The Dr. Jeff Show Ep. 81 – Megan Almon

Episode 81: 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

Dr. Jeff interviews Megan Almon in the new Mike S. Adams studio at Summit Ministries. They begin by discussing Summit’s programs, including the announcement of the Summit Semester program’s expansion into a full gap year. The conversation then shifts to Christian apologetics and cultural engagement. Almon outlines her approach to discussing faith, which emphasizes starting from a place of confidence in objective truth, leading to humility and curiosity rather than fear.

Almon provides practical frameworks for these conversations, including her “BEAR” acronym (Burial, Empty Tomb, Appearances, Rise of Christianity) as a method for making a case for the resurrection. She concludes by using the biblical story of Daniel as a model for how Christians can faithfully engage with a culture in which they are exiles.

Episode Transcript

Dr. Jeff Myers (00:01):
Hey everyone. Welcome to the Dr. Jeff Show podcast. We’re in our new studio at long last, and I can’t wait to invite my guests in here. This program can be seen on Apple, Google, Spotify, Edifi, Liftable, or wherever you get your podcast. And please, I’ve mentioned this several times and some of you have done this, and I’m really, really grateful that you go to the place where you get your podcast and you leave a review that helps other people find out about the program and get excited about it. So please take just a moment to do that.

My guest today was an NCAA division one gymnast, an award-winning journalist, and now a Summit Ministries speaker who speaks in other places, trains tens of thousands of people every year to see things biblically, especially related to the pro-life issue. Please welcome Megan Almon to the show. Megan Almon, welcome to the Dr. Jeff Show.

Megan Almon (00:56):
I’m glad to be here.

Dr. Jeff Myers (00:58):
This is historic, not just because you’re on the show, and you’re one of my favorite speakers, but because this is our first episode broadcast in the Mike S. Adams studio.

Megan Almon (01:11):
I didn’t realize that.

Dr. Jeff Myers (01:12):
Congratulations.

Megan Almon (01:12):
Thank you. This is such an honor.

Dr. Jeff Myers (01:15):
You’re our very first guest in this beautiful studio. So we’re here if you kind of maybe see a little bit of some of the buildings in the background. The Summit Ministries Grandview Hotel is right back. There are students crawling all over it, not literally, but they’re everywhere in the summer programs that are taking place right now. And just on the other side of this wall is a control room where the people who are producing the show operate. And this is where we did the Summit Virtual event last week.

Megan Almon (01:43):
Yes, yes. It looks like mission control in that room. It does look, and the best team.

Dr. Jeff Myers (01:47):
I just asked where the hyper drive button is. That’s the only thing I want to know. They are lots of fun. I love pushing buttons.

Megan Almon (01:54):
The red phone.

Dr. Jeff Myers (01:55):
Oh, it’s my favorite thing about getting a rental car is just push all the buttons.

Megan Almon (01:58):
That’s right.

Dr. Jeff Myers (01:59):
See what happens. But yes, so this is a huge thing for Summit Ministries because we loved Mike S. Adams and he passed away two years ago, and we’ve talked about that some in the media and other places. And the legacy that he left was one that you are tapped into as well because he cared about free speech and he cared about pro-life issues. And when you speak to the administrative students, you’re often speaking on making the case for life and also talking about relativism.

Megan Almon (02:36):
That’s right.

Dr. Jeff Myers (02:36):
And some other aspects of apologetics. So that’s the direction that I want to go, which is every direction all at once. But I’m excited to have the conversation with you and excited that we can do it here.

Megan Almon (02:50):
Me too.

Dr. Jeff Myers (02:51):
Yeah. Well, let’s just dive right in. Megan, you and your husband Tripp, both are part of the Summit Ministries team. You speak to the events, Tripp hosts the Summit Virtual Program, and then the two of you together host the Summit semester program at Snow Wolf Lodge at Pagosa Springs, which is a Summit Ministries property. And we haven’t talked a lot about it on this show, but it’s a three month sort of gap year program for students before they go to college.

Megan Almon (03:24):
That’s right. Three months, wonderful months where they can pull back a little bit from popular culture and take a minute to assess it in a retreat setting, go very deep into the Christian worldview in a community setting. So they’re learning several things at once, just really how to live life well, for lack of better terms, because it is academic and it’s community and it’s work, and it’s all of these things.

Dr. Jeff Myers (03:49):
It’s all of those things, isn’t it? Yeah. It’s everything that you want to be prepared to do well, to think well, to work well, to have your life be honoring to God, to be able to understand the specifics of your design so that you can live that out. All of that takes place. Well, that program is full for this fall.

Megan Almon (04:11):
Yes, yes. But next year we will already begin looking at applications. And next year, actually, as you well know, our three month gap semester is being extended to a full gap year, so full year, two semesters.

Dr. Jeff Myers (04:26):
So you could have a life-changing experience in this lodge in Pagosa Springs, Colorado where you’ll have the opportunity to learn from Summit’s top professors. But you don’t just get an hour with them. You get a week.

Megan Almon (04:42):
No. You get days with them. And in a smaller setting, our class size will never probably be more than 40 students. And so we’re talking about eating meals with them, going on walks and hikes with them, sitting with them on the porch, having one-on-one time if you need that in this setting, it’s pretty spectacular.

Dr. Jeff Myers (05:03):
It’s pretty spectacular. And the facility is surrounded on three sides by National Forest. It’s one of the most popular summer areas and winter areas. Actually in the state of Colorado. There’s a ski facility near there that’s always known as having more natural snow than any other resort.

Megan Almon (05:25):
That is their claim to fame, and it is quite wonderful.

Dr. Jeff Myers (05:28):
Yeah. Well, thanks for letting me bring that up because I realized we haven’t talked about Summit semester, but there’s probably somebody listening right now who’s thinking either I am interested in that or I may have a son or daughter, maybe a grandchild, who could really benefit from having one year like that in community learning to think well, read well, write well.

Megan Almon (05:52):
Establish rhythms of life, understand the importance of work and creativity, learn how to learn, how to ask the deep questions and to sit in them. So it slows things down quite a bit.

Dr. Jeff Myers (06:05):
Yeah. Well, I think that’s just tremendous, and anybody can go to summit.org who wants to find out more information about that. But that’s actually the second thing. We haven’t told anybody yet that we’re going to do a full gap year.

Megan Almon (06:17):
That’s right.

Dr. Jeff Myers (06:17):
Until just now.

Megan Almon (06:18):
That’s right.

Dr. Jeff Myers (06:18):
It’s a whole program of firsts. See how lucky you are. Well, let’s just talk about some of the things that you’ve learned about engaging. We spent a lot of time on the show. How do you engage people with your faith? And this is something that you regularly do. We’ve already talked about the Summit semester program, the summer programs at Summit, but you travel and speak as well to all different kinds of groups.

Megan Almon (06:48):
That’s right.

Dr. Jeff Myers (06:49):
And some of the groups are not your typical evangelical Christian group, so you’re always around people and always meeting people who are dealing with all different kinds of things in their lives. So I’d love to just process with you for a minute what that kind of engagement looks like. You’d always do it in such a winsome way.

And I’ve always kind of wanted to ask you, when you meet someone, first of all, how do you overcome the kind of fear that keeps most people silent? I don’t know if that makes sense, and I don’t mean to judge anybody who’s watching or listening, but a lot of people in fear believe they can’t handle a conversation with somebody who doesn’t believe what they believe, and so they just sort of stay silent or withdraw. How do you tip through that?

Megan Almon (07:47):
I think there’s probably a number of things that happen. Number one, just like we teach here at Summit, we believe that Christianity is objectively true. The only kind of true that matters that deserves placing our faith in something is that it should be objectively true. So I think the first thing is that if I’m confident in that, it means that any conversation I’m entering, I’m coming from not only a position of strength, which is something to remember, not one of weakness, but also one of humility.

Because objective things by their very nature can be right or wrong, can be true or false, unlike subjective truths, which are all equally valid and in a culture that I think is trying very hard. This touches on a little bit of the relativism that we talk about here. I think the culture is trying very hard not to be arrogant, which is well intended, but if I were clinging as the relativists do, well, this is my truth, I would in essence be saying, well, I think I’m right about this and I can’t be wrong. Versus the objective position that says, I think I’m right about this. I have excellent reasons for standing here, but I could be wrong.

(08:57):
And that opens me up to curiosity and frees me up to not claim it as my own, but rather the thing that I believe to be true is it stands or falls apart from me. So I tell students sometimes when someone comes to me and they challenge my faith or a view on a moral issue or something like that, it’s almost like they came and said, well, I think that two plus two is five. I’m not going to get angry with them over that. I’m going to be curious. I’m going to go, really? I didn’t know. The alternative to two plus two common core is the only way I know we can get to that. I’m kidding about that. My mom’s a teacher. So all in good fun.

Dr. Jeff Myers (09:33):
I think you’ve hit on something that I do hear a lot of people say. They’ll say, well, thank you for talking about truth, and I’m glad you’ve found what works for you, but I just, all I can do is speak my truth. And you mentioned relativism. People don’t usually say, hey, by the way, I’m a moral relativist.

Megan Almon (09:55):
Not at all. No.

Dr. Jeff Myers (09:56):
But they’ll say, I think the best I can do is just speak my truth. Things are complicated. I’d see things as I see them. How do you plant seeds in a situation like that?

Megan Almon (10:08):
Yeah, I’m thinking of particular instances of these conversations. I’m thinking of particular people. I think that that’s where just being curious in general about other people helps because as Christians, I think we should be the most interested people and the most interesting people. If God made all of this and he’s infinite, we’ll keep on learning forever and never exhaust the depths of it, but with other people. If that’s the claim, the best I can do is live my truth, and I want to hear what that is.

I think what I’m getting at is what is your, I’m borrowing a term from the Marvel universe. What is your end game? What is your ideal? What are you after? Ultimately? And I want to hear from them what that is. And along the way, if I’m listening, well, I’m going to pick up on some patterns of ideas and things like that, but because I care and we should, if we’re asking that question, I can remember a conversation with a man who said something like that. He said, that’s great for you and all, but I have two daughters. I was burned by the church and I just want my girls to grow up and be good.

(11:17):
Now, the problem is that the worldview he was espousing there had no foundation for anything good beyond his preferences.

Dr. Jeff Myers (11:23):
What does good even mean?

Megan Almon (11:24):
Or their preferences. And so I think that maybe the asking of good questions there. I’ve learned a lot from friends, mentors, fellow Summit faculty along the way, thinking specifically of Greg Koukl’s Tactics from Stand to Read and just the art of asking good questions to draw people out. And I can think, I can probably even give that bit of information. Do you realize that you say you want them to be good, but what you’ve just told me is that good rests on what you define or what your daughters define. So what is the good that you speak of?

Dr. Jeff Myers (11:56):
Yeah, yeah. So he probably has in his mind some things that the good would be, or at least some things that would not be good if they engaged in them, but what’s the foundation for that? Yes, Greg’s been on this program, so that’d be a good show to go back and review. I think it was 40 minutes long, a fascinating conversation. And he just gave some very basic strategies of how you engage in conversations with people. People have different worldviews.

Megan Almon (12:29):
And he does that all the time.

Dr. Jeff Myers (12:31):
And you don’t have to be afraid.

Megan Almon (12:33):
No. Just ask a question because after all, we all share this human nature. I think we tend to pit ourselves against other people and do the comparison thing. So we get really intimidated really easily. But the pro-life view that we would espouse, crowned in the larger Christian worldview, tells us that our value is intrinsic just like the children we’re trying to protect, just like the person that we’re talking to who is angry. So I think sitting in and understanding the things we say to be true gives us a posture that’s helpful.

Dr. Jeff Myers (13:03):
Okay. That’s really good. This, I’ve very rarely, of course, I travel a fair bit and I’m meeting people in all different kinds of situations, secular situations, Christian situations, people who are searching all different kinds of people. I almost have never had anybody ask me, tell me, why do you say that? Or Why do you believe that?

(13:32):
It seems like they’re sort of, you say what you say, then they say, well, well, how I see that, which can make for a fascinating conversation, but it distinguishes the Christian. If you can say, tell me more about that. I’m really curious to see, how did you arrive at that conclusion?

Megan Almon (13:52):
I think that speaks to probably G. K. Chesterton’s Maniac, the first chapter of his book Orthodoxy, which is in my top five, always will be, I think. But he’s talking about the fact that we do that comparison thing. I was talking about a moment ago that we tend to focus our attention inward and we’re very, very concerned with what others think. I don’t get. Why do you believe that? I get, why should I believe that? I get that more often.

We tend to do the same thing over and over again, but the focus is on self, even though that’s not intended. We’re suffering from egos that are all over the place. And Chesterton said, the happy stranger, the land of happy strangers comes when you can look up and realize that those people are not that concerned about you. They’re very concerned with their own problems, and it frees you to be curious about them.

Dr. Jeff Myers (14:41):
Yeah, yeah, that’s right. Yeah. Yeah. I got to get the kids from school. I got to make dinner. I’ve got to try to do a good job at work so that I can move and hopefully earn a little more money. There are a lot of everyday concerns that all of us have. How do I pay for rising gas prices and all of those sorts of things?

Megan Almon (15:01):
That’s a big one right now.

Dr. Jeff Myers (15:02):
It is a very big one right now. But it seems to me, and maybe this is just the weird philosopher part of my brain, but it seems to me even very practical questions about how we live our lives, if we just scratch them just a little bit. The question below the surface is, how do I live a meaningful life when I go to bed at night?

I was a single dad for many years. I’m laying in bed thinking, I am so completely exhausted after PTA meetings and sports and picking kids up and dropping them off in different schools, all of that, and making sure they did their homework and they’re prepared for the next day. I collapse in bed. And there is, the question was, did I do the best I could today? I always want to be able to answer that.

(15:53):
But the question below the surface is what meaning does any of this have? Do you think people are asking that? Or is it just like, Hey, look, that’s just too, that’s just too philosophical. What happens when you get a PhD is you start asking weird questions like that.

Megan Almon (16:11):
No, I don’t know if they ask it overtly, but I think it’s always there. Because I think that’s what, when I’m speaking to groups or individuals, I mean, that’s what I want to tap into, is that part of them. They’re going, why am I doing any of it?

Gosh, I think about, I talked to our students here at Summit about beauty. It’s one of my favorite things to talk about, and we work with it, we define it, and we even address the part of it that is mysterious because part of the question of beauty is wrapped up in us. So it’s going to be a bit of a mystery to us. But what we come out of that presentation with, because I call the presentation Beauty: The Art of War, which is a weird title.

Dr. Jeff Myers (16:55):
That is a weird title.

Megan Almon (16:56):
I like it.

Dr. Jeff Myers (16:57):
Yeah, I’m intrigued.

Megan Almon (16:58):
I had to think about, I’ll tell you about the opening of it, that I had to come up with, because I was sitting here thinking when I was asked to develop it, how do I talk about beauty to 16-year-old boys? They’re going to be like, are we going to talk about floral arrangement? I’m just not here for that.

Dr. Jeff Myers (17:12):
Let’s start by talking about how to take a shower.

Megan Almon (17:15):
Right?

Dr. Jeff Myers (17:16):
Or something. So yes, so you’ve, you’ve got to wrap the audience into it.

Megan Almon (17:21):
But that one, what we come out in understanding is that beauty, because the Christian worldview has room for it. And even the mystery part of it, the things that don’t quite make sense to us, the fact that when we encounter true beauty, it doesn’t just bring us pleasure, it hurts us.

(17:39):
And it awakens that longing that C. S. Lewis talks about in The Weight of Glory. And others have talked about it very, very well also. But when we are intentional in our day-to-day lives to cultivate it, and I make that a very broad thing. So I’m no longer talking specifically about beauty as proportion and unity of forming content and all these things like Aquinas would, but more the idea of living beautiful lives. Living faithful lives.

So you as a dad, when you would go about the day and you are doing these things and you didn’t have to, but you do them faithfully. When a friend comes over and I pull real mugs out of the cabinet and we sit down for coffee when my husband works on this Volkswagen Beetle, that was part of our Summit virtual program this year that they named Roscoe, 1970 Volkswagen Beetle. He’s been, oh, hours and hours. But anyway.

Dr. Jeff Myers (18:32):
I actually did a lecture sitting in the car, driving around Garden of the Gods.

Megan Almon (18:37):
People thought they were filming some crazy movie, which I mean, it’s Manitou Springs.

Dr. Jeff Myers (18:43):
Oh, it was fun. It was so much fun to see people’s reactions. And there’s something about a beetle that brings out all sorts of memories. But anyway.

Megan Almon (18:51):
No, it’s just he’s bringing order to something that was broken. He’s repaired it. I talk about feasting, when we feast together, when we eat a meal together, which is a big part of semester and a big part of our summer program, that they eat together, home-cooked food from scratch when we do that. And we didn’t have to. We are cultivating these beautiful lives. Dorothy Sayers said that Jesus had a daily beauty that makes us look ugly. So tapping into, what does that mean? I think that infuses our day-to-day things, because when we do those things, we are pushing back the dark.

Andrew Peterson wrote about that in Adorning the Dark. We are pushing back, we’re fighting back. We’re making a declaration of war against all that is broken in the world, and Christians are uniquely suited to be able to do that. Human beings have great dignity, whether they believe in God or not, in virtue of being made in the image of God. I mean, it’s wonderful to see and watch, and we have artists who live here locally and all of that. But I think that for the Christian, there’s this infusion into even the little things that gives them this eternal meaning because these little acts echo in eternity because of our significance.

(20:09):
And that’s a powerful thing to get a hold of. And I think that when we’re talking about any of these topics with students, with anyone, really, I ask what the end game is. Because most of the time the answer is something like, I want to live an ideal human existence. So we have in bioethics all the questions about how we can attain immortality on our own.

(20:32):
Or how we can enhance ourselves so that we can be better than we are. These types of questions that Christians need to be part of these conversations badly. Because there’s good there and there’s evil. All these questions even in our question about is our identity based on our sexual identity or something greater than that? All of this stuff, I want to know what the end game is. And it typically has to do with living a life that is meaningful, living a human existence that has some kind of residue to it, some grounding to it. That makes sense.

And I often wonder, just like in the garden, when we dethrone God and we put ourselves on the throne and we start recreating ourselves as humans, the problem is that we’ll never get that because whatever we recreate won’t be human anymore. The abolition of man. So that beauty question, and I think just infuses great meaning. And if we can have conversations that look like that and tap into that, we have such a better story to tell about the world and about ourselves and about other people.

Dr. Jeff Myers (21:37):
Yeah, there’s so many aspects to what you just said that I’m still mulling over. I was even thinking about, I know, seriously. But even the scientific aspect of it. Robert Grassi, who was the guy at the Oxford University professor who sort of got modern science kicked off, he focused a lot on light. That light was this creation of God.

We sometimes assume that God knew the difference between light and dark, but we don’t often think when he said, let there be light. That literally was, that’s a scientific pronouncement, but light then is at the root of enabling us to grasp our world and understand beauty. So you can’t even really wake up and go about your day without encountering some aspect of God. That is really profound. I mean, if flight comes into your eyes.

Megan Almon (22:42):
So I just went, because we’re like springboarding off each other here. This is what happens when you pitch people like this in a room together. I just, I was listening to the philosopher Peter Kreeft to talk about Blaise Pascal. And Blaise Pascal, who was a contemporary of Rene Descartes, was watching what was happening. And Kreeft says that Pascal was probably a bit of a skeptic himself, which maybe made him see more than others. He was sensitive to it. But Descartes in his great project was trying to do the same thing with philosophy that had been done with science. Let’s start by doubting everything. Let’s make it very efficient.

And so the problem with that is that philosophy needs a floodlight. The Christian worldview is a floodlight, and you see the things in relation to all the other things. And Descartes was suggesting, let’s turn that into a laser beam. And I’ve heard you talk a little bit before about when you talk about worldviews and introduce students to worldviews about, what would it be like to look through a keyhole and try and see, rather than open the whole door? Something that, and I think that when we have these, we’re trying to be efficient. We’re trying to make it work on our own, but we need the floodlight.

Dr. Jeff Myers (23:53):
Yeah, that’s really good. I love this. Well, tell us when you, let’s say somebody says to you, alright, Megan, and make your case cool. Make your case for a Christian worldview. You mentioned this earlier. It’s not just do you believe it and do you find it interesting, but why should I believe it? That’s sort of the question that people are asking. And on your website, you just give a little breakdown, something that any of us can remember. So I’m looking forward to hearing this, just making a bear of an argument.

Megan Almon (24:27):
B-E-A-R. B-E-A-R.

Dr. Jeff Myers (24:30):
So walk us through that because we’ve got enough time, and this is going to be such a great way to conclude the show. We can all walk away from this and think, I’m really prepared for any conversation that might happen.

Megan Almon (24:46):
Yeah. Well, flying without my condensed notes, we’ll just do this. We can do this. The bear of an argument. I need those things to remember. I need hooks to hang things on. And so I love acronyms because it helps. It’s selfish, it helps me. It is interesting.

This happened in a school, a Catholic school in New Jersey. I was there giving a pro-life case. There was an exchange student from China who was fascinated by the pro-life apologetic, which did not draw on theology, but wound up there ultimately in the Q and A. And she said, this is interesting to me. Why should I consider Christianity?

And I went to the one thing because Paul said, it’s the one thing in 1 Corinthians 15. If this didn’t happen, this historical event didn’t happen, then we are of all people most to be pitied. So this is drawn upon the work of people like Gary Habermas and William Lane Craig, who have developed this kind of minimal facts argument.

What their project was, was to take all of the facts surrounding the resurrection, and there are hundreds, if not thousands of facts surrounding the resurrection and boil them down to the ones that even the toughest critics of Christianity would accept as historical fact. So we have four. There are some resurrection scholars who would use fewer than this even, but I like these to go with. Okay.

Dr. Jeff Myers (26:05):
So let me back up for just a second.

Megan Almon (26:07):
Sure.

Dr. Jeff Myers (26:08):
If somebody asks, why should I consider Christianity in a word?

Megan Almon (26:12):
It’s testable.

Dr. Jeff Myers (26:13):
The resurrection of Jesus Christ. It’s testable. So the word resurrection is going to be, that’s where we’re going to go with this.

Megan Almon (26:19):
Yes.

Dr. Jeff Myers (26:20):
And Habermas says it’s the most historically provable fact in all of ancient history. Now, you could read all of his books, but summarize for us where you go with it. The bear.

Megan Almon (26:30):
Alright, so the B in the bear stands for the burial of Christ, which implies that he died. So we know that Jesus was executed on a Roman cross in a very graphic way. He was scoured prior to his execution, put to death by professional executioners. The Romans had perfected crucifixion. I know I’ve heard you talk about this. They could speed it up, they could slow it down. They turned it into an art form in a grotesque way.

And so Jesus was crucified, died and was buried in the tomb of Joseph of Arimathea, which is what our historical sources tell us. Which was weird because even for the gospel accounts to say that Joseph of Arimathea was part of the ruling party that had just condemned him to death. It would’ve been an embarrassing thing to include, but they did. The account itself is very, very simple, excellent reasons to believe it. But Jesus died. He was buried. That’s the B.

And so we look at that and we go, okay, that’s one that we can count on. We know that Jesus was buried. We move to the E. The E is the empty tomb. And I’ve heard Dr. William Lane Craig talk about this. He talks about the fact that historians get really excited when they find two different sources that corroborate on the same detail.

Dr. Jeff Myers (27:49):
Yes.

Megan Almon (27:50):
Yeah. We have six on the empty tomb.

Dr. Jeff Myers (27:52):
Wow.

Megan Almon (27:52):
It’s like historical pay dirt. So the empty tomb, the fact that Jesus, three days later, the women went to the tomb and discovered that it was empty. Now, all of this, again, simple account, it’s not embellished, which as a former journalist, I can tell you that that’s something that if it’s embellished, you’re kind of like, okay.

Dr. Jeff Myers (28:13):
You can tell in the way it’s written or the way people talk about it.

Megan Almon (28:16):
Oh yeah. Yeah. I mean, there’s things like when I’m thinking the gospel of, is it the gospel of Peter or something like that? One of the ones that weren’t included in the cannon when the New Testament was put together, but it has these crazy details. It talks about floating heads and the giant cross going into the sky.

(28:35):
And so this is a simple account which would lend itself to its credibility, but also the fact that it was the women who found the tomb that’s in every gospel account. That’s weird because women were second class citizens for good or for not. Jesus didn’t view them that way, but the patriarchal society that was Rome in the first century did. So for the apostles to be telling these accounts and talking about them would’ve been strange for them to include that if they were trying to embellish.

Dr. Jeff Myers (29:05):
Right. You wouldn’t have people identify the empty tomb who could not testify to that fact in court.

Megan Almon (29:11):
Exactly. So it lends itself to the truthfulness. That’s just probably what happened. The women found it. The A in bear stands for the appearances. So post-resurrection appearances of Jesus, we know that he appeared not just to individuals but to entire groups.

When we look at the first Corinthians 15 account, he talks about the fact that he appeared to the 12, which there were 11 then. But the 12 disciples, they called them the 12. He appeared to James, he appeared to Paul himself, and he appeared to more than 500 witnesses that Paul even says in that part of the scripture, go ask them. He says, some of them have fallen asleep, which as an aside is just lovely that he would talk about death that way, but the rest of them are there.

It was his kind of, don’t take my word for it. Go talk to the witnesses themselves. This is testable. It was something people could have investigated themselves and have our J. Warner Wallace and others even since then. So the appearances.

And then finally the rise of Christianity, the R, something has to explain that Christianity caught on like wildfire in a hostile environment, that 12 largely uneducated men turned an entire empire on its ear. And the fact that they were talking about things that weren’t what they believed prior to the resurrection.

(30:37):
And when I read the scriptures, it took me a while to go back through and do this. I had a pastor bring it up and say, go read. They did not understand what was going to happen. Jesus was trying to tell them, but they were expecting the Messiah to be a military conqueror who would overthrow Rome so that the Jews wouldn’t be the oppressed people anymore. That’s what they thought. But the kind of Messiah that Peter started talking about at Pentecost was not that, not a victorious conqueror of an empire, but the son of God who conquered sin and death, which is not something they thought prior.

So whatever happened brought these men out of hiding after their leader had been taken away to be crucified, which by the way meant wiped from the face of history altogether. That’s what crucifixion meant for those who were taken. It was the ultimate embarrassment. Jesus didn’t, he wasn’t forgotten. I mean, I’ll quote Peter craved again. He split history open like a coconut.

Dr. Jeff Myers (31:33):
Wow.

Megan Almon (31:34):
That’s what he did. Not forgotten. Remembered forever. So something happened that changed. Not only the disciples who all went to their deaths proclaiming this truth, but not only them, but James, his half brother. I asked the students, when I do this, I believe I learned this from Dr. Craig as well. What would it take for you to believe that your brother was the son of the living God? And they all laugh. They’re like, no way, but rising from the dead, that might do it.

(32:05):
So James was the leader of the Jerusalem church, one of the earliest martyrs for the faith. And then Paul himself, who as Saul sought Christians out to end their lives, to squash this whole movement. And on the road to Damascus had this conversion experience, this radical thing happened to him, to where he became someone who no longer introduced himself with all of his credentials. Like Paul had all the PhDs. He was Pharisee, Roman citizen, expert of the Torah, all these things in good with all the uppers, the leaders of the day.

And he went from being that guy to the guy who said, I Paul, slave of Christ Jesus. Because to him, that was the ultimate status. And he said things like the guy who had been shipwrecked three times and beaten and stoned and lashed, and who knows what else, list them all. But he would say things like from prison, rejoice. Again, I say rejoice. He stood in front of the leaders of the known world at that time, the highest ranked people, and said essentially to them, you can do whatever you wish with me, but you will never have me.

(33:19):
There is something about that. And the martyrs of the first century, you think about people like Perpetua, the Roman woman who died in the arena reportedly smiling. You can read her diary. Not that she wrote that part, but we have that historical account, just powerful stuff. It gives me chills to talk about it.

Dr. Jeff Myers (33:41):
So it’s the upside down kingdom. It’s the opposite of what people expected.

Megan Almon (33:46):
Yes.

Dr. Jeff Myers (33:46):
And in turn, you look at the profound impact of people in the course of history who believed that Jesus was the truth and not to take away from other people who worked super hard on their art or their inventions.

Megan Almon (34:05):
No, it was their scientific great dignity that brought that about, I think something about them.

Dr. Jeff Myers (34:09):
Right? Yes. Yeah. That they didn’t set out to be the best scientists or artists. They just lived in the firm conviction that Jesus really was the truth. And the world changed as a result. Yes. That’s incredible.

Megan Almon (34:24):
It is.

Dr. Jeff Myers (34:25):
So the burial of Christ.

Megan Almon (34:27):
Christ was buried.

Dr. Jeff Myers (34:28):
The empty tomb, the appearances, and…

Megan Almon (34:32):
The rise.

Dr. Jeff Myers (34:32):
The rise.

Megan Almon (34:34):
Of Christianity. Christianity spread like wildfire. And the thing about the bear is, so that gives us four facts to work with. Again, Michael Laona, I think does it with two. So that would be another resource. He was a student of Habermas, and he’s spoken at Summit, I believe before. The thing about it is when we look at other explanations that have come through the channels of history, things like the disciples stole the body, which is in the book of Matthew. It was the first thing that the guards were paid to say, the disciples stole the body.

When we look at other explanations like the swoon theory, a naturalistic attempt to explain a way that Jesus rose from the dead. He didn’t really die. He just passed out. Even things like the hallucination hypothesis that all these people who claim to have seen him, they really just hallucinated. Those explanations don’t even cover the scope of those four facts. Much less do they do it in a compelling way, which is the necessary ingredient for any good detective novel or TV show. You got to cover all the facts and you got to do it in a way that makes sense.

Dr. Jeff Myers (35:40):
So this is something that people could take home today and run that by members of their family even. Okay, listen, this is something that I learned today. Let me run this by you and see what you think and you can practice it. Then as the opportunity arises in conversations, I guess we’re fortunate because you and your family live here in Manitou Springs, Colorado.

I come to work, I live in Colorado Springs now, but come to work here every day and spiritual conversations are pretty normal here. People are maybe new age spiritual, but they’re spiritual. They like to talk about the things that they’re experiencing in the spiritual realm. I don’t know if that’s, that’s probably not the experience of most people who are watching this or listening to this.

Megan Almon (36:37):
No, I am from Georgia, so I grew up in the Bible Belt South, which had so much good to it. I miss the south in a lot of ways. But doing evangelism to use that, just talking to people about my faith in the South was different because it was such a cultural thing to at least be nominally Christian trip. And I used to joke about the fact that we talk to people and it’s like they got a Jesus vaccine. They got exposed to just enough so they’re immune to the real thing.

Dr. Jeff Myers (37:06):
Right?

Megan Almon (37:07):
And so it was a different way of reaching people, but here the conversations do go a little differently and people aren’t surprised to hear that you’re a Christian. They’re just kind of like, oh, that’s great for you. So they’re just not that interested.

Dr. Jeff Myers (37:21):
So here you’re saying, let me give you something to think about you might not have considered.

Megan Almon (37:25):
Yes.

Dr. Jeff Myers (37:25):
Whereas in other places in your previous home in Georgia, it might be, if this is really true, shouldn’t this change us?

Megan Almon (37:33):
Yes. Shouldn’t it do something? That was Dorothy Sayer’s problem in mid 20th century Great Britain. She was considered very subversive because the dogmas teachings of the church were being touted as old hat or boring. So the progressivism of her day was where she was really trying to shock people with the teachings themselves going, you’re not paying attention. They didn’t put Jesus to death because he was a bore. They did it in the name of peace and quiet. So her writings are wonderful.

But yeah, I think something different today. We all have, those of us who follow Christ have our testimony, we have our experience, and that is a valuable thing to share when you can pair that with reasons that other people can then grapple with on their own like this. And that’s the beauty of apologetics as a tool, an effective tool that helps them see what they weren’t before able to see and maybe take a step in that.

Dr. Jeff Myers (38:35):
Yeah, this is really fun. This is just delightful to have the conversation, and I know that on your website you’ve talked about Daniel in Babylon, and so it’s your sense that we’re actually in Babylon really, that we’re living in captivity, so to speak.

Megan Almon (38:58):
In exile.

Dr. Jeff Myers (38:58):
Exile. So the kind of approach that we need to have to our society is?

Megan Almon (39:07):
Oh, I can sum that one up pretty quickly.

Dr. Jeff Myers (39:09):
Yeah.

Megan Almon (39:10):
I would point you to, because my favorite resource for that book was John C. Lennox. He wrote the book about Daniel, I think it’s called Against the Flow, and it is basically a commentary on the book of Daniel. This talk came out of something I had prepared for a pregnancy resource center banquet. I wanted them to see, how do we do this with the culture that we have on this issue of abortion?

Though much broader than that on our faith, Daniel, as a young man, chose to engage. He could have chosen anything entering those ishtar gates of Babylon, like the gates with the golden animals etched into them. I think there’s a copy of them in the British Museum, and I think about him coming from where he came from and being taken from his family. I mean, there’s something about Daniel that frustrates me because as a mom, I want the commentary from his parents. What did you teach him? That he did these things? And his friends, they’re like, I want to give in your small group and do dinner at your house.

But Daniel could have chosen to give in. He could have chosen to give up. He could have chosen any of those things. And as this young young man, 16 or so scholars think, I don’t know the exact age he chose to engage, there was something about the residue, the foundation that his parents had passed onto him, that he set apart Christ as holy.

(40:36):
And even going into this environment, he wasn’t going to back down from that. The second thing that he did was that he learned the language and the literature of the culture, which was actually Nebuchadnezzar’s military genius when he conquered as areas that Babylonian King would take the best and brightest to basically kind of like the Harvard of Babylon and teach them the literature and the language of the culture. He actually changed the names of Daniel and his friends as we read in the book. He was trying to take their identity from them.

(41:10):
He wanted their names to be forgotten, but we don’t remember his Babylonian name. We speak the name Daniel. He mastered the language in the literature to where he was able to use their poets and their stories and point them to the larger story. And so that’s interesting. I think sometimes as Christians, we shy from the language and literature of our culture, and probably rightly we shouldn’t ingest a lot of that.

(41:35):
Some of it’s pretty frightening, but to know the stories and the songs is a good thing. I think it was Andrew Fletcher, the Scottish theologian. Was he a theologian? I know he was a politician, but he said, paraphrase, tell me who writes the lyrics of your nation. And I don’t care who writes its laws. John Stonestreet tells us the storytellers drive the culture. Third thing he did, he and his friends, is they chose to lock their knees when the music played.

Dr. Jeff Myers (42:02):
Wow.

Megan Almon (42:04):
And ultimately, that’s what we do. And they stood in front of Nebuchadnezzar and they said, oh, there is a God who can save us, but even if he doesn’t, and I could just start crying, even if he doesn’t, we will not bow. And of course then he showed up in a big way in the fire and Nebuchadnezzar was brought to his knees.

Dr. Jeff Myers (42:28):
Wow. That’s a great point. So we want to engage, not escape. A culture of silence is no good. A culture of fear is no good.

Megan Almon (42:39):
No.

Dr. Jeff Myers (42:41):
And this needs to start now.

Megan Almon (42:43):
Yes.

Dr. Jeff Myers (42:43):
So everybody who’s watching or listening to this, we want to pray with you and for you that God will bother you with opportunities to come out of your shell and be bold and share Christ with others in the culture in which we live. Megan, thanks so much for being on the show today.

Megan Almon (43:05):
Thank you.

Dr. Jeff Myers (43:06):
Thank you to my guest, Megan Almon, for joining the Dr. Jeff Show podcast. Today you can find Megan’s training materials, especially some of the things she talked about today, at prolifetraining.com. Now, Megan’s work is supported through the generosity of donors, and a lot of people have asked, how can I make a difference on a life issue? This might be a way to do it. If you go to prolifetraining.com, you can click donate, and then click on Megan’s name, and then you can give a donation.

If you are interested in doing that, and I know many of you are, Psalm 145 says, our generation shall praise your works to another and shall declare your mighty acts. I encourage you to be like Megan, be that sort of person who everybody wants to talk to, and then be that person in your generation who lives by the grace of God and displays the grace of God. Thanks for joining the show today. We’ll see you next week.

Listeners, I want you to know that our podcast is on Edifi, which is a truly powerful app that brings together thousands of the best Christian podcasts in one place for your listening enjoyment. You can download it at edifi.app. Be sure to share the show if you have enjoyed listening to it and leave a review if you would, on the site where you download the show that helps more people know about the Dr. Jeff Show, and I’ll look forward to seeing you next week.