Episode Transcript
[00:00:06] 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.
Sherry from Washington, writes Doctor Ventrella. Thank you for pouring out the weekly dicta. They are so informative and well put together. I have a friend at church who is my apologetics buddy. She and I often get into discussions about worldview and different apologetic resources. She has recently been reading various resources that talk about how Worldview is too ambiguous, that worldview was synonymous with preferences, and that almost anything can be labeled as a christian worldview, and that wisdom was a better approach. Later she got to talking about vantilian epistemology. My eyes glazed over. Can you break this down for me like I am?
[00:01:14] Speaker B: For I appreciate that inquiry. It actually shows a depth of study and knowledge and humility, which is something that the christian mind needs to have bold humbleness, bold humility. So a couple of thoughts here.
There is some current debate in some pockets of Christianity that the term worldview is pretty useless and we should dispense with it. And there's been an interesting debate online, in fact, between two public intellectuals, John Stonestreet and Karl Truman. A friendly debate on that very issue. I think, though, for our purposes, we look at Worldview the way Calvin looked at it. It is a set of glasses through which we perceive things. And everyone has a worldview, whether it's sophisticated theological one, philosophical one, an ideological one, or just Joe Sixpack down the street who wants to watch the ballgame in peace while drinking beer. All those are worldviews, and you can't escape it. Everyone sees because we're creatures. We see the created reality through our lenses and through what we call a network of presuppositions, things that we're committed to on an assumptive basis. Again, as Calvin said, it's like wearing spectacles, and we have to wear little spectacles to understand things. The question is continuing the analogy is whether those spectacles have the right correction in them. And it's really true. The term worldview arose the late 19th century as a german concept. I can't pronounce it, but it's like Veldenschlang or something like that. David Naugle, who recently passed in the last few years, was a scholar who wrote a really good book on the history and understanding of what is worldview and all that sort of stuff. But here we're simply using it as how we view things. Now, she talked about the notion of wisdom, and I'm not sure where that's coming from. Certainly biblically we ought to pursue wisdom, that is to say, the ability to apply norms to particular situations. But she might be referring to some of the kind of resourcement or repristination ideas of retrievalism, the idea that what we're really looking for is the wisdom of the older paths and that sort of thing. We've written on that and we have some concerns if that becomes some historical period, becomes the talmudic truth or something like that. But certainly we're not opposed to wisdom at all. But I don't think it's an either or. I think that we can be wise in assessing worldview, and I think that also worldviews help us, inform us what is in fact wisdom. She also talked about epistemology. That's basically the study of knowledge and what we know and what is justified, true belief and all the rest.
What we need to understand is that we can know for certainty who God is and what he has done, and we know that through his created order and also through his special revelation. And we always know in part, which is why we need to learn in community and we need to understand. But we should never become skeptical simply because we're finite. We can truthfully know as creatures all that we need to know for life and godliness, because God has provided us those things.
[00:04:53] Speaker A: Patricia from New Mexico writes, dear doctor Jeffrey Ventrella, I noted in the past you have spoken clearly against christian nationalism, and I am thankful for that. You have really given me the language and tools to articulate biblical truth to those in my college group who have jumped into that nonsense. I'm confused though, but by what I read in your dicta this week. If I read you correctly, in the section on cosmology and transcendent authority, law expresses lordship, or society's law is driven by the Lord of the culture, end quote. Does this not argue for christians to labor to create their own ghetto christian culture in hopes to regain, create or take over for a christian nation? Or is not all law coercive?
[00:05:49] Speaker B: Yeah, that's very insightful, and I appreciate the question. I'm, I'm thankful that you could, that what we've said in the past has been not only understandable but usable, because I think that's really our burden. We want to. And truth of change exists as a ministry to not only inform the public, but to equip the church and then ultimately protect the future. And you're part of that future as a collegiate person. So a couple of thoughts there.
The universe is God rigged, and God has rigged it in such a way that we can either live in fear or live in faith, and we can either flinch or we can flourish. And God's moral order is designed for those made in his image, that is to say, all humanity to flourish, who live well. And so, in a sense, what we want to do is to recognize the creational norms as well as the moral law of God in ordering our society. God clearly prefers order to disorder and chaos. Yet at the same time, the question is always going to be not whether we legislate morality, but whose morality do we legislate.
Our idea is that we legislate that which produces most human flourishing and honors the Lord who created heaven and earth and all that is in it. Now, when we say christian nation, that can be somewhat ambiguous in the sense that oftentimes people think we're talking about this christian state or the actual positive law. But the reality is, in a christian nation, so to speak, the actual state is fairly minimal, and it exists to protect liberty and certain moral boundaries. So the idea would be to we advocate, we promote, and we propose those standards and norms which facilitate human flourishing. We leave the state to coerce against those things which, for example, Paul says in one Timothy one, that there are law is good if used lawfully. And then he lists basically the fifth commandment, the 6th commandment, 7th commandment, the 8th commandment, and the 9th commandment is the target of the law. So we're talking about overt acts. We're not talking about legislating all sins or sins of the mind or sins of the heart and that sort of thing. So I think that gives us some playing the joints as to we're looking at now, should we ultimately seek to have a situation where people voluntarily bow every knee to Christ? Well, yeah, which is why evangelism on a personal level is part of this. But as Jay Gresham Machen put it when he was speaking about education, he says the greatest threat to the gospel is false ideas.
He says, if you allow the.
Well, I'll use a modern term, the Overton window or the plausibility narratives, to allow for false ideas that's going to impede the gospel. So that means that we must battle against ideologies and philosophies necessary, calling them out, rebutting them, posing them, because those are the impediments that create the mental blockages to the gospel. Now, of course, the gospels free reigning as the spirit wants, but we need to understand the mechanisms involved. These secondary causes oftentimes are intellectual objections or even intellectual plausibility narratives. For example, a committed darwinist believes there's no such thing as human nature. Well, why should you save anything then if we're just material? So those kinds of ideas need to be addressed. They need to be exposed, they need to be opposed, and hopefully someday they'll be foreclosed by acclamation, not by law.
[00:10:07] Speaker A: Last up, we have Gabriel from Birmingham, Alabama. Greetings, Doctor Ventrella. Your recent dicta was great and really got me thinking a lot about how I educate at the local christian school.
I'd love to hear you talk more about history from a christian perspective, especially in light of all the world War two, revisioning, anti Churchill, Holocaust denial, and so forth. Many thanks with that, Doctor Ventrell, would you, for our listeners, explain what Gabriel is kind of referencing there about the world War two, revisioning anti Churchill and so on?
[00:10:45] Speaker B: Yeah, no, I really appreciate the encouragement. We want to equip christian teachers to be able to do these things. And two points.
First, the next dicta edition, which ought to go to press on, what is it, the 17th, next Monday, something like that, has a whole section on this very issue of educating on history. So I'll talk about that in a minute. But what Gabe's referring to is a week ago Wednesday. Let's see, this is being recorded. So let me just get the date out there, I believe was September 4. So the celebrity Tucker Carlson brought on, a fake historian by the name of Cooper, who has some very strange and non factual ideas. He's a super revisionist. And his view is that Hitler was simply being reasonable because after the military actions, there were so many pows, they didn't know what to do with them. So this was a real difficult and a burden on the german society. Well, they had to do something.
And he also indicated that it would be better to conceive of Churchill as the villain. Okay, so that's what Gabe is listening to. And of course, this just fed right into some of the things we've talked about of the rearing of anti semitism and some of the alt right in some of the new right, and sadly, in some of the christian nationalists. And this sort of thing now is getting airplay. Now, it's been thoroughly rebutted, and I include those citations to it in the next dicta. And our truth exchange scholar, Doctor Brian Manson, also commented on this and referenced them as well. But the more the merrier. So we just need to know that this sort of boulder dashed should not be countenanced. So one of the things I think, as a christian school teacher, we need to be doing to equip our students is to understand what the scripture calls the schemes of the devil. The schemes of the devil. Now, what does that mean? Well, let's remember scripture tells us that the devil is a liar and there is no truth in him. And it goes on to say that he's deceptive, masquerading as an angel of light and so on and so forth. So what we know is, based upon romans one, the truth is suppressed. Well, the devil's scheme is to use the lie in advancing his agenda and his minions follow suit. So, in the nature of history study, we see this with frackpot conspiracy theories dressed up. We see this with fetishes, kind of like for the weird. And it's really a gnostic impulse. What I mean by that is we know what's really going on here and those sorts of things. So let's just take a couple of ideas here that are, in the culture, easily demonstrable. So, abortion on demand. The story is told that there was a young woman who was brutally assaulted, sexually assaulted. Found herself single, beaten up, and pregnant. She didn't know what to do. She already had a child. The only thing she could do was to terminate her pregnancy, abort her child. That's the story that was used as a narrative to advance Norma McCorvey's challenge of the Texas law. In Roe versus Wade, she became Roe versus Wade. Except none of that was true. She had not been attacked, she had not been beaten up, she had not been sexually assaulted, and she did not abort her child. Child was born. Rather, she was duped by very clever ideologues to challenge the law. And they use this sympathy story by which to do that. I'll give you another example. In the early two thousands, the police burst into an apartment. There they see two men engaged in sexual intimacy, what we call sodomy. They're immediately arrested, handcuffs and so forth. And then this is used to challenge Texas ban on same sex sodomy, except as a reporter for the homosexual newspaper called the Advocate. It's an lgbt piece, says, you know, this really is not what happened. Well, actually, a law professor in Texas actually reported that.
Yeah, his name is Dale Carpenter. People want to look that up. Turns out that wasn't the case. It was a complete setup. These people were not partners. They were not intimate. They were not engaging in sex. It was an entire setup to challenge the sodomy statute. So there we have it again, that there's a using the lie to suppress the truth.
Another example in the lgbt area is this idea of Matthew Shepard. Matthew Shepard was a young man who was killed, left out in the barrenness of Wyoming. And the story is this, that he was bullied, he was picked on because he was homosexual, he was beat up and left to be exposed and died on a fence post, lonely in Wyoming.
Well, now, this reporter, the advocate, actually did expose. It's simply not true. Matthew Shepard and his attacker were actually business partners.
They sold drugs together and had done that for some time. They were also homosexual lovers, and they had recently just been intimate together.
Domestic abuse is actually quite high in these situations, and they began to quarrel either over drugs and or their Yden relationship, and that's what led to his death. Completely different spin than what was used to then attack the so called religious right. Doctor James Dobson and all the rest. So, Gabriel, that's. Those are just three examples that show we as christian teachers really need to know what we're talking about and not to be duped. And it's particularly difficult now because on the new right, we have christian celebrities that are advancing stories that are just apocryphal or designed to create narratives that are simply not the case.
And that is very unfortunate. We are to be, as the third John says, fellow workers, for the truth. We can know the truth. The truth sets us free. And there's dubious people out there on the left and the right that are intentionally shaving or suppressing the truth. So that's kind of how it works with history. We've got to know what we're talking about there. Again, not to become conspiracy theorists and trying to see an agenda behind everything, but just do our homework. Try to understand it.
[00:18:00] Speaker A: Yeah, the devil is the original revisionist back in the garden when he says, did God really say 100%? This concludes the recording of the director's back. 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.
