The Dr. Jeff Show Ep. 48 – Jeffrey Bilbro

Episode 48: Summary & Transcript

Disclaimer: Please note that this is an automatically generated transcript. Although the transcription is largely accurate, it may be incomplete or inaccurate in some cases due to inaudible passages or transcription errors.

Episode Summary

In this episode, Dr. Jeff interviews Dr. Jeffrey Bilbro, an English professor at Grove City College, about his book Reading the Times. The conversation centers on how to consume news from a discerning, Christian perspective. Dr. Bilbro argues that the anxiety and outrage fueled by modern media have historical roots in the 19th century and that Christians should counter this by grounding themselves in “the eternities”—God’s overarching story—rather than being swept away by the daily news cycle.

He discusses the biblical concepts of Chronos (clock time) and Kairos (God’s opportune time), advocating for interpreting current events through the lens of Kairos. The interview concludes with practical advice, such as focusing on local community, reading long-form works, and cultivating a “holy apathy” based on trust in God’s providence.

Episode Transcript

Dr. Jeff Myers (00:02):
Hey everyone. Welcome to the Dr. Jeff Show. This show’s available on Apple, Google, Spotify, Edifi, Liftable, wherever you get your podcasts. If you’re enjoying it, like it, tell your friends about it, share it with other people. On this show, I interview major thought leaders from many fields of influence to show how our worldview changes everything.

My guest today is an English professor at Grove City College who helps us understand how the news media shapes us and how to be discerning in what we consume, how we consume it, and how we fit it into the rest of our lives. Do you ever feel anxious about what’s going on that you read about in the news? You’re going to really appreciate today’s show. Please welcome Jeffrey Bilbro. Dr. Jeff Bilbro, welcome to the Dr. Jeff Show.

Dr. Jeffrey Bilbro (00:49):
Well, thanks for having me today.

Dr. Jeff Myers (00:51):
I think this is the first time that we’ve had a Dr. Jeff and a Dr. Jeff on the show at the same time, so congratulations.

Dr. Jeffrey Bilbro (00:56):
Oh, I’m excited about this congruence.

Dr. Jeff Myers (00:59):
And you’re also a graduate of Baylor University.

Dr. Jeffrey Bilbro (01:03):
That’s right.

Dr. Jeff Myers (01:03):
I’m also a Baylor graduate, so Sic ‘em Bears.

Dr. Jeffrey Bilbro (01:05):
That’s right.

Dr. Jeff Myers (01:08):
And then you have gone from Baylor University and are now a professor of English at Grove City College, which is one of the schools I just love there in Western Pennsylvania. Had some great friends who are teachers there. And man, I’d just love to come up there and spend a day sitting in your class and Dr. Carl Trueman, Dr. Paul Kengor, and some of the others.

Dr. Jeffrey Bilbro (01:29):
Yeah, it is unfortunate being here because I want to not just teach classes, but also sit in on all my colleagues’ classes. But I don’t always have time to do that, but at least we can catch up over lunch or other opportunities. But there’s a lot of great people here, so it’s a blessing to be here.

Dr. Jeff Myers (01:44):
Yeah. Good. Really special place. And you’ve got a new book and it is called Reading the Times. I thought this would be a great subject for the Dr. Jeff Show because all of our listeners, all of our viewers are interested in understanding the times in which they live. But very few of us have ever gotten any training in how to read the times. How do we? One of the key themes of your book is not just reading the times, but reading eternity.

And so I’m looking forward to digging into the book, but I just have a question before we dive into it. Did you always want to be an English professor? I mean, were you always that kid with your nose in a book when you were growing up and telling the rest of us that we should be reading classics and things like that? Tell us a little of your story.

Dr. Jeffrey Bilbro (02:39):
No. I mean, I guess I was homeschooled growing up and so I had a lot of chances to do free reading, read a lot of books, but I always thought I would go into something related to math or engineering or something. But then in undergrad and particularly going to Bible school in England, I spent a year in England at a Bible school. And I think what sort of struck me was that the American Christian church did a pretty good job in some respects of evangelizing, but didn’t always do such a great job of actually discipling Christians in ways that were distinctively Christian as opposed to kind of American ease with a little Christian veneer.

And I realized that the college environment was such a great opportunity to disciple young people and take people who maybe had a foundation of some sort in Christian living, but help them put legs on that and really think through what it might mean to live a distinctively Christian life in the age that we find ourselves. So that’s kind of when I thought about a vocation at a Christian college. And then from there, I guess my love of language and literature led me toward what I do now.

Dr. Jeff Myers (03:58):
Yeah. Well, now getting a PhD in English though is different from being interested in studying literature. That’s a whole other thing. And you did this at Baylor University, so the names coming to my mind are people like David Lyle Jeffrey and some others there.

Dr. Jeffrey Bilbro (04:14):
That’s right. Yeah.

Dr. Jeff Myers (04:15):
It’s a pretty stellar faculty there.

Dr. Jeffrey Bilbro (04:17):
Yeah. I went there in large part because of David Jeffrey and studying with him makes you realize how little you know, how you will never know very much.

Dr. Jeff Myers (04:27):
Just for context, David Lyle Jeffery is the guy who wrote a bunch of different books and then translated them himself into Chinese just because he was interested in doing it.

Dr. Jeffrey Bilbro (04:36):
Yeah. He has a heart for the Chinese church too. And so he goes over there and that’s just like a, kind of, thing he does in his retirement. So he’s a remarkable guy. And I think that’s one of the big reasons I went to Baylor and it was definitely a formative experience to sit in his classroom.

Dr. Jeff Myers (04:54):
And Alan Jacobs, I guess also is probably.

Dr. Jeffrey Bilbro (04:56):
He came there after I was there, but yeah, he is another person I’ve learned from a lot, at least in regards, at least learning from his writing, but I’ve only met him a couple times.

Dr. Jeff Myers (05:07):
Yeah. When I was reading your book, the new book that you’ve written, Reading the Times, I kind of sensed, and I don’t know how to say this, but kind of an Alan Jacobs vibe, how you create curiosity, take people deep, but also give them a rich experience with lots of different kinds of literature. Just, it seemed congruent.

Dr. Jeffrey Bilbro (05:32):
Well, that’s a high compliment, I think. I think he is one of the people who’s writing I most admire and his ability too. He’s very widely read, but he takes all of the books and the ideas that he’s wrestled with and makes them so interesting and accessible and engaging. And you never feel like he’s being pedantic or obtuse. It’s very clear.

Dr. Jeff Myers (05:56):
Yeah. Well, I know people who are watching or listening or thinking, “Oh, these two guys are geeking out and all these different authors.” But it’s a good idea. So if you’re watching or listening, it’d be super simple when you get home to just Google Alan Jacobs, Google David Lyle Jeffrey, find a book or two and just put it on your reading list. If you want to be a leader, you’ve got to be a reader, but just add that to your reading list for 2022, set out a challenge there.

Dr. Jeffrey Bilbro (06:23):
Good. Yeah. And Alan’s new book, Breaking Bread with the Dead, I think is quite excellent.

Dr. Jeff Myers (06:28):
That’s a great place to start. Yeah. Well, Jeff, I’m looking forward to our conversation because one of the key themes, Summit Ministries is we want people to understand the times and know what America ought to do in the way that the children of Israel, through the tribe of Isaacar, were encouraged to understand the times and know what Israel ought to do.

So I was fascinated by the title of your book, Reading the Times. And explain a little of the context of that quote, reading the times versus reading the eternities, because that’s kind of an important concept to keep in mind. If you remember nothing else from this interview, remember this.

Dr. Jeffrey Bilbro (07:05):
Yeah. So I get the title as kind of a spinoff or a correction or response to a line from Henry David Thoreau in one of his lectures that later became an essay titled Life Without Principle. And his line there is, “Read not the times; read the eternities.” And if you read the book, you realize that I basically agree with Thoreau and that I think his advice is pretty good, but being Thoreau likes to state things in the most kind of provocative, controversial way.

And part of the challenge in writing this book, I think, is figuring out how to navigate that tension between the need to, as Christians, be engaged in what’s going on and understand the times as the Minne Visakar did. But recognizing that if we’re just caught up in the flow of the times and if that’s where our attention and focus is, then we won’t really understand them or read them, we’ll just be caught up in them.

(08:04):
And so Thoreau’s advice to read the eternities and to root ourselves in God’s eternal drama as worked out in his church and in Christ, and then allow that to be the posture or the grounding from which we try to understand what’s going on in our day right now. So that’s the challenge. It’s easier maybe to articulate the ideal than it is to live it, but that’s the aim of the book.

Dr. Jeff Myers (08:38):
Yeah. I remember a pastor of mine used to regularly say, especially when he was teaching on a difficult, say the book of Revelation, something that was difficult and to understand, he would say, “Now, always remember, you should not be reading the Bible in light of the news. You should be reading the news in the light of the Bible.” And I remember writing that down in my little journal and thinking, “Oh, that’s so good.” But then I went home and thought, “Wait, how do you actually do that?”

Dr. Jeffrey Bilbro (09:09):
Yeah.

Dr. Jeff Myers (09:10):
And that’s what your book is about. So we’re going to rely on you to kind of help us process that a little bit. And before we jump into that though, I’d love for you to just talk about why the news has so much influence on us, things that are happening thousands of miles away that we have no personal investment in become our primary concern on any given day. Is that just the times in which we live? What’s going on there?

Dr. Jeffrey Bilbro (09:40):
Yeah. Yeah. So I do think it’s a relatively recent phenomenon, but it’s not a digital revolution phenomenon. So one of the things I do repeatedly in the book is to look back to people about Throw’s time period in 19th century because I think they were some of the first people who really experienced the explosion of the news industry and they didn’t have computers or smartphones, but what they did have was the telegraph, which enabled news to be transmitted basically instantaneously across the country.

And then once the transatlantic cable was laid across the world, they had the first cameras and they had really sophisticated printing revolutions. So if you think about it, the printing press doesn’t really change from Gutenberg to Ben Franklin. It’s basically the same. And then shortly after the revolution, there were a bunch of different developments that in tandem produced really cheap printing.

(10:40):
And you had the first pity newspapers and kind of yellow journalism, sensational journalism, where these papers would print the daily paper, sell it for a penny and ship it around the country via railroad. And everybody could read the same salacious stories and there was a highly partisan press at this period in America. Each party would have its own town, paper.

So it’s very sensationalized, aimed at getting readers hooked, very partisan and very titillating, right? You want to just keep breeders outraged. And so again, there’s no smartphones involved, no social media, but a lot of the same dynamics were at play in 19th century America as we see today, I think.

And it is weird, as you put it in your question, that as we kind of inhabit this milieu, we end up oftentimes, and I put myself in this category, so I’m using the we, carry more about things that happen far away, things that I cannot affect, that there’s nothing I can really do about it, but it gets me angry or upset or outraged and more emotionally engaged with those things than my kid or my students or the people in my life who might have real responsibilities to meet their needs.

(12:04):
So I think it behooves us to kind of recognize the way, the system that we inhabit and then try to figure out how to prudently and wisely navigate that.

Dr. Jeff Myers (12:18):
I was thinking of Marshall McLewan who wrote about a lot of these kinds of issues in the 1960s and if I remember this correctly, he said attention is a function of the square of distance or something like that. We pay attention to things that are closer to us or we think that they’re more important than things that happen, say, in India or whatever.

But it sounds like what you’re describing here, what was taking place in the 19th century and what’s taking place because of the digital revolution is sort of a reversing of that idea. We’re really, really upset about what happened in Washington DC today, but really don’t care that much about what happened to our next door neighbor today.

Dr. Jeffrey Bilbro (12:59):
Yeah. And I think part of what, there’s a bunch of reasons why that is, but at least a couple would be that we somehow think that things that get filtered to us through the newspaper or the television or the social media are more real than the stuff that we encounter in everyday life.

I mean, I remember speaking of Baylor, when I was teaching at Baylor, several of the athletic teams were quite good and they would often be featured on ESPN or the games, there would be a college game day, would be there. And then the next day, the students that were on TV are in your class. And it’s kind of a weird thing to realize, oh, they’re just 18 year old, 19 year old kids, but because of the media system that hypes up college athletics so much, it seems really like a really big deal. And it is in some ways, but it’s also just kids playing sports.

(13:56):
And in the book, one of the things I talk about in the 19th century is a Charles Dickens novel or character, Mrs. Jeloby, who he makes fun of in Bleakhouse. And she is so invested in the problem of African orphans and she’s always attending meetings about this issue, that her own children become de facto orphans and Dickens is kind of merciless in exposing her hypocrisy and maybe that’s a caricature in some ways.

But I think a lot of us when we examine our lives might find some unflattering parallels to her and that we tend to think that the objects that we see in our screens are more real than the objects that are the people or the events that we encounter in our everyday life. And so part of the task I think is to flip that and to try to be kind of emotionally engaged in a more incarnational way so that we hopefully have a more proportionate emotional response to these events.

Dr. Jeff Myers (14:58):
Yeah. A proportion is really at the heart of it.

Dr. Jeffrey Bilbro (15:01):
Yeah.

Dr. Jeff Myers (15:01):
You’re not asking people to just go cold turkey and stop paying attention to the news. You’re asking them to understand it from a biblical perspective, put it into perspective with everything else in their lives.

Dr. Jeffrey Bilbro (15:15):
Yeah. And maybe to begin with Christ’s command to love our neighbor and to begin with your neighbor. And sometimes in our digital life, our neighbor might be distant, right? There might be some people whom you correspond with or interact with or share life with that are a far away distance right now.

But in general, there should be people who are able to relate to, we have some kind of connection to that we can take them a meal when they need help or whatever the case might be, be involved in the work of the church with them. And instead, in this environment, it often gets flipped where we spend more time obsessing about stuff that’s far away and doesn’t really affect what we can do.

Dr. Jeff Myers (16:05):
Yeah. Or something that next week nobody will even remember.

Dr. Jeffrey Bilbro (16:09):
It’s so ephemeral. That’s right.

Dr. Jeff Myers (16:11):
Yeah. Yeah. I have a friend who was in a Twitter storm. He was all being attacked and thousands and thousands of people weighed in on this who have no idea who he is, had an opinion about it. And he told me, he said, “I just remember thinking, Oh my goodness, my life is over. My life is over.” And a mutual friend of ours said to him, “Listen, I know this is hard to see right now, but in one week, nobody who’s commenting will even remember that this ever happened.”

(16:40):
So you’re still the same person, you still have value, just write it out. But beyond that, Jeff, there’ve got to be some tips that can help us read the news biblically or pay attention to the news biblically. And I’m wondering if you could just review for us some of the things that you talk about in the book. I want everybody to get it and to read it, especially if you’re in journalism.

And a lot of people who are watching and listening to this show are thinking about journalism as part of what they’re doing overall. In other words, writing and broadcasting and so forth will be something they do, even if it’s not the only thing they do. So let’s just dive in and talk about, what do we do? First of all, how do we think biblically about the news and then how should that change our habits?

Dr. Jeffrey Bilbro (17:40):
Yeah. So the way I divide up the book is around a section on attention and thinking about what we should attend to and how we should attend, then a section on time, thinking about Christian understandings of time, and then finally a section on community and how the news is actually really a key part of how we belong to one another and the kinds of conversations that we think are worth having. And in each section, I try to offer a couple of practices, at least to get readers thinking about ways that they can apply, I guess, some of these ideas.

(18:20):
So, and some of them maybe are fairly obvious, like in the attention one, I talk about the good of reading more books and long form essays and less tweets or less short ephemeral stories that are just kind of stoking the Alvarez machine, fewer hot takes and more books, but some of them I think maybe are less obvious.

So maybe this is along the lines that we’ve been talking about, but one thing I suggest in the community chapter is that sometimes it’s helpful to just put your device down and go take a walk through your neighborhood and that the practice of walking through our places can help reorient, rebalance maybe our sense of perspective and help us kind of attend to what’s going on in our neighborhood or our community and recognize that there’s life happening here too, and we can relate to it with our bodies rather than use our screens to try to access stories that are happening far away. So that’s at least two places, I guess, to start.

Dr. Jeff Myers (19:30):
Yeah. And so, attention, time, and community were the three key points, right? And then under time, I wanted to ask you about this because you distinguish, and this is something that I’ve written about as well, so I was very happy to see somebody else talking about it. The difference between two concepts of time that present themselves in scripture, chronos or clock time, and then Kairos or opportunity time. And tell us a little bit about why that matters for how we pay attention to what’s going on in the world around us.

Dr. Jeffrey Bilbro (20:08):
Yeah. And feel free to weigh in here. I think there’s so many different dimensions to that distinction, but the way that I talk, and clearly it’s a distinction that’s I think really at the heart of the gospel, the New Testament, it’s runs all the way to the New Testament, so there’s a lot of directions you can go with this.

But the way I talk about it is recognizing that Christians are called to live in some sense in both times, and that we live in history, we live in Kronos, but that’s maybe not the definitive time for us. And yet in our culture that is governed by the clock and the twenty four seven news cycle, that can sure seem like the time that should give our lives meaning and structure. But it’s so arbitrary, right? I mean, if you open up any news website or you turn on any TV or you look at a newspaper, the only structure principle by which they’re organized is that everything up there on the page happened today.

(21:14):
There’s no other sort of sense of priority oftentimes, but Christians have a different way of telling time and a different drama, a different kind of narrative in which we can understand the meaning of our lives, and that is structured around the work of God and his creation.

So beginning with creation, but of course culminating in the life and work of Christ and then carried on in the life of the church. And that’s why the church has always had and kept a liturgical calendar that began an advent and today that we’re talking is epiphany, so we can celebrate the magic coming to Christ, but also the broader themes of epiphany regarding God making known himself to the world.

(22:03):
And living in that kind of time cycle is one way of counteracting, I guess, the dominance of Kronos and reminding us that we have to try to, and this gets back to what we said at the very beginning of our conversation, try to understand what the events of Kronos by means of this kind of Kairos structure that God creates.

And we were talking earlier about David Jeffrey. I rely on David Jeffrey actually in this section of the book because he has a great book that begins with this long chapter on the Hebrew prophets and in there he talks about how the biblical Old Testament prophets are a really good example for us of how to, he puts, have an ear to eternity, have an ear to the events of Kairos, what God is always doing with his people, but then speak to the people in this particular moment, in this particular historical Kronos time, and try to connect those dots so that the people can understand what they should do now in light of who God is and his ongoing work in the world.

Dr. Jeff Myers (23:07):
Yeah. My friend, John Stonestreet from the Colson Center, in most of his presentations just stops to remind people, listen, no matter what happens in the world, we are living in a world in which Jesus Christ has risen from the dead.

Dr. Jeffrey Bilbro (23:21):
Yeah.

Dr. Jeff Myers (23:23):
And you give a quotation in there. It might be from N. T. Wright or somebody who is saying, in many ways, the resurrection of Jesus from Kairos’ time is, we’re closer to that in significance than we are to what happened last summer.

Dr. Jeffrey Bilbro (23:38):
Yeah.

Dr. Jeff Myers (23:41):
But talk a little bit more about that. This is so, so important. I want to be sure that we all get this in our minds, that when we talk about the passage of time and what’s significant in the news today, we’re talking about linear time, but what you’re talking about, liturgical time or looking at the church calendar or measuring the significance of things in their relationship to the resurrection of Christ, that’s jarring in a way for people. Like you can’t wake up in the morning and look at your newsfeed and see that.

Dr. Jeffrey Bilbro (24:16):
Right. And that’s why, I mean, and it’s challenging. I think that’s why it’s so hard for us today because we are continually being formed by the news ecosystem, by so many different parts of our lives that tell us that what matters is new, it’s got to be innovative, it’s got to be this year’s model. There’s the whole capitalist consumerist part. There’s the whole news media. We’ve got to tell you a new story today because yesterday’s is now old.

There’s so many things in our life that want us to see, to find the meaning of our lives and the meaning of our stories in this kind of progressive, ever changing linear timeline. But the Christian narrative is really flipping all that on its head because it’s saying, in some ways, the most important event was the incarnation or the passion of Christ, and that’s the kind of narrative structure of our lives, and it’s that drama that gives the meaning to all these particular events that we see around us.

(25:18):
So what happens today is important and it does matter, but it doesn’t matter because it’s new, it matters because it’s part of God’s work in the world. And there’s a lot of different ways of trying to, I guess, reckon with the weirdness of that. I think one thing that’s helped me anyway is encountering and meditating on Christian art, whether it be visual art or literary art or musical arts, where the artist is trying to find ways of showing us what this means.

So I think I talk a little bit about a novel I love by Makai Brown Magnus, which is about this 12th century saint on the Orkney Islands off the coast of Scotland, and it seems like it’s an acronym, so old. And then there’s this crucial moment of his martyrdom where the narrative just seamlessly shifts and we’re with Dietrich Bonhoeffer in prison in Nazi Germany and he’s being martyred.

(26:25):
And what Brown is trying to show us is yet these are two different people, two different, almost a thousand years apart, two different times, and yet the meaning of their life, the meaning of their death is analogous. It coheres because it’s structured around the events of Christ’s death and their deaths take on meaning because they were faithful. And so trying to understand our lives in that kind of structure, it’s a challenge, I think, for all of us in these days, but sometimes the Christian artists can help, kind of, give us little bits of light to help us understand how we might understand our lives in that framework.

Dr. Jeff Myers (27:10):
Yeah, that’s really cool. I want to read a quote that you have in the book on, it’s on page 27 from Wendell Berry. He says, “We must speak and teach our children to speak a language precise and articulate and lively enough to tell the truth about the world as we know it.” As I was thinking about that quote, it’s one of those where I thought, “I get that. I agree with it.” In fact, my whole life is about that. At least I think that’s what it’s about, but how would parents do this? I mean, how do you help your kids to develop this sense that the now, this present moment, isn’t the meaning of everything?

Dr. Jeffrey Bilbro (28:01):
Yeah. I mean, I think one place to start really is, and this, I talk about this in the next chapter when I begin with Psalm one and the image of the blessed man who is rooted in the word of God. I think one place to begin is, and this is not very revolutionary or innovative, I guess, but to memorize the word of God and put that in our hearts, know it by heart as it were, so that our emotions, our character is formed around those words rather than the words that we read in the newspaper today.

And I think, and that’s what Thoreau is saying when he says, “Read the times, read the eternities,” right? Read the things that last, that matter, that you want to actually orient your life by. So, memorizing other good works, whether it be poetry or songs, recognizing that the stories that matter might not be the stories on the front page of the newspaper, and what do I want my daughter to have in her imagination and have in her mind? It’s those things that have been around for a long time.

Dr. Jeff Myers (29:13):
I was thinking as the producer of our show here, and I have both, at some point, we memorized Gods of the Copy of Bookheadings by Roger Kipling. Right, Ryan? Yep. Yeah. And we were just trying to piece together what we remember of it. It’s been a long time since we’re going to, so we’re going to have to go back and redo that. But there’s an example of a poem that covers all of the ages, presumably, of humanity.

(29:39):
It talks about how we simply fail to learn the lesson. It happens over and over and over again, that the copy bookheadings refers to those proverbs or statements of wisdom that are just true and that people often forget to their detriment. And there’s this incredible passage where he says, “It’s the burnt fool’s bandaged finger goes wobbling back to the fire. As surely as water will wet us, as sure as this fire will burn, the gods of the copy book headings with terror and slaughter return.”

And I thought, I am so glad that in an age when I was growing up that I had memorized that poem and it could help me see that no, God’s truths are always true. And that these lessons that you’ve learned are worth hanging onto.

Dr. Jeffrey Bilbro (30:33):
Maybe we could, I think that’s such a great anecdote and that’s exactly the kind of thing that I think we can do with our kids, but also with ourselves to kind of counterbalance some of the other formative effects of the news.

Dr. Jeff Myers (30:47):
Yeah. Maybe make that a project for this year. Memorize a poem together as a family. Yeah. Go out to dinner or something when everybody’s got it memorized.

Dr. Jeffrey Bilbro (30:54):
That’s right.

Dr. Jeff Myers (30:56):
Yeah. I love it. Tell us what you think are some of the practices we could embrace to be healthier people as we consume the news. I’m thinking specifically of the anxiety that comes up or the sense of hopelessness or the sense of depression. And I know we’ve covered a lot of ground, but people who are watching or listening to this now are also going to be consuming the news today and may actually experience some of the tension that we’re talking about right in proximity to when they watch what we’re discussing.

Dr. Jeffrey Bilbro (31:38):
Yeah. One of the things that was really helpful to me personally, especially while working on this book, was spending time with Blaise Pascal and kind of wrestling with what he calls Sankta in differentia or holy apathy. And the idea that he has this short letter to his brother-in-law where he’s talking about this long up to places. And his brother-in-law is all worked up about some controversy he’s involved with. It’s not going well. His party’s on the losing side. And Pascal tells him, it’s this really interesting letter, but the gist of it is, God’s in control. God’s providence is in control and it’s okay. Don’t worry about it.

And he’s not saying, “Don’t invest your energies in this good work. Don’t hope and pray for God for what you think God’s will is in this situation.” But he’s saying to do that, to read the news, to care about these issues, to advocate for the things you think are in line with the kingdom of God, but to do so from a place of really profound apathy about the outcome, because ultimately God is in control of the outcome.

(32:50):
And I think it’s a tough balance to walk where we care appropriately about the things that we think matter, that God is calling us to work in our communities and in the world, but to also just not allow ourselves to get caught up in the outrage and the stress and the fear that fuels so much of the media because we have confidence that God is in control. Yeah.

So I think Pascal’s notion of apathy, holy apathy is tricky. And sometimes people say to me, “Well, isn’t that kind of the privileged position? Don’t you just not care about what’s going on in the world?” And I don’t think it’s what Pascal’s saying at all, but he’s just reminding us that we have to care in a way that remains faithful to God’s providence, that God is in control. And oftentimes when we’re stressed out, when we get really angry and outraged, that’s a symptom that we don’t really trust that God is in control and that he is, at the end of the day, he’s in control.

(33:57):
Because Pascal says maybe God wants your side to lose, even if you think it’s God’s side, maybe you’re wrong, or maybe you don’t understand how God’s going to work things out, but you’re not in control of God is, and that is a reassuring thought.

Dr. Jeff Myers (34:11):
Yeah. Yeah. It’s reassuring. That is a difficult balance. It takes a lot of discernment.

Dr. Jeffrey Bilbro (34:15):
Yeah.

Dr. Jeff Myers (34:16):
Are there sources that when a new news item pops up and you wonder, I wonder how people think biblically about this? Are there a couple of people that are sort of a handy reference for you, people who you trust that maybe should be on our radar as well?

Dr. Jeffrey Bilbro (34:33):
I don’t know if there’s, I mean, I guess there’s sort of particular issues, certain people who I respect regarding agriculture, like Wendell Berry or technology, there’s those kinds of people. There are definitely news outlets, Christian news outlets that I respect, but they’re often ones that publish on a quarterly basis, kind of a slower cycle.

So something like Comment Magazine I really appreciate or Plow Quarterly, which is published by the Bruderhof, but they publish a lot of Christians. So I think there’s some good sources out there that are often not bound by the daily cycle, right? They don’t have to get something out today that’s responding to what’s happening today. And so that allows them to find people who are going to respond on a slower wavelength, hopefully with some, I guess, grounding in the Bible and the Christian tradition.

So it’s not just, “Here’s what’s happening right now, but it’s here’s how what’s happening now relates to these biblical passages or these other moments in church history.” And that provides a kind of distance and perspective I think that’s often lacking in the more immediate news media.

Dr. Jeff Myers (35:55):
Wow. Thanks, Jeff. This has been so good. It’s great to meet you and congratulations on the book and I’m excited to hear what kind of response you get to it because this is so timely, how we understand the times, how we understand it from God’s perspective, how we understand it from the perspective of the incarnation of Christ, which is the turning point event that changed everything. So thanks for spending time with us today. A special thank you to my guest today, Jeffrey Bilbro. You can visit him on jeffbilbro.com and also find his book, Reading the Times, wherever books are sold.

In the Bible, the prophets, apostles, and Jesus himself interpreted current events to understand what God required of them. That was their central point. We can follow their example on how we are discerning with what we consume every day of our lives. Remember, no matter what happens, it happens in a world in which Jesus Christ has risen from the dead. God bless you and we’ll see you next week.

(37:00):
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(38:04):
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