How Your Church Witnesses to the World

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0:00:00 – (Bob Thune): There actually is a freedom that makes you truly free. There’s a freedom that can actually set you free even from the bondage that you have to your own desires and your own selfishness and your own preferences. And Jesus can actually set you free from self and set you free for the love of God and the love of others. And that’s a deeper, it’s a more eternal, it’s a richer, and it’s a more profound kind of freedom.

0:00:32 – (Collin Hansen): When we receive applications for fellows at the Keller center for Cultural Apologetics, we ask them one question. We ask them, what one thing should Christians do right now to introduce their neighbors to Jesus? Not everybody likes this question because it can seem very reductionistic. And it’s not that we think that there’s only one answer. It’s just we want them to identify what priority stands above all others. And last year, when we were adding a new class of fellows, we were surprised. Everybody gave us the same answer.

0:01:04 – (Collin Hansen): They talked about the public witness of gathered Christians in the church. Now, this could have been for a number of reasons. Maybe they were responding to negative press about the church going back at least 25 years to the Catholic abuse scandal at the same time when the Internet became ubiquitous. Or maybe they were expressing renewed appreciation for the gathered church after the COVID era shutdowns and public disorder. Either way, they were going back to biblical biblical concept rooted in Israel’s testimony to the nations and also in the early church of the Book of Acts, where they are told in Acts 20, Acts 2, they found favor with all.

0:01:41 – (Collin Hansen): Bob Thune is a fellow for the Keller center and writes about this ecclesial apologetics in a chapter for our new book, the Gospel After An Introduction to Cultural Apologetics published by Zondervan Reflective. Bob is also a featured teacher in an exciting new video small group curriculum called Making Sense of Us, published by the Gospel Coalition and Keller Center. Bob’s session, which is recorded against the backdrop of the Statue of Liberty in New York City, covers the cultural narrative. We tell each other in the modern west about liberty.

0:02:14 – (Collin Hansen): And we believe that this curriculum can help you, especially young adults, to both evangelize and edify at the same time. And so when you watch and study with other church members and even non Christians, you can learn together about the Bible’s better story about liberty, which we live out together in the church. So to discuss more on all this, Bob joins me on Gospel Bound. Great to have you, Bob.

0:02:37 – (Bob Thune): Hey, thanks. It’s good to be here.

0:02:39 – (Collin Hansen): All right, let’s just start Bob with Ecclesial apologetics. What did you learn from Leslie Newbiggin? And how was his teaching foreign to what you had experienced early in life in the church?

0:02:49 – (Bob Thune): Well, yeah, I came across Leslie Newbegin after seminary when I was planting a church. So somehow I was never familiar with his writing or his thoughts. And as I was starting to plant our church and was trying to read on missiology, especially in church planting, I don’t know, someone handed me some of Neubigan’s work, and I was really provoked because some of your listeners and viewers will be familiar. But Newbegin Left England in 1936, went and was a missionary in India for 40 years, came back to England and realized that it was post Christian. And that surprised him. And so he wrote a lot about the need for the church to have what he called a missionary encounter with modern Western culture. And so he was one of the first people to start talking about what does it mean for the church to have a missionary posture toward the culture around us. That honestly was new for me. The churches I grew up in, I never heard about the church as a missionary people.

0:03:45 – (Bob Thune): I think there was sort of these still this assumption that we live in a mostly Christian culture and, you know, to use a phrase from Tim Keller, that sharing the gospel is kind of just rearranging the furniture that’s already there in people’s worldviews or their minds. And so Newbegin really challenged me that if we’re in a post Christendom sort of world, we can’t make the same set of assumptions and we have to think like missionaries about engaging our own culture. And so my earliest experience in ministry had been in campus ministry.

0:04:13 – (Bob Thune): And I had been doing, you know, leading Bible studies in fraternity houses and stuff like that. And I realized, oh, yeah, what I saw in campus ministry was I would share the gospel with people, sometimes they would come to faith in Jesus. The Holy Spirit did some really beautiful things in the lives of people. What I failed to do was to get them connected to a local church. And it turned out that over time, many of them didn’t connect to in a meaningful way to Christian community. And so it. What Newbegin said that really resonated with me is that people need to not just hear the gospel, but they need to see it lived out in a community. They need. They need to see what it looks like when a people live their lives in a way that reflects the gospel. He talked about the church as the only hermeneutic of the gospel.

0:04:57 – (Bob Thune): The. The place that sort of fleshes it out for people. And that was provocative to me and, and yeah, really different from, I guess, how I had conceived of the church earlier in my life.

0:05:06 – (Collin Hansen): Is Omaha, Nebraska, post Christian?

0:05:09 – (Bob Thune): Surprisingly, yeah. I mean, I think most of North America is post Christian. I realize it doesn’t feel that way in some places. The odd thing about the Midwest is that we are conservative valued in the sense that people value hard work and, you know, local community and stuff like that. But yeah, it’s just as post Christian as most, most of the places that feel to people more like, you know, the, the more the. The secular parts of America.

0:05:35 – (Collin Hansen): What do you attribute that to?

0:05:38 – (Bob Thune): I think it’s. I mean, here’s what Newbegin said. He said, he used this phrase he called modern Western culture. And what he said is that’s it’s. It’s what we know as sort of post Enlightenment liberal rationalism. And what he said is it’s the most pervasive culture. It’s actually everywhere that, that the Western world has colonialized. And so he said you still have sort of local expressions of who people are, but, but modern Western culture is so pervasive and you know, think about it as capitalism combined with individualism, combined with sort of, you know, free market economy.

0:06:13 – (Bob Thune): All these things are so pervasively spread around the world that it doesn’t matter whether you live in Omaha or in New York City or in London or in Tokyo. Most of the world has sort of embraced this kind of thinking. And so I think that’s why. It’s just that it’s sort of a monolithic reality that shapes all of us, no matter where we find ourselves.

0:06:34 – (Collin Hansen): Again, we’re mentioning here how you founded and still lead now Coramdeo Church in Omaha, Nebraska. When I think about ecclesial apologetics, though, Bob, as pastors, we know more than anyone else about the dark side of a church’s inner workings and certainly even our own souls and our own hearts. How can you still believe in ecclesial apologetics given what you know about the church?

0:06:59 – (Bob Thune): The dark side of a church’s inner working sounds pretty sinister. I would just say, well, a church is made up of human beings, and so it reflects the same flaws and faults that human beings carry with them in their work, in any kind of institution. And so certainly it is an imperfect place. The church is and sometimes really is dysfunctional and hurts people. But I believe in ecclesial apologetics. I believe that the people of God are an important expression of apologetics in our world because quite simply, it’s the story that we’ve seen over and over again in 20 years of planting and sustaining a church here in the middle of America. I mean, just the stories of people that we see come to Christ over and over again.

0:07:45 – (Bob Thune): There’s always two pieces to it. One is I heard the gospel in a compelling way. Maybe that was through a sermon, maybe it was through a conversation with a friend, maybe it was through some of the classes that we run. But I heard the gospel. But then secondly, I saw it lived out. I was around long enough to see people and how faith in Jesus changed the way they thought about marriage, singleness, money, sexuality, vocation.

0:08:14 – (Bob Thune): And over time, the sort of power of seeing what the gospel does in people was instrumental. And that’s just the story of almost everyone that we baptize and see come to faith in our church. And so it’s been so much the story of people that have come to faith in our church that it’s deepened my conviction of the very things that Neubigen and others have talked about, which is that the church, the visible, imperfect community of people orienting their life around the gospel, repenting and believing and growing, that that is in fact a critical part of doing any kind of meaningful apologetics in our world.

0:08:52 – (Collin Hansen): I know you agree, Bob, that we don’t offer ourselves but Christ and inevitably we’re going to fall short.

0:09:00 – (Bob Thune): But.

0:09:00 – (Collin Hansen): So I’m wondering, why does it matter if we have what Ray Ortland describes as gospel culture? If it’s the message of a perfect savior that saves sinners, not our good behavior? Again, why are we talking about this witness of the gathered church?

0:09:17 – (Bob Thune): Well, I absolutely think it’s the message of a perfect savior that saves people. I also think that message transforms people. If you. If you told the early church, if you told the apostles, hey, the. The message is the only thing that matters, not good behavior. I think you’d end up deleting about half of your New Testament. Because if you think about what the New Testament epistles are and what the apostles are doing as they’re writing to the early churches, you know, you have texts like Colossians 3 put to death what is earthly in you.

0:09:49 – (Bob Thune): You have texts like Philippians 2, right? Work out your salvation with fear and trembling. First Peter or two Peter. Make every effort to supplement your faith with virtue. So there are all these exhortations in the New Testament where what you see the apostles doing is saying, hey, in light of the truth of the gospel, here’s how that ought to affect how we relate to one another and how we live in the world.

0:10:11 – (Bob Thune): So saying that salvation is by grace alone, through faith in a perfect Savior is absolutely essential. We don’t want to minimize that. But equally crucial is the longing that Paul expresses in places, places like Galatians 4:19, where he says, you know, I want to see Christ formed in you. So you mentioned Ray Orland’s observation about gospel doctrine creating a gospel culture. And I think the way I conceive of that is that gospel doctrine is holding out the truth of the gospel.

0:10:44 – (Bob Thune): And what gospel culture is, is sort of getting to the beauty and goodness of the gospel. So, you know, all, if you think about the classical triad of truth, goodness and beauty, we want truth, but we also need to see the beauty of how the gospel changes people. And that’s part of what’s happening. And when we think about a church’s life together or a gospel culture, that.

0:11:03 – (Collin Hansen): Leads us then to considering hospitality. This has become a cultural buzzword of late. It’s a big deal in our public school system. Our superintendent was just our school talking about how they’ve transformed so many different things to be more hospitable. What then is unique about the kind of hospitality that we as Christians can and should offer the world?

0:11:28 – (Bob Thune): When I think about hospitality, maybe the simplest way of describing it is welcoming the outsider or making room for the outsider. My wife and I have a college student living with us right now for a few months. And you know, so hospitality just, we’re just making space for her in our house and welcoming her to, to live there for a little while. That’s, that’s what the church does when it practices hospitality, right? It’s making room for outsiders to find their way among us, whether they’re outsiders because they don’t believe the gospel, whether they’re just new to the city and they’re, you know, trying to connect to a local community of people, whatever it might be.

0:12:04 – (Bob Thune): What I think is interesting, and again, Newbegin is so helpful in talking about this, is Christianity is a non coercive religion. So we can’t, we can’t make Christians at gunpoint, right? We can’t force anyone to become a Christian. Our posture is one of listening and persuasion. The gospel. The apostles in the New Testament are preaching the gospel and persuading people that Jesus is the Messiah and that they should give their lives to him and follow him.

0:12:33 – (Bob Thune): That’s the same thing the church does. And it requires dialogue, it requires listening and conversation and persuasion. And so that’s the kind of hospitality I think that, that the church ought to offer. And needs to offer is this. It’s not less convictional, it’s not less about proclaiming the gospel, but it’s about doing so with a hospitable sort of posture that says, hey, come and sit and converse with us and let us hear where are you coming from? What do you think about God and Christ and Scripture and creating space where those kinds of meaningful conversations can happen. And those conversations obviously can happen in one on one settings. They can happen in small groups and living rooms. They can even happen in a pretty large room of people.

0:13:15 – (Bob Thune): I think that that’s the beauty of sort of what gospel hospitality looks like, is making room for people to find their way among us and then eventually just sort of find their way to seeing how the gospel changes everything. Yes.

0:13:30 – (Collin Hansen): What would be the alternative? What does it mean when we’re not making room for outsiders? Where does that go wrong?

0:13:35 – (Bob Thune): I think you end up having ingrown churches, right? Churches that end up sort of, we’re still committed to the scriptures and to Christ, but we fail to be connecting in meaningful ways with our neighbors or with people who are not Christians yet. And so the church just takes on a culture that lacks that hospitality component. And what that does is it impoverishes us in two ways. One, it keeps us from having to continue growing in our own sanctification, to learn how to relate to all different kinds of people.

0:14:09 – (Bob Thune): And two, it sort of shrinks the missionary possibilities of our church. Right. It shrinks the kinds of people who will find their ways among us. And the invitations we have to, to make the gospel known to them. I was just thinking, we just did a, a four week class at our church on the history of the Reformation that our teaching pastor and, and myself taught. And we had a bunch of people, about 100 people came to the class and about a half a dozen of them brought along with them family members who either are currently Roman Catholic or coming out of a Roman Catholic background and just trying to sort out what is the Reformation and how is it different from this tradition that I’ve grown up in. And so what I saw in that is I think that in that classroom we created enough of a hospitable posture that we could be convictional about saying, hey, we’re Protestants, we believe in the critiques and the challenges the Reformation was offering.

0:15:05 – (Bob Thune): But also we can do that in a room where people who are convictionally Roman Catholic don’t feel ostracized, don’t feel talked down to, don’t feel defensive. And that’s a key part of how I have learned to practice hospitality is just how would I talk about this or speak about this with people in the room who disagree? And that’s such a foundational part of persuasion in any context. But the church needs to recover that in significant ways.

0:15:28 – (Collin Hansen): Where do you see it usually go wrong in churches? Is it because they want to be so focused on community that they think then that they can’t really afford to be focused on outsiders? Or is it because they develop an us versus them mentality? We are the people who are righteous inside and we want to remain unstained by the world? Where do you see it normally go wrong in churches?

0:15:49 – (Bob Thune): I think that us versus them thing isn’t just a church thing. I think our whole culture is kind of defined by that spirit right now. And so it’s so hard for that not to find its way into the church. I don’t think Christians are necessarily more prone to that than anyone else. But I do think that, you know, some of us feel embattled. You know, I think it was. Was it Hunter or George Marsden who talked about evangelicals as embattled and thriving, you know, thriving years ago.

0:16:16 – (Bob Thune): And so that idea of being embattled, we feel a little bit like, man, there’s a lot of things in the culture that sort of are stacked against sort of basic Christian virtue. And so people feel a need to sort of have a little bit of a defensive posture sometimes. And then I think, yeah, just the way that everything around us is polarized. So I think what often works against a hospitable posture is, yeah, probably that sense of so much of our lives feels like it’s us versus them.

0:16:42 – (Bob Thune): And there’s a natural instinct to try to sort of like, double down on what’s true. And again, what’s true matters deeply. We should care significantly about that. But I think we can do that in a way that does not lose that sort of gospel hospitality.

0:16:56 – (Collin Hansen): Christian Smith on thriving.

0:17:00 – (Bob Thune): Another psychologist who I failed to mention.

0:17:03 – (Collin Hansen): That’s true. If we were going to get to him eventually, I would get there eventually. Now, Bob, wasn’t the seeker church movement a kind of ecclesial apologetic? I mean, you could disagree or explain how it’s different. That’s what I’m wondering. How is this different from what they have been doing and still are doing?

0:17:23 – (Bob Thune): I think the seeker movement wasn’t an ecclesial apologetic at all. I would say that whole movement. And I was, you know, in my life, that was a sort of a 1990s reality. In my story. I know there’s a lot of churches maybe that still sort of have that paradigm. But I think that completely ignored the thoughtful missiology of people like Newbegin. What I mean is Newbegin’s vision is for the church to be a radical counterculture where it’s. It’s familiar to people but. But radically different. He talks about the gospel bringing with it its own plausibility structure where it sort of forces you to rethink everything. He’s basically saying, hey, the kingdom of God is so upside down from how we think that it ought to confront you in a way that makes you have to kind of rethink everything about how you see reality.

0:18:13 – (Bob Thune): I think that’s a missionary posture for the church. I think the seeker movement was sort of an attempt instead to be. To flatten that and to be relevant in a way that I think didn’t hold forth how countercultural a gospel paradigm is. And so again, I think it was maybe rooted in an impulse to be evangelistic, but what it ended up doing was trying to be evangelistic by sort of buying too many of the assumptions of modern Western culture. And so you didn’t have the sort of upside downness of the kingdom of God standing out in his in a stark enough way.

0:18:50 – (Bob Thune): So I would say that, you know, again, I can’t speak for every person who was a part of the. The seeker movement, but I think the missiology behind that was certainly not a. A robust missiology that understood the logic of the gospel itself and what it means for us to hold that forth in a post Christendom kind of world.

0:19:10 – (Collin Hansen): Perfect segue there, Bob. So we’ve been talking, first half here primarily focused on Bob’s chapter on ecclesial apologetics from our new book the Gospel After An Introduction to Cultural Apologetics. Just really amazing chapter. I can’t think of how many different times I’ve already recommended it to people and just got off a call with Gospel Coalition Regional chapter in Montana where I was commending this to them.

0:19:36 – (Collin Hansen): But this other project that we’re going to talk about now is Making Sense of Us. This small group video curriculum and your session on Liberty filmed out there on the water in front of the Statue of Liberty. I think you set us up to be talking about some of those assumptions that have been brought into the church instead of having that missionary encounter and that recognizing the way the gospel turns everything upside down.

0:20:02 – (Collin Hansen): So what is the most common. And I’m going to go back to what you were saying from Newbiggin Modern West. What’s the most common modern Western cultural misconception about liberty, probably the simplest way.

0:20:16 – (Bob Thune): To say it is that when we think about liberty, we think almost entirely in terms of freedom from, or what some philosophers have called negative liberty. Right. Liberty is the removal of constraints. It’s the removal of boundaries. It’s getting rid of all the things that would hinder me from doing whatever I want to do, being the person I want to be. And so we tend to think it makes sense in our national story.

0:20:44 – (Bob Thune): Why that’s part of it. Because if you think back to the American Revolution and to King George and to the Boston Tea Party, there’s this sense of we want to be free from the English monarchy, we want to be free from some of the unfair taxation. So there’s this sense that America’s whole story is rooted in freedom from. And that’s an important aspect of what freedom is. But what you have is because.

0:21:05 – (Bob Thune): Because all that is downstream from the Enlightenment. And the Enlightenment’s conception of freedom was almost entirely freedom from. It was. It was the idea that to be truly free as an individual, you have to be liberated from all the possible constraints, from all things that sort of would hinder your ability to make personal choices about your life. Stanley Hauerwas has this famous line, you know, that the. The summary of how we think about freedom is I have no story except the story I chose when I had no story.

0:21:37 – (Bob Thune): It’s this idea that I am just an autonomous individual actor. There’s nothing that binds me to any other people or to any shared history or to a family or to a set of relationships that can make claims on me. I’m just totally free. And that’s, that’s, I think, the, the downside of the vision of liberty that most of us have sort of, you know, taken in just by virtue of being Western, whether, whether you’re American or just part of the broader sort of West.

0:22:03 – (Bob Thune): All of those concepts of liberty are very live in in any Western culture. And so it’s that that entire. That vision that freedom is almost entirely freedom from, and that seeps into how we think about all kinds of things.

0:22:17 – (Collin Hansen): How do we understand Galatians 5:1 then for freedom, Christ has set us free. Some wondering here, how does the work of Christ subvert what we talk about all the time at the Keller center, subvert and then fulfill our culture’s narrative of liberty?

0:22:35 – (Bob Thune): All right, so you mentioned Galatians 5. I think Galatians 5 1. It’s for freedom that Christ has set us free. Obviously, the conception there in the broader argument of Galatians is that what it set us free from is this sort of religious externalism. You know, Paul talks about. You observe days and months and seasons and years. It’s the sense that religion is about the externals. And so there’s a sense in which the freedom of the Gospel sets us free from that. And it’s an inner. It’s a more dramatic and more substantial freedom from all of those ways that we sort of try to measure our religiosity.

0:23:09 – (Bob Thune): But I think it’s interesting that a few verses later, then you have Galatians 5, 13. Do not use your freedom as an opportunity for the flesh, but through love, serve one another. So the way that the Gospel sort of subverts and fulfills that American or Western vision of freedom is this. That actually you can’t really be free as long as you’re only thinking about freedom from. Because you’re. No matter how free you are from external constraints, you are still a slave to your own passions, desires, preferences. Right? There’s still a sense in which you’re in bondage to your own inner desires. The more you lean into that story that I belong to myself, the more you end up living out of bondage to self.

0:23:59 – (Bob Thune): And so, you know, the Gospel subverts and critiques that idea of freedom. But then the fulfillment aspect would be. But there actually is a freedom that makes you truly free. There’s a freedom that can actually set you free even from the bondage that you have to your own desires and your own selfishness and your own preferences. And Jesus can actually set you free from self and set you free for the love of God and the love of others. And that’s a deeper. It’s a more eternal. It’s a richer and it’s a more profound kind of freedom. So I think there’s a lot of ways you could sort of work out that subvert, fulfill narrative. Because there’s so many places that the Bible talks about freedom and so many places where that sort of needs to critique our cultural understanding of freedom. But that’s. One is to sort of simplify it, to say, yeah, the American story of freedom doesn’t set you deeply free enough, but Jesus can’t.

0:24:48 – (Collin Hansen): I don’t know if people still use this illustration, Bob, but people used to always talk about the supermarket when it would come to explaining American culture. I guess that was more of kind of a Cold War thing about the way that American supermarkets would have so many different things. People would be overwhelmed here compared to things on the Eastern bloc or elsewhere. But I do think it is still an illustration that at our base, we believe that happiness consists in, as you’ve been saying, a freedom from obligation, but also a proliferation of choice.

0:25:21 – (Bob Thune): Yeah, unlimited personal choice.

0:25:23 – (Collin Hansen): How do we even begin? I mean, we’ve been talking about it in some different ways, but take us a little bit deeper. How do we dislodge that from our own souls and our own instincts? Or how do you see this playing out in pastoral ministry? Because we talk all the time as what we’re trying to do in this Making Sense of Us curriculum from the Keller center about how the strongest cultural assumptions are usually the ones that no one talks about.

0:25:47 – (Collin Hansen): And this would be an example trying to tell Americans that happiness is not automatically the result of having more options. It’s practically inconceivable to us.

0:26:01 – (Bob Thune): I think to the starting point for the answer to your question is just say, yeah, that’s going to be really difficult. And this is one of the reasons why I think pastors and thoughtful Christians need to think more deeply about some of these questions. How does the gospel critique and how can we dislodge from our own souls this false assumption we’ve made that freedom is in unlimited, unrestricted personal choice and autonomy? That’s going to be difficult.

0:26:28 – (Bob Thune): You’re exactly right, because it’s, you know, to use Glenn Scrivener’s book title, it’s the Air We Breathe. Right. It’s just, it’s how we’ve learned to think about freedom. But I think one thing that can be helpful is to draw the connections between places where there’s shared agreement on societal dysfunction and to show how many of those are driven by this idea of freedom. So here’s a couple examples.

0:26:55 – (Bob Thune): In the last two or three years, most people have begun to agree that there’s a big teen mental health crisis around smartphones, and John Hyde and others have done such important work on that. But what you see there is like, okay, we have freedom to. To communicate at all times, in all ways with all kinds of people. But that freedom is actually creating this really negative societal effect where, man, we see all kinds of mental health concerns. And so for. For us to be able to connect the dots, that actually there’s a place where we were told, hey, if you have a phone in your pocket, your life will be so much easier. You can log into your bank, you can talk to your grandma, you can order plane tickets. So much of life will be easier and simpler and you’ll have infinite personal choice, but at what cost? Where has that gotten us?

0:27:40 – (Bob Thune): Another example is the decline of friendship in America. There’s so many writers and cultural commentators who acknowledge that, especially among all sectors, but especially among men and young men, there’s such a decline in personal friendship. And to connect that to the idea that we’ve been told that, well, what you need to do is set yourself free from anything. That is an obligation, Right? And the problem with a good friendship is it is an obligation.

0:28:05 – (Bob Thune): I need to keep up with my friends. They can make demands on my time and on my energy. And so to connect this sort of crisis of isolation and the lack of friendship and show how that’s a byproduct of this vision of freedom, I think that can help us as Christians start to identify the fact that, yeah, we actually don’t want to believe that more and more freedom always leads to better outcomes, because sometimes it leads to worse outcomes. And it can help to provide a little bit of a lens through which to be critical of our understanding of freedom and hopefully to help our neighbors do that as well. I was talking with my neighbors across the street recently.

0:28:41 – (Bob Thune): She had been reading John Haidt’s book, the Anxious Generation. She was like, hey, have you seen this book? These are not Christians. They don’t go to church anywhere. I was like, yes, I have. And we had an amazing conversation because she’s raising two kids, and she’s like, man, I’m really freaked out about my kids and really starting to think about the boundaries I need to have. So I think that’s, like, that’s a conversation with some folks across the street who wouldn’t claim to be Christians and are not churched, but they’re seeing that same negative effect of, man, this thing we’ve believed about freedom has some really detrimental effects in our society. So I think that can be a starting place.

0:29:15 – (Bob Thune): That’s. That’s, I guess, the. The side of the critique. And then I think on the positive side, the ways that we can embrace the good of obligation and duty and dependence. Another place that you’re seeing that good play out right now is in all the conversations, especially in Canada and the uk around assisted dying, medical. Like medical euthanasia, Right? And people are realizing, hey, actually, I don’t think we want to live in a world where we have no responsibilities to those who are aging, to those who are becoming more dependent. That’s actually not a good place to be.

0:29:51 – (Bob Thune): And so I think, again, those conversations in our culture help us lean into the fact that actually obligations and dependence and duty toward one another are A key part of the right idea of freedom.

0:30:02 – (Collin Hansen): Yeah. That is one thing I’m really concerned about with these euthanasia conversations as they spread, because the cultural assumptions about autonomy are so deeply rooted that it’s hard to imagine anything that’s ultimately out of our control or a choice that we don’t get to exercise. So like you said, this will be very, very hard. That’s why you got to bring other elements of moral foundation theory to borrow from Haidt again, things about fairness and justice. Because of course, the people who are most likely to be adversely affected by this will people who do not have money or people who have diseases that other people or conditions that make other people think that they don’t deserve life or they don’t deserve money. So these things are going to come in very direct conflict.

0:30:53 – (Collin Hansen): Give a couple of other examples just for me to chime in on this. As I was thinking about this in terms of how to help people to understand choice does not always solve problems. One would be how many people, if you said in the last 15 years, have we become a better world by people having the ability to say whatever they want with a platform that can reach the entire world? I would think that maybe a little bit more discretion would be the better part of getting along with each other. Maybe you shouldn’t.

0:31:29 – (Collin Hansen): I mean, obviously there’s free speech, but just maybe it’s not a great idea for us to all just say whatever we’re feeling at all these moments. I’m not sure that choice has been used. Well, the other I’m wondering about would be Netflix paralysis, the proliferation of choice with streaming, where you end up spending more time trying to choose between your options and then you run out of time to actually watch anything at all.

0:31:56 – (Collin Hansen): That’s more of a lighthearted version of it, but it does show how you just can keep adding many choice, but as you add complexity, you also bring frustration and not able to necessarily view anything. Let’s close with a couple big questions, and I am hopeful that as people are watching these sessions on making sense of us, that they’ll provoke some really deep conversations about what are we living for, what is our hope, what is the story that we’re telling ourselves and others, and that this would be designed for us to have these conversations with each other in the church, but also with non Christians outside the church as well.

0:32:35 – (Collin Hansen): And one conversation I’ve really enjoyed with you over the years, Bob, has been, well, a lot of the things we’ve already covered here, this post Christendom World missionary Encounter of Newbegin, but also just about our own political order and its seeming decline. And perhaps even at some point here it’s eclipse. And this is the big conversation. You’ve been reviewing these books and writing about these topics for us at the Gospel Coalition. But how is it, and maybe just thinking about us as church leaders and other people listening and watching here, how do we order liberty?

0:33:08 – (Collin Hansen): We’re going to talk about here freedom in a way that better preserves the solidarity here, the solidarity that is necessary for society to function. Because we know at some level if everybody just does whatever is right in their own eyes, judges style, you get the results of judges.

0:33:26 – (Bob Thune): But.

0:33:26 – (Collin Hansen): And yet again we’re so bound to that understanding of negative liberty that it’s hard for us to recognize that there would be limits whether they be imposed or self chosen. So again, help us to bring those two things together. You’ve been thinking about this for a long time. Liberty, solidarity. We need both to be functioning. How do we put them together?

0:33:50 – (Bob Thune): Yeah, that’s a profound question. And I think first I’ve got a few thoughts. First, I think we need to have patience for the breadth of conversations that are going to be necessary in that journey. You know, we sometimes we hear people talk about things like post liberalism or Christian nationalism or even theocracy or Catholic integralism and, and Christians get all worried about like oh gosh, there’s all these conversations happening and you know, are we about to become a, you know, does everybody think we should be a Christian theocracy or are we about to become like a, you know, a communist nation? Where are we going?

0:34:26 – (Bob Thune): I think while there are parts of those conversations that can be troubling, the conversation is exactly what you’d expect. If liberal individualism is starting to fray, we’re not going to move smoothly from classical enlightenment liberalism to whatever comes next. We’re going to move there through a course of debate and give and take and all kinds of different options being on the table. And so I think we kind of need to have some patience for the fact that those conversations are pretty necessary. I’m not even talking about within the church. I just think within the culture at large, you should expect that a lot of people are going to have a lot of proposals about where should we go next.

0:35:01 – (Bob Thune): You asked the question though, Colin. How do we order liberty in a way that better preserves solidarity or makes solidarity possible? I think the answer is we need to go back to that concept of freedom from versus freedom for right. So the problem with freedom from, with only a negative conception of liberty is that it works against any kind of solidarity. Because if what it means for me to be free is I need to be free from your expectations of me, Colin, and from anybody else’s expectations, eventually where we get is where there’s no foundation for any kind of togetherness, any kind of solidarity.

0:35:35 – (Bob Thune): It’s interesting to me as I watch this Happen, thinking about C.S. lewis’s book the Great Divorce, and how he pictures hell as this endless suburb where people are trying to move further and further away from each other. It’s a really profound picture of what I think our selfishness does to us, where it’s just like we. We end up having no basis for sharing any kind of community because we all want to be so individual.

0:35:55 – (Bob Thune): And so we need to recover the sense that freedom, the kind of freedom we really want to have in society, the kind of society we want to be a part of, is a society that believes in freedom for something, right? Freedom for loving and serving our neighbors, Freedom for building our society. Freedom. 4 contributing to some shared human project. I think that might be language I stole from James Davis and Hunter, but that idea of a shared human project, like, hey, you know, if you live in a city, it’s a pretty diverse place. There’s lots of different religious traditions and cultural traditions and lots of different neighborhoods and lots of different kinds of people.

0:36:32 – (Bob Thune): But the thing about a city is it is a shared human project. We all got to have roads and sewers and schools and, you know, people are people realize that there’s some shared humanity that we need to build together. And I think recovering the fact that that’s what we’re free for is free to pursue the common good. And that as Christians, part of that is just caring about the humanity of our neighbors. It’s certainly caring about their eternal souls and continue to preach the gospel, but it’s also just having a vision that we’re free to pursue a shared common human project together.

0:37:05 – (Bob Thune): And I think that needs to be part of the starting point. So I guess it’s a. It’s maybe a pretty simple answer. It doesn’t get us very far down the road. But I think recovering that sense of freedom for that freedom means freedom to build some things together.

0:37:18 – (Collin Hansen): I love that. Let’s bring it full circle here. Let’s go back to the ecclesiast, go back to the church. Another big thing we talk about at the Keller center is thinking about this civilizational change and finding a paradigm back in Augustine and the eclipse ultimately of the Roman Empire. What role then does The Church play in the passing of a political order that has lasted for 250 years. Of course, this is the year that we’re celebrating 205th anniversary. And I don’t mean something like our democracy is going to die immediately.

0:37:53 – (Collin Hansen): Part of. I’m just thinking about how nothing in this world lasts forever. And we can see that frame that you’re talking about there of how do we stay together when everybody’s trying to do their own thing and there’s no clear shared vision, it’s very hard to hold a society together with that. So, not trying to be alarmist, but I am trying to be serious, to say that when you leave Christendom behind and you leave the Enlightenment behind, something has to come replace it.

0:38:22 – (Collin Hansen): And we don’t have that thing yet that’s come to replace it. So we talk about Augustine, the fall of the Roman Empire. That was the major concern that he had in City of God. And so as we’re thinking about the Church, and the Church is then thinking about America, you’ve counseled us toward patience, you’ve counseled us toward loving our neighbors. If the way that we’ve conceived of freedom, especially in terms of, I think you were linking together individualism and capitalism, if those are not linked together quite the same way going forward, what role does the Church play?

0:39:01 – (Collin Hansen): Where do we step into that conversation? Do we have a role to play in that? Or is that just something we leave to the politicians? How do we enter that conversation in the same way that Augustine did in his day?

0:39:13 – (Bob Thune): Yeah, I’m so glad to see more and more people sort of recovering Augustine and getting interested in Augustine, because I do think there are some interesting parallels to the moment he’s living in Rome and the moment we’re living through in our own lives. And I think there’s three ways the Church can help to be part of the solution here. One, the Church plays the role of solidarity bringer, if you want to think of it that way. With the fraying of American solidarity, which you’ve been talking about, there are a lot of different writers. I’m thinking of Rod Dreher, Jake Meader, Yuval Levine, who’ve identified the fact that we need sort of local forms of solidarity that we need to at least be able to find in our local communities something that sort of like creates solidarity. And I think that’s what the Church can be.

0:40:00 – (Bob Thune): To quote Robert Putnam. Right. We’re all bowling alone. No one’s going to bowling leagues anymore. No one’s having dinner parties. We’re more Isolated than we’ve ever been. We need to see the local church as a place of simple human solidarity. And sometimes Christians have a hard time with that because we, we’re so used to thinking of the spiritual purpose of the church, right, As a proclaimer of the gospel and, you know, thinking about people’s eternal souls. But I also think just the social function of the church as a place of baseline human solidarity, bringing together a bun of people in a city who might not live in the same neighborhoods, might not share exactly the same political affiliations or the same social worlds, the church is a little place of solidarity. And so I think we can, to use Augustine’s language, right? We can be a city within the city. There’s a little city of God reality that each local church gets to live out. So the church can be a solidarity bringer.

0:40:48 – (Bob Thune): I think secondly, the church can play that role of subversive fulfillment that we were talking about a few minutes ago, right? It’s the church who gets to say, hey, actually, freedom is the heritage of Christianity, the Western version of freedom, even though it’s kind of been corrupted. We wouldn’t have that vision of freedom if it weren’t for the Christian faith and especially even for reformational Christianity. This is. We’re part of the reason that we live in a world that thinks freedom is a good idea.

0:41:15 – (Bob Thune): And yet when you try to do freedom untethered from other human goods like love of neighbor or others, you end up undercutting the very freedom you’re seeking. So I think the church has a role to play here to say, hey, freedom is great. We’ve always thought that. And guess what? It has to be held together with other human goods like love of neighbor. And so just going back to some of the basic stuff of the Sermon on the Mount, I think is a great way for the church to sort of do that work of critique and of subversive fulfillment.

0:41:46 – (Bob Thune): And then finally, you know, the church just plays that role of alternative city, you know, that, that Augustine framed up so well, the Church of Jesus Christ. Here’s what I always want my church to think about. I know that we’re all so inundated with the political polarization of our, of our society that, that just. We all feel that all the time. But I always try to remind the people of our church, hey, the Church of Jesus Christ has thrived and does thrive in all kinds of different social and political arrangements. So I love living in a country with all the freedoms that we have.

0:42:21 – (Bob Thune): I don’t necessarily want to live somewhere else. But the church is going to thrive no matter what. And that’s a, it’s good news for us to be reminded of that the Church of Jesus Christ is so adaptable and finds flourishing in so many different environments. Think about what the late Roman Empire was like compared to the Roman Empire, you know, or the, the Eastern or the, sorry, the, the Western European Empire after the fall of Rome.

0:42:47 – (Bob Thune): There’s. Those are such different worlds. And yet Christianity thrived in both. And so likewise in our day, we need to make sure that we don’t tie our hopes for the thriving of the Kingdom of God to the, you know, the ups and downs of our political order. Because the good news for us is that Jesus is building his church and his kingdom is going to continue to thrive. And you know, we have a role to play in our social and political environment, but our, our fate as God’s people is not tied to any particular social or political arrangement. And so that’s good news for us because it frees us to just care about loving our neighbors and loving our cities and loving our country in the most possible, the best possible way that has the most integrity.

0:43:27 – (Collin Hansen): Yeah, that was the challenge Augustine faced. We think of often the Roman Empire for Christians as being one of persecution, but then of course it bec one of power. And to the point where in Augustine’s time Christians could not conceive of the Church without the support of the state. It felt like they were losing everything at the same time. And that’s exactly what he tries to address in multiple angles in City of God of the concerns in the church, but also the world trying to blame the Church for what was going wrong. So no wonder this has been such a helpful resource over the many centuries and is very timely for us today.

0:44:05 – (Collin Hansen): But let me also commend for people and we’ll have this in the show Notes Bob’s review of James Davison Hunter’s book Democracy and Solidarity. It’s at the Gospel Coalition website under the title we can’t Build Political Solidarity from Cultural Rubble. The other two projects we’ve been talking about here, Bob’s chapter on ecclesial apologetics from the Gospel after an introduction to cultural apologetics published 2025 fun of an reflective and then brand new curriculum Making sense of us. This chapter there on liberty.

0:44:38 – (Collin Hansen): Bob, as always it’s been a joy. Thanks for all the guidance you’ve offered me over the years and the guidance you’ve shared with us here today.

0:44:45 – (Bob Thune): Colin, so good to talk with you. It’s always a joy and hope that your listeners and viewers find it helpful.

0:45:00 – (Collin Hansen): Thanks for listening to this episode of Gospel Bound. For more interviews and to sign up for my newsletter, head over to tgc.org gospelbound Rate and review Gospel Bound on your favorite podcast platform so others can join the conversation. Until next time, remember, when we’re bound to the gospel, we abound in hope.