Welcome to the For the Gospel podcast. We are all about sound doctrine for everyday people, and we're excited to have you along for another episode. If you haven't already subscribed, be sure to subscribe and follow on Apple, Spotify, Google Podcasts, Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and yes, even TikTok now. We are there. 500 million people on TikTok. It's a mission field we want to be in on, and I can tell you this to put all the rumors to rest. There are no weird dance videos on our page. It is all gospel and only gospel, and that's what we're on there for. And so you can find us there. Today I am joined by our creative director, Justin Bond. Welcome, Justin. And we have the privilege of talking with Carl Truman. Uh, I asked him before the show and before we prayed, do you want us to call you doctor? Or can we just call you Carl? We're sound doctrine for everyday people. He said, Hey, call me Carl. I'm only, I'm only uh you only only call me doctor when I'm mad about something or some other thing. So it's Carl Truman. A blessing to have you.
SPEAKER_02It's great to be on, and thanks for giving me my big TikTok break. Uh that's an unexpected bonus.
SPEAKER_00Yes, we'll be featuring a Dr. Carl Truman on the TikTok account doing a little song and dance, Englishman style. So we're so grateful to have you. Well, um, I want to go ahead and read the title of your new book really quick to everyone. We wanted to have you on to talk about this particular topic and to break it down in simple ways because the world has gone crazy. That's not news, uh, but it's been going crazy for some time, and you have done The Body of Christ or really any anybody from any school of thought, really, if they wanted to understand these perspectives, a great service. You've written The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self, Cultural Amnesia, Expressive Individualism, and The Road to Sexual Revolution. It's out by Crossway. It's a great book that will help people understand why much of what we're seeing in today's society and culture is not new. Uh, it's not something that you need to uh have a fear of in this sense of the fear of the unknown. We can understand what's happening and where these schools of thought come from. And I wanted to jump right in, if we can, and summarize or read the summary off the bat, written in the foreword, that goes something like this, and summary of why the horrors of Soviet communism occurred. Men have forgotten God. That is why all this has happened. Uh, it goes on to unpack this answer also being valid as an explanation for the crises enveloping in the West today, including the widespread falling away from faith, the disintegration of the family, the loss of communal purpose, erotic, erasing the boundaries between male and female, and a general spirit of demonic destruction that denies the sacredness of human life. Because men have forgotten God. They have also forgotten man. That is why all of this has happened. Uh Carl, will you expand on why you wrote the book and on what we're seeing today in the church and in society at large and why a book like this is so important, and we believe it is.
SPEAKER_02Well, the the reason there are a number of reasons why I wrote the book. Probably the primary one in terms of its practical uh implications is I was concerned really at how confused, disturbed, worried, shocked my Christian friends, contemporaries are by the speed of the sexual revolution. If we go back just five years to Obergefell versus Hodges, the uh Supreme Court judgment on the gay marriage case, that's just five years ago. Yet in a sense, it seems a lifetime ago. Even as that was happening, the whole transgender movement was exploding onto the scene. And we've seen a rise of normalization of things like polyamory, uh, even BDSM. Uh, these things are starting to become mainstream. And I wanted to try to help Christians understand that even though these things appear to be happening quickly, the roots uh lie deep in the history of our culture. Really, we've got to go back several hundred years to start a story of why these things happened. And what we're watching now is certainly very dramatic in terms of how uh hallowed institutions or hallowed ideas are falling with with great rapidity. But the reason for that is pressure has been building for a long, long time. You mentioned uh at the start there, the reason this is happening is because people have forgotten God. There's a sense of which, yes, that's true, but we've been living off the capital that belief in God gave us for several centuries, and finally we've come to the end of that capital, and everything is starting to fall apart from a Christian perspective. So I wanted to write the book to help Christians understand why what's happening makes a kind of sense, a sort of perverse sense, if you like, but makes a kind of sense given the history of Western culture over the last three or four hundred years. Uh, and would therefore, although, if you like, I hope people are shocked by what's happening, we shouldn't be surprised or we shouldn't be panicked by what's happening, because, as I say, it makes a kind of sense. Another aspect of that as well was I wanted to encourage Christians to think more holistically about these events. There is a connection, if you like, between internet pornography, views of abortion, gay marriage, transgenderism, all of these things tie together. They're all functions of the way we think of ourselves, the way we intuit ourselves relative to the world around us. And I wanted to help Christians to stop addressing problems atomistically, to actually see these things as symptomatic of deeper and broader changes that have taken place. And thirdly, I wanted to, and this is a sort of twist of the knife point, I suppose, I wanted to help Christians realize that actually we ourselves are complicit in a lot of the problems. That this isn't a question of us and them. That's often how the culture war presents it. It's us versus them. Actually, even modern Christianity, modern Orthodox Christianity has capitulated or been co-opted by some of these trends. And that's important, I think, for Christians because it it cultivates a sense of humility. It should enable us to avoid that Pharisaical, I thank you, Lord, that I am not like other men. That's right. Wow. So there were those three things going on, really, in my mind.
SPEAKER_00Would you be willing to unpack two things? You said we're at the end of that capital. You talked about the capital we've been living on with the belief in God. I want you to unpack that a little more for people. And then I would love for you to go a little deeper into how we are complicit in some of the ideas. But what do you mean by we had capital?
SPEAKER_02Yeah, well, in some ways, the uh the key figure here, certainly in terms of exposing what's gone on, is that the 19th-century philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche. Uh, Nietzsche writes this book, uh, The Gay Science. Gay has nothing to do with homosexuality, it just means happy, the happy science. And in this book, he has uh a rather dramatic scene where this figure of the madman comes into a town square early one morning and confronts the atheists who are hanging around in the town square and says, you know, God is dead, we've killed him. And the atheists all laugh at him. And he says, No, no, you don't understand. We've killed God. And then it rather domesticates the passage to summarize it this way, but he essentially goes on to say, we've got rid of God, and therefore everything changes. Everything's up for grabs. We have to become gods ourselves. There is no there is nothing out there to which we are accountable. We ourselves have to step up to the challenge. Now, what uh Nietzsche's doing there is he's calling the bluff of the Enlightenment. He's saying the Enlightenment got rid of God, but wanted to keep, broadly speaking, Christian morality. Wanted to keep, you know, the ideas of not telling lies, uh being continent, treating other people with respect. And Nietzsche's saying, no, all of that stuff, all of the that that stable morality was actually grounded in God. And if you get rid of God, the madman says it, it's like unhitching the earth from the sun.
SPEAKER_03Wow.
SPEAKER_02You just go spinning off into darkness. Now, Nietzsche thinks that's a great thing. He thinks this is the moment that human beings can rise up and transcend themselves. But he he's on to a really good point there. Uh, it's a point, of course, that Dostoyevsky will make in his novels. It's the point that Solzhenitsyn is making in the uh uh the famous Harvard Address, to which Rodre alludes in a foreword to my book, that when you get rid of God or when you forget God, you really have no grounds for the polite morality that keeps society ticking along. Everything is up for grabs at that point. So that's the uh uh that's the idea of borrowed capital. I think Nietzsche has another passage where he says, you know, after Buddha died, after the Buddha died, his shadow stayed on the walls of the cave, terrifying people for 400 years. And the point he's making there is God is dead, but we're still terrified of his shadow. We still won't step up and be gods ourselves. Nietzsche was writing that over 120 years ago. We're now at the point where we're stepping up to do that, and it's a rather terrifying prospect.
unknownVery good.
SPEAKER_02In terms of complicity, the example I would use is uh I do this with the the kids in in Grove when I'm teaching the humanities course, and I'll say to you know, when was marriage redefined in the United States? And instinctively they'll say 2015, Obergefell versus Hodges gay marriage. And I'll say no. It was actually redefined in 1970 in the state of California when Ronald Reagan signed No Fault Divorce into law. Wow. When Ronald Reagan effectively said, you can get divorced for a good reason, or you can get divorced for no reason at all. What no fault divorce does is it turns marriage into a sentimental bond for the mutual convenience of the two people contracting it? Children don't count, etc., etc. If you think of it that way, then I I think the difficult question for us is how many of our churches have taken no fault divorce seriously? Incredible. How many of our churches have taken steps to deal with members who've gone through no fault divorces now? Wow. Marriage troubles are always difficult, and I, you know, I I I'm not pointing my finger at any particular person here, but say if you've sat lightly on the notion of no-fault divorce, if you've allowed yourself to be complicit in giving a thumbs up to that, then you're complicit in that culture of expressive individualism that makes individual happiness the be-all and end all, which is really one of the foundational principles of the chaos we see around us at the moment. So that would be a good example for me of where the church is being complicit. We'll probably think of other examples, but that one pinches particularly because I think most of us, when we think of that, think, yeah, actually, me or my church, we're pretty compromised on that point. We're complicit in this culture.
SPEAKER_00Justin, for us, we so both of us are. I just turned 36 the other day. Justin's 29. Most of our team would fall in that that age range. Um, and our contributors are older with with gray in their beards and wiser men. But what you just did is take the mind of the millennial, uh, maybe even the Gen Xers down, the millennial and all the first thing I think of is 2015. And I don't think back to 1970 because I wasn't even a twinkle in my mother's eye yet. And you just absolutely rewire the thinking, and then it's convicting because I in some conservative churches, of course, we we uh walk people through biblical divorce versus unbiblical divorces and all of that, but in the end, I have not heard really ever. You hear a lot about overturn Roe versus Wade, you hear a lot of hearkening back to things. I don't hear a lot of outcry over no fault divorce or even the thought that when you take marriage and you give it the easy out and you look back at it makes so much more sense. Incredible wisdom.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. And uh, Carl, I had a question for you. Within the last decade, and probably the last handful of years, we've seen an increase of people being more public with uh them being homosexual or transgender. Um, why is the trans lifestyle, the sexual revolution, and the LGBTQ culture that we're seeing everywhere, why is it so explosive today?
SPEAKER_02Yeah, I mean, that's uh that's a long, it takes me 400 pages to tell that story. That's uh that's a big question. But I I would point to a couple of things, I think, that that sort of lie in the immediate background. One of them is uh really at the last hundred years, really since Freud, uh, the West has come to conceive of sexual desire as fundamental to our identity. One of the things I say to the students is, you know, you'll you'll hear this said, and you hear it said by gay people. You know, there was homosexuality in ancient Greece. I I did classics at university. Yeah, there was a lot of homosexuality in ancient Greece, but but no ancient Greek defined themselves by their sexual desire. They didn't think of themselves as gay. They were men who engaged in homosexual activity. Homosexuality was something they did. With Freud, you get the idea that our sexual desire is actually fundamental to our identity. Wow. And that's important because it means that that language about being gay can kind of make sense and come to grip the imagination at that point. Uh and this is why sometimes Christians will say we don't approve of homosexuality, but we don't approve of greed either. But greed is not typically how we identify ourselves. You know, society doesn't press greed as an identity category upon us. Uh so I think that the the idea of sex as identity, the emergence of that in the last century is very important. And following on from that, of course, as soon as you make sexual desire uh a matter of your identity, then restrictions on sexual behavior take on a singular importance. They become oppressive. So if you are somebody who, you know, I think the the parlance we use in the church often now is if you struggle with same-sex attraction, uh the church telling you that's wrong and you mustn't indulge in that is effectively saying to you, you cannot be who you are. You must change your identity. And that's uh a huge thing. That's not like saying to the greedy man, you need to be more generous with your money, or to the angry man, you need to control your temper more. In in neither of those cases uh uh is that person hearing, because of the sort of cultural framework they're working in, they're hearing, you need not to be you, but to be somebody completely different. Uh with the case of uh of sexuality, it's become an identity issue. And that gives it significant political importance, and that of course is how it plays out then in the political sphere. Really emerges in the late 1960s, the student rebellions of 1968, etc., where very clearly political liberation gets linked to sexual liberation and sets up the play for really what the world in which we are we are living today, also, of course, sets up the play for religious freedom and freedom of speech coming under huge pressure. It's one thing for uh religion to uh to object to certain behaviors, you know, society can tolerate that. But when it comes to objecting to somebody's identity, that is seen as a much more socially subversive and dangerous thing. And that's why all of a sudden we're finding freedom of speech and freedom of religion that 30 years ago Bill Clinton was signing legislation on these things to safeguard them because they were seen as being goods for the Commonwealth, uh, are now being seen as bad things because this identity issue changes, changes everything. Uh the other side of the answer, of course, to that is why is exploding. Highly organized political lobbying as well, strong communities that uh advocated strongly uh for their position in a culture that is naturally sympathetic towards the victims and the marginalized and the oppressed. Uh it's a it's a brilliant sort of political organizational tale as well.
SPEAKER_01And off of that, too, like you you start to see cartoons starting to include this and TV shows and commercials, and the culture is just embracing this. Um and because of that, I feel like there's a lot of pressure on the local church. And now all of a sudden we have Christians who are identifying as gay, trans, homosexual. Um, how would you what advice would you give to um members of a local church and even pastors who are finding themselves in conversations with people who are calling themselves Christians, but also trying to identify in this manner?
SPEAKER_02Yeah, that's very hard. And and again, you know, I was a pastor myself for some years, not a very good one, I don't think. So I hesitate to give sort of definitive advice to any other pastor. But one thing that I did learn as a pastor was every situation is unique. So it's very difficult to say, here is the, you know, you pull the lever and and and this is the answer. But I would say a couple of things should be borne in mind in any engagement with somebody like that. First of all, above all, you've you've got to bear in mind you're dealing with a human being made in the image of God here, uh, and somebody who is as fallen as you are. So I think that should automatically uh give you a natural uh sympathy for that person as they struggle with their issues, as you're inevitably struggling with yours. Uh secondly, I think you need to make a uh sort of flowing from the first, then a clear distinction. Uh there's a clear distinction in my mind between uh the LGBTQ plus movement as a political movement, as an ideology, and individuals who are struggling with that as their particular issue. And I say we give no quarter to the former and we give much compassion to the individuals in the latter. And that means, yeah, I think quite often what happens is we we get those two confused. So our compassion for the individual leads us to change our ethics because we don't want to hurt the individual, or our dislike and opposition to the ideology makes us harsh and unfeeling towards the individual. That's so caught up in this. And it's hard, yeah, it's hard to maintain that distinction, and the person you're talking to may not grant that it's even a legitimate distinction which can make it tough. But I think you need to bear that in mind. And then I think the the approach can only take place within the broader context of a friendship or a relationship of some kind. Uh, I think the the paradigmatic case of uh the conversion of a lesbian to Christianity is, of course, Rosaria Butterfield. And what's fascinating about her story is that it it took place within the context of a friendship. She'd had plenty of angry letters from Christian pastors telling her she was a sinner and needed to repent. She had one letter from a Christian pastor who invited her for a meal, and he and his wife struck up a friendship and were careful not to not to compromise their views, but not to make them a barrier to a friendship. And as difficult it is, is I think uh it's it's in the context of a personal relationship that you're able to speak these truths ultimately. And that's not easy, that's not hard, it's something we need to pray for supernatural wisdom for. And it could take many years, it may never bear any fruit. But I think the that combination of uh holding holding fast to the truth while yet uh doing it in the context of a loving and compassionate relationship that may look different for different people in different places at different times, that I think has to be uh part of the answer. to to the question you've asked.
SPEAKER_00Well you said you you weren't a very good pastor. You probably didn't make a very good one, but Carl, that's a great answer. And I think that's so helpful for many of us who are in the the trenches in local church ministry and um and trying to discern when to you know quote unquote let it fly. And and we're in an era where, especially in conservative circles, sort of a a a renaissance or a a rejuvenating look at preaching. Everyone wants to be a preacher now and we love the reformers and everybody wants to be John Knox and you know gimme Scotland or or I die, you know, all of that kind of stuff. Well in the end you're you're not always going to sit in your office and roar like a reformer at you know the Rosaria Butterfield sitting on the the chair there. You need to be pastoral and you convey the balance in that so well. So thank you. I a few things you said are really got me thinking and so I'll try to stay under control here with the barrage of questions. But um first things first what happens in your view and give us some insight and wisdom on what will happen if we continue to or do lose our freedom of speech, freedom of religion, because these issues have now become an identity and we're no longer just differing on moral ethics but we're actually saying well people think that we're saying you they're less human or they're not who they are.
SPEAKER_02What happens if we lose religion and speech freedom it's you know I I my get out here is always say I'm a historian. I explain how we got here I've no idea where we're going to uh so everything I say now is is just speculative. My own thought is that uh we're unlikely to see the kind of uh totalitarianism that was witnessed in in Russia uh under the Soviet Union or or even in China to some extent today relative to religion I I don't think in America that's coming anytime soon. I could be wrong uh I mean one should never say it can never happen here because it it could. But I I think America has pretty robust democratic institutions. I mean one of the remarkable things of the last election is it's actually proved positive in many ways that democracy still sort of works here. There is significant interest in the democratic process. So I I don't think we're going to see a sort of Stalinist dictator kind of approach. More likely I think is that which Rodre is pointing to in his more recent work Live Not by lies but sort of soft totalitarianism which really involves a kind of unpleasant and uncomfortable marginalization of I think traditional conservative voices and I include within those traditional conservative Christian voices. So I expect you see this already in some of the language being used when when people start talking about freedom of religion as freedom of worship rather than freedom of exercise that's an interesting linguistic shift because freedom of exercise means hey I could be a Christian seven days a week and go to worship on a Sunday freedom of worship has that feeling about it that you could do what you want in your church on a Sunday but it better not spill out into the workplace on a Monday morning or you're going to be in trouble. So I I I I think we could start to see we are seeing restrictions like that coming in. It's going to be harder to be a mainstream functioning member of society if one holds consistently and acts consistently on Christian convictions. That's something you know on one level we could say gay marriage well you know as a Christian I disagree with it but you know if there's a gay couple living next door to me to quote Thomas Jefferson it neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg. It doesn't have an immediate impact on the way I live my life transgenderism could have a very immediate impact on the way I live my life in terms of everything from bathroom policy to sports onwards. So I suspect that's where we're going to see uh marginalization coming. Having said that I don't want to be a total pessimist here. I do think that uh you know the only way you can tell uh whether a society gets more extreme or pulls back is whether it does one or the other. Maybe we'll pull back and I'm I I think at the transgender issue transgenderism is taking on so many political interests as well as you know the basics of nature itself that we could see in 30 40 years' time for example lawsuits being brought by kids today who are used as chemistry experiments by their by their trendy parents and they sue their parents they sue the doctors they sue the insurance companies I think that transgenderism may actually be an overreach. So on that front we could see we could see something of a reversal tragically it will involve incalculable human suffering before that comes about. But I I do think there are there are possibilities that aspects of this revolution may go into reverse at some point.
SPEAKER_00Yeah well ladies and gentlemen Dr. Carl Truman historian author and prophet as well um Carl no that's that's really well said I think everything you're describing actually makes sense there's a logic to what you're you're saying and I know it it it just personal thoughts but um if we were sitting in a private room with you know no microphones and no recording I think all of that would make sense and here I'm so glad people can hear that because um there's a lot of theory out there of course everybody gives their opinion and and we have the armchair theologian historian prophets on Twitter now and everywhere else who all have great prediction powers apparently to tell us the way society is and going to be and I think what you've painted is another thing that people don't often think of is um there is an element in 2030 years of replay where these things may come back to be open doors or opportunities to reach people to care for people for God to change hearts and change minds as you stated so another um sort of political question but not anything that I don't think you you couldn't handle the the element of lobbying you talked about the rise or explosive rise of the trans community and the LGBTQ community involved in that as well of lobbying government and some of that do you think that there is any use still um for Christians for the church to use lobbying and to try their best to be involved in the democratic process in order to stay the the the tsunami if you will of postmodern post-Christian thought absolutely uh one thing I learned I I had the privilege of spending a year at Princeton University to work on my book and uh on a program run by Robbie George the the professor of jurisprudence at Princeton and what struck me about Robbie was we'd have the group of us the fellows would have coffee with him each week and typically something disastrous had happened in the culture.
SPEAKER_02And Robbie's response was always okay what are we going to do about this? What are we going to do about this? How are we going to build networks? How are we going to respond to this? And never in a kind of you know let's grab our machine guns and storm Congress kind of work. It was always in a how do we work within the great American system to to make sure our voices are heard. It may ultimately prove a futile thing but we have these democratic processes let's use them I'm uh uh yeah I'm currently uh connecting with the Heritage Foundation in DC uh to do some work on transgender stuff uh it seems to me that groups like that there are distinctively Christian if you like but where Christians conservative Jews conservative uh you know atheists conservative Muslims may have some common concern uh on on social issues i i think it's it's good to have groups like that working I mean the alternative is we just give up yeah uh yeah you know we've got these silly websites where you have sort of 40 theonomists screaming and shouting about transforming the culture that's not going to transform the culture you know we we need to be working we need to be working uh working the angles within within a democratic society and uh I I think we need to try to be persuasive as well I've uh I've become convinced over the last year or two that the whole idiom of culture war is is probably the wrong idiom because it's not persuasive. I I teach kids at Grove City College, many of whom come from good Christian homes and are Christians themselves but the martial language of culture war isn't persuasive even to them as Christians. And I think we need is we we need to be thinking about persuasion. If we've got the truth it really should be powerful and persuasive in some way. So I would say yes Christians should be involved. I want to see Christians going into Congress. I want to see Christians writing good books I want to see Christians doing podcasts like yours where thoughtful engagement with uh with the culture is is taking place. None of this may succeed but I don't I don't want to go to heaven at the end and say you know Lord the world was going to hell in a handcart and I was very angry about it and shouted about it on the internet an awful lot. Yeah but I never did anything kind to try to persuade my neighbor that my view of the world is a good one. I was not involved in my community. I do think that all Christians should be engaged in some level at uh at showing the truth of Christ in in whichever way they can and that can come through the democratic process as well as helping my neighbor change his tire uh if he's got a puncture.
SPEAKER_01Well speaking of Christians being engaged in reading books um our audience is always looking to understand concepts and then apply those concepts to sharing the gospel living out the gospel so Carl how would a book like yours help someone be more inspired in their gospel witness or be more effective in reaching the world around them?
SPEAKER_02Sure well it's I mean it's a chunky book and uh I I am actually going to be producing an abbreviation which may be easier for people to read. But I would say the the the thing I was trying to do in my book was help clarify in in Christian minds exactly what's going on around them to see connections and to realize for example that you know in discussing homosexuality with a gay person the Christian may think they're talking about behavior. Gay person thinks they're talking thinks you're talking about identity. Identity so it was it was help I I wanted to help people to just to clarify the way the world thinks about itself. The gospel is the gospel and the gospel only has power because of it's accompanied by God's spirit uh but there is a sense in which we we do need to address the gospel to people where they are yeah when I preach in Western Pennsylvania I don't preach in Latin I preach in English because that's right understand English. And I think there are ways we can we can think about the gospel and present the gospel without compromising it which actually address some of the serious questions that people are asking. And to understand those questions to know what those questions are requires us to really understand the logic of the culture that has produced them produced us. So I would hope that my book will inform people in in clarify the the logic of the culture around them to allow them to address the eternal unchanging gospel to the specific context in which they find themselves.
SPEAKER_01Tremendous wisdom and what I what I really love about your book is that we oftentimes think that this is something that just sprung up out of nowhere in our culture. But in your book you you say this isn't a new idea this is something that's been reinvented from decades ago and and palatable for the culture today.
SPEAKER_02Yes uh we it's been a long time coming the idea that uh we are primarily what we are inside our heads that our feelings determine who we are that goes way back to Rousseau and the romantics the idea that those feelings are primarily sexual that's Freud uh the idea that that then plays directly into our identity and into politics that emerges in the 20th century. The story of human sin could have been told in a different way it didn't have to be this way every every era has its sinful manifestations its sinful way of thinking but this is the way our era thinks and what we're seeing now is more and more practical outworking of those basic shifts and changes.
SPEAKER_00Remarkable well Carl I can't thank you enough. I again a 400 page book but you have made it simple to understand and honestly when the abridged or shorter version comes out as well we want to give copies of that away on our podcast and we certainly will the episode today we're also going to give uh some copies away this week on social media of the book and uh where can people learn more about your work or get more from you?
SPEAKER_02Well I do the the weekly podcast that we had the pleasure of having you on sometime ago Mortification of spin if you just type Mortification of spin into a search engine you'll you'll find it um uh I do a lot of my writing on these kind of themes at first things if you if you look up the online it's actually a print magazine as well but there's an online webpage firstthings.com uh that will uh I write there every couple of weeks and also at public discourse and if I can give a plug for first things in public discourse I would say every Christian should subscribe to their email blast public discourse it's not always you know they're not distinctively Christian articles but they're always thoughtful ones addressing issues that are of concern to Christians and if you want to be informed in a world of of noise and media bias on both sides if you want some dispassionate conservative thoughtful uh commentary on today's world public discourse and first things I would I would recommend not just because I write for them uh but because they they they have a stable of writers who are engaging these these issues in a in a courteous mannerly but but solid kind of way.
SPEAKER_00Wonderful I think of Paul the Apostle as you're describing that in the way that he was able in different contexts to dialogue with different audiences, ask different questions and reason. And really that would I want to echo Carl's encouragement go ahead and subscribe on first things in public discourse and get an idea of the way people are thinking in the communities around you and in different uh worldviews and thought patterns because if at the very least you don't agree you now have the ability to ask questions and thoughtful intellectual questions to trigger conversation and lead that into sharing the gospel and understanding what is inside of a person's head. Carl thank you thank you again we'll certainly have you on again in the future thanks so much it's been a real pleasure to get together with you guys. Awesome well Justin thanks for your insights your questions being here uh this week again we're giving away Dr. Truman's book on social media so stay up to date there be sure to follow subscribe and share this episode and what is happening on social media and as well check out the podcast on platforms like Apple, Spotify or wherever you do your podcasting and we're on YouTube as well and don't forget TikTok I still haven't convinced Carl to do any type of video for us but we're gonna work on him and we'll see if we can get him to more on the For the Gospel podcast next week. Thank you for listening today