Beeson Podcast, Episode 351 Bruce Ashford August 1, 2017 Announcer: Welcome to the Beeson Podcast, coming to you from Beeson Divinity School on the campus of Samford University in Birmingham, Alabama. Now, your host, Timothy George. Timothy George: Welcome to today's Beeson Podcast. Today, I have the privilege of having a conversation with Dr. Bruce Ashford. He is the Provost and Dean of Faculty and Professor of Theology and Culture at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary in North Carolina. Welcome to the Beeson Podcast, Bruce. Bruce Ashford: Thank you for having me on the podcast, Dr. George. Timothy George: Now, let's begin by just asking you to say a little bit about how you came to faith in Christ, your own journey of faith in the Lord. And one of the great interests — we're gonna get into this — is your interest in the relationship of Christianity and culture, so ... But first of all, how did you come to faith? Bruce Ashford: Yes, so the Lord was good to me and gave me parents who had just come to know the Lord in their late 20s. They were very serious in their walk with the Lord, and they instructed me in the way of the Lord. They memorized Scripture, they paid me to memorize Scripture, and they had a real, genuine faith, and that issued forth in ... Timothy George: Did you say they paid you to memorize? Bruce Ashford: They actually paid me to memorize Scripture. Timothy George: Where do you get parents like that? I had to do it for free. Bruce Ashford: But, you know, when I was a teenager, the faith became real for me. And the Christianity and culture question has bothered me as long as I can remember, even when I was a child. How does Jesus' Lordship ... What in the world would it have to do with things outside of my personal devotional life and my ecclesial affiliation? And I think the question came to a head for me ... I lived in Russia in the late '90s, 1998-2000, and I lived in a predominantly Muslim republic in Russia. It was kind of a fascinating crossroads just after the Soviet Union collapsed. I moved there, and so the people that I interacted with in the public square were Sunni Muslim, more than 50% of them, Soviet-style atheist, and Christian. And it was that sort of interplay that forced me to really think about Christianity and culture, and that drove me to read Richard John Neuhaus and Abraham Kuyper and Lesslie Newbigin, who were kind of my guiding lights. Timothy George: Well, since you mentioned those figures, let me ask you to comment on each one of them, if you will. We worked together in the circle around First Things, and you've done some writing for us, and so why are each of those important? Richard John Neuhaus, Lesslie Newbigin, and Abraham Kuyper. You can do them in any order. Bruce Ashford: Let me start with Neuhaus. There's nobody like him, and I started to get to know him through his pen, and he wrote with wit and verve, especially against the culture despises of Christianity, and I loved it. Timothy George: There is something trenchant about his writings. Bruce Ashford: Oh, yes. Timothy George: You know, First Things, we have this section, “While You're At It”, that Richard used to just ... It was just what you turned to first, everybody said that. Bruce Ashford: When I found First Things, it was 1999 and I actually went back and read every backlogged “While We're At It”, from the beginning of First Things on, but ... And then I got to interact with Father Neuhaus a little bit. That was a great joy. Timothy George: I remember he came once to your seminary, he told me about it. He was so impressed with the folks at Southeastern Seminary. He did. Bruce Ashford: It was a great joy. We did a conference on sexual morality and the gospel, and he spoke at that conference, and we got to interact with him. He's so kind and down to earth. Abraham Kuyper, you know, I needed ... Nobody had ever given me a theological framework for understanding the relationship between theology and culture, between Christianity and culture, and Kuyper gave me the beginnings of a framework for how to view this, and as we talk during the podcast today, I think some of that will probably come out. Timothy George: Kuyper was a Dutch Reform pastor, a theologian, and also, for a while, the Prime Minister of the Netherlands, wasn't he? Bruce Ashford: Prime Minister of the Netherlands, also he founded a national newspaper, founded a private university, the Vrije University of Amsterdam. Timothy George: The Vrije University of Amsterdam. So he was an amazing person, who embodied in his own way the interface of Christianity and culture. Bruce Ashford: He did, his life and his writings, I think. Lesslie Newbigin was a British missionary to India who, after three or four decades of ministry in India, came back to Europe and said that the pressing question is whether or not the West could ever be converted to the gospel, and spent the rest of his life asking, "How can we bring the West into a missionary encounter with the gospel?" Which I think is a fascinating question. I think it is the question, the question we need to be asking right now. Timothy George: Now, say a little ... Unpack that for us. How can we bring the West into a missionary encounter with the gospel? Now, a common reaction to that might be "Well, the West has the gospel. Why do we need to Christianize the West? Don't we need to send people to places that have never heard the name of Jesus?" Bruce Ashford: Yeah, so, you know ... Here's what Newbigin encouraged us to do, and maybe as I talk about what he encouraged us to do, the answer to your question will take shape. He said that we need to take the posture of a missionary when we approach the West, which is a posture of humility, listening to the West, and understanding the idols that underlie society and culture in the West, and then bringing the gospel into a powerful interface. He said this would do three things. It would mean three things for us. We would have to be prophetic, we'd have to speak the truth boldly, we'd have to be sacrificial, and if our Lord was willing to walk on earth as a homeless itinerant preacher and be crucified, then we can also sacrifice ourself and be willing to be marginalized and excluded in the West. And then third and finally, we'd be humbly confident, confident because we know that the Lord will return, but humble because it won't be us who forces it, who makes it happen. Timothy George: That's a great expression, "humbly confident." Bruce Ashford: Yeah, humbly confident. Timothy George: You have confidence without humility, that's arrogance. You have humility, perhaps, without confidence, and that's self-abnegation, but it's hardly the way of Jesus. Bruce Ashford: That's right. Timothy George: So that's a very good phrase to take with us. Now, there are many people, and you and I know some people in this world who basically think that Christians have no business being engaged in the public square, that that's a way of soiling our faith. Say a little bit about that. Should Christians participate in the public square? If so, how should we do that? Bruce Ashford: You know, let me mention three sort of reasons people might give for not wanting to be involved, and then I have kind of a quick response to each. I think many Christians probably — like me when I grew up — divided God's good world into two realms, the visible and invisible, and treated the invisible realm of the Spirit as if it were wonderful and good and valuable, and the visible world as inferior, or maybe even bad. And if you have that view of things, you're not going to interact with the broader culture. That's a wrong way to look at it. Everything that God created is good, including the physical and material world, and He encourages us to go out into the world and to be a witness in it. I think a second reason people might not participate is just frustration. They just recognize the vitriolic, mephitic, effluvial sort of nature of our public discourse in the United States, throw up their hands, and walk away. But we can't throw up our hands and walk away, it's not an option, and we'll talk about that a little bit. And then finally, I think some folks would just say this is a distraction to the gospel, to care about these things, and I would ask, which gospel? To which gospel are you referring? Because I think the gospel that Paul outlined in 1 Corinthians 15:3-5 is a public truth about a Messiah, Christ — he uses the title "Christ" — Sovereign Lord over all, who resurrected, who raised from the dead, and appeared, made public appearances. So the gospel is public, and it's got public implications. Timothy George: And that's another big theme of Lesslie Newbigin, isn't it? Bruce Ashford: It is. Timothy George: The gospel is public truth, not just our private opinion. Bruce Ashford: That's right. He's got a little book, probably 75 pages long, entitled Truth to Tell: The Gospel as Public Truth, and it is a jewel. Timothy George: You're a Christian theologian, you're the Provost and the Dean of a theological seminary, so the Bible has got to be a very important book in your life and your ministry. So, what does the Bible have to say, what does the Biblical narrative have to say about our participation in the world, in politics, in culture? Bruce Ashford: That's a good question, and I think a lot of times, when we answer that question, we go quickly to a particular passage, like Romans 13, "Submit to the governing authorities," or when the Pharisees came to Jesus and said, "What do we do with this coin?" And those are good texts to go to, but probably the easiest way to address this is go to the biblical narrative. And so, if we just broke this down into Creation, Fall, Redemption, you know, at the time of Creation, when God created the world, He called it good repeatedly, and even called it very good. So it's a very good realm within which to interact. I think when we look at Creation, and we match it with what we've seen in history, we see that God created a world with many cultural dimensions or cultural spheres — you have arts and sciences, politics, education, sports and competition — and I think all of these realms are good realms created by God. I think government and politics would have been in those realms even if there had been no Fall. We would have had to organize our society. Who is going to decide which side of the road we drive on? Who's going to bring the pumpkin pie to the fall festival, and at what time are we going to start it, and where are we going to have it? Okay, so that's Creation. Things like politics are good, and they're created by God. The Fall teaches us that we as human beings, Adam and Eve, and all of us after Adam and Eve, are idolaters. We tend to absolutize some aspect of God's Creation and use that absolutized aspect to beat down other aspects of His Creation, and to idolize something in God's Creation. When we do that, we corrupt and misdirect culture. So that brings us to Redemption. You know, when the Lord Jesus redeems us, He ... As Bonhoeffer says, He does so to send us back to the world in a wholly new manner, so He doesn't just save us from something, He saves us for something, and in relation to culture, I think He saves us to do three things. I do, with my students, I sort of summarize our cultural task in three ways. When we enter into any sphere of culture — art, science, politics, education, sports and competition, business and entrepreneurship, any of those — we want to ask, "What is God's creational design for that type of activity?" Number two, "How has it been corrupted and misdirected by sin and idolatry?" And then number three, "How can we bring healing and redirection to that realm?" And when we do that, that's a part of our witness. Witness is not merely verbal, only verbal, exclusively verbal; our actions also, I think, serve as a witness. And then finally, Restoration. There will be a day when the Lord Jesus will return, and renew and restore His good Creation, and He will install a one-world government and one-party system, with Him as the King, if we could put Him that way, and justice will roll down like the waters. And so our political involvement now should be a preview of that day. If you've ever been watching a television show, and a commercial comes on, a 30-second or one-minute commercial for a movie that will come out later in the summer, you'll know that a producer and director basically take two or three of the best scenes — maybe the only good scenes in that movie — and they put them, and they splice them into that 30-second or one-minute spot, because they want to whet your taste bud. They want you to want to buy the ticket to the movie. I think that our public engagement should make people want what it is that Jesus has to offer when He returns one day. Timothy George: Now, a lot of evangelicals have a very negative reaction to a kind of social gospel theology that focuses on the here and now, on the transformation of culture, in a way, but is pretty soft when it comes to the demands of the gospel, the harshness of sin, and so forth. It's a very utopian, almost, approach. What's the corrective to that? Bruce Ashford: Yeah, that's a good point. You know, Rauschenbusch & Company sort of lost sight of the gospel, and were embarrassed of aspects of the gospel, and so they were left with nothing but the social implications of the gospel. And so what I think the Lord calls us to do is to proclaim the gospel verbally with our lips and promote it with our lives, and to do both of those. And I don't think that there's a priority, per se, on either. I'd rather not use priority language; I'd rather use centrality language. I think verbal proclamation of the gospel is central. If you could envision ... If you ever watched Little House on the Prairie, those of you of a certain age may have watched Little House on the Prairie — I know I did — a wagon wheel has a hub, and it has spokes and a rim. And if you could envision the Christian mission as that wagon moving forward, verbal proclamation of the gospel is like the hub of the wheel, and you've got to have it. Without the hub, the wheel collapses. But I think our social and cultural work, and political work, is like the spokes and the rim, that it's the implications of that hub, and it's what gives it traction. And so when you have word and deed working together, the Christian mission moves in the way that God intended it to. Timothy George: Now, I've always loved that quotation from E. Stanley Jones, who was a missionary to India, Methodist missionary to India, who talked about holistic Christian mission and ministry. He said, "A body without a soul is a corpse; a soul without a body is a ghost," but that God has intended us to be a whole person, soul and body, and both of them in sync under His Lordship, under His direction. Bruce Ashford: That's a beautiful way to put it. Timothy George: Yeah. Now, you've written a book, a very good book called One Nation Under God. You wrote it with another person. Bruce Ashford: With Chris Pappalardo. Timothy George: With Chris, and so, say a little bit about that book, and I was very intrigued that your closing chapter dealt with St. Augustine. Bruce Ashford: Yeah, you know, and I didn't list Augustine with the contemporary trio at the beginning of the podcast, but Augustine has been huge for me. When I was first hired, I taught History of Ideas. We do reading seminars at our college. Every student, no matter what their major, takes four reading seminars, primary readings in the history of ideas. We start with Socrates and Plato and Aristotle, and go all the way through to Kant and Hegel and Marx, and we do literature and philosophy and theology and history. But I had to teach Augustine's City of God, and it was revolutionary. And I think he was the impetus for this book, One Nation Under God: A Christian Hope for American Politics, and I think the beauty of ... Part of the beauty of Augustine is his life story. So, in the fifth century, as Rome was being sacked by the Visigoths and the Vandals, he got a letter, we're told, from a guy named Marcellinus, who walked in power circles and said, "Augustine, you're the smart guy. Would you help us to explain why it is that Rome is being sacked? The Pagans are saying that it's the fault of Rome for adopting Christianity, and that the Christian God can't protect us." So Augustine, in response, wrote about a 1,000 or 1,200-page letter that we now know as The City of God. It's very difficult to summarize a book of this depth and profundity, but I'll do my best to do it in a minute, if we can do that. So he did ... One of the things that Augustine did very well is expose false narratives of the world, and then provide a truer and better narrative in response. So in City of God, I'll mention three false narratives he exposed. One false narrative was their religious narrative, and what he pointed out is that not even Marcus Varro, their renowned history of religion, not even Varro really even believed in the gods. The gods weren't believable. They had sex with each other, they cheated on each other. I mean, just ridiculous. He also exposed the false political narrative, and he said, "Listen, Virgil's Aeneid and the story of Romulus and Remus is actually a verdict against Rome. Rome was founded because of a lust for power, and for all of Rome's talk of justice, all of that talk of justice actually masked a lust for power. And then he also exposed their philosophical narrative with Plato, and then he came along, and the majority of City of God is him telling the Bible story as the true story of the whole world, and he tells it in a captivating and sometimes odd manner, but for the most part, just captivating and powerful. And in that way, I think Augustine is a guide for us, as our Western civilization. You know, I mean, we're not being attacked by the Visigoths and the Vandals, per se, but we are under attack in different ways, and I think we can take our cues from Augustine in how to respond. Timothy George: Now, your book is called One Nation Under God. We're citizens of a nation, the United States of America. Are we a Christian nation? Bruce Ashford: Well, that's an interesting question. You know, if by "Christian nation," you mean a nation that has submitted to Christ corporately and comprehensively since its inception, the answer is "absolutely not." But are we a nation who has been influenced by Christianity, sometimes for the better? The answer is yes, and I think even the ... You know, I think our nation was founded on Enlightenment and Christian beliefs, and even the Enlightenment grew out of Christian soil, and in some ways was an aberration, but in other ways, there were positive aspects of it that came from Christianity. So we are, in that sense, Christian. I like what Richard John Neuhaus said. He always said it better than I do. So he said that when we say we are one nation under God, we say it as a theological fact, and as a moral aspiration. It is a theological fact, we — just like China, and Turkey, and Saudi Arabia, and Mexico — are one nation under God. It's a fact: He rules over us. But for us, we want to say it's a moral aspiration. I think those of us who are believers want our nation's people to align themselves individually and corporately with God's will, and in that sense, it's an aspiration. Timothy George: So is there a place for nationalism in our present moment, whether it's American, British, Italian, whatever? Bruce Ashford: Yes, so nationalism, that's a notoriously tricky topic. Let me list just broadly three types of nationalism, and I'm going to say "yes," "no," and "probably not" to those three types, respectively. Timothy George: All right. Bruce Ashford: There is what is called "civic nationalism," and most people mean by that, patriotism. And I can say "yes" to that, to an appropriate fondness for our nation, an appropriate recognition of what is good in our nation, in its past, in its potential for the future. Timothy George: I mean, the title of your book, One Nation Under God, comes from our Pledge of Allegiance, as it was amended to include it in the 1950s, I think, so we pledge allegiance to one nation under God. Bruce Ashford: We do, and I think that's okay. I think when God commands us to love, that includes our near community, our nation, and not just the global community. And there's a push, and there has been a big push over the past 50 years to sort of move away from nation-states, and to think of ourself only in merely as a global community, and I'm just going to push back and say that I think it's okay to love our nation appropriately. Not inordinately, not idolatrously, but appropriately. Second is ethnonationalism, and I want to unequivocally say "no" to ethnonationalism. Ethnonationalism is a political arrangement in which one ethnic group consciously gains and maintains primacy over all others, and usually perpetrates injustice against other ethnic groups. And there's a movement towards that, the alt-right, in the United States. It's very vocal right now, and I just would want to give a firm and unequivocal "absolutely not" to ethnonationalism. And finally, economic nationalism, and I'm not an economist, and so I'll speak more lightly here. I just think ... I think it is good to want to do what is good for our people economically, but I'm not sure that isolationist policies will help. So I would leave a question mark for that one. Timothy George: Now, one of the most discussed books and ideas that's been around, certainly within the last year or two, is called The Benedict Option. It's a book by Rod Dreher. Say what that is, as you understand it, and how you evaluate it. Bruce Ashford: Yeah, so The Benedict Option, Rod is a great guy, very good writer. I don't know- Timothy George: He's an Orthodox Christian. Bruce Ashford: Orthodox Christian. For those of you listening, he's sort of cultivated a writing style that's unique to him on his website, but he's published this book entitled The Benedict Option, in which he argues that things are so bad right now in the United States that we need to put an emphasis on banding together in communities, and reforming and reshaping ourselves in the image of Christ, and that we're going to need that. And so it's a ... It's not an entire withdrawal from culture, but it's an emphasis on community, Christian community. So many good things in the book. I think he's recognized some of the things that we're struggling with, the negative effects of the sexual revolution, negative effects of our narcissistic and individualistic culture that focuses on choice enhancement and desire fulfillment. He's rightly recognized the restriction of religious liberty, that there are many progressive elites, secular elites, who would like to give us freedom to worship in our homes, but not freedom to exercise our religion outside of our homes and our churches. So he's recognized those things. In terms of the critique that I would give of his book, I'd like to put into conversation two historic traditions, the Anabaptist tradition and the Reformed tradition. The Anabaptist tradition, similar to the monastic tradition, has focused on the church as a colony of the Kingdom, and the Reformational tradition has focused more on the church's responsibility to the world. And I think what Rod is doing here is he's underscoring or emphasizing the Anabaptist or monastic tradition. If I were to come along and give a response to him, I would say I think Abraham Kuyper provides a very helpful way of combining the best of both of those traditions. He talks about the church as in institution and an organism, so the church as an institution meets on Sundays, the work of human hands, if you will, clothed in cultural forms and tradition from over the centuries, and we worship the Lord, and we do it in a way that's pretty closely prescribed in Scripture. There are things we do. We preach the Word, we practice the Lord's Supper, we baptize. These are the sorts of things we do. But the church is also an organism, and so when we leave on Sunday and go about into our lives the rest of the week, we're not just a church scattered, as Luther said. We're more than scattered; we're scattered, but we retain our connection to Christ at the head, and to one another. And the church as an organism has a responsibility for shaping — as I see it, and as Kuyper saw it, and Neuhaus, and Newbigen — have a responsibility for shaping the world around us, or for at least being a witness, socially, culturally, and politically, even if we don't win. And let's face it, we're never going to gain long-term or comprehensive cultural victories until the Lord comes again. He's the only one who wins, and we win because He does. Timothy George: Yeah. You know, we've been talking about St. Augustine some, and very important to you, and to me as well, and one of the great scholars of Augustine was the late Jean Bethke Elshtain, who would agree, I think, with a lot of the focus of your book and your perspective as well. And in her book on Augustine, she talks about Augustine advocating a chastened form of civic virtue, one which does not idolatrize the state or culture, which recognizes the fallenness of the world around us, but also which doesn't retreat from the engagement to which we're called. And I think you're trying to live in that tension, as I hear you talk about this. And what would you say to Christians as they struggle with these alternatives, these extremes of having nothing to do with politics, politics is sinful, no use engaging, either out of frustration or maybe out of conviction? And others who seem to be obsessed with politics, that's the only thing they know, and they either love or hate this or that character in politics, and that's where all their energy goes. Speak into that divide. Bruce Ashford: Okay. Yeah, so let's start with folks whose impulse or reflex is to withdraw, and in response to that, we want to say it's not an option. You're going to want to. I want to. There have been plenty of times, you know, even recently, that I've wanted to sort of throw up my hands and walk away, but we can't do it because God created His world good. He created us as His imagers, told us to till the soil. That doesn't mean to be farmers, per se, it means something deeper and more profound, to ... "I want you to bring out the hidden potential of the world that I've given you. I want you to change it, and I want you to make something from it. Want you to have dominion, want you to manage my world." So we're cultural beings. I mean, there's no way to be human other than to be cultural. It's not even possible, because as you mentioned, we're embodied beings, and so let's do that, let's enter into, let's embrace the context the Lord has given us. Not be bitter about it, not resent it, not wish that we were in the '50s, or in the '80s, or some sort of golden era that someone might imagine from the past; let's embrace the moment, this moment. Neuhaus was right. He also said this. He said, "When I meet the Lord one day, I'm going to meet Him as an American." And, you know, he was right about that. I mean, American is not the primary aspect of my identity — Christian is — but American is an inescapable aspect, and one for which I will give account one day, and all of us will. Give account for whether or not we were a steward of the gospel, a good steward of the gospel in the context that the Lord gave us. So let's do that. And then, for those whose tendency or their impulse is in the other direction, and sort of tend toward an overheated sort of short-term activism, putting all of their eggs in the basket of short-term activism, I would encourage them to take the broad view and to play the long game. And by "take the broad view," I would encourage them not to reduce culture to politics, that politics is only one aspect of culture, and not even the most important. You know, you've got multiple aspects of the arts, the sciences, higher education, the church, the family, this profusion of diverse aspects of culture, all of which are important. And if we as a Christian community will give witness in each of those aspects of culture, the combined cumulative effect of that witness will be unbelievable, just very powerful. And so, so take the broad view, and then second, play the long game. I think in the United States, especially with four-year election cycles, every presidential election is a do-or-die, and has been for years. I'm not just talking about this election, I'm talking about the last five. You know, "If we don't do such-and-such this election, then everything's going to fall apart." I think we need to sort of step back, take a breath, and say, "What are our long ... What do we want over the long term, over the next generation or two? And how can we maintain that type of public witness, and not sacrifice it on the altar of short-term activism, whatever that may be?" And if we take the broad view and we play the long game, I think we've got a chance, Lord willing, of having a powerful witness. Even from a position of weakness, even if we're culturally marginalized, we can still give powerful witness. Timothy George: So, be engaged, be involved, but take the long view. My guest today on the Beeson Podcast has been Dr. Bruce Ashford. He is the Provost and the Dean of Faculty at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary in Wake Forest, North Carolina. Thank you, Bruce, for this wonderful conversation. Bruce Ashford: Thank you for having me on the show. Appreciate it. Announcer: You've been listening to the Beeson Podcast, with host Timothy George. You can subscribe to the Beeson Podcast at our website, beesondivinity.com. Beeson Divinity School is an interdenominational evangelical divinity school, training men and women in the service of Jesus Christ. We pray that this podcast will aid and encourage your work, and we hope you will listen to each upcoming edition of the Beeson Podcast.