The NXR Podcast - THEOLOGY APPLIED - Timothy Keller’s Deathbed Strategy For Evangelicals

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00:00:25.480 All right, welcome back to another episode of Theology Applied.

00:00:33.260 I am your host, Pastor Joel Webin with Right Response Ministries.

00:00:36.960 In this episode, I'm privileged to have as a special guest, Aaron Wren.

00:00:40.740 The title for this episode is Timothy Keller's Deathbed Strategy for Evangelicals.

00:00:47.660 What we're discussing in this episode is one of the final pieces of work that Timothy Keller

00:00:52.860 completed about six months before his passing. And unfortunately, one of the main things that

00:01:00.580 Timothy Keller presents in this final work is a strategy for complementarians to bridge the gap

00:01:08.260 with egalitarians through compromise. That's what we'll be discussing in this episode. And I hope

00:01:15.040 that you enjoy. Applying God's word to every aspect of life. This is Theology Applied.

00:01:22.860 All right, welcome to another episode of Theology Applied.

00:01:29.520 I'm your host, Pastor Joel Webben with Right Response Ministries.

00:01:32.680 And in this episode, I'm very privileged to welcome back,

00:01:35.520 it's been a long time, almost two years,

00:01:37.340 but welcoming back a second time now, Aaron Wren to the show.

00:01:40.840 Aaron, thanks for coming.

00:01:42.420 Thanks for having me.

00:01:43.180 Wow, it's been two years.

00:01:44.640 Yes, sir.

00:01:45.000 Time flies.

00:01:45.580 Time flies when you're having fun.

00:01:47.500 Well, let's go ahead right here from the outset.

00:01:49.260 Let people know how they can keep up with your work and follow you.

00:01:52.860 Sure. Just go to my website, AaronRenn.com, A-A-R-O-N, R-E-N-N.com, and sign up for my newsletter. There's lots of great free stuff on there, including a lot of what we're going to talk about. So you'll want to be in on that.

00:02:06.700 Okay. So it's just AaronRenn.com. That's right?

00:02:09.360 That's right.

00:02:10.140 Two A's, two N's. 0.60

00:02:10.800 And I try to give people—exactly. I try to give people deep insight that you can't get anywhere else about what's going on in the world and the church today.

00:02:19.300 Great. Well, what I wanted to talk about was part of your content that came out recently. It's probably been about a week or two at this point, but you wrote an article and sometimes you'll read your articles and record them on your podcast as well. That's where I typically follow you.

00:02:35.940 but you did one on complementarianism. Basically, the gist that I got was that this middle ground

00:02:43.460 between egalitarianism and biblical patriarchy, this middle ground is starting to kind of shift

00:02:51.260 and really just like a sink pit, it's starting to disappear. And some of the guys with the new

00:02:57.920 Calvinism, young, reformed, restless leaders, including Tim Keller before he passed,

00:03:03.420 um we're making a push it seems like an explicit push for the complementarian new calvinist type

00:03:10.700 of folks to uh to link arms with uh the egalitarians who are at least still within the realm of

00:03:17.720 orthodoxy they haven't you know they haven't embraced uh lgbt those kinds of things so

00:03:23.680 can you kind of sum up a little bit of what you were writing what you're getting at what

00:03:28.540 what are some of the problems that you perceive i like to take the things that you're seeing and

00:03:35.320 observing in the world and put a framework around them that helps you to understand what's going on

00:03:42.720 to see the bigger picture so the thing i'm best known for is my three worlds of evangelicalism

00:03:48.820 framework which i wrote in first things magazine which talks about how we went from a world that

00:03:53.060 was positive towards christianity to one that was neutral towards christianity to one that's

00:03:57.040 negative towards Christianity. This is an attempt to do something like that at a smaller scale.

00:04:03.080 It has been said that conservatism is merely liberalism 20 years too late. And that might be

00:04:10.940 a little bit unfair, but it does get at a reality is that there is a tendency for people who are

00:04:19.380 conservative to get dragged left as the left continues to make further moves, ever further

00:04:27.640 left. And several years ago, I came to the conclusion that complementarianism was really

00:04:33.700 going to run into some challenges because of that. As society moved left, it was going to put

00:04:39.780 enormous pressure on complementarianism to move to the left. And especially as the baby boomers 0.99

00:04:48.060 who created and sustained complementarian theology, largely in the 1980s, started moving

00:04:55.220 on from leadership, this was really going to expose complementarianism to new kinds of pressure

00:05:01.640 that would particularly lead people on the thinner end of complementarianism,

00:05:08.220 the ones who try to have the most egalitarian view of gender relations possible. It was going

00:05:15.440 of caused them to probably flip egalitarian at some point. Not that the older generation

00:05:21.060 themselves would, but that the younger generations might do that. So that's kind of the background

00:05:27.180 hypothesis that I had in mind. I said, let's test that by seeing what is coming along with

00:05:33.860 various things we see in the world. And one of the things I noticed was a strategy document that

00:05:40.460 Tim Keller put out November of last year. It had actually been mostly developed in the previous

00:05:46.240 year or two, and he brought it all together, added some new stuff, and published it then

00:05:51.700 about six months before he died, which was a series and a strategy about the decline and renewal of

00:05:57.420 the American church. It was basically his diagnostic for what's gone wrong in the American

00:06:01.240 church combined with his view of where the church ought to go. This is essentially the last thing he

00:06:08.580 published before he died, along with his new book, Forgive. So it was obviously something that he

00:06:12.320 thought was really, really important. And one of the central features of his new strategy

00:06:20.160 is essentially rethinking differences on the matter of gender. Keller was and remained his

00:06:28.520 whole life in a complementarian, excuse me, complementarian. So he didn't flip to egalitarian,

00:06:34.640 but he essentially posits that conservative christians should take a different approach

00:06:43.080 to their partnerships one that says we're going to add to our coalition egalitarians who are on

00:06:51.280 the more conservative side say those who want to affirm a gender binary they claim men and women

00:06:57.400 could both be pastors for example but they still affirm that there are only two genders

00:07:01.420 add those kind of conservative egalitarians to the coalition and subtract from the coalition

00:07:10.140 fundamentalists so people on the ultra right of the spectrum if you will it's this new

00:07:17.680 alliance if you will this new movement would be structured around a sort of a centrist vision of

00:07:26.140 kind of more left-leaning complementarians and more right-leaning egalitarians that would come

00:07:34.000 together in the center to create this new movement and there's a lot more to it than that

00:07:40.000 by the way he talks about the christian mind project there's there's many great things and

00:07:43.560 they're actually i suggest that people people read it and so that i said he's really again

00:07:49.880 suggesting two things one is to dissolve this notion that gender your theology of gender is

00:07:56.160 sort of a barrier to working together and uh or to make it a much less of a barrier to working

00:08:04.300 together than it previously would have been and then also kind of getting rid of the more

00:08:10.200 conservative people again fundamentalist etc so i saw that that's actually that's actually a

00:08:18.020 strategy. That's actually an explicitly stated strategy that he lays out. You don't need to

00:08:22.680 interpret anything. And I'm like, that is very much the kind of move I would have anticipated

00:08:27.280 in this sort of complementarianism coming under pressure world.

00:08:33.740 Yeah, that's helpful. With that, I want to define some terms, but before I do, let me ask one

00:08:39.760 follow-up question. In Tim Keller's paradigm and everything that he was publishing towards

00:08:45.780 the end of his life on this subject, how does his definition of who is a fundamentalist differ,

00:08:53.320 if at all, with the traditional view of what it means to be a fundamentalist?

00:09:00.100 He has an extensive section on fundamentalism in that document. And there's basically originally

00:09:07.860 four chapters, one of which was on the decline of evangelicalism, which he centers very much

00:09:14.080 in the fundamentalist tradition and he sort of draws on george marsden the historian for his

00:09:19.500 definitions and i don't remember all of the marks that he associated with fundamentalism

00:09:24.980 uh but certainly uh sectarianism would be among them a rejection of things like social justice

00:09:32.920 would be among them it's sort of a highly combative attitude uh would be one so he does

00:09:38.720 have a definition of fundamentalism that's in there. Elevating of secondary and tertiary

00:09:47.620 doctrines above where they should be, that would be another one of it. So I don't think he has a

00:09:54.560 particularly bespoke definition of fundamentalism. He draws on other people, and I think the way

00:10:02.300 that he describes it is, you know, more or less accurate. I'm sure there's experts who would

00:10:08.920 probably quibble on it, but I don't think it's a lie to say there's something of a kind of

00:10:14.040 fundamentalist style, if you will. Okay. To me, it seems as though one of the shifts with

00:10:20.360 fundamentalism, that last point that you mentioned in terms of elevating secondary and tertiary

00:10:27.040 doctrines as though they were primary, giving them perhaps too much emphasis as dividing lines

00:10:32.200 between different camps. It seems as though that is true. The posture, the principle behind that

00:10:38.460 remains true, but it seems as though the secondary doctrines in specific that are being elevated

00:10:45.800 are not the same ones of the past. When I think of even just 20 years ago, it seems as though

00:10:50.980 mode of baptism between paedo or credo was a bigger issue than it is for kind of this new

00:10:58.260 fundamentalism. Um, or another example would be, uh, your view on the sign gifts of the spirit

00:11:04.880 continuationism as articulated, a third wave charismatic position is articulated by Sam

00:11:10.720 storms, Wayne Grudem, John Piper, uh, versus cessationism. Um, you know, the cessationism

00:11:16.660 that we would, uh, connect with someone like Sproul or MacArthur. These seem to be, uh,

00:11:21.980 larger issues and not just 50 years ago, but even just 10 years ago, perhaps even,

00:11:26.860 even just five years ago it seems like uh you would uh draw clear lines in separating tribes

00:11:34.700 and camps around uh a person's or ministry or a church's view of the gifts of the spirit

00:11:41.880 and baptism whereas now it seems like um the fundamentalist the new fundamentalist and i would

00:11:49.160 you know i probably not the term that i would choose for myself but i know that i probably

00:11:53.280 would fall into that category. For me, I'm finding as a credo-baptist far more commonality

00:11:59.580 with pedo-baptists and my fellow Presbyterians, guys like Doug Wilson and the Moscow Tried.

00:12:05.760 We're partnering on lots of different things there, but we're drawing harder lines on issues

00:12:12.820 of roles between men and women. So patriarchy versus a soft complementarianism seems to be

00:12:20.700 a starker uh divide than you know paedo versus credo baptism have you noticed that as well and

00:12:28.460 and what do you think uh what do you think might be going on there if that's true

00:12:31.720 i would put a little bit of a different spin on it when it comes to gender specifically

00:12:37.500 i do believe you're correct that the issues have changed around what the controversies are

00:12:43.160 part of what i saw going back a few years ago looking at the pressure complementarianism was

00:12:50.820 going to come under is it's very clear that complementarianism itself was originally designed

00:12:57.920 as a sort of third way doctrine it's a halfway house this is very clear from the works of

00:13:05.520 sociologist james davison hunter who wrote a book in 1987 the year the danvers statement came out

00:13:12.000 called Evangelicalism, The Coming Generation. And he talked about the three strands of thought

00:13:17.720 on gender roles, sort of the traditionalist position, which sort of unapologetically look

00:13:23.420 back to sort of pre-sexual revolution, 1950s style gender roles as the way it should be.

00:13:30.780 There were the feminists, and then there were the strand that he doesn't call them complementarian,

00:13:37.160 but it's clearly the strand that's evolving into complementarianism at that time,

00:13:41.080 where they say, we are not going to affirm 1950s gender roles, which I agree, we're more culturally

00:13:48.840 bound than per se a product of scripture. But we need to hold, also need to hold firm on the

00:13:55.780 things that the Bible specifically says around husbands as the head of the home and a male-only

00:14:02.920 pastorate. And they left a lot of wiggle room in there, I would say, as to terms of how much

00:14:09.280 differences there are between men and women but those were essentially the two kind of main focus

00:14:15.520 points of it and they also did try to acknowledge certain feminist critiques uh in the danver

00:14:24.480 station uh danver statement talks about an upsurge and abuse for example it essentially began the

00:14:32.620 movement began to redefine being the head of the home as servant leadership, essentially

00:14:39.860 undermining the way it was traditionally understood. And ultimately, it came together

00:14:46.040 into a sort of third way position, you might call it. And just as it's now kind of the thin

00:14:54.860 complementarianism is sort of collapsing on, you know, kind of the left flank, we also see people

00:15:02.060 on the right who are very dissatisfied with the same approach, and they are moving in a more

00:15:08.680 neopatriarchy direction. So we see that there's pressures coming to bear on complementarianism

00:15:16.200 from a variety of perspectives. What I would say on neopatriarchy, though, is that it is

00:15:23.080 kind of a niche, largely online movement. You know, Doug Wilson sort of has some of that,

00:15:29.060 Although Doug himself, I sort of classify as a little bit of, you know, he's a boomer figure himself.

00:15:36.440 And, you know, much of his writing, you know, from the past, I think would be some stuff that certainly some of the Christian Manosphere guys criticized him as being too feminist friendly.

00:15:49.840 So he's he's maybe not as full throated a patriarchalist as some would like.

00:15:56.700 But that's certainly another piece of pressure that's hitting the complementarian position and complementarianism, in my view, congealed at a particular point in time in response to a particular set of social pressures and a particular set of people that were involved.

00:16:17.100 and it created something that sort of held for a while but as time has moved on it's a little bit

00:16:23.420 coming apart and what we see is you know i think if you talk to some of the complementarian

00:16:31.500 biggest complementarian promoters they would simply say look what's wrong with you know a

00:16:37.360 male only pastor i mean that's what we believe in we believe in the bible uh and i think they're

00:16:42.600 they're sort of true on that they're true on that point but it's really sort of this broader vision

00:16:48.140 that extends beyond um sort of the you know narrow definitions of who could be a pastor who's the

00:16:55.040 head of the home into a much broader conception of substantive complementarity of the genders

00:17:01.940 and what does that actually mean and how substantive is it and interestingly uh although

00:17:09.380 So the main complementarian book, Recovering Biblical Manhood and Womanhood, was written to be co-edited by John Piper, and it really doesn't go into any detail on substantive complementarity.

00:17:22.900 It talks about complementarity, but it really doesn't focus on it.

00:17:26.000 Piper himself is really probably the foremost advocate of a sort of thick or broad complementarian vision in which the differences between the sexes have pervasive effects on what they should and shouldn't be doing in his life.

00:17:40.820 I believe he says things like women shouldn't be police officers, for example, and has gotten criticized over that.

00:17:47.960 And so, you know, I don't want to suggest that all of these people thought exactly the same.

00:17:53.100 I mean, part of it is with complementarianism, there are people who had kind of different perspectives and they had to create something that everybody could agree with.

00:18:01.840 It's like any sort of statement.

00:18:03.380 uh you know once you try to actually create an institution in create a movement create

00:18:10.100 a document you can all sign on to that causes uh you know it's a lot harder because you're

00:18:17.120 dealing in the real world you're not just dealing in intellectual abstractions or

00:18:20.600 you know aaron wren putting out what he thinks in a newsletter now you're dealing with oh wait a

00:18:26.280 minute i have people that i have to actually work with and that you know kind of strains what we

00:18:31.300 can do right yep um you're right to say that there's a sliding scale a spectrum uh within

00:18:38.580 the complementarian world from you know i've articulated in the past as um kind of narrow

00:18:45.840 and soft versus broad and hard the the hard and soft piece i use those to describe um you know

00:18:53.820 you could hold to a woman can't be an elder but she could still preach underneath the authority 1.00

00:18:59.020 of the elders. I would say that that's a soft complementarian view, whereas hard would be,

00:19:04.320 you know, she cannot exercise authority or teach, seeing it as not one prohibition in 1 Timothy

00:19:10.940 chapter 2, but as one prohibition, meaning she can't teach with authority, but as two separate

00:19:18.480 prohibitions, she cannot teach or exercise authority. So that's the soft and hard. That's 1.00

00:19:23.400 an example of that piece. And then the narrow and broad would be, do these differences, these

00:19:28.680 distinctions only have application in the home of the church, or is there a broader application?

00:19:34.500 You brought up the example of John Piper, who would be what I would describe as both hard and

00:19:40.260 broad complementarian. Just for our listeners, let me, in my assessment, show a little bit of

00:19:48.300 the distinction between egalitarian and complementarian and then complementarian and

00:19:51.700 patriarch. And I'd love to get your feedback if you would agree with these definitional

00:19:57.200 distinctions for the record um i would place myself into the patriarchy category uh for the

00:20:03.620 view that i hold but the differences as i see it is that um some of these egalitarians that the

00:20:09.060 softer complementarians are being encouraged to link arms with um that would be the more

00:20:13.980 conservative egalitarians they would still see a gender binary still see male and female

00:20:18.140 um but at the level both the home and the church um it's not that uh the husband is the head of

00:20:24.180 his house, but it would be this mutual submission under Christ. And the emphasis would be placed

00:20:29.900 there. So there's not a male headship in the home and there's not a male headship in the church

00:20:35.080 within complementarianism. In my assessment, 1988 is when Wayne Grudem and John Piper coined

00:20:42.480 the phrase, I think it's always meant to be a halfway house, a third way option. And it seems

00:20:49.500 as though they said there are distinctions and roles that do actually stem from a distinction

00:20:54.540 and nature so it's not just male and female roles he assigned them but male and female natures he

00:20:59.400 designed them he made them but the only difference in nature is in the physical realm that women have

00:21:06.120 hips and men you know can can bench press and so even in the broad iteration of complementarianism

00:21:13.940 You know, it would extend beyond that, like certain roles like police officers or combat roles in the military, those kinds of things.

00:21:21.600 But it would it would limit the distinction of nature to the physical, whereas patriarchy, by comparison, most of the patriarchal guys that I'm familiar with, there would be, you know, a spectrum of iterations and applications.

00:21:35.140 but most would agree that the distinction in roles is not just relegated to the home of the church

00:21:42.500 but the whole of society and those distinction of roles are not arbitrary or capricious. They

00:21:48.340 stem from a distinction in design nature but that distinction in design is not merely physical

00:21:54.840 in our physical anatomy but they would also cite passages. I would be one to cite passages like

00:22:01.260 first corinthians or i'm sorry like a first timothy chapter two that where paul doesn't just

00:22:06.460 rely on the order of creation but he also relies on the order of the fall and so going back to

00:22:12.360 some older theologians that would put some emphasis on the fact that the woman was the

00:22:17.340 one who was deceived and became a sinner so it's not just her physical anatomy being different than

00:22:23.080 a man that she's not physically built to lead but emotionally psychologically that there are other

00:22:29.380 components of the whole person of men and women that are distinct at the level of nature not

00:22:35.660 merely role and that the role stems from that difference not just a physical difference in

00:22:39.880 nature but a psychological emotional that all the way down god made us different and that that

00:22:45.280 applies not just in the home of the church but in society as a whole that's my understanding of

00:22:50.540 biblical patriarchy and there are other iterations is there anything that you feel like i missed or

00:22:55.520 anything that you would add to some of those definitions? Well, I think you kind of covered

00:23:02.720 up some of the differences between these camps within the evangelical world. One thing that I

00:23:10.800 would say is when it comes to patriarchy, you know, patriarchy is not just a set of interpretations

00:23:16.960 about scriptures. I would have said that historically we would have thought of patriarchy

00:23:20.420 as an actual cultural legal system in which, you know, the father held genuine rules.

00:23:28.940 So the Roman paterfamilias really did hold legal, social, cultural power over his household.

00:23:38.140 Whereas, you know, in our society, we live in a legally and culturally egalitarian society.

00:23:44.740 So that is the background.

00:23:46.400 And I do think if I were to put one challenge to the patriarchal position here is,

00:23:50.420 to me, it's a little bit like, I believe in the divine right of kings.

00:23:55.260 Well, we don't have a king.

00:23:57.220 You know, so that's, I think that is a huge issue for practically speaking,

00:24:02.620 what does it mean to believe in patriarchy?

00:24:05.280 I think that that has not been fully kind of teased out in terms of,

00:24:11.800 in light of this belief system, how does one live in a society like today

00:24:16.880 where fathers are actually disadvantaged by the cultural and legal systems creates a really kind

00:24:24.680 of an interesting uh conundrum i think but i do think that basically with what the proviso that

00:24:29.800 i think patriarchy is actually essentially a legal and cultural system in addition to being

00:24:35.260 an interpretation of the scripture that would be the only thing the only twist i would put on there

00:24:38.500 okay yeah that's helpful um but yeah you're right it's difficult um to actually practically carry it

00:24:44.800 out when we are so far from that system in the West today that really, and part of that is not

00:24:53.280 just our views of men and women, but it's also views of households and individuals that we're

00:24:58.880 an atomistic society, that the basic building block for many is considered to be the individual

00:25:05.000 person and not the household. And so this idea that- I don't want to get too far afield from our

00:25:11.420 from our discussion here but you know there's a lot of things like that just the fact that we live

00:25:15.060 in a uh you know mass urbanized highly technological society uh compared to the

00:25:22.240 pre-industrial household based society of the bible it really creates a radically different

00:25:29.060 environment you know today versus the past that makes things quite complex in terms of thinking

00:25:37.020 about how to live uh you know what does it mean to live in any kind of biblical manner in that

00:25:43.740 environment which is radically different uh from the past kind of unprecedented in many ways

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00:28:51.580 All right, well, go ahead and share any other thoughts

00:28:54.860 that you might have in regards to,

00:28:57.200 well, I'd love to hear,

00:28:58.720 not that you have a crystal ball

00:29:00.980 and so we're not going to hold you to it,

00:29:02.820 but if you could indulge in some speculation,

00:29:05.860 what are some of your predictions

00:29:07.320 for the evangelical church on this particular issue,

00:29:10.680 men and women, what do you think's going to happen?

00:29:16.000 That's a good question.

00:29:17.220 I do see evidence that people are putting the Keller strategy into practice, which is – we saw it with some writing columns that Russell Moore has recently done.

00:29:31.180 Russell Moore, former Southern Baptist entity chief, now editor of Christianity Today, wrote a column where he essentially repented of being the old patriarchal Russell Moore.

00:29:42.580 In fact, Russell Moore used to be an overt patriarchalist, and he now says, I want to partner with these conservative egalitarians, and I want to be less associated with people like the old Russell Moore.

00:29:58.720 So like Keller, he sort of divides the world into sort of good and bad egalitarians and good and bad complementarians, and he's like, well, the good complementarians and the good egalitarians need to work together.

00:30:08.440 We also see a lot of debates over gender roles in the Southern Baptist Convention.

00:30:15.980 There's a proposed amendment that would clarify constitutionally that churches can't be part of the SBC unless they have exclusively male pastors.

00:30:29.280 So I do believe there is going to be kind of an elite movement more in an egalitarian direction.

00:30:37.460 The first step is to essentially downgrade egalitarianism as constituting one of these barriers that would have defined tribes and say, well, rather than we have the complementarians over here and the egalitarians over there, why don't we just work and partner more with these egalitarians?

00:30:56.580 Why don't we just embrace them as more authentic?

00:31:00.740 So we just essentially downgrade the gender roles to a sort of lower status, maybe from – this is illustrative here – from a second-order issue to a third-order issue.

00:31:10.680 So let's start downgrading that and sort of treat it as a matter of conscience.

00:31:14.780 That seems to be the move that's going now.

00:31:18.460 i believe that's going to be something that's going to have a lot of appeal

00:31:23.220 to a lot of people who are highly educated and it kind of leads off in a direction towards

00:31:30.400 ultimately egalitarianism um i think it's going to be very difficult to sustain any sort of

00:31:40.000 complementarian vision that has a very narrow and thin view of the differences between men and women

00:31:47.080 and essentially treats the difference between men and women

00:31:53.320 as coming down to two arbitrary rules God made. 1.00

00:31:55.740 You know, women can't preach. 0.99

00:31:57.280 Only men can preach and be pastors and men are the head of the hum. 0.63

00:32:01.060 There's a lot of people who believe that.

00:32:02.580 That is essentially the Keller position.

00:32:05.460 You know, it's summed up in the Kathy Keller line. 0.90

00:32:07.940 You know, a woman can do anything an ordained man can do. 0.99

00:32:11.400 And I think that's going to prove to be unsustainable in the long term 0.99

00:32:16.120 because it's it's really weird you know if you think about it it kind of is a weird position

00:32:22.120 uh the uh you know so i think that that that sort of is going to go in one direction

00:32:28.620 i think the uh you know we're also going to have this sort of neo-patriarchal split

00:32:33.580 off the other side and i think for the people who want to remain complementarian and or

00:32:41.960 patriarch kind of patriarchalist they're going to have to find some way to make that viable

00:32:50.080 to actually live out in modern industrial society in which the official culture of society and the

00:32:59.040 legal system you know are deeply hostile to it you really can't you really can't say well the

00:33:04.440 husband is the head of the home but if the wife decides she doesn't like him anymore for no reason

00:33:09.840 at all she can divorce him and it's going to go pretty much in her favor or certainly not against

00:33:15.100 her in the divorce court and oh by the way then she can show up at a church and they're going to 0.92

00:33:20.400 treat her as this victim of emotional abuse when she claims that you know her ex-husband is no good 1.00

00:33:26.600 and that she's a poor single mother who needs help and the church is going to actively underwrite

00:33:31.020 that divorce right and it happens all the time and so when you're in that environment uh

00:33:37.640 Now, you have to come up with some sort of a vision that's actually functional in that environment, and that's going to be a very big challenge.

00:33:50.180 Now, having said that, when you look at the votes at the recent SBC, which came down, you know, 80, 90 percent on some issues in favor of complementarianism, it does not look like essentially, you know, evangelicals, certainly conservative evangelicals are planning to abandon complementarianism anytime soon, although we see things moving in certain particular directions.

00:34:15.440 Right. Yeah, no, I think you're right.

00:34:17.480 at a societal level um you don't have some of those safeguards um but that's you know i mean

00:34:25.920 that's in some sense it feels like saying it's going to be really hard to practice integrity

00:34:30.840 and not lie uh because of social media and ai um you know like there are always going to be

00:34:37.640 certain cultural and technological advancements um that are going to force people if they want

00:34:43.780 to live in accordance with their conscience, and what they believe the Bible teaches, that they

00:34:49.660 won't have the social constructs to keep them in that lane, that it'll have to be a conscience

00:34:54.940 choice, that it'll have to be, you know, they'll actually have to be willing to do that, and so 0.77

00:35:00.060 right now, you're absolutely right, at any point, the trad wife can decide, that's it, I'm done,

00:35:06.700 you know, I've been LARPing as a 1950s, you know, housewife for the last decade, and, you know, I

00:35:12.920 had my fun and I ran my social media accounts and I, you know, did these kinds of things. Um,

00:35:18.440 but I'm kind of done with that. I don't like my husband anymore. And she could tap out in a way

00:35:24.280 that a woman actually in the 1950s could not tap out. She could say, I don't like this, but she

00:35:30.280 wouldn't really have anywhere socially to go. Um, so all that being said, I think you're absolutely

00:35:35.820 right. Uh, that does make it more challenging, but in my assessment, it doesn't make it impossible.

00:35:41.440 you still have you know your will your ability to choose to abide by a certain set of principles

00:35:48.940 that you believe in regardless of what the law happens to be in that particular place in time

00:35:55.820 so any any other thoughts on on that i don't think so okay um for the patriarchy guys last

00:36:05.580 question um you do your best or also feel free to decline to answer it's up to you but for the

00:36:11.040 patriarchal guys the theo bros whatever you want to call them um it seems like we don't really have

00:36:18.120 any institutions um you know it's it's going to be a really uphill climb uh certainly seems um

00:36:25.800 disheartening and uh all but impossible the one thing i think that we have on our side

00:36:32.620 um aside from i believe the word of god and because i hold to that position so obviously

00:36:37.840 i'm convicted that that the word of god speaks to it in addition to that we also have nature

00:36:42.080 and nature usually tends to be a force to be reckoned with so we don't have the social and

00:36:47.560 legal system um but uh but we do have um some just some natural things that it's just hard to

00:36:54.260 go against the way that god designed the world no matter how technologically advanced you may

00:37:00.120 become. They're just certain things that, uh, that God has built into the fabric of the world,

00:37:04.120 uh, that will eternally ring true. Um, all that being said, again, uh, despite those advantages,

00:37:11.140 there are lots of disadvantages. Uh, what do you think the, the patriarchal guys, that side of the

00:37:17.780 aisle, do you think there's any hope for them with this, you know, this shift you're saying,

00:37:21.920 I already see institutionally this shift of what Keller was advocating for towards the end of his 0.53

00:37:26.760 life that you know the arms are being linked the the allegiances are being made with the egalitarians

00:37:32.740 i see that happening um do what do you see with the patriarchal side of the aisle do you think

00:37:38.540 it's just just um these guys are just going to be larping around all 14 of them you know on twitter

00:37:45.320 or do you think that do you think there's actually a chance i always say that you know the first

00:37:52.140 thing we have to do is discern and align ourselves with the truth and so we need to make sure that

00:37:59.120 we are not just regurgitating things and that we actually know what the truth is or we at least

00:38:06.800 know where we don't know you know because a lot of my work kind of came out of the fact that i

00:38:13.820 thought i believed one thing when i came to church and i was taught all these things i just took it

00:38:18.240 I said, well, this is what they're teaching me. These are the good guys. And so I'm going to

00:38:23.020 follow this. And then all of a sudden I realized some of the stuff they're telling me actually

00:38:26.120 wasn't accurate. And so I think we need to have the courage to admit that we ourselves could be

00:38:32.920 wrong. And so I think that willingness to do it ourselves is important and to know where we don't

00:38:39.400 have all the answers. How should we live today? That is a hard question without an obvious answer

00:38:48.220 maybe an answer that can't be boiled down to a set of rules i think a lot of times people want to 1.00

00:38:54.620 have this biblical rule very bright line that's one of the reasons i think that you know women

00:39:02.000 can't be pastors things appeals to people because it's it's a rule we can apply a rule whereas a lot

00:39:08.280 of the things that we have to do today involve wisdom where should i live what kind of career

00:39:13.980 should I go into? How do I find a spouse in this environment? How do I actually stay married?

00:39:21.160 How do I raise my kids in ways that they will not abandon their faith when they're older and

00:39:27.820 they'll stand on the truth? These are hard questions that we have to equip people with

00:39:32.900 tools to answer. That's one of them. The other thing I say is, again, I think a lot of this

00:39:39.440 stuff tends to be an online movement and i think some of the online interactions are very

00:39:44.360 counterproductive uh you know when tim keller died people are trashing him on twitter i mean

00:39:52.600 that's just not going to win many admirers from people we have these social rules like don't speak

00:39:59.980 ill of the dead and you know you do that you're in trouble and the other thing i'd say is you know

00:40:04.660 you see some of these people this is not necessarily all of them picking fights with

00:40:08.960 women online if you believe when men and women are different then you would go back to that old

00:40:14.240 rule from the playground you can't hit a girl and basically i would say you know the odds are very

00:40:22.220 low that anything good is going to come out of getting in a fight with a woman if you're a man

00:40:26.940 it typically doesn't go well for you and so uh how do you operate in that environment is not always

00:40:34.220 is is not always key uh but i think it goes almost like the political idea of owning the libs

00:40:40.400 becomes like the the motivator uh a little bit and i would dial back some of that and think more

00:40:49.280 about some of these other issues substantively um and you know what does it mean to live out

00:40:56.540 you know the bible's um calling in this world today practically speaking right and that is a

00:41:04.600 very difficult question dude i do not plan you know profess to have all the answers to myself

00:41:10.560 you know and you know i i do believe certain things i do believe you know it's good to be

00:41:16.120 married for the most for most people i think that's the normative call people's lives there's

00:41:20.460 things i i do think but i think we need to focus a lot more on kind of the the practical uh the

00:41:27.460 practical side of some of these things uh as well that's what i would say and again that's not like

00:41:34.800 how do the how do these people win or get traction i don't know but those are the things that i i see

00:41:40.620 in the movement that i might uh suggest focusing on yeah no i agree uh definitely in terms of the

00:41:48.500 getting into arguments online with women it's a ironic posture to take for somebody you know i

00:41:55.800 would say patriarchy you know one of the things that i would say that differentiates the work

00:42:01.600 that i did and my newsletter was originally called the masculinist and it very much focused

00:42:05.760 on men's issues and i still write about men's issues but it is not rooted in anti-feminism

00:42:12.220 and i was thinking about this it wasn't something i self-consciously thought of when i started it

00:42:17.820 But as I was thinking about people who get in arguments with all these women, I said to myself, you know, nothing that I'm doing is a response to something women are doing or saying.

00:42:31.960 It's just, you know, I've got an agenda that I'm pushing.

00:42:34.820 If anything, it's other men that I'm interested in pushing back on.

00:42:39.260 And I do think there's a sense, if you went back to this sort of pre-feminist era, you know, men were not obsessed with what women were doing and saying, it wasn't like, it wasn't, you know, it wasn't something that was like, you know, men kind of had their own world, you know, men had their own social world.

00:42:57.520 And that's sort of been destroyed.

00:42:59.200 In fact, that'd be one thing I'd do is recreating sort of a men's social world in an era where there are no more all-male clubs, no more all-male spaces, or very few of them.

00:43:07.000 uh you know men operated largely in the world of men they didn't really spend a lot of time

00:43:12.580 concerning themselves with the affairs of women i think a lot of the kind of conservative

00:43:16.440 people i see seem to have a very explicitly anti-feminist posture and it's always

00:43:22.260 a bad idea i shouldn't say always but it's a general rule it's a bad idea to define yourself

00:43:30.000 in opposition to something instead of being in favor of something yeah we can make some

00:43:35.380 exceptions there it's probably good to be anti-slavery but for the most part being anti-something

00:43:41.280 creates an identity that is simply a reflection of that thing that you're against instead of

00:43:46.620 being something you're for yeah that makes sense uh the last thing that i'll say is this um i think

00:43:52.300 part of the difficulty on this particular issue really any issue but i always say that um as a

00:43:57.720 pastor i always say that faithful preaching is comprised of uh three primary components it's

00:44:04.140 revelation, interpretation, and application. Revelation being I have a text, not a dream or

00:44:09.300 a strategy, but a text. The interpretation being a faithful exegesis of that text. And as the late

00:44:15.320 great R.C. Sproul once said, there's only one accurate interpretation. You can have a thousand

00:44:21.880 different faithful applications of a singular text, but God means what he means by that text.

00:44:28.800 so it's god's meaning god's interpretation the exegesis so revelation the text uh interpretation

00:44:34.880 the exegesis god's meaning of the text but then application and one of the things that i've

00:44:39.440 noticed is um that a lot of the reformed guys i think were light uh with the new calvinist movement

00:44:46.160 over the last 20 years a lot of them were light on that third piece application whereas the old

00:44:52.000 calvinist if you think of the reformers and especially the puritans um the puritans i mean

00:44:57.360 they would they would go a whole extra hour sometimes in their preaching of just giving

00:45:02.380 practical applications and that's really in many ways that's where you know the the term you know

00:45:07.820 the pejorative puritanical comes from is that they you know that they were constantly being accused

00:45:14.180 of being legalist because they were taking the word of god and saying in this particular practical

00:45:20.040 instance it means you need to do this there were commands actually being issued and so all that

00:45:27.760 being said i think that a lot of the more modern reformed new calvinist preacher types

00:45:33.920 i would say are the equivalent of an audible commentary an hour-long audible commentary on

00:45:41.100 lord's day it's it's revelation and interpretation but very little if any at all application that

00:45:47.420 third piece and i think part of the reason why is because that third piece is the most controversial

00:45:52.720 piece um you can read the text and and just read the text and sit down and offend you know somebody

00:46:00.100 who's maybe deeply progressive and lgbt affirming um but with your fellow brothers in christ across

00:46:07.820 the aisle and different tribes if you just read the text and even go further from revelation to

00:46:12.500 interpretation and give a reformed exegesis, conservative interpretation of a particular

00:46:17.500 text, you still won't have a lot of enemies on your right. Um, but the moment that you give an

00:46:23.200 application and you say, um, you know, so like for instance, you know, I've asked people, uh,

00:46:28.660 not theoretically, not in theory, but in practice function, um, what kind of authority does a man

00:46:35.300 have in his home? If you are a complementarian or patriarchal, if that is your position and you

00:46:40.480 believe that the husband is the head of his wife what does that mean because on the church side

00:46:45.320 complementarianism is a lot more practical we all have at least this working definition of what

00:46:52.980 that means is that a woman can't preach and she can't be an elder and so we we have a real clear

00:46:58.620 we don't have that on the home side on the home front when we come to the home with the same 0.92

00:47:04.160 doctrine of complementarianism or even biblical patriarchy in both views when it comes to the

00:47:10.200 home, practically, what does this mean? And essentially, what it usually boils down to,

00:47:14.760 and I think I've heard this from a lot of guys, including you talking about Mark Driscoll, that

00:47:18.600 when you really get down to the nuts and bolts, the application, practically, that Driscoll was

00:47:24.180 kind of a little bit egalitarian. For as macho as he sounded and those kinds of things, what does

00:47:29.760 it mean for the husband to be the head of his home? It means you exercise that authority to

00:47:33.740 do what your wife wants. Exactly. And that's it. And so really at the end of the day, you know, 0.87

00:47:40.300 I I'm actually running a poll on Twitter right now, which is probably something that you want

00:47:44.660 to do. Um, I'm being a little facetious, but I'm trying to make a point and I'm not trying to be

00:47:48.720 overly, uh, offensive. Uh, but I said, uh, practically speaking, aside from theory,

00:47:54.400 practically speaking, how much authority does a husband have in his home? And then I gave two

00:47:58.900 options none i'm an egalitarian and none i'm a complementarian so i wanted to see you know you

00:48:05.540 know which option people would pick and so i think part of what the patriarchal guys are trying to do

00:48:10.200 and and i'm not saying that everybody's doing it well but i think uh what they'll have to do if

00:48:15.820 it's going to be a viable position is they're going to have to get into the realm of application

00:48:20.160 not just revelation interpreted but the realm of application and you cannot get in that realm

00:48:25.560 without creating enemies in my experience not just me and the complementarian the soft

00:48:32.020 complementarian and the hard patriarchal we're both going to share enemies on the left for the

00:48:37.120 for the the person who doesn't even identify as being a follower of christ who's you know has the

00:48:42.060 rainbow flag and they're on the front porch we're both going to have that person as an enemy um but

00:48:47.420 but the person who begins to talk about not just revelation and interpretation but application is

00:48:52.280 going to quickly, uh, find enemies amongst, uh, genuine brothers in Christ. Um, and so,

00:48:58.880 but I don't see any other way, uh, to outline a position like the roles between men and women,

00:49:05.680 uh, without getting into the practical piece. Well, any, any final thoughts on that? And then

00:49:11.540 we'll go ahead and wrap up the episode. Yeah. I would say in many of the areas that I highlighted

00:49:19.600 about how we need to be creating applications and tools to help people live in the world,

00:49:25.600 that it's not all up to the pastor of the church to come up with that.

00:49:30.660 Pastors of churches have become a little reticent to give life applications

00:49:35.480 as a result of some things like purity culture.

00:49:39.300 You know, I Kissed Dating Goodbye really wasn't a biblical application.

00:49:43.980 and so i think certainly it's within the role of the pastor to give applications of scriptures

00:49:53.480 in people's lives and help them do that and make it tangible and practical but today evangelicals

00:50:00.220 essentially assume the pastor's got to have the answer for everything the pastor isn't going to

00:50:04.480 have the answer to everything we need people who are lay experts in various things who can step up

00:50:11.320 and show the way on certain things like, oh, how do you find a spouse today in this world?

00:50:19.080 Maybe the pastor's going to know something about that.

00:50:22.120 Maybe there are going to be a lot of other people in the pews that are going to know

00:50:24.520 things about that too and could share the wisdom that they've learned.

00:50:28.200 So the application one is one that goes beyond just the pastor.

00:50:34.560 It's unfair to put that much pressure on a pastor to come up with all of the answers

00:50:40.520 for how to live now it has to be a more full spectrum uh approach agreed um okay final

00:50:47.600 question so how do you feel about the puritans i don't know that much about the puritans

00:50:56.480 uh to to be honest i'm and i'm not a puritan scholar uh so i'm afraid i really can't say

00:51:04.080 too much about that okay fair enough all right um anything if you could ask another question

00:51:08.660 And if that wasn't sufficient, you could take a mulligan on that.

00:51:11.900 Well, then I'll ask you this question.

00:51:13.320 It'll be serving for you.

00:51:15.420 How can anything else that you want our listeners?

00:51:17.860 We already talked about your website.

00:51:19.080 We can plug it one more time here at the end.

00:51:20.600 But anything else that you would like our listeners to know about that you're working on?

00:51:25.880 Yes, I do have a book coming out in January called Life in the Negative World.

00:51:31.240 You can preorder it on Amazon and looking forward to that.

00:51:34.780 And it does come up with a few ideas.

00:51:38.660 for how we ought to be responding.

00:51:40.000 So coming up with application is not just something I'm saying you need to do,

00:51:43.320 but I'm trying to take some of that too.

00:51:44.820 So you could go pre-order that on Amazon.

00:51:47.000 And then don't forget to sign up for my website at AaronWren.com.

00:51:50.600 Cool. Great. Well, I'll be looking forward to your book.

00:51:52.960 And once it comes out, we'd be honored to have you back on the show.

00:51:56.680 Great.

00:51:57.400 All right. Thanks, Aaron. Appreciate it.

The NXR Podcast - August 22, 2023

THEOLOGY APPLIED - Timothy Keller’s Deathbed Strategy For Evangelicals

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