BONUS: Advice for Apologetics (with Wes Huff)

The following is an uncorrected transcript generated by a transcription service. Before quoting in print, please check the corresponding audio for accuracy.

Wes Huff
The confusion that apologetics is something other than evangelism, which it’s not necessarily why Jesus is a very profound apologetic question. Also, I think the life of the church is for the believer. So speaking to and feeding the flock is always going to encourage them to then not just understand what they believe and why they believe it, but give them boldness to then go out and proclaim that in a world that is likewise searching.

Matt Smethurst
Welcome back, friends to this episode of the everyday pastor, a podcast on the nuts and bolts of ministry from the gospel coalition. My name is Matt Smethurst,

Ligon Duncan
and I’m Lig Duncan,

Matt Smethurst
and it’s not just an episode of the everyday pastor. We’re actually making this a special crossover episode with our friend Colin Hansen, the host of gospel bound. Colin, thanks for being with us. I’m really excited to be here. Love what you guys doing on this podcast, and looking forward to our time together today. Yeah, and the reason that LIG and Colin and I have come together is to chat with our friend Wes Huff. Wes is the central Canada director for apologetics Canada. You can find great resources there at apologetics canada.com

Matt Smethurst
Wes has been a guest on a variety of public platforms, from Joe Rogan to Piers Morgan to Andrew Scholz, and has participated in numerous public dialogs, debates and interfaith events on issues of belief. Wes is currently working toward his PhD in New Testament at the University of Toronto’s Wycliffe College. And you can follow his work on his YouTube channel, social media and [email protected]

Matt Smethurst
Wes thanks for being with us today. Yeah, it’s a pleasure to be here. I’m really excited about the conversation. I’d love to just start by hearing Wes how you came to faith in Jesus Christ, and also what the role of apologetics has been in your own personal story, whether before your conversion or since.

Wes Huff
Yeah, so I grew up in a Christian home. My parents were missionaries, and I was born in Pakistan, and spent a portion of my childhood in the Middle East. And so you can tell by my complexion that those are realities. But I grew up in a home where the Bible, the Christian faith, was very coherent one. My dad was a pastor when we came back overseas from overseas and were living in central Ontario, here in Canada. And so I always grew up with a very clear understanding of what the gospel is. And I think made a genuine profession of faith when I was about six or seven years old, and so that led on to, you know, living in a very solid, biblically household, but it was really just before my 12th birthday when I was diagnosed with a rare neurological condition that left me paralyzed from the waist down, where my faith journey started to become a little bit more real for me, because I was diagnosed with a rare neurological condition called acute transverse myelitis. And the diagnosis was that I was most likely going to be a paraplegic, but experienced what I truly feel was a supernatural healing in that one month from the day that I woke up and couldn’t feel my legs, I woke up on a Saturday, got out of bed, walked over to my wheelchair and sat down, and that was it. And and despite that, however, I really struggled with more intellectual questions in my teen years, and so it was connecting those dots between something happened when I was a lot younger that was seemingly unexplainable, but questions of purpose and meaning and understanding that my parents had raised me to believe a particular thing, but wrestling through if that was really the best reason to believe, it was what eventually led into my love of the Scripture and apologetics. Although I couldn’t have told you at the time when I was a teenager that apologetics was what I was doing, but I was looking for the reason for the hope that my parents had, that I had, that I could see within the pages of Scripture. And fortunately, growing up in a missionary family, we had things like the Quran and the book of Mormon and other religious texts in and around the house. And so I, to the best of my ability, as a 17 year old, read through those, investigated some of the claims that those worldviews made, and then at the end of it, came to the conclusion that Christianity, that the historic faith of the Bible, was true. And at that point, took that as my marching orders to commit my life to that. Now, I went on to university with full intention of going into the police force, and God had other plans in that, but it was through a number of different things, growing up and the influence and testimony of my parents and their steadfast faith, along with investigating and searching through some of the. Big answers to the ultimate questions, and then connecting those dots between my head and my heart,

Ligon Duncan
Given given your journey, do you have advice that you would want to give to pastors about the way that they engage with apologetic questions in the course of their ministry, whether it’s their preaching or whether it’s in one on one or small group settings with members of the church or not members of the Church. Any advice and counsel about that to pastors?

Wes Huff
Yeah, I think, you know, there are a few kind of layers to a question like that. I think right off the bat, I would encourage people to make sure that their motivation for an apologetics endeavor to give the reason for the hope that you have, that it’s not out of trying to give an answer for what the world might think is silly. And what I mean by that is that where apologetics can be an onboarding for liberalism is when we look at what the culture around us sees as foolish or problematic or even controversial, and then we try to rationalize around what Scripture teaches, rather than graciously and boldly proclaiming the truth of that sad thing. And you know, you look at liberalism, as Richard Niebuhr said, is a God without wrath, purchasing men without sin entering a kingdom without judgment through the benefaction of a Christ without a cross, and the way you get there is by seeing that the world is embarrassed with certain things that we as Christians hold to as historic, the expression of God or scriptures ethic on sexuality or exclusivity of truth, exclusivity of Christ or the state of fallen humanity, and then we confuse the world’s perception of what is controversial by trying to make certain biblical truths unclear. If the methodology ends up muddying the waters of historical biblical orthodoxy, then your methodology to accomplish the motivation ends up simply making a mess, and it’s the gospel that speaks clarity into the culture of confusion that we live in. And so while the application of communicating the gospel might vary, the actual core message of the gospel doesn’t. And so I think my advice for pastors is that the apologetics and evangelism, those are two sides of the same coin. And you know, I think of Alister McGrath, who said that apologetics lays down the foundation, the groundwork for the invitation, and then evangelism extends it. And so we need to be kind and gracious and gentle, but we also need to not confuse courage with rudeness. And so those things are not synonymous. You know, there’s this great quote by Blaise Pascal that I was meditate on and think on when I’m asked to go into settings where I’m being implored to give a reason for the hope that I have. Because Pascal said that people hate religion because they’re afraid it might be true, and that the cure for that is to show them that religion is not contrary to reason, but worthy of reverence and respect. And then he says, Next, make it attractive. Make good men wish it were true, and then show them that it is. And so I think there’s a lot of room within a pastoral setting to make sure that we’re proclaiming truth in boldness, but in an endeavor to look on a world that often misunderstands and confuses what we believe, to speak that with clarity and not try to maybe water down the truth, we can dumb down certain concepts, because I think that’s a necessity sometimes, but not water down the truth of the gospel message, and

Matt Smethurst
along those lines, Wes we wouldn’t be having this conversation if we didn’t want pastors to think responsibly about apologetics and lean into apologetics in their ministries. But I’m I also know that as an academic, there are times when you wish some pastors would stay in their lane a bit. So what are some approaches or arguments related to apologetics that you think pastors should avoid because you’ve seen them be unhelpful or even harmful, just kind of think common mistakes that hurt rather than help our Gospel witness?

Speaker 1
Yeah, it’s a good question. I think part of the answer to that question is to be careful to make sure that we’re answering the questions that people are actually asking.

Speaker 1
And you know, Paul says in Colossians four, five, to walk in wisdom towards outsiders, making the best of the use of the time, and let our speech always be seizing the salt so that we may know how to answer answer each person, and it’s interesting that he says each person, and not necessarily each objection, and realizing that there’s a person, there’s a questioner behind a lot of the questions that we see being asked. And I was once given this advice at a conference that I spoke years and years ago, where one of the organizers who.

Speaker 1
Simply beforehand, kind of brought all of the speakers together and just encouraged us to picture the most vulnerable person we could think of in the audience and speak to that person directly. And I think you know that can go awry in the sense of what I was saying before. You know we can, we can almost pad the truth too much. But I think there’s an aspect of speaking with graciousness and clarity in understanding that there’s going to be a person who might have some baggage that we need to be aware of. I get this a lot when I do events and speak on the problem of evil, and I just someone inevitably comes up and starts talking to me afterwards about all of the issues they have with a good God and why certain bad things happen. And it’s happened a few times where I’ve just realized, you know, there’s something going on here. And kind of tried to take the tone of the conversation down and said, you know, those are great questions. Why would you ask those questions and find out that this person is dealing with some sort of personal hurt and realizing that a lot of those kind of big problem of evil questions are less theological and philosophical and sometimes more personal. And that’s something that’s more of a zooming out approach. You know that there’s the more you know, getting into the nitty gritty, into the weeds of something like that. We need to be careful not to over exaggerate in certain claims. Apologetically. My area of speciality is in manuscripts. And there has been some exaggerations in sort of the apologetic endeavors to answer certain questions about manuscripts, where the say manuscripts of the New Testament are compared to the writings of other ancient

Speaker 1
texts like Homer and Pliny and Plutarch. And it’s talked about that the copies of the manuscripts of the New Testament dwarf all of these others, and that’s actually true, but when I started to dig into some of the catalogs of those manuscripts, what I found was that classics categorize manuscripts very differently than New Testament studies does, and that classics tends to catalog what they call functional manuscripts, where you can actually read from the document, whereas New Testament studies counts every fragment that has a discernible text that could be linked to a New Testament document as a manuscript. And so this tends to start to compare apples to orchards in that it is true that we just we do have far more New Testament copies of ancient manuscripts than we do say for

Speaker 1
Homer. But in sort of presenting that data, sometimes it can, it can present something where we’re not really making an accurate comparison, and the ends to the means actually end up skewing the data in a way that, if you actually look into the data is, is somewhat unhealth, somewhat unhelpful and so I think in our apologetic endeavors, I think trying to find the best forms of the argument and make sure that we’re not over exaggerating for the purpose of getting to the conclusion, whereas the conclusion might actually be true something like a manuscript comparison, the conclusion is still true, that if we’re going to trust that Thucydides wrote this particular document, and we only have a couple dozen copies, and they’re written hundreds of years after we know the original was written, then we’re going to have to apply that same standard to the New Testament, where the number of manuscripts, both in quantity and in quality, are far better than Thucydides. So that’s a true statement, but in some of the kind of presentation of the data that I’ve seen in some popular level apologetics endeavors, it tends to present the information in a way that, for individuals in my field, kind of cringe at how the you know it you’re playing loose and fast with some of those facts. Funny anecdote about that, when you went on the Joe Rogan experience, I was vaguely familiar with your work because you had written a few articles in the past for the gospel coalition, but and then I noticed you were following me on the X, and I was like, Oh, wait, have we interacted before? So I searched our two names on x,

Matt Smethurst
and you debunked me on this very thing a few years ago because I had shared some chart comparing the number of copies. And you said something to the effect of kinder than this is going to sound. I used to share charts like that before I started studying. So you know what? I consider it a claim to fame that I was debunked by Wes Huff before anyone else on the internet. Thanks for that. That’s good. You can put that in your bio Exactly. Wes I, in my first five or six years at RTS, back in the dark ages, I taught apologetics, not.

Ligon Duncan
Not because I was particularly adept at it, but because my the senior professor in my department, didn’t want to teach it, and so I was assigned the responsibility of teaching apologetics. And I had grown up in a world where there was a lot of debate about epistemology, and I was already kind of irked that, in my little reformed world, people spent more time arguing about what the right way to argue was than they did actually making a persuasive case to unbelievers. So in your own in your own study, in your own development in this area, what have you found helpful in terms of helping you make a case to unbelievers. Maybe talk to us about how you evaluate whether an apologetic approach is is helpful in our making a case for the gospel. Yeah, I think you know there, there have been some sort of methodological battles over the way that you or the particular way that your apologetic method is applied. Are you a evidentialist? Are you a presupposition list, you know? And and I think that sometimes those are really helpful in identifying how we’re really getting to the conclusions that we’re drawing, but I think the methodologies are far more they have more crossover than they don’t, and that depending on the particular interaction that you’re involved with, there’s a lot of benefit To using something like a presuppositional approach, if you’re dealing with someone who is being inconsistent in their epistemology, if they’re appealing to a certain reality that is assumed rather than proved, then talking about the fact that they have no foundation to ground said reality on is very useful in other instances, I think, taking a multivalent approach and saying, you know, the Christian worldview doesn’t stand or fall necessarily on one single argument. I mean barring the resurrection right, but that you can look at science and philosophy and psychology and history and theology, and it’s the intersecting points of these different disciplines and evidences that actually cross over and point to the truthfulness of the Christian worldview as a whole. I think that that’s true, and that if you don’t, like say, one argument scientifically or philosophically for the existence of God, that then your entire faith doesn’t crumble like a house of cards. And so I think methodology is very important. And unfortunately, because of the proliferation of the internet and being able to look up information very quickly in the supercomputers that we call phones, we’ve forgotten really how to rationalize. And so I give a talk that’s really, it’s an apologetics 101, type talk that I call how to talk about Jesus without sounding like an idiot. And in it, I talk about the fact that Twitter, or now x has kind of affected the way that we see argumentation being done in the marketplace of ideas, because people throw out assertions and assume that that’s rationale. And in this talk, I use the illustration of an argument where the conclusion is actually the roof of a house. And you don’t start building a house by starting with a roof, right? You there’s a lot that goes into the building before that. You need a foundation, you need walls, you need supporting beams, and all of that are the those are the rationale. Those are the facts and the arguments and the evidences. And only after that do you put a roof on the top. And with something like, you know, the limitation of characters that you can use online, with a platform like X, people throw out assertions and they assume that they’re arguments, and that is, I think, affected the way that we dialog in a way that’s probably more unhelpful than it’s not. And so methodologically, going back and maybe slowing down the way that we converse, especially when we feel often that we fall on the end of having to go on the defense. You know, often, a lot of conversations I find are people making statements, them bearing the burden of truth, but then us feeling like we need to defend that. You know, someone says to me, it is irrational to believe in God. I need to hold them to account. To say, Why do you think it’s irrational to believe in God? Now, what do you mean by God? And what do you mean by rationality in that sentence? Whereas, when I was a lot younger, I failing to realize the methodology of how an argument operates, I would then start defending the.

Speaker 1
Why it is rational to believe in God and fall in pitfalls of finding out, you know, far too late in the conversation, that the person I was dialoguing with actually didn’t believe in the same God that I believed in. And so the in that sense, we both didn’t believe in the same God. And so I was defending something that I never should have been defending to begin with, because they, you know, in the instance that I’m thinking of, they pulled out a Richard Dawkins quote of God being a malevolent and,

Speaker 1
you know, a dictator and all these things. And I was like, wait a minute, that’s, I don’t believe in that God and and so I don’t actually need to defend that God existing.

Speaker 1
But I fall into this trap. And so in questions of epistemology and methodology, I think far more than the intricacies of are you really following

Speaker 1
one approach to the T I think helping us in this day and age to even just understand how does logical reasoning progress in a very simple manner,

Speaker 1
understanding a handful of logical fallacies and making sure that we are avoiding them and we are aware of when people use them, goes a long way in just helping us navigate through particular conversations.

Collin Hansen
Wes, I’m gonna, I’m gonna jump in here and shift the conversation a little bit, I’m going to shift it in a direction of lot of people talking about this vibe shift we hear in the broader culture, seeing more interest, perhaps among Gen Z, especially young men in religion, seeing pushback on some of the different progressive turns in our culture. Think about transgender ideology as one example of that. But I want you to help us apply this for pastors, and you represent some in the interviews that you’ve conducted in the ministry that so many of us have gotten to know in recent recent months, in the last year, you embody a lot of that vibe shift. Do you think pastors should do more of the online kind of apologetics that you’re talking about, maybe starting more YouTube channels, be more engaged with it directly. Or do you think there’s a value of just staying hunkered down in their local churches and letting you and others who excel in that kind of handle that part of it. What counsel would you offer for pastors in this vibe shift moment? I don’t know if there’s necessarily a straightforward answer to that. I think what I find interesting about the particular cultural moment we live in is that a lot of the gimmicks that I grew up with in as a teenager in the early 2000s

Speaker 1
that didn’t seem to do what the kind of natural, organic, grassroots, if

Speaker 1
you want to call it, a revival, that I think we’re seeing, has accomplished. And I think what that testifies to is that we can try to force the work of the Spirit, and that that will never be as fruitful as being faithful to

Speaker 1
just biblical historical orthodoxy and speaking into the lives of individuals who are searching for who God truly is that the smoke machines and the the music and, you know, when I was growing up, the lock ins and the pizza parties, and none of which are necessarily, you know, in and of themselves, bad things. But I think we often force ourselves into being gimmicky. And I think what we’re seeing now is a testament to people are actually looking for substance, and they don’t want to be bait and switched. And so I think there’s an aspect of understanding and putting your finger on the pulse of the culture and making sure that there’s a relevancy in the church to what is going on around us. I think right now, it’s important to understand that the new Atheism is largely dead and gone, and so if we’re still preaching against Richard Dawkins, we’re probably missing the bill. Because I don’t think people are asking the same questions or making the same objections that they were 20 years ago. I think that those seeds were planted and they grew into dead and dying trees that had fruit that nobody could a stomach. And so the end result of that was now we are encountering people who are quote, unquote, spiritual, but not religious, and that requires a completely different approach to speaking clarity into the confusion. And so is that to say that pastors need to be watching YouTube and making sure that

Speaker 1
they’re understanding what’s going on? I think that could be it. But I think often, like I said before, is the confusion that apologetics is something that.

Speaker 1
Other than evangelism, which it’s not necessarily why Jesus is a very profound apologetic question. And also, I think you know, the the life of the church is for the believer, and so speaking to and feeding the flock is always going to encourage them to then not just understand what they believe and why they believe it, but give them boldness to then go out and proclaim that in a world that is likewise searching for what that belief actually holds and the answers that it possesses, Wes, do you see people that are doing a particularly good job at this? I mean, obviously we’re encouraged by the public conversations that you’ve had, and we’ve got some pastors in our neck of the woods that we think have done a pretty good job of trying to speak to cultural concerns, making a case for the gospel and for the truth of the scriptures. Are there, are there people that you have read or people that you listen to, that you’ve you felt, boy, that brother is doing a good, faithful job, reaching out and also making a case for the gospel?

Speaker 1
Yeah, I think there are, I think that there are individuals like Glenn Scrivener out in the UK through his organization, speak life. Gavin ortland, his YouTube channel is truth unites. He’s doing some phenomenal work, particularly in articulating what historic Protestantism is. You know, there’s always he’s no longer with us, but the relevancy of Tim Keller, I still think, lives on, and individuals who have been faithful for a long time, like Mark Dever, voting balcom. You know, these are individuals who I think have a lot of content that is is very useful and practical and full of truth. Might be remiss if I didn’t mention my own pastor, Justin Gulati, who I think is, you know, a faithful individual who really does a phenomenal job of articulating the gospel in a faithful and practical way. But, you know, just off the top of my head, I think those individuals, I genuinely think that someone like Glenn Scrivner in his book the air we breathe, I think that’s some of the best apologetic work right now that speaks into what we’re seeing in a world that is so concerned with topics of justice and meaning and purpose. Yeah, and you mentioned Mark dever that book, the air we breathe by Glenn Scrivener is one that he has been just giving out by the dozens to his church members there at Capitol Hill Baptist

Matt Smethurst
Wes you already touched on this, but I just would love to hear you, especially in light of what the apostle Jude says when he when he commands us to have mercy on those who doubt.

Matt Smethurst
Any advice, you would commend to pastors for what that looks like, practically when to have mercy and when to be more confrontational. And of course, that’s going to have to do with one’s ability to discern the emotional or spiritual posture behind a question, to know if it’s sincere doubt or defiant critique, but any general advice,

Wes Huff
yeah, I mean, that one comes with a lot of wisdom and practical, you know, going out and actually engaging with people. I think I made a lot of mistakes early on in thinking that someone was a wolf in sheep’s clothing, and then realizing very, you know, afterwards that that wasn’t the case, and feeling a little bit embarrassed about that, that maybe I should have come in with a different approach and attitude, and a lot of that just comes with time and realizing that, you know, a lot of people are searching, and that not a lot of people are skeptics, but they might not be cynics. And what I mean by that is a skeptic is someone who reserves to make a conclusion before they have enough evidence to actually feel like they are justifiable in making that conclusion, whereas a cynic is someone who raises objections for the sake of objections. And I’ve definitely ran into cynics, but I find that more people than not are skeptics, and I would even include myself in that category, to some degree, at least under that definition, and that there are certain topics that I still reserve judgment on, because I don’t feel like I have the proper evidence to be able to actually delineate on a truth claim regarding that. But it takes a lot of prayerful wisdom to be able to figure out, okay, this is someone who I actually maybe even need to, you know, walk away dust the, you know, kick the dust off my shoes and and kind of leave the Holy Spirit to do a work in that person’s life. I’m not going to convince them. Right? My job to join, my application to join the Trinity has been denied. I fail the minimum requirements so I can let the Spirit do the work. In that regard, I’m.

Speaker 1
Or, you know, realizing I’ve had conversations where I feel like I’m just beating a dead horse, and then all of a sudden the person goes, Yeah, you know what? I think you’re right. And, you know, throwing my hands up, and, you know, realizing that I was a few seconds away from giving up, and that really what that course of that conversation was actually doing something in that person’s life. So I think it’s just, it’s realizing, ultimately, that God is the one who does the sovereign work of saving a soul, of taking out a heart of stone and giving a heart of flesh, and that we are called, not necessarily. You know, when we stand before the throne of the father, he’s not going to say, Well done good and intellectually robust servant, or well done good and clever servant, or well done good and intelligent servant, it’s well done good and faithful servant. And so really, we kind of stand within the boundaries of the making disciples of all nations, of giving an answer for the hope that we have. But ultimately, the groundwork for that is simple faithfulness, being faithful in our own lives, first and foremost, but also being faithful to take the opportunities where they are presented, and to do so in a way that is ultimately representational of Christ. And sometimes that might mean, you know, calling someone a brood of vipers, but we want to make sure that we’re not calling

Collin Hansen
a person of brood of vipers who is actually someone who is genuinely, as Luther said, you know, beggar looking for bread when we know where the bread is, Wes. I want to. I was thinking about holding this question until the end, but You’ve so many You said so many different things here, that that I find fascinating and that are provoking me in a lot of different directions. Of course, as I serve as the executive director of the Keller Center for Cultural apologetics, we I mean, what Gavin’s doing, what Glenn’s doing, are just part and parcel of what we do, the air we breathe. So much a part of the post Christianity podcast that Andrew Wilson and Glenn Scrivner had done for us to explore those, those questions. But I’m wondering from you, what you see next in the world of apologetics, and at the risk of answering the question for you, because I care more about what you think than than my supposition here, but what I appreciate about you is the way you integrate so many different aspects of apologetics. It’s not a dichotomy. It’s not presuppositional or historical evidences or cultural apologetics. You’re weaving it all together. Which I which I greatly appreciate. And one thing I’ve noticed is that things that are new are actually old, and so part of what you’re showing me with the with the kind of the reach of your own ministry, is that some of the like defenses of the text of scripture that I didn’t think as many people had questions about today, all of a sudden, are right at the forefront. And I’ve been looking at applications for our next round of fellows for the Keller center. And we did not plan this, but every single one of them says the same thing, that the primary apologetic is the collective witness of the gathered church. And I thought, well, in some ways, that’s new, but in some ways, well, it’s just Leslie Newman again, and then before that, of course, it’s the Scriptures themselves. So I guess, what do you see as new but within the recognition that we’re not trying to reinvent the wheel here, we’re just trying to answer the questions being asked. And the Lord leads, sometimes in surprising ways, but he often leads us back to places the church has always already been. So help us to answer that question? Where do you think it’s going? And he’s some of the new frontiers we should at least be prepared for? Yeah, it’s interesting how these sorts of things echo in terms of their relevancy when we’re talking about evangelism and doing the work for the kingdom of the world. I think, I think we’ve moved into an era that’s far more emblematic of the first few centuries of the early church than it has been in the recent past, particularly in the West, where our culture is moving further and further away from the Christian roots and there’s much, much more misunderstanding and misapprehension about Christianity than there is a an outright rejection of it in the same way that you see, you know, some of the early apologists within the first few centuries

Speaker 1
arguing that, you know they’re not

Speaker 1
kidnapping Babies and eating them in the Lord’s Supper. And you know, all of these things, which is fundamental misunderstanding of what’s going on. I find I’m having conversations where I was talking to someone at the campus at the University of Toronto, and another, you know, fellow PhD student in a completely different field, but, and I’ve realized.

Speaker 1
That she was using the term gospel, but I don’t think she knew what it was. And I said, What? What do you mean when you say gospel? And she said, Well, the book. And I said, Well, which one? And she said, there’s more than one. And it was just this realization, oh, she doesn’t know what the Bible is. And so there’s, there’s, it’s not that she’s necessarily rejecting something specifically she doesn’t actually know what she doesn’t know. And that that I think, is the society that we live in, in that a lot of people, they have these vague ideas of spirituality, which, like I said before, the spiritual, but not religious, kind of mindset, which is really, you know, I want the bits and parts that are actually capital T truth, but I don’t want to be held accountable to anyone specific. I think questions of beauty and meaning and purpose really go a long way, especially when our culture is so concerned with justice, issues of justice and equity, you know, like Glenn talks about, those are biblical ideas. And I think we can press into them and say, I think you should be concerned with that. I think that it’s good that you’re concerned with that. Where do you think that comes from? Where do you think these Why do you think we shouldn’t oppress the marginalized? Why do you think we should take care of, you know, without using too overt biblical languages, widows and orphans. You know, where does that idea come from? Because the Christian worldview gives a framework for those things. And I think that’s good, and that’s beautiful and and I see a lot more people worried about that. You know, we see less of the

Speaker 1
atheist busses that say God doesn’t exist. So, you know, get on with your life. Now, there’s the famous campaign out in the UK, and we see more people who are protesting what they see as injustice. And it might be misguided, unfortunately, a lot of the time, but what it actually is a testimony, too, is that our hearts are crying out because we are image bearers, and even if we don’t understand why we are so irked by people being held down or

Wes Huff
unjustly treated,

Speaker 1
we actually because We are created in God’s image, we understand that there’s something that goes beyond just, you know, a line that I said on Rogan was, you matter more than you are matter. And I think that’s the kind of shift that we’ve seen, is that people realize that it’s not just that we’re a product of time plus matter plus chance. Like the new atheist said, we’re more than that, and we realize that. And I think we need to put a foundation into

Speaker 1
what those desires of people are. And that’s where I think the frontier going forward with something like apologetics, is people are genuinely interested in those things, and sometimes we need to address the questions, maybe that they don’t realize are the ones that they want answers to, things like the historical reliability of the Bible, which, when I was getting into this, people are saying, you know, that might be an interesting hobby for us, but nobody’s actually interested in, you know, what the Coptic and how it compares to the Greek New Testament in the third century manuscripts are and they may have been right, but also, I’m always shocked at how many people are asking me those specific questions. Well, they could, they couldn’t predict the Joe Rogan experience coming about that it is. It is so funny, the more often we think that a question is contemporary or new or different. Let’s take the material comment you just made right there. Last night. I’m reading CS Lewis’s on living in the Atomic Age. What’s it about? But said against it’s against materialism, right there, and that you’re more than matter, that life doesn’t make sense unless you see that you have a soul. So anyway, what’s new is often old. Again, in apologetics, yeah, yeah. But I’d also be curious into what your your answer to that question would be in terms of what you’re seeing, what? Because I think there is a different sort of dynamic that I’m finding in Canada than even south of the border in the United States. So in in relation to what you’re seeing, how would, how would you approach that question? Well, I mean, I’ll answer briefly here. I do think the the

Collin Hansen
physical component in there, the gathered church. I think there’s a reason that so many people also shared. Stanley Hauerwas quote recently about the witness of the church. If we’re not killing our young and killing our old, then we will have accomplished something. Well, look what just happened in the UK. So a lot of the apologetic now is going to be so much of how we live and how we live in physical ways at a time when people seem to be choosing choosing death, because they don’t seem to have a purpose. You.

Collin Hansen
To life. So it’s going back again to those basic questions of the church being the church, the church living differently, being willing to go back to the second century situation of of being different, being odd, but accessible at the same time. And I think Wes it’s one thing that you model so well is that you are, you’re saying things that that sound odd and different in the in circumstances where you’re sharing them, but you’re sharing them in such a way that they’re also accessible, but also appealing, but you’re not shying away from the confrontational aspect of it, that this is, this is different, but compelling. And so that’s, what I see of this new frontier, and going back again to to just an integrative approach, where we’re going to need those those appeals to to goodness and to truth and to beauty,

Ligon Duncan
but at the same by the same time, we’re still going to need those rational defenses, because people going to still come back and say, Yeah, but how do I know that the physical Resurrection actually happened, and they’re still going to be asking the questions about but how can I know that I can trust the testimony of the scriptures that tell me that the resurrection happened? So I just think we’re going to need an all of the above approach going forward. Let me be an amen Charlie and just say I’ve that’s another thing I’ve appreciated about West that you combine both historical apologetics and cultural apologetics in what you do. And I do tell my students I see generally different kinds of objections to Christianity now, as opposed to when I was in seminary in the 1980s and I do get a whole lot you mentioned, you know, God is a genocidal maniac. And then you’ll ask somebody, well, like, where do you get that from? Well, that’s from the Old Testament. I’ll say, well, where in the Old Testament do you get that from? And then you find out, they’ve never read the Bible. They have no idea. And so you actually have to get down into the nuts and bolts of the text to be able to work out those questions. And I think both your interest in textual criticism responding to some of the kinds of dismissive things that are said about the integrity, historical reliability of the text, and yet at the same time being able to address the issue of not only the true but also the good and the beautiful. I think we can quickly move past the true and go to the good and beautiful and forget the true. We’ve got to do all of them, because again, as CS Lewis says in his essay on apologetics, it doesn’t matter whether it’s good if it’s not true, so you have to, you have to pay attention to all those things. I think you do a really good job of doing that. And I think that’s a good example for campus ministers. If you’re a campus minister on a university campus, you’ve got to keep all those things together when you’re because you’re going to run into different kinds of objections from different people with different backgrounds, and so you have to be kind of handy in all of those areas to carry on the kind of gospel conversations that you want to let’s on the question of campus ministers. Let’s just be very equipping now here for campus ministers and pastors, yeah, if, especially if they’re listening to some of these podcasts and some of the conversation. Now, if they want to know, they want to learn themselves and then share with others books on the Bible’s reliability, where are some of the few places that you would go in terms of recommendations? Yeah, there are a number of good books that I recommend. Actually, I’m going to pull them off my shelf, good

Collin Hansen
live action only on video folks, right?

Speaker 1
So these are the ones that I’ve been handing out that I think are very, very good, and I’ve been trying to find and hunt down books that are

Speaker 1
less than 200 pages, because I find that I was giving a lot of books out, and people would put them on your shelves, and they would have them as a resource, but they wouldn’t tend to read them. And so there’s this, a Christian’s Pocket Guide, two series that I find very helpful. They have how we got the Bible. That’s Greg Lanier has that one. And then there’s another one on how God preserved the Bible by Richard brash, and those are, like, barely 100 pages, like, I think this one is 86 so I find that people see that and they find it farm. It looks accessible. And those are, those are good. They’re solid in terms of their content.

Speaker 1
Who chose the books of the New Testament? By Charles Hill, it’s a great book. It answers a lot of basic questions that apply specifically to the canon of Scripture, but also touch on issues like a reliability and even Old Testament preservation. My friends Peter Gurry and John Mead, their book scribes in Scripture is excellent and covers exhaustively in a very short period of time, that content there and then Peter J Williams is can we trust the Gospels? Once again, no more than 150 pages, but covers a lot of issues and goes into a number of D.

Speaker 1
Details in terms of, why can we say confidently that this is early eyewitness testimony? Well, it’s because of the fact that we keep seeing them getting these, these minor details right in regards to geography and a name correlation on domestic congruence and plants. And so if they’re getting all the small details right, if they’re doing that in historically reliable way, is it then a big leap in logic to say that they got the big things right? Well, not really. It’s not that big of a jump to make those. So these are the ones that I am buying in bulk and I’m handing out when people have questions, because I find that they do a really good job of addressing some of the base level questions, and then if there are follow up questions to those, then there are other books I would recommend that kind of go a little bit more in depth. But I’m very encouraged, as someone who is the nerd on these particular topics, that I’m getting more and more people who genuinely want to know the answers to questions in regards to inspiration and inerrancy and preservation and canonicity. And I get to be able to share those praise God for RTS, some good RTS. Professor. Plug there absolutely Chuck Gill and Greg Lanier, yes, right. Yeah. Wes you just mentioned inerrancy.

Matt Smethurst
Obviously, that’s a doctrine that is subject to misunderstanding. How would you encourage pastors to talk about what inerrancy is and isn’t and why is it still such an important doctrine?

Speaker 1
Yeah, I think it’s important because I think that everyone should take Jesus’s view of Scripture, and I think inerrancy is what Jesus’s view of Scripture was. So you look at somewhere like Matthew 22 where Jesus is verbally sparring with the Sadducees and they’re trying to trap him on a question about the resurrection. In the course of the conversation, Jesus makes this really interesting phrase where he says, Have you not read what God spoke to you, saying. And then he goes on to quote Moses, and it’s a little bit awkwardly stated in both the Greek and the English, because he should say, Have you not read what God wrote to you, or have you not heard what God spoke to you? But that’s not what he says. He says, Have you not read what God spoke to you? And it’s as if he’s holding his original audience accountable as if, when they’re reading the scripture, that God has spoken directly to them, that they are the first audience. And like I said before, he goes on to quote Exodus. And though the Sadducees aren’t standing at the base of Mount Sinai, hearing God’s voice via Moses, Jesus is beholding them to that as if they were. And so first and foremost, I think if we’re going to claim to be Christians, we should at minimum, hold the view that Christ held in regards to what inspiration and inerrancy was. And so I think ultimately, what I’d say is that inerrancy is a statement on the origin of scriptures, that scripture comes from God, and because God does not err, neither does His Word. And so I think that’s communicated from the pages of Scripture itself. But you can look at individuals throughout church history, Augustine, when he’s conversing with the manicheans in his back and forth, he writes to Jerome, and he says that this heretical Gnostic sect who asserts that Augustine’s view of inspiration is contradictory. Well, Augustine says simply that there are no contradictions within Scripture because no author has erred, and that if you find what looks like a mistake in Scripture, it’s either your misunderstanding of the text or the translation you’re looking at is poor, or you’re reading some sort of scribal error, and none of any of that impacts the original words, inspirationally penned by the authors of Scripture. And so in, you know, more recent times, you read something like RPC and 80 Hansen’s book on the Bible without illusions is that it’s called Yeah, and though those two are neither necessarily friendly to historic Protestant evangelicalism, they’re very early on in the book. They state that something like biblical inerrancy is just the Christian reality, right? That their contention is not that Christians haven’t believed this, but it’s simply that it’s outdated and that people shouldn’t believe it because, you know, we’ve grown up from all that outdated silliness. But I think what that testifies to is that this is a view that is part of the historic church. And I don’t know how you could trust that God is trustworthy, but not trust that his words are trustworthy. And so I would ultimately say that it’s a hill we can die on in terms of what Scripture is, that Scripture is truthful in what it claims to be, truthfully saying. And so there are some caveats to that. There are some things that we might assert scripture saying that it’s not intending to say, but that’s why good exegesis and hermeneutics is on.

Speaker 1
Important. But these are things that you know aren’t, haven’t necessarily been part of, say, the toolkit of the apologist, necessarily. But I think are things that I said recently on a on a biblical languages podcast that I was featured on where they asked me, you know, what are the most important things you have found, apologetically that have helped you in your study. And I have no qualms saying it’s studying the biblical languages in church history, because almost always an objection to the Christian faith comes down to some sort of misunderstanding in regards to bad exegesis or hermeneutics, or a complete, just

Speaker 1
misapprehension or complete made up story about church history. You know, the reason we continue to hear that Constantine is the boogeyman, and that everything happened at the Council of Nicea is because people just don’t have the basic comprehension and literacy of what actually did happen at the Council of Nicea. And so that’s where I think it’s important to when we are called to give an answer for the hope that we have, and do so with gentleness and respect. And respect, understanding scripture and scripture, first and foremost as the words of God, and being able to communicate that if God is trustworthy, His Word is too Wes, it’s, it’s entirely possible that a pastor or a campus minister might listen to you in a debate or watch one of your videos and be personally encouraged and at the same time intimidated, like man I How long would I have to study to be able to do what Wes does? So what? What would you say by way of encouragement to a pastor, a campus minister, a faithful Christian that wants to be able to give a better testimony for the hope that is within her or him. What would be something that they could do, starting this week, that could help them in this area? Don’t want to be intimidating, want to be encouraging to them. What would you suggest?

Speaker 1
Yeah, well, I would say, first and foremost, I empathize with that, because very early on, I went to a talk, you know, when I was started getting interested in apologetics and John Lennox was in town, and I went and listened to a talk about John Lennox, and walked away thinking, Uh oh, I don’t know anything about mathematics or science and so.

Speaker 1
And what I would want to encourage people with is that, you know, apologetic and spiritual conversations are less about hitting a home run and more about just being willing to step up to the plate. And that’s where you know, when I talked about earlier, our job is to be faithful. We don’t need to be Christian encyclopedias. We don’t need to be Bible Answer men and women. We just simply need to be faithful and honest and willing and prayerful in

Speaker 1
allowing God to help us in these conversations, and that he is ultimately the one who is doing the work and to have the both encouragement and confidence that even when I have conversations and I sound like ice being dumped on concrete, that God can do something in spite of me, and that being listeners of people is a very important skill that I think goes a long way, especially when actually answering people’s questions. You know, when we asked earlier, how do you how do you differentiate between someone who might be a cynic or might be a skeptic? A lot of that is just listening to how people are engaging or coming up with questions, and

Speaker 1
really trying to tease out, you know, what might be the motivation behind this question, or the reason why this person is asking. Are they really concerned with that issue, or is this a hurdle that they’re putting in their way because they don’t think I can jump over it and they want to trip me up? Or maybe they feel daunted by, you know, issues that they don’t understand either. And it might sound like they’re being antagonistic, but really they’re they’re genuinely searching because they just feel overwhelmed by this particular issue or that particular issue. But the encouragement I would give is I genuinely would encourage people to, first and foremost, know the why for their own faith. You know, apologetics starts well, first and foremost, it lives and dies in the local church, but it starts with us submitting ourselves to Christ and saying, I’m not going to be able to find the answers to all the questions that even I have, and that at the end of the day, that’s okay, but give me the wisdom and the unction to Be able to when the time comes to be faithful in those occurrences, be honest, be truthful, and use the tools and giftings that you’ve given me,

Speaker 1
you know, the hymn, take my life and let it be and it talks about, you know, your you know, take.

Speaker 1
My mind. And that’s a Love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul and mind. And we can do that as Christians. We’re not called to

Speaker 1
leave our brain at the door. I was in India a few years ago, and I saw this Hindu temple, and it said, leave your shoes and your brain at the door. And I remember walking by and thinking, not not me, the Christian doesn’t leave. In fact, you walk through the church, you’re not leaving either of those at the door, right? And so it’s less of a case of,

Speaker 1
how do I get all the information into my head so I can regurgitate it and more, how can I be faithful with the giftings that God has given to me and be willing to use those in season and out of season. It’s good you mentioned the sovereignty of God, and I’ve heard you call yourself reformed with a capital R. And for some people, they might think, well, how does how does that fit? Because if he believes God is sovereign over all things, including salvation, why would he care so much about evangelism and apologetics talk about how those two things relate. Yeah, well, I’m very encouraged, because of my doctrine of the sovereignty of God, that God will accomplish what he sets out to do, and that he has predestined the ends and the means. You know, sometimes I say, you know, if, if God knows that my stomach is going to be full, Why do I bother eating? Well, it’s because it’s the way that my stomach gets full. Is because I eat right? You know, God invites us into these acts to accomplish His will. He could just supernaturally

Speaker 1
reveal himself to everybody, and I think the reason he doesn’t is because God is a relational God, and He invites us into this process. He doesn’t need to create. He lives in a set of living, loving relationships. And yet he does that anyways. He could supernaturally just reveal himself to everybody, and yet we see in his revelation of Himself to His people throughout the Old Testament, it’s not I am the Omniscient, the omnipresent, omnipotent god. It’s I am the God of Abraham Isaac and Jacob, I am the God of your fathers. It’s relational in that sense. And I think that that should be encouraging to us as we set out to preach the gospel, that the ends and the means are predestined and we are invited into that. And in one sense, my evangelistic endeavor is 100%

Speaker 1
successful because those whom, those who are His sheep, will hear His voice, and I want to be faithful to telling the sheep where the master is and how he can rescue them from their sin and their

Speaker 1
their ultimate ends on which, you know, unfortunately, we’re all clawing our way towards and without the work of of God taking my heart of stone and giving me a heart of flesh. There’s no way I’m believing either. And so it’s because of the reality of knowing what God has done in my life and knowing how my stomach can be full, and it’s via me eating.

Speaker 1
You know God, God knows that it will reign in Israel. And the reason it rains in Israel is because Elijah prays, and so it’s, and if Elijah didn’t pray, it wouldn’t rain. And it’s, it’s, it’s, both of those things are true simultaneously the exact same time. And when I see just the thorough going doctrine of sovereignty and that woven all throughout the pages of Scripture, barely a page goes by where you don’t see God in control and knowing what he’s doing and inviting his people for his purposes and his glory. And so that’s that’s a large part of my motivation and why I can put my head down on my pillow at the end of the day and not feel like I’m responsible for

Speaker 1
taking the Spirit’s work, but that if I’m faithful, I can be confident that he’s doing the work, mostly despite me, but sometimes with me.

Matt Smethurst
Yeah, my church here in Richmond, Virginia, we have a line in our church covenant where we say, and it’s kind of riffing on language from Bill Bright we will be active in evangelism, taking the initiative to proclaim Christ and the power of the Holy Spirit, leaving the results to God. And there’s, there’s just so much rest available for us in that, that final phrase we get to leave the results in the hands of a good and sovereign God Wes as we near the end of the interview, I just thought it’d be fun to do a little lightning round where you give brief response to common questions or objections. Now, obviously there’s more that you could say or would say if given the opportunity, but in daily life. Of course, we don’t always have the ability to engage in unhurried dialog. So I’d just be curious to know where you tend to immediately go with a skeptic with various topics. So for let’s just start with the problem of evil, which for many people, is the number one.

Matt Smethurst
One stumbling block and kind of defeat or belief as they think about how God could be all powerful and all good and all loving, especially in the face of seemingly senseless suffering with children and others. Colin recently wrote a book exploring this in the TGC hard question series, and particularly reflecting on the Holocaust. So what’s your what’s your kind of quick way of going about what is a very heavy and complicated topic?

Speaker 1
Yeah, well, I think part of the question of the problem of evil, which I think is arguably the hardest apologetic question there, is because there isn’t a simple answer to it is the fact that the question assumes something to begin with, is that evil is something, right? We see it in the world. We see the brokenness. We understand that the this beautiful world wasn’t meant to be like this to some degree. And so the fact that God that evil is something testifies to there being an objective standard to weigh that by right? If there is an objective evil, you’re positing an objective good, and if you’re positing an objective good, you’re positing a moral law well, we need an answer for who that moral lawgiver is. And apart from God, I really think you’re running into a lot of issues. You’re removing God from the picture. I don’t think solves the problem. I actually think it complicates it, because it means that evil is purposeless. And if evil is purposeless, then it really doesn’t matter why you’re struggling with any one particular issue. It’s just, you know, that’s just, we’re bags of meat running into other bags of meat, and so we’re all going to die, either, you know, sometime sooner, at the heat death of the universe. And so who cares? And I think that’s a problem, and I think we realize that’s a problem. And one of the most quoted verses in the Bible from the Bible is a version of Exodus 34 six, where God describes his character as compassionate and merciful and overbounding His steadfast love. And I’ve always thought it was interesting, as someone who has been very interested in linguistics and Philology, and that the English word compassion, which seems to be the stream throughout the different iterations of that Exodus, 34, six, whether you’re finding in the prophets or the Psalms, is that compassion in English comes from two Latin words, calm, meaning with compassion, meaning suffering. And that the God of the Bible is not something someone who is aloof is not the God of theism or deism. It’s not the God that sets things in motion, but it’s a God who actually can relate to our hurt, because unlike, I think, any other God, in any other religious perspective, the God that we serve stepped out of eternity and into humanity in the second person of the Trinity, and experiences that and can relate to that can relate to abandonment and torture and hurt and heartbreak. And so I think the problem of evil is the hardest question, but the fact that evil is something and also that evil is not some thing, right, that we can’t measure it. We can’t put it in a jar and say, this is depravity, and if I pour it on you, you’re going to be worse than you were before. And and so that means something too, doesn’t it in that we we understand that evil is something, but that it doesn’t carry an ontological status, and that God is, has and is doing something about evil when Christ died on the cross that started the work of making all things new. And so God is not indifferent about suffering because it killed his son. And so I think we can speak to people who are hurting and who are suffering and say, you know, God cares about you, and God probably understands that more than you know

Speaker 1
Wes a lot of people trip on the claim of the exclusivity of Jesus Christ. How in the world can you believe that Jesus is the only way. Yeah, well, I think all worldviews at some point are exclusive. I was in, I mentioned being in India a few years back. Actually had a short lived Bollywood career, but that’s another podcast. And so I was, I was in India one summer, and I ended up at the at the Grand Bahai Lotus Temple, which is in Delhi, and I was walking around, and I happened to find because he was sticking out like a sore thumb as well, another white guy, he was from California, and he was there on a pilgrimage. And he said, you know, Hi, my name is so and so I’ve been working here at the Baha’i temple, and I believe that all ways lead to God. And I said, Oh, that’s interesting. My name is Wes. I’m a Bible believing Christian. I believe one way leads to God. And he immediately went, Oh no, no, I can’t accept that. And I went, hold

Wes Huff
on, you’re excluding me. And he

Wes Huff
went, No, no, no, we want to include everyone.

Speaker 1
And you know, it’s always stuck out in my mind that even the inclusivist have to exclude the exclusivists. And so nobody is fully inclusivistic in that sense. So for me to say that Jesus is the Way, the Truth and the Life, and noone comes the father, but through him, is not it’s not actually unique. In the same sense that if you look at all worldviews, you know, Islam says Muhammad is the prophet of God and and there is no other God, right, even the.

Speaker 1
The Jewish statement, the Shema here Israel, the Lord is God. The Lord is one. Well, that excludes perspectives that don’t believe that God is one. And you know, people often like to tout that there are these perspectives like Buddhism, that are more inclusivistic. Well, if you actually read into Buddhism, guttama Siddhartha, who grew up a Hindu, rejected Hinduism In the Vedas and said that they were evil. So you know, if you dig down to all these things, you’re going to find an exclusivity somewhere, even if the inclusivists have to exclude the exclusivists. So I don’t think it’s unique. And I think truth, by its very nature, is exclusive. And that might be controversial, but it’s not unclear. It’s good. Let’s jump to the next one. How can God be so loving if you can send all these people to hell? Well, I think what the question fails to realize is that it is out of God’s love that his justice needs to be enacted, and that it assumes that God owes us something. And the reality is is that we don’t actually want justice, we don’t want our just desserts, because if we get justice, we get punishment. Grace and mercy are often confused. But whereas justice is getting what you do deserve, Mercy is not getting what you do deserve, and grace is getting what you don’t deserve. And so if you want justice, well then we’re all sunk. Right? We get what we deserve, and that is sin and Hell 100% of the time, but thanks be to God that when Christ dies on the cross, justice is fully satisfied, and the wrath of God that we deserve is taken upon him. And because of that, Mercy is actually enabled to be given out because God’s law is not broken. It’s accomplished. And so now we don’t get what we do deserve. And not only do we not get what we do deserve, we get what we don’t deserve, and that is being adopted as sons and daughters of the Most High and so it is because of the doctrine of hell, because God is holy, and he’s concerned with his holiness that we actually, you know, nobody looks at, say, a criminal who has committed a heinous crime against vulnerable people or against children or against the elderly, and says, you know,

Speaker 1
is it really, is it really just to punish is it really loving to punish them? You know, more often than not, we want to throw the book at them. And I think what we fail to realize is how truly heinous the cosmic rebellion of our sin actually is. Sometimes people say, you know, if God is real, well, why doesn’t he do anything about the evil in the world? And I think actually, when we actually look at the doctrine of hell, that is God doing something about the evil in the world. And unfortunately, whereas we might want to play God when God actually is able to play God, we point the finger at him when it’s far more often that we don’t understand what’s going on.

Matt Smethurst
Reminds me of the Puritan Thomas Brooks, who said there are no little sins because there is no little God.

Matt Smethurst
Wes we live in a scientific age. How can you take the Bible seriously in light of the findings of science?

Speaker 1
Well, I think if you actually look at the history of science, the majority of individuals who came up with something like the scientific method were individuals who saw the coherence in the universe and tried to find an explanation for it, right? And so I think a lot of people assume that science and God are mutually exclusive, but that’s not. That’s not true. That’s not true historically. And if, if God did create this world, then the investigation of the answers to the created world is just another way to glorify Him. And so if we want to pit that against scripture, I think we’re mostly missing the boat in that sometimes scripture is not intending to give us scientific realities, and we can read some parts of Scripture like a scientific textbook when that was really not the intention of the book to begin with. And that doesn’t mean that they’re contradictory. It just means that we need to make sure that we’re reading hermeneutically things properly. And likewise, you know, there’s the was it Aquinas who talked about the revelation in in the word and Revelation within nature? And so, as Paul says, you know, God’s divine attributes and invisible qualities have been shown through our creation, so that no man is and it’s an apologethe Without an apologetic so we can look at the universe and realize that the nature itself is crying out, that there is a Creator. And so the investigation of that is actually, in one sense, could be argued as a form of worship.

Speaker 1
But Wes Christians have done terrible things. How can you possibly believe in Christianity? Yeah, I think that’s an interesting objection. A friend of mine, John Dixon, wrote a great book called bullies and saints, which I would highly recommend on this topic. But one of the illustrations that I sometimes use in this is that, if you judged Beethoven.

Wes Huff
Been based on my ability to play the cello.

Speaker 1
You’d be getting a few things wrong, wouldn’t you, and so if you handed me a cello and said, you know, play Beethoven’s Concerto Number four, I would say, Okay, I could scratch away on it. And then if your conclusion is, then Beethoven is terrible. That’s not an accurate reflection of Beethoven. That’s a that’s a poor reflection of my ability to do that. So I mean, if anything, the testimony of Scripture is that we are going to be inadequate representations of God, and that’s why the story is not about any one of the characters of Scripture, other than Jesus, because what we can’t do Jesus does on our behalf. And so I think we should expect Christians to fall short, not that that’s a an excuse or a way to justify when people truly do things that they should not, but that’s going to happen. And if we’re putting our hope and trust in people, that’s a that’s highly problematic, and we should make sure that we’re following Christ, that it’s Christianity, and maybe not churchianity or pastorianity, or, you know, you fill in the gaps your favorite theologian or Christian, or whatever

Wes Huff
they’re they’re going to be faulty in some regard, minor or Major. And so I would expect Christians to act poorly and badly, because I understand that I act poorly and badly, and I don’t want to be the standard of what a Christian is either. I want you to look to Jesus Christ, who is the only person, the author and perfecter of your faith.

Speaker 1
Only a few more to go here. I’m gonna give one right up your wheelhouse. Okay, that’s gonna be the reliability of the scriptures. But specifically, why don’t you talk about the Old Testament? Because I think it’s sort of like a pyramid. A lot of the answers are about the Gospels, then broadly about the New Testament. I don’t read nearly as much about the Old Testament reliability. Answer that question, yeah. I think what we see within the reliability of the Old Testament is a little bit different than the New Testament, if for no other reason than the New Testament is just so much newer historically it we have a lot more to go off of, because it’s closer in proximity to our own time. And so the older you go, the more ambiguity you’re going to get on something like historical verification. Now, that being said, I think there’s enough ground to look at some of the archeological data and say that there’s confirmation of a great deal of what’s going on there. And so you shouldn’t expect to find Moses’s tent or Abraham’s garb or whatever, because I don’t think that those would survive 1000s of years later. But that being said, I do think it’s interesting that our primary source for a lot of historical information was the Bible, until we found artifacts that kind of played into the evidence of that. If you were to go back to the 13th century and ask a monk who say, a king in ancient Mesopotamian Mesopotamia was by name, he may very well open up the Old Testament and show you, you know, who is King Sennacherib. Oh, well, you know he led a siege against Hezekiah in Jerusalem. And it wouldn’t be until hundreds of years later that we would dig up King Sennacherib throne room and actually have a verification of something like the siege of Jerusalem or the sacking of Lachish and all those things our primary evidence for a long, long time for someone like Sennacherib, king of Assyria, was the Bible, and I think that that testifies to something, and that’s not true of every instance. Archeology isn’t a slam dunk for the historical reliability of the Bible, but I think it gives enough credence to say that there’s enough of showing that these are talking about real places, real times and real locations, to give us a level of confidence to say that there’s something that’s truthful going on here. We historians refer to verisimilitude. That means the appearance probability and the likelihood of truth. And so I think there’s an there’s the the air of verisimilitude within the Old Testament text, enough that we can say from a historical standpoint, this is true, and then once again, from a theological standpoint, we can see time and time again, Jesus referring back to the truthfulness when he’s quoting the Old Testament that he also thought that this was true, that these things happened, and that should be brought into the conversation as well.

Matt Smethurst
Second to last question, Wes, what would you say to someone who is convinced that Christians are bigots because of the Bible’s sexual ethic?

Wes Huff
Yeah, I mean, that’s a trick.

Unknown Speaker
You one,

Wes Huff
I think I would say, you know,

Speaker 1
when it comes to sexual ethics, we’re talking about something that is sacred, and we’re talking about something that God is not just kind of arbitrarily setting boundaries in place because he wants to be a cosmic killjoy. And in one sense, the the

Speaker 1
first mandate of creation to be fruitful and multiply, you know, the first covenant made with humanity in marriage, the two should become one flesh. I think that that testifies to something that’s beautiful and that’s sacred and that exists within proper boundaries for our good, for human flourishing, and I think we shouldn’t make light of that, that the that sex is a good and beautiful thing, that gender is a good and beautiful thing, and that it’s the corruption of that that starts to erode the sacredness of this reality. And in one sense, you can look at something like the 10 Commandments, and you can see those as a reflection of who God is in his character. You were created in God’s image. God is not an adulterer. Don’t commit adultery. You can live up to the image of God in you by holding that law as sacred, and in when the Spirit of God is working in your life, that starts to become less of a command, Thou shalt not, and more of a promise, Thou shalt not. You won’t. You don’t need to do this. You can live the life that you were created to be. On the back end of that, I’d also like to say this is that our culture has swallowed the lie that your ability to have a sexual or romantic relationship is the be all and end all of your identity. And boy, is that not true. All you have to do is get married and realize that that’s not true, right? You’re not going to all of a sudden be fulfilled in all aspects of your life when you get married, and that’s okay. And in one sense, I’m I’m more and more of the opinion that that to say that that this is the be all and end all, is actually, in one form, a Christological heresy, because the true image of humanity in the person of Jesus Christ was that of a celibate, Single Man. And so to say that you have to live out your identity in your ability to pursue your sexual or romantic desires is actually to say something incorrect about the person of Jesus Christ. And I think that that is, at minimum, it’s dangerous, and at most, it’s radical. And so I think we need to look at our society and say this identity issue is not about your ability to live up to those standards which society is telling you is going to fulfill you, and it’s not. And you are more than the sum of your actions.

Speaker 1
That’s a gospel truth, right? We are more than the sum of our actions in terms of our sin, and thanks be to God that that is a reality, right? And so I think this the world is going to look at something like sexual ethics, and it’s always going to misunderstand what the purpose and meaning and intention of them are, and it’s going to say that unless you are able to all the time without reservation, do whatever you want whenever you want, because that’s perfect freedom. I mean, there are countries around the world today where you can do whatever you want, however you want to do it, whenever you want to do it, whenever you want to do it, and we don’t refer to those places as safe. That’s an anarchy. And so that applies in all uses of the term, especially when we’re talking about something that needs to be held within the boundaries of something that is good and that is beautiful, and that’s what sex is Wes Why do you believe that Jesus rose from the dead? Yeah, well, I mean, there, there are a number of layers to this. First and foremost, I’m convinced historically, that that actually did take place. I think that the Gospels have enough of that air of credibility to them that the the inference to the best explanation of what took place there that you went from 11 scared disciples hiding in an upper room to going out and being the most effective world changing missionary force that the history of the world has ever seen. I think that the explanation for that, and specifically the rebuttals to that, the rebuttals are insufficient to actually explain the evidence. You know, some historians say that you the resurrection is not something that you can weigh historically. And I think that that’s incorrect. I heard Peter Williams once say that, you know, our ability to test something is only as good as what we weigh them on. So if I put my toothbrush on a bathroom scale, it’s going to say it’s zero. But that doesn’t mean that my toothbrush is has no weight to it. It’s not floating in the air. We just need to calibrate our ability to actually ability to actually discern what we’re trying to evaluate. And so I think there is a level of kind of turning up the calibration on the historical method and saying we have someone who objectively lived, we have someone who objectively died, and then we he was seen again after that. And so the.

Speaker 1
Needs an explanation. And on top of that, the ability of

Speaker 1
that narrative to change lives also needs to be factored in this conversation is you have the what could be labeled as you know, not the objective facts, but the fact that people go from spiritually dead to spiritually alive, and are truly and genuinely impacted by the message of the gospel. And I think that, combined with the historical information, I am convinced beyond a reason of a doubt, that historically Jesus rose from the dead, but also that has completely and radically changed the way that I view the world, and so because of those two factors, I am more than convinced that I can live my life on that basis, and that that is true the capital T West. This has been amazing, but I’ve learned so much and and I’m always eager to be able to be sharpened in my apologetics, but especially encouraged in my faith, not only in what you’ve said, but in how you’ve said it, in the model that you’ve given us and the model that you’re you’re giving so many others right now. So how can we be be praying for you, praying for your ministry and otherwise supporting you? Yeah, I mean, I am still a little bit overwhelmed by what’s taken place in the last few months. It’s happened very quickly. And, you know, someone asked me recently, you know, how do, how do you progress in sort of the Christian

Wes Huff
I think they even use the word

Speaker 1
no, a celebrity like, how do you get there? And I jokingly said, while you make manuscript Monday posts for 10 years, and then Joe Rogan invites you on his podcast. And I think you know what’s what that testifies to me to is that man i i have really been

Speaker 1
so uninvolved in what’s happened, and it’s a testimony to the work of the Spirit, but that requires a lot of wisdom and guidance, and I’m so thankful that I have a good support system

Speaker 1
in and around me, which includes my pastors and my wife and people who I’ve met through this who I otherwise don’t think I would have, who have been able to guide me and pray for me, but I continue to COVID Everyone’s prayers if I fade into obscurity and end up just pastoring my church, I’m fine with that too, and I think that that would be more than what I’m owed for the the calling that God has has put on on me, but I think to make the most of every opportunity like that Colossians passage I quoted earlier, and to do so with just pause. It’s so easy to jump into all the opportunities that seem to be presenting themselves, and but to do those carefully and slowly and also to make sure that I’m prioritizing my family. Yeah, because that that is something that can Did I just hear, but let’s say, Amen from another Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1
I have three kids, another on the way, and I want to make sure that I’m not neglecting the formative years of their young lives, and making sure that they know that their their dad is loves Jesus, but also loves them. And so any, any and all prayer for me

Ligon Duncan
in you know, all of the above categories is very helpful, and so I appreciate what God has been doing, but also that I’m able to use that as a practical example for my own kids. Yeah, that’s great. Who is sufficient for these things? As Paul says, Blake, will you pray for Wes and his ministry? Let’s pray. Let’s pray. Heavenly Father. Thank you for Wes. Thank you for saving him, thank you for drawing him to trust in Christ alone for salvation as he is offered in the Gospel our we can only imagine how overwhelmed he is with the opportunities that are before him. Now I pray that you would keep him especially close to yourself, that you would give him joy in his wife and in his children, that you would give him joy and fellowship in the ministry of the local church, that you would give to him and to his counselors real wisdom in deciding what to do, what not to do, how much of what to do.

Ligon Duncan
Above all, Lord, give him the greatest joy, simply as being a faithful servant of the Lord who draws attention to the Savior and says he must increase and I must decrease. Give give him no delight in his fame, but give him supreme delight in.

Ligon Duncan
In the fame that he is able to ascribe and point to, that is in Jesus Christ, and keep him humble, but keep him encouraged. We pray and keep him in your word, and using that word in his own life to grow in the knowledge of the Lord and then share that reality with others, for the glory of Christ, for the building up of the church, for the salvation of sinners, all these things we ask in Jesus. Name Amen, Wes. Thanks so much for your time. It’s been fun chatting with you today. Yeah, I know. I appreciate being able to come on here and have the opportunity to chat with you guys. I you know dr Duncan read your stuff for years, so you know, the opportunity to talk to people like yourself and others is a little bit, I

Ligon Duncan
don’t know if the word is surprising, but it’s been, well, it’s very humbling. And the I don’t know when I started watching you Wes, but I was not only impressed with how you carried yourself, but also the sources. And you know, you’ve done the work too. A lot of guys get this moment and they’ve not done the work, and you’ve been doing the work. And so I want to just commend you for that. And as I’ve seen you interact with Mike Horton and with Dan Wallace and Mike Krueger and some of these other folks that the Lord has opened some doors for you that I pray those doors will stay open, and then you’ll know which ones that you need to walk through in the days ahead. But you’re a real encouragement to me.

Matt Smethurst
I appreciate that. Thank you very much and listeners, thanks for tuning in to this episode of the everyday pastor and gospel bound coming together for this special conversation with Wes Huff. We would love it if you’d take a moment to subscribe or leave a review to our respective podcasts so that we can continue getting out good content as we help everyday pastors and everyday believers always be prepared to give a reason for the hope that we have you.