Why Doesn’t Beginning of Wisdom Tackle Big Cultural Issues?

Very rarely have you heard me talk about the big cultural issues facing Christians today. My reason for that is simple, really, and not as calculated as you might think. I have spoken on cultural things from time to time and I’m not shy about it.

Really, it comes down to the best use of my time. When I started BW, it was because I had a drive to give a Christian defense of what the Bible teaches, in the face of challenges and questions. I didn’t have any particular topic in mind, and thought I would probably be focusing on the doctrinal issues most closely affecting my own life, like the Trinity and the Gospel in the face of pseudo-Christian movements like the Jehovah’s Witnesses and Mormans. In fact, my only two official debates to date have been on the Trinity and the Book of Mormon.

If you’ve followed for any length of time, you know I’ve been heavily invested in providing answers to the Torah movements and Hebrew Roots. That wasn’t the original goal. When I started Beginning of Wisdom, I had no idea what those were. And as I began to learn more, I didn’t immediately create content addressing it, since I didn’t want to misrepresent what people believed or misunderstand the arguments I was addressing.

But again, what about cultural stuff? If I wanted to really grow a platform, I could spend more time on those things, and I have spoken on them from time to time. Indeed, I may speak in some limited capacity on those issues more in the future.

The reason I haven’t at this point is because of how I view the place of the church in the world today. We are pressed and attacked on many fronts. One of the things some pastors and teachers are perhaps guilty of is avoiding the cultural issues in an effort to attract more people to them from different backgrounds and belief systems. None of us should shy away from speaking the truth on plain moral issues, like abortion, gender confusion, etc.

The simple fact is this: there are already so many able defenders of God’s moral standards in the culture who have influence many orders of magnitude greater than mine. I appreciate them and the work they’re doing. Anyone who knows about my work almost certainly knows about the cultural issues and they don’t need my opinion to make up their minds. I don’t try to hide my positions at all, and you might find them to be quite strong. I just don’t focus on expressing them.

My focus is on the areas where I see a deficiency in the available resources where I can be of particular assistance. This has certainly garnered grumbling comments from my theological opponents, both inside and outside the essential Christian faith. “Why don’t you talk about more important things, like the cultural issues?” They ask.

My answer is simple. I agree that the issue of Torah observance is not as large of a threat to the faith as many other things. There are cultural challenges facing the church that are much more pressing. But those issues also have many able defenders of the truth speaking loudly and forcefully about them. Yet I cannot fill a handful of fingers with the people addressing the Torah movements with any depth. Many Christian apologists have spoken on the issue once or twice and have had varying degrees of depth and awareness of the actual arguments when doing so. Very few have given the Torah movement and its arguments the attention needed to truly address them adequately. I have also seen that most Christians I’ve talked to have encountered at least one person advocating this theology in their church or social circle, and those people need resources.

Lord willing, I will one day work myself out of a job, so to speak, on this issue, having produced enough that there is an answer for any question someone might ask on the topic, or having inspired more people to produce enough on the subject that the answers are all there to be had by anyone who cares to look. At that point, you will find me spending more time on other theological issues facing the church that I see are in need of response that I am able to provide.

At this stage, I don’t see that happening. Over the last several years, as I have produced videos and articles addressing the arguments of the Torah movements, I have seen that those advocating Torah observance are still much more comfortable addressing the more shallow, off-the-cuff responses given by other, more generalized apologists. That’s understandable. Those apologists are both more well-known and easier to respond to. They often haven’t done the work of addressing the arguments head-on, and in their best forms.

So for now, I don’t see much of a change in what I am producing. I still study a wide array of topics, and have plans to produce things on other topics as well, but I will keep filling this need as long as it looks like it needs filling, and leave the bigger cultural issues to the scores of faithful Christians who are tackling them every day.