Truth Unites - Should Evangelicalism Be Deconstructed?

Episode Date: November 6, 2022

In this talk at the 2022 Center for Pastor Theologians Conference, Gavin  Ortlund shares what church history can teach us about reconstructing  evangelicalism.    The Center for Pastor Theologians exists to equip pastors to be  theologians for today’s complex world.  Check out the work they are  doing: https://www.pastortheologians.com/vision-mission   Link to the sessions for the entire conference: https://centerforpastortheologians.vhx.tv/products/reconstructing-evangelicalism   Link to the original video: https://centerforpastortheologians.vhx.tv/packages/reconstructing-evangelicalism/videos/session-1-gavin-ortlund-1 Truth Unites is a mixture of apologetics and theology, with an irenic focus. Gavin Ortlund (PhD, Fuller Theological Seminary) serves as senior pastor of First Baptist Church of Ojai. SUPPORT: Become a patron: https://www.patreon.com/truthunites One time donation: https://www.paypal.com/paypalme/truthunites FOLLOW: Twitter: https://twitter.com/gavinortlund Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/TruthUnitesPage/ Website: https://gavinortlund.com/

It is my honor to introduce our first plenary speaker this evening, the Reverend Dr. Gavin Orland. Gavin is the senior pastor of First Baptist Church in Ohio, California. He holds a Ph.D. from Fuller Theological Seminary. He's written widely on matters of church history and the life of the church. His most recent book is entitled Theological Retrieble for Evangelicals, published by Crossway in 2019. Gavin is a CPT fellow, and he's a member of our St. Basil Fellowship,

and I've gotten to know him in that capacity in my role here as a CPT chair. And I think it's fair to say that Gavin is quite possibly one of the most amicable and charitable people that I have met. And Gavin, I don't know what your aneagram number is. Maybe you don't know, but I'm betting it's a nine. Oh, it's a four? Well, you've just got some nine vibes going on, I feel like so. Well, Gavin sent me his paper ahead of time, and in his paper, he argues that evangelicals must have a posture of even-handedness and sympathy as we consider this task of reconstruction. And I won't try to give you Gavin's paper.

That's why he's here. But I'm happy to say that what Gavin argues for in his paper, he is in his person. So please join me in welcoming the Reverend Dr. Gavin Orland. So honored to be here, and I'm excited for the next few minutes that we have. My prayer and my hope is that the Lord would use this time truly to serve the church and to serve his purposes. If that's a desire of your heart as well, just as I'm talking to say a silent prayer for this time that God would be with us. Now, as Gerald mentioned, what I'd like to propose is that church history should induce us toward even-hand.

and sympathy in the task of reconstruction. What does that mean? Well, let me start with an illustration, and one of the things that I've learned as a preacher is that it is very risky to ever reference any modern-day politician for any reason whatsoever, but I'm going to do so anyway, and I would just ask that you bear with me here

and understanding the point of this is not about politics per se. The point of this is to make a more basic human, and sociological point that will hopefully crack open this idea of reconstruction. What is reconstruction? In March of 2008, during his presidential campaign, Barack Obama gave a speech entitled A More Perfect Union. Many of you will remember this. This was in the context of responding to concerns about controversial remarks made by his

pastor, Jeremiah Wright. And I will never forget reading through Obama's presidential memoirs where he's describing the intensity of the behind-the-scenes process for a few days leading up to that speech. And at that time, it seemed as though this whole episode might tank his campaign. And he writes in his memoirs that there are moments in politics as in life when the only option is to steal yourself and go for broke. And I love the courage of that. And he talks about staying up till 3 a.m. the night before, tweaking the speech, last-minute

adjustments. And the thinking is, we might lose the election for this, but at least I'll be saying what I really believe in my heart. In his speech, Obama condemned Reverend Wright's statements, but not his person. It was me. I'm sorry. That was the best part of my speech, and you missed it. Oh, well. I'll just back up. He emphasized the complexity of our racial heritage as a nation, and that we cannot simply dismiss the anger reflected in his remarks. Without condoning it, we need to understand. it in order to make progress. And then he said these words,

these people are a part of me, and they are a part of America, this country that I love. I read that about six months ago, and immediately I started thinking about this talk at this conference. One reason the speech was so effective is that Obama's critique of right

was intermingled with a sense of even-handedness and sympathy. It was less like dropping a bomb and more like a careful surgery. Okay, what is the point of this illustration? Here toward the beginning of this conference, I would like to propose that in the task of deconstruction and reconstruction, for evangelicalism or for anything, we need even-handedness and sympathy. Just as if you are counseling a friend who is struggling with depression or an addiction,

you're not well positioned to help them unless you have some level of sympathy for them. So also, when we are talking about an entire tradition, we are not a very tradition. best positioned to help if we have no sympathy for the tradition. Sympathy does not mean condoning evil. Sympathy means understanding, carefulness, and love. And without sympathy, what happens, I fear, is that we often get stuck in deconstruction. Deconstruction is so important. It's also possible to glide over the deconstruction process too glibly. But another danger is deconstruction. can become an end of itself, and we can never get beyond it into reconstruction. I believe the gospel calls us to do more than just deconstruction.

I believe it calls us toward the task, however painful and vulnerable, of reconstruction. Otherwise, it's like when you take your car to the mechanic and he takes it apart, but he doesn't put it back together again, and you can't drive. Or if you go to the doctor and he gives you a brilliant diagnosis but doesn't give you any medicine, and then you're still sick. Well, the gospel calls us to reconstruction, to move forward in the healing of Jesus. To go through deconstruction into reconstruction, I hope I said that right, through deconstruction into reconstruction, we need, I propose, even-handedness and sympathy.

And that is not easy. Probably we already feel the pressures of polarization swirling around us in our culture that pull us away from even-handedness and sympathy and toward outrage and hatred and tribalism and so forth. So how do we do this? Well, I'm going to be sharing a bit from my own life in this talk which would be very vulnerable, putting my heart out onto the table, what I want to give my life to in terms of serving the Church of Jesus Christ.

But one of the powerful tools that we have is church history. Church history will enable us to see the dynamics of the present moment in a larger context. And it will remind us that actually what we are going through in some sense is an ancient and perennial task of the Christian Church, deconstruction, reconstruction. In some respects, this is part of the very pattern of the life of the gospel in our hearts and in our corporate life. So I'll be brief so we have time for interaction.

I'll go as quickly as I can, but I've worked really hard on this and just invite you to pray for me and enter into this with me. I'd like to propose church history can teach us two things. first about the nature of reconstruction, that is how we reconstruct, and second about the goal of reconstruction, that is what we reconstruct. First, the nature of reconstruction. One of the most striking and sobering facts of all church history is that there is always a poignant, and I'll say even a painful mixture of both good and bad.

And therefore a perennial temptation for us will be to focus on one to the neglect of the other. We can focus on the good to the neglect of the bad, leading to an unhealthy idealism, or we can focus on the bad to the neglect of the good, leading to an unhealthy cynicism. Truthfulness requires us to hold the good and the bad in tension with each other rather than to play them off of each other. In other words, it requires even-handedness and sympathy. So let me give a few examples. Let's consider first the relation of the church to political power.

One of my current areas of academic research is on the Christianization of Scandinavia in the 10th and 11th centuries. Now, the common way of telling this story in the literature is that it's all politics. All empire building and calculated moves for control and for power. Basically, a king wants to consolidate power. Getting baptized will do that. It will enable him to strengthen various foreign alliances and remove enemies from power and replace them from Christians at home and so on and so forth. and so the king gets baptized and voila, now you have a Christian nation. And a lot of my work in this area has been to try to suggest that there's a lot of truth to that,

but it's not the whole story. And I'm working through a medieval text to show how many waves of missionaries and martyrs traveled from places like Germany and England into Denmark, Sweden, and Norway for several centuries, about 400 years. And I just, you know, this is the Vikings. I always, I won't go into details because I always get choked up in talking about persecution and martyrdom and things like that. And when we pray for the persecuted church, it's for some reason deeply stings in the soul. But the Vikings were pretty cruel.

And the nature of the martyrdom is just brutal. So it was very emotional for me to discover this, sort of a forgotten story and the bravery of some of these Christians who sailed up to preach the gospel to the Vikings and the things they did. It's amazing. And so here's the danger that we might have is we will be tempted to play one of these dynamics to the neglect of the other. So one person will say it wasn't the martyrs, it was politics. It was all politics. And then the next person might say, no, no, no, no, it wasn't politics. It was the martyrs.

That's what really made the difference. And that could be a temptation for me in trying to bring a corrective, right? And here's the simple truth that is so painful to consider and difficult is that it was both. there were martyrs and there was political power grabbing and they both played a role in the Christianization of Scandinavia and so it's really hard to hold those two intention okay here's another example let's consider the early church's posture toward issues of social justice on the one hand we're going to feel pretty buried and overwhelmed with grief pretty quickly as we start to survey this because we're going to come to terms with the painful sin

that is in our Christian heritage. Consider, for example, perhaps the two greatest pre-modern Christian theologians, Augustine of Hippo and Thomas Aquinas. I consider both of these men to be sort of theological father figures for myself, and with Augustine, a kind of spiritual father as well. I love them. I'm eager. I'm frequently find myself seeking to defend them from criticism, from different angles, sometimes secular critique, sometimes conservative evangelical critique, but I have to admit that their positions on social issues are disappointing and sometimes disturbing. For example, these two great theologians

maintained that men and women did not constitute the image of God equally, and they flesh that out in all kinds of unwholesome and unedifying ways. And I've got some footnotes here with some quotes about that. We can talk more about that, and this is a tragic part of our heritage that we have to come to terms with. and again the temptation will be, we don't want to downplay this or shortchange this. This is wrong.

Or consider their views on slavery. They maintained that the institution of slavery was the result of the fall, and they opposed its worst abuses and crimes, especially Augustine. But they also maintained that slavery had utility in the current state of the world in maintaining social order,

and so the institution of slavery as such should be tolerated as a kind of punishment on the world. Now, their views are very complicated. I'm not trying to glide over. There's lots of more things to nuance about that. But I think that's a broadly fair summary of the main strokes of their thought on that. If you want to quibble with the details of that, if that's an area of research for you, we can talk about that.

But suffice to say that we don't find the kind of abolitionism that we might hope to find in them or in much of the pre-modern Christian tradition. So the question then arises, and this is a deep burden on my heart, and thinking about reconstructing evangelicalism, Many of the voices that seem to put all of the focus on deconstructing evangelicalism, I worry, could be turned toward Christianity wholesale. The question comes up, should we consider these as father-like figures, just as some of us might ask, should we reconstruct evangelicalism?

Well, here as elsewhere, I propose that carefulness, even-handedness, sympathy will be repaid. There's more to the story. Just like in Scandinavia, you have to look a little harder and dig around to find the because the martyrs are less visible than the politics, so in early Christian history, there are other social postures that are perhaps less visible. For example, if we look over to the east, we find Gregory of Nisa.

And I've done some work in Gregory's fourth homily that he preached in the year 379 AD during Lent, which one historian has called the most scathing critique of slaveholding in all of antiquity. Gregory starts off the sermon by asking, I love his fire. I just wish I often thought I wish I could have heard the sermon live. He starts off saying, can you even imagine the arrogance of one person thinking I can own another person? And he builds this powerful argument against slavery on grounds of natural law,

the image of God, human equality, and the gospel itself. What made Gregory's sermon so prophetic is that he wasn't merely saying that it's unjust to mistreat a slave. He was saying slavery as an institution is always and necessarily unjust. And the fact is that that was rather rare in antiquity. I'm not aware of anything like Gregory's sermon in antiquity myself. So here again we face a temptation that will arise for us. And that could be on the one hand, we might look at Augustine and Aquinas and say,

the early church is nothing but bad when it comes to slavery. They failed to oppose slavery as they ought. Or another person could look at Gregory and say, well, the early church led the charge in opposing slavery. Gregory was saying things before others were saying them in the broader culture. And again, the truth is it's more complicated. We have to hold the two in tension, and therefore we need a sense of even-handedness and sympathy. There are many other examples of this that we could give.

We've looked at politics, social issues. We could look at other examples. We could look at the tragic capitulation of many churches in Germany in the 1930s to Nazi power. And yet we can also, if you dig deeper, you do see those prophetic voices like Martin Neemolar and Dietrich Bonhofer that God raised up. And once again, for the historian, there will be this temptation to play the one against the other rather than to hold the two intention. We could also consider in Holy Scripture some of the characters we come across, King David.

One man can say, one person will say, King David sinned grievously with Bathsheba and Yariah, therefore he will be. was not a man after God's own heart. Another person will come along and say, no, he was a man after God's own heart. Therefore, this sin wasn't as bad as you're saying. The truth is, it's both. The sin is terrible, but he's called by scripture, a man after God's own heart who wrote a big chunk of our book of Psalms. What does this have to do with reconstructing evangelicalism? I would like to propose and humbly submit this to you all for your consideration, for us to think and pray about together that the same dynamics play out in evangelicalism today. There is a mixture of good and bad,

and we have to hold the two in tension as we consider the task of reconstruction. If we focus on the good to the neglect of the bad, we will end up minimizing evil. And that is a real problem. There are real sins within evangelicalism. And if we want to know how wrong that is, and it helps us to not rush past this, it's just imagine a time in your life when you've been mistreated grievously, and then someone comes along and minimizes that. We don't want to do that. On the other hand, if we focus on the bad to the neglect of the good, we may end up rejecting or marginalizing some of the work of the Holy Spirit.

It often strikes me, and this is something I've brought up in my debates with some of the non- Protestant traditions, that the context for Jesus' warning about blasphemy against the Holy Spirit is rebuking the Pharisees for failing to discern an exorcism. He's saying, look, Satan doesn't cast out demons, and therefore, I am holding you accountable to see the finger of God working among you. And that's a passage that really grips me. Wherever the Holy Spirit is at work, I want to champion that, discern that for what it is,

celebrate that, move toward that in my heart. And that there is a lot of good fruit from the Holy Spirit within the evangelical movement. So, again, not trying to be on this drum too much, but we need even-handedness and sympathy as we work through this painful and difficult process of reconstruction. Now, let me address three objections very quickly. Some of these might have come up in your mind already. The first objection is this. If you call for even-handedness and sympathy, this will lead to compromise.

For example, it might cause us to minimize or rationalize evil. something terrible happens, and then someone wants to come along and say, well, we need to be even-handed about this. And that's both wrong, and it's also just obnoxious, if you've ever been through something terrible, right? And I would like to say that that is a legitimate concern. People have this concern with Obama's attitude toward Reverend Wright, and Obama did eventually distance himself more fully from Reverend Wright. So let us make a crucial distinction here that's come up a little bit already. We are not saying that in In evangelicalism there is good and bad, therefore adopt a neutral posture toward the whole.

Rather, we are saying, in evangelicalism, there is both good and bad, therefore distinguish between the two, with as much razor-sharp clarity as you can, so that we can be 100% for the good and 100% against the bad. Put otherwise, even-handedness and sympathy does not mean downplaying the bad in relation to the good. distinguishing the bad from the good. And therefore, done rightly, that is not compromised. That is simply accuracy. Okay, that also touches on a second objection that comes from the opposite direction, and that is that to open the acknowledge bad in church history or in evangelicalism specifically means we are slandering the church. This is something I've discovered you can be accused of on Twitter. Big surprise, I know.

If you speak against the sins of the church, you will have a lot of people telling you you are smearing the reputation of Christ's bride, you are slandering the church and so forth. However, slander involves false accusation. The goal of even-handedness and sympathy is simply the truth. And the truth is there is sin and dysfunction in the church. And we want to acknowledge that sin so that it may be healed, restored, repented of again. My deepest heart and everything else I'm saying is nothing other than this,

that the gospel of Jesus Christ calls us to the task of reconstruction. It's put very well on the website promoting this conference. As people of the resurrection were called to engage in the work of rehabilitation, healing, reconstruction, etc. Well, that healing cannot happen without open acknowledgement. Okay, here's a third objection real quickly. Some people will say, well, there isn't always a mixture of good. and bad. Sometimes it's just bad. Or it's like 99% bad. And that's true. Some particular

situations could be so toxic, so abusive, so terrible, that even-handedness and sympathy is completely not the appropriate response. However, this tends to be the case when you're focusing on a more targeted specific reality, like one church or maybe even one region or tradition. evangelicalism has almost 500 million people and it's exploding in the global south so even-handedness and sympathy will become more and more important to the extent that we're talking about a very large and diverse target group okay now the point we've made thus far I realize is fairly simple

but I do believe it's important to remember right now in the midst of the swirling forces of escalation polarization that will direct us toward more totalizing judgments. And the basic point that we've made so far will now set us up for the larger and more complicated task of the goal of reconstruction. If there's both good and bad in evangelicalism, what is the good and what is the bad?

And how do we know? And that is a big question that we have the rest of the conference to explore, and for many of us we probably feel like we'll be taking the rest of our lives to keep working through that and continually revisiting those kinds of questions. But let me just make one brief and modest contribution here as we're kind of getting going in the conference. Once again, I believe that church history can help us. For Protestants, we do not look at church history as an infallible rule,

but we can consider it a powerful testimony that can help us disentangle the wheat from the chaff. It's just one voice. For example, church history will bring in pre-modern voices and non-Western voices, which are so important for us to hear. And these voices can help us make progress and make distinctions that can help us re-envision what is orthodoxy looked like as we move forward. So to make this point, let me share a bit about my own experiences of deconstruction.

And this will get back to church history. I grew up in a wonderful Christian home. I thank God every day for my family. I became a Christian at a young age, and I've never rejected faith in my life. Nor have I even really come that close, but I have been through a couple of seasons of great angst where I'm working through. Some of you know these feelings of anxiety

where you're working through those deep questions and it feels like the ground is kind of turning beneath your feet, and you're putting all your courage into it, seeking the truth and praying. The first season I had like that was in college and the second one was about maybe five or six or seven years ago, about that time, not having hard edges to the time frame even. As far as I can tell, the causes of this more recent season of angst were threefold.

First, intellectual questions related to questions of science. Second, disillusionment about the current political and cultural dynamics within many circles of American evangelicalism. Third, so many scandals in the church. And you know how that feels. Especially when it hurts you personally. you can get to a point where you just say, you know, what next? And that's really dark and really, really tough. I know some of you will know those feelings all too well.

During my own experience, I found tremendous refuge in apologetics. I went back, like Francis Schaefer during his season, I went back and did my homework and rebuilt from the ground up, and I landed really solidly in two foundational bedrock convictions that were helpful as rocks on which to do. further reconstruction. Number one, there are compelling reasons to believe in God, and number two, there are really compelling reasons to believe in the resurrection of Christ. And I came to feel that a naturalistic worldview is more arbitrary, less plausible, less interesting, and ultimately

dehumanizing. And I talk about that in my book, why God makes sense in a world that doesn't. The other source of refuge for me was church history. It was like opening the windows in spring cleaning and the fresh air and you think, ah, there's so much out here. And in the context of that, my working through things led me more firmly within Protestantism, and that's what a lot of I do on my

YouTube channel, giving reasons to be Protestant. But also, I landed back neither a fundamentalist nor a liberal. And so in what I think is one legitimate sense of the term, I became, in a sense, more committed to being an evangelical Christian.

Now I know that there's different meanings of that term, and that's why I think it's so important to define that, and that's what we're all working through here. At the same time, through that process, I became more open to consider with an open heart what needs to be disentangled from a healthy evangelical faith in terms of political, cultural, social, and also even doctrinal expressions of that in our context over recent years. And I have not figured all of that out. but let me share how church history has helped me in a couple of ways and how maybe it could help some of us. What helped me most on questions of creation and evolution, which I still have not fully figured out, is St. Augustine. Reading Augustine, you know, you just think this is perhaps the most influential Christian theologian in all of church history, and yet he wrote five commentaries on the book of Genesis, and he came to different positions in all of them. and you can feel, talk about angst, you can feel his angst.

And he's humble. And he says, I don't know about this. You know, he'll canvass a passage and he'll say, well, here's five ways you could interpret it. It could be one. Maybe it's two. I think it's three, but ultimately just go your own way and trust the Lord. It's like, amazing, you know. And I think what helped me so much is just his posture of humility to the questions

because what that does is it opens up breathing room for you to say, Ah, okay, there's space to struggle with this within classical Christianity. And for some reason, to correct evangelicalism specifically, growing up in evangelicalism, I had somehow imbibed this idea that the, there's sort of a, you know, the literalistic reading of Genesis is the classical Christian way to do it, and modern science has put pressure on that, so we need to adjust in response to modern science. And Augustine just shows that that's really not the case at all. He affirmed animal death before the fall. He was very patient at harmonizing scripture with what we call science. He was very far from a literalist, and I'll just stop there. I wrote a whole book on this, if you're interested in that.

But suffice to say, this is an example of where church history can induce even-handedness and sympathy in the task of deconstruction and reconstruction. It can be a testimony to help us reassess what is really central. Where maybe, as evangelicals, have we drawn boundaries? too narrowly. Sometimes evangelicalism has certain eccentricities where there's a doctrine that we assume as the normal, this is the safe view, but actually the view that we think of as safe as evangelicals was the very controversial one all throughout pre-modern times. Another example of this would be some aspects of the doctrine of last things or eschatology. Many evangelical Christians assume

as a kind of default dispensational pre-millennialism. And if you don't know what those, Those words mean just think of the Left Behind series. I've discovered as a pastor that I would have to say I think most street-level evangelicals are simply not aware that there are other views. And yet that view is extremely rare throughout all of church history. If you could send the Left Behind series book back in a time machine to the church fathers, they would be completely mystified. This would be new information for them.

So this is just an example. I'm not trying to make fun of that belief, but more just sort of induced reflection on this is one way the testimony of church history we will find very helpful, and some of us will find it like oxygen, say, oh, there's more room, you know, especially on some of these tertiary and secondary doctrines. However, and here will be my comments, which will be more on controversial matters,

and so I just would offer these in a spirit of love, and I'm open to your pushback, okay? But, well, this first one isn't that controversial. Church history can work in the other way. It can help us say, no, you've set the boundaries too broadly. And one example of this would be the sacraments and our doctrine of the church. I would wager that one way that evangelicalism tends to be different from prior church history is we tend to have a lower view of the sacraments, a lower view of liturgy, a lower view of doctrine of the church.

And so as we think about, what does it look like to work at the task? of reconstruction, what does a healthier evangelicalism look like in the 21st century, if we are successful, what do we hope to see? I would propose, just to give a specific example. One thing is, we might hope our worship services will have less of an entertainment feel that they can sometimes have. We'll have greater liturgical depth, like the wonderful worship we had this evening, which was so intentional, a greater aesthetic sensitivity, a richer sacramental theology in practice, and so forth. That's one example. Okay, let me give another example. that will touch on matters that are a bit more controversial.

And that would be our understanding of sexuality, gender, and marriage. The room gets very quiet when I say that, doesn't it? Again, I said, pray for me. Some feel, increasingly, especially among the younger generation, that in order to reconstruct evangelicalism, we must adopt a more inclusive posture toward non-traditional views of marriage, for example, sexuality. Here, the testimony of church history would offer cause.

I believe. When it comes to the doctrine of creation or end times, we are noting differences between evangelical theology and classical mainstream Christianity. But, for example, the definition of marriage is between one man and one woman is not an evangelical distinctive or eccentricity. It's virtually universal throughout the non-Western church, the pre-modern church, and the non-Protestant churches like Roman Catholicism, Eastern Orthodoxy, Oriental Orthodoxy, the Assyrian Church of the East, the old Catholic churches, etc. So a change in an area like this would be less about reconstructing evangelical churches and more about reconstructing the entire global historic Christian church. And I'm very jealous to defend evangelicalism from unfair criticisms that attack it for things that

it actually holds in common with classical mainstream Christianity. Related to this, there are many criticisms of evangelicalism for promoting a hyper-masculine and sexist culture. As one who is open to consider where there is truth to this, I also think we need to be careful in the process, again, even-handedness and sympathy. Some of these criticisms could apply equally or more so to the entire pre-modern Christian world, and to the non-Western Christian world to a large degree, and to the non-evangelical Christian world. For example, it has become common in many circles to associate the term complementarianism with abusive cultures in evangelicalism. Again, let's be open to consider. Where do we need to repent? At the same time,

let's not go too far. Someone said that the history, all of human history is a series of overcorrections. The basic idea that the higher office in the church of teaching and leadership, whether it's called priest or pastor, presbyter, bishop, elder, etc., is restricted to men, is character. It's characteristic of non-Western, non-white evangelicalism more than Western white evangelicalism. It's also characteristic of the Roman Catholic Church, the Eastern Orthodox, as we say, the Oriental Orthodox, the Assyrian Church of the East, etc. It's also characteristic of virtually all pre-modern Christianity to my awareness. If we value the insights and perspectives of our non-white, non-Western, pre-modern,

and non-protestant brothers and sisters in the faith, this should induce caution. We must be continually open to considering where criticisms of evangelicalism may be too influenced by modern Western values and where the gospel may call us to resist the baseline cultural narratives in our context. In the task of reconstruction, we need tremendous humility. One thing that can help us is to remember, whatever we arrive upon, subsequent generations will likely be deconstructing and reconstructing that. So we're not perfect. We have blind spots. So we need fear and trembling to be very careful where we don't want to overreact. And I'm trying, I hope you feel,

what I'm trying to do is navigate here with a sincere openness to say, where do we need to repent? But I'm also trying to say, again, even-handedness, sympathy, let's be careful. So what does all this leave us with to conclude? So we have time for a few questions or comments. Those of us who want to see evangelicalism

reconstructed should keep talking with each other so we can learn from each other. In those conversations and in all that we do, I think my deepest concern in this talk is a simple methodological point that we need even-handedness and sympathy along the way. I am concerned that some voices are putting so much emphasis upon deconstruction and too little on reconstruction. In the other direction, some are too defensive about evangelicalism. If we want to be faithful to Christ in the times in which we live, it seems to me that we must resist the pressures that direct us toward one extreme or another. This means open acknowledgement of evil. No defensiveness. Let the Holy Spirit in, blow open the doors and windows. At the same time, it means an open acknowledgement

of good, a brotherly heart or a sisterly heart toward our evangelical fellow Christians. Sympathy, love. I'm pretty sure if we're called to love all Christians, it means that loving evangelical Christians too. In my own time of deconstruction, I had a few dark moments. I had times where I couldn't see the pathway before me. Apologetics and church history were two resources to me because they were reconstructive forces in my heart and imagination. When we're going through deconstruction,

we need the counterbalancing forces of reconstruction. As we live in the tension of those competing forces, and as we surrender to the Holy Spirit's work, and if we are vulnerable to the point of extreme honesty, I believe we will emerge on the other side with a stronger faith and witness. Okay, here's a final image to land the plane. And then I will want to listen very carefully to what you have to say. Alexander Solzhenitsyn was a decorated soldier in the Russian army,

but he was in prison near the end of World War II for disparaging comments that he made about Joseph Stalin. And it was there in prison, as he's reconsidering his life, that he says, I finally came to understand just how subtle is the nature of the struggle between good and evil in the human heart. He wrote these words. In my most evil moments, I was convinced that I was doing good. That already is quite a humbling and amazing statement.

And he says, and I was well supplied with systematic arguments. It was only when I lay there on rotting prison straw that I sensed within myself the first stirrings of good. Gradually it was disclosed to me that the last, lines separating good and evil passes not through states, nor through classes, nor between political parties either, but right through every human heart. This line shifts inside us. It oscillates over the years. Even within hearts overwhelmed by evil, one small bridgehead of good is retained, and even in the best of all hearts, there remains an unoprooted small corner of evil. Solzhenitsin's comments remind us that this mixture of good and evil,

that we've been identifying as a part of the evangelical heritage and a part of the Christian heritage is also true of every single one of us as an individual. We're a mix. And that's why we have to find our identity in the gospel of Jesus Christ and his work on our behalf. And it's also why we need even-handedness and sympathy as we move forward as the church. Thank you so much for listening. All right, Gavin, thank you for that. 5.30, is that our end time or someone tell me in the back there?

Does anyone know? No one knows. People are nothing. Where is that? All right. Well, I'm going to go to 5.30. So we're going to hope for the best for that. I got a few questions that I wrote down. And then all of you, you may have a question or two as well. So I'll kind of get us going here with a question. And then feel free to come on up when I see you standing at the front.

I'll know that that's your queued up. A little pro tip on the microphone stands, if you squeeze the handle, the whole thing goes up and down. Joey will demonstrate here. You got to squeeze the handle and then it goes up and down. So you can make use of it there. Gavin, okay. So even handiness and sympathy, these are the catch words that we're working towards.

And I accused you of being an enneagram nine. I am an enneagram nine. So I'm all for even-handedness and sympathy. And you raised, like, one of the potential critiques against the call for even-handedness and sympathy is, you know, does that kind of lead to compromise? Can it be, lead to kind of a lukewarm response to injustices? And you, you know, you took, I think, a good stab at responding to that. to

to kind of lead into that to kind of come back to that critique when you kind of look at the landscape right now do you think the moment calls for the moment that we find ourselves in

do you think that it calls for even handiness and sympathy from everybody so that we all should adopt a posture of even had in sympathy? Or that there are some who uniquely kind of need to hold

some things together? In other words, are there some of us that maybe just shouldn't follow you into that space? You know, grant the premise that we need to have some even-handedness of sympathy, but not everyone needs to be there. Yeah. That seems right to me. I mean, you don't

want to give a formula. If someone is in a... Part of it will depend on what our context is. But yeah, I mean, I think even-handedness and sympathy comes to my heart and mind in this area in the big picture. So we're talking about a movement. I mean, the title of this conference is reconstructing evangelicalism. As I mentioned, evangelicalism has hundreds of millions of people. So as we're thinking at the big picture, I think that's really important. And I am sincerely concerned that sometimes we're evangelicals, in light of how big it is, some of the

criticism seemed to be targeting it in a way that is sometimes uncharitable. But if you're in a particular context responding to a particular sin, absolutely. I think there will just be wanting to look at the model of Christ. Christ is not always even-handed and sympathetic. He's extremely gentle to some, and he's one of the things I love about the personality of Jesus is how tough he is to the Pharisees. He does not yield an inch. I just love that about the character of Christ. So when one is in a context like that,

then, yes, leave wiggle room for all of those complexities of what righteousness actually looks like. But even handiness and sympathy to me is lurking in the background there in the big picture because I don't want evangelicalism as a whole to be either dismissed or rejected or unfairly targeted,

and I just have a sincere concern about that. So your approach and the call for even-handedness and sympathy, I think it's an attempt to hold together for kind of a shorthand way of saying it, some of the left impulses within evangelicalism and some of the right-leaning impulses within evangelicalism. And there are kind of corresponding sets of virtues that maybe say we'd say all within the fold might hold, but the left, sorry, like these are non-negotiables. The right would say these are non-negotiables. So you're calling for a way that sort of is in attempt to hold that together. And my question would be, do you self-consciously think that way?

Like, I'm trying to hold together left and right. And if so, why? Are you just looking for unity or truth? Do you have, like, a thought on holding together these two kind of strands of evangelicalism? Yeah, I would just, I would say two things. One is to just reiterate, the even-handedness and sympathy is for evangelicalism as a whole. And that's where, again, the global and historical perspective, I think is just going to be key for us. in the American context early 21st century per se

I do feel self-consciously in this middle lonely space where I've made a commitment to do personal study on issues of race and how is a white evangelical pastor how can I learn there's things I know I can't see naturally that others can see that I need to study, learn and then talk about And I'm dismayed at the pushback that you get from some quarters if you bring up issues of race in the church today. And people will say, especially on the conservative side, it can be pretty vicious, pretty quick.

So I'm feeling that pressure, but I've made a personal vow before God. I will never stop. I really am just going to use the word learning, because that's where I feel like my focus is now. But then in that it comes to conversation, efforts, sermons, so forth. I'll never stop doing that out of fear. And so that's kind of a hold the line, you know, the quote about you steal yourself and go for broke, consequences be darned, follow your conscience, kind of a mentality. That's where I'm at on that.

But then there's other issues where I feel a sense of pressure in the other direction. And I just feel that we're living in very polarizing. times and that there are pressures that push us into extremes, and I've just made the decision before God to just follow my conscience, even if it means you're getting attacked from multiple directions. And of course, I won't do that perfectly along the way. That's why I want to try to listen to people in different perspectives. But I do feel that faithfulness to Christ will often look like resisting pressures in

multiple directions. It just seems to me that that's unavoidable in the times in which we live. That's good. We'll go to your question. You take it. I have a good one, but we're going to... Oh, okay. Sorry, I thought you were doing a transition.

No, no, you're good. You're in. Well, first of all, I just want to say I really appreciate it. And by the way, you have to stand or I'll look at, I'll see that you're not there. So don't, like, sit next to your microphone or I'll think you're not there. So, yeah. Okay. Well, I really appreciate your talk, Gavin, and I really broadly agree with what you had to say,

and I just appreciate your overall tenor and the sympathy. I also think you have an appropriate caution when you're talking about marriage and not wanting to be overly hasty and just kind of saying, all right, our culture is shift in this direction. Sounds good. Let's go with the love is slogan. That sounds good, right? And then move forward.

At the same time, I wonder if a couple things. One, if you think that there is a way, right? So that certainly has been a trend. There have also been Christians who have not taken that kind of superficial approach and have not tried to say, oh, anybody who's against same-sex marriage is just a hateful bigot. But I've said, no, actually, we see so much wisdom and so much good in the Christian tradition on sexuality. But we do think that when it comes to the issue of same-sex marriage specifically, this is an area not for burning everything down, not even for deconstruction, but for reform. Right?

Is there an area, is there a possibility within your vision? It almost seemed like you were saying more like, oh, it needs to be restoration. If it's not going back to, if it's anything that is different than what the Christian tradition was, then that shouldn't really be something we should embrace. But is there a room for reforms, right, that are still seeking to go back to scripture, but on certain things saying maybe we were wrong on this? And then do you see Christians who seek to take that approach and who do affirm same-sex marriage, Do you still see them as brothers and sisters in the faith?

Or for you, do you say, no, I don't really see you as a brother anymore based on that difference in perspective? Okay. Thank you for the question. And I appreciate what you said early on there of steering away from a triumphalism in the way we talk about an issue like this. I think it's one thing if one says, okay, the Christian tradition has gone in this direction, but we need to reform that tradition. and wow, they were really idiots back there before, you know. There is a lot of sometimes triumphalism in that direction and in the other. I have more respect for someone who says there's a lot of wisdom we need to learn from,

but we need to induce a sense of, we still need to make a correction in a more modest sort of mindset or something like that. Ultimately, though, I feel, let's talk about what reform is. What is Protestantism as a reform effort? this is something I've done a lot of work in, and I'm convinced that the Protestant Reformation wasn't saying all of church history was wrong on something, and now we're seeking to reform it. I'm convinced that the reformers were trying to go back to the church fathers as well as to the Bible, and so their reforms had historical precedent.

And so to be, you know, I owe you to being candid here. To be candid, I do feel a concern if a reform is proposed. that is against the entirety of the Christian tradition. It would seem to me that this would be, this is a tough thing to countenance because it raises a lot of tricky questions, like how did the Holy Spirit not lead anyone to this in any sort of large-scale way prior to the reform?

So that's a sincere concern about that kind of reform. the second part of your question is a really tough one. I've taken flack for expressing nuance and openness on this. The answer is I don't fully know in every case, but I hope so. And to me it depends on the details of what's really on the table. I do think it can be a kind of barrier to basic Christian fellowship. And the reason for that is I do worry that an alteration of the definition of marriage is a revisionist approach on an important issue that goes against the entirety of the church.

History, East and West, patristic, medieval, pre-modern, early modern, and so forth. And so that really is a concern for me. But I want to try to leave a little bit of wiggle room because I don't have a ton of experiences in really working through this with individuals. So I'm wanting to be extremely careful. And so I'd like to just kind of say, well, it's concern, it's on the table, let's keep talking about that, and I'll keep listening.

That's a bit where I'm at on that. All right, thank you. Thank you, Matthew. We'll go over here and then over here. I appreciated your comments about even-handedness in general, but specifically in the areas of sexuality and the ordination of women. But something that I've experienced

is that many people have had so much hurt in situations where that conversation was very prominent, whether it's sexuality or the role of women in the church. And I've experienced many people, because of that, feel a legitimate fear to really engage much in any way, whether it's even-handed or not, because they're fearful of being hurt once again. So my question would be, do you have any recommendations for engaging people who have

experienced that hurt in the church in an even-handed way when at times it can be difficult to even begin that discussion? Yeah. Thank you so much for the question, and I'll be a briefer so we can get through as many questions in the few minutes we have left. I do have a lot to say about this. as a pastor, there is so much hurt in the world right now in general and from the church. I think just, you know, at a conference like this, we can think about these things at such an intellectual level. And I think there is great wisdom in just pouring out a great deal of love and humanity in the context of the discussion that we're having about these things. For example, in certain situations with someone, they may have a different position than you do on an issue. like the ordination of women in the church.

And there may be contexts in which, based upon their background, you may take a very patient approach of just saying, number one, I want to listen and understand. What are the causes of that hurt? What can I learn from that? And number two, to not make the goal some immediate movement of their position, that sometimes can be a temptation, but to take a more long-term human approach to the relationship. That's not to say we take off the table. our desire to commend the truth as we see it.

But it's just to say a lot, a lot, a lot, a lot, a lot, a lot of love in the process. Hi, thank you again. So you've given a lot of really helpful examples historically of what even handedness might look like. So far we've also been talking about defining evangelicalism today. And I guess what I'm wondering is that we have the suggestion, that we should be even handed in reconstructing evangelicalism. But I'm left with kind of a question before the question of still, what is evangelicalism categorically that it needs to be reconstructed.

And I tried to think of two examples that might represent kind of the scale upon which it might fit categorically, culturally at least, that on the one hand you might have it being paralleled with reconstructing Boy Scouts of America after its child abuse scandals. On the other hand, it could be something like on the level of Vatican 2. So do you have a historical analogy in mind of what is evangelicalism analogous to that it is worthy in and of itself of being reconstructed? In 30 seconds or less, right? Somewhere between Vatican 2 and the Boy Scouts. Okay. Really whittling it down. I don't have an analogy that comes immediately to my mind.

I just think, I'll just give a very general answer and apologize that this probably won't be a really great answer or detailed answer so that Zach can then ask his last question before we finish here. But I just think as we wrestle with this question of the definition of evangelicalism, because we're in, frankly, such a weird time, I just think it will be increasingly important to consider the perspectives about much. what is evangelicalism of earlier times and of non-American contexts? And to me, that will really help inform, okay, what is this thing we're trying to reconstruct? The wider we can look and the further back we can look, I want to see evangelicalism for all that it historically and globally has been taken to mean. So that's the general emphasis of where I want to put the focus. But I'm sorry, I don't have a more specific answer, but we could talk more maybe.

I know we're at 529 and here comes. Sorry, Zach, you only have one minute. Well, we did start five minutes late, so I think I have an online question that I'm going to read and then maybe, you know, lightning around, we might have time for a couple more. So what's our end time?

35 is what I'm going to say. Okay. So this is an online question. This person asks, you use the word careful a lot throughout your talk. So when you say,

careful, do you mean cautious? And if so, do you think that being careful has been, at times, the historical downfall of evangelicals? For example, I think the person asking this question, we've sometimes been too careful when it comes to, for example, seeking justice over the course of American evangelical history. Okay. The answer is no, I don't mean cautious by careful. To use a metaphor. Careful means you aim the arrow at the bull's eye in the target. It doesn't mean you shoot at half speed. Careful means you critically distinguish what is good, what is bad, and so forth. It doesn't mean that you're soft, generally soft or neutral in the criticism being offered. So to the extent that your careful historical and theological discriminating work yields this result where you're saying,

okay, this is sin, then you should not be cautious. You should be full-throated in your repentance, your lament, your efforts at repair, etc. So I hope that could be a helpful distinction. That relates to what I was saying earlier. Even handiness and sympathy doesn't mean a neutral posture toward the whole. It means careful distinction between the good and the bad, precisely so that we can be fully for the good and fully against the bad. I think your illustration of an archer taking aim is interesting and I appreciate the

distinction between careful and cautious. I think the reality is as someone that tries to be careful, to be careful, you have to take a bit more time to like aim the bow, right? So like you're not just flinging arrows all over the place, right? But the amount of time it takes to carefully aim the bow is interpreted, I think, by folks as like kind of a tepid cautiousness, right? they don't have to go together, but often there's a little more time that's, I feel, because what I feel that I think is helpful and true, and what you've been saying is like, we need to

slow down just a little bit and, like, look at things a little more carefully. Well, I don't know, slow down speed is not in my mind in terms of let's go as quickly as we can. What I have in mind by a lack of carefulness is when the story of evangelicalism is told through the lens of its abuses. That's not careful. But that's quick. It's quickest way to tell the story. Well, it could be quick. Yeah, it could be a quick way to do it. To me, it's a sociologically

charged way of doing it. And I am burdened. I'm jealous to defend evangelicalism to the extent that this is a, you know, any tradition can be maligned by speaking about it in terms of its worst expressions. Or only its best expressions, which is also quick. Or only its best, which is what I was trying to, that's to me, the caution. To me, it's not about being, I'm not advocating for being sluggish toward repentance. I'm advocating against what sometimes is, I would have to say, more of a simplistic narrative about what evangelicalism is. That's to me the lack of carefulness that I, that's in my mind as I'm thinking about it. Yeah, that's good. One more question. Yeah. Okay. You can go

go away. You're good. You're good. I'll get to my suit first. I just. I just, want to know you can squeeze that a handle there we'll come down a little bit no given some of the atrocities with evangelical I can understand trying to preserve it because you can pervert anything you can pervert the term Christian because Christians so many things have been done under the name of a Christian but I have a concern with the I like grace versus sympathy sympathy for that doesn't feel right but grace does for me. And I also feel like I don't like the both sides of the even-handedness.

I like a fair assessment. Fair assessment. Okay. This situation. Great comments. So would everyone take away from my talk is fair and grace. Forget even had innocence sympathy if that helps because maybe that's a better way to think about it. Yeah, I'm open to making little course corrections in what we're envisioning and how we're thinking about it. But even handedness to my mind speaks more to the method of how we're functioning. So that's kind of how that came into my mind. Sympathy, my mind came a little bit out of the illustration with Obama and Reverend Wright. But, yeah, I'm open to tweaking our terms and our exact understanding of how we go about this.

I don't have a monopoly on it or a crystal ball I'm looking into. I'm just seeking the truth. but I think my biggest concern is just that there are ways of telling the evangelical story that are not gracious or fair either. They're not, you know, and they tend to be, again, sharing the story in light of the worst abuses that have been there. And I think you made a really insightful comment at the very end that I want to underscore here towards the end, and that is by that methodology, we can deconstruct Christianity.

There are terrible abuses. church history prior to evangelicalism. If we tell the whole story in light of them, then we can tear the whole faith down, potentially. And that's, I don't want to completely identify evangelicalism with all of church history, but at that basic methodological level, there's a comparison that can be drawn, and I think, again, that should just be something we wrestle with and should make us very prayerful and careful along the way. But thank you for your comment.