Rumors of Another World

well it is indeed an honor to welcome Phillip ENC to this evenings Veritas forum event I first became aware of his riding through Christianity today where he's an editor at large and through a book called what's so amazing about grace which was given to me by some close friends since then I've read several more of his books and given away copies of it his words have spoken to me to my heart in ways that few other authors have been capable of doing especially during difficult times he shares his pilgrimage through life transparently and compassionately with a vast audience of readers Phillip is a prolific author six of his books of one golden medallion awards and Billy Graham is said of him that there is no other writer in the evangelical world that I admire and appreciate more a quick search last night on amazon.com produced 27 titles that he is author to co-authored and I expect there are others and that may be out of print that I I missed from that list and there are more than 13 million copies in print some of which had been translated into other languages I intend to read some more of his book so it looks like I had my work cut out for me in addition to writing essays and books he also serves as co-chair for the editorial board for books and culture we're great very grateful you've come to UCSB tonight to speak to us on rumors of a hidden world let's welcome mr. Yancey to the podium good evening I'm impressed you could be seeing outfoxed maybe you thought this was a theatre that was showing out Fox you could be watching Major League Baseball and instead you came to a Veritas forum no baseball tonight rained out oh that explains this crowd okay all right I heard one time from a professor who wrote an essay question for the final exam the essay quite Haley was a philosophy class the essay question was if I had only one hour left to live I would and just a blank page and so he took the papers home and he was sitting at home grading the papers that night and he could tell some of the students were obviously just kind of brown-nosing him you know if I had one hour left to live I would read Shakespeare and listen to Mozart it kind of kind of answer you expect a good grade for but he's reading and he says oh listen to this honey talking to his wife he said this student really got it this student is so insightful they they understood what I've been trying to communicate because it says if I had one hour left to live I would spend it in your class she said let me see that and she took the paper and her vision was a little better than his and she noticed there was an asterisk and it said if I had one hour left to live I would spend it in your class and the Astra said please turn over she turned it over it would seem like eternity well I don't know how you feel about coming to a group this that's advertised as religious in nature I don't know if you feel nervous defensive I probably would have at your age in your place I went to a Christian college and we had Chapel every day and you could always find me because I was sitting there reading Time magazine that's when I read Time magazine and the deans would call me in on this and they would say Philip I noticed that you're reading Time magazine during chapel's yes sir well you should be listening I said well sir I've mastered multitasking I can actually read the magazine and listen to Chapel at the same time and they'd think about that and they'd say well don't you think that's disrespectful for the people who are speaking and I would say well I'd be glad to go up and introduce myself beforehand and explain my multitasking abilities to them the kind of student that the deans hate and that's kind of how I felt about any in a organized group where somebody stood up and talked about God nervous defensive maybe a little guilty slightly curious but it takes some courage it takes some courage in in this society especially to think about ultimate questions to show up to go see something called Veritas rather than outfoxed so I'm glad you came I want you to relax nobody's gonna yell at you nobody's gonna preach at you this is not a debate there's no one I'm debating with and I'm not gonna try to talk you into something I'll I'll admit that for much of my life I I hated Church I wrote a book one time with the subtitle how my faith survived the church and I got a letter from a pastor who was not happy and he said he said Philip I get so tired of you complaining about the church you grew up in I feel like writing a book called how my church survived your faith I encouraged him to do that I thought that would be a very interesting book to read but most authors really have only one story one theme that they circle around and and talk about from different perspectives and and if I had to summarize my theme what it would be is this it would be to survive the worst church imaginable and somehow end up in the loving arms of God because the church I grew up in was misrepresented God as as dearly as it could for example my father when I was just 1 year old got polio he was totally paralyzed he was in an iron lung could not even breathe on his own and the people in this church decided that that God was going to heal him so against all the doctors advice they removed him from the iron lung and about a week later he died so I have no memories of my father because the church made a mistake in theology I had a mother who claimed that she had not sinned in 12 years this is hard for a teenager how are you gonna win an argument with a perfect woman you know on all of the major issues of the day those were the the 1950s early 1960s our church was on the wrong side I grew up in Atlanta Georgia its most famous citizen as a man named Martin Luther King our church would joke about him in fact they called him Martin Lucifer Kuhn it was that kind of church just this mean-spirited ugly racist ungraceful place and my own pilgrimage as a writer has been to to go back and try to scrub off those words that were stains that were polluted and try to find is there anything there so I write books with titles like the Jesus I never knew because I never knew that Jesus growing up in that church what's so amazing about grace because I never encountered grace growing up in church and if you've been raised under ungrate of grace it is amazing it's like nothing else and my pilgrimage as a person and as a writer has been to go back and and reclaim territory I keep threatening my publisher I tell him I want to write a book called lies my church told me I saw a great movie lines called lies my father told me and I might publish this is no no if I fill up I don't think you ought to write that yet okay but I I get letters from many people who tell me I'm not alone I think probably the greatest gamble that God ever took was turning his reputation over to the likes of us because if you read church history at all if you go to a church at all you realize how unskilled we are at demonstrating what God is truly like and that's been a struggle for me as it's been for many other people there was a chaplain number years ago George but shriek at Harvard University and he had a very common experience students would come in to his off he had a big comfortable chair and they would kind of throw themselves down in this chair and announce I don't believe in God and he was quite used to this happened almost daily and he would say this you would say well tell me what kind of God you don't believe in I probably don't believe in him either and I learned a different kind of God than my church taught me and I've been kind of in in recovery ever since one thing I learned is that the is the best way to to grass what God is like is to is to look at Jesus God gave us Jesus I believe as an exact image of what God is like and if you want to know what God is like look at Jesus in God there's no undies asleep Ness at all God is like Jesus one of the things I notice about Jesus it said he never twists arms he never tries to get people to do things they don't want to do in fact he says he says you will know the truth veritas that's what that word means and the truth will set you free and I've come to believe the converse of that statement if it doesn't set you free then it's not truth and the church I grew up in did not set me free that and I concluded that was not truth but when I look at Jesus I'm I'm stunned that the kind of person he is when I wrote the book to Jesus I never knew I could go through the Gospels Matthew Mark Luke and John and you could draw a line the more respectable good citizen obedient responsible a person was the more threatened they were by Jesus and the more of a social outcasts the more ungodly the more irresponsible a person was the more attracted they were to Jesus it's kind of the opposite of what we think and even the stories that Jesus told the stories always have the wrong person as the hero he tells the story about the Good Samaritan not the good Jewish rabbi he tells the story about the rich man and Lazarus we don't even know the rich man's name Jesus doesn't bother to tell us Lazarus is here oh he tells the story about the prodigal son not the good boy who does everything his father wants but the guy who squanders it all and I realized that Jesus came for the losers Jesus came for the rejects Jesus came for the social outcasts Jesus came for me I concluded and sometimes when I was speaking to philosophy students particularly I say you certainly have the freedom to reject God to disbelieve in God but I am one who believes in God and one of the things I respect about God is that he gives us that freedom to do that in fact I challenge you to find a single argument against God in any of the great agnostics or atheists Voltaire Bertrand Russell people David Hume that is not already included in the Bible the book of Job Psalm sabbatic lamentations Ecclesiastes and you can reject God surely but I personally have respect for a God that not only allows us to reject him and even to say he doesn't exist but who gives us the very words we can use in doing that in his sacred scripture that's not a manipulative arm-twisting freedom overruling kind of God that's a freedom enhancing freedom enhance respecting kind of guy why do I believe especially coming from a church background like that why do I believe well I'll be honest with you one reason I believe is that I haven't found any good alternatives to faith there's a scene in the Gospels where people are leaving Jesus because he's not an easy person to follow don't ever follow Jesus because you think he's going to make your life easier and Jesus makes your life more complicated much for company you got to care about things that it's easier not to care about Jesus doesn't give you that option to follow me you have to care about the kind of people I care about he says I can't think of any alternatives really to religion every society ever ever studied by anthropologists sociologists has a defined religious belief now there are some scientists today who have no religious belief one of my favorite science writers is a man named Chet Remo Chet Remo was involved in InterVarsity which is one of your Christian programs here on campus in northeastern universities but eventually forsook his faith and he writes beautiful books he writes a column in in Boston newspapers and he's an astronomer and he once calculated the odds he's an agnostic now he once calculated the odds and he talked about the the odds of this planet with with these electromagnetic forces that that result in the exact proportion of magnetism and and gravitation and the binding of molecules and carbon and hydrogen and oxygen the odds of that happening by chance which he believes he is not a believer in God he calculated at 1 in 10 to the 15th power which he goes on to say is is a larger number than all the stars in the universe or all the grains of sand on all the beaches of the world well I quoted that one time I was at a very distinguished meeting I was speaking on a panel with there were two there were three Nobel Prize I get you've got some Nobel Prize winners here don't you all right this week even there were three Nobel Prize winners two in physics one in chemistry on the panel and I quoted this and I said is this true and one of the the physicists said well let me see that I gave him the quote and he stated to see one to ten in the fifteen win to ten to fifteen you could see the calculations going on in his head and you know there there are there are three kinds of physicists in the in the world those who can count and those who can't and and this is obviously one who could count in it and he said one two ten fifty yeah I would buy those odds and I thought well you can buy those odds you can think you can come to the conclusion that everything around this the the reefs offshore the mountains here where I live in Colorado all of this just happened there are there are people who believe that but those aren't odds that I accept those aren't odds that most people accept I I view the world rather I see signs it's not a perfect world but I see signs of creativity and and and beauty and genius when I read books of theology they always start off with these big words like omniscience and omnipotence and they have to explain what these words are it seems clear to me that if the most obvious thing about God if you look at this world is one of God's creations is that God is an artist who loves beauty I climb mountains in Colorado you probably don't know this but Colorado is actually the largest state in the United States I earned flat it's got more ground area we've got 54 mountains over 14,000 feet and 700 over 13,000 feet and 700 over 2 more over 12,000 feet and I've climbed a good number of those mountains I hope to eventually climb all the 40 nurse their 54 I did 40 for number 44 this year so I'm getting there the only ones left are really hard ones oh so I don't know if I'll make them and my wife would say numerous times this happens I I'll lose the trail and I'll be hiking along and suddenly I realize there's you look for these Cairns little statues of rocks that people put to let you know when you're on the trail and suddenly I'll realize there are no Cairns we're lost in about half an hour later I share that knowledge with my wife and yeah and by then we're very lost and I'll turn a corner and we'll we're above 13,000 feet and the trees stop at 11,500 feet and there's nothing but kind of Tundra and I'll turn a corner and I'll have the feeling it's probably not true but I'll feel I may be the only person who has ever seen this sight in the history of the world because you know by now I'm really lost and there are a lot of mountains in there very large and what do I see I see a carpet of wild flowers just wild flowers everywhere think it's smaller the higher you get we call it belly botany because you have to get down on your stomach to see them and and these were these are flowers that that have existed for all of history whether even even though I may be the first set of eyes humanized that I've ever seen them or I have snorkelled off the Great Barrier Reef of Australia for centuries nobody knew it was there no one had really seen it close up until Jacques Cousteau invented scuba gear in 1950 and now you go down and I guarantee you there is there's no museum anywhere in the world the getty museum none of them that has pieces of art more stunning more beautiful than you see on the Great Barrier Reef on little fishes that just go around eating each other all day that's that's what they do and I look at this world I look at this universe it's just it's lavished with beauty and I think that tells me something about God tells me something about God I sometimes tell people that I became a Christian because of three things really it wasn't the Bible I was immune to the Bible I was vaccinated against the Bible in my church it wasn't a gospel tract I wouldn't give those the time and it wasn't a Billy Graham I would never listen to him the three reasons that that I back then the three reasons that I became a Christian I say are the beauties of nature and classical music and romantic love I thought I had life all figured out and those things kind of got to me at a soul level and I remember reading at that time a book by GK Chesterton wonderful writer wonderful book and he he made this comment he said the worst moment for an atheist is when he feels a profound sense of gratitude and has no one to think and that's the condition I found myself in a profound sense of of gratitude for this earth for what I was sensing what I was feeling and and no one to think I gradually and gradually is the operative word came to believe that that God was not my enemy that God the the person who the being who invented this universe created this universe couldn't me was a being who was primarily motivated by love that the heart of the universe was not a scowl but a frown but a smile not a frown but it's but a smile I came deeply to believe that and I increasingly come to believe but a lot of things that kind of turn people off to religion they're looking at the wrong way part of the reason they're looking at is because the church doesn't do a very good job of explaining it but I truly believe if you had asked me about say 30 years ago what is your definition of sin I would have said well my definition of sin is God's Way of keeping us from having fun and if you ask me now what your definition of sin is I would say sin is God's Way of keeping us from hurting ourselves destroying ourselves I wrote three books with surgeon British surgeon who is a world specialist in leprosy and he was head of the there was a leprosy reom in Louisiana at the time it's since been closed due to budget cuts and every year the top medical people in the United States government would get together for a conference the head of the Centers for Disease Control Public Health Service that was dr. brand my friend the National Institutes of Health the Army Medical Corps all of them would get together and they would try to come up with a position paper of what what they as the guardians of the United States hell what they should emphasize and dr. Brandt told me about this meeting in Scottsdale Arizona well all these very high-powered important brilliant medical people these are not preachers these are not moralist they're doctors and all weekend they're talking about let's try to come up with the 10 greatest health problems facing the United States if we can agree on that then maybe we can have a health policy that addresses those problems make sense so they did and at the end of the time number one was smoking and tobacco related illnesses whole list of those illnesses number two was diet obesity related problems I think that's now number one some people say diabetes all sorts of heart problems related to obesity then there was drug addiction alcohol fetal alcohol syndrome drunk driving things like that hypertension caused by stress sexually transmitted diseases and finally at the end of the weekend they came up with ten that they all agreed these are the greatest health problems facing the United States violent crime was another one now dr. brand had spent 25 years working in India with leprosy patients and he said I I have been in meetings just like this in India only in India we'd have a whole different set number one would be would be malaria leprosy would be up there there may be four million people with leprosy in India polio until recently was very high until recently their smallpox yellow fever diseases like that and he said in India if I had gone into that group of medical experts and said you know I can get rid of your 10 top problems they would say oh this would be so wonderful then we would live in paradise we'll see we've done that and United States there's nobody getting polio in the United States and by getting leprosy malaria unless you travel overseas but do we live in paradise no we have substituted our own every one of the ten top problems that the doctors agreed were things that we do to ourselves we eat too much we smoke too much we drink too much we have sex with too many and the wrong kind of people and so I came to see that that if God did indeed design this planet and design the human body he did it in in a way for our benefit not to keep us from having fun but to make to give life to the fullest as Jesus said a lot of people don't look to the church for advice on how to have the best time on earth but I'm convinced that's true in fact there there lies floating around that I've looked at very very carefully one of them is about sex I heard from Billy Graham one time that the average American male thinks about sex every 7 minutes so at least you guys here have been thinking about sex while I've been talking so might as well talk about it right okay now there's a song some of you know by great group called Bloodhound Gang and the song goes like this you and me baby we ain't we ain't nothing but mammals so let's do it like they do it on the Discovery Channel do you know that song okay well now that that is not a philosophy of sexuality that you would get from the Bible it's but it is a philosophy of sexuality that you hear all around us on culture in cultured billboards advertising movies and very clearly in this movie we're just we're mammals so let's do it like they do it on the Discovery Channel and that sounds very attractive because we you know we like sex and we're mammals but it breaks down I've been studying mammals and in fact in December I went to South Africa and spent a lot of money going to game preserves and I watched how how they do it on the Discovery Channel and this is what I learned the person running this game preserves said now if you want hippos you can't have just two hippos they will never produce any babies you have to have three you've got to have a big male a slightly smaller male and a female because the only way a male hippo will mate is if he beats up a smaller hippo and then he'll get excited and mate with the female hippo some people would say that that is how humans do it but well then we looked at lions now lions are very different they they only have sex two two times a year every six months they go into heat and it lasts for 72 hours and they have sex every 20 minutes for 72 hours they're completely obsessed and then they forget all about it for the next six months they go around chasing gazelles and impalas and things now I actually live in a part of the country in Colorado where I see mammals doing it like they do it on the Discovery Channel a few weeks ago it's always about the third week in September I hear this noise early in the morning it's a great noise it's it's elk bugling and I go outside and there's this one bull elk it's got a big rack and then there are other little Bulls and their racks aren't quite as big and for a week or so they're they fight each other until the one with the biggest rack wins again maybe like humans I don't know and and and then that one who wins has in in this case about thirty to forty cows and they they kind of hang around my backyard and eat all the flowers we've been planting all summer and I watched them and this guy like the lion is totally obsessed with sex he's got 40 cows to take care of and for about two weeks that's what he does and I can be out on my front steps videoing him and he doesn't care okay so bloodhound gang tells me you and me baby we're nothing but mammals so let's do it like they do it on the Discovery Channel well I look at how they do it and I find that it's not really how most humans I know do it do you remember the scene when in a beautiful mind where the Nobel prize-winning mathematician goes up to the girl in the bar the woman in the bar and says you know I never was good at this social stuff so why don't we just skip the small talk and get to the place where we exchange bodily fluids like the mammals do it right flap right on the side of his face worst pick-up line ever in movies and we we don't you know we most of us don't like doing it in broad daylight with people videotaping us now there are a few perverts out there but most of us don't like that most of us don't like doing it with 40 people at once most people I know and and and most people think about it and other times of the year then the third week of September or twice a year in the case of lions and in fact the more you study human sexuality the more what stands out is how different it is from mammalian sexuality mammalian sexuality is all about creating new hippos new lands new elk human sexuality is about creating intimacy creating relationship and the more you study it the more you realize it's really not how other mammals do it it's it's unique it's different it touches not just bodies but but souls and every aspect of human sexuality some of these things I can't talk about but you can read about them in my book every aspect of human sexuality underscores that so when I look at this planet and when I look at just the evidence that's given us I think God may not be so dumb after all God may understand the humans that he designed the humans that he created I called the the book I wrote about this called rumors of another world and to me those are rumors they're not proofs but there are rumors there are times in our lives when we pay attention and wonder is there something else going on for me when I experience profound beauty I told you about the ways I did through romantic love and classical music and the beauties of nature I start thinking huh maybe there's more maybe there's more at hinge moments in life you will probably sense that I have a friend in Chicago who is a pastor he's ordained and he runs a web service where he will he will marry you and so he interviews all these people they call him up he I always have some come over to his house a couple and he would he'll say have you ever been to church no I don't go to church ah okay why why did you call a pastor well we just thought you know there's something dis important maybe I don't know somehow it might be nice to have God involved oh okay and then he leads to discussions about that our funerals I was at one just a week ago a person in debt in downtown Denver committed suicide Versailles had funeral and so many people stood up one by one and told about what a wonderful person this was and I kept thinking if only Bruce had heard these words five days ago he may not have killed himself because he didn't think he was a wonderful person I've never once gone to a funeral where where somebody stood up and talked about oh man George he had the greatest 50 inch gas plasma television screen oh man you should have seen George a stereo system he drove an Audi a4 six-speed they don't talk about that they talk about how George was generous George was kind judge was funny and extra fact George was kind of a jerk but it at funerals it's funny at funerals at this at this moment this hinge moment when life ends we instinctively want to remember the good things the lasting things George spent his entire life trying to accumulate and he was a jerk in doing it and yet we couldn't quite come to terms with that we wanted to believe more about George we wheelied even even at his funeral those are the rumors that we hear and they are just rumors you have to pay attention to them our own culture is telling us a lot of other messages very loudly if you want to know what our weather our culture values go to any newsstand here in your town college campus and just just look I do this regularly airport on the way through I'd stopped the newsstand and I look what can I learn about American 21st century culture from these magazine covers well first thing I learned is we we like women taking their clothes off about half of all the magazine covers I see are women without much on so we value bodies and we value men's bodies too you see you see athletes we've then you read further I remember when Michael Jordan retired the second time he retired three times now and when he retired the second time some sports writer figured this up and calculated that Michael Jordan the next year for not playing basketball case retired he's got a hundred million dollars from Nike he's got all these endorsements would earn twice as much money that next year for not playing basketball as all presidents in the history of the United States put together now that says something about our society to me you could probably make a good case that Michael Jordan deserves more than some particular presidents we won't get into that tonight but if if our society pays Michael Jordan I like Michael Turner I lived in Chicago what's in play I think it's wonderful but if we value the ability to put a round object into a larger round object more than all of the leaders of our democracy in history that's a little crazy I think and I go and I stand at the checkout lines and I watch the people who buy these magazines this is the United States scientists tell us that 64% of Americans are overweight and having watched the checkout stands I agree that is true so you see all these overweight kind of Slaven Lee Americans buying these magazines of these skinny beautiful people and you think this is the strange that here we have this great value of of Jessica Simpson Jennifer Lopez and people drool over them and none of them look where are these people I've never met one is it that strange that we we live with this illusion and the things that are so important we're told in this culture and in some ways don't matter my wife used to work at a hospice she was a chaplain at a hospice in this hospice you had to be very near death just to get in in fact the average person who went to that hospice lived only ten days before dying so these are people the very end of life and she would come home and tell me about the people she got to know and sometimes I would go down with her and some of these people were very famous there were people who played for the Denver Broncos in 1957 and they would have clippings on the wall of their time in the Sun or they would be socialites and again newspaper clippings and some of these people were rich millionaires and some of these people had no money at all they were scraped off the street by policemen no hospital wants them it would just increase their mortality rate so they took them to the hospice it's the Charity Hospice and the interesting thing is that all the things that we spend so much of our energy doing beautiful bodies having large bank accounts none of those things matter to the people in the hospice there were no beautiful bodies in that hospice and and the things the size of your bank account know that millionaire would have given all of his bank account if he wasn't in that hospice and he had years left of life these things that we we spent our lives on Jesus told stories about they thought about a farmer who built bigger and bigger barns and at the end of the at the end he finally had the barn as big as he wanted and then he thought then the next day he died and Jesus says what is the profit you if you gain the whole world and lose your soul why are we chasing this celebrity culture and this cult of beauty and and possessions when these things are they don't last one reason I came back to faith was because of my profession as a journalist I go around and interview people journalists are we're leeches we don't have lives of our own so we grab onto somebody who does have a life and the people who impressed me most I've interviewed I've interviewed famous people I could tell you some famous people and I I kind of divide them into two categories they're stars and servants the stars are the ones that we put the spotlight on we put on the covers of the magazine's to Bill Gates's people and and I've gotten to know these people and I went in thinking man would I like to be like those guys but the more I've gotten to know them I really wouldn't want to be like those guys sneaky journalists I've been in their medicine cabinets I've seen how many pills it takes him to get through in a day I know how many spouses they've been through I know how much they pay for counseling these by a large few exceptions aren't happy people they're not fulfilled people instead I've spent most of my career really finding people that we would normally overlook and I told you I wrote three books with dr. Paul brand he's as brilliant man as I've ever met he was offered the head of orthopedics at Stanford at UCLA at Harvard turned it all down his brilliant man graduated from the best medical school in England top of his class who spent his entire life working life among the lowest people on the entire planet I guarantee you that there is nobody lower on any social ladder than someone in the untouchable caste in India who has leprosy that's as low as it goes there kicked out of their own family that kicked her out of their own villages their hands their feet their faces are falling apart and here was this brilliant orthopedic surgeon who devoted his life to putting them back together and I'm sure he would have won a Nobel Prize if he had stayed in the nice laboratories in England but he didn't do that he went to this godforsaken place in the middle of a desert in India because nobody wants to live next to a leprous area and as a journalist I just have to tell you I've never met a more fulfilled and grateful and balanced person in my life than the servant in this godforsaken place giving up you know the most the the the statement that Jesus made that's repeated in the Gospels more than any other statement six times goes like this he says you don't find your life by grabbing hold and seizing and accumulating you find your life by giving it away in service to others and I found that to be true not just as a lil I guess I got to do that but if you actually do it you are the one who benefits you are the one who is the better person I remember interviewing a man named Millard Millard was an entrepreneur he was uh he was a millionaire practically by the time I got out of high school he had the scam going where he paid the secretary to the principal and she gave him for a certain fee she gave him the the phone numbers and birthdays of everybody in the school so he would call it was an Alabama he'd call mrs. Smith Miss Smith we got this little little tradition here I understand Mary's birthday is coming up next Tuesday well yeah that's right well for $5.00 we'll bake her a cake him I love everybody in the school sing happy birthday what do you think would you like to donate five dollars but what mother's going to turn that down and and he got out of high school he's already rich it becomes a lawyer and he's driving along one day and he notices that back in those days in nineteen fifties people are on these old metal ford tractors they look so uncomfortable they're bouncing up and down so he invents a tractor cushion shaped like a tractor and and becomes a millionaire but his life is falling apart and one day he's getting a divorce and one day somebody says to him an african-american taxi driver in New York City says Sarah sorry I've been over here and what you say here but you know what you need to do you need to go down and see Clarence Jordan in Georgia he'll straighten out your life and Clarence Durden was this radical Christian living on a commune was blown up by the KKK numerous times and Millard went down there and explained this whole situation and Clarence stirred and said well sounds to me like you got entirely too much money so why don't you go give away all your money and then you come back and talk to me he said all of it he's citizen that what Jesus said to the rich man give it all away okay simillar did he went he keep gave away 2.3 million dollars and he came back Clarence said you get away all of it yes sir all of it yes sir well we need to find you a job don't we he said what do you think makes God unhappy and I well disease or play all these things make God what do you think and finally they decided you know what really makes got unhappy there are a lot of people in this world who have nowhere to sleep at night they sleep in cardboard boxes they sleep under bridges ah that's a good one well I'll tell you what Miller why don't you go build a house for everybody who doesn't have a house everybody do you think God would be happy if anybody's no sir well you better get started and Millard fuller founded Habitat for Humanity and they haven't built a house yet for everybody in the world but they've built 200,000 houses so far I was in a radio station with Millard in Chicago and he was on the air : show this woman called up Jewish woman she was furious she said I came to Habitat for Humanity and then I started getting all these mailings with all this Jesus talk what is all this Jesus stuff I don't believe in Jesus I'm a Jew and Millard said well of course Jesus was a Jew too ma'am but he said he said ma'am you don't have to be a Christian to live in one of our houses and you don't have to be a Christian to help us build one of our houses but I got to tell you ma'am the reason I get up every morning and most of my staff gets every morning and and do what we do is because we're trying to be like Jesus and we think Jesus wouldn't be happy if there's anybody who doesn't have a house so that's one of the last reasons why I believe simply because I've seen I've seen the gospel work out in the people I admire most CS Lewis said this he said if you read history you we'll find out that the Christians who did the most for the present world like a Millard fuller Paul brand were precisely those who thought the most of the next aim at heaven and you will get earth thrown in aim at earth and you get neither well I've talked a long time and I did agree that we would have a question and answer period so you want to explain the rules here thank you very much for coming and for listening and we're going to go into that scary period where you can ask me well let's see you can ask me almost any question I was gonna say not about the Iraq war but I'll be glad to talk about the Iraq war and probably not the ordination of gay bishops I really don't want to talk about that tonight but most any other question I'll be glad thank you Thank You Philip so much for sharing your heart in your life and even making us laugh a little bit appreciate that for the Q&A session if you could keep your question just one question per person and I was gonna say keep it related to the topic but he just said that you can pretty much talk on any topic you want so okay just come up here and make sure you speak into the mic so he can hear you and then just one question per person hello oh great great job thank you I wrote a lot of notes are you truly from Canada are you no I'm not but I'm representing you should go it's a very nice place and not only that for those of you who travel overseas it wouldn't be a bad thing to put a Canadian flag on your backpack it's that is the truth okay well I have just one quick statement and then one question my statement was just about animals and obviously there's no we should well here's my statement I wrote it down so I wanted ramble so I'm reading now God did let us learn from the animals a little bit I believe is because no animal or cat or dog you've ever seen commit suicide they don't self inflict pain I think that's something that you know they don't hold their breath forever they don't even know how animals just be and I think that's something that God taught us that we can learn from okay my question I'm a Christian and I'm really confused and this has to do a little with the election but I don't want to get into you know specifics or anything but fact is the more I think about becoming more like Jesus I think about giving all your money away like st. Francis taking off all your clothes you know get given everything away and going and follow Jesus and the more I think about that I think about what would Jesus do the WWJD bracelets I think about forgiving your enemies loving your enemies like you said becoming Jesus is very complicated because you don't really want to love these people or forgive these people I think about turning the our cheek no revenge there I think about don't throw the first stone we don't supposed to judge anybody but and the more I think about it the more I see as I don't want to put categorized labels on but I think of like a liberal perspective in the sense of forgiving and second chances and all that stuff as opposed to the term that we know we hear Christian conservative I think of myself as a Christian liberal and I think and and I'm confused because when I looked in news I they don't exist I think maybe Martin Luther King maybe Jimmy Carter i I don't know but Christian conservative is what I see everywhere and I don't really identify with that so my question is one is I do a little bit will you talk about the church your own personal experience with the church and sometimes that seems like a little bit more conservative and now I'm rambling I understand so my question is why is that wide when I think of Jesus is it not really what a Christian conservative is seems like to be a pretty big gap there for my point of view and then also the question is who would jesus bom jesus but bom bom so that's kind of be anyway i'm gonna go sit down hey i wrote in one of my books sometimes I ask myself what would I rather be the most liberal person in a conservative room or the most conservative person in a liberal room and more and more I feel like that's my only option two options a number of comments first I would say that the wedding of the religious right wing the wedding of conservative politics and conservative theology is is fairly unique to America if you go to the United Kingdom if you go to Australia and you go to New Zealand the more conservative a person is theologically wanting to follow the Bible wanting to follow Jesus the more likely they're gonna be liberal politically so the United States is kind of unique there and that's true of most of Europe that I know of as well well how did Wow there are certain social issues that are very important to Christians who try to be faithful to the Bible certainly abortion is one homosexuality is another and thirty years when I was a child when I was a child even thirty years ago but like when McGovern when George McGovern ran for president his his vice-presidential candidate for a time was a man senator named Thomas Eagleton Democrat liberal but very strong pro-life and that was fairly common there were Democrats who were strongly pro-life who were social conservatives Democrats who were politically liberal social conservatives and in addition there were Republicans who were who were anti-war like Wayne Morse like Mark Hatfield who were who were liberal on uncertain issues in the United States I you know I don't know how it happened you'll have to ask Karl Rove I suppose but in the United States we've we've really split and the right wing has become totally allied with the Republican conservative right religious right has become allied with the Republican Party and there's not a lot of room for them as you probably know in the Democratic conventions they will not allow a pro-life speaker to speak and some of the issues that the religious right thinks are important I just shake my head at you know abolishing the Department of Education what does this Jesus want us to abolish the Department of Education but that's important for the religious right I'm not a politician some of you guys are political science majors I would just say well we were talking at dinner and I said isn't it interesting that the two issues that define a lot of evangelicals interest in politics are abortion and gay rights both of those existed in a far more egregious form in Jesus day people in the Roman Empire didn't generally abort babies they let them be born full-term and then they left them by the side of the road called the abandonment of emphasis of infants and between a quarter and a third historians estimate of all babies born in the Roman Empire were just abandoned and when the Christian Church came along they started taking some of those babies in there is a whole platoon of wet nurses who nursed these babies and they adopted them and kept them going but okay Benjamin of infant's far worse than abortion because there's no question about it is this a human being of course it's a human being it's born it's been carried to term nine months it's outside of the woman it's a viable human being and yet they let it die and gay rights they're there weren't the kind of lifelong partnerships who were being that are being talked about today it was usually older men having sexual relations with young boys pederasty that was pretty common in Greek culture and in Roman culture illegal in every state in the United States I think every country in the world so here are two forms of what is important to the religious right today abortion but far worse and inter-gender relationships but far worse illegal today and yet Jesus didn't say a word not one word about either one of those isn't that interesting that the two issues that that evangelicals get most exercised about existed in Jesus day in a far worse form and he never even mentioned them it seems a little strange to me now he talked a lot about wealth as you say he talked a lot about enemies he talks a lot about a lot of things but he didn't talk about those things so when I look at that I think huh am i following Jesus or am i following some kind of 21st century American little thing going on here now I think both of those are important moral issues that I have to deal with but they're not as important as some other issues that I have to deal with that were important to Jesus evidently so you rambled on your question I ran all that in my answer we didn't solve anything next question you mentioned that you had experiences in your early church life that vaccinated you from the the Bible what advice would you give to people who have been through a similar situation or who have a loved one who have been through a similar situation well there are some people who probably should take a vacation from church and I think that's okay however I think it's it's it's not a good long-term solution because it's very difficult for a person to maintain a spiritual warmth alone the Christian life should should come with one of these warnings you know do not practice alone in your home I guess my my advice would be to find a a grace-filled place could be just a small group could be a group of friends where you're rewarded for honesty not punished for honesty Jesus was that kind of person and I think the church should be that kind of institution it often is not a lot of people the last place they would think of being honest is in a church but I have been fortunate enough graced enough to find churches where where I could just say even as a teacher and I read this passage and I I'm really struggling here I have a hard time even believe in this and I know I'm not really living up to it and I wouldn't be kicked out of the church for saying that and and increasingly you know certainly compared to the childhood Church I grew up in and there are options there are grace filled places around when I look for a church I look for a place of diversity you look at the Pharisees what was wrong with the Pharisees Pharisees were very upright outstanding citizens the basic problem of the Pharisees is I study them is that they hung around other Pharisees all day if instead of just being around Pharisees if they've been with some of those text collectors and prostitutes and different people they wouldn't have such a neat little view of the world and so I look for a church that has that kind of diversity and I look for a church that that doesn't one of the most moving scenes of the Gospels to me is after the resurrection of Jesus Jesus only appeared two groups of people groups of people who already believed in him isn't that interesting that proves that Jesus was not an American you know if I if I were Jesus if I were Jesus and I was raised from the dead you know where I'd be Monday morning pilots porch I'm back

Channel: University of California Television (UCTV)

Views: 45,429

Rating: 4.7639751 out of 5

Keywords: Philip, Yancey, doubt, faith, religion

Id: TT9BGHcbqDc

Length: 59min 31sec (3571 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 24 2008