[00:00:06] Speaker A: Welcome to the Truth Exchange podcast. This is a weekly program with Doctor Jeffrey J. Ventrella where he answers questions from subscribers around the globe, answering questions about worldview, cultural apologetics and other miscellaneous items. I'm your host, Joshua Guillotine, and this is another edition of the director's Bag.
[00:00:29] Speaker B: This is the Truth Exchange podcast and a preliminary symposium edition where we discuss the upcoming event with our speakers giving a glimpse into the theme of the symposium as well as the subject of their talk. I'm your host, Joshua Guillo, along with Doctor Jeffrey J. Ventrella. Today's guest is the founder of Truth Exchange, executive director Doctor Peter Jones. Welcome back to the program, Doctor Jones.
[00:00:54] Speaker C: Thank you.
[00:00:54] Speaker B: Our symposium this fall is every square inch taking Christ's lordship to the streets. Join Truth Exchange the 30th through the 31 August in Pasadena, California at Providence Christian College, where we will explore, be equipped and be challenged to take Christ's lordship to the streets where everyday life is lived. At this event, you will be challenged and changed for God's glory. And you will not only view the world in the same way in which you leave it, but you will be challenged to live as a believer and ambassador, because every square inch of creation is Christ. So let's live like it, and let's do it together. Doctor Ventrella, you preface this symposium with a quote from CS Lewis. There is no neutral ground in the universe. Every square inch, every split second is claimed by Goddesse and counterclaimed by Satan. Abraham Kuyper has also said something similar where he said, there is not a square inch in the whole domain of our human existence over which Christ, who is sovereign over all, does not cry mine. Why the theme of this symposium for this time?
[00:02:11] Speaker D: Well, thank you, Joshua, and so good to see our founder here as well. The key thing about that is that if you see what's going on in our culture, we have a lot of christians, well intended, who have been trapped by forms of pietism and reductionism on the lordship of Christ. But the fundamental exclamation, the fundamental profession, is that Christ is indeed Lord. And the implication of that is exactly what Lewis and Kuyper and many others have taught. We just kind of lost focus. So the idea here is to go back to the foundation, Christ is Lord, and show that he is relevant and his lordship is relevant to all that we're called to do. There is nothing that is secondary or of less importance than what we're doing now. Christ came that we might have life and have it abundantly, and that starts now. And so he's called us to fidelity, even in what we do on a day to day basis with ourselves, with our bodies, with our relationships, and ultimately with our entire culture.
[00:03:22] Speaker B: Excellent. Doctor Peter Jones, you will be addressing the sexual implications of Paul's binary and cosmology, and he'll show how that impacts every square inch. Could you take a little bit of time for our listeners to understand, well, what is a binary cosmology? Or more specifically, what is Paul's binary cosmology?
[00:03:44] Speaker C: I'm going to be speaking about marriage, and marriage is a beautiful thing, but that includes, of course, how we see our sexuality. And clearly marriage, well, it used to be marriage only implied heterosexuality until in 2015, the Supreme Court chose to legalize what they call gay marriage or same sex marriage. That's made marriage into something quite different, because in biblical marriage, you have two people who are both different and unique. No, not unique. Unified. Different and unified in one covenant, whereas in same sex marriage, you have two people who are the same, unified in a covenant of marriage. And that's all the importance of the difference between sameness and difference.
And I believe that the universe is built on difference, that we can see things clearly when we see the difference, and that that's how God created the world and that's why he created males and females as both different and yet unified in marriage. So what do we mean by sexual, sexual binary? Well, it obviously means binary means two.
And so we have not one kind of sexuality, but two kinds of sexuality, male and female.
That binary is important because God tells us in scripture that we are, that he made us male and female in his image. And of course, that means that we reflect God's image, which is both unified but different. The three persons of the Trinity are distinct, but they are unified. And that's what marriage reflects, that we are distinct but unified. And so we are no longer living in the image of God. When we join things that are the.
[00:06:19] Speaker B: Same, can one have a worldview that is void of marriage or sexuality between as a binary system?
In other words, a lot of the young people today are talking about a massive spectrum of what gender is. When you have that, a non binary system, anything kind of goes and it becomes quite dysfunctional, I guess. How would you then speak to young people that come to you with saying, no, I think it's a little more complex than just two?
[00:06:53] Speaker C: Well, you can sort of imagine what things should be. But if you go back to scripture, which sort of establishes the truth about human beings, then actually twoness is the crucial element in all that we do, really.
I take the crucial nature of twoness, as we all do here on Romans 125, which says that we either worship creation or we worship the creator.
And if you worship creation, you really are worshiping the notion that we're all one, whereas if you worship the creator, we're not all one. God is different than us, and so we have to take account of difference and we call that two ism. So God is distinct from us, and that's how we bear his image in us, by recognizing that distinction, that he's the creator and we are creatures.
And that distinction is absolutely essential to the way we understand the world, the way we understand human beings, and really everything about existence. So that text, Romans 125, is crucial to way we think about human beings.
[00:08:28] Speaker B: Paul's argument sounds like sexuality is quite key to understanding how worldview is put together, how worship is understood rightly. So if you blur, if you ruin the distinctions of sexuality, or if you get sexuality wrong, you're obviously then going to get worship wrong. Or if you get worship wrong, you're going to wind up getting sexuality wrong.
[00:08:52] Speaker C: That's right.
[00:08:53] Speaker B: So therefore sexuality is something that's going to continue to matter. It might be some fatigue from some of our listeners as they look at the issues in the news, from school supreme courts to federal issues. So some christians might be facing fatigue as this is another. We have to keep dealing with sexuality. It's not going to go away. How would you encourage our listeners, and this is for you, Doctor Vercel and Doctor Jones, how can our listeners be encouraged to continue engaging on this, well, brittle and hot contested topic?
[00:09:30] Speaker D: Yeah, well, I'll go first. One of the issues I think that helped sustain us is to recognize that it wasn't the christians who came up with the so called clobber verses or tried to make everything about sexuality. The reality is the progressive left and the neo pagans have been pushing this and requiring a response from christians. And this, I get great encouragement from that, because if you look at, at the history of the faith, it was the gnostics who were goofing around with who Christ was. And it took the church several centuries to come up with precise language based upon the scripture to articulate orthodoxy from non orthodoxy, truth from paganism. And I think in the same way, these sexual battles have required us to go to the woodshed and to articulate things in a way that are more acceptable. Yes, these things. Marriage as a creational norm used to be accepted, but now we have to explain it. And, you know, one of the things I think is very helpful is to say, look, on the legalized abortion question, it took us nearly 50 years to turn that tide with respect to it. When we started that battle, the largest denomination in United States was the Southern Baptist convention and they were pro abortion. So that's a problem. But I. Things have changed because God is faithful.
[00:10:59] Speaker B: Doctor Jones, would you like to add anything to that on ways that christians can live as beacons in the lordship of Christ dealing with this issue of sexuality?
[00:11:08] Speaker C: Well, you see, two ism. That is, the distinction of sexual existence is the only thing that saves us. Because when God created Adam, he said it's not good that he should be alone.
That doesn't mean it was not good that Adam feel miserable about himself. It meant that if Adam was alone, he could not create civilization, which is what God told him to do, gave him a woman.
And then here were two persons, different and yet united, able to produce the civilization on which we all depend. So heterosexuality has the incredible ability to create babies and thus to create the next generation, whereas homosexuality does not create anything.
[00:12:16] Speaker D: That is a great point.
Oz Guinness says that contrast is the mother of clarity. In other words, difference is how we understand and can make distinctions that matter. And when I'm talking to younger people, oftentimes I'll tell them everyone in this room has a respiratory system. Everyone in this room has a neurological system. Everyone in this room has a circulatory system, but no one has a sexual reproductive system. Rather, every person in this room has one half a reproductive system. And that's by creational normativity.
[00:12:58] Speaker C: Isn't that interesting that that's the way God did it in order to show the importance of twoness?
[00:13:04] Speaker B: Yes, Doctor Jones, Doctor Ventrilo, thank you for being on the program again. The upcoming event is every square inch taking Christ's lordship to the streets of at Providence Christian College in Pasadena, California. It will be August 30 through the 31st. For more details you can visit
[email protected] again, that website is www.truthletterxchange.com.
[00:13:34] Speaker A: This concludes the recording of the directors bag. For more resources from Truth exchange, please visit us online at www.truthexchange.com. you can follow us on x as well as Facebook for more updates and content related to Truth exchange. Be sure to join us next week for more questions from the director's bag. I'm your host Joshua Guillo, and this is the Truth Exchange podcast.
