Trevin Wax – The Thrill of Orthodoxy & the Beauty of the Christian Faith

Episode 107: Summary & Transcript

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

Episode Summary

In this episode of the Dr. Jeff Show podcast, host Dr. Jeff interviews Trevin Wax, a Summit Ministries graduate who has taught at Wheaton College and Oxford University, and is the author of several books including his latest, The Thrill of Orthodoxy. Wax reflects on how his Summit experience in 1999 taught him critical thinking skills and showed him how the Bible applies to all areas of life. The conversation centers on the concept that orthodox Christian faith should be thrilling rather than stale, exploring how Christianity uniquely combines both inclusivity (in its worldwide call to faith) and exclusivity (in its claim that Jesus is the only way to God)—a powerful combination that transformed the Roman Empire.

Wax addresses the current trend of faith deconstruction, encouraging listeners to distinguish between removing unhealthy elements in the church while preserving foundational truths, emphasizing that this discernment comes through understanding global and historical Christianity. He concludes with a challenge for younger generations to take responsibility for rebuilding and reconstructing the church rather than simply criticizing it, creating a vision that gives both personal purpose and a unified sense of mission.

Episode Transcript

Dr. Jeff Myers (00:02):
Hey everyone. Welcome to the Dr. Jeff Show podcast. It’s available on Apple, Google, Spotify, Edifi, Liftable, or wherever you get your podcast. If you’d like to show, please take a moment to review it on your favorite platform that lets more people know about these interviews with these great guests who are major thought leaders showing how our worldview changes everything.

So my guest today has taught courses on mission and ministry at Wheaton College, has lectured in Christianity and culture at Oxford University. He’s a founding editor of the Gospel Project, a regular contributor to the Gospel Coalition and author of many books including The Multidimensional Leader, Rethink Yourself, This Is Our Time, and Gospel Centered Teaching. Today he’s joining me to discuss his latest book, The Thrill of Orthodoxy. Summit Ministries graduate, Trevin Wax. Please welcome him to the show. Trevin Wax, welcome to the Dr. Jeff Show podcast.

Trevin Wax (00:55):
So glad to be with you. Thanks for having me on.

Dr. Jeff Myers (00:57):
Well, I’ve been looking forward to this conversation for some time. I love your writing, I love your books. I love the thinking that you do, but I want everybody to know you are also a 1999 Summit Ministries graduate.

Trevin Wax (01:11):
That is right. That’s right. I went to Summit, it was the summer after I graduated high school, and it was a really formative experience for me. It was like a crash course in worldview, and I gleaned a ton and I’ve told people, multiple people after that have asked, how was Summit influential in your life? And I said, I think what Summit did was it gave me the tools to think more critically about the world, about messages. I would hear about all sorts of things. A lot of Christian education is teaching people what to think. Summit helped me really learn how to think.

And so I’ve told people, even if I come to some different conclusions on different things, having studied now since then and been around the world in different places and whatnot, then necessarily everything that Summit would say, I recommend the experience because I’m like, this is a great place to go and have your mind fed and stretched and to learn what it looks like for us to try to take the Bible and apply it to the world we see.

Dr. Jeff Myers (02:24):
I think that’s a great word for the parents and grandparents who are listening to this show who have the opportunity, even this coming summer, to get a young person involved. I was just with a group and they said, what’s the difference? Why does Summit have that kind of impact? Because we go to camp, we go to camp every summer and camp is really fun. I think it’s a valuable experience because it changes how you feel about God, but at Summit, something more seems to happen where it changes how you see everything else because of your understanding of your faith.

Trevin Wax (03:00):
That’s so true, and I still remember at the little bookstore there in Colorado in Manitou Springs where I’ve got the very addition of C. S. Lewis’s Miracles that I bought from that store, which was a mind stretching read for me at the time. It was. I can still remember some of the conversations and some of the professors and some of the things that we went over.

And also what you take away from it is that the Bible really does have something to say about all of life and Christians are wrestling through how do we apply the Bible to the world that we live in, and what does the Bible say about all sorts of, there’s no area that’s off limits from the sovereignty and majesty of God.

Dr. Jeff Myers (03:46):
Yeah, amen. I love it. Well, that leads into the conversation that I’m looking forward to having with you today. We’re kind of basing this on a book that you’ve written called The Thrill of Orthodoxy, and I’d love the title because I think it’s probably the first time the word thrill and the word orthodoxy were ever used in the same sentence.

Trevin Wax (04:09):
Probably, and unfortunately it should be more common than it is. I wanted that title, I pushed for that title because I thought this juxtaposition of words is unusual, but it shouldn’t be. It really shouldn’t be. I go back to Dorothy Sayers who had an amazing essay in which she talked about the dogma of Christianity being the drama of life, and a lot of people in her day were saying, the problem with these churches is they’re just all about dry dogma and they’re not about experience and reality or whatnot.

And she said, no, no, no, no. She said, the boring dullness that you find in many churches is because they have lost sight of the drama of the dogma that they claim to be believing in and promoting. And I feel that that resonates with me so strongly, and as someone who’s been very influenced also by GK Chesterton, who I think more than a century ago, really did an amazing job in his book Orthodoxy of showing the paradoxical marvels that are at the heart of the faith. That’s really what I wanted to come out in this book.

Dr. Jeff Myers (05:21):
Trevin, when a lot of people hear the word orthodoxy, I guess my mind turns toward Russian Orthodox or Eastern Orthodox, something like that. They don’t see the aliveness of their faith in that, so we probably should define that term. What counts as orthodoxy?

Trevin Wax (05:42):
That was a question I knew I was going to have to deal with early on when writing the book. You can’t write a book and not define the term. No, we’re not talking about, specifically about, Eastern Orthodoxy in those different traditions. We’re not talking about Roman Catholicism or we’re not talking about even what would constitute little orthodoxy for different denominations that Baptist Orthodoxy versus Presbyterian orthodoxy or things like that.

What I wanted to really make the focus of this book, the goal was to have a mere Christianity kind of feel in which I was able to say, look, if you go back to the ecumenical creeds, to the main statements of faith that virtually all Christians everywhere have confessed for more than a thousand years now, the Apostles Creed, the ING creed, the Athan nation creed, what you find there is a core, it’s a Trinitarian core of the faith that all branches of the church, whether Catholic, Protestant, orthodox, say, yes, we believe that, and I wanted to land there.

Now I’m writing this as an evangelical Protestant and I realize that the way I’m addressing this is not the way that a Catholic or an Orthodox scholar would recognize it, but I’m hoping that even friends and other traditions would be able to read this and glean a lot of goodness from it because there is that common core, the trunk of the tree, so to speak, that is where the roots go down really deep. And I really wanted that to be that idea of what has been believed by Christians everywhere, always, and by all. That’s what I wanted to be the focus. And so that’s the main thrust of the book when we talk about orthodoxy.

Dr. Jeff Myers (07:22):
Now, there are different aspects of Christian belief that would be believed by other religions. I suppose a lot of Hindus believe in God, people who are Muslim, believe in the virgin birth, people who are Mormon believe in the resurrection. So you’ve got some of these things that different traditions believe in. But the Trinity, starting with the Trinity as a Christian distinctive that would separate Christianity from even Judaism, sort of our parent faith. But talk a little bit about what some of those key components of orthodoxy are. What are the things without which a person could not reasonably be called a Christian?

Trevin Wax (08:10):
Yeah, that’s a great question. I mean, obviously at the very center of all of this is the gospel that you’ve got God, the Father sending his son to live the perfect life in our place, die on the cross for our sins, be raised from the dead to launch God’s new creation and then be exalted as king of the world. And now through the work of the spirit, people are brought to repentance and faith in that message.

So the gospel is at the core, Jesus dying on the cross for us being raised to new life and us being able to participate in his death and resurrection through the work that we do together or through the work that he has done that we then participate in and then through the outflow be able to do good works in his name. So I think that’s ultimately foundational at the core.

(08:57):
But what’s interesting, if you go back to the creedal statements, that Trinitarian core that we’re talking about, there are lots of different churches and denominations that have different confessions that fill in the details as to what it looks like. But those creeds tend to be very concise and they tend to be very focused on who God is and what God has done. So it’s like this is God, this is what he’s done. And some of them go into great detail about, this is who Jesus Christ is. When we say that he is 100% God, 100%, man, this is what we mean.

And they go into detail like that, the confessions come along and it’s like they build on the scaffolding of the creeds and they fill in the blueprint, so to speak, with additional details that different denominations and churches will say, we believe those things. Yes, but in building on that, this is kind of how we put all this together.

So I think creeds are important, confessions are also important, but that line of Trinitarian orthodoxy is foundational. It is what separates Christianity from everything else. There’s nothing else that’s like it. And so that’s why when we go back to what makes Christianity distinctive, we have to go with our vision of who God is and what he has done.

Dr. Jeff Myers (10:12):
Yeah, I’d like to focus on the creeds as part of that because probably a lot of people who are watching or listening to the show, maybe even recite a creed that’s possible that they do that as part of their worship each week. The Apostles Creed is the core statement of faith for Summit Ministries. All of our employees are familiar with the Apostles Creed and they all agree to it, our board members, our instructors and so forth.

We also have an additional, we have our own confessions. We have an additional statement of convictions is what we call it, of things that we believe and teach without. We could disagree on some of those things and be Christians, but to be part of Summit Ministries, we want to be sure that you have those convictions at the core convictions about marriage, about God.

(11:03):
About the nature of even our economic life, things like that. But let’s talk about the creeds for a minute because I was sort of taught, I didn’t go to seminary. I went through three universities, two of which were completely secular, one of which was Denominationally affiliated. But in my classes, as far as my experience was concerned, it was secular. And I was given the impression that these creeds were developed by people who were trying to put themselves at the center of the church.

In other words, we’re going to make these statements and we’re going to make everybody else agree with them or else we’re going to call them heretics, that there was some sort of a coercive aspect to it. And I’d love for you to just talk about that for a moment because I think we missed the organic nature of how carefully scripture was considered in putting these statements together and who did it and why.

Trevin Wax (12:01):
Yeah, I think that’s a great point. What’s interesting, if you look at the development of the councils that led to the creeds and where the creeds have come from, I mean the Apostles Creed is a famous example. It didn’t come out of a council. It actually came out of baptismal rites. This is what Christians were confessing when they were baptized, the beliefs that they were saying, this is what I believe. There are variations and differences.

The old Roman creed is where it generally comes from. The Nicene creed is the most famous statement, the most famous creed in history. Or you could say it’s the Nicene constant noble creed because the one that we use is from 381 and not 325, but the basis of it started in 325, and it really was as much about worship as it was about belief. The creeds were developed as a way of saying, this is what we as Christians believe, and this is the name we confess.

(12:57):
When we confess the name of Jesus, we want to be very clear about what that means. We’re not, this isn’t just theological hair splitting. We want to get, when Jesus asks the question, who do you say that I am? It’s fundamental and foundational. We get the right answer to that question because only the real Jesus can save.

And so really what was in the balance there for the nice and creed in particular was this is the son of God on the creator side of the line or on the creature side of the line. Because even if you say he’s exalted, even if you say he’s divine in some sense or whatever you want to say, which many of the leaders at the time, there were some leaders that were saying he didn’t exist as much or he was not as great as the Father or whatnot.

(13:45):
What they were really saying was at the end of the day, the Son of God is on the creature side of that distinction. And the vast majority of Christians at the time basically we’re saying, no, no, no. We worship Jesus because this is what we see in scripture. This is who we see he is, and we are not going to diminish his glory in any way. And the coercive aspect of it is a little bit complicated because a lot of this was happening right around the time. Christianity was just getting a certain measure of freedom in society and in the Roman world, in Christianity.

I mean, there was not an emperor who had famously converted, although interestingly enough, this goes way against sort of the Da Vinci code narrative and all of that. But Constantine and his son Constantius and others, they were actually more in line with the Aryans, with the heretics at the time, not with the Orthodox, although they really weren’t necessarily putting the thumb on the scale one way or another.

(14:51):
But it is true that some of the church fathers, and if you look historically, occasionally there has been some coercion and things like that. Our history is complicated. People are messy, even heroes are flawed. And so you look back at the history and you kind of think, well, I don’t know that we would do it exactly this way then now.

Or you might look at what they were at some of the ways that it all came about, but for the most part, the idea that it was the powerful winning over the week is really not the picture. Athanasius, for example, was exiled multiple times. He was a staunch defender of orthodoxy, he was exiled because his views were so out of step with those in power at the time.

So it’s a complicated riveting story, but you’ll follow along and you’ll understand why it mattered so much. If you really get to the heart of why they cared, they cared because they believed they had to be true to the scriptures. And we’re talking about having an encounter with the living God. And I mean, what could be more important with that than that, getting that right his identity, right.

Dr. Jeff Myers (16:06):
Trevin, I want to take us into a Sunday morning. I have to say I’ve been in some dramatic times of worship, but I don’t know if I’m really honest, if I even think about a Sunday morning worship service as being in that category of drama, help me develop a mindset of when I’m experiencing times of worship with others in the body of Christ, what do I need to be prepared for? What do I need to do to prepare myself to be ready for God’s spirit, to move in a way that helps me experience what you call the thrill of orthodoxy?

I don’t know if that makes sense. There’s some services where there’s great, there’s some churches that have really tremendous deep symbolic rituals, but it’s easy to get lost in the rituals and to lose the life that’s behind it. So I need your help.

Trevin Wax (17:16):
A couple of things I would say in response to that, first, it’s great to have an expectation, but to not be disappointed if you don’t feel something thrilling in something that has become ordinary. It’s like I like to tell people when they’re doing scripture reading every day, not every day do you eat a four course meal and have a steak. You might not even remember what you ate two weeks ago today, but it sustained you, right?

So there’s a sense in which just God is working among us in the ordinary rhythms without some sort of mystical experience or thing. And C. S. Lewis would say, don’t try for that. It’s wonderful when that happens, but don’t think that somehow you’re missing out or that there’s a problem if you don’t feel that. But there are ways that we can prepare our hearts and can help ourselves to really take in what is going on. And sometimes that comes in more intensified feelings. Sometimes it just comes in the knowledge of what we’re doing may seem ordinary, but is really extraordinary.

So a few things I say about a worship service, I mean, just consider that on a Sunday morning in a small church or wherever you are, wherever you’re worshiping with, you’re not only lifting your voices voluntarily, you’ve all gathered there. You’re not only lifting your voices together with all the people in that sanctuary, but there are literally millions of people all around the world at the very same moment.

(18:42):
That are lifting voices to the same Jesus that are singing to him, that are praying, crying out to him. You are in a company of global witnesses. At the same time, you’re also confessing the same truths about Jesus, that those who have gone before us are so you have the great cloud of witnesses above us. You’ve got all the people that have gone before, great grandparents and others that were believers or even beyond that, some of the heroes of the faith that are now with the Lord. They’re all worshiping as well. You’re joining them in worship.

So even though it may not feel like anything, there’s a lot going on there. And then the other thing I like to remind people is sometimes it’s the really ordinary things that extraordinary things are happening. I tell people that we’re in the middle of a cosmic battle that may not always feel that way.

(19:33):
The world is teaming with spiritual wonders that we don’t see, but when just when we’re on our knees in morning prayer, whether we feel it or not, we are praying, we’re pressing up against that thin space between heaven and earth where we’re praying to our father, our brother is standing next to us, Jesus interceding for us, and we’re praying the spirit is excelling those words through us like you are pressed up against wonders of which you are unaware even in the very routine moment of praying.

And so we’re not going for the feeling, but I just, I’m in this book, I’m trying to help people see what it is we actually believe and reminding people of that or maybe showing it in a new way so that a little bit of that thrill comes back and that keeps us from drifting off toward new and innovative doctrines or things or practices that we think are going to suddenly make us feel that again.

Dr. Jeff Myers (20:36):
Yeah. Well, I love several aspects of what you’ve said, pressing up against that thin space that actually is bringing tears to my eyes to sense when I’ve not seen prayer life in that way, I’m missing something really powerful, but also sort of the holding of hands of saints through time and the creeds we’re talking about 1,700 years ago approximately.

And there is a connection between my generation, the previous generation, the previous generation, the previous generation, really all the way back to the time Jesus walked to the earth. And that’s something that’s significant that I am not sure a lot of people grasp when they’re thinking about the now. What am I doing in this present moment?

When the apostle Paul was talking to Timothy in second Timothy, he said, remember Jesus Christ risen from the dead and descended from David according to my gospel that, oh, I always thought those were the easy days of Bible readings. Like so-and-so. We got so-and-so. We got so-and-so. Okay, I can skip all that now I can get onto the rest of the meat, but there’s just something about that connection through history that is so powerful.

Trevin Wax (21:55):
Absolutely. Timothy George is a hero of mine, a Baptist theologian, reformation scholar. And one of the things he’s known for saying at the beginning of a church history class is says something to the effect of, listen, my job is to tell you that there are a lot of people in between Jesus and your grandmother and that they matter.

Because I do think especially in Protestant, evangelical, especially more low church denominations of which I’m a part, there can sometimes be just a sense of whatever’s new, whatever’s fresh, whatever’s innovative, the thought of all of that sort of, we don’t want to get bogged down with history. We don’t want history to be a drag on us, kind of a thing. And there are ways in which people can just live in the past and become traditionalists in a way that leads them away from the mission.

So those are always dangerous to be aware of, but I think especially in our day when the cultural winds are blowing really strongly, really strong right now, the tree has deep roots and you need to, one of the burdens I had in writing this particular book was to say there’s a lot out there that’s crazy and confusing.

(23:12):
I mean, we just went through a global pandemic. We’ve been through all, I mean the division and polarization in the country, the rise of social media, the balkanization of so many different groups, even within the church, a lot of people that are a lot closer than they probably would think, they are kind of divorcing each other over issues that are not foundational or orthodoxy necessarily. And I just thought, okay, a lot of people just don’t know what to think about everything.

And the good news is you don’t have to know Christians. I’m sure we’re getting stuff wrong in what we’re doing. Every other group has throughout history. I mean, we get some things right, something’s wrong, but here’s what I can tell you. You dig down to the bedrock of the faith that you see as summed up in the scriptures summarized by those creeds, and you plant your flag there.

(24:03):
And I’m like, I know I can plant my flag there and I know I can take my stand there. And I also have confidence that a hundred years from now, if the Lord doesn’t come back by then, a hundred years from now, Christians will be planting the flag in the same spot. There’s a lot of stuff we may be getting, maybe getting wrong, all sorts of other things, but I can take my stand there.

So you really need those roots of church history to be able to recognize, no, we come from a long line, and honestly on some of the questions related to marriage and things like that that are currently embroiling different denominations, I take a lot of confidence in the fact that it’s not just how I think the Bible, what the Bible teaches, it’s also the way that the church in an unchanging witness has read the Bible for 2000 years.

So I can look at it and just, I can say, yep, I can just take my stand here. People will say, well, you’re digging in now. I’m like, no, I’m just standing. I’m standing where we’ve always stood. And that’s I think one of the best things we can do as Christians in the world that we live in today.

Dr. Jeff Myers (25:10):
I love the picture of being deeply rooted because it’s that deeply rooted tree that actually becomes stronger when the winds blow. It learns to strengthen itself because of those deep roots.

Trevin Wax (25:24):
Yeah, that’s one of the fascinating things about heresy, and I don’t want to be misheard here. Heresy is usually, it’s not good for the church in the sense that it always ravages the church. It leaves divisions and schisms and all sorts of things. But if you’re going to look at the bright side of heresies that do arise, it leads the Orthodox to dig deeper into the faith, to have the resources to combat the heresy.

So we have a fuller and more beautiful vision of Christ today because of the way that the Orthodox had to defend the beauty of Jesus Christ when his majesty and glory was being assaulted. We have a deeper and better understanding of grace today because of the way that Augustine had to oppose Pelagius. We have a better, and I think a hundred years from now, if the Lord will tell, we will have a more defined and beautiful understanding of marriage, of maleness and femaleness of what it means to be made in the image of God, our anthropology, our doctrine of humanity.

We’ll be more filled out and beautiful because of the challenges that are arising currently to those things. It’s not that we are creating new doctrine, it’s that we are digging deeper into the deposit of faith that we’ve received and we’re unearthing new treasures that we didn’t know we needed yet that are already there, and we will have a richer understanding because of that. So if there’s one good side to all of those kinds of challenges, it’s the fact that we wind up with a more beautiful understanding of the biblical inheritance that we’ve received.

Dr. Jeff Myers (27:07):
Yeah. Well that’s great. Well, you think about any area of life where you want to develop strength. A person who goes to the gym and says, I want to get in shape, give me the lightest possible weights that I can lift is missing the whole point that there’s a heavy lift involved in growing stronger. There’s time in the desert that prepares you to be a blessing and all of that. So yeah, I think that’s really important that, boy, it’s sad that some of these movements have arisen that there are heretical things happening, but we have a choice to whether we’ll sink back to those roots.

Trevin Wax (27:48):
Absolutely. I mean, and sometimes that workout will leave you sore that you’re talking about, but hopefully it’s a good tired, it’s because you’re building up new muscles because you’re growing, you’re developing, and that’s part of, every generation faces certain challenges. I always tell people, I think some people harken for the good old days, they have a bit of nostalgia toward the past, and I look at that.

I mean, even the early church people are like, if we could just get back to the early church. And my response to that has always been, well, which one? I mean, Thessalonika had already lost the hope of resurrection, and Corinth was, I mean, they were getting drunk at the Lord’s table. They were all divided. There was a guy bragging about sleeping with his mother-in-law, I mean, the Galatians had lost the gospel. So I mean, you look back and you’re like, there’s never been this pristine golden era.

(28:40):
Even the time of the creeds, like we mentioned before. I mean the history of the councils is riveting to look at, but everybody, it’s just, it’s a wild and fascinating time and there’s no one particular moment that you look back at church history and say, well, there’s where everything was right. Every generation faces its challenges, and I think we do ourselves a disservice when we say, I wish I had the challenges of another generation. No, God has put us on earth. We’re on the platform right now.

The play is going on and we got to figure out our lines and figure out how to be faithful in this moment, but we’re on stage now as long as God has us here, and it won’t do for us to just keep looking off back into the distance to see how to wish we were in a different era or in a different act of the grand narrative that the Lord is writing. We’ve got to be faithful in the time God has put us in.

Dr. Jeff Myers (29:36):
That’s a great word. Picture my mind is kind of going off in two different directions of where I want to take the balance of our conversation, but one is I do hear a lot of people throw out the word heretic as sort of a, if you’re not in the Christian orbit, it might not really matter that much to you, but when somebody says, well, so-and-so’s a heretic, or this is a heretic, or this is a heretical movement, I know you have your finger on the pulse of a lot of different movements. Are there movements that as believers we need to be wary of in your view that maybe we could talk about for a few minutes?

Trevin Wax (30:20):
Yeah, I mean I think there’s a difference between orthodoxy and then obviously there’s a difference between orthodoxy and heresy, but then there is that category in between of errors, and a lot of times I don’t think we’ve got the categories to be able to distinguish between the two or between the three. Sometimes we’ll see particular errors and immediately assume they’re heresy when you actually may want to say no, that’s just a really big error that probably will lead or could lead to heresy but isn’t necessarily heresy.

So I think we’ve got to be really careful. The H word gets thrown around so much that I’m afraid it loses some of its meaning, and then you don’t really have that word when you need it, and there are times when you do need it. So I’m cautious about using the heresy word too flippantly too frequently because I think it’s important for us to differentiate, but obviously, and one of the things I say in the book, most likely we’re all in error somewhere.

(31:24):
None of us have our theological i’s and dotted and t’s crossed exactly as God wants us. He’s going to have to straighten us all out once we are with him. And even then it’ll be an entire eternity of trying to plumb the depths of God, which we’ll never come to the end of because he’s infinite.

So we will have a lot of studying and contemplation to do even after. But what I think a lot of people are too quick to do is rush to the heresy word when what they really mean is, well, I think that’s an error, and I think that error could lead to greater dangers. I think that’s a good conversation we need to have if we’re afraid that someone may be drifting and drift happens in different directions, there’s drifting towards sort of a fundamentalist sect or cult that can happen when there’s drift toward liberalism or theological compromise that can harm our witness.

(32:24):
There’s drift in different directions. There’s a drift toward the politicization of the faith, certainly we’ve seen in mainline denominations, but there’s also drift toward politicization of the faith that we see even in conservative and more right leaning denominations. So I think we’ve got to be able to hold convictions carefully to say, look, this is the way I see. There are certain things. I see this. I think this is what the Bible teaches, but I’m going to hold them a little looser than the way I hold the orthodoxy.

There’s certain things I’m going to just say, there may be Christians in other parts of the world or even in our own country that may have disagreements on the best most prudential way or wisest way forward or whatnot on this issue or that issue, but I know I can stand here when it comes to the foundational tenets of orthodoxy.

(33:12):
So I think it’s important for us to recognize the difference between orthodoxy and heresy and those errors that may show up and we want to keep an eye on and we want to warn people away from errors that lead to continual doctrinal deviation at the same time being open to people telling us the same thing, saying, Hey, I think you may be in danger of moving in this way when you could be moving away from orthodoxy without even knowing it. I think we want to be alert to that, and we want to be listening to lots of people so that we’re able to keep our center as the cross and keep our foundation firm.

Dr. Jeff Myers (33:52):
Yeah, I like that. Well, I love the way you’re approaching it in that you’ve got to continually be thinking this through talking things through. If the H word, I love your use of that. If the H word becomes a conversation stopper, like that’s heresy. We’re not talking about this anymore. We’re actually missing an opportunity to help people grow deeper in understanding the truth.

Trevin Wax (34:19):
Yes, and I’m most concerned, not that, I mean the H word in some sense is a conversation stopper that we definitely don’t when there’s that clear line we are not wanting to say that’s up for debate, but a lot of times we deploy that line, we deploy the heresy label so quickly that we actually cut off conversation with people who may be in error but not actually heretics to be able to kind of pull them back.

And that’s part of discernment is not just discerning error, it’s also discerning truth and beauty and what’s good. And so I think to be really discerning, you’ve got to discern where people actually are and then seek to lead them in the way of the scriptures and to be in conversation with those who are brothers and sisters in Christ only reserving the heresy for that, which actually puts one outside the faith where they would say, let it be anathema.

I mean, at that level, at that point, yes, there’s a line that’s crossed and that line must be bold and must be very, very clear. Our generation doesn’t, a lot of people in our generation don’t like that. They don’t like the in and out conversation or the bold distinct lines, and yet the apostles did and so did the church fathers. They thought that that line really did matter and that you’ve got to be on the orthodox side of those questions.

Dr. Jeff Myers (35:49):
That’s good. Well, in the time that we’ve got left, Trevin, and I’d love for you to just share, I’m an author, so I know that when I write in a way, I don’t know if anybody else has like this as an author actually, but I write in order to grow, and I’m curious, what are some of the doctrines that you looked at in writing the book that came to life in a new way for you? Things that you thought, yes, that’s true, but it’s dry now. It’s come alive in a new way.

Trevin Wax (36:24):
Yeah, this was the hardest book that I’ve written because when you’re taking on something as challenging as orthodoxy and you even put it in your title, you’ve laid out the challenge before you, I read a whole lot more than I even expected. I read a whole lot on the development of creeds and councils and confessions, read a lot about Nicea, and that part of history really did come alive for me, not so much because the book goes into great detail on all of that.

I wanted people to get a little bit of a sense of the adventure of all that without having to go into the weeds of some of those debates. They got really technical where exegetical, but very technical and I don’t think that every Christian needs to know the ins and outs of all of that debate, but I think what really struck me and which really hit me fresh as I was doing all that study was the seriousness with which our ancestors in the faith, our forefathers and mothers really took the question of who God is and why it matters that we encounter the true God and not a God who’s a figment of our imagination.

(37:41):
They cared about this because they loved him and I think the love part of this, that this was rooted in love for God and wanting to get him right because we love him and we adore him and we want to worship him. That worshipful side really came alive to me. There were some other aspects too.

I mean think we live in a day where one of the big aha moments for me was we live in a day where people really want to stress the inclusivity of Jesus Christ over against his exclusivity and oftentimes in ways that actually oppose his own moral teaching, and what was fascinating to me in doing just some study of Jesus and the gospels is how simultaneously inclusive and exclusive he is and that either that combination of both what makes orthodoxy thrilling, that combination of both the inclusive call to all to come to faith, not just Jews but Gentiles and everyone worldwide call to faith and that exclusive claim that Jesus is the only way to God.

(38:49):
That’s what shocked the Roman empire, what blew up the Roman religions at the end of the day. I mean, it wasn’t just that they were inclusive and they were just adding Jesus to the pantheon of deities, and it wasn’t just that they were a little exclusive little sect that was fine to be on their own. No, they were evangelistic. It was the fact that they were both, it’s this, I mean, it’s just this explosive combination and there’s multiple times working through the book where that both and combination where they’re not going to narrow.

They’re not going to say, Jesus’ is only God or Jesus’ only man, or they, they’re not going to narrow the beauty of orthodoxy in that way where you really see goodness, the faith comes alive here because it’s these paradoxical marvels at the heart of the faith where all the excitement is and that’s where the power is, and so if you wind up going with one over against the other, you wind up narrowing instead of broadening and you wind up hurting the very orthodoxy that you want to deliver to the next generation.

Dr. Jeff Myers (39:55):
Yeah. Well, that’s a perfect segue to what I wanted to be. The final question, which is speaking to the next generation for a moment, there are a lot of people listening to this podcast and watching it who are thinking about deconstructing their faith or they know people who are going through a process of deconstruction. That’s a big thing right now. I wonder if you just speak to that for a moment, give something that would be hopeful and helpful.

Trevin Wax (40:27):
Well, I’ve been burdened about this for a while. I recently finished the first season of a podcast called Reconstructing Faith, which is it’s more documentary style kind of in the vein of the rise and fall of Mars Hill kind of podcast, but it’s got a lot of guests and clips and music and things like that, and which I really, I wanted to guide people through the different areas in which there’s been a bit of a credibility crisis for the church.

And one of the things I’m telling people who are kind of in that phase of, they see a lot of rot in the church today, I’d say, look, if there’s rotten mold in the house, the conservative type is prone to ignore that or downplay that in order to protect the structure of the house and the reputation of the house. The progressive type wants to just blow up the whole thing, pillars and everything.

(41:27):
Foundations just purge it all, and I think that actually the task ahead of us is one of rebuilding and reconstructing in which we have to do two things at the same time. We’ve got to remove the rot. We’ve got to fortify the foundations, and the only way that you could know the difference between the rot and the foundations is if you have the global church around you and the church throughout history behind you, if you actually, you can recognize what are the foundations.

What are those low bearing walls that need to remain? What do we need to, if we’re going to renovate inside, what can we touch and not touch? The only way that you really know that is if you have a really firm understanding of what orthodoxy is, and so I’m constantly saying, listen to the global church, get familiar with church history, have your Bible open in front of you and read this alongside of that, and then you’ll know what you can move and what you can’t, and then let’s get busy.

(42:21):
Let’s get our, at the end of the day, there’s a lot of talk right now about the challenging young people and challenging, I think of the Jordan Peterson phenomenon and a lot of young men want to be called to something. I just want to say, look, 50 years from now, what’s the church going to look like? She’s still going to be here. What’s she going to look like? And the answer that, my generation is millennial, but then those coming up in Gen Z and beyond, what will the church look like?

That’s partly our decision, the health of the church, the vibrancy of the church, the orthodoxy of the church, what we believe, what we confess, how we evangelize, how we root out what’s wrong, that should be changed. I mean, that’s on us. I think we’ve moved beyond the stage where we can just continue to bomb the rubble of what has been.

(43:20):
We’ve got to rebuild and reconstruct in the days ahead, and we do that not because we want the world’s popularity. We do that because we want the world to see Jesus a better picture of who Jesus is, and that’s ultimately what I hope will inspire people as they’re kind of wrestling through deconstruction or doubt or whatnot, just to say, look, there are some things that should be deconstructed.

There are some things that should be disentangled from what you’ve grown up with, but you need to recognize the core of what’s here. It’s been here, it’s going to remain here, Lord willing will be better in the days ahead, but that’s really going to depend on everybody sticking together and rolling up their sleeves and getting busy and wanting to make the house look worthy of the one that we worship.

Dr. Jeff Myers (44:09):
Yeah, that’s a vision that gives a person a personal sense of purpose, but also a unified sense of purpose together with others. I appreciate that. Well, Trevin, man, this conversation has just flown by in my mind and I’m just praying that it will really touch people’s hearts and change the way we worship, but also call us, as you said, to the thrill of orthodoxy. I love it. Thanks so much for being on the show.

Trevin Wax (44:36):
Thank you so much for having me.

Dr. Jeff Myers (44:39):
Thank you to my guest today, Trevin Wax, for joining me on the show. You can find his book, The Thrill of Orthodoxy, wherever great books are sold. Psalm 119 declares oh how I love your law. I meditate on it all day long. May God grant us the joy in knowing Jesus as the embodiment and foundation of truth. Thanks for tuning in. We’ll see you next week.

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