Dr. Owen Strachan: Episode Description

On this episode of The Inspiration Project, Brendan Corr talks to Dr. Owen Strachan about the current war on men. They discuss what led Dr. Strachan into ministry, how he became a Christian, what it means to be a biblical man, why men are under attack in today’s culture, why Toxic masculinity is actually a toxic idea, where and how the war on men began, what it would take to fix this issue in society today, how Dr. Strachan would answer a modern feminist who disagrees there is a war on men, and What does Dr. Strachan mean by the notion of re enchanting the world.

Episode Summary

• The current war on men
• Why men are under attack in today’s culture
• Where and how the war on men began
• What is means to be a biblical man and why that’s important
• Why toxic masculinity is actually a toxic idea
• What it would take to fix the war on men
• How Dr. Strachan would answer a modern feminist who disagrees there is a war on men
• What does Dr. Strachan mean by the notion of re enchanting the world

Dr. Owen Strachan: 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
Hello everybody, welcome to another episode of The Inspiration Project podcast, where we get a chance to talk with Christians of significance who have been able to find the expression of their faith through their career and their vocation. This morning we’re having a conversation with Dr. Owen Strachan. Dr. Strachan is provost and research professor of theology at Grace Bible Theological Seminary. He’s previously stayed at other programs at Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, where he gained his PhD. He studied at the Evangelical Divinity School where he obtained his master of divinity, and at Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine in the northeast of America. He’s written several books, including Reenchanting Humanity: A Theology of Mankind. The Pastor as Public Theologian: Reclaiming a Lost Vision. And more recently his latest book, The War on Men: Why Society Hates Them and Why We Need Them. Dr. Strachan, it’s very nice to meet you. Thank you for giving us your time. You must be a very busy academic with so much to do.

Dr. Owen Strachan
Well, I do stay fairly busy to keep myself out of trouble, so thank you very much for having me on Brendan. I appreciate it.

Brendan Corr
Thank you so much for your time. It’s a very topical subject that you’ve chosen to explore in your most recent book. And I want to get into that, some of that significance during our conversation. But I wonder whether you could unpack for us, you’ve lived in different parts of America. Some of those places that you’ve studied, some of the places that you’ve worked have been Midwest, Northeast, Illinois around The Great Lakes area. Tell us a little bit about your story. How have you ended up exactly where you are?

Dr. Owen Strachan
Yeah, it’s been very interesting. There’s been no master plan to be Where’s Waldo? That’s an American reference to a little guy who pops up all over the place.

Brendan Corr
Yeah, we know that. I think we call him Where’s Wally? over here in Australia.

Dr. Owen Strachan
Okay. Yeah, well it translates then. Yeah, so I had no idea I would be born on the coast of Maine in New England, and then go to Washington DC and Louisville, Kentucky, and Chicago, and then Louisville again, and then Kansas City, and now in Arkansas. But yes, I have been able to have the blessing of seeing a lot of America and even living and working in a lot of America. And it just really owes to God’s providence, and it’s taught me that as much as you can teach about the providence or the sovereignty of God in a kind of textbook way, this is the definition. In terms of actually living out God’s plan for your life, it’s not dull, it’s not boring, and God will surprise you in some different ways. But he seems to take joy in doing so. So I’m along for the ride.

Brendan Corr
Yeah, I’m interested to hear that generalised, no master plan, that it was seizing the opportunity as they came or responding to invitations. What led you? What was the thing that was allowing you to explore such a diversity of experiences? Was it family, was it career?

Dr. Owen Strachan
That’s a great question. I wanted to be in Christian ministry when I got to college, and especially during my sophomore year. But I had no, again, plan by which that was going to happen. And that’s been a theme of my life. My father was not in ministry. He’s a Christian man, but he wasn’t a pastor. A lot of my peers in Christian ministry were trained in a pastoral context, missionary home, or academic home. That’s not what is true of my background. So I’m in college, and my roommate in college goes to DC and hears about a pastoral internship and tells me about it. Long story short, I applied and ended up being accepted, and so then I went to Washington DC. And then while I’m there, I’m told about Southern Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky where Al Mohler is the president, and I end up going there. And then when I’m at Southern, I end up hearing about a job at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School. And so I go there and do further study. And it’s just been like that throughout my life. Everyone has their own God-written story. That’s mine. But yeah, it’s not been dull, and it’s caused me some amount of vocational confusion at different points. But I suppose God has used all of that back and forth to teach me to trust him and rely on him, even when I don’t know what’s up ahead because I surely don’t.

Brendan Corr
You commented, on some of our first remarks about teaching the sovereignty of God as a concept, and then how you experience that being lived out. I want to come back to that. But clearly, faith is a fundamental part of your story, part of your identity. Can you share with us, how did that happen? How did you become somebody who was committed to the idea of faith and service to God?

Dr. Owen Strachan
I grew up in a Christian home. And from a young age, I knew that I needed the grace of God. I knew that I was not sufficiently holy to be accepted by God as I stood. And so growing up in that context, you hear the gospel message from the scriptures, and the gospel message is very simply that Jesus Christ died on the cross to save sinners, and rose again from the grave to give those same sinners eternal life. And we lay hold of that forgiveness and even eternal life itself when we repent of our sin, which means turning from our sin, rejecting our sin, breaking up with it if you will. And then we follow Christ, we set our face to follow Christ. And all of that does not occur by some virtuous motion of our own heart. All of that occurs ultimately as God works in us, and God gives us a zeal for the things of God and takes away the zeal we formerly had for fallen things, for sinful things. And so that’s true in my own story. When you become a Christian, of course, it doesn’t mean that you get zapped with a magic wand and you never sin again. You never have to battle thinking the wrong things, desiring the wrong things, saying the wrong things, and acting in the wrong ways. But it does mean that you are given what the Bible calls a new heart, a new nature. And now you want to please God. You want to please your heavenly father, and you’re given the spirit’s power to do that. And now you see it as a joyful thing that God is in control of your life. And it’s not scary. It’s not as scary as it is when you’re not a Christian that God is in control. Now it’s the most comforting truth there is.

Brendan Corr
Dr. Strachan, I don’t mean to probe too personally, but you spoke there very persuasively about the attractions of the things that have fallen, the things that are not honourable. And I think everyone who has an exposure to Christianity or at least an evangelical notion of Christianity would understand all of those distracting temptations that we know are not good for us. Without making this too personal, you’ve now enjoyed a measure of career success. You’ve become quite a well-known measure of fame. Were those things that you aspired to, was that sense of prominence, influence, and significance part of what you were hoping for or drawn to?

Dr. Owen Strachan
That’s a great question. I have three kids, 15, 12, and nine, and they ask me sometimes because I’ll go and speak at an event. And they’ll say, “Dad, are you famous?” Because there are people who will know who I am at a Christian Church sometimes. And I will say, “When we go to the airport child, there will not be a single person who will know who I am. So no, I am not famous.” They have not yet hounded me when I go to the supermarket. But I appreciate your kind words. I would say that yes, I was driven from an early age, and I think a lot of young men want to make their mark in the world. They want to be strong from birth. They don’t want to be weak, they want to be heroic, and they want their life to count. And that was true of me. That instinct has been wired out of boys, or at least folks have tried to take it out of boys, but it’s wired into boys by God himself I believe. And I see that in my background. I didn’t have a strong notion of earning a lot of money. I’ve never been that concerned with earning a lot of money. I’m thankful for what God gives. I wanted to be a basketball coach from the time I was young, in particular, because I enjoy young people, and I love sports. I love the drama, the intensity, the struggle, and the approximation of the hero’s quest that you find in a small form in sports today. It’s one of the last heroic theatres we have in the modern world. So that’s what I aspired to. But no, I’ve had all the normal battles with pride, vanity, desire for fame, and affluence that anyone has or many people have. And I’ve had to die to those sins. And even today in Christian ministry, you have to watch your heart, because it’s a very dangerous thing to be in ministry but then have worldly desires for fame, money, or prominence creep into that. And so I’m not here to present myself as one who has navigated those struggles perfectly, because I haven’t. But I can tell you that by the grace of God, I want to pass the test and I pray that I will.

Brendan Corr
Amen. I appreciate your comments. As I said, I understand that they may have been trading into some personal reflections that weren’t anticipated in this conversation. I want to come back to that if you’re okay with us because we are going to talk about the focus of your recent work around the erosion of what you hold to be a rightful notion of masculinity through culture. And there’s a lot for us to say about that. But I’d love for us to circle back and revisit what might be your thoughts on any sort of parallel erosion in terms of the evangelical church, where passivity, and lack of ambition, and just live quietly, and don’t aspire to have an impact, maybe one of the messages that the modern church is being drawn into presenting for boys or any of us. But anyway, we’ll come back to that as we go. You’ve introduced the notion that you have a belief that our modern society or the society in which we find ourselves is with the most generous interpretation, confused about how it is to understand gender roles. And possibly at worst, intentionally confusing the members of its society. Is that too strong a statement to summarise your position?

Dr. Owen Strachan
No, it’s not. We’re fundamentally in an age that values safety more than risk. And it’s seen as toxic, for example, to be a risk-taker if you’re a boy or a young man. I can scarcely think of a worse framing than that for adulthood, manhood, and Christian maturity guy or girl alike, than that. We all want to be safe. You can see walls behind me. I’m not broadcasting from a forest glade open to nature and animals to invade the broadcast. So there’s a right form of safety that we all very much need to seek and pursue. You train your kids as a father or a mother in all sorts of rudiments of living wisely, to use a better word than safety. Wisdom is the greater category than safety. But safety has been allowed in our time to usurp wisdom and dethrone it. And so now, what we train our kids to be is safe, not wise. And again, to reuse this word once more, that’s a tragedy. Because what is going to happen if you train children to want to be safe above all, is that they are not going to have an appropriate instinct to take risks. And life in a fallen world necessitates that you must often act with the wind in your face and you must often venture into unsafe territory if you are going to make a difference in any number of areas. So one of the absolute worst things you can do is platform safety as the highest virtue or the greatest good. It is no such thing. And that’s had tremendous effects in all sorts of directions. But yes, one of them is to extract the very nature of boyhood from boys, such that if they show any boyishness at all, it’s a terrible thing. It’s a crime against humanity. When of course boys need shepherding, training, and formation. But a lot of that is supposed to come not in a punitive way or a medicinal way through pills. It’s supposed to come through a father’s arm around the shoulder, speaking calmly and lovingly, and sometimes just a bit sternly into his son’s ear, such that his son is shaped and helped and guided. But here again, we’ve lost many fathers from our world as well.

Brendan Corr
Where do you think this started? Were the beginnings of it post-war, the notion of the explosion of the ’60s, and ’70s? Was it the fallout from the proliferation in the ’80s? Where do you see the beginnings of this preoccupation with being safe? Or is it something more recent? Is it about not causing offence and being politically correct?

Dr. Owen Strachan
In the 1970s, the political philosopher Irving Kristol wrote a marvellous essay on this very theme. I cite it in this book, The War on Men, which just came out. And Kristol talked about the loss of grand figures and grand narratives. And this is something that dovetails with the rise of postmodern philosophy in the last 40 to 50 years where there is no grand narrative to life, there is no higher truth, there is no telos, end goal to existence itself. We all have our truths, and communities have their truths, and you sort of muddle along as best you can. And that’s an altogether deficient understanding of life because life is to be lived as a great adventure for the glory of God.

Brendan Corr
So is that in and of itself the root of the problem, or has it been conflated with other ideologies and other agendas that have sort of harnessed themselves together to promulgate what you see as this attack on Godly masculinity?

Dr. Owen Strachan
Well, I think it is at some level the loss of Christianity from society because Christianity at its best does not tuck you in at night and say, “The goal of life is just to be safe.” The Christian message is all about light entering darkness. It’s all about God coming to Abram in Genesis 12 and saying, “Go.” It’s all about Jesus in the New Testament gathering his disciples after his resurrection and saying, “Go,” and make disciples. And so there’s this gravity, and energy, and momentum in the Christian story that you cannot miss, but that has been robbed of Christianity, it’s been extracted from Christianity. And as Christianity has been largely pushed out of the mainstream of Western life, that means that we’ve lost a sense of adventure, of risk, of going in the name of God. You think even about how imperialism and colonialism are treated. I’m not here to offer some full-throated defensive either, but the rejection of each of those realities dovetails with the broader postmodern attack on the Christian message.

Brendan Corr
So what I think I’m hearing you describe is that the Christian framework, the Christian paradigm of existence held the notion that there was purpose and that to achieve purpose… Well, I guess there’s a book that’s written recently, Biblical Critical Theory. In that, the author unpacks the notion of a narrative that outnarrates even the current stories, and the idea that the loss of purpose is robbing the world of the sense of where things are heading, that the doctrine of sin in itself suggests we need to be active in changing. What we’ve got is not what it should be, and we should be active agents in forging a better future. Is that something of what you’re describing?

Dr. Owen Strachan
Yes, it is. I would differ from the author of that text on several counts, and I would not encourage Christians to use or apply critical theory. I think the resources we need to re enchant the world are all in scripture itself, and in Christian theology as traditionally understood, if you will. But I definitely think that the loss of stories from people’s lives is a huge part of why there is such little purpose, meaning, and worth in the existence of many people around the world. In your country, in mine, and again, across the world. Suicide rates among young men today are sky-high in America, for example, and it’s baffling. It baffles many people. Because material conditions are relatively very good in terms of prosperity, in terms of money, in terms of earning power. They’re not what they were. Our economy has been suppressed in recent years, and that’s sad to see. But still, we’re in a very prosperous age, relatively speaking. And yet people are hopeless. They’re hopeless. And I think it’s not just because of the loss of story, it’s because of the loss of true story. That’s what you need. You don’t just need a story. There are still lots of stories around. The Marvel movies give you a story. And that can distract you for a few hours, and you can even engage that story, and it can even impact you in terms of great literature, or great movies, or great plays in the theatre. But what you need is not just a compelling narrative, you need a true story, and that’s missing, and that’s what the Bible gives you. The Bible is not a sterile collection of dates, names, and boring moral principles. The Bible has data in all sorts of directions, but ultimately the Bible is the grand story that gives your life, your tiny little story, immense significance. Your life echoes unto eternity. So if you take that away from people if that is taken away from them or they simply lose faith in it because they believe other stories for a time, then nothing but chaos is going to result. Nothing good will come of that.

Brendan Corr
I think I hear exactly what you’re saying, Dr. Strachan. The notion of the narrative that you’re advocating, the purpose, the hardwiredness of some of the attributes that are placed in gender very clearly is in the context of other versions of gender politics, identity politics, intersectionality, which have their own story, right? They’ve got their symbols and their explanation of what’s going on and how best to achieve those sorts of things. And you’re offering or you’re proposing a true story, something that is rested on something beyond philosophy, beyond the constructs of the thinking of the world. Let me ask you this question. How would you answer a critic from one of those other camps that would say gender politics for example? Your book is just a version of the notion of gender politics.

Dr. Owen Strachan
Well, they’re free to say that, and I’m glad for intellectual exchange. I’d rather have intellectual exchange than none. I’d rather have fires in the dark, even by warring parties than complete bleakness. But I would say no. The reason why my writing has any ring of truth to it, to the degree it does, is because it reflects God’s truth. And God’s truth is premised not simply on compelling ideals or symbolic signs. God’s truth is predicated on time and space. It comes to us in history, and God stakes a claim not simply in the human imagination, but in lived reality. The incarnation which we’re going to celebrate globally in a few weeks came in time and space. God could have, I suppose, perhaps transmitted some sort of salvation to us in some weird spiritual dimension without sending his son. I don’t think he would’ve done that of course, but God can do what God wishes to do. What did God do though? God sent his son born of a virgin. And so God has very much claimed not merely the category of true truth or transcendent truth, God has claimed history. History is God’s, and woe betide the Christian, therefore, who gives up on the history God has claimed. Don’t relinquish the claim that God has made. And I think that’s what is so significant for re enchanting people’s worldviews. It’s helping people understand that 2,000 years ago just about, Jesus walked where we walk, and Jesus had a flesh and blood body as we have. And God is not shy about entering our world much as we might like to keep him out.

Brendan Corr
That’s an interesting picture that you’re describing for our listeners. Even the phrase re enchanting the world of the theology of mankind, one of your earlier books, one of the features of the modern world, the post-industrial modernist perspective was the disenchanting of the world, the taking of fantasy as it was seen, and locating those things in grounded truth as it was understood. What do you mean by the notion of re enchanting the world?

Dr. Owen Strachan
Great question. I mean much what you just said, that we must understand the world not in materialist grey, but in IMAX high definition spectra colour as made by God. God has not given us an anodyne creation where there is no joy, there is no taste, there is no delight, and there is no beauty. And frankly, alongside those things, there is no pain, searing pain. There is no suffering, there is no temptation, there is no loss. God has given us a consequential world. God has given us a multidimensional experience of his desire, of his freedom of creation. And God wants us as embodied souls to experience the range of the human condition. So I want to restore all of that. I don’t want to just restore the get you saved part of Christianity though. That’s everything. That’s everything. I want to restore the whole range of emotion, experience, and affection that is supposed to be a part of life in this world. And that too is a part of re enchanting the world. It’s very interesting. I was at Oxford and Cambridge just a few weeks ago on a tour and was reflecting on C.S. Lewis’ famous journey to Christian faith. A key part of that journey… There are different dimensions people focus on with Lewis, but to plunge us into Lewis’s arcana here for a minute, a key part of it was C.S. Lewis as a materialist denying the existence of the supernatural. So living in a disenchanted world where there’s just cause and effect and there’s nothing supernatural occurring. Lewis had a friend who had gotten very caught up in spiritualism, and in seances, and engaging darkness, and these sorts of things. And sparing your viewership and listenership the details, this man, it appears from my reckoning as a Christian became demon-possessed, and I do mean demon-possessed. And the man for two weeks lived with C.S. Lewis, and the man was so tormented, whatever precisely was going on with him, that C.S. Lewis as a materialist mind you, would have to hold him down on the ground. He would tremble and shake so violently. He was having visions of demons and spiritual beings just at bay from him. And the experience is a key part of why C.S. Lewis crosses the line from materialism or secularism as we would probably call it today, to belief in the supernatural. And I would say it’s the opposite. The way this is often presented today at leading establishments, and all the fine colleges and universities that students want to go to across the world. It’s the opposite of how they present it. To understand the world, you have to write all of that off. To understand the world, you actually have to embrace all of that and welcome it in. Not in terms of being demon-possessed, God willing, but in terms of seeing the world in its dimensional reality.

Brendan Corr
Yeah. So in lots of ways, what I’m hearing you unpack for us is that notion where the idea of disenchantment has come to mean removing, naivety. You’ve spun that on its head and said a more profound understanding of reality includes the elements of the supernatural and a proper view of our existence. A proper view of our world necessarily has to take into account the reality of a spiritual dimension.

Dr. Owen Strachan
Yeah, that’s a thick reality. And the thin reality is you’re just a collection of atoms bumping around together. People do what they do, merely because they’re cogs in a machine. There’s no greater purpose to life. There’s no ought in the cosmos. That’s not a thick reality. Your materialist vision, your secularist vision, your atheistic vision, your skeptical vision, that’s not thick. That’s thin. I’m over here, not because I’m better than you, but I’m over here by the grace of God understanding transcendence, understanding that there must be a creator of all of this, understanding that a tiny baby entered the world sent from heaven so that that tiny baby would grow up 30 years later or so and die on a cross. And in so doing, affect atonement for my sins. That’s a thick reality. Thin reality is avoiding all of that.

Brendan Corr
And the notion that you’re just describing the nativity, the preciousness of the incarnation, but the council also not to restrict God’s activity in the world to that event and that period. But that he remains intimately connected, intimately involved with the functions of our world, our lives, and our society. That’s part of your theology of mankind?

Dr. Owen Strachan
Yes, nicely said. It’s kind of like families of a middle or upper-class tone who when you get together for the holidays, only discuss polite things. You avoid the sticky stuff, right? You avoid the tough topics. You’re not necessarily hashing out the meaning of life with your uncle who clearly disagrees with you. You talk about sports teams and pleasantries, and then you go out on the porch and watch some sports, and go home at the end of the night. That’s not a thick reality. That’s a thin reality. And that’s what is sold to us from high culture today. That’s what the arts, to switch the conversation back to the arts, that’s what our arts communicate to us over and over again, that there’s nothing beyond this. That’s not deep engagement with the world. That’s a polite conversation over the holidays. What Christianity does at its best, and I will admit that all churches do not show this necessarily, but Christianity at its best doesn’t invite you to a stiff, polite conversation where you don’t talk about anything real. It invites you to a live rollicking discussion, where there’s pipe smoke, and there’s merriment behind you. Then somebody gets into a fight outside, and then you’re hashing out the mysteries of life with people who are listening to you. And at the end of it, you all sing songs in the halls of kings together or something like that. That’s a thick reality. And that’s what people are longing for, but they’re not going to find it on little screens, in sterile classrooms, and secularist paradigms.

Brendan Corr
Yeah. And it sounds an awful lot like the New Testament. It sounds like Paul engaging with the philosophers, and writing his treaties as the epistles of this is the reality of the world. It hits our lives. It makes a difference to how we do family, how we do work, how we do commerce. It has to touch every part of how we show up in the world.

Dr. Owen Strachan
Yeah. And there’s an aversion in all of us to the pain, and the struggle, and the risks. There’s that word again, that real life brings. To have a child is to risk something awful befalling your child. And growing and maturing actually, as a father or mother is not thinking you can control your child and everything around them. Growing, and maturing is realising, “Okay, I darn sure better do everything I can to disciple this child in the Christian faith, and train them, and right and wrong, and how to think well, critically, but ultimately I can’t control them.” And so there’s this terrifying reality of releasing them into the world. But that’s real life. Real life is not a sanitised, anaesthetised life. Real life is a risk. Real life is marrying someone you are in love with, but you probably barely know. And then navigating, God willing, for 50 or 60 or 70 years, the ups and downs of life together. And by the way, the personal ups and downs each of you bring that necessitate not sterility around a holiday dinner table and polite conversation, but real, getting into each other’s battles, sin struggles, pastimes, and backgrounds. But all of it Brendan, is worth it. That’s what we have to say above all. It’s not just that it’s exciting to do it. It’s worth it. And what the reformers recovered in their era in the 16th century is that it’s not only just generically worth it, but all of life is coram deo. All of life is lived unto God. It’s not the priests alone who live unto God. Every person who is a Christian is a priest unto God. And so when you are doing the hard work as a mother of training your kids day by day, when you are doing the hard work husband to wife of saying, when you are doing the hard work of building in your vocation, when you are a student or a young person and you are denying the flesh again, all of that is coram deo. It’s not just that you’re in a story and it’s a good story at the end of the book. It’s that right now matters. Every moment matters.

Brendan Corr
You mentioned C.S. Lewis and some reflections that you’ve been having on him with a recent trip. The way you’re unpacking this, Dr. Strachan, sounds very much like the C.S. Lewis reflections on free will. The notion of, why did God create the notion or the possibility that things could go wrong? And the fundamental conclusion was that it’s worth it. When it goes right, that world that has the beauty, and the richness, and the taste, and you described it so beautifully a few sentences ago. But it also has the possibility of pain and disappointment that is worth it. It is worth a full experience of the best, is worth the experience of the other. Am I summarising some of your thoughts appropriately?

Dr. Owen Strachan
You are. Lewis and I might tangle over free will to some degree. I would more straightforwardly confess the sovereignty of God in all things than he would in certain respects. But I find Lewis a profound thinker, and I think he’s onto something when he is discussing the worth it-ness of this great enterprise of life. And I think, to go all the way up, I sense we’re probably concluding soon, but to go all the way up, I don’t want to read creatureliness onto God because we must not do so. He is the creator, we are creatures. It’s vice versa. But God represents himself in scripture as a God who loves to love for example. And so I wouldn’t use the term risk of God, meaning attempt an outcome he can’t secure. But I would say God enters into a relationship with humanity and kickstarts this whole venture, invests our lives with immense worth, potential, dignity, and purpose, and lets us do things. I think if we were writing the story, we would think, “We shouldn’t do that. God, just write us as automatons, write us as robots in this story. And you do it. You do it. We’ll watch you do it.” And that’s not at all what God does. God calls us to live lives that are at once microscopically small, and at once epically significant.

Brendan Corr
Yes. And that extraordinary gift of our incarnation, that we are given this gift of time, with the limits and the constraints of our humanity that allow us to experience wonder, and surprise, and anticipation, and hope, and all those things that give us a full life, a full experience, are completely dependent on living constrained humanity.

Dr. Owen Strachan
Yeah. I’m not trying to get us into any societal debates or something, England versus other societies. So bracket that. But just being in London and seeing the statues that these societies have erected of great figures, you go to Trafalgar Square, and there is this massive statue of Lord Nelson who led England to victory over the French, the Imperial French in 1805 and died for it. And again, not to get into the particulars of this society against that one, but when you look up at it, you’re transported, you’re taken to a vision of humanity that’s greater than you would otherwise think. And then you recognise that there’s something far beyond a great naval figure, forgotten as he is. People walk past these statues, by the way, without a second thought, without a glance at them. And I almost couldn’t make my way through London. There are so many statues. I love the grandeur they represent. I love that they convey the nobility of the human person and the potential of the human person. But far greater than that is the grandeur of God, the greatness of God, is the God who is acting in our lives. A temptation for us is, is to think God acted in his life, or God acted in the biblical figure’s life, but God is not acting in my life. And what we need to do is recognise… I was reading the story of Joseph recently in the Book of Genesis. God is with Joseph, yes when he is in power in Egypt. But God is equally with Joseph when he is in a prison in a dungeon. And that’s true of us.

Brendan Corr
Yes. Interestingly, and again, without drawing societal comparisons or continental division, one of the things that has become a feature of some of our recent news in the last few years has been the tendency in your own country to pull those statues down, to decry them as representing something abhorrent, something that is to be scorned and completely rejected. And I guess we’re not putting up a false sense of militancy. I mean, you talk about the war, the war against men, which has that militant dimension to its description. The thought that’s behind that militancy, that charge against what were the grand figures of humanity and the self-defining-ness of modern ideologies, in contrast, is almost a utopian cleansing of identity. Any thoughts on that type of movement that you’ve witnessed?

Dr. Owen Strachan
Yeah. At the end there, you got onto something I was about to go to, utopian cleansing. It’s a kind of savage Lockeanism, referring to John Locke and his idea that the human person is a tabula rasa, a blank slate. There’s a kind of savage form of that today where you’re supposed to rewire humanity, rewire figures of the past, and deny those who had any failing in their existence. To respond to those pulling down statues, we don’t say, “Those figures were perfect. Those figures got everything right. How could you do this?” We do the opposite. We do what we’ve been talking about in this conversation, and we should be able to do this in schools, colleges, and universities. We should be able to treat historical figures as if they were complex people. Christianity, by the way… Again, thick reality like we were talking about. Christianity is the worldview. It’s often identified with thin reality, but it’s the faith that rightly gives voice to complex humanity. You think of David, the man after God’s own heart who slays the husband of the woman he seduces. And he is yet a man after God’s own heart. So we have categories for complexity as Christians. The ones who don’t, they’re not doing any justice to the complexity of the human condition, the human person. Are the ones who yes, would pull down statues of heroes, of grand figures. And they’re not just pulling down statues of Washington or someone like this, some soldier from the American Civil War. They’re pulling down the very idea that there is nobility. They may not say that that boldly, they may not even know that consciously, but they are rejecting heroism, even as they are thinking of themselves as heroes. So there’s an irony there. You destroy the real heroes, at least some of them, and yet you anoint yourself as a hero for doing so. And in so doing, you doubly condemn yourself.

Brendan Corr
Yeah. You’re describing a very… It is more than ironic. That in itself is something of a tragedy, where in the name of tolerance, you become intolerant. In the name of redefining the diversity of humanity, you become exclusive and denounce individuals who were complex in themselves as you described. I was going to ask you a question around the notion of some of that history, some of the response of the modern world to dismantle the historical nature of gender, identity, and society, and to supplant it with a redefine, would appear to some people to be well motivated. There was violence perpetrated, that there was inequality, that there was exploitation, that there was unhelpful stereotypes. And patriarchy as it’s been referred to is worthy of overthrow. Your response to that?

Dr. Owen Strachan
That’s a very complex question. Neil Ferguson has been good on this, as has Andrew Roberts, both of them British by background. They’ve both written well about these issues. Yeah, I mean colonialism has a very chequered past to be sure. What’s problematic though is saying because something has a chequered past, it therefore did nothing good. It yielded no good. So it is correct to say this movement has flaws in it and some of them are deep. It’s correct, and therefore, let’s not repeat those flaws. Good. Let’s not. Not correct to say this movement has flaws some of them deep. And so we can learn nothing from it. And in fact, we should burn it down and erase it from the pages of history. And in so doing, recognise no strengths or advantages we have reaped from it. That’s the problem. So young people about history, now we seem to be on history as a topic. Young people with history are being given only a kind of cleansed, sanitised vision of history where unless the movement or individual in question got everything right, you can’t in any way appreciate it. And this is why there are massive demonstrations in favour of Hamas, for example, in London. It’s because the English people have had their history taken away from them. After all, there are real sins and failings in their past. There are real sins and failings in their past, just as in America, just as in every society. But that doesn’t mean that there is not a heritage that has some good to it.

Brendan Corr
Yeah, I get that. It comes back to our… Well, I think for me it reconnects with the idea of reenchanting, the notion that there’s a bigger thing going on, and there are forces of good and there are forces of evil, and there is light and there is dark. And we as a society and as individuals need to find where we can leave the dark and enter the light, where we can let go of the era and embrace the truth. And to deny that as a fundamental part of the creation is one of the things that’s leading us astray. G. K. Chesterton writes about the well-intentionedness of the modern world. He makes a description to say the world is not evil. The world is in some ways too good, in that it pursues particular virtues disconnected from reality, disconnected from truth. And I wonder whether that’s some degree of what’s happening here, that equality, or tolerance, or acceptance becomes the benchmark, becomes the pinnacle of virtue, disconnected from other equally important significant aspects of truthfulness or a virtue.

Dr. Owen Strachan
Yeah, And I think you’re right. Your supposition is right. And here again, those who are dynamiting the past, erasing the past, are the same ones who are selling themselves as the answer. And there is a profound problem there. It’s not a small problem. It’s a category five hurricane of a problem, where they’re saying the people of the past are bad and need to be erased, but we are the ones who have it figured out. When in reality, there’s real light in the past. It’s not all light. It’s not all light, but there’s real light there, and you need to behold it, and you need to look into it, and you need to go there and see what is light there, and be influenced by it and learn from it. But instead of learning from it, you’re extinguishing it. And so young people are being trained in exactly the wrong instincts. And this is where the Christian faith cuts in once again. About the patriarchy, just to resurface that for a second. First of all, what is the patriarchy? It sounds like the world’s worst advertising agency. But beyond that, have men sinned badly in years past? Yes. Does that mean though that you therefore banish men from leadership or something like this, or call strong men toxic? Is that the move to make? No. The thing to do is to go back and see where there’s light, and learn from the light, and have some of it reflect on you. And then you go forward into an uncertain future having learned from it, but not having gone there to extinguish what is light, what light there is to be found.

Brendan Corr
Yeah. That’s wonderful Dr. Strachan. Thank you so much for those concluding remarks. I guess one final thought from me before I come back to the notion of individual response to this, is the characterising of identity simply with the notion of your genderedness rather than your creativity is one of the problems. If there is a type of masculinity that is excessive or exploitive, then let’s call that out and not dismiss the whole category of masculine. Let’s find what is the creativeness of a godly expression of the things that he’s put in place. This comes back to that notion I said to you earlier, that the society at large, the ideologies and the politics that young people, in fact all of us are now wallowing our way through, which denies the notion of being active, and being assertive, and being purposeful. I’m conscious that at least to some degree, there may be something similar that is spoken about in Christian circles, that it is not good to be ambitious, that it is not good to have goals for yourself, to work hard, and the right thing is just to sit back and let God work it out. That doesn’t necessarily seem to be your story. I wonder whether you could reflect a little bit on that for any of our listeners who might be, “I’m just going to leave it to God and come what may.”

Dr. Owen Strachan
The more you go on in the Christian faith, the more you find you wait on God and you are dependent on God. But the form of total dependence that the Christian life takes hold of, and expresses in us is not exactly what we’d expect. The total dependence of the Christian found in the Bible is, a bit ironically, there’s that word again, a very active dependence. It’s not a passive dependence where you do nothing. It is an active dependence where you risk much. And God has everything sewn up from the beginning. God has written out every one of our days. God has not only allowed trials, challenges, and failings even in our lives. God has appointed all of that, to use a more technical biblical term. We don’t experience that in terms of a printed-out list of directions for the day, turn-by-turn maps, or something. We don’t have that. We don’t have any of it, and yet God has it all sewed up. But in terms of our experience, we are called into a life of active dependence, where we set out, and we try hard, and we risk much. And God works through all of that, and men are called to lead out in that. It is better today in cultural terms to not risk and thus not risk bad verdicts upon you than to risk and have challenging consequences arise. The Bible has the opposite. In the Bible, it’s better to launch out and live boldly for King Jesus. It’s better to proclaim Christ and take the consequences as they come than to stay silent and risk nothing. And so what we need to recover in our boys and our youth, in general, is a sense of godly adventuresomeness. We need to let kids adventure. We need to feed them the Christian story as something exciting and not merely something soothing. We need to give them a Jesus from the pulpit who has fire in his eyes. Not a Jesus who is here fundamentally to tuck everybody in at night, but a Jesus who actually comes to you as you’re sleeping, and shakes you awake, and you wake up, and you’re startled, and you’re getting your bearings. And there’s this kind face right here, but there’s fire in the eyes. The eyes are kind in an Aslan kind of way, but there’s a fire in them and he says, “Come on, let’s go. We’ve got work to do.” And with that, he’s gone. And so you’re not walking step by step, you’re flying behind him. That’s true Christianity. And some of that spirit as I know we’re wrapping up, is found in the Narnia books. I don’t agree with everything in them. But C.S. Lewis has some very key things that lots of people don’t get. One of them is the sense of northernness, transcendence, and majesty of God, of the Aslan figure. And another of those dimensions is the sense-spirited adventure, that courses through true biblical Christianity.

Brendan Corr
Amen. I appreciate that, and that call come follow, and the notion that it’s not just a gentle stroll along the lakefront, but it’s into the territory and areas of risk, and challenge, and that same creation mandate to take dominion, exercise dominion is part of God’s call to us all, because he’s hardwired that need into us. I also appreciate Dr. Strachan, the notion that challenge isn’t always abseiling, whitewater rafting, hiking, or physical. That challenge can be intellectual and it can be moral, and part of crafting our life that is rich and full. I want to thank you for your time. I want to thank you for the work that you’ve done in the service of God and his people, in thinking through the issues that you have and representing them in the work that you’ve produced, and for the difference that is making for the way, people understand the God that calls them and themselves that need to be surrendered to his lordship. We continue to pray that he will equip you and lead you in all the paths of righteousness that he has planned for you.

Dr. Owen Strachan
Thank you. That’s very kind, and I’ve loved the discussion. And I pray with whatever else has been put on the table in this little conversation simply that we will think of ourselves as servants because that’s all I am. I truly am not anything. I’m just a servant. I’m just a footman in a great castle of God.

Brendan Corr
That is a biblical thing I think. Dr. Strachan, thank you so much.

Dr. Owen Strachan
Thank you.