The Dr. Jeff Show Ep. 88 – Dr. Jeff and Gary Schneeberger Part 2.

Episode 88: 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

This interview is the second part of a conversation between guest host and journalist Gary Schneeberger and the podcast’s regular host, Dr. Jeff Myers. The discussion centers on Dr. Jeff’s new book, Truth Changes Everything. He first distinguishes between objective, universal “Truth” (capital T) and subjective, individual “truths” (lowercase t).

Dr. Jeff then provides a chapter-by-chapter overview of his book, arguing that Christians, motivated by a belief in capital-T Truth, were historically responsible for profoundly positive changes in the world. He details their impact on valuing human life, establishing healthcare, promoting education for the masses, driving the scientific revolution, shaping the arts, founding representative government, creating justice systems, and defining modern concepts of work. The interview concludes with Dr. Jeff explaining how to discuss these truths kindly and effectively and encouraging listeners to purchase the book to help spread its message.

Episode Transcript

Dr. Jeff Myers (00:02):
Welcome back to the Dr. Jeff Show podcast. This show’s available on Apple, Google, Spotify, Edifi, Liftable, wherever you get your podcasts. Have you gone to those platforms yet and given it a positive review? I hope that you will. That really does make a difference. Boy, as soon as reviews start coming in, people start seeing the podcast more and more, and we can communicate the truth because truth changes everything. And that’s what we’re talking about in this continuation of last week’s episode.

My friend Gary Schneeberger, who’s a journalist, is here to interview me in kind of a weird turnabout for the Dr. Jeff Show podcast so we can talk about the nature of truth. And in this episode, it’s just story after story after story of amazing people from history who change the world. But the truth is they’re just like you and me, and we can do the same thing. In this episode, you’ll hear how.

Gary Schneeberger (00:53):
Well, welcome to this episode of the Dr. Jeff shows with our guest, Dr. Jeff himself. Dr. Jeff Myers, thank you again for being here, I guess, right?

Dr. Jeff Myers (01:04):
Gary, yeah. Thank you. Thanks. And I appreciate you being on the show. It’s fun to have a conversation with a journalist to talk about something that’s really top of mind for me right now, which is this new book called Truth Changes Everything.

Gary Schneeberger (01:16):
Yep. And that’s what we talked about in part one. We established what truth is, how it differs from truths, lowercase t, s on the end. And that is the prevailing wind in culture, that truths perspective. And I was really moved by a key point in that tug of war between the two different, the truth and truths that you mentioned a few times in the book. That those who believe that truth is out there and those who believe it’s in here. By way of catching folks up if they didn’t hear the first episode, can you unpack the differences between those two perspectives out there and in here?

Dr. Jeff Myers (02:00):
Yeah. Well, we do want truths that are objectively out there in the world to be in our hearts. In other words, we recognize their importance. But truth is objectively true. That is, it is knowable. These categories of meaning exist independent of our ability to perceive them, and they exist whether we’re paying attention or not, or even when we’re deceiving ourselves about their importance.

And this won’t surprise any Christians because the apostle Paul told his disciple Timothy, that evil people and imposters will become worse, deceiving others and themselves. We sometimes deceive ourselves from being able to see the truth, but it’s still there. It still exists. So that’s the idea of capital-T Truth.

Small-t truth says that if truth exists objectively, it’s not knowable by us, it’s our understanding. So all we have are our perceptions, the words we’re using don’t describe anything. They’re just words, right? So we would then say, truth is up to the individual. There’s no truth out there that exists that can be discovered by us and change the course of our lives, not to mention the course of history.

Gary Schneeberger (03:23):
Perfect segue, you’ve done this kind of stuff before because that’s the major meat of Truth Changes Everything, is how historically truth has done just that.

Dr. Jeff Myers (03:34):
Yes.

Gary Schneeberger (03:35):
You cover in eight chapters how Christians motivated by Capital-T truth have changed the world in key areas of life. So let’s go through those chapter by chapter point by point because there’s a richness in the stories you tell. Eyes will be opened by these stories and people will get an idea of how they can walk in the footsteps of those who have come before. And it really is, I got a lot out of that. It motivated me. Again, not just want to, as we said in the first episode, not just have it in my head and my heart, but put it in my feet. So let’s start with how Jesus followers changed how we value human life. How has that occurred?

Dr. Jeff Myers (04:31):
This is one of my favorite, well, they’re all my favorite, right?

Gary Schneeberger (04:35):
It’s like kids, right? You can’t pick the favorite one.

Dr. Jeff Myers (04:36):
I have eight favorite children in this book, but how humans value life. So we all have this sense that life has value. Ronald Reagan, one time, put it this way. If you were going down the highway and you saw a bag, you wouldn’t try to run it over if you thought there might be something living inside of it. We just have this sense that no life has value, life is meaningful, we can’t just dispense with it. But where did that idea come from? In college, I was taught that, oh, well, it’s democracy. That’s where it came from. And democracy came from the Greeks and Romans.

But it turns out, and I read about this in the book, that Greece and Rome were haughty elite driven cultures. If you were a majority culture property owning male, you had rights. If you weren’t, you didn’t. If you are a woman, a child, a slave, a non-property owning poor person, no rights for you. Well then all of a sudden, a few years ago, this French philosopher who’s an atheist named Luke Ferry, wrote a book called A Brief History of Thought. In chapter one of the book, he said, it is to Christianity that we owe our democratic inheritance.

(05:58):
He says, look, I wish this weren’t true. I’m telling you as an atheist, but it was not the Greeks and Romans who did it. It was the Christians. And here was the distinction. He said, Christians started with the idea that every human being is an image bearer of God, that when you’re with another person, you are with someone who bears God’s image. And then later Christians went even further than this and they said, if you are with another person, you’re actually with Jesus because that’s where Jesus is.

So for instance, Catherine of Sienna, who a lot of Protestant listeners might not be that familiar with her. Catholic listeners, probably more familiar. She had a series of visions and she wrote out things that were essentially, they were from scripture, but they were her sort of applying, this is Jesus speaking kind of thing. And she said, if you want to be where Jesus is, then you go to the suffering. Why? Because Jesus is with the suffering. If you want to sit with Jesus, you sit with the suffering because that’s where Jesus is.

(07:10):
Think about how that simple thing changed the whole understanding of what it means to be human. Every person’s life has value, not just those who’ve done something extraordinary with their lives. That came from Christianity. And then it developed into an understanding of the biblical concept that’s presented all throughout scripture that really hadn’t made its way into society a lot and been applied rigorously and philosophically until the work of Thomas Aquinas.

So he was a brilliant philosopher, wrote some books. I mean, if you try to put them all end to end, it would be that big on the shelf. It would be probably two and a half feet of books, millions of words. And he based his whole philosophy on the idea that human beings have souls. We are not just bodies. There are two parts of us. They’re intertwined together. Our bodies and our souls, we have souls because of that, we have a particular kind of value and we know that we have souls.

This is where Aquinas’s work has been verified now by a lot of philosophers and scientists since that time because they recognize things. Some simple things like our value are continuous. You don’t stop being Gary just because you’re getting older.

Gary Schneeberger (08:30):
Right?

Dr. Jeff Myers (08:31):
I’m sorry to tell you you’re getting older.

Gary Schneeberger (08:32):
It feels like it sometimes though.

Dr. Jeff Myers (08:35):
You can’t go to court and say, well, I’m not the Gary that committed that crime because all the cells in my body have now been replaced. Your substance is continuous. If you have your appendix cut out, you’re not less of Gary than you were before. So we have a physical substance, we have a continuous physical substance, and then we have an awareness of things.

Animals have desires, but they don’t desire to have desires. Animals have a purpose, but they don’t have purpose seemings. They don’t purpose to have purposes. They don’t have an awareness that they have an awareness. Human beings have all of these things and it sets us apart and it’s unique. And it came from people like Catherine of Sienna and Thomas Aquinas who led us to understand that if you want to properly apply the Bible, you have to treat every human being as if they have value.

Gary Schneeberger (09:32):
Wow. Well, that is favorite child number one, favorite child. Number two, you discuss how Jesus followers have changed how we care for one another. And one of the things that I found fascinating about the book is you talk about it here as an impetus for this, but you talk about it in other chapters too, and the Bubonic Plague is a turning point for this. So how have Jesus followers changed how we care for one another?

Dr. Jeff Myers (10:01):
Yeah. If you ever think we must live in the times of the worst crisis ever to befall the world, I want you to think back to the 1300s and read some of the stories of what happened during the Black Death, during the Bubonic Plague. I tell the story in the book and how it actually came about and how it began to spread. But the horrifying nature of it is that in many European cities, and it’s hard to know what happened in other places around the world where we didn’t have written records.

(10:33):
But in European cities where there were a lot of written records, a third to a half of the population died in the most gruesome way imaginable. If you were in that situation and you had medical skill, you might be of a higher class, you would have financial resources, you would get out, you would escape, you would run away. And that’s what happened.

Anybody who had the financial ability to flee, fled, so who’s there remaining to care for the sick and the dying? And it turned out it was religious people. They were the ones who said, no, Jesus is here with the suffering. If I try to leave them, I’m leaving Jesus. So they wanted to stay. They also believed that all of those people’s lives had value. They had souls.

(11:27):
And they needed to be sat with. They needed someone to be a witness to their pain. They needed someone to be able to give them eternal hope. All of those things led pastors and other religious workers, priests and nuns to be able to stay behind. The death rate among those in the ministry was far higher than the death rate of the average people in the population because they moved toward the sickness rather than away from it. And Gary, that established a tradition of caring for people. If human beings don’t have value, then why would you care for them? Only if it benefits the rest of society to do so.

But these religious institutions, and still today, people live in towns where the hospital’s called Baptist Hospital. Why is it called Baptist or Presbyterian or Methodist or Adventist or whatever it happens to be? It’s the hospital of St. Francis. Well, that’s Catholic. So why would these different religious groups have hospitals? That doesn’t make any sense. I mean, they should have churches, not hospitals, but they started hospitals because they believed that there is a convergence of the soul and the body.

(12:43):
And if you want to care well for the soul, you also care well for the body. And if you want to care well for the body, you also want to care well for the soul. You have both to do at the same time. After the Black Plague, you had this incredible time of the civil government having collapsed. If half the people in your city die, that means the mayor probably died too. And all of these different people, so civil government collapsed.

What remained? The church. Why? Because they were there. They stayed there, and then they began to develop practices of health. So for instance, we talk about the idea of a quarantine. Quarantine means 40 days. Where did it come from? People looked back in the Bible and said the most significant things happened in 40s. Jesus was in the wilderness for 40 days.

(13:36):
The flood, it was 40 days and 40 nights, those kinds of things. They said 40 days and in fact turned out to be the number of days that you need to have somebody in isolation to make sure that they don’t spread disease. That came about through the church. What also came about through the church were sanitation systems and all kinds of things that were really incredible in establishing healthcare.

Now, I had to deal with a couple of things in the book, and you’ll have to read this and see what you think if you’re listening to the broadcast right now, there were a lot of times where people said, oh, it was Christians that hampered medical care. They hampered the development of science.

So for instance, if you were to look at a website about dissection, it almost certainly will say something like it was Christians who kept dissection from taking place because they didn’t believe that bodies should be taken apart. They believed the body was holy, and therefore they hampered medical progress by hundreds of years. Totally false. Completely false. It didn’t happen that way. I prove it in the book. And by the way, this book has 500 footnotes that go along with it because I want to be sure.

Gary Schneeberger (14:55):
There’s like 25 pages of footnotes.

Dr. Jeff Myers (14:57):
Yeah, I want to be absolutely sure that people know that this is well-documented evidence. This isn’t just me saying, hey, this is true by secular historians, that it was Christians like William Harvey for example, who said, I think we need to do some dissection. We need to understand the body. We need to understand the vascular system. And that led to a whole process of being able to develop medical care as we understand it today.

Gary Schneeberger (15:27):
Is it safe to say that witnessing human suffering has historically brought out the best in believers? Is that accurate to say? Because you write, charitable acts are a way to emulate Jesus in the book, which made me think of that. Is that safe to say, human suffering has brought out the best in us?

Dr. Jeff Myers (15:48):
I would say human suffering, if we respond to it in a godly way, brings out the best in us human suffering. If people aren’t tutored well, to understand God’s nature and character can actually lead to even more suffering because people then just protect themselves. It’s survival of the fittest. If you take on a you first rather than a me first mindset, then suffering brings out the best, and that’s what happened, and that’s what happened through the Black Plague. If there was ever a time Gary, where you would think people would abandon God, God has clearly abandoned us, we are going to abandon him. That would’ve been it.

But that isn’t what happened. Instead they said, no, Jesus is right here suffering with us. That gave them the courage to move on and to press forward, to make advances in sanitation and in civil government and in economic structures, and in art, and in science and all of these other areas. I think it was a point of departure that changed the whole course of the world.

Gary Schneeberger (16:58):
Yeah, it’s always interesting to interview someone who is him or herself, a podcast host, because you’ve just basically asked my next question, or you gave me an on-ramp to my next question, and that is you also discuss how Jesus followers have changed how we care for one another. How have they done that?

Dr. Jeff Myers (17:17):
Yeah. Well, the whole idea of compassion comes from the recognition that every human being bears the image of God. That caring for the body and the soul of other people is what brings dignity to us as well as to those other people, and that this is what Jesus would have us do. So the very first hospital was established by basal, they called it the Basia.

And you look all the way through Christian history and you realize, well, even to this day, a huge percentage of the hospitals in the country, in our country, in the United States of America were started by religious groups. And a huge percentage of the hospitals that weren’t started by religious groups were started by people who had a motivation to respond to God by caring for the bodies and the souls of other people.

Gary Schneeberger (18:09):
On page 87 in the, here’s the book, Truth Changes Everything. On page 87, there’s a fascinating list of data points that you write on this subject of how Christians care for one another. And I’m just going to read some of the things you say that are just fascinating. You write that 73% of addiction treatment programs in America have a spiritually based element. They’re largely run by volunteers for 130,000 religious congregations.

Then you say these in kind of the fast money round here, you say US voluntary giving to overseas poor now totals $44 billion, which is more money than the United States Federal government, which is only 33 billion. You say religious Americans adopt children at two and a half times the national rate. You say the bulk of volunteers mentoring prisoners and their families are Christians.

And what that for me did is created, I have a sister who’s an atheist. I have my best friend who is an atheist. And as you talk about engaging with folks like that, these kinds of data points that are factual, not feeling based, are great ways to have conversations to point out not how great I am as a Christian, but how great Christians have been in creating goodness, how truth has changed everything. When I read this book, my number one feeling, Dr. Jeff was this is a research library and how to engage with non-believers and talk about the truth of the faith.

Dr. Jeff Myers (20:08):
Yeah, yeah. Christians still do this. So Christians get a bad rap, but not because the facts are being presented, but because the facts are being ignored. In the course of the presentation right now, Brian Graham and Melissa Graham, who are both scholars, found that if you add up all of this, $2.67 trillion a year in economic value through Christian charity, 2.67 trillion a year. Now, I don’t remember what the whole economy in the United States is worth every year, but that’s probably somewhere between 10 and 20% of the value of the entire economy comes from Christian charity. And this is before one single computer or car or loaf of bread is sold.

Gary Schneeberger (20:56):
Yeah, I mean, that is again, an incredible, this book is an incredible research library to talk about the impact that Christians and Christianity has had upon culture historically and still today. One of those areas, another of your favorite children, you discuss how Jesus followers have changed how we learn and grow. How?

Dr. Jeff Myers (21:17):
The idea of education starts with the value of a human person. Why would you bother to educate them if they didn’t really have inherent value or if you didn’t believe that they could be educated? Well, it starts off with the nature of a human being.

So I start the chapter by telling a story, which is, I think it’s really fun. There’s a researcher named Herbert Terrace. He had heard this MIT professor Nom Chomsky talk about, oh, human beings are different. Human beings are different from other animals. And he thought, that can’t be because if human beings are different from other animals, then how do we explain human evolution?

So we’ve got to be able to show the linkage between humans and say other higher primates. So he got a chimpanzee and trained it in sign language and in mockery, he named it Nim Chimpsky instead of Noam Chomsky named it Nim Chimpsky. Well, Nim was very bright, an eager learner, lots of M&Ms involved, and he learned more than 100 words in sign language.

So Terrace was just about to publish all these results to authoritatively refute Noam Chomsky and all of those who believe there’s something qualitatively different about human beings from other animals. And he decided to one last time go back and review the videos. And he discovered to his horror that when Nim Chimpsky used these signs as a chimpanzee, that he was using them in imitation of the trainers.

Gary Schneeberger (22:54):
Right? He wasn’t actually communicating on his own.

Dr. Jeff Myers (22:57):
He wasn’t actually communicating. He was imitating them because good things happened for him. More M and Ms came if he imitated them. Mortimer Adler wrote about this kind of research later as a philosopher who spent most of his life as an atheist and became a Christian only much later in life. But even before he became a believer, he said, we have taught the chimpanzees to communicate only to realize they have nothing to say. So human beings on the other hand, are hardwired to learn.

(23:30):
Babies from the moment they come out of the womb try to imitate, turn taking in communication, you talk to a little baby and you notice them moving their mouth, they’re imitating you. They’re learning the idea of communication, but there’s something already going on inside. They are hardwired to learn and grow.

So it was Christians who decided long, long ago that education for the masses should be of high value. It’s not just something for the elites. It isn’t just something for the economic or religious elite because most people, if you look back at the history of society, those are the only people who got education. No education should be for the common person. And a lot of this happened because of people like John Wycliffe.

John Wycliffe was a professor at Oxford University. He wanted to translate the Bible into English, but this simply was not done, not only because you might get killed if you did it, you might be executed, but the reason people were being executed for translating the Bible into English is because they had been taught all of their lives that Latin was the finest language ever invented.

If you take something from Latin, this very fine language and put it into English, this unrefined language, that would be sort of like developing a good poem and then inserting a vulgar word every third or fourth word. You just wouldn’t do that. That would be horrific. That would be dishonoring to God to do it. But Wycliffe made this argument. Moses heard from God in his own language. The disciples heard from Jesus in their own language. People today need to be able to hear from God in their own language.

(25:16):
But English as a standardized language did not exist. So he created it. He actually invented 1,100 words in English, including the word wordy, which I think is hysterical. Yeah, that is. He invented these words in order to be able to produce the Bible in English. As a result of the Bible being in English, English as a language became standardized, the standardized English language then became the number one trade language in the world. From that time until now, it has been the number one trade language in the world. Quite literally. The entire world was able to communicate because one man risked execution to translate the Bible from Latin into English.

Gary Schneeberger (26:13):
There is a great example of truth changing everything, everything right there. You also discuss in another chapter how Jesus followers have changed the world of science, and this is a big one, I think given the culture’s view that science and faith are in opposition. It’s another one for the research library to hold winsome conversations with nonbelievers, and on page 112 is an example of that.

Dr. Jeff Myers (26:40):
Look how many pages you have turned down there. You’re more thorough.

Gary Schneeberger (26:43):
I know. I’m about to charge you for the ink in my pen that I use for underline and all this stuff.

Dr. Jeff Myers (26:49):
You might actually do better on the test than I.

Gary Schneeberger (26:52):
You say on page 112 and this idea of how Jesus followers have changed the world of science, you say this fascinating statistic when people say there’s no science and religion are antithetical to each other. You say this according to historians, sorry, according to historian and sociologist Rodney Stark, of the 52 active scientists who made the most significant contributions during the scientific revolution, only one was an atheist.

Dr. Jeff Myers (27:26):
Yeah, only one. Edward Halley.

Gary Schneeberger (27:28):
Yeah. I mean that is not a case of science and the Christian faith in particular being at odds, right?

Dr. Jeff Myers (27:35):
Yeah. Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sachs was a very famous public intellectual Jewish leader in the city of London, passed away a couple of years ago, said, science takes things apart to see how they work. Religion puts things together to see what they mean.

(27:54):
And it’s a helpful quote that makes us recognize that faith and science are not at odds. In fact, everything that we take for granted to be good about science finds its origin in these people of faith. Well, why? Why would you study the world if the world wasn’t orderly? If you did an experiment at time A and an experiment at time B, how could you even be sure you’re doing the experiment in the same world? This wouldn’t have happened in Greece. They debated, can you even step in the same river twice? There’s no permanence to reality. It’s all of those kinds of things.

And these people said, no, there’s design. There’s a moral order, and there is a physical order to things. And that design comes about because there is a designer, the designer has seen fit to withhold from us an explanation of everything. Why? Because he wants us to seek it out.

So through time, about seven different principles developed of science that are consistent with, and in most cases only derivable from an understanding of the world as it is revealed in the holy scriptures, that’s how science actually developed, and it’s still that way. John Lennox from Oxford University said that two thirds of the people who’ve ever won the Nobel Prize in science put Christian as their affiliation. The top 15 universities in the entire world were all started as Christian institutions. Most of them were started actually as monasteries to train priests.

Gary Schneeberger (29:35):
There’s no question. This is factually backed up in your book. This is not a glib meme on social media, right? This isn’t someone’s opinion that goes into a glib meme. This is documented historical fact.

Dr. Jeff Myers (29:49):
Yeah. Some of the stories are super interesting to me. The founder of Modern chemistry, Robert Boyle, grew up as a very privileged child. His family lived in a castle that had been built by King John, was sold to the family by Sir Walter Raleigh. It’s a very large piece of property and a very large house. By the way, you can still rent it. You could still rent it for a hundred thousand, hundred week thousand dollars a week. Yeah, a hundred thousand dollars a week.

It’s possible that he could have just become a trust fund baby. He could have been a spoiled brat running around town, drinking with his friends, wearing brightly colored clothes and wasting his life. But he decided that as an experimental philosopher, he was obligated to pursue an understanding of the physical world because God made it and it brings honor and glory to God. And how do we know He thought this? Because he actually wrote a devotional book called the Christian Virtuoso, and the whole book is about how to be an experimental philosopher, which was his name for scientist back in the day, who honors God and does great work.

Gary Schneeberger (31:01):
Another one of your favorite children is the chapter on how Jesus followers have changed the arts. How have they done that?

Dr. Jeff Myers (31:11):
Well so, first of all, you start to understand when you look at the history of the arts, that beauty isn’t just our description of the physical world based on our personal preferences, but it’s actually something that exists. So beauty’s real beauty isn’t just an appearance of the physical world, it’s actually part of the physical world.

(31:32):
So as I was studying this, I came across, of course, you probably have seen the video about the male flame bowerbird in New Guinea. This is the one who, he lays up all of these pebbles and bottle caps and whatever he can find to make a little pathway into his bower, and he makes a forced perspective that if you’re following it visually, you have to follow it right to the bower. So he sits there in his bower, and then when a female approaches, he comes out and does a really elaborate dance for her to try to attract her as a mate.

None of this has survival value. It’s really bothered ornithologists because they say the only reason anything would ever happen in nature is because it somehow makes it more likely for you to be successful in sexual reproduction or daily survival. I quote from an ornithologist from Yale University who says sometimes the outcomes are just decadent, which is his way of saying you can’t explain it from an evolutionary viewpoint. Its beauty just is.

(32:33):
So humans take the idea of beauty and then we turn it into art. We turn it into things that are meaningful. There are a couple of specific ways that you see this. One is in architecture. So a lot of people have been very fascinated by going to visit old cathedrals. We find them to be very beautiful. They bring us to a point of silence and a point of reverence to God, and when you go into a cathedral, your eyes are drawn up toward God. You sense that somehow the space, it’s not a place to put a statue about God like Artemis or whatever.

(33:08):
But God is present in this place, and the way everything is used demonstrates that even the layout of a cathedral had a teaching aspect to it. If you were to see an old cathedral from the top, it looks like a cross, and that’s on purpose. So you come in at the foot of the cross, you sit where Jesus’ body would’ve been on the cross. You are the body of Christ. You’re listening to the minister who represents the head of the church, which, and he teaches from where the head of Jesus would’ve been on the cross.

And then at the end of the service, you depart once again out at the foot of the cross to become the feat of those who spread the good news. So architecture before books were very popular. Architecture is the way people communicated their ideas. People also communicated their ideas through sculpture and through painting and through music. And so some of the stories I tell in the book are just about amazing people who really changed the whole course of the world in terms of the arts because they started with a belief that Jesus is the truth.

Gary Schneeberger (34:21):
Right? You also discuss how Jesus followers have changed. What’s the big one today, right? With an election approaching some argue that Christians have helped make politics more divisive, but in the long view of history, that is not true at all, is it?

Dr. Jeff Myers (34:40):
No. This was one chapter I was a little bit nervous to write about. I can imagine because people, they go to church or they say, ah, I don’t want to go to church. It’s just a bunch of red state right wing Republicans or whatever, and they’re just going to try to use Jesus to get their political figures elected to office and so they can gain power and Lord it over the rest of us. I don’t find a lot of evidence that that’s actually what’s happening. I think it’s more of a criticism that people have that gives them an excuse for not engaging with spiritual truth.

But nonetheless, I understand why they would say it, because if Jesus is the same thing as a political party, then you’ve limited the work of Christ in the world Scripture when the Apostle Paul talks about, so we speak the truth with gentleness, why perhaps God will grant them repentance, leading them to a knowledge of the truth. Then they may come to their senses and escape the trap of the devil who has taken them captive to do his will.

That we always ought to have that hope that people who don’t respond to God’s truth will now, in a nation where our citizenship viewpoints matter, because we are the rulers in this country, in the United States of America, we don’t get a choice. If you want to obey God, you must be a good citizen because the apostle Paul in Romans 13 says, obey the ruling authorities.

(36:20):
Who are the ruling authorities? Abraham Lincoln said, we have government of the people by the people and for the people, you are him, you are her, you are it. This is us altogether. So where did we get that idea? I just tell a whole bunch of stories going all the way back into, especially into the middle ages of how we even got to the place where representative government could be a legitimate thing.

One of the stories I tell in the book is of Samuel Rutherford, who was a Scottish pastor, and he wrote a book that really upset all of the people who were in charge, and it was so simple. The book was called Lex Rex, L-E-X-R-E-X in Latin. That means law is king. Now, why did it upset the people in authority? Because the king did not believe that the law was the king. The king believed that the king was the law.

Gary Schneeberger (37:17):
Okay, right.

Dr. Jeff Myers (37:17):
So whatever the king does, whatever is automatically right, whatever the king says is automatically right. Rutherford was saying, Nope, the king has to respond to the law. Well, the book, by the way, the title’s really awesome and cool, right? Just six letters, Lex Rex, the subtitle is 136 words. It’s all written out on the cover of the book, but you see from the argument he makes inside the book, his point is that the king is not sovereign. Overall. The king is an heir of Adam. Yes, but so are all the rest of us, right?

Well, the king at the time, Charles II did not like hearing this. He was upset. He sent his soldiers to arrest Samuel Rutherford, bring him to Parliament, put him on trial, give him a fair trial, and then hang him. That was kind of how he was going to handle it. Soldiers went to get Samuel Rutherford. He rather rudely died before they arrived, and his dying words were, I have been summoned by a higher authority. Wow.

Well, the cat was out of the bag at that point. Yeah, the king could no longer say that he was the law. People understood, nope, the king has to obey the law just as much as the rest of that became part of the founder’s motivation in the United States of America for developing representative government. So trace it back. Of the 56 individuals who signed the Declaration of Independence, 51, possibly 53 of them were members of a Christian denomination.

Gary Schneeberger (38:50):
I’m going to cross off one of the questions I was going to ask you because you just answered it.

Dr. Jeff Myers (38:52):
Being a member of a Christian denomination does not make you a Christian. I think we can all agree on that.

Gary Schneeberger (39:00):
Right?

Dr. Jeff Myers (39:01):
But it did shape where they turned for good information about how to build a good nation. Donald Lotts is a political scientist who examined 15,000 documents related to America’s founding, and he discovered that the founders of the United States of America quoted from the Bible more than all of the other sources put together.

What were they doing? Not just coming up with a verse here or there to justify their particular viewpoint. They were actually looking back to try to discover what was involved in the development of the Hebrew Republic. Now, this blows a lot of people away and it undid about a third of my political science major from college. The Hebrews were not establishing a theocracy. They were establishing a republic.

(39:54):
So Christians get this criticism all the time. If you put Christians in charge, they’re going to turn it into a theocracy and they’re going to oppress everyone else and they’re going to be the third inquisition. The Hebrews established a Republican form of government. They had representation, they had courts. They had a very advanced legal system, and the founders wanted to know, how do we take something like that and put it into place in America so we can create a self-healing, self-governing form of securing the rights of people?

So the takeaway for us today is don’t forget the government does not give you your rights. The government at best secures the rights that are given to you by God. And if you decide that government is awesome and you want it to be bigger, just keep in mind a government that is big enough to give you everything you want is big enough to take everything you have.

Gary Schneeberger (40:54):
Excellent insight as the guest host. I’m mindful that we want to end, to land the plane here on time. So I’m going to move quickly if I can here, but we want to get through the last two chapters that you talk about. You discussed how Jesus followers have changed the pursuit of justice. How have they done that?

Dr. Jeff Myers (41:15):
This goes back to a lot of what we’re talking about with the founders establishing a justice system. Now, there are two kinds of rights that we would talk about in government. We would have negative rights and positive rights. Negative rights would be things that the government does that keep the government from trampling on the rights of people. Positive rights would be things that are the government acting in such a way as to make sure that people’s rights are preserved.

So positive rights would be things like establishing a highway system that the government pays for using tax dollars because we’re all going to use it. Negative rights would be making sure that the government cannot use a trial system that tramples on your rights. There has to be a government of your peers or a jury of your peers. You have to have a speedy trial. You have to know what the accusations are. You have to be allowed to not testify against yourself and so forth.

Okay, so where did that whole idea of justice come from? And it goes all the way back to biblical times. Really honestly. It goes back to the writings of Moses. That was the most advanced system of rights, judicial rights, possible.

(42:44):
People will quote things from the Bible and say, well, the Bible says that if a parent finds that their son is rebellious, that they can take him to the authorities and get him judged and then they can stone him. And they say, well, that’s so rude. That’s so mean. Why would you do that? And they skip over, what really is at the heart of that whole system? They don’t get to have an honor killing and kill him themselves. They have to take him to court and have a proper judgment passed.

Now, there’s no record that anyone ever, any son was actually ever stoned to death for disobedience. But people skip over that. Oh, there was a court system in place. You had to have a proper judgment. You could not have a person condemned to death without the presence of two witnesses. So that whole legal system then developed into something today that helps us maintain order and justice in our own society.

Gary Schneeberger (43:40):
Yeah. This is a good time just to interject this point, that the way you end each chapter is with a section called What Should We Do Now? And you give four or five things for today’s Christians, us to sort of walk in the footsteps of those who came before. And I single out this one because the first point you make in the chapter on the pursuit of justice is the first point is Start with God. And really you could extrapolate out that that’s a great place to start on all of these, right?

Dr. Jeff Myers (44:13):
Sure.

Gary Schneeberger (44:15):
Alright. The final chapter you discussed is about how Jesus followers have changed the way we work. What happened?

Dr. Jeff Myers (44:25):
Most people aren’t very happy at work. I have a job that I really enjoy. You have a job that you enjoy, but most people are not in that situation. 70 to 80% of people are not engaged at work and they feel very uncomfortable with the way their lives are going. To be honest, they’re not all that satisfied or happy, but there is a biblical understanding of work that we work as unto the Lord and not unto ourselves.

Well, where did the apostles get that idea? They went all the way back to Genesis chapter 2. The Lord put the man in the garden to work it and to keep it. That was before the fall. So there are really three things happening here. Work and then risk and then rest. Okay? You’ve got to be willing to work hard, but then you have to be willing to take risks as well. That nothing good happens without you making some kind of an effort, taking a chance.

And then rest is a significant part of it too, that rest at the end of the days of Creation, scripture says that God rested from his work. Why? Surely not because he had a need to rest, wasn’t tired. Why? Because he is establishing a pattern that we rest from our work.

(45:54):
So all of those things actually come from a biblical understanding. Even the idea of a seven day week. You ever thought about that? Because you have a year. A year as the earth goes all the way around the sun, one time a day, the Earth makes one complete revolution. What about a week that’s not in nature. The idea of a week, seven day week exists in the mind of God.

By the way, atheist societies in history have tried to change that disaster every time. Whether they try to have a 10 day week like in the French Revolution or a five day week like in the Soviet Union, total disaster didn’t work, that God has arranged it so that we have a day of rest, one day out of every seven that exists in the mind of God, and it became the basis of the way we work today.

Gary Schneeberger (46:37):
Yeah, there’s a couple more areas that I want to get to really quickly. There’s a next step chapter where you talk about how to tell the truth and be nice at the same time. There are some people that don’t think you need to be nice at all. You can tell the truth, truth, speak it boldly and you can speak in any way you want. Just quickly, since we’re hitting on time here, why is that important?

Dr. Jeff Myers (47:00):
Maybe nice is not the best word. Maybe a more biblical word would be kind to speak the truth and be kind at the same time. But the basic way you do that is through dialogue. You just learn to talk. You ask questions. Here’s what’s weird. If you’re in a university campus, you’re probably one of the most intellectually shut down places in the world. You cannot say what you think without incurring some kind of social harm, some sort of shaming or punishment, Christians to be the ones to open the conversation. Back up. So I teach my students at Summit Ministries five conversation altering words. Tell me more about that.

(47:38):
Why do you say what you say? How do you define the terms that you are using? How did you arrive at that conclusion? How do you know that’s true? All of those sorts of questions open the conversation back up. And it turns out when you do that, most people, 19 out of 20 is my best guess. 19 out of 20 people respond by being willing to open up and talk with you about what they think. Then you’re in a position to gently instruct in the hope that God will grant them repentance, leading them to a knowledge of the truth.

Gary Schneeberger (48:11):
Right now, look at you. As we’re getting to time, you answered both of my questions, my last two questions with one answer because I was going to touch on, and I’ll say this to listeners, you end the book with 14 ways of speaking up personally in a way that builds trust. And that’s one of the ones that you just talked about there.

Dr. Jeff Myers (48:29):
That’s right. Yeah, that’s the first one. What I’d love to see happen from this is folks to go get the book, and you can buy, you can get it at summit.org of course from Summit Ministries. It’s actually helpful. That’s another question? Honestly, I was not looking at your list.

Gary Schneeberger (48:49):
I know. That’s awesome.

Dr. Jeff Myers (48:53):
Amazon.com, if you buy the book there, it moves it up on the sales charts and when it moves up the sales charts, the algorithms automatically begin to promote it more. If 100 people heard this show and went to Amazon and bought Truth Changes Everything, it would turn it into a number one bestseller in its category, at least for one day. And that changes the algorithms and allows more and more people to see it.

So I’d love for folks to go get it. Go figure out your five best friends from college and send it to them at their house and just say, let’s have a discussion about it. Let’s read the book and talk about it. Don’t have to agree with everything, but we want to be thinking and talking about truth capital T.

Gary Schneeberger (49:43):
Yeah, and I know that you say that about rises up the bestseller charts, not so that Dr. Jeff Myers can be a bestselling author in that sense. You say it because you want to get this book.

Dr. Jeff Myers (49:52):
This message is true. Well, look, I get, none of that money comes to me, so if a hundred people buy it, I think I actually don’t make anything. I might make a dollar, something like that. Yeah.

Gary Schneeberger (50:08):
So that’s important to know. You want to get this book in the hands, the minds, hearts and feet of people who read it.

Dr. Jeff Myers (50:12):
I want it to get out there. If this message is true, then we want to get it out to as many people as possible.

Gary Schneeberger (50:20):
Well, Dr. Jeff Myers, thank you for being a guest on the Dr. Jeff Show. And truly thank you.

Dr. Jeff Myers (50:26):
This is the most fun I’ve ever had being a guest on my show. Yeah, thank you.

Gary Schneeberger (50:29):
Thank you for giving me the chance to step in and guest host this for you. And one thing I want to say, if you’re listening to this listener on a podcast app and you’re not watching on YouTube, watching on YouTube because there’s something I’ve seen in this entire time. We spent an hour and a half over two episodes. There’s joy all over your face as you talk about these things. You’re not only authentic and knowledgeable, but there’s joy here.

And I think when we started out how you wanted to do this, because if this is the last thing I ever wrote, what do I want it to be? And I can see, I pray none of us knows our last days. I pray that is not the last thing you’ve ever written, but the joy about what you’ve written is contagious. So thank you.

Dr. Jeff Myers (51:16):
Yeah, I’m so glad to hear that. I just want people to be filled with hope. We are in a time of crisis, but there is never a better time than a time of crisis to communicate the truth. Amen. Well, I hope you’ve enjoyed the last two episodes, talking about the book Truth Changes Everything. I want to say thank you to Gary Schneeberger, the journalist, for coming on and helping me articulate the message in the book as a guest host for the Dr. Jeff Show podcast. 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.