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Dr. Preston Sprinkle (Ph.D.) joins today’s episode to speak with Tim and Rick on the work he's doing to help foster civil, thoughtful, and faithful disagreements on contentious issues. Preston unpacks some of the motivations with his wildly popular Theology in the Raw podcast, and they also discuss the Theology in the Raw conference - an annual conference where people of differing views come together for 3 days to speak with one another on some of the more polarizing topics affecting the church today.

Transcript

Rick Langer: Welcome to the Winsome Conviction Podcast. My name's Rick Langer and I'm a professor at Biola and also the director, co-director with my good friend Tim Muehlhoff of the Winsome Conviction Project. And we are thrilled to have you joining us today for our podcast. Thanks, Tim for having me come join you too.

Tim Muehlhoff: Rick, it's great to be here as always, and I'm just going to let you know right now I'm breaking podcast protocol. I'm doing it, Rick.

Rick Langer: How are you doing that? Please tell me, Tim.

Tim Muehlhoff: We do not know when this is going to be aired, but I'm stating right now, as of right now, I am wearing my favorite Christmas present. It is a Detroit Lions hooded sweatshirt. We are 15 and two. We have a buy to start the playoffs, and many people have picked us not only to get to the Super Bowl, but by golly, to win the Super Bowl. And I'm wearing it proudly, and who knows when this will air. Maybe we just got upset and that'll be the end times. You are wearing some swag, my friend.

Rick Langer: Well, I just want to pause here for a moment and help me understand how it is that you talking about your favorite sports team that's breaking podcast protocol.

Tim Muehlhoff: Because we don't know when this is going to air. This may air a long time, but as of right now, we're 15 and two and you're wearing the Broncos.

Rick Langer: I am wearing my Bronco outfit-

Tim Muehlhoff: Which is awesome. And you're going to-

Rick Langer: Because after eight years without the playoffs, we're there.

Tim Muehlhoff: Stop it. I hate that kind of talk. Eight years. You know how long it's been since we've been to Super Bowl?

Rick Langer: Yeah. I know.

Tim Muehlhoff: Stop it. We have never been to a Super Bowl.

Rick Langer: So Tim, could you stop whining and give us an introduction to who our special guest is today?

Tim Muehlhoff: Now, the reason I felt the freedom to do this is because we have a friend on the podcast. This was a person, linguistic scholar who had won the Nobel Prize. I might've refrained, but it's not. It's our friend Preston Sprinkle-

Preston Sprinkle: It's just me.

Tim Muehlhoff: It's just Preston.

Rick Langer: It's just Preston Sprinkle. Okay.

Tim Muehlhoff: No, stop. Preston's pretty impressive. Let me read you his bio. Dr. Preston Sprinkle is a biblical scholar, speaker, podcaster, a New York Times bestselling author. This is actually a deep part of me that just ticks me off and is the co-founder and president of the Center for Faith, Sexuality and Gender. He earned a PhD in New Testament from Aberdeen University in Scotland. He's an international speaker, New York Times bestselling author. He's written books like, Does the Bible Support Same-Sex Marriage, most recent book, Exiles: The Church in the Shadow of an Empire. He's currently the president in the Center for Faith in Sexuality and Gender. He has a theology in the Raw podcast and Exiles in Babylon conference we're going to talk about. But I thought the best part of your bio, at least the one that I read, is that when he wants to grow up, Preston's dream is to move to a tropical island and become a professional surfer.

Preston Sprinkle: That dream may not materialize anytime soon. Yeah.

Tim Muehlhoff: But Preston, welcome to the podcast.

Preston Sprinkle: Thank you for having me back on the show. I really appreciate it.

Tim Muehlhoff: I will say that when we first started this thing, you were so gracious to be a guest and to date your episode on how do you love the trans community? LGBTQ community is the most listened to interview we've ever done in our entire life of the Winsome Conviction podcast.

Preston Sprinkle: Wow.

Tim Muehlhoff: Obviously you're resonating with people. Obviously this is a topic people want to talk about. We want to talk about something you've done called, The Theology in the Raw Conference, but before we even get to that, it's kind of based on this idea of an exile. This is a metaphor that has really resonated with you. Could you explain why that resonates with you and how that shapes your thinking about ministry?

Preston Sprinkle: Yeah. I mean, obviously it's rooted in the literal exile of the Old Testament, but after that exile in what, 586 BC in the middle of the Old Testament, Israel's exiled to Babylon. When they return, there's still this sense that there's still in this kind of theological political exile that really runs all the way into the New Testament. And you see it in explicit places like one Peter addresses his audience as living as sojourners and exiles, but that theme, it underlies so much of how the New Testament views its own political identity in relation to the Roman Empire. You see it especially in the book of Revelation where you see this almost this battle between the Kingdom of God and Babylon, the Roman Empire. And so yeah, all that to say, I think that that's a really helpful lens to view our own modern day political identity as citizens of God's global multi-ethnic kingdom. When we put our identity in that kingdom first, that just tweaks or reshapes how we view our political allegiances to our modern day political systems.

Tim Muehlhoff: And maybe even expectations. In private conversations, you often say, "Listen, we're in Babylon. What are we overly surprised about?"

Preston Sprinkle: One of the most controversial things I've said on Twitter, which is really weird, was I think it was the night before the 2020 election, and I said something that was the most theologically, the most vanilla thing you could possibly say. I said, "Tomorrow, Babylon is going to elect a new leader. Let's pray for that leader." That's it. And people flipped out, like, what are you... But that perspective is like this, I'm a good citizen. I pay my taxes. I try to obey the laws best I can, so I'm a good, I don't sleep with people's wives. I am not killing people. I'm a really good citizen. I'm not a drug dealer. I'm a good citizen of Babylon, but it's still Babylon. My primary identity is elsewhere. So my allegiance is to the kingdom of God.

Rick Langer: What impact does a failure to have an imagination that have on what we want of our government, what we are thinking we should get, what we get offended if it doesn't do it, how does it affect the way the church's voice comes out? And I guess maybe some of this is even our own emotional passions because of what we think we should be, should be getting.

Preston Sprinkle: I think it stifles our faith in Jesus when we put our faith in political parties. The Greek word pistis is translated faith, but it can also be translated allegiance. So when we put our faith in Jesus and him alone, that should put a shadow on any other kind of hope or support we put in any other potential leaders in the world.

Rick Langer: So that's an interesting distinction there because I think a lot of us think of having faith in lots of different, you may have faith in the monetary system, so I put my money in a bank or whatever, and there is a positive sense of faith that you have in lots of things.

Tim Muehlhoff: Detroit Lions, go ahead. I digress.

Rick Langer: Let me continue. But one of the things that is interesting about an allegiance is it does have that connotation of the allegiance that are poorly shared. They are not things that are meant to be divided. In fact, we have a saying about divided allegiance that immediately seems to be problematic.

Preston Sprinkle: When it comes to my citizenship in America, I mean, I try to stick to the biblical language. I submit to governor authorities. I pray for my, I probably don't do as much as I should, but I should be praying for my leaders. I obey the laws unless those laws conflict with my allegiance and my obedience to Jesus. But yeah, the term allegiance, I think I don't give my allegiance to my country, I just don't. My allegiance is to Christ and Him alone. That doesn't mean, again, I'm again obeyed laws or whatever, but I think allegiances, it has...

Rick Langer: Is a different feeling.

Preston Sprinkle: It's a religious language. It really is. Biblically speaking, it's very religious. So I think that's when it crosses over. I don't give my allegiance to any political party.

Tim Muehlhoff: And that allows me to critique my country even if I love my country. That kind of language, that kind of context allows me to step back and say, "Listen, I'm an American and I'm proud of our heritage, but there's good and bad in the heritage." I mean, it would be pretty myopic to say, "Hey, red, white and blue. And I'm not ever going to critique my country." Having lived in the former Soviet Union for a year with my wife, God bless us, that we can critique our country. I mean, the freedom of the press alone separates us from where we lived for an entire year. And so I think those are things to be celebrated, not shunned. And I love this exile language means I do love my country, but it's not the kingdom of God.

Preston Sprinkle: Right. Yeah. Of the Babylon's in this world, America is probably among the better of them, certainly better than the North Korea or China or other places. I would not want to live there. But it's still Babylon. It's still theologically not on the side of the kingdom of God. It's just not.

Tim Muehlhoff: That's great. Hey, we try in our own little small way to open up discourse, we try to do that at Biola's campus. We try to do it with college students. We try to do it on Capitol Hill with very mixed results. So we've been a huge fan of your Theology in the Raw conference that you really do put money where your mouth is and you organize this conference. I just want to read to you a description of the conference and I just had to chuckle as I actually went to the website to read it. Here we go.

At the theology in the raw conference, we will be challenged to think like exiles about race, sexuality, gender, critical race theory, hell, transgendered identities, climate change, creation care, American politics, and what it means to love your Democrat and Republican neighbor as yourself. Different views will be presented, no question is off-limits. No political party will be praised. Everyone will be challenged to think. Jesus will be upheld as supreme. We're now a collective of church and de-churched Christian Contrarians who resists the echo chamber. Preston Sprinkle, what were you thinking? Was life just boring?

Preston Sprinkle: I'm going to, I have not read that in a while. That must've been when we first did the conference and I probably wrote that. I have not read that in a while. That's funny.

Tim Muehlhoff: What were you, I mean, let's just do the greatest hits of issues. So tell us what led you to create the conference and then we want to hear about the mechanics, because we're fascinated. How do you actually pull this off?

Preston Sprinkle: The conference grew out of the podcast, so if you know nothing about the podcast, that would give you a running start to it. In short, my podcast is all about having curious conversations with a diverse range of interesting people. It's not usually a debate. Sometimes there might be some of that, but it's me sitting down and getting to know another person, their viewpoint, try to steel man, their arguments, try to play devil's advocate even if I agree with them. In fact, I might even push back on people I agree with more than even people I don't, which throws people off. Like, "Where are you at?" I'm like, "I'm having a conversation." So I have found that there is a quiet hunger for that kind of thing. It has attracted a certain kind of person. It is also repelled another kind of person too.

Not everybody wants that. They want somebody to sit in front of a microphone and tell you exactly what you believe and what you think they should believe and close in prayer and that's it. Kind of like a sermon. And I often tell people the podcast is not like a sermon from a stage. It is like a conversation with your neighbor. Those are two different, I mean, communications guys here. So this is a different genre of communication. If you cross those genres, you're going to totally be frustrated with the conversation. And I'll say probably most of the people I have on the podcast, maybe a lot of the people I have on the podcast, if I was a pastor of a church, I would not invite them to be a guest preacher to open up the Bible and say, "Here's what you should believe." I'm like, "Well, no, I probably wouldn't do that." But that's not the nature of the podcast. So it is an acquired taste.

I have found that it seems like there is this kind of silent majority that actually love to listen in on, well, what does this side say? What does this side say? Or what does this person actually believe? I heard they're a heretic, and I heard that somebody said, you shouldn't read their book, it's garbage. But is that true? Are they representing them correctly? What does this person actually believe? And so I try to give space for people to do that. And having said that, Tim, I mean I would say the majority of the people out on the podcast, there's still a lot of resonance with, it's not like I'm just having... The other day I had, you might know Adam Davidson, he's a Jewish atheist I had him on. And that was just me just getting to know this guy has major problems with evangelicals. I just want to know why.

I'm not here to debate it. Other people, I might see eye to eye on 98% of the things and I'll have them on the podcast. So it is a diverse range of I think, interesting people to be fun. So I didn't answer your question. So in short, the conference, so I've been doing the podcast since 2015. The conference basically grew out of that and it was trying to be a place where people who have really enjoyed the podcast, have listened from a distance, can be together in a room and basically do that sort of thing live where they can see people. It's embodied. I can see people face to face that have been listening to me for eight years. And so really the conference has the same sort of vibe as the podcast.

Tim Muehlhoff: Our good friend, Dr. Ed Yuzinski was telling me he's been a part of it. He's attended it, and so if I get this correct, you will invite maybe two to three, to four, and they're going to give different perspectives when it comes to critical race theory or even the eternality of hell. And they get up and they do a little maybe five to seven minute, and then they all sit on a couch and take questions from the audience, but they get to interact with each other. Is that right?

Preston Sprinkle: Sort of. So each conference has been, there's four different sessions, three ish hours that focus on one topic. Usually there's two to four different speakers. I will say, I would say the majority of the sessions we've done, it's not a debate. In fact, the majority, there's probably a lot of agreement. They're just hitting things from different angles. So for instance, this year we're doing a session on the gospel and race after George Floyd, it's in Minneapolis, the conference. So we have Latasha Morrison who's done a lot of just bridge building work, questions of race. We have Ephraim Smith who is an African-American pastor who's been in different cultural contexts, urban, he's been in suburban white context. So he again, can help navigate that. Then I have two African-American police officers who are going to give their perspective of being black, but also on the police side. And so in a sense, I'm not really putting these voices up against each other. They're just coming from different angles, are going to help us. Oh, Ed's going to give it kind of a, he's the only white speaker, and he's going to give-

Tim Muehlhoff: Love it.

Preston Sprinkle: ... from a white evangelical perspective, who understands conservative white evangelicals and maybe some questions they have about the race conversation, but also he's been in many multi-ethnic spaces as well. So in that session, it's not so much a debate, it's more just people with different levels of expertise giving different angles. Let me give you another example. So we're also doing a session on transgender people in the church. Me and Mark Yarhouse are going to give a 20-minute talk. He's going to give a psychological overview. I'm going to give a theological overview that's going to be very similar. Me and Mark are on very similar pages, and this is more like here. This is where I'm like, here's what I think everybody should believe, it's going to be framed that way. But then we're going to have three different testimonies, 10 minute testimonies from three trans or formerly trans-identified people.

One is a Christian who hasn't transitioned and is more moderate, maybe even progressive leaning, believes in a traditional view of marriage, but definitely sympathetic to trans experiences in certain ways of thinking. Then I have a fully transitioned trans woman who's not a believer, and then I have a D transition person who's very conservative, like maga conservative. So those testimonies are not to say, "Here's what you need to believe," because that's impossible. They're going to disagree probably very aggressively with each other. And then we're going to sit on the couch for an hour and hash it out.

Rick Langer: I trust it'll be a large couch.

Preston Sprinkle: It'll be a large couch.

Rick Langer: Plenty of room, neutral corners built into the couch. That's good.

Preston Sprinkle: So shorter talks, 10 to 20 minutes max, and then we really prioritize that conversation. Every session we'll have about an hour long conversation. The last 20 minutes might be audience Q&A.

Rick Langer: Do you do anything to help those conversations go well? In other words, do these people meet each other beforehand or do you have anything that helps grease those wheels or do you just go for it?

Preston Sprinkle: That's a great question. I'm still growing and learning at this, and I have learned that I probably need to do a bit more preparation with the speaker. So the last one we did, I tried to send just thorough emails ahead of time just to give them as much information as I can on the nature of the conference, even telling them about the audience and who you're speaking to and the other speakers who you're speaking to. It depends on each session really. With the trans conversation, I don't know when this will drop, but some of them might be when they see who else is speaking.

I've been trying to be really clear upfront like here's who else is speaking. But I almost guarantee, I think some of them might get flack from their tribe saying, "You're sharing the stage with this person." Right? Yeah. And we might want to talk about that a little more. That has happened at every conference. I always have one to three speakers drop out because the website goes up, they see who else they're sharing the stage with. I usually get a long email or a short and abrupt one saying, "I can't share this age with this person."

Tim Muehlhoff: That's so interesting.

Rick Langer: Talk to us.

Tim Muehlhoff: Yeah, I love that.

Rick Langer: We're really interested in that. If I share a platform, I have endorsed or deplatform, refusing a platform because then you're approving and when you're doing perspective, if you want to hear from other sides, if you want to foster understanding, it's really hard to do that if we're only going to do people who have everything right. But it seems like there's a big current that pushes back. So talk to us about how this has gone.

Preston Sprinkle: And this is where if you follow the podcast, there's no issue. No issue. Because I have said frequently that I sort of despise the verbalization of the noun platform in the last several years. I get the, okay, if platform means you're giving a person a voice and you are endorsing that with the impression that you should believe this, yeah, there's definitely voices I wouldn't want to do that with, but that's just not the nature of the podcast. This is, we are trying to understand where somebody's coming from trying to understand their viewpoint, and you need to be challenged to think through that. Let me give you example. So I got flack last year because I had a panel on deconstruction.

So I had four different journeys of deconstruction. One was from fundamentalist Christian to progressive Christian. One was from evangelicals and the catholic, one was from kind of a white dominated evangelicalism and he's black and he kind of got turned off by how white dominated evangelicalism is. So still very evangelical in his beliefs, but just critical of the kind of racial component. And then Evan Wickham, who in a sense has all the ingredients to have deconstructed but didn't. He's very passionate about orthodoxy. So what my goal in that session was I want to understand the different journeys that people are on when they deconstruct, I want to hear from them why they deconstruct. Just so happens the guy whose now progressive, Tim Whitaker, it's not... Is fully affirming of LGBT questions, checks off all the progressive boxes, and I got pushed back for platforming an affirming person.

I said, okay, we had a session on sexuality and every single person there believes in a traditional via marriage. I would not platform in the traditional sense of the term, somebody who is affirming. If it was like a debate or something, then I'm fine at that. But I'm not just going to give somebody a stage and say, "Go ahead and spout off all your views." Tim is fully affirming all three of the other deconstruction, but people in that session were very much not. In fact, Abigail Favali has written one of the most profound or persuasive books against trans ideologies and has a PhD.

Rick Langer: Gender and Genesis or...

Preston Sprinkle: Yeah. Notre Dame professor. So I even told Tim ahead of the time, I said, "Hey, look, you're here because I want you to share your story deconstruction." If you try to advocate for an affirming, you have me, you have Abigail, you have, it's not going to go well because if we feel like you're spotting your view, we're man, you've opened up the door for that. So the goal was I want to listen to deconstructioners so the audience can think through how can I better walk through the many gen z and other millennials and stuff that are deconstructing. You can't help somebody who's deconstructing if you don't actually understand why they're doing it. So to me, again, this seems so basic. I want to understand deconstructioners, why not listen to deconstructioners? But that didn't go out in social media and stuff. People just, they don't get that. They're like, "You should have had this person on. They wrote a critical book of deconstruction." Well, they haven't deconstructed. Why would I?

Rick Langer: Yeah, and I would want to just push our little pause button here for us and our own listeners to say here what Preston just said on this point, the importance of saying, "Listen," and listen is so different than saying agree or affirm or platform or particular and saying, man, there's a bunch of currents in our culture that I really find problematic. If you think they're that problematic, it would probably be good to understand what they're really saying and then what you really need to say in response. Because I see a lot of people responding to positions and I'm like, "Okay, I agree with everything you said, but that is not responding to what this person's actually saying. So we're kind of wasting our ammo, so to speak."

Preston Sprinkle: Well, and you shoot yourself in the foot, you can't refute something you don't understand. And if you try to do that, you will discredit the view you're trying to promote. And in the age of the internet when people could just Google what you're saying, "Well, the deconstructioners, they say this and they're deconstructing." All they have to do is say, "Are they?" Well, they're actually, they're not saying that. Then the view you're trying to advocate for is completely discredited. People are like, "Well, I don't trust you. You're not actually accurately representing what you're critiquing."

Tim Muehlhoff: And let me invoke from a critical race theory. No, let me invoke from theory. The rule of reciprocation is we want to, as evangelicals speak at Berkeley, we want to be invited in to offer our viewpoint, which by the way, a ton of people over there would find our views of appalling, but yet we want to engage. So thank you for welcoming us on your podcast. We're not assuming that's because you endorse the Bible Institute of Los Angeles. So if we shut down it on our end saying, "I'm sorry you can't be on our podcast, you can't come on campus because we're platforming you," then we just closed a million doors where our liberal friends say, "Well, then I'm not going to platform you."

Then we're literally stuck with no communication. So I love that you're coming in and saying, "I will open my stage to people and have complex conversations." Let me mention one that I thought, I wonder how much pushback you got for Gregory Boyd. Now, I'm a Gregory Boyd fan in the fact that his book Letters from a Skeptic is probably one of my all-time favorite apologetic books ever written because it's him sharing apologetics with his dad in light of the death of his mother, his wife. It's beautifully written both relationally and content wise, but he's an open theist. So what was the reaction to Gregory Boyd?

Preston Sprinkle: A lot less than you would think? So here in the past, we've done three sessions where it's kind of that different perspective. Sometimes they're all on the same page, but I have reserved a last Saturday session to a more formal, I call it a dialogical debate. So we did one on hell, annihilation versus eternal conscious torment. Greg Boyd was in that more clearly debate session on the problem of evil. So he presented because his open theism really influences his view of problem of evil. And then I had my friend Joey Dodson, a biblical scholar, give kind a critique of that. It was actually supposed to be Clay Jones, but he had to drop out. So I wonder if that's why I didn't get much pushback, but I did. I mean maybe a little, I also don't listen to, I don't Google my name or go searching for stuff, so I'm sure people were grumbling, whatever.

I probably got a little more pushback from, I had Brian Zahn on last year who has some theological beliefs that don't all resonate with evangelicalism around, especially the atonement and stuff. But again, he was speaking, oh, he was a politic. It was on politics, and me and him see eye to eye almost completely on politics. So I had a right-leaning Christian, a left-leaning Christian, and then Brian Zahn is just kind of this more like Anabaptist, like the whole thing's corrupt, but I still got critic on... But his atonement beliefs are unorthodox. First of all, he's not speaking on tournament. Second of all, I would still want to understand what those are and maybe have somebody respond to it, if I did that.

Tim Muehlhoff: That's very mature nuancing of a person. I'm thinking of Jim Daly focused on the family when he partnered with the independent very liberal newspaper in Colorado that regularly attacked Dr. Dobson. But he partnered with them to address the foster care system in Colorado because Jim Daly is the product of foster care and feels like it's broke. And he read an article in the Independent that was critiquing Colorado's foster care system. So he literally called them and said, "Listen, I'm Jim Daly from Focus on the Family." And they're like, "Yeah, we know who you are." He goes, "I'd like to have lunch that we can talk about how we can come together for this one instance and be big boys and girls and know that we disagree on a million things. Would you like to have lunch?" And the guy said, "Yes, but can we have it at Focus? We've always wanted to go there."

Preston Sprinkle: Oh my word.

Tim Muehlhoff: So they did. They focused on this massive event and were able to parse it. See, I love that the independent is pro-choice, pro-gay marriage and obviously Jim Daly's not. So that's what I love about what you're doing is, okay, I've got a guy who's an open theist, which is on the heretical side, but he's not talking about that. He's talking about this. I think that's a remarkable nuancing that we're losing today.

Preston Sprinkle: And I should say too, and again, this is maybe an acquired taste, but I've taken the posture over many years that I want the strength of my passion to match the depth of my study on any particular topic. So in seminary, our limited exposure to open theism was reading a critique of open theism. So I had all these assumptions about what open theism was. It wasn't until five years ago, I actually read one of Greg Boyd's book, and I was like, oh, that's different than what I was presented. He's going through all these texts and it is one of the most biblically saturated books.

And I'm like, okay, I'm not quite convinced, but I don't want to be so passionate against something that I haven't really taken the time to study. So there's several areas that I feel like I've done a lot of work and I feel very passionate and very clear on my beliefs, and I feel strong. I feel like I'm confident in that. In other areas where I'm like, well, age of the Earth or something, I'm not a scientist. I have not read 57 books on the, I've read a couple, I've talked to people, there's people I respect. So I'm like, okay, I probably lean this direction. Don't ask me.

Tim Muehlhoff: I will not.

Preston Sprinkle: I don't care. But that's based on I'm not going to be super passionate about it, because I have not. I've exhausted if somebody on the other side debating me, he'd probably kick my butt because I've not done the work.

Rick Langer: Before we finish this conversation, I'd love to have you just take a deep breath and think about, so in the time that you've been doing this, what are some lessons that you've learned? And I'm thinking particular lessons that might be helpful for people who are listeners who aren't necessarily hosting a theology, national theology in the rock conference, but they do have a brother who shows up for Thanksgiving dinner or they have a co-worker and they have all of these divergent kind of opinions that we're talking about that they're encountering in their space. Are there things that you look at and say, yeah, here's a couple of things that would be good to keep in mind as you're engaging people that way?

Preston Sprinkle: For me personally, with regard to the conference, I think I could do a better job just being very clear about the nature of the conference and the mission of it. I've relied on people listening to the podcast, anybody listening to the podcast, they get it, they know it. But there are maybe some people, maybe a friend brings a friend or maybe somebody who sees the conference and they show up and maybe they don't know too much about me. They could be thrown off by the nature of the conference when they're expecting a bunch of sermons telling them exactly what to do. So I think we've tried to do a better job at communication there. And also with the speakers for sure. Now I go out of my way to say, "You're sharing the stage with this person. We have had this person. Will you please let me know ahead of time if this is an issue."

So I try to go out of my way to clarify that. In regards to just interpersonal relationships. I've just seen so much power in demonstrating genuine, honest curiosity with other people. That is just, it's so rare today, and yet there's such a deep, deep hunger for it and for people to hear authentic conversations, to see vulnerability, to see you say, "Oh, actually I made a mistake. Let me say that differently." Or just be honest. Even if you're wrong on certain areas, there's a reason why the most popular podcasts around like the Joe Rogan or Lex Friedman or others.

Rick Langer: Vincent Conviction.

Preston Sprinkle: Vincent Conviction is number three. Yeah. Like why? They're just, sometimes they're just rambling for three hours. It's like, well, there's just, regardless of what you think about it, there is curiosity and there is honesty, and I think people are hungry. Just let me listen in on a conversation between other people being themselves, thinking out loud. They're not so scared to self-censure what they think or the questions they're trying to ask.

Rick Langer: Genuine curiosity.

Preston Sprinkle: Yeah.

Rick Langer: That's great.

Tim Muehlhoff: We partner with a group called Bridge in the Gap, Simon Greer and National Director, and we asked him one time, "Distill it all down, all of it." And he goes, "Lead with curiosity, genuine curiosity." Tell me more about that.

Rick Langer: Tell me more. Those kinds of questions are super powerful.

Tim Muehlhoff: One quick last question, we'll wrap it up. So Ed was saying that one of your favorite questions is to ask a person, what are the holes in your argument?

Preston Sprinkle: What's the best argument against your position?

Tim Muehlhoff: What a great question. How do people respond to that? Are they able to articulate it pretty quickly?

Preston Sprinkle: Yeah, it depends. I just had a Carmen Imes on my podcast.

Tim Muehlhoff: Oh, of course. We love Carmen.

Preston Sprinkle: Carmen's great. And I asked that question, we're talking about David and Bathsheba, and she immediately, without even getting emotion, nothing, she wasn't even thrown off. She goes, "Well, actually this would be the best counter." And so it depends on the person. I mean, I think she is a genuine scholar. She wants to know what does the text say? She's not threatened by different beliefs or whatever. So I think if you have that posture, I think you actually enjoy that question. I love answering that question, but that really takes a certain personality. Other people, I've had some people say there isn't anybody. I'm like, okay.

Rick Langer: If there's a hole, I would've fixed it.

Preston Sprinkle: That might work in some audiences, you just lost my entire audience. If they hear that they're done, they're like, "Nope, don't believe you anymore."

Tim Muehlhoff: But what you just said is so spot on. For some audiences that plays really well. I mean really well. Listen, you can disagree with this, but no thinking person, we call that calling in, calling out in a conversation, and clearly calling out is shaming a person by saying things like, "Hey, listen, if you read the Bible, if you have a fair reading of the Bible, there is no other position than this position." So interesting that in some groups you would get kudos for having that staunch unequivocal stance.

Preston Sprinkle: I came from that group and I don't swim in those circles anymore.

Tim Muehlhoff: Hey, thank you so much for being on our podcast. We really appreciate the platform God's given you. We were huge fans of your podcast, Theology in the Raw podcast. You've had us on in the past. You're very gracious with your platform. We really thank you for that. And then how can people, even if they can't attend the conference, I was noticing on the website, there's still ways to get the content.

Preston Sprinkle: Well, you can purchase previous content that's all available, but also you can live stream it.

Tim Muehlhoff: Oh, great.

Preston Sprinkle: Yeah, you can live stream the whole thing.

Tim Muehlhoff: And how would they do that? Just search-

Preston Sprinkle: Theologyinraw.com, all the information's there and they even get access... If they can't make it in the moment live, you get seven days access to if you live stream it. And then even if you can't do that, you can always purchase the videos after. And we try to do a good job with multiple cameras to try to make it as live experience as possible. So it's not just you just staring at one camera.

Tim Muehlhoff: Kind of like our podcast. No, we don't want to do anything like that. Yes. Okay, got it.

Rick Langer: We are grateful for you guys joining us as listeners, and we really do want to encourage you, be your regular subscriber. So pick us up at Apple Podcasts, Spotify, wherever it is that you'd like to get your podcasts. And we'd also encourage you to check out the winsomeconviction.com website. We have some resources there and things like that. It's also a place you could sign up for a regular newsletter. Love to keep in touch with you that way. And so thanks for joining us in that regard. Tim, last words here.

Tim Muehlhoff: So Preston talked about getting both sides of an argument. We literally created a website called and the stalemate.com that teaches you to do, we call it perspective taking bopping between perspective. So you can actually go to this interactive website. It's a three-day journey into perspective taking. So go to endthestalemate.com and we're going to introduce you to some topics that are probably going to push your button, but we asked you to go with curiosity to that website, so go ahead and check that out.

Rick Langer: Yeah, so thanks for joining us. We'd love to hear from you, and please become a regular member of our organization here by just signing up for the quarterly newsletter.