Episode Transcript
[00:00:03] Speaker A: Okay, now start.
I wanted to. Were all of you here last night? Most of you here? How many were not here last night? That would give me. Okay, This might be a little difficult for those of you who weren't, because I thought we would discuss some of the things that were brought up last night.
Let me recap quickly for those of you who weren't, and also for those of you who were.
The principal concern that I'm trying to stress in these two lectures, and we'll work up to much more specific content this afternoon, is that apologists have to be sensitive not only to the presuppositions, to the ideas that are dominant in modern worldviews, that are alternatives to Christianity, but we also need to be more alert to what I call the sensibility or consciousness, the spirit, the mood, the attitude, the posture of people.
That's much more elusive and more difficult to grasp. And you only begin to grasp it as you begin to compare different consciousnesses.
The way we experience things, the set of expectations we have of life, has much to do, and I would argue as much to do, or maybe even more to do with the kinds of intellectual choices we make than does the kinds of philosophical presuppositions we start with.
Let me think of a couple of quick examples that I didn't mention last night.
I alluded last night to Lewis address his inaugural address at Cambridge, where he talked about the chasm of difference between modernism, the era of modernism, literary and artistic modernism, and every other age in the history of the arts and the history of Western civilization, saying that that was the greatest change.
In that same address Lewis talks about, he argues that the single most significant event in changing the modern consciousness, in creating the modern consciousness, was the rise of the machine, the rise of, I should say, the omnipresence of the machine.
It is a historical novelty for us to be surrounded by so many mechanisms.
This air handler here is doing something, and there's constant background noise from it that you're not even aware of. Only an audio technician would be constantly plagued by it.
There are qualities to this light that you're not aware of because we're so accustomed to them.
But for someone unaccustomed to the mechanistic aspects of it, it would be quite jarring.
There are constant conveniences and annoyances that machines bring with them that change our manners, that change what we expect from life. But one of the things that Lewis points out in that essay is that the most dominant effect is the machine introduced into consciousness a preference for novelty.
The new machine is always Preferable to the old machine generally, because the new machine does work better than the old machine. If you have a computer that was made this year, you would probably prefer it to a computer that was made in the mid-70s because of its greater efficiency.
[00:04:02] Speaker B: Efficiency.
[00:04:03] Speaker A: But efficiency was not always regarded as the highest of virtues in human experience.
With the rise of the machine, we have a new metaphor, in a sense, the metaphor of novelty, which comes to dominate popular consciousness.
Lewis says, I forget the exact wording, but let's see. I'm trying to think of the. It's rather poetically stated, and I hope I can recall it.
I don't think I can think of it, but I should have written this down. He talks about how.
Oh, I know.
He takes the term stagnant and compares it to the term permanent.
And he said, at one time, in culture, ideas and values that were rooted in tradition, that were rooted in history, were regarded as permanent values.
After the machine age, people began to use the term stagnant to refer to the sense of constant commitment to a set of ideas or values.
Stagnant with all of its, as Lewis says, malarial overtones.
So once it was a good thing. Permanence suggests solidity, and something you can rely on, stagnant suggests something you want to spray.
And he argues that that is largely a product of the unconscious role that machines play in our lives. Now, that's one example of the difference in consciousness wrought by what the sociologists and historians call modernity.
Another is, with the rise of technology came the advance in not only communications technologies, but especially in transportation technologies, which meant that one was no longer restricted to living where one grew up and staying there. I remember when I was in seminary, a church history professor who was rather colorful, explaining, giving his kind of nutshell description of life in the Middle Ages. And he claimed, he said, that someone once calculated that the average person in the Middle Ages only met about 30 people in their entire lifetime. Now, they may have been 30 rather nice people, but nonetheless there are only 30 of them.
And the consciousness that we take for granted because of our mobility, not only the fact that we can get 30 miles away to attend a lecture, but the fact that we don't assume that we're going to live in the same region or necessarily even in the same country in which we grew up, what that does to our sense of commitment to the past, to the buildings and the topography of the place in which we grew up, as well as our sense of commitment to the family and to the people with whom we have lived, is Just astounding.
So that that technical advance creates a change in consciousness which encourages a philosophical development of modern individualism.
If it's conceivable technically for me to move from place to place and to be relatively rootless and have no prior commitments that are necessitated by my staying in one place, then it's much easier to embrace the ideas, a worldview, a philosophy that argues that individuals are essentially laws unto themselves and ought to be left alone, that my self fulfillment is a higher good than my sense of obligation to my family.
Those are a couple of examples. And I really think that Christian apologetics has not been successful in articulating and being sensitive to the way in which sensibilities have changed and that sensibilities drive worldviews.
We can come up with a wonderful critique of non Christian worldviews. But unless we're willing to address the sensibilities that continue to testify to the reality or testify to the apparent validity of those worldviews, then we're just clanging cymbals.
Sociologist Peter Berger talks about plausibility structures.
What he means by that are institutions or traditions or even structures, physical structures, physical styles, forms that lend plausibility to a particular belief system.
And he argues, for instance, he makes the claim that Mormonism is more plausible in Salt Lake City than in Manhattan.
It's not more credible, that is, it's not more logically consistent, but it's more plausible because of the institutions that exist. The structures that exist in Salt Lake City lend a certain amount of plausibility. You've been there for a while. Mormonism seems like it's just part of the landscape.
So it tends to become normalized.
And there are many institutions and habits and structures and traditions and conventions in our own lives that lend plausibility to worldview that is antithetical to Christianity.
And I would argue that much of our popular culture, with its stress on immediacy, with its stress on immediate fulfillment and immediate gratification, is a plausibility structure that works against the Christian notions of patience, Christian notions of forbearance. The Christian commitment to permanence of Christian truth works against even the very idea of truth itself.
So that when we uncritically try to step into or mimic those sensibilities in order to gain a better hearing. If we start behaving with the same kind of sensibilities, or put on the consciousness of our age so that people will respond to us, what we are doing is endorsing those plausibility structures, encouraging those plausibility structures, but which undercut the reality of the message that we're trying to present.
I mean, it's like organizing hookers for chastity or something.
I mean, one could conceivably do that. One could conceivably hire a number of prostitutes and pay them a certain amount of money to do public service announcements on behalf of chastity.
But depending on how they were dressed and what their demeanor was, there would be some, some what psychologists call cognitive dissonance involved there.
And I think that much of evangelicalism's attempt to be relevant to the culture is guilty of precisely that problem.
It presents a great, great problem for us because we believe we have a message that ought to be communicated to as many people as we can, that people are perishing for want of this message.
And so we look for means and sometimes for formulas that will reach the widest number of people.
But in so doing, have we in fact used forms that are working against the very kind of discipleship that we're trying to encourage? And in fact, are we in fact sustaining institutions and sensibilities and forms that over the course of time will virtually wipe out the possibility that anyone can even hear the message that we're speaking today? One of the things that ought to be of great concern for us is the extent to which Christianity has been reduced in conservative circles to a substitute for, for some self help movement or other.
So Christianity is basically the best self help thing there is. I tried est, I tried getting Rolfed, I tried all these other things and then I tried Jesus.
And now everything's great, now everything's in line. I'm centered.
When Christianity is reduced to a self help mechanism or when it's marketed as a self help mechanism, usually people who do that never intend to be reductionistic. They don't intend to limit the gospel, but they say, well, we've got to market this thing. We've got this great product, we've got to get it out there.
And this is what the people are buying. People are into self help. So if we can market Jesus and as the real thing, if we can market Jesus as something that's better than drugs, this was the thing in the 1960s and 70s.
Ralph Carmichael's musical the Natural High. Back in the late 1960s, which was one of the first kind of Christian folk rock musicals, the idea was, well, let's sell Jesus as a substitute for lsd.
Well, when that happens, then we ought not to be surprised that the gospel is read in a truncated and limited way.
Similarly, if the gospel is sold merely as the best remedy for social change, whether by conservatives or by radicals, the gospel is reduced to that and no longer makes transcendent claims on us and no longer makes claims on us about our own spiritual need, then what we are doing is sustaining the very.
Kinds of sensibilities that are now the great obstacle to the gospel. And I don't know, I don't think there is any easy answer to this. And I suggested last night, and I firmly believe that part of what a post Christian culture that term means anything reasonable, that part of what it may mean is not just that Christianity is no longer embraced by people or that Christianity is no longer the principle informing worldview of our culture, but it may also mean that in time Christianity becomes so totally implausible because of the fact that the culture is creating an environment in which the essence of the gospel is nonsense. It's meaningless, not just foolishness to the Greeks, as Paul would say, because of the content of it.
It's always foolishness.
The content of the gospel has always involved a certain measure of apparent folly to unbelievable, but foolishness in the sense that it literally cannot be believed because the structures of belief and the mechanisms of the human mind have become so atrophied and twisted if one's consciousness is so bent. I think that's kind of one of the cultural lessons of Romans 1 and 2. I won't take it out now, but look at Romans 1 where Paul talks about this to 2 deterioration supposedly of an individual. But he does talk about they. He talks about groups of people where there's this deterioration because of the rejection of the gospel. And eventually they do things that are evil and they praise those who do things that are evil and God eventually turns their minds over to this folly.
And I think that part of the warning of that chapter is that cultures can come to a point where there is no audience for the gospel. I think that we don't. That should not be that incredible suggestion. We can look at cultures in our own day, where in many Muslim cultures for many years prior to the advent of more relations between Muslim cultures and the West, Christian missionaries would go for years without seeing any converts because of the fact not only there were some pretty serious plausibility structures involved there, your head would get chopped off if you converted. Now that's a rather ominous plausibility structure. But I think that we ought to take seriously and not be tempted to say, well, no matter what the culture is, we ought to be able to reinterpret the gospel in some form to reach it. We have to know what the Bottom line is, and know that there's a point beyond which we can no longer contextualize the gospel.
Maybe I will stop there and we'll start some discussion.
[00:18:27] Speaker B: Excellent example.
[00:18:28] Speaker A: From the Scripture on this is familiar.
[00:18:32] Speaker B: Acts 17:23.
Paul entered Athens.
For as I walked around and looked carefully at your objects of worship, I even found an altar inscription to an unknown God.
Now, what you worship as something unknown, I am going to proclaim to you.
What Paul did there was. He took the context.
I walked around and looked carefully at
[00:18:58] Speaker A: your object of worship.
[00:18:59] Speaker B: He understood to some degree what was going on, picked up on it, went from there. And of course, what we have following is one of the finest examples of the presentation of the Gospel in the Book of Acts, particularly for us, in that the other presentations of the Gospel were to Jews who already knew about
[00:19:18] Speaker A: a creature of God.
[00:19:20] Speaker B: And so Peter and Paul at the other times didn't bother with that here he had to do that. And he presented the Gospel very clearly.
[00:19:27] Speaker A: Right. And I'm reminded there of Lewis's remark that I quoted last night that we ought not to think that a post Christian person is effectively a pagan person.
Lewis says, I mean, Paul had it easy. He was ministering in a pagan culture, that's easy.
But to minister in a post Christian culture is much more difficult because as Paul said, as Lewis says, that two people who worship different gods have more in common than those who worship a God and those who worship none.
The concept of a monotheistic single creator God is much more plausible to the Greeks that Paul was speaking to in Athens than it would be to many people in a modern culture because of the concept of transcendence was there. The concept of eternality was there. The concept of judgment was there.
The concept of spirituality was there. There were so many concepts that are essential to understanding God that were involved. The concept of guilt was there.
Paul could take that and say, this is knowledge you already have. You can't quite put it together because you don't know the person of this God.
And the concept of moral seriousness was.
I mean, the fact that these people came to hear this itinerant Jewish lecturer and were willing to engage him in moral discourse.
That was a cultural phenomenon that is virtually impossible to find in most modern cultures today, where generally moral discourse is regarded as purely the expressions of the political preference of the speaker and not any kind of transcendent pursuit of truth.
So I think we have to.
I mean, I think Paul's speech there is an excellent example, but it's also a warning because of the fact that he was speaking to a good pagan audience instead of a. Instead of a post Christian audience.
Does that distinction make sense?
[00:21:50] Speaker B: It makes sense, but what I keep wondering is how do we go about changing society so that the sensibility,
[00:21:59] Speaker A: right, we take over. We take over wtop, that's the first
[00:22:03] Speaker B: thing we do,
[00:22:05] Speaker A: and take over Ted Turner. We kidnap Ted Turner and Arsenio hall and we throw them in a closet.
The Arsenio hall show, by the way, I think, is a wonderful display of what seems to be kind of a new kind of sensibility. Maybe. I don't know, maybe I kind of. Maybe I'm reading too much into the mythology of it. But that's definitely something different than what happens with David Letterman. And I think there's a striking dumbness to it, for one thing. It's kind of. Anyway, what do we do? Well, the first thing we do. I think that the first thing we do is reaffirm our belief that human nature is a constant, that human nature hasn't changed, and that there's still some possibility that in the providence of God, that law written on the hearts of man that Paul talks about in Romans 1 and 2 is still getting through in some way, if not through cultural mechanisms that testify to the plausibility of the truth of the gospel, at least through some inner sense of what people know to be the case because of their reflection on their own humanity and on their own lives as moral creatures.
The conscience is still there.
But conscience, conscience is a function of what we would theologically call common grace.
Conscience is a function of what God does.
I mean, if reformed people believe that, left to their own devices, people would behave totally unconscientiously and ultimately destroy God. That sin is so powerful an agent that the only thing that keeps people from being totally destructive is some mitigating force by the work of the Holy Spirit restraining their sin.
And that God in his providence, chooses to restrain sin to a greater or lesser degree for his own purposes.
And I would think that one of the reasons for the restraint of sin is because God's ultimate purpose is building his own people, Building, Building the church.
And so, in a sense, the cultural setting in which the church exists, God is using to build the church.
So he's either bestowing more common grace in the restraint of sin in order to build up the church, or he's not restraining sin in order to build up the church in order to put the church through trial, in order to put the church in a position where it's its identity as an Alien, sojourner, pilgrim, people is more poignantly felt.
So we start with the idea that the way that the conscious expression of conscience is a reflection of God's common grace.
Now, what are the means of common grace?
That is, what are the mechanisms whereby God does affect the conscience in addition to directly through the work of the Spirit in some spiritual way?
Classically, theologians have said that culture itself is one of the mechanisms of common grace.
That popular opinion that conventions, that traditions serve to restrain sin and serve to inform conscience.
And when the culture becomes more and more depraved, in a sense, God has removed a means of common grace.
But we want to start with the fact that first of all, God can work immediately in restraining sin. And does.
We also want to start with the fact that human nature is a constant.
And so that not only is conscience there, and no matter how atrophied, conscience is an organ that's still capable of functioning. But we also want to believe that.
There's something metaphysically about being a human being that requires that certain feelings, certain responses are natural, no matter how distorted the culture, no matter how unnatural they feel in the cultural sense. So it may seem very unnatural in a certain given cultural setting.
To be generous, it may seem very unnatural to even care about living in some.
To care about one's own continued existence in some cultural settings.
There are some things that people still respond to. Let me finish the third point and then take another question.
The next thing the church has to do is the church has to structure its own life so that it is a plausibility structure for the gospel, so that in its life and in its character and in the quality of its cultural expressions, which is what I'm particularly interested in, in the quality of its relationships that.
It is perceived as being, as expressing the kind of culture of transcendence that is no longer evident in the culture at large.
Now, that means.
That means we may become the 20th century equivalent of the Amish. I mean, that's how we may be perceived.
I don't think our goal is to try to be separate from the world in the sense of not having any attachments to the world.
But we have to have the goal of being perceived as, in a sense, an ethnic group within the world, an ethnos, a peculiar people.
And to the extent that we're not perceived as being a peculiar people, to that extent, it's impossible for us to exert any kind of influence on the culture at large.
That is precisely what happened when Christianity first began to influence the culture.
That the quality of the lives of the people of the church. I mean, there was a whole lot of power politics involved too.
But there was something about the Christian community that testified to the superiority of Christian belief, Christian commitment that eventually swept all of Europe and pushed aside paganisms of the day. Now again, the backdrop they were working against was paganism.
I don't know that we can be as successful against a post Christian culture. Yes,
[00:29:12] Speaker B: I would hate to see you go right back to that because that's,
[00:29:17] Speaker A: that's a good point. I wonder, in fact, I sometimes wonder if we're going to see such a plurality of sensibilities that I think there are some, there are emerging, there is emerging a new kind of paganism. But there are a whole lot of people who think that that's Baldernash. I mean, there are a lot of secular people, a lot of secular people who think that Shirley MacLaine is as wacko as I think she is.
And these are the real modern people. In a sense, these are the hardest ones to reach.
The other problem is that the new paganism is more relativistic than the old paganism was.
Sure, right.
Well, yeah, they are. But like I suggested last night, there's a big difference between conscious, deliberate, devoted worshipers and unconscious worshipers. And so, I mean, it would be difficult to make the kind of appeal that Paul made on Mars Hill, on Wall street and say, I see you have erected this monument to, to your God money.
And I think people would just say you're cracked because there's no God involved here. Now, some people at some level may be stricken and realize, yeah, I do worship money, but it's not self evident. Whereas in Paul's case it was self evident that this was in fact a being that they were attempting to understand.
So I agree with you that I certainly wouldn't want to put all of our effort in confronting so called post Christian culture.
I do think, however, that the differences between the new paganism and the old paganism are significant and that they have. Those differences are understandable to a large extent by understanding the effects of modernity themselves, which have created what I'm calling post Christian culture.
[00:31:18] Speaker B: Yes, I wanted to ask.
There is a beat.
[00:31:25] Speaker A: I would like to say also that there's a being that plans to judge us. Unless and say, I would not want to start with. In a sense, I would want to start with saying there's a being that holds us accountable.
Right, right.
Because I'm afraid that a lot of the presentations that just stress the love of God read like varieties of self help.
So I think we want to say that there is a transcendent being that is holding us accountable now that holding us accountable can be read as a form of love.
But it's not just a being who's there to make us feel better about things.
But you're absolutely right that the personality of God is a great testimony to the reality of the personality of man.
And I think one of the most disturbing things to see in a lot of disciplines today is the attempt in the 60s we had the death of God theology. There's actually now a death of man theology that arose in the 1980s, which was basically attempting to do the same thing to the concept of man. I mean, death of God wasn't that some metaphysical being breathed his last and no longer exists. Death of God, as Nietzsche formulated, was saying that the idea of God no longer has any cultural relevance or power. It no longer has any currency. And we have to live as if God didn't exist, whether or not he does.
The death of man theologians, who fortunately haven't yet made the COVID of Time magazine, but they really have a lot in common with other disciplines which are trying to say that the concept of human nature is as much an artificial, arbitrary construct as the concept of God was. And now that we've gotten rid of this concept of God, we now need to finishes the job and get rid of this concept of humanity, of man, of human nature as being some distinctive thing.
And so you see it in everything from as diverse as literary theories called deconstructionism.
In fact, the death of man theologians usually are called deconstructive theologians.
You see it in the animal rights, in some of the rhetoric surrounding animal rights.
Recent article in the New Republic by one of the editors in the New Republic, which basically said that the animal rights people are right insofar as there is nothing morally significant about being a human being. That is that there was no moral criteria different from a baboon in a human being.
So there's nothing distinctive about man.
So the idea of the reality of my own personality is something that ought to be important to everyone. And the only way that the reality of a human personality can be maintained ultimately is.
Is if the reality of the personality of God is maintained.
I mean, it's not. I mean, I think. Was it Dostoyevsky or who said that Bertiev. I think about destroying God and then destroying man. That if you destroy God, then you have to destroy man. This actually some 19th century, I can't remember somebody posed Nietzsche.
But if we can restore Again, it works the other way. If we can restore God, that is, if we can become human plausibility structures for the existence of God, for the personality of God, then the personality of man is one of the consequences of believing that God is there. So it's kind of a backwards argument in a sense, but you're absolutely right. It should be terribly powerful. But all that we do should exhibit that sense of personality then, so that we shouldn't engage. See, I don't think churches should buy computers that have voice synthesizers that call people and give evangelistic messages, okay? If we believe in the reality of the personality of man, the personality of God, and you can now buy this hardware and software.
And the great thing, there was an ad in Christianity Today for one of these and it says, this computer will make personal invitations to your church.
That's the one thing it won't do.
And it calls all the numbers and you program it with all the exchanges in your neighborhood. And they guarantee a certain response rate of people who will come. I think even a lot of direct mail, a lot of churches now are big in direct mail marketing.
That strikes me as having more than a whiff of impersonality, of mechanistic view of human beings. No matter how successful it is in terms of numbers, at some level, the communication has got to be, you're something that belongs in a Skinner box, okay? You're something that we understand as being a creature of stimuluses and responses. And we're going to push your buttons and get you to come to our church to worship our personal God. Now, there's something wrong in that argument. Yes, I agree with you.
[00:37:08] Speaker B: But I think that the problem is more ingrained in American Christianity than that.
[00:37:13] Speaker A: And a few years ago I talked
[00:37:17] Speaker B: with a sister in the Lord and instead of going to church on Sunday morning, she watched the television and doing that. And inside me rage, okay, just rage. It was not rage at her, it was rage about the situation.
And I thought about it for a moment, though for a while, it took
[00:37:37] Speaker A: me time to calm down.
[00:37:39] Speaker B: That the typical Protestant Sunday morning service is the major focus on it is the sermon. We have the hymns, the offerings, whatever, and the service.
And if the Sunday morning, what is euphemistically called worship in most of our churches, from my standard isn't worship.
[00:38:02] Speaker A: It is, you know, sermon service.
[00:38:04] Speaker B: That if it is really just to hear the sermon, sure. Then we might as well have the best Thanksgiving sermon, have it on television as far as what's going on. Right.
My point here is that there's a To me, Sunday morning works as two things, the worship of God and the fellowship with fellow saints. And in the church I'm in, we have that at least available. And I would suggest that most of our churches even go good church
[00:38:35] Speaker A: to
[00:38:36] Speaker B: a certain extent, are at least in danger, as they would fall into the danger of not having that.
[00:38:41] Speaker A: Sure, I agree. And I think that partly that's a function of a tendency toward rationalism, which is not to be confused with the desire to be reasonable.
But I also think that the extent to which even the Sunday morning worship is a focus of the life of the church, not only the extent to which the sermon is a focus of worship, but the extent to which the service is the focus of the life of the church, is a problem.
My brother is a pastor and told me that a couple of years ago he had a church service scheduled and there was some big playoff game on television. I can't remember even what sport it was, but there were a number. My brother's quite interested in sports, so he was close to the young men in the church who were also interested. And he said, well, look, you don't have to miss the game. You can videotape it and watch it later. And one person asked in all earnestness, why don't we just videotape the service so we can watch the game while it's going on?
And somehow the idea that seeing the game as it was happening was much more important than seeing the worship service as it was happening. In auditing the worship service.
Another example of this tendency toward impersonality, at least I think it's an example, a lot of churches now, as new congregations, are hiring marketing consultants to come in and advise them on everything from the name of the church to what the church program should include. And I got a mailing from one of these consultants recently, and he was talking about how successful it was. I was really impressed by, was a church in California that was located in a beach community somewhere near the ocean. And the guy said, look, he said, two things you have to go for when you name a church. Don't call it something like St. Paul Methodist or Knox Presbyterian.
Keep the denomination. Keep the denomination name as part of the name. That's name brand recognition. That's good.
But stay away from saints. Stay away from anything antiquated. Why are people living in this neighborhood to be part of the beach? So you call it Newport Beach Presbyterian. You get name brand recognition. You get the resonance with people of why they're in the community. Great, great name. And they had a church where they actually did that. And the thing that got me most was they said, okay, now your church activities, what are you going to have? See, who are these people demographically? Mostly yuppies, two income families.
These people, do they cook? They never cook. When they entertain, they eat out.
Therefore, no potluck suppers.
Don't ever have suppers where people have to bring food because these people don't know how to bring food.
So if you're going to have a dinner for these people, make sure it's catered or at a restaurant.
Now, I thought to myself, I was thinking of injunctions about hospitality and scriptures. And I thought, now, is this a contextualization or is this a denial of the obligation to enjoy hospitality?
Now, the problem is this marketing consultant, if he were here, he would say, yes, but nobody's going to come to your church if they feel like they have to bring succotash or something to a potluck supper because they're going to feel alienated.
And at that point, I think he's wrong. I think he's wrong, in fact, because I think that it might actually be an exciting novelty. But I think, shouldn't conversion and shouldn't Christian discipleship involve a certain amount of novelty? I mean, shouldn't it involve us in activities that are, in a sense, unnatural? That is unnatural to what our culture tells us is not natural, but natural to who we are as human beings. And I think as human beings, we have a natural desire to do things like prepare food for others. I mean, that's very primal. And rather than, you know, it's like, my name is Ken, I'll be your brother in Christ. For tonight, our special.
[00:42:56] Speaker B: I have a question about his possibility. Stressing all day,
[00:43:00] Speaker A: well, again, you don't want to be an icon of implausibility. I mean, you don't want to. I mean, you may be that, but you don't want to strive to be that. Obviously, I think I would, depending on whatever the interest. And this is.
I mean, what kinds of topics are there conversations about? Are there conversations about movies? Are there conversations about books they're reading? Are there conversations about current events? Are there conversations about.
What I would do is. I would. Okay, I would try to take something in, whatever. I mean, unless you're just talking about bowling scores or boyfriends or something. I mean, if there's something substantive, there ought to be some way in which you can say something that would be provocative enough to direct, if not to direct the entire conversation in that direction, at least to plant some seed of Doubt or something without your being a wet blanket. Yeah.
And again, if you give some thought to striking some resonance with who they are as human beings and what their concerns are. So, I mean, you could take popular movies, I think movies are great conversation starters for that reason, and find some aspect of a film that either you liked or didn't like that said something about human nature, or said something about relationships, or said something about history or whatever the topic is, and try to pull in at that.
Nothing springs to mind immediately. Unfortunately. As an example, Sometimes what I like to do is show people the logical.
Yeah.
And I think you can do that in a disarming and yet non confrontational way very often. I mean, I think you can sometimes do it in almost a very offhand way.
And I think that can be very disarming at times.
But I think it's possible. I mean, I worked at National Public Radio for eight years, which is probably.
I don't know what paper you work with.
But we did have the advantage there of some people who were kind of good old fashioned humanists who at least still believed in some values of some kind, so that it wasn't entirely frivolous and entirely cynical. I think. Let me say one thing that have time to develop because we've got about 30 seconds left. I think one of the greatest dangers in terms of sensibilities that we face is falling into the cynicism of the age. I think that in fact there has been some written on this. In fact, of all places, Spy magazine, the most arch cynical publication I can think of, did an article last year with Chevy Chase on the COVID I think it was last year or the year before the article was called Isn't it Ironic?
I think playing on the old Gershwin. Isn't it romantic, something that.
Something from a musical from the 30s.
But critics have identified the movement called postmodernism in art and literature as being a mood literature that has a mood of irony.
The best statement I've seen on this was from Umberto Eco, who wrote the Name of the Rose. And in a book he wrote called the Postscript of the Name of the Rose, which was a collection of short essays about how he wrote the book and other things.
And he had a piece in there where he said that the mood of postmodernism is a mood which puts everything in quotation marks. And in fact, on the COVID of Spy magazine they had Chevy Chase going like this.
It's a mood that can't. That has no guilelessness. It's a mood that has nothing that can be stated sincerely.
Eco said that in previous literature a character might say, I love you madly.
In postmodern literature, a character would say, as a Barbara Cartland character might say, I love you madly. They can't bring themselves to say it because they realize they're. They're so much aware of the fact that what they are about to say might be regarded as stereotypical or cliched.
So it's this consciousness of cliche which becomes so overwhelming that one can't say something honestly and sincerely. And I think that's one of the most difficult things. And if you look at children's television now, children's television has always had a certain amount of irony involved with it because of the fact it was produced by adults who were kind of putting in jokes for themselves, little in jokes for other adults. When I was growing up, George of the Jungle, which is on Tom Slick, remember, there was a whole lot of really hip irony going on there. But now Pee Wee Herman is an ironist par excellence. Everything he does is layered with all this level of irony. But it's irony that's now being watched by 2 and 3 and 4 year olds who don't have any awareness of the cliches or conventions that he is satirizing. All they now know is that top layer of irony and cynicism.
So that is something that terrifies me because the pure, sincere message of the gospel, I think, is threatened when one can no longer say anything that is pure and sincere.
