Listening In preview: Paul Gould

MEGAN BASHAM, HOST: Next up on The World and Everything in It: Christian imagination. 

In this week’s Listening In program, Warren Smith talks with author and cultural apologist Paul Gould.

MARY REICHARD, HOST: Gould asserts that we live in a “disenchanted” world. Its fallen and distorted view of reality results in a culture where mystery, beauty, and wonder isn’t acknowledged.

Gould challenges Christians to inform their imaginations with the gospel to help those with broken hearts.

WARREN SMITH: Paul, I don’t remember where I heard you say this, but I know I heard you say it, but you said that one of the things that we need to do as Christians is just see and delight in the world the way Jesus did and the way Jesus does.

GOULD: We can’t proclaim fully the beauty of the gospel until we have learned to see the world the way Jesus does and then to delight in it. And I’m always driven as I think about this to a quote that C S Lewis said in the book The Problem of Pain, but he’s talking about divine goodness. And he says this, he says, look, God doesn’t give the happiness there isn’t, he gives the happiness there is, and you know, we only have two options. We can either enjoy God in creaturely response or we can eternally starve, right? This is, this is the only options that we have as humans. And this is what happiness amounts to. And so, yeah, I think that the idea of seeing and delighting in the world is just the idea that the way that we view the world actually matters. And theologians today are talking about an idolatrous way of perceiving the world. Uh, when we talk about disenchantment because when we perceive the world through the disenchanted lens, what we do is we reduce the world and reduce God to the level of human appetite and then we’re not actually being correctly related or interacting with the world that God has made.

(Photo/Preaching Source)

WORLD Radio transcripts are created on a rush deadline. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of WORLD Radio programming is the audio record.