Episode Transcript
[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.
Dr. Ventrello, the writer asks, I was or states, I was disheartened to read the dicta about Calvin Yu I'm a member in a Reformed denomination, let us just say, is apostate by smaller Reformed denominations because of its embracement of female clergy, its stance on LGBTQ marriage, and so on. I've chosen to stay in this church because of my history with it. I was baptized here, married here, my children were baptized here as well, and so on. I've put up with a lot in this denomination, and thankfully not all of it has come into my local church. However, I sense the winds of change blowing. Would you share your insight on when it's a good time to leave a church? Many thanks for your ministry to the church abroad.
[00:01:23] Speaker A: Well, I appreciate the sentiment there, and thank you for taking the time to express yourself in that way.
These are more pastoral questions that we're talking about because you haven't said that they have utterly extinguished the gospel proclamation. There's been barnacles for sure, put on. It sounds like the local congregation remains solid and has not bowed the knee to these innovations and departures from robust orthodoxy. But let's understand the question of sexuality, which we addressed in the Calvin University issue, because Paul says that these views and practices shall not inherit the kingdom of God are very serious. They are, quote, salvation issues. And so I think that the first line here is you've been in that church a long time. Sounds to me like you probably have some credibility with the various leaders. You don't want to be a gossiper or going around the, you know, the side, but you should talk to the ordained leadership and express your concerns about the direction of the denomination, about the stance of the local church, and so on and so forth. Now, if you still had young children in the congregation, that would be another factor because you as a mature Christian have more of a force field to not that you can't be affected by error, but you're less likely to be affected by error. Whereas your young children, you teach them to obey your elders, to honor their fathers and mothers and so on and so forth. And they hear, you know, Kathy the deaconess say something that may be out of left field, but because there's this tension between, oh, I want to, you know, honor my teachers and so on and so forth, that it can become problematic. So there are many factors that go into the question of departing. A church used to be called that. The Presbyterians were called the split peas because of the drop of a hat. They would form a new denomination, and that's still kind of the trend. So I think we have to be careful of the pension. The one hand, breaking fellowship for any and every reason. On the other hand, watching ourselves boil to death, saying, well, it doesn't affect me, it does affect you. You're part of a community. And so you have to be very aware, very apparent. And I think this is a time for candid dialogue, not threats, but spirits of inquiry. And if. And if they think that these departures are no big deal. I remember when I departed my First Reformed Church, I was told, well, that's just happening actually in Grand Rapids. That's not going to affect us. The synod won't do anything. Lo and behold, I think a year and a half later, they went down that pathway. And ultimately, though I had departed the congregation, that congregation ultimately left the denomination for a more faithful one. And they were. They kind of came to me with their hats in their hands going, well, you were right. You know, you were young, but you were right. Okay, well, here we are.
[00:04:39] Speaker B: Here we are.
Next up, we have a writer Asked Dear Txt podcast. In the. In the news, there have been stories about the Supreme Court dealing with the LGBTQ curriculum. I have wondered if opting children out of the LGBT curriculum limits our witness and also withdraws our ability to teach our children to counter such thinking. What are your thoughts?
[00:05:05] Speaker A: That's a great thing. So I think the listeners referring to the Mahmoud case that was just recently argued, some colleagues of mine in the. The broader religious liberty segment, the Beckett Fund, argued that case.
It involves a plaintiff who's a Muslim who objected to lgbtq. That was a strategic matter. So you didn't have some of these more overt, you know, culture war ish sorts of issues. It's an important point, though, because the parents have been entrusted by God for their nurture to raise their children in the nurture and admonition of the Lord. And I just have to say, in this day and age, the vast majority of public education largely puts your children in the Companion of Fools. And Proverbs warns against that. And so you have to be very involved if your children are in publicly funded education, particularly in more blue states or where. States where the teachers union has great push and power, the opt out is Certainly something you want to do to protect your children against, for example, sexually explicit kinds of instruction, those sorts of things. Now, this question of, quote, ruining your witness or losing a witness, I think I would turn the question around a bit and I would say who's witnessing to whom?
Because you don't send out someone who's never been to boot camp into war. That just becomes a meat grinder. Rather, we, you know, we ought to be strong in these areas and that are engaging in it. And it's not really a kind thing nor a prudent thing to send our own children who are ill equipped, harshly formed, into a situation where they're going to be propagandized and inundated with hour after hour of gospel and God denying teaching. And I just think that's an unwise way to think about it. I think the, quote, witnessing component is far down the line. And one of the best ways to be salt and light is to pull your children out of the public schools, run for public school board. Like one of our colleagues at Truth Exchange, her husband is on that school board. He's now chairman of that school board and is doing great work, but he's a mature Christian. And so we don't want to throw our children in there for the weekend.
And I'm not saying you're doing this, but pat ourselves on the back and look at the witnessing going.
[00:07:43] Speaker B: Right, right.
[00:07:44] Speaker A: That's just not a way to educate your children.
[00:07:47] Speaker B: It seems that their parents are also at a disadvantage where they drop off their children for six to seven hours and then the children come back and the parents only have an hour or two before it's bedtime or maybe three dinner and all those things. And they have to hope that the children are regurgitating and articulating what they have learned in the school system. And then the parents have to counter that and hope that the parents are countering rightly the arguments being laid out.
So all I have to say is that the disadvantages for the parents and not for the schools.
[00:08:22] Speaker A: Well, that's really right. That's a great point. You're usually playing defense parent with respect to that. You're always searching, you're always sniffing. And think what that does to the parent child dynamic, you know, don't you trust me, dad?
Can't I think on my own? Yeah, but you don't understand and appreciate. Well, Billy, you know, doesn't go to church and he's one of my best friends.
[00:08:47] Speaker B: Wow.
[00:08:48] Speaker A: Oh, my. Yeah. You know, all that sort of thing. So you're Basically setting up an oppositional relationship between parent and child. So it's really a catch 22, if I can use that. Yeah, a popular phrase. So I think in this day and age, I'm not sure it's a disciplinable, you know, church fence because I think there's many, many situations that are involved in there. But I think that the local churches ought to be robustly supportive of the parents obligation to raise their children and educate them in the nurture and admission of the Lord, including assisting private schools that are Christian, assisting home education, these kinds of things. And the church can't simply say, well, that's, you know, not church work. Certainly it is, because the community of the believers involves the next generation. And particularly when you're dealing with, in the, you know, Anglicanism and reformational kinds of theology, children are part of that congregation. That's right. The sign of the sacrament is applied to them. And so the ordained servants in fact have an obligation to assist them and thus to assist their parents as well.
[00:10:04] Speaker B: Amen. Last up is a question.
I was talking in my small group about the podcast and we began discussing Christian culture and multiculturalism along with liberalism.
So one question is, is liberalism the product of a Christian culture? Second question, would you consider multiculturalism the end product of liberalism?
[00:10:34] Speaker A: Yeah, those are, those are great questions and I'm glad you're tackling them and wrestling with them. Let's, let's get our definitions a little more sharp here. What do we mean by liberalism? Today's culture? Liberalism oftentimes refers to a left of center political orientation. I gave up years ago using that, calling these folks liberals or whatever because they're really progressives, they're really political progressives. Liberalism is actually something that comes from a Christian ethos and background because it venerates, in a sense, the individual. It validates the individual. Oxford Dawn Larry Siedentop, who's no Christian, wrote a book called Inventing the Individual. And that book is fascinating because he shows that it was not the enlightenment of that created this notion of liberty, of letting the individual have its own dignity and so on and so forth. But actually it predates it by millennia. And it was the Christian worldview. Luke Ferry also did the same thing. He's a pagan philosopher atheist out of Paris demonstrated that from a philosophical standpoint, it was really the Judeo Christian understanding of Imago DEI that allowed these things to develop and grow and so on, so forth. So liberalism is not a dirty word in my view. I think it's, I think, understood correctly. It's a very important understanding of how we order ourselves under the dignity of, well, the validation of the dignity of the human person.
Multiculturalism is something very different. Multiculturalism is a form of political polytheism. What it says is there are no differences between cultures, that the government, the state's view is to validate each and every instantiation of culture, that all cultures are valid, all cultures are equal, all cultures must be separated.
You can see that that stems from not the Christian ethos and liberalism, but rather it stems from critical theory, this idea of leveling hierarchies, that there's not one culture, that that should be preferred to another. And I simply ask the question, would you rather have North Korea or would you rather have South Korea? There's a commonality of peoples there. Clearly the cultures are quite different. One is utterly statist. The other is a fairly recent democracy that allows for liberty. And so multiculturalism says just the opposite. It says we must celebrate and validate each and every instantiation. So, hey, we believe in philanthropy. That's great. Well, we believe in burning widows to death. That's just another form of culture, so on and so forth. And so what it does is it jettisons any normative standard for contrasting, comparing and evaluating contrary or competing cultures. And that's just simply erroneous culture. God does. Creation culture is what mankind does. Fallen man creates bad cultures oftentimes, and we ought to be able to critique those. Multiculturalism ignores that there are deficient cultures, that there are cultures that ought to be addressed, called to repentance, and so on and so forth.
[00:14:12] 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.
