Christians are called to be ready to make a defense of the faith. But as cultures change, the questions and approaches to that task shift. Philosopher Paul Gould helps us navigate these tricky waters through insights from his book Cultural Apologetics.

Many—including many Christians—no longer perceive the world in its proper light. As a result, the Christian imagination is muted. Moreover, the church has grown anti-intellectual and sensate, out of touch with the relevancy of Jesus and how to relate the gospel to all aspects of contemporary life. As a result, the Christian voice is muted. In this age Christian wholeness remains elusive, blunting the church's ability to present a winsome and compelling witness for faith. As a result, the Christian conscience is muted.

Cultural Apologetics addresses this malaise by setting forth a fresh model for cultural engagement, rooted in the biblical account of Paul's speech on Mars Hill, which details practical steps for reestablishing the Christian voice, conscience, and imagination. Readers will be equipped to see, and help others see, the world as it is—deeply beautiful, mysterious, and sacred.

Cultural Apologetics by Paul Gould (Zondervan, 2018). | Christian Book Distributors

Transcript

Welcome to Questions That Matter, a podcast of the C.S. Lewis Institute. I am your host, Randy Newman, and my conversation partner today is Dr. Paul Gould, professor of philosophy of religion. And, Paul, it's great to have you on the podcast.

Thanks, Randy. It's great to be here with you.

What Is Cultural Apologetics?

Let me tell our listeners a little bit more about you. Paul and I have been friends for a very long time, which is really delightful, but he's also really brilliant. He has a PhD in philosophy. He is a professor at Palm Beach Atlantic University, both on the undergrad side and the graduate level side. He's actually the director of the Master of Arts of Philosophy of Religion program. Paul has had a long ministry and campus ministry and in a number of academic places. He's taught at Trinity International University's Henry Center. And so there are many things I could impress you with. But Paul is a brilliant philosopher and also has a great heart as an evangelist and wants to connect with people and has written a very, very helpful book which will be the topic of our conversation today. It's entitled Cultural Apologetics. So the question that matters today for our listeners is: What in the world is cultural apologetics?

Okay. Well, that is a fair question, Randy. Actually, let me give you the genesis of the idea for writing the book, because that'll help explain what it is. But about, I don't know, seven or eight years ago, I was teaching at a seminary in Texas, and one of the classes that I was asked to teach was actually a class called Cultural Apologetics. And so, like any educator would do, assigned to teach a class, I Goggled the phrase, “What is Cultural Apologetics?” And I basically found nothing at the time. So I don't know, six, seven, eight years ago. Found very little on answering that question, what is Cultural Apologetics? So basically, that semester, I just picked about seven books that were somewhere in the intersection of culture, the gospel, and apologetics, and I assigned them to my class. And then I taught it the next year, and I swapped out those seven books for seven more, and then I did that probably two or three more times. And I'm happy to say, by about that time, I finally understood at least what I thought cultural apologetics was.

And so let me give you the definition I’ve arrived at after teaching this. First, let me give you the question that was driving it, and then I'll give you the answer. The question that was driving my desire to teach that class was really the question: How does the gospel get a fair hearing in our culture today? And then the definition that I've come up with, after teaching and thinking and researching all these years is this: Cultural apologetics is working to establish the Christian voice, the Christian conscience, and the Christian imagination, so that Christianity will be viewed as true and satisfying. In other words, Christianity is not just true to the way the world is, that it's reasonable, but it's also true to the way the world ought to be, that it satisfies all the deep longings of the heart for love and justice and goodness and beauty, and all those things as well. So that's a little backstory, and that's kind of a working definition of cultural apologetics.

That is really helpful. And like a true philosopher, you packed a lot in there, so I want to unpack a few things. But your driving question is so very important. How does the Christian message get a fair hearing? It certainly seems to me that is such a crucial question, because I think a lot of Christians, they could articulate the gospel if you ask them, “All right, so tell me, what is it you believe?” And they could even answer some standard apologetic questions like, “Why do you believe the Bible? “Or, “How could you believe that Jesus rose from the dead?” But they don't even ever get to those conversations because people are just not interested. It's not on their radar. They would be like people thinking, “Gee, what's the atmosphere like on Venus? I just don't care. “And so how do we get a fair hearing? So tell us more. So what are some starting points? If our listeners are committed Christians, they've read a lot, they’ve read a lot of C.S. Lewis, they've read a lot of apologetics, but they're thinking, “Yeah, this is exactly my struggle. I don't know how to get this to have a fair hearing.”

Yeah. Well, I think, in terms of starting points, we've got to understand the culture, number one, but even before that, I think it's just important for us to do some sort of in-house critical reflection. And here's the reality, and this is kind of where I begin in the book as well, is that Christianity, we suffer from an image problem today in culture. That's actually part of the subtitle here. I guess I would put it this way: We've largely lost the Christian voice and culture. And part of that is because, for us as Christians, many of us don't see the relevancy of Jesus to all aspects of life. We're not viewed as intellectually competent. Jesus isn't viewed by us often as intellectually virtuous, right? We might give Jesus spiritual authority and moral authority in our lives, but we don't always give Him intellectual authority, and so, as a result, like you said, people aren't coming, knocking on the church door, to hear from pastors or theologians the truth about the world. And so we've lost the Christian voice.

But beyond that, as Christians, many of us are just as fragmented as our non-believing neighbors, right? Our thinking’s and our willings are often at cross purposes. Weekly, we read of Christian leaders who disqualify themselves from ministry because of a moral failure. On social media, we’re just as bad, if not worse than everybody else often, lacking kindness and charity and humility and so on. And so what happens, though, is that traditionally the church is called to speak light into darkness and to be salt into a culture that is decaying. And traditionally we have this prophetic voice, but we're not able to exercise that because we’re fragmented. And so we've lost the Christian conscience in our culture. And then the third part there, about the Christian imagination as well. Many of us, as Christians, we basically look at the world the same way everyone else does. We might use words like every day, or the world is ordinary, it's mundane, but in reality, the world is exactly the opposite. I mean, C.S. Lewis, since we're talking to you, Randy. The proper word was sacred or holy, to help them understand the nature of the giftedness of creation. And so we become disenchanted, is the word that I use. And so we need to re-baptize that Christian imagination and really see the world and I think, delight in the world the way Jesus does, or it's just not good. People aren’t going to want to hear our voice.

And so, if you add all that together, this sort of image problem. If you add that together, here’s kind of the bottom line, is that, for many in our culture today, Christianity is either viewed as implausible or undesirable or both. And so that's, I think, where we need to start, is just to kind of do some in-house about where we are, and then we can move from there.

How Do We Re-Enchant a Disenchanted World?

Well, you use the word disenchanted in your subtitle, Paul. Your subtitle is: “Renewing the Christian Voice, Conscience, and Imagination in a Disenchanted World.” I think you’ve unpacked for us about the voice and the conscience and the imagination. Tell us more about this disenchanted world. What do you mean? And how do we re-enchant a disenchanted world?

Yeah. Okay, good. And I think you're familiar with Lesslie Newbigin, too, Randy, but one of the books that has made an impact on me, just early on in this kind of stuff was Lesslie Newbigin’s book, Foolishness to the Greeks, and in that book, he was a missionary sent from Great Britain to India, ministered faithfully among the Hindus for like 40 years, comes back in the early seventies to Great Britain to realize that his own sending country had become, a she would call it, post Christian. And so he wrote this book, trying to wrestle with how do I have a missionary encounter with my own culture? And on that book, on the first page, he asked what I think is our crucial question in a post-Christian age, or in a secular age, or in a disenchanted age. And the question is this: He says, “What would be involved in a missionary encounter between the whole way of thinking, perceiving, and living that we call modern Western society and the gospel?

“I think that's a great question because Newbigin understood that the gospel is never preachedin a vacuum. And how there's these plausibility structures that inform how people receive the gospel. So anyway, in there, he uses three words: What is the dominant way of perceiving, thinking, and living? And disenchantment is the answer to the question, what is the culture’s dominant way of perceiving? So in a word, it would be that word disenchantment. And all I mean by that is that we no longer see the world in its proper light. In reality, the world is gift. It’s created, it's holy, it's sacred, it's mysterious, it's beautiful, but we see it as mundane and ordinary. And what happens, though—actually, theologians talk about this: There's this idolatrous way of perceiving, where we reduce God in the world to the level of human appetite, and then we no longer see it, and we no longer see the fingerprint of God everywhere. And so as a result, I like to use the word disenchanted, but another word that people throw out is secular.

An important philosopher, Charles Taylor, says we live in a secular age. And what he means by that is that we live in the age of contested belief, where belief in God is not automatic. And even for Christians, belief in God is more difficult. So the last thing I would want to say then, how do we re-enchant the world? Part of sort of the prescriptive or hopeful project of my book was thinking that we can join with each other and with God to re-enchant the world. And I offer kind of two steps. One is to reawaken longing, and we can talk about that, about these deep-seated longings that we all have for goodness, truth, and beauty, which find, as we follow those deep seated longings, we find its source in Christ. But then secondly, that we would return to reality as Christians. And what I mean by that is two things: Number one, that we would see and delight in the world the way Jesus does. And then number two that we would invite others to see and delight in the world the way Jesus does as well. So that's a little bit of what I mean by disenchanted, and then how we might join with God to re-enchant the world.

Wow! Well, you've said several mouthfuls.

I know. Sorry about that.

Well, so I'm going to just try to slow us down a little bit. You know, I think a lot of non-Christians that I know and talk to, they don't think secular is necessarily a bad thing. They would think that disenchanted is a bad thing. I mean, secular, I think, for a lot of people, and I'm not questioning your understanding of it, or Charles Taylor's definition of it. I think secular is a very negative thing. And secularism, I think, has to land at, eventually, disenchantment and nihilism, purposelessness. What's the point? But I just think, for a lot of people, we probably need to spell out or point out some of that disenchantment and hopelessness, and then try to be able to say, “But you know, there is a hope, there are reasons to be enchanted with this world and where it points. But it’s not the Pollyanna simplistic of, “Oh, well, I just have a positive attitude about life.” Soam I thinking along the right lines there?

Yeah, I think so. I mean, I would want to make just a few distinctions.

Of course, you're a philosopher. That's what philosophers do. They make distinctions.

Yeah. So actually, Charles Taylor, who is a philosopher, he distinguishes three senses of that word secular. And I think you're right. The classic word secular just means... The secular is the realm of the butcher and the baker and the candlestick maker, but the sacred is the realm of the priest or something. That was a classic sense of the word. But I think most people today, when you say secular, the modern sense of that word is the irreligious realm. It's just the claim that the secular square would be... religion is scrubbed out of that or something like that. It's kind of a neutral. But then Taylor's sense is actually a third and distinct sense of that word. And what he means by secular is the age of contested belief, that belief in God is not automatic anymore. And so, yes, I would just want to make that distinction. You're right. And that’s why I actually prefer to use the word disenchanted, because I think it gets at some of what was lost.

But what's so interesting: The second thing I'll say. With your probing question is, for example, modern intelligentsia, the intelligentsia tell us that there's nothing magical to the world. There's nothing beyond this world. Everything is mundane. As Charles Taylor would say, we live in an imminent frame, right? And we can live our life and find our meaning without any appeal to the transcendent, without any appeal to anything beyond this physical world. But what's so interesting about that is that that's what the intelligentsia tell us, that there's no God, there's no meaning, no purpose, but our longings betray us. Why are we so fixated on superhero movies or, I don't know, Pokémon Go and augmenting our reality? Or even the paranormal, the fascination with or different, I don't know, I was going to say zombies, but like vampires and things, the kind of things that are beyond this mundane world. It’s kind of interesting, if you look at the things that we watch and the books that we read and the things that we're drawn to, they kind of betray the deep longing of the heart.

And of course, as Christians, we know, as Augustine would put it, the deepest longing of every human heart is to know God. As Augustine said, “Our hearts are restless until they find rest in you.” And so that's part of what we need to do is the world has repressed or suppressed these deep-seated longings. And as cultural apologists, we want to reawaken those. And I kind of offer a model for how to do that.

You mentioned the phrase plausibility structures, and on a sort of a theoretical level, we want to have ideas that help people consider the idea of Christianity or make it worth considering or plausible, believable, right? So how do we do that? What does that sound like in conversations? Two people who work in the same office, they're grabbing lunch, socially distanced, of course, wearing masks, of course. What does that look like? What do you say in a conversation that might build a plausibility structure? I know I’m putting you on the spot, but that's what a podcast is.

That's right. Oh my! Yeah, no, that's good. I would just say, and I'll do this briefly, and I unpack this in detail in the book, but I find Paul's example and I know, Randy, even you, I’ve heard you talk about this too, but Paul's example in Athens on Mars Hill is so helpful. And basically you see him do three things. So he's engaging a culture unlike his own. He’s speaking to the Greeks. He's Jewish. First thing he does, though, is he identifies a starting point, a common ground. And basically for him, it was the idols to the unknown God that he found there. And he basically is identifying the religious impulse behind the idolatry and the Athenians there. But he uses that as a starting point to outflank their thinking and build a case, build a bridge to Jesus and the gospel. And he does it in a brilliant way, if you look at his message there, where he's quoting from their own philosophers and their own poets—so they’re storytellers—to build a bridge to Jesus in the gospel.

So basically it’s... I love how N.T. Wright summarizes Paul's speech. He says Paul does three things, and I think this is what I would say, in brief. He, number one, affirms what he can affirm in Athenian culture, and I think that's a good model for us, affirm the things that we can affirm in our culture. Number two, though, what Paul does is he outflanks their thinking, and he does that in a brilliant way. And I would just point you to the passage in Acts chapter 17, and I unpack it a little in my book. But he outflanks their thinking, quoting from the philosophers and the poets of his day. And then thirdly, he confronts the rank idolatry. And what he does there is he brings them to the ultimate question. If [UNKNOWN17:10] question was the penultimate question, how does the gospel get a fair hearing? What Paul does so well, and I think we need to follow his example, of course, the ultimate question is what do you make of Jesus Christ? And you see how Paul does that in a culture unlike his own, which is similar to our situation.

So like Paul, when we understand our Athens and then, like Paul, identify a common ground, a starting point, and from that, build a bridge to Jesus and the gospel. And of course, we answer objections along the way as well.

We’ll return to my conversation in just a moment. I do want to invite you to take a look at our website, cslewisinstitute.org, and avail yourself to the many resources that we have there. We have over 40 years’ worth of articles and recordings and events that can be tremendously helpful. Check out the different ways that we can help you share your faith or grow deeply in your faith. And consider also supporting the institute. If you click on the button that says donate, we would love to have you as a ministry partner. Now let's return to the conversation.

I agree with you. Paul's speech in Athens has so many applicable lessons because our culture today is a lot like Athens, far more than... Just a few chapters before that, in Acts 13, Paul preaches in a Jewish synagogue, and he uses the scriptures as his starting point. But that was a very religious audience. On Mars Hill in Athens, instead, he quotes their poets. So you’ve already mentioned superhero movies. When I think about our poets today, I think primarily the two biggest poets, I think are songwriters and movie script writers and storytellers through movie and television and film. So, in addition to superhero movies, what are some of today’s poets, either songwriters or storytellers, that you would want to latch on to and say, “Now, look at what they're saying. They're saying something good. There is something more, isn’t there? We are longing for more.” Can you think of some of your favorite poets?

Oh, my! Yeah, that's a great question, Randy. You know what's so interesting about that? I’m not going to give you a total cop out, but I'm going to tell you what draws me to good story, because what popped into my mind as you're talking is Harry Potter. Why are so many people engaged with loving Harry Potter stuff? And I think part of the answer is because... I mean, she’s a great writer, it's a great story, but the things that are great about that story I actually think are the gospel parts of the story. And so, like Tolkien... he wrote this essay 50 years ago called “An Essay on Fairy Story,” and he said that the thing that we're drawn to in fairytales, but I would just say for any good story, the things that we're drawn to are parts of the story that point to, as he puts it, in underlying reality that is more real than the reality of our primary experience. And that underlying reality was the gospel story. And so he’s talking about why he writes fantasy, but I think it's for any good story.

So whether it's a Christopher Nolan exploring metaphysics in Inception or exploring epistemology in Memento, or we'll see what he's going to do in the movie Tenet, exploring some big idea. The things that would draw us to that are parts that connect with some part of the gospel story, whether it's the tragedy of man’s sin or the divine comedy of God becoming man, or the unexpected to the tragedy of the crucifixion, which is the resurrection, or the unending sudden turn of the gospel story, that we can all have eternal life in Christ. And so, yeah, so in terms of specific, there are certain Christian artists that I'm enjoying and watching. I would name Andrew Peterson as someone that I think is really doing some good work in art and the gospel. I think actually a lot of spoken word poetry these days is really cool and doing some cool stuff. Christians are doing cool stuff there. And then back to literature, I think some of my favorite actual writing storytellers today would be... They're a little more difficult to read because they're not sort of flashy, but like Marilynne Robinson, and folks like that, I think, are evoking the divine and the transcendent in a way that's not preachy or crass, but yet they stir our hearts to wonder and to move us toward this longing for the divine. So anyway, I'd have to think more about others. I just like a lot of stuff.

Well, I think the challenge, what we want to do is we want to encourage Christians to read those books and to see those movies and to think Christianly about, “Okay, what question is this movie trying to ask? And what's the answer that it comes up with?” And I think movies, especially, they raise the really crucial important questions. Now, even when they come up with what we would say is the wrong answer, it is still an amazing springboard for talking to people about the gospel. “So what did you think about what they said there?” And a lot of people are frustrated with Paul's speech in Acts 17because he doesn't quite land the plane where we want to. I mean, he mentions the resurrection, but it almost seemed—well, I'm pretty sure that he got interrupted at that point, because the text tells us that people sneered, and some of them said, “Well, you’re crazy.” So he got interrupted. And I think what Paul was willing to do, though, was to raise the questions and let people feel the uneasiness of an unanswered question before actually answering it and spelling out the answer. And I think sometimes we’re impatient. We want to jump really quickly to the answer before people have felt the difficulty of the question.

I just recently watched Hamilton, because Disney Plus was running it for free, and I thought, I'd rather watch it for free than have to pay $1,000 for a ticket. It's brilliant, and it's amazing, and it's powerful, and you're knocked off your seat. But there's this moment in it when Hamilton and his wife are dealing with—they talk about the unimaginable—and it was about the loss of a child, but also the unimaginableness of trying to put a marriage back together after unfaithfulness. And it’s so poignant and beautiful. And the words are, “Can you imagine?” They're trying to live the unimaginable. “Can you imagine?” And the power of music just makes it so it's like, “Wow, that's really difficult! Wow, that's really amazing! Oh, I really want it.” You want them somehow to be able to experience the unimaginable or the imaginable. And I think those are conversations that, if we could get into those with people, it can be building plausibility structures.

Yeah. I think this was one of the key insights as I was researching and writing the book, was there’s this great philosopher, Peter Kreeft, who wrote a book called back to Virtue, but in there he had this chart which actually was so profound in pulling some strings together for me. But he talked about how God has created each person, each individual with three... he calls them prophets of the soul, but three parts to what it means to be human. God's given us a mind, reason, God’s given us a conscience, and then God has given us the imagination. So every human being has a reason, a conscience, and imagination. But each of these faculties of the soul, these parts of what it means to be a human, are on a quest for the object of their longing. And he kind of had this chart where reason is on a quest for truth, and then the Conscience longs for goodness, but the imagination, so interesting, is on a quest for beauty. And then he has Christ in the middle. So Christ is the source of all these things. If we put our theology cap on and say, “Well, what is the source of goodness, truth and beauty?

“So as we awaken these deep longings for goodness, truth, and beauty, we're actually setting people on a journey that ends with the true object of their longing, which is Christ, the source of beauty. And that's why Lewis was so taken—if you read his biography, Surprised by Joy, he says at age six he became a votary of the blue flower. There's a couple of words in there. Votary means like a follower, devotee, of the blue flower and what that meant—this was his first experience with beauty. The blue flower was this mythic symbol in German romance literature that stood for this experience of intense longing that propels you forward but is just outside your grasp, and it's ever elusive, but it propels you forward. And so he became this follower of the blue flower, this longing for beauty.

And God used beauty in his life to ultimately bring him to Christianity, which was the perfect blend of beauty and truth, or true myth, as he would put it later. And so, yeah. So, in apologetics, we’re really good, I think we have been really good at giving arguments and showing the reasonableness of Christianity. But I think in our culture today, and this is the importance of the arts, is that Christianity is not just true and reasonable. It's good and beautiful. It's desirable as well. And so we've got to show that as well. And that's where art and the aesthetic currency of our age, poetry, storytelling, movies, paintings are so powerful. And of course, we own that, as Christians, right? Because God is the giver of beauty and art and story.

The Difference between Goodness and Beauty

Now, for our listeners, I want to go back a little bit. I want to underline something you said. You said, so we have the mind, the conscience and the imagination. And the midpoints us to truth. Our conscience points us toward goodness. Our imagination points us toward beauty. You mentioned Lewis and what he said in Surprised by Joy. One of my favorite lines of that book, when he was coming to grips with the fact that he loved mythology and he loved story. But if you asked him objectively what he believed in, he said, “I don't believe in God. I don't believe in any kind of ultimate big story.” And he wrote, “Nearly all that I loved I believe to be imaginary. Nearly all that I believed to be real, I thought grim and meaningless.” And I think that's what we want to try to do is to point out to people, “Listen, if you think that life is pointless and meaningless, why are you hoping that your marriage works out?” Or, “Why are you hoping to find someone to love?” And it's that contradiction that we want to help people feel like. Its like, “Wait a minute. No, you don't have to live with that contradiction.” So spell out a little bit more for our listeners and for me, the difference between goodness and beauty. How are those different categories?

Yeah. Well, I mean, in philosophy, they're both actually sub disciplines of axiology or value theory. And so one, morality has to do with questions of worth and things like that and right and wrong. Mostly, when we talk about value, we talk about worth. And then beauty, though, has to do with questions of aesthetic value. And so there's always this question, “Well, what is beauty?” I do think it is objective. I don't think it's merely in the eye of the beholder. It's something that we behold with the eyes, but I think it's objectively part of the furniture of the world, in the same way that moral facts are. There's facts about beauty. And so that's the sort of realm of study. But it's also pleasing to the senses, right? So it's subjective, but it also takes... it’s pleasing to behold it, as Aquinas would put it. And I think that God, of course, Isa beautiful God. And a lot of theologians, when they try to make sense of what beauty actually is, they oftentimes end up with, “Well, it's just God. God is beauty. The divine is the most beautiful thing.” But I think that God has implanted, all over this world, beauty because it’s a reminder of who He is [UNKNOWN 30:05].

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I think that's the aspect of current Christian experience that's lacking the most. I mean, if we're pursuing truth, Christians will say, “Well, yes, it's true that Jesus really did rise from the dead. The Bible really is God's revelation to us.” And if we think about conscience that points us toward goodness, “Well, it's good and it's morally right to stay faithful to your spouse and to not cheat and not lie and not promote injustice.” But beauty is a category that—I think we're very much afraid of it, because it seems so sensual, and we're afraid we are going to get caught up in lust or covetousness. Loving the creation rather than the Creator.

But beauty is all around us, physical beauty, animals, trees, flowers, beautiful music, beautiful art. And I think the arts have been used by the devil to lure people away from God. And so I think a lot of Christians, we’re just afraid of it. At best, it seems like a waste of time. “I'm going to listen to this symphony.” Well, it's 45 minutes of time. I’m not doing anything else. It's not background music. I'm just listening to it. And then when it's over, it's over. And I think, “Well, how did that really contribute toward fulfilling the Great Commission?” But it contributed in making me a person who loves beauty and who loves the God Who created our world to be such that those kind of sounds would be so moving to me. 

But I do think that we have a hard time trying to figure out, “How does that fit in with making every minute count and those kind of things?” Again, am I just rambling? Well, probably, but I'm the host of the podcast and I'm allowed to do that.

Yeah, you’re allowed to do that. Well, I would say this, Randy, because actually this is so important. And so maybe if I can just add to you what you were rambling with my own rambling. It is true that the culture has held beauty in captive, I think, and the church doesn't know what to do with beauty. We don't have a theology of beauty, and if we incorporate beauty into our church at all or our church service, it's usually auditory beauty because we sing. That’s about it, right? Otherwise, we're in multipurpose rooms, and we're very pragmatic and so we don't spend money on, I don't know, making the embodied sanctuary a place of beauty that actually moves us or something like that.

But what's so interesting, though, if you look in scripture, the very first person that you reading scripture where God fills him with the Holy Spirit, it's in Exodus 31. It’s is actually an artist. It’s a command to Moses, to build the tabernacle, and God calls by name—Israel has been in captivity for 400 years, but God knows by name the community of artists and calls them by name to build the tabernacle. And if you read the account in Exodus 31, it's the first eleven verses, you see that there's artists in the community, you see that they’re commissioned to create works of beauty. In fact, Francis Schaeffer says, in this command to build the tabernacle, you see every form of representational art known to man, is given in that command.

Actually, a lot of the specific instructions for how the tabernacle was to be designed are meant to point back to the Garden of Eden and also forward to the future, when all things were renewed again. And so there's this question, “Does God care about beauty?” And the resounding answer in Scripture is yes, because it awakens us, and it reminds us of home, right? The way things ought to be, and it gives us hope for the future and so one of the most underutilized aspects, I think, in evangelism, is art and beauty, especially now that we live in an age of video, YouTube and Netflix, as opposed to... You know, we are People of the Book, living in an age of video. And so how do we engage this culture? We've got to be engaging, not just ideas, but ideas and image together, because we're embodied human beings who are moved by aesthetic beauty. And so many people say that some of the great evangelists of the 21st century will be artists, and I think that there's some truth to that.

I sure hope so.

They're helping us see the way the world actually is.

Well, Paul, we need to kind of wrap this up. Is there anything else that you want to inform our listeners about your book or about the task of cultural apologetics? We could talk a whole lot more. Well, I'm going to interrupt my own question and say it does seem to me that art and beauty is such a wonderful common ground starting point, because non-Christians love beauty and Christians love beauty. And so if we can enter into experiences together, reading books and discussing them, or going to an art museum and looking at paintings, or going to a concert and talking about it, those are common-ground starting places of God's general revelation of His beauty, I think the more we can do that, the better. Reading fiction together and talking about, “What kind of longings does this book stir?

“But let me let the last word be for you. Anything else you want our listeners to have in mind about this idea, other than the very obvious, please go buy my book. But I'll tell them that. You should really read Paul's book, because it really helps us with these very deep ideas in very, very practical ways.

Yeah. Thanks, Randy. No, I'm just thrilled to be on with you and talking about these things. Let me just give a plug for—if these kinds of things are of interest to you, especially, how do we engage with our culture in a thoughtful way where we're showing the goodness, the truth, and the beauty of the gospel?

Well, then I would just invite you to join us. So you had mentioned at the beginning of the program, I newly moved to Florida. So I just want to give a shout out. There's a new program that officially begins in the fall of 2021. It's going to be a new Masters in Philosophy of Religion, and we're super excited about the program. Something that's unique about it is that we’re really intentionally engaging with what we're calling public philosophy. But it’s basically the kinds of ideas that I unpack in this cultural apologetic book. How do we thoughtfully engage with culture and love Jesus and our minds in such a way that Christianity is viewed as reasonable and desirable? So I just invite you to check it out. We're developing the program as I speak, but Palm Beach Atlantic University, Masters of Arts in Philosophy of Religion officially opens doors Fall 2021. So, thanks, Randy.

That’s wonderful. Thanks for being on. And to our listeners, I want to say we hope that this podcast really stimulates you a lot to pursue the true and the good and the beautiful. May all of our resources at the C.S. Lewis Institute be used by God to propel us more to love Him with all of our heart, soul, strength, and mind.

Brought to you by the C.S. Lewis Institute and the Questions That Matter Podcast with Randy Newman.