Dale: I'm thrilled to have a guest here today, David Zahl. David is a husband and a father. He's a lay preacher and the founder of a ministry out of Charlottesville, Virginia, the Mockingbird Ministry. And he's the author of a handful of very thoughtful books: Seculosity, Law & Gospel, and Low Anthropology.
David, I've framed this podcast with three big ideas. Number one, there's an obvious and consequential problem in contemporary Christianity, as nearly half of confessing Christians have left the faith in 25 years, according to Barna research and Pew research.
Number two, I believe the crisis is due to a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of Christianity--it's been reduced to merely a lifestyle. Unknowingly, contemporary Christianity is now "Christless".
And third, the remedy is simple and extravagantly good, and that is for the church to pursue wisdom. What do you think about contemporary Christianity?
David: Let me say, Dale, thank you for having me, by the way. It's an honor to be here.
That's an enormous question. That's the question a lot of people are asking, or they're trying not to ask, and there's a huge amount of anxiety around it. I sympathize and agree with what you've just said, and the problem is that Christianity represents to most people a mammoth NO, a big judgment.
People today don't see Christianity as a safe haven or a fountain of good news. They see it, rather, as a purveyor of moral judgments. And it is making people feel terrible about themselves and tying them in knots.
Now I guess it's been interpreted as moralistic in its central thrust. And for me, as a Christian it's very difficult to see our faith--and it's painful to see our--understood that way when our central symbol is a man hanging on a cross.
The overwhelming evidence is that Christianity is a faith about salvation, grace, forgiveness, absolution, and life. And to see it turned into its opposite for me is like a confirmation of the devil at work.
I also don't want to discount the work of someone like Charles Taylor who says that we're pressured towards disbelief and the conditions of belief have become more difficult. He says we're catechized unconsciously through Hollywood, Madison Avenue, the internet, and certainly through Silicon Valley, to grab hold of anything supernatural or simply spiritual.
That's very real. On the other hand, I see people grabbing for all sorts of spiritual solutions. It's not the main story. I think the main story when it comes to the decline of Christianity is that the church is losing its nerve a little bit in proclaiming the grace of God in its loudest voice.
When you do get the gospel presented, it's usually as an evangelistic tool to get people on board with your project for holy living or something. But the actual gospel, that God has died and rose again to save you from sin and death--I don't think that has any less traction than it ever has. People don't associate that message with the church.
And sooner or later, it just gets easier to do something else on Sunday morning that doesn't feel like homework, coercion, manipulation, or another wagging finger.
Dale: You live and work out of Charlottesville, Virginia, which is a college town. What changes have you noticed over the last 15 or 20 years?
David: Oh gosh. I do notice the culture; there is less we can take for granted regarding spiritual or religious fluency. It's it's no longer a given. People say, oh, it's culturally Christian.
It's inot even that culturally Christian. We have. I happen to work at a church that's doing quite well, and I think in part because we see ourselves as a place where grace is on tap every single week. You're not going to show up one week, and it's going to be a sermon about an election, how you should spend your money, or something like that.
But I do see a certain degree of anxiety among Christians feeling like they have to defend their tiny little market share that seems to be decreasing. And it scans as insecurity and it's not attractive. It's not attractive interpersonally, not attractive collectively.
So I see a tremendous amount of insecurity a need to get further and further back from this first, what we would consider to be the traditional starting place for talking about life or in Christianity.
I also see an increase in despair-fueled attempts to find some meaning and answer the idea that we, people, want to know that they matter. They want to know there's some kind of purpose.
Where I live, I find that people tend to look to politics and social activism to fill that need for purpose to tell them that life matters, that they matter. I also see people lean on their careers for that very same thing.
So there's a frantic attachment to what traditionally we would call idols, bu now are just almost called replacement religions that can produce a lot of competing pieties and other sorts of judgments.
People are burned out. I see a lot of spiritual hunger because I see a lot of despair and an increasing aversion to looking to the church to address or meet any of that.
Dale: Would you talk about your most recent book, Low Anthropology? What is it? What's the premise? And what made you want to write it?
David: Sure. it proceeds from the idea that everyone has an anthropology, which is not a fancy class you take in undergrad. It's where you study different cultures. Everyone has some operating view of human nature.
Consciously or unconsciously, everyone has something they mean when they say, I'm only human. By and large, what we think humanity is good at, bad at, capable of, or incapable of creates expectations in our lives. Expectations of ourselves. Expectations of others.
I looked around and, in myself, I saw what I would call an inflated or high anthropology. I saw a view where people are improvable, and the point of life is to transcend your limitations and to optimize your efficiency. There's a mechanized understanding of humanity.
And the result of that is not a lot of opportunity but a large amount of anxiety and a feeling that we're falling behind. Everyone feels like they're just failing all the time. And I saw this high anthropology at the root of cultural burnout and loneliness.
People succumb to this idea that I can only reveal the best things about me, the proudest moments to the world. Social media amplifies and perpetuates this in unprecedented ways. I wanted a more accurate anthropology, which I call low anthropology, which accounts for human limitation.
Like mortality, the very idea that I'm going to die, that my body is aging. We fight against that with every fiber of our being. And also, human beings are conflicted. We're not a straight line in terms of I believe this, so I'll act this way. Everyone is dealing with inner conflict or functional hypocrisy that they're trying to hide or rationalize.
And people are driven by the heart. That's a more accurate view than we're driven by information.
Then, thirdly, there is such a thing as sin, or I would just say self-centeredness lurks underneath the surface. There's a darkness to the human condition that only festers and worsens unless you acknowledge and talk about it.
And a low anthropology, what sounds like a more sober view of human nature, I find laid out in the Bible and in the Christian faith. It creates compassion, unity, curiosity, humor, and love.
All of these things that are hyperproductive activity activity-obsessed culture denies us. That's why I wrote it.
Dale: That is awesome. You have a quote where you write:
"The most lasting and transformative bonds between individuals are almost always sealed through weakness rather than strength, suffering rather than flourishing, vulnerability rather than nobility. If high anthropology alienates us from one another, maybe low anthropology can bring us together again."
David: It's a good quote because I think it's inherently true. It's empirically true. Take away any kind of spiritual or religious import. Love never has any kind of lasting impact unless it is someone who loves you when you're at your worst.
Dale: I mentioned that in the last episode, I teased through the first four Beatitudes where "blessed are those who are spiritually poor. They concede that they lack the resources to get themselves to righteousness. Blessed are those who mourn that condition. Blessed are those for whom that translates into behaving with a sense of humility. They don't wear a facade when they're engaging with other humans. So, with that, talk about Anne Lamott's quote.
David: You are pointing out the upside-down nature of the Beatitudes. Talk about something that is not historically bound. Those words have been spoken throughout the ages. And they will always be unpopular because no one ever wants to be meek, and no one ever wants to be poor in spirit or otherwise.
Come to find out, in our poverty, where we experience provision, and in our misbehaviors, we experience forgiveness. These are profound truths.
The Anne Lamotte quote to which you're referring is one I use at the beginning of the book. She says, "Everybody is broken, screwed, scared, and clingy. And even those who seem to have it more or less together they're far more like you than you realize. So please try not to compare your insides with their outsides."
It's a classic and brilliant distillation of low anthropology in its liberating, unifying, sympathetic, and ultimately gracious expression.
Dale: My next discussion like this is with a C. S. Lewis scholar, an expert in Lewis and Tolkien. And so I've been rereading a lot of stuff from Lewis. One of the things that rings true, and I'm assuming it's rung true for you from what I've known of you from reading your books and then just getting acquainted today. Lewis wrote profoundly about at least these two things: suffering and doubt.
I don't think the church handles either of those things very well, but he wrote about them as one with a massive intellect and experienced those things for his entire life. He lost his mother at a very young age and lost his wife late in the, in late age. And he, but what he says about them is that if you try to dismiss the possibility of suffering, you dismiss the idea of life.
Doubt and suffering aren't signs of weakness. They're part of human life with rational beings free to make choices and live in a world with finite bodies, as you mentioned before. So sickness, death, suffering, betrayal--it's all part of life. Your thoughts?
David: Yes, grief is a measure of lost love. You don't grieve the things that you don't care about. It's an indication that you do that you have been given certain things. You can't lose something if you haven't been given it in the first place.
The idea that we would go through life as one long parade of triumph and acquisition must be more accurate and helpful. It's a dream that gets sold to people. Ultimately, what binds us together is the experience of loss. That binds me to anyone I can think of. Think about the person you can't stand, who votes differently, hates your haircut, or lives in a foreign country.
The second you find out that they, like C. S. Lewis, also lost their mom, or they're well acquainted with the devastation of suicide, it doesn't create agreement, but it certainly creates sympathy. You can get a little wedge between what the person says and does and who that person is.
Listen to enough testimonies of people who talk about God, and they will invariably talk about how God was somehow made more present in the cross in this sort of suffering and in the moments of despair and doubt.
It was so interesting. I was listening to an interview with a comedian named Rob Delaney. He lost his son who was three years old, and this guy was an absolute atheist. And he said the strangest thing has happened in the months since he lost his son. He finds his faith muscle has come alive in a way he never thought possible in talking about it with other people who've had similar losses. He can't stop wanting to do that.
That's the only thing that makes him feel better. It doesn't make him feel worse. Something about this is written into the grand scheme, and I wish it weren't. But it also seems to be one of the reasons why the religion of the cross and the resurrection resonates so deeply and cannot be obscured, even by the church. It will be rediscovered because it has got so much potency.
Dale: Amazing. One of the reasons why I've looked forward to meeting you and chatting with you live is I had an experience. I wrote a story about a young widow who looks for God and meaning in the Christian church and cannot find either one. And recently, I posted a fictional story that invites readers to imagine they've settled into a cafe and notice a suffering woman with a challenge of how to respond to her thoughts and questions. The woman lays out her life's tragedies and then shares her deepest questions about whether suffering has any real meaning or is purposeless, random, and indiscriminate. The post ends with her asking what the reader's thoughts are.
David: Yeah. Wow. Isn't that an invitation to simply listen to someone. One of the reflexes that we develop as Christians that's very unfortunate is we feel we have to make excuses for God all the time. If we don't have the right answer in the correct format, somehow God won't be at work, or that we will thwart the work of the Holy Spirit in the world.
There's nothing more powerful than someone just simply being silent, listening or saying, I don't know. Nick Cave is one of my heroes. He's a musician and a writer. He's lost two sons and one who fell horrifically to his death off a Cliff He's another person who's encountered God amid tragedy and suffering. He said that the most powerful thing that ever happened to him was going to the place where he likes to get lunch. One of his first times going out, he ordered lunch from the lady at the counter who knew who he was. She just took his order, and she squeezed his hand a little when she gave him the change after he had paid. He said that gesture was, to him, the beginning of healing. It was also the most beautiful moment.
This is part of this man's journey to God. And there were no words. Can't you just picture that gesture?
Dale: It's profound. I have heard you in interviews say the most enthusiastic response to your preaching is when you preach on suffering, which is in concert with everything we've been saying. Can you say more about why that is?
David: I would say two things. If you tell people you're going to preach about suffering, no one will come. But any preaching, any engagement with the word of God, that's not engaged with pain and does not assume that everyone's hurting no matter what people might look like on the surface. You cannot risk not talking, not acknowledging that or preaching the kind of grace and forgiveness of God in the midst of it. You can't risk not doing that. I t ink that is tying millstones around people's necks.
I'm in a mainline denomination where there's a lot of pressure to make statements about this, that, or the other, usually political.
The topic du jour, but it might not be political. It might be that Will Smith slapped Chris Rock or something; you have to, in case people are wondering what you are thinking about these things and are not inundated nonstop with hot takes about stuff. But I find that the only times I've ever tried that, I'd only succeeded in reifying those who are, who agreed with me and alienating those who didn't, and they just shut their ears.
Yeah. And I never have someone coming up to me ten years later saying, Oh, remember when you talked about the election? But when I have spoken of grief or loss, or rejection, suffering... I remember having to preach right after Sandy Hook happened; that was a sad day.
Anything that acknowledges the pain of being alive, like you're talking, you just write about the restlessness, or you're talking about restlessness, or a big one today is estranged children or family, estranged family members, simply acknowledging that.
Those are the times when people, when lightning strikes and the residence guard goes subterranean and they want to tell you their whole life story. And they or you admit just how difficult it is for people to get along in romantic relationships, or in marriages, or someone who lives with chronic pain. And you start talking about this stuff. That's the great privilege of ministry. You find out that everyone has some boulder they're carrying and that they're dying to lay down.
And if church doesn't, the place where, if it's a place where they have to carry, take up new boulders, they will eventually stop coming. They might come in the short term, thinking it'll be another way to fix them. But if it's not ultimately the place where they are allowed to lay down the facade or admit to someone that their life is hard.
Dale: Here's a quote and I'd love to get your thoughts on it. This is from your Law and Gospel. My spiritual journey had me gravitate like a magnet to a refrigerator to Martin Luther. Here's the quote:
"In a life governed by the law, striving for victory and fear of defeat loom over every endeavor. Nothing that hasn't already been done in a life governed by the gospel needs to be done. The law says do this, and it's never done. Gospel says believe this, and everything is already done. We have nothing to lose or gain. The pressure to self-justify is removed, whether we believe it or not, and freedom has replaced it. The freedom to die and yet to live, to fail and yet to succeed. The freedom to play, to serve, to love, to wait. to laugh, to cry, to sit idle, even to get busy."
David: One of the reasons we wrote that book is because is that when you confuse the law and the gospel, people only hear the law Most of the time, what we're really talking about when I talk about Christianity declining is because it's been experienced as a religion of law. Just everything you mentioned where it's a religion of threat and control, under a soft exterior.
It's three strikes, and you're out of a program for behavior change or transformation. God has things to say about right and wrong. If we could keep the law, that would be wonderful. But the final, and ultimately the great word that Christianity has to speak to the world is the word of forgiveness; the word of God's grace, that God's disposition towards you in your failure to be good is one of acceptance, or it's one of forgiveness, absolution.
He brings you closer rather than casts you out. Christians often make what I think is a mistake of reintroducing the law in a softer form that ends up being just as severe once people make a confession of faith, or at least that's how it works in the Protestant traditions and Catholic traditions. Just as long as you keep coming to church.
Jesus died for your sins. He has raised for your justification. And in light of that, what do you want to do? That's what I think about law and gospel. It's an essential distinction. It's a way of safeguarding the grace of God, saying it is distinct from accusation.
Dale: One of the things Luther said is that the way to know the difference between law and gospel is how they sound in your heart The law sounds loud and it sounds like chaos. The gospel sounds sweet and delivers freedom.
In this quote that I just read you refer to freedom here. One of the things that Paul says in his scalding letter to the church in Galatia--and he's referring to spies that were sent to make sure freedom in Christ was not being preached.
And to make sure they were preaching the law. He says they'd been bewitched. Who has bewitched you? Having begun with the spirit, and the gospel of the finished work of christ, are you now trying to achieve your goal by human effort by your obedience to the law?
Contemporary Christianity stopped making sense to me. Biblically, logically, and it didn't fit my experience. One way that it didn't make sense is that there's no way to marry together "be perfect as your heavenly father is perfect" with "taste and see that the Lord is good." That's a square circle.
David: A hundred percent. This word of freedom it's the scariest thing in the world, but it's also the only answer ultimately to people in chains. It's like Christians are sitting on dynamite; this is dynamite.
Freedom is still preferable to a new code of doing this or else. But freedom is so scary. We are so hardwired or addicted to control because we're fearful.
So we run from freedom, and that ends up controlling us differently. Occasionally the church has gotten a hold of this, and usually in times of great revival, there's been some sense in which the kind of one way love of God has been preached without, fingers crossed or without fine print, without, caveats and the fruit has been off the charts. It was exciting, and people who didn't want to be alive suddenly were doing things for the sake of their neighbor, and all sorts of cool things happened.
But there's something about institutions that need to perpetuate themselves. The church seems to have a bias toward squashing this truth, this message. That's the great irony.
Dale: David Zahl, it's a treat to meet you. I appreciate your time. Thanks for your thoughtfulness. Where can listeners find anything that you've done?
David: Online, wherever books are sold, in the normal places books are sold. Seculosity, Law and Gospel, and Low Anthropology. I also wrote a book about music called A Mess of Help. Mockingbird also has a print journal, which I think is as good as anything we do. And I host a podcast called The Mockingcast. We talk more about grace and its absence as it relates to our world.
Blessings and peace.
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