The Biggest Lie About Modern Spirituality (Copy)

Cameron (00:05)

Welcome to Thinking Out Loud. I'm your co-host, Cameron McAllister.

Nathan (00:08)

And I'm your co host, Nathan Rittenhouse.

Cameron (00:9)

I've found something else to blame on the boomers. Sorry if you're a boomer listening. J yeah, okay, boomer. Just kidding. Well, specifically, let me set it up like this though. I think when you look at people in the millennial and Gen Z categories, if you look at that age range, what does that include? I that includes people all the way up to their forties, but going down to their probably twenties, right? Twenties, forties, roughly.

I think you would have to conclude that there are some, you know, brilliant people out there, amazing questions being asked, amazing work being done, but the basics aren't so basic anymore when it comes to Christianity. And so there are a couple of ways we can say this, but basically, I mean, some of the most perennial habits that have characterized Christians down the ages are not really habits anymore. So reading the most bare bare bones would be praying.

Reading scripture, going to church. All three of those are viewed as expendable in practice. People wouldn't necessarily say that, but in practice, if you look at the way people live their lives, those three things are often not present, or they go on the back burner as soon as other, you know, they're not they're certainly not prioritized. But what that's led to is you get people who think that they know Christianity are really interested in a whole host of exotic questions, you know, gospel of

lost Gospels or, you know, the Book of Enoch or something like that. But they in the meantime, they don't know anything, or at least they don't appear to have a real handle on the actual gospel of Jesus itself. Because that's boring. A failure of transmission, I think, has happened here. And I'm not talking about cars. But specifically, I think people who were who were in the who were who were older did have a handle, not just on the gospel, but on

Nathan (01:51)

Yeah.

Cameron (02:02)

The story of Christianity, but failed to communicate, failed to tell that story in a compelling or holistic manner. And instead, you have a lot of people who got rules and regulations, got various iterations of what they now take to be legalism, or got kind of what appear to be more cultural sort of heirlooms. than the actual gospel. So I thought we'd we'd talk a little bit about that. We don't wanna we don't we're not we don't wanna just cast dispersions or point fingers here too. So we wanna we'll get a little bit more construc constructive here. But yeah.

Nathan (02:39)

Well, but but also I think

if you're on the younger side of this listening, we're gonna lean on you a little bit to say, okay, maybe there's been some failure of transmission between the previous generation and you, but what makes you think that you're going to be able to transmit it in the other direction? So this is an equal opportunity. we're gonna lean on lean on all of us here. there there's so many versions and iterations of ways in which you can think about this. I think particularly of the children of immigrants.

Cameron, your German's probably not as good as your father's. I I don't know. or your your Scottish definitely isn't. you so where you get this a sense of I I think of everything from that, do you think of like foods within families and recipes that are lost through generations? I think Ross Dalton in the New York Times recently wrote about his failure to transmit a love of baseball, to that, you know, something that was a core part of his childhood and looking at the box scores and get in the newspaper to leave

Nathan (03:35)

And he's like, my kids have no interest in this. and so there's there's always that sense of things that will be lost between generations. Recently had a group of thinking out loud listeners staying in my home for a weekend. We were doing some studying projects, and one of the young ladies when she left, she said, I think you know things that my grandpa knew but forgot to tell me was was her summary of the weekend.

Yeah, that's a that's a wild, kind of a haunting, haunting thought. And I wonder if if we aren't living in that time in which we're beginning to feel like, wait a second, there were some pretty important things that were so obvious to previous generations that they never said them out loud because it was that obvious that didn't really make it across the make it across the generation. And that seems to have some fascinating cultural implications, but definitely within the theo theological realm.

Cameron (04:31)

I think there are so let me make not play devil's advocate so much, but try to give a sympathetic portrait here of what I think is part of the reason for this happening, Nathan. And this is so I'll j I'll put I'll put forth some some of my own ideas of what went wrong here. But I so I really like a book called Without God, Without Creed. Not because I think we should be without God or without creed, but because I think it's a very helpful

Intellectual history of unbelief in America. And it was a kind of a pioneering work. Came out in 1986. Johns Hopkins Press, James Turner. He was kind of he was kind of Charles Taylor before Charles Taylor. So it's it's a ri but it's also, this is sort of unusual in this genre of academic writing. It's beautifully written. So there's another there's another recommendation for it. But one of the things that he points out is so the intellectual

Nathan (05:11)

Okay.

Cameron (05:26)

crisis of modern that modern Christians faced. They were facing two, I'm gonna paint with a broad brush here, I have to, but they were they were facing two major, major challenges. One was German higher criticism, which I mean really, it's hard to even wrap our heads around what how disconcerting that would have been if you were if you were an intellectual, if you were paying attention to what was was going on. Scripture had always been treated as

Nathan (05:43)

Mm-hmm.

Cameron (05:56)

Authoritative. I mean, if you look at the history of apologetics, by the way, many of the arguments look really naive to us now because they would just say, well, essentially some variation of the Bible says the Bible, the Bible tells me so. Right, exactly. I I appeal to the authority of Scripture, but suddenly these scholars were treating the Bible just like a historical text. And not only that, like an ancient text. And they were just deconstructing it, taking it apart, and you know.

Nathan (06:07)

Yeah. D de facto fact.

Cameron (06:22)

Positing multiple all authors for Isaiah and I mean this was this was and also they were pointing out well we don't need to get into all the weeds of that, but that was so there was one front, and the other was evolutionary theory wasn't new, but Charles Charles Darwin was a is a he's a brilliant writer and gave to us a poetic vision, among other things. I know he's revered as a scientist, but he gave to us a poetic vision.

Nathan (06:36)

Humans aren't special.

Cameron (06:50)

And in this poetic vision, we were no longer special, just as you said. So he debunked or th or knocked humanity off of its throne. And that was profoundly disorienting as well, because all of a sudden you it it's and what Turner says really well in that book is he says it's not necessarily that Darwin's theory, when you really pressed into it, had a high degree of plausible or had a

you know, plausibility or that it really worked or or that it was that scientifically viable. It actually wasn't. But it was an alternative story. And as an alternative explanation story it really worked. It when it worked really well. Yeah.

Nathan (07:27)

Okay. Well

well let's go with this then and maybe this is where you're headed. So let's say that you're living in a time, you're mid mid nineteenth century for kind of the mythology around the origin of humanity and its uniqueness within a move from creation to nature, I guess. Then you go from scripture as history and authoritative to maybe it's just like all the rest of the books out there and has some holes in it. Those

You look at the the foundational sh shaking that that had within the the psyche of institutions and communities. And then let's ramp that into modern time, in which now there are like five thousand competing myths and narratives about the so it like the zone has been flooded in totality of the options of what it is that you can believe and orient yourself around. And in fact, maybe you can even create your own. And so this is the

transmission of a defining collective narrative is almost an impossibility. Almost.

Cameron (08:27)

Ye

yes. What this also did, and so here's that's right. So yeah, now you got a a whole to use the crude metaphoric cafeteria of of all these different competing options. But what this did was it galvanized a lot of Christians into trying to defend, I mean, this was a noble this was a noble venture, of course, defend the faith against these challenges and against these attacks. So there was the twofold there was an emphasis of defending the integrity and the authority of scripture, trying to do that on the one hand.

And then also on the basis of the the hard sciences, which in the nineteenth century and early as twentieth cent early twentieth century, the you know, basically the hard sciences began to have more and more of a kind of culturally dominant role, specifically as way as the the supreme way of knowing, right? So Christians tried to meet the critics on their own terms here. Now, I don't I'm gonna set aside the question of whether this was the right tack to take.

I wanna bracket that for here for for the time being. What I wanna say here, my argument is what this led to was a heavy, heavy emphasis on the facts of the Christian faith. A heavy, heavy emphasis on it on technical arguments, evidentiary arguments, that were looking at the actual veracity of the faith. So eventually when you come to when you move all the way down, you end up in you know with early event you know, in the the sort of the nineteen seventies, you get

You know, I think the title Evidence That Demands a Verdict from Josh McDowell was was one of the f I mean that phrase kind of captures that impulse. But again, I wanna bracket whether this how effective all of this the question of how effective all of that was. And I just want the I just wanna point out real quickly that this leads to a real focus on arguments, evidence.

Nathan (10:14)

All right, no. Well, no, let let's put

Cameron (10:25)

Some of them abstract arguments and it takes us off of the the story itself. It also takes us off some of the the basic elements of of that story and namely what the what the gospel is, how it ought to orient our lives, and it focuses onto more of a technical kind of view of whether the faith stands up to scrutiny or not.

Nathan (10:49)

Well yeah, but this isn't hypothetical. Like I'm and I'm sure you've had these conversations too, where you have the parent who comes to you and said, Look, my kid, we took them to church, they've studied apologetics, they know all the stories, they've read all the books, and they have no interest in the faith.

Cameron (11:03)

Mm-hmm.

Nathan (11:05)

But I mean it's a it's a very sad thing, but clearly was what was communicated like clearly they had access to information, but what wasn't transmitted was the story itself and and the significance of how it applies to the to their lives. Yeah.

Cameron (11:18)

Significance. The significance

Yeah. And so I think that's why I wanted to give that sympathetic portrait because I think there were some real noble aspirations here. And we'll have our own shortcomings as ourselves when it comes to the our interactions with our children. I mean, grace is always needed because we're human we're just human beings. We can't absolutely. I mean, we we can't possibly anticipate all of the unique challenges and setbacks of our moment. But

Nathan (11:40)

Forty years from now, we'll smack ourselves in the face. Yeah.

Cameron (11:53)

In our zeal to answer our critics, I think thoughtful Christians, many thoughtful Christians, dropped the story in the process. That's my impossibly unfair broad brush strokes way of saying it. In our zeal to answer our critics, many thoughtful Christians dropped the story of Christianity.

Nathan (12:10)

Yeah.

Yeah.

Cameron (12:20)

And lost its significance for their for for their children and you or you real children or symbolic children, younger people.

Nathan (12:27)

You can di you can get so distracted fighting your enemies that you forget to transmit the core of who you are. And the reason that I can say that definitively is that scripture itself warns against this. This is the story of the entire Old Testament of God blessing the people, them prospering, them forgetting, them getting tangled up with all sorts of foreign wars and whatnot, and losing the plot. And so this idea baked into the religious structures and patterns of Old Testament worship.

I mean the one of the key elements is remember, remember, remember, stack up these stones, tell your children about this. When your kids ask why do we do this? From circumcision to temples to sacrifices to what like it all points back to something. So it's when you're walking, when you're sitting, when you're you know, th this this idea of a continuous conversation with the next generation being the key responsibility of what it means to be human of telling the story of

Who is it that we are? Where did we come from? What do we do? Why is this significant? Where are we going? Who do we worship? Why is that important?

Apparently humans have the propensity to forget to do that or we wouldn't have had to be told ad nauseum to do it.

Cameron (13:43)

You know, I think often of Drew Johnson, D R U Johnson, he he talks about how for the Jewish people, and he's talking about the Old Testament, memory is a physical thing. So it's not just that we you know, you're gonna you're gonna tell this story to your children and the and their and your children's children, you're gonna tell this down the ages of how the Lord led you, liberated you from Egypt, you know, and the Passover, but you also you're gonna celebrate this.

And you're going to, you know, you'll have specific customs and rituals and feasts that you follow. And this is part of how you internalize this. This is part of you act this is part of how you act this out. And we, of course, supremely, this all culminates in, you know, in the in the New Testament. The main practices that we have, the main embodied physical practices are the baptism on the one hand and then communion on the other, where there is a physical, there's an acting out.

of what you do. This is also incidentally why some people will tell you that when you pray, it's helpful to make, you know, prostrations of some kind. It's helpful to get on your knees, not because it makes you holier necessarily or it, you know, puts you in good standing with God. You get extra points, but because it actually is driving home throughout your whole body that you are putting yourself in a posture of posture of surrender or reverence. And

That's a that that brings knowing to a well actually be helpful a little bit, Nathan. Can you talk to us just briefly, give us a brief excurses on the Hebrew understanding of knowing? 'Cause it looks it's different from what we mean when we say, yeah, I know the material for the test. It's not the same thing. You could talk about that for just a sec.

Nathan (15:33)

Yeah. Well

well so so I it's it's interesting that we talk about a biblical category of wisdom literature. so so wisdom is part of that, but also it it's not just Hebrew, it translates into the modern time when we talk about the original definition of the word art was knowledge that comes by experience. So maybe the art of being able to stack a stone wall on your farm.

It wasn't, this is like, you know, modern theoretical art. No, this was a this is a skilled and a knowledge understanding of a time and a place with a practical outworking that was seen as a an expression of your embeddedness in the place in which you lived. and so that sense of to to know as a full bodied I mean, but you see, you even have this in in in in Paul where he's like, don't

You know, don't let anybody give me grief. Like I bear the markings of Christ on my body. Here here is a body who is literally physically disfigured from the the abuse that he'd received from some preaching. And so to be able to to look at someone and their actual physical shape and nature be reflective of, but I'm so like I mean, half of the Jewish customs were just to distinguish themselves on the way that they trimmed their beards or didn't, or the tassels on their garments or the

Foods that they did or didn't eat, or how they treated the lizards that fell in the pots. And I mean, the whole this this idea of of a full bodied distinction of a way of life. you think about this, like Moses, God didn't say to Moses, see, I set before you today two ideas. He said, I I set beside you two ways.

That that that is the and so this is what's interesting for me, Cameron, is watching there are those who are deconstructing their intellectualized faith, but then there are those who are joining much more. I had a friend who joined a much more old order type church, and he said I wanted a full body faith. So he said, My version of deconstructing or ex evangelicalism is to step into a full bodied version of the faith.

Not a, here's a neat set of ideas for half an hour on Sunday morning and then we're off to lunch. so, so I don't think it's just a Hebrew thing. I think there's always that a little bit of a longing there for us to connect with something in a tangible way in which we can say, I know this to be true in my body, not just in my my mind.

Cameron (18:08)

To have to take hold of real experience there, experiential knowledge. Well, I mean, and also, I mean, I think it's it's worth pointing out, you know, some a lot of people who have deconstructed their their childhood faith or their, you know, their their religious upbringing, they're making their way into if they're if they're staying in the faith in some way, they're making their way largely to traditions that will tell you how to be a member.

Nathan (18:33)

Mm-hmm.

Cameron (18:33)

So if you become a Catholic, they're not just gonna accept you immediately. You have to be catechized. Or if you wanna be an Orthodox, you gotta be catechized, you're gonna be a catechumenate probably for I think it's up t two years in some cases. It might be a little shorter. There are, you know, they're always trying to find ways to ex historically it takes a while. But they want to they're joining where they they are taught how to embody that set of practices, and that set of practices are seen as a means of transcending

Nathan (18:47)

Yeah, historically at least, yeah.

Cameron (19:04)

The hollow culture surrounding them. So there is, there's a lot of really significant pointers right there. So if we have

Nathan (19:12)

Well, hang on hang on, before we move on, let's not forget, though, that it's not just Catholics and Protestant or Catholics and the Orthodox who had that. I come from a theological tradition that that was the expect expected role of the family. As you were catechized at the dinner table in your evening worship, in your way you worked, and the way you treated your neighbor, and the way that you did business, and the way that you thought about money, and the way that you thought about what you ate, that all of it was connected.

Cameron (19:27)

Right.

Yes.

I think we can safely say that that has waived bye bye to most American households a long time ago. That does not happen. Of course it was my family. Now these are but this is ideally speaking, and same I I would you would say the same, but we are outliers. We're very I mean, that's a tremendous blessing that so many people don't know.

Nathan (19:48)

But but who who formed you the most spiritually?

Well, but what the point I'm making is

it's it's not that the non high churches didn't have a v a vision for catechesis. Theirs was just seen as the family worship and the household as a yeah, so may maybe there's a whole nother conversation there, but

Cameron (20:12)

Sure.

You're right there.

There is. But just to go along that path just for a second, I do think that we could be us Protestant, you know, either Protestant centric or Protestant churches, non Catholic, non Orthodox churches. I think we could be a little bit Yeah, I think we could we we could be a little bit better here. I think sometimes we're so

Nathan (20:41)

That's a nice

way of saying that.

Cameron (20:43)

Right. Yeah, I'm trying to be diplomatic. We I we're so

overzealous to welcome everybody. I think we're a little bit like the proverbial student ministry, you know, set up on a campus. Please, please, please come to our event. We'll give you pizza. We we we have all sorts of wonderful amenities, you know, just please please come and hear our speaker. We just we'll do anything to get you through the doors. Some of our churches look a little bit like that. You know, please, okay, are you here? Great. You wanna join? You wanna join? You wanna join? You wanna join? You wanna join? You wanna you wanna volunteer? You wanna volunteer? And so that overzealousness sometimes is overzealousness.

And especially in some of our I think I mean, it's easy to play, you know, is it Mon Monday morning quarterback? But you you you look at you look at the past, a lot of the the amazing missions of evangelicals, especially I'm thinking of just North America right now. You know, whether we're talking about Billy Graham Crusades or all of these amazing conferences or, you know, the Passion Conference and all of that. I'm not necessarily I'm not denigrating any of that, but I am saying there there is a big

push toward action, toward response. And there's not enough room given for people to to reflect and in the words of our Lord, count the cost.

Nathan (21:58)

Well so but but it is this is not scripture's fault. So I was just thinking about this over the weekend. John three sixteen, super, you know, well known keep going there. Because verse twenty one says this But whoever lives by the truth comes into the light, so that it may be seen plainly that what he has done has been done through God.

That's a powerful sentence about living by the truth in order that the good that happens in your life brings glory to God.

that the to like living by the truth. What in the world does that mean? so we love verse sixteen, whoever believes, but I mean this is the same sentences. I mean, this isn't another section of scripture. This is the same speech of John three sixteen. This talks about living by the truth.

So you just get to pick and choose what part of No, believing is a prerequisite there, but we shouldn't act like that's the full story.

Cameron (22:54)

I think about I think about cultural Christianity a lot here because so we can it's easy to to go after cultural Christianity and go after exotic examples of major capitulation and all of that, but cultural Christianity usually just takes the soft and sort of easy road. I think about Ezra Ripley, who was the minister in Concord when, you know, Henry David Thoreau would have been a kid. And it was you know, so this was he was the Unitarian minister. This was

You know, at the time this was the liberal kind of major, you know, Protestant denomination at the time. But basically what his message was just a big emphasis on community and performing your duties as a citizen. And so you want to be an integral part of the community. Now he would draw on scripture to corroborate some of his statements about how you become a good basically a good member of the town and a good citizen.

And basically, he was giving you a message every week. I mean, he gave thousands of sermons, very eloquent, of course. He was, you know, he was he was well trained. He was a great he was a great speaker, but they were, they were just basically good pep talks on how to live successfully and frugally and well in Concord as a citizen. And in a sense, you know, you that you can have those kinds of messages on all sides of the of the

Political aisle. There's a there's a conservative version of those messages. There's a more liberal version of those messages. But they they basically break Christianity down into a set of helpful principles that help you to, you know, succeed well in cultural terms. And when your culture is in a in a t in a place of relative ease and stability, that can kind of go by undetected. And you can have that for a while. Because I mean, Nathan, I just

Speaking candidly, I have sat in many churches. I remember down the, you know, especially in the, you know, the 1990s and you know, early 2000s, and these were conservative evangelical churches, but basically their messages were a lot like that. Scripture was was used as a sort of proof text for for the major point, but these were largely topical sermons about just, hey, here's how you manage your finances. Well, I w I remember going to one church, Nathan. This was a Pentecostal church, and it was it was, you know, it I it was actually ended up it was it was

Pentecost Sunday. But this church was so non-denominational in its ethos that it it the message wasn't on that, it was on managing your finances. And I just thought I just thought, wow, this is kind of a towering irony right here. But there were and was there anything wrong with the message per se? No, there were some pretty sound principles and all of that. But if your child sitting in in sermon after sermon

Nathan (25:26)

man. On Pentecost.

Cameron (25:41)

about yeah, here's how you live, what here's how you manage your finances. Here's I remember going to a a a series of, you know, sermons on how to how to handle conflict, conflict management. Were were there was the there the odd Bible verse used in the series? Yeah. Was it the main point of the sermons that no, not do these really even rise to the level to the dignity of a sermon? I probably not in the traditional sense. Were they, I mean, they were helpful principles for managing a conflict in the office or in your neighborhood.

But my point is these were these were messages that were very light on the Christian story. If they had any of the Christian story at all, what they were communicating was, Hey, the Bible is a set of interesting little principles and helpful guidelines that can aid and abet your success.

Nathan (26:26)

Well, so let's let's give credit a little bit of credit here because I think a lot of times churches are teaching in this way of saying, if we give if we give all of the chapters, people will be able to put together the narrative. So does the Bible speak a lot about economics? You bet it does. does it speak a lot about justice? You bet it does, about the family, about you filling, yeah, whatever. however, those are all if we don't tie those into the

overarching story, we're probably not going to, if we put show up once every 167 hours, be able to remember the details enough in order to string together the over the big story. You you know what I'm saying? Like are we trying is there a sense in which we can say, hey, we are trying to help people live by the truth. And so we're we're teaching on these things, hoping that we'll they'll be able to build an understanding of what God is up to in the world based off of these principles.

Cameron (27:09)

Well yeah.

Look, story is a basic unit of human communication. That's one way to understand it. You get home from, you know, you get to the office on Monday. What are you gonna do? You're gonna tell stories about the weekend. You get back from summer vacation, what are you gonna do? You can tell stories. This is how we relate to other people. But in a deeper sense, an overarching story is necessary for us making sense of our lives, understanding their overall significance. So when we think about what we're talking about here on this episode.

What is the story that has captivated more people who self-identify as Christians? Is it the story of Father, Son, Holy Spirit who has graciously given to us existence? And we see in scripture the grand drama of his relationship fractured and then redeemed with humanity, or is it the story of I am the captain of my ship? I am the person in charge. The Bible is helpful to me because I find some inspiration in it. But

largely speaking, I call the shots and I have to figure things out for myself and I have to discover my meaning. I mean, I think very obviously that second individualistic story has captivated most of our hearts, and that's the one that has to be countered at our particular moment in North American history. And it doesn't happen accidentally. It happens by intention. Your kid's not just gonna love baseball. And your kid's not just gonna understand the Christian story.

you have to actually talk about it. You have to act it out. Catechesis or just basic teaching of that story and its basic events must be taking place in order for us to then and then you can hear a sermon on finances, you know, sound principles of s financial management or whatever. And you can you can grasp the overall significance of that. Yeah, you're you know, I'm exercising good stewardship. I'm also, you know, living in such a way that I can give

a good bit of my money to the church and also to others in need, or I can, you know, give it to future generations. I'm thinking long term, you know, but you can situate it. But if it's if th but that does not happen by osmosis, it doesn't happen organically. It has to happen intentionally. So that's part of what we're we're getting at here.

Nathan (29:36)

Well, it also ha

it also happens through a phenomenal amount of repetition. Phenomenal amount of repetition. Phenomenal amount of re Yeah, okay. Anyway, but so I I think the you know, some people have listened to us talking for a while talk about how much I quote from my grandfather. You know why? 'Cause he said the same stuff to me all the time. In fact, I remember as a kid being slightly annoyed by it. But it's stuff I remembered. Because he said it over and over again. that's

Cameron (29:45)

Amen.

Nathan (30:07)

if you want your kid to know about baseball, you're probably gonna have to spend a lot of time at the ballpark. That's that's just how that how that works. and so if it's

Cameron (30:13)

No doubt. Yep.

Nathan (30:21)

The the the st the starting point on all of this, I think. So let's let's not say, Hey, what did my grandparents forget to tell me that I wanted to know? It's what do you know that you want the people around you to know and the people younger than you to know? And then be thinking, how do I intentionally pass along the most important things that I know to those that I love and and and the the closest to and have the most influence in their lives? It's gonna take a lot of time. It's gonna take a lot of repetition.

And it's gonna t take a lot of telling really great stories about what God has done, what God is doing, and what God has promised He will do. And then once we get that picture, then let's make sure that we're going back and filling in the details of how that is done. But we can't start with the details and expect the kids these days to put together the big picture.

Cameron (31:12)

Well said. Think on these things if you want to. You have been listening to Thinking Out Loud, a podcast where we think out loud about current events and Christian hope. If you like what we do, then please do like it and share it and subscribe. And also if you'd like to support the work that we do financially, you can do that by going to www.toltogether.com.