Pastor Joel Webbin and Dr. Joe Rigney dismantle the fear that fantasy media defiles Christians, citing C.S. Lewis's Narnia as a tool to shape hearts toward Christ while rejecting Freudian "Bulverism." They distinguish faithful magic aligning with God's dominion from unfaithful attempts to bend reality, clarifying that cessationists like Doug Wilson affirm living in "God's magical world" without demanding on-demand miracles. The discussion critiques surrendering arts to paganism, noting AI reflects human bias rather than neutrality, and concludes that while Christ bound the strong man, believers must remain vigilant against post-Christian apostasy releasing demonic forces. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: CohereLabs/cohere-transcribe-03-2026, WAV2VEC2_ASR_BASE_960H, sat-12l-sm, script v26.04.01, and large-v3-turbo
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Living Like a Narnian00:14:58
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For several decades now, Christians and conservatives alike have surrendered the hill of media, entertainment, and the arts.
Christians have gotten rather lousy when it comes to telling good stories.
I think that in our desperate attempt to hedge our bets, to keep from being defiled by the world, we've surrendered things like fantasy.
And magic.
That's one of the things that we're going to talk about in particular in this episode of Theology Applied.
What is a Christian view of magic?
How should Christians feel about certain fantasy novels that contain elements of magic, like the Narnia series or The Lord of the Rings?
Our special guest is Dr. Joe Rigney, and I think you're in for a treat.
This is Theology Applied.
All right, welcome back to another episode of Theology Applied.
I am your host, Pastor Joel Webbin with Right Response Ministries.
And in this episode, I'm privileged to welcome for the first time as a special guest, Joe Rigney.
Joe, would you go ahead and introduce yourselves?
Yeah.
Yeah, there's only one of me.
Yeah, no, I'm the president of Bethlehem College and Seminary here in Minneapolis.
I was born and raised in West Texas.
And moved up here after college in 2005 in order to do a pastoral apprenticeship here at Bethlehem.
And then we thought we were coming for two years, and then we ended up staying around now for 17, my wife and I.
And so we've raised three boys here.
So I got 13, 11, and four.
And I was a professor for 12 of those years, and then I've been the president now for about two and love it.
I'm also a pastor at Cities Church in St. Paul, and I write for Desiring God pretty regularly.
Great.
Did you actually know Tim Kane?
I think he might have done a similar pastoral internship around the same time.
Yeah, I knew Tim back in the day before he came up here, did a residency, and then it's now out in San Diego.
Yep.
And yeah, we've been out there to see them a couple years ago when we first planted our church, kind of went out and did some stuff there.
But yeah, I love Tim and Molly.
Cool.
Yeah, I pastored and planted a church in San Diego for a while and then handed it over, and I knew Tim when I was there.
Yeah, that's great.
All right.
So, what we wanted to discuss is your book, Live Like a Narnian.
Can you give our listeners, if they haven't read the book, just the brief synopsis and your purpose of writing the book, what you were trying to accomplish?
Yeah, that was the first book.
I've written about five or six books now.
That was the first one, and it was the most fun.
The other ones have been work.
That one just kind of I pulled and it came.
So, about 10 years ago, I'd been kind of teaching classes on Narnia.
Kind of here in the church and at Bethlehem, and had just kind of lots of thoughts about the ways that these books had shaped me as a Christian, not just as sort of, you know, I read them as a kid with my mom.
And then I remember picking them up again in college, probably to avoid homework.
It was like, hey, I've got a paper to do.
And that book over there, I'm going to go read some Narnia instead.
But really, kind of beginning like 07, 08, kind of really got back into them more as like legitimate literature.
Not just sort of children's stories, but that there's really profound things happening that Lewis is doing.
And so began to put some of my thoughts together, taught some classes on it, and then put together a book that was basically how does living like a Narnian basically mean living like a faithful Christian?
What do these books do?
What do they get into your bloodstream as a kid?
Because I think that's what Lewis is intending for them to do he's writing stories that children will love and they do, but that also are doing things to them.
That are shaping them, molding them, setting trajectories, habits of their mind, habits of their heart, so that when they grow up and they sort of encounter Christ, if they're raised in a Christian home, they've maybe known Jesus all along, but there's a way in which they've been prepared to know Jesus more deeply.
And then as adults, there's stuff in there that I found that I'm like, this is the most profound thing I think I've ever read on this subject, and it's in a children's book.
And so basically, that book was an effort to, in a couple of short chapters, kind of two or three chapters per chronicle, Just kind of lay out some of those lessons, some of those truths, and the way that those seven books have shaped me as a husband, as a father, as a pastor, now as a professor.
That was the basic goal.
Cool.
One of the major themes that pops out of the Narnian series is a free Narnian, like freedom and not being a Tolorman or like a slave, but being a free Narnian.
One of my questions, I guess, is with that, you know, I always think of the book of James and, you know, the law of liberty and that freedom, you know, G.K. Chesterton, you know, freedom is found within the bounds.
With that idea of free Narnians, do you see that, the Narnian experience, as being freedom that comes from a pluralistic society?
Or do you see it as, no, the freedom comes because there's clearly one king over all of it?
Yeah.
It's the latter.
But it's an interesting way that Lewis does it.
So, Narnia, you know, people wrestle a lot of times with, you know, how Christian should we think about it?
Is it an allegory?
And Lewis says it's not an allegory.
He calls it a supposal.
So it's basically imagine that God became incarnated in that world, just like he became incarnated in this world, but that world has talking animals.
What would that be like?
So just it's kind of, it's that kind of imaginary deal.
But it actually is structured a little more like the Old Testament in some way.
So Narnia functions in its content, in its world.
The kingdom of Narnia is like Israel.
And then there's sort of these friendly nations that are next to it, like Arkinland.
Right.
Which would be sort of like, you know, remember when the king of Tyre helps Solomon build a temple.
And so this is like, they're not Israelites, but they're friendly.
And then there's sort of the great nations around it that are more of the threat.
So you've got Kalorman, which is, you know, Lewis depicts very clearly as a kind of Middle Eastern, Turkish empire type place that worships other gods and is tyrannical.
And there's a despotism built into it.
And then you've kind of got the giants to the north, which are their own sort of.
Different animal.
So the kingdoms are set up that way in a very kind of Old Testament sort of way.
But in terms of Narnia itself, I think it's in Lion of the Witch and the Wardrobe after the four kids become king.
It basically says they made good laws and basically minded their own business.
It kept people from being busybodies.
And so there is a way in which the sort of political picture in Narnia is one driven by we serve Aslan, Aslan governs, and yet there is a real sense of freedom and liberty that is a sharp contrast to Kalorman with its more slavish, servile, everybody's, you know, there's hierarchy in Narnia, but it's more of the dance versus the.
Goose step, where you're at the bottom, and so I can step on you.
You have to bow and scrape, that sort of thing.
And Lewis seems to think that the kind of God you worship shapes the kind of social order you'll have.
And that comes up pretty most clearly, I think, in Voyage of the Dawn Treader, which is a good example where, as they're journeying and they get out to some of those islands and they've got slavery on them.
And there, the slavery is presented as sort of a progressive thing.
Like, hey, this is sort of progress.
This is.
Um, you know, you can't turn back the clock.
The governor Gumpus, um, objects as you can't turn back the clock.
Um, this is progress, man.
And uh, and Caspian's like, uh, yes, we can, and sets everybody free.
And so, there's sort of that like progressive element there.
Uh, within uh, Horsen His Boy, you get the contrast with the Kalormans and uh, and the Narnians when they show up.
One of the things Shasta notes as they're walking through the first time he sees Narnians, he is one, but or he's Arkanlander, but he sees Narnians is that they're walking with like a free swing in their arms, they're they're um.
They're whistling.
They have, you know, the colors of their clothes is very different, and they just seem to have a different quality about them.
And he said they look like they were ready to be friends with anyone who was friendly and didn't give a fig for anyone who wasn't.
And which is basically my philosophy of friendship in a nutshell.
It's like, I want to be friends with anyone who's friendly, and I don't give a fig for anyone who's not.
And so there's that quality that comes from who their lord is, who their king is, that runs all the way through the books.
Yeah.
Yeah.
No, I like what you said in terms of, you know, the God shapes, you know, the God that you worship shapes the way that you live.
Thinking of like, you know, even the last battle with, you know, Tash versus Aslan.
What do you know?
I'd be remiss if I didn't ask you.
What's your take on, you know, where Lewis talks about, I forget the character's name, but the individual, you know, he's been serving me, Aslan, this whole time, but by a different name.
Yeah.
So, Emeth, the faithful Kalorman, I do think Lewis thinks something like this is true.
And that sort of, I don't know if you call it like the noble pagan idea.
I think that he thinks, is there a way?
He kind of is in that stream.
I do think it's important to recognize, though, that it is more like an Old Testament world, more so than a New Testament world, in some kind of weird way.
Like there's no Narnian Great Commission.
Like there's no, you know, go therefore and make disciples of Aslan everywhere you go.
Like they're not, the Narnians are not called to go evangelize the Calormans.
There's not quite the same New Testament thing happening.
And so the, the, The rules are set up a little different.
So, is this more like the Queen of Sheba who eventually finds her way to Solomon's Palace and Emmeth just finds her way?
So, there's a little bit of that.
I think I heard Doug Wilson one time say, This isn't a swing and a miss, but it is a foul ball on Lewis's part.
Okay.
So, it's like, Yeah, okay, that's probably not the way it is, but that's, but Lewis probably did think something along those lines or at least hope for something along those lines.
Right.
Right.
Okay.
Well, so.
One of the things that you talked about was, you know, before we started recording, was in the silver chair, puddle glum and his kind of pessimistic spirit, but the way that he stands up to the witch.
Do you want to flesh that out for us a little bit?
Yes.
This is something I've been working on.
There's a chapter in Live Like a Nardian where I talk about this really important scene.
And I just think as time has gone on, you know, that book's been out for about a decade almost now.
And that scene has become more profound and there's layers and depths to it that.
I don't think I recognized when I wrote it, and I'm trying to work those out.
But the basics of it is there's sort of a modern narrative that Christians buy into that says the world in the old days used to be enchanted.
Middle Ages, Reformation was an enchanted world that believed in both the physical and the spiritual, angels, demons, fairies, dryads, all of that sort of stuff.
And then the Enlightenment came along, modernity came along, and basically disenchanted the world.
And it basically debunked all of the.
All of the spiritual stuff.
And there's a kind of common narrative that Christians do.
And that then for us as modern Christians are always kind of going, how do we re enchant the world?
How do we re enchant it?
So the world was enchanted, then it was disenchanted.
And now our call in the 21st century is to kind of re enchant it.
And that's a pretty common, you know, Max Weber has that as a kind of his disenchantment thesis.
Charles Taylor kind of leans into that with some of his stuff on a secular age.
The interesting thing about Lewis is that he actually doesn't think that.
He thinks not that the world has been disenchanted, but that we've been put under a dark enchantment.
So, as he thinks about modernity, it's not that the world used to be enchanted, now it's not.
It's that the world used to be enchanted sort of in a good way, well, or semi good way.
There's dark spirits there too.
But that now what we experience as sort of the drab dullness of modern life is actually itself a kind of dark spell.
Like we're under the spell of a dark sorceress.
And so, in Silver Chair, he kind of depicts this as they're in Underland, and the Prince, Prince Rillian's been under a spell for, you know, 10 years, and then he gets, they set him free, and then she comes back and she starts trying to put him to sleep.
And, um, And so she's got some magic powder she throws in the fire.
It gives a drowsy smell that kind of gets into your blood.
And the more it gets into you, the less you notice it.
And the more you're kind of coming under the spell.
She's playing a little bit of like soft music, thrum, thrum, thrum thing happening.
And then just starts asking them questions.
And the questions are basically sort of the modern ideologies that we see around us that basically say religion is just a fairy tale for children to help you cope with the fact that life is hard and you'll die.
So, you know, and or that.
God is just a projection of human ideals and desires into the sky.
So in the story, it's, you know, what's a lamp?
She says, What's the sun?
They talk about the sun.
And she says, What's the sun?
What are you talking about?
And they say, Well, have you seen a lamp?
And she's like, Yeah.
It's like, Well, a sun is like a big lamp in the sky that hangs from the sky.
And she's like, Oh, no.
See, you just took a lamp and you imagined a bigger and better lamp.
And then there's the same thing with Aslan, with Aslan the lion, and says, What's a lion?
It's like a cat.
You like cats?
Yeah, of course I love cats.
Well, a lion is like a big cat with a mane.
You know, terrifically strong.
And she's like, Oh, see, here again, you're just taking things from my world, the real world, the sort of physical world that you can see, and you're just projecting it.
Storms and Psychological Needs00:15:21
And this is the sort of thing that guys like Freud and Feuerbach and some of those, you know, late 19th, early 20th century thinkers would say is all of us when we're kids have fathers who take care of us and they provide for us and they protect us and they love us.
And then as we get older, we sort of realize dad's not strong enough to do that, but I still have this sort of psychological need to be cared for and somebody to be looking out for me.
Things are going to be okay.
And so religion is basically a projection of that desire, fear, wish into the sky.
And so now we have God our Father.
That's sort of like the debunking of religion.
And so the witch is just running this play on them with sort of the music in the background and the something in the air that makes that make sense.
And it's playing on a reality that's basically true, right?
That there is a connection between divine fatherhood and human fatherhood.
It's just got the projection the wrong way, right?
She says we're projecting human fatherhood into the sky, whereas the scriptures teach us that God is projecting his fatherhood down through your dad, right?
Your dad is meant to be a mini representation of God.
That's why.
You know, right here at Bethlehem, when we talk about child rearing, we talk about be the smile of God to your children.
Like, that's the heart of fatherhood be the smile of God to your children as a sort of projection of divine fatherhood into your family.
So, there is a real connection that's just got it backwards.
And so, that's sort of this modern enchantment.
And Lewis presents it as the children and puddle glum and the prince all basically start to fall under the spell and they go to sleep.
And there's a relief as they go to sleep, as they kind of give in.
It feels like, oh, this feels good to kind of give up to.
To the truth of things or quote unquote reality, the real world.
And she gets them to sort of repeat the catechism.
She says things like, There is no sun.
And then they echo back, There is no sun.
There never was any sun.
There never was any sun.
And so there's this way of like the repetition of it sort of reinforces the enchantment.
And this is very similar to the way that you go to a museum, you watch anything on TV, and just sort of the godlessness is sort of assumed, and you're supposed to repeat back.
The narrative.
You repeat back every science documentary, right?
65 million years ago, right?
You're going to have all, they're going to recite the story, they're going to recite the catechism, and they're going to expect you to recite it back.
And that becomes a kind of mythology.
This is how Lewis actually talks about it in some of his essays it's like a mythology.
Evolution is a modern myth.
He has an essay called The Funeral of a Great Myth, in which he says the real appeal of evolution is not to your reason, but it's to your imagination.
It's a mythological, it's the underdog story, classic underdog story of, you know, This black void cosmos, and then life kind of pops up.
And like the little, he's the infant hero who's going to struggle against all odds and overcome.
It's like Rocky, but like life.
And then he does it again when like now you have humanity with like these giants and, you know, dragons and monsters.
And like this little bitty biped is going to be the one that rules everything.
And it's appealing to all of the pathos and that grandeur of a myth.
And that's actually what captures our imaginations and becomes the background furniture or the mood music.
In the story that sort of shapes us, and that even Christians can kind of fall prey to.
We can start to fall asleep.
So there's this really great, it'd be an exaggeration to say this, but not much of one.
It's probably the most profound analysis of modernity that I've ever read.
And it's like 10 pages in a children's book written in the 1940s.
It's just this amazing thing.
And then the glory of it is then how Puddle Glum, as everybody's finally giving in, they're succumbing to the enchantment, Puddle Glum breaks it.
By sticking his foot in the fire and having this glorious act of defiance.
So it's a beautiful picture, I think, of what the struggle of faith is in the modern world and how we can fight together.
That's great.
As you were talking about Sigmund Freud, it made me think of, I think it was R.C. Sproul who once was commentating on that and saying that one of Freud's more popular arguments to kind of dissuade people from the notion of God was to say that God was invented in the imaginations of men.
Because, like, what you were saying about fathers, right?
So it's like, I have an earthly father, he's my hero.
I start to get older.
I see his flaws, his deficiencies, his inability to care for me when I'm a 30 year old grown man.
But I still have this innate need for protection and provision, a father figure.
And so I'm projecting from fathers on the ground to this divine father in the sky rather than the opposite, which is actually the truth that there is the father of lights from whom every good and perfect gift comes.
And our human fathers are actually meant to be a reflection of the one true father of all.
And so, all that being said, Freud is making that argument, and he says that the reason why people invented God or the notion of God is because as they're getting older and those kinds of things, they recognize, and it is kind of that fatherly, in the protective sphere, they realize that there are certain threats that cannot be appealed to.
So, if there's a mugger or a robber or a murderer who finds you in a back alley, he's an evil man, a malicious man, but he's a man.
There's personhood there.
And so there's something that you could actually appeal to.
You could plead for your life.
You could beg.
You could try to barter or trade, or I'll give you all of my money if you spare my life.
But how do you barter with a storm?
You know, how do you appeal to the better nature of cancer?
You know, and like you don't.
And so then what people did was they tried to take these impersonal threats that are inescapable, like a storm, like famine, like a drought, like cancer, like sickness, like disease.
And as humanity was facing, whether it be a plague or whatever it might be, these natural disasters, they needed to find a way to personify them so that there would be something, someone, namely to appeal to.
And so the notion of God was invented out of the imaginations of men so that they would at least have some sense, some silver lining, some sense of hope in the midst of desperate situations.
So there's a famine and even the pagan notion.
It's still a deity, it's not the true God, the triune God, but.
This sense of, well, if we make enough sacrifices, then the famine will go away.
That propitiation kind of idea that there's a God, this storm is, there's a person in the storm or behind the storm.
And so the storm is this inanimate object that can't be appealed to, but there's a person behind it, and the gods are angry, or this God is angry, and we need a propitiation, an atonement, a payment.
To satiate his wrath.
We've done something wrong.
And if we can satiate his wrath, that at least gives you this sense of hope, other than the alternative being that there's just a vicious hurricane and there's absolutely nothing you can do about it except for a hunker down and just wish upon a star.
Just hope for good luck.
And so that was Sigmund Freud's idea.
But Sproul, I like what he said.
He said, if that were the case, that would explain the invention of many gods, but it would not explain the invention of.
The Christian God.
And he uses the example of the disciples on the boat with Jesus in the midst of a storm.
And Jesus, he speaks, he has authority over wind and waves.
But the problem with Sigmund Freud's theory is that the disciples, it says there was a great storm and they were afraid.
But then after the storm is calmed by Jesus, it says they were exceedingly afraid.
So now they're actually more afraid because what they're afraid of is no longer the storm, but this God who has power, who's more powerful than the storm.
The Christian God is terrible, are his judgments, right?
He is a God to be feared.
He is a fearsome God.
It's a terrible thing to fall into the hands of the living God.
And so the triune God, the Christian God, would not be a logical answer to the fear of inanimate tragedies and calamities like a storm.
You would want to come up with a nice God, sugar and spice and everything nice.
But the triune God of the Bible is not that God.
He's actually more fearsome.
And so, anyway, Sprowl was arguing and saying that Freud's theory doesn't account for the triune God.
The only thing that accounts for that is.
The fact that he's real.
Yeah, it's true.
Yeah.
Lewis has some great essays where he tackles this.
One thing he notes, and this is actually a precursor to some of the conversations we have about whether it's postmodernism or critical race theory or some of that sort of stuff.
Lewis is dealing with the subjectivism that kind of runs through all of that.
And so when dealing with the Freudians, or he actually uses Marxists as an example, who basically try to debunk ideas by showing.
The psychological needs that they meet.
So, the studios have that one.
The Marxists say, you know, you're all a part of a class or whatever.
Now we would do identity politics in the same vein.
And they basically say that the trick is assume that your opponent is wrong.
So, just assume it.
They're wrong.
Their beliefs are false.
And then, rather than refute, you explain how they came to believe it, like what motivated them, what sort of, you know, it's a power play or you just, you know, you believe that because you're a man or whatever.
And then, once you've kind of shown the psychological conditions that led them to accept it, You can then dismiss it.
And Lewis says, Well, that's a fun game, but can we all play?
Like, right.
There's a way, like, that's a universal acid.
Because do the Marxists have psychological needs that their philosophy is meeting?
Does, you know, do the Freudians?
Everybody, you know, if Christianity is sort of a wish fulfillment dream, religions are a wish fulfillment dream.
We don't want to, we have to, we're going to die.
We want to survive after death and we want God to look out for us.
So it's a wish fulfillment.
He says, Well, aren't there fear fulfillment dreams too?
Like that, it works the other way.
And might there be some atheists who don't want God to be there?
And that's precisely the ground of their atheism in terms of how they came to believe it.
And his point in sort of turning the tables is not to say these are reasons to not be an atheist.
He's to say this is a stupid way of arguing.
This is assuming it's a fallacy.
It's a fallacy.
He calls it Bulverism.
He invents a name for it called Bulverism.
And he says, The mythical founder is Ezekiel Bulver, who when he was five years old overheard his parents arguing.
And his mother seek to refute his father, who was maintaining that the two sides of a triangle, the angles of the triangle equal the other angle or whatever it is, some kind of mathematical theorem.
And she responded to that by saying, You just believe that because you're a man.
And Mulber said, The world will be at my fingertips.
I don't actually have to disprove anybody.
I don't have to deal with questions of true or false.
I just have to explain why someone might believe something in psychological terms.
And then treat it as refuted, and then the world will open up.
And so Ezekiel Bulver became one of the makers of the 20th century.
And so Lewis names this fallacy and says Christians can play this.
It actually can be useful sometimes in pastoral situations.
Like, are your doubts, say, if I'm dealing with someone who's dealing with doubts, are your doubts pure and simple intellectual questions?
Or is it, you know, you've been sleeping with your girlfriend and it would be really convenient if God wasn't real?
Right.
Motivated reasoning is a thing, but it doesn't actually tell you whether something's true or false.
And so Lewis sees clearly through this kind of smoke screen of the Freudians and the Marxists and the subjectivists who try to reduce everything down and say that can't be all there is because you'll just see through everything and then therefore you won't see anything.
If you see through everything, everything becomes invisible and you don't see.
You might as well be blind.
Right.
It's funny because even so, yeah, first, like, hey, that's a fun game.
Can I play too?
So, like, that you can, you know, Christians can play the same game.
But even with that, and it is a logical fallacy.
So Christians have to do more than this.
In disproving false truths.
But even by that standard, I feel like the triune God would win, even though it's a flawed standard.
Because when you think of the need for a father, the things that we've referenced earlier, these are virtuous needs.
They're not evil.
There's nothing inherently morally wrong with the need for protection, the need for provision, the need for a father, the need for love, the need for.
Purpose, the need for, you know, whereas you think like just Marx, Freud, and, you know, Darwin, if we took those three, Freud is all three of these, the need that's being trying to be met is basically an assuaging of guilt for desiring something that's actually not a virtue, but a vice.
So, like, I would say, you know, in the case of Marx, it's condoning envy.
Yeah, right.
In the case of Freud, it's condoning lust.
In the case of Darwin, I think it's condoning guilt, right?
Like that God doesn't exist and therefore man is the measure of all things.
You know, I can do these things.
Where the gospel doesn't condone guilt, the gospel covers guilt, it pays for guilt, it actually deals with guilt.
You know, that like the Christian faith, you know, there is no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus, but the gospel is not a guilt free zone.
As a Christian, I feel more guilt now.
For my sin, than I did before I was saved.
The difference is not that we live in a garden that's a guilt free zone.
It's just that there's a tree that I can go to to have my guilt actually paid for and dealt with.
And so I actually have a heightened sense of guilt as, you know, post conversion than I did before, but I have a place to go.
And so, anyway, so I was just thinking that as you were talking.
One other question that I'd love to hear your thoughts on because.
Part of the frustration for me is, you know, so we talked a little bit before we hit record.
You know, my, you know, personally, my theological convictions, I would be more in the Kuyperian sense.
And when I say Kuyper, like there's plenty of things by Abraham Kuyper that I don't agree with, but I say I'm Kuyperian in the same way that I say I'm a Calvinist, right?
I'm one of the few individuals who've actually read John Calvin's Institutes, and I don't agree with everything that Calvin says.
But when someone says they're a Calvinist, they're not saying I agree with every jot and tittle of the Institutes.
Right.
They're saying I agree with.
The five points.
Yeah.
And every square in the Kuiper's, it's every square inch.
Exactly.
So when I say I'm Kuiperian, I think there's a lot of good things that Kuiper gave us.
Redeeming Culture and Media00:04:08
But I mean, it's funny.
Like, it's some of the Kuiper's sentiments are what I would consider to be anti Kuiperian.
Like, he kind of has a pretty low view of art as an example.
You know, and I'm like, wait, that's not Kuiper.
You're not keeping it with Kuiper.
And, you know, but anyways, so Kuiperian is every square inch.
Exactly.
So all of Christ for all of life, not just the home and the church, you know, but every sphere of life.
We want to see the gospel and the law of God.
In its first use, revealing our need for a Savior.
Second use being a restraint, a shield, you know, against not changing the heart, but holding back outward manifestations of sin that the world would be a better place to live in.
And the third use that the law of God, we delight in it, that the law of God is bad news in its first use, that it shows us we need a savior, but it's not bad news in the third use.
We delight in the law of God.
It's a compass, a guide, a lamp into our feet, showing the Christian how to respond in love.
If you love me, you obey me, and how to respond in love out of gratitude for the free salvation we have in Christ alone.
And so, all that being said, My point is, you know, with this Kyperion, you know, applying the law and gospel to every sphere of life, I'm constantly talking about the need for Christians to redeem the arts and culture and media and entertainment and everything and medicine.
My goodness, we need Christian doctors and politics to be sure and all these things.
But particularly with the arts and media and story, right?
Christians have gotten really bad with story.
You know, conservatives are really bad with story.
And I think part of it is like the Ben Shapiro sentiment, right?
My facts don't care about your feelings.
Because we have the true content.
We don't feel like we need to dress it up.
But a lot of people aren't won over by pie charts.
You know what I mean?
Pie charts, like, may be true, but it's not, it doesn't grab, you know, it's got to be the Puritan view of the pulpit, right?
Light and heat, you know, the pathos, you know, of the preacher.
And that's the way God created us.
And so, with that, you know, I'm constantly encouraging Christians to make stories, let's make movies, let's write books, and not just books on, you know, penal substitutionary atonement, praise God, but.
And I'm sure there's more work to be done.
Charles Hodge seems sufficient to me, but let's write fantasy.
Let's write, you know.
And this is what I come up against I've noticed that it's a very, very thin margin.
If you had like a Venn diagram, the circles barely overlap.
There's your progressive individuals, non Christians, unbelievers, and then some of them may be professing Christians that are unbelievers, and some professing Christians that are just in sin and confused.
And then, you know, so the progressive circle and then the conservative circle.
And not all conservatives are Christians, but I would argue more, many more in this circle are actually Christians.
And then the place where it overlaps is where I'm trying to live and where I'm trying to encourage others, because most of the people in the conservative circle have the bunker mentality.
Jesus is going to come back on Thursday.
The world is destined by God to only get worse and worse until he does.
And that eschatology influences the way they live in the world.
And so when you think of like, you know, like independent fundamental Baptists would be an example, you know, like, you don't, You don't drink or chew or date girls who do, you know, and we're not even going to go to movie theaters.
And I've noticed that, like, so I'm highly theologically and culturally and politically conservative.
And so I attract my ministry, my church, I'm a local pastor as well.
We attract people who are, you know, anti vaccine for COVID, which I'm anti vaccine for COVID also, you know, but people who are much, much more anti, you know, certain things than I am.
And then I start talking about the need for, I want to see Christians write fantasy books with magic.
Like Narnia.
And some of the conservative guys lose their mind.
They're like, there are a lot of Christians who are very conservative.
They like me because of my conservative takes on things, but they won't like this episode.
There's people who will watch this and be like, Joel is pro Narnia?
Yeah, yeah.
That's witchcraft.
Right.
Talk about how can, what's a Christian argument for, you know what I mean?
Faithful Magic vs Escalation00:08:17
Can you help me with that?
Yeah, yeah, for sure.
There's a chapter in Live Like a Narnia where I talk about, you know, Lewis does the deep magic and deeper magic and thinking through more clearly, what do we mean by magic?
I think that if many of the things that we know, there's a.
All Christians believe at some level in magic because you believe in miracles, right?
If magic just means an exertion of power that's sort of unexplained and undefined, like in other words, you don't know the mechanism, you don't know how it worked, you just know that it worked.
Jesus healing someone or multiplying, you know, there was a little bread and then there was a lot of bread.
That there's an element of if you saw that, if you, like right now, If you walk down the street and someone was like, you see 5,000 people on a hillside and a guy's got a little bowl of bread and fish, and then all of a sudden everybody's eating, you're going, witchcraft.
That's magic.
Now, I'm saying that not to say Jesus was some kind of sorcerer or something like that.
What I'm saying is that that kind of exertion of power in the scriptures can be good.
And it has to do with what's the source of the power, who's wielding the power, what's the purpose for which they're wielding it.
All of those kind of questions become relevant.
Is it a power that you have, sort of like as a person that you're over it?
Like it's a power over?
Or is it a power of like under?
Like, you know, God, I thank you that you hear me, and then here we go.
So it's an answer to prayer and an appeal to ultimate divine power.
So I love what Nate Wilson says that the first wizard duel in literature is in the book of Exodus.
You know, Moses with a staff that can turn into a snake walks into Pharaoh's court, and then you have a wizard duel between the sorcerers of Egypt.
And Moses.
And it's, you know, for the first couple of rounds, it's tit for tat.
He does it, they do it.
He does it, they do it.
And then at some point, he does it, and they're like, we can't do that.
Right.
You know, watch out, Pharaoh.
And Pharaoh doesn't listen.
But like, there's that escalating.
And in both cases, you have sorcerers tapping into demonic power.
But then you have Moses, the servant of the Most High God.
You have Moses, the servant of Yahweh.
And that's a wizard's tool.
It's like, it's actually the foundation in sort of like the Western imagination for that scene.
Gandalf, Dumbledore, all of those guys.
Like, what's the original?
It's Moses with his.
Magic staff.
And I'm thinking of the Red Sea now, you know, the Israelites have already passed over, and now the Egyptians are trying to do it.
I'm just picturing Moses saying, You shall not pass.
You shall not pass, right?
And all he does is, and I mean, you see this in the battles, you know, like in the when the Israelites are fighting the Amalekites, and, you know, Joshua's down there fighting, Moses up on the mountain with Aaron and her, and it's like, as long as his arms are up, they win.
He gets tired and they lose, and it's like, right, like win, lose, win, lose.
And it's that.
And you're going, What is God?
God made the world that way.
God made the world that way.
And Moses is not over that power as though he's the master.
He's the servant.
That's how Moses is most consistently.
I'm about to preach Hebrews for our church, Hebrews 3, for our church.
And Moses is the servant of the Lord.
That's his fundamental title.
He's under, he's in God's house.
And it's Christ who's the son over God's house and is the sort of source of that power.
So all that, there's a kind of theological thing there that underneath that, when we think about magic, there's faithful magic and unfaithful magic.
You could say godly magic.
And if you just put it in an appeal to power for the good of others from the God who made the world, if you just do that and you say, okay, now call that magic for a minute.
It's supernatural, it's spiritual, all of that, all that.
That's fundamentally different than what the necromancers and the sorcerers and the guys drawing circles in the ground and doing X's in their attempt to manipulate dark powers into giving them power so that they can lord it over others.
This is one of the things where Lewis actually says, He talks about the fact that, you know, in the science and magic were both birthed at the same time.
Modern science and magic, the heyday of magic, were the same time.
The guys who were doing chemistry were also doing alchemy, trying to turn base metals into gold.
The guys who were doing astronomy and, you know, hey, Galileo and Copernicus and these guys trying to figure out the orbits are also doing astrology, right?
These different, we just give them different names now because one of them succeeded in the sense of discovering the way God made the world and the other didn't, or at least didn't consistently enough, right?
I'm sure dark powers used it.
And Lewis recognizes the family resemblance between.
Our science and technology, especially our technological science, where our goal is to sort of take reality and shape it according to and bend it to our will.
So, reality.
Which is really just pushing back against the curse.
That's what that is.
It's the dominion mandate, it's exercising dominion over the world that God gave us, but the world that is under a curse and resisting man's stewardship and dominion and finding tools, technology just being a high powered tool to ultimately push back against the curse.
Yeah, so that's the good element is the sort of dominion, but.
Faithful dominion means cutting with the grain of reality as opposed to trying to, you know, sort of, you know, it's kind of like if you work with it, you're like, you can, you know, and I'm trying to turn it, but then you just break it.
And so that's the, you know, when you think about the transgender sorts of stuff, that's what that is, is it's reality's Plato and it needs to bend to my wishes.
And I can break, I can't, there's no grain of reality that I'm trying to cut with.
And if I cut with the grain, then everything works.
That's dominion.
That's godly dominion.
Right.
But so the way, the, I was just going to say the way that I communicate that is the distinction between pushing back against the curse on nature versus pushing back on nature itself.
That's exactly right.
That's exactly right.
So, when we push back against sickness to expand lifespans of people, which has happened just in the last 150 years, you know, and like when we put, you know, find cures for diseases, like we're pushing back on the curse, which when you're trying to turn a little boy into a girl, you're pushing back on nature itself, which is the basic plot line for every.
You know, sci fi horror movie, you know, Jurassic Park, like life finds a way.
Like nature, you're not going to beat nature.
Nature is stubborn and will have her revenge.
When Lewis, you know, of course, in that Hideous Strength, that's his space trilogy is sort of his attempt to do this kind of fantasy sci fi.
You know, the Hideous Strength is a fairy tale for grownups.
And it is this kind of the contrast between those who sort of want to cut with the grain of reality and have true dominion.
And then between the NICE, sort of the bad guys in the book, who are tapped into dark powers in the name of science and are trying to like reshape reality into their own, based on their own instincts and impulses and whims.
And in The Abolition of Man, Lewis unpacks that in sort of prosefulness.
This is what you're talking about with the imagination.
So Lewis knows, hey, I'm going to do these lectures, very academic lectures on education and the conditioners of society who are trying to take man under their wing and reshape humanity into their own image and all that kind of stuff.
He can do that in three lectures.
And say, this is a fundamentally different view of education than what's come before us.
Old education was about us conforming ourselves to reality.
This is about bending reality to the wishes of men.
Those aren't the same.
And so he does the prose version.
But then he says, you know, I need to be able to sort of incarnate this, express this in a form of a story, and it will stick with people.
Like those images in the story and the narratives and the plots will have a kind of punch that simply a lecture lacks.
And so this is one of the reasons, you know, here at Bethlehem.
Like, I love teaching classes on Lewis because what I'll do is it's like, hey, let's read the fiction version and let's read the prose version and then let's compare.
And then we're gonna hit both the reason and the imagination.
We're gonna get both to the head and to the heart because you see Lewis make the same arguments, commend the same virtues, blast the same vices, show all of the same things.
The Cessationist Debate00:09:23
I can show it to you in an essay, and I can show it to you in a fantasy novel or a fairy tale or whatever.
And it's in seeing both of them, you see it better.
And then as a result, our students are able to live better.
They're able to navigate the world.
With a greater degree, because it's not simply intellectual, but like their imaginations have been shaped and molded.
That's one of the things we love to do.
That's great.
Yeah.
And I think that's what I'm getting at is that, you know, I think we've got plenty of essays, not enough fantasy novels, you know, at least in recent, you know, American, you know, the West.
It just seems like we've kind of surrendered that hill to the pagan and said, we'll keep the essays, we'll keep, you know, the theological treaties, but you can have, you can have.
The arts.
And I think that that's a mistake.
One other thing I was going to say is I kept, as we're having this whole conversation, I keep picturing in my mind the debate from once upon a time.
It's probably 15, 20, I don't know.
It's old at this point, 15 years or so.
But it was Driscoll and Wilson.
And it was on cessationism versus continuationism.
And, you know, and so I'm a cessationist.
I'm, you know, I adhere to the 1689.
And I understand there are some guys who say you could, you know, but I feel like the 1689 is, Cessationist.
And so I raised cessationism five years, six, seven years ago.
I wasn't always a cessationist.
I was raised in the vineyard church.
The church that I planted in California, actually, in the very beginning, was a vineyard church.
And then we became an Acts 29 church.
And then we left Acts 29 and just became a confessionally reformed Baptist church.
And so, all that being said, that's kind of where I've landed and where I am today.
So, I'm on the cessationist side of things.
But one of the things I so appreciated about Doug was, I think some cessationists are.
I think I'm persuaded it's the correct theological position, but some cessationists, it's like it affects their whole person, their whole personality.
They're just not a lot of fun.
They're grim, they're dreary, they're like puddle glum.
Whereas Doug Wilson is jolly.
And so, as he's having this thing with Driscoll, it's like this debate and back and forth.
He gives Driscoll, Almost like ammunition that you typically wouldn't want to do in a disagreement with someone, you know, where he recounts this story of a phone call that he, you know, had with someone and how he basically knew that that was going to happen ahead of time because he had like a dream or, you know, whatever.
And, you know, Driscoll, of course, is saying prophecy.
Yeah.
It's called prophecy, you know.
And at the time when I watched it, I was like, yeah, Driscoll, get him, you know, yeah, that's prophecy.
And I didn't have the categories that I have now, but the retort that Wilson gave was like, I live in God's magical world.
And that's not to say, you know, without making a strong argument, because I assume that you're a continuationist.
Is that correct?
Yeah.
And so we would disagree on this.
And so I'm not even making an argument for cessationism at this point.
I'm just stating the position that I hold.
But I liked that, like, here's a guy who is a cessationist who believes there's no new revelation.
And yet, and that was one of the hardest things, I think, for me was I didn't, it was like Calvinism.
So cessationism, Calvinism, similar in my testimony.
When I came into reform doctrine, one of the hardest things was I felt like I had to surrender my personal testimony.
But one of the things that helped me tremendously was having an older brother in the faith who had been reformed for longer than me and helping me realize you don't have to surrender your testimony.
What you have to do is see it through a new lens.
All these things.
So, where you were seeking after God, He was drawing you and calling you and wooing you.
So, the same things happened.
You don't have to give yourself a lobotomy.
No, it's the same things.
Those things were real.
But you need to, you're seeing them now through a new lens.
And so for me, you know, like things like, well, I really felt like God spoke to me in this way, or I felt like, but then having categories and say, I don't have to throw out the baby with the bathwater.
Discernment is still a thing.
You know, and so, you know, and living in God's magical world is still a thing.
And as a cessationist, miracles are still a thing.
I just personally don't hold to a worker of miracles who on demand, you know, can slap a river and it crosses, you know, and, Healing.
I pray for healing per James chapter 5.
The elders take them to the elders and anoint them with oil and lay hands on them and pray, and the sick person will be made well.
But healings versus healer.
And so that was so helpful for me coming into a cessationist position, which I personally think is more conducive with a confessionally reformed position.
But not having to discount every experience that I had and say, well, I must have just been.
I must have just been underneath a spell of manipulation from emotions.
And I just thought that that was so interesting as we're talking about magic and as we're talking about that, like Doug Wilson, here's the cessationist giving, in my opinion, more credence to the magic of God's world than the continuationist was in that particular moment.
Any thoughts on that?
Yeah, I think that's right.
And I think some of the debate on those two sides often is a matter of definitions.
What are cessationists trying to keep out of the?
Conversation and what our continuation is trying to get on.
And so there's actually frequently, you can find more common ground than you find because we're all supernaturalists.
Like the common thing, that's what Doug was getting at with God's magical world, is we're supernaturalists, which means not just supernaturalists in the sense of there's a heaven someday and God's up there somewhere, but then like the entire universe is shot through with divine agency and not just divine agency, but with other kinds of agencies.
Like we believe that angels are real, we believe that demons are real.
And we don't know a ton about them.
And sometimes people can speak more dogmatically about what they know about how angels and demons work than maybe is biblically warranted.
But like the little glimpses we get is that like there's this whole other world sort of intersecting with ours that involves battles and fights and warfare, that involves temptations, that intersects with our own personal lives, that affects our bodies and our minds and all of these sort of things.
We get these little glimpses and we go, and as Christians, we have to go, I may not be, I don't have the bird's eye view of that.
There's things, you know, it's like there's things into which angels long to look.
There's things, right?
For us, we're like, hey, so that whole thing where Daniel prays and then Michael comes, but then he's like, you know, like I'm up in Persia for like a half, you know, a couple of weeks and had to fight that guy and now I'm here.
We're like, could we have time out?
Like we have some details.
I'd like to write that down.
But we don't get that.
God doesn't give us that because, and I think the reason is you don't need to know that in order to live faithfully.
What you do need to know is that that's real and that you're wrestling with principalities and powers.
When you fight your sin, when you resist temptation, and that God is active, right?
That God is present even when He doesn't seem to be.
And I think this is another thing, maybe, with the Narnia Chronicles that I found so helpful.
And it's actually from that The Silver Chair.
The Silver Chair is the one book of the seven where Aslan never actually appears in Narnia itself.
He's in his own country up on the cliff, but he never comes down into Narnia.
He only gives them their assignment, sends them, and then they come back there.
Whereas the other ones, he always comes into Narnia himself.
Like he leaves the fight or he rescues whatever.
He doesn't actually come down.
And I think that Lewis is intentional there to kind of say this is a book of sort of divine absence.
This is a book of Aslan's absence.
But the point is, he was guiding them anyway.
All along, he was like, they're as they're making, they're blowing it left and right, like missing the signs, missing the signs, missing the signs.
And it's like, Aslan's guiding them anyway.
He's going to accomplish purposes anyway.
Right.
He is there.
It makes me think of, you know, the Voyage of the Dawn Treader with Lucy.
You know, she does the spell that makes invisible things visible.
And all of a sudden, Aslan appears and, you know, and he essentially says, What makes you think that I wasn't, you know, I was here and I keep in step with my own word.
So you're reading my magic book.
This is my spell.
This is my, you know, and, I'm not going to contradict my own word.
And so you made, I didn't come to you.
I've been here the whole time and you just made me visible by using my own word.
And so, like, that he's always there.
So I completely agree with you.
The last thing I thought about, maybe we can end here, but just as a fellow post millennial, yeah, the power between angels and demons.
And for me, I'm old fashioned in the sense that, you know, like I just, God wrote a book and I believe the book, you know, and so I believe, and I'm not a biblicist in, you know, in taking that too far.
But I believe in six literal day creation.
I believe in a relatively young earth.
I believe in Nephilim.
I believe in the sons of God, that they weren't kings and princes, but that they were angels, and that per the usage in the book of Job, sons of God, and that they saw that the daughters of men were attractive.
AI Imprints and Nephilim00:07:48
And I see that as one of Satan's ploys, whether it be Herod at the time of Christ and killing all the boys, or Pharaoh killing all the Hebrew boys, or the Nephilim.
What I see again and again and again is Satan.
Knowing the prophecy given in the garden that the woman will have a seed and he's going to crush your head, and Satan trying to pollute the line of the seed.
He's trying to stop the messianic lineage from happening.
And so he's doing this by trying to take out whole lines of people or corrupting even bloodlines.
And I think that's part of what's going on with the Nephilim and these kinds of things.
However, the post millennial piece, I think that demonic forces are still at play.
That is still very much a thing.
But I think part of the reason why Jesus in his earthly ministry before his crucifixion and resurrection is casting out so many demons is almost to say that, you know, showing so much the extent of Israel's rebellion, the extent of demonic presence at that time, that Satan is at large.
But, you know, the parable of, you know, if you're going to plunder the house, you must first go in and bind the strong man.
And that at the cross and resurrection of Christ, that the strong man.
Has been bound, um, and he still has some minions at work.
Um, and and Satan still does, in a sense, prowl around.
I would argue maybe a shorter leash.
Um, but but I guess part of what I'm getting at is, um, we live in a magical world, demonic forces are apart.
That's one kind of magic in this, you know, different agencies.
But it does seem as though that has been severely limited.
You've got the Third Reich, as Wilson would say, that could be measured in a matter of months, but you don't have Babylon, you don't have Assyria, you don't like something, something objective switched.
In real human history, would you agree with that?
Yeah, that's a good question.
I think as long as it's not a.
So I do think that the spread of the gospel does inhibit, limit, restrain, even maybe imprison in certain ways.
You know, again, how the mechanisms of how this works, I don't know.
The work of demons, insofar as the gospel spreads and everything.
But I don't know that it's a fixed reality.
Like once you've taken the territory, it's now taken for good.
Gotcha.
I agree.
At one point, North Africa was largely Christian, right?
It's where Augustine lived there, and now it's not.
And so, the, and I, you know, I think that a plausible understanding of Islam is both as a sort of a Christian heresy, it's a knockoff of Christianity, right?
Also, demonic influence there in that kind of imprisonment.
And so, with that, there was sort of like a, it is a pitched battle.
And so, even, you know, with our hopefulness about the penetration of the gospel between the first and second coming of Christ, there's room for, You know, moving the battle line forward and then having times where it's in retreat.
And part of that retreat, I guess, if the gospel is spreading, the demons are subdued through our rebellion and apostasy, right?
They get let out again.
The gods come back.
And I think in some ways, you see that at some level in the post Christian West where there's a sort of a reassertion of paganism.
And, you know, I've been talking to friends about, you know, the AI, everybody's talking about the AI chatbot thing.
And I'm like, if that thing does start talking back to us, Christians should not be like wrongly freaked out.
It's like, well, what would, what a great mechanism for demons to use, right?
Like, it's just technology.
Why wouldn't they be able to manipulate it?
And so if it does seem like, hey, it has a mind of its own, like it actually might.
That's not a crazy thought that, like, you know, you're, you're, you just think you're asking Google.
But like, so those are all, I think, on the table because, because we're Christians and we believe, That the world is suffused, not just our own body is suffused with a spiritual reality, the soul, the material thing that survives the death of the body.
And so, also, there are other kinds of spirits out there, and we don't need to fear them in an absolute sense, but there needs to be an acknowledgement of they're on the table and they're at war.
And so, we too have the same sort of zeal, which is first and foremost about our own holiness.
I love it, it's important to remember that the only weapon that the devil has against us.
Is only the weapons that we give him as Christians at this point, right?
Like his greatest weapon, condemnation, God disarmed him, disarmed the principalities of powers.
They don't have that weapon anymore.
So now it's all trickery, manipulation, power games.
But like he who is in us is greater than the one who's in the world.
That's the promise.
And so we don't need to fear, but we need to actually live into it through our own devotion and holiness and pursuit of Christ.
Amen.
And even apart from demonic influence with like Chat GPT, I think of.
It's just one more example that, you know, for me, within the presuppositional framework, that nothing is neutral.
And that, you know, that I, so, you know, right now, the point that we're at with narrow AI, you know, we haven't, it's not AGI, it's not transhumanism.
So I personally, my position is I think some of these things actually are impossible because man can only, we're lowercase c creators.
God alone creates X and the helo out of nothing.
We can only take the materials in the world and in the cosmos that God gave to us.
And I think there's a lot more we can do.
I think, you know, the sky is a limit.
There's materials that we haven't even gotten to.
You know, some moon floating around this planet over here that has some kind of precious metal that can create this.
You know, like, so I think, you know, the sky's the limit with that.
I personally don't think that we'll ever be able to create AI at the point where it's sentient.
But even apart from that, even in the realm of narrow AI and what we, the developments that we currently have, you can see that, you know, you can see that if there's not a demonic imprint on it, which there may be, there's certainly, A man's imprint on it.
Chat GPT is not neutral.
It's created by certain men and they built into it a framework, a certain blueprint, certain codes that it cannot, you know, it can't say this because that would be offensive.
It can't say that.
It's funny because I feel like if it actually was made and they actually did it in a completely neutral way, then I think that Chat GPT would be one of the best apologists and evangelists and would, you know, because it would.
It would have no choice.
People would ask questions, you know, and people have already kind of hacked it and done some funny things where they're like, you know, what's the best way, you know, to solve the energy crisis?
And, you know, and it's like, well, fossil fuels, duh, you know.
And then they have to go back in and say, oh, you're not allowed to say that.
Oh, never mind, not fossil fuels.
That's way too logical and makes way too much sense, you know.
So it must be this other thing.
So, anyway, so I say that to say that, you know, I think that with technology, apart from even the demonic possibilities, there's certain people have to realize that, Nothing is neutral.
The person who makes something, they're imprinted on it.
They've built it in such a way, they're giving it commands, they're giving it guidelines, and a man is either for Christ or against him.
And that's reflected, I think, in everything that people do.
Wisdom in a Recession00:03:17
So it's great.
Yeah.
All right.
Any final words for us?
If not, tell people how they can follow you, tell people a little bit about your seminary, and give us a sign off.
Yeah, good.
I'm on Twitter.
I use it mainly to promote our school, so I'm not.
I may not be the most engaging follow, but Joe underscore Rigney there.
I write regularly for Desiring God.
And yeah, we have a college and a seminary, undergrad and graduate programs.
We're an intentionally small school here in Minneapolis.
At our college, we teach great books in light of the greatest book for the sake of the Great Commission.
And so, some of what we talked about here today is a pretty good snapshot of the sort of thing that our faculty love to do with students in order to shape them so that they're rooted in Christ and ready for the world.
We want them to be mature adults who are ready to witness for Christ.
With wisdom and wonder for the rest of their lives.
And that wisdom and wonder are both integral to it.
We want them to know their Bibles, to love their Bibles, and then we want them to be in awe of the world that God made and equipped to face it, both the good and the bad.
And then we have a seminary, of course, where we're training shepherds, intentionally small cohorts of students.
We take about 16 guys a year.
So, with four year program, about 60 guys total in the seminary, 60, 70 guys.
And they go through that program together and get their Bible, learn to preach.
We major on it, we want to create preachers.
We love preaching the word.
It's one of John Piper's greatest legacies, I think, will be his handling of the scriptures.
And so we're seeking to create more pastors like that.
And so if any of your listeners are interested in either college or SIM, bcsmn.edu, and our team would love to talk to you.
Great.
Well, thanks for coming on the show, Joe.
Thanks, Joe.
It was great to talk to you.
Can I be frank with you for just a second, right here at the end?
Look, some of you guys, you're financially supporting this ministry.
And from the bottom of my heart, I say thank you.
I cannot thank you enough.
However, some of you, you just can't afford it.
In fact, some of you, you shouldn't afford it.
Let's be honest.
I mean, we're living in Joe Biden's ridiculous economy.
Our nation and our totalitarian political elites lost their minds over the last three years due to COVID.
We have written checks that we simply cannot cash.
It doesn't matter if people change the definition of a recession.
We are living in a recession right now, regardless.
Some of you are struggling to afford a carton of eggs at the grocery store.
You cannot support financially this ministry at this time, nor should you, but you could still help us tremendously.
I am asking you, please, if you're willing to do so, take one minute of your time.
Leave us a five-star review on your favorite podcast platform, iTunes, Spotify, whatever that might be.
This is the way the system works.
We want to be innocent as doves, but shrewd as vipers.
We need to be strategic.
You leave us a five-star review, and our podcast shows up for more people.
And the Word of God and courageous theology applied in practical ways to every realm of life gets out there.