Episode Transcript
[00:00:07] 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.
This is the Truth Exchange podcast, a preliminary symposium edition where we discuss the upcoming event, every square inch. Taking Christ's lordship to the streets with our guest speaker, we're taking a glimpse into the theme of the symposium as well as the subject of their talk. I am your host, Joshua Guilo, along with Doctor Jeffrey J. Ventrella. And today's host is. Or no, not today's host. I'm the host. Today's guest is Thaddeus Williams, who is no stranger to the Truth Exchange podcast. He's one of our senior fellows, truth exchange scholars. He teaches at Biola as well as Trinity College, and he also faithfully serves and ministers at a number of church regularly. So, Thaddeus, welcome back to the program.
[00:01:14] Speaker B: Joy to be with you, gentlemen.
[00:01:15] Speaker A: You know, it's funny, every time we have you on the program, it seems to be that you're writing a brand new book. It seems like you are the nt write of Biola.
[00:01:25] Speaker B: Wow. I will brandish that as a badge of honor. Okay, I got two more. I got a. Yeah, it's been about one a year for the last couple years. And I got. Yeah, two more planned for the next two years.
[00:01:40] Speaker A: So the last book you wrote was don't follow your heart?
[00:01:43] Speaker B: Yep.
[00:01:44] Speaker A: And then you have a new one.
[00:01:45] Speaker B: Coming out, which is revering God, subtitled how to marvel at your maker.
[00:01:51] Speaker A: Okay.
[00:01:51] Speaker B: Which is sort of like packers. It's in the tradition of packers knowing God.
Piper's desiring God sprouls holiness of God, sort of for a new generation, just giving them a sense of the grandeur, the infinity, the infinite worthiness of worship and reverence of the God very much in that tradition.
[00:02:18] Speaker A: Could you describe a little bit about that book in the terms of, is it a correcting false notions and errors that are out there today in the culture, in the church? Is it building something within the church for a new generation who maybe didn't grow up around Ji Packer or RC Sproul?
[00:02:37] Speaker B: All the above.
Yeah, all the above. And it's really coming from the perspective that, you know, we're looking at all these, these culture wars raging all around us. You know, you have pronoun controversies swirling in the culture. You have right to life abortion questions that have been turned up to eleven ever since the Dobbs decision, you have is the nuclear family, the western prescribed nuclear family, something that we need to dismantle. You know, according to BLM's original credo you have, how do you deal with racism? How do you define racism? There's all these issues that percolate above the surface underneath.
I'm arguing that what you think about God is the question behind the question behind all those other questions. Underneath all of those issues, I think where the church is going wrong, we have a shrunken view of our infinite creator. A shrunken view of our infinite creator. And that will manifest itself in the way we engage these, these cultural issues.
So this book, it really follows on the heels of my last two. I had confronting injustice, dealing with racism and the right to life and social justice questions and socialism. And then the last book, don't follow your heart.
Tackling expressive individualism in the culture. This book is sort of like completing the sentence of those last two to say, look, we need to get back to an orthodox, a historically christian view of the grandeur and glory of God.
[00:04:33] Speaker A: Okay, could you unpack a couple words for us and for our listeners? One I'd like to hear about, what do you mean by to revere or reverence? Isn't that a bit of an archaic, just a churchy word that might turn people off? The other word I would like you to unpack is the word glory.
[00:04:51] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, great question. So reverence is one way to render the hebrew term, which is the most oft repeated imperative command in the scriptures, to year out to fear the Lord, to revere the Lord, to be awestruck at the Lord.
In a deep sense, it's living authentically before the reality of the creator creature distinction as maybe one way to capture what's going on with that word. You are living authentically before the creator creature distinction. So that's going to entail a lot of things. It means I'm going to recognize that the sovereign meaning maker over my life, the one who defines me, the one who is supreme over defining the meaning of my body in my biology, the one who is sovereign over the meaning of marriage, the one who is sovereign over the meaning of life, is not me. I'm a creature.
It's the creator. So a year, a reverent approach to life is going to be truly authentic before the fact that God is God. And I'm not so wrapped up in that term, is the sense of admitting our own finitude and acknowledging the supremacy, the godhead of God. That's part of it.
Part of it as well is a sense of something that's been unfolding in the. The field of positive psychology for the last ten years. And positive psychology, it's a burgeoning field of research.
And one of the things they're finding is, you know, instead of negative psychology, here's a psychosis, here's a neurosis, here's, you know, post traumatic stress disorder, here's schizophrenia. Positive psychology is focused on. But what is happiness? What is fulfillment, what is flourishing? Questions like that. And one of the interesting findings that in reality, is just another case of science catching up to what scripture has been saying for millennia, right?
Is that we need. We don't just want.
We need to be awestruck. We need to be captivated by something bigger than ourselves. And that's actually a crucial ingredient or component to mental health, to spiritual health, to human thriving. And so there's a researcher out here in California by me at UCI University of California, Irvine, a guy named Paul Piff. And he's done research on it where he subjects his students to what he calls elicitors of awe. Now, that might be a photograph of the aurora borealis, right? The northern lights. It might be a sweeping vista of the Grand Canyon of Yosemite's half dome at sunrise or something like that. And what he found is that by triggering that sense of awe, people became less narcissistic, you know, less self centered, more what he calls pro social.
And they cared about creation more. It just. It helped break people out of their heads.
What David Foster Wallace called our skull sized kingdoms, tiny little skull sized kingdom. And awe has a way of breaking us out of that prison cell. And then in Arizona, Arizona State University, another positive psychologist, Michelle Schiotta, found fascinating study.
She had people read terrible articles, articles just ridden with fallacies, non sequiturs, just terrible, terribly argued pieces. And then she would subject them to elicitors of awe. And she found that in a mental state of awe, people spotted fallacies better. Their cognitive faculties functioned higher, and they were able to see through propaganda, and they became less dupable, which is just fascinating.
Again, science catching up to scripture here we were created for y'ra. We were created to be awestruck. And when we're awestruck at our creator, there's tons of research that just, if you are trapped in your skull sized kingdom and depressed or anxious, just getting out into God's creation is so filled with pointers, with signposts upward to the transcendent, that it helps pull you out of your own head.
So long. Answer to a short question. But when I'm talking about reverence, I mean recognizing the creator creature, distinction, plus being awestruck at someone infinitely bigger, more interesting, more holy, more creative than yourself, that's great.
[00:10:15] Speaker A: And that ties in really well with, I think, of the Westminster shore catechism question. Answer one, which is question one? And the answer is, what is the chief end of man? Which is to glorify God and to enjoy him forever, which flows right within that vein of reverence.
[00:10:35] Speaker B: Well, real quick on that before you move on to the next question. Understand the context. Know what time it is has become a phrase all over the interwebs these days. Knowing what time it is, part of knowing what time it is is to see how our culture, a gallup poll found that it's 84% think that the chief end of man, the meaning of life, is to make yourself happy. 86% said to make yourself happy. Do what you desire most. In a whopping 91% of Americans, that's a super majority, said that the answers, to find the answers, look within. And so we are in the context where expressive individualism has become the cult, the mainstream pseudo faith that has inverted Westminster shorter catechism question one to the chief and demands to glorify and enjoy yourself forever. And we're at a time in history now where people are buckling under the weight of the stupidity of that dogma, which is a prime time for us as christians to come back and bring it back to the truths of Westminster and the truths of scripture, that there's so much freedom, so much liberty, so much joy to be had in making God rather than yourself the center of existence.
[00:11:58] Speaker A: Excellent. Doctor Ventrella. I could see why you picked Thaddeus to be a part of this symposium and combining having reverence for the God who is supreme over all. Hence the theme of our every square inch belongs to the supremacy of Christ. Did you want to add anything to the conversation before we close out?
[00:12:19] Speaker C: No, I'm just always in awe of Thaddeus's comprehensive understanding. He sees from 30,000ft, but he doesn't stay there, he applies it. And so I'm delighted that he is going to be keynoting the end and the conclusion of this, because he understands, as also a law professor as well as a theology professor, that there are ethical considerations here. But what's underneath those, what ties them together, either rightly or wrongly, is going to be this vision of not of a transcendent principle, but of a personal goddess who's the creator and I, I think of, you know, some of our listeners are into classical conversations or whatever, so they study the greek myths. So you have, you know, the Odyssey. And so Odysseus doesn't want to get taken in by the Sirens. And so what does he do? He has his boys tie him up, you know, stuff his ears, you know.
[00:13:14] Speaker A: I'm not going to move.
[00:13:14] Speaker C: I'm not going to move.
[00:13:15] Speaker B: No matter how crazy I go, I'm not going to move him.
[00:13:17] Speaker C: So he knows what he's against.
But you look at another myth that's similar, Jason and the Argonauts, and what does he do? He brings the best musician of all time to sit and play and sing the most beautiful song. It's not what we're against. That's our own strength. It's what we're for. And so what Thaddeus is talking about really is putting the godward orientation of our lives as a priority, which of course is consistent with seeking first protest the kingdom of God and so on and so forth. So I'm, I think this is, the bookends of the keynoters is going to be outstanding. And he just has an excellent way of, for all of our audiences, we'll have students there, we'll have, you know, gray hairs there, and it ought to be just a very rousing way to make that happen. So thank you, Thaddeus, for coming. We're going to enjoy you and our fellowship.
[00:14:12] Speaker B: My first think tank, my 1st, 1st symposium where I can join the gray hairs, thanks to I got a couple streaks in my beard here, so I've graduated, so I'm excited. You, jeff, Doctor Jones and everybody else. Fun.
[00:14:31] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:14:31] Speaker A: Thank you, Thaddeus, for joining us.
[00:14:33] Speaker C: Here we are.
[00:14:34] Speaker A: Join us for Truth exchange on the 30th through the 31 August in Pasadena, California at Providence Christian College, where we're going to explore. You're going to be equipped and be challenged to take Christ's lordship to the streets where everyday life is lived. Every square inch of creation is Christ's. So let's live like it, and let's do it together.
This concludes the recording of the director's 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.
