Do Evangelicals Still Believe Evangelical Things? Exploring the 2025 State of Theology

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Speaker 1: Hey, everybody, welcome to this episode of Thinking Christian On.

00:00:03
Speaker 2: Doctor James Spencer and I'm joined by doctor Ashish Varma today and we've known each other for a long time.

00:00:08
Speaker 1: So we're going to have a conversation.

00:00:10
Speaker 2: About the State of Theology report and some of the things that we've noticed as we've kind of played around with the report.

00:00:16
Speaker 1: It's a really interesting.

00:00:17
Speaker 2: One and so we're looking forward to a good conversation today about maybe something like generational differences amongst evangelicals on certain theological perspectives.

00:00:27
Speaker 1: So Ashish, welcome to the show. How you doing, man, Thanks good to be here.

00:00:31
Speaker 3: I'm doing all right, a little cold, but doing all right.

00:00:35
Speaker 2: You're in the frigid Lombard Library and I appreciate you.

00:00:39
Speaker 1: I appreciate you hopping on to do this well.

00:00:42
Speaker 2: So we had a previous conver we had a conversation before the show. But the State of Theology report just kind of give everybody a sense of it. And you can actually just google the State of Theology or the State of the just go to the Stateoftheology dot com. It's a report that Liganier does, I think bi annually, and so they came out with the twenty twenty five results earlier this year and just been playing around with this report for a while.

00:01:07
Speaker 1: Now.

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Speaker 2: They rank and they give you different filters on this, a lot of different filters on this, and so what we're going to be doing today is just kind of playing around with those filters a little bit and you know, waxing philosophical, making some hypotheses about why the different results might come out the way that they did.

00:01:27
Speaker 1: So that's kind of where we're at.

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Speaker 2: The report doesn't actually give us a lot of the things that we're going to talk about. It gives us some raw data to kind of play off of. So I don't want to give the impression that the report gives us all this information that we're going to talk about today. It just is a jumping off point for some of our scholarly investigation.

00:01:48
Speaker 1: Fair enough.

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Speaker 2: So, just in case anybody wanted to look at this report, like I said, you can go to the state of the dot com and what we're going to do. We're looking at the data explore just so people can find the information we're looking at, and we're going to filter this out for two stable variables, and then we're going to look at the different generational or age demographics as we go through some of these questions. So the two stable ones are going to be affiliation and belief. We're marking both of those evangelical. We did find that as we played around with some of those others, if we put in not evangelical belief or if we put in something like, you know, mainline affiliation, the results do change pretty drastically, and so it's kind of interesting to watch how these things change. But for the purposes of this conversation, we're just going to make it a little simplified and talk about evangelical beliefs across different age ranges. So that's what we're going to start, and we'll start with what is statement sixteen. The Bible, like all sacred writings, contains helpful accounts of ancient myths, but is not literally true. So that's the statement. And then people are asked, do you agree with this, do you someone agree with this, are you not sure about this, do you somewhat disagree, or do you strongly disagree.

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Speaker 1: It's kind of that five point scale.

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Speaker 2: So I'll be looking over to the right because I've got the report pulled up, and so if you see me looking off camera.

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Speaker 1: That's what I'm doing.

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Speaker 2: I'm adding quickly in my head agreement numbers. So we looked at this and for statement sixteen, if we filter for the two evangelical and then you do eighteen to thirty four, we have twenty four percent agreement that the Bible is contains helpful accounts of ancient myths but is not literally true. Versus if we factor in all the other age groups, which run from you know, thirty five all the way up to sixty five plus, we have a pretty big disparity. There's only seven percent agreement amongst all the rest of the age groups, and so that's a pretty big difference between the eighteen to thirty four range and then all the other age groups. When you say ashij.

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Speaker 3: Yeah definitely maybe one of the starker different says that we see in this report.

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Speaker 2: Yeah, it's they're obviously the biggest category at twenty four percent versus even if we factor them in lump them in with everybody else, the whole agreement is only ten percent. So factoring by age really does make a difference on this one. What I found interesting is when I looked at some of the other statements, like let's say statement eighteen, modern science disproves the Bible. Right, you see a very similar trend there. The eighteen to thirty four year old age group really does agree more frequently with that, so twenty seven percent agreement versus let's say the sixty five plus which was only ten percent agreement. So again a pretty big disparity between these are between these ages higher percentage of younger people believe modern science disproves the Bible and that the Bible is not fully literally true. Now that would be disturbing in my mind if it weren't for some of these other stats that we look at. So if we move to question I'm getting there twenty or question thirty, excuse me, statement thirty, The Bible has authority to tell us what we must do, and you filter it. All the age groups agree with this to a level of ninety six percent. The eighteen to thirty four year old age group is actually at ninety six percent. The sixty five plus age group is slightly higher than that, or as slightly lower than that, actually ninety three percent. And so there's this interesting variation. And if we just go too statements more, the Bible is the highest authority for what I believe it doesn't matter which age group you pick, you get one hundred percent agreement. And so these things don't seem to fit together. Right now, I'm in that middle age group of thirty five forty nine, and so maybe it shouldn't fit together for me.

00:06:01
Speaker 1: But I don't know. What do you make of this man? What do you think?

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Speaker 3: Well, one, that it's super interesting and you you you tend to hear a lot. You know, it's sort of the thing that we do as we get older. I think I find myself looking at my kids saying, we used to do things this way, right. You know, in my day, we didn't have streaming services. You just had watch what was on and get over it, right. Or I said, this is my class yesterday because they were talking about fighting fighting among their siblings when they were kids between the remote control, and I finally just piped up and said, you know, our TV didn't have a remote. It just had buttons for each channel on top of it, so there wasn't really much fighting except who got to the front of the TV first. It's a thing that you do as you get older, right. We have this sense of what's normal that comes from when we were younger.

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Speaker 1: Yeah, so.

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Speaker 3: Part of it you expect, and that's as you get older, your sense of normal is phased out. Right. But the part that is odd about it, or at least that seems to contradict that way of looking at this, right, This this notion of as you get older things look different because things are changing. Is that this last question thirty two that you're talking about, it doesn't matter hold you are, if you're an evangelical or you identify as an evangelical, you say the Bible is the highest authority for what I believe, and it's not even like so they divide it up. Agree strongly agree.

00:07:42
Speaker 1: Is right?

00:07:44
Speaker 3: Strongly agree? Which is interesting and to me that raises other questions. Is the issue here with some of these other questions of the relationship to the Bible to the sciences, the relationship of the Bible to myth, relationship of what we believe the Bible says, to questions of gender and so on and so forth.

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Speaker 1: Yeah, is this really a.

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Speaker 3: Question of lack of trust and belief or is there's some other factor that is entered into play in which we're looking at the Bible as saying different sorts of things.

00:08:22
Speaker 2: Yeah, Yeah, yeah, when I would just say one thing before we move into that kind of conversation, just to give people a reference point. If you mark not evangelical, and then you mark the different affiliations that are not evangelical churches, that percentage the Bible is the highest authority for what I believe. The strongly agree goes down to fifteen percent one to five, and the somewhat agree goes down to twenty eight percent.

00:08:49
Speaker 1: So the evangelical.

00:08:51
Speaker 2: Belief and the evangelical affiliation, it's actually really strongly correlated with this particular belief. This is not just something that you know, Like you could ask any Joe schmol on the street. They're going to go, oh, yeah, I strongly agree with that. This is a uniquely evangelical belief. And so I do think that as we get into some of the more granular questions, does modern science disprove the Bible as the Bible.

00:09:15
Speaker 1: Fully and literally true?

00:09:17
Speaker 2: Probably part of what we're running into is the I think I would say the access to information is just getting more and more open. In other words, as we've gone into a digital age, we're all seeing more information and being less able to integrate it into our faith paradigm. Right, So what do you do with some of these things? I mean, there are books written on, for instance, like climate science. I have known nothing about climate science. I haven't looked at it at all, But this is one of those areas. Part of the reason I haven't looked at is because I don't feel like I have the time. I don't know that to get up to speed to understand all of that would be a really long process. And so as you're looking at some of these scientific theories, looking at some of these scientific studies and things that are coming out, you have to actually have the time to not only gloss them, but to really deeply understand them. And then once you've deeply understood them and critically analyzed them, then you've got to integrate them back into your faith. And my guess is that what's happening is that that sort of old analytical style of processing information just isn't happen as much.

00:10:35
Speaker 3: Yeah, if I can offer an analogy, I know you love analogies.

00:10:39
Speaker 1: There, go for it.

00:10:41
Speaker 3: So I played basketball. I won't get into the weeds of what all that entails, but the game has changed a lot.

00:10:48
Speaker 1: Yeah.

00:10:48
Speaker 3: Now, personally, I'll make comments every now and then again if I think this era was better than that era. Yeah, but I just love the games. I'm going to keep playing. I'm going to keep watching. But i play pickup ball with the group, and I'm on the older side of the guys that play. And one of the big things that's changed. And it's not important to understand the ins and outs of this, but there's a rule that's a current way that an offensive player can move with the ball, called the step through. You could not do a step through when I was growing up. In fact, what we call a step through now would have been called a travel, a travel back in my day. I've always prided myself on being a good defender. I think it's important not just to be able to shoot, but can you make things hard on the other team. The step through changes everything. So I'll be guarding these young guys and in my mind, that's just not a move you make. It's not part of my repertoire. So I'll try to lock them down on defense and they'll slip through suddenly with a step through, and it's annoying. It's definitely annoying. My inclination is to say travel, and then I have to remember, no, it's not a travel anymore.

00:12:03
Speaker 1: It used to be a travel.

00:12:04
Speaker 3: It's not a travel anymore.

00:12:06
Speaker 1: Right Now, what do I do with that?

00:12:08
Speaker 3: The game has changed? Right? I want to keep playing. I could throw a fit about the fact that in my day there was no step through, right, I don't know that that gets me anywhere. They're just going to call me old man and keep playing. And they're not wrong, right if they if they turn on the TV and watch the NBA or college or high school, the step through is allowed. So what I have to do is I have to be able to adjust. My defense has to take into account that what might have been a lockdown defensive play before now has to be able to account for this step through motion. It makes being a defender harder, but you got to do it well. My analogy in this is that to your point, things have changed just in terms of access. Yeah, whether it was right or wrong to make blanket judgments in the absence of access thirty years ago, we'll leave that to the side unless you want to.

00:13:10
Speaker 1: Get into that.

00:13:12
Speaker 3: The reality is just simply access has changed, and complaining about it isn't going to change that access has changed. Right, Having taught college students and grad students. I don't think the way it's specifically in theological studies. I don't think the way forward is to spend all this time talking or bemoaning the access that comes to various ways of thinking about the Bible, various ways of thinking about theology. And it's more about, Okay, access has changed. Now, what does that mean for how I engage as a professor, how I engage in theological education. To me, that's got to be the way forward. Sure, we can have our moments of griping on the side in our in our old man corners, just the same way I do with my fellow old man basketball players. But when you get on the court, you know, you've got to adjust. And I think this sort of dissonance that might seem at first when we look at this kind of report, we've got to move quickly by and ask the questions that you just asked.

00:14:15
Speaker 2: Yeah, because I think the other thing we were talking about before this, and I appreciate the basketball analogy. I think that makes a lot of sense. One of the things I would say has changed. And you you know, as we talked before the podcast, we both agree on this is that the liberal conservative thing is not the way to solve this problem. Those categories aren't going to be as helpful in describing this data. And so some people might look at this and go, well, there's eighteen to twenty four year old or eighteen to thirty four year olds. They're going liberal. They think science just proves the viable. They don't think the Bible is literally true, right, and so this is a liberal drift. I as I look at the whole of the report, and obviously we're not covering every question on this podcast because that would be a lot, but I would say, as I've looked at the whole report, sure.

00:15:00
Speaker 1: That's exactly the conclusion I would come to.

00:15:03
Speaker 2: I think you have all of these different intersecting beliefs that are being brought to bear on different generations of people, and that those intersecting beliefs can tend to skew how they answer something. In other words, if we were looking at this just from a you know, a straight theological perspective, right, we might say, well, there is a right answer to that, right, we might have to simplify it down a good bit, right, you know, remove a lot of the complexity of these conversations because even you know, ancient myths, but is not literally true. Literally is difficult for me to get my head around, right. I would have just preferred it to be said, but it is not true because I'm not sure what the difference between literally true and true actually is. Right, But that's probably more granular than most people are reading that question. So the point is is I think that and I'll give it. For instance, when I looked at the question about whether or not Christian beliefs or one's religious beliefs should influence their political activities, there were a higher proportion of eighteen to thirty four year olds who said that it shouldn't. They agreed that their faith should not influence their politics. And then you go to some of the moral questions, you know, transgenderism, homosexuality, some of those, and you're like, how are these not going to be skewed by that particular perspective? In other words, if they think that their beliefs, their Christian beliefs shouldn't skew their politics, and they view these as political issues, they're going to answer those differently than someone who actually does think that their faith should influence politics. And so I think there's just a lot there that we when we're looking at how do we correct maybe some of these views, how do we cultivate more agreement on some of these use We can't just go straight at and go well, we need to get back into bibliology, and we need to teach inerrancy, and we need to teach inspiration, we need you know, maybe I mean those are always good things to understand, I suppose, but there are these other areas I think coming around the side that if we're not addressing this is only gonna get worse.

00:17:20
Speaker 3: Yeah, to the to the question you just raised about should should Christians allow their religious beliefs to influence their political decisions? As we were talking about before, there are interesting trends when you when you take the evangelical population and then you remove that filter and put on the non evangelical population. So generally speaking, we've noticed that with the evangelical box checked, there does seem to be a movement as you get younger in these age backits. But when you remove the evangelical and you go to the non evangelical, the movement is far less fluid. In fact, you have a strange commonality and most of the categories between the young and the old. So the eighteen to thirty four being the young plus sixty five plus being the old tend to be in similar positions. So with that, with that pattern in front of us, what I think is interesting on this particular question, Christians should not allow their religious beliefs to be influenced to influence their political decisions. Strongly agree. The highest population here is the youngest eighteen to thirty four, but the next highest, not far away from them, is that sixty five plus. So this time a general landscape question whether evangelical or not. And that's fascinating to me. You know, maybe maybe it shouldn't be as surprising to me when I look at other sorts of statistics. So, for instance, we have we have a late late night talkshow ecosystem on many of the major networks, and the age group that dominates the ratings for those are the sixty five plus people because they're the only ones who seem to watch TV live anymore. But then you go to the YouTube population and that tends to be a younger group and they're getting millions of views per clip, So maybe there's some correlation there as well, right, But I think that's an interesting thing to note on this particular question that for the evangelical population, it breaks the otherwise noticeable trend of younger means different, and this case, younger doesn't necessarily mean different.

00:19:43
Speaker 2: Yeah, they were much closer on a lot of these measures. When you just bracketed just the evangelicals versus the whole population, there was a big difference. The other thing I would say there were some difference is is I looked at different questions in the density, which I found fascinating. Density refers to whether you live in a large city or a rural area, a suburb or a small city, or what have you. And I was kind of going through some of the questions with those that filter on as well, and you did see pretty big differences. The way that people in large cities thought about these things was different than the way people thought about in rural areas. Now, all these are just percentage differences, right, and so at some point you're getting probably too granular in your sample size. In fact, if you put too many filters on the website, will pull up a little note and say there was under fifty you know respondents in this filter. These results probably aren't going to be accurate, But just again as sort of a thought experiment for us. What I think we're seeing is that some of these community aspects actually really matter. So even when I was doing my little experiment and I took off, you know, you'd just use evangelical belief. An evangelical belief alone apart from other factors didn't seem to really get it done. But if I put evangelical belief and then evangelical affiliation, then that percentage would lower. And if I put evangelical belief, evangelical affiliation and church attendance several times a week, it would lower again. And So while we tend to and I'm definitely guilty of this, I tend to think in terms of headspace, Right.

00:21:22
Speaker 1: What do you actually believe? What do you know?

00:21:24
Speaker 2: I mean, I think it's just the academic geek thing, right, you sort of like to think about these things. But the reality is, if we were looking at this survey and we follow some of these trends, community and time spent in community is actually crucial to holding some of these beliefs more strongly and obviously others less strongly.

00:21:49
Speaker 3: Yeah, well said, What I think is especially interesting in that equation. If we can dig into this a little bit as the church attendants. Yeah, you spent more time with that filter than I did. Do you mind sharing what you shared with me earlier in terms of kind of the more granular elements there. One of the ways they divided is it's not just church attendants, but it's frequency of church attendants. Do you go religious days? Do you go once or twice a month, or once tw twice a month, once a week, which probably is the most that's right, the most obvious place that people would think of, will you go to church every Sunday? Right?

00:22:30
Speaker 1: But then there once a week times that changes things, right?

00:22:35
Speaker 2: And so I looked at this specifically with a question on the report, does God accept or God accepts the worship of all religions including Christianity, Judaism, and Islam? Right, So this is the question I was looking at, but just to illustrate how some of these filters actually work. So if you look at evangelical belief there was only forty seven percent agreement on that either strongly or somewhat right or there was forty seven percent agreement, So forty seven percent of people with evangelical beliefs said that God accepts worship from all religions. If I then go down and say, okay, but if you're combined with if you combine that with evangelical affiliation. So now I've got evangelical belief and evangelical affiliation that goes down from forty seven percent to thirty one percent thirty percent thirty one percent agreement. And then if I say, well, what about church attendance, it drops another ten percent to twenty one percent if I add in several times a week a church.

00:23:38
Speaker 1: And so that's sort of the tear that I'm talking about.

00:23:41
Speaker 3: It.

00:23:41
Speaker 1: It's like, you see this, the belief aspect, the.

00:23:45
Speaker 2: Evangelical belief aspect I hold, the evangelical beliefs is not as strongly correlated with what I would consider to be a right answer on this one. I mean, I think that should be stated right. I would have said strongly disagree to this question. I think there's ample reason, And I'm writing an article for Christianity dot com, so if you guys want to check that out, you can find it there. But basically, what I would say is God doesn't accept false worship. If we think about worship as the reverential homage toward God, recognizing the worth of who God is. There has to be an understanding, a matched identity between what the worshipper thinks they're worshiping and who the you know, who is actually being worshiped. And we see this throughout scripture. I think, so I'll be making that argument in a little bit more of a robust case. But my point is for this, as we go down from belief to affiliation to attendance, you see this agreement shifting pretty drastically. I mean you're talking twenty some more than twenty five percent decline decrease in that percentage from just belief all the way down to church attendance. So it's a fascinating trend to look at. I wouldn't have expected that drastic a drop.

00:25:01
Speaker 3: Honestly, what do you make of thinking specifically about this question? God accepts the worship of all religions, including Christianity, Judaism, and Islam. In terms of strongly disagree, I suppose, somewhat predictably, several times a week of church attendance, that number of skyrockets, right, most people disagree. What surprises me within it is the next category down is you go once a week to church, and that group is more likely to agree with the statement than those who only go once or twice a month.

00:25:40
Speaker 1: That's right, that's funny to me.

00:25:43
Speaker 3: I don't know what to make of that.

00:25:44
Speaker 2: I'm not sure either. I don't know what to make of it either, But yeah, I noticed that trend too. I would just say.

00:25:54
Speaker 1: If we infer from which it's difficult to do, like, what are we doing for with church attendants? Right? Like?

00:26:04
Speaker 2: What are we How are we supposed to understand that? Are we supposed to understand it as a commitment to a bigger commitment to I think certainly I didn't even know you could attend church several times a week at this point, right, Like I just didn't realize that most of the churches I've ever attended have that once a week service.

00:26:25
Speaker 1: And that's kind of it, and.

00:26:26
Speaker 3: And so the Wednesday thing is kind of flittering away.

00:26:30
Speaker 2: Yeah, And so it's interesting to think about even just when you're answering this question, are you talking about your worship service in a small group, or are you talking about, you know, your worship service and another church function like I used to have when I was a kid. We'd go on Wednesday nights, right, Or you'd have maybe a Saturday night service or something like that, Like, there were multiple opportunities for you to be at church, right, not in a small group, but at church. And so I'm wondering if some of this has to do with just church structure or not necessarily a comment on the dedication of an individual to be there several times a week, but the availability of multiple service times per week at a local congregation doing a better job of educating, like that could be it. Because once a week at church, you know, you're listening to a sermon usually, and so if the sermon doesn't address the exclusivity of Christian worship and the uniqueness of it and how God responds to worship of other groups, maybe you just don't get that question right. You know, you're inferring a lot of different things. So I don't know that we have enough. I mean, I could speculate on certain things, but yeah, my gut is to say, if if several times a week of church attendance doesn't mean small groups, or even if it does mean small groups and some other things, that maybe there is a gesturing toward better training, right, a different understanding of this than what what a Sunday worship service would really do for you, which wouldn't necessarily help you answer this question.

00:28:10
Speaker 3: Yeah, so maybe that's the takeaway that there's a certain level of investment within the larger operation of church training, church teaching that if you're involved in multiple facets of church life, that you're not getting on a Sunday morning just by nature of what a Sunday morning is, right, I wonder so that to me, that raises the question of causation versus correlation. Sure, so does the multiple Is it the attending of multiple days or multiple events during the course of a week that's giving you the training to answer the question in this particular way, or is it you're already inclined towards that. So it becomes sort of an in group.

00:28:56
Speaker 1: Here.

00:28:56
Speaker 3: I say. I don't mean this in a negative way, but group think sort of mental If you're the ones who think this way, and that's why you're the ones there, and the self selection of the others are not the ones who think this way, that's why they're not there.

00:29:10
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean I think there's something to that. You can view it as maybe it's better training. You could also view it as the more time I spend around people with similar thoughts as I do, the less likely I am to think that people with different thoughts than we have different beliefs than we have different religious practitioners belong with us. And so that's not necessarily a bad thing.

00:29:34
Speaker 1: Right.

00:29:34
Speaker 2: That development of a strong in group identity, particularly if it's forged in discipleship, that in Christ's identity, is actually pretty crucial, right. You can identify who's in and who's out. You see this happening like First John, for instance. Right the first chapter of First John, he provides some markers the true Christian community, right, and says, if they had been of us, they would not have gone out from us. Right, So if they really have been part of our community, they'd still be here, they wouldn't have left. We see this in probably First Corinthians, where Paul is trying to circumstribe and say, hey, don't have all these divisions, You're one in Christ. And so it's just there's a crucial aspect to this in group identity that I don't want to I don't want it to be polarized and be like, oh, they're just an insular community that doesn't reach out or something weird like that. I think there's a really healthy way that we understand ourselves as being different from other religions and that there are clear boundaries between us and other religions. So I think that could be cultivated in a more frequent interaction within the Christian community and with a group of Christian folks that may be the impetus behind this. Whereas people who are like kind of once a week, if you think about how little time that actually is versus what you may be doing for the rest of the week. Right, who you may be interacting with the rest of the week, So you're co workers, you're you know, you know, maybe members of your family, maybe some of your friends, your bowling league, whatever it is. Right, You're now not interacting solely with Christians. You now have friends who may be of different faiths, and that may very well condition the way that you're answering this question. And so time is a factor. I think that we shouldn't minimize in this because the more time we're spending within the church, I think obviously we're going to pick up a i don't know, for lack of a better term, of cultural awareness of what the church actually is and be more inclined to feel a part of it as opposed to it being something that I attend weekly.

00:31:38
Speaker 1: Does that make sense?

00:31:39
Speaker 3: It does. It raises more questions if you're willing to try it on us. So it's fresh. I'm fresh, it's fresh in my mind. This John seventeen dynamic just from class be in the world but not of the world. Yeah, which is really interesting. It's not entirely clear what that dynamic looks like. If anything, one could argue it's deliberately a dynamic full of tension, no easy answers. And I hear what you're saying. I wonder if this is also one of those no easy answers. Right, where's the line between what I think you're helpfully describing and on the other side, you're not in the world. You don't know what's going on, and so there's no ability you know that, there's a there's a hermeneutical entailment to not getting the full dynamics of it or right, So what we don't want is an echo chamber, and I think that's dangerous for any community and the group in any place. But there is on the other side, I think something right as you're describing to this iron sharpening, iron sort of way of thinking, and maybe the line is intentionally blurry and that's where our where our discernment has to come in. What are your thoughts on that?

00:33:11
Speaker 1: Yeah, I agree number one. Yeah, I agree with the one hundred percent. I don't want that to come off as like, here's the only narrative that would work. I think there are.

00:33:19
Speaker 2: A variety of factors here that we're not able to get any real clarity on from the survey. We're just trying to give some broad picture of what this could be and what factors are involved. I think you're right, there is that healthy a group aspect, but then there's also this dynamic where we're supposed to be going out and I think the challenge for Christians generally. We see this almost in the Book of Ezra. I've always found it fascinating when Ezra is bringing the exiles back from Babylon. One of the things he tries to institute is the elimination of for is the returning exiles with people of the land, like, don't intermarry with the people of them land.

00:34:00
Speaker 1: And part of what I.

00:34:01
Speaker 2: Think he's trying to do there is he's trying to preserve the purity of the Israelite returnees, right, so that they can reconstitute and be a part of the restoration of the nation of Israel as a whole. So if we view the exiles as the Judeans largely who are coming back from Babylon, they still need to reach up into some of the Northern Kingdom or even out into the Assyrian Empire and know that these other Israelites, the Northern Kingdom, Israelites have a place to come back to. So he's trying to do is sort of circumscribe this purity. Ultimately it does. None of it works, right, It's all sort of a disappointing failure. But I think that we can get into that sort of mindset of this has to be as pure as possible before we go out, And I think what you're pointing to is it's never going to be as pure as possible. There's always going to be this sort of tension of push and pull of we're going to pick things up.

00:34:56
Speaker 1: From the world that need to be.

00:34:59
Speaker 2: Re formed when we come back into the church, and we're ultimately going to probably spend too much time reforming in the church instead of going out into the world. Right, And so I think, yeah, that that dynamic. To me, We're never going to balance it perfectly. It's always going to be really sloppy, messy line. And this is what repentance is for, This is what forgiveness is for, This is what the encouragement of the community is for. Where I think the challenge of this question and a couple of the other questions, honestly, because I think we probably shouldn't view this one in isolation to like, let's say, statement six, God loves all people the same way. This one, no matter what you filter it with, let's say evangelicals, evangelical belief, evangelical affiliation, church attendance several times.

00:35:51
Speaker 1: A week, you still have eighty four percent.

00:35:58
Speaker 2: Agreement, eighty one percent strongly three percent someonet agree to God loves all people the same way. It's difficult not to correlate those two. You know, God accepts the worship of all these other religions and God loves all people the same way. Now, I would admit that's a fairly opaque statement, But I guess my point is there may also be these other intersecting beliefs that are influencing some of these other responses, and so we can't we can't lose that one either. So Yeah, overall, I'd say the survey doesn't give me a lot of It gives me some hope to say, Hey, being in community and participating in church can help some of these things. But then you come to a question like this, you know you're filtering that the exact same way as we just did for the previous question.

00:36:47
Speaker 1: You're not getting much better result, right.

00:36:49
Speaker 3: If anything, you're getting counterintuitive results for this one. It is because the moment I suppose this says more about my expectations, I would expect this answer to be higher, a higher agreement from non evangelicals, but it's actually lower from non evangelical.

00:37:06
Speaker 1: It's actually lower for non evangelicals. Yeah, I mean that's yeah.

00:37:12
Speaker 3: Some of that is you hinted at definitions. What are people thinking? What are they meaning?

00:37:17
Speaker 1: Yeah?

00:37:18
Speaker 3: Then biblical understanding, it's a complicated understanding. On the one side, we have God is love, greater love has no one list mainly laid on his life for his friends, which is clearly an allusion to the ultimate love of Jesus.

00:37:29
Speaker 1: That's right. And then we have.

00:37:32
Speaker 3: What on the surface anyway, are hard to square with the Jacob I have loved he saw I've hated, right, right, So it's a complicated question and you're not getting that in these questions understandably, also educational questions.

00:37:48
Speaker 1: Right right.

00:37:49
Speaker 3: You could even like that you have to educate, and that's not how these things work.

00:37:53
Speaker 2: Yeah, you could even get into the conversation about what is love? Right, you know, are we talking about God's covenant loyalty? Because then you have a unique case where God is especially loving Israel a unique way because they're in covenant with him, and so if we view love is equally loyalty, then there is a unique and special love. The election of Israel, I think plays into that. The choice of Israel plays into that. You know, all these different things kind of play into that. Whereas we're just talking about a general sort of yeah, God loves his creation. Okay, maybe there's a generic way in which God loves everybody in sort of the same way, but there's obviously specific examples we could look at, Like you said, Jacob, you know, Jacob, I loved you, saw I hated. That's not a the traditional love hate that we often think of, but it is balled up with these other concepts that are kind of difficult to deal with.

00:38:48
Speaker 1: And so yeah, overall the survey, I think, I will say.

00:38:55
Speaker 2: I looking through all the survey answers, looking through all the demographics I have, I'm not there aren't a ton of alarm bells for me in the survey, other than some of them that I just find quite puzzling. This one where we see, you know, God loves everyone the same way. There's a question statement seven on Jesus was a great teacher, but he was not God. You're getting a pretty I mean it's not it's a relatively low percentage, but twenty eight percent of evangelicals agreeing with that statement, regardless of age group.

00:39:38
Speaker 1: Like, that's all of them.

00:39:40
Speaker 2: And so the eighteen to thirty fours are a little higher on it than any other age group, and so they skew that data a bit.

00:39:49
Speaker 1: But that's a pretty fundamental belief.

00:39:54
Speaker 2: And you've got twenty eight percent of Christians of evangelicals and you know, agreeing that Jesus is not God. So there are these counterintuitive results, I think in a lot of these different places.

00:40:11
Speaker 3: Yeah, and again I think not to be the dead horse, you have to take some of that with a grain of salt. What are people understanding when the question is being asked. I think evangelicals fairly consistently point to the importance of the Bible, and so we're not shocked when we see one of the respondence, regardless of age group, the Bibles the final authority, or however exactly it was worded. But then we throw in the dynamic that we've discussed here in terms of what are we understanding the Bible to be saying materially. Now that gets more interesting, especially when you factor in more data. Right, we can be just just to to draw out the sort of thing we're talking about, the extremes of if you live in a pre Galileo pre Copernican society, you're reading language like the setting of the sun and the rising of the sun in different sorts of ways.

00:41:15
Speaker 2: We still say the rise of the sun, right, but.

00:41:21
Speaker 3: A pre Galileo pre Copernicus person's thinking about it. So that changes the way you read the Bible. But then there's a there's the further dynamic of from where are you reading it? You know, not to get into murky waters here, but.

00:41:42
Speaker 1: If you.

00:41:44
Speaker 3: If you live in the United States with all the social social sorts of things and political unrest, that are going on, right, and you read it from a place of of historic that's the best way to put it. Oh, it's historic sense of what the Church ought to see in the making of the American government. You're reading the Bible in a certain kind of way if you live in the same setting and you come from a historic setting into which things like slavery and Jim Crow were significant, you're reading it. And yet another way, if you're reading it as the children of immigrants, in which you're the first person who is a Christian in your family, you're reading it yet in other set of ways, and maybe to a point that you made earlier, but just starting to highlight it. The agreement is there in terms of the significance of the Bible, Yes, but the things that you're noticing maybe aren't the same. Yeah, yeah, and that that's going to change the way that you shade things. Right. We have these in terms of historic doctrinal disputes. Not my favorite doctrinal dispute, but one that has a lot of airtime. So it's a good example, I think, is Calvinism versus our Minianism. Sure, there are different different textual starting points, you know, and how one then reads certain passages is going to be shaded by those different textual starting points, and who gets to decide which one started at the right place?

00:43:27
Speaker 1: Correct?

00:43:28
Speaker 3: That that's just a genuinely and generally historically Protestant problem, right of authority, yes, but authority for what We're not sure. Yeah, that's why we have so many denominations. Right, So all these things go into those sorts of questions. So similarly, I don't have the same kind of alarm bells. I did some perusing online just to see what some of the talking heads were saying about this report, and there's a lot of alarm bell sort of things going off in a way that I didn't shared the same kinds of concerns. To me, It was more a marker of the landscape is shifted in the same sort of way as the landscape of playing basketball shifted. So what are we going to do to adjust accordingly? Right, it's not good enough to just simply say, well, our pastoral and theological education in the nineteen sixties was X, therefore it should be that today, Well, no things have changed. Yeah, obviously Jesus is who Jesus was. We're not saying that's changed. But the sorts of ways in which you address issues, the sorts of issues themselves they need to be addressed, are right.

00:44:37
Speaker 2: Yeah, you might not need to call together a Creedle council to correct some sort of abarrant heresy, you know. I mean those worked really well early on in church history, or worked fairly well and early on in church history, but they may not work now, you know. And I think that that is really crucial to understand. I'm not saying that I'm exactly happy with all the responses on the report, and some of them are a little more troubling than others. It's just there's no reason to get so agitated about it that you jump back in with the response that says, let's hammer these.

00:45:15
Speaker 1: Doctrines home one more time, right, we need.

00:45:18
Speaker 2: To start teaching systematic theology in churches, you know, like maybe we need to do that, but there may also be all these other things that need to be massaged into place, and so it's it's like we can't just you know, you we're looking at a jigsaw puzzle. There's all of these different pieces that are laying out on the table in front of us, and if we only focus on putting together one little corner. None of these other pieces are going to get placed. And so we've got to at least broaden our vision enough to sit back and say, look, where would all these other pieces fit, and how would they contribute to a.

00:45:52
Speaker 1: Reorientation of some of these beliefs. How would that help us if we understood better.

00:45:58
Speaker 2: I go back to the church in politic question, largely because you know, when I was a dean at Moody, I had this question come up. There was a disagreement. Some of the students were celebrating a law that had just been passed and it happened to be about, I think about homosexual marriage, and some students were celebrating that. And so then you get certain people are saying, oh, the students are going liberal. But when I talked to the students, they weren't really. They weren't really going liberal. They still believe that, you know what we would have believed about the Bible and homosexuality.

00:46:34
Speaker 1: But they were off or I would say they were confused. They hadn't thought about it.

00:46:39
Speaker 2: They weren't integrating in how does government fit with faith?

00:46:45
Speaker 1: What's a very different thing than saying they've gone liberal.

00:46:49
Speaker 2: Right, They're disintegrated maybe, and so there's some education that needs to go into this. But we didn't need to plow into, hey, let's go through all the Bibles that condemn or let's go through the Bible passages that condemn homosexuality or something. What was necessary was some additional exploration into what does a political theology look like, how does the church and the state actually fit, What does it look like to be a Christian in a democracy? How can we celebrate the rights that other people are getting? How is this good for? Like all these different questions that you could ask and reframe in terms of Christianity as opposed to just reacting to it and saying no, we have to now preach on this specific doctrinal issue.

00:47:32
Speaker 1: We have to make them read these things.

00:47:35
Speaker 2: Like if once we understand why people are believing what they're believing, why they're thinking this way, then we can come up with some solutions to help move them in a different direction. But I think if we just look at this report and go, okay, you know, one of the questions that I found interesting was like, let's say I'm going to find it here in a minute. The Holy Spirit is a force, but is not a personal being. Okay, Uh, forty three percent of evangelicals agree with that. Well, obviously that's not a trinitarian belief. But how much of it is it conditioned on the way that we tend to ignore the Holy Spirit in our churches?

00:48:18
Speaker 1: Yeah?

00:48:19
Speaker 2: Right, Like I mean, it isn't It isn't necessarily solved by going Okay, let's explain the Trinity. It could very much, very well involve a number of different practices that we need to draw in. So I think that's sort of the My impression of the report is it just gives us a lot to think about and probably a lot more to explore.

00:48:41
Speaker 3: Yeah, fully agree, it's the direction of travel, so to speak. Right, Yeah, everyone, If a large number of people think the Holy Spirit is an impersonal force, that's probably says more about the way we talk about the Holy Spirit of God, right. But equally significant to me is when you put that one next to the statement about trinity. Yeah, got his father's son in Holy Spirit, Hi by in.

00:49:16
Speaker 2: The board, right, And that's those are the difficult things like these.

00:49:21
Speaker 1: Some of these feel like.

00:49:24
Speaker 2: They may not be And I know this is strange to say, because they're asking questions about belief but I don't know that there are actually questions about belief I think what you're getting is sort of maybe some top level agreement on main doctrines, but then once you get.

00:49:38
Speaker 1: Into the.

00:49:41
Speaker 2: Nuances of it, people are like, I don't know, Like you know, there's just not a depth there. And these are not things that we sit down and say, well, let's have a class on the Holy Trinity. Like some of these things are things that we just need to embody, we need to practice in differently. So there's a roundness to this that I think we need to keep in mind, right, that we've got to figure out how it is that we go about reinforcing certain beliefs. If we're looking at this report and I'd say, okay, forty three percent agreement, then the Holy Spirit is a force but not a personal being that one stands out. So if I'm going to solve that though, it's not just a question of going, well, that's not true. There have to be layers to analysis to this to figure out I think what you would do in order to sort of rehab let's say, the views of the Holy Spirit within the church. Right, So interesting stuff, man, I don't know. This report is always fascinating to me. I enjoy kind of talking through it and fiddling around with the data. But ultimately, I think when I walk away from my takeaway at this time around was I was really encouraged to see that church affiliation and a tendons did have a positive effect in certain instances. At the very least, I think that's that's hopeful. That's hopeful. Right in an age where we maybe think that church is sort of optional, it does now feel like, no, the church can actually have a really good influence on some of these things, and maybe it can have more influence in other ways. I know the data isn't fully consistent, but I just really I felt like that that trajectory I thought was really helpful.

00:51:33
Speaker 3: Do we dull that a little bit though, when we see that the spirit does just diforce in that sense?

00:51:40
Speaker 1: I sadly, yes, that's what I mean.

00:51:43
Speaker 2: The data is inconsistent, but I it's like, if it works for one, maybe it can work for the others. You know, it at least pushes us to look at what does our community of practice look like, and maybe we maybe it has an influence that we're just not realizing yet. My hope again, you know, there's a lot of inference going on here because the data is what the data is. It just doesn't lead us anywhere necessarily. It just shines a spotlight on certain of these things.

00:52:12
Speaker 3: For sure. One thing I'd like to see from this, so when you go into this data Explorer model, it gives you the previous reports as well. Yes, And what I would have loved to have been able to do is say, let's compare this. So they did this every two years, it looks like except for this time it was three years ago.

00:52:34
Speaker 1: Yeah.

00:52:35
Speaker 3: I would love to go to the previous report or the eleven years ago report and see what the researchers, the surveyors found for the same questions, but they're not the same questions, right, That would actually help making more sense of some of this data. Has there been movement or could we have gone back eleven years ago? So I tried to find some that were roughly the similar, roughly similar, but there were different adountfas that I don't know that I can say very much from that.

00:53:05
Speaker 1: Yeah.

00:53:06
Speaker 3: Yeah, So if you're listening out there and you're one of the surveyors of this, maybe give us the same questions.

00:53:12
Speaker 2: Thanks time, give me the same questions, Oliver. I will say I appreciate it on this one. They had one that I dealt with a couple of years ago when this came out. It was I believe the statement was God can learn and change, and this time they changed that to just one of those you know, God is unchanged, And I think it's the way they phrased it, which I think is a more appropriate way to phrase it. Yes, because when you have the and in there, God can learn and change. I understood what they were doing right, I could get it, but it does add an element.

00:53:48
Speaker 1: Confusion there and so many.

00:53:52
Speaker 2: Yeah, I think they did have some good clarifications in this one, but it does mean you can't compare the results, so.

00:53:59
Speaker 1: Not as well as you might want to.

00:54:01
Speaker 2: God accepts the worship of all the different religions was the same as the in this one as it was the last one, and the results haven't changed that much from what I remember. So that was that was interesting.

00:54:14
Speaker 3: And modern science disproves the Bible to another one that does carry over. Yeah, and again it's actually not. Actually, what I'm surprised to see is that the number of strongly disagrees up on this one. Yes, maybe I'm less surprised than I should Maybe I'm more surprised than I should be because we do have a little bit more of a polarized The data gives me what I want to see, if not, I disagree. Yeah, sort of a dynamic.

00:54:42
Speaker 2: But well, I know we talked a lot about the meta report kind of stuff today. I'd like to have you back on to discuss some of the specific questions like and and really dive a little deeper into some of them.

00:54:59
Speaker 1: But will we'll that another time.

00:55:01
Speaker 2: We've been going for about an hour, and I think that that's probably overkilled. But it's an interesting survey and I just encourage listeners to go check it out, play around with it. My encouragement would be not to be alarmed by some of the results, but to be thinking through it in the way that Ashish and I have, just trying to figure out, Okay, how does all this fit together? What does this really look like? And how might our church, my local congregation me as an individual Christian? Number one, how do I think about these issues? And number two? What might what might we need to do to sort of move people toward a more orthodox belief So be my two cents, but thanks all she's for participating in this man.

00:55:47
Speaker 1: It was good to have you. Thanks for having me absolutely all.

00:55:51
Speaker 2: Right, everybody, we're going to call it a day there and we'll catch on the next episode of Thinking Christian.

00:55:56
Speaker 1: Take care, everybody,