Men of Virtue | Zachary Wagner

In this episode of the Pastor Theologians podcast, we welcome one of our own, Zach Wagner, to discuss his new book, Men of Virtue: How the Fruit of the Spirit Forms Male Character in the Modern World. Zach reflects on his decade of ministry with CPT, his transition into a new season, and the journey behind writing a book that reframes conversations about masculinity through the lens of Christian virtue.

Rather than focusing on cultural ideals of manhood, Zach explores how the fruit of the Spirit—love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, gentleness, and self-control—forms a distinctly Christian vision of male character. The conversation examines the modern crisis of meaning, competing narratives around masculinity, and how following Jesus challenges both the denigration and idolization of masculine identity.

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Transcript

Zach Wagner 2:32

If you want to be a godly man, focus on being godly, not manly. Because your manliness is not next to your godliness. Like become more masculine or virile or more respected by the men around you. And Jesus says thumbs up. I actually don't know if that's always going to be true.

Joel Lawrence 2:56

Hello, everyone. Welcome to the Center for Pastor Theologians podcast. I'm Joel Lawrence. I serve as the president of the CPT. And I'm here with Rae Paul, who is our Director of Operations. Welcome back to the podcast, Rae.

Rae Paul 3:11

Thank you. Glad to be back.

Zach Wagner 3:14

And normally Zach Wagner would be the one doing this introduction. But today I am because Zach is our special guest today. He has a new book out called Men of Virtue: How the Fruit of the Spirit Forms Male Character in the Modern World. So we're looking forward to having a conversation with Zach. Welcome, Zach. Great to be here on the other side of the table, as it were.

Joel Lawrence 3:38

As it were. Yeah.

Zach Wagner 3:39

A s it were. We are not, in fact, at a table.

Joel Lawrence 3:45

We are not. Virtual table. Virtual table. Virtual table. Before we dive into the book conversation, we did want to give a CPT update. Let those of you who are regular listeners of the podcast who hear Zach on the podcast all the time let you know that his role with the CPT is coming to a conclusion at the end of June. Last fall, Zach and I started having conversations where he was thinking about some stirrings in his spirit of potentially exploring other directions. And through those conversations, we've we uh agreed that this would be a good time for him to move forward. So, Zach, I do just want to say, on behalf of the CPT, our fellows, the podcast listeners, uh thanks so much for everything you've done for CPT. Um Zach will continue to be a fellow of the Center for Pastor Theologians. And as he continues to crank out books, we will have him back on the podcast. But but again, Zach, thanks so much for all you've done and uh blessings as you move forward.

Zach Wagner 4:56

Yeah, thank you. It's been an honor truly and a pleasure um to be at CPT for uh 10 years last month, which is pretty wild.

Joel Lawrence 5:05

Yeah.

Zach Wagner 5:06

It's wild. Yeah. And as you were signaling, I've I've just had a sense of the Lord leading elsewhere and really appreciate the conversations you and I have had about that. And um that came in conjunction with me finishing up and defending my D Phil uh late last summer is is kind of when this process started. So um I I this podcast in particular is one of the things I'm gonna miss for sure. And being able to hang out with you, Joel, and uh talk to people about books and hear our fellows talk about their stories and their ministry and the way the Lord is working in their lives. So uh it's been it's been really great. And I'm I'm sad to be moving on in that sense, for sure.

Joel Lawrence 5:51

Well, we'll we will we will miss you. It it is nice that you still will be just around the corner from Calvary.

Zach Wagner 5:56

 I'll be close enough.

Joel Lawrence 5:56

You'll be close enough to our home our home church, so we'll still be connected in life as we move forward. But Rae, this makes you this will make you the longest standing employee of the Center for Pastor Theologians.

Zach Wagner 6:11

So among active players, this is the same thing. That's what I mean. That's what I mean.

Rae Paul 6:18

I have 15 days on Joel is the punchline.

Joel Lawrence 6:21

And apparently never lets me forget it. So yeah.

Zach Wagner 6:27

This is like my wife, um this is like my wife Shelby holding over me that she's 10 days older than me. So whenever the kids ask,

Rae Paul 6:33

You gotta take what what wins you got.

Zach Wagner 6:35

Yeah, mummy's older than daddy. So yeah.

Joel Lawrence 6:38

That's right. All right, Zach. So we're here to talk about your new book, uh Men of Virtue, um, published by Brazos Press. Official release date is May 27th.

Zach Wagner 6:51

26th

Joel Lawrence 6:52

Is that correct? 26th, sorry. May 26th. So probably people will be hearing this after that date, but it will be out in the wild at that point in time. I am I am holding my own copy. We at the CPT, our the St. Basil Fellowship that Zach's a part of, we got uh copies a few weeks ago at our fellowship gathering. So we were able to get advanced copies. Um Zach, you wrote a book, came out a couple years ago called Non-Toxic Masculinity.

Zach Wagner 7:21

Yes.

Joel Lawrence 7:21

And this this question of masculinity, which is a huge question in our culture right now, uh a big question, I think, in all generations, but I would say particularly in your generation and some of the emerging generations.

Speaker 7:38

Yeah.

Joel Lawrence 7:38

Um, can you just give us a little bit of the background um of this book in particular, how it links to non-tax non-toxic masculinity? Sure. And kind of how you sense you're speaking into this cultural moment and what you want to bring to that.

Zach Wagner 7:55

Sure. I mean, huge kind of personal context as well as church context, generational context, um, national context, truly, to all of this. But I'll try to keep it focused on this book. The the first book I wrote came out in 2023 and was focused mostly on questions related to male sexuality and and dating and relationships, marriage, sex within marriage, um, abstinence or chastity, which is kind of my preferred term. And in that book, I was trying to replace this kind of purity narrative where you kind of white knuckle it while you're single and then uh go nuts, presumably, if you get married. Uh discipleship narrative that was really formative, I think, in the 90s and the aughts, which is around when my generation, millennials, were being discipled into uh sexuality. So replacing that kind of purity paradigm with a growth into maturity in Christ paradigm is what I'm trying to do in that first book. But it is um, in that sense, at least, narrowly focused on male sexuality and eroticism, even like uh that that kind of experience of that part of our humanity. Um, but it was not, and in this sense, maybe the title's a bit of a misnomer, but we don't we don't pick our own titles as authors. Um, they're chosen for us by the publisher. It is not a specifically by the marketers. Absolutely. Yes, yes, the the uh certain department at the publishing house picks the title. Um and the subtitle, I think, is very descriptive of what's in the first book for sure. But um it's not this kind of full view. What does it mean to be a godly man or what does it mean to be a quote unquote non-toxic man um beyond uh merely these kind of questions related to sexual integrity or purity and uh maturity and all of that? So that was one of the questions I got a lot is like, hey, you talk a lot about sex in this book, and maybe whoever I was talking to appreciated or didn't appreciate what I might have written there. Um but like kind of I would get these broader questions. What does it mean to be a godly man? What is quote unquote biblical masculinity? How do we cultivate a godly version of manhood in the modern world? And um I had I had I was happy to engage those conversations, but I had assumed I was done with writing about this uh after the first book. And then um I was I was headhunted by um an editor over at Braz at Brazos, um Katelyn Beaty, who's uh a friend, a friend of CPT. We've had her around for a couple things and had her on the podcast in the past, if I'm not if I'm not mistaken. Um she kind of asked, like, hey, what are you what are you up to? What are you gonna write next? And I said, I don't know, but it's not gonna be on masculinity. And then we went back and forth, and she was like, she disagreed. Yeah, she disagreed. And I and we went back and forth, and she managed to, not like convince me or talk me into it, although it genuinely she did, but more to the point, over the course of the conversation, and I just think the email exchange, um, or maybe we spoke on the phone, I don't recall exactly. Something that came out was well, if I were to do something, it would be on kind of new New Testament virtue, vision of virtue, and the character traits of godliness and as those relate to masculinity. I don't know, like something on the fruit of the spirit. And she's like, I think that's a really promising idea. And we went back and forth. And what emerged out of that was um this contract to write a book on masculinity framed specifically around the fruits of the spirit. And I agreed to it because that was an idea that genuinely excited me and felt uh relevant and uh uh distinct from the books that I was reared on that tend to focus a lot on role and what makes men and women different and what makes the kind of biblical instruction towards men distinct from the biblical instruction towards women. And um I I think the something like the fruits of the spirit are really instructive for us, all of us, to remind ourselves of in this cultural moment. But I think particularly in the conversations around men and masculinity. So um yeah, Katelyn talked me into it, and and here it is a few years later, a few years later. Um, but I'm I'm really grateful for the process and the opportunity and and excited about the book.

Joel Lawrence 12:53

So you're you're the the the beginning of the book in the introduction, uh, you know, as you're setting out the framework, the the crisis of meaning is a key theme. And that's a theme that's you know running all over our culture these days. Like we're living in a world that has lost a sense of meaning. The stories that have narrated the world for us have lost their force.

Zach Wagner 13:15

Yes.

Joel Lawrence 13:16

And now we're we're all kind of trying to figure out what's the narrative, what's the force. Tell tell us a little bit, just at a again, a kind of a bigger picture how you're understanding the crisis of meaning and then how that particularly is playing out in in uh the crisis of masculinity.

Zach Wagner 13:37

Totally. Maybe three things come to mind three books, I suppose. Um there's been a lot of shifts, and I know you, Joel, you think about this a lot. Um in the past kind of 150 years or so. But you can like when do you timestamp this? You can go back to the Enlightenment or the Protestant Reformation or kind of the rise of modernity or the Industrial Revolution. There's there's been it's really about modernity, is what it is. And I think you could identify late modernity as perhaps kind of post-industrial revolution, or you could identify it as post-internet. I don't know. Like the this is the the conversation, it seems to me. And I'm in the read of uh the middle of reading Paul Kingsnorth's new book. My wife and I are reading through that, and he talks in there quite a bit about the kind of meaning structures of Christendom, which is a category that he's not completely uncritical of. Um, but Christendom has has been replaced by this machine world that we're living in. And I think a knock-on effect of that is that the meaning making associated with all sorts of things, up and down society, that were taken for granted in Christendom have more or less been jettisoned. And we've been kind of running on the fumes of Christendom in the West around um all sorts of things. And I think gender, sex, and and masculinity and femininity are certainly in that bucket. And I think now we're genuinely to continue the metaphor, you know, we're running on fumes, and I think we're running out of steam or something like that, on what does it mean to be human, which again has knock-on effects for what does it mean to be male and female. And um relatedly, uh so I don't talk about King Kingnorth's book, came out too recently, so I don't talk about him in the book. Uh, but I do talk quite a bit about Alistair McIntyre's After Virtue, which is making kind of a similar argument in the sense of we've lost our moral virtue ethics framework in the West. And um kind of a Nietzschean read has has won out over and against an Aristotelian one, and uh where we we've lost the roots that put us into a story that made sense of who what type of people we ought to be and how we ought to live. And in particular, the kind of uh broadly Western, but specifically Christian roots of that story. I I'll I think I'll just add a couple other things. I'm thinking also about Charles Taylor's Sources of the Self, is a big, is a big kind of influence here. You know, Tom Holland narrates the kind of Christian roots of lots of our ideas. This is getting a little too long. I'll I'll pivot, I'll pivot to masculinity in particular, because I think there's this broader crisis of meaning, but then it kind of is refracted and and focused and even reaches uh uh genuinely a crisis point in a unique way with the technological advances of the past 150 years. So I've already alluded to the industrial revolution a couple times, but then I think the sexual revolution, invention of the birth control pill, the kind of explicit questioning and upturning of a lot of mores related to gender and sexuality, and then the technological revolution of the past 30 years or so, or even kind of reaching a fever pitch now with AI. The unique contributions of male embodiment in particular are less and less obvious by the day or by the year at least. It used to be being the societal contribution with all its downsides for sure of wars and rumors of wars, but like men built things, men cut things, they cut trees down, men did uh hard manual labor. And it there was a kind of intuitive, well, that makes sense to the world when you looked at female embodiment and particularly childbearing and child rearing, and the way women's bodies are uniquely suited to that. And then men's bodies, which are you know good at chasing a boar and killing it and bringing back food for everybody and building shelter and doing hard work in the fields, and you're like, well, you can see the wisdom of God's design, quote unquote, in the way this is split out. And there's uh an appreciation and a reverence for the unique contribution of female embodiment as well as male embodiment. Well, women are still the only ones who have babies. So there's a there's a meaning making there of a kind for femininity that I think has increasingly become less clear on the masculine side of things. And combine that with lots of not so um not so flattering kind of cultural discourse and discussion about men and masculinity. And I think it has men in a unique aimlessness and um aggrievedness and confusion. And even like if it's well-intentioned, hey, I just want to live well and and and succeed and flourish and have a good life, or from a Christian perspective, I just want to follow God and do what um Jesus would have me do with my life. And the answers to that have just become less and less clear, it seems to me, yeah, in the last uh century and a half or so.

Rae Paul 21:34

Zach, I'm curious, because I think the the com the loss of meaning conversation, whether or not that language is explicitly in a number of books targeted towards men of the last 10, 20 years. I think a lot of them found a way to address that by leaning into the role conversation, by trying to say, as you've lost your role or the male archetype of whatever role you were supposed to have, here's here's a return to the warrior, here's a return to the leader, here you know, there's all the ways in which the role has just kind of doubled down on uh and and leaned into. Why start on the character side of things? Why not just throw your hat in the ring of all the other role conversations?

Zach Wagner 22:19

Um well, one reason simply is that it's been done to death. And I wasn't all that interested in writing that book. Like there's been there's been a million, a million books published on kind of litigating the biblical passages that describe male and female quote unquote roles and what the implications are for family or church or society more broadly. People tend to be pretty kind of like have their view on that anyway. So I think a lot of the books that get published there are just more or less read by people who already agree with the conclusion or people who disagree just so they can write up their critique. So that's m maybe that's a little cynical, but I think it's pretty true.

Joel Lawrence 23:11

Um number one, still be it could be cynical and true at the end. And true, yeah. Yeah, yeah.

Zach Wagner 23:18

So uh yeah, I didn't have a ton of interest in in doing that. And and frankly, um, you know, not to throw shade on anybody who does this, but me personally, I find it just a little boring um because it's so done to death and um not something I could kind of sustain the interest or the passion to put a book project together on. But you're right that I think a lot of the books have that exist in the kind of masculinity space in particular, whether they're litigating role or prescribing a role, oftentimes they kind of double down on it. And I'd put, yeah, I'd put like the most popular Christian book written for men ever, Wild at Heart by John Eldridge. Um, you know, he's not talking about roles and biblical passages. He's not exegeting much of anything, frankly. And I have really mixed feelings about John Eldridge, but I do think he's kind of doubling down on this like church is boring and men need to recapture their sense of like virility and warrior spirit and adventure, and like go camp and think about your relationship with your dad, hunt a deer, uh, watch Braveheart, cry a little bit, and you'll you'll kind of recapture something that's been lost. And like, I don't know, I I think it's fine. Um, and I think there's something that is there's genuinely some wisdom and like fatherly sage wisdom in sometimes boys or young men need to be invited into a more adventurous kind of even even pre-modern, pre-industrial spirit to get in touch with who they are and who God has made them to be. But I get really nervous, frankly, when we use language like men are created in the image of God, and the Bible says that God is a warrior, so men are warriors. Like, and this is this is the kind of Eldridge approach. And I think it's refracted, it's it's us reading our ideas about what masculinity ought to be back into scripture rather than like inhabiting a gospel story. So that's number one. I would also say, like, someone like uh Nancy Pearcy's book, The Toxic War on Masculinity, How Christianity Reconciles the Sexes, the subtitle has nothing to do with what's actually in the book. But the uh title, like her thing is she talks about this crisis of meaning, and I think she has some, and she pins it on the Industrial Revolution in particular, but she um is doing a lot of the men used to be, it used to be assumed that men were the head of the household, and men derived a lot of meaning from that role. And if we could allow men to live back into that role and honor their place in the home as heads of household, there would be all these positive benefits for society and for the mental. Health of men and the flourishing of men, and we wouldn't, we wouldn't denigrate them or insult them nearly as much if we just remembered that the kind of divinely prescribed role is head of household. Sure. But it of course begs the question that the divinely prescribed role is head of household. Um, and I again I'm not litigating that. And when I do talk about that in the book, I say, you have some of your opinions about this. I'm trying to do something different with this book. I'm not going to convince you of my view on that. You probably already think what you think. I do want to draw our attention back to these kind of core virtues of godliness and the example of Jesus, uh the model of Jesus, the way of Jesus, um, the fruit of the spirit, um, as opposed to the works of the flesh. These really robust New Testament themes that I really think need to be more central in our vision of what it means to be a godly man rather than a more culturally situated what is your role or what is your standard of masculinity. So, what I'm trying to do is um say focus, if you want to be a godly man, focus on being godly, not manly. Because your manliness is not next to your godliness. Like become more masculine or virile or more respected by the men around you, and Jesus says thumbs up. I I actually don't know if that's always going to be true.

Joel Lawrence 28:00

So so that takes us into the structure of the book, which is around the fruit of the spirit. Um, and and as you as you lay it out, kind of you had, you know, you have chapters on the different the different fruits of the spirit that you're articulating. And I think it's probably fair to say, like even in the role conversation, when society was structured around men as men as the head of the household, it's not like that itself produced character, produced virtue. You had bad heads of the household, right? Like they may have been heads of the household and they may have gotten some meaning from that, but it was they were bad people, lots of bad men heading households. So you're taking us to something else. You're taking us to this character conversation, the f fruit of the spirit conversation, and then asking how that inflects through masculinity in this particular case. So talk us through that some more about how does grounding this conversation in the fruit of the spirit and virtue then help us to see what masculinity is and and how that should be understood in our in our conception of what it means to be a human male.

Zach Wagner 29:21

Yeah. Yeah, it's well, it is a Christian conversation in the sense that masculinity is a, you know, there's not a single essential masculinity. There are masculinities, plural, that we all inherit in our unique context or even family system or culture, or you know, 1960s America is very different than 2020s America, and 2020 America is very different from some other global cultural context, or even within the states, depending on your, you know, there are different American cultures. There's not one unified American culture, and it's not. It's it's it's very clear that Americans don't agree on what is masculine or how men ought to be. So I do get nervous when there's an aspiration towards like manliness or masculinity just without qualification or like full stop, as if that necessarily were a good thing. What I want to do is shift, again, the conversation from let's make Christian men more manly to what is a genuinely Christian vision for masculinity? If we do have a vision for masculinity, what would make it Christian as opposed to the counterfeit, dehumanizing, pagan, you know, imperial, culturally captured, whatever you want to say messages out there, or just even the lack of a vision for masculinity, which I think is a ditch that we see in all sorts of parts of the culture, too, and we see the negative knock-on effects of that as well. So um what I yeah, you use the word inflected, I I believe. So something I say or argue in the book is that there's there's a an embodied distinction between men and women that I think is a core tenet of the Christian faith and puts pushes back on all sorts of counter narratives in the culture. Um but Christians believe that embodiment is good, and we believe that our created our creation as sexed beings, men and women, is good. And the clear is so from a Christian perspective, we ought to need to have a heritage that requires us to affirm the goodness of male embodiment. And that, it seems to me, pushes back against this kind of like men are toxic, men need to act more like women narrative on the one hand, but I think it also pushes back on this kind of in in more indulgent lean into your manly virility masculinity narrative that we see in the culture as well, maybe on the other side of the ideological political spectrum, and says, no, men also are called to, as Christians, certainly, put to death the deeds of the flesh and uh not live according to things that are contrary to the kingdom of God and cultivate in themselves Christ-like virtue as um brought about in them by the Spirit of God. So the way gentleness or kindness or self-control or love is expressed by men, I believe can and does, and to some extent should look differently than it does as expressed by women. And it's not as if our sex or our gender is the only way that those things are refracted differently. It's also refracted differently, again, through our context or our culture or our content, um our you know, the congregation we're a part of, or the needs that are are there or our gifting and our skills. But also, I think our temperament, um, our personality is every bit as much a um a lens through which the fruit of the spirit is refracted as our gender is. So we're all human, and then we're men or women, male or female human beings. There's no androgynous, non-sexed way to be human, at least this side of the eschaton, depending on who you ask on the other side of the eschaton, we'll we'll see.

Joel Lawrence 33:53

That's another that's another conversation.

Zach Wagner 33:55

Yeah, we can go Augustine versus origin on that down the line. But the um origin doesn't matter. Um, so there's no non-sexed human existence. So all of us are called as to be disciples and to follow Jesus, and that's refracted through our sex on one hand, but sort of it's also refracted through our temperament and our personality on the other, as well as our culture. But the the call to follow Christ is the same, but the way it looks um might be a little different. And I I think we'll be helped in these conversations if we focus less on perhaps what makes men and women different, but um no, let me say that a different way. If we focus less on the limited biblical data about distinct instructions for men and women, and more on the unified call to exhibit these virtues.

Rae Paul 34:52

Zach, I know you had an opportunity in the writing of this to workshop through the virtues with a men's group here at Calvary. And I and I know obviously just even your personality of being able to have these conversations with a variety of people. In the process of this, did you find a folks associating certain virtues more easily with manhood or masculinity? Were there any that you found it was more work essentially to get someone to think of how this interacts with or is enacted as a man?

Zach Wagner 35:27

Yeah, I mean, much and every way. I was I was grateful. It was really a great group of guys with a nice generational and kind of cultural background spread to have these, and it's fascinating to have conversations with them. But yeah, you would get some pushback, for instance, when you're talking about gentleness, where someone will not, you know, these are these are good and godly men. So they're not gonna say like men shouldn't be gentle, but they would say, like, well, the man's role in the parenting relationship, for example, is to be firm. And and the mom, you know, she'll she'll be a little more lax, and that's that's good and appropriate for her to be gentle, but it's not always good for a father to be gentle. And you know, that's that's probably not verbatim what was said, but that was some of the the vibe a little bit. My my editor Katelyn, she and I had conversation early in the early going, like there's gonna be a bit of an uphill battle, to your point, Rae, of commending some of these virtues to a male audience. You know, love, joy, peace. She uh I remember her saying this, sounds like you know, this is like a Christmas card. This is not like, all right, guys, let's lock in and be more joyful and full of peace.

Rae Paul 36:48

If you found it on a sign in a craft store, it's not for guys.

Zach Wagner 36:52

Yeah, yeah. Live, laugh, love, joy, peace. It's at Joann's. Yes, exactly. This is not this is not a Dick Sporting Goods or or Bass Pro Shop or anything like that. Yeah, you're not you're not saying like, yeah, whatever, we can stop there. Um the the But that's uh frankly, that's part of what makes the conversation so interesting to me is like what if if our vision of masculinity is such that we hear like these nine virtues and the fruits of the spirit, and we're like, eh, no, thanks. That that's like a red flag to me. Um it it's a it's a signal that what we're really after is something else, some culturally situated standard of masculinity that's not the way of Jesus. And we're trying to reverse engineer like that 100%. Yeah. So I like if you find the fruit of the spirit like unhelpful or offensive as it relates to Christian masculinity, I'm not sure like Christian masculinity is the thing you're after.

Joel Lawrence 37:57

Yeah, yeah. It I mean, it and it gets back to the the the narratives, it gets back to the question of of meaning of and I and I think this is why this is so particularly helpful and an important book in this moment, when there is, as you have the hegemony of certain structures of the way that we understand the world, as that is is is disintegrating, there is a ton of narratives running in to take over this meaning of making. But what we've not really done, in my view, and this is you know a broader thing, but but in this case, like in that conversation with those guys, what an opportunity to say. If you find gentleness, which is commended to us by the apostle Paul in his vision of what it means to be human and live out the work of the spirit, if you find that challenging to get your mind around what narrative

Zach Wagner 38:56

Jesus the describes himself that way is is is worth noting as well. Yeah.

Joel Lawrence 39:01

So so what narrative is competing for your vision of what it means to be human? Um and and and and how can that be an opportunity for the church, for men, for women, for all of us together to ask these questions and which go beyond this to ecclesial questions and and our understanding of of what it means to be disciples. And so that's why I think your book is so helpful and important here, because it is aiming at men in the masculinity crisis. But what you're actually also what you're you're tapping into is this much bigger question I think is facing the church, which is which narratives have we been captured by? Which narratives are we trying to fit discipleship into that are keeping us from actually following after Jesus?

Zach Wagner 39:49

Yeah. Yeah. And it's it's a challenging line to walk in some ways. I alluded to this earlier in our conversation, but I I do share some of the concerns that folks who are kind of loudest in this masculinity revisioning masculinity, the church has been quote unquote feminized, or we as a culture just kind of hate men, certainly in kind of a progressive mainstream. I was reading a really interesting article a day or two ago as a review of the very popular show on HBO called The Pit, which is set in a in an emergency room. And it's there's there's some pretty patronizing stuff uh directed at men in particular, and arguably some not so sympathetic. It's a great show, truly, but it it's also working with some talking points, uh, shall we say. And um I think there is a genuine crisis that we're facing in in terms of a denigration of everything we assume to be masculine, and saying we don't have space for this anymore in our culture, and this is bad and needs to be suppressed. And you see the kind of negative fallout of that in the stats in educational attainment and fatherlessness and deaths of despair and drug uh drug use and overdose and um unemployment. Like it's a really grim picture when you look at the stats related to men in particular right now. So I want to, and that's why I say the Christian tradition I think finds the balance between these extremes of like denigrating and suppressing and um denying the goodness of male embodiment on the one hand. As Christians, we can't go there, as well as commending a challenging, like genuinely challenging and difficult and countercultural, at least in a certain sense, vision of what godly character looks like. And this is last thing I'll say here, this is kind of essentialized in the New Testament authors and Jesus' disposition towards strength. On one level, you could say, what does it mean to be a man? Like what is the essential distinctive of male bodies? Well, in general, they're about 15% larger, stronger, and faster than female bodies. So strength would rank would rate high, or rank high rather, on a what does it mean to be a man, at least in distinction from what it means to be a woman. Well, it means you're strong. But then, you know, in the New Testament, you see Jesus not describing himself as strong, but as gentle, even weak and lowly. Um, he submits himself to crucifixion in a kind of maximally emasculating form of execution and doesn't defend himself, even though Peter wants to. He rejects the kind of zealot rise up against Rome uh narrative of his own day. And Paul in the New Testament says, uh, I mean, we could talk about Philippians too with Jesus, but we'll skip that and go straight to Paul in 1 Corinthians. Says, God has chosen the weak things of this world to save the or to shame the strong, rather. And um, you know, this is why Origen and others, when they're talking to kind of pagans uh uh understanding of Christianity, was um that it was kind of a feminine and servile religion. It was contrary to the Roman values of the world. And and Paul, and in his conversation with Jesus in 2 Corinthians 12, talks about um Jesus tells him that his power, Jesus' power, is completed by Paul's weakness, and Paul rejoices in his weakness. These are really difficult and challenging ideas for a vision of masculinity. And um I'm losing I'm losing the thread on your original question, Joel, or your original comment, but I think the the the balance here is I I think perhaps the most significant contribution of of the biblical New Testament narrative.

Rae Paul 44:32

Yeah. Zach, I'm thinking of the women in my life that I think I'd love to recommend this to, knowing that the title is

Zach Wagner 44:42

Is helpful because it's helpful because men don't read books.

Joel Lawrence 44:47

So get to get to the male audience, boost the sales with women.

Zach Wagner 44:52

You gotta do you gotta do a kind of a pincer movement to the male audience through a female audience. But I didn't agree.

Rae Paul 44:57

Which but this is where I think I want to give you the opportunity for a pitch of what would you want women to see and to receive from this?

Zach Wagner 45:08

Um all women have a stake, all women in the church, let's just leave it at that. I think all women in the church have a stake in the in the health and virtue of men in the church. Um certainly if you're a mother to boys, that's pretty clear. But if you're a woman who is friends with men, would like to marry a man someday, or is thinking about I don't I don't want to just kind of flatten it out to like just the romantic implications. But I do think it's good for women to have a sense of one, what makes maleness unique and what are responsible Christian way Christian ways of thinking about that. And I hope they would be helped in thinking about their own femininity in in engaging that conversation. Um and I also just think from a in terms of a justice orientation, men are suffering. And um, this is not to say that women aren't in their in their own ways in our kind of societal moment, but uh yeah, men are men are not in a good way right now. And I think that's some something women um should care about and be able to point and direct men towards and and kind of gently challenge uh men when they see them being captured by the kind of podcast circuit manosphere ideas that often masquerade as Christian when one of the things I argue is that they're much more pagan or neopagan than they are um built around the way of Jesus. So um, yeah, I mean it's in it's in the marketing copy, as it were, you know, for men and the women who love them. And uh I I do think this is I will say this this book is more giftable from a woman to a man than the last book was.

Joel Lawrence 47:11

Because yeah, that's not really intended, non- toxic masculinity by your wife.

Zach Wagner 47:16

This is something you should read. Um yeah, and that was, and I think there is an important conversation. There are important conversations to be had, I think, about sin patterns that we see replicated across the kind of men in the church and have that kind of negative conversation. But what I'm trying to do in this book is have a much more aspirational conversation about what men can be. And I think women have a role in shaping men towards that, shaping boys towards that, holding men to a standard in their relationships, whatever they may be, and um holding men accountable to no, if we're following Jesus together, this is what we uh expect of you and and want to help you grow up into.

Joel Lawrence 48:02

Well, Zach, thanks uh so much for joining us for the the podcast in this way. And again, thanks so much for all you've done to serve the Center for Pastor Theologians, to serve the church. I I do want to say uh part of what you're gonna be doing in the near term is is happy to promote the book, happy to go places and and and talk about the book. So, how could people get a hold of you if they wanted to invite you and come and speak to their church, speak to a retreat, what whatever that might look like?

Zach Wagner 48:34

Yeah, no, I'd love, I just want to underscore, I would love to do that. We recently did an event here at Calvary where we kind of had a pub talk about the book, and I talked about these these ditches that I see the culture going into. And I I had a ton of fun. The engagement was great. We had about 60 folks out for it, uh, which was a really, really great.

Rae Paul 48:53

Can confirm. Can't confirm.

Zach Wagner 48:55

I'm not just blowing steam, raised, raised like I was there. Um so that was good, and I'd love to do that at other churches, and I'm already I have a couple things scheduled, and I'm in in conversations with others about that. My website, personal website, is ZacharyCwagner.com, and there's a contact form on there, and I'd love to hear from you if you're interested in doing that. You can also I have a sub stack I've recently started where I'm talking a bit more about these ideas too, and folks can find me on there.

Joel Lawrence 49:24

It's great. Well, again, so um want to encourage folks, uh, get the book Men of Virtue, How the Fruit of the Spirit Forms Male Character in the Modern World. And I hope what folks have heard through this conversation is Zach's heart for men, but also for the church, for women, for the way that the church represents Christ in our culture. And again, I think this book speaks to masculinity, but it speaks beyond that as well. So I want to just really encourage folks to pick it up. And thanks for your endeavors in writing it, Zach. You wrote two books while also doing your doctoral dissertation, which I would not recommend to most people. Yeah, I wouldn't I would not either. Zach's one of the few I would uh that could pull that off. So appreciate you, brother.

Zach Wagner 50:13

Yep. Thanks for being here. Thanks for the conversation. Thanks for listening to today's episode of the CPT Podcast, a theology podcast for the church. If you enjoyed this episode, would you consider subscribing if you haven't already? You can also help us out by leaving a rating and especially a review on Apple Podcasts or wherever you're listening. We love hearing from listeners in this way, and it helps others find out about the show. The Pastor Theologians Podcast is a production of the Center for Pastor Theologians. You can learn more about the CPT at our website, Pastor Theologians.com. You can also find us on Facebook, YouTube, and follow us on X. This show is produced by Seth Porch and Sophia Luke. The show is recorded and edited in partnership with Glowfire Creative, and editing is done by Seth Creekmore. Hosting duties are shared by Joel Lawrence, Rae Paul, and me, Zach Wagner. Thanks for listening.