Ep. 243 Mike Cosper - The Church in Dark Times Resisting the Lure of Ideology

Mike Cosper
You can find all these examples, particularly inside kind of the church growth movement, where people said, hey, if we can just solve this problem, then we can reach the city, reach The world, change the world, et cetera, et cetera.

Mike Cosper
Contrast that with the book of Job, where God shows up in the book of Job and he’s like, hey, look at the ostrich. Can you figure that out? Because you can’t. Right. Like and that’s the beauty of God’s whole dialogue in the book of Job. Like and I mean, I am so enamored with the book of Job. I could talk about this for a long time. But so throughout the book of Job, his friends are saying, you’re a moral failure. And that’s why these bad things have happened. And you should be more humble before God. And he is saying, I haven’t done anything to deserve any of this. And when God shows up, God’s going to explain all of it to me. So then God shows up and God says, I’m not explaining Jack to you. You don’t even understand a waterfall. You don’t understand a windstorm. You can’t comprehend an ostrich. So you should be humbled before me. The end result of God’s dialogue with Job is that Job is satisfied. That’s enough for him. Like, I’m going to be silent before the mystery of the world. And so on the one hand, I think like that’s an insight into kind of the answer to the ideology question, because Job

Mike Cosper
And that’s why these bad things have happened. And you should be more humble before God. And he is saying, I haven’t done anything to deserve any of this. And when God shows up, God’s going to explain all of it to me. So then God shows up and God says, I’m not explaining Jack to you. You don’t even understand a waterfall. You don’t understand a windstorm. You can’t comprehend an ostrich. So you should be humbled before me. The end result of God’s dialogue with Job is that Job is satisfied. That’s enough for him. Like, I’m going to be silent before the mystery of the world. And so on the one hand, I think like that’s an insight into kind of the answer to the ideology question, because Job recognizes like there’s not some simple explanation for all of this. Like, I’m not going to comprehend. I thought there was when God showed up. He wowed me with wonder and mystery, and I’m going to be silent before him. But there’s another layer to it that I think is really, really important, which is that when God then reckons with Job’s friends, he tells Job’s friends, Job’s righteous and you’re Not. And Job’s friends who had this simple explanation of, you must have done something to deserve this and you should be humble before God and all the rest of it. He doesn’t call Job to make sacrifices to reconcile to himself. He calls Job’s friends to do it, to reconcile with Job and with God. So it’s like the indictment of the book of Job is that Job’s friends end up having to make these sacrifices and everything else to reconcile with God and Job. So there really is this thing of like, man, there’s just this massive landscape of sort of mystery, confusion. I’m going to overwhelm you with creatures and imagery and stories that just don’t make sense and if and if you can be content before that and go okay you’re job but but if the flip side of That is like the the contrast to that is his who said, there’s a very simple, rational, moral structure to this whole creation. And clearly you brought this suffering upon yourself. They’re the ones that have to make sacrifices and apologize. Anyway, that’s a very long answer to your ideology question. But I do think it’s like a fascinating deconstruction of ideology because it’s like the Bible just goes, no,

Mike Cosper
And so on the one hand, I think like that’s an insight into kind of the answer to the ideology question, because Job recognizes like there’s not some simple explanation for all of this. Like, I’m not going to comprehend. I thought there was when God showed up. He wowed me with wonder and mystery, and I’m going to be silent before him. But there’s another layer to it that I think is really, really important, which is that when God then reckons with Job’s friends, he tells Job’s friends, Job’s righteous and you’re Not. And Job’s friends who had this simple explanation of, you must have done something to deserve this and you should be humble before God and all the rest of it. He doesn’t call Job to make sacrifices to reconcile to himself. He calls Job’s friends to do it, to reconcile with Job and with God. So it’s like the indictment of the book of Job is that Job’s friends end up having to make these sacrifices and everything else to reconcile with God and Job. So there really is this thing of like, man, there’s just this massive landscape of sort of mystery, confusion. I’m going to overwhelm you with creatures and imagery and stories

Mike Cosper
And she sees this guy and he’s in the booth at the trial. And there’s all this drama going on around him. She’s very critical of the trial. She feels like they’ve mismanaged the trial significantly because they’ve kind of tried to turn this guy into a monster. And she’s like, and then you look at him and he talks in cliches and he talks in stock phrases and he spends as much time trying to kind of talk about the successes and advances of his own Career as he does actually answering the questions of anything else and and what she sees in Eichmann and I think she’s right I mean what she sees in Eichmann is she sees this is this like Careerist buffoon and it just so happened that the opportunity that was set in front of him was to be an anti-Semite murderer of Jews in order to advance himself inside this institution. And so what emerges for her then is kind of this new theory of evil where she goes, this isn’t radical evil. This isn’t some monstrous thing, transcendent concept of evil from beyond that’s incomprehensible. It’s empty. It’s hollow. There’s nothing there. This is a guy who’s an empty shell who would say whatever it took for him to advance his career. And,

Mike Cosper
And so what emerges for her then is kind of this new theory of evil where she goes, this isn’t radical evil. This isn’t some monstrous thing, transcendent concept of evil from beyond that’s incomprehensible. It’s empty. It’s hollow. There’s nothing there. This is a guy who’s an empty shell who would say whatever it took for him to advance his career. And, and what I think is really important about her theory. And when I, part of the reason why I think she’s so right, it’s like, you, you look at, you look at Christian tradition around evil and over and over again, it kind of comes back to this idea That like evil is emptiness. It’s the absence of God. It’s the, the absence of a moral vision. And so, so when she talks about the banality of evil as being this sort of emptiness, which ends up getting filled by this careerist buffoon who talks and talk stock phrases and everything Else, it’s like, that makes a whole lot of sense when you understand Genesis three and beyond as a, as a world in which it’s not even that people are sort of actively motivated to like fly In the face of God. It’s that they’re, they’re actively motivated to prove their own value and worth with that world without God. It’s about the emptiness else. That’s what makes her vision so compelling

Mike Cosper
The way Arendt defines thinking that, again, I think it’s just so interesting is she says, thinking is a dialogue between two people, me and myself. And so what it is, is, and what’s wild is like, I mean, you know this, right? We live in this moment where we are so inundated with information and messaging and text messages and social media messages and the feeds and the emails

Mike Cosper
And they’ve got to figure out how do I bear witness in the position God has put me in? I think there’s something corrupting for people in those positions. On the one hand, that tempts them to sort of become grandiose. And like, I made a whole podcast about what that looks like, right? But I think there’s also a temptation on the flip side of it that tempts them to go, I mean, it’s almost like, I don’t know, maybe the best metaphor for it is to hide their light under a bushel, Right? And say, yeah, God’s put me in this position. I’m the head of my department at this big university, or I’m a partner at a legal firm, or I’m a principal at a high school or whatever, but I’m going to sit in this position and not talk about My faith or certainly not express that my faith informs how I do what I do. That’s very tempting. That’s very comfortable. It’s especially comfortable for Christians who are made uncomfortable by kind of the political, social, cultural environment that’s emerged with the candidacy of Trump.