Behind the Scenes with J.P. Moreland

all right friends we're here with one of my favorite people and i say that with all sincerity because growing up in a christian home where i learned apologetics it always made sense to me i thought it was true never really had any doubts when i got into college had some real doubts and questions about my faith and jpmorlin who's with us was one of the key people in person and through his books that really helped me make sense of my faith and find answers to it he is a friend he is a mentor a colleague at biola a distinguished professor and joins us today because we're going to do something different we've had you on jp to talk about evidence for the soul we've had you want to do a live q a with tough questions about the faith but today we're going to do is get a little bit of a behind-the-scenes look at your life about the people the experiences and the books that have shaped your life so thanks for carving out the time to to come on well i'd always like to be with you my friend you're uh you're a dear brother and colleague at the university and we're fellow soldiers and i i'm just honored to be able to share my heart with our brothers and sisters watching and those who aren't maybe aren't christians and so thanks for inviting me i'm looking forward to it well yeah this is this is a real treat let me start by asking your story to faith i know you didn't grow up in a christian home what was that moment where you became a believer well i was born in kansas city missouri and raised in a small town grand view south of kansas city and attended a fairly liberal united methodist church but i didn't know it was but jesus was kind of presented to me as a middle middle america white guy that kind of had some really good values and i and i admit i was attracted to him in the gospels but i didn't i was too busy playing sports and i didn't really care about church i went to the university of missouri majored in chemistry and i i i think i believed in god but i didn't think that there was any reason to believe in god you just had to more or less bet one way or the other and my junior year i mean i i was doing really well in school and i was a part of a social fraternity the sae house so i i was doing pretty well in my dating life i had you know a lot of young ladies in my life at different times so you know i was doing oh i was doing okay but uh there's no doubt that there was a nagging emptiness in me because i was just the kind of person that asked big questions like what does all this matter anyway and uh in my junior year some fellas with campus crusade now called crew came by my fraternity house and gave a rational presentation uh for the historical reliability of the new testament documents and the bodily resurrection of jesus well i had never even heard of such a thing so it shocked me and i said to myself if this is really true this is the greatest news i've ever heard but i just don't know if it is so i started meeting with a staff member he gave me books to read and i ended up concluding that it was highly likely that this all happened and so i made it in my mind i ended up being you know 70 75 sure it was true i wasn't positive but it wasn't more than i doubted and so i decided to take that step the third week of november of my junior year in 1968. wow and it literally was the greatest decision i've ever made that's not a slogan it rapidly turned me around and i became kind of a radical i mean i'd get up on free speech platforms wow take the mic microphone away from black panthers that were yelling and screaming and i preached jesus to him to all these students around i got my butt kicked several times because i didn't know what i was talking about so but uh that uh led me to want to learn more about why i believed what i believed and i've been walking with jesus now uh for 52 years and i'll be honest with you i'm as motivated and excited about my faith as i ever was now my energy level's a little bit lower because i'm older sure but i'm still just overjoyed and full of peace and joy so that's what happened well that that that's an awesome story i love hearing that that you began with such a a radical heart for jesus reminds me a lot of my my father with that kind of radical nature too interestingly enough i interviewed gary habermas not long ago and he said after he did his dissertation on the resurrection he actually went through a period where he considered becoming a buddhist and almost left his faith did you ever go through a questioning period like that and significant doubt or has it been more of a steady experience since becoming a believer um it's been more of a steady experience but i definitely gone through times where when i've had doubts i discovered that most of my doubts were emotionally based not rationally based the difference being if the doubt is really an intellectual one then you ought to be able to write it down in a paragraph or just be able to state it specifically uh if it's emotional doubt it's kind of just a vague sense of maybe disappointment maybe god answered prayers or he doesn't seem real to you or you're lonely or you you can't connect with them like you want to and i think my doubts were more of that nature though there's no question that i had intellectual doubts but what i did sean is i i i had enough integrity to know that if this wasn't true then i just didn't want to have anything to do with it and so when i when i was faced questions that i didn't have an answer for i did everything i worked until i found one and i read i talked to people that i thought could help me and i got the vast majority of them answered and as i grew in the lord sean um a pattern arose where i began to see that when i didn't have an answer to a question there was somebody out there that did and what i needed to do was be patient not throw in the towel and wait until i found them or found the book and lo and behold that's worked and so i probably i don't i don't have doubts anymore i just haven't for i don't know 10 or 15 years uh i just uh you know then i'm not bragging and i don't think it's there's anything wrong with people who do don't hear me saying that but i've just been at a point in life where i'm very settled both emotionally intellectually and i just i don't have doubts any longer jp when i went through a period of questioning in college in the mid 90s you remember i came met with you in your office and you said at that point which is gosh 20 some years ago you said i've had a lot of questions over my life but i've done this long enough to know that there's an answer if i'm willing to find it and i remember thinking gosh that must be right that must be nice because i don't have that confidence now i want to tell you i remember that decades later and i don't have all the answers i'm sick and stuff but that helped carry me through periods of doubt knowing that if i would seek it there would be an answer that was out there so i remember that well so one of the other things you taught me is that belief is not just yes or no it's it's graded so to speak you can have higher percentage of belief 51 means you believe something but it's a pretty weak belief i put on twitter that i was interviewing you and somebody said what percentage would jp moreland say he's confident that christianity is true if you were forced to put a percentage on it yeah well you have to understand what a percentage means to me because uh you know i'm i'm 95 sure there's an external world um uh i i am 90 sure that christianity is true uh i actually know it's true am i am i completely certain no uh uh i don't have any doubts about it but i don't think that you can achieve that kind of epistemic certainty like you can uh with in mathematics or logic or my own existence i'm more certain that i exist than that god exists i am more certain that 2 and 2 is 4 and that if p then q and p therefore q is a necessary truth of logic then i am that god exists so they're up there around 98 or 99 my own existence is pretty much a hundred percent okay but god but christianity is up at 90 and i'm telling you that's really high uh for me so uh people have to know that by 90 ranking in my life uh that that's uh that's pretty far up there that that that makes sense let me shift a little bit and we'll come back to to the issue about doubting questions maybe later what are some of the books that have been most influential in your life whether books on spiritual disciplines philosophy apologetics whatever well that's that's so good uh early on in my christian life uh norm geisler's book philosophy of religion and christian apologetics and ff bruce's book the new testament documents are they historically reliable and your dad's book evidence that demands a verdict all helped me at that time and as i grew on i read a new testament introduction it's about an 800 page book by donald guthrie that talks about the authorship and the dating and form criticism and redaction and all that stuff and i continue to read works like william lane craig and gary havermast have done a tremendous amount of good work on bolting down the resurrection for me uh but i think in these latter years uh the last i'd say 20 or 30 years um the writings of in no certain order of bill craig richard swinburn chisholm uh who uh it was a tremendous philosopher uh and um uh in the spiritual and and i've kind of kept up with some of the works on the historical jesus that have that have been helpful and there there's a number out there i think um a book by richard balcom called the eyewitnesses about the gospels being eyewitness testimony yeah really strong for me uh but i think in addition to that two other things one would be books on uh spiritual life and i would say doubt willard's renovation of the heart the book by uh my mind is now leaving me uh a celebration of discipline by richard foster okay uh and um the dallas's book on the the uh the divine conspiracy i'm sorry sean that's okay so um books on the supernatural where you're reading books that are credible accounts of supernatural activity and i would say one is john burke's book imagine heaven which is a very credible book the fact that near-death experiences are are biblical most of them and there's hard evidence that they're true and there have been some other books in that area i have a book that will be coming out in about 10 i'd say 10 months with undervalue and it's all about uh documenting five different kinds of miracles and telling us stories that i personally know about and have verified uh that show that the miraculous is happening all the time wow so the books that have been of tremendous encouragement to me uh and there are many others but that comes off the top of my head that's a great list let us know when that's coming out so we can help uh spread the word for you that sounds fascinating i'm having a dr steve miller on in a few weeks to talk about the evidence for near-death experiences i know you've read his works so that's a reminder for those of you tuning in make sure you hit the subscribe button this channel is brought to you by biola apologetics and notifications because we got some other interviews coming up and we're here with one of our professors jpmorland not so much doing apologetics but asking some more personal questions about his life now here's a big question i had for you and you just took a glass so i think you tipped yourself off how confident are you that kansas city is going to repeat for the super bowl uh 70 30. okay i yeah i just think they have an ability to step it up when when the game was on the line and i think that they they were a little bit bored to be honest with you with a season and i that they won a lot of games with us less than a touchdown and i think that they did what they had to win so there you have it dude got it love it hey how much time do you spend just reading books and studying i know we're both professors so that's kind of worked into our job but an hour a day five hours a day how do you specifically carve out time and how much do you read right it goes in waves uh there because i don't i don't do it uniformly uh it depends on if i've got a project i'm working on or if there's a topic i'm really hot on so like right now i'm doing about uh four or five hours a day and i've been doing that for about a year wow because i'm working on a very technical high-level uh scholarly work on the soul and i'm reading everything in sight so i just have gone wild on that but uh there are other times when i might you know read a couple of times a week for maybe an hour or so uh i also will read pretty typically uh maybe through three or four hours a week on spiritual life books okay five maybe um my wife and i read together every evening uh we read through books with miracle stories and things of that sort muslims coming to christ through jesus appearing to them and they're we get credible ones and they're very very encouraging so it it it waxes and wanes and it kind of depends on uh whether there were other things i've got going now when i was younger had more uh because i had more energy and i'm 72. so you might want to keep that fine but but yeah i mean in the older days i mean i might read five or six hours a day uh for you know five days a week uh and did that for maybe 20 years i don't know something like that i love that in the same sentence you said being wild and reading about the soul that just captured it that was awesome um that that's that's great stuff um here's a question that came through tell me about the people who have most shape your life you shared about books but what about the people that most shaped your life well um there are three that stand above anyone else if we're not talking about personal friendships for my wife okay and that would be bill bright howard hendricks at dallas seminary uh the the greatest of all was dallas willard wow um and it was bill's godly character and his faith and his vision and i gotta tell you uh i have a group of friends that on the faculty here that were with crusade in those days in the 60s and we're still marked by it i mean we are still great i mean it just we never went back on it we're still great commission we're cause oriented and you know and we'll all be that way until the day we're dead it doesn't matter what we're doing for a living howard hendricks was a person that that maintained his motivation until the day he dropped dead and uh he just was on fire and um he was he worked so hard at what he did that he was just a role model of commitment dallas willard was probably the smartest person i ever met personally for any length of time and the closest thing to jesus christ of any human being i've ever had the privilege of meeting he was the absolute real deal and uh it wasn't perfect of course but i'll tell you the guy marked me and he loved me and i loved him and that was great my wife has been you know and it's it's typical to say this because you're supposed to say your wife's wonderful but my wife hope is just uh she's kind of one of those odd women that just everybody notices her because she's got a humble heart she's an evangelist she's a servant she's happy every day i've lived with this woman for uh you know approaching 40 years now and i mean she's just always happy i'd like to choke her but uh but but he's been a great influence on me and and then my friends bill roth and uh the other friends that i've had and have been real intimate sean i think it's important to have a group of friends that are you can say anything you want they will they'll get in your face if you need it you can get in their face but there's a a commitment and a love and it uh there's an intimacy there and i've got guy friends that are like that i've got about four or five and i i just love these guys and uh they're just they sustained me and i sustain them that that's awesome i i one of things you said about talbot and biola and the crew background is one of things that drew me to study there is it was you william and craig horner guy that doing first-rate philosophical work but an evangelistic heart and i think biola is very unique with that um and it's neat to see that crew has played that influence question for you about your desk i keep something right up here it's actually a sequoia tree pine cone oh my gosh sequoias are the largest trees by volume but they have the smallest pine cone and the seed if you shake them out as like the size of an oat like from oatmeal and it reminds me that small things can have great power and that was kind of meaningful to me being a small basketball player but also just in our world where it feels overwhelming it's just a reminder that i can make a difference i'm curious do you keep anything on your desk that just encourages you reminds you inspires you that you look at regularly yeah i do i i i have uh this uh picture make sure you can see it yep jesus can you see that uh-huh and uh it it is one of those classic pictures and it just it reminds me of how much i love him and need him every day so i look at this picture i grew up with it in the methodist church uh and uh it it just is it's moving and very touching to me and then there is one other thing and that is a picture of my wife when we got married uh and she was she was really hot then and everyone but she is 72 and she could forgive her not being like to us then but and it reminds me of uh just how important family is to me i have my daughter here and if you don't mind i will show you one other thing please uh this is a bottle of wine from kansas city wow this is the club plaza in kansas city and i am a kansas city boy i i'm a missouri boy uh and i i loved growing up there and it reminds me of my roots i come from a humble family uh i they my mom and dad were blue-collar workers they were never full of themselves uh if i ever got full for myself uh there would be two feet inserted in my backside and and so you know what if i can say this i i and that this may sound terrible but i've never really had a problem uh with being prideful or arrogant i i i guess one reason is i have to live with myself and that that'll do it but the other thing is i i really get that this is about serving the lord jesus i'm grateful to you know if i accomplish something i enjoy that i'm not being an idiot uh if i do a book or a talk and it went well i'm very happy about that but uh my roots in in missouri uh gave me kind of some fundamental values about the way to treat other people and uh those are state they were reinforced when i began to get in the word and became a christian one of the things you've chosen to write on and speak on is mental health issues can you tell me why you chose to address that maybe some of the story behind it and some of things you've learned in your research right good question um my mom's side of the family from my grandfather to my mother and two of her sisters and then uh to me and then one of my daughters that clearly looks like me and my other daughter that looks like hope doesn't have the problem but we were all born with a genetic predisposition to anxiety and my mom and her sisters were on valium in the latter part of their lives and so i was born that way that doesn't mean i had to become that way but i had a predisposition that means it was easier for me to fall into anxiety didn't have to it wasn't determinism but so uh as i grew up i was basically okay uh in fact some of the anxiety gave me energy to uh to to get with it but um in 2003 i'd i finished a year uh from hell i was stressed beyond belief and at the end of the school year i literally had a seven month nervous breakdown and it happened to me 10 years later in 2013 uh after the same kind of year and i i i felt like i was losing my mind i was having almost daily panic attacks and so i really dedicated myself to not only good christian counseling and and medication which has been very helpful to me but also sean to studying everything i can get my hands on and i must have read 40 books on anxiety and depression including this big 400 and some page uh standard uh guide for psychiatrists and psychologists i read that and uh i boiled down what i learned to a set of ideas that i i committed myself to putting into practice so when i wrote that book it was really an attempt to share with others things that i had proven worked for me because i waited until they worked and i and and and uh so that's what happened and i haven't had problems with uh any anything like that for seven years uh but um the main thing i learned and and this is a keeper it's in my book finding quiet but the main thing i learned is that not all the time but most of the time anxiety is a learned habit that you can unlearn by doing the right practices so it takes practicing certain things day day by day that un uh disingroove those anxiety triggering grooves in your brain and nervous system and replacing them with healthy grooves that trigger peace and joy just automatically is their default position so i think private formation and habits of the way i talk to myself am i half full or half empty well i was more than half empty but now i'm half full and more but you can't just will yourself to be there you've got to practice certain things that i list in my book that will get you there over a few months if you stay with it and that's that's what happened and why i did that and i i guess i think that we lose a lot of people to the faith or to effective ministry in a vibrant christian life not as certainly by doubts and ideas but also by their their emotional uh instability and their fragmentation maybe from their childhood and so i wanted to just strengthen and kind of support my brothers and sisters from the things that had certainly helped me jp i have not read near as much on mental health issues as you have but as i read gen z and follow kind of the data pretty much every expert i'm seeing is talking about how the concern with mental health issues depression anxiety loneliness skyrocketing during the quarantine do you think does that match up within i could guess but tell us why if that's so you think that would be the case oh very much so um there are several reasons why anxiety and depression have been on the rise for about 20 years one of them is the pace at which we live our lives it's too rapid we weren't made for that second is the inordinate individualism where we don't have close friends and have community and regular we don't know how to attach to them uh i think the third one was a loss of meaning and purpose in life as the main thing that guides us and so i think what happens is that's that's gone on today and the covet situation not only has caused people to be afraid about dying or are getting significantly sick or losing a loved one but i think more than that and losing your job i mean that's all understandable but i think more than that it's it's caused people to have to be to slow down and be quiet and that's really hard to do if you're used to being adrenalized by activity so you can actually go through more anxiety when you're in a quiet stage if you don't embrace it and work through it and learn to make it your friend uh because what you'll do is turn to addictive behaviors to give you a little soothing and then that just is a turkish delight situation where you're gonna get worse and worse as time goes on so that's what i think happens it exposed the uh fact that we were coping by being busy and uh being on on these technology gadgets all the time and god blessed them but they're good for us but not all the time that's what i think happened that's really helpful that's great by the way jp i haven't read them too but there's a number of people commenting on your books and ministry that have just been very meaningful and encouraging to them i want to make sure you heard thank you thank you to all of you thank you one of the things you've shared a few times when i had you in a mentoring group i've heard you speak and in class is that you grew up you didn't grow up with a father and that that did have a big effect on your life would you be willing to share what that father vacuum for lack of a better term was like and just how you've how that's affected you in your life in your ministry well my father got sick with cancer when i was six months old he had radical surgery which in those days you could do meaning that you didn't have anything to lose you were gonna die anyway so they tried the surgery which might have killed him in the operating table but it actually helped him and then he ended up dying in second when i was in second grade so i i my mom remarried five years later in seventh grade to a wonderful man but he didn't really know how to relate to me very well he was kind but what happened was i felt i didn't really know how to be a man what a man looked like uh i i i felt unprotected uh i remember going to this cub scout meeting and my mom dropped me off at the at the church door where they were having it and i walked into this room and there were like 80 kids in there and they all had dads and here are these big men and i i don't know what i'm supposed to do and i'm walking around and i'm just wanting to cry and run out of there because i i didn't have anybody that was overseeing me and i felt very vulnerable so i think it made me i think it it made me have a feeling of inadequacy uh that that that vacuum created now um here's the good news the good news is that i was uh my senior year i was athlete of the year and i was all-conference two years first team in basketball and all district and football had scholarships to play both at small schools played baseball and track and so i had coaches and god surrounded me with some really wonderful coaches that were good men and i would i modeled my life after these men and and they were all the kind of men that you'd want to model your life with many of them were believers which i didn't really understand but they were they were just good role models you know understand so god filled the vacuum with other men the other thing was this i was raised by my mom and uh what that did for me is that i and i'm not bragging i'm just telling the truth as best i can i've taken tests on emotional intelligence and i really cry on emotional intelligence i score very high on five different scales and that means i'm i'm pretty good interpersonally and i'm a good listener i don't take all the air out of her room when i walk in and the reason is because my mom i was raised by a woman and women tend to be better at that kind of sensitivity than men and so the benefit was that i got the wonderful influence of my precious mom and uh it actually was a good thing in that way so god can bring good out of uh out of bad uh and i i'm proof of that god saved me but it's tough to be fatherless sure i really appreciate your honesty jp ever since i've known you you've been vulnerable and it's been a it's meaningful to me personally you know my my dad grew up a father who was in the home but who was drunk all the time who was abusive distant and before he was a believer people would say you have a heavenly father and he'd be like why would i want a heavenly father father equals drunk abusive and there was a lot of relational and intellectual rewiring um how did that or did that shape your spiritual life and do you think that's a barrier to people coming to the faith or do you think the fact that there is a father in the faith is more of a draw for people or is it some mix of both yeah i think uh there's a one of the psalms that says that you're you're god's speaking to his people and it says you thought i was just like you and we tend to project on god our own who we are and uh the the the most formative influence on a person's god view is the father that the mother plays a role of course but my view is men and women are different they're better at different roles uh i don't absolutize that uh i'd be glad to have a woman president but uh they're just that seem to be naturally gifted and um as a result i think the father is a little bit more influential in shaping that picture of god now for me uh since my my father was absent uh i i think that i i might have had a little i had more difficulty in my first let's just say seven or eight years as a believer connecting with god he seemed absent from me more than he has for the last 40 some years because i was not expecting him to be present so i think that was a part of a problem for me in terms of my picture of god and what i had to do is i had to really zero in on jesus and not the father as much and that got me through but now i've come to realize that i've been prepared for an explicit investigation of the father's love and uh and and i and embracing his love over the last i don't know 15 years has really enriched me uh if i may say so but it wasn't as easy as it would have been for someone who had a nurturing and a protective father who was strong and made you feel safe and was available to you thank thanks for sharing openly and uh honestly when i work with students you know i still teach high school class part-time fatherlessness is just it's huge and it affects kids on so many levels let me shift gears somewhat you have uh two daughters who are grown out of the home uh so you're obviously a parent still a parent if you were gonna go back and start over parenting what are some things that you've just learned that say you know what i might do this differently or emphasize that a little bit if you had a parenting do-over so to speak what might it look like now that you're a few years removed from having kids in the home um well for me when i got married uh i wanted daughters i i just have a daughter daddy and i sons would have been wonderful but i i asked god to give me girls because i just love little girls they're just fun and they're frilly and and they do these little things where they wear all these costumes and have tea parties and i love that and uh so i to be honest i really gave my heart and soul to fathering and doing reading and practicing and talking to people i had a good course on christian marriage with howard hendricks at dallas so i i i don't have very many regrets there's there there are two things though that i that i would say first is i would i would try not to be um angry with the girls so quickly i mean there were times when i just got i got hacked off and i said you know i was thinking to myself what whose kid are you i mean what is that and you know i would uh i would come at them in a way that was that was too strong and uh i wish i hadn't done that i wish i would have been a person who worked harder on taking a deep breath and doing things like that before i talked to them about something uh probably the the single biggest issue uh that i wished i had done differently isn't with them it's with my wife uh the biggest conflicts in our marriage were during those years when the girls were i'd say from sixth grade up through the first year to a college because we have really different approaches we have the same values we have very different approaches and she's much more here's an example i mean uh my daughter was a first girl at esperanza high school with my daughter ashley to be on the varsity peer quad four years in a row wow he made it as a freshman and uh her senior year uh or her junior year there was the varsity tight in who wanted to take her out on a date well uh no that was just not gonna work for me because i knew i knew what he was thinking and my wife just jumped all over i mean first of all i said no and if my daughter had had a knife she would have cut my head off without thinking about it or crud caught my eyes out she was enraged well my wife as was typical jumped on their side and so now i'm against three women and i eventually gave up because i i thought well this isn't worth fighting about but uh uh but i did have a strong talk with her and uh my daughters were virgins when they got married and i'm great i'm proud of that it's okay if some of our viewers weren't i wasn't uh because i was an unbeliever for a good while uh but uh so that's not to harm anybody but i'm just proud of them being that way but i wish that i had we'd gone to counseling and tried to work out how we could resolve our differences in issues without getting on each other's pace and in raising the uh the decibel level you know sure sure something that i wish i had done differently i i appreciate that that's awesome to hear you say how much you poured yourself into being a dad not a lot of regrets i hope when i get to the end i can look back and say you know what i tweaked this or that but as a whole poured myself into it i think that's where where we should be with honest reflection so i'm i'm thrilled thrilled to hear you say that uh one question that somebody had more of kind of a writing question is why did you first choose to write on the soul and consciousness and then how do you choose what to research and write and focus on well i began to uh see uh a growing number of christian scholars and this this took place i'm gonna guess about 30 years ago uh who were abandoning the idea of a soul and just saying that we were our bodies and brains but we had emergent consciousness and i that didn't make any sense to me and you know one one guy richard bube at stanford said that when we die we cease to exist but we are we are continued in existence as a memory in god's mind well i thought dude uh you know it's nice that people remember you and it's nice that god remembers me but that ain't me in his mind or else i'd be a constituent of his intellect you know and i'm not part of god now so a memory of me is not me and i couldn't figure out how there could be an intermediate state between death and resurrection where i existed in in a disembodied state if i didn't have a soul and and on it goes and so i began to realize that we were giving up territory to the emerging naturalism and materialism of science and i didn't think it was needed i thought that there was no sense in this and so i began to research it and teach on it and i realized the more i looked into it that the evidence that consciousness isn't physical and that there is a an immaterial soul is in my opinion overwhelming it's it's not like it's 55-45 wow it's 20. and uh for me that's that's pretty far up there and so i i wanted to set the record straight and i knew that i had the horsepower to do it and so i wanted to fight back and and to write a book that countered the encroachment of materialism and naturalism with the result that we were constantly revising our theology to make the scientists happy with us and that's not i that's that just ain't who i am uh you know i'm just not gonna i'm not gonna go that route i pick things to write uh based on uh a couple of criteria number one is this a need that is out there is this something where the church needs help uh and uh the secular world is grossly misunderstanding what we actually believe about this subject and why two am i am i passionate about this because if i'm not then that's important issue but maybe it's for somebody else so what are my passions and three do i have the ability to address this subject or could i get up to speed on it so need passion and do i have the ability to address it so i would say that you know love god and do what you please as augustine said uh that's kind of how i've approached it and i've been just putting out brush fires and trying to deal with things and put my you know finger in the dike and keep the dyke from breaking and maybe even mobilize other people to get involved hmm that that's amazing when i was picking a dissertation it was can i do this is there a genuine need and am i passionate about it was those exact three criteria and uh unless you planted that in my subconscious and i forgot it uh that that's that's pretty cool to hear that's a similar let me ask one question i'm curious about i asked this to to bill craig and i'd be curious what you would say do you have a favorite book of the bible yes it would have to be if i may luke axe uh luke is my favorite gospel although i you know matthew's in there too and i love all of them but if you ask me to pin one down on an island i'd take luke and the book of acts is is right there and is one of my very favorite books in the whole bible and the reason is this that book every time i read it i am overwhelmingly impressed about its historical accuracy and these things really did happen now what that what that does for me is it increases my expectations that they will happen today and so i find it faith inspiring second tier would probably be the book of psalms uh which which would would be up there and and then in paul's writings um probably either first corinthians or or philippians very very very interesting i love love to hear you say it now you describe it it makes sense that luke acts and we can combine those together uh would fit since he's a doctor an intellectual and gives a lot of facts to study plus the radicalness of acts 2 always motivates me uh in my faith how do you deal with criticism i know right now it's probably not in person because of the quarantine but over the years in your debates in writings you've received a lot of criticism from within the church for your stance on mental health issues some of i've heard say this is compromise um from outside the faith some have some have criticized you what's your approach when you're when you're criticized well um it's changed over the years i think it bothered me more early on but after a while you get used to it and dallas willard told me if you don't want anybody to criticize you then just don't say anything submitted and you know he's right so i just i'm not willing to make that trade off and i'm gonna so uh i i'm the kind of person that is willing to hear arguments against what i believe i read them i get try to give them a fair assessment and i make my students do that well um so i don't mind somebody giving me a hard-hitting critique of a position i've taken that's fair but when they start assaulting me or or using ad hominems and and making things that are cheap shots that they you don't need to do that i just i'm at the point where first of all i j it doesn't bother me because i don't care uh like there's so much work for them i mean i if they have to stoop to that kind of stuff that shows my arguments are pretty good uh and i just i find that that kind of thing i just chalk it up to the to the sad situation we're in on the culture today now if if i get criticized by by somebody i love a close friend uh for example that's harder and unless it is done in an honest truthful spirit with an aim of of building me up in the long run now that's still hurt it's embarrassing sure it still hurts i you know i don't like it but i i know that i'm going to work through that because i know why so did this he's not against me he's for me but if you get one where it's kind of even one of your friends you know is kind of hacked off at you and he gives you a cheap shot that hurts that doesn't happen a lot but those those kind kind of get because i love this person and i know what are you doing you know i get enough of that out there and i don't look at it anymore i mean i just say it's not a good idea i know another scholar who's a real good friend of mine and he spent an awful lot of time reading criticisms of his of his pieces and and trying to answer everybody and and i and i saw just the agitation it brought in a soul and i understood why i did it but i it wasn't for me i i decided that i would argue out my stuff in the journals and in the in the books and so on and uh and so i don't look at that stuff i i don't google my name uh all kinds of crap comes up so that that there's a lot of wisdom to that that makes sense i can find it starts expending not only time but emotional energy too and can affect me in negative ways although i want to be aware of criticisms when appropriate so it's a tough tough balance so i think that's great great advice um we got time for probably just a couple more questions but let me ask you uh kind of briefly what was the story behind the m.a philosophy program and why you came to biola because i've i've shared this with you that i went to biles in undergrad awesome did my doctorate at southern baptist but that time from 2000 to about 2003 when i was in mayfield program my wife who knew me at that time we were high school sweethearts even beforehand described that as the most the greatest transformation she had seen in my life basically since junior high knowing me um and i could give all the reasons for that i won't but what's the quick story behind that program and for those the mayfield is the m.a philosophy program at talbot which is a part of biola i had a burden to create something that would multiply my impact and and train up others to do what i did uh either go into the church or para church ministries or just have a regular job but be effective in their church or go on for phds and teach and make a difference uh but there there needed to be a university that had a chance to be a a real academically respected university because of the quality of their work not because of caving in and also valued the great commission and evangelism of the spiritual life and biola had a shot at that i saw that so i was invited to come and join the faculty with no promise that we could start this thing but scott ray who is a uh the bioethicist and general ethicist in our program uh was finishing up his doctorate in ethics at usc and uh we were already buddies we knew each other from seminary and so we we wanted to try to get a program going so we went to mcdonald's and we got out and uh actually napped them and we said if we wanted a curriculum what would we do and we wrote out a curriculum on this thing uh the courses we thought needed to be in that thing and we typed it up and took it to the dean and and he bought it and he said we got to see if you can have students now and so we'll give you you know four years and so we had 12 the first year and then 30 the next year and then it got up to 130 for a while it was the biggest m.a program in the world and so and we pumped 220 students in phd programs and many of them like you are teaching and writing and doing other things so it was the burden to combine a heart for spiritual life and evangelism and impact for christ with a well-developed mind and an articulate ability to spell out the christian faith into the culture and that's what we tried to do tried to love jesus and be real in our journey but also think you know tough-minded i had never heard the piece about mcdonald's that you went and sat down and wrote it there when my dad tells the story about writing evidence he took a couple folders went sat in a mcdonald's and then went back to his room and finished it up so that's kudos mcdonald's has inspired some good apologetic and philosophy yeah hey for those of you watching a couple of books that came up today i would really encourage you to get two that i'd love to benefit from by jp one is a book just called the soul if you're looking for an explanation of what the soul is and the defense of substance dualism you will not find a better book than simply called the soul we had an interview earlier if you just search jp my name and evidence for the soul we kind of walk through that if it's helpful and then his book finding quiet where he really lays out a practical plan for spiritual growth tied to what he discussed earlier in terms of combating anxiety and some other issues as well finding quiet is a book that you'll definitely want to pick up make sure you hit the subscribe button we actually have an interview we don't normally do this but tomorrow we have michael behe coming on and he's going to talk about his latest book um where he's really defending pretty much the arguments he's laid out there from the flagellum and from the edge of evolution and i'm going to lay the toughest questions out there for him and see if he can defend intelligent design i know he can but that's tomorrow at noon so make sure you hit subscribe make sure you hit the uh notification button because we'd love to have you join us tomorrow believe it or not bring your tough questions and i know dr b he will want to be ready to answer those and just very quickly this this channel is brought to you by biola apologetics we'd love to have you join us in the m.a philosophy program that jp is talking about it is a full distance program and in the m.a apologetics program there's information below check it out we'd love to have you at biola uh jp hang on just for a minute but thanks so much for coming on and this is a great stimulating conversation if you enjoyed it consider sharing it with a friend everybody have a great night thanks so much for being here with us

Channel: Dr. Sean McDowell

Views: 3,002

Rating: 4.951807 out of 5

Keywords: JP Moreland, philosopher, philosophy, life, experience, ministry, training, apologist, lessons, debate, apologetics

Id: WlusvA8kEy0

Length: 59min 45sec (3585 seconds)

Published: Wed Jan 06 2021