We're back with another edition of the Federalist Radio Hour. I'm Emily Dashinsky,
culture editor here at the Federalist. As always, you can email the show
at radio at the Federalist dot com, follow us on Twitter at fdr LST.
Make sure to subscribe wherever you download your podcasts into the premium version of
our website as well. Today we're joined by author Gregory Kocol. He has
a new book out. It's actually a sequel to another book. It's called
Street Smarts, Using Answers using Questions to answer Christianity's toughest questions. He represents
the organization Stand to Reason. Gregory, thank you for joining the show.
Emily is fine if you let me call you em I'll let you call me
Greg. Okay, it sounds a good deal to me. Where can people,
by the way, find a the book and be Where can they find
more information about Stand to Reason? Well, Stand to Reason it's the organization.
I represent the acronym as str and, So the website is str dot
org and they can get the book there or they can also get the book
on Amazon. Course very easy. It's easier to find it by my last
name, because there's more. If you could just type in Street Smarts,
you're gonna get kung fu things, you know, Mma STU. My last
time is spelled ko u k l ko u k l. And then both
of the books Tactics, which is the prequel, and Street Smarts with is
the sequel, and that really they all kind of cover the same ground.
Well, I should say they are related in the same way, but they
cover different ground. One is kind of more advanced than the other. And
incidentally, we'll talk about the Street Smarts that's the main focus of our conversation
today. But folks do not need to have Red Tactics to be able to
benefit from Street Smarts, because I bring them up to be on the whole
tactical game plan in the beginning of the book Street Smarts. And as we
dive into or right before we dive into Street Smarts, could you tell us
a little bit just about your background, your career, what led you to
this point. Yeah, well it's a long story. To keep it brief
because my spiritual birthday is in about two weeks and I will have been a
Christian half a century. I became a Christian at twenty three. Now I
just revealed my age as a student at UCLA, and I had thought I
had tried Christianity being raised in a religious denomination, but cast that off mid
sixties when everything was getting wild and crazy and exciting for a young male finally
and initially kind of experiencing his own world for himself. And it wasn't until
about three or four years after that that I really began thinking about the claims
that Jesus of Nazareth made about himself, the claim he made about the nature
of reality, and then nick claims he made on my own life. And
kind of after asking a lot of questions and pushing back a lot, and
you know, coming back to the table, I finally came to the conclusion
that Jesus got it right, and the smart money was on Jesus, and
I began following him in nineteen seventy three, and so it's it's been a
mister Toad's wild ride ever since. Have had all kinds of amazing experiences with
the Lord. I worked three and a half months in Europe in nineteen seventy
six, and five and a half weeks of those I spent behind what was
then called the Iron Curtain, working with Christians who are being persecuted for their
convictions. I lived in Thailand in nineteen eighty two for seven months working with
Cambodian refugees who had survived the Cambodian Holocaust from nineteen seventy five to seventy nine,
and then I took a pastor role at a church for a few years,
about eight years, and then started Stand to Reason in nineteen let's see
nineteen ninety three, and that means this year as our thirtieth anniversary, and
so we have been in a bowl market for thirty years. It's been fantastic.
Like I said, it's a you know, mister Toad's wild ride,
like having a tiger by the tail. But we've seen some amazing things in
those thirty years. I've spoken more than ninety college and university campuses here and
abroad, and written a number of books, and have a great staff of
nineteen people with five other speakers that do the same kind of thing that I
do, making the case that Christianity is worth thinking about the smart moneys on
Jesus. So that kind of brings us very quickly to this present moment.
Well exactly, And you used a fantastic phrase that it's been a bowl market
for thirty years, and it's certainly hard to argue with that tell us about
the type of person this book is for. Well. Our mission statements,
tandaries, and starts with three words, we train Christians. So we're not
an evangelistic organization that we want to, of course have an gillistic impact.
We are really here as a more discipleship and we are here to build Christians
to be able to make the case at first to think more carefully about their
convictions. And Christians have not, historically, When I say historically, I
mean within my lifetime or even the twentieth century, characteristically have not been good
at thinking. We've been great at thinking before that, but we've kind of
abandoned that for other things, more emotional appeals, and consequently we left the
field the culture to the disciples of Nietzsche and Darwin and Marx and Freud and
a a whole bunch of others that have kind of taken over. And this
is kind of what we're facing right now. We're facing a culture that is
extremely hostile to Christianity. When I first became a Christian, I was you
know, it was Jesus movement. You know, if you see the movie
Jesus, the Jesus went Revolution. Yeah, well that's what that's the era.
That's the time that I became a Christian. I actually didn't see the
movie because I didn't need to live, you know, a long hair and
everything. But it was the Gospel was quite straightforward then in the sense that
people understood the language and the concepts and even though if they didn't follow it,
and so communicating the gospel was a lot easier. Now the Gospel simply
characterized seems like hate speech to some people, and so we have to do
a lot more of what Francis Schaefer called pre evangelism. And because of the
heat in the street, so to speak, because the street is any place
you feel vulnerable and uncomfortable in a spiritual environment. The way I'm using the
word. This could be with colleagues, this could be with a family,
members, friends, students, university professors. I mean, it's very hostile
out there ideologically, and it can get hostile between people. And so Christians
are sitting on the bench large because they're scared, which I understand. Jesus
when he sent his first missionary team out, so to speak, Matthew ten,
he said, do not fear three times inside of seven sentences. Paul
believe it or not, the Great Apostle Paul Acts sixteen had his knees knocking
together in Corinth and he had to have an appearance of Jesus in the middle
of the nights and said, Paul, get out there and speak. Don't
be afraid anymore. I have many people in this city, so it is
natural to feel frightened when there's a threat. All right, and there is
a threat. However, you know, we got seuth Central here at Los
Angeles. You don't go to Seuth Central. You don't walk around there unless
maybe you're an MMA fighter or you're packing you know, a weapon or something
like that. In other words, when you're prepared for challenging circumstances, the
fear level drops precipitously. And this is what my goal has been with the
Tactics book first and now the one that just released yesterday, actually street Smarts
using questions to answer Christianity stuff as challenges. This is written for Christians to
think more carefully about the challenging issues that they're faced with, and will talk
a little bit more about that, but in general, things like abortion and
atheism and the problem of evil and challenges that people make to the Bible,
slavery and genocide, challenges with gender and sex and marriage, all of these
kinds of things that we're being confronted with all the time. Challenges about Jesus,
his person and his work, Jesus being the only way. Really,
are you kidding? You know? That kind of thing, how arrogant,
how narrow minded. So each of those are chapters in this book. After
I lay out the game plan and talk a little bit about the spiritual environment
that people will be encountering, the Effician six stuff you know, behind the
scenes, spiritual schemes that are in play, and talking about why questions are
so critical to engaging productively in the culture, and this is the foundation of
the game plan. Questions keep you safe. Put simply. Then I go
into substant substantial analysis of these different areas of challenge. And here's the key.
Here give sample dialogues with sample questions that help Christians to get into the
conversation and maneuver in the conversation with tremendous safety, with calmness, dialogically with
other people having largely friendly conversations. This is what we're after, and these
are constructed in such a way as to keep things tame, keep it safe
for Christians, but also make it effective. You know, I was actually
going to ask, although I hesitated to ask this question, why questions?
Because it's asking a question about the value of questions. It sort of answers
itself. But why questions? Why are they so central to your blueprint or
your roadmap for questions looking to evangelize? Well, I kind of my icon
for this idea is not Socrates, though he's historically characteristic the Socratic method.
It's rather Lieutenant Colombo of TV fame, and many people still remember him.
He's in the number one TV icon of all time because he would come in
and solve his murder mystery with coming in very much under the radar, scratching
his head, mumbling to himself, I don't know as something about this thing
that bothers me. You know, you know, he doesn't look dangerous,
and he starts asking these questions. But in asking the questions, he's gathering
information. So questions allow you to come in in a low key way,
showing an interest in another person's point of view, gathering information in a safe
environment. Because if you're just asking questions, I mean, you're just ankle
deep in the pool. There's no risk at all to asking questions. We
start making statements, which oftentimes, certainly the more aggressive type of Christian,
who's going to do Now we've got something to defend, and now we're a
big target for attack because we're a target for attack. Taking that approach,
a lot of Christians aren't even going to go there. They're not going to
go on the street. They're going to stay in the house, doors,
lock lights out, you know, needs knocking. And so the questions give
them a means of getting into the conversation in a friendly way. They also
provide an opportunity to get the kind of information that they're going to need to
move forward. And we just discuss that at a moment. But here's another
key, and you're exemplifying it right here. Okay, Emily, I'm doing
all the talking. I'm doing all the heavy lifting. I'm doing all the
work here. All right, you're just sitting there asking a question here and
there. Easy for you, But guess what this conversation is going in the
direction that you are sending it. You're in the driver's seat because you're asking
the questions, and so this is critical. When we ask the questions,
we are the ones that are directing the conversation and choosing where it's going to
go. And we can change our course midstream if we want by asking other
questions as we get more information. And so all of these are very,
very powerful reasons why questions are so important. Plus, the pressure, as
they intimated a moment ago, as not on us. So like you asked
me the question, there, you are relaxed. You have time to think
about, well, where might I take this conversation with gregor whoever you're interviewing
in the next step. Same thing for us. We get hit with a
hard challenge. If we start asking questions and we're listening, we're also buying
some time breathing room here for us to think about what to do next.
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code Sarah. You know, I want to go back to the point about
it being a bowl market because it occurs to me. We have the conservative
movement tends to be very heavily Catholic, so we have a lot of Catholic
authors and thinkers on the show, and I think the first person I posted
this question to was Raymond Arroyo, and it was about the resurgence of Latin
mass especially among young urban Orthodox Catholics, and why so many young, urban
educated people, maybe not even Catholic, are being drawn to Catholicism, to
Latin Mass. I've heard I've heard it from some members of the Jewish community,
and it speaks to I think the reality of that bowl market, that
there is something right now about religion that is pulling at the hearts of a
few people my age, millennials, gen Z. Because for some people,
the pains of a hyper secularized, high tech world are starting to become more
and more obvious. And I wanted to ask if that's something you're dealing with,
and if that's something that people can look to this book for. Well,
you know, it's interesting. It's a very good observation, Emily,
You're making it. I think what we see as a polarization and a galvanizing
Okay, Unfortunately, the galvanizing people are just getting so hardened because of the
When there are public conversations about anything controversial, they turn into gladiator events.
You know, who can draw first blood, who can draw the most blood.
And we're not interested in this as Christians. We shouldn't be, and
though sometimes we get pulled into it. But what you're identifying is a deep
human need. We are all made in the image of God and we have
to live in the world that God made. I mean, that's a fact
of reality. Friends. The Shaffer is the first person that I remember saying
this, and it's really impacted me because it's helped me. In the Tactics
book, there's a tactic called inside out, and the point of the tactic
is to be aware that inside of every human being is a whole, whole
passle of information that they're born with. They know intuitively that God is built
into them because they're made in the image of God, and this is a
moral nature. For example, there is this is an understanding that life is
more than just molecules clashing in the universe, Okay, that there is purpose
in life. This is why we talk people out of suicide. We try
to even if we're atheists. Well, why because we don't want to waste
their life. We can't waste the life that has no meaning. We intuitively
know it has a meaning. Okay. So now, when you've got a
culture that is focusing on it's not that there's no meaning and culture. Now
that's not the emphasis. The emphasis now is the meaning is all inside of
you. You have the burden of constructing your own identity for the moment,
okay, And that's what authenticity is. Well, human individuals are not an
adequate reference point for deep, profound meaning. And all this leads to that
you do you is just profound and deeply unsatisfying a long run narcissism. Okay.
So what's the response. Some people are waking up to that. And
so what they're looking for is they are certainly looking to fill that God shaped
vacuum, and the only thing that can fill it is God. You know,
as Augustine said, our hearts are restless and they continue to be restless
until they find the rest in you, okay, And so that's what they're
after. Now, I think what some of the more liturgical forms of religious
expression, okay, help them to feel more stable. There's something ancient about
it, there's something solid about it. There's it's actually it's it's retroactive.
It's in a certain sense reactionary. It's going back to an older time when
things were simpler and when they're more comfortable. And I understand that, and
I think that's fine as long as what they're going back to that has this
structure also as the truth. Just going back to any kind of religious structure
is not going to be adequate because that's not going to fill the whole.
It will help them feel better in a chaotic universe, but if in that
environment they're actually getting the truth and not just some religion that makes them feel
good for a while, Yeah, I like this religion. I like Buddhism.
Well, religion isn't about what you like. It's about what's true.
It's about what picture of reality is accurate to the way the world actually is.
Actually wrote a book titled The Story of Reality, making the case that
the Christian Biblical characterization of reality is the accurate one. It's the true story.
So I think that helps explain the move. It's a good impulse.
It reflects something inside of people that God has placed there. But I want
to make sure that people find the right landing place and not just a comfortable
place better than the chaos in the world. And so we have something we
can appeal to. We can say, there is an identity that you have,
and it's the identity God has made you with you don't have to discover
it. It's not flexible. You're a child made in the image of God,
and this gives you infinite value. That's the final resting point upon which
you build. That's the foundation point, and that's what I want people to
see. And of course the Street Smart's book is meant to make the case
against all of these kinds of challenges. Those other challenges are not going to
work as smart as the ability to either perry a challenge to the Christian view
or legitimately periods not just a dodge. It's to show why it's not elicit
challenge, and or to take a foreign view like atheism, for example,
and show the problems with it, to show look at this isn't the place
you want to leend. This is not taking you anywhere good. Atheism is
the is the is the ultimate non answer. There's no answer to anything.
It's just neihalism, nothingism. You know, it's just molecules clashing in the
universe. And the best any individual can do is make up their own meaning.
But there's no value difference between Mother Teresa and Adolf Hitler in that regard.
You know, they chose their on this view. There it's changing and
choosing their own existential moment and existential project. Okay, so you're with me
on that, but that's what we're facing and if we can if we can
have a tool too, as I put a guard. Okay, I'm not
interested in the harvest. This sounds crazy given what I do fifty years as
a Christian, thirty years with Standard Reason Apologetics. I got books, and
I've spoken on more than ninety university campuses. I think it maybe I mentioned
that. I don't know. I've done a couple of interviews or ay today,
so I can't remember what I said what I haven't said. But the
point is I'm just trying to get people thinking. I'm just trying to garden
in them, because without good gardening, there's not going to be a harvest.
All right, Jesus and john Ford talked about sewing and reaping, okay,
and some stow and others reap. What I've discovered and this is not
just something I've seen, and I've been taking polls about this, you know,
with audiences recently, but I also see in the New Testament it is
unusual. It turns out that it's unusual in people's lives. To be led
to Christ by a person who prays with them the sinner's prayer, or they
come forward at an altar call. It's unusual. Biblically, there are no
altar calls in the New Testament. There are no times where people are told
to receive Jesus as Lord and Savior. Not against that, I'm just simply
saying it's not the biblical pattern. And when I pull people my audiences have
been averaging about three quarters of the people in the Christian audiences that come to
an apologetics presentation did not come to Christ by praying to receive Christ or by
having an altar call. So there was not this. They didn't get harvested
by somebody else. The Holy Spirit harvested them individually. And in fact,
this is what we see in the Gospels and the Book of Acts. The
Gospel goes forth, the preaching goes forth, the word goes forth, and
then people moved by the Holy Spirit respond to it. They begin believing in
it, even without quote unquote receiving Christ. Again, I'm not against that
motif, but I'm just I want to release Christians from the burden of thinking
that's the way they have to do it. So if they have some gardening
tools, which we have been given. We have harvest tools, the little
booklets, read through the simple Gospel, here's the Sinner's prayer. You know,
that's not the only way it's done. In fact, that isn't the
way it's done in the New Testament. So what I'm giving with tactics and
especially street smarts, is I'm giving gardening tools so Christians can do spadework in
a relaxed environment and still make a huge impact for christ I was not in
my head somewhat vigorously when you were discussing the importance of the landing pad,
you know, for people who are exhausted by modernity and technology. And I
was thinking of Andrew Tate actually gravitating towards his version of Islam. And I
do think we'll start seeing more and more of that. One word though,
that you just used many times, was a version of true or truth?
Yes, it sounds so obvious, you know. I think of a book
that was really powerful for me when I was younger, especially as a journalist,
was at least strouble starting as a journalist and trying to answer the question
for a creator and coming down on the side of Christianity. But that's for
a generation that was raised to believe in the obvious importance of truth. I
never questioned, and if I did, I came down on one side of
that question very strongly about whether there is truth or whether truth is ultimately relative,
if there is a truth capital t truth, or whether it's relative.
And it strikes me that must be a new challenge for people who are looking
to ask some of these questions now, because there's a lot of my truth
versus your truth. Your truth may be that you have a God and that
your scripture tells you that you know abortion or marriage or whatever it is.
That's how a lot of gen Z kind of navigates these difficult questions. And
that's a that's a brave new world. Well, yeah, this is a
obviously this notion has been around for a long time, but it is beca
really popular since the sixties. I'm going to watch the whole development because I
was a young man during the sixties and going to college and watching the counterculture
movement. And this is when Francis Shaefer made this distinction and is writing between
true truth and relativistic truth. It's not a distinction that ought to be made
because all the word truth means, to get a simple synonym is fact.
A truth is a fact, okay. And when we say something as a
fact, we are talking about a fact in the objective world, in the
world out there, as it were, Like gravity is a fact, all
right, Believing gravity doesn't make it happen. If you stop believing in gravity,
you're not going to float away, okay. And so when people say
there is no truth, what's so ironic about that statement, am is that
that they are stating a truth when they say that, they are stating a
fact. Now that almost sounds like a word trick when you say it,
because it's so simple. But one of the and I actually think this is
this is this little dialogue is in streets smarts. It's either that or tactics.
But my question is, when somebody says there is no truth, is
I'm trying to figure out how you want me to respond to that. I
mean, I think you want me to take you seriously. I think you
want me to believe you. I think you want me to think you're correct
on that. In other words, I think you want me to think your
view, your statement is actually true. But the minute I am tempted to
agree with you. I realize you are not allowing me to do that.
You are telling me I can't agree with you. I can't affirm that because
there is no such thing as truth. So how am I to take your
statement? Now? Notice there I ended my little analysis with a question,
and the question is meant to force them to think about the foolishness of the
statement they just made. Okay, Now, just for clarification and the postmodern
influence that really hit in the early two thousands, that really hit the culture
big time and hit the church. Okay, it's been around for a long
time. Is this the idea that you know you can't know truth? Truth
is a narrative, it's linguistically constructed. Of course, that statement itself is
meant to be taken as an accurate characterization of how knowledge works. You can't
avoid being self refuting in this. I call that the suicide tactic. By
the way, you can't avoid that. Okay, However, there is a
distinction that can be made, and this is an Enlightenment distinction. So people
in the Enlightenment said, well, you can know things about reality, especially
if you use the scientific approach. You can use empirical methods to test the
physical world and no physical fact. But if you're not dealing with physical fact,
you're not even dealing with knowledge. I mean, these are the verificationists
and the the of the early twentieth century. You said, you know,
well, you can't, you can't. You can't know anything unless it's empirically
proven. Of course that statement can't be empirically proven either, and this is
why that's largely abandoned. But the impulse is still there. And so what
we have is like a two tier universe now. And this Francis Shape was
great at characterizing this. Nancy Pearcy is an author nowadays that does a good
job making this distinction osgonus as well. But that you can know certain kinds
of things, as science teaches, but when it comes to like the so
called immaterial world, morality, religion, soul stuff, you can't know that.
That's just unknowable. You just take a leap, you just make a
guess whatever. Well, this is patently false, and it can be demonstrated
to be false quite easily, and with the proper questions. For example,
I had a guy in a university. He was raising this particular issue,
and I said, do you know what you're thinking right now? This is
from the audience. He's right there and he pausitive. Of course I know
what I'm thinking. How do you know what you're thinking? Are you tasting
it, smelling it, touching it, feeling it, hearing it? Is
that all five? No, you have direct access to your own thoughts.
That's how you know your thoughts. You have direct access. And there's a
whole bunch of things in the world that we have direct access to. Okay,
did you have coffee for breakfast yesterday? Of course they did. How
do you know that the way pump your stomach and look at this? No,
you remember it? You were there? Okay, Well, how do
we know what happened before we were born? Somebody told us that we rely
on That's not science, that's history. That's different. They all have their
the strengths, and they all, all of them, even the scientific approach
has their weaknesses. So we as thoughtful people are kind of going through the
process of assessing the truth claims about each of these areas. The same can
be done with morale, and the same could be done with religious claims as
well. And so this is my project, is to help Christians be confident
that these are areas of knowledge, and that they can be shown to be
areas of knowledge even with the other person. If you have the right game
plan, you're asking the right questions, and you know how to proceed.
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Chris Markowski on Apples, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. You
know, it made me think that The New York Times profiled actually University of
Florida President Ben Sass, former US senator, just this last week, and
he had a quote in the interview where he said, basically he was deflecting
I think a political question, saying I'm not especially interested in politics right now
because I think when people look back one hundred years from now on the politics
of the day, they're not or on the history of twenty twenty three.
They're not going to be focused on the politics of the day. They're going
to be talking about some of these things that are happening. They are much
much bigger, even though we don't you know, if you work in politics,
you don't really realize it. On that note or in that contact,
I wanted to ask, actually, how the seemingly politically charged world that we
have so many of these faith based conflicts in these days, for better or
for worse, and very often for worse, how does that affect some of
these conversations. Meaning I imagine, you know, the type of conversation with
somebody in a deep blue city about christ Janity is actually probably going to have
marriage, abortion, men and women looming over it, even if you know
the person, the Christian asking the questions, doesn't put it there. I
would imagine the reflex of a lot of secular liberals, urban you know type
educated people and others throughout the country is just it is their version or their
impression of Christianity is is heavily colored by politics and by a cultural political depiction
of Christians. Is that true? Is that what you find how to deal
with that? That's a very good question you, Emily. You asked great
questions. And I had an interview with Newsweek magazine. Oh maybe ten or
twelve years ago, was right when Katrina came through, maybe as longer than
that now. But the question I was asked is why are you Christians only
concerned with homosexuality and abortion? And I said to him, That's not all
we're concerned about. That's all you write about. You know, this is
very important news from a journalistic perspective of your own background. If it bleeds,
it leads, right, And if it's not bleeding, they cut it.
If they want this to be part of their narrative, all right,
and so they make it bleed. In other words, So during Katrina,
every church I was in, and I was in a church almost every other
weekend, okay, they all had projects in their announcements and stuff about helping
Katina. And where were the victims? Where were the articles about that?
What most people think about Christianity is what they hear on the news. That's
what colors there their understanding Christianity. And so when you go into these environments,
you're going to of course that's going to be front and center for them,
these preconceived notions of Christianity. And unfortunately sometimes Christians they're not careful to
be good ambassadors, which is a very strong ethic and stand to reason.
We are building ambassadors. And one characteristic of a good ambassador is character okay,
being win winsome and attractive, gracious and friendly, incisive in our thinking.
We can be strong, we can be bold, but we need to
respect people and their ideas and and and so I mean that's that's that's the
command that we have from Scripture. So when when you think about it,
people in the world they're fighting all of these things. What they don't realize
and what we're not always as equipped as we should be as followers of Jesus
of Nazareth is to show how the biblical ethic and world view view and understanding
of reality speaks to all of those kinds of things. The underlying issue,
look at the culture is a ship without a runner right now. People are
looking for something to hang onto. We have these so we have these fads
that people went through, We went through a cutting fad, you know,
people cutting, especially girls. Okay, and now we're going through a gender
dysphoria fad, especially girls. Why that a gendersphoria happens to two and three
year old boys. Up until just recently, that was the profile, the
psychological profile. Something else is going on. This is a this is a
cultural phenomena that's going on that people are laughing out on. Who knows all
that's driving it? Okay, there are spiritual forces at work too, but
there is a hunger for something. That's the foundation. You brought this up
earlier. So part of our task is to show that we can provide that.
Let's just take the problem of evil, if I can just go there
for a moment. Okay, this is a standard atheist objection to Christianity and
any form of theism. And so when people ask me this dialogue, I'm
going to share with you here or the short thing is in the Bookstreet Smarts
to show how this navigation works. Somebody says, well, what about the
problem of evil? I said, what about it? Notice a question I
tossed back to them. Let them do their talking. Well, it's a
problem for you, isn't it. What's the problem. I want them to
spell it out. Well, if God is good, he want to get
rid of evil. This actually isn't true, but that's that's the way they
put it. And if He is powerfully be able to get it, but
evil still exists, so there's no God. Say so, here's my response.
Okay, let me ask you a question. Let's say you're right,
there's no God. He's gone. Okay. Now those things that you just
described to me a few moments ago, rape, torture, murder, genocide,
et cetera, et cetera. Do they still happen. Oh? Yeah,
of course they happen. Are they still evil in your mind? Yeah?
They're evil. That's why I don't believe in God. Okay, Now
you have a godless universe with a whole host of things that you call evil.
Explain to me how an atheistic worldview solves the problem of evil. You
see, Emily, the problem of evil is not a Christian or theist's problem.
It is a human problem. No matter where you live or when you
lived, everyone knows that the world's broken. This is an absolute given.
Okay. So the question is if you're going to adopt a worldview that's adequate
to explain reality. It's got to make sense of the problem of evil.
Atheism can't make sense of the problem of evil because it has no categories even
to make good and evil coherent. There's no external standards. There's just the
individual doing what he wants. Okay, so they can't solve it. What
about Christianity? Guess what? Evil's part of our story. Actually, our
whole story is about the problem of evil. It starts in chapter three,
doesn't end until sixty six books later, So it's part of our story,
and our story is not over yet. So now can you begin to see
how Christianity, the whole picture of reality properly understood, begins to speak to
the most foundational concerns that human beings have. Okay, there's just one example
there. So this goes right to the core of one aspect of human being.
What is right and what is wrong? And if nothing's right or wrong,
then what do we make sense of all those things? How do we
make sense of all those things that seem to be wrong in the universe or
the things that seemed to be right? I said Hitler and mother Teresa,
are they actually really no different morally? Because there is a way to make
moral distinctions. No, we know better. We know better by the way.
There's one of those bits of knowledge that we all have that's not by
science. Okay, it's this moral understanding that there's evil in the world.
So where does that come from? What worldview makes sense of that feature of
reality? That's what I'm asking And when we get when we look more closely
at the Christian world view, we find that it speaks to all of these
things people are struggling with. It's very robust, and the image of God
and man starts in the very first chapter of our story, becomes a foundational
concern for human identity, human value, human obligation towards other humans, and
human rights, because without that, there are no human rights that are inherent.
They're just what governments give. And if governments give it, they can
take it away. People with power can give and take, and that's all
that's left. Do you have any standout stories from your decades now of experience
in this space. Is there any story I'm sure you have many, but
that you might be willing to share of how this tactic of using questions has
really maybe pulled at someone's heartstrings, change somebody's mind again. I'm sure you
have many such stories, but is there anything you might want to share?
You know I can. Well, what I'll do is, I'll give you
a couple of examples, because I remember, my goal is not in the
moment to change the mind, right, I'm not looking for a conversion of
some sort, not immediately. I'm just being a gardener. But I'll give
you an example. That's a funny example, I think, because it's this
is this is an anecdote. So this happened to me, and this story
is in the book, and there's a lot of other anecdotes encounters I've had.
But I was in Seattle doing a doing a series conference on Friday night
all day Saturday. There are other speakers, but I worked really hard.
I was really tired. I wake up Sunday morning and I'm off to speak
at a church, you know, two services right now. So I'm pulling
my rollerboard through the hotel and into the little restaurant to get my coffee.
And one thing you probably don't know about the Emily. No you wouldn't because
we just met, is that I'm not a morning person. Okay, I
mean before my first cup of coffee, I'm an atheist, right, So
you know, it's like really hard for me to get going. And so
I'm pulling my roller bag into this hotel room and into the restaurant and I
do not I'm just telling you, I do not want to talk about God.
I don't want to talk about Jesus. I have conversation with waitresses,
but not early in the morning. Leave me alone. I don't want to
witness, just you know. But the waitress comes up and she's way too
exuberant for me for the time in the morning. Hey, how's the day,
what's going on? What are you doing in Seattle? Whoa great?
Oh man, I'm thinking go away, you know that kind of thing.
And so I tell her, well, I figured this will do it.
I told her I'm going to preach in a church. Oh that's good,
she says. And I'm thinking, what's good about that? Well, that's
why I asked. I said, maybe she's a Christian. I'm thinking,
are you a Christian? No? I used to be, but I'm not
a Christian now. The universe takes care of me. That's what she said.
Okay, And I'm thinking, huh, what does that mean? But
I just said to her, what does that mean, how does the universe
a person? And notice, I'm just curious now, But one thing you
don't know is in the tactics game plan, the very first step is to
gather information with some form of the question what do you mean by that?
Just to get clarification. So I'm not witnessing because I don't want a witness.
I don't want to talk about God or Jesus. But even so,
my inner Columbo is already coming out a little bit because I don't understand what
she's getting at. And she said no, no. I asked her as
the universe as a person. She says, no, it's not a person.
Well, then how can the universe take care of you if it's not
a person? Oh? And she stops am and thinks about that. He
said, okay, I guess God takes care of me. And then I
said, oh, okay, that makes sense. Then God is the universe
And I said, oh, what do you mean? God is the universe?
And so we're back and forth. I'm just trying to make sense out
of what she's saying, asking these questions of clarification. I'm not trying to
put her down, not trying to prove her wrong, but she's kind of
a New age type person. Finally she goes away and brings my coffee in
my scrambled eggs, whatever it is. And then when she brings her check,
here's what she says to me. Nobody has ever asked me questions about
my view before, and it got me thinking, how mine drop? Right,
That's all I'm after when I'm trying that I wasn't trying. I was
trying not to try, but still God used that circumstance, just that kind
of innocent opportunity, not even innocent, I mean I was. I wasn't
trying. I was trying to get rid of her, you know, but
still, what are you talking about? And by just drawing her out,
Now, this isn't you know, at the end of the world that isn't
like and she became a Christian. I dropped to her nas and I don't
know whatever happened to her. I actually gave her a copy of the book
The Story of Reality was. She was very glad to receive and I signed
it, you know, and all that, so I'm hoping she'll read it.
But the point I'm making there is all I was doing was almost reflexively
employing the game plan in a non intrusive way, trying to find out more
about her view, and God still used that to get her thinking about her
own view. Now there's just one example, all right. I also want
to mention one other example that's more over a period of time. Okay,
I'm not sure what your exposure is to other apologists, Emily, but have
you heard of a guy named Jay Warner Wallace. Jay Warner Wallace, So
he wrote a best selling book called Cold Case Christianity. In fact, it's
okay, that's Jim Okay. He was a cold case detective in Towrents,
p d and Elle County for many, many years. He never he was
amazing. He never lost a case that went to trial, you know,
resurrecting these murders that people committed twenty or thirty years ago and finding the bad
guy. He was good. Okay, four of his shows were on TV,
you know, on the Dayline or whatever that is. But he was
an atheist. He was hardcore atheist. And then somebody challenged him to think
about Jesus and he said, Okay, I'm a detective. I know how
I witness testimony works, I know evidence works. I'm going to go and
I'm going to apply it to the New Testament documents and lo and behold.
After a lot of search, and this is similar to least struggle with journalism.
After a lot of a lot of research, he came to the conclusion
that the testimony was reliable in the New Testament documents, particularly the Gospels,
and that Jesus rose in the dead. And he became a Christian. And
then he wrote a book called Cold Case Christianity, which became a best seller.
And he has absolutely, hands down the best communicator that on Christian apologetics
I've ever met. Okay, here's what you don't know about Jim Wallace.
By the way, he's a very close friend of mine. Here's what you
don't know, Jay Warner. Wallace was in my garden when he was an
atheist. He was listening to my radio show. He was interacting with my
ideas, you know in abstentia. You know, it's like he wasn't calling
me, he was listening. And then as he after he as he moved
forward in his Christian life as a new Christian, he kept using the standardis
and stuff. Now, I'm not trying to wave standardisons flag. That's not
the point The point is garden. He was all I was doing. But
gardening was was was a central my garden, and Jim's life was a central
factor in moving him forward to his decision for Christ. And Abdu Murray,
the Muslim who became a Christian and then a Christian apologist, written a number
of books. He was in my garden too. He's a very well known
Christian apologist. John Noyce who was on our team as a Christian speaker.
He was in my garden when he was an atheist, then he became a
Christian. He doesn't even know when he became a Christian. Then I met
him, and then he's joined the team at standard reason as a speaker.
These are just three people I know personally and closely now that were that became
Christians, and they will tell you that the gardening I did in life was
a vital element of their journey. I didn't harvest them. Somebody went into
my garden picked my frew right. But Jesus said that the one who sows
and the one who reaps can rejoice together as John chapter four. So there,
I mean, you know, we're living in a time here. But
there's a couple of cases an anecdote of me just almost unwillingly being pulled forward
and God using that with the waitress in Seattle, and then the long term
excuse me effective here three people, and I have many other people that have
told me that one I've shared those stories publicly, that they've been in my
garden and then God brought them eventually to christ is so powerful. The book
again is called Street Smarts, Using Questions to answer Christianity's Toughest Questions. Gregory
Kocol thank you so much for joining the program and talking about all of your
work in this space. Well, Emily, anytime you want to chat,
I'm at your service. I really enjoyed our time together, really appreciate it.
You've been listening to another edition of The Federalist Radio Hour. I'm Emily
Joshinsky, culture editor here at the Federalist. We'll be back soon with more.
Until then, be lovers of freedom and anxious for the frame. Heard
the fame and reason, and then it faded away.