Truth Unites - The Deconstruction Movement: How the Church Should Respond

Episode Date: April 4, 2024

In this video Gavin Ortlund shares two strategies for responding to those deconstructing their faith. Check out Trinity Evangelical Divinity School: https://www.teds.edu/truthunites #sponsorship 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/

Many of us who are followers of Christ have had friends deconstruct their faith, and that word deconstruction is kind of a buzzword. It can mean a lot of different things. But the simple fact is we're going through one of the greatest seasons of religious decline in the history of the United States. There's a great book called The Great Dechurching. I'm going to put up a picture of that. And Jim Davis and Mike Graham wrote this book. I've referenced this book maybe more than any other over the last year or so. And it's sobering because they're talking about basically the amount of de-churching that's going on is greater than the first and second great awakenings and every other great revival in our

nation's history combined, but in the opposite direction. Basically about 40 million people, about 15% of the U.S. population, have stopped going to church. And then you also see a lot of deconversion. So deconversion is, of course, not the same thing as de-churching. That's one of the things that's interesting is a lot of people who've stopped going to church haven't necessarily stopped professing Christianity. So there's all kinds of people who just stopped, you know, just for convenience reasons, maybe during COVID, or maybe they moved

and they just haven't found a new church. We'll talk about that. That's a huge thing. But then you also see a lot of people just leaving the faith altogether. You can think of deconstruction as kind of a whole spectrum of different things. In the mildest form,

you might just think of someone who they go off to college and they deconstruct, meaning they pick apart and re-examine and then potentially piece back together some of their beliefs about like the end times. You know, like the mildest form could be they grow up thinking like the left behind series is the Christian way to think about the end times and they deconstruct that. Okay, so there's lots of healthy forms of kind of refining or reforming your faith that can be called deconstruction.

But at the ultimate other end of the spectrum, it would be like a lunge into atheism, you know, or just a hard deconversion from Christianity. And that's a huge movement right now. It's got so much energy to it. In 1989, when Tim Keller planted Redeemer Presbyterian Church in New York City, the percentage of religious nuns, N-O-N-E-S, people who don't profess any established religion, they don't identify with any religion, was about 5% of the population throughout our country and about 25% of the population of Manhattan.

So those are very rough figures. But basically, you're talking about, you know, one out of 20 people in the nation. one out of four in New York City. As of 2021, the number of religious nuns is about 30% of the whole population. So what Manhattan was 30 years ago is everywhere now, and it's going more and more like that. By 2017, most predictions are that according to the current trajectory, because I'm going to keep emphasizing hope and prayer for revival and that we're not helpless start this video. but if things keep going, then Christians will be less than half of the population by 2017.

So we're in this rapid time of secularization and de-Christianization. And we might disagree about all the details of how to understand this. To what extent is it our fault? Is it scandals and issues in the church? To what extent is it things outside of our control, like social media? What are the other factors? But I don't think anybody can deny that this is the world we have to face now. and basically the great passion of my life vocationally is to try to spend myself doing whatever I can do

to try to help address this and try to give my life to, you know, praying for a third great awakening and praying for new life. And I think all the time, I was just talking with some friends who were visiting last night at dinner about Gen Z, about younger people and their culture and just praying for revival, especially among young people on college campuses and so forth. That's what I want Truth He Nights to be about. I want it to be a positive, counteractive force that's constructive and unifying. And even when I'm doing polemics, even when I'm defending Protestantism, the desire underneath that is really, I want to help people who have ecclesial angst. You know, it's not just a construct for me. It's about what's happening in someone's heart. Or when I talk about creation or when I talk

about other issues doing theological triage, the desire is to remove stumbling blocks because I want people to experience the gospel right now. So I know I'm not alone in that. I mean, I'm so grateful for emails and feedback that I get where I think a lot of us feel this sense of an urgent need right now to try to help address what is happening right now. And some of you watching this video may be deconstructing or you may have deconstructed whatever that may mean for you. All of us probably have friends like this. I think the way it's hit me the most is when I have somebody and I totally don't see it coming. It's like the person that you really looked up to and admired, and then you find out they no longer identify as a Christian, that can be disillusioning and

sad and hard. And then a lot of us have family members and friends and others. The hardest thing is when you see it among Christian leaders, too, or there's so many Christian musicians that we could talk about. I thought about putting little clips into this. And I thought, I don't want it to be like, I just want this to be a, not targeted anybody, but just a response that hopefully Lord willing is helpful. One of the words that I use to describe the feeling right now is the word disintegration because I think that captures something of the emotions of the moment. A lot of people feel the sense of disenchantment, loss, cynicism, you know. But this word deconstruction is probably the biggest buzzword that people use right now. And like I said, it has a spectrum of different meanings,

but what I want to address in this video is a full-blown deconstruction. So people who are considering deconversion, basically leaving Christianity. And I want to try to especially speak to Christians who are trying to respond to that. You know, maybe you have a friend who's going through that. Maybe you're going through that. You're wrestling with it. And I'll start with just an anecdote to make this topic become a little more human. I thought about playing clips of people sharing.

And I thought, no, I don't want to. I only, maybe I'm oversensitive about this, but I never want to show clips of someone that makes them feel targeted, you know, even though they're putting their thoughts out in public. It's not wrong to do, but I just, you know, you always want to do not just what is okay, but what is best. So let me give you one from fiction and from literature, and again, not in the spirit of looking down on this, but John Updike wrote a novel where there's a Presbyterian minister who has doubts with his faith, and then basically in a moment he swept up into like a full-blown deconstruction. And the image that he uses is a spider crawling out of a sink, and then suddenly the water

sweeps up and sweeps him away down the drain. And that's the metaphor for just like that, his faith is gone. and in the aftermath he's describing the emotions that this person feels. And on the one hand, he talks about how there's relief because now he doesn't have to worry about understanding predestination anymore, which I thought for a Presbyterian minister, I could see how, you know, there is an upside, I guess. But he also talks about the pain of it. And he says, the former believers habitual mental contortions decisively relaxed.

And yet the depths of vacancy revealed were appalling in the purifying sweep of atheists. human beings lost all special value. Without biblical blessing, the physical universe became sheerly horrible. I believe that. I've been through my own journey of digging down into apologetics when I'm going through, when I'm wrestling with something. And the reason I use the word relief to describe what that feels like when you hit solid ground and you realize that we have really good reasons for what we believe is because I do believe, without any disrespect to atheists, that atheism is dehumanizing. And I think if you just think that through,

and what is a human being, what is human love, what is meaning in life from that standpoint, I don't think there are answers there. But that's certainly the impact that not everyone experiences that, of course, but I'm saying the ultimate, like, philosophical basis. And that's certainly what this Presbyterian minister

who leaves thinks through, and it talks about it. I'll read you what it says. The thought of eating sickened him His body felt swollen in its entirety like the ankle after a sprain, and he scarcely dared take a step lest he topple from an ungainly height. So that gives you a sense of the emotions of it. And I'm referencing that to help us all feel this topic. You know, this is painful.

Some of you know those feelings, or you have loved ones who are working through these deep questions of, what do I really believe? And it's painful. It's hard at times. So we want to approach this with the compassion of Christ. in the, you know, think of Jesus weeping over Jerusalem. We want to approach this in a way that will be as helpful as possible and convey love

and care as well as answers. So the question that I want to pose in this video, and I've condensed this down, this is from a talk I gave at Southeastern Seminary last fall. I've condensed it down even more to try to be helpful because I think it could be useful in a YouTube video for those of us who are followers of Christ, especially who want to help those deconstructing, or if you're in the middle of it, or if you yourself or maybe just on looking. Maybe it could help you, but especially I'm thinking of Christians who want to help either others or themselves. I'm going to give two suggestions. We need attentiveness and

apologetics. So one of these is more relational. Attentiveness means listening with genuine love. The other is more intellectual. Apologetics means pointing people to the beauty of Christ and to the beauty of the gospel. Before we dive in, I wanted to mention that this video is being sponsored by Trinity Evangelical Divinity School. I always want Truth Unites to support not only local churches out there, but are wonderful seminaries, which are so important. And Ted's is a leading evangelical seminary. I lived and worked there for one year. I also grew up in that area, so I have a lot of affection for Trinity. And I just know a lot of people who are watching my channel are interested in being more thoroughly equipped at being a student of theology, being a follower of Christ. Some of you are

working through deep questions and you're, I get this sense of anxiety from people because sometimes it seems like you're thinking, I just need to read more books and I need to watch more YouTube videos and I need to kind of figure out this. And I love to encourage people to consider getting formal theological education. You don't have to do it all on your own, you know? Seminary can be such an encouraging environment to be in. It gives, and it's not just for people training for ministry, though it's wonderful for that, but it's also just anybody who wants to go to the next level in their theology. And you get structure and you get a community and you get support and you get to be immersed in this wonderful community where there's world class faculty and there's a commitment

to the authority and inerrancy of scripture at TEDs. But you also get to learn from different perspectives within a broadly evangelical framework. And that's valuable as well. I've never regretted giving time to formal education. And I think that's always a good investment. So I'll share more in the video description, you can click on the link and learn about there's multiple start dates and they have eight-week modular classes. So you can kind of tailor this to your schedule. You can be online or in person. They have some scholarships available. Summer courses begin May 13th of this year. Fall registration opens June 1st. So it's right, we're already in April right around the corner here. So check it out in the video description, Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, Wonderful Institution. All right, let's dive in. I

I want to talk about listening to people, listening with genuine love in our hearts. And this is so important because every situation is different, of course, but one of the most common factors in de-churching situations, and I think de-Christianizing situations or deconverting is relational incompetence from Christians. Now, I know people get defensive about this, and I understand that. But hear me out on this, because from what I'm reading, this is actually a huge factor. Sometimes we overly intellectualize things. And I'm going to talk about apologetics for the bulk of this, but we actually have to

start further back. This is a huge piece of what is going on right now. So many people who leave the church, their concern was not that they had a question or a doubt or a struggle, but they had one of those that couldn't be voiced. They didn't have a hearing or a safe context to work something through. And a lot of times what people need is not necessarily the resolution of tension, but just a place to work through it. And I understand how tricky this is, because some of the criticism that comes against us as followers of Christ, as the church is done in bad faith. There are people

who deconstruct, and then they just ruthlessly attack their former Christian community. That does happen. A lot of pastors right now. I have a heart to encourage pastors because I feel like a lot of pastors feel like punching bags right now. You feel like a lightning rod, you know. You become the target for people. And there can be a lot of feelings of hurt that we have, those of us who are followers of Christ when we see our friends walking away, and that's hard. So I want to kind of leave space for that and acknowledge that, and there's plenty of times to disregard bad faith criticism. But one of my concerns is our overall posture towards those outside, the church becomes overly defensive, and we don't think about what we can learn. Not all of the criticisms are unfair. Some

of them are totally valid. And we have to remember, it's easy to get defensive and fail to show kindness when it is difficult. But kindness is most important right when it is most difficult, when it feels vulnerable. For example, just to give some, like I'm speaking to this, not at a theoretical level. This isn't super deep or complicated, but I just see it pastorally. So this is something you see happens a lot. You ask someone who's an atheist or an agnostic, who journeyed away, who deconverted, and you say, what was the start of your journey away from Christianity? And then you listen, you know, one of the things that I hear over and over is it rarely began when they first had doubts or first had questions. Usually it's when people

when basically they didn't feel like there was a way to work through their doubt or their question, and especially at the social level when they felt a sense of pressure or shame against them. So here's a classic example. A child has a question in Sunday school class. They raise the question. It's a good question. It's a question like, you know, how does this make sense in the Bible? I don't know. I don't want to talk about Noah's flood for fear of bringing that whole thing up again. I was going to say, how did all the animals fit on the ark? But, you know, something like this. And so, and the Sunday school teacher, God bless their heart. They're just doing their best. They don't have formal theological training, they're just volunteering. And so what happens is they feel threatened by the question.

And so instead of saying what they should say, which is just, I don't know, great question, let me get back to you. They find a way to turn the question back on the questioner and they make fun of it or they rebuke them for asking or they put shame upon them, something like that. That is hugely destructive. Another example is when you have a friend who's deconstructing and we take it too personally and we can become self-referential. For example, with parents, I think this happens a lot. Your child comes home from college and says, I'm not sure what I believe anymore. And you kind of go into panic mode and you think, I'm a failure. I'm a bad parent. I must have done something wrong. But you might not have done anything wrong. It might not be about you.

And what we want to aim for, I think, is to be so secure in our own walk with Christ that we're not threatened by what is coming at us. We give our friends freedom to work through their questions. and we encourage them, we come alongside them and encourage them in a relentless search for the truth. If we believe Jesus is true, he really rose from the dead. I believe that. I've stake my everlasting salvation on that, given everything in my life to that. I really believe it's true. And if we are solid in that, secure in that, we can give people a sense of freedom to explore that,

and work through their questions with them and not clamp down. You know what I mean? So this is one of the things I've discovered is that we have to really. listen. Somebody once said you're not really listening until you're willing to be changed by what you hear. Oftentimes Christians, especially Christians who haven't themselves been through seasons of doubt, we sometimes don't listen and sometimes we make assumptions and place those assumptions on those who doubt. But we have to remember lots of genuine Christians go through doubts. Thomas and Judas are not the same. There's a comforting thought, right? You might be Thomas, but don't be afraid that you're

Judas because you're Thomas. You know what I'm saying? You might have doubts. Okay. In Matthew 28, they see Jesus. Some of them doubted. That doesn't necessarily mean you're not a true Christian just because you're working through doubts. And in fact, Jude says have mercy on those who doubt. So we want to have a heart posture to people that reflects that commandment of mercy. And part of that means listening and not making assumptions. Not everyone who's working through deconstruction is a bad faith and has bad motives and so forth. Let me give four assumptions in particular. I think we need to avoid. Number one, don't assume that all deconstruction is intense rather than casual. This is something I've had to learn. Because I love to study apologetics, I can easily assume that if someone is

fading away from church or from Christianity, it must be the result of intellectual factors. They might be reading a Richard Dawkins book or something like this. And obviously that can happen, but actually, when you get into the sociology on this, you see that a huge percentage of those who are leaving are doing so very casually. It's not a violent lurch into atheism. It's just kind of a fading away. And actually, as I think I mentioned this earlier,

a lot of people leave the church while retaining relatively orthodox beliefs. And it's just practical factors. You know, this is a huge thing in our culture. COVID, so a lot of people stopped going to church during COVID, just never came back. And this is what the great de-churching book so hopefully enables us to understand. And then another big factor would be so many people have moved.

And when you move, it's disruptive. Sometimes you don't find a new church. And so you've got a lot of de-churched people who are open in principle to coming back to church. That's one encouraging piece in all of this. What the sociology seems to indicate is a lot of people would come to church with an invitation. They don't necessarily need arguments or apologetics. A lot of people just need us to say,

hey, I'm going to church on Sunday. It starts at 10. Let me pick you up. And a lot of people will respond well to that invitation. I mean, we just have to be aware of that. It's a huge thing. Okay, a second assumption is sometimes we assume that people who are deconstructing

have bad motives for that and they just don't want to take the harder path of following Jesus. or we think, well, if they really were committed, if it's really important to them, then they won't be struggling or they won't walk away from it. Not necessarily true. That oversimplifies people's complicated experiences. And when we make these kinds of assumptions, we can alienate people.

The truth is that sometimes people leave Christianity and they might even tell you. You know, they might even say, yeah, yeah, I just don't want to follow Jesus. I've had people like this, you know, where it's like, I just, I don't want to break up with my girlfriend. She is not a follower of Christ and, you know, they'll just, you know, talk about it's a very practical factor like that, but it's not always like that. As you listen to people's stories, as you lay aside assumptions and open your heart to hear and to listen, you see, deconstruction for a lot of people is exquisitely painful. It's not a matter of taking the easy path. It's not like they don't care. Now it's hard. G. Campbell Morgan was raised in a Christian home. He eventually became a

great minister, but I've talked about this in other videos. He became, he went through a season of doubt in his college years, and he said, in the worst of it, there came a moment when I was sure of nothing. A lot of people are there right now these days. A lot of people are struggling like that. They don't, they're really feeling turned upside down by all the disintegration and chaos in our world. This is why my passionate desire for Truth Unites is try to speak into that and help people. You know, here's a thought. We are not helpless in relation to the dark forces in our world. I know we feel overwhelmed a lot of times. We look at the impact social media is having. We look at the polarization in our country. We look at the broader state of the church. There are so many

reasons for discouragement, we're not helpless. We shouldn't just kind of feel overwhelmed and give up. The demons are not invincible. Our prayers, our actions can make a difference. The simple act of inviting people to church around us can make such a difference. And of course, there are some bad faith people out there where no matter what we do, they're going to attack us. But there are a lot of people who are just also just overwhelmed, they're suffering, they're struggling, and we just need to be careful to not assume that we're dealing with someone who is a bad faith because the world is complicated. It's not formulaic. Everybody's story is a little different. Here's a third assumption that we can have, and that is that mature Christians don't experience deconstruction, only immature

Christians experience deconstruction. Totally false. Sometimes it's actually someone who's been walking with the Lord for a long time, that we will regard as spiritually mature, that's very thoughtful about their faith, and then they go through the dark night of the soul. And we need to be aware of that and not place these ungodly judgments upon people. C.S. Lewis, okay? He wrote a grief observed in the final years of his life. It was published in 1961, two years before he died. And that book is not deconstruction per se, but he is unbelievably raw. in speaking about his sense of God's hiddenness in the process of grief, so much so that people didn't believe he was the real author because he wrote with a pseudonym.

The fact is, and you see he's one example, but all throughout church history, even just looking at the book of Psalms, even just looking at the book of Job, we can already recognize there are people who go through that experience, like the Presbyterian minister in the John Updike novel, who are relatively far along in their faith. And we want to be aware of that and be mindful of that. And, you know, what that means is we should be humble and be kind. And we shouldn't assume that those who are struggling around us, those who are in that place

of, you know, they don't know up from down. They shouldn't experience us as aloof and superior, like, oh, you know, you're in that category of person and I'm kind of looking down on you from above. We should engage them with an open heart and with humility. Fourth assumption, this is kind of a specific one, but I wanted to include this because I see this a lot. A lot of times people assume that the cause of deconstruction is one specific belief or practice, when in reality it's this more basic bedrock kind of cultural sea change that we're going through that's way more complicated.

But you hear people saying it's the mega churches that are the problem, all these big churches that are so worldly, you know, or people say, oh, it's these small, tiny churches that don't have professionalism and how they handle things. Or you might, you hear people, I'm sure, because people, anytime I address anything that isn't about Protestantism, a lot of people will say, well, Protestantism is the problem. It's the reason for this. Or people might say it's the traditional churches, or it's the low churches, you know, that don't emphasize liturgy and so forth. Or a big one you hear is it's, it's living in certain parts of the country. If you live in, on the West Coast, if you live in California, well, no surprise, right? Having lived out there a lot,

I can tell you, California is incredibly diverse. You can find incredibly conservative pockets. I mean, California is not this monolithic thing that people think it is. There's so much local variation. But the other thing is schooling choice. People will say that, you know, public school or private school or homeschooling, one of these things will be perceived to be the cause of why our young people are leaving and that kind of thing. And it's just helpful to realize it's way bigger than any of that. When you read the sociology, you see that deconstruction, in this as defined as deconversion, I'm talking about deconversion throughout this, really.

That is roughly equal in evangelical Protestant, mainline Protestant, and Roman Catholic contexts. I don't have enough data about other contexts, other Christian contexts. and the studies seem to indicate that those who attend secular universities and schools are not deconstructing more. That's another assumption sometimes we bring to things. So the point is that instead of assumptions and defensiveness, we want to cultivate curiosity, we want to practice listening, and then we want to show genuine love. I know I say this a lot, but it's so important and it's so wonderful, we can never say it too much,

showing sincere love for people does wonders. It's just foundational to everything else we do. If any of my videos ever, if I ever veer off from that, I just hope my channel shuts down immediately because that's what I hope is at the core of everything. I want to care for people. I want to help people. I want to be, that's what Christ has done for me.

I believe Christ is the answer to the mystery of what this life is all about. and what I've found from him is a joy and a peace that just comes in like this vertical bomb getting dropped on your heart and it changes everything. And I want my channel to feel like that and communicate that to others. So that's the second, that leads to the second thing and that's apologetics. It's not enough to just listen. I mean, I tend to think these two things, attentiveness and apologetics go really well together. So we want to listen.

But then we also want to communicate the hope of Christ. We want to point people to the beauty of the gospel. We want to give people answers. And I have two strategies here. The first one is to start whenever we're, this is a very practical video. I'm trying to be helpful for specific conversations you may be having. So the first thing to say is don't assume that someone who is deconverting understands and has personally appropriated the basic gospel message.

One of the things you discover is that a lot of people who leave the faith have never really heard the gospel, or they've never personally received the gospel in their actual felt existential place within. The place of your being where you fall in love or you face death or you make the deepest decisions of life that really goes into your decision-making place within. They've never really brought the gospel in there. And so they may never have just had a point where they, I mean, I've had lots of conversations where I'm talking about, talking with someone and then suddenly I realize, oh, they actually just need someone to ask them if they want to become a Christian. It's like, oh, I mean, I've been in baptism interviews and

you're talking and you're trying to figure things out. And then finally you just ask them, like, have you ever become a Christian? Have you ever received Christ into your life? Have you ever repented of your sins and placed your faith in Jesus? And you can never assume that. But sometimes it takes me a while and I don't think I'm the only one. We forget to be careful. about these assumptions. And so the point here is a lot of people who are in deconstruction, they might be kind of just leaving a generic Christian kind of context, but they haven't actually ever, and a lot of people are open to doing that if you kindly invite them and explain to them what it means to become a follower of Jesus. More basically, a lot of people deconstruct the faith

because they don't do theological triage well. Theological triage, I have a whole series on triage. this is where we rank different doctrines. I see this, again, I never got into theological triage because I find it intellectually stimulating. I got into it because I find it pastorally necessary. Over and over and over and over, I see people, you know, someone goes off to college. They've had it beaten into their head that this one very specific view on this relatively peripheral part of Christian theology is foundational to the gospel. When that doctrine is questioned, they then question everything. And that's why I do videos on things like creation and eschatology and other things like that.

Happens over and over. And a lot of times in our context in the United States, among evangelicals, we have kind of an eccentric default sense of triage. It's like we're just off base, you know. We don't value the central things like we should, like say the things that are in the Apostles Creed, but then we put all this weight on all these peripheral. things that are sometimes not only historically rare, but are historically non-existent until like 150 years ago. I've talked about that in my video on end times views. So the point is when we're trying to help

a friend who's going through deconstruction or when we're going through it, we want to identify, we want to do triage well, we want to identify the kind of basic guardrails of what it means to be a Christian. Things like Apostles Creed, Basic Christianity 101, things that are universal throughout church history or near universal, things that are clear in scripture, things that are logically foundational to the gospel, these non-negotiables. I have a whole book on triage that can be helpful, hopefully, for people. But what the point here is, oh, and let me mention another book that goes into this really well. Sean McDowell and John Marriott have a book called Set Adrift. Fantastic book on this point, but also just the general topic of deconstruction, really helpful book. This is something they emphasize

there a lot, that there's space for disagreement on secondary and tertiary doctrines. When you're with someone who's working through deconstruction, don't focus on those kinds of issues. I would say, put it like this. It's not that they're not important, but that's not where you start to rebuild from the inside out. We need a relentless focus on Jesus himself. What do you believe about Christ?

What is your basic understanding of Christianity? And do you have an existential relation to it? And start there with someone, help them understand what it means to walk with Jesus day by day. when the young people around us are drowning in anxiety and mental health issues, talk to them and help them understand what it means to allow the Holy Spirit to speak to those struggles. A lot of people have never had someone teach them basic Christianity 101 of walking with the Lord. How do you pray? How do you read your Bible?

Again, we can't assume the basics. So again, I know what I'm saying right now is not intellectually profound, but I'm saying it out of my pastoral experiences that starting with the basic gospel, message itself is so helpful. Okay, second strategy for apologetics is just learning some basic arguments. I absolutely love apologetics and giving arguments for the Christian faith. And I will say it like this. I'm going to give sort of an apology for apologetics here. That is to say I'm going to defend the idea of defending the faith. Because this is actually controversial. But the basic situation that I'm seeing is this. American evangelicalism, and I say this as a sort of loyal

friend of evangelicalism. I often defend evangelicalism. I think evangelicalism has been broadly a good thing, and I'm not saying this as an outside critic. But as an inside critic, who's grateful for this movement, it has a lot of deficiencies and eccentricities. So one of them has been intellectual shallowness. That's a generalization. Of course, there's some brilliant evangelicals, but a lot of evangelicals have not been very theologically deep as a generalization. That hasn't been as much of a characteristic value in our movement. And so this is one of the things I try to do with Truth Unites. This is why I do, you know, I say theological depth for gospel assurance. And the theological depth part is important. I'm trying to give resources that can help people go a little deeper.

I think that's hugely needed. So many people are deconstructing their faith because they're kind of outgrowing an intellectually shallow context or theology that they've been accustomed to and they're not aware of the riches that are out there or they just struggle to experience those because they know it's hard to break out of what you've seen.

Lots of people have become a Christian in the United States because either they or someone in their family went to a Billy Graham crusade, and they got saved, and that's wonderful. But then there wasn't as much discipleship. And so a lot of people are growing up in a context where they suddenly realized they need to rethink and rework things at an intellectual level. In my heart, I have so much patience for people who are going through that. I totally get it, you know?

People are working through like universalism and annihilationism and those kinds of things. It's like, do I just accept what I've always been taught about hell, or is there something else? totally valid to work through that. That's an example of the kind of issue that people growing up in evangelicalism, they're working through that. So many other issues we could mention. But a lot of these things I hope my YouTube channel is to help with.

I know I haven't done as much on the doctrine of hell. I did one video a while back. I do want to do a study during 2025 on annihilationism. I'm nervous to do it. Because I'm at this point still persuaded of an eternal conscious torment view of a kind of C.S. Lewis type variety of thinking about, but I'm going to dive into that a little more. But I know that a lot of us have worries about this term apologetics and have worries about even the idea of going into theology. A lot of people don't even like theology because we've

seen it done so. Actually, I think there's two reasons for this. Two reasons why a lot of Christians don't like apologetics. One is we feel intimidated by it and it feels too abstract and too technical and kind of hard for just the lay Christian to touch and understand. But the other thing is I think we've just seen it done badly so much. And a lot of times Christian apologists have over-relied upon arguments. They've over-estimated the power of arguments, or they've been done in a way that's relationally clumsy or in a way that's culturally insensitive

and not aware of the dynamics right now and the pressing needs right now. and you get this overly rational case for Christianity that doesn't really fit the needs in the moment. But this is about apologetics being done badly, not about apologetics per se. We need a new apologetics. This is why I'm so grateful to be part of the Tim Keller Center for Cultural Apologetics, one that's sensitive to the cultural needs right now. And this is hugely important. This isn't the only important thing we need to help those who are deconstructing,

but it's hugely important. Let me put up 1st Peter 3. In your hearts, honor Christ the Lord is holy. Always being prepared to make a defense to anyone who asks you for a reason for the hope that is in you. Yet do it with gentleness and respect. Three things to observe here. Number one, that verse was not written to the elders of the church. That verse is written to all Christians in the church.

Every single follower of Jesus should be prepared to make a defense of the hope that we have. Number two, apologetics should be the overflow of worship. The verse starts saying, in your hearts, honor Christ the Lord as holy. You know, apologetics should spin out of your heart out of the sense of reverence for Christ and how wonderful and awesome he is. Number three, it should be done in a Christ-like disposition with gentleness and respect. Okay, using arguments, if you don't like the word apologetics, fine, you know. but using arguments and appeals to commend the plausibility of Christianity is a wonderful, good thing.

And one form of that can be giving your testimony. Totally valid form of apologetics or just generally commending Christianity. You just share, look, this is what Christ has done in me. Totally valid. Sometimes that's one of the best ways you can help someone, but we have to go further than that as well. But that's one great thing. And this is a historic Christian practice. the all throughout church history, Christians have appealed to like fulfilled prophecy, for example,

where you think of in the medieval era, people like Anselm and Thomas Aquinas constructing these arguments for the existence of God. This is a historic Christian practice because we want people to understand that what we believe is true. We may not be able to compel and force assent from every person. We might end up feeling as though we're just giving an indication that it is plausible. But a lot of times actually that's all that's needed. In my experience, people often will come to faith, not because they've gotten to a rational certainty, but just because

defeater beliefs have been cleared away so they can say, okay, I can believe this without intellectual embarrassment. And we can give arguments. There's nothing about arguments that need be insensitive to culture or relationship. We can give arguments. You know, propositions and narrative can often flow well together and support one another. We can give particular arguments that fit into a larger narrative appeal that is sensitive to beauty, sensitive to culture, and so forth. And the simple fact is, we've got some great arguments. There are some great reasons to believe that God exists and that Jesus rose from the dead. And as much as we can oversell these arguments, we can also undersell them. If you want to get better at that, by the way, I'm going to be

offering a cohort over this summer. It's a six-session online cohort. It'll meet on Wednesday nights. We'll meet for three weeks, and then we'll break a bit, and then meet for three more weeks. We're going to go through classical arguments. And what I'm going to do is try to do a deep dive into certain arguments. I'll also be responding to objections, like what about slavery in the Bible? What about the conquest of Canaan? What about the problem of evil? What's a new argument? The problem of divine hiddenness. But I'm also going to go through arguments like, you know, the fine-tuning argument and the moral argument and evidences for the resurrection of Christ, things like this. We'll try to do as deep a dive as we can within the time constraints

we have, not making it dumbed down at all as much as we can. And then, but, and then I'm going to translate them into everyday conversation. So, you know, we'll go through like the, a cosmological argument and then I'll give you the most simple colloquial way to use these arguments in everyday conversation. We're also going to look at the emotional implications of these arguments. And that's what I want to say to finish off this video. I'll give some examples. You know, just some examples of arguments that we have. I would say the argument from contingency is incredibly powerful. This is one, I've said this before. Every time I think about it, the power of it hits me afresh. And it's wonderful who not oversell it, but also not undersell it. Christianity has a great explanation,

as do a few other worldviews as well, but more so than atheism, of the fundamental question. Why is there something rather than nothing? What are we all doing here? Why does our world exist? Christianity basically teaches there's an infinite, necessary, simple reality called God. And that makes so much sense. In the cohort, we're going to tease that out. and give it in more technical expressions, but then more colloquial expressions, but it tease out just how powerful of an appeal this is and how deep it goes into our intuitions. The argument for God from the design of our universe. Why is our world so exquisitely well-ordered?

Why are the physical constants of our universe? So precisely set so that our universe can be life-permitting. Christianity has a great explanation for that fact, namely, our universe is like a piece of art, or it's like a work of music. It's a creation from an intelligent person. And that makes so much sense of things. I'll never forget when I first discovered

that basically the major rival alternative theory for explaining fine-tuning is the multiverse theory, which is equally unable to be proven by science. Basically, that means we're just in one universe, but there's zillions of other universes and we just happen to live in the right one. And that's the most common way of responding to the fine-tuning argument. What you think about when you realize that is it reduces the contempt put upon us for believing in God

because a simple fact is any worldview on the market is going to have a lot that is unprovable, that you can't fully encapsulate around by means of science and observation of physical reality and so forth. In the cohort, we're going to talk about the argument, the moral argument. It's under fire. A lot of people want to abandon the moral argument. I still think the moral argument is pretty good, especially if you appeal not just to objective moral duties and facts, but you appeal to the full range of human moral experience and moral significance.

And we're going to give what we call an abductive argument, which is an argument an inference to the best explanation. And I would say I agree with John Henry Newman, that conscience is one of the most powerful testimonies of God. We're going to talk about in the cohort the historical evidence for Christian, When I first started studying apologetics, I assumed that you could make a good case for God, but it'd be really hard to make a good case for Jesus. And I was blown away by how compelling and endearing the historical evidence is.

The four Gospels give us so much concrete information that has all the ring of plausibility to it. And so we'll talk about the claims of Christ and then the evidence for the resurrection. There's high-level academic debate about all of these arguments. None of them are simple. I want to avoid being triumphalist. But at the end of the day, we can use arguments to show that Christianity is rationally plausible. Maybe the arguments don't get you to rational certainty. I personally don't think they really do.

I think they get you to rational plausibility, and then the Holy Spirit kind of takes over from there, and you arrive upon certainty at a more existential level. That's my experience. But the arguments can help get you to rational plausibility, And they can help you see how intuitively and emotionally compelling the gospel is as well. So I love apologetics, as you can tell, and I hope to give my life to it and basically just as a service of love to try to help people who are struggling. Now, a lot of my work in this area is to appeal to beauty as well as truth.

I think each of the arguments we can give for God and for Christianity also gesture toward the beauty of the gospel. And that's important because a lot of people aren't even interested in having these conversations, but when you talk about the allure, the enchantment, the wonder of the gospel, that gets their attention. Charles Taylor has written this wonderful book, A Secular Age. In one section, he's going on and on about how modernity tends to discourage faith. But then he writes, all this is true, and yet the sense that there is something more presses in. Great numbers of people feel it. In moments of reflection about their life, in moments of relaxation and nature,

in moments of bereavement and loss quite wildly and unpredictably. Our age is very far from settling into a comfortable unbelief. The unrest continues to surface. I think that is so insightful and it's so true. You know, the human soul longs for something transcendent. And in an age where we distract ourselves from that longing with our devices and with our busyness, nonetheless, it just comes out at certain times. This is where music and the arts can be so helpful for us.

lots of people become a Christian by reading the Lord of the Rings. They read the Lord of the Rings, and something about it captures their interest, and it starts a process that leads them to Christ, or another fiction as well, because it conveys transcendence, and people are looking for that. And the simple fact is that a lot of people aren't willing to part ways with this innate sense that things like love and justice have transcendent value. but in a secular worldview, it's really hard to see where they get that value, because they're reductively explained as the products of evolutionary psychology. We value love and we value justice because

such values helped our animal ancestors survive. They have no objective reference point in the non-biological world. And so they have no final resolution, no final significance. They're just here to help animals survive. Lots of people aren't willing to come to peace with that because they rightly see that it's absolutely vitiating for everything that makes life worth living. Charles Taylor calls these points of tension the unquiet frontiers of modernity. And basically, to put it simply, secular people still long for religious qualities that don't fit within secularism. And so part of our task as apologists is to press on those points of inconsistency.

and we want to help people understand the barrenness and confinement of a secular worldview and the enchanting happiness and wonder of the gospel as an alternative. I always say this and I just say it again. If it's something I really value, I don't mind repeating myself. If Jesus rose from the dead, it means infinite joy like you can't even possibly fathom. You can't even begin to fathom it. I was talking with a friend of mine. This is a random thought.

Timmy, if you watch this, this is you. He's an actor. We were talking about, I was saying, what's the hardest? Because I'm fascinated by acting. Every time I'm around him, I just ply him with questions about, you know, what makes for good acting and that kind of thing. I've always wanted to, like, take an acting class. But anyway, I was saying, what's the hardest emotion to capture well when you're acting? And he said, joy.

And I thought, that's interesting. A lot of people probably because they've never experienced it. How many people in our culture have had a lot of comfort and convenience, but they've never had one moment of true, powerful joy. Probably a fair number of people. How do you even help people feel, you know, understand joy? Remember when you woke up as a little child and you're, and you suddenly realize that it's Christmas morning or when you're pursuing the person you love and you first realize they

love you back. That's joy. If Jesus rose from the dead, it means joy like you can't imagine. it means that the suffering of this life is not just going to end, but actually, for those who trust in Christ, it will be turned onto glory and happiness like you can't even fathom. It's hard to even convey that. That's why you've got to read a book like Lord of the Rings just to get it in your heart.

And in the gospel, we have a message that lands upon the human heart like that. We have the food for which the entire world is perishing with hunger, the good news of Jesus Christ, that you can be reconciled to the Creator God. by trusting in him. And right now people need to experience that. And now is not a time for retreat and panic. Now is a time in the tumult of our world to lean forward with the gospel and give the hope of Christ to people. So just to finish off, I'll give you a final image here. We've said basically, what I've tried to do in this video is give these two strategies for responding to the deconstruction movement, attentiveness and apologetics. And I think they

work well together. If we love people and listen to them with openness, but then we point to the truth of the gospel, because listening doesn't mean we abandon our convictions. But we're sensitive, we're open, we're learning. But then we do have to point people to what we believe is true, and that's the gospel. That's a winning combination, those two things. But let me give you a final image to,

this is about how the fundamental need of the human heart never changes, and the desire, the spiritual desire for transcendence, and the human heart never goes away. A few years ago, I read the novel Contact. I put out a video about this because it affected me so much. I was interested in this book because I'm interested in the larger science and religion relationship in our culture. And Carl Sagan, the author of this novel, is a kind of father figure in that conversation, especially for people more on a scientific side,

scientism being the attempt to kind of explain the whole world through the lens of science. And I think novels, I've listened to a lot of Carl Sagan interviews and I'm interested in his other works, but I think novels are often a great, more indirect pathway to understand a person and to see their worldview and understand where they're coming from. And so I simply went in with one goal and one goal alone to just understand. How does someone coming from a more secular perspective who thinks religion is kind of passe, how do they understand the world? What are the kind of stories they tell to make sense of life? Because stories are how we make sense of the world. I was blown away. I could not believe what I encountered in this book.

And without getting into too much detail, essentially, I noticed three things. Number one, the main character is a rationalist who discovers the need for faith. She has an experience that is so powerful that she cannot prove. If you've seen the movie, you know the scene toward the end. Jody Foster's saying, she's like, I get it. I just can't explain it, but I had an experience. And as an atheist, she finds herself doing the very thing all her life she had criticized religious people for doing, namely believing in something you cannot prove.

Second, she realizes her need for love and for redemption. And at the end of the book, she basically says, I was better at making contact with the aliens out there than with the people in my own life. Third, the aliens, because the book is all about coming into contact with aliens, it's like one of the few books that has to do with aliens in which the aliens are benevolent rather than like killing us. And the, but the aliens don't replace God. Because you might think, okay, well, fine.

the aliens are going to come in and they're going to basically fulfill the role that religion has traditionally played in human civilization. And there's a lot of that. But they don't ultimately replace God. Ultimately, they point further back beyond themselves and make the question of God even more poignant and more unavoidable. And that's through several ways. Basically, there's a wormhole system that they travel through in outer space, but they have no idea who built it. and basically the aliens say the universe is designed. The final paragraphs of the book are basically a design argument. And so here I'll never forget finishing that book.

And I was at the public swimming pool in Deerfield, Illinois, with my kids sitting there reading it, and I got to the end. I'll never forget. When I picked it up, I didn't know if I was going to make it all the way through, if I'd find it interesting. And I get to the end, and I'm like, okay, here I am. I go to this leading scientific figure to see what kind of sort of. story he writes, how to scientific and even scientific people look at the world and what do I find? A story in which the hard skeptic finds a need for faith, in which alien life suggests a supernatural antecedent and in which the faraway regions of the galaxy are easier to penetrate than the human

heart. And I'll never forget getting there and realizing what I wrote in the back of the book is the human need for God is never going to go away. even when a character is having a conversation with an alien in a book written by us from a secular perspective, the question of God just pops up. And I think the same question and the same need is in the hearts of people today. Even though there's so many, so much chaos all around us, ultimately, what people need is the gospel. What people need is the sense of the love of God given to us in Jesus Christ and the settling transformative effect that that has a

your heart from the inside out in every area of your life. So that's what I want to give my life to. That's why Truth Unites exists. If that resonates with you, then I definitely appreciate just whatever support you feel compelled to give, not even just financially, though that's helpful, and there's a way to do that on my website, but even just, you know, just join me in praying for this, you know? Why not just pray for revival? Why not just dream of big dreams right now? Why not just dream big and say, you know, what if, what if the Holy Spirit were to pour, you know, Pentecost is a one-time event, but it's also a paradigm for what the Holy Spirit can do all throughout the church age again and again of just that language of pouring out. What if there was a pouring

out of the Holy Spirit in our own day leading many people to experience the good news of the gospel? For that, I give my life. That's everything to me vocationally. That's what I want to do with Truth Unites. So those are two strategies that hopefully can help us because the need of the human heart never goes way. You're never going to get so sophisticated and so scientifically literate and so advanced in your understanding that you cease to have a soul that needs God. And if I go on any longer, you'll hear my kids in the background because they're getting home from school. And also, I promised that I'd end it. So I'll stop there. But more videos coming out soon. Conquest of Canaan video coming out soon as soon as I can get the reading done. I'm going to respond to some of the

Eastern Orthodox critics. Just compile a bunch of a lot of stuff, a lot of response videos, compile them all into one video. I won't go into details now. Look out for that. It'll get into the icon veneration responses as well a little bit. Other videos coming out in April. I put out, so I put out, if you want to click off the video, you can, I'm here at the end,

but in case anyone's interested in the future, I put out, so I'm here in Nashville, and we've been going strong. I've been, even though I feel kind of fatigued these days with all the transition stress of moving and trying to be a faithful dad. We, I put out eight videos each month so far, two a week on average. And, but I've been a little fatigued with that. So I'm going to keep trying to do that. I don't do it out of duty, though.

I do it just because I love doing it. It's a lot of fun. But this month in April, 2024, might be just a notch back simply because the kinds of videos I want to do are going to take a lot more research. And I want to do a good job. I never just want to throw out videos. I never want to do videos that are just click baity or just whatever. So that's where if you help me share the videos, that helps because I put a lot of work into these.

But my videos are not necessarily the most like sensationalistic type topics. So that's where sharing them helps. It means a lot to me. When you share videos, it means a lot to me. So thank you. But so there might be a few less videos this month, but there'll be more research intensive. And when they come out, I hope they'll be compact and helpful and really speak into some of the conversations happening. today, especially in these apologetics conversations.

All right, thanks for watching everybody. God bless you. And may the Lord be pleased to send revival in our day and pray for that. All right. We'll see you next time.