was a very specific movement with a very specific truth claim about the nature of reality and the nature of religious truth. And that is Jesus is the Lord. And this claim goes back to Jesus himself. I mean, many of us will have heard this passage from

John 14 quoted, but it really is amazing if you stop and just let it wash over you afresh. Jesus is saying, I am, listen to these three things. I am the way, I am the truth, and I am the life. No one comes to the Father, but through me. And of course, that's one example, but this is all throughout the Gospels. Jesus is saying, you know, I'm the light of the world. I'm the bread of life. I'm the resurrection and the life and so forth. So the point here thus far is, I'm just trying to say this, that the oneness of religion idea is going against that strong. of teaching in early Christianity, and therefore it's at the very least an equally ambitious claim. In other words, saying Jesus as one teacher among others is an exclusive claim

set over and against alternatives, just like saying Jesus' Lord is an exclusive claim. So I'm just trying to kind of even the playing field right out of the gate here. The second observation I would make is about the law of non-contradiction. And this arose for me when I was listening to Rain, talk about his heart for the state of the world right now. The world is falling to shit right now, and we need to make the world a better place. And I don't give up what you believe. Like, are you a part of the problem or a part of the solution?

And the solution is banding together and creating community and creating deeper compassion and educating ever deeper and seeking healing and peace and truth and love. And if you do that without a conception of anything beyond the mere material, you know, God bless you. God bless you, kiddies. But, and if you're a born-again Christian and you, you know, you speak in tongues and you're still doing it, great. God bless you, too. Like, we need people to band together.

Now, I share concerns about the state of the world right now. And what I appreciate from Rain's perspective is the desire to speak respectfully, cooperate where we can and so forth. There's a lot there we can agree with. You know, Christians believe, and we as Christians do not always live up to our creed very well. We are very flawed in living out what we profess, or even sometimes understanding it. But Christians believe everybody is made in God's image, therefore everybody deserves respect, so we can learn from others. You know, we should have humility. C.S. Lewis used to say that when he was an atheist, he would, he kind of regarded all religion is just fundamentally a mistake, but when he became a Christian, he said, now I'm able to

learn a little better. I can see some truth in these other religions, but he also said being a Christian means where they differ, you think Christianity is right. And that's the important point that I want to emphasize is that there are these irreducible differences. And so humility, yes, but it's also okay to believe in one specific religion and just think it's right. And let me unfold that a little bit, try to explain that, why I don't think that's in any way. I mean, you might even just say it's sort of unavoidable because of how the differences are. This is the challenge for the oneness of religion perspective, it seems to me, is that the differences between religions are so fundamental. So, for example, at one point,

Rain is saying basically, I think we just saw this clip, he's saying, I don't care what you believe, are you a part of the problem or are you a part of the solution? But I would say that what we believe determines what we see as the problem and what we see is the solution. So Rain mentions these values, community, compassion, healing, peace, truth, and love. Unfortunately, not everybody shares those values. And where they are shared, or where there's at least a lot of overlap, there's huge differences about what they mean and how to achieve them. Because religions have these fundamental differences, even on the most basic questions like,

is there a God? Is there an afterlife? What's the problem in the world? What's the solution? What's the way to salvation and so forth? And these differences seem way bigger than just the differences between one upgrade of an iPhone to the next. And ultimately, it just seems like they can't all be right. I think that's a reasonable perspective to say, look, in the realm of physics, you have the law of non-contradiction. Something can't be both A and not A at the same time and in the same sense. So maybe the same holds for metaphysics as well. You know, with respect to Jesus, for example, the early Christians claim that he rose from the dead, for which they were willing to die.

He either did rise from the dead or he didn't, you know. And related to that, he either is the way the truth in the life or he isn't. And really, it comes down to that, because I would approach it in this way. I'd say, if he rose from the dead, then I'm just going to trust the other things he said. Here's another Keller quote, if Jesus rose from him. the dead, then you have to accept all that he said. If he didn't rise from the dead, why bother about any of what he said? And so I would say Jesus is unique. Setting aside what we just immediately want, you know, that insistent self that is our little caveman that wants to accrue more,

you know, figs and elk meat. Well, like you say, religion can do that too, which is why I'm interested as to whether you are pessimistic about the decline of traditional religion in America, in England the latest census, I think. Now, it's true that Jesus talked a lot about loving others, about care for the poor, about looking to the marginalized and so forth. There's this kind of idea all throughout the scripture about the first shall be last, the last shall be first. You think of Mary's Magnificat in Luke 1, her song of praise,

where she's talking about how, you know, what Jesus coming means the outsiders are lifted up, the lowly are raised up, and so forth. But the main message of Christianity is unique. Jesus's main message is absolutely unique because it is not about what we should do, whether in a Marxist vision or any other. It's about himself. It's about what he came to do. Jesus said, I'm here to save you. He basically said, to abstract from the gospels, I'm God, and there's good news, I'm here to save you.

I'll put up, I try to think of all the different verses I could cite. I'll put up John 6. What an amazing statement. and I won't even offer an interpretation of this. Just think about it. He's saying, I'm the living bread. If you eat me, you live forever. What does that mean?

Well, since I've quoted Keller twice, let me finish here with a final quote from Tim Keller. He says, every other religion and philosophy says you have to do something to connect to God. Christianity says, no, Jesus Christ came to do for you, what you couldn't do for yourself. I believe this with absolute love and respect for other people who don't agree with me. But this is what I base my whole life on. I believe this is just true.

You know, sometimes when you grow up, going to Sunday school and you hear something and later on you kind of outgrow it. This is something that I remember hearing as a child and I think this is just actually still quite true. That other religions tend to say here's the path to God and salvation, but Jesus says, I am God and salvation. This is the fundamental message of Christianity. It's not about something we do to love each other and better the world. That flows out. It's a fundamental kind of metaphysical claim, which is either true or false, namely that the God who made the world showed up in the person of Jesus to fix things. That's, and that's either true or it's not true, you know. And for anybody, so the metaphor,

to put it in the iPhone metaphor, it would be kind of like the part, I mean, it would be this exalted to, it'd be like the person who built the iPhone showing up and saying, hey, I built this, let me show you how I designed it, which is the best upgrade and so forth. That seems to flow out of the exalted claims of Christ, whether in John 6 or elsewhere. And my challenge for anybody who is exploring these things is to read the Gospels and let Jesus speak for himself. I'm basing my eternal destiny on this. So I'll put it this boldly to say, there's nobody like Jesus. He makes claims that are absolutely fundamentally unique, and they're either right or they're wrong. And that's why I'm not a pluralist. I kind of appreciate some aspects.

that and as I'm listening to Rain Talk, I think, bye, I ever like this guy. God bless him. But ultimately, I think Jesus is either right or wrong, and he either rose from the dead or he didn't. So I put this out there in a spirit of hope, here's my thoughts, healthy engagement is good, hope this is interesting and maybe helpful to people. My encouragement is if people are seeking the truth about these, read the gospels, and my encouragement is always, just pray and ask, say, God, if you're real, show yourself to me. You know, if that's the great comfort we have in exploring religion is sort of a dynamic. process because it's not just up to you to figure it out. It's kind of the whole point.

God is searching for us. Way more than we're searching for him. All right, that's the end. Here's lightning the mood here. Deutsch Rout. I'll give two quotes because I have, here's the runner-up. Nostalgia is truly one of the greatest human weaknesses second only to the neck. And here's my all-time favorite. I never smile if I can help it. Showing one's teeth is a submission signal in primates. When someone smiles at me, all I see is a chimpanzee begging for its All right, thanks for watching everybody. Let me know what you think in the comments.