Relatable with Allie Beth Stuckey - Ep 92 ｜ Eric Metaxas

00:00:00.000 Eric, thank you so much for joining me.

00:00:02.520 It's a sacrifice, Allie.

00:00:03.880 I know that it is, but I'm glad that I got just a little bit of your time.

00:00:08.020 I know that you're a busy man.

00:00:09.320 I know.

00:00:09.800 It's a delight to talk to you.

00:00:12.160 You know that.

00:00:12.780 It's fun for me. 0.98

00:00:13.780 And I already, I have to start out with a stupid joke just because I like you that much. 0.98

00:00:17.480 That's my love language. 0.99

00:00:18.620 I tell all people.

00:00:19.640 That makes me feel really special.

00:00:21.120 So you should feel special.

00:00:22.580 I do.

00:00:22.860 I think a lot of you.

00:00:23.840 Oh, thank you.

00:00:24.560 You're like a daughter to me.

00:00:25.360 You don't realize that.

00:00:26.380 Oh, are you serious or is this part of the joke?

00:00:28.720 No.

00:00:29.120 Well, everything I say has this kind of like joke edge.

00:00:32.180 I know.

00:00:32.460 You have to just kind of wonder.

00:00:33.420 But there's also truth to it also.

00:00:36.120 No, I'm very fond of you and what you've been doing.

00:00:38.860 It's a joy to see you do your stuff.

00:00:40.000 Thank you.

00:00:40.440 You are a really fun person.

00:00:43.160 Like the first time I met you, I think that was what shocked me because people think of

00:00:46.520 you, okay, so you wrote Bonhoeffer, you wrote Martin Luther, you've written a ton of other

00:00:49.800 books.

00:00:50.420 I think of you as an intellectual, which you are, but you don't always think of intellectual

00:00:55.040 people as fun, but you're like really fun.

00:00:57.540 Well, the intellectual part is all an act.

00:01:01.440 Oh, okay.

00:01:01.800 I just like study stuff and then I come out and I pretend like I've known it for years,

00:01:05.900 but I'm really not that bright.

00:01:07.180 Oh, gotcha.

00:01:07.840 But the fun stuff, it is interesting because when I was, I went to a very secular university,

00:01:14.800 you might've heard of it, Yale University.

00:01:16.940 Oh, no way. 0.95

00:01:17.360 Totally secular, PC, insane.

00:01:19.980 And I kind of, you know, I grew up in a working class background.

00:01:23.420 My folks are immigrants from Europe.

00:01:24.820 My dad came from Greece.

00:01:25.660 My mom came from Germany.

00:01:26.740 And I really discovered myself as college kind of unfolded.

00:01:31.120 I realized that I want to write humor.

00:01:33.620 And so I was the editor of the humor magazine at Yale.

00:01:36.520 Okay.

00:01:36.760 But I was also really interested in being a writer writer.

00:01:39.980 So I've always had this weird, you know, divergent thing.

00:01:43.920 And I've ultimately made peace with it.

00:01:46.040 I don't try to make sense of it anymore.

00:01:47.580 I just kind of go with it.

00:01:48.440 I figure this is how the Lord made me.

00:01:50.180 So I'm going to do my best to, you know, be a good steward of both weird sides of myself.

00:01:56.400 I think that there's a lot of pressure too in this industry.

00:01:59.460 And we're not in the exact same industry because you've written a lot of books and I'm just now

00:02:03.820 writing my first book.

00:02:04.760 But there is a lot of pressure to find your niche and to find the one thing that you are

00:02:09.100 and to fit into a category so people can look at you and say, oh, Eric Metaxas, he's the

00:02:13.340 funny guy or he's the intellectual guy.

00:02:15.280 Right.

00:02:15.560 And then when you throw something else in there, like, oh, well, I'm actually funny and I write

00:02:19.740 some funny stuff too, it can confuse people.

00:02:22.380 And I've certainly experienced the same thing.

00:02:25.240 But you're right.

00:02:25.720 What are you supposed to do?

00:02:26.380 Just suppress one part of the other?

00:02:27.540 It's also part of my calling, the calling that God has put on my life.

00:02:31.620 I often say that it's my job to, I want to confuse people almost intentionally just enough

00:02:38.680 so they're forced to pay attention.

00:02:40.580 Yeah.

00:02:40.960 In other words, people who think they can put me in a box, I would say, you know what?

00:02:46.100 You can't because sometimes, I mean, on my radio show, the Eric Metaxas show, which is

00:02:51.280 now we're doing a TV thing kind of like this.

00:02:52.960 But on that show, from one day to the next, one day I might be talking about, you know,

00:02:58.140 Mueller and Hillary Clinton and the president, you know, like, and you'd think that it's

00:03:03.340 that kind of a show.

00:03:04.420 And then the next day it's like comedy and joking, whatever.

00:03:07.980 And then the next day it's super faith oriented and it's about some deep Christian thing or

00:03:13.620 even the prophetic or healing or miracles or whatever.

00:03:16.600 So I do think a lot of times people get confused.

00:03:18.620 But, you know, this is all authentic.

00:03:20.240 This is who you are.

00:03:20.540 This is all me.

00:03:21.600 And at some point, I think what's good about it is that if people pay attention long enough,

00:03:26.540 they get the person, they get me, and then they can kind of go anywhere.

00:03:30.760 But it is weird.

00:03:31.440 A lot of times because of the Bonhoeffer book, people kind of, Greg Laurie, who's become

00:03:34.640 a friend, the pastor, when he first came on my radio program, he thought of me as like

00:03:37.960 the author of Bonhoeffer.

00:03:38.760 And he was like freaked out at me joking with him.

00:03:41.740 Because you're very sarcastic and I think people might not necessarily.

00:03:45.480 They don't know that that's scriptural.

00:03:47.360 It is.

00:03:47.760 It's very scriptural.

00:03:48.760 Totally is.

00:03:49.060 Yeah.

00:03:49.280 Yeah.

00:03:50.080 I think that I was pleasantly surprised though because I love people that you can immediately

00:03:55.080 feel comfortable with.

00:03:56.340 And it's rare for someone that is smart.

00:03:59.640 Because a lot of times when you talk to smart people, they can only talk about the things

00:04:03.200 that they are an expert in or that they know really well.

00:04:06.160 And you kind of feel like, well, you're intimidated and you kind of feel like, okay, we can't even

00:04:10.160 have a real conversation.

00:04:11.200 Right.

00:04:11.380 But you've carved that out really well.

00:04:12.780 In all seriousness, I really feel like a part of this calling on my life is to be a generalist.

00:04:18.740 Now, there's my eclectic resume from VeggieTales to Bonhoeffer to whatever it is.

00:04:24.480 It's God's way of calling me to the center so that I can take things that you might think

00:04:30.940 of as intellectual or highly academic and translate them for everyone because I'm not an academic

00:04:38.300 or a hyper-intellectual, but I'm able to appreciate those things enough and it gives me a joy to bring

00:04:44.220 it down to a level of people that they're just average folks, but they're interested in the origin

00:04:49.080 of the universe or this or that.

00:04:50.480 And they can't really get it maybe from the guy who wrote the book specifically on that,

00:04:56.440 but I can maybe interview that guy or talk about it.

00:04:59.300 So that's, I think that's actually an important role in culture to have somebody.

00:05:04.760 I mean, in the past they would call them-

00:05:05.940 It's like a translator.

00:05:06.440 Yeah, that's right.

00:05:07.120 I mean, in the past they might call it a public intellectual.

00:05:09.320 You know, I get uncomfortable with that, but I guess the idea is that it is important

00:05:13.340 that everyone understand that, and it's one of the reasons I love Bonhoeffer, is that

00:05:17.240 the ideas that you think are way up here are really for everyone.

00:05:20.760 And so we need to be able to prove the truth of these highfalutin ideas by communicating

00:05:27.060 them on a simple level.

00:05:28.220 And if you can't communicate certain ideas on a simple level, you have to ask, like,

00:05:32.020 is there anything to them or is it just somebody blowing smoke?

00:05:34.360 Is it just pseudo-academic, pseudo-science?

00:05:36.420 There's a lot of pseudo-intellectualism.

00:05:40.080 Totally.

00:05:40.440 And the way they shut you up is by saying, well, you couldn't possibly understand and whatever.

00:05:45.140 Well, you just don't understand it.

00:05:45.600 And on the contrary, if you didn't understand it, you'd know it's nonsense.

00:05:49.620 Right.

00:05:50.160 Okay, tell me how you became a Christian.

00:05:52.180 I know this story, but not everyone might, and it's very interesting.

00:05:55.520 Well, the book that I'm working on right now, which I hope will be out either this fall

00:06:00.940 or in the spring, is the story of my coming to faith.

00:06:03.840 And it's sort of long and complicated.

00:06:06.940 The short version is that I was raised in the Greek Orthodox Church.

00:06:10.520 So I was raised as a friend of God, very pro-God, but never getting any clarity on,

00:06:20.240 is this really true or can we know whether it's true?

00:06:24.440 There was no apologetics.

00:06:25.680 It's just kind of a cultural Christian thing, and you kind of go along and go along.

00:06:28.660 And then I go to a very, as I said, aggressively secular, PC, loony university like Yale, and

00:06:37.920 suddenly all of your beliefs are challenged.

00:06:40.200 And you think, did I get it wrong?

00:06:42.560 I grew up in a humble background.

00:06:43.900 And maybe, you know, these smart people, the leaders of the world now have discovered that

00:06:48.380 you can't know the answer to these questions, and therefore it's not true.

00:06:51.460 So how were your beliefs challenged while you were at Yale?

00:06:54.560 Was it people overtly saying, wow, you're a Christian? 1.00

00:06:57.460 That's really stupid. 1.00

00:06:58.340 Or was it just through the kind of pseudo-intellectualism that we were just talking about? 1.00

00:07:02.520 It was everything.

00:07:03.900 And that's why it's hard to explain that.

00:07:06.820 But I think the bottom line is it's a cultural thing.

00:07:08.940 I mean, if you go to a place like Manhattan, nobody's going to say, like, what, are you a

00:07:12.100 Christian? 0.80

00:07:12.580 They're just going to give off the vibe that we all know that that's kind of been disproven.

00:07:19.440 And that the sophisticated people, you know, don't cling to their guns and Bibles and vote

00:07:23.780 for, you know, cavemen like Donald Trump.

00:07:25.460 Like, we all know, like, what's what.

00:07:27.820 And then the reality is that if you don't have the confidence of your beliefs, you don't

00:07:32.160 challenge that.

00:07:32.980 You just kind of go, oh, yeah, okay.

00:07:34.500 And you go along.

00:07:35.640 And pretty soon you pick up that, well, there must be more to the story, the simple faith

00:07:40.060 that I had.

00:07:41.020 That can't really be it.

00:07:42.080 And so what happened to me is I just drifted sideways into a kind of, you know, classic,

00:07:48.840 typical, tolerant, who's to say about anything or whatever, because I wasn't really an overt

00:07:54.880 Christian.

00:07:55.620 I was sort of, you know, in some ways I was, but it was a very kind of weak faith.

00:07:59.720 And so as soon as it was challenged, I didn't know what to do.

00:08:01.540 So I graduated really confused and convinced, as I think many smart people are, that not only

00:08:09.380 don't we know the answers to these things, but even if there are answers, we can't really

00:08:16.100 know them.

00:08:16.860 No matter, and the smarter you are, the more you know that you can't know, because it's

00:08:20.640 complicated, right?

00:08:21.440 Well, I went through a really tough time.

00:08:24.380 I guess I was 24.

00:08:25.740 I'd been out of college for, you know, a little bit over three years, floundering, trying

00:08:28.900 to be a writer, lost.

00:08:30.600 And to cut to the chase, the Lord very dramatically used this time of real trial in my life and depression

00:08:39.180 and confusion, whatever, to get to me a little bit.

00:08:42.860 And at the end of that, right around my 25th birthday, I had a dream.

00:08:48.280 And in the dream, I won't tell it because it's too complicated, but in the dream, the

00:08:53.700 Lord very miraculously and clearly blew my mind with his reality, his love, his prayer.

00:09:00.880 It was just in a dream.

00:09:02.380 So it's like I went to sleep wishing I could know that that were true, but pretty sure you

00:09:06.880 can't.

00:09:07.100 And I woke up like, game over, done, I'm in, the Bible's true, Jesus is Lord, where

00:09:11.660 do I sign up?

00:09:12.140 It was genuinely miraculous.

00:09:14.220 I've written about it in my miracles book, of which I just gave you a copy.

00:09:17.700 It's in that book.

00:09:19.600 And then even easier, my website is just my name, ericmetaxas.com.

00:09:23.360 There's a video where I, an I am second video where I tell the story.

00:09:26.240 But it was a truly miraculous conversion.

00:09:29.280 And then I had to play intellectual.

00:09:30.380 It was just like an assurance that you woke up with and you were like, no doubt this is real.

00:09:34.020 I mean, look, let's be blunt.

00:09:35.940 If God speaks to you and you know God spoke to you, you can chit chat about the details

00:09:42.640 for the rest of your life, but you know, because the one who made every atom in your body and

00:09:48.500 every atom in the universe has communicated to you.

00:09:50.660 So there was no doubt whether I could communicate that to people is another story.

00:09:55.960 But in my mind, it was like there is absolutely no doubt.

00:09:59.480 The details may be in doubt.

00:10:01.680 I have questions and things, but of course you have questions.

00:10:04.620 But so I spent the next number of years kind of reading books and sort of playing intellectual

00:10:08.100 catch up to find out, you know, it's kind of like if I saw Bigfoot, right?

00:10:12.740 Yeah.

00:10:12.980 And I knew that I saw Bigfoot.

00:10:14.300 I smelled the disgusting thing and he's eight feet tall and then he disappears.

00:10:18.940 And now I have to, I can't run after him.

00:10:22.200 So now I have to sort of say, well, I don't have any doubt what just happened.

00:10:25.900 And now I've got to read books and kind of find out what can I know about what happened.

00:10:31.600 But nobody's going to convince me I didn't see it, like because it was right there and

00:10:34.740 I smelled it and it was, and this dream was like that.

00:10:36.940 It was so real that there was zero question.

00:10:40.920 I mean, this happened 30 years ago.

00:10:42.020 There's zero question of the reality of, and once, if you watch the video at ericandtaxis.com

00:10:47.260 or if you read the book, you will get the details to see why it blew my mind.

00:10:51.300 And because in the dream, God spoke to me in a way that really would have made no sense

00:10:56.360 to anyone else.

00:10:56.980 It's like he wove a few parts of my life together in this spectacular fairy tale dream that just,

00:11:04.720 I knew instantly that my deepest longing is being given to me on a silver platter.

00:11:11.620 It was amazing.

00:11:12.400 It was amazing.

00:11:13.140 So what did that intellectual journey look like?

00:11:15.240 So after you see the proverbial Bigfoot and you're studying and you're trying to figure

00:11:20.080 all of this out, what did that look like?

00:11:23.380 Well, it really was, first of all, there was an incredible joy to know that I could know

00:11:30.600 because I was convinced you couldn't know.

00:11:33.120 Even if it were true, you couldn't really know.

00:11:35.240 Yeah.

00:11:35.880 And I think a lot of people almost fetishize the idea of doubt, like it's cool to have doubt.

00:11:40.920 And I think, you know what? 0.99

00:11:42.000 That's a lot of garbage. 0.98

00:11:42.920 It's like telling your five-year-old, it's cool to not be sure you can swim and maybe 1.00

00:11:48.740 you'll drown.

00:11:49.720 Like, no, that's not cool.

00:11:51.360 Like something is true and something.

00:11:53.400 So it doesn't mean that you can't learn more every day.

00:11:56.220 It doesn't mean that you won't have questions.

00:11:59.180 But the idea that you can't know that Jesus is God and all that stuff, I say categorically,

00:12:04.860 that's nonsense.

00:12:05.700 You can know, just like I can know, you know, the molecular weight of beryllium or gold.

00:12:12.320 I mean, these are not, like, who's to say?

00:12:15.060 There are certain things that I think fair-minded people would say the evidence is pretty overwhelming.

00:12:20.140 Now, most people don't even know that.

00:12:21.660 And I didn't know that.

00:12:22.600 When I wrote my book on miracles, for example, I talk about the resurrection, right?

00:12:26.580 I was myself astounded that this thing that I believed, okay, has so much evidence that

00:12:33.940 I would call secular evidence, historical evidence.

00:12:36.120 So that even if you, it doesn't make sense to you and you say, it doesn't make any sense,

00:12:40.460 I don't believe that somebody could do it.

00:12:41.320 I would say, okay, but look at the evidence and tell me, what do you think?

00:12:43.800 And I think at the end of the day, a fair-minded person would look at it and go like, you know

00:12:46.560 what?

00:12:47.420 It doesn't seem possible that this could have happened, but the evidence is really freaking

00:12:52.260 me out, okay?

00:12:54.080 I didn't know that there could be evidence, but on something like that, it happened, you

00:12:57.620 know, effectively in modern times.

00:12:59.040 I mean, we have an infinity of documents and things from 2,000 years ago.

00:13:03.120 It didn't happen 20,000 years ago.

00:13:05.220 It didn't happen, you know, in prehistory.

00:13:07.560 It happened in the middle of history.

00:13:09.560 So there's all this information.

00:13:10.740 So I really, when this faith thing happened, like boom overnight, I guess to know that I

00:13:19.260 could know was so freeing and so wonderful.

00:13:23.200 It was like, it was a giddy thing for me at first.

00:13:26.360 And then of course, I began learning and reading and more and more.

00:13:30.360 And the thing that to this day, I mean, I'm sure till I die, I'll feel this way.

00:13:35.440 The fact that there is so much outrageous, wonderful evidence and so many brilliant people

00:13:41.820 who believe in so many books and things that most people just don't know about.

00:13:46.100 You have conversations with people and they've never heard of, you know, whether it's C.S.

00:13:50.860 Lewis or whatever, that's just the tip of the iceberg.

00:13:53.440 But there's this infinity of wonderful books and wonderful human beings that when you meet

00:14:01.160 them, you realize not only aren't they crazy, but they're delightfully emotionally intelligent

00:14:06.660 and secure and generous and whatever.

00:14:09.780 And they have this Christian faith.

00:14:10.860 But the mainstream media would give you the impression that those people don't exist.

00:14:16.620 And that the evidence doesn't exist.

00:14:17.900 And that the evidence doesn't exist.

00:14:19.280 So when I discovered that it did, I've had this passion all these years and always will

00:14:24.760 to get everything that I have learned out to a more general public.

00:14:28.940 It's why I write the books that I write, just because I think that if most people knew

00:14:32.260 this, it would change their lives.

00:14:34.500 And I'm convinced they're not going to see it on the networks.

00:14:37.420 They probably won't even see it on Fox.

00:14:38.800 They're probably, it's just people don't have time, you know, they want to cover the

00:14:42.700 news.

00:14:43.040 They want to cover politics and all this other stuff is fundamentally more important to help

00:14:48.660 you understand the newsy stuff.

00:14:50.640 So.

00:14:50.920 Right.

00:14:51.260 If there was one book that you would tell people to go to of yours or not of yours, someone

00:14:58.280 who's maybe starting the journey that you were on when you were about 25, trying to figure

00:15:02.980 it out and trying to understand, okay, is there really evidence?

00:15:06.320 Is there a reason behind all of this stuff?

00:15:08.780 What would you direct people to?

00:15:10.220 Well, that's always impossible to answer.

00:15:12.240 I wrote three books with the title, Everything You Always Wanted to Know About God But We're

00:15:16.140 Afraid to Ask.

00:15:16.940 The first one is called Everything You Always Wanted to Know About God But We're Afraid

00:15:19.060 to Ask.

00:15:19.480 The second one is called Everything Else You Always Wanted to Know About God But We're

00:15:23.140 Afraid to Ask, which is just a continuation.

00:15:25.020 And it's fun Q&A of this kind of stuff, right?

00:15:28.920 And then the third one is Everything You Always Wanted to Know About God But We're Afraid

00:15:31.500 to Ask, the Jesus edition, which talks about, you know, the resurrection,

00:15:34.540 all that stuff. So those are real primers on the basics, kind of a fun Q&A for somebody

00:15:40.460 who's just like, I don't know. The Miracles book is also a very good one for that because

00:15:46.880 I get into the scientific evidence for how do we know whether everything just came into

00:15:52.760 being randomly or that there was an intelligence behind it. The evidence is freaky. It is so freaky.

00:15:59.720 And what amazes me is that most intelligent Christians haven't been exposed to it. 1.00

00:16:05.480 And I think, you know, a lot of people say, well, I'm going through like a really great

00:16:09.200 Bible study on Ephesians right now. And I go, that's great. But if you're in the workplace 0.99

00:16:15.260 and somebody challenges you that science kind of disproves faith or there's so many

00:16:21.240 planets in the universe, the idea that we're the only ones here and that some God created it,

00:16:25.940 that's just nonsense. You know, and you think most people don't know how to respond to that.

00:16:31.040 I have been, as I say, nothing less than astounded at what good materials there are available. And

00:16:38.720 again, part of what I do is I'm a popularizer. So like I read books by somebody like John Lennox

00:16:42.740 or by Stephen Meyer or by Hugh Ross. I've had them all on my radio program.

00:16:48.600 By having them on my radio program is one way to get their, you know, information out there. But in my

00:16:52.900 book, Miracles and other books I've written, I kind of give you the bite-sized version of it.

00:16:57.360 Yeah.

00:16:57.920 And in the Miracles book, I talk about the origin of the universe and all this stuff in a way that,

00:17:02.260 you know, as I say, your average reader is going to be able to understand it. But it is

00:17:07.040 so astounding that I wish I could, I mean, frankly, they should be teaching this stuff in every school

00:17:13.680 in America, not just in Christian schools, because the evidence is overwhelming. And so that's my

00:17:18.160 passion. It's like, look, it's true. If you can rebut it, good luck. But they,

00:17:22.760 they act as though, oh, it's already been rebutted. We don't even need to talk about it.

00:17:27.080 It's like, oh, really? I think you're afraid to look into it because it's going to scare you to

00:17:31.600 death. In fact, Christopher Hitchens, obviously before he died, said, somebody asked him, what

00:17:35.340 is the greatest argument on the other side for God? And he rather honestly said, oh, there's no

00:17:43.040 question about it. It's the fine-tuned universe, blah, blah, blah. And he said that that's the one that

00:17:48.180 gives all of us on our side pause that we don't really have an answer for it.

00:17:52.620 But they rarely communicate that pause or even the possibility that it could be out there.

00:17:56.760 No, not only that. Not only that. But when I wrote my Miracles book, I wrote an op-ed on what

00:18:01.200 we're talking about. They titled it, Science Increasingly Makes the Case for God. And it

00:18:06.260 went into the Wall Street Journal. It went insanely viral, like nothing that I ever dreamt, like 650,000

00:18:12.980 shares, like the kind of thing that is just nuts, right? Why am I saying this? I'm saying this because

00:18:18.140 the amount of people who wrote, the number of people who wrote against what I wrote, and in their

00:18:24.520 first couple of sentences were like, all this stuff has been disproved years ago. And it's been, it's

00:18:29.300 like, we've already answered this, right? And I thought, wait a second, Christopher Hitchens just

00:18:33.900 said, no, you didn't. Christopher Hitchens said, this is the one that gives you pause. So if you want to

00:18:41.060 make some kind of argument of sophistry and twist it around, whatever, have at it. But if you're

00:18:49.280 honest, you can't dismiss this. This is the one thing that to most scientistic materialists is

00:18:58.380 horrifying because they don't have an answer. So you know what they come up with? The big one is

00:19:01.460 they come up with the multiverse theory. They say like, oh, we have no evidence for it, but we're

00:19:05.380 pretty sure there's an infinity of universes. And this is just the one where everything kind of worked

00:19:10.680 out perfectly. Oh, and by the way, we happen to be in that one. That requires infinitely more faith

00:19:18.960 than the wildest Christian claim you've ever heard. But who has the guts to face that in the academic 0.96

00:19:25.340 environment and so on and so forth? So it's important we push because the evidence is there.

00:19:30.260 My question is, how does someone say someone read your article and said, okay, I believe that there is

00:19:35.600 a directed force behind this fine-tuned universe because it's too hard for me to believe, like you

00:19:40.180 said, that this all is just kind of random. It just doesn't make that much sense because I was

00:19:44.640 actually just listening to a podcast that made this argument. How do you get from there to the God of

00:19:50.240 the Bible? Why isn't it some just random creator we don't know? Well, I mean, I think to be fair,

00:19:54.420 you don't have to. No, there's some people, they'll stop there. But like anything else,

00:20:00.040 if you want to know what this intelligent force might be, and if you're open-minded, and it takes

00:20:07.600 courage to be open-minded, but if you want to know, there is ample evidence that would, again,

00:20:16.460 logically suggest. I'm not saying, you know when people say like faith is a leap in the dark,

00:20:20.900 that is totally wrong. Not true, yeah. I mean, if anything, faith is a leap in the light. You're not

00:20:25.520 meant to believe things where you say, well, I don't know if it's true, but I believe it.

00:20:31.200 Do you think God would ask us to believe something? He only tells us to believe what is true, okay?

00:20:37.480 And so there are all kinds of evidences for these things, but it depends on each person's journey.

00:20:43.980 My journey was kind of weird. Like I already knew that Jesus is Lord and the Bible is true and all

00:20:50.280 that stuff before I had the intellectual evidence for it. But that's not to say I didn't have intellectual

00:20:55.000 evidence. It's just that the kind of intellectual evidence that I had is harder to articulate.

00:21:00.500 But anytime you believe something, it's disingenuous to make it sound like, well,

00:21:04.780 I don't have any reason. I just believe what I believe. Then you shouldn't believe it. Like you

00:21:09.320 have to know. It's kind of like, again, if somebody said to me, like, you know your father,

00:21:14.520 like you've met your father and stuff. I go like, yeah. Like I had breakfast with him. I just talked

00:21:17.640 to him on the phone. They go, well, how do you know you know? And it gets into a kind of absurd

00:21:22.640 conversation. When I get in my car and turn on the thing, like I know it's going to go forward.

00:21:27.800 People say, how do you know you know? That becomes sophistry and silly. You know, if people don't 0.89

00:21:34.980 want to know, they kind of hide in that kind of stuff. But there's so much evidence for the Bible.

00:21:39.520 I mean, you could get into the archeology. You could get into the manuscript evidence. The evidence

00:21:47.160 for the, you know, what's called the historicity of the Bible or the veracity. It's huge. And the

00:21:52.760 funny thing is there's way more today than there was 40 years ago, 50 years ago. Like it, the evidence,

00:22:00.760 one of the ways you know something is true is that the evidence for it increases rather than

00:22:04.460 decreases. Kind of like talking about Darwin, right? Darwin said 150 years ago, you know,

00:22:10.020 I think the fossil record as time goes by, we're going to uncover more and more of these linking forms

00:22:15.700 between, you know, we found this and we found this and over years we'll find this stuff. Not only hasn't

00:22:21.280 it happened, precisely the opposite has happened. We found more of this stuff and more of this stuff

00:22:26.140 and nothing here. And so after 150 years, you have to start saying, okay, the evidence actually seems

00:22:32.680 to be pointing in the opposite direction. That if there was this thing called evolution, that it was

00:22:37.080 directed by intelligent force, it couldn't have happened by random mutations the way, you know. And so it's

00:22:43.060 really, it takes courage to be honest because some people are scared by the implications.

00:22:47.860 And it's almost, I mean, it is like a religion without a name. I was just watching the Flat Earth

00:22:54.320 documentary on Netflix. I'm not sure if you've seen that. There's a whole Flat Earth community on

00:22:58.780 YouTube, you know, they're convinced. And they show them doing these experiments to prove that the

00:23:03.960 earth is flat. In the experiments, they realize, oh, dang, the earth is actually rotating. This ruins

00:23:10.980 everything. But that reminds me of what you were just saying. All this evidence comes out, but

00:23:15.140 they've already got their conclusion. And they're not going to let go of it because just like Flat

00:23:19.860 Earth is this religion, this community, this cult, and it's who they are now. It's the same thing with

00:23:25.180 Darwinism or the neo-atheist, whatever they're called now. It's, you know, it's who they are. It's

00:23:30.260 their identity. It's their worth. And it's their church.

00:23:32.760 You have said it. And that's why I think we have to push people and say,

00:23:37.620 why do you cling to this faith when the evidence points against it? You would do me the honor of

00:23:44.780 telling me that my faith is nonsense if the evidence points against it. Like, let's have a

00:23:49.440 fair conversation. But we have to be honest that most people are afraid to face those kinds of facts

00:23:55.380 because they do have a predetermined worldview that they're clinging to. And that's normal too.

00:24:03.060 In other words, just because a few facts come in doesn't mean you throw away your paradigm. But at

00:24:07.200 some point, the welter of evidence says, maybe you should begin looking more, be more open to the

00:24:14.600 situation. So again, but that takes courage. Yeah. I think the cop-out typically is, at least at first,

00:24:19.680 is, well, I'm not going to believe anything that is not materially proven. Everything that I need to

00:24:24.560 know about the universe and what I feel can be seen in the material world. But we know that's true

00:24:30.640 if you look at things like beauty, meaning, morality, purpose, love, all of these things that

00:24:35.240 aren't just chemicals in our brain or neurons in our brain firing off because there's really no

00:24:40.280 Darwinian explanation for why these things would exist if natural selection is really all there is.

00:24:46.160 Once you get someone to admit that, okay, not everything that you know to be true, you know beauty

00:24:51.740 to be true, you know love to be true, you know them to be actually real in your mind.

00:24:56.960 Yeah. They're not just chemical reactions. Once you get them to admit that, then it opens the

00:25:00.960 possibility that, okay, maybe not everything can be explained by what I see physically.

00:25:05.680 Well, even the concept, even this idea that science can explain everything is, are you ready for this?

00:25:13.460 It's utterly unscientific. Science is just science. Science cannot tell you why the earth exists.

00:25:24.440 It can tell you that it exists. It can describe it and describe it and describe it. But I think what

00:25:28.840 horrifies scientists is that even science can point you beyond science. In other words, if science,

00:25:37.320 science can't tell me what happened before the Big Bang, but it can point me to the mystery of this

00:25:44.160 moment when the universe comes into creation and it can lead fair-minded people to say, wow, that

00:25:51.400 suggests a number of things. Now you can't go back there with a test tube and calipers and figure out

00:25:57.200 what happened before. So you've bumped up against the limit of science, but science nonetheless can point

00:26:04.300 beyond the limit and suggest that there are things beyond the physical universe, even though they

00:26:10.640 can't prove it. So it's really a bizarre conundrum because you have a lot of scientists who are

00:26:15.780 themselves reaching way past science. And then when you say something that they think unscientific,

00:26:21.400 they kind of say, well, that's unscientific. And you want to say, well, excuse me, you're being

00:26:24.520 unscientific. And somehow through the tools of science, suggesting that science is all there is

00:26:30.160 and the physical universe is all there is, you can't even know that. So if you want to be honest,

00:26:33.800 you have to at least say, we can't know. But rather than be scientific and honest about it

00:26:40.000 and say, we can't know, they overreach and say, we know. And if you disagree, you're stupid and 1.00

00:26:45.480 you're unscientific. It's like a really weird place that, and I'm sure that there are a lot 1.00

00:26:51.140 of scientists who kind of get this, but they're maybe afraid to speak out or something because

00:26:54.840 the scientific community, you know, kind of like the political climate, people are so aggressive and

00:26:59.300 nasty that they, if they don't have an argument, they just try to shut you up.

00:27:03.200 Yeah. If someone were to ask you, okay, fine, but why Christianity? Why is Christianity different 0.97

00:27:10.120 than any other religion?

00:27:11.820 There are many reasons. I guess the first one I would say is Christianity straight up says,

00:27:19.720 in history, this thing happened where a human being comes into the world and they say,

00:27:28.840 was sent by God, in fact, was God in the human flesh, that he died on the cross, that this was

00:27:36.120 part of God's mysterious, strange plan. And then he rose from the dead, not from the sick,

00:27:42.880 not from the coma, from the dead, that God raised a human being to life as a way of showing all kinds

00:27:51.680 of things, his power over death, that he is life. And also as a way of showing the power of love

00:27:59.780 over hate, the power of good over evil. There's an infinity of things that we say happened in history.

00:28:08.760 And, you know, all serious Christians have always said, as Paul said, if that didn't happen,

00:28:14.920 the whole thing might as well be thrown in the garbage.

00:28:17.220 So anytime anybody says, well, Christianity teaches the same stuff as this or this, I would say, 0.85

00:28:22.320 no, no, no, no, no. Christians have had the guts to say, this stuff does not matter if that didn't 0.98

00:28:31.100 happen. If that didn't happen, then we're just, we're talking about nothing. So Islam, Judaism,

00:28:39.380 any other kind of religion says that didn't happen. And so I think we have to be real clear that that

00:28:45.200 is the one clear difference. It's not really an ideological difference per se,

00:28:51.240 but it becomes ideological. But I guess that we can't pretend like, well, it's all about some kind

00:28:56.080 of teaching. And no, truth is truth. And, you know, good teaching and wisdom are wisdom.

00:29:02.300 But you can have that without Jesus and without, you know, you can talk about those things. But the

00:29:09.040 Christianity and the Christian religion have always said that at the heart of all of that

00:29:15.960 is a person, that God is a person, that he came into the world, into history as a person.

00:29:25.040 And therefore, that is different than talking about a God presence, a divinity, a Godhead,

00:29:32.700 a Christ consciousness, whatever. All that stuff is very different than what the Bible teaches.

00:29:38.840 But I would also say that the Bible and the Christian faith makes more sense than a lot

00:29:45.020 of the other religions in terms of the idea of forgiveness. How do you deal with evil in the

00:29:49.280 world? You know, all that stuff. And then the most fundamental thing, I would say, Christianity

00:29:53.200 is the only religion that is an anti-religion religion. What I mean by that is that every religion,

00:29:59.600 since the dawn of time, since people were like, you know, killing chickens and covering themselves

00:30:05.220 with chicken blood and whatever. Every human being has had a sense since the fall that there's a

00:30:11.080 problem, that we are somehow separated from whatever it is up there, that we have this kind

00:30:16.960 of guilt that we can't bridge the gap between us and the gods or Godhead or divinity. Every human

00:30:24.220 society has acknowledged that and then tried to deal with it in different ways by doing X and Y and Z

00:30:28.600 and then do X, Y, Z again and doing that. And there's this kind of pecking order. How do I work

00:30:33.480 my way up to bridge the gap? Maybe only the shaman can do it and whatever. And so everybody is trying

00:30:38.420 to bridge the gap. And even Judaism is effectively trying to deal with that. There are these religious 0.91

00:30:43.620 rituals and so on and so forth. And then Jesus comes into the world and says, okay, now do you realize

00:30:49.700 you can't do it? Now do you realize that no human being through human effort can bridge the infinite

00:30:56.880 gap, which you know is there. Therefore, God has come into the world to bridge the gap for you.

00:31:04.300 And if you accept Jesus by faith, then you are by faith in him enabled in yourself to bridge the gap

00:31:14.160 with him and to be at peace with the God from whom you have been distant and with whom you've had this

00:31:23.160 broken relationship. All of that can be healed, but God has to initiate it. So in a way, Jesus ends all

00:31:29.760 religion. And so even the Christian religion can become a kind of a counterfeit of itself where it 0.96

00:31:36.400 becomes like yet another religion. And of course, that's what Jesus came to abolish. So you have all 0.99

00:31:41.640 these kinds of heresies within Christianity which are tending toward these other religions where they

00:31:47.700 say, well, here's the pecking order. Here's what you do. You do this and this and this and this and this

00:31:50.700 and this. So it's on you again, right? And Martin Luther, of course, kind of rediscovers this 15

00:31:56.940 centuries after, you know, Jesus and says, hey, we have slid, the Christian faith and the church has 0.98

00:32:03.740 slid into doing the very thing that we ought to know Jesus came to abolish. And we need to get back

00:32:11.380 to that and understand it's only by faith in him and it's only he who can bridge the gap. And so that,

00:32:17.100 you know, that's, you talk about fundamental difference between the Christian faith and

00:32:20.800 every other religion. It's like pretty big. Okay. So you mentioned Martin Luther and him saying,

00:32:26.660 okay, we've gotten into this legalistic thing where we're saying you got to do these things in

00:32:31.080 order to get closer to God or to be holy, whatever. And he said, that's not, that's not the gospel.

00:32:36.980 Tell me what he did for those who don't know. Oh my gosh. Yeah. I wrote, you know,

00:32:43.160 the Bonhoeffer biography and the Wilberforce biography. And I was sure that I would never

00:32:47.020 write another biography. And I had two friends, Greg Thornberry and my friend Marcus Speaker,

00:32:52.160 who said, no, no, Eric, you have to write the 500th anniversary is coming up. You have to write

00:32:56.100 the biography of Luther. And they went on and on and on. And the way they convinced me was by helping

00:33:03.180 me to see what I had not seen before. I'm always happy to confess my ignorance. People think that I've

00:33:06.920 known this stuff forever. No, they convinced me of the influence of Luther, that what he did

00:33:13.740 absolutely changed the world and created the modern universe in which we live, right? For good and for

00:33:19.700 ill. I never really saw that. And so it intrigued me. And then the second thing is like, he's such a

00:33:25.740 funny maniac that I knew writing about him would be fun. Yeah. And I always joke around that he's such

00:33:30.600 maniac. He makes Trump look like Mike Pence. Yeah. He is incredible. So if Martin Luther had 0.99

00:33:35.880 a Twitter, it might be bad. Well, he did have a Twitter. It was his pamphlets. No, I mean,

00:33:40.720 there are weird parallels. But before we get into that, or, you know, we don't have to, but it would

00:33:46.120 be fun to. But that's what convinced me to write about him is that I thought, oh my goodness, I've

00:33:50.600 missed the import. And you cannot underscore it. I say without doubt, he's the most influential

00:33:57.540 person in 2,000 years apart from Jesus. There's no doubt about it. He did not set out to be

00:34:04.820 influential, but he ends up being influential. Why? Because just what you were saying, he basically

00:34:11.080 frees the gospel to do its thing in history. You have, you know, you kind of wonder, why does God do

00:34:19.260 things the way he does? Why would he allow us to fall and then to have these, you know, centuries,

00:34:24.800 centuries, millennia of whatever it is before the Messiah comes into the world? And then

00:34:30.360 you think, well, okay, and why does the Messiah ever come into the world at this point in history?

00:34:34.400 And then why isn't it all over then? Why do we have to have 15 centuries of whatever before

00:34:42.360 Luther comes in and says, oh, by the way, we've been getting all this wrong? And effectively,

00:34:46.880 he frees the gospel. Now, the gospel is freedom. So it's like he frees freedom to fly out

00:34:52.800 into history and to touch everything it had not yet touched. And the number one thing

00:34:57.720 is this idea that if I'm to have a personal relationship with God, I have a personal

00:35:04.960 responsibility. I can't point to the priest or the governor or the prince or the king or anything.

00:35:13.900 God says, no, no, no, that's over. Now you have a direct relationship with me and you talk to me.

00:35:22.100 It doesn't mean you don't look to other people for wisdom and that you don't know everything, but

00:35:25.360 fundamentally, there's this relationship. Now that ought to have existed from the beginning,

00:35:30.420 but somehow it got obscured in 15 centuries of history. And as we know, because human beings

00:35:35.940 are sinners, we drifted so far away that we created what God had come to abolish, which is this kind of

00:35:42.480 system of how you get to God that wasn't even very different from, you know, the Jewish system.

00:35:50.540 It's just this, it's the same kind of thing, except now with this patina of Christianity over 0.99

00:35:55.220 it. And so Luther, in a sense, sees this and not intentionally sparks a revolution that we call

00:36:04.260 the Reformation. I mean, he, it's almost like you pull a thread. Nobody else was willing to pull the

00:36:08.680 thread. He says, well, I think I have to, and let's see what happens. And I'm going to trust God. And he

00:36:13.580 pulls the thread and the whole sweater unravels. And, you know, you have a naked guy without a sweater

00:36:19.420 and you got a lot of trouble and the whole world turns upside down. And basically, has the Reformation

00:36:25.020 ever been described as a naked guy without a sweater? I'll have to look. I'll have to look.

00:36:29.800 But it is kind of funny because he didn't intend to do that, but he was willing to do what he thought

00:36:34.200 God called him to do. And so what Luther did at the heart of it is said, I'm going to trust God rather

00:36:42.520 than man. And I'm going to trust that God, being a God of love and mercy, that even if I screwed this

00:36:49.640 up, he wants me to, in my heart, to trust him first. And not to be afraid of what man can do to

00:36:57.240 me, burn me at the stake, but to be too afraid of what he will do to me if I completely blow him off

00:37:02.440 and worry about what these men can do to me. I'm going to worry about what God is going to do. And 0.97

00:37:07.100 even if it's not a fear thing of hell, but it's the idea that I have this joy of serving God and

00:37:12.840 I believe he's going to see my heart. And if I got it wrong or if they're going to put me to death,

00:37:17.460 I know why I'm doing what I'm doing. And by the way, he had studied scripture so much that he didn't

00:37:22.200 think like, hey, who's to say? It was pretty clear to him that they had missed this. But so there's a

00:37:27.300 number of things that happen. One of them is that for the first time, he sees daylight between truth

00:37:33.680 and power. Now imagine this, right? The church, the Western church, the Western church had over

00:37:42.140 the centuries amassed complete power so that if you wanted to know what is true, you had to go to them.

00:37:50.580 So Luther, by reading the Bible, and by the way, nobody was really reading the Bible except Luther

00:37:55.020 for reasons I go into in the book, he discovers that, okay, I see some daylight. I see a crack. I see

00:38:02.020 light coming through this crack. We need to address that. We need to patch up the crack or

00:38:06.580 figure this out. As in, this is what the Catholic church is teaching. Here's what I'm reading in

00:38:09.900 the Bible. There's a gap between the two. And it wasn't even necessarily what they were teaching.

00:38:13.480 It was, they might be teaching the right thing, but the practice of it was harmful. You know,

00:38:19.500 it's not like, I mean, of course, some of what they were teaching was wrong, but it's almost like

00:38:24.620 it wasn't like official doctrine. It was sort of like side doctrine or how they interpreted the

00:38:29.300 doctrine. He says, listen. Like, is indulgences an example of that? Yes. Indulgences is an example

00:38:34.220 of that, where you could argue that there's nothing so wrong with the concept of indulgences

00:38:37.940 in its pure form. But very quickly, it becomes a source of income. It's just like the federal

00:38:42.140 government. When you have a tax, okay, you say, we're going to have a temporary tax to do this or

00:38:46.320 to do that, to raise money for this or for that project or something like that. Great.

00:38:50.680 But we know what happens. Power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely. When there's money

00:38:55.480 involved, suddenly that tax becomes permanent. And suddenly they say, you know what? If we could

00:39:00.620 raise this much money with that tax, why wouldn't we double that tax? And why wouldn't we make 0.97

00:39:05.160 everybody pay that tax? Not just these people, but it becomes a revenue stream. Human sin nature

00:39:11.080 takes over. So this thing called indulgences, which you could argue is a very simple way of saying to

00:39:17.200 somebody, look, okay, you've sinned. I mean, we could use more of this in the evangelical church,

00:39:21.440 right? Instead of saying, hey, there's grace, man. No, there's not grace. There's

00:39:25.280 Jesus dying on the cross, which is a painful, costly grace. So when you sin, you should take

00:39:32.000 it seriously and want to make reparations, for example, right? I mean, if I murder somebody,

00:39:38.560 you don't say, hey, there's grace, man. It's cool. It might be cool in terms of your salvation,

00:39:43.100 but in terms of your life and the life of people around you, you'd say, I know I can never make that

00:39:47.920 right, but I want to do everything I can to show my repentance. I want to write a book about it and

00:39:56.540 have the funds go to the people who've been affected by this. He says, I'm going to pay

00:40:01.500 the poor. Yes, I'm going to pay back the people. So that's a biblical principle. And so the Catholic 0.58

00:40:07.160 church, in part, would say like, okay, you sinned, so you pray this prayer. And I can imagine a very

00:40:13.580 loving, fatherly priest who cares for the soul of somebody and he says, okay, you've done this sin.

00:40:20.460 Pray these prayers and why don't you pay something to the church, you know, to show that you're serious

00:40:27.640 and it'll go to God's work. It can all be on the up and up for that person's soul, but pretty

00:40:33.300 quickly it became corrupt. And so suddenly it was like, hey, that money you're going to pay to the

00:40:37.260 church, let's triple it. And let's start preaching indulgence sermons to get money to pay for St.

00:40:42.980 Peter's in Rome. And by the way, St. Peter's in Rome is a great thing. So it's all good, right?

00:40:46.800 Yeah. Well, it became really bad and really wicked. And Luther saw a number of these things. It

00:40:53.120 ironically didn't really start with indulgences. I mean, the whole thing was kicked off with

00:40:56.320 indulgences, but he saw a number of little issues and he said, let's do the right thing and try to fix it.

00:41:02.480 Yeah. And what happened when he went to fix it, when he sees this daylight between what is true

00:41:09.080 and what the power says is true, and he says, we want to fix this, their response was, shut up. 0.71

00:41:16.900 Yeah. And if you don't shut up, we're going to kill you. How's that, Luther? Shut up. And he said, 1.00

00:41:22.220 whoa, if you're telling me to shut up, I'm starting to now wonder, do you care about truth or do you just

00:41:29.360 care about power? And that's when he got more and more radicalized, so to speak. He kept thinking,

00:41:37.160 who am I dealing with? I love the church, but these forces in the church seem to be forces of

00:41:42.100 Antichrist. So I've got to speak louder and be less conciliatory. I've got to wake people up.

00:41:47.960 So it becomes a kind of a war. But at the heart of it is this idea, which we now take for granted,

00:41:53.120 the difference between truth and power. We now know that one person could have the truth and

00:41:58.260 that power could try to crush it. We know there's this thing as illegitimate power, okay? If I'm in

00:42:02.980 North Korea and I say, hey, this is true, and they say, no, no, no, you don't get to say what's true.

00:42:08.020 Only we get to say what's true. Well, in the West and in the Christian world, 0.99

00:42:12.700 that was not rectified until the Reformation. The Reformation said even a common man 0.69

00:42:19.280 might see the truth of God and the powers that be in the church might get it wrong. So they didn't

00:42:25.540 wipe away hierarchy, but they said, we've got to rethink this here because truth is not malleable.

00:42:31.840 Human beings can get it wrong. The church at the time was trying to say to Luther, no,

00:42:36.180 the Pope can never get it wrong and the church can never get it wrong. Now, to some extent,

00:42:42.800 that might be true. And it was today, the Catholic church would say that if the Pope is speaking

00:42:46.940 ex-cathedra, which he almost never, ever, ever does, that it's the Holy Spirit, kind of like a

00:42:51.480 church council where we say that what happened in Nicaea or whatever, that that was the Holy Spirit.

00:42:55.600 It wasn't just a bunch of people voting. But Luther was seeing that they're starting to blur the lines,

00:43:01.740 they're getting confused, truth cannot change, and the word of God is the one way we know what is true.

00:43:08.700 And so this tiny little thing sparked the Reformation and really gave birth to the West because once 0.83

00:43:14.440 you allow the possibility that the church is wrong and that we have to start a church

00:43:21.240 that gets this right, by allowing for the possibility of a second church, you've just opened the door

00:43:26.920 to 10,000 churches. You've just changed everything. And so now it becomes a personal thing.

00:43:34.980 What church do I go to and how do I know who's teaching the truth? That's called freedom.

00:43:39.980 And it's a terrifying thing, but it's at the very heart of the gospel of Jesus. And so Luther

00:43:46.100 brings that into the world. And the ramifications in history go way beyond what I've just said,

00:43:50.540 which you know because you read the book and you know about this. It goes everywhere, including

00:43:55.040 to the issue of self-government and American-style liberty. We could not have American-style

00:44:00.500 self-government and liberty. The United States could not exist if Luther had not pulled the thread.

00:44:04.880 Yes. I tweeted something along those lines the other day. And my Catholic friends who I respect,

00:44:11.960 some of whom you know. And I'm a very pro-Catholic, non-Catholic. I say that clearly 0.73

00:44:16.900 because it's true. I am a very pro-Catholic, non-Catholic. But there's some people get very

00:44:21.240 hidebound on these issues and they, you know. Yes. And the pushback typically is with the

00:44:27.280 Protestant Reformation from the Catholic side, again, Catholics that I love and respect and know are very

00:44:31.760 smart and have studied this stuff, is that, okay, one, no, the Protestant Reformation did not help

00:44:37.280 build the West. It was actually the Catholic Church that did it solely. And all the Protestant 1.00

00:44:41.120 Reformation did was divide. And now, look, you have all of these different denominations, they say.

00:44:48.060 And how can you say that's a good thing? My response would be kind of what you said. That's

00:44:51.840 always the risk that you have in freedom. And by the way, we're not saying it's a good thing. We're

00:44:55.560 simply saying that it is what it is. In other words, what people who were the enemies of Luther

00:45:00.520 predicted would happen did happen. And so it is this calculation. You say, okay, we're going to

00:45:06.880 give the possibility for people to believe whatever they want. And some of them will believe the wrong

00:45:13.840 thing. And, well, it's really just what you said. It's called freedom. So then the question becomes,

00:45:20.040 as William F. Buckley used to say, the question becomes how we,

00:45:25.520 how we draw the line. Because at some point we know that it is impossible to coerce someone

00:45:36.520 toward the truth. That somehow we have to choose truth and God freely. So as a parent, you'll be a

00:45:48.160 parent very soon. Actually, you already are. When you're a parent, you have to think, what can I force

00:45:56.020 my, in my case, my daughter to believe or do? And what am I going to have to trust God with?

00:46:04.120 That is the challenge. Because if you could force your child to believe everything that's true and

00:46:09.620 to be perfect, on some level you would. But then you realize, I can't. I only have a certain freedom.

00:46:15.520 And you could say the same thing about the church and about governments. They can only do so much.

00:46:19.800 And the genius of the founders of the United States of America was that they understood this.

00:46:24.980 They said that in order for freedom to flourish, in order for faith to flourish and virtue to flourish,

00:46:33.980 we have to make it absolutely free and uncoerced. If we establish a religion and we tell everyone

00:46:40.700 they have to go to this church or that church or not to go to church or to go to a mosque or whatever

00:46:45.220 it is, if we do that and we use our power to force people to do that, to the extent that we use our

00:46:54.240 power to do that, we really squelch the authenticity of those expressions of faith. It has to be free.

00:47:01.060 And we know that when we don't coerce it, some people will blow it off altogether. But that's freedom.

00:47:06.260 And that's something that we have to trust. It's almost like trusting the free market.

00:47:10.280 The free market doesn't guarantee us that everything is going to get better and better.

00:47:15.240 But it says that this is our only shot at that.

00:47:18.180 Yeah.

00:47:18.400 And so if you have a virtuous population, a virtuous market, virtuous citizenry,

00:47:23.380 that we want good things, the market will give us good things.

00:47:26.200 If you have a perverse population, they will want better and better pornography and drugs

00:47:35.420 and whatever. And the market will deliver that. So at the heart of everything we're talking about

00:47:40.680 is this idea that we have to have virtue for democracy to work, for freedom and self-government

00:47:46.380 to work. We have to have virtue for the market, the free market to work. All these things cannot

00:47:52.240 be coerced. And this is to me the ineffable genius of what we call liberty. And it comes right out of

00:47:59.500 the gospel that God says, there are no guarantees. You are free to walk away from me. You're free to

00:48:05.640 walk toward me. But no one can coerce you in toward walking toward me. We all know stories of people who

00:48:11.140 were raised in a very strict, let's say, fundamentalist kind of Christian environment who

00:48:14.680 rebelled against it. There is a real line. And I think in history, the founders, they tried to get

00:48:20.760 this right. And they tried to say, we can encourage faith. We can encourage virtue. But at the end of

00:48:25.900 the day, it's a cultural thing. It is not a government thing. It's not a state thing that we

00:48:30.120 can force. The Reformation enabled us to see that. And it came with a lot of downside. And I'd be the 0.59

00:48:37.020 first to say that my Catholic friends are right about a lot of that. But I think that it nonetheless 0.92

00:48:41.340 happened and in part happened precisely because of the Catholic churches in that period getting this

00:48:49.740 wrong. Yeah. And they were kind of like the coercive parent who is so overbearing that it forces the

00:48:56.000 kids to rebel. And there's a scripture, right, that parents don't exasperate your children. Yeah. That's a

00:49:01.100 biblical principle that if you are so threatening and heavy handed, at some point, that kid's going to run

00:49:06.720 away from home. And that's part of the story of the Reformation. Yeah. I think a great way for people to start 1.00

00:49:11.720 getting educated is reading some of your books. So can you tell everyone where to find you?

00:49:17.200 What? Yeah. That's like, that's my favorite interview question. It's like, and how can we

00:49:22.360 get this lovely product? Actually, no, in all seriousness, I'm passionate about my books and I

00:49:27.940 wish I could give them to everyone free. I really can't. I do that when I can. But my website is

00:49:33.380 ericmetaxas.com. Obviously, you can get them all over there, barnesandnoble.com, amazon.com,

00:49:39.120 whatever. But I think that my If You Can Keep It book, as I say, it's the sort of thing that I so

00:49:45.140 wish I could give to every American because in writing it, I understood that this is absolutely

00:49:50.820 crucial. We need to know this stuff and we need to teach this stuff. We need to get excited about it.

00:49:55.500 You can get that anywhere. But I mean, I feel similarly about most of my books, honestly, because

00:50:00.100 I feel an urgency about these things. The time is short and we need to, well, let's put it this way.

00:50:10.200 We should be happy that there are these wonderful answers. We don't have to say what's happening,

00:50:15.560 what's going on. I really believe God is always on the throne. Even if things go to hell, God is still

00:50:20.180 on the throne and He still commands me to rejoice in Him, to be anxious for nothing, whatever. Like,

00:50:25.680 we need to know that, first of all. And then, you know, speaking as a Christian, I say that

00:50:30.160 if we don't fight for what we know is just and true and beautiful, there are people whose lives

00:50:38.540 are depending on it. There are poor people right now who are going to grow up in the culture that

00:50:42.780 we allow to exist. And I think if you care about them, you have to take this stuff seriously. And

00:50:47.980 that if the church can't be the church and get excited and involved in this stuff,

00:50:52.160 it really is on us. So keeping the republic is on us. And it will not be kept unless we keep it.

00:50:59.880 And so I just want to say to everybody, that's my life. That's what I care about. And so I just hope

00:51:05.180 that I can inspire people along those lines. Yeah. Gosh, there's so much more I want to talk

00:51:08.860 about. I think it's especially important for Christians because unfortunately, we see a large 0.99

00:51:13.300 section of even previously conservative evangelicalism moving towards the left. And we could spend a whole

00:51:20.500 episode on that. So maybe we'll do that next time. You know what? I would really love to do that.

00:51:25.940 It's so much fun to talk to you. And these are so important things. But I would love to do that if

00:51:31.380 we can do that, Allie. That would be fun. It's important. Yes. Well, thank you so much, Eric. And

00:51:36.780 everyone, go check out erikmitaxes.com. And they can follow you on Twitter if they want to.

00:51:41.660 I'm on Twitter. I'm on Facebook. I'm on Instagram. And most importantly,

00:51:45.680 I have a daily radio show where I have on the most amazing guests ever. If you sign up for my

00:51:51.100 weekly email at erikmitaxes.com, we'll weekly send you details of every episode so you can just click

00:51:58.080 and listen to it. And a lot of it's on video right now. I have interviewed amazing people from way on

00:52:03.940 the left to way on the right. I just did a huge thing with Milo Yiannopoulos. I know. I don't like

00:52:09.120 that, but. Crazy. No, I know. But I'm saying like I am, I run the gamut. I interview people

00:52:13.920 with whom I disagree. Yeah. And well, you'll see. You'll see. It's. Yes. I mean, you're never

00:52:20.220 going to be bored watching or listening to your show. That's for sure. And I think that's good,

00:52:23.780 especially for us millennials. Well, thank you so much for listening. And we will see you here on Monday.

Relatable with Allie Beth Stuckey - March 29, 2019

Ep 92 ｜ Eric Metaxas

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