Off The Wire

Matt, hey, my friends, welcome to the off the wire podcast. My name is Matt Wireman, and with over 25 years of coaching experience, I bring to you a an integrated approach to coaching where we look at mind, body and soul. So this being my little corner of the universe, welcome we cover everything from spiritual formation or the interior life all the way to goal setting and how to make your life better with life hacks, and I cover everything in between. So whatever it fits my fancy, I'm going to share with you, and I'm so thankful for your time, and I hope this episode helps you. All right. Well, hey, welcome, welcome to another episode of Off The Wire. This is Matt, still I haven't changed, but I do have with me, my friend. Really proud to call him a friend. And from seminary days, Dr Josh chatro, who is the Billy Graham chair for evangelism and cultural engagement at Beeson. That's a mouthful. Josh, well done. And then he is also, they just launched a concentration in apologetics at Beeson, which is really exciting. They got a conference coming up this summer. Is that also an apologetics Josh,its own preaching and apologetics? Okay? Awesome.And, and largely, you're also, you're also part of the Tim Keller Center for Cultural apologetics, and then also a, they call them fellows at the Center for Pastor theologians as well. That's right, yeah. And you in, you have been at Beeson for a couple years, because prior to that, you were at a you were heading up. And what was it largely an apologetics group, or was it, was it more broad than that in Raleigh?Yeah, it was. It was much more expansive than that. Evangelism and apologetics is part of what we were doing, but it was the Center for Public Christianity, okay? It was also very much in the work and faith movement. And I was also resident theologian at Holy Trinity Anglican in Raleigh. We were there for five years,excellent and and you don't know this because you don't keep tabs on who bought your book, but I've got every one of your books brother, so every every book you put out, and I'm like, I love this guy, and I'm gonna support him and buy his book. So it started all the way back, if you remember, with truth matters, yeah. And I use that book for one of the classes that I built here where I teach. And then then I want to go through the Litany here and embarrass you a little bit. And then it goes to apologetics, at the Cross Cultural Engagement, telling a better story, surprised by doubt. And then one that you just released called the Augustine way, retrieving a vision for the church's apologetic witness. So do you write much on apologetics? Is that kind of your thing?Yeah, I've written a few books on that.So why? Like, what is it about apologetics that has really captured your heart, in your mind and like, as opposed to just teaching theology, yeah, it's a certain it's a certain stream. If folks are first of all, folks are curious, like, What in the world is apologetics? Are you apologizing to folks? Like, are you saying I'm sorry?Well, I do have to do that. I'm sorry a lot. That's a good practice. That's not quite what apologetics is. Okay. Okay, so we, one of the things I would say is, and when I meet, when I meet up with old friends like you, sometimes they say, What have you been doing? Because we didn't see this coming. And when we were in seminary together, it wasn't as if I was, you know, reading a lot of apologetic works. And so one of the things is,and you weren't picking fights on campus too much. You were always a really kind person. And most, most time, people think of like apologists as, like, real feisty. And you're not a feisty friend. I'm not. I actually, unless you start talking about, like, soccer and stuff like that, right? Yeah,yeah, I'm not. Yeah, I don't. I don't love, I don't love, actually, arguments I'd much rather have, which is an odd thing, and so I need to tell how did I get into this thing? I'd much rather have conversations and dialog and kind of a back and forth that keeps open communication and and because, I actually think this ties into apologetics, most people don't make decisions or don't come to they don't come to any kind of belief simply because they were backed into an intellectual corner. And but now maybe I'll come back to that in a second. But I got into this because I was doing my PhD work while I was pastoring. And when you do yourpH was that in in Raleigh, because you did your PhD work at Southeastern, right?That's right, that's right. But I was actually, we were in southern, uh. In Virginia for the first half, we were in a small town called Surrey. It was, if you know anything about Tim Keller, it was he served in Hopewell, Virginia for seven or nine years before he went to Westminster and then to New York. And we were about 45 minutes from that small town. So if you've read Colin Hansen's book, he kind of gives you some background on what is this, these little communities, and it does, does kind of match up the little community I was serving for two years before moving to another little community in South Georgia to finish while I was writing. And so I pastored in both locations. So these aren't particularly urban areas, and yet, people in my church, especially the young people, were asking questions about textual criticism, reliability of the Bible.Those are any topics forfolks like, yeah, something happened called the Internet, yes. All of a sudden now, things that you would, you would get to, maybe in your, you know, thm, your your master's level courses, or even doctoral level courses. Now 1819, year old, 20 year olds or 50 year olds had questions about them because they were reading about some of this stuff on the internet. And because I was working on a PhD, I was actually working on a PhD in biblical theology and their New Testament scholar, people would come to me as if I'm supposed to know everything, or you know. And of course, of course, when you're studying a PhD, you're you're in a pretty narrow kind of world and very narrow kind of lane. And of course, I didn't know a lot of things, but I was, I kind of threw myself into, how do I help people with these common questions. So it wasn't as if, it wasn't as if I was saying, oh, I want to study apologetics. I kind of accidentally got there, just because of really practical things going on in my church context. And and then as I was reading and I started writing in response to Bart Ehrman, who is a is a agnostic Bible scholar. Wrote four or five New York Times bestsellers, uh, critical of the New Testament, critical of the Bible, critical of conservative Christianity. I started writing those first two books. I wrote with some senior scholars. I wrote in response. And then people said, so your apologist? And I said, Well, I guess I am. And so that, yeah, so I'm coming at this I'm coming at this area, not because I just love arguments, but really to help the church really with really practical questions. And then as I began to teach it, I realized, oh, I have some different assumptions coming at this as a pastor, also as a theologian, and trained in biblical theology. So I came with a, maybe a different set of lenses. It's not the only set of lens. It's not the it's not the only compare of lenses that that one might take in this discipline, but that's some of my vocational background and some of my kind of journey that brought me into apologetics, and in some ways, has given me a little bit different perspective than some of the dominant approaches or dominant kind of leaders in the area.That's great. Well, let's go. Let's get after it. Then I'm gonna just throw you some doozies and see how we can rapid fire just prove all of the things that that are in doubt. So here we go. Okay, you ready? How do we know that God exists?Yeah, so that word no can have different connotations. So maybe it would be better to ask the question, why do we believe God exists? Oh,don't you do that? You're you can't, you can't just change my question. I was kidding. Well, I think, I think you bring up a great point, is that one of the key tasks in apologetics is defining of terms and understanding like, Okay, you asked that question. But I think there's a question behind the question that actually is an assumption that we have to tease out and make explicit, right? Because, I mean, that's, that's part of you. So I think sometimes people get into this back and forth with folks, and you're like, Well, you have assumptions in your question. So go ahead, you, you, you go ahead and change my question. So how do we knowthe issue is, is there is that when we say something like, you know, we people begin to imagine that the way Christianity works is that we need to prove Christianity in the way we might prove as Augustine said this in confessions, four plus six equals 10. And Augustine, early church father, and he's writing, and he's writing about his own journey. He said I really had to get to the point where I realized this is not how this works. Yeah, we're not talking about, we do not one plus one, our way to God.Yeah. And when is Augustine writing about When? When? So people are, yeah, 397,at. This point. So he's writing right at the, you know, right right before the fifth century, okay? And, and, of course, Augustine famously said, we have to believe to understand, for most believers, God is intuitive, or what? Blaise Pascal, the 17th century Christian philosopher He called this the logic of the heart. Or I can just cite a more contemporary figure, Alvin planeta, calls this basic belief that. He says that belief in God is a basic belief, and and for So, for for many believers, they would say something like this. And I think there's validity in this so is that God just makes sense, even if, even if they haven't really worked out arguments that they they say, Well, yeah, this God makes sense to me. Now I can kind of begin to explore that. I will in just a second, but I just want to say there's, for most of your listeners, it's something like, I heard the gospel and this and the stories of Jesus, and I knew they were true, right? And as kind of insiders here, we would say that's the Spirit's work. The Holy Spirit is working, and God speaks through creation and his word, and people believe. And so that's that's why we believe now, of course, once we say that people have these kinds of intuitions, or as theologians would put it, this sense of God kind of built into them, I would want to say, as an apologist, or even as a pastor, just a minister, you don't have to be apologist to say this is that we can appeal to those intuitions and make arguments in many different types of ways. Well,hold on one second. Isn't that a little too simplistic, though? Because, I mean, you have the Greeks who believed in all the different gods, and the Romans who adopted those gods and changed their names and like, how do we assimilate that? You know, where, you know Christopher Hitchens or Richard Dawkins famously say, Well, I don't, I don't believe in Zeus. So does that make me an atheist? It would have made me an atheist back in, you know, you know Roman and Latin and Greek times. So, so there's an intuition, but, but how do we delineate that? Well, that's not the right object of that intuition.Like, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So we have this intuition, you know, we could say Romans, Romans, one is pointing us to, this is what I would argue, this sense of God, and yet we're, we're fallen, according to the Christian story. And so even though we have this sense of God, we suppress that, and we worship false gods, or we worship the created, rather than the Creator. So the Christian story as a as a Christian, helps make sense of both the kind of why? Well, although we have this sense this, there's this common sense of God, it goes in many different directions and and I would argue that even if you deny kind of transcendence altogether, you're still going to have you're going to still make something kind of a god. You're going to you're going to want to worship something. And I think that's that's part of the point of Romans, one, you end up going to worship the created rather than the Creator. So does that get out what you're asking Matt or Yeah,I think so. I think sometimes the arguments that are real popular, even now is like, well, I just don't, I just don't, I just don't believe that God exists, just like I don't believe that Zeus exists, like, what's, what's the big deal? Why? Why are you so adamant that I believe in that God exists? Like to because I don't, I don't know that God exists because I don't see him. So how would you respond to somebody who says, Well, this Intuit intuition that that you say we all have, and that Romans one says we have, I just don't buy it, you know, because, I mean, I'm, I wouldn't believe that Zeus exists, because there's no empirical evidence to show me otherwise. So how would you respond to somebody that's equivocating or saying that, you know, Yahweh of the Old Testament, the God of the, you know, the God of the Bible is, this is just a tribal deity, just like Zeus is. So, how should we? Iwould, I would say so. So I think we can make kind of arguments for some kind of for transcendence. So there's ways to make arguments against naturalism. That's that's what's being promoted. And there's various different kinds of, you know. So sometimes these kinds of arguments that are in the Christian tradition are used to say, hey, we're going to prove God's existence using these arguments. I think I'm not. Are typically comfortable with the language of prove and how it's used in our context today, again, we get into the math, kind of two plus two equals four. Kind of thinking, yep. But I think a lot of those arguments are appealing to both intuitions and they they work much more effectively as anti naturalistic arguments. Not so much saying, Okay, we know a particular God through, say, the moral argument, okay, that we're but, but it's arguing against simply a naturalistic, materialistic. You know, even Evans, who's a longtime professor at Baylor, makes this argument that those, those types of arguments are really good against pushing back against naturalism. So plan again, has a famous argument that says, if naturalism and evolutionary theory are both true because of how evolution theory works, it's not about right thinking, but right action that you perform certain things to survive. Then, if both of those are true, you have no reason to trust your kind of cognitive faculties.Can you tease that one out a little bit? I kind of lost on that one. He said,What planet is arguing? Is he saying? Look, if, if all of our kind of cognitive faculties are just a product of evolution, okay? And by the way, not only does it's not just a plan. Ago makes this argument, it's actually kind of interesting figures who were like Nietzsche and others made this argument that basically, if, if evolution and naturalism is true that all we are is energy and manner and this product of evolutionary process, then we would have no reason to actually trust kind of our rationality, and that's what rationality is actually mapping onto reality. All of our our brains and our minds are really just producing certain conclusions to help us survive. So it would undercut the very foundations of that position. Now again, yeah, being able to observe, yeah, yeah. So, so with that, again, I think that's an example of an argument that doesn't so much. You know, say this is the Christian God. This supports the belief in Christian God. But what it does is it from within their own thinking. It challenges that. It undercuts their own way of thinking, which is what you're assuming and what you're kind of pushing back on, is a kind of naturalistic world. And I think we can step within that try to understand it and then challenge it on its own terms. And I think that's the real strength of planning this argument. What he's doing now, go ahead.Well, that's it, yeah, in his, in his, like, the the Opus is, uh, warranted. Christian belief is that what you're referencing the the big burgundy book.I can't remember where he makes this argument? Yeah, I can'tremember exactly. But like, if all your cognitive faculties are working, somebody who believes that God exists does not mean that they does not negate all of the other cognitive faculties that they're like if they're in their rational mind, that they have warrants for their belief. But, but that's what I what I think, where I'm tracking with you, and I love this is that even like, it still holds true, right? Like there's not one silver bullet argument to say now we know, like, that's what you were challenging even in the question is, how do you know that you know that you know that God exists? Well, you have to layer these arguments. And so this is one layer of that argument that even the Greeks and the Romans had a sense of transcendence that they were after, and they identified them as gods. But there's this other worldliness that they're trying to attribute to the natural world that they observe, that they can't have answers for, and that we can't observe every occurrence of reality, that there has to be something outside of our box, so to speak, out of our naturalistic tendencies. And so even that can be helpful to say, well, that kind of proves my point that even the Greeks and the Romans and other tribal deities, they're after something outside of our own experience that we can experience in this box. Yeah, that'sright. And there's a, I mean again, this, this argument, isn't intellectually coercive, and I don't think any of these are intellectually coercive. What I mean by that is you can find ways out. And so the approach I would take is actually called an abductive approach, which says, Okay, let's put everything on the table, and what best makes sense, what best makes sense, or what you know, what story best explains all of this? And so that way, there's a lot of different angles you can take depending on who you're talking to, yep, and and so what one of the, one of the ways to look at this and contemporary anthropology? Psycho psychologists have done work on this, to say, the kind of standard, what we might call natural position in all of human history, is that there's there's transcendence. That's, it's just the assumption that there's transcendence. Even today, studies have been shown even people who grow kids, who grew up in a secular society will kind of have these intuitions, like, there is some kind of God, there is some kind of creator, designer. And the argument is that you actually have to have a certain kinds of culture, a particular culture that kind of habituate certain thinking, what, what CS Lewis would call, a certain kind of worldly spell to to so that those intuitions are saying, Oh no, there's not a god. You know, there's not transcendence. And so the kind of common position in all of human history across various different cultures is there is some kind of transcendence. It takes a very particular, what I would say, parochial, kind of culture to say, oh, there's probably no there. There's not. There's, of course, there's not. In fact, Charles Taylor, this is the story he wants to tell of how did we get here, at least in some secular quarters of the West, where it was just assumed, of course, there's, of course, there's a God to 500 years of to now, and at least some quarters of the West, certain, certain elite orsecular? Yeah? Yeah, people. And even then, that's a minority, right? This is not a wholesale thing, yeah.It seems to be. There's something, well, even Jonathan height, uh, he's an atheist, says, has acknowledged that there seems to be something in humans. That's something like what Pascal called a God shaped hole in our heart, and so there's this kind of, there's this deep intuition. And what I'm wanting to do is, I'm wanting in my arguments to kind of say, okay, given this as a Christian, that I believe we have this sense of God and this intuition of God, these intuitions, I want to appeal to those intuitions. And so there's a moral order to the universe that people just sense that there is a right and wrong. There's certain things that are right and certain things are wrong, even if a culture says it is, it is, it is fine to kill this group of people, that there's something above culture, that even there's something above someone's personal preference, that is their moral order to the universe. Now, given that deep seated intuition, what you might call a first principle, what makes best sense of that, or a deep desire, that that, that nothing in the universe seems to satisfy that we have. This is CS Lewis's famous argument. We have these desires, these natural desires for we get thirsty and there's there's water, we get hungry and there's food, and yet there's this basically universal or worldwide phenomenon where people desire something more, that they try to look for satisfaction in this world and they can't find it. Now, what best explains that? And notice what I'm doing there, I'm asking that the question, what best explains it? Doesn't mean there's, there's not multiple explanations for this, but we're saying, What's the best explanation, or profound sense that something doesn't come from nothing, that intelligence doesn't come from non intelligence, that being doesn't come from non being. Yeah, a deep sense that there's meaning and significance in life, that our experience with beauty is not just a leftover from an earlier primitive stage of of evolution. And so we have these deep experiences and intuitions and ideas about the world, and what I'm saying is particularly the Christian story. So I'm not, I'm not at the end, arguing for just transcendence or or kind of a generic theism, but I'm saying particularly the Christian story, best, best answers. Now, I'm not saying that other stories can't incorporate and say something and offer explanations, but it's a, it's a really a matter of, you know, you might say out narrating or or telling the Gospel story that maps on to the ways we're already intuiting about the world, or experiencing or observing the world.Yeah, so, so going along with that, so we don't have, like, a clear cut case, so to speak. We have layers of argument, and we appeal to what people kind of, in their heart of hearts, know, they don't have to like, they have to be taught otherwise. Almost like, if you talk to a child, they can't, they kind of intuit that, oh, there's something outside, like, Who created us? Like, who's our mom? You know, like, going back into the infinite regress. It's like, okay, some something came from nothing. How does that even how is that even possible? So there has to be something outside of our. Experience that caused that to happen. So, so say you, you go there, and then you help people. Say, help people understand. Like, I can't prove God's existence, but I can argue that there are ways of explaining the world that are better than other ways. So then, how do you avoid the charge that, well, you basically are a really proud person that you think your religion is better than other religions. How, how could you dare say that when you can't even prove that you're you know? So how? How would you respond to somebody who would say, like, how do you believe? Why do you believe that Christianity is a one true religion? Yeah, um,well, I would say a couple of things. One is that, in some sense, everyone is staking out some kind of claim. So even if you say you can't say that one religion is true or one one religion is the one true religion, that is a truth claim that you're staking out. And I think it's fine that this for someone to say that they just need to realize. I mean, I think they're wrong, but I think they're they're making a truth claim. I'm making a truth claim. Christians are making truth so we're, we all think we're right, and that's fine. That's fine, but, but then we but then once you realize that, then you're not saying, Well, you think you're right, but I just, I'm not sure, or it's arrogant to say you're right. I think, of course, with some some things, we have more levels of confidence than other things. And I think that's the other thing we can say with Christian with as Christians, it's saying, Hey, I believe, I believe in the resurrection. I believe in the core doctrines of Christianity. It doesn't mean that everything I might believe about everything is right. It doesn't even mean all my arguments are are even 100% always the best arguments, or I could be wrong about a particular argument and and I'm also not saying that you're wrong about everything you're saying. Okay, so, but what we are saying is that, hey, I I believe Jesus is who he said he was, and you're saying he's not okay. Let's have a conversation. But it's not, rather, it's not a matter of somebody being air. You know, you can hold those positions in an arrogant way. But simply saying, I believe this isn't in itself arrogance, at least, I think how arrogance is classically defined, yeah. And what is this saying? I believe this, and I believe, I believe what Jesus said about himself. And I can't go around and start kind of toying with with, if I believe he's Lord, then it's really not up to me to say, okay, but I'm gonna, I'm gonna, kind of take some of what he said, but not all of what he said. If you actually believe he rose from the dead and he is Lord and He is God, then then you take him at his word.What is it, as you think about cultural engagement, cultural apologetics that you've written on like, what is it in our cultural moment right now where people you say that thing, like Jesus said, You know, he, he, he said, I'm God, you know, not those explicit words, right? That's some of the argument. Like, no, but you look at the narrative he did, and that's why he was going to be stoned for blasphemy. That's why all these things. But that's, that's another conversation for another day. But, and then you talk to someone, you're like, Well, I don't believe he was God. I don't believe His claims were. Like, why then do you do we oftentimes find ourselves at a standstill, and people just throw up their hands like, well, that's your truth, and my truth is, I just don't, like, just don't push it on me. Like, why do we find ourselves in this? And it's not new. I mean, this is something that goes back to, you know, hundreds of years ago, where people are making arguments and they're like, Well, I just don't know. So I'm gonna be a transcendentalist, or I'm gonna be a deist, or I'm gonna whatever. So how do we kind of push back on that a little bit to say, No, it's not what we're talking about. Is not just a matter of preference, and it's not just a matter of, hey, my truth for me and your truth for you. But we're actually making it a claim that is true for all people. Like, how do we kind of encourage people to push into that tendency that people have to just throw up their hands and say, whatever? Pass the piece, you know? Well,okay, so I think let me answer that in two ways. One's philosophically, and then two are practically. One philosophically. I do think it's, you know, CS Lewis was on to this, as he often was way ahead of the curve on certain things, but on an abolition of man. When he talked, he's talking about the fact value distinction and how we've separated. You know, you have your facts, and then everything you know, where, classically, you would kind of recognize that courage, you know, is a virtue, and that's, it's a, it's a, it's also a fact that we should pursue courage and rather than just my preference of kind of and so there's actually. Be this, but now we have, well, that's a value, kind of courage, and say you should do something, but it's, it's, that's your value and and so we have this distinction between facts, which is, follow the science, and then values over here. And as that has opened up. You have both a kind of, on one hand, a very, very much, a people saying in a very kind of hard, rationalistic way, you know, science has said, which, that would be another podcast to kind of dive into that more science is good and, yeah, and, but science doesn't say anything. So I'm a fan of science, but it doesn't say anything. We interpret certain things, but, but so you can kind of have a hard rationalism, but you also combine with a kind of relativism, or at least a soft relativism that says, Well, this is my truth, because values become subjective. So that's the philosophical take. But the kind of practical thing, I would say, is they need people. One of the reasons people do that is because, it's because they've seen kind of these to reference what you're talking about earlier this hey, this person's coming in wanting to talk about my worldview, and it just becomes this fierce, awkward encounter, and I don't want anything to do with that type of thing, like I don't, I don't want to go down the dark corners of of the Internet to have these, to have these intellectual just like Charles Taylor says, a lot of the kind of arguments are, I have three reasons why your position is untenable. He says something like untenable, wrong and totally immoral. Now, let's have a conversation. It just and so it's kind of like, no thanks. I don't think I want to have that conversation. You do you. And so there's, there is a part that, culturally, something is going on which needs to be confronted. And Lewis was doing that work, and a lot of philosophers have followed him in that but there's also a side of of maybe where our own worst enemies here, and the way that we try to engage people, and where we start with people, and we think, Okay, let's start in this kind of, you know, apologetic wrestling match with people. And a lot of times, people are just looking to cope. People are just looking to survive. They have mental health issues going on, and they don't want another one to pop up because of the apologist. And so they're just looking to try to skirt that conversation and get to feeding their kids or dealing with their angry neighbor. And so we've got to kind of take stock on kind of where people are at, and then how to engage them with where they're at. Now I'm going to apologize. I think all of those arguments are helpful in a certain context, but a lot of times, we've been our own worst enemy, and how we try to try to engage so what I what I encourage students and ministers to do is is start talking about people's stories, and you know how life is going and where what's hard, and asking really good questions, and kind of having a holy curiosity and and often, I was in an encounter with a guy who came up to me after a kind of a university missions thing, and he was an atheist, and he wanted to talk about the moral argument. And I was happy to do that for a few minutes, but then I just asked him. I said, what you know, what do you love to do? Tell me about yourself, and where do you really find joy in life? And he looked at me, and he started to tear up, and he said, You know, I'm really lonely right now, you know, go figure this moment in our world, the kind of fragmented world we live in. And he said, what's really meaningful to me is my is my pet, because he provides solace. And there's this moment where, of course, I mean, here's an atheist wanting to show up at a Christian event, right? And because Christians were nice to him, and he's deeply lonely, and we got to have a pretty meaningful conversation about, you know, the benefits of following Christ in the community, communion with not only God, but with others, yeah, but if I would have just left it at, let's go to the more we would have never got there. But it took me kind of asking the question, which is, in essence, what I was trying to ask is what, I didn't put it like this, but what are you seeking? What are you really after here? And where are you really getting joy in life, and what's going on? And I if we can learn to go there, I think we'll have much more productive conversations. And then just kind of, I heard chatro talk about the, you know, ontological argument. Now let me throw that out there at somebody. I think that's why apologists and apologetics have sometimes been given a bad name. But if you. Actually look at the tradition, the the larger tradition. There's so many resources, and there's so many people, apologists, doing lots of different things, that I think gives us kind of way to actually engage people where they're at.Yeah, yeah. No, that's great. Well, I It reminds me, I believe it was Schaefer who talked about the the greatest apologetic, at least his time, and I think it stands true even now, is welcoming people and being hospitable towards people, welcoming the questions, not looking at folks as adversaries, but fellow pilgrims. And then you welcome them into that space, into that community. And then they're they see that, quite frankly, the faith works. The Christian ethic actually works, albeit imperfect, by imperfect people in imperfect ways. But you know, as we go through pain and suffering, as we go through, you know, elation and disappointment, like there's still a lot that that we can demonstrate to the world through our testimony that it works. You know, so to speak. So I'd love to hear you kind of help walk us through how the Christian story tells a better story about pain and suffering, because that's that's a fact of every person listening is that there's some modicum of pain and suffering in their life at any moment. And then you look at the grand scale of the world and all these things, but just even we can go down to the individual level of the why is there pain and suffering in my life and in the world and, you know, in general. But I like, like for you to just kind of riff on that for a little bit for us, to helpus, yeah. And in some ways, this question, and the apologetic question is a kind of real, a snapshot into the into what we're talking about with, how do we respond to that? Not just as Okay, an intellectual question, yeah, yeah, but it's also a profoundly experiential question. And there's youmean, you mean, and how, in the moment when you're saying, in the moment when somebody asks you the question, not getting defensive, but being being willing to listen to the question, Is that what you mean by that? And yeah,well, what I mean is, that's certainly true. Matt, what I was really thinking, though, is how this is not just something kind of an abstract, intellectual question. Oh, okay, but it's a profound experiential and there's different angles that we might take into it. But I mean, as a kind of snapshot or a test case in our apologetic is, I think there's ways to answer that question that are sterile, that are overly academic, and I and that also, I would say, rushes in to give an answer. And I would want to argue that Christianity doesn't give an answer to evil and suffering, but it gives a response. And let me make, let me explain that, yeah, is, is an answer. Tries in the way I'm using it, at least tries to say, I'm going to solve this kind of intellectual problem, and the problem of evil and suffering in the world, of why a good God who's all powerful would allow the kind of evil and suffering we see in the world is, is one that we might say, Okay, now there's the problem. Now let me give the solution. And this is often done, and we've you maybe have been in this if you're listening into a certain context where a kind of famous apologist says, Here is the answer, or famous Christian celebrity says, Here is the answer to evil, and this solves all the problems, until you start thinking about it a little bit more, or you go home, or three or four years, and you grow out of that answer and and so I think we need to be real careful here when we say we have the answer, because if you keep pushing that question back in time, or you start asking questions like, well, that that bullet that hit Hitler in World War One and didn't kill him? What if the God of the Bible, who seems to control the wind and everything, would have just blown it over and killed Hitler. It seems like maybe it could have been a better possible world if Hitler, you know, didn't lead the Holocaust. Okay, so, so again, I think, I think pretty quickly you begin to say, Okay, well, maybe some of these theodicies Don't actually solve everything, although I would say that some of the theodicies that are given things like free will, theodicy or or the kind of theodicies that say God uses suffering to to grow us and develop us. And I think there's truth in all of that, and there's but what it does. What none of them do is completely solve the problem. And so I think that there's value in those theodicies in some extent.Hey, did you know that you were created to enjoy abundance? I'm not talking about getting the latest pair of Air Jordans or a jet plane or whatever that this world says that you have to have in order to be happy. Instead, I'm talking about an abundant life where you are rich in relationships, you're rich in your finances, but you are rich in life in general, that you are operating in the calling that God has for you, that He created you for amazing things. Did you know that? And so many times we get caught up in paying our mortgage and running hither and yon, that we forget that in this world of distractions that God has created you for glorious and amazing things and abundant life. If you would like to get a free workbook, I put one together for you, and it's called the my new rich life workbook. If you go to my new rich life.com my new rich life.com. I would be glad to send you that workbook with no strings attached, just my gift to you to help you. But here'sthe thing, here's what I want to go back to with a question. Is that the Odyssey as we know it, or this? And what I'm using theodicy for is this, this responsibility that that we feel like we have to justify the ways of God, is a particularly modern phenomenon. I think this is where history comes and helps us. Charles Taylor talks about this in that the kind of way we see theodicy and understand theodicy was really developed in the middle of the 1700s with figures like Leibniz, and then you have particularly the Lisbon earthquakes in the middle of the 18th century. And that was this kind of 911 for that context. And in this 911 moment, you have philosophers being saying, Okay, how do we justify the ways of God? And are trying to do it in a very kind of this philosophical way to solve the problem. But from for most of human history and history of the West, of course, evil and suffering was a problem, but it wasn't a problem so much to be solved, but it was a problem to to cope with and and and live in light of, in other words, what you don't have in the Bible is Job saying, Okay, well, maybe God doesn't exist. Or the psalmist saying, maybe God doesn't exist because I'm experiencing this. No, they're ticked off about it. They're not happy about it. They're struggling to cope with it. It is, it is a problem, but it's not, then therefore a problem. That says, well, then God doesn't exist. Yeah. And it didn't become a widespread kind of objection against God's very existence, until certain things have happened in the kind of modern psyche, the kind of modern way of imagining the world. And here is what's happened. This is what Charles Taylor says. Is that Taylor says what happened is kind of slowly through through different stages in history, but but in some sorry to be gloved here, but it's, it's a very kind of, you know, long argument. But to get to the point is, he says our view of God became small, and our view of humans became really big. And so God just came became kind of a bigger view of version of ourselves. And then we said, oh, if there is a reason for suffering and evil, we should be able to know it, because God's just a bigger kind of version of us, and he has given us rational capacities. And therefore if we can't solve this, then there must not be a god. That's kind of where the logic goes. And of course, if you step into the biblical world, or what I would say a more profoundly Christian way of looking at it is God. God isn't silent, and God has spoken, has given us ways to cope and live with suffering and ways to understand it. But what he what he doesn't give us, is that we're going to he actually promises that, that we're not going to fully understand His ways that, that we're going to have to trust Him, even though we can't fully understand why he does what he does in history all the time. And so this leads into what, what's actually called. There's, this is a, this is a weird name if you're not in this field, but it's called skeptical theism. I'm a skeptical theist. And what skeptical theists Are you is that we're not skeptical about God, but we're skeptical about being able to neatly answer or solve the problem of evil. But we actually don't think that's as big of a deal, because, simply because. I don't understand why God, God's simply because I don't understand God's reasons. Doesn't mean he doesn't have reasons. Yeah, yeah. Andso just beyond your the your finite, uh, temporo spatial understanding of things, right? Like you don't understand how this horrible situation plays out in a grander narrative,right? So it's Stephen wickstra. He had this famous argument. I'll riff off of it a little bit. I mean, just metaphor. He says, if you have a if you have a tent, and we go camping together, Matt and and I open the tent and say, there's a giant dog in there. And you look in there, there's no dog, you would say, Yeah, you're either crazy or a liar. But if I open the tent and say there's tiny bugs in there, and they're called no see ums, you wouldn't, you wouldn't know. You wouldn't be in a position to know. You wouldn't be in an epistemological position to know whether there's a bug in there or not. So you would simply have to decide whether you're going to trust me or not. And then, you know, the claim of the non Christian might be, well, yeah, why would I trust the God given the kind of crap that I see in the world? And I would say, well, a couple reasons. One is most profoundly because God has entered into this world. He has not sat on the sidelines. So even though we don't fully understand it, he has in the person of Jesus Christ, he has suffered with us and for us. So this is a God who says, I haven't given you all the answers, but I have given you myself. And that's I think both has some rational merit to it, and profoundly some intellectual merit to that. I'd also say that the Christian story actually gets at some deep intuitions, kind of underneath this challenge or this problem. It was CS Lewis, who was an atheist in World War One, and and he was very angry at God because of the evil and violence and his his mom dying at an early age, and was an atheist. But then he realized that in his anger against God, that he was assuming a certain standard, a certain kind of moral standard, about how the world should be, that there is evil in the world and that it shouldn't be so, and this deep intuition that it shouldn't be so that certain things aren't right. Actually, you don't have if you do away with God's existence, you just you have your preferences. But in a world of just energy and matter, why would the world not be absurd? Why would you expect things not to be like this. Why would you demand them not to be like this?So a deeply embedded sense of morality that can't be explained by naturalism is what you're getting, yeah?That that we have a certain problem here, or certain challenge with not fully being able to answer the question, yeah, but they have, I would say, a deeper challenge, that they don't have even the kind of categories to make sense of the question. So that's those are some of the directions I would go, and it's first stepping inside and kind of challenging against some of the assumptions. But then I'm as you, as you can tell, then I'm going to say how the Christian story does make sense of these deep intuitions, our moral intuitions, that are underneath the problem, or the challenge of evil and suffering. And then also going to Jesus in the Gospel. And the Gospel story,one of the questions I had on our on the list of questions was, how do we know the Bible is true? But I want to delve into more of this understanding of doubt and how that plays, because you've written a lot on this. But I'd like, could you just direct us to some resources, or some folks, if folks are interested in, how do we know the Bible is true? I'm thinking real popular apologist right now is Wesley. Huff is a great place to go. But are there other like, hey, how do I know that the Bible is true? Because you keep appealing to Christianity, which is in for is the foundation of that is the Bible. So could you give us a few resources so people could chase those down.Peter Williams has written a couple little good books on the Gospels. AndPeter Williams Williams, he's in Cambridge, right, orTyndale house, over there and over the pond. And he's written a book on the Gospels. And I can't think of the name, but if you put it on the internet, it'll show up. And the genius of Jesus as well. Okay, little books, and I think both of those are helpful as far as the Gospels go. Richard, Richard balcom is really good on this, Jesus and the eyewitnesses. As well as a little book that most people haven't heard of. It's a, it's an introduction to the Gospels in that off in an Oxford series, which is, you know, kind of a brief introduction to the Gospels. And he, especially at the very beginning, he gives us John Dixon, who's at Wheaton now, has written a lot of good books on on on this. And it's got this series called skeptics guide to and it does both Old Testament and New Testament kind of stuff. So that little series is, is really helpful. So those are some places I would start. And in my books, I typically have, you know, chapters on this, but I haven't, haven't written, you know, just one book, just on this. The early books, truth matters and truth in a culture of doubt, were, were engaging Bart airman. But really, Bart airman not to pick on on Airmen, but just because he was such a representative of a lot of the the views that that we were hearing, he ended up being a good kind of interlocutor. In those I would just say, I know you didn't. You just asked for books. And let me just say one thing about this is I, I think if you are trying to engage, I think if you take the approach of, let me prove the Bible, let me take everything and just, yeah, I don't think that's the best way. I think you often have to give people some you know, whether it's, you know, the beginning of Luke's Gospel, where he's saying, This is how I went about this. And I actually did my homework to kind of say, this is at least the claim of the gospel writers say, and then, but the real way that you you come to see and know, is you have to step into it and read it. And I think one of the apologetic practices I would want to encourage, or just evangelistic practices, is is offering to read the gospels with people and and working through it. And then certain things come up as you read them, apologetically that you'll, you'll want to chase down and use some of those resources for but I think often it's, it's saying, hey, the claims are, at least that, you know, these guys have done their homework and and some of the work Richard welcome is doing is saying, you know, the Gospel traditions were, were were pinned within the lifetime of eyewitnesses and this. And so that's some of the work that that balcom has helpfully done that kind of help us get off the ground in some of these conversations.Would that be your go to gospel Luke or, like, if you're walking with players, or a go to like,some people say more because of the shortness or John, I I'm happy with them. Allfour should be in the canon. Yeah, no, that's great. And I think a couple other books I'm thinking of Paul Wagner's from text from text to translation, particularly deals with Old Testament translation issues, but then text critical pieces, but then also FF. Bruce's canon of Scripture is a real, solid place to go, if people are interested in those big pieces, but those, I mean, yeah, Richard Bauckham work was really helpful for me when I was like, How do I even know, you know the starting place is a good starting place. So, yeah, thank you for that. Sowhat the challenge is, people have got to make up their mind on Jesus. Yeah. I mean, I think that's where I want to kind of triage conversations and say, Hey, I know the Bible is a big book and there's a lot going on. First things you gotta make a call on. So that's where I'm going to focus on, the Gospels. That'sgreat. No, that's great. Well, you know, a lot of times you, and you've mentioned this earlier, that sometimes in our attempts to give reasons for our faith, we can come to simplistic answers like, Okay, this is, here you go. Here's the manuscript evidence, for example. Or, hey, here's the evidence for the resurrection. Oh, here. You know, this is pain and suffering, Romans, 828, you know, having these quick answers. And I think it stems from a desire to want to have a foundation for what we stand on. But a lot of times, and I think what we're seeing in our culture, and this is not anything new, this topic of deconstruction is not really a new topic is, you know, it's what's been called in the past, apostasy, or just not believing anymore. But now it's gotten a more, you know, kind of sharper edges to it. And and I would love for you to you know how you would respond to someone who is deconstructing from their faith because it didn't allow for doubt or because they were raised in perhaps a really strict Christian home. So how would you respond to somebody who says, I don't I don't like the. Had answers anymore, and I don't, you know, it's just too simplistic, and it doesn't, it's not satisfying. So how would you, because I encounter a lot of folks that are in that vein, the ones who are deconstructing, it's, it's not, you know, there's definitely intellectual arguments, but there's something else in back of that too, I think. So I'd love to hear you just kind of, how would you respond to someone who is deconstructing or has deconstructed in their faith?Yeah, yeah. And of course not. In that situation, my first response it's going to be, tell me more. Let's, let's talk more. I want to hear, I want to hear your story. I want to hear your deconversion story, or where you're at and and to have some real curiosity. Rather than here, let me tell you what your problem is. And let me tellyou, yeah, you just don't want to believe because you got some secret sin or something. Yeah? Oh, goodnessno. I mean, it's right faith, unbelief and doubt is complex, and there's lots of forms of doubt. And we use that word I mean, it has quite the semantic range, and we use in lots of different ways. And of course, the Bible, by no means, is celebrating doubt. The Bible, it's, you know, that we is saying we should have faith. It calls us to faith, not to doubt, but doubt seems to be a couple things to say. We talk about, we talk about ourselves as Christians, as new creations in Christ, but we also recognize that we still sin, we still we still have sinful habits. We're still sinful, and in the same way we we we believe, but we can struggle with doubt, and that's a reality. And it seems to me that that doesn't mean, though, that then we celebrate doubt, as if doubts this great thing, no, but at the same time, we need to be realistic and honest that we do. And there's certain things culturally that have happened, because we now live in a pluralistic world where people seem very sane and rational and and lovely, and they believe radically different things than we do. And just that proximity, Peter Berger, the late sociologist, did a lot of work on this area. This is just it. It creates these kinds of this kind of contestability, because, well, we could imagine even possibly not believing, or kids not believing, in a way that, again, 500 years ago, you know you Luther was wrestling with whether the Roman Catholic Church had everything right, but he wasn't wrestling and doubting the whole the whole thing, yeah, God. So that creates certain pressures that I think we need to be honest about, and but, but with, and part of that honesty, I think, in that kind of conversation to say, Hey, you're not alone and you're not just simply crazy because you're you're raising some of these things because, I mean, that's in many ways, understandable. Yeah, okay, yeah. I'm not saying it's good, I'm not saying it's right, I'm just saying it's understandable. And I hear what you're saying, and I'm, let's talk about it now. The the kind of metaphor that that I use is to think about Christianity as a house. Of course, that's not my metaphor. I'm I'm borrowing from CS Lewis, who talked about Christianity as a house and in Mere Christianity, Lewis said he wanted to get people through non Christians into the hallway, and so he wanted to get them into the door so that they would and then they could pick up a particular tradition, they could enter a room. But his approach in Mere Christianity was to represent kind of the whole house. And what I think is happening in many cases is that people, now, I'm riffing off of his metaphor, people in the church. People have raised in the church, so they've grew up their whole life in the house, but it's actually in the what I would call the attic. And the attic as as I talk about it is, is in the house. It's, it's a Christian community, but it was, it was many times they're built out of a kind of reactionary posture against culture, without a deep connection to the rest of the house. It's kind of like, Hey, we're scared, and understandably so, the kind of decadent morality, certain shifts happening in the west with Can you giveus a couple examples of what you're thinking like? What would a person living in the attic like? What would their tradition kind of. Look like,yeah. So a couple of things. One in response to, in some cases, in response to the kind of intellectual movements, the kind of sex, secular and, you know, thinking they would say, you know, intellectualism is bad, that would be one response from the attic, like, don't worry about, you know, thinking. Just believe your problem is you're just thinking too much. So that would be one response, a kind of anti intellectualism. The other response is what I would call a kind of, depending on what kind of mood I'm in, I would call it a kind of quasi intellectual that, and that sounds harsh that I say what kind of mood I'm in, but a kind of quasi intellectual response, which is like, Oh, you want arguments. You want evidence. We'll give you two plus two equals equals God, and we'll kind of match, you know, fire with fire, and we can prove God's existence. And oftentimes, those kinds of apologetic reactions, I would call them, sometimes they're kind of quasi intellectual, because I don't think that's how the kind of bit we come to the big decisions. I don't think it's rational enough about a rationality about kind of what type of humans we are, and how we come to the big decisions and the big truths and and so I think that's one response, and that's why you have a kind of industry of apologetics sometimes. And the way they do it, I'm not saying in some ways it can be helpful, but in other ways, it can cause problems down down the road, and we've seen that at least, like, for instance, with the evil and suffering kind of conversation we were having before. If people say, actually, those arguments actually don't make, don't fully do what they were. We you claim too much for your arguments. Let's just say, like that. Okay, so that's one kind of, so there's a there's a kinds of, well, Christianity, in that side can kind of become this kind of intellectual, sterile work where you're just kind of trying to prove God, rather than this, than this way of life, where does worship come in? Where does devotion come in? What is And so very quickly it becomes, you know, this intellectual game, rather than communion with the living God. And so the emphasis understandably goes a certain way, but I would say understandably wrong goes a certain way, and that argument should be part of this deeper life of faith that we live and so we again, I'm wanting to say the motives aren't necessarily, aren't wrong, but where we get off because we're too reactionary, can go off. Let me give you one other ones. And I would say, like the purity culture would be another kind of side of this where we see a morally decadent culture of sexuality, and we want to respond to that we we don't want our kids to grow up believing those lies. Yeah, as as a friend of mine says, you know that the sexual revolution was actually and is actually bad for women, and we need to say that. We need to say that to people in the church, absolutely. But in response to that, then we create what, what has been called a purity culture, which, which has, has kind of poured a lot of guilt and have made have over promised again, if you just do this, you'll have a wonderful life and a wonderful marriage if you just do this, and then if you mess up, oh, you've, you've committed this unpardonable sin, almost. And so there's a lot of pressure being put on, particularly young women and then, and then over promising and so all of this,can people see that the House of Cards is coming down because they're like, Yeah, my marriage is horrible.It creates this pressure, right where you have to. You have to think a certain way. You have to behave this very kind of way. It's reaction to want to protect them. So again, I'm saying, Yes, I understand the reactions, yeah, and, but, but, and this is, I think, a key part of this, because it's not connected well to the rest of the house. It often reacts, rather than reflected deeply on the tradition and helps fit your way, the centrality of the Gospel, the centrality of what's always been, Christian teaching and coming back to the main things, rather than kind of reacting to culture because we're nervous, and doing it in such a way that, you know, well, people will begin to say, That's what Christianity is about. Christianity is really about, you know, your politics, because that's all my pastor is talking about, interesting, you know, and this is all they're talking about. So that becomes the center,even though the ethic is is, is, becomes the. Center, as opposed to the the philosophy and theology guiding the ethic, is that, would that be another way to put it, like how you live, become, becomes preeminent to, you know, wrestling with doubt and and trying to bring God into the space of your doubt and that kind of stuff is, that, is that?Yeah, I mean, so that, I think one of the things that the the early creeds help us to do is it helps us to keep the main thing. The main thing, it helps us to keep, rather than saying, well, because culture is talking about this, we're going to, you know, kind of in our churches, this becomes the main thing, is reacting or responding, maybe, whether it's with the culture and certain movements or against the culture, yeah. But if you're anchored to the kind of the ancient wisdom of the past you're you do have, you are at times, of course, going to respond to what's going on culturally, yeah, but it's always grounded to the center, and what's always been the center, yeah? And I think so when you're in a community like this, like this, the pressure of, I've gotta think rightly. I've gotta check every box here, yes, and oh, and I've, I've been told that there is proofs, and I just need to think harder. I just, you know, even believe more, even Yeah, if I just, if I just think harder, then I'll eliminate my doubt, but my doubts not being eliminated. So either I'm stupid or maybe there's a problem with the evidence, because it's not eliminating all my doubt, but this creates this kind of melting pot of anxiety for a lot of people as their own Reddit threads and their Oh, and then this, trying to figure all this out, and they're Googling all these answers, and then the slow drip, oh, well, to be honest, sometimes the massive outpouring of church scandal is poured into this, yeah. And it just creates a lot of anxiety amongst young people, and eventually they say, I'm just going to jump out of the attic, you know, because it looks pretty freeing and it looks like a pretty good way of life out there. And what, what I say to people is two things. Number one, rather than simply jumping out, first look what you're about to jump into, because you have to live somewhere, and outside the attic, you're not just jumping into kind of neutrality, you're jumping into cultural spaces and assumptions and belief. And so let's, let's just be just as critical as, yeah, the attic or house as you are will be mean, be just as critical with those spaces as you have been with the attic. So you need to explore those. But also, I'm wanting to give them a framework to understand that actually a lot of the ways that you've kind of grown up is actually been in this attic. Why don't you come downstairs, and if you're going to leave the house, explore the main floor first.And what would be the main floor? What would you say? The main floor?Yeah. I would say themain orthodox historic Christianity, like, yeah. Orthodox historic Christianity, Apostles Creed, the Nicene Creed, just kind of go into the Yeah. And whatI would say is, for instance, the apostle creed gives us kind of what I would call load bearing walls in the house. So it gives us the places where you don't mess like load bearing walls. You don't you don't knock those down if you're going to do a remodel, and, and, and. So you would recognize the difference between load bearing walls, walls that are central versus actual different rooms in the house, and how? Well, these aren't load bearing walls, but they're, they're, they're, they're how certain people in Christian communities, churches at particular times, have articulated it and and some of these, you could deny certain things, but you could, but those are more denominational battle lines, rather than the kind of load bearing things that you if you pull out the resurrection of Jesus, if you pull out the the deity of Christ and the full humanity of Christ, If you pull out the Trinity. So let's go back to the core. And if you're going to reject, if you're going to leave, leave on the basis of those core things, not okay. I've had these bad experiences in the church now, yeah, what I think this to kind of wrap this up on this is what often happens, or what can happen if someone says, Well, yeah, I've done that, and I still don't, I don't believe Okay, yep, that's going to happen. Yep. But one of the things I suggest, in at least some cases, is that the addict has screwed people up more than they realize, and that the way that they approach. Approach the foundation and the the main floor, it's still in attic categories, as in, to go back to our first question, well, I can't prove this, yeah. And I was always told that I should be able to prove it. Well, that's not how this works, yeah. And so they they reject Christianity on certain enlightenment terms, but they don't reject Christianity as Christianity really is. So people are going to interact with Christianity, I would say sometimes your people are investigating, say the resurrection, and reflecting more on on these central claims, but they're still doing it as if, if it doesn't reach kind of 100% certainty that I can't believe. And that's just not how this works.Yeah, that's, that's food for thought, because there, there's so many people that I interact with that I try to encourage. Like, yeah, your experience was really bad, like I'm affirming that, and that was messed up. That's not That's not Christianity, that is a branch on this massive tree trunk that stinks and that needs to be lamented and grieved and also called out as wrong. So I'm using another metaphor of a tree instead. But I love the because the house metaphor is something that you use in the telling a better story. Isn't that surprised bydoubt? Surprised by doubt? Yes, that's that's what we use, and we march through things, and we use that as, really our guiding metaphor through all the chapters. And that's what I would encourage if you're if you have somebody who's struggling with this, or you're struggling with this yourself, that's That's why a friend of mine, Jack Carson, that's why we wrote the book together, because obviously this is a we had a lot of friends and acquaintances and people who were coming to us and we weren't fully satisfied with all of the kind of works, yeah, that were responding and so this, this was our attempt to try to helppeople. Well, the book right after that was, is telling a better story. And one of the things I've really appreciated in your emphasis over the last few years has been, I would call a more humane apology, apologetic in that, you know, not giving into, okay, we're gonna give you want evidence. We're gonna give you evidence, as opposed to like, okay, let's just talk about being a huma

Podcast: Off the Wire with Matt WiremanGuest: Dan Creed, Business Coach and EntrepreneurEpisode Overview:In this inspiring episode, Matt Wireman interviews Dan Creed, a seasoned entrepreneur and business coach with over 15 successful startup experiences, discussing business growth, personal development, and overcoming challenges.Key Timestamps and Themes:0:00-10:00: Dan's Entrepreneurial Journey- Transition from farm life to radio industry- Founding and selling 15 successful startups- Creating groundbreaking technologies like Interactive Voice Response- Key Takeaway: Entrepreneurial success requires adaptability and innovation10:00-20:00: Entering the Coaching World- Mentorship from business legends like Zig Ziglar and Brian Tracy- Motivation to help businesses avoid common mistakes- Developing a comprehensive coaching curriculum- Key Takeaway: Continuous learning is crucial for professional growth20:00-30:00: Coaching Philosophy and Techniques- Importance of listening and understanding client needs- Shifting from "telling" to "asking" mode- Priority management vs. traditional time management- Key Takeaway: Effective coaching is about empowering clients, not dictating solutions30:00-40:00: Business Challenges and Solutions- Common obstacles entrepreneurs face- Importance of clarity and goal-setting- Overcoming self-limiting beliefs- Key Takeaway: Clear vision and written goals are fundamental to success40:00-50:00: Navigating Difficult Times- Maintaining business growth during pandemic- Creative problem-solving strategies- Focusing on opportunities instead of obstacles- Key Takeaway: Resilience and adaptability are key to business survival50:00-60:00: Mindset and Personal Development- Survival mindset vs. possibility mindset- The power of hope and belief- Importance of surrounding yourself with positive influences- Key Takeaway: Your mindset determines your potential for success60:00-70:00: Coaching Beyond Business- Work with prison rehabilitation programs- Reducing recidivism through goal-setting and personal development- Holistic approach to coaching and personal growth- Key Takeaway: Personal transformation is possible with the right supportContact Information:- Website: www.mastercoachdan.com- Email: dcreed@focalpointcoaching.com- LinkedIn: Dan CreedRecommended for:- Entrepreneurs- Business owners- Professionals seeking personal development- Anyone looking to overcome self-limiting beliefsHashtags: #BusinessCoaching #Entrepreneurship #PersonalDevelopment #LeadershipSkills #BusinessGrowth Thank you for listening! If you want to find out more about Matt and how you can get coached toward your better self, visit www.matthewwireman.com and check out his Instagram account @matt.wireman

0:00 – Welcome & IntroductionMatt introduces the Off the Wire Podcast, an integrated approach to mind, body, and soulGuest introduction: Bobo Beck, founder of Wisdom Calling1:07 – How Matt & Bobo MetTheir story of friendship and shared passion for faith-based leadership coachingExploring how faith and personal growth intersect2:48 – Bobo's Personal Journey & UpbringingGrowing up as the youngest of 6 in AtlantaInfluenced by lifelong educator parents → exposure to growth mindset and learning cultureChildhood entrepreneurship: started a candy business in 6th grade to buy Air Jordans8:01 – Early Leadership Development in Church & Youth MinistryServing in volunteer leadership roles as a teenLearning event planning, motivating peers, leading without authority9:47 – Redefining Leadership as Influence, Not PositionLeadership story: reimagining a missionary awareness program in collegeBobo's philosophy: “Leadership is influence, not title”14:01 – Leadership, Faith & Personal DevelopmentMatt & Bobo discuss leadership as inspiring people toward a greater purposeThe role of wisdom in personal development coaching15:15 – Wisdom Coaching: Applying Ancient Wisdom TodayBobo's focus on helping young professionals navigate career, calling, and faithBiblical wisdom offers timeless guidance for modern challenges18:45 – Holistic Wisdom for Whole-Life CoachingWisdom encompasses physical, emotional, relational, intellectual, and spiritual healthBobo's coaching process: addressing sleep, fitness, mindset, friendships, and more23:52 – Coaching Beyond Surface Goals: Addressing the Interior LifeHelping clients move past external goals to focus on identity, soul care, and faithWhy integration > compartmentalization for sustainable growth31:39 – The 4 Pillars of Wisdom KnowledgeKnowledge of God → foundational to wisdomKnowledge of Self → cultivating self-awarenessKnowledge of Others → understanding relational dynamicsKnowledge of Creation → recognizing systems, structures, environment40:16 – Overcoming Compartmentalized LivingThe Western tendency toward segmented living and productivity obsessionCoaching as a safe, objective space to connect the dots between life areas49:47 – Practical Steps for Goal AchievementFocus on systems and habits over goals aloneBackward design: breaking 2–3 year goals into quarterly action plansExample: growing income by $25K → mindset shifts, networking, accountability56:56 – How to Sustain MotivationIntrinsic vs. extrinsic motivationUsing environment design (e.g., laying out workout clothes) to trigger habits1:01:43 – Balancing Ambition with GraceEmbrace human limitations → avoid tying self-worth to productivityBiblical wisdom → celebrate weakness, depend on God's strength1:07:51 – Avoiding Productivity IdolatryYou are more than your output → resist culture's push for endless achievement1% daily improvement (Kaizen) as a sustainable growth mindset1:10:54 – Connect with Bobo Beck (Wisdom Calling)Website: wisdomcalling.orgInstagram: @wisdomcallingnowLinkedIn: Bobo Beck1:12:13 – Closing Prayer & Final Reflections

Join me as I sit down with Doug Wood to unpack his compelling transformation from a life of limitations to one of incredible success and fulfillment. Doug shares his personal journey as detailed in his book "From Church Boy to Millionaire," offering an inspirational look at how he harmonized mind, body, and soul to achieve remarkable personal and professional growth. Taking personal responsibility and intertwining it with faith, Doug narrates his climb from being in debt struggling for wellness to a state of flourishing health and financial prosperity. His story is a testament to the power of life coaching, actionable faith, and confronting fears to actualize dreams on a grander scale. Listen in as we tackle the significance of wise counsel across the spectrum of life's challenges, from managing finances to making tough, life-altering decisions. We shed light on the journey of overcoming staggering debt, emphasizing the profound lessons learned about stewardship and the need to scrutinize advice in a world where expertise is often self-proclaimed. The discussion ventures into the concept of 'living above the line,' embracing radical ownership of our actions and choices, and the liberating power of shifting from a scarcity to an abundance mindset. Doug's narrative encourages listeners to align with the strength God provides and act in concert with it for a life rich in finances, relationships, and purpose. In our heartfelt exchange, Doug and I reflect on the intersection of faith and finances, challenging the misconceptions that often hinder progress and discussing the potential for wealth to be a force for good when directed by purposeful generosity. We explore the implications of responsible stewardship and the impactful role of fatherhood and mentorship in society. This episode is a beacon for anyone seeking to break free from limiting beliefs and step into a life marked by abundance, responsibility, and impactful living. Thank you for listening! If you want to find out more about Matt and how you can get coached toward your better self, visit www.matthewwireman.com and check out his Instagram account @matt.wireman

In this second part of a two-part interview with Dan "Kill Mode" Long, Dan shares how we can move past our past. The difficulties that we experience in life can actually be the very thing God uses for us to help others. Thank you for listening! If you want to find out more about Matt and how you can get coached toward your better self, visit www.matthewwireman.com.

00:00 Introduction and Background03:00 Growing Up in Turmoil11:41 The Impact of Divorce20:10 Moving Forward and Making Choices28:11 Negative Coping Mechanisms37:48 Recognizing the Need for Change42:09 Learning from Others' Mistakes43:37 Making a Decision for Change45:03 Using Distractions to Cover Up Pain45:29 The Turning Point: A Near-Death Experience  Off the Wire (00:10)Welcome back to another episode of Off the Wire. And I have the privilege of having my coach, Kill Mode, Dan Long, on this podcast. And I am privileged because Dan has invested a ton in me as a friend, as a mentor, as a coach, to be able to make my life better, to be able to do the things, the dreams that I have and the things I've been trying to execute on in my own life. And as you know, in this podcast, Off the Wire, I'm trying to link together both what we believe about God and the life of faith, and then how that applies to our life so that it's not just, hey, I believe in God, but it has nothing to do with the here and now in our physical bodies. And a lot of times we can differentiate between what we do in our physical bodies from what we do in our spiritual lives. But what we're gonna be talking about today with Dan, because he has been a fitness entrepreneur over 20 years, is that right, Dan? I mean, how long have you been doing it? Well, I've been really dedicated. First of all, thank you so much for having me on here, Matt. I am very blessed and for everybody listening, please, if we give you some value today, give Matt some love back to this podcast because that's what this is really all about. It's about you, it's about us spending time, sharing time, and literally dumping the value into you guys that we possibly can give you because God gave us our gifts and it's our choice and it's our job to actually open those gifts and share them with the world. And that's what our goal is today. And so thank you so much for having me today, Matt. I mean, I am literally blessed to be on this podcast with you today and I am blessed to share time. And so getting into personal training and not only that, but just health and fitness. I mean, I've been, I have been dedicated to the health and fitness space since the age of 20 years old. So everybody knows I'm now 50. And so I've been doing this for a little over 30 years. Now, as far as dedicated and full time, like literally changing people's lives and impacting people globally, yeah, it's been a good 20 years, but putting it in a business realm, it's been since 2009. Like 2009 is really when I went all in and realized that health and fitness is my 100% passion. Not only do... I love helping people like yourself and other people in the world that I've been blessed to be able to be a part of your lives. It's also something for me to be able to share these gifts that God gave me because I've gone through a lot of turmoil. There's been a lot of things that have gotten me to this point. It didn't just happen. It was something that, you know, everybody's like, well, how do I find my passion? You know, how do I really hone in on what I should be doing and what God thinks I should be doing? And, you know, this is all, honestly, I believe in God's messengers. And so, you know, I believe people come to you and they tell you what you're really great at. They tell you what you should be doing more of, and you should be paying attention to that. And mine just happened to be health and fitness. One of those things was that coaching was another thing because I love people. I'm a people person. If you've ever met me, I may look intimidating from a distance, but once you talk to me, you'll realize that I'm a good dude. I really do care. and I'm here for you, you know, and if I have anything that I can help lift you up and or give you any positivity or give you any type of a blueprint that can help you get to where you want to go, you can bet your bottom dollar. I will do that. And that's really what it's all about for me, Matt. So, you know, I've been in this game for a little while now and I got a lot more to go everybody. Listen, I'm 50. This is a short life. Wouldn't you agree, Matt? In a short life like it's not really that long. We're on the downhill now according to the timeline of history, right? Like I just turned 45 a couple days ago and we're on the down swing now, according to everything. But I think in a lot of ways, you know, many good things that have happened and a lot of the people that have blessed the world have done that on the back half of their life. You know, as you think about all of the, you know, everybody that... I can think of right now, it takes time for you to find your calling and to step into that. It takes a lot of courage and it takes a lot of just being fed up with what you've been dealing with. And I want to double click for a minute on you mentioned that you've had your share of struggles in life. And I'd love to hear just how you came in, not just the fitness space, but just a little bit of your journey. You came from a pretty rough upbringing. but you're probably one of the most positive people that I know. What in the world happened to where you're not falling into that vein of doing what has always been done around you? Because so many people that I talk to, they live their lives out of habit and out of not thinking about what they're actually doing, and they just pick up the habits that they were taught over time. So what clicked for you? What snapped? What was the point where you're like, This is not going to be true of Dan Long. This may have been true for other people that I've grown up with, but not me. Can you walk us through that a little bit? Sure. So everyone knows, I'm 50 years old. I have an amazing wife of 16 years, married 13 years now. She's my Greek princess. As you can tell, if you're watching this right now, you can tell this is the Parthenon here in Greece where I've taken my whole family. We've been multiple times. I'm so blessed to have my wife. She is the rock of our family. On top of that, I have three amazing kids. I have a stepdaughter that is 25 years old. I have my own daughter that's turning 19 next month. And then I also have my son that is from previous marriage. And all three of my kids are my kids, but they're from a previous marriage. My son's 17 turning 18 December. Now, I want everybody to know, I was never always a family man. I was never always a husband. I was never always, honestly,positive of every single moment of the day. I had to get there. I really did. I had to get there because I went through a lot of things. And my mom and dad, my father went to the Vietnam War and he went at a young age of 18 years old, they were handing him a gun and said, you're going to go fight for our country right out of high school. And my mom was more or less kind of on the standby waiting on him to come back. And my father was over there earning every award you could imagine, even including being shot at and he's got to this day he has shrapnel in his legs that still sits in there because they didn't want to remove it because it would have caused more problems and so he had a purple heart from all that. So he spent years over there fighting right. So I grew up in a, I want to everybody understand like my mentality of when I grew up in my household was military and my father was, my father didn't have a father and so this is one of the reasons why when you get into my story here. I've given him more of a pass a little bit. And I've also, you know, I love him no matter what, but I also know why he's the way he is. And so, you know, my father never grew up with a father figure and his dad died from leukemia at the age of four when he was four years old. And so he never really knew his dad. And so going into the war, that's already a lot, right? On a man to put you out in war at 18 years old. And then he comes back and now he knows he has to provide for the family and back then in these days, right? That's what the man did, right? He went out and provided for the family. If the wife could stay home, she was the housewife. And that's the way it became. Well, they were obviously high school sweethearts and that's what they, they grown close together. But then they grew far apart. And I noticed this as a kid, now that I know what I know, they started growing apart because he was always gone. And this is gonna come front and forward in the future of why I'm where I'm at today. But my father was, he was always really good at what he did and he really wanted to serve. And so he decided to go in the police academy. and he decided to become a police officer. And I remember those days. I remember him coming home. I'll never forget it. I remember him coming home and just being so excited about going into the police academy and he got accepted. And this was a life-changing event. Matter of fact, this was right before John Lennon got shot. I remember when that happened. And so at that time, my father is like, okay, I'm gonna go do this. Well, now, so everybody understands if you have a police officer in your family or someone in your spouse, is a police officer or anyone knows, like you are gonna get 40 hours of work, but you're gonna make all your money when you work overtime. That's the way it works, okay? And so with police officers, they entice them to work off duty shifts all the time. So I never saw my dad. I played 10 years of sports throughout school. Four and a half years of baseball, I played three years of track and field, three years of cross country and I ran cross country and I also played two years of football. During the entire time of all of that, my father was never in the stands one time. Now, I could say that that's all his fault, or I could say that half of it's the job, the J-O-B, and half of it's because he made the decisions the way that he did. Now, he was never big into sports, he never was. He was a guy that was big into just really honestly serving our country and helping the people around our city. And so I grew up where I really felt like I didn't have a dad. I mean, I did. But I didn't. And then all of a sudden, and my mom stayed home and she cooked and she cleaned and she took care of the house and made sure us, us kids were taken care of and so forth and we didn't grow up with any money, just so everybody knows, like we were, you know, we were not even in the average when it comes to income, um, with one household with my father at the time, just getting started. And then all of a sudden at 11 years old, my mom and dad, I have, at this time, I have a brother that is six and a half years younger than me that was born. His name is Tim. And. we are now living at the house and I'm never seeing my father, but then all of a sudden, you know, my mom and dad are starting to have serious turmoil inside our household. And that's when my mom and dad separated at 11 years. I was 11 years old at the time. And for every kid, it's different. And everyone listening right now, if you've ever been through a divorce, you understand what I'm talking about. If you are going through a divorce, I pray for you. And I'm praying that it all comes out great, not only for just you, but also the kids, because the kids are, it molds your kids for the future. Okay. And I'm a product of that. Now, it could have gone really bad. And you're right, Matt. I will tell you, there's been many people tell me I do not know knowing everything they know about me, which is not everything, but they don't know how I'm not permanently messed up like forever or a drug addict or an alcoholic or just literally looking at the world as negativity because it can happen very easily, right? It's a choice. But being at 11 years old, you would think, are my grades, everybody just so you know, my grades were straight A's. I worked my butt off in school. My father really, honestly, he had me scared to do wrong. He had me scared to ever try a drug. He had me scared to ever try to get a tattoo. I know you see the tattoos on me now. He told me if I ever grew my hair along, he would hurt me. Literally, he would fricking hurt me. And so I was scared of my dad. And my dad was a big dude, six foot two, carried himself very well. If he smiled a lot, it was, I mean, he did, but he didn't, you know, he just kept things very serious. That's how he was. So in my household, if you, if you got a hurt on something, put some duct tape on it, like there was, you're not going to, you're not going to the doctor. It was just, it was a rough time. And so, and so, you know, when my mom and dad divorced, man, it was, it was a devastating thing for me. I did not realize it. I was in it. I was dealing with it, but I really didn't even realize that. That was the reason why I was feeling, that's what's crazy everybody. I was 11 years old. You would think that at that age, I would be able to decipher why I was going through what I was. And I literally could not even figure that out. And here's kind of like the moment that really hit me. It was like, I got pulled in back in the day, there was these things called portables. And portables were for mobile classrooms to be added onto your school. And I actually liked them, because you could go inside there and you walk up the stairs and you get in, the floors would creak. It was kind of cool, right? And so I remember being pulled in there and the guidance counselor showing up and saying to me, could you please tell me why your grades went from straight A's to now F's and I remember breaking down crying and not being able to answer that question truthfully. I could not answer the question. I did not know. And so that kind of started my understanding of like, I'm, I'm messed up. Something's wrong here. I'm as a kid, I'm something's not right. So then, and I don't want to sit here and bash my parents because they're amazing. I love them. We are all in the same. frame of mind today. We see each other, some more than others, but I love them and I would do anything for my parents. Okay. But I don't have to carry on traits that I don't agree with. I don't have to. That's my choice. Okay. And it's our job as when we become adults and we have children that we should be looking at the past generations and saying we shouldn't do that. We should do this and we should keep continuing to work forward to make our families and our generations within our families better. That should be our goal, right? And so, I'm sorry, this is a long story, but I just, I have to kind of paint, I gotta paint the picture for you to understand. And so, and so, and so everyone knows trauma, I've learned this today, right? Cause we all should have coaches, we all should have therapists, we all should have people that are in the spiritual realm of a pastor or a priest to go to and be able to throw things off of that person and get discernment. That's really what it's about, right? Don't hold it in. And I'm guilty of that for many years of my life. I'm so guilty of that and I don't do that anymore. Um, and I hope you don't after today. Okay. And so, you know, and I hope the story inspires you some because if it can happen to me, it can happen to you guys. So, um, at 11 years old, this all happens. And my mom, if you ask my mother today, okay, no one knows this and I'm gonna tell you on this podcast. If you ask my mom today, if she would take my father back, she would tell you she loves my dad. And she would take him back in a heartbeat because she's the father of the children and she's always loved him. And obviously, you can tell that the relationship didn't split because she's the one that pulled the cord. It was actually him. And that's another story for another day. But long story short, him being a police officer and being on call all the time, being on the street all the time, I grew up in a neighborhood, just so everyone knows. It is not a neighborhood that you would want to be ideal for children to grow up in with gunshots. people being murdered inside the woods that were right next to my house. Just so everyone knows, if you look at me now, I'm six foot two, yes, I'm muscular. I was not always that way. I was six foot two when I graduated high school at 169 pounds, okay? Today I'm six foot two and I'm 225 on a good day. Okay, so, and I'm pretty lean. So, and all of that came from subconscious so that I didn't even realize that later on that would happen. And so, growing up in this neighborhood, I just want to paint a picture for you. You know, my father would bring his police car home and they were allowed to back then. And they parked them on the front lawn. Well, that put a target on us as a family, okay? Because we are not in a great area. There was a lot of drug use being used around there. Don't ask me why my dad picked this area. I do not know, but my mom still lives there to this day. Okay, still lives there to this day and is friends with all the neighbors. They don't mess with her. It's crazy, but she still deals with a lot of drama in that neighborhood. Helicopters all the time, police officers coming down the road trying to make sure people are okay. It's a high crime area, okay? And so go ahead and plan a police car in her front lawn and see what happens. It was nothing for us to have a bomb threat at our front door with a paper bag with wires sticking out of it, okay, on every other week. And I'm not, and we would always go across the street to the neighbor's house. The bomb squad would come over. They would get out everything they need to get out to get this ding thing off the front lawn and figure out if this thing's a bomb. I've seen onions inside bags with wires sticking out of them. I've seen hate notes. My first dog, Pepper, I had a doxin. My dad got me. And my dog was killed by someone in the neighborhood. This is the stuff I was dealing with. And granted, don't get me wrong, I had a lot of great times, too. But I was. considered to be the local snitch. Even though I was not, I was labeled as the local snitch. I was labeled as- You're the queen's office kid, right? Exactly, I was labeled as a father. What are you gonna do, go tell your daddy? What are you gonna do? He's gonna go, you're gonna have your daddy arrest me? This is what I grew up with, okay? And it was all the time. And so from elementary, all the way through high school, I literally was beat up a lot. And my father did not teach me, unfortunately, and I'm gonna call him out on this because I don't want anybody else to do this, okay? In the United States, we're not supposed to be big on bullying. Bullying is supposed to be something that is frowned upon and it is looked at as we should get rid of bullying, okay? Well, I had these two kids in elementary, first grade, I'll never forget it, first grade, Dusty and Darren, and what did they wanna do? They wanted to bully me. So I went to my dad and I said, dad, this is what I'm dealing with. And my father, he says to me, son, you need to turn around and walk away. Now I want everybody to understand that was the worst advice that you could ever give someone, because now I know what my father was doing. He was protecting his badge. He didn't want his name to be mud in the area because his son gets into fights at a school when all along it wasn't even being caused by me because I'm the least person in the world that wants to start a fight. Okay. And if you ever looked at me back then. Like I looked at this homie little kid, like I was not that guy. I was just not that guy. I didn't grow up with that. And so that's what I did. I turned around and walked away and it caused me major, major anxiety, major heartache. I was always looking over my shoulder. I constantly knew that I was gonna get beat up. I had to run home all the time. I had to try to- Because they didn't stop bullying you. They just kept- They kept on. And they kept on Matt because why I showed them that I was weak. And because if I showed them, I was weak, they're going to pick on you more. And so no, I'm not telling you to try to beat somebody up, but what I am telling you is you need to stay in your ground and show someone that you're not scared. And if that's what it takes, that's what you have to do. Okay. And, and, and until I got older, I didn't realize that. Okay. Well, my father taught me the wrong way. I'm telling you right now. And so I taught my kid the opposite. He had one time someone in his school took his sandwich. I shouldn't say one time. It happened multiple times, but one last time, this kid took his sandwich out of his lunch bag, right in front of him, three times his size, at a good school, by the way, and he ate it right in front of him. And he asked him not to do that. And then that was the last time that kid ever did that because my son did exactly what I told him to do, which was stay on your fricking ground. And yes, he got suspended into detention for three days. And I talked to the police officer, I talked to the school resource officer. I called the principal. I told my kids, I will always back you if it's not your fault. Do not start things, but back yourself up. That happened. The police officer had to do his protocol. And long story short with all that, it never happened again. And my son's a senior in school and he has a reputation. Do not screw with that kid. And it carries on guys, it really does. And so throughout high school, so here's me, I'm getting beat up. I got bomb threats on the front lawn. Every neighbor kid thinks I'm a snitch. I get a bicycle that's brand new from Christmas. There's this guy Jack that lived on the street. He picked up my bike and literally slammed it on the ground and bent the frame. Okay, brand spanking new, just because this is what I had to deal with, okay? And so then my mom and dad divorced at 11. And I'm devastated internally, don't even know why. And then all of a sudden. Sorry, mom, but you know, she knows this and she's already apologized for this, but my mom was in such unbelievable, like her brain was just in a place where it was like, she didn't know how to handle what was going on in her world. She turned to alcohol, okay? And when she turned to alcohol, next thing you know, alcohol became the priority. Not me, not my son, not my, not my, it's not my son, he was, I was like my son, not my brother. Okay, it was her. just trying to get rid of pain. I can see that now and I understand that, okay? But it's not okay to take your kids and leave them outside of a bar while you go inside and get hammered. That was me, okay? They left me, my mom would leave me with her sister and my cousin outside. And so the sister and her would go inside the bar. That bar still exists here in Tampa Bay. And the railroad tracks right next to it. We used to sit there as kids and sit there and break bottles with rocks. And then we would put stuff on the railroad track trying to derail a train, which you can't do. I don't, I don't recommend that either. Okay. And so anyways, here we are. We're out here doing things you shouldn't even be doing anyways. And I'm being left out in the open like that. I mean, are you fricking kidding me? So then this just spiraled out of, out of control for six months. It spiraled out of control to the point where not only was my mom doing that, but my mom was, let's just say speed dating. Okay. And I'm seeing this in front of me. Yeah. And the last straw was right before I turned 12 years old. I was six months into this divorce. Yes, my mom got custody, believe it or not, with my dad even being a cop in Florida. It is very difficult to get custody of your children. And now it's 50-50 shared parenting. And so long story short with all that, she got custody. But after time and time and time again, it's Christmas Eve. And I'm taking myself back to that place right now. And I remember it like yesterday. It's Christmas Eve. The Christmas tree is lit. My mom is not home. I am watching my brother. Santa Claus is supposed to be coming. And my mom comes home with a guy I've never seen. And she was not sober. And all I could think to myself was, my brother is not gonna have a Christmas like he deserves, like I did when I was a child. And I felt for him. And when that happened, I literally picked, when my mom disappeared to the back of the house, I picked up the phone and dialed just like this because that's how it was back then. I dialed just like that. I dialed my dad and I said, you need to come get me and my brother. And we're not living here. That's it. And so he showed up and it was a big fricking ordeal on my front lawn. We left and I'd never been back to my mom since. And my dad got custody of us after that. And I'm with him and my stepmother, which they're still together today. They've been together for a very long time. long time like 34 years something like that 35 years um and we moved in there and my stepmom owned her own grooming shop and she um did pretty well i mean you know back then she was doing pretty well for herself and so you know i got experienced now into a new world of a pool i never saw a pool before um i came into this house and you know there were fancier things than what we had. And the next thing I know, she's saying, I wanna make you a steak, dinner, and lobster. I didn't even know what that was. And so I'm being introduced to stuff now, but I want everybody to understand something. As a kid, let me tell you what that kid wants more than anything for you to buy them stuff. Sure, that is an instant minute of gratification that does not last forever, okay? And I know this because I've been there. And I'm gonna tell you guys what the kids really want. They want to know they have a purpose. They want to know they have parents that love them. That's what they want, OK? No matter how much you think it's all the other shiny objects, it is not that, OK? It is when it all boils down, it's the older they get, and the more that it becomes more and more coherent of what's going on, they want to know that they are loved, and they have a purpose, and the reason why they are here. Period. That is it. So my stepmom, she tried to do a lot of things I was not okay with because, you know, I get it. You're trying to buy my love more or less, right? And to this day, I don't call her mother. My mom is my mom. She's my stepmom. It doesn't mean I love her less, I'm just saying. And when I got this experience of all this stuff, I was like, I really, honestly, I want everybody to know I got mad. I got mad. I got really mad. I got mad at it all because I wanted my mom and dad together. I didn't want my mom and dad separated. And that wasn't, and here's the problem. This is another thing I don't recommend as your parent right now, going through all this or possibly going to go through it. Okay. Do not put your children in the middle of this. It is not their fault. They did not do anything wrong at all period. And if, and if you do, they're going to carry that burden for their life. Okay. I am still carrying burdens from this. That is something that I have to skew. Okay. Cause I've almost become an alcoholic before I've almost went off the rails on drugs before. I have literally done things to cover up pain in an older stage of my life, in my early 20s, where I had to figure out who was me. I had to figure out what I was all about. Why am I feeling the way that I did? I didn't have help. We tried counselors and I bait and switched them because my mom would always be like, oh, I'm gonna get you a counselor and this and that. I said, okay, fine. I was not about it, but. I go in there, the counselor's like, yeah, and this is not every counselor, okay? This is just the ones I was dealing with. Yeah, whatever you say in this room, we're sworn to secrecy and it will never be shared with your parents. And I set them up and I was smart enough to know to set them up and I set them up and I knew that if I told them something that was about my mother, that my mom would never be able to keep her mouth shut in the heat of the moment. And there was no one else that knew it other than the person I told. And so, When that happened, it hit the fan. Okay? And I literally said, I was never going back to a counselor ever again. And my mom knew she was lying. They were lying to me, because she knew. I was like, there's no way for you to sit here and lie to me. Okay? And so anyways, that kind of soured me for a while. And so, I mean, I could sit here and talk for days on all this, but let me just tell you right now, this is the turmoil that I was dealing with. Okay? And so my mom and dad did put me in the middle of it. They were literally gonna put me on a stand in front of a judge and say, Who do you want to live with? Do not do that to your children. They want to live with both of you. They don't want to live with the mom more than mom or the dad or more than dad. They want to live with both of you. Now there are certain circumstances where that could change, but in most cases that's not the case, okay? And so this is the burden I'm dealing with on my own parenting side now. And meanwhile, I'm trying to be like a parent to my own brother, which my brother and I are like this today. We're very close, okay? And I also had a step brother that... You know, my dad married into with my stepmom, Sue, and I had a stepbrother that also was a year and a half younger than me. So now I got another brother. And so, uh, which we pinky swore that we would never be cops, by the way. And the reason all is not because I don't think cops are amazing. It's because I never saw my family. And I literally knew that as a young age where I'm just like, man, I don't want this for my family moving forward. And so, um, With all this, because I can go on forever, I want everybody to know, fast forward, how did I, because your question, Matt, how did I take all of that and turn it into positive? Well, it took work. Okay. It took work because in my young twenties, I hated cops. Go figure. Why is that? I don't hate anybody. I hated police officers. I hated authority. I hated rules. I hated having to be in the situation I was with my mom and dad. I hated the fact that my brother did not get the same upbringing. I felt like he should have, although it ended up turning out. He got a better upbringing than me, which is great. Cause as soon as I left home, things changed. Um, you know, I had a lot of anger, a lot of anger built up that I didn't even realize at the time guys, I really did not realize it. I used to literally go, there's this place here in Tampa Bay. I live in Tampa, Florida, so everybody knows. And. was this place called Ybor City. And back then, there wasn't a whole lot going on down there. But anyways, I used to go down there and there'd be some cops and this and that. And I would instigate issues. I really would. I would instigate issues because that was my way of getting back at what I dealt with when I was younger and still. Honestly, I still deal with some of it today. Okay. But I just know how to deal with it. Okay. And so I got arrested. Yeah. I got arrested when I moved out at 18 years old. for stealing a pack of condoms. Okay, and I'm gonna tell you that because the truth is, here I am, I'm with a girl for two years, I didn't want to have a kid and I didn't have any money. So what did I do? I went and fricking stole the pack of condoms and I got arrested for it, okay. Then after that, which I know that sounds crazy, but you know what, they're expensive. And when you're young, it's a big deal, okay. And then I learned a little bit of a lesson from that and then went for, just working my butt off up in Gainesville. I moved to Gainesville and I ran away. Just so everybody knows, I ran away at 18 because my mom and dad, this is another thing I don't recommend. The last thing you ever wanna do to a rebel, someone like me, is sit there and tell them and hold it over their head, well, when you turn 18, if you wanna talk like that, you can. If you wanna turn 18, you wanna go eat food like that, you can. If you wanna turn 18, you wanna move out, go ahead. We dare you, okay? Do not do that to people that are like me, a rebel. Do not do that, okay? Because that sits in there and all you think about is that. every single fricking day. That's what I thought about every single day. And I grew up with parents that use the F word, every other sentence, because it's all police talk. My stepmom was a police officer. And just so you know, besides owning a grooming shop, that was my dad's ride-along partner. That when they split up, my mom and dad, that's who he married. Okay, so you do the math on that. And so here I am, I'm in all this turmoil. I'm... I'm out living on my own because I left home at 18. I left home on bad terms, but you know what? Legally, I could leave on my own. I've never been home ever since. And two weeks after I left home, I talked to my dad and I said, I'm coming by to grab my stuff. And he had no clue where I was. Just so you guys know, he had every police officer in Tampa Bay looking for me. I used to be a long distance runner. And I also grew up with a father that was a police officer. So I knew how to do what I needed to do. Okay, and I got out of town. And, um, I came back every bit of everything I owned was in a black trash bag, sitting on the front lawn. He walked out, I'm putting the bags in the car and he looked at me all mad at me and says, you know, you are never going to amount to nothing. This is what he says to me. And I said, I said, oh yeah. I said, well, you know what? I'm going to make you eat those words. He says, you're not going to college. You think you're going to move out right now and you're going to go live on your own. You have no money and you're literally going to go do all this on your own right now. And you think you're going to amount to something. He's like, you'll never amount to nothing. And all he did was piss me off more to the point where now I took that and I put it on my shoulder and I said, I am never going to ask my parents for anything ever again in my life, ever, never. Okay. And when I draw a line in the sand, I want everybody to know it is a fricking done deal. Okay. There is no ifs, ands or buts or no, this is how it goes down. And I drove off and I started my quest and little did I know it would come back at 20 years old, 21 years old, right around when I started turning into the drinking age. Um, the pain would resurface because you can only cover that stuff up so much and you can only compress this stuff in your spine. so much down before it will show its head, okay? It will come back up. And when it does, it's not gonna be good. And you notice that a lot of successful entrepreneurs go through a lot of trauma in their early ages. And I've known this now because I'm involved with a lot of different groups of amazing people that do amazing things and they have a lot of trauma. We have a podcast, we talk to a lot of people, we think our stories are bad. People always out there have worse stories than us, okay? And so, Matt. I think honestly, out of all what I just said, because there's way more than all that, we could talk about this for hours. I think the biggest reason why I had to go through all what I did to get to where I'm at, and I think the reason how I was able to get to a positive spot with all of it was because I learned me. I learned who I was as a person. I... I understood what kind of value God gave me where I wasn't following the word of God back then. I believed in God. I went to Bible study as a kid. We never went to church a lot. Okay. I remember our Bible study was two doors down at the neighbor's house. And we would literally go on the front porch and the kids would get together and there'd be these little trophies. And I remember earning those trophies with a cross on them. And I thought I was the bomb because you would recite scriptures and different things. And, and I remember a paper. a paper poster board on the wall that had those, I don't know if you remember the gold stars and silver stars and red stars, and they would put stars on there for every achievement that you had. And I thought that was absolutely the bomb. And so, I believed in God. I was not following the word of God, and this is my own fault, okay? And so, becoming full circle, I think looking back now, going through the times of covering things up with drugs. going through the times of covering things up with alcohol, going through the times of covering up, you know, all the pain that I had with doing things that I should have never been doing, including getting arrested. I should have never, ever, ever been doing this stuff, but you're a young kid and you're making mistakes. And so I think I had to go through all of that because God doesn't do it to us, He does it for us. And if I look back and I look why it was happening for me, it literally was teaching me who I was as a person. And because every time like getting arrested, I'm like, That's not you, Dan. Why are you doing this? You see what I'm saying? Like, I'm questioning this stuff as I'm going through it. You know, I'm out drinking. And meanwhile, I watched my mom come home for day on day on and sit there and be puking in a toilet. And I thought that was normal, okay? I grew up thinking that was normal. And so next thing you know, what am I doing? I'm puking in a fricking toilet. What am I doing? I'm going and drinking. And listen, guys, listen, I'm gonna tell you the truth, okay? I used to drink to black out. And when I say that, that was your goal. You know, I thought that was normal, Matt. I honest to God thought blacking out was like the goal. And I don't know if it was my goal. I just thought that was normal. And that's a bad, bad recipe for destruction. Okay. And I grew up thinking because I watched my mom and I watched a lot of my... Just so we know, on my mom's side, there's a lot of alcoholic problems, okay? And there are many family members that died from alcoholism, like liver problems, all kinds of issues. And so, I grew up thinking that was all normal. And me deciphering what was normal and what wasn't, and I think that also had to do with getting around other people that didn't do that. watching other people that lived a different lifestyle, lived a different way and didn't, that's not, that was not their goals. Their goals were to impact something in the world or, or do something amazing or make more money or, you know, take their family somewhere or whatever. I had to get around these people and get around stuff like that to understand this is not who I want to be, you know? And this is the decision. This is an internal decision that you have to do the work internally. And most of the time you cannot do this alone. You need to have or like someone else that you believe in that's a coach to help you, a priest, a pastor, it doesn't matter. Someone need you, somebody you look up to that lives the life and the lifestyle that you want. You need to lean on them and you need to spill it out and be all in because that's another mistake. If you're not all in and you're hiding stuff and you're not telling everybody everything and you're just sitting there wanting to make yourself look good, You're not going to heal. You're not going to get the work done. And you're not going to go where you want to go. I'm telling you right now, I've done this. I understand how it works. And I'm telling you right now, you have to be all in. This goes for relationships. This goes for friendships. This goes for business partnerships. This goes for spiritual. It doesn't matter what it is. It covers the broad spectrum. Okay. And so, you know, I think it was me doing the work, Matt, over all the years. I think me going through the trenches of pain, just heartache and covering it up with garbage every single time just became a revolving door of just Satan was winning. Satan was winning. What was that point you mentioned in your 20s that you had this moment where it's like, okay, I'm getting drunk. I'm running after all these things. I'm doing the very things that I despised growing up. Like was it you just sitting down and saying, okay, if I continue down this path, I'm going to end up like this. What started to shift in your mindset to get you to really reckon with, okay, I don't want to do this. I don't want to be this way. Because a lot of people who've gone through trauma that you've articulated will stay there and will point the finger and be saying, hey, all these things happened to me. And you already mentioned these things didn't happen to you, they happened for you. And we say it with compassion, like it's horrible what people do to other people. We're not justifying that by saying, no, that horrible thing happened for you. It's like, no, that's not what we're saying. We're not justifying the bad things that happened to the person. But can you articulate for us, what is the moment where you say, okay, I'm not justifying them getting drunk or them doing X, Y, or Z, but there has to be a decision that you make where you say, okay, all of these horrible things around me are shaping me and making me into a different kind of person. Can you walk us through what was happening in your 20s when you're like, okay, something's gotta change? Yeah, and with that note, so everybody, yes, absolutely, it's a great question. These are great questions. Going through that process, I would watch the Joes around me. The, you know, the, the Johns, the, the people that were around me, I would watch even women, all of them, I would watch what was going on and, and I don't know that I was watching myself as much. I was watching what was happening and I would watch John go down that road. And next thing I know, I saw John got killed inside of a mall because he went and shot up a mall or something stupid. or, and these are all things that happen. Like everybody knows, like if you're older like me, you've been through the block enough to know that you've heard stories about people from high school. Everybody that you thought was gonna be amazing. And some of them turned out to be the most low lives of the earth. And some of them turned out to be some of the most biggest winners. And so I would watch this process of what was going on around me. And over the years I was seeing that So and so, this one went and bought a motorcycle and next thing you know, this one's out stealing something and this one's out drinking while he's on a motorcycle and that one ended up dead, or this one ended up in jail by doing something stupid for a long period of time, or this one ended up on an overdose or whatever it was. I was seeing these things that were around me and everybody thinks it's not gonna happen to you, right? You always think it's not gonna happen to you. And DUIs and all these different things that were happening and they're all... me to say this to you right now. If you're doing any of that stuff, it will catch up to you. You are not going to go your whole life and you're going to get by. It is not going to happen. I'm just letting you know right now, it is not going to happen. And you're not going to be successful even on the flip side. You're not going to keep doing these things. And then all of a sudden you find yourself on the top of a mountain saying, look at all this awesome stuff I've got. Yeah. Because you know what? Sugar, sugar. One of the most addicting things on the planet. Right? More than more, more addicting than cocaine. Okay. Cocaine. Then you get to people who smoke weed. Okay. Whatever you can, you could, however you want. Then you got alcohol. I think honestly alcohol is worse than weed. My opinion, you know, you got alcohol, which is alcohol and it's legal. Now weed's legal. Now all these things, it's all these things that are happening. But the thing is, you're right. To be successful, if there's anything that is skewing the best part of you, that's not making you a better person, it is literally letting Satan win because it's the devil. It's all the devil. And I had to learn this, unfortunately, the hard way. The good thing is, is I did learn, okay? The good thing is, is that I'm sitting here at 50 years old and I'm stronger and more powerful and more influential in a positive way than I've ever been in my life. And so back to the, how did I get there? It was going through that process of watching these people all along, learning from their mistakes, seeing what path I really wanted and saying to myself, this is not where I wanted to go. I, and you know what, and here's a great, here's a great example. Yeah. I'm trying to remember the age I was. I probably was. I was probably 27, 28 years old. And I remember walking in, so-and-so picked me up and we went over to a house where they were partying. And I remember walking into this house. Now this is, listen guys, this is right before I'm turning 30 years old. This is like 27, 28 years old, okay? I have kids that are 25, okay? So I'm going to this house and I remember saying, oh, they say, oh, we're gonna go to this house, we're gonna party, okay. Now here's the problem. It's a weekday. Let's just do the math here. It's a weekday. It's two o'clock in the afternoon on a weekday. And I'm going to a house to party? Really? Now that's my fault, okay? I get in this car, I go to this house, we walk in the front door, and I'm gonna paint a picture. It's dark, windows are blacked out with sheets, and there are people There are people all over the house. And when I walked in, I'm standing at the front door with the front door closed. I'm looking in, and I'm watching all what's going around in this room. And I saw someone. This is brutal, OK? But I'm going to tell you, because this is reality of how bad it can get real fast. I saw someone with an insulin needle stick something in their arm. I have no idea to this day what it was. I have no idea. I don't even care, OK? I've never done any of that so we're clear. Okay. So here's what's crazy. I saw that someone else is on a bong. Someone else is on this, that whatever. I literally took me not even 30 seconds to look at all of this. And I said to myself, Dan internally, is this what you really want? I literally did this. I want you guys to know, this is not a lie. This is a hundred percent how I, I literally looked around the room and I'm like, is this what I want to myself? And as soon as I said that to myself, I did an about face and walked out the front door and I said, this is ridiculous, this is freaking, I'm not hanging around none of these people anymore. Okay, I started changing so many different things and that was my like big epiphany moment of where my escalation of all my bull crap got me into people that would bring me around situations like that before you know it. I'm being walked into a home and now you're what? The average person is probably gonna sit there and partake in the bull crap going on in that room. I'm not doing that. I'm the heck out of here, right? And so that's really how I think I've gotten to the point of where I'm at and wanting change, Matt, wanting to be better, you know? And now I know I can look back at this and I can say to myself, I was carrying the pain burden, always trying to... completely just cover it up to get rid of how I was internally feeling with something. It didn't matter if it was, it wasn't drugs or alcohol. It could be something that could be adrenaline based. It could be, you know, something that was fun, whatever it was, it got my mind off of it, right? And so, which you could use all the things that you're going through, you can use all good things for to replace the bad things. Okay. And I've learned that. And so, That's, I think how I got into honing in that, you know what? I am not this guy and the bigger moment of it all...  Thank you for listening! If you want to find out more about Matt and how you can get coached toward your better self, visit www.matthewwireman.com.

00:00 Introduction and Background03:53 Challenging False Dichotomies08:06 The Journey of Deconstructing Sectarianism10:27 Moving from Rigid Beliefs to Charitable Living16:12 Understanding Virtue Ethics21:57 The Change in Definition of Freedom28:05 The Role of Authority in Virtue Ethics32:21 Virtue Ethics as a Way Forward for the Church34:17 Addressing Deconstruction and Hypocrisy37:41 Virtue Ethics and Political Engagement43:07 Navigating the Political Landscape with Virtue Ethics48:17 Closing and Prayer Welcome to another episode of Off the Wire. And I am really excited to be able to have Lee C. Camp here in the interview space, at least through Zoom. And I was telling Lee earlier that I am thankful to be able to have him on the podcast because my wife and I have been avid listeners of his podcast, which is called No Small Endeavor. And we were listening to that. We've been listening to that the past couple of years, but he has done a great job of helping us think through how to get rid of, or at least challenge false dichotomies. Because a lot of times, as we've talked about on Off the Wire, that there are a lot of times that we think this, not that. And a lot of times the answer is in the gray space or in the this and that. So the both and is what is helpful. And so I'm really grateful to have you on the podcast, Lee. Thank you for your time. And And you are hailing from the great city of Nashville, Tennessee, where you're a professor, right? That's correct. Yeah. So can you tell us a little bit about how you got into that space and what you teach and everything like that? Sure. Yeah. Thank you, Matt. Pleasure to be with you and appreciate the invitation to be on your show. Yeah. So I live in Nashville. I've been in Nashville starting my 25th year of college teaching at Lipscomb University in Nashville. I teach theology and ethics. And, um, So, you know, I got into that line of work by some, not terribly circuitous, but a little bit circuitous route. I, when I was in, started college, I intended to be something in science or technology, engineer, physicist, something like that, and started in engineering and then moved to computer science and actually did my undergrad in computer science. But somewhere along the way, I had kind of a nagging sense of calling of some sort towards either pastoral work or teaching. And I finally kind of yielded to that sometime between my junior and senior year in college. And did you go to Lipscomb for college? I did. I did undergrad there. Yep. And, um, but while I was doing my computer science degree, I also did biblical studies and Greek along with a math minor. So, um, so those different minors gave me access to a lot of different stuff. Off the Wire (02:28.782)So then I went on to seminary. In seminary, I kind of fell in love with the very notion of the history of ideas and intellectual history, and then the way theology fits into that. And that kind of piqued my interest in doing PhD work. So after a brief stint, my wife and I went to Nairobi for six months between seminary, and then I got into Notre Dame to do my graduate work and did my PhD there, was there for five years, and then came to Nashville and started teaching. So that's kind of a... That's a quick snapshot of how I got into the world I'm in. Well, that's great because, I mean, obviously that's going to inform what you're doing right now. I mean, how do you move from an engineering type mind of being very definitive in things? And obviously theology and systematic theology works at trying to say, you know, Jesus is this, he's not that. So how do you move into the space where it could be for a lot of people? very scary or very shaking to their foundations to say, okay, I'm going to move from these very hard lines of what is true and place those in areas of conviction to where someone can still be a Christian and disagree with me and still be a brother or sister in Christ. Can you walk us through that journey of where you're seeking now to help people demolish strongholds, namely, false dichotomies? Yeah, that's a big and can be a complicated question, but it's a super important one. So just, I guess some of the things that are important in my own history or thinking about that is that I certainly was raised in a highly sectarian church context in which, you know, not only were. was it that we were the only ones going to heaven, you know, but that we weren't so sure about the people sitting on the P with us either. And so, so that that was kind of the, the world I was raised in, as far as thinking about who's in and who's out. And then so it was, it was a long process of realizing that the world is big, that the Christian world is big, and that the world is big. And that there are a lot of ways that people have tried to Off the Wire (04:46.542)be very serious about their Christian faith in ways that I originally had no idea about. And then with regard to the question like about an engineering mind, I think that there were certainly, I was laughing about this at church Sunday morning with kind of the social visiting time. And I don't remember how it came up, but, oh, was someone talking to me about, someone mentioned a famous Saturday Night Live sketch from when I was a kid. And they said, Lee, you probably didn't get to watch Saturday Night Live, did you? And I said, well, actually, we actually weren't permitted to watch the Love Boat, but we could watch Saturday Night Live. And I said, but I never watched Saturday Night Live because I didn't get it. And it just didn't, I didn't understand it. And then I laughed and I said, I think it's because... I was raised in such a literalist context and where we looked at everything so literally that that really does, you can't be very funny and you can't understand comedy and humor when you're that literalist. gotta explain the joke, you've lost the joke. That's right, right. And so think like satire and so like that. I just didn't get it. I didn't find it interesting. And so learning to have different ways of reading texts, of thinking about the world and all that kind of stuff, not only does it give you a better sense of humor, but it gives you a better sense of... the beauty and the wonder and the mystery of life and the mystery of the universe and so forth. And so that then brings me full circle to the last thing I'll comment on at the moment about that is that I recently got to spend a day with a well -known writer, Parker Palmer, and he talks a lot about paradox. And he quotes the famous physicist, Niels Bohr, who Bohr once said, the opposite of a true fact, is a falsehood. But the opposite of a profound truth may be another profound truth. And I just find that super helpful. Clearly there are things that are true and things that are false. I was born in 1967, that's true. And any other assertion to the contrary is false. But there are certain profound truth claims. Off the Wire (07:10.638)that there may be, and it's important that Bohr was careful there. He didn't say the opposite of a profound truth is another profound truth, but that it may be another profound truth. And so this capacity to hold onto paradoxical claims, I think is terribly important and enriches our lives in numerous ways. Was there a certain author or certain school of thought that started to get you to go down a path of saying, maybe I don't need to always question the person down the pews salvation. Like, were there certain, for my experience, it was reading the early church fathers who were going back and forth about the person of Jesus, right? And they're arguing about these very fundamental doctrines. And then I'm like, well, I guess that particular extension of that isn't as important as maybe the fundamental Orthodox beliefs. So that's my genesis of coming to a place of, okay, I can listen to people who I strongly disagree with and I can learn something from them. Was there anybody, any author that you could direct somebody to that was helpful for you? For me, it began to be challenged. My sectarianism began to be challenged by a mentor of mine as an undergraduate. And he was actually the vice president of our college. And for whatever gracious, generous reason, he began to connect with me and a good friend of mine and would visit with us once a week. And he would begin to ask us questions that we couldn't answer. And so it was just kind of basically asking us questions that stood in tension with what we had taken for granted and showing us this doesn't hold up necessarily as well as you might think it does. And he did it in a non -threatening sort of way. But then he upped that. by one evening, I'll remember this night the rest of my life, he invited me to this ecumenical gathering in which we sat in a circle, there were probably 15, 20 people in this circle. And people were asked to talk about their life of late and the way their faith had been informed, challenged, growing in the last season of their life. Off the Wire (09:28.238)And so that was really the first time I had ever sat and listened to devoted Christians who didn't share all of my convictions. And I remember sitting with this mentor at a break and me expressing, I've never gotten to hear people that are different than me talk about their faith this way. And clearly there's something to this faith that they have. And so that began a long process of kind of deconstructing my sectarianism and helping me have a much bigger... more compelling vision of a Christian faith and practice. Yeah, no, that's great. Because even within my, in my own journey, and I don't know if you can, would resonate with this or not, but I found that I grew up in a more mainline Protestant denomination. And then I was converted in college and I became very adamant with beliefs and like, okay, I'm going to walk through this passage. I'm going to get the meaning of the text, which is there is one meaning. and all those who don't agree with that. And so I became very rigid in my approach to not just theology, but others in life in general. And as I started looking at my own life, I said, the path that I'm on, I'm going to be a really bitter person in 30 years. If everybody is suspect and I'm not really being able to hear somebody say, oh, you talk about Jesus. and I'm going to take you at your word as opposed to looking at them as though they're not really talking about the same Jesus. So that was part of my journey as well, is being challenged with what kind of person are you being charitable? Are you being loving? Are you being kind? Are you exhibiting the fruit of the Spirit? And quite frankly, I had good doctrine, but I didn't have good living. And would you find that like within your sectarian upbringing that that was a large... or was that visible in how you exhibited your life and the people that you observed in church? Well, I think that there were certainly a lot of people in my childhood church community who did subscribe to a lot of sectarian presumptions, but they also had beautiful lives. Off the Wire (11:50.324)along with it. But at the same time, I'll also say that even though sectarian presumptions, I think it is important to challenge some because, and I'm not a child psychologist and don't know a whole lot about child development, but one thing I do understand that I think is commonly presumed about growth in childhood, is that when we're younger, we have a much more black and white vision of the world. And a lot of times we might not be able to see that there's a lot more nuance around us as children because all we have is the scales, lenses that see things in very black and white terms. And so I've learned to try not to presume that my interpretation of things that I had as a kid of my church context were actually in fact true. It was my childhood experience of that. And so I can look back on some of those settings and realize that even, you know, there was this one preacher that I had during my adolescent years that was very sectarian and was highly legalistic and was really good about the shaming and the blaming and all that kind of stuff. But there were other preachers that I had even when I was younger and then preachers that came later that they weren't that way, you know, and they had a much more charitable. gracious vision of the world and what their faith meant. And then there were people sitting in the pew that I'm sure a lot of times they were just trying to figure out what in the world do I do with this stuff that I'm hearing that I may or may not agree with, you know, and doing their best to try to live a life that they thought honored love of God and love of neighbor. But yeah, I mean, I can look back at some of those beautiful people that were in the pews around me and think those were wonderful human beings that I was really grateful to get to be in community with. Even though sometimes I was having to struggle with some of the presumptions of teaching and so forth. I'll say too that, you know, there did come a time where I would feel a sort of sadness about the fact that, for example, after my first book came out when I was young, I was in my thirties, I guess, and my first book came out, you know, it was, it was another denomination that invited me to come back to my hometown and lecture on the book. Off the Wire (14:13.102)and very few people from my home church showed up to be with me. And so there's sadness about that kind of reality is that because even the bare fact that I was lecturing at a competing denomination that a lot of folks wouldn't see as Christian meant that they would just wouldn't come hear me. And so there's genuine sadness about those facts and it definitely gets in you and affects you as you have to process what you do with all that kind of stuff. Even as you're talking, I was thinking about in my own experience that I wonder how many times the life that I lived has actually changed multiple times. Meaning, as I look back on it 20 years down the road, I remember when I first started walking with Jesus that I used to say, well, I don't remember hearing the gospel. I never heard the gospel at the church I grew up in. And the fact of the matter is, more than likely I did. But I wasn't listening. I didn't have the ears. Right. Spirit, right? And along with those same people, there were a lot of amazing people who were very charitable, who exhibited the fruit of the Spirit. But because I was so black and white in my thinking, I was unable to see that. I was looking at everybody through a certain lens that compromised literal interpretation of Scripture, and they didn't really believe the Bible was inerrant or any number of things. And because of that, everybody was written off. And I could really see the beauty. that was there until 20 years later. Right. Yeah. So you, you, and I mentioned this at the beginning when we first started that you've given a lot of your energies and thinking to virtue, what is called virtue ethics. For folks that aren't familiar with that term, can you explain exactly what virtue ethics is and why that could be a way forward in not only how we think in nuance, but then also how we just, quite frankly, live our lives. Can you talk some people through them? Yeah. Well, certainly when I do this with classes, I have to take two or three or four full lectures to try to begin to answer that question or those series of questions. But prior to the... So taking... I'll summarize briefly, for example, the philosopher Alistair McIntyre, who's one of the most prominent virtue ethicists, a Scottish American. Off the Wire (16:41.962)philosophers who's still living. I think he's in his nineties now. But, you know, McIntyre would talk about how prior to the enlightenment, moral theory had three basic elements. It was humankind as it is or untutored human nature, and then humankind as it could be if it realizes its essence or if it realizes its telos, what it means to be a human. And then there are virtues or moral practices or habits, skills, dispositions. that constitute a way of life that can help us realize that excellence. And so with Aristotle, the classic example was, one of the classic examples Aristotle used was think about a musician. You've got a master musician who epitomizes the essence of what it means to be an outstanding musician, an excellent musician. And then you have an untutored child who wants to be that master musician. Well, there are certain dispositions, skills, habits, practices. that have to be put in place to move from one to the other. And so what McIntyre says is that's the way until the Enlightenment that we thought about morality, that morality was not some arbitrary capricious rules to squelch joy or to squelch pleasure. It was instead a way actually to be free. If you want to be free as a musician, you have to undergo all of this discipline, all of this work, all of these practices. And then you can have this incredible liberty. to be free as a musician that's wonderful and masterful and delightful. And so similarly with the virtue traditions, we're asking what are those skills, habits and dispositions that are indispensable to being a human being? And apart from those, we will experience bondage or inability to be what we were created to be or what we were designed to be. And so for example, going back to Aristotle, Aristotle would talk about there are four cardinal virtues and by cardinal that word is taken from the Latin cardo and cardo means hinge. And so these are four key practices that are the hinge on which your life will turn. And this is common sensical, right? So for Aristotle, it's the four cardinal virtues are courage, prudence, temperance, and justice. So courage, for example, if we don't have any courage and we're Off the Wire (19:06.932)constantly living under the lash of cowardice. Clearly that's not going to be much of a life that's a life worth living. You know, it's just, it's just not, it's going to be a pretty sad life to have to live. Similarly with temperance, if we have no temperance with regard to pleasure, then we fall into another sort of bondage, right? Prudence or wisdom is the capacity to choose the best way to do the right thing. And you know, you can be super, um, moral, if you will. But if you have no prudence about choosing the best way or the better way to practice these things, you're just going to be very difficult human being and probably cause a lot of harm. And justice for Aristotle, justice has to be one of the four cardinal virtues because we are social creatures. And, you know, no man is an island, the poets would say later. And because we live in community, then we have to be attending to justice. We have to be attending to relationships. So somebody like Thomas Aquinas, the great Christian thinker in the 13th century, he picks that stuff up from Aristotle. He says, Aristotle is right about this. And he said, however, there are three so -called theological virtues or three infused virtues which we receive as a gift that are faith, hope, and love. And so apart from things like the four cardinal virtues plus the three theological virtues, faith, hope, and love, then we can't be the human beings that we were created to be. And so that's the quick framework. The last quick note I'll give about that is that in following the Enlightenment, we completely reconstitute what freedom means. And this is so crucial, right? Because prior to the Enlightenment, in various virtue traditions, and so this could be going back to the Greeks, it could be the biblical tradition, it could be various medieval virtue traditions. For all of them, freedom is found on the other side of discipline, going back to the musician, right? You have a freedom that is unbelievable as a musician. I know a lot of world -class musicians here in Nashville and see them do what they do. It's because they've given their lives to this and then they have a freedom to do things that mere mortals cannot do. It's just amazing to see what they can do and to hear and to watch them do what they do. So freedom is over here on the other side of discipline. Off the Wire (21:29.39)So you're to have the unschooled person say, leave me alone. I want to be free. I want to be free to do what I want to do. And the ancients would have looked at that and said, that is not freedom. That is bondage. So it's crucial for us to see that after the Enlightenment, we have taken what we call freedom. The ancients would have said is not freedom. It's the opposite. It's slavery and it's bondage. And so this is a huge reality that I think, generally speaking, a lot of modern people are oblivious to. And so once we began to reframe this, it allows this profound new vision for thinking about our lives, this profound new vision for thinking about why we care about things like morality, why we care about habits, why we care about giving attention to our lives, because we can then begin to say, okay, there is a possibility for me living a life that is beautiful and true and good. but it means I got to give attention to it and it means I've got to do what I can. So, and then the last, I said that was the last thing, but let me do one more thing real quick. For Aquinas, as I noted, you know, you've got the things like the cardinal virtues and the cardinal virtues typically are seen both in the Greeks and like Aristotle and in the Christian tradition as virtues that we really can work on ourselves. Whereas the theological versions are seen as a gift to us from God that we receive that we cannot manufacture ourselves. So this is kind of one way of thinking about faith and works. You know, there's their courage. Aristotle says one becomes courageous by doing courageous deeds. The only way you're going to become courageous is by practicing. And if you don't ever practice being courageous, you're going to be a coward. No, no getting around it. That's just the way life is. So there's no escaping the discomfort. There's no escaping the fear. There's no escaping the anxiety that you have to go through to learn to practice courage, faith, hope and love. Well, these are gifts. We can still cultivate ourselves to be open to receive those gifts, but they are gifts. But again, this kind of gives us a frame to think about what can I be giving attention to? What ought I'd be giving attention to? So that I can really take seriously my own life and the life of those people around me, the life of my community to foster. Off the Wire (23:52.334)some sort of vision of what it means to live a good life. I threw a lot at you there, Matt. No, it's wonderful. There's a couple things that stirred my thinking. First of all, do you think the change of definition of freedom at the Enlightenment and post -Enlightenment, is it lumped in with a throwing off of authority? Do people say, no, true freedom is you not telling me what to do, church, and authority figures. Is that? What happens is very much related to authority for sure. Yeah. So following the enlightenment autonomy, the word autonomy becomes actually the marker for what it means to be a moral person. And so so there's this famous line from Immanuel Kant, one of the great modern enlightenment thinkers who says he quotes the slogan, have the courage to use your own reason. And then he said, then his commentary on that is this is the motto of the enlightenment, right? Have the courage to use your own reason. And so autonomy, self -rule is seen as the marker of what it means to be a human being after the enlightenment. And then being under the authority of another is derogatively, pejoratively called heteronomy. But if you go back to the virtue traditions, this reconfigures the notion of authority. So that, again, go back to the example of the musician. Now, what I need to do if I want to become a master at a given craft, such as a musician, I want to find some sort of... authority who can actually help me become that. And I can sit over here and say, I'm just going to do this on my own. And what I do is I become a hack at it. And I might get pretty good at it, but not in the same ways I can get good at it. If I get the privilege of having rightful, I don't want to say rightful authority. I want to say healthy authority. I want to say fruitful authority. Off the Wire (26:11.95)that can show me how to do this, right? It's not imposing. It's not an imposing authority, but it is a exemplary authority. It is an inviting authority. It is an authority that says, this is the way you do this. This is the way you hold the boat. This is the way you play a scale. This is the way you practice. This is the way you memorize. This is the way blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And then I can become something I couldn't become otherwise. And so you're pointing to authority is crucial there. And so again, the point is not any authority is good. That's obviously patently false. And I would be super cautious of anybody that is going to have this un -nuanced celebration of authority. I'd kind of run from them, frankly. Yeah. Yeah. But the notion of looking askance at every authority is just as problematic. It doesn't help us either. So this virtue tradition shows us a different way to think about authority and frame it up in a way that can be immensely fruitful and helpful for our lives. Yeah, because there is a bit of truth to having self -law in the sense of, by extension, the four virtues are you having governance over yourself, right? Yes, right. don't do this in excess and know when to do this and not that. So it takes it in by extension, but makes it a law into itself. Always you need to be the authority, but then you have to ask, what is the objective lens, the objective truth in which we need to be moving towards to be able to say, okay, this is what is just and this is what is unjust. Right. Yeah. And with the Enlightenment, the autonomy typically focused not so much upon character as much as it focused more upon rationality. And so, you know, the, in the enlightenment, the focus moves much more towards intellect and rationality as opposed to embodied habits and embodied practices. And so the virtue traditions are much, they're going to care about rationality, but they're also caring about rationality in relation to bodies and embodied habits and practices. Off the Wire (28:30.414)But in the Enlightenment, we're just caring mostly about minds. And so autonomy is construed in terms of you use your own reason, you use your own mind. Whereas the ancients would have said, yes, of course, use your own mind, but you have to learn how to use your mind in conversation with under helpful, useful authority while you're also working on the ways in which you have a sort of rightful governance of your body and of your appetites. Last thing, another thing that comes up with that, you pointing to that, it's super helpful, is another thing I like about the virtue traditions is that they'll talk about the use of the word continence. And of course, when we hear the word continence, we think about the capacity to control your bladder, right? But it's an interesting word to think about with regard to the moral life, because there's a sort of, it's interesting that, Protestants and there's a Catholic writer, I'll think of his name here in a minute, who's written on the Cardinal Virtues and he's got this great book on leisure. But he talks about how in, and I can't remember if he calls that Protestants or not, but I'll call us out because I think it's important for us to be thinking about. A lot of times we will think that the harder something is for us to do, the more virtuous it is. And we'll look at Jesus and say, well, And Jesus is calling us to this high standard, for example, of love of enemies and how hard that is to love our enemies. But what this philosopher points out is that that completely misconstrues what the virtue traditions are trying to get at. Because, you know, his point there is that who's more virtuous and who's more Christ -like, the person for whom we're greeting our teeth, thinking I have to love you, you SOB, and so I'm going to love you. or the person who with some sort of grace can acknowledge the pain and can acknowledge the hurt and can acknowledge the sadness, but they still have a gracefulness about loving that other person. And so the notion of continence is I can restrain, I can hold it. But beyond that is the goal. And that is I'm not just holding it, continence. I actually have a freedom to be this kind of person. Off the Wire (30:52.494)in a maturity that is beautiful and graceful. And I just love that vision, you know, and we're all always in progress towards that sort of vision of life, right? But to have that sort of vision is very compelling to me. Yeah, I mean, Jesus seems to put an emphasis on the actual act of obedience and it's not devoid of a heart, right? That's part of the problem is you don't just obey because you're supposed to, but obedience is an actual outworking of what's already taking place in your heart. Right. Yeah. So the son who says, I'm not going to do it, but then he goes and does it is actually in a better pathway than the one who says, I'll do it, but never does it. Yeah. I can agree with you cognitively. And I think what you were saying reminds me of Jamie Smith's, uh, who, where he says that we oftentimes as Protestants are just, uh, heads on a stick, right? Just these cognitive being like, give me the truth, but the truth is not devoid of action. Like it's not really. and it's not real obedience in what God's called us to do. So within that same vein of self -rule, and you look at our cultural landscape right now where everyone has a law unto themselves and I'm doing right by me, I'm living my truth and those kinds of things, how could virtue ethics be a way forward for the church to be able to speak into the life of our culture right now? Do you see there being some kind of bridge of what? virtue ethics can afford us if we were to come back to reclaiming the action that is needed of courage, temperance, and so forth? I think it may be really the only way forward. And I think that the more I have studied it and the more I see it and envision it, the more I think that some sort of framework like this is the only way to be true to what the biblical vision of life is, of what the biblical vision of what it means to be human is. And then I think that it gives us a lot of nuance to speak both to excesses on the American political right and excesses on the American political left. And so it's just, it's so nuanced and it's so holistic that I don't see how we can make a significant contribution. Off the Wire (33:18.734)or do very compelling culture making, to use Andy Crouch's phrase, apart from some sort of vision of the moral life like this. Yeah, you know, I've often wondered with a lot of conversation about deconstruction of people's faith in the current cultural milieu that we're in right now, it seems that as people are deconstructing their faith, it isn't necessarily about proves that they find more compelling as much as, oh, look at what happened again. Look at how that person is a hypocrite or that youth pastor would teach and then he abused that person. Can you draw some connections between that issue of deconstruction, people's problem with how people are living and how there might be a way forward in helping people? reconstruct their faith as it's connected to virtue ethics. I don't know that I've thought a whole lot about that quite in those terms. I definitely think that what a virtue type approach is going to do can help us undercut the various forms of legalisms against which that fuels a lot of deconstruction. But we can look at certain legalisms and they finally just break, you know, like that just doesn't fly because it leads to so many problems and so much grossness. And so people finally just say, I'm done with that. If that's what this Christian faith is all about. Yeah. Off the Wire (35:19.726)Whereas the virtue approach is going to ask a different set of questions and is not going to let us settle for any various forms of legalisms. For me, a legalism is a moral rule or some doctrinal rule that has lost sight of the end. So going back to the three -part thing, there's humankind as it is, humankind as it could be if we realize it's telos, and then... rules or virtues or habits of movement that constitute moving from one to the other. Well, a legalism is just, it's insisting upon the rule, but without any vision of what we're trying to be and the kind of people that we're trying to be. And so by removing the goal and the telos, but insisting upon the rule, that is this deeply perverted way of thinking about the moral life. And so what happens is that rather than there being freedom over here, We've lost the over here. And instead, what that rule does is it now restricts us and it's seen as a restriction of freedom and a restriction of our desires and a restriction of what it means to be human is the way that ends up feeding us a thing of what we have to do. And it's like that's a very non -compelling vision of what it means to be a human being or to be a Christian. And so, and again, I'll note very quickly that you can find legalists on the right, and legalists on the left. And you can find deep shaming stuff on the right and deep shaming stuff on the left. And so it's a virtue approach will keep pushing us and saying, isn't there a different vision than that sharp legalism or that sharp shame based approach to living on the right or the left? That's a different sort of way forward. Yeah, you said that virtue ethics. causes us to ask a different kind of question. And as we're looking at some of the political landscape, right, and we want to be Christ -like, what kind of questions ought we to be asking so that we aren't co -opted by the right or co -opted by the left, but we actually are following after Jesus? Are there certain kinds of questions we can be asking to right the ship, as it were, on both sides of that equation of, no, if you really love people, you'll do this. No, if you really love people, you'll do this. Off the Wire (37:41.834)the other side of the aisle. As we think about the political landscape right now, just so bifurcated between you're a Christian, you can only be a Christian if you vote this way. And you hear a lot of people saying, Christians can't vote for this person and that person. What is a way forward? And as virtue ethics asks us a different middle way type question. Yeah. Well, I've got a... a book that I published, unfortunately, that came out, it came out the week after the pandemic came down, which is really terrible timing on my part, you know, scheduling on my part, but I called Scandalous Witness and it's subtitled A Little Political Manifesto for Christians. And so what I'm doing in that book is I'm trying to make a case for how Christian faith could inform the way we engage the world and think about politics. And I really love the book and I wish a lot of people would read it. And because I think it can make it one more time. It's scandalous faith, scandalous witness witness. Yeah. And then the subtitle is a little political manifesto for Christians. And so I try I try to take up that question that you raised at great length and try to ask if not, as far as books go, it's a it's a pretty. not a terribly long book, but I think I've tried to set forward a number of propositions to think about how we could frame thinking about that. And one of the things that I keep coming back to in that is avoiding ideological commitments to American partisanship, which I want to rush to say that doesn't mean that we don't have opinions and strong ones about the things that are. happening in our cultural setting. But that. Off the Wire (39:46.126)It comes with an awareness that all political systems known to humankind fall short of the kingdom of God and that the kingdom of God is grounded in a sort of radical grace and a radical freedom that eschews violence, that eschews coercion, that eschews imposition of its will. And that the most radical, one of the most radical claims about God is a God of love. which allows us to reject God and even kill God when made incarnate in Christ. And that this is the politic actually to which Jesus invites us to participate. Is this what God's way of being in the world? We're invited to that kind of politic. It's not a spirituality devoid of, and it's not even a spirituality that has political implications. It is itself a politic, right? So when we ask what does the word politic mean, traditionally it meant, And going back to the Greeks, it's grounded in the word etymologically, polis, which is a word for city state. And so politics is the art of arranging the affairs of a community. And so politics classically asks questions about power. It asks questions about money. It asks questions about offenses. It asks questions about marriage. It asks questions about reconciliation. And like, well, who talks about that? Well, duh, you know, Jesus talks about that stuff all the time. And so Jesus is calling us to an alternative politic that's deeply, that's radically grounded in the love of God and love of neighbor. And for us to say that Christianity is not political just means we don't have the slightest idea of what Christianity is. But we can't then run to say, well, then we have to identify, am I going to be X or Y? Because the facts are, is that... There are going to be things about the right that I find, well, let me rephrase this. There are going to be things about classical American conservatism that I'm going to find to be true and helpful. And there are things about classical liberal politics in America that I'm going to find to be true and helpful. Off the Wire (42:08.244)And if I can't look at the, I think it's imperative upon us to try to figure out what are those things that we find true and helpful and what are things about that that we find not true and not helpful and have what I would call an ad hoc approach. And so we're always looking for what's the issue right in front of us that the Christian faith has a lot to say about. and then us try to find a way in a compelling, winsome way to bring the Christian tradition and Christian faith to bear upon whatever that issue is in front of us. So rather than thinking ideologically or partisan, we say what's something that we can genuinely bring that could be helpful to our community? Bring that forward. would that look like? What would that look like as it relates to this very thorny issue in your view? Off the Wire (43:07.266)There's so many issues I'm trying to think of, which ones we want to stick our foot into. Yeah, either way, there's going to be a bear trap. I do think that's part of the fear, right? And the church is becoming very silent on things, or they're being too bombastic, and they don't sound a whole lot like Jesus to where he cuts both ways. And you're either going to be in this camp, and if you... critique that camp, then you aren't really one of us. And I just find like there's such a vacuum right now of a prophetic voice in our culture because the church sounds so much like the culture, either right or left, as opposed to cutting it in half and saying, oh, the Pharisees don't like him, and those who are loving their licentious life don't love him either. And so how can the church find a way forward and how... how could virtue ethics be that answer? I mean, I think, so let me just speak from my own context for a minute. If anyone's paying any attention to local state politics in the United States of America, everybody knows that Tennessee is crazy right now. And literally, people, one party walking out of the state house this week because of. one member being silenced, which appears to be related to a personal political agenda. But a lot of this stuff goes to the immense frustration that we're experiencing about a refusal of a state house to take seriously common sense gun reform. And because of the horrific shooting that happened, two miles from my house this spring, or six people were, seven people died, six were shot and the perpetrator was killed. And so what you have in this particular case is people who want to talk about Christianity and act as if they are purveyors of the traditional Off the Wire (45:27.614)conservative values and want to ally themselves with Christianity and a lot of them claim to be Christian. And yet they refuse to take seriously any sort of, you know, it's a particular interpretation, I won't put it that way. It's a particular interpretation of the second amendment that then triumphs every sort of thing that the Christian witness has a lot to say about. Christian witness has a lot to say about violence. Christian witness has a lot to say. about our notions of the right to protect ourselves or the right to use violence against other human beings. And so, you know, I think Christians are quite right to be standing up and saying, this is outlandish. And it appears to be a sort of bowing down to the power of the gun lobby, where if you're serious about Christian faith, you're going to have to quickly get uncomfortable. readings of, you Russell Moore, who's no liberal, right? Russell Moore's editor at Christianity Today. But ironically is considered a liberal by folks that are very far right. Correct. Right. But he was on NPR a couple of weeks ago talking about how he was hearing from preachers. And if I remember the story correctly, he said he'd heard it more than once. He was hearing from people who were saying that the preacher's saying that they're citing the Sermon on the Mount, turn the other cheek and love your enemies and stuff like that. And they're having people come up to them after the sermon and saying, where are you getting those liberal talking points? And they're saying Jesus. And then Russell said, what's interesting to know is that these preachers are reporting that the people... that are pushing on that don't then apologize and say, oh, I'm sorry, I didn't know that that was Jesus. Instead, what they're going on to say is, well, that's weak and that's irrelevant to the world today. And it's like, oh, okay, well, here we see what's happening, right? Is that what purports to be Christian is not Christian. And it's not taking seriously Jesus. And so I think that... Off the Wire (47:50.094)Yeah, we have a lot of sorts of things before us that require us to be savvy and courageous and prudent and attend to justice. And we'll throw some temperance and it's going to have to have a huge dose of faith, hope and love to maintain bearing such a witness. And unfortunately, I'm going to have to go. Yep. Yep. Yep. And I wanted to ask you just very quickly, if anybody wanted to follow... your work and where you're going. Of course, you mentioned your book that I would love to give out to folks as they share this podcast with others. I've got several that I'm going to be buying and sending out to folks. But if they wanted to follow you, that your podcast is called No Small Endeavor. No Small Endeavor, yes. You can also find more about us on our website, nosmallendeavor .com. Sign up for our email list as well. And we're also now being distributed through PRX to public radio stations around the country. So if you're people in your area wanted to call your local radio station and ask them to pick up No Small Endeavor on public radio. PRX could help them with that. Lee, could you do us the favor of just closing us in a brief prayer before you hop off? Sure thing. Gracious God, we give thanks for the gifts of this day and your mercies and your call to be your people. Grant us such grace, O Lord. In the name of Christ, we pray. Amen. Amen. Amen. Thank you so much. Thank you, Matt.  Thank you for listening! If you want to find out more about Matt and how you can get coached toward your better self, visit www.matthewwireman.com.

Matt Wireman00:00:23 - 00:01:00Welcome to another episode of Off the Wire. This is Matt Wireman and I am so thankful to have with me Dr. Brian Arnold, who is currently serving as the president of Phoenix Seminary. And that is really fun to say. I met Brian while he and I were students at Southern Seminary together. And I believe we had an early church history class on Augustine together, if I'm not mistaken. And I had no idea that guys that I was going to school with were going to be president. So here you go. So I'm really thankful to have you, Brian, on this podcast. And I just wanted to thank you for your time.Brian Arnold00:01:01 - 00:01:03Well, it's great to be with you, Matt. Thanks for asking me on.Matt Wireman00:01:03 - 00:01:24Yeah, so you, we were chatting before we hit the record button and you've been at Phoenix Seminary for five years you say and then just recently have taken the post as present. Can you kind of walk us through what that transition has been like and what you find yourself busying yourself with as opposed to what you found yourself busying yourself with?Brian Arnold00:01:25 - 00:02:55Absolutely. So in 2014, actually, I got a call from a friend of mine, Dr. John Meade, who was also at Southern with us. He was doing his PhD in Old Testament and said, hey, are you looking for a job in academia? And I was pastoring at the time, and I'd love to tell more and more about that if you'd like. And he said, there's a position open to Phoenix. So I applied for it and got the position. We moved across the country in May of 2015, which is not the time to come to Phoenix to get the brunt of the brutal summers. See if you're really committed. That's why you went to Phoenix. Absolutely. And taught in church history and systematic theology for those first couple of years. What I recognized pretty quickly about myself is as much as I love scholarship and I enjoy writing and lecturing, I also noticed, one I've noticed this my entire adult life, even before, is a mentorship and a desire to help make things better. So some of my colleagues are exceptionally gifted scholars, but I always found myself drifting into more meetings and thinking through curricular issues and just noticing, especially at Phoenix Seminary, how much potential I saw here and wanted to maximize that as much as possible. And part of it was I never thought I'd actually get a job even teaching at a seminary. And I wanted to make sure the Phoenix Seminary had every chance it had in this kind of environment to be successful in the long haul. So that's what kind of led me to administration.Matt Wireman00:02:55 - 00:03:10Yeah, so your goal was not to be in higher education. It sounds like you were a pastor when you got that phone call from John. So like, what were you thinking? For one, why did you get the PhD if you knew you were going to be a pastor?Brian Arnold00:03:11 - 00:03:28So I almost had to go all the way back to college when I first got a taste for theology,late high school, early into college and started devouring just different books as I found them. I remember even I was a paramedic major in college and so I was in fire and EMS and.Matt Wireman00:03:28 - 00:03:30Eastern Kentucky, right? Is that where you were at?Brian Arnold00:03:30 - 00:05:43I like to say Harvard of the South, nobody else does. But I had a 500-hour internship program that I had to do over the course of a summer in the back of an ambulance and I was doing for a long time, 24 hours on, 24 hours off. And I wanted something substantive to read and my director for Campus Crusade said, why don't you read this book? It's a big fat systematic theology by a guy named Wayne Grudem. And so I went to Barnes and Noble, bought it. And I remember walking in the parking lot looking and seeing like, wow, Harvard and Westminster and Cambridge. And he teaches at this place called Phoenix Seminary and I've never heard of that before. But I read that that summer and fell in love with even academic theology as well as a couple of my roommates in college. And everyone I knew had gone to Southern Seminary. So that was a no-brainer. I was an hour and a half down the road and went to Southern. And really from my first day there, I remember a guy named Scott Davis was in admissionsat the time. And I said, you know, I'm going to go through the MDiv and get my PhD and I would love to teach someday. And he was like, easy there. He hears that from a lot of people. And he said, you haven't even started the MDiv yet. You don't know how hard that is. And also over that same kind of weekend, the New Student Orientation kind of things, Russ Moore, I was sitting next to him for lunch. And he said, you know, one of the founders of Southern Seminary said, if your greatest desire is not to go into the pastorate, then you probably shouldn't be teaching at a seminary. And I thought, you know, I do have a passion for the local church and I would love to pastor. So I kept those two ideas in my mind of what I kind of wanted to do. And then I was realistic. I knew how many guys go and get a PhD and never get a job in higher education. So I thought the chances of me actually teaching at a seminary are very slim, but I love the study of theology. And I knew that even doing that level of work would improve my communication skills, my ability to read better and to write clearly. And so I was really passionate about getting the PhD and either adjuncting somewhere while I was pastoring or writing or any kind of combination of those things. And there was a school near me where I was pastoring in western Kentucky that actually went out of business the day after I went there to talk to them about teaching, potentially.Matt Wireman00:05:43 - 00:05:46Where were you pastoring at in western Kentucky?Brian Arnold00:05:46 - 00:05:50So it was a little town called Smithland, Kentucky, just outside of Paducah.Matt Wireman00:05:50 - 00:05:51Okay, awesome.Brian Arnold00:05:51 - 00:05:54The school that was down there was called Mid-Continent University.Matt Wireman00:05:54 - 00:05:56Okay, okay. Very familiar with it. Yeah.Brian Arnold00:05:56 - 00:06:24They went out and I had been looking for higher ed jobs the whole time. And I told my wife, if I don't hear anything at this ETS, it was going to be ETS in 2014, I'm not going to pursue higher ed anymore. Well, that's when John Mead reached out and said, hey, are you interested? So I always wanted to go into higher ed. I just, in some ways it was hedging saying, I know that it's unrealistic that I'll actually get a position in higher ed.Matt Wireman00:06:24 - 00:06:27Just because it's such a saturation of PhDs, is that why?Brian Arnold00:06:27 - 00:06:52huge saturation of PhDs, less people are going to seminaries, there's a scaling down.There was just all the confluence of issues that make it that much harder to get into the market. I felt like we're happening. So, I'm a pastor, the Lord is really blessing our work there and it was exciting and I could have done that for an entire career and been really satisfied doing it.Matt Wireman00:06:52 - 00:07:12Mm-hmm. So what was it about Phoenix that you would make a move? I mean, because that's not just, you know, right down the street kind of seminary that like you alluded to.I mean, that's a substantial climate change, but also a substantial cultural change. And so what was it about Phoenix particularly that drew you to even apply?Brian Arnold00:07:13 - 00:07:45Yeah, if I'm just being frank, it was a job. I kept telling my wife, you know, we could be,and I always pick cold places, and we almost went to a school in Montreal, actually.That's a bit of another story, but I was like, it could be Alaska, it could be Maine, it could be Canada, and I never even thought about warmer places, and it ended up being Phoenix, and so it was an opportunity to get my foot in the door and begin teaching. So I knew to find a job in higher education, in seminary education specifically, I was gonna have to be open to moving anywhere.Matt Wireman00:07:45 - 00:07:55Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. So you were teaching systematic theology and church history.Well, your major was systematic theology, was it, or was it church history?Brian Arnold00:07:55 - 00:08:00I'm Church History, so I study under Michael Haken and particularly Church Fathers.Matt Wireman00:08:00 - 00:08:23Okay, and then you moved to Phoenix in 2014, became the president. Can you walk us through that process? Like, I mean, that's a big jump. So you found yourself more in administrative type meetings. But what was it, I mean, to go from that to, you know, to go from just being in meetings to being a president is a pretty significant change. So walk us through.Brian Arnold00:08:23 - 00:08:45When I was dean for about two months. Does that count? Say what? That I was dean for about two months before I became president. So yeah, it's a bit of a convoluted story. Our president, who'd been here for 23 years, had even been one of the founders of it back in 1988.Matt Wireman00:08:45 - 00:08:47Dr. Del Husey, is that right? That's right.Brian Arnold00:08:46 - 00:12:05That's right. You have Dr. Darolda who say he had been pastor of Scottsdale Bible Church, which is probably one of the first big mega church churches in America. And so his background was more in church ministry, but he recognized even back in 1988, Phoenix is growing. Most people would be surprised, but it's the fifth largest city in the United States. And so here you have a city that's booming and there's no place to get a seminary education. So all of our best and brightest, most talented pastor candidates are leaving to go to seminary and they don't come back. So we need something here. And we were actually a branch campus of Western Seminary in our founding and they were independent from them around 1994 or so. So I was following a pretty long presidency of Dr. Del Jose, which is already a challenge in and of itself for somebody who's that deeply ingrained here. Now he serves as the chancellor and we've got a great relationship, really thankful for him. But he even recognized that they needed somebody who had more of an academic background to take it to the next level. And hesaid, I'm just waiting for somebody to come in and say they want my job. This is my first six months at Phoenix Seminary. And I walked down to his office, I said, I love your job. And I was just kidding. And I said, I'm kidding about that. I just, I know myself, I see myself more gifted and bent towards administration and leadership. So I would love to be mentored by you and really get to understand what higher education looks like from a leadership position. And so early on in my tenure here, I was really getting involved in the leadership aspects. I helped lead us through a major curriculum change. We had a bunch of two hour classes, we moved to three hour class system. So that gave me a lot of understanding in our workings. And through all that, I was coming up under Bing Hunter, our previous provost and dean, and was kind of gearing up for that position. Well, at the same time, the presidency was coming open. And I wanted to throw my hat in the ring because I see so much potential here. I'm very thankful for where Dr. Del Jose brought us. But I also recognize we really can get to the next level here and establish ourselves as one of the major theological institutions in the West, especially the Southwest. And when you think about where Phoenix is located, we're pretty good distance away from a lot of other seminaries. We're back east, they kind of seem to pile up on top of each other. So there's a lot of even geographically speaking, room here to grow. And to really, I tell all of our team all the time, I'm asking people just to grab some basket and pick the low hanging fruit. I mean, we're here with Arizona State University, which is the largest undergrad, GCU, which is now the largest Christian undergrad,we've got a great relationship with Arizona Christian University. So I saw all these things, I kept thinking, how can we grow this potential? And as the inside guy, I knew where our challenges were, I knew where our threats and our opportunities were. And so I just wanted to make a case to the board and say, as the inside guy, I know how to tweak some dials right now, they can get us moving in the right direction. And I think it was a long shot. I was a long shot, I think, from the very beginning of the whole process. And from what I understand, just kept kind of making it through to the next level to the next level to the next level until especially I got to be able to presentMatt Wireman00:12:05 - 00:12:08Survive in advance, right?Brian Arnold00:12:08 - 00:13:53It really is exactly what it felt like. But we used Carter Baldwin, which is an executive search firm. When the rep, you get to the round of eight or nine or so, he flies around the country to meet with you wherever you're at. So we flew back out to Phoenix and we sat down to meet for our interview. His very first question, at the time I was 35, he said, you're 35, you don't have much higher education experience. Why now? You're coming into Dean's role. Why not just learn that and climb the ranks that way? I said to him, honestly, for me, it's an issue of gifting. The gifting and skill set, you need to be a really accomplished dean. A lot of times, it's a very different skill set to be a successful president. Deans are a lot of times, they're the ones that are keeping the trains moving and they're really keeping you within the lanes of accreditation and assessment and all those different pieces with the DOE and ATS and ensuring that the institution is healthy from that vantage point. I see myself more as the big picture visionary. I want to be out there preaching. I want to be casting vision. I want to be meeting with donors. Because for me, donor relationships are not only a great opportunity for pastoral ministry, but it's also a chance to just explain what my heart is and vision is for the seminary, and see if they want to partner with us. When I just look at skill set wise, I saw myself having a better skill set for the presidency. I said, that may come across arrogant, I don't mean it to. It really is just about finding the right seat on the bus for each person. I think I could sit in the presidency and do okay. Here we are.Matt Wireman00:13:53 - 00:14:46So here we are. Yeah, well, I know it's very exciting, very exciting. I'm really thankful that you're in that presidency. Because one of the things that I love about your story is that you said you could be totally content serving at a local church. You know, and a lot of times, even within higher education, Christian higher education, even, that there can be this sense of climbing the corporate ladder, you know, paying your dues and then being entitled to being a successor and all these things. But I love that you framed it and saying, I would have been content and happy and would have lived a fruitful life being a pastor in a town that people hadn't heard of, because that's valuable. Because one of the things that's unique about Phoenix Seminary, what's the tagline or the mission statement for Phoenix? This is a quiz. This is a quiz.Brian Arnold00:14:45 - 00:14:48No problem. Scholarship at the Shepherd's Heart.Matt Wireman00:14:48 - 00:15:36Yeah, so I would love for you to reflect on, not only as the president, but as a formerpastor, as someone who has a pastor's heart, a shepherd's heart, what is that relationship that you view, and you could view it in both sides, because you've had both hats on, of what that relationship is between a seminary and the church. So much of the theological fighting that took place in many of the seminaries took place because there was a divorcing of, or a assuming of, roles as opposed to a tight relationship between the seminary and the church. So I'd love for you to just reflect on why the seminary is valuable to the local church, and why then the local church is valuable to a seminary.Brian Arnold00:15:36 - 00:18:31Absolutely. I think we have to begin with what is God's plan for humanity? And a big part of that is the church. Jesus died for his bride. It is the church. That's his plan for the world. That's his mission for the world. And so I think it's important for people in my position now to always remember that we are really the quartermasters. We're the ones behind, we're off the front lines. We're equipping, we're preparing, we're training, we're sending out. But really the battlefield's out there in the mission field of the church. And so I'm very happy to be recognizing my backseat role as a parachurch ministry, helping undergird God's plan for the world. And what helped me with that is that I've been in both worlds. So I realized very quickly in my pastorate that had I not had a seminary education, I would have been in a tough spot. So why is that? Like, yeah. Yeah. So we moved to Smithland in June of 2012. And we already had a vacation that was going to be planned. So we went on that and I'm on the beach on the East Coast. And I get this phone call from one of my deacons and he was a deacon and his dad was a deacon. And he said, Hey, I just want you to know, my father's kidneys are failing. And we don't know what that's going to mean for him. My wife was just diagnosed with breast cancer and my daughter's best friend just committed suicide. And I remember sitting there on the beach thinking, okay, that was the shortest ministry honeymoon in the history of humanity. I haven't even like really landed there yet. And this is already, I'm already recognizing how messy ministry is and you're really entering into broken lives of people. Well, I was going to be preaching through Philippians first off. And here I am at a local small Southern Baptist church in Western Kentucky preaching three times a week, Sunday morning, Sunday night, Wednesday night. And I'd probably preached 10 times total before I took that position. So in my first month, I'm going to be preaching more than I've preached my entire life. And I'm going through Philippians, all of a sudden you get to Philippians two pretty quickly and you get this issue of kenosis. What does it mean that Jesus emptied himself? If I had a seminary training, the background, understanding my Christology, you can get to a text like that. It's going to take you forever to walk through the challenges that present you in that text. But I was so thankful because the seminary education put me that much further ahead, even to my own preparation and study that I was used to exegeting the text when I came totheological challenges. It wasn't the first time I'd seen them or thought through them before. So that actually freed me up to do more ministry in the church because I had a deeper understanding of the text already. Does that make sense? So, yeah.Matt Wireman00:18:29 - 00:19:32Yeah, yeah. I mean, yeah, you're not having to try to figure out like so many times I talk to guys who, you know, are in the middle of seminary training or haven't had seminary training and then they, yeah, great, great example, Philippians 2, and they're like, I didn'tknow this was an issue. And then they read one guy and they're like, I think I agree with that. And then they read another guy and they're like, I think I agree with that too. And they're like diametrically opposed to each other. And you're like, well, that will make a dramatic effect on how you for one read all of Philippians and then the entire New Testament and those kinds of things. So yeah, I hear you. And along with that, just a little side note, a lot of times people ask, well, how long does it take you to prepare a sermon? It's like, well, you know, each sermon has got, you know, 20 years of teaching behind it, you know, 20 years of education behind it. It's not something that I just kind of whip up over, you know, in a week. It's something that there is a lot of training that's going behind every single sermon. So it's kind of a misnomer to say, well, how long is your sermon prep? It's like, well, it's a couple decades. That's right.Brian Arnold00:19:31 - 00:20:06That's right. Exactly. David Allen Black says the pastor should be like an iceberg. People see the top 10% above the water, but they know that there's 90% below it as well. But I don't know that we've really helped people in the church see just how important that is or they're not connecting those dots. You know, this is not a knock on where I was coming from and I pastor it. But a lot of the pastors in Western Kentucky did not have a theological education. And I knew some of them who'd show up to church on Sunday morning, do like a flip open method of sermon prep, wherever they open the Bible. It's like, Hey, that's.Matt Wireman00:20:05 - 00:20:12like, Hey, that's, you're not, you're not exaggerating. Right? I mean, this is like, cause people joke about that, but there were people actually doing it.Brian Arnold00:20:12 - 00:20:54who did that down the road from where I was a pastor. And just to show you this, this is not to pat myself on the back, it's to pat seminary education on the back. That's right, that's right, that's right. Is I had a guy who my very first Sunday was my sermon I was preaching to get hired at the church. He's about 75, he graduated by the army. And this guy could have taken me. He's a strong, tough guy. And he pulls me to the side and he goes, we don't need a preacher. Those are a dime a dozen. We need a pastor. Do you understand what I'm telling you? And I was like, yes, sir, I know exactly what you mean. And he wanted to know that as I was coming into my late 20s, that I was going to love people, be there with them, to walk through suffering. Absolutely. I mean, that's my heart. I want to do that.Matt Wireman00:20:22 - 00:20:23That's right, that's right, that's right.Brian Arnold00:20:54 - 00:22:52Same guy, we have a great relationship, but he's not much of a talker over the next three years while I'm pastoring. My very last Sunday, he grabs me again and pulls me to the side. I doubt he even remembered that initial conversation. And he said to me, I've been in the church for 50 years, and I've never learned as much or gone deeper in my walk with Christ or understood the Bible as much as I have these last three years. I only tell that story to say, and I'll tell this to my students, is don't underestimate the power of opening God's Word and preaching through it in an expository way. God will change lives doing that. But it was my seminary education that helped me do that. And even if my church couldn't articulate it, it's like, why is our church... We were growing in a really healthy way. Other churches, you could tell people were like, okay, these people at Smith and First are really getting fed. And I wasn't sitting there drawing the lines all the time for them. But when I left, I tried to help encourage the deacon saying, think about what you said about the preaching ministry here is because I was seminary trained. So go back to that pond and fish again. Because I knew quite literally, there's a couple thousand people just down the road who love the Lord, are committed to the gospel, and have the right type of training to do it. So now on my side of things, that makes me even more passionate, having been a pastor for a couple years, knowing what I needed in the pastorate. And now I can help deliver and train that for other people who are now... You're starting to see students come back and say, oh my goodness, you're right.This is having a significant impact on my ministry. I see guys here, Matt, who have been in ministry for 20 years who are now coming back and getting seminary education, who are lamenting that. And they're saying, I put the cart before the horse. I really wish I had known 20 years ago what I know now. My ministry would have been different.Matt Wireman00:22:52 - 00:24:16Yeah. Well, I'd like to revisit this relationship between the church and the seminary and just your diagnosis of why there is, in some ways, you know, a dumbing down of the pastorate in some ways of where people are like, we don't need all that education. It's like, well, I don't know why the person has to have a Southern accent. You know, Southerners, we get beat up on sometimes. But, you know, you want to say you can preach, period. Like there's a beauty in saying, you know, if God has called you to preach, preach. And yet at the same time, we want to bridle that horse up and be able to say there's a lot of good here. But I just have found like a lot of times people are very quick, and I'm sure medical doctors get this too and lawyers get this too, where people are like, I know you studied for like 20 years, but I read this. I've got a webMD. Yeah, exactly. And a lot of times that happens at the church too, but in some ways, we havebeen the cause of that problem by saying education is not important. So I'd love for you to just kind of tease out a little bit more like how you see the seminary serving the local church.Brian Arnold00:24:16 - 00:27:36Absolutely. And this argument is trotted out quite a bit, but I think it's important. Andyou kind of said it there, people expect their doctors and lawyers to have a certain levelof training because what they're doing is of great importance. How much more the careof souls, the shepherding of people's eternity, and for people to know and understand things. Yeah, there's been a historic challenge here, at least in the last couple of hundred years between the seminary and the church. And when you think back over time, a lot of the people who were most theologically trained were week in and week out pastors. If you think about the Reformation, you think about people like Martin Luther and John Calvin, these guys were pastors who were also leaders in theology. It's really not almost until the Enlightenment where you begin to see a wedge put between the seminary and the church as higher education because of its own kind of thing, where you might have seminary professors who have not been pastors before. And so I think that even then leads further to people seeing a greater divide between them. I think it's everybody kind of knowing those places. So as I mentioned before, recognizing, yes, the church is God's purpose for the world, but there's substantial training that a pastor must have in order to faithfully execute that office. It's a high office that God has called upon. When you think about somebody like Paul man, right, he's converted. He's already well-trained and yet he secludes himself kind of more training. Even think about the apostles before they're sent off in Matthew 28. Jesus is with them for three years. I mean, that's a pretty solid seminary education that they're receiving. And Christian history for the last 2,000 years has been deeply invested in education and recognizing that we are touching sacred things and people need to know those. And so if seminaries recognize their parachurch status more and the recognition that local churches simply cannot do what seminaries can do. I know very few churches, maybe if any, where you have somebody you could teach Greek, Hebrew, systematics, church history, evangelism and discipleship, world missions, all the different things that you kind of get from a seminary education, local church can do this. So the idea is, right, there's a hub of education that many churches can pour into and get trained from and then they get sent back out to their churches. Working together in tandem like that with the recognition that a seminary should be chosen by a student if that seminary is deeply invested in the work of the local church. I mean, if they're not and they're just actually a think tank or an ivory tower, then don't go there. But if a seminary is actually saying, look, our heartbeat is for the local church, that is what God has given us. All we want to do is give you those tools that you can't get from the local church and let us equip you in those ways and then we'll send you right back. Hopefully, we're on fire for God. Hopefully, deeper in their ability to handle the text, more aware of how to do actual practical ministry, all these different pieces so that they don't get this divided. I mean, the saddest stories are oh, Johnny was a great preacher before he went to seminary or, you know, Bill was so in love with the Lord and then he went to seminary.Matt Wireman00:27:36 - 00:27:44What happens to those guys? Why is that sometimes part of the narrative, you think?Brian Arnold00:27:45 - 00:28:43It's a great question. Partly, I often wonder if it's a straw man kind of argument. I mean, you and I were at Southern Together. When I think back, whenever I'd hear people talk bad about seminary, and I'm thinking, I'm with these guys who love the Lord and are bringing their education to the pew week in and week out. I never understood that. I never understood why people say those things. And chances are, a lot of times it was going to be a person who was going to be a bad fit for ministry anyway. Seminary can't, if I can say this, maybe you'll have to edit this part out later, I don't know. But seminary cannot take a weirdo and make them not a weirdo. Right? Seminary can't take somebody who has no actual gifting from the Lord in pastoral ministry and somehow do that. I mean, there's spiritual gifts involved in this as well. Sometimes I think seminaries unfairly bear the brunt of criticism that we're not responsible for.Matt Wireman00:28:43 - 00:29:53Yeah, and in some ways, like people, you know, one of the things at Southern, and I don't know if Phoenix does this or not, I'd like to know, but you know, you have to get a reference from your church that you're a member at. And I think, and I'm afraid that many churches are not doing the hard work of saying, hey, brother, you probably need to get some humility before you go to seminary because there'll be some classes and I know you were in these classes too, not you, you weren't doing this, but there were guys in classes, I was like, I would never be a congregant in that man's church because he is abrasive, he is proud and everyone sees it. And then the seminary is supposed to miraculously just say, hey, you shouldn't be a pastor. It's like, that's not the seminary's job. It's just really frustrating that, you know, the talking heads or the, you know, the heads on a stick as it were, that gets to be the misnomer for seminaries when in fact, it's taking, you know, what Paul said, a fan in the flame, the gift that was given to you and how you do that, well, you put more fodder on the fire and how you do that, you get more training, you get more education to be able to do that.Brian Arnold00:29:54 - 00:31:24Absolutely. Yeah, they should be people that the church is already saying, we see the call of God on your life. And, you know, one of the ways this does go sideways sometimes, Matt, and this is a sad situation is where people are deeply involved and invested in their local church. People do recognize the gift that God has given them. They want them to fan it into flame. They recognize their need for education. They go to seminary and they stop being that involved in their local church. That happens, I think that's a record for disaster, right? So, one of the things that I'm passionate about as a president here is even mentoring. So, one of the things that I did love about Phoenix Seminary as soon as I came here is that every student has a mentor. And I've not really seen that in other seminaries before. And that's one of the areas we're going to be investing in a lot more in the next year or two. But I think about even these books on pastoral calling. The one that always sticks out to me is Paul David Tripp's, Dangerous Calling. And on the original cover, there's five endorsements on the back. Three of them aren't in ministry anymore. On a book on how dangerous pastoral ministry is. So, why are we seeing all these ministries implode? And everybody looks to me as though we're the sole solution. Now, we're going to do everything we can to help bridge that, to remind people that as deep as they go, or maybe as high as they go in academic theology, they need to go deeper into the roots of their spirituality.Matt Wireman00:31:24 - 00:32:01Trust me, just seminaries are not giving people passes. They're not rubber stamping people. They're trying to do their due diligence, teaching students humility by giving them accommodating grades. So, this is actually average or below average, go do work.So, the seminaries are...the ones who are, like you said, embedded within and see theirmission as a parachurch ministry are hugely...are very successful in what they do, but people can't start imputing upon the seminary what they ought to be doing, which is not part of their charter, right? Absolutely.Brian Arnold00:32:01 - 00:33:08That's right. But this is a big fight out there right now and debate between some theologians of what's the seminary's role in these things. And I just see a vicious cycle of churches that are not doing a good job of discipleship because a lot of their pastors were never personally discipled. I was and it changed my life. A lot of people have never had that. And then they go to seminary and they don't really learn that because the seminary says, well, it's not my job. And then we wonder why the local church isn't doing it. And they're producing people who've never seen it. And we're in this pattern.And so I want to just say, what can we do at Phoenix Seminary to just help break someof this pattern to say, look at how powerful and impactful personal mentoring can be.Now, in your church, now that you have this theological education, you've been mentored, how do you start almost like a master's plan of evangelism? I'm going to disciple my elders and deacons. And now they're going to take two or three people and they're going to disciple them. Where would our churches be? That was true. And then even thinking, you know, some people want to use the seminary like it's a Sundayschool class or something, right? Like I want to know more about theology, so I'm going to go to the seminary.Matt Wireman00:32:02 - 00:32:03That's right. That's right. But this is a big.Brian Arnold00:33:09 - 00:33:34I'm fine to train those people. That's great. Come, we'll give you a great education. But what I'm hoping is I'm putting out pastors who can take that to their church and equip the saints for the work of the ministry. So we just have this, you know, I think you used this term earlier, this dumbing down all over the place of where pastors think that what people need is something other than doctrine and theology.Matt Wireman00:33:34 - 00:35:33And other than a good kick in the pants. Yeah, at times. In that, you know, no, you did not exegete this passage appropriately. No, that word does not mean that. And no, you cannot do that. You know, like being able to help push people to say, no, no, no, we are, like you said, I thought so well put that we are shepherding souls. And there is a lot at stake. Most of the people that I have heard of and have met that have been hurt by people are by those who have not gone through the rigors of some kind of training ground. Now, it doesn't necessarily have to be a seminary. It could be a church-based training ground, but some kind of training ground as opposed to like, hey, you know, this is, you know, Johnny Preacher that feels called. And I think in so many ways, people, there are many wounded Christians because they haven't, folks haven't done the hard work of being challenged and having to come up with a biblical explanation of why they believe exe regarding this practice that they believe. That's right. You know, and I do wonder too, if in some ways the seminary is inundated with Christians who love Jesus, but who are not called to ministry because the particularly evangelical church, since that's our context, has not done a good job of heralding vocation. And what I mean by that is, you know, being able to say, hey, what are you passionate about? Did you know that you can serve Jesus faithfully as an electrician, faithfully as a plumber, faithfully as a doctor and a lawyer? Because I remember when I was in college, if you were really sold out for Jesus, you went into full-time ministry. So, you know, I've interfaced with several folks who are like, I don't know if you're called to preaching. Well, I don't think you're called to preaching ministry, but I think you're called to ministry, but your bread and butter may be from somewhere else.Brian Arnold00:35:34 - 00:37:35Absolutely. Yeah. And there's been a lot of confusion. There's been some good work recently, I think, that's overcoming some of those kind of stereotypical type of pieces that we felt when we were coming up through the ranks. It was one of the issues, though, the Phoenix Seminary, I would say, if there was a little bit of mission drift, it was more towards training people who just felt the lack of solid theological teaching in their local churches. One of the things we have in Phoenix is you will have the hour-long worship service, and a lot of times, that's it. There's no Sunday night. Wednesday night, I might have kids and youth kind of ministry things, but nothing for the adults, and then small group ministry. And we've all been helped by small groups. I think those kinds of communities are really great for developing deep relationships with people. But what's missing in the churches now is that educational element where people just don't knowthe basics of the Christian faith anymore. So, even when a person says, I've been really involved in this church, I feel called to ministry, and then they come to seminary, they don't know anything because their churches have never really invested in that. It's one of the interesting trends I think we need to keep an eye on is how many churches are kind of returning to a Sunday school type of model, recognizing the vacuum that's been left when people don't know what the Trinity is and don't know who Jesus is and don't understand salvation. We go down the list, and we have a very illiterate church population today. And this is the wrong time to have that. With the challenges that are happening in society, we need people to know the faith better than ever because there's no cultural assumptions anymore. And in that kind of hostile environment,Christians are gonna have to either know the word deeply or they're gonna be swept away in the time. And that would be really concerned for the kids. And so, yeah, we all know these issues, right?Matt Wireman00:37:34 - 00:38:47Yeah, no, it bears explicating because I think a lot of people know that there's something in the water that's not tasting right, and to be able to call it and say, no, that's arsenic. Or, you know, that will kill you if you drink it because that's...I mean, evenpart of my own story when I was serving overseas, I could smell heresy when I was talking to different pastors at different churches, but I couldn't articulate, oh, that's a heresy because that is the kenotic theory. You know, I couldn't do that, whereas, you know, seminary helped to do that for me. You know, I'd love to, as a seminary president, you're sitting down with someone who loves Jesus and is in a vocation other than being a pastor or a missionary or going into seminary. And they're like, I just want to grow in my faith. My church doesn't have, you know, Sunday school. My church doesn't...like, what you just articulated. So how would you counsel someone who doesn't feel called to pastoral or missionary work but wants to grow in their faith? Are there any books or are there different avenues that they could go down that you would encourage them to get better trained?Brian Arnold00:38:47 - 00:40:12Dr. Seheult- That's a great question, Matt. We are living in a time of great resources.When you think about what's being put out all the time, either through technology oreven through book medium, there's just a lot of helpful things out there. So I would encourage this person in a number of ways. One, if they're looking at any kind of leadership in the church, from deacon to elder, any kind of position like that, I would say seminary education would be really beneficial. You might not need the full MDiv, but getting in and getting kind of a Master of Arts in Ministry that gives you a lot of the groundwork would be really helpful. But again, for the person who just says, I'm an electrician, but I'm passionate about the Lord, I want to know more. I would encourage them to start with one of my colleagues' books, actually, and that's Systematic Theology by Wayne Grudem. He's got the second edition coming out in December. And so lots more content. And I think that's where I cut my teeth theologically. And I know there's places that people disagree with Wayne on some things. I do too. But it's still, I think, the most readable, helpful entree into theology. So I think starting there to get the kind of the whole picture of theology through the Bible is helpful. And then I would even encourage some intro kind of books to the New Testament and to the Old Testament, things like Carson and Moo on the New Testament to give them those kinds of pieces.Matt Wireman00:40:12 - 00:40:22You're talking about their introduction to the New Testament, right? Absolutely. Google it, Amazon or introduction to the Old Testament. Those are just surveys of those different books.Brian Arnold00:40:22 - 00:41:05Yep, yep. The Faith of Israel by Dumbrell might be a great place to start with the Old Testament. But as a Dominion of Dynasty by Dempster would be another great place to start with the Old Testament. So there's all these resources. And then whoever you want to teach you today, you can find it on YouTube. You can go there and get a lot of great content from some of the best teachers in the world a click away. And so take advantage of yourself those resources. What we can't say is there's not enough resources. Like there's plenty of those. We might say there's not enough time and then I'd ask about your Netflix, binging, you know, we can certainly binge some other things as well that would be more helpful and beneficial to the soul.Matt Wireman00:41:05 - 00:41:34And so some of it too is along with those resources, I've found that there are a lot of folks that feel like they're swimming in a sea of resources and they don't know which are the good ones to be able to find a someone that you trust. And I'm going to avail myself to anybody who's listening to this and I know you would too, Brian, but like, you know, if you need help and direction, just send me a message and happy to happy to direct you because there are tons of resources and there's tons of really bad resources to run.Brian Arnold00:41:34 - 00:41:47That's exactly right. One of the things, I'm happy you said that, Matt. One of the things that, when I got the bug for theology in college, my roommates and I, we'd always get the CBD catalog. Maybe that dates me a little bit.Matt Wireman00:41:46 - 00:41:51Yeah, no, it's still going strong. I still need to get up on there.Brian Arnold00:41:51 - 00:41:57Catalog, why I still use CBD for four. And then, by the way, let's just tell the listeners that's not the oil.Matt Wireman00:41:57 - 00:42:04Yeah, that's not the oil. That's Christian Book Distributors. CVD. That's right. Not O-R-D or something.Brian Arnold00:42:05 - 00:42:51Absolutely. When my wife said, you know what CBD is? I'm like, I've been shopping there for years. Let's clarify that. But that's a great place to get resources. But I can remember getting that and seeing some Old Testament books, especially Gerhard von Raad's Old Testament Theology. It was like six bucks. And I'm thinking, I don't know much about the Old Testament. I really would love a book to help with that. But I knew enough about that name to say, I need to be suspicious. That might not be the best resource. But I don't know what is. When there's almost too many resources, you go to LifeWay, and if I can say this without getting in trouble, a lot of the resources that are fronted there are the last things I would encourage people to read. You got to go back into the back into a small corner section to find the real gems there.Matt Wireman00:42:51 - 00:43:21Well, you know what's been interesting even in the resources that you mentioned is not10 ways to be a better husband or 10 steps to be a more biblical wife. It's actually learn the Bible. That's the dearth of information that we're having a problem with is that people don't know where Malachi is in the Bible. And they don't know that he was a prophet. And they don't know all these things. It's like, get to know the Bible. That's the first place you should start.Brian Arnold00:43:20 - 00:44:21Absolutely. Absolutely. And then, you know, so one of the things that was great for mewith seminary education was I'm learning to even know what the resources are. Like, that was a big part of it for me is now I feel like I can pick things up, know where theywent to school, know when they went to school there, and get a pretty good picture already of where they may stand. And then you get the grid, right, for being able to filtersome things out. But also, I hope you're at a church, and this is another plug for seminary education, where the pastor has a seminary education, who can help provide those resources, who knows those things. So I hope you're at a place where your staff is able to do that. In the meantime, if not, find somebody who is that you trust, and they would be happy. Any time that people come to me and they say, can I get a resource on X, whatever that is, that is one of the things that give me the greatest joy in answering, because that tells me there's another Christian out there who really wants to go deeper with the Lord, and I'm always happy to help resource.Matt Wireman00:44:21 - 00:44:41Yeah, yeah, no, that's great. Now, so for the person who is at a church and they feel like they want to go into full-time ministry, can you just kind of walk through how does someone come to that decision to where they're like, I think I should be a pastor or a missionary?Brian Arnold00:44:41 - 00:44:47Absolutely. I mean, step one, ps.edu, you apply online.Matt Wireman00:44:47 - 00:44:52And he will waive your admission fee.Brian Arnold00:44:52 - 00:44:57Just mention Matt Wireman in the comments or something. No, it's a great...Matt Wireman00:44:56 - 00:44:58No, it's a great. Yeah.Brian Arnold00:44:58 - 00:47:11I wrestled with that as well. I mean, here I was in fire EMS. My dad had been a fire chief.That's the world I knew. And I didn't even think I could have been satisfied in a career doing that. I know CH Spurgeon is often used, if you could do anything else besides ministry, do it. I don't really agree with Spurgeon on that one. Because of why? Well, because I think that a lot of people who do well in ministry are people of deep curiosity and they love a lot of different things and they themselves given 10 lives doing 10 different things. Well put. Right. So I would say that God calls people to ministry and it's not unique to me. It's kind of the historic answer in two ways, the internal call and the external call. The internal call is when you start to say, Lord, is that you calling me to ministry? Like, I feel a passion for this. I want to teach the Bible. When I was in seminary, or I'm sorry, my undergrad, one of the biggest kind of moments in my early life was sitting at a Bible study in Campus Crusade and my campus director is there and he's leading us through Colossians. And I remember thinking, you get paid to teach people the Bible. That's amazing. Like, I would love to do that. That's what I'm so interested and passionate about. So I had that internal call. And then I started going to other people and saying, do you see this gift in me? Could we give me some teaching opportunities where we can actually see, is this there? And could God use me in this way? And I had three or four people in my life who are still in my life to this day that all affirmed that. And so I know that question's more for, should I go into ministry? But even for me with PhD work, I remember Dr. Russ Fuller sitting me down in his office and saying, I think you should consider doing PhD work. And that was a great confirmation to me that I should move on. So I, when weighting these things, more often weigh the external call higher than the internal call because I can be deceived. But chances are, if I'm asking four or five other mature believers, do you see this call of God in my life? And they're being honest, you're going to get some really good answers to that.Matt Wireman00:47:12 - 00:48:38And I think for that person to start with a posture of, I don't see clearly, and God has given other people to me in my life to help me see clearly. Because a lot of times, you know, folks will ask me like, I think I'm called the ministry. And I'm like, well, that's awesome. Celebrate, first of all. And I don't want to stiff arm anybody in that. No, that's right. We need more laborers. But then secondly, listen to somebody that cares for you and actually is in the work of that ministry to say, hey, maybe instead of going to seminary right now, maybe you could just be here for a couple years and get some relational tools in your belt, you know, so that you can learn like, what is it you're getting into? Because maybe in two years of volunteering at a church, you know, and it's not just to get free labor for people, it's actually in a service to them to be able to say, hey, why don't you just serve here as a volunteer, because if you don't want to do it as a volunteer, then you're probably not, it's going to be even more tainted when you get paid for it. I promise you that. If you're not willing to not be paid for this, then it's going to get tainted really fast. I've seen tons of people in full time ministry who depend upon full time ministry for their salaries, and their lives become a shipwreck, because they start to treat God and divine matters as a slot machine, you know, andBrian Arnold00:48:38 - 00:49:00Absolutely. And there's not much in that slot machine. Let's just say that as well. I mean,ministry, it was really hard. I mean, I had breakfast with my wife this morning and we were just kind of going over some different pieces and remembering back to my years in pastoral ministry when things were exceptionally brutally tight. And it was a challenge.Matt Wireman00:49:00 - 00:49:07As you're getting a call about a man who just, you know, has all of those things going on in his life, right? Yeah, yeah.Brian Arnold00:49:07 - 00:50:06Yeah, exactly. And recognizing that there were times that I just needed to keep going back to 1st Corinthians 9. Woe to me if I don't preach the gospel. Like, it has to be so deep-seated in you. And this is where I will tip the hat to Spurgeon a little bit and say I get why he's saying that. Because there has to be that fire in the belly. Even if I'm not getting paid for it, even if I'm booted out of two or three churches, God has put such a call in my life, I must preach the gospel. I want to see the harvest field full of those kinds of laborers who just say, I'm here because God has called me here. And even if I don't get converts, and even if I run into wall after wall and obstacle after obstacle, God has called me to preach and I'm going to do it. And I think back about people like the Puritans as they were getting kicked out of their ministries and then you have the Five Mile Act. They couldn't be within five miles of their old parishes. And yet they're still preachers of the gospel. We need more of that in our day.Matt Wireman00:50:07 - 00:50:20Yeah, that's great. I'd love to ask what you see as a president of a seminary, what you see are some of the challenges to higher education right now, particularly as it relates to seminary education?Brian Arnold00:50:20 - 00:53:22Sure. I think there's multiple, and there are internal threats and there's external threats as well. The internal threats are a lot of what you and I have been talking about today, Matt, and that is back 20 or 30 years ago, if you were gonna go into pastoral ministry, you would not find a position without having a degree. A master of divinity degreewould have been the bare requirement expected of somebody to go in. Well, now, churches don't really seem to care about that or, you know, an undergrad degree will suffice if it's in Bible. But let's be honest, a lot of pastors don't even have that. They were in banking and felt a call on their life. And so that's part of it from where I'm sittingis how many people in churches I see who don't even care about that minimal level of expertise in the field. So that's one of those kinds of threats, I think. Another one, and these go more to external than, is there's a higher ed bubble out there anyway. And everybody kind of sees this out there as the next one that could burst. And if it bursts, that's gonna be catastrophic on undergraduate institutions. Well, I'm downstream of undergraduate institutions. So if there's fewer and fewer people going to undergrad institutions, then there's gonna be fewer people going to graduate school as well. And so I think that could be a place where we begin to take a bit of pressure and a bit of a hit with enrollment that way. I think part of it is gonna be the cultural piece. It's not getting any easier out there. I think Christian institutions in particular that are going to stay faithful on issues of gender and sexuality are going to have a very difficult road ahead of them. And this is where I hope that the Lord gives us the fulfillment of this. And that is, I hope there's always a Phoenix Seminary. If we had to lose our accreditation because of our stances on some of those issues, then so be it. If we lose a lot of donor money because of our stances, then so be it. If it's just us without walls, we're going into a church basement somewhere and teaching theology, I hope there's always something like that. I think about a guy like Dietrich Bonhoeffer with Fingermann. He's, what do you do in the midst of Nazi Germany oppression? You start a seminary, right? It's amazing. The thing that people would think, well, that needs to go. It's like, no, no, no, we need this now more than ever. So all the threats that I see, those being some of the major ones, I still believe that what we are called to do at a seminary is vital for the health and vitality of the church. And as long as the church is here, we're going to need places of theological higher ed to help prepare those people in the word. So I don't worry about the threats too much. I mean, we got to be wise and anticipate some of those things that are coming and get ready. But at the same time, I think our call is always going to be there.Matt Wireman00:53:23 - 00:53:39That's great. I'd love to hear, I got two more questions for you. Just as you explain some of the challenges to higher ed, particularly Christian higher ed and seminaries, what do you see as some of the greater challenges to the church, to the local church now?Brian Arnold00:53:41 - 00:55:19Yeah, a lot of those would be the same kind of ones, right? Is the pressure right now to conform to the world has probably not been greater in American society since our founding, right? I mean, this is a very new shift in Western civilization. And so I can't imagine being a 12-year-old right now about ready to go to junior high and high school, facing the kind of pressures that these kids are facing from a worldview standpoint. And I think churches have not been well equipped to speak into those. And so they're getting a lot of it from culture, not from the church. Well, pretty soon the churches are going to be far emptier than they are now because of just attrition to the culture. So I think that's a real serious, not existential threat because Jesus has promised that the church will not be overcome by the gates of hell. And I believe that promise and I'm not worried about the church from that aspect, but I do think the harder times are coming for the church. But a lot of that to me goes back and maybe I sound like a one-trick pony on this, but I think the deeper that a pastor is able to go and root people in, then it doesn't matter how hard the winds blow, those people will stay rooted. My fear is that we are seeing in the church these trends coming. And so instead of raising the bar, we keep lowering the bar and wondering why people don't hit it and wondering why peopleare leaving, but we're not giving them a beautiful counter narrative to it at all.Matt Wireman00:55:19 - 00:55:22Lowering the bar in what sense?Brian Arnold00:55:21 - 00:55:55Well, even kind of what we're talking about, right? Why is it that the saints of God know so little about the Bible? Why do they know so little about theology? Why is it when Ligonier comes out with these surveys that they do, they had one question in there, it was a couple of years ago now, maybe just a year or two, it was something about Jesus's humanity was Jesus, like, you know, basically was denying the divinity of Christ,almost like an Aryan kind of response. And I don't know if it was the way the question was worded or something, but it was like 75% of people who took it look like they were Aryans. That should never be.Matt Wireman00:55:55 - 00:56:21And if you don't know what an Aryan is, that's A-R-I-A-N, go look it up. That's one way to look it up. If you don't know what something is, there are tons of resources to be able to just look it up. So if you're hearing this and you're like, Aryan? No, we're not talking about a nation or anything like that. We're talking about the Aryanism. So look up Aryanism and you'll find something. Even if it's on Wikipedia, that's better than nothing.Brian Arnold00:56:21 - 00:56:24That's right. That's right. Just don't become one.Matt Wireman00:56:23 - 00:56:25Yeah, exactly, exactly.Brian Arnold00:56:25 - 00:57:34So they're just not ready. And so we have this view in the church that these concepts are so hard, so big, so difficult. We don't want it to feel like school to people. So we would rather give them 10 steps, like you said before, of healthy parenting and marriage. And everybody wants these practical pieces without understanding the substance of the Christian faith, which is the greatest place for the practical piece of Christian ministry. Like the deeper I know God, the better my marriage is gonna be. The better I know the word, the better my parenting's gonna be. I don't need these offshoots. I need people to take me deeper into the things of God through his word so that I'm prepared to handle anything that comes at us. But instead, we keep moving that lower. And I'm always amazed when you have like an astrophysicist in your church who's like, oh, I just don't really understand the Bible. Look, one of the things that we believe is in the perspicuity of scriptures. Now that's like one of the worst named doctrines ever. It just means the Bible is clear and it should be able to be understood by anyone who calls himself a Christian. So I think oftentimes it's not for intellectual ability,it's lack of trying.Matt Wireman00:57:37 - 00:58:09This has been awesome. I'd love to have our time closed by just a final exhortation that you might give to those who are listening as it relates to knowing the Bible. I think you already have done that and I'm thankful for that, but I'd love to hear, like if you were to sit down with someone who's listening to this podcast and you were to exhort them towards greater love for Jesus, a greater love for the Bible, what would you say to them over a cup of coffee?Brian Arnold00:58:09 - 00:59:55Yeah, I think I would reiterate what I have just the last thing I said is, if you really want to grow as a disciple of Christ, it's by knowing Him. It's by loving His word. And so don't think that I need something else outside, you know, the 10 lessons on this or that to actually grow in the walk with the Lord. Get deeper into those things. When I was in college, my life changed when I got deeper into theology. When I got deeper into theology, my walk got deeper. When suffering came in my life, it was the deep rootedness of my knowledge of who God is that got me through, not little trinkets on the side. And so as a theological educator and as one who is pastored, be a person who seeks those deeper things of God. Be a person who, if you're a pastor listening, take your people deeper. If you're somebody who's at a church that they just simply are not going to do that, find a new church. Life is short. You've got to be at a place that is going to take these things to the utmost seriousness. And I think by doing that, Christianity itself will be able to present that beautiful counter narrative to what's happening out there. As the saints of God, know Him better, cherish His word, and recognize that true human flourishing comes through loving God with all heart, mind, soul, and strength, and loving neighbor as yourself.Matt Wireman00:59:56 - 01:00:10Amen. Great. Thank you so much, Brian. This has been really refreshing and encouraging to be able to have this time with you. I'd love to ask you if you could just end our time by praying and thanking God for our time together and, and yeah, and then we'll close.Brian Arnold 01:00:10 - 01:01:11I'd be happy to. Matt, thanks for having me. This is great. You bet. God, I do thank you for moments like this when we get to take an hour or so and just dwell on you and think about you. And I thank you for Matt and this podcast that he's doing to help try to equip these saints out there for anybody who's listening to know you and your word better.And Lord, I do pray that there will be an awakening in your church. An awakening begins with people who are so full of the Spirit because they're so full of the Word of God. And I pray for pastors in this labor field who will really get the tools that they need and recognize that those are not some additional thing. But these are actually the tools of our trade to get people into this place where they can really love you, heart, mind, soul, body, strength, and begin to love their neighbor. And that people in this culture that is decaying will see that the gospel is full of life and full of fruit. Praise in Christ's name. Amen. Amen.Matt Wireman01:01:11 - 01:01:13Amen. Thank you, brother.Brian Arnold01:01:13 - 01:01:14Thanks again. I appreciate it.

In this episode, Matthew Wireman interviews Dr. Duane Garrett, a former professor of his and current professor at Southern Seminary in Old Testament, Hebrew, Old Testament exegesis, and hermeneutics. Dr. Garrett shares his story of his journey to faith and how he became an Old Testament professor. He addresses the misconception of the God of the Old Testament being wrathful while the God of the New Testament being gracious. He emphasizes that wrath is seen in the New Testament as well, and that both testaments must be kept in balance.The conversation then delves into the complexities of Old Testament scripture in relation to modern Christian beliefs. Dr. Garrett points out that it is often easier to slide into heterodoxy when it comes to Old Testament studies due to a lack of hard limits when compared to New Testament studies. He then discusses the "Frankenstein Hypothesis", which discusses the documentary hypothesis and its problems. Dr. Garrett also explains that the Proverbs are general truths, and that although they are generally true, there may be exceptions to them.The conversation then shifts to the two focuses in the Old Testament: the election of Israel and the way God has structured the world. Dr. Garrett explains that the election of Israel is focused on God's covenant with them and their mission to reconcile the world to God, while the wisdom literature focuses on living a good life in this world by following the rules of God that are built into creation.Regarding the law, Dr. Garrett explains that the law was given to Israel as a pedagogue in order to keep them in line as much as possible until the coming of the Messiah. He further explains that the law is still canonical for New Testament believers and still teaches them, although there is a cultural gap between ancient Israel and modern Western countries.The episode ends with a reminder to share and keep growing and going. This is a fascinating conversation for anyone interested in theology and the practicality of Old Testament scripture in modern Christian beliefs.

In today's episode of Off the Wire I interview Dr. Tom Schreiner. Listen to hear what he has to say about the book of Romans.

Today I interview pastor and author Mike Breen. We discuss the important aspects of helping those in the church become adept disciples and maintain a life that is something others can look at and aim for.

In today's episode of Off the Wire I interview Dr. Nicholas Wolterstorff. Together we discuss the Christian life and the challenges that we will face and how to handle different scenarios and concepts.

Today I interview artist and speaker Makoto Fuijmura. Our discussion focuses primarily on his book Culture Care and the valuable lessons and questions that can arise from the content.

In this episode of Off the Wire I interview the president of Blackaby Ministries International in Atlanta, Georgia, Dr. Richard Blackaby. Together we discuss the topic of spiritual leadership and what is necessary for successful leadership. Dr. Blackaby gives great advice on how to resist pride, focus on God, and be successful in one's leadership progress.

In this episode I interview Dr. Kirk Wellum, the principal of Toronto Baptist seminary and Bible College in Toronto, Canada. We discuss the challenges of ministry and how that affects the time before seminary, after seminary, and during one's ministry. We also dive into the difficulties of today that are presented to use through the media, technology and entertainment and how Christians can handle the worldly ideas and concepts that are constantly being thrown at us.

Dr. Luke Stamps is a much-beloved professor of theology at Anderson University in Anderson, South Carolina. In this episode we talk about the fact that salvation is intended to save the whole person--body and soul. Too often people of faith can draw a distinction between the physical and spiritual. We talk about the need to have a full-orbed view of both the person (individually) and the church (corporately). In a culture and time where much of the Christian life is marked by experience, the church is intended to shape. The Church seeks to form people into men and women into people who look and sound and act like Jesus...and not merely show up on a Sunday morning experience.

Dr. Haykin is a first-rate historian that has dedicated his life to making the practice and teaching of the early church practical. Michael was a full-fledged follower of Marxism and was dramatically converted through the faithful witness of believers. We cover topics of the early church, the rich history of Baptists, the call for parents to disciple their children.

Dr. Stephen Wellum, Professor of Christian Theology at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary and Editor of The Southern Baptist Theological Journal, discusses how he came to faith, how theology changed his life, how to do apologetics, and his hopes for the future of theological education.

In this first episode, Matt lays out the groundwork for Off the Wire. We all have a theology. We all have thoughts about God--even as basic as to whether he exists or not. Whether he's a he or something else. Whether he's involved in the world or let's it spin like a top. The question is how do we formulate our thoughts about God. It is vitally important for us to have a clear method for how we think about God. In this episode, Matt helps draw out specific ways we can form our theology so that our lives are affected by our knowledge. We learn that theology must always lead to doxology. Our thoughts affect our actions. Love of God always leads to love of others.

matthewwireman.com

matthewwireman.comWhy did Matt start his podcast now after three years of thinking it over? (0:40)What is Matt hoping people will get out of his podcast? (2:16)The issue of having good theological podcasts as well as good practical podcasts, but not intentional ones that bring the two together. (4:50)How would someone get in contact with Matt  for any kind of question? (6:22)What is one of the major goals as believers? (8:03)What does James chapter 2 tell Christians about knowledge? (10:38)What does James 2:14 tell us? The illustration of planting a seed and seeing growth or lack of. (13:40)What does scripture tell us about the man who built his house upon the rock? (15:09)The Great Commission laid out for us in Matthew 28. (17:18)How do teaching and obedience go together to outline what it means to be a Christian? (18:53)Ending comments (19:05)