Christian College... Really?

The following program is recorded content created by Truth Network. And now, here's your host, Steve Noble.

Okay, if you're a parent out there, and your son or daughter goes to a private Christian school, be it a high school, middle school, even younger than that, or they go to a prestigious Christian university, I want you to take a big long reach. Just stretch your right hand out, and then reach back behind you and put yourself on the back. Just get a good old bat on the back back there. Awesome job. You can essentially reach back behind you.

If you want to retire, go on vacation, everything's gonna be fine. Because as long as they're at a Christian school, be it a high school or otherwise, or a Christian college, Liberty University, out in the Ozarks, whatever, you pick it, Biola, let's go all the way out to the West Coast, then everything's gonna be fine. Or is that a painfully ignorant position to take?

Because they have a cross on top of the building, and they have like a David is their mascot, whatever the case may be. And I'm not throwing every single Christian school under the bus. Some of them deserve to be thrown under the bus. And many of them, if not most of them, I'd like to think are well-meaning. Just because your kid goes to a Christian school, does that mean they're actually getting a true Christian education, whether that's at the college level or high school and under? And that's a question that especially as this culture continues to go darker and further to the left and further away and aggressively so from any notion of a biblical worldview, just hanging out in the crowd where it seems to be safe isn't good enough, especially for our children, our sons and daughters as they get pushed out into this world.

They have to be a little more equipped than they used to be. And so that's the question today on Theology Thursday with our friends at BJU Seminary as well as Bob Jones University, Dr. Renton Rathbun back in the house, who's the director of the Center for Biblical Worldview at BJU. How you doing, buddy?

Doing great. Thanks for having me. So I want to dig into your personal experience a little bit because you've taught in the secular world as well as in the Christian world. So from your experiences in the secular world, Renton, what does that look like there? I mean, oftentimes I think we assume if we send our kids off to a secular college, they're just, we might as well throw them over and burn them in front of Molech. But what's that like there in terms of the inculcation of something other than a Christian worldview? And then we'll switch and talk about Christian colleges and in schools because they're not all the same. OK, well, what's interesting is that I think the reason why a lot of people have taken their children out of public high schools is because the worldview has become so blatant and so loud that they see it so obviously. I think the idea is if I then go to a secular university or college, that's going to be more neutral.

There's a lot more neutral information there. And, you know, you might have a radical teacher here and there, but in the end it'll be OK. And the problem with that is that it's not that it's more neutral there, it's that the subtleties of the worldview are going to be a lot more pervasive. So you're not going to have someone yelling at your kid that, you know, I hate Christians, I'm coming after you. It's more like, I'm glad you're in my class. I'm excited you're here and I'm glad you have a faith.

You're very brave to have that. Now let's talk about my subject area. And what they do is they'll distance themselves from their faith and then they'll inculcate their view in the classroom where reality stands. And it's subtle. It's very effective. And you may not even realize it's happening to you because of the precision that's used in getting to the students thinking. Right. It's not just a matter of doctrine being poured on them. It's actually changing the way they think about the world.

Right. And that's the that's the big trick here. I was having a conversation with a friend just the other day about what I do in my classes that I teach.

And I tell the students, listen, you know, you guys, you're 15, 16, 17 years of age. You have an unbelievable amount of information coming at you on a daily basis from all kinds of directions. The vast majority of it is not a biblical worldview.

And to be quite frank, you guys lack both wisdom and discernment. So your operating system isn't in good shape. And so as all this stuff gets crammed into your computer, you don't really know what's coming in. You don't really have the ability to kind of pull out the false from the true and compare it to a Christian worldview.

So you don't have a good, healthy operational system. We talked about this last time you were on Renton and I just shared the link for that because there's those kind of five different things going on in a secular environment that will lead your child away, your son or daughter, away from a Christian worldview. And you know this. So many people, their kids go off to college after going through college.

They go to youth group, you go to a good church, all that stuff. And then after a few years at school, they come back and you're like, whoa, what? What happened here? And I think that's something again, we're not going to rehash all that.

And I just shared the link for it on Facebook Live so you guys can all check that out for yourselves. But you have to understand what's going on out there. But today we're going to turn the corner and kind of bring it into our own yard and talk about Christian education, because just because you go to a Christian school doesn't mean you're getting a Christian education. So they might say, you know, we teach a neutral subject or we're learning in a Christian environment. We have spiritual events. And like you guys down at down at BJU, I mean, we have we have chapel once or twice a week. We have small groups.

That all sounds great. But is that enough? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, if you if you begin to think that a biblical worldview is limited to chapel and to extracurricular activities, you really could go to a secular school, get hooked up with a Christian group on campus. Right.

Have your own types of chapel, have your own extracurricular activities that are very Christian. And the and the classroom then remains, you know, close to the neutral subjects. Right. And sometimes that even happens on Christian campuses where people believe that or even professors believe that they really are teaching something that is what we would call a neutral subject that has kind of neutral content. That, you know, whether you're at so-and-so community college or here at blah, blah, Christian college, everyone has to know how to do their formulas and write kind of math thing or know how to do, you know, how to have good writing skills.

Econ 101, communications, whatever. Yeah. And they really there are some schools out there where the professors really don't see how their subject area really does fit into a biblical worldview.

Some of them think that a biblical worldview is something that you have to stop your learning for a moment to have a little devotional in the middle of your learning and then go back to your right. Right. Right. Exactly.

Which then convinces all your students that the Bible has nothing to do with your subject. Right. Exactly.

Right. And so now you're divorcing the realities of the real world from your faith, which is going to cause a problem for your student on down the road because that will continue in their lives. What is a real Christian education?

What's it composed of? We'll be right back. Welcome back to Steve Noble, the Steve Noble Show Theology Thursday with our friends at BGU Seminary, as well as Bob Jones University, discussing Christian education to any Christian colleges, just because your son or daughter, grandson, granddaughter goes off to a Christian school. It's fine. Everything's good now. Let's let's just hang back. Let's just hang back and watch a show on Disney Plus. Oh, no, you can't do that anymore. Watch a show on Netflix.

No, you can't do that anymore. Just chill out. Whatever. Read your Bible. But you don't have to worry about it. They're at a Christian school, so everything is going to be fine.

But that's not necessarily true. So the question you have to ask yourself isn't should I send my kid to a Christian school? It's what kind of Christian school should I send them to? And do you even know there's a difference between a Christian school and a Christian education? So that's why we're always excited to have Dr. Renton Rathbun back in the house, the director of the Center for Biblical Worldview at Bob Jones University. But particularly on this type of subject, Renton, it's just great, such an important topic as people are, especially people with children or grandchildren, especially in high school, college, that kind of age range, understanding that there's a difference between a Christian college and a Christian education. Right.

I mean, they can be two very different things. Yes, that's right. Yeah. A Christian college could be something like, you know, if you like a state university, but you want a wholesome environment, come here. Right. Yeah. You know, we we may not get into the depths of biblical worldview, critical thinking work, but they'll be able to talk about Jesus on a paper without getting in trouble. And they'll and we'll have lots of really cool Christian rock bands for him to listen to in the evenings. And, you know, if that's if that's your idea of a Christian college, that's one thing. But I think I think in the war we are in and the warfare that we are fighting right now. Yeah. We don't need a Christian college to be a vacation for our for our kids. Yeah, that's right. It needs to be a place where they actually grow in the depth, both both in their hearts, but also in their minds of the depths and the breadth of God's word and how that applies in reality to every aspect of life.

Yeah. And when you look at it that way, that is such a comprehensive perspective, a comprehensive worldview, and your worldview really isn't very effective if it doesn't speak comprehensively, if you can't overlay it on all of life, then it's a weekend thing or a Sunday thing or a Monday night Bible study thing. It's not a it's not an all encompassing thing in a biblical worldview should be all encompassing.

You literally should be able to overlay it. So when you talk about your Christian reality, how you live your life, not that we're talking about being devoid of sin. We all struggle with that. But they say they go, you know, is your Christianity an aspect of your life or is it the epicenter of your life? And do things flow out of it or do you kind of go in and out of it?

So you had this point and I shared the the blog post today as well. What a Christian education is. So I just want to clip through these three things right quick to make sure everybody understands kind of the nuts and bolts of what a true Christian education. Now, we're talking about a Christian education, not just this is a Christian college, but what is a Christian education? The first one, biblical reality, which you're alluding to, embedded in the curriculum and in the teaching of that curriculum. So, again, you mentioned before, Renton, hey, we use a neutral textbook.

You have to understand there's no such thing as a neutral textbook because it was written by somebody with a worldview. Right. That's right. That's right. Yeah. So you if if you think that if you think a textbook is going to just dump data into your lab, no textbook would get published that way.

Textbooks get published when the data is uniquely communicated and that uniqueness is what gets that book published and the uniqueness is going to be along the the the view of what the publishing company thinks is a good view to have. Right. And if you're talking about a secular worldview, that's what you're going to have, because we don't you know, when we talk about you, you had said like an overlay of the world. And that's kind of you know, we got to see how comprehensive that really is, because data does not just slap you on the brain. We confront data with our mind and have to interpret data.

Right. There's nothing that can that is that leaves that's left not to be interpreted. And so the minute you interpret something, it has to be against the way you see the world and people communicate data in the same way. They communicate it to you in the way they see reality shaped. Yeah, it's going out of their worldview and it needs to be filtered through your own. But everybody's playing with the same thing. We all have the worldview.

That's the thing I want to keep reminding everybody. You said in the second point, the curriculum itself is based on the biblical reality and communicated as such. So when you say the biblical reality, what do you mean by that? So I have found that Christians, and this has been happening over a long period of time, Christians have become comfortable with the idea that we live in an already established reality that has been established by culture and established by, if I can put it this way, cultural bullies that tell us what we're supposed to believe.

And things that you want to believe because you want to fit in. And then we can add God to all that and see what part God fits into and what part God doesn't fit into. And then God embarrasses us, right? So God seems to be very harsh about homosexuality and we don't feel that way because we live in a culture that's different. So how do we change these verses so that God can be more moral like we are? And you begin to see the Bible as an added thing to an already existing reality. And what we need to do is reverse that entire way of thinking. How is it that as I am in the reality of God's word, I then can interpret the world around me?

Right. And that's why one of the things I talk about pretty often, whether it be here on the show or in classrooms or just in conversation, is the fact that I know because I have an operative biblical worldview, every single human being in the history of the world has the same operating system in terms of the imago Dei, the fact that we're made the image of God. And then that that's the starting ground. And then out of that, you throw in the world, the flesh and the devil.

The devil can't really create anything. He just marrs and distorts and plays around with things. And so I know what I'm dealing when I watch people, I watch the news, I'm seeing things happen. I'm walking through a textbook, through a curriculum, talking about a particular item.

I know what I'm dealing with because I know where it came from. And so, like, when we look at this third point, which is so powerful, every part of the student's experience, including the classroom, is understood through, assessed by and produces a biblical worldview. And I think that's where we have a huge problem with a lot of our students going off to college is they don't really have a set, strong, operative biblical worldview. They're Christians. They went to church. They heard lots of great sermons. They're all off at summer camp right now, getting not enough sleep and maybe giving their lives to Jesus Christ for the 15th time.

But but they don't have this kind of robust way of thinking that's biblical. You know what I mean? That's right.

That's right. And it's you know, we get and like you're saying, you get these kids that that have that are constantly reminded about having a heart for the Lord. And the Lord wants that heart and they become very sincere. And sometimes we as adults confuse our own kids with, you know, demanding out of them, hey, this is what the Lord says. And then the Holy Spirit within them, you know, affects their heart. They repent and they have these moments of clarity.

Yeah. And then then what do we do? Do we just leave them without training their mind of how then do I think or have we not trained their mind? And then they become weak again in their mind, afraid that they need another experience to get them to that feeling of being OK with God. Right.

Instead of training their mind to think as God has taught us to think in his word to to not just not to be conformed to the world, but to have our mind conform to God. Oh, you should write that down. That that's a good one to not be conformed to the world, but perhaps be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Yes. Francis Schaeffer once asked, how should we then live?

That's the big question. We'll be right back. If you have a son or daughter that just graduated from high school, welcome back.

It's Steve Noble and the Steve Noble Show Theology Thursday with our friends at BJU Seminary, Bob Jones University as well. And they just graduated. And that's that's awesome, right? But are you sending them off like a sheep to the slaughter? Are they ready for what's out there?

And again, not I would say very few colleges and very few college professors are going to fit nicely into. Oh, Renton, what was the name of the Christian movie? God's not dead. Right. And so you have this really obnoxious Kevin Sorbo, who I think Trump referenced earlier as Hercules. This Kevin Sorbo, aggressive, intelligent, sharp and good looking atheist professor that's just going to slice and dice your kid into the ground. There are some of them out there like that.

But even somebody like Bart Ehrman here locally to me at University of North Carolina is a is a pretty likable person. And so the danger isn't in the the really obnoxious affront, the full frontal attack by the obnoxious atheist, the danger is much more subtle and it's pervasive. And it's been going on since your kid was about, I don't know, five or six and whatever they're watching, whatever they're listening to, the video games that they're playing.

And then they go through college and high school and college and the curriculum and everything else. This is the slow burn because they're marinating in this stuff. They just don't know it.

And because they don't have a fully functioning and well-developed and robust Christian worldview, you don't really have you don't have a colander. Everything's kind of coming through and going into your fridge. And the next thing you know, you open your fridge and it's like hell coming at you.

You're like, how did that happen? Well, it was a slow burn over a long period of time. That's why today with Dr. Renton Rathbun, we're talking about what does a Christian education look like?

Just because it's a Christian college doesn't necessarily mean your son or daughter or your grandson or granddaughter is going to get a true biblical Christian education. So we're kind of pulling this apart. And again, Renton, thank you for bringing your expertise and your experience to this. This is a super important topic that I don't think anybody gives enough time to. That's true.

Yeah. And we, you know, when we think about what a Christian education is, I've been thinking about how you would how do you solidify that into a simple sentence? You had to say, what is a Christian education?

I think what we would say is a Christian education is is at least for a student learning the skill of interpreting the world through the reality of a biblical worldview. And it's important to understand that through a reality of a biblical worldview, not as Christians. This is how we see the world. And then as other people see the world this way and we all have our little views. Yes. It's and this is something and you're just another symbol on the coexist bumper sticker.

That's you. I mean, sometimes we talk that way. We talk as if, you know, well, their view is different or, you know, they see another. And I know what we're doing. We're trying to be intelligent. We're trying to acknowledge that people have other world.

And I get that. But we don't live as if we know the reality. Yes. That we don't have to apologize for reality. We don't have to leave room for other realities. But ours really is superior worldview because it's the real worldview. And we've got to stop being afraid of saying that.

Yes. So on a beautiful summer day, whether you're down there in Greenville, South Carolina, burning up like you're on the face of the sun or up here in Raleigh, North Carolina. Beautiful blue day and you walk outside and you're having your lunch or whatever, and somebody walks up next to you and they say, wow, the sky is just that's the most beautiful shade of pink I've ever seen. And you look to the side and you're like, what are you trying to figure out? What's up with this person? Are they on drugs? Are they drunk?

What's their deal? Because, you know, the reality is the sky is blue. And as soon as they say pink, you know, something's off because you realize that there actually is a reality. Del Tackett, focused on the family, came up with the truth project years ago.

It's really good. And he has this little this little saying that he uses all throughout it. Do you really believe that what you say you believe is really real? Because a foundational Christian worldview, God defines reality. So, Renton, when you look at the when you look at the world around us on a daily basis, and do you ever say the place is crazy, the world's crazy?

Right? Yeah, because it is. What is crazy?

Crazy is being out of touch with reality. What is reality? Reality is that which is true. Well, what is true?

OK, good question, Pontius Pilate. Christian worldview, God defines reality. Everything else is bogus. It's outside of it. It's a distortion of it.

Or it's just an outright replacement in the lie. Romans one. That's right. And and, you know, whenever we're together, Romans one comes up. Yes.

And and what's important about Romans one is it reminds us that the the unbeliever is not does not actually believe the lies. If I can put it that way. In other words, there's something in him that knows the truth and he's suppressing, suppressing it. Yeah. And you can't suppress the truth without going a little crazy or sometimes a lot crazy. Yeah, that's right.

Because when you suppress reality with your unrighteousness, your unrighteousness then has to comfort you and be the bridge to the sanity you think you have. Yeah. And you'll go crazy. You'll get to the point where a woman won't even be able to know what a woman is anymore.

That's right. Because she's not a biologist. And then I was listening earlier today and this really courageous college female swimmer speaking out about all the crazy transgender stuff and especially about Leah Thomas at Penn. And at Penn, she knows some some girls that are on the team. He's in the same locker room.

And so now they're literally telling these girls, if you have a problem seeing male genitalia in the locker room, we suggest you speak to a counselor. Oh, wow. That is insanity by definition.

It's just crazy. So when we go through this, because I want to go through these points, what a Christian education does. Point number one, develops biblical worldview skills in the classroom that do not direct the students away from the subject matter. What do you mean by that?

Because that's where I think we go. There's biblical worldview and then there's like Econ 101. Those are two different things. So if you're talking about math, if you want to talk about conversion of metric units. And so the conversion of metric units is on the table and you say, you know, kids, conversion can be defined as turning from one thing to another. You know, when the Lord saved us, he turned us from sin to himself.

Beautiful. Now, back to metric units. Right. That is not biblical worldview. That is a pause in math to have a Bible story.

Go back. Yes. And and what you've done is you've convinced the kids, yeah, math has nothing to do with God.

Exactly. The real question is, I was able to talk to a professor over at Redeemer University up in Canada who who has developed work in a biblical worldview of math specifically. And the question is, what's a number? They started with that basic value, because what we want to do is we don't want to take math already in its history and its ideas and then try and bring over the Bible and say, hey, where do these things meet together? But what we want to do is we want to start math in scripture itself and asking that question, what is a number, brings us to answer a question that the world hasn't even answered yet. And so we started develop this idea of how do we answer the question, what's the number? And we came to Genesis one and two and saw how Adam was naming the animals. And that was part of his image bearing of God to imitate his God. And we began to develop this idea that, you know, when we a number is a name we name by quantity so that we can model. And why do we name by quantity so that we can model so we can obey God's command to subdue and rule over the earth? And that's the birthplace of math.

It's in Genesis. And so from there, we we then move from there out into all the different proofs and different ideas of math. But when you show them that there is this foundation where math is, where we're able to answer questions that the world hasn't even answered yet, it's convincing and clear to the students. And that's when I do when things like that, by God's grace, happen in my classrooms, you see the lights come on because all of a sudden they've taken these two worlds that they thought that were disparate math, civics, history, whatever. And then they're Christian, they're Christianity over here. And all of a sudden they're like, oh, I actually didn't know those things go together. And that reality emanates out of the creator of reality, which is God himself.

That's right. So they learn it's not only do they go together, but math isn't something that merely just clicks with the Bible. Math relies on the Bible. And when you start realizing that the Bible really is sufficient to speak to everything in God's world, that's showing the power that's already in Scripture. You're not giving power to Scripture. Scripture is demonstrating its power to your students.

And what happens is, at least this has happened for me, and I think it's definitely obviously happened for you, is it builds this strength intellectually, which builds the strength of your faith. And then when you see the world, I don't shrink back from the world. I'm like, hey, listen up, world. I get you.

I know what's happening here. I'm not running around in the places on fire and I'm trying to figure out why. I'm like, actually, there's all kinds of answers for all this stuff. And so we can lean into the world as a source of truth, as opposed to being afraid of the world because they have a competing truth claim. They don't have a competing truth claim.

They just have lies. We have reality. So. All right.

So we're going to when we come back, we're up against the break. Developed biblical worldview assessments. I love that word. Skills.

I love that word. And we'll talk about that. And this is an interesting one. Developed biblical worldview skills that allow for cross pollination between diverse subject matter. This is really good stuff. You should probably listen to this show a couple of times over and share with people.

We all need to get a whole lot better at assessing what we're doing with our kids. We'll be right back. Welcome back to Steve Noble, The Steve Noble Show Theology Thursday with our friends at BJU Seminary. Bob Jones University as well today with Dr. Renton Rathbun, who's the director for the Center for Biblical Worldview and also teaches down there, by the way. So what classes are you teaching this fall semester, Dr. Rathbun? I am teaching a freshman course in Bible God called Creation.

New Creation, where we span the entirety of scripture to see the big meta narrative so we can see how our world fits into that into that narrative. That's cool. Is that the is that like the only class you're teaching? I mean, what do you do for work?

Well, believe it or not, the Center for Biblical Worldview takes up most of my time. Are you out? Are you done? It's over. Tell the producer I'm gone. I'm out of here. Oh, and I am teaching I'm co-teaching a course at the seminary in the fall in bioethics.

Whoa, I love that. See, that's another one of those topics that God's word has a lot to say about bioethics. Now, it takes a little work because scripture wasn't written when we have cloning going on. But bioethics, because our intelligence and our knowledge base is far outpacing our ethic.

Oh, yeah. And so we've got we're all like Frankenstein now. There's all kinds of things we can do, monsters we can create.

We just don't know what to do with them. And every principle you need to make good biblical decisions are there in scripture, even though scripture is not a textbook for cloning. That's right. It is. It does tell us every principle that we need to be able to know what to think about.

Yeah, that's right. And that's a that's a great reason why people should go down those roads. And I talk about that stuff in my ethics class. And that's just awesome to hear that you're teaching this. So we're working through what a Christian education does. We talked about develops the biblical worldview skills in the classroom, develop biblical worldview assessment. Assessment is so important that allows the student a chance to practice the skill of worldview evaluation. So talk about that, because that's one of the biggest challenges. I looked this up.

I don't know if it was earlier this year, Renton. I was just wondering with with my own students, with my own sons and daughters, how much how much information is really coming at these guys on a daily basis with everything that comes at you? Social media, eight hours a day on your phone, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Go look up your own screen time.

But it's not going to be pretty. And it's about 32 gigs a day. This is an iPhone 13. It's an iPhone 13 plus. It's got about five.

I think it's 560 gigs of storage. So I would fill this bad boy up in about 12 days. Wow. Just with the information that's coming at you. So assessment and evaluation way more critical, I think, than any of us realize.

Yes. So it's one thing to claim to everyone that, you know, at at Bob Jones University, we have a biblical worldview that begins in the classroom. And, you know, that's a great statement.

But, you know, how do you deliver on that? You can theoretically say it and people might do it well in degrees. But how do you assess that we're doing it well? So we what we do is we have we have connected Bloom's taxonomy verbs to skills that our students can do, that our biblical worldview skills that then we can assess. And so we put these these skills on our syllabus so that we can assess it in the classroom.

And then we can take a broad look at all our classes to see how people are doing. And so what that looks like is we take them through three different three different steps in interpreting the world around us. And the first step is trying to identify. That's one of the Bloom's verbs, identifying creational norms.

So how did God make the world to function? Can we can we identify those? Can we explain those? Can we describe them to people?

So, you know, if I see if I see if I see design in a in a cell, can I describe how design works in a cell and how how that displays God's orderliness and things like that? But we live in a fallen world. So the next thing we want to do is just be able to think about how the subject area that we're looking at deals with the fallen corruption of this world.

So the world in doing that, we want to evaluate the strategies used to distort the things in this world. So God created, if I can put it this way, God created marriage. Right. And marriage is good.

It's a function that he created. Now, the world can't invent something new, but they can distort. Fallen world can distort things. And so they change. They tried to change marriage to mean something different. And so are we able to evaluate that?

I'll tell you the thing that really messed up my my students when I taught at a secular university and college was I would play the who says game with them. They would they would give a statement they feel very passionate about. Well, you can't say that. That's that's not fair. You know, you know, you can't you can't say that the people have to do what you say here in America because they live in Cambodia or something like that. Right. And that's not fair. And all I had to do says who says.

And silence. Right. Because what's your source of authority? Exactly. And it came down to their feelings, something they saw online that resonated with that.

But they realized very quickly my feelings and what resonates with me online really isn't proof of anything. And so being able to evaluate how I know something is distorted, I need God's word. So I need God's word for the creation part to see what racial norms even. Yeah.

Yeah. I need God's word to be able to evaluate so I can use it as a capital as a catalyst to see how the world has distorted his his function in this world. And then the last one is redemptive response. How do I formulate a response to this, to the fallen corruption I have found, and that formulation that's one of the higher booms words, it's up there with create. And so you're trying to design from scripture you're trying to design a response to the world, using the principles that scripture gives us to be able to give a real answer to to this fallen world, and how we might be able to in view of God's redemption. How are we to act in view of God's redemption.

So it's not that we're redeeming all of all of the world. But what we are doing is being able to respond biblically in view of God's redemption knowing what needs to be bent back towards God and what needs to be left alone. And then that redemptive response, there's, there's speaking truth just for the sake of being a good witness for the Lord. And so you want to speak truth which is a benefit you glorify God and hopefully a benefit to some people that are willing to listen.

But you also want to see people changed as a result of it and so you kind of got to get yourself in there I got a in the mail just the other day yesterday the day before, a three or four paragraph rent and handwritten letter, because I mentioned recently that I had gone to see the movie Elvis, and so they went online and found out how many swear words there are in the movie Elvis about Elvis the recent one right. So then their whole point is, why in the world would you go to a movie like that. Okay, fine.

Let's have the conversation. But going back to this, and the reason that I love movies, is that it's a, that's like a playground for what you're talking about, for me personally, I walk into a movie, and I can sit there and go when movies are working. And when there's truth there, I know where that comes from. I'm like hey you guys don't understand Marvel guys, Robert Downey Jr. whatever, you don't understand why that works, but I know why it works because that reflects the reality that God has created.

So there's that's the first one I'm identifying a creational norm. Then I get broken hearted by the fallen world aspect. What Elvis did to his life. The people that lied to him, the people that abused him, he lied himself, blah, blah, blah, blah, the lifestyle he chose to live all these things and so then I get broken, and then my redemptive response is, okay, the world's going to see this movie the world's talking about this movie I want to show them things in the movie that reflect God's reality.

I also want to show them the things that are marring God's reality that are heartbroken then, and then can I point them to the gospel of Jesus Christ, as a result of talking about the movie Elvis, and I can. Wow. And so that that to those three points. That's what I do when I watch movies, be it at home or go to a big screen. Everything's functioning when I do that. Yes, that's what I tell my students. When you get this this concept right when you have these steps in your mind. This should ruin every movie. Exactly, because you can't stop listening to what the words are what you're saying what they're trying to get across. And I and you know it, eventually, you enjoy things because of it.

But it also, you know, it might ruin your favorite song. Sure, if you actually listen to the worldview or it might ruin your favorite movie. But, you know, you're right. That's all that's all there. I mean, when you talk about, like this, the cartoon Spider-Man and the Spider-Verse. Right, sure.

The relationship between that between between Morales and his dad. Yeah. Was a creational norm.

Absolutely. That should be that dad should love their sons and be affectionate to their sons and be masculine men. Oh, strike. Can we strike that part out? Can we can we believe that masculine? That's a double. That's a double problem right there.

Masculine and men. And, you know, the guy that, you know, put that cartoon together isn't thinking this will honor God, but he's made in God's image. And there's certain things in this world. They can't help but to address and say, yes, things function well. Yeah.

When this works. Yeah, that's right. And they and they're not glorifying God when they display hit that reality. Although God can pull glory from it because he's like, yeah, that's mine.

That's right. I made that reality. At least you included it in the movie.

But yeah, that whether we're talking about movies, set that aside. You can do this with economics. You can do it with botany. You can do it with philosophy. You can do it with any major at any time.

The sciences, nursing, medicine, engineering, whatever. All those things are ripe playgrounds for this type of biblical worldview. And so that's why we have to keep asking ourselves, are you sending your son or daughter to a Christian school that teaches gives them a Christian education? Or is it like a light version of that?

Because if you have a light version of it, it's not worth your money. So make sure of that. Renton, always great to see you, buddy. Thanks so much for being here today. Thanks. You're welcome. You're welcome. God willing. I'll talk to you guys real soon. And like my dad always used to another program powered by the Truth Network.