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. Montrello, this last dicta that came out prompted a couple of questions and one is from a pastor and he quotes your recent dicta on the pagans, Paganism's welcome mat. And the quote is this. You wrote the survey's demographic breakdown reflects that the church has failed to impact the theological formation of the next church generation, whether pew sitters or the broader population. The theological ignorance is stunning.
Later you quote another author, it could be argued that the primary theologians influencing the spiritual views of America these days are figures such as Tucker Carlson, Joe Rogan, Russell Brand, Jordan Peterson, Megyn Kelly and Bill Maher. End quote. So the pastor writes, clearly the church is failing in its catechesis, but certainly ministers are up against a competition of those who take six days of content and then come in on Sunday with no appetite for the means that is supposed to supply them for the week. How can churches compete?
[00:01:47] Speaker A: Well, that's an important question. And just so our listeners, maybe they haven't read the dicta. When I say stunning theological ignorance, I'm referring to the fact that a very minority of self professed born again Christians even believe in the Trinity, kind of one of the core foundations. So we're not just talking about nits, and that's we're talking about stunning, shocking theological ineptitude and ignorance. And that's a real problem. So getting to the pastor's question, I think one thing I would say is we need to situate everything that we do under the lordship of Christ and his story. Creation, fall, redemption. And to me that's a very comforting way to do it because if you look at the first century church under pagan Romanism, not only with an empire, but with tyrannical dictators in charge. And what did the church do? Well, the church understood the lordship of Christ touches all things, and they deeply catechized new converts and so forth in a trinitarian orthodoxy. And then what did they do? Well, they did things like they were good citizens, they paid their taxes, they honored the emperor, they prayed for those in authority, for the structure, for the government, and even for those emperors who did horrible things. And so the point being is that their actions began a form of catechesis other than the once a Sunday deal. They live the Christian life And if you look at, for example, the early I'll be talking about this in next week's Dicta, the Didache, which comes from the very first century, it talks about the way of life and the way of death. And it shows that public theology was super important, that the church did not simply say, well, that's not a salvation issue, and let their ethics or the culture go to literally hell in a handbasket. And so I think that a robust understanding of the lordship of Christ and his non negotiable story and intention of creation, fall and redemption matters. And then to the point about these other folks, it is true that our people have not only thought the wrong things, they have ceased to learn how to think. And they've been influenced by people who have meager or no theology. And that quote I mentioned referenced that. That's by Dr. George Barna, actually. So what do we do with that? Well, I think we engage. I think we have to ask ourselves the question, why are those influencers, so to speak, so popular? Well, I think one reason is they're addressing the gaps that Christians aren't getting from the pulpit, just to be blunt.
They are speaking clearly. They are speaking with moral categories and confidence. Now, they may be wrong in certain ways, but I think what we're seeing is, as the scripture says, a person can't go to the battle if the bugle's unclear.
And so these people are really sounding the bugle with clarity and it's resonating because they are addressing things that are deeply seated in what it means to be human. What we have done is we've adopted oftentimes in evangelicalism and including in the Reformed community, the idea that, well, we need to get people to belong before they believe. And that's just a false dichotomy. Certainly the early church didn't do that. Early church practice was the catechized for three years before they even applied baptismal waters to them. So I think we need to revisit first principles and I think the pastors then what do we do? Well, I think part of it is the messaging needs to include some of these influencers where they're right in their conclusions. Let's applaud that, but then critique them for not having the right roots of their righteousness. And then where they're wrong, we need to address them, we need to correct them, and we need to warn our constituents about them. And so we need to return to a balanced understanding. And this is again, we need to ask the question one time I said, if your formation only comes from one author or one publisher. You're essentially uneducated. And so what we need to do is to broaden ourselves. And so, as I indicated, the pastors need to really roll up their sleeves and engage with these ideas and show that where the influencers are mistaken or incomplete, that the Christian way, in fact, under the lordship of Christ, addresses all these kinds of issues, whether that's in the public square or in our hearts or elsewhere. And so really the judgment begins with the household of God. That's what the scripture says. And so we need to own it, but we need to understand that every sin has been placed under Christ. And so we say, okay, I'm shaking the dust off of whether it's my abdication or my ignorance, and I'm going to faithfully lead our people in these kinds of issues. The Scripture resonates and teaches us. So a couple of other. I'm getting really in the minutiae here, but one thing I would say is let God's people hear God's word. In other words, recite and quote wide swaths of the scripture, whether or not that's the text of your sermon. In other words, you can catechize them by putting before them the very word of God. And I think that is something missing in a lot of evangelical situations. You've got a snippet of a verse and then some PowerPoint bullet points. That's really, how can I put it?
Enervating or flaccid. It doesn't really have power because it's not in context. So that's, that's a long winded, I suppose, example. But I think there's clearly a methodology here that Scripture itself embraces because it's predicated upon Jesus.
[00:08:35] Speaker B: So I, Dr. Vitrelli, I'm sure you have seen this on social media. There's, there's been, as, as we approach Easter Sunday, there's been a rise of Easter videos. And I wonder if, if just on your take, just broadly speaking, is Easter, pastors are trying to compete in one sense with the content producers, as it were, of the social media realm. And so they're putting out videos to try and encourage people to church. And I wonder, is it the medium itself that is not being helpful? Is it the substance of what we see in those kind of videos that's leading in a wrong direction? What's your take on some of that?
[00:09:18] Speaker A: Yeah, so my sample is probably not scientific or representative, but you're right. My algorithms by the demagogues that have determined that have been showing me A ton of, hey, come out to Easter.
And I guess we begin with the good news is that we are grateful that people are adapting, using technology in an effort to invite people to church. The question is whom the services of the church are for. The Christians, believers and their children. If we're creating a situation where it's normative for pagans to come. Now, pagans do come, and that's a good thing. But I'm wondering about the balance there now. Maybe some of these churches that are doing this are tapping into the reality that there are people still in our culture that think it's nice to go to church on Christmas and Easter and maybe for a grandchild's baptism. Okay, I don't know what the percentages are there, but it's kind of like the old joke in the Church of England. People go to church three times in their life when they're hatched, when they're matched and when they're dispatched. In other words, baptism, marriage and funerals. Well, okay, so I don't know. But, but I have to say, and you said it much more articulately than I did, the substance of what actually is being communicated in the videos I've seen is in many cases, not all, but in many cases is dreadful. It is man centered. I've seen things about, hey, come to our Easter service, we're going to have a helicopter egg drop. We're going to have fun. It's going to be just powerful, it's going to be exciting. All these adjectives that appeal to base emotions, very little about the, the nature of what goes on from Good Friday to the Silence of Saturday and then ultimately to Resurrection Sunday. And so we've really got to question what's being, who's, who's witnessing to who here.
And so I've seen everything from helicopters to that are doing egg drops. I've seen these adjectives of exciting, powerful, all the emotions that are designed, essentially they're appealing to base emotions as if that constitutes the substance of reality. And we see an absolute avoidance of Good Friday and we're seeing an avoidance of what's called Holy Saturday or the Silence of Saturday and how profoundly theological that can be. And really focusing not on what's going on in resurrection power. So a lot of it too was come solve your problems, give church another cry. Very much in a therapeutic, very much anthropocentric, in other words, man centered sort of appeal, appealing to one's desires as opposed to one's responsibility to their Creator who saved us from our sins. And so like I said, I thought a lot of these were just redful and they are competing with one another. What's ironic is they have a lot of the same PR firms because the look and the message is virtually identical whether it's from Oklahoma or Seattle to South Carolina to Arizona. It's just, you know, one I saw yesterday was, hey folks, here's our newest campus. Let me take you on a tour. And it was like, okay, and here's some cabinets going to be removed. Here's some cabinets going to be put in. Oh, here's where our kids will hear about Jesus.
Which Jesus? That's what I want to ask. It was just, it was just.
And nothing about any, of course, doctrinal distinctives. Even the basic notion, as we saw from the dicta, about the trinitarian God, who, who's Creator and Redeemer. Very little. Because I think they bought the idea that says, well, we need to get people to belong before they can believe. And that's just like, you know, you're not the Holy Spirit.
We need to be welcoming the doors of the. The church should be as broad as the kingdom of God, but our message should be radically different than what's influencing. And I think I just have to say who's influencing who, who's witnessing to who. If you judge by the content of these ads, it's very clear that the direction and the vector of this is that the culture is determining what the church is articulating, not vice versa.
[00:14:35] Speaker B: Another question was, does the Bible support the ministry of parachurches like Truth Exchange, or could parachurches be a part of the area where we see a rise of ignorance today?
[00:14:51] Speaker A: Yeah, that's an important question. And it's a question that's been ping ponged and debated along the lines, you know, why do we have parachurch organizations?
One answer, but I think it tends to be a very simple answer. A convenient answer is because the church is not doing its job. Well, let's think about that a little bit. Let's look at the global missionary advancing. The reality is that churches have long been involved in that, but because of legal and other strategic matters, we've had to have organizations crafted that can actually execute that mission because the church simply can't either because of its residency, because, because of the way it looks, I think of closed countries, that sort of thing where you bring a cross in and you're going to be immediately targeted and shut down. So there is a necessity there. And so you look at the Scriptures and the scripture does not condemn the association of other believers for a common mission. In fact, just the opposite. I think that you see that this idea of our liberty, this combining and exchange of information that we see in both the creational mandate we cannot do, the cultural mandate absent. These kinds of Christians are commanded to do that, but not as an institutional church. And so then we see the necessity of these other kinds of groups. And so, yeah, I think scripture certainly permits and implicitly requires things that are so called parachurch. But why call it parachurch? Aren't we saying really that they're para institutional church?
Because what we're looking at is Christians doing the work that God has called them to do in using different formats and different mechanisms for doing it. And so if we use it that way, I think it's a much better understanding of what the scripture actually requires us to do.
[00:17:05] Speaker B: Agreed. Last, we have a question from Brooke in Ontario, Canada, and she writes. Dr. Ventrella, my son Tommy asked me about the pagan roots of Easter historically and its relation to the church historical practice. Is Easter a oneist or pagan practice that became synchronized with Christianity? Should we reject it in favor of a more earlier practice like the Seder dinner?
[00:17:37] Speaker A: Wow, that's a very interesting question there. So a couple of things come to mind there.
At the outset, let's understand that the King James Bible uses the term Easter, which of course is not in the Greek.
So that's an interesting historical tidbit.
So let's understand that the role of the church, and we see this from the Book of Acts onward, the methods are often to subvert. Paul uses subversive language. Peter uses subversive language. And so even though there's a pagan culture, ultimately it's Christianized. What do I mean by that? Well, Monday was originally named after the moon. It was moon day.
Thursday was Thor day. We don't even know these things now because Christianity so permeated and upset the pagan apple cart that we just say those are the days of the week. We see this also when it comes to the, you know, how do we calculate the year? Well, it's the year of our Lord 2025, and everyone uses that in their banking and everything else. Christianity is what actually created that. So are there pagan holidays that celebrated, shall we say, springtime and renewal? Yeah, of course. But how do we understand that? I think we understand that because it reflects a yearning even of sinful man to is in need of renewal. Now, they would attribute that to fairies or to, you know, the demiurge or whatever, but the reality is God ordered the seasons after the flood at Noah, those things produce regularity. They reproduce then reliability because of the regularity. And that's a God thing. This points toward the sovereign Creator God. And so people, even in their sinfulness, can't ignore that we live in a God rigged universe. And so while there are again pagan rituals and so forth, Christianity had its own separate track with the prediction of Christ, the Messiah dying and the prediction of him rising again and thereby the worshiping again on Sunday, which is the first day of the week, which tells testifies to a new creation. And so we're once again not only redeemed, but we're redeemed unto the created order. And so the church began meeting. Well, they met often, but they met on Sundays for the more liturgical or the order of worship and those sorts of things very early on. And so I don't think it's a hard if in fact Easter is, quote, has pagan roots. I think it's loose and I think it's a dotted line. But I prefer to see the history that Christianity came and just upended and is now putting under the Savior's feet all his enemies, including pagan rituals and roles and all that sort of stuff. But I think it's an important question. It's kind of like the Christmas tree. Many pagans had, you know, totems and used trees and that was part of their magic and so forth. But now we see the Christian practice basically subverting that, putting lights on these things and going, he is the light of the world. And so we are subduing even the pagan culture in such a way that gives glory to God.
[00:21:20] Speaker B: This concludes a recording of the Director's Bag. For more resources from Truth Exchange, please visit us online at WWW dot.
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