Megachurches, Academia, and Christian Vitality — Ep. 155

I think sometimes even we've said, "Okay, so education's the enemy." I don't know that it is the enemy. A bad heart is the enemy, and the way in which we express that heart is the enemy. So let the enemy be the enemy and not put something else in its place.

Hello everyone, welcome to another episode. Today we have Roseanne Bahlman and Vince Beiler with us. This episode's a little different than what we've done in the past. In season three, Vince did a few episodes with us, and we had various comments and feedback that came in from that, and we thought we should do a follow-up episode to explain some of those things and dive a little deeper. So, without further ado, let's jump right in. Vince, would you mind introducing yourself for everyone? Yeah, name is Vince Beiler, formerly of Lancaster, Pennsylvania area.

I moved around a little bit since then. Right now, my wife and I, Lydia, and our four kids, we live in Anchorage, and I'm working on a PhD in Hebrew Bible there. And Roseanne? My name's Roseanne Bahlman. I'm a nurse in Southern Ontario.

I've been teaching nursing at a community college for, I guess it's my 15th year. So I've actually spent probably as many years in academia as out. Okay, fascinating. So one of the episodes we did with you last, Vince, addressed this whole concept of does academia affect our faith and how these things work together.

Jeff from the UK sent in this comment. He says, "I've been a Christian for 47 years." He lives in East Sussex in the UK. He said, "I have a question on your source of information regarding the percentages of Christians in various places."

And I think he was referring in your episode there about how you said there's a high percent or a higher percentage of Christians living in places like Cambridge or Oxford versus other parts of the UK. He says, "I don't know where your statistics come from, but some of the percentages you speak of for Oxford and Cambridge just don't add up. Some of the youth coming out of school and going to university these days are secular with maybe a small percentage of Christian. The fastest growing belief system in the UK is Islam." He doesn't really cite where he's what experiences he's talking from, but I'd be curious, could you just clarify that, Vince?

Yeah, I mean, it's a good point. And what I said was taken from somebody who just gave me a 10% figure. He said, "Of course, that's very low. That means 90% aren't churched of the population of Oxford or Cambridge." But let's just say that it's 10%. And elsewhere it's 5%. That means it's higher than other things, all things being equal. Details aside, the point wasn't really, you know, here it's more churched, here it's not. Is it 5%? Is it 6%? Is it exactly what? Person plus academia equals less faith. That's just sort of the way we think about it.

And that doesn't need to be the case, nor should it be the case. I understand why people say it's the case. But that's really all. That was really the basis of my point. So really just addressing, "Hey, let's look at that assumption and not just say that that's the case unilaterally across the board.

Think a little deeper about it." Is that kind of what we're trying to get at here? Yeah, I think we just need to call into question certain narratives and say, "This is just the way things go. It may go that way."

There are other reasons it may go that way too. I mean, just personally, I think a bigger reason for secularism is wealth than education. You could argue they go in tandem, but I think money has a lot of problems. And of course, Jesus talked a lot about money, and he didn't talk much about education. Really, that's the thing that he had a big problem with in a lot of cases. That and pride were two huge things.

So you could challenge that and say, "Well, you know, Jesus did it this many. Why don't we see we're getting those stats?" But the point is, Jesus made some really strong points in these areas, and we do well to listen to them. And I think sometimes even we've said, "Okay, so education's the enemy." I don't know that it is the enemy. A bad heart is the enemy. And the way in which we express that heart is the enemy. So let the enemy be the enemy and not put something else in its place. Does that make sense? Yeah, that does. That's clarifying and helpful. And Jeff, if you're watching this, thanks for your comment. And let us know down below what you think.

Yeah, it's good things to think about. Okay, so another person, and I don't believe this is a real name, so I'm not even going to give it, but they said, "I don't even know where to start. Such a troubling discussion. Sixth graders are unable to understand the Bible," they say, which I think is referring to one of the things you said, Vince, about at a younger age, there's certain things we can't understand or sometimes we can have an overly simplistic view.

And then this person goes on to say, "Does he actually believe a 12-year-old cannot understand anything in the Bible? Why are we determining what an age group can or cannot understand?" And then I think they're quoting you saying, "We have a naive reading of the Bible. What does that even mean? What does simplicity have to do with anything? There are concepts that even a child can understand, i.e., don't kill, don't steal, and other concepts in the Bible we understand more as we grow." I'm not entirely sure what this person is getting at, but I would love to hear, yeah, maybe, yeah, what would y'all's response be to that? Roseanne, what do you think of this?

I wasn't sure if we were sort of taking out of context what Vince was actually trying to say in the first place. I had to think of the Pilgrims' Progress story, which I loved as a child. I understood the basis of the story, but as an adult, I see a lot more connotations, a lot deeper meanings, more levels, and so on. And I think about that in terms of children understanding scripture as well. They can probably understand the basic storyline, but it becomes richer and deeper with maturity and time.

I don't know, Vince, is that sort of what you were getting at? Yeah, I like your analogy there, Roseanne. And I thought of when I saw this comment, my father-in-law is very fond of quoting Mark Twain on this point. He says, "It's not the, supposedly," Mark Twain said, "that it's not the parts of the Bible he doesn't understand that bother him. It's the parts he does understand." So of course, children can understand. And again, I don't think that was my point. I was basically saying what Roseanne is saying, that sometimes nuance is a good thing. And we have tended to go into one camp, which is to say everything is simple. We flatten the biblical narrative into something that's easily compressed into it's tweetable, if you will.

We do it a disservice in doing that because that isn't the Bible. Of course, there are some in the Bible that are perfectly tweetable. But that doesn't mean you can sum it up that well. Any discussion can't be summed in a tweet. So if you want to say something well, it's going to take some time. It's going to have some complexity. It's going to have some nuance. And even if it's simple, it's still that way.

And of course, we know that if the Bible is so overwhelmingly simple, why do we study it all our life? Why do we say that this is something worth studying for the rest of your life, worth reading, worth reflecting on if it's so simple? Because it's simple, but it's not. And that's the deception. And we shouldn't kid ourselves on that, I think. I don't think I hear Vince in that suggesting that a person has to be educated or a certain age to start comprehending those things because we have people who their cognitive challenges lead them to force them into a simple understanding of things. And I think scripture speaks to them as well.

So really, this strikes me as more about understanding the bigger context and the nuance and being okay with the fact that the Bible is rich enough it will take a lifetime of study. And that's a good thing. Am I hearing both of you correctly on that? Yeah, I think so.

I think it's humility more than anything. I'm not a fanboy for education as such. I certainly don't want to be heard in that sort of way. But I think if our view is we have that one covered, it's a cocky complacency that I think really bothers me. That is an issue more than how much you know or don't know. If you're giving it all to God, he can work with that. If you think you've got it covered, that's a different sort of problem. Okay, so I'll move on to the next comment we had. This is from Matthew. He says this: "So many, nearly all, quote-unquote, evangelical churches are nothing more than group therapy, i.e., six ways to defeat the giants in your life," he says, going on to say, "They never interact with the difficult theological topics.

So they send Junior off to university, and for the first time, he is sitting in front of a well-dressed, smooth-talking professor who is bringing up topic after topic that the young believer has never heard addressed, and he shakes him to his core because he has no foundation. We must address the deeper issues and show that there are answers." So he's not as much of a question, but adding some perspective here. Yeah, what do you all think of what Matthew has to say here? Does he have a valid point? Many of our Anabaptist churches practice the idea of having some sort of instructional meetings for young believers connected to their baptism. And in those instructional meetings, we attempt to give them some foundation, some what would have been called a catechism in years gone by, some foundation.

So I don't feel like we're sending people out with no foundation. Perhaps what we don't model as well is how to take a new idea, analyze it, compare it to your foundation, and decide what to do with it. Is it something that you wish to adopt into your paradigm? Is it something you wish to separate yourself from? Sometimes we don't model that kind of thing well, that you actually take an idea, analyze it, and make a conscious decision about where it goes, whether it gets integrated into your paradigm or whether it's not something you want to be part of or whether it is.

It's like examining the context and points of view and different perspectives well without automatically just, yeah, this sense that anytime we run into something that we disagree with, we just turn and run the other direction and never understand the broader context or the different perspective. And then, like this person's saying, you end up in college where you may not be able to do, like you are encountered with these things and you have to face them, and maybe you haven't done that before. I think the caution for some people is that faced with a new idea, a young believer might just swallow it, assimilate it, go with it, or, as you said, totally debunk it without even thinking about it.

And so, yeah, sometimes I don't know. Is it the foundation we're lacking or is it modeling how to work with new ideas? Because they're going to come up in or out of academia. You're going to meet at some place. Yeah, and these are things that will face you, and you are going to have to face them. And use your brain, I guess, so to speak, or reason through and pray through these things and work through them. And yeah, it's not always easy. Yeah, that's some great points. Vince, do you have anything to add?

Professors, I've had not all. They aren't smooth-talking or well-dressed. They come with different socks on and sandals.

Some sandals, that's what I've experienced. And I've had much smoother talking. I've heard much smoother talking preachers than I have professors for the content. And so they're a bit of an acquired taste. And they know quite a bit about their narrow subfield. Bigger issue is they know a lot more than you do. And your quick answer doesn't begin to plumb the depths. How are you supposed to address something you've never heard before? Sometimes, again, I guess it is advocate humility on some of these things. That's a really good point because there's sometimes there's this sense that, well, clearly we're right, you know, because we have the Bible and we're just right. And whenever we run into these people who disagree with us, we should be able to put them in their place in two well-placed sentences and, you know, boom, pow, we have it all sorted.

Maybe not in those direct terms, but I've gotten that sense sometimes. And I was like, I've always wondered where the humility is in that because there is so much that we don't know. I don't know. I'd love to hear y'all's feedback on that because just because there's things that we don't know doesn't mean we should. There are some things we still should not go or believe or certain worldviews we should not accept, even though, yes, we're fallible and don't know everything.

Where does that line end of understanding, yeah, we don't know everything, but there are certainly some things that we need to stand on? I think there came a point in my life where I had to decide what my non-negotiables were in terms of my faith.

What are my non-negotiables? These things I believe to be true, and I'm not willing to negotiate on them. And then everything else, yeah, you work with or tweak, as Vince said, or whatever. And do the non-negotiables change over your lifetime? Perhaps in small ways. We all have to come to a place of this is truth, the best way that I can understand it in this moment.

Vince, what do you think? I think I tend to view this as something of a continuum where you can be way off in one field and completely isolated from all else and all other views. It'd be extremely bold of me to somehow assume that my worldview, whatever it was, was automatically correct. I mean, because that is the standard of everyone in the world. I mean, you go all over and everyone thinks that their country is the place they live is somehow the best. Why do we think it's the best? You know, what we call the best situation, or we idealize that and we look at off on one side, this is the only thing and nothing else is right or everything from is wrong.

Yeah, yeah, I think that is helpful. So that was the last question we had for this episode. Thanks to the people who put comments in or sent us emails, gave us feedback on a previous episode we had done, which if you want to see the other two episodes we did with Vince last season, those will be linked down below. And we love hearing feedback from you, the listeners and the viewers online. If you want more content like this, go to our website at anabaptistperspectives.org, and we thank you for watching.

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