Derek: 00:28

Welcome back to the Fourth Wave podcast. Today's episode is going to be based off of a Sunday school lesson that I did a few months back. For those who might not have been around through all that many episodes, it might help to have a little bit of background on the type of church that I go to. So I am in a relatively conservative denomination. Some people it's kind of one of those denominations that, you know, I feel is more in the middle.

Derek: 01:01

But if you're on the right side of the spectrum, you would look at us and you would say, we're too liberal. And if you are on the left side of the spectrum, you'd look at us and you'd say that you are too fundamentalist conservative. It's kind of a, you know, in weird section. If I had to pick, I would say it leans more a bit more right than I would definitely be. Of course, I mean, there are a variety of people in that church who are kind of all over the place on the spectrum.

Derek: 01:35

But in general, if you took a census of everybody in the church, it would definitely be more to the right. To give you kind of a feel for the type of right that they are, this Sunday school lesson that I was asked to do was actually based on, Carl Truman's book. And he actually has he has two books. The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self is the longer version, the deeper version. And then I don't even remember what this is.

Derek: 02:04

I'm sure I'll remember it when I get into it, but it's kind of his shorter version of it. Now I read his longer version, I think twice, and I really enjoyed it. I thought it was very explanatory. It helped me to understand what was like how we got to the place that we are now. But then I read an article from him later and I was like, Oh, I really don't know that I like him that much or would agree with him all that much on some things.

Derek: 02:37

I thought his expounding of history was helpful, but when he started to make value statements and start to, you know, he seemed kind of demeaning and, you know, angrier than than I would like. So I don't know. But when I read the shorter version, it definitely felt a lot more pointed and lacking grace than his longer version seemed to do. But then again, I read the longer version a couple of years ago, so if I went back and read it now, who knows where I am on the spectrum and I might kind of pick up on some things that that I didn't pick up on before. But nevertheless, our Sunday school class was going through this book by Truman, and they asked me to do a lesson.

Derek: 03:24

And the thing that I like to do in a lot of lessons, I mean, just in life in general, is, to push back. Like, I don't want to tell people what they want to hear. I want to, you know, scrape away those things on the surface that nobody is going to take the time to scrape away, to like to get through that stuff, to get at our hearts. Right? I don't need to shoot arrows at other people's hearts and, shoot daggers into their hearts.

Derek: 03:54

I need to have my heart be pierced. And so I wanted to do something that was going to pierce my own heart as well as the heart of my community. Now what Truman's book is largely about is how we get to a place today where truth is very relative and a lot of his focus is on, you know, how did we get to the idea of like, there is no male and female, like transgender movement and stuff. And so, of course, in a relatively conservative church, especially amongst the older generation, which this Sunday school class had had a lot of in it, they're very focused on just how insane our world is and how could anybody, you know, not see truth and all of that kind of stuff. And I get it, right?

Derek: 04:42

Because we're in echo chambers and, to be gracious towards those people, they haven't been confronted. Church isn't a place where you can, where you can really ask questions. And so I tried to help the Sunday school class to take a little bit of a turn in a different direction, in a direction that would hopefully help the hearers to, be more empathetic to, you know, this dissolution of truth that they say others have, but that they themselves embrace, and that our Christian culture has long embraced. And so, yeah, it fits. Because I took Truman's book and I went in a different direction with it, it's going to fit into this season in regard to the idea of economic simplicity and just the way that our culture has trained us, has propagandized us, has taught us to view money and wealth.

Derek: 05:52

So, I'll just go ahead and jump into the lesson. My kids are currently in a really annoying stage. It's the know it all stage. It's when they have fun taking everything literally and then trying to catch you on stuff. You know, right now they keep doing that whole every time you point, you have three fingers pointing back at you and it's really annoying.

Derek: 06:25

But at the same time, there is a lot of truth in some of the things that they they say and do. I mean, that that three fingers pointing back at you thing, right, metaphorically, like, that's usually very true. Take the log out of your eye before you try to take the speck out of your brother's eye, right? My teachers growing up in middle school, they had sayings like, It takes two to tango. Blame is rarely ever one-sided.

Derek: 06:55

If we take Jesus' analogy of the log and the speck, it's very likely that we ourselves have something that we need to address before we can address somebody else. Now I'm not sure what my spiritual gifting is, but I often feel like God has called me to be a lumberjack. Hence, the beard and my outfit. But seriously, I've long felt it a duty of mine to be introspective and to bring that introspection to whatever group I find myself in. So today has been a great setup for me to maybe poke us all and make us a little uncomfortable.

Derek: 07:37

Today, I want to extend the teaching by holding up a mirror for us to bring the focus back onto ourselves rather than focusing on on everybody else. Using Truman's chapters six and seven as a foundation, I wanna look at where we are now, how we have been complicit in creating the world that we bemoan, and the powerful tool that God has granted us which gives us hope for transformation. I wanna start with the reading of two passages of Scripture. Judges 21, 25. In those days, Israel had no king.

Derek: 08:15

Everyone did as they saw fit. Ecclesiastes one:nine, What has been will be again. What has been done will be done again. There's nothing new under the sun. It's easy for us, for each generation to think that the threats that we are facing are uniquely apocalyptic.

Derek: 08:38

I think the two verses selected for today show us that we probably aren't really facing anything new. I mean, I remember growing up in the nineties and the early two thousands, and the Christian turmoil then was the rise of the new atheists vocal, harmlessly militant atheists who lambasted Christianity. But you know, in retrospect, that was actually a pretty healthy exchange of ideas. I think that exchange was healthier than what we see today because the atheists, they didn't tend to outright deny reality. They dealt with the same facts that Christians did.

Derek: 09:15

They just interpreted them a little bit differently. You could defend Christianity and attack atheism by pointing to facts. And if you walked away in disagreements, you could at least respect and understand where your opponent was coming from. But here in chapters six and seven, Truman identifies in modern world and the modern sexual ethic, something that goes beyond disagreement with where the facts lead. Truman identifies the modern viewpoint as one which looks like what we saw at the end of Judges, an era in which truth is denied and people create their own realities.

Derek: 09:53

It's what Truman calls a liquid world. Sexuality and gender are no longer tied to the external biological world, what we might consider a more objective world. Reality is now tied to the internal, to the subjective realm, with as many truths as there are individuals. And that's part of the reason you find far less debates on modern sexuality than you did when the new atheists were the threat du jour. And it's why you might bang your head against the wall when it comes to trying to discuss these issues with those who hold them.

Derek: 10:26

How do you argue a truth that is internal to someone else? A truth that's subjective? Who are you to tell someone how they feel or what they identify as? Their internal reality is real. It's true.

Derek: 10:40

And you're pointing them to an external reality just doesn't mean anything to them. While your truth is fixed, their truth is fluid and accessible only to them. Now to we Christians, so much of the modern sexual movement feels like lunacy, doesn't it? I feel that way particularly when I look at what's happening with transgenderism in women's sports. I see the lunacy and I can't understand how so many others don't see it.

Derek: 11:07

It just like it can't compute for me. God made the world and we are to conform to it. And even if God didn't make the world, reality is still objective. It functions in a particular way. And who are you, O man, to talk back to God?

Derek: 11:24

Or to the laws of gravity? Or the laws of biology? You don't have to be a Christian to realize the importance of truth and how crazy some of this modern stuff is, right? Scientific atheists are doing it, but so are some of those that we'd least expect some who are part of the LGBTQIA community. Truman gave what I think is a fantastic example where many gay individuals are declaring that they aren't attracted to trans people.

Derek: 11:50

And why? Because as Truman points out, these gay individuals recognize that a person isn't just who they are now, they're also who they were. A person is someone with a particular history. Do you agree with that? Now we might raise our fists with that truth, that a person is someone with a particular history, And this truth can be invoked in a way that some of us might not like so much though, because many of us would say that we're against cancel culture.

Derek: 12:21

Are we really going to judge someone for what they wrote ten years ago on Twitter? For wearing black face in high school? For sexual deviance before they ran for political office? Of course, we're very fluid on what we think about a person's ties to their history. A person's history matters when it comes to identifying their gender, but it might not matter so much if a person's history hurts my agenda, my political party, or ideology.

Derek: 12:47

The same thing is true in regard to our collective history, isn't it? Our history is important and embraced when it comes to celebrating what we love, the aspects we want to acknowledge and embrace. We celebrate the July 4, independence. There's a lot of our history that we minimize and dismiss. Just take the Southern Baptists as an example.

Derek: 13:09

My friend lovingly refers to the SBC as the slave holding Baptist convention because the SBC became the SBC when they broke into their own denomination in order to uphold slavery. Is that a good and fair thing to remember as a part of their history? The SBC doesn't want to be known as the slaveholding Baptist anymore because they want a new identity conferred upon them. One they feel like better represents them and puts their past far behind them. Like the LGBTQIA plus community, we as individuals and as groups often embrace fluidity.

Derek: 13:48

We want to be distinguished apart from our history when it's convenient. We want a new identity conferred upon us. We want to be recognized by how we feel now, not by who we were, maybe who we still are. For the gay community, I think Truman highlighted a place where we see this best in their declaration that having a family, adoption, in vitro, surrogacy, whatever, that this is a right for them. Why is having a family such an important right for them?

Derek: 14:22

Because children are new identities built from the self identification of the parents. Why do so many parents live vicariously through their kids? Why do parents tell their children the stories that paint them in a good light and hide the stories of their darkness in their past? Because children are receptacles of a curated history. They're a chance to embody the identity we envision for ourselves.

Derek: 14:48

For the LGB community, children are a chance for them to propagate their new identities. This desire for modernity that truth be fluid in regard to identity, this fluidity of truth is what leads Truman to declare that we now live in a liquid world. And to summarize this fluidity, he invokes two names in particular, Nietzsche and Marx. Specifically quoting Marx, he says, All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned. What a terrible ideology, No wonder we despise Marx so much.

Derek: 15:26

All that is holy is profaned, he says. Wow. Now, it's really easy for us to bemoan the state of the world that we're in now, and many in our group blame Nietzsche and Marx for building the society that we live in. But I want us to take a look at Marx's broader meaning in the quote that Truman pulled out because a lot of people are thinking that Marx designed and built this fluid world that we're in now, but really, he had a lot of help. I want you to listen to Marx's Fuller quote.

Derek: 16:00

Marx says, Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast frozen relations with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions are swept away. All new formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life and his relations with his kind, end quote. Marx is not at all celebrating the fluidity of the world that he finds himself in.

Derek: 16:50

He's rather making an observation about the world he lived in, a world that was changing. Marx wasn't declaring that he liked the world or that he wanted to create a fluid world, but rather that this is the way that the world worked in his time due to things like globalization and and the market. Marx saw the fluid world as mercantilism and capitalism's tendrils spreading around the globe and demanding conformity and submission. Marx saw the love of money and the power of money, its power to make truth fluid. Listen to what Marx says about the the possessor of money.

Derek: 17:28

Quote, what I am and am capable of is by no means determined by my individuality. I am ugly, but I can buy for myself the most beautiful of women. Therefore, I'm not ugly for the effect of ugliness, its deterrent power is nullified by money. I am bad, dishonest, unscrupulous, stupid, but money is honored and hence its possessor. Money is the supreme good, therefore its possessor is good.

Derek: 17:59

Money besides saves me the trouble of being dishonest. I am therefore presumed honest. I am brainless, but money is the real brain of all things and how then should it possess its possessors be brainless? Besides, he can buy clever people for himself and he is who has power over the clever, not more clever than the cleverer. Do not I, who thanks to money, am capable of all that the human heart longs for, possess all human capacities?

Derek: 18:28

Does not my money therefore transform all my incapacities into their contrary? End quote. Now this quote right here goes back to our episode on distillates. So if you haven't listened to that, make sure you go back and listen to that, and this quote will ring very true there. Now, it's not my goal to justify Marxism or to condemn capitalism here, but it is important to understand that Marx wasn't necessarily seeking to create a new world from scratch the way that he wanted to create it.

Derek: 19:02

He's rather recognizing that the world either was or had become fluid. And since the world had been made fluid, he feels the need to form it to the mold that he thinks is best. He saw the industrialist forming the world to his liking and it was a pretty terrible world for a lot of people. So why shouldn't Marx shape it into something that looked better for him? Of course, we can disagree with the form that he made, but the fluidity did not originate in Marx.

Derek: 19:32

Besides Marx, Nietzsche's name is brought up by Truman in chapter seven as well and is someone that Christians like to blame for the modern fluidity. But like Marx, Nietzsche wasn't destroying truth to create his own. He was recognizing that truth had already been obliterated. Nietzsche didn't murder God, he just declared or observed that the world had already killed him. Science, knowledge, exploration, political power, the world was functionally moving full steam ahead without God and in spite of him.

Derek: 20:04

Nietzsche was just the first one to really call it like it was, to admit the truth. Wake up people, you're already living as if God is dead. And if God is dead, we have to all figure out how we ought to live. And for Nietzsche, the ethic was essentially power, a will to power. And that ethic makes sense in a world without God, doesn't it?

Derek: 20:26

He who has the power determines what is true and what is good. Now if we look back beyond Nietzsche and Marx, we find that the church at large was creating, or at least perpetuating, the fluid world that Nietzsche and Marx ended up observing in their time. The Crusades, Conquistadors, Inquisitions, Heretic Burnings, Third Baptisms and Forced Baptisms, Enslavement, Native Eradication, Wars I mean, the list goes on. The church was a significant part of, if not the driving force behind many of these terrible elements of history. The church was obsessed, it is obsessed, with money and power.

Derek: 21:11

And not just the Catholic church, but the Protestant church too. The church in Christendom tilled the field that was ready for planting when Marx and Nietzsche came along. And that's our history. That's who we are. You might want to say, Well, that's who we were, but is there no continuity between the past and the present?

Derek: 21:32

Are we not a people with a particular history? And be careful how you answer that because sooner or later, you'll have to recite a creed during service. So I again ask, are we not a people with a particular history? You can't just take the parts that you like. The thing is, I don't think our Nietzschean will to power is just something in our distant past.

Derek: 21:56

I think it's a part of our present too. I'm reminded of a book I read by Ted Karpf where he was recounting his time as the President of World Vision during the AIDS crisis. And Karp wanted to begin sponsoring orphans who had AIDS or who were orphaned due to the AIDS crisis. And he was told not to do it because World Vision was a G rated ministry and AIDS was an R rated issue. In this poll, 2% of respondents said that they would definitely support this initiative, while over 50% said they definitely would not.

Derek: 22:33

And what is that saying if not that we hate a particular sin so much, we want even the children of those sinners eradicated? I think of Greg Johnson, a former PCA pastor who had a lifelong struggle with his desire for other men, but lived out a faithful, celibate life. He was talking about the difficulty of living a life in community when everyone was trying to teach him how to change the oil or throw a football, how to do manly things, but nobody would invite him, a perpetually family less man, to join them for Thanksgiving dinner. They wanted appearances. They wanted conformity and distance.

Derek: 23:14

Not messiness, not discomfort, not relationship. What is that saying if not, You're not a part of the family, we just want you to look like us? And I think about the politics and conversations of today how everyone's trying to argue or shame or legislate others into conformity. What is that saying if not, You are not a people to be loved, but objects to be formed into the image that we see fit, and we will conquer you one way or another. Seeking the conversion of others, conversion to our political party, to our viewpoint, or even conversion to Christianity is objectifying.

Derek: 23:57

The Great Commission is not to convert people, but to disciple. And to disciple, it's going to take time and sacrificial love in relationship. So often we forego discipleship and sacrifice because we are today what we were in the past. Those who embrace a fluid world and live out an ethic of a will to power. Okay.

Derek: 24:23

Well, that's pretty depressing, isn't it? So where's the hope for us and for the world in all of this? If I am a person, if we are people with a particular history, are we forever tied to our sins and to our people s sins in the past? Enter my favorite Christian thinker ever, Kierkegaard. Now he was actually a contemporary of Marx and Nietzsche, thinking and writing in the same tumultuous world that they were.

Derek: 24:53

Kierkegaard saw the same will to power in the church and the world that Marx and Nietzsche saw. But rather than observe that God was dead or that truth was fluid, he observed that it was the church by and large that was dead and untrue. Kierkegaard's whole stated goal in his writings is to reintroduce Christianity, Jesus, to Christendom. Christendom being Christianity's institutionalization or its will to power. In my favorite book ever, Kierkegaard declares one of the most beautiful things I've ever heard and something I latch onto a lot.

Derek: 25:30

Kierkegaard says, quote, For as the good is only a single thing, so always lead to the good, even the false ones, end quote. He sounds a lot like Marx and Nietzsche there, right? Truth is fluid? Is that what he's saying? Even the false ways lead to the good?

Derek: 25:53

No, he's not at all like Marx or Nietzsche in his conclusion. Kierkegaard says that all roads lead to the good because God has granted us the necessary power to make it so. All roads lead to the good, quote, when the repentant one follows the same way back, end quote. See, shame and guilt anchor us to the past and they hold us there. Shame and guilt tell us that we are our pasts, people who are far from the good.

Derek: 26:27

And thinking that we are only our past is just as much a problem as thinking we are not at all our pasts. That's why so many people embrace fluidity. They want to escape the reality of their past and they have no tools to deal with that. But God has given us the gift of repentance so that on whatever road we find ourselves, it can always lead us to the good, an objective good that exists outside of ourselves. Now just think about how that works.

Derek: 26:57

No matter how many turns you've made away from the good, repentance will lead you back to the good with just a single step. And it does that without denying the road that you've traveled to get there. In fact, repentance leads you to the good by recognizing the past and constantly moving away from it. Fluidity, on the other hand, denies not only the objective good, but also the many dead end roads one has traveled down in trying to create their own good. Now, I don't at all want you to hear today that I don't think modern fluidity is a problem.

Derek: 27:35

It's really easy for us to cower under the condemnation of those who point out some of the terrible history of our group. A history, some of which may not be in the distant past, but in the recent past or even the present. But in order to move forward, or I guess in this case, to turn around and take a step backwards and then start moving forward in repentance, we have to know where we are and where we're going. And that's going to require a few specific actions of us. I think first, we have to acknowledge the terrible things in our past and in our group's present.

Derek: 28:16

But acknowledging is different than repenting. We can't just acknowledge. Mere intellectual assent is meaningless. I mean, even the demons believe in God, right? Our group is so good at dismissing.

Derek: 28:30

And what is dismissing but acknowledging without repenting? Acknowledgement without doing anything about it, acknowledging a truth and then, without action, showing with our actions or showing with our inaction that, that truth that we assented to doesn't cause us to do anything, doesn't cause us cause us to take any steps. If we dismiss our history without the God given tool of repentance that gives us continuity between our past and our present, then we're creating the fluid world that we condemn. Our pasts have to inform our present and guide us in the direction that we need to go towards the good. Furthermore, I think we need to recognize our own complicity with creating the fluid world that we live in now.

Derek: 29:18

We like to hyper focus on the sexuality issue while overlooking the economic and political aspects that created the world Nietzsche and Marx observed, and the world that we so often perpetuate today. Sexuality isn't the only area where there is fluidity. It's always easy to see the evils in others, but we are products of the same society as those in the trans movement. Therefore, it's likely that we have the same basic philosophy, we just enact it in different areas. Areas we don't highlight and areas in which we self justify.

Derek: 29:51

And honestly, areas which impact a whole lot more people on a whole lot larger scale, right? Political and economic injustice is so big and so atrocious and so damaging. It doesn't even compare to the trans movement or any sexual ethic like that. And so this whole issue of sexuality, in my opinion, ends up being a big sleight of hand so we can focus on some other person's more trivial sins while we continue reaping rewards from the great injustices that we're perpetuating. Finally, I think we should speak up against evil.

Derek: 30:33

I do, right? This isn't something that's saying, don't acknowledge evil where it exists. But I question how we ought to speak. So often, I find that we are speaking up in a will to power sort of way, seeking to own the other group as so many YouTube videos have labeled on them to try to get you to click on them. Right?

Derek: 30:55

We want to prove that they're wrong rather than listen and understand and disciple. And that's what people need, isn't it? Discipleship. Discipleship is a mirror. The other side needs a mirror held up in order for them to see themselves.

Derek: 31:10

But to hold up a mirror, we need to be a certain type of people. Kierkegaard says of this mirror, It is true that a mirror has the quality of enabling a man to see his image in it. But for this, he must stand still. If he rushes hastily by, then he sees nothing. End quote.

Derek: 31:30

We're trying to hold up a mirror to various groups of people out in the world, but we're waving it in their faces and we're so busy bouncing around from tirade to tirade that they can't see themselves in it. And if we just so happen to stand still long enough to give them a stable image that they could look on and contemplate and digest, it might just be that we'd begin to see ourselves in that mirror as well. And in seeing ourselves, repent and become the type of people that others in our community would want to sit down with and hear from. That's all for now. So peace and because I'm a pacifist, when I say it, I mean it.

Derek: 32:33

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