Thinking Christian about the new world we are in With Dr. James Spencer

Oh, yeah.

You know what time it is?

That wasn't low enough.

Oh, yeah. It's a good try.

Every time. Every time. This is so exciting. Welcome, everybody, to a new episode of MU Talks. We. I'm right here in the studio of Mollemere University with Rev. Dr. Rob Robert J. Hildebrand and with Dr. James Spencer. Today, we have a new guest for you, Dr. James Spencer. I'm going to introduce. We're breaking tradition a little bit. I'm going to introduce James a little bit because. Not a little bit. I'm actually introducing proper.

Yeah, that's right.

Because James is a close friend now, Rob, I've brought James on our MU Talks. You get to, you get to know James a little bit today. And in.

Congratulations. Yes.

In getting excited, in getting to know James, you actually get to know somebody that has been highly influential in my life. Life in a lot of areas, especially in leadership. We, we worked together for a few years and I got a chance to see his leadership in action. And I think the, the largest area of influence in my life was in the area of, of thinking in the way that he formed some of the thoughts that I've had and have evolved in various ways. So that's why I'm excited to expose you to. And our. Our very large.

To.

To James. So James graduated with the BSN in.

Yeah. Yep. Yes.

In what?

In. In kinesiology.

Kinesiology, yeah.

Exercise physiology.

So let me, let me show you the credentials here to see his life journey. If nothing else, nothing else talks about James and who he is than his, his educational journey.

Right.

So he, he's a personal trainer.

Right.

Did a degree in that to make sure that he, he gets that. And then he did a Master of Divinity from seminary and then an MA in Biblical Exegesis from Wheaton and then a PhD in Theological Study in Old Testament.

Yeah.

So he's Old Testament scholar. We should have.

We should.

We're going to connect him with the God's hammer.

Yeah, that's right.

Also known as Becky Zosberger. Our, our. We love you, Becky. We love you. But now he is the Chief operating officer at Moody Center.

Yeah.

Right. So his research and James researches and writes in the area of biblical and theological studies. And he recently, fairly recently, published a book called Thinking Christian, which is also what we're gonna unpack somewhat today and we're gonna land on. So Thinking Christian, I want to definitely challenge every single one of you. Go to Amazon.com here I am giving a shout out to Amazon.com and definitely consider buying and purchasing, even if an electronic format. Thinking question essays on testimony, accountability and the Christian mind. Ah, we're excited to talk a little bit about that. So, James, welcome to MU talks today.

Thanks, Alain. Good to be here.

Please let us know what, what is Moody Center? What do you do there? Tell us a little bit about that.

Yeah, so, you know, I grew up, like you mentioned, sort of as an academic and an academic dean, really. I was vice president over distance learning. Spent a lot of time in online education and then moved a little bit into residential. But I mean, the bulk of my career has been in online education. And so Moody center is very different than that. Moody center is not an academic organization. We're actually an independent nonprofit organization in Northfield, Massachusetts, and we are dedicated to restoring and sort of reviving the legacy of D.L. moody. D.L. moody is actually from Northfield, Massachusetts, Little small town in Western Mass. Beautiful place.

I visited.

Have you really?

Yeah, I love that area.

It's an amazing property. And so what we're. What we're seeing at Moody center is about 15 to 20,000 visitors a year coming through Moody center and just sort of walking the property, using it for retreats, hosting their events there. There's a functional 2300 seat auditorium where D.L. moody used to. It used to be standing room only. They'd open the doors, there'd be 3,000 people hanging out listening to DL Preach or whoever he brought in to preach. It's a really fascinating place, but we still get that level of volume coming through our property. And so we are slowly working our way toward restoring that property and making it into sort of a destination spot. We're putting in some boutique hotels, we're going to do some other lodging solutions, but we really want it to be a place where pastors can come and just retreat. And that's been the interesting part for me with Moody center and the ministry we're doing there is when you come out of online education or really any academic organization, you'd think you'd have just tons of times to think, right? And maybe I've never served as a full time faculty member, so maybe as a full time faculty member, you have more time to think, right? But in academic administration, it's a little more fast paced. Like you don't always have time just to stop and think and stop and think and stop and think. And so for me to be at Moody center and thinking through the urgency that's needed to take care of pastors by providing a space and designing a space where they can really come and pray and just have seclusion and quiet and in space from their everyday sort of hustle and bustle around. Ministry has been really quite fascinating, I feel. The other side of it is we're building the DL Moody digital archives, and so a lot of his letters and papers and different things that haven't really been previously published or available online, we're putting those online. And so it's been spiritually refreshing to get to know DL Moody a little bit through those archives. I mean, again, as sort of a career academic and you read heady stuff, and it, you know, it can get really sort of like, you know, nerdy. D.L. moody has a way of. Of making things as simple as they should be.

Yeah.

And. And conveying the gospel and what it means to live the Christian life in a way that is compelling and, I think, heartfelt and earnest. And it's just been a real joy to be able to study him a little bit more.

Clear thinkers have a way of doing that.

Yeah.

What city are you close to? A city. This is east coast we're talking about, right?

Yeah. I mean, we're probably two hours from Boston. Okay. Depending on traffic. Right. You always have to throw that in there. And then Springfield, Connecticut. That's usually. I. Well, no, Hartfield, Hartford, Connecticut. I'm sorry. We're probably about an hour from Hartford, so I usually fly into Hartford and then drive up to. Through Springfield, Massachusetts, up to Northfield. So, yeah, we're accessible. And so if you wanted to come to Northfield, we'd encourage you to visit. It is a really fantastic place, and we're starting to get a lot more traction around people coming and doing the prayer walk and just enjoying the campus and the environment. So. Yeah, that's Moody Center.

So is it that. Is it that place where you found some time to start thinking Christianly?

It was. I mean, I think that leaving academic administration for me was. It was the right time for me to do it. I'd done it for 11 years and was really pleased with the work that I'd done there. I mean, working with guys like Ali is always awesome, and so that's why.

I brought him on the show.

Yeah, I really. That's right. Just. Just for that one compliment. That's the only reason.

That's it. That is it.

But no, I mean, we did some great work, you know, and it was. It was a lot of fun. But I think at some point, I started feeling like, man, I'm just. I'm giving myself away to this job, and there are other things that I'D really like to think about and I'd like to do and that I'd like to, you know, sort of have space for. And so moving over to Moody Center, I intentionally carved out the space to start writing again and really start thinking. So I started a blog. NextGenChristians.com is the blog. And it's just sort of a place where I reflect theologically on various things that hit me. I wrote one yesterday on God and gorillas. And it's based on inattentive blindness. This article on inattentive blindness. These guys put together a video and they're supposed to count how many times basketball players pass a ball. And in the middle of the video, there's a guy in a gorilla suit who walks out, beats his chest, and then walks off the other side of the screen. That's great. 50% of the participants are so focused on counting how many times the passes go that they miss the gorilla. And so I wrote a little blog kind of on that. But yeah, moving over to Moody center allowed me that time and allowed me that space. It's just, it's a different paced ministry that we're working through. And my, my leadership team and the president, Emma Mitchell, has been really encouraging me and giving me the space to do some of this kind of writing and thinking. And so, yeah, it's, it's been. That's a year's worth of work right there.

And you wanted to ask about the beat of thinking.

Thinking Christian. Tell me a little bit about the book.

What's it about? What is it? So I think the fundamental question that I always had was in what ways or how are we making God look more like us than allowing him to transform us to look more like Him? And so I started writing the book with that question really in mind. That's the deepest question I'm trying to answer. And the way I'm looking at it is really through the lens of different dynamics that we've got in the Christian community, the rise of the digital age and social media. How do we handle accountability with really prominent, you know, big international or national names? What does accountability look like for them? And really the book, I started it after I taught a class for a group called Ride on Mission called Developing a Christian Mind. And we read Henry Blmeyers. You guys familiar with Henry Blmeyers? He was kind of a student of CS Lewis and he wrote a book back in the 60s called the Christian Mind. And so that's what we used for the class. And the challenge was that he was English So a lot of the, you know, challenges he's talking about are, like, 1960s England sort of challenges. And even I'm going. I don't, I don't know what you're. I don't really fully understand what's going on here. And so I wanted to try to update that book a little bit for, you know, what we're dealing with as the church right now in the U.S. cool. Yeah.

I actually browsed through the book. I just received a.

A copy. Yeah, just brought you a copy.

A copy. And I'm excited. But it's. It's available online. You talk about terrible simplification.

Yeah.

And I'm going to read a quote that I. I think we're going to talk about this a little bit. So last. Last episode. I don't know if it's last episode. I don't know what the order is going to be, but one of, one of our episodes, we spent some time thinking about next gen millennials, all that. And you say we have brought some bad habits with us into the digital age. Ways of thinking and acting that are more divisive than unifying and more vindictive than redemptive. Redemptive. I. The digital age and its tools, then, are not so much the culprit, but the mechanism by which our collective misthinking regarding a number of matters have become more evident. I do want us to talk about next gen. So I love, I really love your blog. I love what you think about, you know, stuff. But let's talk about thinking in the digital area era. Let's talk about, like, next gen. What, what passions, what, what passions do you have about us rethinking a lot of the ways we're doing these days.

Yeah. So this, this kind of all started for me when I wrote an Old Testament theology with a couple buddies, Brian Babcock and Russ Meek. And one of the, one of the chapters I wrote in there was Old Testament theology in a digital age. And so I was really looking at how is it that Old Testament theology, which is usually written in books that are five inches thick, what does it look like to do it in an era where we're tweeting, we're blogging, we're writing more in short form and those kind of things. And some of the research that I ran across was about how reading in short form and reading in these small snippets, the kind of stuff that we get on Facebook and Twitter and those kind of pieces are actually changing the neurological structures in our brain. They have that potential. They're reinforcing these pathways. And so what I came to was, man, we may run into like in academic campuses, students who just can't physically read long term or long form or faculty. Or faculty. Yeah, or faculty. But, you know, it's not about them not wanting to sustain that attention. It's that they can't actually physically do it. And so how do we deal with that? So one of the things I would say that we really need to think through as part of this digital age is as people of the book, Right. Who have a really thick book to read. And it's not always easy. You dive into some of those pieces of Leviticus or numbers or Job. Those are in depth, difficult sort of passages to read. They take sustained attention and sustained energy to do that. And so what does it look like for us to be a people who are committed to sustaining this level of mental thought within our community? It can all just become blogs and tweeting. And I have nothing against blogs and tweeting. I have a blog. I don't tweet much. I still don't get Twitter. Yeah, I think I'm too old for it maybe or something. Yeah, I just don't get it. But I'm not against the blogs. It's just a question of, you know, it's almost like nutrition, you know, sure, you could probably live on Twinkies. It might not be the most, the healthiest thing you'd ever do. Like, at some point you need real food. And. And so we've got to cultivate this mix, I think, within the digital age of making sure that we're thinking well about the topics we're addressing, but also thinking well about what topics we address. And that's part of what I'll talk about in the book as well. Thinking well about the topics we address really is about not allowing sort of the social media trending, what's trending now, kind of feel to automatically drive the questions that we're asking ourselves. We have to ask new theological questions.

Oh, wow. Okay. So Dr. James Spencer is also a guest with our Faculty Lunch and Learn at Multima. We're having forward to it Faculty Lunch and Learn where we unpack all kinds of things and try to grow together as a community of faculty. So I'm excited about that.

Yeah.

And you, you're going to talk to us a little bit about new pedagogies and more than new pedagogies. Right. How do we engage the next generation in a different way?

Maybe. Yeah, yeah.

Go and unpack that a little Bit.

I will. A little bit. So there's a lot of information about, you know, what students prefer. And attending to student preference is never a bad thing. And I think that's the hard part about a lot of these conversations. It's like you have all these not bad things, right, that are happening around you, and it's easy to adopt one and just go, let's do that.

Because it's not bad, right?

Because it's not bad. So let's just do that. But then there's inequality. There are unintended consequences to doing things that aren't bad. Right. And a lot of times when we're doing the things that aren't bad, we tend to not address the unintended consequences. And so part of what I'll talk about a little bit is education is discipleship and helping students be what we need them to be. And by the we, I mean the church as a whole. Multnomah is a Christian college and so committed to forming disciples, even as you train them to be different things. Not just training pastors, but you're training people to go into technology sectors or business sectors or what have you. There's still something that we need from people who are going to populate the church in the next generation. And that collective we of the church needs to, I think, play a part in the way that we train students going into the next generation. It may not be something that is particularly appealing to them, but what I've found is, as I've studied God's word is God is not always concerned about what I want. He's concerned about me doing what he knows I need to do. And I think we have to sort of adopt a little bit more of that approach as we train the next generation. Not in the sense of us just telling you what you have to do, but in the sense of what does it look like for us to be the body of Christ and what sort of people do we need to form that community of character? So that'll be a little bit of what I talk about tomorrow.

Okay. Yeah, I'm excited about that because I think that's a challenge for us. You find yourself stuck between making sure that you. You serve your students well with providing them what. What they communicate that they want. Yeah, but know, moving them from what they want to where you think to be formatively. It's a challenge. It's a. It's a massive challenge. And I have here the youth. Youth department chair, youth ministry and all that. Department chair, right. Which. Which deals with that challenge of how do we really form. How do we create an appetite in this next generation for things that they really need to wrestle with and consider? And also, I'm thinking of having the humility somehow for us to admit that they might have to think again about some things that we're doing now in this generation.

Right.

That we just. We decided to do them because they were not wrong.

Right.

And we focused our attention. But it. That have unintended consequences. Major unintended consequences.

Yeah.

Of where we position our interest when it comes to church.

Right. There's actually a part in the book where I talk about some of the theological questions we might ask. And one of them is how do we pass on the faith to the next generation in a way that will allow them to really own it? In other words, to own it for their context and own it for their generation? How is it that we pass it on in a way that allows them to make their own mistakes?

You have an answer? You want people to buy the book?

Well, I don't actually answer it. I think that's part of the charm of the book, is that asking the questions means, you know, I shouldn't have the answers. This should be a communal discourse that we're having. What does this look like and where does it go and how do we get there? Because I think a lot of times we're just missing, you know, students come into higher ed. And you guys know this probably at this point better than I am. I'm a little out of higher ed at this point. But, you know, when I was leaving higher ed, a lot of the conversation was around career orientation. You know, students are making choices based on what's going to get them a job after college. And to some degree, that makes sense because college is expensive and much more.

Today than any other time that I've.

And much more.

Conversations in admin right now are, can we connect them directly?

Can we connect them directly?

Curriculum in.

Yeah, right. And I don't think there's anything necessarily wrong with that. There should be a utility about, you know, college and the way that we do it. But at the same time, you know, we can't miss out on these possibilities that God provides, because as Kingdom people, we can live at a deficit. We can do things that like, you know, you can do that art degree, you can do that theology degree, you can do that Bible degree and not be necessarily afraid as God is sort of leading you into that, of where it's going to end up. And I think, you know, the story that I usually tell about this and what I think students and, and just all of us as Christians really need to grasp. I grew up in a really small town in central Illinois. It's like, you know, 5,500 people. So it's. When my family lived down there, my son was in like maybe kindergarten, first grade, somewhere in there. He was a little guy and he'd have a tendency to, you know, run a block ahead of us and just kind of hang out and he'd do his thing and then wait for us to catch up and then he'd run another block ahead. And on the streets of Carlinville, you're not really running into a lot of crowds. We moved up downtown Chicago when he was right around first grade. And so I remember the day we're going down Michigan Avenue and it's crowded and there's like tons of people. And so, you know, my son Judith, a regular day, right? Regular day. So Judah's trying to run up ahead, right? He's doing his thing like he would do in Carlinville. The problem is, you know, there's people like texting and walking. There's, you know, they're not really looking for a little short one, you know, first grader, like. So he's getting jostled around, he's hugging the wall to make sure he didn't get run over and trampled, whatever. And so I called him back to me. And at the time I was, I'm 6 foot, I was about 250. I've lost some weight since then. And, and I do have a, like a three quarter sleeve tattoo on my arm. So I'm not bullying my way down the street, but I'm noticeable. That's right, right. Like people, yeah, it's like just shove my way down, but people don't miss me. And so when he's walking next to me, he walks as if he's 6 foot, 250, right. And I've always thought of that as the picture of what it means for us to walk with God there. You know, when I'm not walking with God, I have to dodge people. I have to hug the wall. I had to, you know, I have to do things that I don't really need to do if I just walk by God. And I think that's part of the message that we need to give to the next generation, is that like, just walk with him. Do the basics, like hang in there, really think deeply about what it means to walk with God. And some things will become a lot clearer, you know, and so I don't know, just as we think through what it looks like to train that next generation, I think that's an important picture to give them, is that God offers you possibilities that you don't think are possibilities at the moment. He's not limited.

I like it. And by the way, if you're listening to this podcast without headphones, you really should be listening with headphones because we got some good voices going on today. Okay, I want to give you two questions. Answer the one you like.

Okay.

Don't answer the one you don't like.

All right, I like it. Okay.

The first question is education related. We got two. We got two online guys that have done some work with online, and some of the old crowd, even younger old crowd, sometimes can be a little bit haters. Haterish with the online. You know, we haven't gotten with it. And so question one would be, what's the beautiful thing about online? You know, make it give me apologetic for it. Why should people consider it? Second question is, as a blog writer and kind of a thinker and a person who's had some time to reflect, what do you see when you're looking at the country century? Like, what. What do Christians need to know? It's kind of a deeper question, but they're both. They're both questions. You take one of them or both?

Yeah. Can I do both?

But you've exposed yourself to this level of inquiry when you wrote a book called Thinking Christians.

No, I understand.

You need to take those questions.

Yeah, right.

I'll make a little comment on the voice.

Yeah, sure.

I've had this since seventh grade, so if you can imagine a little kid with this, My son has pretty much the same voice. It's kind of hilarious. Yeah. But, yeah, seventh grade, I had this. It's just been there forever. Yeah. So it's awesome. Yeah, it's a. It's a face for radio and a voice for radio.

I'm going to talk up here just to keep it. I say it.

I got to talk up here just.

To keep it interesting.

No, the contrast helps. Yeah. Because I guess I could take it a little lower. You got to tell where everybody is. Yeah.

Back to the questions.

Sorry.

This is really funny.

This is me avoiding the question.

Yes.

Yeah, that's one way. Online. So, yeah, I mean, I really cut my teeth on online. Started in 07, hadn't ever taken an online course, got thrown into distance learning, and had no clue what I was doing.

So let's give context. 07 is when you have to whisper that you teach online. Like you couldn't say it publicly. You're like, yeah, I teach at this university.

Oh, what do you do? I know, I work in.

I'm an adjunct.

I work in a university.

Yes, I work in a university and I'm an adjunct.

Oh, really? What department? Just one of them. Yeah. So, yeah, it was, it was, it was one of those moments in time where online was really having to prove itself. And even now, more than today, I'd say, yes, I think now it's a much more acceptable thing. But I will say one of the things that I'm not sure online has ever really realized, but I think part of its potential is that it allows people to learn, to acquire knowledge as they're embedded within their local community of faith. And I think that's important because if you can combine knowledge with discipleship, knowledge in the local church, knowledge and participation in a real community, I think that's important. And I think that's one of the powerful things about online that, like I said, I'm not sure it's been realized yet, but I see that as probably its greatest potential is that instead of having to move away from your family or your friends or what have you, which also has its benefits, you're getting new experiences and interacting with new people and getting different things from the residential college experience. But I don't think those are sort of the sin qua non of education. And so if online has a benefit to it, which I think it does, it is that you can stay embedded within that local context and allow the local church to form you, even as you're learning all these different things. And I would just say, like I said, I didn't do online education, but I will say that as I went through my theological coursework, one of the things I had to learn sort of on my own, be kind of coached through, was what it looked like for someone with upper level theological degrees to sit underneath the authority of a local congregation. It wasn't that I was rebellious necessarily, but what did that look like?

I get that.

And so I think it would have been sort of highly beneficial for me to been able to have sort of that church home where I'm being discipled as I'm gaining this knowledge. And there were a lot of reasons I didn't have that. A lot of them were my own personal demons that I was dealing with. But at the end of the day, I think that's the. That could be a real strength of online. Aline, what do you think?

I mean, I echo that and don't be Fooled. James mentioned that he didn't necessarily like teach online, but he led the whole online school which had to deal with all that. And I've seen his leadership and he was innovative. One, one thing that I really liked about his leadership and again, I, I had a chance to, to see him for five years in action. And so that for me speaks volumes. But one thing that I loved about it, and it connects directly to what I think about online, is that he was really innovative and pushed the agenda a lot on a lot of issues. Actually I think the most that I've ever seen anybody in that position ever. But that's exactly what I think about online. Online had to prove itself for a long time, and which means that they had to push and ask new questions that traditionally have not been asked in traditional education in the past few years. Now they're starting to. But I, I did some, I did some presentations to some campus professors one time in Spokane. And after we were done with what, how we teach online, the professor, I remember the. He said, I've never considered that I can adopt this in my own language in my class, in my actual class. Right, Class. So I think they've been. There's been innovation in pedagogy and andragogy that has happened online that right now campuses benefit and traditional education benefits from the way we, we do flipped education from the way we engage the learner. And we had to ask those difficult questions because, you know, you have to prove yourself.

Right.

The one statement that I heard that it made a lot of sense for me is that the only reason online education was not seen as a viable and a good way of learning for a long time is because the people that did it and they did a brilliant job with it, didn't publish and didn't do actual academic work to show research and to show the facts. So now you have this practice that is happening, that is making a difference. So I've been teaching life for nine years. Nine years. I have a folder in my Evernote shout out to Evernote where I keep all the positive. So I have more than 70 students, 70 students that have. They wrote to me with significant, meaningful life changes and growth. And I kept those, I saved those. And I often go through that because there's 70. 70 people and just those. The ones that wrote, not the ones that maybe didn't realize right then this was transformative. This was actually. I've never considered that this online class a world away will be so transformative.

Right. Yeah.

So that's that those are some of the things that I can. I contribute to that.

Yeah. And I think it's interesting to think, you know, one of the knocks on online education was, you know, the. The faculty didn't have the face to face time. And that face to face time is obviously valuable. I mean, I don't think I'm here today without Walt McCord, who was a professor at Moody Bible when I went through my Master of Divinity. I mean, he really pulled me aside my second year and basically said, you need help. Just really took me under his wing and said, you have potential, but you need help.

And like, not professional. Like, he just.

Well, maybe professional. Yeah, I don't. He didn't go that route, but I think maybe professional.

Yeah, but I mean, he poured himself into.

Yeah, he really did. And I mean, I needed that face to face. I needed somebody to do it.

Yep.

I think some of the fallacy that we get into is that if I hadn't gotten it there, I wouldn't have gotten it anywhere. And to me, that's a limitation that we're putting on, sort of the way God can work within our communities. And, you know, with online, I think that there is a power in the way that we communicate online. There's an intentionality, I think something I've learned when I've looking through D.L. moody's archives. There's an intentionality about writing a letter.

Yeah, right.

That doesn't. You know, communicating in that fashion is not lackadaisical. It's not. We sort of see it as more easy because of email and that kind of stuff, but communicating in print and taking the time to actually do something that's well thought out and conveys your emotion to another person is not a trivial thing. I just found an old letter that my wife wrote to me, and it wasn't like a love letter or anything. It was just sort of a normal letter. Right. That I'd kept that she wrote to me and I reread it and I'm like, this is fantastic stuff. Like, why don't we do this now? You know, like stupid email. Like, you know, like, we need to take more time for this kind of thing. And so I don't think that that online has been, you know, we've sort of defaulted to some. Some assumptions that maybe we shouldn't have defaulted to, that you can't develop relationships at a distance, that, you know, sort of the pen pal approach to this is. Is not good. Or even now with video conferencing, I mean, you can actually have face to face interactions pretty well. And so it definitely has its limitations, things we'd have to work around. But I think it has a high degree of value.

I wasn't the first guy on the online train. I will admit, I wasn't the first dude. But it was funny. As I was hating one day, in my own mind, I noticed that I had, I think I was blogging, like one of the debates, political debates. Of course, I'm an immigrant, so I can't vote, but I do enjoy, like, I don't know, putting it on. And I think I had something like 2, 270 comments. Like, guys are just. And we were having a really good interchange.

Yeah.

And I thought, this is learning.

Right.

And honestly, some of us are more honest, you know, when we have a time to think about it, when we can put our ideas down, we're not quite so intimidated by looking people in the eyes, you know, some of us, you know.

Right. So I'm with you. I hear you. It's got its benefits. It's got its benefits. Now your second question was around, what do you think about what's going on? Yeah.

The world.

In the world and America. America. I do address this in thinking Christian a little bit. And I address it from this perspective. I think that we have to make sure that we are not just going along with the conversations that are already happening. And so I deal a fair amount with Charles Taylor, and he wrote a book called Modern Social Imaginaries. And it's slightly different than Worldview, but it's these general philosophical concepts that underlie everything that we do on a daily basis. And so one of my favorite examples is what is the different underlying social imaginary to cast lots for your leaders as opposed to choosing them through a human resource process. That's just a fundamental difference in understanding. It's not a value judgment. It's not a, you know, it's not a, you know, one way is better than the other. It's just a fundamental difference. And I think that those are the questions that we need to start asking in sort of American Christianity today. You know, Christianity in the States. Where have we really adopted these ideas that are more American than they are Christian? Again, we're, we're people of our culture. We're situated beings. You know, it's hard to get away from every influence of our culture at the same time. It's fairly easy to ask the questions and to say, even if these things are good, how is it that these good things may be diminishing others within the body of Christ? And what does that look like, how is this keeping the body of Christ from being more coordinated than it is right now? Are we dividing ourselves unnecessarily? Because we've accepted that this, that or the other thing is just extremely important. And so I see that not only in, you know, sort of, I guess the easiest one to point at is political debate. Right. I mean, it's, it's sort of right out there. It's a low hanging fruit. But, but I also see it in the way that we, you know, we, we talk about sort of our fallen leaders, people of prominence who have, who have made mistakes, and all of a sudden we're canceling them. We're canceling them. Yeah. The cancel culture is very, it's a very real way for us to look at it. And I think one of the questions I've been asking myself lately is, you know, are we, you think about how odd it would be to have an Olympic swimmer show up to his race in full football uniform. It's, he's, he's, you know, racing in a swim event in a football uniform. That is the wrong equipment for the job. He's fundamentally sort of made himself less competitive. He's going to fight the wrong battle here. And I think sometimes we aren't, we're showing up for our swim event in full football garb. We're fighting the, you know, the flesh and blood. We're not fighting the realm of the spirit. And so we're picking up flesh and blood type weapons when really what we need to be doing is picking up the weapons of the spirit, putting on the full armor of God. But I don't know that we really think about it like that. And so those are a lot of the questions that I sort of deal with in the book and just trying to unpack how we might be Christian in the midst of the United States, in the midst of the world, in a way that makes us truly distinct and odd, but also not just odd, but odd in the right ways.

And you addressed this in, in your chapter eight. I'm sure you know what chapter eight is with the terrible simplification. Yeah, you addressed that in a very, very new way that I, I really loved. And how do you. I think it was that contrast between the, the Christian voice, the, the old Christian voice or the, and, and the way we actually approach complex issues happening in society. Yeah, I really, really like, if nothing else, if nothing else, you need to read this book. Even if, for that chapter, if nothing else, just buy it, go straight to that chapter and read it. Because I actually think that's what I mean. I love. I resonated immediately with our desire to simplify the debate, to simplify what's happening and choosing where we position ourselves in the debate based on one point or two points.

Right.

When. Yeah, when. I think I might be wrong. But our Christianity compels us to not do that, to think in more complex terms with a very, very complex God. It doesn't let us really come to simple conclusions. Well, I think I support this in our society because of this.

Right, right.

Let's just let it be a little more complex than that.

Yeah, I mean, there's more gray areas than we usually give credit for. And I think Daniel Kahneman's work, you know, thinking fast and slow, he's done a lot on this. And one of the things he talks about, which is just fascinating, is that, you know, our brains are geared toward coherence. We like coherent stories, and we will dismiss evidence that makes our story less coherent. But the other thing he says is it doesn't really matter whether there's an amount or the amount or quality of data that we use to construct our coherent stories. Doesn't really matter. We're not concerned about amount or quality. As long as it's coherent, we're okay. And I think that that's where Jacob Burkhart's concept of terrible simplification comes in. These terrible simplifiers, it's. They're providing a coherent solution for us. And because it's coherent, it feels good, it makes sense. But we aren't always going to have everything make sense for us. Sometimes we just have to sit in the tension and the complexity and trust that God is going to help us work this out. And honestly, not even trust that God is going to work it out. But the way I like to think of it is Christians aren't called to fix the world. We're called to be faithful in a world so broken that only God can fix it. And so sometimes the complexity of the world that we see around us isn't ours to address. We just need to sit in it and be faithful in it and wait on God to do his thing. And so sometimes the terrible simplication, I think, pushes us to act. There's a sense in which we want to act urgently. And there's nothing wrong with action. And it's just that when we start to think that activities like prayer or Bible study or deep theological conversation aren't appropriate expressions of our earnesty or of our urgency, that's when I think we've gone wrong. Ooh. Okay.

I think that's. That's our time today. I hope. I had multiple reasons for having James, not just that he's here with us in Portland this week. Huge shout out out to Kim, James's wife, for allowing him to travel and be with us in this interesting time. But one of the main reasons was because I really think we cannot exhaust discussions on how do we think in a new way, how do we really have new conversations to engage this new generation? And I'm thankful for. I'm thankful for you being here. Any concluding thoughts?

No, it's good stuff. Thanks for being here.

Appreciate it.

Well, that does it for us. I'm gonna play. You want to start the disclaimer? You can do the disclaimer here. Hold on, hold on.

I'm waiting for it.

Thank you, James, for being with me.

The views expressed on MU talks here in the beautiful studios of Multnomah University in no way represent the formal belief system values. Milton Shawang of Multnomah University.

This is the most entertaining part of. But very important because, no, we're not. It doesn't represent. So thank you for being with us, everybody. Have a good one. See you next time.