Feminism, Wright, and AI... Oh my!

[00:00:00] Speaker A: Foreign. [00:00:06] Speaker B: Welcome to the Truth Exchange podcast. This is a weekly program with Dr. 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 Gilo, and this is another edition of the Director's Bag. Andy from North Carolina writes. Dr. Ventrell, I've noticed from your footnotes to actual portions that you've mentioned NT Wright and even quoted him in light of his recent statements on abortion. When does the wisdom factor apply for not recommending a theologian? This could be a principle even from the patristics to. To Dabney and to N.T. wright. Do we always have to say disclaimer not all in, but I like what so and so says, end quote. [00:01:02] Speaker A: Yeah, no, I really appreciate that and that's a very candid question. Thank you for it. And thank you for reading the footnotes. We did a specific podcast on how to read the dicta and by very strong design, the footnotes are designed to propel people into greater thought and to deal with some of the side issues. So I'm grateful that at least one person in the universe is reading the the footnotes. But you raise an important question. Footnoting, it does not connotate an endorsement of the person. Rather it points to something that they have said that is relevant to the ongoing discussion. So we have to understand that citing someone is. It may be in contradistinction, it may be in support, but I think it should be understood by people of goodwill that it's not a blanket endorsement. Having said that, on certain situations we do have to be careful and we may want to warn and I've done that in some of the other dictas where I've said, you know, we don't take their position at all, but this is an important point or an important survey, those sorts of things. As to specifically Tom Wright, who I don't know, I've greatly benefited from a lot of his scholarship, but not all of it. We have some disagreements on a number of issues. I was disheartened to see his brief post on where he's talking about or was asked about abortion in cases of rape and incest. And what I heard him say was that in principle you would never do that, but there are circumstances and conditions where that might be something to occur. I think that's mistaken. I think that's morally inappropriate and absurd actually. But he left himself a little room with respect to that. So yeah, what do you do with that? You are correct. Because if you simply blanketly assume that everyone that you reference has picture perfect ethics and picture perfect theology, you will be greatly mistaken. And so I think that with respect to people like that, we need to do a good job, particularly if someone's in the news, to distance ourselves or simply find an alternative citation. A good example of that, a person I've benefited from in their writing and scholarship in many ways is RJ Rushdoonie. But Rushdoonie had some very weird and mistaken views. And so because he can be a lightning rod, I. I've always found a way to use an alternative source for the same point. So I don't know if Tom writes in that category, but he might be. And so we just need to understand it carefully. I will say this in defensive right When Marcus Borg in the Jesus Seminar was creating all kinds of mischief and fostering frankly deep what we call now deconstruction, cynicism and doubt concerning the New Testament, concerning the Gospels, concerning Jesus resurrection, Tom Wright was the only guy who was taking him on and could take him on tit for tat and intellectually do it. The reality is many evangelicals murmured about the Jesus Seminar but did not have the horsepower to deal with it. So yeah, right, right. Was being used mightily by the God in. In certain aspects. And he's mistaken on some others too. So here we are. [00:04:45] Speaker B: It seems like this also comes from kind of a pastoral kind of question where it's are just concerned about the lack of discernment. [00:04:55] Speaker A: Yes. People don't know what they don't know. And when I. People ask me about Tom Wright stuff, I said, well, if you're well read and well formed, right. Will benefit you. If, if not you can be taken in. Because he's a very charming guy, he's very articulate, super smart. So I think that there's kind of what I would call readiness levels, which again, to your point, we need to read deeply and broadly so we understand. I'm very fond of something Oz Guinness often says and is contrast is the mother of clarity. And so if you're only reading from one author or only reading from one publishing house, you are not an educated man or woman. You really need to continue developing and grappling with these kinds of issues and having the humility and the posture of modesty to kind of go, huh? And I remember a longtime friend, an OPC pastor, told me, he said he used to pray this prayer, help me, Lord. I think I'm right. I found that to be. I don't always follow it, but I think that Getting rid of hubris is a really important. I think I'm right on this point, right, man. I need help because I can be arrogant, I can be narcissistic, I can sin with my tongue. And so I just think that. And I'll mention his name. He's godly man. Dan Dillard, pastoring in Bend, Oregon. But yeah, I think that that's kind of important. [00:06:28] Speaker B: Janelle from Boulder, Colorado, wrote to the Truth Exchange podcast. I'm stay at home mom and use your podcast for my teens WorldView class. Recently, AI has come up in discussion from it being a useful tool to demonic activity. Some have cited CS Lewis, that hideous strength. I recently read that teachers and academics are finding it becoming more and more problematic as students are becoming more dependent upon it for art, music, and their own assignments. Is this the time for Christians to rise up and subvert AI? My prayer is for you all and your ministry. [00:07:10] Speaker A: Yeah, that's a very thoughtful question. And certainly our prayers go out to the Boulder community after that terrorist attack, which, let's be very clear, was religiously motivated. So worldviews do matter. We believe in structural pluralism, that everyone should be treated well under the law and the same under the law. We don't believe in substantive pluralism, meaning that all religions are the same or equally valid. They certainly are not. And the streets of Boulder endured some horrible things by these. This attack from this person who was in the country. So not a good thing. So let's talk about AI. That. That would be at least probably 50 or 55 different podcasts, because there's a lot of perspectives on this, and you're right to flag it as something Christians need to be engaged with. What I would say is that we need to be engaged, but we need to be informed before we are engaged. I think there's a lot of temptation just to say something and we may not really understand kind of the basis of what we're getting at there. These things can be very valuable tools, and we're not to be techno technophobes, but they can also create laziness, they can create dependency, and they can suspend our thought. So we've got to be very careful, as with any technology, with respect to using them. I think people know that I have the privilege of teaching in a number of institutions as well, and that's a big deal with the administration on how do you deal with AI, both in terms of pedagogy, does this help people learn? And in terms of the honor code, are people cheating because of it? And that becomes Very scary. I, I have to say that we need to be careful because you saw that the recent Health and Human Services report came out and it cited fake studies. My hunch is that those were generated by some AI program that was used. People didn't do their own homework. We're seeing also I think we're going to see, we've seen a number of pastors that have been found out that have plagiarized their homilies and their sermons. I think you're going to have something similar to that where they're just not going to turn their own butter. They're going to say, I need a 30 minute sermon on Exodus 21:4. And they're going to, you know, make the temptation instead of utilizing that as a research component, they'll just kind of copy and paste. And I think that's could be very problematic with respect to it. And so again, what am I identifying? I'm divine definitive, sorry. Identifying the moral actor in this situation, the human. What's the motivation and what's the purpose versus attacking the technology. [00:10:11] Speaker B: So let me use, let me use. Some of our older listeners may be familiar with the TV program Mr. Wizard and say, well, Mr. Wizard, what's wrong with using AI to produce a sermon or to produce an assignment? Because then now I've used a program as a tool and now I'm liberated to do other things that could be more beneficial or good for let's say, society or at home or insert. [00:10:43] Speaker A: Yeah, so I get sermon preparation. I've done a lot of pulpit supply in my day. Are you a form of oral amanuescence? We're not just simply conduits, but we're actually in a sense merging with what God has given us to proclaim. So I think that's part of it. Now, if you're simply saying I need really help. And what are the, the ancient Near Eastern arguments with respect to this particular text? Well, I think AI can do that very, very well. But that's very different than saying I want a sermon on this particular passage. I think perhaps an experienced expositor may be able to, to utilize that and then conform it. Like for example, someone's been preaching 35 years, all their sermons are up on sermon audio. They've gotten very, very ill. They have less prep time or there's been a, a difficulty in the congregation. Pastors are supposed to pastor their sheep, by the way, so there something comes up and they have less time. Well, I'm sure you could develop a, a constraint on a search and say, you know, I don't, I don't have any of these, these tools. I don't use them at all. I probably should learn though. Chat GPT please, in my voice, do a sermon that is similar to what I've done in the last 10 years. That might be a way to utilize that faithfully. And then if someone edits it well, so I don't think it's per se wrong. Although I can see the budget committee going, hey, we're paying you to prepare sermons and now you're spending 10 minutes instead of, you know, 30 hours or whatever. That's a separate issue. But I do think there can be a liberation as long as it's not. Well, you know, I'm, I'm working out and I'm working on my platform and I've got my side for profit business. Well then I think we have another kind of discussion aside from AI Wes. [00:12:50] Speaker B: From Sand Springs, Oklahoma writes Hey TXC podcast. I was reading in the article on the impotent manosphere news state, this vibe is often trumpeted by purported Christians who condemn the trash world supposedly spawned by feminism and other bugaboos in scapegoats. Whether real and imagined, this attitude reflects a blame casting crisis, responsibility, end quote. West says he agrees, but is not feminism and the ambitious career woman abandoning the home and the lack of father stepping up to being men part of what Anthony Bradley was getting at for our listeners? Part of the dicta was quoting a bit of Anthony Bradley's article. Men and women abandoning the creative order has created a real deal deficit in both sexes. Appreciate your time and labor. [00:13:46] Speaker A: Yeah, so I think you're, you're right that any ideology that is contrary to God the Creator and God the Redeemer is going to be injurious to human flourishing. And certainly feminism is an ideology that is damaging. And of course there's about four different waves of feminism, the first of which actually was beneficial because it opposed abortion and those sorts of things. So we have to be careful there and not get too general. But I think that it is certain an important point. The idea here will though in dealing with the manosphere is not to abandon our criticism of feminism or to anyway endorse it, but to simply fight the fire where it's burning. Today we're seeing the manosphere and the theobros is kind of a loose network opposing some real deficits that have occurred because of feminism and, and the lack of men following what they ought to be doing. And I get it. But the trouble is we have an overreaction and so we've been trying to address that and it's causing some great concern because you're having young men having a distorted view of, of what the nature of the human person is. And they have this bifurcation almost in a classical sense that men, you know, have washboard stomachs and you know, go battle for honor and all this stuff. But of course you don't really see that in Scripture. [00:15:20] Speaker B: Right. [00:15:20] Speaker A: So let me put it this way. Any definition of masculinity and any dish, definition of femininity must apply to throughout chronologically one's life, geographically, wherever men and women appear and throughout every age. And so we've got to be careful not to think we're retrieving some ideal golden idea of either masculinity or femininity, whether that's the 1950s or 550 BC. We, we need to be very careful. We don't absolutize some historical manifestation of, quote, what it means to be a man, what it means to be a woman. But, and I don't mean that as a lecture, I, I, I think that you're right that feminism is, is detrimental. I think that the lie told that women have bought is that you can have it all. That's completely false. That cannot be the case. Women have babies, women carry babies, women, women nurse babies. And so there's certainly trade offs there. This is not to say that having a gainful employment is necessarily by a woman is necessarily sinful. That can't be the case. As we've seen in scripture, widows have a particular place there. They are to be cared for if their families don't help them, and so on, so forth. And the idea of making a few shekels by, I don't know, let's say Lydia dying robes, she was an entrepreneur with respect to that, she owned her own business, it appears, because she was a person of means. So I don't think an absolute condemnation is, is in order, but I do think the general trend is problematic there. Why are we giving up the blessing of, of having children and rearing them in the nurture and admonition of the Lord, but both by mothering and by fathering. [00:17:19] Speaker B: Yep. Yeah. I have always appreciated the way that you've articulated that, Jeff, especially just in light of Scripture. Just think of the Proverbs 31, Woman, she's busy with her hands, she builds her home, she's considering the field and she buys it, she sells in the marketplace. Like these are all very clear in Scripture. And for some reason the certain crowds that you pointed out they want to just completely jettison that. And those are good things. Those things in Scripture call good. So, anyways, Bill. Bill from New Hampshire says Jeff and TXC has now been. Has been known to address. Excuse me. Has been known to address the LGBTQ issues of the days. For years, I wondered under TXC 2.0, how it would address the Pride Month and its push in the town square. How do we not. How do we not be obnoxious and juvenile boys like the Ogden Webbing crowd, yet call a spade a spade defend for what is true, beautiful and good. [00:18:27] Speaker A: Yeah, that's a good point. You know, we did a dicta a number of months ago where we talked about cultural liturgies, and I pointed out that it's not simply Pride Month, but there's an entire calendar year that's designed to instantiate the LGBTQ idea culturally, not only. And the I. The answer, of course, is, why are they doing that? Because they know that the culture will help drive the law, and so that's what's going on there. So how do we stand against that? We stand against that in the same ways we. We stand against any other deformation of what it means to be human. We speak the truth. We approach people graciously, and if need be, we are Titus 1:9. We refute them and. And shut their mouths intellectually. Not with force or violence, of course. And. And we need to do that. We need to stand up and testify. I remember a number of years ago, one of the leaders in this area who's. Who's. Who's still a chaplain, but a pastor, faithful pastor in San Francisco, who is known in opposing and was sued by a homosexual organ player for not keeping him on the payroll, was sued for that. It cost them lots of money, but they ultimately won. His church was firebombed and all this sort of thing, all those tolerant people, didn't really like people who embrace the gospel. Well, he was called up. There was a person who had been elected to another Bay Area school board who was lgbtq. What are we going to do about this? What are we going to do about this? This is, you know, terrible. Terrible. The homosexuals are invading the school board. And my friend Chuck said, well, are there any divorced and remarried people on the school board? Oh, yeah. Are there any who've committed adultery on that school board? Yeah. Are there any who've been convicted of drunk driving on that school board? Yeah. Where were you then? So we have to. I think the best way to do this is to a fight. Why the where the fighter is, but also have a consistent moral vision, because that's what Paul did. You know, if you look at Romans 1, yes, the actions that are contrary to nature instantiate what it means to worship the creation rather than the creator. But he includes in that the manifestations of the idolatry is not only sexual perversion, but it's in gratitude, it's slander, it's disobedience to authority. And so we need to have a consistent moral witness. And I think that gives us credibility that we're not just quote, as Dr. Jones would say, using clobber verses here, we're putting it in an overarching moral vision for the universe, creature, creator, and those sorts of things. And when we exchange that, then we have the truth versus the lie. So the answer is to have gentleness, to have respect, and to have no compromise. We've got got to be able to speak the standard well. And so that gets us to the. The dicta for this week is being prepared, and some people might be called to focus on LGBTQ. And those kinds of questions that Dr. Jones identified for us decades ago is not because he's fixated on. On sexuality. It's because the Bible tells us that how we behave sexually reflects what we actually worship. And so this is a bigger question. It's an apologetic and an evangelistic question, and it's a worldview question on what it means. Again, as we blur the distinction between male and female, well, we're going to blur the distinction of what it means to be sexually flourishing. And so that's that, I think, is do it. So I think your question hints at one way to do that, and that is don't be just articulating what we're against. Articulate what we're for. The beauty of marriage, the beauty of conjugal love between husband and wife, the beauty of procreation, the beauty of a society that's ordered hierarchically under God. What I mean by hierarchy is that there's rules and there's principles with respect to that. We're not just anarchists. Right? So I think those are some ideas. Now, we could do an entire every square inch on how to do that. I would encourage you some of. Our colleague Mary Weller has done some good work on how to talk to a confused gender confused person there that was considering the trans issue. So there are, you know, granularly particular things to do. But from an overall perspective, we need to understand that we are on the Lord's side. The question is, is he on our side? Right. [00:23:32] Speaker B: As, as some of the corporations and, and stores. And even in the way that television is watched, there's, there's certainly an influx of LGBTQ pro type commercials for, for the listeners out there who, who have young children. Do you recommend doing a type of monastic or monastery type lifestyle where you boycott all programs and televisions and we're just getting our shows from the libraries this month, kids. Or do you let the program go and have the remote handy and discuss with your children what they're seeing visually? What's your take on some of the, those different maneuvers and parenting? [00:24:19] Speaker A: Sure. So I think one question is, are we viewing this stuff for entertainment or is there a greater pedagogical purpose to it? If we're just passively consuming things, then that's a problem. For no matter what age it is, we ought to develop ourselves. Hebrew says we need to develop our discernment to be mature. And so I think that one of the great inventions we're talking about technology is this idea of streaming services where you can start and stop stuff. And I think we should have remote in hand and be able to deal with that. Now the whole, you know, I'm just going to boycott it. As if to say that sin won't enter you, your own heart. Jesus says that which defiles us comes from within us, not from outside of us. Now, are there influences out there? Yeah, of course, course. But I remember Dr. Sproul saying years ago saying that, you know, if you want to be culturally irrelevant, okay, if you're really interested in evangelism, if you're really interested in the lordship of Christ, you need to understand what's going on in the world. You need to understand what's going on in the world he made, which is kind of right. And so I think that of course we have to be, you know, something salacious if there's, you know, tons of potty mouth stuff in there. And what is the age of the, the children? But by the same token, we need to instruct them on this stuff. One of the worst things we can do is not prepare them as, as godly parents to encounter this and let them know. Like a lot of my children when they were late teens or early 20s, did internships and stuff, or lived for a while in, you know, major big Cities, we Washington, D.C. well, if they're not prepared on how to navigate that with different viewpoints and frankly, temptations and all the rest of it, yeah, you're, you're doing a disservice to your children there. Having said that, you know, we watch very little television and whatnot. We find ourselves watching more British shows than anything else, which is interesting because the acting's good. There's usually not gross violence, but there's a huge LGBTQ agenda. They always have to slip that stuff in and are interesting to us. Yeah. [00:26:35] Speaker B: Huh. You know, in hearing you talk, Jeff, about being the wisdom and raising children, there's. There's. And you probably know better than I do, there's GK Chesterton, quote, he said something to the effect about fairy tales. Fairy tales don't tell children that dragons exist. Children already know that a fairy tale communicates that dragons can be killed. And kind of the principle behind that is we're not running away from said issue. So we're parents. We're watching with the remote in hand. We're using discernment. We don't watch. We watch with intention. Right. It's not just flipping, vegging. We're thinking about these things. We're instructing our children. And I always remember one of the think tanks you were talking about the importance of in raising children, and you reminded all of our listeners about the instruction in Exodus and in Leviticus, it says, when you lie down, you instruct them. When you rise up, you instruct them. When you're walking down the street, you're instructing them. It's always as a catechesis is going on, and parents need to do that. They need to not just hide, but be active. [00:27:55] Speaker A: No, exactly right. Intentionality. And then the other thing to recognize is that worldviews are more often caught than taught. And what happens is it's not just the four letter word or, you know, a glimpse of a nude body that's problematic. It's the worldview that's being articulated in these TV shows and narratives. And if you don't have the ability to discern and to explicate what that looks like, what that means, it's kind of like the old poker gig. If you're at a poker table, I'm not advocating gambling, but if you're at a poker table and you don't know who the mark is, it's you. Okay? If you don't know the person they're gonna just fleece, it's you. Well, the same is true here. If you don't understand the worldview, the vision of reality that's coming at you, it's not the. The S word or the F word that's going to pollute you. It's. It's the worldview that's going to corrupt you. [00:28:53] Speaker B: This concludes a 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 Gilo, and this is the Truth Exchange podcast.