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Rich
It.
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Megan Allman
Hey, everybody, this is Megan Allman. Stand your reason. Wow. Probably not the voice that you're normally expecting to hear on the radio show. My first time behind the microphone on this end. Anyway. I've been interviewed before, but today I am in the seat, so to speak. So thrilled to be with you all. We are just coming off of a wonderful weekend in Seattle. Of course, we've been doing the Reality Apologetics conference that was stop number two in Seattle. And the Pacific Northwest did not disappoint at all. Gosh, it was beautiful. Seattle is beautiful in October. But more than that, the people who came, the team, the job that we did, the church that hosted us, it was a fantastic event. So super grateful to be a part of that. Of course, many of you know if you're following along with these stops, that Minneapolis is next, Reality Minnesota. You can still get tickets for that particular stop through this Friday. That's October 24th at a $10 discount from the full price. So if you are in the vicinity of Minnesota, well, Minnesota, but Minneapolis, go ahead and buy that ticket and we would love to see you there. We are talking about the story of Reality this year, all about Worldviews with some incredible speakers. I'm just privileged to be a part of it. Get to do a couple of breakout sessions, one with my husband, Tripping. You guys have probably heard his voice on the radio show as well. Trip is the Stand to Reason outpost coordinator, and we are actually doing one breakout session at Reality this year on a Christian worldview response to dating. And most of that session is like an open forum format, so we get all kinds of questions from the students who come on how do we look at dating through a Christian worldview lens? Anyway, it's a great time. Come join us in Minneapolis if you can. Well, this is surreal for me, I have to say. It's been. Gosh, the first time I listened to the Stand to Reason radio broadcast was 20 years ago. And so to be sitting where I'm sitting today is surreal. That's the best word I have for it. This felt like an ordinary day. Definitely got up this morning, did some pre algebra with my eighth grader, made some soup because I'm hosting a community group at my house later this evening. And now here I sit doing this surreal thing. But in the conversations leading up to today, what I wanted to talk to you guys about was beauty. In fact, that's what Amy and I discussed that I would talk about that because it is an interest of mine. I think the Stand to Reason Facebook page and the social media stuff that went out said that it was a specialty of mine. Inasmuch as I'm a student of it. It's that, gosh, I just love studying about beauty. I also love beholding beauty, and those are different things, I think. But the study of beauty only deepens the love I have for beholding the beauty that we have in the world around us. The thing that drew me into Christian apologetics and more than anything else, was the discovery that the truth was very beautiful. Of course it is very good. Of course it is true, but it is beautiful. Of course. I first kind of had that insight listening to Scott Klusendorf talk about human value and what it means to be human all those years ago. And here I sit. So I want to talk a few minutes about beauty, and then we will take some callers. We have a few waiting patiently in the queue already. When it comes to beauty, one of the things I love most about it, though we can talk about it in objective terms. We can. We can do that. In fact, I'll talk in just a minute about why I think that it is objective. But one of the things I love most about beauty is the room that it allows, the room that it requires for mystery. Peter Kreeft, who's a wonderful Catholic thinker, he said that beauty is not a problem that can be solved, but. But a mystery that can only be participated in. And I think the French philosopher Gabrielle Marcel talked about questions like beauty. There are other questions like this that philosophers can give their whole lives over to and never reach the end of the question. Beauty is one of those questions. And I believe it was Marcel who said that the reason for that is that the question is wrapped up in us. We are, of course, subjects. We are people. We are image bearers of the great subject. Three persons, one essence, that is God. But as subjects, as individuals, we cannot fully objectify ourselves because we're the ones doing the objectifying. Like you can't put yourself under a microscope and fully understand yourself. Um, and because that beauty question is wrapped up in, I think, our humanity, in some ways we remain somewhat mysterious to ourselves. And so there is mystery that's involved. Now, mystery is not the same thing as a contradiction. I find that helpful. Mystery just means that we don't have all the information yet. So as Christians, when we can study an infinite God, from whom beauty comes, if beauty is truly objective, that means that we will study of him, that we will behold his beauty forever. Forever. That's worth repeating. And we will never exhaust the depths of it. I think mystery in that sense is where there's room for, of course, astonishment, wonder, and in this case, worship. It's where some of that comes in. So beauty, how do we know that it's not just in the eye of the beholder? I get that question a lot. That's actually saying that's really popular these days, that beauty is purely subjective, up to us to define for ourselves. And while I do think there's plenty of room for talking about taste and preference when we talk about beauty, I don't think that beauty itself can be purely subjective. After all, if something is just subjective, it's not really real. Beauty, however, is something that C.S. lewis talked about in a book that wasn't about beauty. It was about values, and that was the abolition of man. And so the easiest place I know to go to, to begin talking about beauty as an objective part of reality, something that is woven into the fabric of the world around us, is to this little conversation that Lewis has toward the beginning of that great little book. And in that book, Lewis is, as a professor, he's been asked to look at a high school grammar textbook. This textbook is. Is a lot of times, I guess, as teachers, many teachers who are listening, or if you have a teacher as a relative, my mom was a teacher. Often they are asked to review corre curriculums before those curriculums are sent into wide publication to see is this a solid curriculum for this age group, for this age level, for your teaching objectives. And so that's what Lewis was doing. And as he looked at this grammar textbook, the authors of the textbook were recounting a conversation that the poet Coleridge had had at a waterfall. Coleridge was listening to two tourists talk about the waterfall. One of the tourists called the waterfall pretty, and the other one called it sublime, which in its definition is very similar to beauty. So I'm going to substitute that word beautiful there. Coleridge endorsed the second tourist description of the waterfall and said that the first man got it wrong. Now go back to the textbook. The authors of the textbook in their grammar lesson, said that neither man was actually talking about the waterfall. Each was simply describing his own feelings. In other words, beauty is something that I, the subject, create according to my personal preferences. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. And this is where Lewis took issue. He said they were no longer teaching grammar. They were teaching a worldview. They were teaching an idea, and a dangerous one at that. Lewis went on to say, and I'm paraphrasing, that there was no way that the Men could be talking about their feelings. The only way they could be talking about their feelings with regard to the waterfall is to say, I have humble feelings. In other words, when that second tourist looked at the waterfall and called it beautiful, it's because the waterfall made him feel the direct opposite. It made him feel small. The beauty was a real attribute of the waterfall. And though. So he was right to describe it that way. And we think about what beauty is, there have been definitions written about it. Um, Gosh, I remember years ago hearing Greg talk about evil by saying, evil is something, but it's not something. Thing, right? It's. It's something. It's real, but it's not some physical thing. I always pictured the pink goo that in the second Ghostbusters movie. Like, if you're covered in this evil goo, then you turn evil, right? It's not like that. It's something. I think beauty could be talked about similarly. But the problem is that we speak so often in metaphor is we end up talking about things when we talk about beauty. So you ask someone, what is beauty? And they start naming things. Beauty is a flower, Beauty is a sunset, Beauty is a mountain. You know, well, okay, but which one is it? Because those are all their own separate things. Better to describe beauty as an aspect of reality. So, like, truth and goodness are aspects of reality. And by the way, Christians aren't the only ones who would think about beauty as being something that is objective. The Greek thinkers understood this. Plato in particular wrote about beauty. He would not ground it in God, of course, but he did understand that for beauty to be real, for us to be able to talk about it objectively, to recognize it because it is real, it must come from somewhere beyond us. So he understood that beauty was objective and it had a transcendent source. Now, many have, you know, attempted to describe or define beauty throughout the years. That mystery part gets us a little bit stuck on it. But that's okay. We'll talk more about that in a second. And I think there have been some who've given very helpful definitions. So as a student of it, I appreciate Thomas Aquinas's definition of beauty as that which, when being seen, pleases. I think what he was getting at there is because beauty is sensed by us, it's a. It's something that you recognize when you encounter it. You don't always have to see it, of course. You could hear music, you could taste flavor, you know, things like that. But he understood, like, this is. You know it when you see it. You know it when you encounter it. He did give some attributes of beauty that. So beautiful things share these things. One of those he talked about was a kind of a unity of form. So it's true that beautiful things have a particular. Like their form. They are that what they are. There's a pattern to it, a simplicity to it. It is that thing and not something else. So beautiful things aren't really missing anything and they don't have anything extra about them. They are simple in more the sense that of their wholeness, their completeness. Aquinas said that beautiful things have a sense of proportion and harmony. So proportion easy to think about. Like you could think about that in terms of size, right? You walk into a cathedral and there's something at the front of the cathedral that draws your eye to it. And it's typically bigger than the things around it. Something like a cross or a statue or a painting of some sort, maybe a stained glass window. Harmony. The deaf, by definition, means that every part brings out the best in all of the other parts. So harmony is something we most often think about in music. Some philosophers call music the highest form of beauty, because when you are hearing great music, you can actually hear the harmonies that are not being played, which I find fascinating. Um, but proportion and harmony. And finally, Aquinas said that beautiful things have about them what he called a radiance or a luminosity, something like a divine spark. I've heard it described that way. Um, that's the thing I think you recognize when you encounter divine spark. The thing that grabs your attention, captivates you, such that you just can't look away. It is captivating. A simple illustration might be something like the first time you looked into a campfire and remember just beholding it, and it was mesmerizing to you. So we have some working definitions of the things that beautiful things share. Jonathan Edwards gave other descriptions and another definition of beauty that's really good. I think others have talked about it at some length. But these definitions of beauty don't cover the peculiar things about beauty. There are psychological effects that beauty has on us that can't be fully encompassed by the definition. Just some working examples. I think that beauty is. I mean, it's no secret that it's very potent. Gosh. I've heard one philosopher describe it as more enticing even than truth and goodness. And he said that's why we have temptation. That made some sense to me in. In experientially, in terms of, like watching a movie or listening to music or ideas that creep past because they're packaged in something quite beautiful and they kind of grab hold of you without you realizing what's happened. They sneak past your defenses. Beauty has a way of disarming us and doing that. Beauty makes us do things that make no practical sense whatsoever. Um, for example, I live in the mountains of Colorado where I'm so grateful. I think it was Anne of Green Gables that said, I'm so grateful that I live in a world where there are Octobers. Right. I, I don't know if I'm getting that quote exactly right, but October is stunning here. However, people tend to build their houses on the edges of cliffs. This makes no practical sense to me whatsoever. I would never sleep at night. Why do they do it? Because it's beautiful. My aunt lives on one of the barrier islands off the coast of Charleston. Folly Beach. Beautiful place to visit. It's a five mile stretch of island and all the way down at one end of the island, there's an area called the Washout. It's got great surfing if you're an east coast person. Usually, I think the state championships in South Carolina are held there because of the way the sandbar is under the water, the way it breaks. I know there's a lot of west coast people listening too, but at any rate, if you visit the east coast, you can go surf at Folly Beach. The Washout is called the Washout because when a major storm comes through, all of those multimillion dollar homes are washed out and then they just build them back. No practical sense whatsoever. Why would they do that? Because it's beautiful. Beauty has a way of taking us out of ourselves, giving us kind of almost an out of body experience. Now that sounds crazy, but I know listeners, you guys have experienced this. Anytime you are reading a good book, maybe watching a good film, you're engrossed in it and somebody comes into the room and interrupts you. I don't care how sanctified you are, you're going to be frustrated with them. Like, what do you want? Imagine they come in and they say, hey, what are you doing? You know, if I'm reading the Fellowship of the Ring, my answer before I think about it is probably going to be something like, I was taking the ring to Mordor. Like, what, what are you doing? I wasn't in my chair in the room. I was in the story. Beauty takes us out of ourselves in that way. And I think that there's even more to it in studying beauty. This, this, this was surprising to me. It made sense once I'd Learned it and wrapped my head around it. But we know that beauty brings us pleasure. That's, that's common knowledge. Beauty can be quite healing to places that are broken, to people that are experiencing suffering. But beauty doesn't just bring pleasure. It also can bring pain, discomfort, fear, sometimes even sheer terror. Especially if you're confronted with stark beauty. That is, that is a very high beauty. Yeah. Peter Kreeft, I think, said one time, the best compliment you can give to an artist is you broke my heart. There's something about beauty that stirs those things in us. Lewis understood this when he wrote the Weight of Glory. He talked about beauty as being a kind of longing, that it awakens that within us, a kind of homesickness. And in the Weight of Glory, he gives that beautiful passage where he talks about the rising sun. Of course he's kind of using his words in a double sense, a double entendre, you know, there. But he, he's talking about the sun that comes up and to behold that that would be bounty enough. I'm paraphrasing. But then he says there's something more that we want, that the books on aesthetics, that's the branch of philosophy that talks about beauty, the books on aesthetics don't give us, but the poets and the myths, they know all about it. Remember, Lewis was a medieval scholar, so he studied that time in history when people, I think more expected to encounter the supernatural in their day to day lives. That's been stripped from us quite a bit in our world, which is why we talk a lot about disenchantment. Lewis talked about that, Tolkien talked about. Others have talked about that. My friend Paul Gould talks about that in his book Cultural Apologetics. But Lewis said these guys got it. And then he goes on to say we want more than just to look at it. We want to bathe in it. We want to enter into it. And it's like we can't quite get in. He says, what would it be to taste at the Fountainhead? That which these lower streams prove so intoxicating. Something like that. But this idea that there is something more out there, wherever you find yourself listening, thinking, watching, whatever it is, try and think about the most beautiful place you've ever seen. This is a challenge I've given to the students I've worked with before and others. Just an exercise while we're camping out on this lovely idea of beauty, this beautiful idea of beauty. It doesn't have to be a grand place. It could be somewhere small, maybe the corner of a room or a part of a garden somewhere beautiful. God created this physical world for us to enjoy. I mean, it's astounding. Jaron Bars, in his book Echo of Echoes of Eden, talks about the different ways in which God was at play in his creation of the physical world. God, the supreme artist, right? In Genesis 1, the earth was without form and void. God gave the world the two necessary components for any work of art. Form, form and content. Stuff. Um, and Jaron Bars talks about the fact that God made this world so perfect when he made it, calling it good, that Hebrew word tove, the sense of this completion, this ultimate good that he ascribed to it. Um, artists often try to capture, you know, paintings and sculpture and different mediums, likenesses of what God made. And artists are usually their own worst critics. But I think many would agree when they say it's hard to come close to that because God made it so wonderfully, so perfect. You think about the diversity of the world that God made of the physical world. Like I said, October is a beautiful time to be alive. Just walk outside and look at all of the different patterns of leaves, just leaves, the colors, the shapes, all of that. Just the diversity is mind blowing. And that's just one example. He also just the sheer profusion of what God made. Jerome Bars talks about that it wasn't enough. I'll borrow from GK Chesterton here. For God to make one daisy, right? He wanted to make fields of daisies. He was like a little child saying, do it again, do it again. Anybody who has toddlers in their lives knows what this is like. Do it again. You play the game, you do something fun, and that's the first thing they ask. And they will do it again you until you are exhausted, about to fall over. But Chesterton suggests that perhaps God is like them in that maybe we in our sin have grown old if we're not delighting, if we're not seeing the wonder of all of this place. So this physical world that God made, I mean, just look outside and you know that he cares about beauty. Many of you thought of your place a moment ago, don't know what it was. I have a few places that come to mind. For me, one of them is just sitting on my porch and looking out over a lake with mountains in the backdrop. We are incredibly blessed to get to live where we live. I've often had that experience looking at the ocean. There are friends, homes that when I enter them, it is like an aesthetic experience. They're just their attention to detail combined with the warmth of their presence, different Things, the relationship which has a balance of proportion, a harmony of its own, is quite beautiful. But whatever the place was that you had in mind. I had a professor, Dr. John Mark Reynolds, who I was at Biola University years ago for my Master of Arts degree in Christian apologetics. And I remember him asking, what if Adam and Eve came and stood and looked over your shoulder at this place? What might they say? And his very provocative suggestion was that they might go, man, what happened here? This place is a real dump. And I was taken aback by that the first time he asked it. But the more I sat in it and thought about it, the more I realized that these places that take our breath away are in a world that is broken. Which tells me that when it comes to thinking about beauty and wonder and mystery and delight, there is more. There is more. It will only get better with heavenly realities as God makes all things new and just. That is a wonderful thought. Yeah, I'll just. I'll wrap up this just section of talking about beauty today with just the. The notion that I've been reminded of quite a bit lately, that to enjoy beauty requirements requires. Because beauty does make demands of us. Many of those demands are that we need to train our appetites, our taste, in certain ways. But beauty makes demands on us in terms of our time as well. Um, it demands a kind of inefficiency in our lives that is hard to attain in our very busy, very noisy world. Um, I was reminded of this just yesterday. My son and I were sitting on the porch. We were looking out at the lake, and we just had a good time. We were watching a heron, a blue heron, and then some ducks. I actually have cormorants on this lake that come and visit. They're my favorite to watch because they do the most unexpected things. They look like a duck, and then they dive like a seal and they swim underwater. So it's a swimming bird. I know penguins swim, but this was a new experience for me. And we were watching this heron for a time and just delighting in it. Of course, my son was doing, like, the narration kind of imagine like Steve Irwin, the Crocodile Hunter. So I was cracking up the whole time. But the wonder of the moment was wonderful. It was a beautiful moment, a beautiful thing that we were gazing upon that God made in his playfulness, in his design. Didn't have to be that way. Why do herons look the way they look? I don't know, but that's the way he made them for us to delight in, to ask these very questions. And it was the time that we had yesterday after a very busy weekend to kind of be still for a time. So inefficiency is something that is required. And of course, we live in a world that demands a lot of efficiency and productivity. Those are the two highest virtues. Dr. Kelly Cap exactly says that our culture holds right now. Productivity and efficiency. Um, and those are exhausting things. So I hope this has given you guys some wonderful things to think about in terms of the way that we do Christian apologetics. Um, a lot of this intersects with that just because I think that part of our job is to stand back and point to the reality that is the beauty of both Christianity. But of course, Christ. There's a wonderful painting by this. I think it's the 16th century German painter, maybe 17th century Matthias Gruenwald on an altar piece that he painted. The one in the center is of the crucifixion. And there's a John the Baptist stands at the bottom right of that particular image with an unusually large index finger that is pointing straight at Jesus and hanging on the cross. And of course, a painter only paints a grotesquely large index finger if he wants you to look at it and ask these very questions. Why is his finger like that? Because he wants you to notice John pointing to Jesus. In a way, that was what John's whole life was about. And in a way, I think that's what our lives should be about. Our conversations, our work, the things that we do with our own creative capacities. I don't know that everyone is an artist. I think art is a particular kind of vocation. But with our. With our capacities that we are able to cultivate beauty in the world around us through our small faithful acts, the things that we produce, the meals perhaps that we make and share, like sweet potato, chicken, southwest soup that I've made for tonight. But even in our conversations, when it comes to the questions that we're trying to answer or the people that we're encountering, that we would be able to stand next to each other and behold this objective reality together. Blaise Pascal was. I don't. He didn't say these words, but they are kind of a summation of his Penses, which is a collection of his shorter writings. A lot of thoughts that he had. I've not read them all, but I. I intend to. I think they're wonderful. And really, I think what he was about suggesting was that when we do this enterprise that we know is Christian apologetics or Christian case making, that we try and make good men wish that it were true. I don't know that we have to work to make it attractive more, I think more that we get to try and remove the stumbling blocks the world has put in the way so that we can all behold the beauty of it. Um, but to make good men wish that it were true and then to demonstrate that it is. And that of course comes with, well, being an ambassador for Christ in the way that Stand to Reason has talked about it all these years. To have the knowledge, the wisdom, that artful method, the character of your life. Aquinas talked about a life of virtue, being beautiful, that those things would help us to make our case clearly and beautifully. So we are going to go to a break in just a moment here and after the break I do have some callers who are kind of waiting in the queue. We'll get on on the on the air with them and we'll go from there. Talk to you guys in just a moment.
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Stand to Reason Announcer
Would you like a Stand a Reason speaker at your event? Greg Allen, Tim John, Megan and I. Tripp are available in person or online just email bookingstr.org our team speaks on a wide range of topics from issues in bioethics, gender and science to topics in apologetics, theology and philosophy, and how to respond to other worldviews, all from a biblical perspective. Whether it's a conference, youth event or Sunday service, we're here to give confidence for every Christian, clear thinking for every challenge, courage and grace for every encounter.
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Amy Hall
Friends, if you like this broadcast, I know you'll love Strask. It's our shorter 20 minute podcast where I am paired with the wonderful Amy hall, and together we answer the questions you send us on Twitter. Strask is released twice a week, Mondays and Thursdays, and it's only about 20 minutes long, so it's perfect to listen to on your morning jog or while driving around running errands or cleaning your garage, or just playing loafing at home. Amy and I tackle your questions on theology and ethics and culture and lots more, offering our insight on the questions you're asking or the challenges you face. You can listen on Apple Podcasts or wherever you download your own shows. Just remember, send us your questions on Twitter using the name of the podcast. Strask. That's Strask.
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Alan Schliemann
Bible critics like Bart Ehrman, Alex o', Connor, and even some Muslims claim that gospel authors embellished Jesus divinity over time. Well, is that true? Find out as I unpack the biblical evidence in the latest episode of my podcast, Thinking Out Loud with Alan Schliemann. Look for it on itunes, Spotify, your favorite podcast app, or at the top of the homepage@str.org Sam.
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Megan Allman
All right, you guys, welcome back. Yeah, let's. We're going to jump on the air in just a second. I do want to just announce that there's a new stru course out called Unbreakable, a Clear case for biblical inerrancy taught by the great John Noyce. You guys can see that@training.str.org looking at what the Bible claims about itself and how Jesus viewed it, how we got the Bible, why it can be trusted in every detail and goodness, you'll learn all these vital distinctions of terms that you often hear. Inspiration, inerrancy, infallibility, and so forth. So you guys can check that out. All right, we do have a caller on the line. Let's go to Gretchen, who's in Anaheim.
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Gretchen
Hi, Megan. Hey. I'm so excited you're hosting the show today.
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Megan Allman
Thanks.
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Gretchen
Very cool. Okay, so I have a question that's been rolling around in my mind lately. We raised all of our kids going to reality conferences, summit and impact 360 and all that. And, you know, just been equipped by Greg for so many years. And so as parents, we've been able to answer the hard questions from home. And then we wanted to just equip them in the public school to be able to do that. And so we felt great about that. That's gone fine for us. But when dealing with, like, the local church environment, my question is, do you think that it could be potentially dangerous to bring up the hard questions within the context of, like, serving in church, like, as a leader or whatnot, when it appears that the students aren't asking them openly at church. Right. For the possibility that it could cause some students to deconstruct, like, upset the apple cart, so to speak.
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Megan Allman
Right.
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Gretchen
Bringing those things up. Like, I know that if they ask the questions, hopefully they'll get good answers on our local churches. But by bringing it to them, if they're not asking.
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Megan Allman
Yeah, that's a great question, Gretchen. And I understand kind of where you're going with that. I don't know that every home is like yours, right, where you're discussing those things at home. I think the way that I'm going to come at that is to say that my hope is that the church would be a safe place for those questions to be brought to them. If the questions are going to be brought to them by the world, by the media, by. I mean, and probably they are. They are being brought to them. In fact, we know they are. It seems to me that the church is becoming an equipping ground for these young people and for those who may have the question but are scared to ask it out loud. I think it would be helpful to lead them through the question and solid answers, even let them struggle with the question. If you have that kind of setting in the church to go ahead and build an environment where that's possible. I mean, I'm countering this in my mind as a mother. I'm thinking about what I would do with my kids at home. Now. Our kids were raised in an environment where we were around college students. My husband ran a gap year school for seven years. And so a little bit unconventional in terms of they were hearing a lot, maybe earlier than we would have wanted them to. So the questions were being brought into my house by the students that we were working with. So my, my kids were grappling them with, with them in their ways differently. And as a parent, I would say it's a good thing to let the kids ask the question that they have. Or maybe you can prompt the question. Hey, have you any thoughts about this? And then see what they're willing to give you that will give you a good idea of the depth to take it. Now, I'm sure that you already have thought this way just with your kids because you don't just dump it all on them at one time. I do think, however, that when you're in the church environment, there is a sense in which you can bring the what's happening out there to them. So at summit, Dr. Jeff Myers, the president of Summit, would often say that students don't come with us or to us with unanswered questions as much as they come with unquestioned answers. So they think that they know the answer, whether they've absorbed that from the world or absorbed that from somewhere else. But it's the tools to think about it well that you really want to give them. So maybe the way to go about it is to be the person who's leading that youth group or that group of students in the church in that safe environment, who bridges those things in some way that you bring the question to them and let them discuss, see where they are with it, and then you can kind of go from there. But I do find that using things like tactics. So your good questions that you're asking them to lead them through the thinking about the question is maybe more powerful than just lecturing at them all the time, though they certainly need the information so some balance thereof. What do you think about that, Gretchen?
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Gretchen
I think that sounds great. And I think some churches are more equipped. Their leaders, like even their student leaders, the training that they may have is better or even the pastors, whatnot. My. Some more equipped to be able to handle this stuff. Yeah, yeah. I guess the follow up question would be how do you, how do you, how do you have any tactful ways to help your church get a little bit more on board with that philosophy?
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Megan Allman
Some of, I think some of that would be just demonstrating where the students are and what they're asking or not asking. Um, maybe it just takes that person who's willing to get in there with them and isn't afraid. And to your point earlier, you're right. Some churches may be more equipped than others with the people they have in that leadership role. Um, I mean, it's a great time for a plug of, you know, the outposts. Right. Because those scru videos are so very helpful to walk through with study guides for everyone. Um, so that would be a resource. That would be a handy one. Um, goodness. At the same time, I think that seeing how those challenges come to. I think seeing a leader who isn't afraid of the questions, even if they don't know the answer, benefits those students to go, oh, okay. They might not know all the information, but they weren't rattled or afraid when I asked the question. Which means it's okay to ask my questions even if they're hard questions, because I've been shown that asking the question or having a doubt, if I'm willing to do it out loud, it doesn't. It's not a sin. It's a good thing that can lead me deeper into my faith rather than the deconstruction as it's being used these days. Right.
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Gretchen
That makes a lot of sense. Yeah. And I can see how having an outpost in a church would be a great way, kind of systemically to encourage these conversations to happen within the ministries of the church. So I hadn't thought about that. That's, that's great. Thank you.
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Megan Allman
Thank you, Gretchen. Yeah, thanks for calling.
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Gretchen
Okay, you take care.
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Megan Allman
All right, bye bye now.
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Rich
Bye bye.
- [40:52]
Megan Allman
Okay, we have other caller in the queue. I see Rich from Texas calling in.
- [41:02]
Rich
Good evening, Megan.
- [41:03]
Megan Allman
Hey.
- [41:05]
Rich
I'm in the car driving, so I want to make sure. Can you understand me?
- [41:09]
Megan Allman
I can understand you loud and clear.
- [41:11]
Rich
Okay, good. My question comes out of a Bible class that I'm teaching. I'm teaching high school students the Old Testament.
- [41:20]
Megan Allman
Yeah.
- [41:20]
Rich
And a student, as we were going through. Exodus asked me about, you know, one of the various times that Moses steps in and intervenes when God says he's going to destroy the Israelites. The question he had was, if Moses in those instances did not intervene, would God have followed through on his warning or on his threat to destroy the Israelites? My gut tells me that, you know, maybe in God's foreknowledge, that if he knew that Moses would not have intervened, he wouldn't have made the warning in the first place. But I don't know. I kind of feel like a cop out to me. So I figured I'd reach out to someone and see what, you know, see what you had to say about it.
- [42:03]
Megan Allman
Yeah, I don't. I don't think it's a cop out. I think that was a good way to approach this question. I don't know that Moses has the power to thwart God's sovereign plan or to, you know, change it in that way. I think that God worked through Moses as he works through us. So this is, of course, getting into larger questions here about that that I. I'm not going to solve in one conversation, but about, you know, about prayer, about. About what God experiences as things happen, that God's foreknowledge of the thing like you talked about may be different than the way that he experiences something in the moment. That conversation that happened in with Moses in real time. I think that what we understand when we approach those passages is, is we have to begin evening questions about Old Testament stuff. And by the way, the student asked a great question. Right? Love what you're doing. Thank you for teaching. Anytime. We approach this, the first place to start is who God is. So we have all of those attributes in place. His. His sovereignty, as you pointed out, his plan, his. His moral will, his sovereign will, all these things. And I think that we have to understand his justice, his perfect justice. That would be a way to kind of come back to this with the student. Would God be justified in destroying the Israelites? Well, God would have been justified in doing away with every last one of us apart from the work of Christ. And he would still be good because, you know, we think about justice by itself. Justice will take place at the end of time when it comes to hard questions about the Old Testament. My good friend Alicia Wood, I've heard her say this, and it's so helpful when students ask questions like this. Understand that no matter what hard thing comes up, justice will be served, someone will pay, and it will either be the perpetrator or it will be God himself. It will be Christ. So, but, you know, measuring or balancing justice, here we also have God's attribute or his attribute. Yeah, his attribute of mercy, that God is merciful. And that's what's revealed in this encounter with Moses is that God extended mercy. So, yeah, I don't God was going to do the things he was going to do. I think the plan was laid out and I don't think it's a cop out to say it that way, but better to look at the passage and understand maybe these things that we can glean from it. This was an occasion for God to display mercy instead of perfect justice in that moment. And good thing they didn't get what they deserved, nor us. So we bring it to the larger conversation about justice and mercy and the gospel.
- [45:01]
Rich
Okay.
- [45:02]
Megan Allman
Yeah.
- [45:03]
Rich
So can I play this? Play this back to you just to make sure I'm on the right track here.
- [45:08]
Megan Allman
Sure.
- [45:11]
Rich
So in this situation, God knew that Moses would do what he ended up doing, namely intervene. And knowing that, he used this as an opportunity to not demonstrate his justice, but to use Moses to demonstrate his mercy. So he made the warning knowing that Moses would intervene. Moses intervened and God used that to demons, like I said, demonstrate his glory in his mercy. And if Moses, if he knew Moses wouldn't have done that, then the plan would have been something different.
- [45:48]
Megan Allman
I don't know that the plan would have been something different. Say that again.
- [45:56]
Rich
He wouldn't. He wouldn't have made the warning or the threat like he did because he would know that it wouldn't work out the same way.
- [46:03]
Megan Allman
Yeah, well, perhaps, but in this. In this. Yeah, I think that that's a good recounting of what we just talked about. But yeah, God is working here through relationship with Moses as he works through relationship with us. And I think it demonstrates all of the things you just recounted so well.
- [46:20]
Rich
Okay, all right, thank you. I appreciate it.
- [46:22]
Megan Allman
Thank you, Rich, for calling. Okay. All right, great questions, great stuff here. And we don't have any other callers in the queue at the moment, so if you do have a question, make sure that you call in. We've got a few minutes left of my time here. I think I can jump back into some of the things we were talking about before. When I left off, I was talking about this kind of need for slowing down a little bit more to appreciate beauty. Interestingly, love, which is God's highest virtue, greatest commandment, is to love God and to love others. Love does also require an inefficiency. Real Love, Biblical love. Is man arguably the most inefficient thing you can do because it requires so much more than our feelings. It requires our act of the will, our choice to act, to speak, to do for the true good of the other person involved or the other people involved. Um, so that inefficiency and beauty that we would slow down a bit, try to look around, try to appreciate this world around us. Practically speaking, I got to the point we were talking in apologetics about showing off the beauty of the Christian worldview, pointing to it like John the Baptist would point at the crucified Christ, who in a way that God does, turned something that was extremely awful, that, you know, the crucifixion, which that Roman execution style meant to humiliate him. Him, meant to erase him from the pages of history forever. Of course, it didn't do that successfully. Jesus transformed it into the thing that gives us life, that gives us not perfect justice, but mercy through his grace. And in doing so, you know, Jesus declared war on evil. When we read the Gospel accounts and really just the story of reality, we see God's plan working in such a way to overcome our greatest enemy, our behalf. An act of love, an act of mercy, an act of unmerited grace. An incredible romantic in the sense that Chesterton uses it. Surprising story. And oftentimes we see that the disciples didn't fully understand what Jesus was doing. They thought he was going to conquer Rome and be that military messiah who would put them back on top so they would not feel so oppressed anymore. And what we see after the resurrection is that they began preaching a type of messiah that was very different than the one they expected. This messiah apparently thought Rome was small dice and went on and conquered our greatest enemies, sin and death. Jesus did a beautiful thing and did it as a declaration of war on evil. Um, now I'm not Jesus, none of us are, but he does live within us. His spirit lives within us. And I think that there is something really powerful here that we can get down to practically when it comes to talking about beauty. Um, and I do think that our ability to cultivate beauty in the world around us is an incredible thing that we're given that comes with our status as image bearers. I said before, we're not all artists. That is, I think, a particular vocation for people to create things that, that elicit, that are beautiful in the world. The conversation about art is a much lengthier and nuanced one than what we're talking about here. But we are all creative we have the ability to create in a lesser sense than God. Not ex nihilo, but using the things that God gave us, the medium of the. The world around us. And so we have physical means by which we can create, whether that's preparing a meal or, or producing a piece of art. It might be building something, it might be designing something. In that sense, creativity can also be in the realm of ideas. When we come up with thoughts or new ways of saying things, the writing of poetry or the writing of a well worded book that helps people to understand these ideas in a new way or differently. Dorothy Sayers was a master of that in her essays and many other writers like her that I so enjoy reading. And I benefit from the work they've done. But I think what I would love for you guys to understand is that your ability to create, to cultivate beauty in the world around you through acts of everyday faithfulness, through this kind of inefficiency, doesn't necessarily require a huge platform. I don't think that our production or cultivation of beauty has to be as big as the problem. After all, Jesus has already overcome our biggest problems. But I do think that our acts of everyday faithfulness do more and mean more than we commonly think that they do in our disenchanted world, in our maybe even disillusioned world. Many are disillusioned these days with the world around them. There is a loss of understanding that there is beauty to be beheld, wonder to be beheld in the ordinary, in what we would term the everyday or the mundane. It's just right there in front of us. It requires that inefficiency to look and see, to behold both the order and the surprise that awaits there, the unexpected things. But anytime we're willing to do those things as image bearers whose value has already been determined by our Maker, I think the results are. Have eternal echoes. I think that we are capable and able to, in a lesser sense perhaps, but still just a significant sense, to declare war on evil, on the dark in our day to day lives. I think that happens anytime we do something with intention that we didn't have to do to cultivate this idea of beauty in the world or the reality of beauty in the world. In my family, this works out in different ways. I am an artist, so more traditionally I'll write poetry, I'll write my thoughts out. When I craft a presentation, I think I view that very much as what I hope to be a work of art doesn't always hit the mark, but I want it to be beautifully done, if it can be. My background is in painting and storytelling, and so I don't have as much time to do those things these days in this season of life. But those are ways that I would work to cultivate beauty in the world. My son is an athlete. His movement is graceful. It's wonderful to watch him do any of the various feats that he does. And he has excellent body awareness. He's an acrobat. So he can flip and twist and jump on his bicycle and do all of these things in a way that is both ordered and surprising. I think it's beautiful the way that he moves with such grace. My daughter is very talented at bringing order to what is chaotic. She wants to start a business where she provides. Where she provides an organization business for people's closets or for spaces. And that brings her life and joy. That's not the only thing she's good at in terms of cultivating beauty in the world, but it's something she can do well. My husband, for those of you who've heard him before, is a writer of dirt bikes and a. A driver of fast cars and those types of things. His way, many times of bringing order into the world is to fix what was broken. He loves to tinker with his dirt bike on a Saturday morning. That is restful to him and. And that too cultivates beauty in the world by bringing repair to what was has been broken and order back to what was chaotic. He's also very good at doing that with thoughts. So he's the one I go to when my thoughts are a jumble and he's the one who can set those straight. I talked about a meal earlier and I think the fixing of a meal also is a cultivation of beauty in the world. Feasting, which is an art that we practice, but maybe don't remember that we practice as often because so often I think we're trying to eat in a hurry, running one from one place to the next when a meal is something to be enjoyed, something to fellowship around. So just to leave you with that thought of. C.S. lewis wrote in the lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe about the feast that the animals had in the forest. I was introduced to this notion by the writer Kelly Keller. Her name's easy to remember because first and last name so similar. Kelly Keller. She's a writer, I believe, for the Rabbit Room, which is an online collective of Christian creatives. And she wrote about the feasting as an act of war. Those animals in the forest had their feast because Father Christmas had come into the forest and given it to them and when the white Witch saw what they were doing she lost her mind. Their simple feast was a way of proclaiming to the White Witch that her Narnia her always winter and never Christmas always winter and never spring was coming to an end. Her reign was coming to an end because if Christmas was able to break through then the thaw had begun. Christians, if you are listening to this I hope that you will think of ways that you can cultivate beauty in the world around you. It could be small ways, it could be unexpected ways but every time you do that you are letting the enemy know that his reign has come to an end in this kingdom that is already here and coming. I hope you guys will take these things to heart. Just enjoy the beauty of that is October and as Greg would say and how surreal that I'm getting to say this go out there and give him heaven.
- [57:47]
Rich
Sam.