086: Racism and Paul

Paul says something that to modern sensibilities might be considered prejudiced. "One of their very own prophets said, Cretans are always liars, evil beasts, lazy gluttons. 13 This testimony is true. So, rebuke them sharply, that they may be sound in the faith."

Our culture thinks such statements to be prejudiced and hateful. But is it true? As Sean and Patke dive into this topic, we would do well to ask if Paul was racist and how do such statements need to be understood and applied.

Transcript

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SPEAKER_02 0:15

Hello folks, welcome back to Theologic. I'm Sean Mustion. And I'm Zach Packy. Today we're going to tackle a question, but before I pose that question, I want to ask my co-host two questions.

SPEAKER_00 0:29

Zach, what is your favorite food? Teriyaki chicken. You know, you you marinate it with some soy sauce and some garlic, and it's fantastic. I love it.

SPEAKER_02 0:38

Yep, that's that's a good flavor. Now, with that, the next question. If given the opportunity, money's not an object. Let's say you've got a job opportunity set up, maybe some friends in the area, where would you move?

SPEAKER_00 0:52

Um, because of my past history, I would move to Peru. Peru? Yeah. Okay. I'd move to Peru. If I yeah, practice my Spanish and and all that, it'd be fun.

SPEAKER_02 1:01

So what what why go back to Peru? Because you you've been there before, but hypothetically speaking, um, you could have gone there in the past and been like, I'm never coming back here. Sure. Yeah. So what draws you back?

SPEAKER_00 1:12

I guess I could say the the familiarity of the culture uh that that I that I know what I'd be getting into uh a little better. I'd know how to not only do that, but also um transition my family into those kinds of things. The food is fantastic down there. Uh the people uh are very they are very, very, very kind people. I mean you went to Belize, right? I don't know if you experienced the same thing I did, but I appreciated so much my uh my brethren in Christ down there and their great kindness and uh something that's worthy of invitation. I think my wife would adjust really well to that culture. So there's just a lot that that uh uh that would be a big part of it.

SPEAKER_02 1:50

Okay. All right. Well we'll circle back around to those in a minute. Sure. But the question that I want us to think over is was Paul a racist? That is the question of the day, the question of the hour. Was Paul a racist? Now, I'll answer that in a minute, but I want to share about an interview that I heard a few years ago, and you may have seen this, it circled around quite a bit. This was it may have been during 2020, maybe 2021. But Denzel Washington had just released a movie called Fences. He directed it, he acted in it, it had a lot to do with a lot of there's a lot of racial tension in the story at large. And in an interview, he was asked the person asked, Was it necessary for you, a man of color, to direct this movie? I saw this. What okay? So do you remember his do you remember his answer? He's he basically dismissed the whole thing, didn't he? He corrected the language. Okay, he said it's not a matter of color, but culture. And then he gave an example of how like Steven Spielberg did uh Schindler's List. So Spielberg is Jewish. Schindler's List deals with Jewish history. Right. So he he was in that frame of mind. So he's talking about the cultural connection. And so yeah, I appreciated how he he recognized what she was getting at. There's a dynamic of if you're gonna direct a movie about a particular culture that deals with very sensitive issues, it is helpful to be in that culture, in the know, if you will. And Denzel Washington went on to elaborate that, but he got at the color part of it. He's like, this is not a question of color.

SPEAKER_00 3:17

That's good, right? That is oversimplifying, isn't it? I mean, you get a different you have different cultures within people that have the same skin color over in Africa, right? Even within that. I mean, there are different cultures within the United States from one white person to the next.

SPEAKER_02 3:31

Exactly. Yeah. And so, yeah, that's so that that was that for me was a watershed moment. Because again, I that was either 2020, 2021, thereabouts, or maybe it was maybe it was an earlier interview that was really starting to circle with all the racial tension of that time. Um, but that was like for me, that was so helpful. And so that for me ties in with the question hand that we're gonna look at from Titus chapter one regarding a statement that if read wrongly, we might say, well, Paul sounds like a racist. Now, to our audience, before Zach and I get into this, I want to say this as a disclaimer to be abundantly clear that we reject hatred, anger, and violence, whether verbal, political, religious, or physical toward anyone. So let me be clear on that before we say what we're going to say, that which is pretty much what I just said is we reject true racism, is pretty much what I just said. And so with that, I want to make, I'm gonna turn it over to Pac here in a minute. I want to make a couple of observations that I see in our culture and explain where we're going with this episode, read the text, and then we'll we'll pause here. But what I want to observe is that in our culture here in America, that's obviously a broad statement because we're a big country, a lot of subcultures within, but generally speaking, any negative statement about a group of people at large or an individual who belongs to a different culture is quickly and thoughtlessly called racism. Let me say that one more time any negative statement about a group or people at large or an individual who belongs to a different culture is quickly and thoughtlessly called racism. Now, with that in mind, two objectives for right for today, for these next 30 minutes. Firstly, clarify the difference between cultural critique and that which is truly racism. And then secondly, which goes hand in hand with that, show how Western culture, with its unbalanced emphasis on the individual, can at times blindly call cultural critique racism when in fact it is not. So let me read the text for us. I'm gonna read the broader context just to um help us see where Paul's coming from when he makes the key statement that we're gonna hone in on. But I'm gonna read Titus chapter one, verse nine through fourteen. We find these words. He starts out with the pronoun he, and he's speaking of the uh the person that holds the office of the elder. He must hold firm the trustworthy word is taught so that he may be able to give instruction and sound doctrine and also to rebuke those who contradict it. For there are many who are insubordinate, empty talkers, and deceivers, especially those of the circumcision party, they must be silenced since they are upsetting whole families by teaching for shameful gain what they ought not to teach. Verse 12. One of the Cretans, a prophet of their own, said, Cretans are always liars, evil beasts, lazy gluttons. This testimony is true. Therefore rebuke them sharply, that they may be sound in faith, not devoting themselves to Jewish myths and the commands of people who turn away from the truth. So we emphasize and we highlight from that text where Paul quotes the Cretan prophet who says, Cretans are always liars, evil beasts, lazy gluttons. And then verse 13, Paul turns around and says, This testimony is true.

SPEAKER_00 7:15

And that's important for us to note too. He's not just saying this out of nowhere. Titus is on the island of Crete, and his role is to go throughout and set up elders, you appoint elders in verse five. So he's not just making that statement willy-nilly, he's dealing with something that Titus is actually facing.

SPEAKER_02 7:31

Yep. Yep. No, that's that's important because that um leads us to thinking about in general with missions, there is this whether whether it's uh negative characteristics or even positive characteristics, knowing the culture that you're you're in helps you to best express the gospel. It's actually something we're talking about as a church right now, is the three general cultures of the world. Um, again, that's a very broad statement, but there's three general breakups in how each one of them, their tendencies lead them to first connect to particular aspects of the gospel before others. And so knowing, okay, which culture am I in and which facet of the gospel is more quickly gonna connect with their mindset. And so, yeah, yeah, I would I would agree with you that Paul is doing a very similar thing here where he's expressing the culture that Titus finds himself in because he is tasked, like you said at the beginning, to go and establish elders there. Yeah. So we're gonna examine uh Paul's words and consider the implications of those uh with regard to how we think and speak about others. And with that, too, we're gonna address some blind spots in individualistic thinking. And so when I say blind spots in individualistic thinking, I want to share a story that's kind of timely. It's literally just happened last night. I was washing dishes with my daughter JL, and somehow Karl Marx came up. Now, I'm washing dishes with a seven-year-old. You might wonder how did Karl Marx come up in that conversation? Well, if you ever heard of this TV show or inbook series, Tuttle Twins, uh, they address Marxism. So as far as JL, seven years old, is concerned, Marxism is bad. But I asked her, I was like, why? Why do you disagree with Marxism? And she was like, I kind of drew a little bit of a blank. Well, understandably so, she's seven years old. So, I mean, I'm not looking for her to be able to quote the communist manifesto to me. But I did explain to her, I was like, okay, it's right now, it's not a big deal, but it's something that as you get older, you're gonna need to be able to say, if you disagree with something, here's why you disagree with it. And I gave her a few points as to why, or pointers as to what was troublesome about Marx's ideas. But then I said, however, one of the things that Marx got wrong is he over-emphasized the collective, he over-emphasized the value and interest of the group at large to the detriment of the individual. And so that was one of the things. But I said, I told her as a jail, we live on the opposite end of that spectrum. Where in America, generally, the individual is emphasized, my feelings, my rights, et cetera. So that we're not necessarily making the same mistakes that Marx made, but we have to realize that when there's an imbalance of the value of the collective as well as the individual, that you're gonna have your own blind spots and your own mistakes that you make in that sphere. And so I want our listeners to let that, I want that to land and rest with our listeners because that's gonna be really huge as we move through this, that we're gonna critique a little bit as to how we in the West as individual thinkers will have our own blind spots. I'm not saying we're Marxists, that's a very different thing, but there are gonna be areas that we need to be aware of. So let me ask you three questions. As you think about life, family, number one, which is more important in society? The interest of the individual or the group? Secondly, how should we make our estimations of someone to look at them individually or what collective they come from, what culture, what society they come from? Third, how do we navigate between considering and judging each man by his own merit and being honest about what marks the culture from which he comes? So, Pac, you've done weddings before, correct? Yes. Okay, so in marriage counseling, has there ever been concerns about the uh um in-laws? Like, is one ever like maybe the the husband had a bad relation with the mother-in-law, kind of the classic example?

SPEAKER_00 11:23

I don't know if I can remember experiencing that, but yeah, I could certainly see that as a factor sometimes.

SPEAKER_02 11:28

Yeah, and so we oftentimes here in America, we think about the person we're gonna marry. That person and maybe they come from a rough background, maybe they come from a background that has a uh have has ideals and philosophies that would be different than our own, but we tend to say, well, I'm marrying Susie. I'm not marrying her dad, her mom, I'm marrying Susie. But that is of itself to neglect the impact that the collective has in the situation dealing with family. Right. I've been married now for almost 10 years. You've been married for 15. I mean, you're I think you're married longer than I have.

SPEAKER_00 12:04

2011, yeah, it's gonna be it's gonna be 15 next year.

SPEAKER_02 12:07

Okay. Yeah. So I don't know about you, but the longer I'm married to Hannah, the more I see the hands inside of her. And that's not a that's not a negative critique, it's just the reality of the more I also am getting to know the family, I'm seeing overlap of okay. I I've heard Doug say something like that before. I've seen Louise react in a similar way.

SPEAKER_00 12:27

Yeah. I yeah, I've done all the time. It's like, well, you you look like you're you're that's that's a face that your brother would make, you know, that kind of thing. So I could see the similarities because of the relationship. It's kind of cool.

SPEAKER_02 12:37

Yeah. So we're a product of a culture, that's a subculture to say family, if you will, but we're a product of that. And my friends, I want to point out that I think we over-emphasize the individual to the point of not giving a good estimate and value to the collective that the individual is a part of. I think marriage is an example of that. And that's what Titus, or not Titus, but what Paul is doing uh within the book of Titus. So as we step in there into Titus chapter one, I know you wanted to talk through like what we're what we're talking about in the text itself and even addressing head on, like what is what is racism?

SPEAKER_00 13:15

Well, I would argue first off that that in our culture today, racism, especially I mean even amongst younger people, that uh that I'll hear people kind of jokingly say, Well, I'm racist against that, and it's like it's something silly like um eating teriyaki chicken. I'm racist against that idea. It's kind of like a silly word now that's been used and it's just thrown around. And the definition of that term seems like it's just bent and been warped and twisted to be sort of a little more about whatever you want it to be. It almost becomes like this guy does bad things. It's almost an extremely generalized idea, as that term racist is just thrown around everywhere about everything. And and I think it's also, we're saying in our culture, it's less and less something that is really bothering people because that term has just completely lost its its meaning. And I would argue that that term racist really isn't uh isn't really an accurate term as we think through that whole thing, uh, because there really is one race. Um, I mean, in if we're being accurate and if we're being biblical, Acts 17, 26, he made from one blood every nation of men. That's God who made them, every nation of men to dwell on the face of all the earth. We're we're all one real race. There isn't a a an argument for either one race or another, but there are different ethnicities. And that's really the difference. This is to say uh I would call it an ethnic superiority. That would be a racism. Like I am, because of by virtue of who I am, by virtue of what I grew up with, therefore I am better than the other person. Um, there can be good things from one culture to the next. There could be better things from one culture to the next. I already brought out about Peru. Uh I love the fact that when I was down in Peru, their kindness, I thought, trumped American culture in so many ways. Like I was this kid who's trying to learn Spanish, I didn't know a lick of it, but every single person down there would tell me things like little by little, you can eat an elephant. It's okay, you're gonna you're you're getting there. Whereas when we're in America, right, what happens? We we have people who come to the states and they you better learn English next week. It's like I realized how unrealistic that expectation is. Um I understand people need to learn English in order to function in society, but I learned the unrealistic expectation of that, especially if you're older. That's that's near impossible for some people who are older, if they're elderly, to learn the language. And so those kinds of things I think really open my eyes to just that there are some things that are better in some cultures and some things that are better in other cultures, and that's an okay thing. But to be the person who argues for superiority of myself and my group because of by virtue of who I am, what I am in my essence, that's when we bridge the gap into all sorts of prejudices. And I don't mean just racism, that could be gender prejudice, right? It could be economic status, right? If I'm because I'm rich, by virtue of what God has given me, therefore he must love me more, therefore I have uh I'm I am innately better than this person. Well, that's when prejudice begins to rear its head and people start start responding in prejudiced ways.

SPEAKER_02 16:29

Yeah, and I want to speak to prejudice in a moment. Just as you were speaking, I this is not in my notes, but just the way you said like someone that is saying I am superior because of who I am in my essence. Right. Okay. Your essence, that is, that is race language. But as you pointed out, there's one race. Right. Now, we would say that we're one race made up of various cultures, millions of cultures. Um, but we are one race. So we cannot say because of who I am, I'm superior, because really that begins to undermine the biblical idea of race. Right. Where you're you're the same race as everyone else. There is no superiority based on your who you are in your essence. In essence, you're an image bearer of God, just like all of humanity that is made up of different melanin um counts. Right, right. So And different cultures. Yes, cultures are made up of image bearers, made of made of people of different colors. But you're also saying prejudice, and something I wrote down, I appreciate the question that you sent about what is racism? An ungrounded prejudice. So I emphasize ungrounded, because you can have a prejudice that is rightly grounded, but an ungrounded prejudice against a person or group, so something could be ungrounded is skin color. Right. You look at someone that has a different melanin count than you, and you're that's your reason for being for being prejudiced. That that's that's racism. I further went on, and this kind of echoes what I'd written regarding what we reject, but hatred, anger, violence, or any sinful posture or act toward a person or group based on a prejudice against the group or person. And essentially what we're talking about is unjust treatment.

SPEAKER_00 18:09

Yeah, and and that's good, right? Because this is about as a Christian, we want to emulate our God who is impartial, right? And that kind of sometimes shows when somebody looks at a person of a certain culture, of a certain melanin count, when they have those those interests, those those that prejudice in their hearts, they immediately assume, right? The prejudice and judginess kind of go in together, right? They immediately assume something about that person individually, or based on their general understanding of the collective, which may or may not be true. Right.

SPEAKER_02 18:42

So that that really leads us straight up to the doorway of Titus chapter one. Like, is what we read of Paul's words in in the book of Titus, is that the kind of racism that we have described? And once again, let me just read it again afresh for our for our audience. One of the Cretans, a prophet of their own, said Cretans are always liars, evil beasts, lazy gluttons. And then Paul's comment on that at the beginning of verse 13, this testimony is true. And so, Packy, I know you wanted to talk through what this text means. So why don't you Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 19:18

Um one of the things I I really wanted to point out is uh, you know, oftentimes in our own culture, if if a white guy stands up and does stand-up comedy on their own culture, uh, we don't tend to consider that as prejudiced, or a Jewish guy standing up and doing the same thing, or a black guy standing up and doing the same thing. We don't tend to think of that as prejudice. We tend to think of that as somebody who's experienced it and and maybe might also be might have some truth in what he's saying because that's his life experience. He's grown up and he's joking about it, make people laugh and so on. Paul is basically quoting a guy who grew up in that very same culture and would be an authority on that, and he's agreeing with what somebody else has said, which is why Paul says he is a prophet of their own, right? And so I guess it would be confusing to me for people to say that Paul is racist, and I think we're being inconsistent when we, on the one hand, in our culture, seem to think that, well, that's okay for uh a person to do that kind of critique, but I can't do that. Well, Paul's agreeing with somebody else's critique, he's bringing that out because not only was that guy's experience, but Paul is affirming that, yeah, it's it's right. And this guy is a prophet. That is to say, he's pointing to somebody who is a leader, and you might consider him to be more of an authoritative source on that culture. And so he brings that out not to just knock that culture, but there's a practical purpose behind that because Titus needs to, as we said, work with the Cretans that he's working with. There are Christians who've gotten saved out of that background. And Titus, who who may be somebody who might be naive to the lying and to the laziness, Paul is warning him to keep an eye out for that because it's going to harm the church as that culture, as the people in that culture, which, as I said, there are negative parts of every culture and positive parts to every culture. But the negative part needs to be highlighted and understood so that Titus can do his job.

SPEAKER_02 21:18

Right. And I like how you point out that it's in the con like it has a it has a contextual flow within Titus one, where Paul isn't just randomly without any purpose bringing this up. Yeah. It's not like he's about ready to transition to another idea and he's like, hey, you want to hear a joke? And make some kind of like racial slur. Right. There is a purpose for him bringing this in. It's not pointless. And so with that, yeah, he's he's observing the culture. And that's where I would I would point out, I begin to turn our audience's attention to this idea that it is okay to give cultural critique because if we look at Paul, as Packy has just noted, he's not being racist. I would add to it, he's being perceptive. Yeah. And there's three things I want to mention about this. He addresses the culture, not the color, or things that are inherent to the person's being. Or I like how the word packy used essence. But he is he's addressing the culture. He's addressing that they are liars, evil beasts, lazy gluttons. These are things that are um not inherent to the person's being. And I know that begins to go into total depravity and simpleness of man, but in the way that God made us, it's not yeah, and the positive creation of God in that person, right?

SPEAKER_00 22:26

There's nothing wrong with melanin. There's nothing wrong necessarily with a culture, but there are sins because we're marred human beings, image bearers. Yeah, there are going to be sins in every culture. It's worth pointing out so that we can grow in godliness and speak the gospel to those needs.

SPEAKER_02 22:41

Right. And that's where this begins to kind of expand. I think kind of press in and challenge our individualistic minds in the West. Uh, something that um Jason Georges points out in his book, 3D Gospel, is how the world is made up of the individual and his personality, as well as the group as the uh culture and their groupality. Now, I don't know if he coined the phrase groupality, but it gets that point across that there in the same way that if I were asked to describe Zach Packey or Zach Deacon, um, there are going to be things that very quickly come to mind as are markers of who they are, what they do, um, in the same way um in what comes to the idea of culture. Uh, there are things that are markers, things that are kind of commonly known and seen in them. And this is what Paul is addressing. He's speaking to what is known and what has been affirmed by that culture's groupality. But thirdly, we need to understand that collective language is not wrong. Although it can be misused and abused, so we want to recognize that. Collective language is not wrong on and of itself. And let me let me give you some examples of this. And this goes back to my first question to Packy about favorite food and such. He mentioned teriyaki. I had written down for this that my favorite is Thai food. Like, hands down, love Thai food. And uh Pad Thai. You ever have Pad Thai? Oh, I've had it. I just had that recently. So good. I'm normally like I'm looking for a curry. Like if I go in, if I go to a Thai restaurant, I'm looking for something, some kind of yellow, yellow curry, lamb, something like that.

SPEAKER_00 24:24

I go with some Thai or Chinese, but Thai definitely. Yep.

SPEAKER_02 24:27

So good. I'm hungry now. And then Packy and I land pretty close on the question of where we would live. So again, this is this is I'm making a point here about collective language. Um he mentioned Peru. I could definitely go for that. Um, my experience to go to Honduras, which is is close, not the same. That's that's the other thing, too, where on the we're talking about like culture and stuff. Sometimes it can be too assumptuous, like, oh, it's South America, it's South America, it's Central America.

SPEAKER_00 24:52

I had a friend of mine when I was in Peru and they has the question, how are the Mexicans doing? Uh I'm sure they're fine, but we're in Peru right now.

SPEAKER_02 25:00

So when when Packy says, I love um, so teriyaki would be, was that Japanese?

SPEAKER_00 25:06

That'd be Japanese, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 25:07

So essentially he's saying I love Japan Japanese food. I go with that too. I love Thai food. We're both saying we love Latin American culture, we love uh Peru. I'm saying specifically Honduras. I spent a couple of months there. But at the end of the day, that's collective language. Now, I have never ever been corrected or rebuked from saying something positive that's collective. I can use collective language so long as I'm being positive. And even what Pac you're saying earlier about comedy, that's another area where you can hear collective language and even sometimes maybe some of the negative sides coming out. And in comedy, we kind of have this like sacred cow where it's like it's a space where the joke where jokes can be made. Stand-up comedy. Now, the past four years, we've seen a lot of us. Yeah, it is, like with wokeism and stuff. Hopefully, wokeism is falling down. But I think generally we get it, it would. Huge. I'll pray for the sake of my daughters and your children. May it fall.

SPEAKER_00 26:01

By God's grace.

SPEAKER_02 26:03

But a follow-up on that is that if we are willing to use collective language in humorous yet respectful stereotypes, as well as in compliments to a culture, we must ask two questions. Why is that okay? Right. Is there a basis for that? And then secondly, why are the use of stereotypes called racism when it's negative? Now, let me say something clearly in the word negative, and it goes back to our disclaimer. Negative and hateful are not the same. Right. A critique is not the same as slander. And so we're talking about negative observations on a culture, not hateful, slanderous. In that case, we go to the term racism. Not that. So with that, this is an inconsistency when we rightly express appreciation for customs and foods, which generally belong to a culture different than our own, yet nothing negative can be said. Right.

SPEAKER_00 27:03

Yeah. Yeah. Really good points. Really, really good points. Yeah, and I love that fact because this is about objectivity, this is about consistency. I've talked about this before. Double standards are not a Christian virtue. Consistency in personhood and characters. We strive to be imitators of God as dear children, to be as consistent as He is. And we need to point out where double standards can be the case and are the case, whether it's in our living or in our theology, in order that we might live in a consistent way. And I think that's one of the obvious inconsistencies of the cultural moment right now. Yeah, we can say nice things and positive things, but we can't critique. But if if we recognize this because we have a biblical worldview, because we recognize, as I said in Acts 17, 26, there is one human race, but multiple ethnicities within that human race. And within that human race, all cultures are marred by sin. And as a result of that, we can say that all cultures in one way, shape, or form, have negatives that they could critique that need to be critiqued. I I brought up a positive of Peruvian culture, and I remember I it sure would have been nice when I was down there if the uh the police were a little more consistent in being just. That's a common issue in Latin America. There is uh asking for bribes and stuff like that. That was a big problem down there. Uh does that mean uh I uh I dislike Peruvian culture? No, I don't think the Peruvians like that. They they did they would they would wish that their policemen would have been a little more uh just in their dealings with people. But does that mean I dislike them? Of course not. They need the gospel just as much as anybody does. And it is true to say that it's the gospel that fixes those problems, that speaks to all of those issues and speaks to all those problems. And so I would just say this way, the bottom line, it's not as clear-cut. If somebody asked the question, can a culture have better traits than other cultures, I'd say, yes, it's possible. It is, it's very possible to have a culture that has some superior traits than another. Um and I think if we examine that it's not as clear-cut that one culture is superior over another, but that as each culture, listen, reflects their creator. And that's the bottom line. As the culture properly, rightly reflects their creator, in that way the culture would be superior than another culture who does not reflect their creator. If a culture, generally speaking, can be more just than another culture that is unjust, we can say in that way they better reflect their creator. And objectively, there is a betterness to it. And in other ways, the kindness and the patience and the goodness of another culture that shows itself in love in the ways that you might experience in in ways that are different than another culture. We can say, okay, they reflect their creator in that way. No culture is going to be perfect, but there is a perfect God that is the objective standard for what is superior and inferior.

SPEAKER_02 30:01

Amen. Amen. So as we begin to wrap this up, and I emphasize the begin, not the wrapping up part, just we've got a little bit to go here. But I want to turn us back to Paul, and as we begin to close out, looking at considering the need for the American West to have more of a space in their thinking for the collective, for the group, and I'm not trying to make us Marxist. Right. Yeah, don't think about it that way. But in the biblical sense, as I want to show here that as I mentioned earlier, we're on the far end of the spectrum where there's too much on the individual. We need to have a biblical balance of this. Now, I'm gonna bring up my daughter again. I had a really great conversation with her about a week and a half ago. We're sitting having coffee, and I'm telling her, she's asking what I'm preaching on the next Sunday, and I'm talking a little bit a little bit about Ephesians 2 and how God brings people together in the church. And I'm trying to explain to her like what it means to be a part of a a collective, a culture, as well as being an individual. And I'm sitting there scratching my head, like, how do I explain this? And then she turns around, she's like, Oh, dad, you you mean like you and mom. Like you're married, you're you're one flesh union in marriage, but you but you're also individuals too. Good, good idea. You're not just sitting there like, Good job, yeah, Jail, thank you for helping me explain it to you. Boom. She got it. You didn't even need an illustration, right? And so that from that was it, so that is, I think, paramount to our conversation because where did humanity begin? Garden of Eden, Adam and Eve, in that cultural relationship of marriage. So, in that, you have a union, you have a culture, you have a collective, but also distinct individuals. And God gives us this picture of balance that the Christian world view is a balanced view of the individual and the collective. And so when I was as as JL and I were sitting there talking about this, and again, I was trying to tell her how some cultures over-emphasize one over the other, and vice versa. And I was like, There's a need for balance. Once again, she said something I was like, that is so good. She said, I was using the word balance, and she said, Yeah, dad's like a seesaw. It's like if you have two kids on the seesaw, it's balanced, everything's fine. But if one jumps off, if you jettison one of them, the other crashes. You can't have one truly without the other being present. Both must be there in order for there to be balanced. And then the words of the sea with the seesaw, if one goes away, the other crashes, and you have neither one, neither of them.

SPEAKER_01 32:28

Right.

SPEAKER_02 32:29

And this is where I want to turn our attention to, okay. I mentioned Adam and Eve, Garden of Eden. There, there's the first picture of this balance of individual and collective. But now in our day and time, we would see in the New Testament that the church is that space where we find this individual but also collective. Right now I'm in Ephesians preaching there, and there's terms about a body, there's terms about a building, a building made up of uh stones, bricks, etc., a body made up of members. And that really gives us a good image in our thinking about what it looks like to be a part of a collective while also being individual. And as we consider how Paul portrays this to us, we might ask, well, then how do we go about living in that? How do we keep that balance? And although this may sound simplistic, I believe it is true that we ask the question as Christians, what does the Bible say to me as a saint? What am I to do as an individual believer? But then also recognizing that there are commands to the church collectively and obeying those in that, um, in that spirit of a collective, of a group together. Um, the much of the commands in Ephesians are not really to the individual saint as much as the saint inside the context of the church. And so with that, I want to bring a one second and final point here that as we see God having a design for the individual and the collective, and in the West we have the imbalance toward the individual, one of the reasons we need to have a appreciation of the function of the collective is when it comes to our evangelism, if we only think on in the individual basis, we actually miss a bit of our evangelism. If it's just about the individual, we have no spot for critiquing the groupality, then what do we make of comments from Peter on the day of Pentecost when he said, You who killed the Prince of Life, and he calls them to repent. He's speaking to a group, saying, You did this, repent. And then Jesus, in a similar way, goes back to the Theobite that we've recorded on uh Revelation, but to the churches. There's like five of them that he calls the group to repent. And so there is an aspect of the gospel call that we can utilize in the same way that Paul is to Titus, like you mentioned earlier, that he's thinking of the collective, where it's not just individuals, but it's also a calling out. And I would argue this goes back to the very promise to Abraham, yeah, where he says, Through you, through you and your seed, the families of the earth will be blessed. So the gospel is given to us in individual language, but it's also given to us in collective language. And if we only think in terms or we think in categories of the individual, we actually end up missing out a part of the gospel that is presented.

SPEAKER_00 35:17

Yeah. And in depending on the person you're reaching, because some cultures, as you're bringing out, are very collectivistic. Peru is that way, and America is very individualistic. And each one, we should understand both, but each one would be we would be wise to reach it in a different way, in the way that best speaks to their heart, and as much as our Lord does the same thing, he speaks to Nicodemus differently than he speaks to the woman at the well.

SPEAKER_02 35:41

Again, not that the individual in that perspective is wrong, but we do have an imbalance in our in our nation and Western culture generally. There is in recent years a more of a shift in that, but there's still a very um heavy residue of individualism. And so I hope that what we see from Titus helps us to understand that giving a cultural critique is okay, is biblical, is not racism, and that we can have a balance in that view. We should strive for that. And as Christians, ultimately, we should strive for that inside the church and let that experience and that reality of the church living in that balance bleed out then into the culture that we find ourselves in, whether it's here in America or it's Peru.

SPEAKER_00 36:22

Yeah. Praise God.

SPEAKER_02 36:24

All right, folks. Thanks again for tuning in. God bless you.