How to Engage in Spiritual Conversations

So, Mary Jo, tell 'em what you do at Houston Baptist and why you're visiting Dallas and why we have you on The Table podcast. Your professional role is you are an…

So, anyway, I, as a later teenager – I mean I had been raised on a steady diet of science shows, like In Search Of and NOVA and things like that. My mom was a fan of the musical arts, and so, I had gone to many symphonies and musical theater. So, I had a rich cultural background.

But I came to a point, in my older teenage years, where I realized that I didn't really have a reason to think that I mattered. And at that time, there was a high school band director who I greatly admired, and he was a Christian. And he had never shared his faith with anyone. I'm the first person that he really felt a strong burden to talk to about belief in God.

So, my senior year, right at the time when I'm starting to think about meaning and purpose in life. He comes along and, in my senior year, he gives me a NIV one-year Bible, and he gives me the baton that we used to – that he used to win the state band contest with. It was pretty cool. If you know what a baton is, it's what your –

And anyway, he said, "When you go off to college, you're gonna have hard questions, and I hope you'll turn to this."

And I read that Bible cover to cover. In fact, I didn't stay on the one-year plan, because it really wasn't what I expected. It wasn't what I was seeing in Hollywood or on TV. And reading that Bible brought me around to belief in God. But it wasn't until I went off to college, and I heard the Gospel – I actually heard my position as in need of a Savior – that I understood and was willing to trust Jesus and to commit to him.

And so, it caused me to begin to have emotional doubt. I would say it was emotional doubt. But that led to intellectual questions such as, "Well, why do I believe in God?" I'm not sure. I don't have a response like, "I believe in God because of X."

Now, I do believe I had a real experience, but what I've noticed is that experiences fade over time. You know? It's hard to remember what it was I did back then and why I did it. So, that fact of not – the experience fading, not having anything to really say, "This is why I believe in God," not having that foundational evidence.

So, I began to say, "Well, I'm not sure if there is a God, and I need –" But for some reason, I decided that I needed to find the answers, and I needed to look at both sides.

So, it wasn't just enough to go out and read all the new atheist material to see all the arguments against; I had to hear what the rebuttals were as well. And so, I started listening to debates, like William Lang Craig. I started – I read The Case for Christ by Lee Strobel. And I came back around to a point where the arguments for Christianity seemed to make the best sense to me. You know?

And you're also going to help us think through how we deal with the culture that's around us that claims a certain tolerance but really doesn't reflect it. So, we kinda want to work through those two parts.

And your approach represents something I'm pretty familiar with, because I've just come from a weekend myself of doing apologetics with Greg Koukl, who is a common friend. And the whole idea of rather than debating, as we engage in apologetics, engaging and asking questions and drawing people out. I call it getting a spiritual GPS on someone. Okay? You know?

So, I want to try to avoid that sort of a situation. And I break down just having an effective conversation into four elements. And the first one is knowing what we believe. And I think people don't talk to other people about their faith because they don't know their faith. They are not trained in essential Christian doctrine. They don't – they're not comfortable in their Christian skin. Right?

So, I want to find points of communication by really listening to minister to them. And not only am I gonna find points of communication with them, I'm gonna maybe get a chance to hear their story. So, how did they get to this point of accepting these beliefs as true? Very important.

Whereas the person who has come out of the Church because, in many cases, they've had some type of a bad or even traumatic experience in the Church, they're coming from a completely different place with a completely different set of needs, and they also come with some elements of understanding about what you're gonna be talking about. So, it's a completely different conversation in many ways.

And so, they – sometimes they feel like they were swindled or they were bamboozled. There's a good word. And so, you're dealing with – you have some back work to do with them, because they don't trust the Church.

Out of the 13 people that he profiled, 12 of them grew up in the Church and had a bad experience.

But we also have to offer an invitation. Well, I can't have a chance of them hearing the challenge unless they know I care. You know? And so, like I say, they won't care about your challenge unless they know you care.

So, I love the relational emphasis that you have, and I love the call to walk into a conversation. And my first assignment, should you choose to accept it – okay? – is to listen.

You don't just let it fly by and try to answer and respond right away, "Well, I don't agree with that because…" Rather you give them a time to clarify their statement. Because what I have found is that sometimes I don't understand what they're trying to say, but sometimes they don't understand what they're trying to say.

"This is the objection. I play this card, and that usually puts people off, and I can keep them at arm's distance by saying this." That may be all that they're doing. They may not –

But then there are other people who will answer that question, and they'll start using names and books. And then you know: different conversation.

So, he tells me there's no right or wrong. And then later on, he gets into politics. [Chuckle] It's already funny.

So, we got 'em both going these days.

So, I know you've given a lot of thought to the way tolerance does and doesn't work in our culture and in our society. So, I'm just gonna – that's just a wide-open question. Talk to me about tolerance so I can be tolerant or intolerant. What am I supposed to be?

This is – he gives a clarion call, basically, for what we view as tolerance, putting up with others. But he goes beyond that. He's not just putting up with people, he says that you have to do good to those who persecute you and do good to those who hate you. Because he says, "What good is it if you only do good to those who do good to you?"

And unfortunately, if we go to Matthew 5:43, this is the kind of attitude that Jesus was specifically teaching against, "Love your neighbor and hate your enemy." He flips that, right?

And so, that's where I start with Christians.

And the you've got this other realm which is the public realm, and that's being said as, "This is the cold, hard fact realm. So, basically, anything we can empirically observe without going too far into that.

So, that, I think, is at the basis of this. We don't talk about this; we just sort of tolerate. Right? And I think that that sacred-secular split has caused us to think – even Christians to think, "Well, I wonder if I shouldn't talk about this because it belongs in the private realm. It's the sacred."

So, I want to make sure that we have that understanding that that's going on in the background. We tend to split things up as a society. But what concerns me even more is that this has gotten into the Church, that Christians go and serve their time, but that's their view. So, they don't want to go push their religion on others, and that's coming out of the sacred-secular split.

And so, I understand those origins. But then the other thing that happens – and this is the "sinister" part of it, and I mean that word – and I'm thinking about what T. S. Eliot called "chestless people." You know?

So, he's saying, "Before the student, before the boy or the girl is old enough to understand that they have engaged in philosophy, even the potential to understand this is being cut out of their soul." So, you're developing like what you said, like T. S. Eliot says, C. S. Lewis also says, "Men without chests." So, you expect of them honor and virtue and all these things, but you're not gonna get it. You kind of laugh at virtue, but then you expect it."

And the point that was being made – this is in a secular context – the point that was being made was that we do need to think about our values and how our values impact people. So, at least we were being taught to think about how we're interacting with our neighbors, even in a context of a secular situation. But I went to school – you know, I was in high school in the late '60s and early '70s. So – and I'm not sure we're doing as much of that now.

Well, Christians are gonna say, "Well, there's Jesus' teaching," like we already discussed, but they're also gonna say, "Well, look at Genesis 1:26-31. Every human being is made in the image of God. And they share – they have that image equally. They're given – so, there's something about each individual that needs equal respect, that demands that respect.

That's a grounding. But if you remove that sort of grounding, you say that human beings are just reducible to their material matter, they're a higher order of animal in the Animal Kingdom, now what's our grounding for tolerance.

And so, I think that that's part of what's underlying this problem with the new tolerance because it's not really tolerance because it doesn't have its grounding anywhere. It doesn't have a basis, like we were talking about, with being made in the image of God.

And so, the society – the society that thinks that it can be neutral and ignore the presence of sinfulness really sets itself on an – in an unstable – with an unstable foundation. And the interesting thing is is that the founders of at least our country were very conscious of the presence of sin and sinfulness, which is why they set up a system of checks and balances, because they didn't want too few people to have too much power.

But we have to couple that, like we were saying at the beginning of the show, especially in such an environment as we have now, we have to focus on that relational excellence. It has to truly be about caring about those people if we're gonna be able to show 'em that they do have a vacuum or a void going on.

So, what kind of advice do you have for us, when you're in that environment and someone plays that card and says, "You must really hate people because –" and then fill in the blank however you fill in the blank in light of – because you exclude people or whatever it is. How do you – what kind of advice do you have for people who find themselves dealing with that kind of pushback?

And make the person who's accusing you of it actually bring the evidence to bear, "This is why it's hate speech, and here's what hate speech is."

So, there's actually speech that robs human beings of the goodness of speech that speech was intended for. So, we can say things like this to people. But then, you still need to support your view.

I have no apology for bringing you on the air. It's been great to have you with us and to have you help us kind of negotiate this space.