Ideas Have Consequences
Worldviews shape communities, influence politics, steer economics, set social norms, and ultimately affect the well-being of both your life and your nation. Obedience to the Great Commission involves replacing false ideas with biblical truth. Together with the help of friends, our mission is to demonstrate that only biblical truth leads to flourishing lives, families, societies, and nations. This show explores the intersection of faith and culture, aiming to address pressing societal issues through a biblical lens. Ideas Have Consequences is the podcast of the Disciple Nations Alliance.
Ideas Have Consequences
Why Christians Disengaged from Culture: Last 100-Years of History | Krista Bontrager
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Episode Summary:
Why do so many churches struggle to respond to today’s cultural challenges? The answer lies in a forgotten chapter of church history. What’s happening in the church today did not appear overnight. The roots go back more than a century.
This week we are joined by Theology Mom, Krista Bontrager, co-founder of the Center for Biblical Unity. She traces how the modernist fundamentalist controversy that started in the late 1800s ultimately set the stage for current postmodern pressures in evangelical churches and institutions. Historically speaking, this is one of the few times in history when Christians have disregarded its clear mandate to seek to transform our cultures with God’s truth, goodness, and beauty.
This conversation will help you understand:
- The roots of progressive Christianity
- The history of evangelicalism
- Why many Christians are culturally disengaged
- What it will take to renew Christian institutions in our cultural moment
- Practical next steps
It is long past time for our churches and Christian universities to rise up in obedience to our calling to be salt and light in the cultures and nations around us.
Who is Disciple Nations Alliance (DNA)? Since 1997, DNA’s mission has been to equip followers of Jesus around the globe with a biblical worldview, empowering them to build flourishing families, communities, and nations. 👉 https://disciplenations.org/
🎙️Featured Speaker:
Krista Bontrager is a fourth-generation Bible teacher. She is an author, podcaster and former university professor. Krista’s teaching reverberates with Christians from all walks of life. She has a unique ability to communicate the truth of Scripture in an accessible and practical way. She has dedicated her life to helping others discover how to love God in Spirit and truth.
Krista has a BA in Communications from Biola University, and a MA in Theology, and MA in Bible Exposition from Talbot School of Theology. She has worked for almost three decades in various capacities in theology and apologetics, and is the VP of Educational Programs and Biblical Integrity at the Center for Biblical Unity. She is a Doctor of Ministry candidate in Public Theology at Birmingham Theological Seminary.
Krista has appeared on shows such as the Alisa Childers podcast and Focus on the Family.
📌 Recommended Links
👉 Recommended Podcast: Biola’s Founders Fought Modernism. Will Today’s Leaders Fight Postmodernism?
👉 Center for Biblical Unity: Home | The Center for Biblical Unity
👉 Theology Mom: Home | Theology Mom
👉 Center for Biblical Unity App: Mobile App | CFBU
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Welcome And Guest Introductions
Speaker 1Just give me uh Luke your ideal runtime for this. Like we're not doing Joe Horogan three hours or Mike Wheeler.
Luke AllenSorry, I was thinking like six. Yeah, sorry. I shouldn't have said. No, uh let's let's yeah, we'll wrap up at two. So sixty minutes. Okay. All right.
Scott AllenWe'll we'll do our best to ways to wrap up at two, yeah.
Speaker 4All right.
Luke AllenI'm on it. Okay. So just just keep that in mind, Dad. Transition to kind of the application around 40 minutes.
Scott AllenOkay. I'll okay. Okay.
Luke AllenAre you ready? I'm ready.
Scott AllenOkay, good. Well, it's great to be back again on another episode of Ideas Have Consequences, and uh excited to be here together with Luke and um also with someone new to the podcast and new to the team who's actually not new to the team, uh Nelson Montiero. Nelson, it's great to have you with us.
SpeakerThank you, Scott. Um not my first podcast here, but now as a host.
Scott AllenThat's right. That's right. Nelson joined uh the team, he's our new vice president of operations, and uh Nelson's been um the person for the DNA over the last several years who's headed up uh all of our training and teaching in the Portuguese-speaking world. Um, done has done such a fabulous job with that um that we approached him about joining the team as the VP of operations, and he agreed after a lot of prayer. And so we're excited to have Nelson in the office and now on the podcast, he brings just a wealth of experience. He's uh based up in Victoria, British Columbia. So uh with his his wife Lisa. So great to have you, Nelson, joining us today. And um, while it sounds like Nelson's gonna be our guest, that is not the case. We are thrilled to have with us today uh Krista Bontreger, otherwise known as aka Theology Mom. Krista, I am so excited that you're here with us today.
Speaker 1I'm super glad to be here. Thanks for having me.
Scott AllenOh, thank you. We are such huge fans of Krista, Monique, and the Center for Biblical Unity. Um, just the the really, really vital work that they're doing. Um I remember, I always think back to the the dark days of 2020 uh it was a 2020, you know, and and the woke when the woke revolution was at full swing and uh why social justice is not biblical justice had just come out, and um and these fine people reached out and said, Um, or I reached them, I'm not sure how we connected, but we connected and realized that um we were like-minded and um we needed to stand together, and they've been just such close friends and allies ever since, and it's just meant meant the world to me, honestly. So can't recommend the ministry enough. Go to Center for Biblical Unity, you need to learn from them. And then Krista, of course, you're the not not only are you uh what what is your are you the vice president, the president, I'm co-executive director. I don't know what your title is there. What is it?
Speaker 1Yeah, vice president and co-founder with my ministry partner, Monique Dusan. She's the president.
Scott AllenYep.
Speaker 1And we've been walking in this journey on for the Center for Biblical Unity since February 2020.
Scott AllenAbsolutely. But you also are uh on your own a popular teacher, Bible teacher, you're a fourth generation Bible teacher and the host of the popular theology mom podcast. Um so you have your own teaching ministry for sure. Um just a little bit about Krista. She's got her bachelor's in communications from Biola University, which, as you know, is near and dear to my heart because uh my daughter Kayla attended Biola. And she has her master's in theology and Bible exposition from Talbot School of Theology, right there on the campus at Biola in Southern California. Uh Krista's worked for three decades in various capacities in theology, apologetics, um, and as we mentioned earlier, she's the vice president of educational programs at the Center for Biblical Unity. Um so, Krista, again, thanks for joining us today. And I I we we invited you on because uh we uh tuned into one of your podcasts here recently. The title was Biola's Founders Fought Modernism. Will Biola Fight Again? And um I was I was I told Luke right after I listened to that, I said we've really got to have Krista on to talk about this. And what I want to talk with you about today, Krista, is I think this history that goes back to the founding of Biola University and more broadly than Biola, the the beginnings of what some call the fundamentalist movement. Um, this is such important history. We talk about it a lot in the Disciple Nations Alliance in terms of kind of answering the question: why is the church having so little impact on shaping the broader culture today? And I think unless you understand the history that you got into in this podcast, you can't answer that question. And when I listened to you, I thought she really understands this, and I loved the way you framed it around the founding of Biola, and then brought it right up
Why A Century Ago Matters
Scott Allento the present as well, you know. And so we really want to get into this, understand this history, bring it right up to the present and see what it means for us today. So again, just really excited. This is uh I I just think this is such important history. Um, first of all, Christa, if you could just kind of walk us through the controversy that was brewing in the late 18 uh 1880s, uh, you know, all the way up until the the turn of the of the of the century into the early 1900s. Um this this what was happening in the Bible-believing church, this fundamentalist, as some call it fundamentalist modernist controversy that was going on, what was at stake, what was happening at that time? So just take us back to that because again, this is such a pivotal time.
Speaker 1Yeah, it really was, and you're so right, Scott. Like you cannot really understand even what is happening today in our very complicated relationship that we have as evangelical Christians with the broader culture if you don't go back a hundred years. And uh I know that sounds crazy, like most of us aren't thinking about what happened a hundred years ago, but there really is uh some important connections historically to understand. Now, in the late 19th century, so the late 1800s, early 1900s, there was a rise in confrontations against the Bible. Um, there became doubts about whether or not the Bible was the error-free word of God when it came to things like historical claims or claims about the physical world, like some scientific claims. And so we see this particularly in the rise of evolution coming into educational spaces. Some people may have heard of the Scopes Monkey trial that happens in 1925. Um there was uh just an increasing amount of pressure socially, but also from within the church to modify how Christians thought about the Bible. And this is a very important thing.
Scott AllenYeah, Krista, yeah, just it was such a tipping point because I think up until that point in the West in the United States, uh the Bible, Bible teachers, biblical institutions had a lot of cultural weight and authority, right? But it was after this there was a direct kind of frontal attack on that authority. You you're right, coming from uh secularists, Darwinists, um, you know, people kind of these critical biblical theorists. Um and through a number of events, they really did kind of undermine that authority and and establish themselves at kind of the center of cultural authority. And and it hasn't really changed since then. So I'm sorry to cut you off, but that that was that was kind of the pivot, wasn't it, there?
Krista BontragerOh, it really was. I think your phrase tipping point is is right on the money because um what happened is that these ideas of um undermining the authority of scripture, undermining the supernatural nature of Christianity, things like miracles or the virgin birth, um, and uh the rise also of what was called the social gospel, all of these ideas um were ways of kind of reframing the traditional historic Christian faith to accommodate the modern sensibility. Yeah, this modern person.
Scott AllenRight, exactly.
Speaker 1Yeah, and so these ideas were not just cultural ideas, they came right into the seminaries and would trickle down into the the pews because as pastors went off to seminary to get educated, they would bring that education back to them and it would come down to the regular people in the pews through the sermons. And um as these ideas penetrated into the the to the regular people in particular, it became a divide of what we call the fundamentalists versus the modernists. And the modernists were Christians who wanted to have a more accommodating view of the faith. They wanted to um accommodate things like uh the belief in in the rise of anti-supernaturalism. And so maybe we need to reinterpret some of these miracles. Maybe this is a little allegorical. Maybe this is a little bit more poetic and not historical. Okay, so these were the modernists.
Scott AllenAnd now the fundamentalists are one yeah, one thing I'm sorry to just cut you off again there. But yeah, the when I think of the modernists and the social gospel, I mean, these were this was the progressive era in the United States and in Europe. Um there was a lot of optimism. This is before World War I. Uh we can kind of make the world this perfect place. Um and so you had a lot of Christians kind of wanting, they had this kind of utopian idea that we can really perfect things, but they abandoned kind of this biblical approach, uh biblical theory of change, if you will, and they said like, for example, one of the key doctrines that they immediately kind of let go of was the doctrine of human, you know, the depravity of man, um, you know, this this and and with that, you know, this human sinfulness idea, and with that, you know, they said, hey, um, you know, no, it's no longer the gospel, the the need the you know, the the the regeneration that comes through faith in Jesus Christ that's at the railhead of social transformation. Uh they said things like, we can bring the kingdom of God, we can bring the kingdom of God through enlightened human reason, science, and government programs, things like that, right? Uh you know, and so they stopped preaching the gospel, essentially, and they started kind of focusing attention on government, politics. And part of the reason is that people today, I think, have this allergy to politics is is is a right reaction to that, right? That the it was the you know, this is a hundred years ago, where they said, we don't need the gospel, we don't, you know, we can we can bring the kingdom of God through enlightened human reason and and social programs, things like that. Is that fair, Krista, from your read?
Modernism Challenges Bible Authority
Speaker 1Yeah, I think that somebody like Walter Roshenbush's book on the social gospel is a very helpful one-volume book if people want to get a snapshot of how uh the social gospel came into the church and how it was kind of the gospel became reimagined according to this new progressive uh system of ethics and understanding the Bible. And um the the modernists were really kind of the first progressive Christians. And some of what we're dealing with today in progressive Christianity, in my humble opinion, is just the same thing the church was wrestling with a hundred years ago. Absolutely. Um it's it's just doing it within a postmodern context rather than it within a modernist context. But it's very similar, similar issues. On the other side of the of the street, though, were the fundamentalists. And the fundamentalists were those Christians uh who wanted to hold on to a traditional understanding of the Bible, and they wanted to affirm that. So now there began to be major splits within big denominations. So no longer was the the the dividing line between Methodists and Presbyterians or Baptists and Pentecostals. Now the dividing line became between modernists and fundamentalists. Right. And so there were there were modernist Methodists and modernist Presbyterians and modernist Baptists, and there were fundamentalist Baptists, fundamentalist Presbyterians, and fundamentalist um Methodists. And so as these dividing lines shifted, the the Presbyterians who were fundamentalists suddenly saw I actually have more in common with the fundamentalist Methodist and Baptist than I do with the the the progressive or the modernist in my own denomination. And so that fault line shifted, and this is where we get an explosion of new denominations. So rather than the Presbyterian Church USA, now we have the Orthodox Presbyterian Church coming out of that as a fundamentalist kind of movement or splinter group off of that. And that happened down the line in many denominations. And the dividing line was over, I think if you boil it all down, it was over the authority of Scripture, whether or not the Bible is the inherent word of God, but then other things followed from that. And um and this is still impacting us today. We have outsourced, we have we have exported these ideas to the third world because um we brought the social gospel into South America and it became, you know, liberation theology. It became Gustavo Guterres. We exported modernism into Africa. Uh and so we have participated as American Protestants into exporting, I think, some very bad ideas into other countries, into the global south. And so these things are still impacting us today.
Scott AllenYeah, absolutely. Talk talk about the reaction um of the fundamentalists a little bit, and and that gets us to the founding of Biola and uh really some of the most elite kind of Christian evangelical universities today. They they they were founded by the fundamentalists who were really reacting against um yeah, the social gospel and this rise of progressive Christianity that really was an abandonment of the inerrancy of Scripture and the need for the gospel at the railhead of self- at the railhead of social change. They said we've got to hold on to these, you know, the fundamentals of the faith. And and I, you know, there's a place to criticize those folks, and we'll talk about that, but boy, they really deserve a lot of of credit for standing strong for the scriptures at a time when it was really under attack and could be lost. And I think if you look at a country like France, you can see how that you know, in a in many ways it was lost, largely lost. Um, you know, I know there's a lot more history in places like France or Germany and things like that, but but there was this group in the United States, including the founders of Biola University, said we are not going, you know, kind of over our dead bodies. We're gonna fight for this. So talk talk a little bit about that. Those folks and the founding of uh Biola, because Biola is just a representative of this larger movement here.
Speaker 1Yeah, I think Biola is a good test case to understand the dynamics of the modernist fundamentalist controversy um from a historic point of view, and how it's still playing out today, which hopefully we'll get to um toward the end of this conversation. But Biola University originally started as the Bible Institute of Los Angeles. BIOLA is an acronym, and it was part of the movement from about the 1880s through the 1920s called the Bible College movement, which was an extension of the fundamentalists. And they um during this time what happened was there there was a fleeing out of historic institutions like Yale and Princeton and Harvard, where uh the modernism I and its ideas were taking over these historically um Christian institutions and Christians were fleeing them, but they wanted to found new institutions. Where will we send our young pastors to get educated, our missionaries to get educated? We can't trust these former institutions anymore, so they set up Bible colleges. And during this time, I think that like over a hundred Bible colleges were founded in this very short window of time where they wanted to provide um uh a kind of a different environment for young pastors and missionaries to to learn. So Moody Bible College was one of the first established in the 1880s in in Chicago, and it is, you know, it is you know still uh an important institution within evangelicalism. Biola was sta established in the early 1900s by an oil magnet named Lyman Stewart, and um he was he used his money from the Union Oil Company to found Biola and also to publish a series of books called The Fundamentals. And this was a series of 90 essays by scholars all over the world to try to summarize the key beliefs of the historic Christian faith. What were the fundamentals that we ought to be standing for?
Scott AllenYeah, that we have to protect against this threat. Right.
Speaker 1Stuart played this pivotal role of doing two very important things, of founding Biola and funding these essays called the Fundamentals. And these established the core doctrines like biblical inerrancy, authority, the role of the supernatural in Christianity. And often it was tied to, the fundamentalist movement was tied to, in particular, premillennial eschatology, which was a view of the end times, that um before Jesus would come back, there would be seven years of a tribulation, the rise of the Antichrist, and then the return of Jesus, and then go into a thousand-year reign of Jesus on earth. And not all fundamentalists held to premillennialism, but the vast majority of them did. And these were some of the key features of these fundamentalist training centers like Biola that sprung up during this period of time. But um now these there was some alternatives for pastors to go to and equip being equipped. And I think it was important too because no longer there was a sense in which the fundamentalist movement was more about the everyday man, the everyday Christian. It was no longer going to seminary, it was just kind of this thing for the elites. It became more accessible for the everyday man who had a vision to become a missionary or become a pastor, they could be equipped and trained in these Bible colleges.
Scott AllenTalk about, you know, we talked about how brave, courageous, and uh uh, you know, uh we owe a debt of gratitude, frankly, to people like Lyman Stewart um and others who said, Listen, the we will lose these fundamentals of our faith um to this corrosive ideology of of uh modernism, Darwinism, secularism that's coming in. We'll lose them if we don't fight for them. And so thank God. I just say thank God that they did, that they stood. And they fought hard. But I think in hindsight now we can look back and we can say they made some errors as well that created the conditions, I think ironically, for the church, like for for what's happening at Biola today. And I'd like to kind of frame this, Kristen, have you respond to it? You just mentioned the formation of Bible colleges, and that's one example of what I mean by the way they maybe overreacted or over-responded, because the earlier generations of Christians set up universities, Harvard, Yale, Princeton. These were universities, and there was a sense that, you know, all of these areas of knowledge were under God and His authority and needed to be understood. And we need to have people study all of these, this broad range of subjects, not just the Bible, but all of these subjects from the vantage point of the Bible, and they need to be in positions of leadership in our society to help shape a culture. The fundamentalists began to say, oh, these but these schools, these Harvard, Yales, and Princetons, have become secular. They're sending people in to shape the culture. We just need to kind of it was almost a retreat in my view. Like we need to retreat into just the Bible and into Bible colleges, and we'll just focus on the Bible and not so much on the culture, because the culture's become secular, hostile to Christianity. Is that a f th that's I know that the I'm talking in a general way, Krista, but is that a fair assessment of some of the um maybe the pitfalls that the fundamentalists fell into a little bit?
Speaker 1Yeah, and I I say that with a with a heavy heart and and uh acknowledgement that my own grandparents uh heard the gospel for the first time through the Biola Hour radio uh program back in the 1930s during the Depression. Although they had grown up uh as cultural Christians in the Dutch Christian Reformed Church, they felt like they had never really heard the gospel until they heard uh Louis
Social Gospel And Progressive Faith
Speaker 1T. Talbot preaching it on the Biola Hour. So for me personally, my own grandparents were the product of the Bible college movement. My grandfather um then went to a small Bible college here in Los Angeles, not Biola, but a different one, got some education and went on to become a church planter. He planted eight churches in California, most of them are still going. And uh so my family is directly in line with the fundamentalist movement and has been impacted by it. I am a biola grad, my husband's a biolog, my husband's parents went to biola, um, our oldest daughter went to biola, so we are a three-generation uh biola family. We are in the tradition of fundamentalism, but it's also good to be sober-minded about the long-term impacts that that strategy, the fruit of that, and what it brought forward. And because Christians left the institutions like Harvard and Princeton and Yale, because they felt like it they had become too polluted by modernist ideas. Yeah, secular they made a strategic decision to form altern an alternative or a parallel culture. And what ended up happening was by withdrawing, and I don't think they saw they looked down the road and saw, like, oh, this is gonna be the long-term impact of this this decision. They were just trying to pragmatically think how are we gonna train our young pastors and our future missionaries? How are we gonna stop the bleeding of the progressive dread that was on their minds?
Scott AllenAbsolutely, yeah.
Speaker 1Yeah. The long-term impact that I stand in, you know, in the shadow of it 70 to 100 years later, if I go back to my college days, is that because Christians left those institutions by and large, they have continued to degenerate. And um there was no kind of or very little salt and light, if you will, left in those institutions to help redeem them. Now are there exceptions? Certainly. Um we see those exceptions. Um books like you know, Finding God at Harvard uh, you know, helped to highlight that. But I'm speaking in generalities, the long-term impact of that is that evangelical.
Scott AllenRight. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1We left the cultural conversation and we established a parallel culture.
Speaker 5Yes.
Speaker 1And so if you think about like the Supreme Court, for example, to my knowledge, there are no evangelical Protestants on the Supreme Court. Trevor Burrus, Jr.
Scott AllenThat's right. There are and not just the Supreme Court, but just about any area of kind of institutional leadership in the society, whether it's in media or um you know, education, justice, you know, very few are are evangelicals because of the retreat that you're speaking of, right?
Speaker 1Yeah. And I I think that think about even in conservative think about even in conservative radio. The bigger personalities are either Roman Catholics or Jewish people. Now there are a few exceptions. Somebody like Hugh Hewitt, for example, um is an evangelical, but but there's there's not a lot. We have um we kind of left and we established our own publishing companies, our own institutions as alternatives, our own magazines. We we established a whole Christian subculture as evangelicals.
Scott AllenNow and if I if I could too, I think it it went even beyond that. It became the faith became very personal, which it is.
Speaker 1Yes.
Scott AllenBut it be it you know, but it became almost private. Like in a it was like it it it lost its kind of sense of missionary, public facing kind of we need to be salt and light in the in the public sphere. It it kind of let that go, and it was much more about um personal salvation, personal spiritual growth, um, you know, and in church planting, you know, and evangelism for sure. All of these things are so essential. But um but it but it lost that kind of sense that we are here to be redeeming the culture, to to be salt and light. Um and yeah. The irony of this tube is that this sets the stage for what's happening at Biola right now, because when you retreat in that way, you're still we we we as Christians still live in this culture. We we become shaped by it, right? If you know, if we and today that culture is largely postmodern, right? You know, we're facing new threats uh and and and so you see this postmodernism because we're be we're being shaped by it coming into places like this is the irony, like biola of all places, which is what you've been writing about so much here and teaching about.
Speaker 1Yeah, I I think that evangelicals, another consequence of leaving the academic world and the academic institutions is that we adopted a very anti-intellectual uh posture. And by changing the faith from being personal to private, which those words can sound kind of similar, but they actually are very different. The what it m the Christian faith is very personal in the sense that each and every one of us must put our faith, hope, and confidence in Jesus as the Messiah. That is um, you know, I'm not saved on my grandparents' faith. I am I will have to stand before the great white throne based on my own position and posture and belief in in Jesus. But what we did as as fundamentalists and even as evangelicals is we changed it from being personal to being private and and having a private faith. I don't bring it in the public square, I don't bring it into my politics, I don't bring it into public discussions on the radio or in the courtroom. This is something private, I can I'm free to worship however I want, and and I'm free to believe in whatever I want, but those things have no connection to the public realm. And decades of that have now dumped us off the cliff, and now we're in postmodernism, which is taking us kind of and some people will debate this like what is postmodernism direct i exactly, is it just taking modernism to its logical conclusion, or is it something else? I won't debate that here. But um the idea that we are now in a world where there is no fixed meaning, there is no transcendent truth, there is no thing that is truly true for all of us in all times, all places, and all cultures. It is postmodernism is the world of my personal truth.
Scott AllenThat's right.
Speaker 1And everything has become pr totally privatized, but then also we our our job now in the postmodern world is to deconstruct, to take down ideas, frameworks, and and even institutions that were built on this idea that there is objective truth. That is something to be attacked and to be overturned by the postmodernists. And we see this play out in literature and art and education and the social sciences and politics is where we're reframing everything as power plays and uh personal truth and we're going to deconstruct every institution, every idea, every framework that basically became came before the 1960s. And so we have truly fallen into a um pretty precarious situation.
Luke AllenYeah. I uh you I my brain is spinning right now. This is fascinating. I've um tell me if this is correct. I want to kind of run some thoughts by you, Krista, and I want I want to hear your response. So, you know, postmodernism, like you were saying, it's hard to understand. I think it's a lot easier to understand when you understand modernism like we've been talking about in pre-modernism. So to sum up the last 2,000 years since Jesus, there's been these three big eras, right? Premodernism, a time in which the Christian church was growing, and um there was a lot of respect for the church, you know, kind of the the the age of the Christian.
Scott AllenThe Bible had authority. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Luke AllenThe pre-modern era, and then we came to the modern era. Uh why did the pre-modern era end? I would say Pride of Man, um, through the Renaissance, and then kind of the early Enlightenment thinkers, think Kant, uh, you know, uh John Locke, uh Jean Jacques Russeau. Um we came to this point where we're like, we can figure it all out on our own. We don't need
Biola And The Bible College Boom
Luke AllenGod anymore, you know. So we chucked God to the side and we said we can figure it out on our own. So this was this really optimistic era of the Enlightenment, the modern era. And um then that came completely crashing down when the early you know, earliest twentieth century, um, you know, the the the World War World War One, World War II, and we pretty quickly figured out that modernism does not work, and um Nietzsche was right when he says you kill God, you know, you kind of ruin yourself as well. He saw where it was heading and it headed there. Um and then we came to this postmodern era. Now, one thing I hadn't thought about until today is how how quickly these I d these movements of history sunk into the church. Because usually the church is kind of late when it comes to cultural discussions, and um when we were talking at the beginning of this discussion, for some reason I had never made the connection between the the modernist fundamentalist controversy talking about the modernism of the Enlightenment modernism, same thing. But the discussion the church was happening in the late 1800s, when that discussion in the broader society started in the early 1700s, with again Kant and Rousseau. So it took a long time to sink into churches, and I think it took so long because churches were were really pushing back to it. You know, they had that forward-facing look towards culture, and they were pushing they were pushing culture back because they understood, you know, we say it all the time on this podcast, someone or some set of ideas is always actively influencing culture. If it's not Christians, then it's gonna be someone else. Culture's a tug-of-war battle always. And the Christians coming out of the the pre-modern era understood that, and they were pushing back against cultural uh mores and cultural lies and whatever it was, and for that reason it took a long time for modernism to seep into the church, and then the fundamentalists in a way stopped it. But then the fundamentalists didn't have that offensive look towards culture. They played kind of like this defense kind of, you know, retreat mentality, which paved the way immediately for postmodernism to just run straight through culture. There was hardly any opposition from the church, which is why we had this, you know, the again the the modernist fundamentalist controversy, late 1800s, early 1900s, postmodernism starts in the 1950s, and it just comes straight into churches. There's like zero um pushback in a way to a lot of churches. We see it now, we're t starting to talk about it. I think people are really starting to talk about postmodernism in like the 2020s because we're seeing it actually played out in very dangerous ways in our culture.
Scott AllenRight? Yeah.
Luke AllenBut I just I I'm I'm looking at kind of it through this offensive-defensive lens, and I don't know, it just made sense for the first time. Like when when the church isn't pushing back against culture, we're just gonna get run straight over. And the more we retreat, the more culture runs away from Christ, essentially, and God's ideas. So that's not really a question as much as just a reflection, and I I find it interesting to put it in that light.
SpeakerYeah, I have a question actually. Um at first, actually, I I took a couple notes of what some of the things you said, Tristan. And you talk about the global south, and uh uh that that interests me because I up I come from Brazil, I come from Latin America. And interesting that you talked about the rise of evangelicals preserving orthodoxy and and experiencing growth in the global south, not only Latin America, right? And I I was thinking interesting that the fund the whole fundamental fundamentalist movement and and I come from uh uh my origins are Pentecostals. I mean they go to 1906, right?
Scott Allen1906 as on this side of the US.
SpeakerUm and those are the missionaries who went to Brazil and and generated the whole the whole beginning of the Pentecostal movement in Brazil. Uh and the idea of the growth there and I I was wondering here actually, I wonder if it's if part of it was because modern modernism had not yet uh hit us with the force that it hit had hit Europe and North America, and that was kind of one element maybe that promoted that growth because we're still a little bit behind in terms of the things that were happening in the US, as we are talking here, right? Um that gave that freedom and more space for the growth of evangelicals in in not only Latin America but the global south. So that was an interesting thought. But the other thing is um much of what we have discussed so far, what you you have said, and that still has an impact on us and in our society. So it goes back to modernism. But then uh at some point we saw we just started to talk about postmodernism, right? And this whole uh force. So could could you give us a summary, a brief intellectual history of how postmodernism developed?
Speaker 1Yeah, probably not very much, probably not as much as Scott could do. Well, I don't know. No, you no you know these these ideas do take some time to to trickle down to the regular person from academia to get them to the masses, and usually that process takes about a hundred years or so of kind of cooking, if you will. But the big picture of postmodernism is to understand it as um as it's seen as a failure of the enlightenment. That's kind of the big picture. And the the big project is to overturn the Enlightenment ideas of objective knowledge or objective truth. This idea that of um science being objective, uh that there is objective knowledge, these are projects that the uh postmodern context says no, there is no objective truth. One of the things I did in my doctoral dissertation I wrote on standpoint feminist standpoint theory and its impact in the in the church is that um I especially had a focus on the impact of standpoint theory onto the sciences. And you would think the sciences would be pretty immune from this idea of my truth. Like we're just gonna look at a beaker of chemicals, like how in the world does my truth change that? But the the idea that even women perceive reality different than men. And or you as a Latin American, Brazilian would see the world differently than Scott, Luke, and I, you know, and that there's different perspectives, but these perspectives are more than just like, oh, I have some different experiences to share. It's it's it's more deeply rooted than that, that even impacts how I interpret objective reality because there is no objective reality. There's no meaning in texts anymore. The text becomes simply um my own perception or experience of the text. I am not trying to find the author's meaning of the text. And so these are some of the things of what I'm talking about when I talk about deconstruction. The deconstruction project is to overturn the ideas of the Enlightenment.
Scott AllenI think you see this so clearly right now in the present in the the whole transgender movement. I think it's just such a perfect window into into this history. Uh because if you go back to the kind of, as you were saying, Luke, the pre-modern era where the Bible was believed, God was believed, the Bible had authority. Uh, when you get to issues like sex, male and female, we right, we believe that because that's what the Bible teaches, right? In the beginning, God created the male and female, end of story. We all believe that as a culture, right? But then you get to modernism and God is abandoned, the Bible, the authority the Bible's abandoned. But as you were saying, Krista, science is not, right? So now science replaces, so to speak, the Bible and God as the source of authority. And so science tells us biologically, we can look at genes and things like this, and we can go, yep, you know, there's male and there's female, right? Uh that was never debated in the modern era, right? It was a scientific fact, right? Science tells us this. Now you get to postmodernism. Okay. So not only is God abandoned as a source of truth in the Bible, but science itself is abandoned. Now, who's the source of truth? Who's the source of authority about what's true in it? I am. I am, I'm at the center, and it's based on my feelings, what I feel strongly about. And if I'm a man biologically, but I feel like I'm a woman, then you need to affirm that because that's truth. That's to me just postmodernism crystallized. You know, it's it's putting the person and their feelings at the center of everything. And uh it you know, I don't I don't know. I've often thought that that's kind of the perfect distillation of postmodernism in some ways.
Speaker 6Mm-hmm.
Luke AllenWell, uh it was um who was it? Um Jean-Francois Lyotard. Wasn't that his definition of postmodernism, more or less? What was that, Krista? Yeah, I I know you don't you know that quote. The or I'm putting you on the spot in the middle of the year. I don't I don't have it.
Speaker 1I know I really am.
Luke AllenIt was meta-narratives and an incredulity towards meta-narratives, postmodernisms and incredulity towards meta-narratives. Question everything. Which you know, you can't really blame the guys because this the their thoughts started right after World War II ended. The world's in burning still, you know, still smoldering from the war. And it's kind of that post shock moment where it's like, what do I even believe anymore? You know, after like any giant tragedy happens, like, what's
Retreat Culture And Private Faith
Luke Alleneven good and bad anymore? I they just they took that questioning, but then they ran way too far with it. And they just essentially tore down everything that had come before that point in history. Said it's all f it's all false. We gotta rebuild from from the ground up essentially, but without any firm foundation to build on. I I it's just it's it's just a grief run too far or something. I don't know.
Scott AllenUm Krista, I want to take you back to to Biola for a second and and the podcast uh because um this is where the this is really where this becomes relevant for the present time. Um and I think what you're seeing is, as Luke, you were saying earlier, postmodernism just ran kind of unopposed through the culture and even right into the church. And part of the reason that it ran right into the church, including the Bible-believing church, is because of this fundamentalist that they sowed the seeds for it by saying, we'll just focus on the fundamentals of the faith, you know, it it was a kind of a defensive posture and you know, we'll f you know, this personal, private kind of understanding of the faith. Meanwhile, the culture has become very postmodern. And in a way, then the the Christians, as Darrow uh Miller, you know, often will say, if the church isn't actively discipling the nation, the nation is discipling the church. So you get this irony where uh you know present-day Biola is being deeply influenced by postmodernism, and this is the question you raised in your podcast is uh, you know, a hundred years ago Biola saw, you know, it was it ra it was it was raised up to stand against this hostile kind of threat to the Bible and to the gospel that was coming in at that time. Will present-day Biola do the same? You know, it's it's you know, with this this current kind of woke Marxist postmodernist threat. Um and it you we're you know what we're seeing is a kind of a mixed story on that, you know. Uh I mean what how do you answer your own question there, Krista? I know that you've put a lot of thought into this. The question being, will Biola fight again? Will it be true to that DNA that essentially was there at the beginning?
Speaker 1Yeah, and I think to provide a little bit more context to what you're getting at there, um after World War II, I think that there started to be a shift in the Bible college movement uh toward how do we get back a sense of academic respectability. And there was the rise of another movement called the neo-evangelical movement, and this was kind of in the 50s and 60s, and it was part of um Billy Graham, Carl, Carl Henry, um and others, where they wanted to forge a path back toward re-engagement with the culture. Right. They wanted to find a way to hold on to orthodoxy, to hold on to those fundamentals, um while also beginning to re-engage the culture.
Scott AllenAnd so things like Campus Crusade for Christ, um Inner Varsity, yeah, Food for the Hungry, the group that we were a part of for many years started out of that same movement. Okay. World Vision, yeah, and um all of them.
Speaker 1Yeah, World Vision, um Christianity Today, the NASA National Association of Evangelicals. Right. These were all part of what was called the neo-evangelical movement of like, hey, like the whole um retreat from culture thing, that might not be working out so well for us. We're about 50 years into this social experiment. How do we begin to re-engage the culture? This is also the time um during which like the Jesus Revolution starts happening. And um, so a lot of a lot of things that they were rethinking. Biola.
Scott AllenYeah, when did Biola become a university? It used to be as you said Bible college of Los Angeles, but when did it become Biola University? Because th this is what we're talking about now, isn't it?
Speaker 1Yeah. So it became a Bible college in the I think around the mid-fi 1950s, but it became a university in 1983 or 84. And it was about that time where we really started seeing a lot of shifts from first there was the migration of a lot of Bible institutes and informal training programs into formal colleges, and then into universities. How do I get accreditation? How do I hire people with PhDs and and doctorates to begin to re-engage the culture and to provide um hold again, wanting to hold on to those fundamentals, but wanting to do it in a more academically rigorous way. And so many of these institutions went first, the first phase was like making them into Bible colleges and then into universities. And so, like here locally, we have Azusa Pacific College when I was growing up is now a university. Hope International College is now Hope International University, same with Biola. And so a a certain percentage of these institutions evolved over time. And but where we find ourselves now is that many of these Christian higher ed institutions have been recruiting professors who have done their doctoral programs at secular institutions in the 1990s, roughly. A lot of them in the 90s and early 2000s. Because to to boost their accreditation and to boost their academic credibility, they needed to begin to hire faculty that had PhDs from secular and European institutions. And they're be kind of started chasing the former Bible colleges, they are now chasing the very thing that they wanted to get away from a hundred years ago. But they're many of them are trying to do it in a way of still holding on to their statement of faith that they started out with in Biola's case over a hundred years ago, but then hiring these faculty and what's ended up happening for many Christian institutions. And I would say this is even also true of other Christian institutions of that we have known, if they've been around for 50 to 100 years, they are st they are struggling with these same issues of how do we stay relevant, how do we incorporate cultural re-engagement and holding on to our legacy as Christians. And what has happened in many of the Christian higher ed institutions is that there's been a drift. They've brought in professors who have been trained in the very ideas that they were trying to escape a hundred years ago. And so what's happened is that there's kind of this forward-facing look to the outside world, to donors and and partners and prospective parents and alumni, that hey, we are still holding on to those fundamentals. Look, our doctoral statement hasn't changed. But internally, we have hired a bunch of people who have had their education in progressive schools and are kind of just sprinkling Jesus on top of that and bringing it into the Christian institution. And so now we are in an era of um, I think that is not dissimilar to where the f the fundamentalists were 100, 120 years ago, of how will we preserve our institutions, our Christian institutions. The approach that I have been taking is for the last five years or so is publicly speaking, in particular about Biola, because it's the institution that's close to my heart, and it's the institution that I want to fight to save. But what I am fighting for is not burning the institution down, not leaving it, not abandoning it. I am trying to fight for renewal and
Postmodernism And Deconstruction Explained
Speaker 1to do something different than what my grandparents' generation did in leaving the institutions and forming a parallel culture. I am trying to fight for by calling on the leaders to fight for um the original vision of what we were trying to do a hundred years ago, which is a return or a steadfastness to those fundamentals, because those are things are still true today. So that's going to mean that some of our institutions are going to have to part ways with people that they have hired internally who are progressive leaning or who have imbibed the the postmodern ideas. And so that's kind of the model that I have been talking about. I'm just using Biola as a test case. And I do want to say, like, Biola has made tremendous changes. When I first started speaking about these things five years ago, um they they were in a pretty dark place. Uh they had on paper a orthodoxy, but behind the scenes, they had hired a significant number of progressive leaning professors and staff who were implementing policies and curriculum based on postmodern ideas. They have turned that back in many ways.
Scott AllenYes. Yeah, no, you're right to bring that up. But I I want to draw a parallel to the world that I grew up in, to what you're talking about, Chris, to the world of Christian relief and development, because um you're right. The the neo-evangelical movement is where you know the fundamentalists said, hey, we've got to re-engage culture, and it gave rise to Christian relief and development. Uh you know, during the fundamentalist time, the the heyday of that, it wasn't uncommon for evangelicals who had been very involved in ministry to the poor to kind of start uh slowly abandoning that because it didn't really connect to the fundamentals. It was always seen as important, but not really important, you know, and the scriptures like the poor will always be with you would kind of get thrown out there, and you know, it's kind of a futile thing to even help the poor because it's just this kind of unsolvable problem. Then the Carl Henry, the the neo-evangelicals gave space to say, no, we've got to, you know, get back into culture. Let's get back into fighting against poverty, the rise of food for the hungry and whatnot. But but because they've been out of the picture, that, you know, for for what, now fifty, a hundred years, you know, the people that dominated that space, in this case, you know, relief and development, poverty fighting, or it could be, just like you were saying in the university setting, uh sociology, you know, any of these disciplines that weren't, you know, the fundamentals of the faith, let's say, that those discussions had been carried by non-Christians, right? They were now the leaders in those fields. So when Christians got back in, they here's the mistake I think they made is they they brought, they just bought into the systems that were in place, but they prayed in the morning because they were Christians, right? Like we so we saw this at in Food for the Hungry, where our approach to poverty fighting wasn't really significantly different than any secular relief and development organization. It really wasn't, uh even USAID. But we were Christians and we were motivated to help the poor out of the Bible, what the Bible taught, and we prayed, but that prayer was very private and personal, and then when we went to work, we did it according to the principles that were dominant in the field at the time. And I see a parallel to what you're talking about with the universities. So with universities get back into all of these different areas of society with neo-evangelicalism, but instead of doing it in a distinctly biblical way, saying, how do we do this biblically, they just borrowed the ideas that were dominant at and you see this like even, for example, in the whole social justice movement, right? Uh you know, we'll borrow all of that, bring that right into our curriculum, our classrooms, and and what I see you guys doing, for example, at the Center for Biblical Unity is pushing back in the right way, saying, no, we need to be involved in justice, but we have to do it biblically with very biblical definitions. It's going to look very different than this the you know the kind of postmodern social justice, Marxist social justice. So you're thinking that through, you're writing the curriculum, you're doing it the right way. I just think that's the I want to applaud you for that. I think that's the opportunity in front of us now going forward is it's not enough just to re-engage culture. We have to re-engage culture from the first principles of the scripture and rethink all of this stuff that we kind of lost in a sense. And when we hired, you know, the the leaders, the academic leaders of of economics and business and sociology or whatever it was, and we brought them into the you know the universities, like you were saying. Any reaction or thoughts to what I'm saying, Krista on this?
Speaker 1Oh, yes and amen. I mean, I think it's exactly a parallel to that. And and I mean, I see this in the Christian higher ed all the time. People are like, well, you know, there was nothing distinctly Christian about my master's program and social work when I went to this big name Christian university. It was all the same ideas we just prayed at the beginning of class. Right. You know, uh uh it there and from my standpoint, you know, we we have to do the hard work of like, no, what is the distinctly Christian framework for helping the poor? What is that exactly?
Scott AllenOr for justice as opposed to just bringing in this whole concept of social justice from neo-Marxism, right?
Speaker 1And we can't just say, oh, you know, love. Like we're just gonna fly everything under the banner of love. Like we've got to do more than just this minimalistic uh Jesus Jesus wants us to have love for neighbor, and then we're gonna fly in every crazy socialist policy under that. Like, no, we there is a diff distinctly Christian way that God wants us to go about this project. What is that? And that is the question that we are asking at the Center for Biblical Unity. We are not about bringing in diversity, equity, and inclusion, sprinkling Jesus on top of it, and then sending that out into Christian higher ed. Um we are trying to fight for a distinctly Christian approach.
Scott AllenA real biblical way of understanding this. And I'm so glad that is to me, that's where we're at today. This is the opportunity in front of the church. You guys are paving the way. You know, you're not just reacting against you could just be fighting that social justice strain at biola and trying to rip it out and saying, you know, these chapel speakers or curriculum or professors, they all need to go. Okay, yes, you're right. But uh, as Nancy Pearcy says, you've got to offer something better, and the better is what the Bible actually teaches about these things. But we we haven't we've kind of gotten out of the habit of doing that kind of work because again, it's it's the you know, we've reduced this is again the I think the error that the fundamentalists made. We've kind of reduced the Bible to evangelism, personal faith, et cetera. We just got out of the work of thinking biblically from first principles about all sorts of things. And that's what you guys are trying to do, right? Yeah.
Speaker 1Yeah, and I I want to say very clearly that Biola has made significant improvements in turning around. And they are a good test case for what can be done. I want to encourage everyone to listening to this podcast to fight for your favorite institution. Institutions matter. They are part of what provide us generational stability. And so I am not here to burn down Biola or any other institution.
Biola’s Drift And Renewal Fight
Speaker 1I even think I think Christianity today is should be really called progressive Christianity today. I think it's pretty progressive. That's an opinion. Yeah, no, no. Don't write to my good friends here at at Disciple Nations if you all have that it's heartbreaking.
Scott AllenLet me just be honest, it's heartbreaking because we know the history of these powerful institutions. Christianity today has done such good work. It's heartbreaking.
Speaker 1I want them I want these institutions to survive and to thrive and to turn back. And so I want to encourage everyone who's listening to this podcast today to fight for your favorite institution. If you love a particular Christian college because you came from there and you're you're seeing drift on social media, don't just abandon them. Start to fight back, and we all can fight different ways. I mean, if you want to craft a carefully worded letter, that's great. I did that in the beginning too. And then I escalated that a little bit more and a little bit more and started writing blog posts and posting on social media and making videos. Not everybody's called to that.
Scott AllenBut I do think the tactics that you've used, the approach that you've taken with Biola specifically is a model. I want to recommend it to people that are doing that are called to do similar work, regardless of the church or institution that, you know, may be on your heart. And I just again I want to applaud you, Krista, because Biola is not just any institution, Christian institution. It's it's a leading one. You know, Christian universities all over the country and the world look to Biola. It's worth fighting for. And so, and I I see you right on the forefront of that. And again, it's not just fighting against, you know, these bad neo-Marxist postmodernist ideas that have come in. It's it's doing the work of calling them to something better and saying this. The Bible offers something so much better on this question of racism and uh a race and unity. I mean, there's nothing like what the Bible teaches on that, you know, it's so beautiful, powerful.
Luke AllenSo Yeah, yeah. I I I mean it's it's it's an approach you don't see often at all is this reformation, reforming things, rebuilding things, you know. And in a world where everyone just likes to tear everything down, just rip it apart, you know, with no plans of the future and building their own thing, but just rip it apart, you know. Um this idea of rebuilding is so beautiful to see. Uh but and I I I do have an eye on the time, Chris. I'm sorry, we're already over time, but I I I just am itching to ask you this question. When I was looking at Christian schools, um, and you addressed this a little while back, is um I was I wanted to go to a Christian school, but one of the drawbacks for me is they're not there's not the intellectual rigor and prestige that comes with a degree from pretty much any Christian school in the country, which is a bummer. You know, if you if you have a degree from Princeton or Harvard, everyone's like, oh wow, you know, Ivy League, and you have much better hires and all that. Um but this i i and I don't think the Christian schools did themselves much good when they kind of had this approach towards anti-intellectualism. Um we were talking about that a few weeks ago on the podcast. Is this kind of approach that like we gotta stay away from the secular topics, you know, just the Bible, which to the world says we don't take those things seriously. Therefore, probably that's how we ended up with this um, you know, persona to the world. Um how can Christian schools uh I don't know if it's even a recover, but how can Christian schools have you know build programs that are intellectually rigorous and taken seriously and can build kind of a prestigious institution? Not that that matters too much, but it is very helpful for the students. But it it's it's also just I mean, I'm looking again, Princeton, Harvard, Yale, all Christian colleges. So they figured it out. What's different what's different with these new Christian colleges? Like, what did we get wrong? I don't know.
Speaker 1Oh, that's a whole podcast, Luke. Oh sorry. I I think that we're living in a day and age where I think that, and this is this is this is an opinion, um, but I think as we move forward, we're living right on the cusp right now of a revolution in artificial intelligence. And there's a lot of studies right now that are happening on the impact of that of technology on education. There's one school of thought that thinks that schools won't even be needed anymore because we'll just give people computers and they can teach themselves everything. There's another school of thought of emerging data that um technology actually hinders learning. And um so I'm wondering this is a speculation, but I'm wondering if one of the things that could differentiate Christian institutions over the long haul is our disengagement with technology as a tool of learning in many cases. That we go back to pencil and paper uh taking notes and reading physical books because there's an emerging body of research that shows that people learn better, it registers in their brain better, it forms neural pathways. That are more firm when they are engaging in these sorts of real world tools versus just clicking on their laptop in class or using AI to generate their answers or book summaries. Of returning to the classics. But I think that I I'm personally a skeptic of a lot of education technology. Now that's not to say I'm a Luddite and I'm against computers, but I think that if we really want to help students grapple the most with the ideas, we've got to go back to paper and pencil testing. And I don't know if you're old enough to remember blue books, Luke, but we got to go back to blue books and paper and paper books. And that there's so much research that this is how the brain, God seems to have designed the brain to learn the most. And so I think that that is an opportunity for Christian institutions to think about something that could differentiate them from the noise of all of the other institutions. And I think the other thing that we could offer as Christians in our higher ed, and I this is something I think that Biola actually does pretty well, is having relationships with our students, that it's more than just the book learning, but that there is relation relational things happening and discipleship. I know for me I was so impacted by my professors at Biola, and I think that that ethos is deep into the Biola culture. And I would like, you know, that to be true at more Christian institutions where there is that relational component and discipleship and the careful hiring of people who love students as much as they love the information.
Scott AllenWhat I hear you saying here, Krista, is not it's not just the content that we need to teach differently, but it's how we need to teach the pedagogy itself. It needs to be distinctly Christian and rooted in a in a deeply biblical understanding of what it means to be a human being, right?
Speaker 1I've reflected a lot on that, that Jesus is called the Lagos of God, he's called the Word, and but we are raising a generation who doesn't know how to interact with words on the page. They write, they have AI write their book summaries for them. I'm concerned about a generation that will not be that doesn't have strong reading skills. Because if you do have strong reading skills, you could teach yourself any anything. But if we don't have wrong strong reading skills, how will we interact and engage with God's Word? And reading the AI summary is not the same. Not the same.
Speaker 6Oh no.
Scott AllenBoy, this is a this is another podcast. Luke, sign up, Kristin. We need to have another podcast on this. This is really important.
Luke AllenI know, I know. But yeah, I I keep saying this. In the age of AI, which we're entering, if you want to be taken seriously and you want to, you know, exponentially I can't even use my words. See, I use too much technology. Um if you want your your worth in the economy to to to grow exponentially, um uh two things. Uh be known for your integrity and your truthfulness, because in the world of AI, truth is gonna become the currency that's just gonna skyrocket. And then be able to critically think. And the best way to do that is paper on pen, you know. Just just think about our founding fathers. Some of the smartest people this country has ever produced, usually grew up in cabins with two books, the Bible and you know, something by Locke probably, and brilliant men who knew multiple languages. So you can do it. You don't need you don't need technology.
SpeakerUm also the whole issue of discipleship, right? That's another podcast of discipleship our institutions really disciples our churches, uh us as parents,
Education In The Age Of AI
Speakeruh what we understand by this, so that's a whole other issue.
Scott AllenYeah, yeah, you're you're right to bring that up. I mean, really, I think the line between discipleship, Nelson, and learning, teaching, training, you know, it's it it blurs, it really does. So I look I you know, I I understood this when I was a parent with my kids. You know, where does education stop and discipleship start? Well, it's hard to draw that line, you know. So right.
Luke AllenYeah. Um, Krista, just as we're wrapping up here, um, you know, for listeners who are feeling overwhelmed by all these cultural shifts and you know postmodernism in itself, it's hard to even define, as we were explaining. Um, it's just a lot. It's how do I wrap my head around all these things? It's moving so fast, you know, um, not to mention all the theological debates that are comp constantly happening in the church that can be very overwhelming and confusing for people, um, especially if you're a newer believer. Um what are like practical next steps that we can take at this moment? I love the idea of calling our institutions back to their to their Christian institutions, back to their foundings, back to the cornerstone, that firm cornerstone, the rock on which we stand. Um but what else can we do? What other takeaways can we take away from this discussion?
Speaker 1Yeah, I think um one thing you can do that's really easy is just download the our mobile app from the Center for Biblical Unity. You'll be able to get a ton of content across all our platforms, all there, it's all free. Um and just be proactive to learn more about the faith. And um one of the things that we do at the Center for Biblical Unity is try to disciple people in these cultural issues, help them to think just in a distinctly Christian way, but also connect them with other ministries like Disciple Nations. We have a whole page on our website of other like-minded ministries that will help you learn more about the faith. So that's really my number one is be proactive, learn more about the faith. Um daily Bible reading, and I really want to encourage people to read through the Bible together as a family with your children, one chapter a day out loud, discuss it together. Because in an age where the only scripture that most young people are interacting with is a few deconstructed verses that are flashed up on a screen on Sunday, it's easy to deconstruct from a faith that you never knew. And if children do not read the Bible, um they don't know what they've re what they're really even walking away from. And so read through the Bible one chapter a day and discuss it together as a family. Um total game changer. If you want to know more,
Practical Steps And Where To Learn
Speaker 1there's a go on my theology mom uh channel, YouTube channel. I have a whole training about it, walk you through it. Um so those are my number one and number two is be proactive and daily Bible reading with your children. Third is commit to a local church that unashamedly affirms historic Christianity. Like, not a mushy middle church, not a church like, well, yeah, it's on paper, it's on our website, but we don't really talk about it. And you know, we're not gonna talk about politics or social issues because that's private. Like, go find the church in your community that unashamedly affirms historic Christianity and is willing to have the conversation of how does the Bible apply to the very complicated world that we live in and those social issues. Uh, fourth, I would say build a little community of like-minded families with other children, um, go camping, uh, have pool parties, uh toilet paper each other's house in the middle of the night. Like do crazy stuff to build a community with other like-minded families who want to walk in the Christian worldview and um that can foster accountability. Hold on.
Scott AllenI'm just one I'm just wondering if Nelson understands. Nelson, do people toilet paper each other's houses in Brazil?
SpeakerWe have other forms of expressing at least for this.
Scott AllenOh, those are all excellent, Krista. I just think um really, really helpful and very practical as well ideas. So thank you for that. And as we wrap up, again, how do people how do people uh tap into again those rich resources that you have, both on your podcast and at Center for Biblical Unity? What's the best way for people to follow you?
Luke AllenNo problem, I'll edit this.
Scott AllenOh, are we frozen? Okay.
Speaker 1So edit that out. Okay, she had a so Scott, ask me the question again.
Scott AllenYeah, uh Krista, just as we wrap up, tell people how do they get in touch with you and uh your ministry and your teaching? What are the best ways to reach you?
Speaker 1Sure, yeah, just look for us uh on the internet, Center for Biblical Unity.com. Uh you can also find my teaching at theolymom.com. And again, the best way is just download the Center for Biblical Unity mobile app, and you can get connected to us uh across all of our platforms.
Scott AllenAwesome. Great. Thanks for being with us today, Krista. It's been a great discussion, and uh and yeah, it's it's it it really is an exciting time. As many challenges as we face, I feel like there really is a time for us to turn a corner right now and do something, kind of get get away from some of the mistakes that were made, you know, going back a hundred years and and and try to learn from those mistakes and and plow a new way forward here. So that's my hope, anyways. God bless you, Krista, and thanks for being with us again today.
