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.
[00:00:31] Speaker C: All right, well, we are back for a second season of the Director's Bag. Dr. Ventrella, it's good to have you back on the program. Of course.
[00:00:39] Speaker A: Thank you. Happy New Year.
[00:00:41] Speaker C: Happy New Year to you. We had a wonderful Christmas tide at the Gilos. I'm sure the Ventrella's was full and an eventful and exciting time. You had grandbabies in the house, right?
[00:00:54] Speaker A: We did not. We did not. We, we had multiple grandbaby was on the east coast, but a lot of face, timing and all that sort of thing. We had a number of children rotating in and out of the household and we were able to feast quite. We are still feasting on some of the things I smoked. So it's all, all good.
[00:01:13] Speaker C: Excellent. We have a number of questions for the program today. We'll start first off from an inquirer on the X or Twitter website. And he writes, what is a nation and what is a biblical worldview towards them?
Is there a difference between people groups and nations? And should we have any allegiance to the preservation of nations or people groups and if so, to what length?
[00:01:41] Speaker A: So that's a very insightful question and I appreciate it for this reason, among others, is that the idea of using a word in one context may not be the same connotation in another context. And so in the New Testament, the word that's often translated nation is traditionally something like ethnoin. It refers to people groups, not what we commonly understand nation today in English to mean nation states. The notion of a nation states fairly recent in Western civilization. There were of course vast kingdoms, there were empires, but the nation state really came out in many respects following the Protestant Reformation and so forth and being able to then cement creeds and those sorts of things. So we had the Treaty of Westphalia which applied to nation states in choosing which religion would be dominant and all those sorts of things. So that's pretty important. The second question is, should we be concerned about preserving? And I think he means here is people groups. And that can be a dicey question for this reason. Certainly as Christians who are to love and protect their neighbors, if there is a genocide afoot, I think we do, as Christians have an obligation to stop that sort of evil. So anti Semitism, the Armenian Jewish genocide The destruction of the Uyghurs in China. So though we're not doing it to preserve a people group primarily, we're doing that to stop existential evil that's going on there. So there's a different rationale now. There are people, and they are adjacent to the Christian nationalists. They are kenists, who believe that. That things like interracial marriage should be discouraged, if not illegal, because it dilutes the people group, it taints the blood. To put it in pedestrian language, that, of course, is an unchristian position. There's nothing in the scripture at all that says that marriage must be along the lines of ethnicity. In fact, the Westminster Confession of Faith, which addresses marriage, it says people of all types can marry. It's very explicit that the Reformed confession requires, or I should say, understands and contemplates that all sorts of people may marry unless they are under some disability, meaning that they are previously married, they have an unbiblical divorce, and are attempting to remarry, those kinds of things. But that has nothing to do with. With ethnicity. In fact, the confession is exactly the opposite on that. So when it talks about preserving people groups, I think that genocide targeting a particular group, we would pose that and thus preserve them. But that would be a consequence, not a reason that we would engage in that way.
[00:04:53] Speaker B: Yep.
[00:04:54] Speaker C: Daniel from Ventura, California, writes, Dear Dr. Ventrella, looking forward to the resources TXC puts out this year. Thank you, Daniel. I just signed up to be a monthly donor and it isn't a whole lot, but I don't want to see the work of truth exchange go anywhere. Thank you, sir. I had an issue with one thing you said in the recent dicta, and maybe I read it wrong or missed something. You were implying.
You wrote, while paganism minimized the human mind, the Enlightenment elevated it to a position of ultimacy. Indeed, man did become the measure of all things.
I have found the opposite to be true of paganism in general. And I have also considered the Enlightenment a part of the pagan movement, that is worship of the Earth versus the Creator. Sure, you have the hippie kind of let go and let earth or let go, let God goofy kind of mantra out in the market world of ideas. But I see pagans elevate deep thoughts thinking. What are your thoughts, Doctor?
[00:05:59] Speaker A: Yeah, well, thank you, Daniel. And let me echo Joshua's gratitude there for your support for us for engaging with our ideas and making this a reality. We do need financial resources, and it's really important that we have those resources to continue to create content and to inform the public, equip the church and protect the future.
Well, the idea is, I think you're correct, Daniel, to see that certain instantiations of the enlightenment were simply pagan. They idolized man, not the creator. And I think that that is correct. The burden of that prior dicta was to show though that some people think that the enlightenment is an answer to the kind of earthbound voodoo, spell casting pagans or Yoda and Star Wars, Joseph Campbell, sorts of things of, you know, bypassing the mind and getting rid of it. Problem is, on the Enlightenment side, the solution they offer is the primacy of the intellect, which is not a Christian position as well. We are not simply brains on sticks as humans. We are fully integrated humans. That's what it means to be made in the image and likeness of God. So I think it is true you could find examples of paganism elevating the mind. But the contrast that we were trying to draw there was that the mistaken notion that, oh, if we get rid of this typical pagan idea of let's get rid of the mind, don't think, only do feel the force and all that sort of thing, that the answer is rationalism. And both rationalism and irrationalism are sub Christian in their applications to God's world. And so we must be thinkers, but we also must understand that we're not only thinkers.
[00:07:57] Speaker C: Sam B. From Kansas City, Missouri writes Dear Truth Exchange podcast I was reading in Bavinck where he states the pagan world is a quote. The pagan world, especially in its philosophy, is a pedagogy unto Christ. Aristotle, like John the Baptist, is the forerunner of Christ. It behooves the Christians to enrich their their temple with the vessels of the Egyptians and to adorn the crown of Christ their king with the pearls brought up from the sea of paganism.
How does the TXC hermeneutic oneism, twoism ply here? Typically I read things inherently dangerous in the pagan world that Txe has talked about.
Pagan dualisms, yoga, enneagram and so on.
[00:08:44] Speaker A: Yeah, that's a very insightful question. Of course, Bob Inc's one of our heroes here at Truth Exchange. One of our scholars, Dr. Brian Madsen, is in fact a Bavinck scholar. And so Brian is very adept at knowing the nuances and things. I would answer the inquiry this way. One is we need to take into account, and Bhavik certainly does, the notion of common grace. And so while the certain pagan systems are pagan all the way down in God's common grace, they actually have insights and they actually have Things that we can utilize, taken captive to Christ. And so I think what Bovink is telling us here is that nothing happens by chance and that nothing is without value as we consider it with the Christian worldview. Notice he's tying everything to Christ. He's saying that as a pedagogy, it's teaching us to understand Christ more fully, not to substitute Aristotelian things, but to learn from them and see how they in fact point to why we need Christ, which is Paul's idea in first Corinthians, right? The Greeks, the Christian faith is foolishness. The Jews want a sign. And so the idea there is that we learn from those things. It's almost like when Paul talks about parts of the Old Testament, saying that these were written for our example. Well, what parts? Well, that includes Pharaoh as well as Moses. And so we are to learn from them in terms of the truth exchange hermeneutic. What he's referring to there of course, is the truth exchange for the lie. Romans 1:25 is the exemplary passage concerning that, the creature creator distinction. So I think the idea there is that when Aristotle contemplates the unmoved mover, for example, well, that's certainly not the God of the Bible, but it certainly is some form of transcendental that tells us that we can't just live and move and not consider something that is above us. So I think we take that from the Apostle Paul when he was engaging with the Stoic and Epicurean philosophers at Mars Hill. He was familiar with their literature, he knew what they taught and then he subverted their language. Hey, in him. And we live and move and have our being the earth, the unknown God that you're worshiping, all that sort of stuff. So I think that's how Bovink's understanding it. I could be mistaken there, but I don't think it's a light switch. It's pagan, therefore there's nothing to be gained by understanding it. I think that's the mistake. I think Paul's warning in Colossians tells us do not be taken captive by philosophy and empty to steep according to the traditions of man. In other words, don't just rest yourself in pagan thinking and thinking. It's equivalent to Christianity. It doesn't say. He doesn't say don't study it and understand it. In fact, he says you're going to have persuasive arguments cast against the Christian faith. You need to understand them and undermine them. And so it's not a admonition not to study philosophy. It's to study it with the mind of Christ.
[00:12:13] Speaker B: Yes.
[00:12:13] Speaker C: I was reading in St. Basil the Great the other day and he says that Christians can gather pagan nectar to make Christian honey.
[00:12:28] Speaker A: Ooh, nice metaphor. Yeah, yeah, yeah, certainly true.
Because let's remember the pagans borrowed it from the very good creation.
[00:12:38] Speaker B: Yes.
[00:12:39] Speaker A: We're just reclaiming it. And when Bavinck talks about taking the plunder of Egypt, absolutely. You know, we as Christians, as God's people, will inherit what the earth restored earth.
[00:12:53] Speaker C: Amen.
[00:12:55] Speaker B: This concludes a recording of the Director's Bag. For more resources from Truth Exchange, please visit. 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.
