Doug Wilson: Episode Description

On this episode of The Inspiration Project, Brendan Corr talks to Pastor Doug Wilson about the discipline of a life filled with learning, what a reformed evangelical theologian believes, whether the titles of pastor, apologist, evangelist are equal, how Doug became a Christian, how God lead him towards his current career path, why Doug joined the Navy, growing up in an evangelical home, whether Doug found anything about God or His teachings that didn’t quite add up, meeting a young Guru Maharaji, debating and being friends with renowned atheist Christopher Hitchins, understanding the moral destructiveness of postmodernism and whether Darwin’s theories were right.

Episode Summary

• How to become a more disciplined life long learner
• What a reformed evangelical theologian believes and why
• Whether the titles of pastor, apologist, evangelist are equal or different
• How Doug became a Christian
• How God lead Doug towards his current career path
• Why Doug joined the Navy
• Growing up in an evangelical home
• Whether Doug found anything about God or His teachings that didn’t quite add up
• Meeting a young Guru Maharaji and what he learned from him
• Debating and being friends with renowned atheist Christopher Hitchins
• Understanding the moral destructiveness of postmodernism
• Were any of Darwin’s theories right

Doug Wilson: Episode Transcript

Sponsor Announcement
This podcast is sponsored by Australian Christian College, a network of schools committed to student well-being, character development, and academic improvement.

Introduction
Welcome to The Inspiration Project, where well-known Christians share their stories to inspire young people in their faith and life. He’s your host, Brendan Corr.

Brendan Corr
Well, hello everybody. Welcome to another episode of The Inspiration Project Podcast, where we get a chance to meet thinkers and leaders of significance who have made a success in their world, and have been able to incorporate the foundations of their Christian faith into that practice. This morning I’m talking with Doug Wilson. Doug is a Christian apologist and pastor. He describes himself as a conservative, reformed evangelical theologian. He’s working in the city of Moscow, Idaho in the U.S., and supports part of the faculty of St. Andrew’s College there. He’s a regular commentator on modern culture, and is engaged in open debate with folks with different views. A writer, published a number of books, possibly the most well-known of which is, Is Christianity Good for the World?, which was the trigger for a series of debates with Christopher Hitchens, one of the leading anti-theists in the world. Pastor Wilson, thank you so much for giving us some time today. I understand, at least from my own experience, that you are prominent on some of the social media broadcasts in advancing the truth of Christianity. How did you end up in that kind of space?

Doug Wilson
Yes, Well, I remember I started blogging back in 2004, and it was a relatively new thing, and I heard someone say it, someone mentioned it, or a colleague of mine had started blogging, and I asked somebody, “What is that? What is that?”

Brendan Corr
That’s really starting from the ground up.

Doug Wilson
That’s right. So, I like to tell people that I write for the same reason that dogs bark. I just have to write. I love writing, I love doing that. And for years I was the editor of a magazine, Credenda/Agenda, but the turnaround time with the magazine was a couple of months. An issue would hit, you’d start thinking about it, you’d write it, you’d have to get the thing printed, and mailed, and it was a couple of months’ turnaround. Now, some issue hits, and you can write something, respond to it that day, and have something up that day. It’s a much greater velocity than it used to have.

Brendan Corr
Is that a good thing for a writer, Pastor Wilson? Is it?

Doug Wilson
Well, it’s like there’s a ditch involved, right? You can send your thoughts out there, unedited, unscreened, unsupervised, which means it sets you up for, you can get it wrong, you can swing and miss, you can have a host of typos. There’s that sort of problem. But there’s also the advantage of having to learn how to think fast. When you’re talking in real time with an atheist that you met on the airplane, or on the city bus, or you’re talking with someone at work and he says, “Well, what about this?” You can’t ask for a couple of months’ turnaround time. You need to be quick on your feet. And the velocity of internet communication has been a very good discipline for me in that respect.

Brendan Corr
It’s interesting you describe it as a discipline. I was just jotting some notes that I want to come back to in our conversation, and it was one of the things that prompted a question for me, in that the notion of fully, or properly, respectfully, appropriately filling this, or occupying this space of immediacy, and fast-paced interaction, you described the potential hazards of that, and it speaks to the preparation. You can only do that well if you have the background… Well I’m posing, you might have a different view, or unpack it. The discipline of a life spent learning to think, learning to argue, learning to weigh truth.

Doug Wilson
Yes. And if you’re a pastor, if you’re an apologist, if you’re an evangelist, you need to be in that position. Peter says that we should always be ready to give an answer for the hope that is in us, because you don’t know when the question is going to be posed. You don’t know when the situation is going to erupt, and there are times when it’s appropriate to say, “Oh, I don’t know, man, let me look that up.” But most of the time for the standard issue objections, or the standard issue questions that are thrown at Christians, you ought to have something ready to deliver all the time.

Brendan Corr
Can I ask you in that vein, pastor, you were stringing some things together, some titles, pastor, apologist, evangelist. Are they equal? Are they equivalent roles, acts of service, expressions of faith?

Doug Wilson
No, they’re all equal in dignity, but they’re not the same thing. They’re all responsible callings. As a pastor, I’m feeding the sheep. I’m meeting with God’s people. I’m exposing the Word to them on a Sunday-to-Sunday basis. That’s what I do as a minister, and I meet with them during the week to answer questions, or if some challenge comes up, pastoral counsel needs to be given, that’s what a pastor does. An evangelist goes out to where the non-believers are and simply declares, simply preaches the message. And I’ve done some of that too. I’ve done open air preaching on college campuses, and you just go out where there are people, and you stand up on a ledge, or a place where people can hear you, and you begin declaring the gospel. That’s evangelism. Apologetics happens when you get a heckler or two in the crowd, and they say, “Well, what about this? And what about that? What about evolution? What about the Bible was written by men? Why do you trust the Bible?” When those questions are thrown at you, and you answer them, you’re functioning as an apologist. So, the apologist answers questions in the context of defending the Christian faith. The evangelist simply proclaims what the Christian faith is, what the gospel is, and the pastor feeds the sheep, nourishing them in the Christian faith.

Brendan Corr
And your premise was that each of those, in their own particular way, are best exemplified when there is a habit of discipline, thinking, reflection, immersion in the truth, allowing the spirit of God to lead, and reveal things personally that you carry into your service. Yeah, I was interested… The reason I asked that question, because what prompted in my mind when you talked about needing to give an answer, and you need to be responsive, is the implication that it is more than simply being well-grounded, well-informed about the faith, and informed about doctrine. You need to have an understanding of the counterpoint, to properly be able to engage in that debate.

Doug Wilson
Absolutely.

Brendan Corr
Is that so?

Doug Wilson
That’s absolutely correct. If you’re going to debate an atheist, you need to be able to make his case in a way that he would sign off on. So, if I’m going to debate an atheist, I have to be able to say, “Christopher, you would say in this situation, this is how you would articulate your views.” And if he says, “Yes, you’ve represented my views accurately,” then I’m in a position to responsibly engage with him. But if he says, “No, no, no, that’s not what I’m saying at all,” You-

Brendan Corr
Yeah, so you can’t set up a straw man that’s going to misrepresent. I had a teacher that was very influential in my own Christian development and understanding, and they had a phrase, which I’m sure other people have heard, that you need to know what you believe, and why you believe it, and know what you don’t believe, and why you don’t believe it. Would that be something that you would agree with? Consent to?

Doug Wilson
Yes, I would sign that happily. Yes. And you also need to know the things that you don’t believe and why you don’t believe it. You also have to know the other people who believe the things you don’t believe, and you have to know why they do believe it. Right? So John Stott in his book on preaching, and I think this applies to apologetics, and evangelism as well. John Stott said, “The preacher has to know the Scriptures, he has to know the text. He has to know the truth that he’s affirming, but he also has to know the people, because he’s a bridge between two worlds.” There’s the world where the people are living, and they might be Christian people in your congregation, or they might be the pagans that you’re street preaching to, but you need to know where the people are coming from, because it’s your task to connect those two worlds.

Brendan Corr
Yeah. To be a vessel by which the revelation can be transmitted to the other heart, the other mind. Yeah. Thank you. Pastor, clearly you are grounded in this experience. It’s part of what has become your life’s calling, to advocate, and advance understanding of God, of His purpose, of his character, of the role of His church in the world. When did that start for you?

Doug Wilson
Well, I was greatly blessed in that I grew up in a Godly Christian home. My parents were old school evangelicals. My mom was a missionary to post-war Japan. She was from Canada, and was serving on the mission field. My father was a naval officer in Japan during the Korean War. They met there, and married there. They were devout Christians, and on top of that, they were consistent Christians. It was not just a profession, it was something they actually lived, actually believed, lived out. It was a wonderful home to grow up in. And I asked my mother when I was four, I told my mother I wanted to become a Christian, and I’m 70 now, so that’s 66 years. I was brought up in the nurture and admonition of the Lord. So, I don’t have flashy testimony, but as I’m fond of telling Christian parents in parenting seminars, your job as parents is to see to it that your kids don’t have flashy testimony.

Brendan Corr
Amen. That’s a very good warning. I like that.

Doug Wilson
It’s a good thing that God saves Saul of Tarsus. It’s a good thing that He saves the head of the Hells Angels. It’s a good thing when that happens, and we glorify God. But God wants a lot of Christian kids growing up with a boring testimony, because if you really understand it, it’s not boring at all. If you grow up in it, you’re a native speaker.

Brendan Corr
Yeah. Yeah. I have a similar experience from my own background. I remember coming to a realisation that it was the gift of God’s grace to place me with parents that allowed me to see the truth so plainly, so early. I share your appreciation for that aspect of God’s work, but that’s quite early. Four-year-old. There must have been many other times through life where you were confronted with walking the road, decisions to make, moments of test, or trial, or doubt.

Doug Wilson
Basically, growing up in that home, I had a pretty serene experience as a Christian, in a Christian home, that put me at odds with a bunch of my schoolmates, and I had encounters, or clashes with them, which were never a big deal with me, because whenever there was a discrepancy between what friends at school, or what the teachers were saying, and what my parents were saying, I always went with my parents. That was an easy thing. But when I graduated high school, I joined the Navy. I spent a stint in the submarine service and the U.S. Navy, this may surprise you or shock you to find out, the U.S. Navy is not a bastion of righteousness.

Brendan Corr
I don’t think any navy is actually.

Doug Wilson
I don’t think it is. Anyway, I figured it out pretty quickly. It was very at the front end of my hitch in the Navy, I figured out pretty quickly that I had been privileged to grow up in a greenhouse. I was sort of a hothouse plant, and I was green and flourishing because the climate was always just right, and I always got watered, and everything was just right. And all of a sudden, I was in this hostile environment, and I remember thinking, “I cannot be here on my parents’ faith. I can’t. This is not going to work if I’m just counting on them, because they’re thousands of miles away now. I’ve got to be my own sort of Christian.”

Brendan Corr
Yeah. And make your own direct connection with the truth? Was that a moment where you sort of discovered-

Doug Wilson
No, it was not a moment where I… It was not like a conversion where I entered into a relationship with God. It was more like, “I’m going to have to fight.”

Brendan Corr
The acceptance of responsibility.

Doug Wilson
Yeah. “I have to take this on and be willing to stand for it, against hostile questioning and that sort of thing.”

Brendan Corr
Yeah, which was well-supported by what you’d learned at home, the truth, the reality.

Doug Wilson
Yeah. The assurance was all there. The assurance was all there. I’d gone through practises many times, but this was the game night. I had to go out and do it.

Brendan Corr
So it’s still quite a journey from a faithful Christian in the services, to becoming a public apologist for the faith. And a minister. You started your blogs when you were first on the scene, but that’s only the expression of something that God was doing much earlier than that. How did you land into this space of critiquing culture, and having a voice into the bigger conversation?

Doug Wilson
Yeah. My father, although my father, after his time in the Navy, he was an evangelist, and ran Christian bookstores that were basically literature ministries, and my plan was coming out of the Navy, I was going to do what my dad did. I was going to open a Christian bookstore in a college town, and minister to the kids as a literature minister, evangelist, and apologist. When I came out of the Navy, I went to school at the University of Idaho here, and I majored in philosophy. I got my bachelor’s, and master’s in philosophy, and I did that in order to study the various unbelieving worldviews that were out there. I didn’t want to be the kind of apologist that said, “Well, Buddhism is wrong because it begins with a B instead of a C.” So, I majored in philosophy, in order to study the intellectual frameworks of unbelief. And while I was here, basically, this was the mid ’70s, I got out of the Navy in ‘75, which is when the Jesus People movement was…

Brendan Corr
Yeah, yeah. The big movie that’s just been on. Yeah, Jesus Revolution.

Doug Wilson
Yeah. And interestingly, the lead in that, Joel Courtney, in the Jesus Revolution, grew up in our church here in Moscow. Yeah. But that movie captured a lot of what was going on then. And I was involved in a Jesus People like church plant, and I played the guitar, so I was just a student, and I was one of the song leaders in this thing. And then one day, the man who was preaching, the church was just like a year and a half old. The man who was doing the preaching announced that he’d gotten a job in another city, and good luck everybody, and he was going to be gone by the next Sunday, and I was up front with the guitar.

Brendan Corr
Everyone looked at you.

Doug Wilson
Yeah. So I preached the next Sunday, and one thing led to another. I was still a college student at that time. And the church started to grow, and flourish, and then I got married. We had our first child, and the issue of education then came up. So, by 1981, we started Logos School, so my daughter would have a place to go to school, and my plan had been to go to another college town. My dad was doing his ministry in Moscow, Idaho. My plan had been to move away to another college town, and do the same thing, but the roots went down very quickly. I found myself a pastor, found myself on the board of a fledgling Christian school. All these things started to happen. So, the roots went down quickly, and one thing led to another.

Brendan Corr
Quite an amazing story, and the connections with some of those things that were definite moves of God in the history of the world, not just California, not just the U.S., that movement touched so many parts of the world. Pastor, one of the things you describe about your perspective is a reformed Calvinist view. How do you make sense of what was happening in the spontaneity of life, and a guy who was leading the church making what seems to be a completely independent decision, you end up in a circumstance that is not of your making, not of your plan, not of your design. Where do you see God in all of that?

Doug Wilson
Well, I see God in every single aspect of it. I remember, for a long time I wanted to be like my dad and I wanted to be in ministry, but I didn’t want to be a preacher. That was not what I wanted to be. And when I preached the next Sunday, my wife and I spent a great deal of energy trying to find someone else who would take that position, because that wasn’t on our dance card. That was not what we were planning on, but it was very clearly what God did for us, in His sovereignty, and looking back on it, it just shows how He knows us far better than we know ourselves. He assigns things to us that we don’t think would be good, but then looking back, you say, “No, that was perfect. That was just right. Perfect fit.”

Brendan Corr
All things work together for the good.

Doug Wilson
They do. Yes.

Brendan Corr
Amen. Romans eight. So, pastor, the notion of engaging with the philosophies of the world in your studies, was there ever a situation where you encountered something, where you felt the Christian story, where the truth of God came up short, or didn’t outplay, didn’t have a Trump to play?

Doug Wilson
No. There were times when I knew that I came up short, where I didn’t have the right response, or I didn’t know the answer, but I never had a sense that… I always had the sense that that was my problem. I remember, one of the funniest ones was when I was a very young man. I was still in the Navy, and I was doing some evangelism on the beach, and there was a… I met a young follower of Guru Maharaji, an eastern mystic kind of guy, and I was talking to him, and then I gave him my testimony. I shared Christ in my life, and I gave him my testimony. And then he said, then he said, “Well, okay, I’ll give you my testimony.” He said, “I went and I met Guru Maharaji. I met the Guru, and he touched my forehead, and I saw a blinding white light.” I thought, “Shoot, he’s got a better testimony.” So, of course, one of the things you learn from that is you can’t declare the faith by swapping subjective experiences. There are people, let’s say someone who’s musically sensitive, musically trained, could go to a performance of Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos, and feel that experience far more intensely than I feel a particular religious experience, which proves exactly nothing. It proves that I don’t have as many nerve endings as that guy. It doesn’t have anything to do with whether Jesus rose from the dead. If Jesus rose from the dead, certain things follow. If He didn’t, none of those things follow. And our experience, my testimony, and this young mystic’s experience all have to be subordinated to the objective truth, of whether Jesus was crucified, buried, and rose again.

Brendan Corr
That’s good. I hear what you’re saying. All of those experiences simply remove our common humanity. They’re just verifying we are emotional beings, that we respond to things, and it speaks to where Christ says, “Truly, truly,” that He wasn’t just saying, “Trust me.” He was actually saying, “I’m unpacking, this is the way of the world. This is the fundamental reality that you need to appreciate and comprehend.” So, pastor, after 70 years of immersion in God’s word, God’s truth, why do you still believe? What’s the thing that says, “Okay, I’ve had experiences that have been good, and bad, and hard.” On what do you base your enduring faith?

Doug Wilson
So, I don’t know if you have this in Australia, but something that Americans do, it’s a thing called demolition derby.

Brendan Corr
Yes. We don’t have them as much as we used to.

Doug Wilson
Well, you get a bunch of cars in the arena, and they drive around, and the last one running wins. They’re just colliding with one another. Worldviews are like that. So, what happens is, I’ve read unbelieving books, I’ve read unbelieving articles, I’ve talked to people who are not Christians. I’ve had many encounters of various sorts, and when I encounter these other faiths, I’ve learned how to ask one or two questions, and when you ask these key questions, the whole thing comes apart in your hands. It just disintegrates, and that car is not running anymore. I don’t have to…

Brendan Corr
You’ve crashed into their radiator, or whatever is bursting asunder.

Doug Wilson
Right. Right. So, the easiest worldview to do this to, to illustrate the point, is the worldview that is dominant among our elites, which is materialistic atheism, Darwinism, secularism. Okay? So, if someone says, “All we are is meat, bones and protoplasm, we’re just atoms banging around. That’s all we are. There is no soul. There is no nothing.” A John Lennon song, “Imagine there’s no heaven, no hell below us, above us only sky.” And I would say, “Okay, if that’s the case, then all our thoughts are simply the result of atoms banging around.” Okay. Yes. So, why should we believe them?

Brendan Corr
Yes. There is no comprehension of truth, if that’s the truth. Is that-

Doug Wilson
That’s right. When you spill some milk, if there’s spilled milk on the kitchen floor, and mom wants to know how it got there, the one thing she doesn’t do is ask for the milk. I don’t know. It’s an accident. If we are just nothing but a cosmic accident, then we have no reason to believe that our account of cosmic accidents has any validity at all. Right?

Brendan Corr
Zero explanatory power.

Doug Wilson
Zero. So if I had a bottle of Coke, and a bottle of Pepsi, and I shook them both up, and set them on a table in an auditorium full of people, and both of them foamed over, and then I said to the audience, “Which one is winning the debate?” They would say, “There is no debate. They’re not debating, they’re just fizzing.” If the atheist is right, we’re not debating. We’re just fizzing. The bottom falls out. So I cannot get my mind into the shape that it would have to be in, in order to try to make sense of that worldview. My mind doesn’t bend that way. It’s like trying to square the circle. I can’t square the circle. And so, secular atheist Darwinist materialism doesn’t trouble me at all, because I pick it up and it falls apart.

Brendan Corr
Yeah, I get that. Beautifully unpacked, too, thank you, pastor for that, because what you’re arguing is that the argument itself is self-defeating, if it is simply the action of random electrical impulses, and there’s nothing absolute that we can even debate about.

Doug Wilson
Right. No true statement, no true worldview can entail its own falsity.

Brendan Corr
One of the things that you spend some time in your blogs and your writings shining a light on is described as postmodernism. Do you see those as direct consequences that the secular, materialist, humanitarian, secular view is postmodernism? Or are they versions of-

Doug Wilson
No, it’s the difference between stage three cancer, and stage four cancer. It’s the same thing, but it’s pushed to the next level. So, the modernist, Christopher Hitchens, was the same kind of atheist that Voltaire was. They believed in an orderly universe. They believed in natural laws. They believe in reason. They believe in… Now, two questions will illustrate that they have no right to believe in reason, but they do. So, they pride themselves on being rationalists, and the postmodernists, to their credit, have seen through that. So, I would say it this way, it’s like the postmodernist, and the modernist both agree that metaphor is meaningless. Okay? They say metaphor is meaningless. The modernist says, “Metaphor is meaningless,” and then he goes off to find meaning in the formula, or in math, or in logic. So metaphor, language is meaningless, so I’m going to find it in science. Okay? The postmodernist says, “No, metaphor is meaningless, and everything is metaphor.” So then the modernist and the postmodernist get into these debates, which can be quite funny, because they both very clearly see the failures of the other system, and they point them out, but it’s a Tweedledum and Tweedledee kind of thing.

Brendan Corr
Yeah. So, that reminds me a little bit of some… One of the things I also noted when I was doing some background reading for you, you described that you were wanting to advance what you called a Chestertonian Calvinism. I’m assuming you’re talking about G. K. Chesterton. He wrote in one of his treatises about the notions of the virtues being disconnected, and that the modern world wasn’t evil so much as it was too good, in that there were certain attributes that are praiseworthy that had been exaggerated, and exclusified, without complement, or without balance. Is that what you’re sort of describing, that the modernists and the postmodernists have found their thing, and it’s become the exclusive way of viewing the world, and they’re blind to other perspectives?

Doug Wilson
Very much so. What heresies are, a heretic is someone who takes a truth, exaggerates it out of all proportion, and suppresses other truths for the sake of his one precious truth. And the modernist does that with reason, science, and the postmodernist does it with experience, subjective feelings.

Brendan Corr
And Christianity provides a story that unites, and coheres?

Doug Wilson
Correct. In the Christian faith, you have a glorious union between form and freedom, the one and the many. So in ancient philosophy, they used to have this debate between the followers of Parmenides, “What is ultimate? Is it unity ultimate, or is diversity ultimate?” And Parmenides said, “Unity.” He was a monist. “Unity is ultimate.” But then you can’t account for avocados, and armadillos, and these different things. And then Heraclitus taught that diversity was ultimate, the world is king.

Brendan Corr
Individualism, atomization, yeah.

Doug Wilson
Atomization. But then you can’t account for the unity of anything. It’s either all this one great big frozen slab, Parmenidian slab, or this Heraclitian tornado, where everything is just, like dumping 10 tonnes of confetti into a tornado. It’s just everything flying around. And so, this was the back and forth. What’s ultimate? Is it one or the many? And then the Christian faith arrived on the scene, and they turned to the Christians and said, “What’s ultimate? The one or the many?” And the Christians said, “Yes.”

Brendan Corr
That’s right, neither either or, this and.

Doug Wilson
Yes, The Triune God, the Lord our God is one God. And Father, Son, Holy Spirit. So you had this glorious statement of the one and the many together, and that’s why in Christian cultures you have this exquisite balance of form and freedom together. And so, what God does, in the creation account, for example, is He divides. God creates everything, all the matter, and then He divides. It’s just division, sun and moon, sea and dry land, the evening and the morning, and then the whole thing is crowned with man and woman. And so, then what God does is He divides. There’s a man standing there, and God divides him into two. God breaks him. Everything in the creation account, God says, “And it was very good, and it was very good, and it was good. It was good, it was good.” And then he comes to Adam and he looks at Adam and says, “Ah, not good. It’s not good that man should be alone.” And so he takes the one man and breaks him in two, so perfectly good man, he separates him in two, fashions the woman, so that he might make two into one, so that one of them can become two. And she gives birth to a child. And the whole thing is this glorious knitting of the human race out of that. Well, that’s because God is the one who unites, and divides. In our experience, we can unite everything, and create a totalitarian hell hole, or we can divide everything and create a state of anarchy, but we can’t unite and divide both. And that’s what the Christian faith enables us to do.

Brendan Corr
Amen. And even as you’re describing that, pastor, what is firing in my own mind is the unifying event of the contrast of what’s metaphor, what’s not, the value of proposition, or absence, and again, united in this picture. The argument is Christianity about morality and behaviour, or is it about doctrine and professions? And the Christian says…

Doug Wilson
“Yes.”

Brendan Corr
“Yes. It’s both. They can’t be separated.” And being able to live in that nexus. What I’m hearing from your comment is that it is the incapacity of our humanity to do that other than by connection with the God who is the fundamental reality that unites those things.

Doug Wilson
Correct. And that’s why I’m fond of saying, “It’s Christ or chaos.”

Brendan Corr
Yeah. Yeah. And He becomes the organising, and the framework that gives meaning.

Doug Wilson
Yeah. In Colossians one, Paul says that Christ is the archaea. He is the principle point of integration of all things. “In Christ, all things hold together.”

Brendan Corr
Wonderful. That’s right. It does say that. Yes.

Doug Wilson
Without Christ… Yeah. It does say that. Christ all things hold together.

Brendan Corr
He holds all things together by the power of His Word. It’s not just a metaphor, it is actual.

Doug Wilson
No, he’s doing that. And this is going to seem simplistic to some, but if I ask questions like, “Why do I stick to the sidewalk when I walk down it?” A secular scientist would say, “Well, gravity.” And I’d say, “Well, what’s gravity?” He’d say, “Well, gravity is sticking to the sidewalk when you walk down it.” Right? I’d say, “No, it’s not an impersonal law that makes me stick to the world. It is Jesus. Jesus is the one who holds all things together.” Another illustration I love to use is that the nucleus of an atom has neutrons which have no charge, and protons which are positively charged and the negatively charged electrons are out in orbit, but positively charged things repel. So, why do we have this cluster of multiple protons all with a positive charge? What are they bound together like this? What causes them to stick together? I remember a physics prof years and years ago, when I was in college, a physics prof saying, “We call this the strong force.” You’re not explaining anything, you’re just describing. Jesus holds everything. Jesus Christ holds everything together by the Word of His power.

Brendan Corr
Amen. Pastor, I know we’ve covered some interesting ground. I wonder whether we could just pull our conversation together as we conclude by offering some comment about the role of Christianity in broader culture. I know that we’ve been talking about understanding that individuals can carry, and that Christians can feel convinced about the assurance of the truthfulness of their faith, and their encounter with God is real, and they can bring their own explanation to the world around them. What role does the Christian Church have, or representatives such as yourself of the Christian Church, have in the marketplace of ideas, and the public square?

Doug Wilson
Yeah. Not just the marketplace of ideas, but also the public square where citizens gather to debate, but also the decision-making apparatus of a people, of a nation. In governance, politics. And this is an area where there’s been a frightful muddle for years, and years, and years. When people say that they want us to have the separation of church and state, what’s happening there is they’re saying something that’s true. I want separation of church and state also, but I don’t want separation of God and state. I don’t want separation of morality and state. I don’t want separation of forgiveness and state. If someone says, “I want a government that has no connection whatsoever to morality.” I’d say “Seriously? Think about that for a minute. Do you really want to live under a government that has no moral code?” And if they, “Oh, no, no. We’ll say they have a moral code.” And I’d say, “Okay, which one?” All law is imposed on morality. There is no law… So it’s not whether, but which. It’s an inescapable concept,

Brendan Corr
And that’s got to be rooted in some value system, and some fundamental belief.

Doug Wilson
Correct. And you have to choose, a culture, a people, a society, have to choose what value system that’s going to be, because the Muslims will have one value system. Atheists will have another value system. Hindus will have another, and Christians will have another. And you can’t split the difference, and throw everything into a crock pot, melt it down, and just make a hodgepodge, because then you’re going to have a hodgepodge moral system. So, what you have to do is say, “No.” I’m more than happy to say, if someone says, “Well, you pro-lifers want to outlaw abortion.” I say, “Yeah, that’s what we want to do. Exactly. I’m glad you’re understanding me.” And they say, “But you’re imposing your morality on the woman, and on the doctor.” And I say, “Yeah, yeah, I’m doing that. That’s what I want to do, but I’m not unique in this, because you need to understand, at the end of the day, your moral system wants to impose your morality on the baby.” “At the end of the day, someone is going to impose their morality on someone, and I don’t want that imposing morality to be based on a lie. I’m a Christian. I want it to be based on the truth.”

Brendan Corr
Yeah. That’s lovely. Well, pastor, I want to thank you for the time that we’ve been able to spend today, and I thank you for the service that you are rendering to the purpose of God, and the Kingdom of God through your apologetic ministry. And I don’t know much about the ministry you must have as a pastor, feeding your local flock, but I’m sure that they are greatly blessed by the work that God is doing. If folks were a bit interested in following up a bit more, hearing a bit more of your thinking, maybe contact with your blogs, or some of the other books that you’ve written, how might they do that?

Doug Wilson
Yeah, thanks for asking. We set my blog up. The address is Dougwils.com, and the name of the blog is Blog & Mablog. The pagan nations that come down from the North. So, Blog & Mablog, Dougwils.com, and If you go to that website, pretty much everything I’m involved with is somewhere there on the front page. New St. Andrew’s College, Logos School, classical education, everything. It’s a networking portal to pretty much everything I’m involved with.

Brendan Corr
Yeah, classical education was another thing I wanted to ask you about. The Quadrivium and the Trivium, is that what you mean by classical education? Is that something that is of interest across schools in America, or Christian schools in America?

Doug Wilson
Yes. We established Logos School here in 1981, which was the flagship school of the Classical Christian School resurgence. And now there are hundreds of schools all across North America that are following this model of the Trivium, and we are up to our necks in it here.

Brendan Corr
Yeah. Have you done some writing on that?

Doug Wilson
Yes. I’ve written a couple of books. The Case for Classical Christian Education, and Recovering the Lost Tools of Learning, and Why-

Brendan Corr
Was that Dorothy Sayers?

Doug Wilson
Well, her essay was The Lost Tools of Learning, and it was her essay that inspired us to do what we did.

Brendan Corr
Yeah, interesting. I’ve read some of her work, which has been very provocative. I’ll dig some of this reading out. This’ll be very interesting.

Doug Wilson
Okay, great.

Brendan Corr
And maybe we can have another chat about that aspect of your thinking.

Doug Wilson
Happy to.

Brendan Corr
Well, again, pastor, thank you so much for your time, and do know that we’ll be praying for you, and for your country. We understand that the U.S. is a significant player in the affairs of the world, and that God’s providence in how that culture stands, and strengthens, and bears influence around the world, it’s important that we uphold that in prayer, even from the far distant reaches of Australia.

Doug Wilson
Please. Please do. We’re in the middle of a rodeo.

Brendan Corr
Yeah, we get that. Well, God bless you, and thank you.

Doug Wilson
Okay.

Brendan Corr
And listeners, if you chase down those links, we’ll make sure that they’re available here on the website also. God bless you, pastor.

Doug Wilson
Thank you.