In this divisive era, differences can often lead to harsh words and angry rhetoric. So A Gentle Answer by Scott Sauls, senior pastor of Christ Presbyterian Church in Nashville, is an extremely timely book. It reminds us Christians can be countercultural to the finger-pointing and instead, enter into conversations with humbleness and empathy.
SOLA Editorial Board Member Kevin Yi interviewed Scott Sauls in June about his new book and the need for gentleness in our relationships with others. They also discussed the need for community, especially during the pandemic, and even touched on honor-shame and cancel culture. You can watch the full interview below.
An edited transcript of the interview is below.
Kevin Yi: Hey, everyone. Welcome to the SOLA Network podcast. My name is Kevin Yi, the youth/college/young adults pastor at Church Everyday in Los Angeles, California. And today, I have the pleasure of interviewing Pastor Scott Sauls. He’s the senior pastor at Christ Presbyterian Church in Nashville, Tennessee, is married to Patti, has two daughters, Abby and Ellie, and previously, Pastor Scott was the lead and preaching pastor for Redeemer Presbyterian Church in New York City. He’s written a number of books, and today we’re here to talk about A Gentle Answer.
I know that the topic of the book is something that you’re deeply, deeply passionate about in terms of how we respond, how we communicate in a gospel-centered way about things that have deeply fractured our culture. I don’t think [this book] could have come at a better time with regards to how much we need to learn from you and with regards to how we have difficult conversations about things. So I’d love to hear the origin story of your book.
Scott Sauls: I started writing it about 18 months ago. And originally, the idea was to put something out there a few months before the American presidential election. It hasn’t gone well those seasons every four years. There is polarization and a lot of bickering. Cable news ratings go way up and, and people get upset and snippy.
I thought, “What would it be like to release something, maybe the summer before all of that frenzy happens.” And so that was the idea was to boot off of Proverbs 15:1: “A gentle answer turns away wrath.” Maybe this will be a good opportunity for the Christian witness to shine as a countercultural sort of kindness movement when everybody else is turning in on each other.
The irony is that we haven’t hardly even talked about the election yet, and we are almost at July as we’re talking, and so many other things have been thrust into front and center of the conversation. They’re very important, meaningful things, but this book has turned out to be very, very timely. I’m very actually quite sad for all the reasons why it’s timely and yet thankful to be able to be part of the conversation as well.
Kevin Yi: It’s come to my attention that in 2 Timothy 3:3, the apostle Paul lists what will happen to people[in that] here would be godlessness in the last days. As part of that list, he uses the word unappeasable, or irreconcilable, or unbending is one translation as well. Again, with regards to the timeliness of this book, we live in an age where people don’t seem to listen to one another well, and so I wanted to ask because so much of this book is about this, how does Christ’s pattern of gentleness help us to kind of cut through the challenges of such a polarized time?
Scott Sauls: Well, to your point, Kevin, Paul also wrote to Timothy about how there will be people in the churches who have a craving for controversy and quarrels, who are actually looking for a fight. And of course, he was confronting that as being counter to the Gospel.
But to your question [about] the gentleness of Christ, I think it’s really important to realize that Christ had an eighth “I am” statement. We talk about the seven “I am” statements of Christ in the gospel of John. There’s an eighth “I am” statement that he makes in Matthew 11 where he says, “I am gentle and humble in heart.” At the very center of his identity is gentleness and humility.
He’s the one, “who being in very nature God, did not consider equality with God something to be grasped but made himself nothing taking on the nature of a servant,” washed his disciples’ feet to demonstrate to them and to us what true greatness really is, what true power really is. Think about even his behavior on the cross toward those who were opposing him. On his way to the cross, he refers to Judas as “Friend,” even as Judas is in the act of betraying him.
There’s a picture of his gentleness on the cross. He cries out, “Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they do” to those who are torturing him. To the thief on the cross, who’d been insulting him just a few moments earlier, he responds to the man’s question — “Please remember me and Your Kingdom” — [with] “Today, you will be with me in paradise,” sort of gently assuring him.
And then he rises from the dead, and Peter is filled with shame and self-loathing for his three denials. Jesus makes a point of restoring Peter, and in fact, when when the women meet the angel of the Lord at the tomb, the angel of the Lord says, (this is in Mark’s gospel) specifically to the women, “I want you to go tell the others and Peter,” as if to say, and especially Peter, that I’m coming to him. And, you know, he’s just always responding to our issues, even our hostility toward him with a gentle answer.
God demonstrates His own love and while we were still sinners — that’s when Christ died for us. And so, if that’s the grace that we’ve received, if that’s a gentleness that we’ve received, if we’ve already been given a gentle answer, then it seems likely that that’s going to change the posture of our hearts and make us a lot more difficult to offend and make us a lot more likely to go first and trying to defuse these polarized conversations and try to seek solutions together.
Kevin Yi: I loved how gospel-centered you were in your responses to a lot of the criticisms that you faced in your life. There’s a really great reminder in there about how sometimes the way that we bristle at particular criticisms can be just one of the ways in which we don’t believe in the Gospel in those moments because we aren’t assured of Christ’s love for us and our identity being secure in Christ.
The gentleness of Christ is something that we as Christians should be striving for. And I’m wondering what are practical practices that we can prepare ourselves with in terms of learning how to do that?
Scott Sauls: The answer resides in a couple of statements that Jesus made. The first was when he said, when we’re in conflict, to make sure that before we presume to remove a speck from somebody else’s eye, we remove the log in our own.
He’s talking to all of his disciples and he’s saying: Let’s say there are two of you, two disciples of Jesus Christ, who are in conflict with one another. If both go into the conversation under the assumption that I’m actually the biggest problem here — the thing that I need to address first and most is my own contribution to this conflict — then I will be in a position to help my brother or my sister with the speck. Because we do want to address the specks because the speck can turn into an infection, and infection can turn into blindness. If two people come with that posture that “Hey, I don’t presume to be holier-than-thou. In fact, I know that I’m part of the issue here,” it’s going to go a lot better.
But if both parties go into the conversation or even if just one party goes into the conversation thinking, “Well, the log is in your eye, and all I’ve got in mine is a speck” — that’s what he calls self
-righteousness. [It is] just keeping in mind the call to deep humility that Christ has given us. He’s going to exalt those who are humble and he’s going to humble those who exalt themselves.
The other is this whole thing in the Bible about being quick to listen and slow to speak. Oftentimes, we get that reversed too, where we’re quick to speak and slow to listen. These are just these are some sort of heart postures and behaviors that Christ himself has given us to lean into, consider, and meditate on when we engage in conversations that involve conflict.
The other one is empathy: to realize that everybody is hurting, everybody’s carrying a battle that they’re fighting and that includes the person you’re at odds with or the person that’s at odds with you. Sometimes if we can just discipline ourselves to remember that — that this is not just a person that I’ve got issues with right now, this is a person that has some pain. Sometimes hurting people will hurt people.
A lot of it has to do more with the mindset than it does with anything else — of just going in humbly and empathetically to conversations where it’s hard to be either. And yet, the Lord has given us the Holy Spirit and the Gospel to be able to do that.
Kevin Yi: We are now months into the United States’ shutdowns, quarantines, and lockdowns. That’s also on top of the racial justice and racial reconciliation issues. You also have loneliness and isolation during this time of the pandemic. That breeds a lot of cynicism, too, especially with younger millennials and Gen Z, in particular. I work a lot with that particular demographic, and I know a lot of the guys that are listening and reading the SOLA Network fall into that category.
Do you have any words of wisdom or advice for those of us working with that demographic also, with regards to how we can help walk them through this time and give them sort of hope and resilience? This is a really tough time for a lot of them, especially when they think about their futures. I think a lot of it kind of lends itself towards arguments on Facebook and arguments on Twitter because that that that anger needs to go somewhere. You talk a lot about anger in your book as well and just sort of healthy responses in terms of how we deal with that. So if you could speak to that, I think that’d be really helpful.
Scott Sauls: Yeah, it’s a very hard time right now to be a young adult, a recent college graduate, or even a college student as you look ahead and think about job and career opportunities. It’s a very, very different climate than it was for my generation, Generation X.
When I was getting out of college, there were plenty of opportunities out there, and not only opportunities but options — you could choose a career path. There’s a big challenge to that too because I think that the millennial generation, and this is a very generalized statement, but it has a lot higher expectation than my generation did about starting out with a great job that’s completely fulfilling and that it’s right in the pocket of who I am and what I think I’m called to be. And so there’s something to take ownership of as well as something to limit.
The lamentable thing is it’s such a hard climate right now.
The thing to take ownership of is that the Lord may actually have a different path for us than the one that we dream of straight out of college or in young adulthood. We really have to be flexible, malleable, and receptive to whatever opportunities the Lord might be putting in front of us, even if it’s not our dream opportunity, and to realize that that oftentimes those dream opportunities happen to us over time after we’ve grinded it out, in work that we don’t find extremely satisfying.
And yet it’s valuable because it’s work, and all work has dignity to it. Bear in mind, too, that over 85% of the world’s working population does not experience great satisfaction with their jobs. It’s actually a very significant minority. The millennial generation, in particular, is very surprised at jobs that lack satisfaction. There’s something to be said for the building of character in work and at activities — that we really have to serve. We’re called to serve. To serve is to lean against our own kind of impulses and natural likings and so on.
But, but along with that, it’s a very lamentable thing to think about — Wow, it’s so much harder for this generation than any other living generations before it. To find that that lane of calling right now, at least not without a whole lot of obstacles to overcome. So the good news is the Psalms are filled with prayers that affirm the lament and even the anger that’s there about a world that just doesn’t feel like it’s working the way it’s supposed to. So get in community, stay in community, and work these things out together with other people who are going through similar things. [Doing this] under the leadership of people like Kevin here is a really good and healthy idea as well.
Kevin Yi: Your previous book, Jesus Outside the Lines, has spoken into a lot of this stuff. You’ve also written Befriend, talking about gospel-centered friendships. And I would love for you to speak just a little bit more into that with regards to loneliness and isolation. You talked about getting into community.
I’ve been a youth pastor for 15-plus years, and I’ve seen over time, just how much harder it is for people to get into friendships [because] with the polarization comes a lack of trust. You have to vet people based off the things that you’ve seen them post in order for you to know whether or not they’re a safe person. I feel like that’s a little bit antithetical to what our heart needs to be as Christians because we want to enter into spaces and we want to love others, regardless of their political dispositions.
What are some things that you would say to that younger generation that understands their own issues but is willing to kind of go in there and really help to foster and create community. What are some things that you would encourage them to do?
Scott Sauls: I’ll make a statement that might offend some of your listeners, I’m okay with that as long as it produces rich conversation for your community. Here’s my offensive statement: There’s a difference between saying that you value diversity and valuing diversity.
The truth of the matter is you don’t really value diversity until you stop being offended by diversity. You’re more intrigued and curious by diversity than offended by it when diversity comes to town, so to speak. There’s all this talk on college campuses, for instance, about safe spaces. And in your question set up just a second ago, you use the word spaces for conversation and you use the word safe.
Now, especially on college campuses, students can rise up against professors for teaching ideas that hurt their feelings. This is the offensive statement: Grow up.
Van Jones is an African American political commentator. He leans more to the left politically. He’s typically on the cable news channels and such. But he had this really interesting statement in an interview that he did with David Axelrod. David Axelrod asked him what he thinks about safe spaces. An
d you would expect that, that such a staunchly blue-stage guy would say, “I’m all about the safe spaces. Students shouldn’t be subjected to ideas that upset them.” But he said the opposite.
He said, and I’m paraphrasing here, but he said, It’s ridiculous to demand that you be safe from other people’s ideas. I want you to be safe, physically. I want you to be safe from assault, I want you to be safe from physical abuse. But in terms of ideas and ideology, I don’t want you to be safe at all — I want you to be strong. I want you to be ideologically strong. And I want your convictions to be so well-developed that they can withstand any type of ideological pushback on your convictions. And I also want your humility to be so strong that you’re open to be persuaded of other ideas that might actually be healthier and more life-giving than the ideas that you have now.
I thought that was remarkable for a very progressive leader to decipher the difference and really push back on this idea of ideological safe spaces. Because eventually you’re going to be out in the real world and the whole safe space thing is not going to work for you in the workplace, it’s not going to work for you in the courtroom, it’s not going to work for whatever you’re doing professionally, it’s not gonna work for you and your family. When you get in an argument with your spouse or when your kids push back, it’s not gonna work.
So the faster we can grow up in terms of really embracing diversity, instead of just talking about how we embrace and love diversity, [the better]. Diversity is really the willingness to be curious about and humble in the presence of ideas and perspectives that challenge our own. What better place than inside the Body of Christ, where Christ affirms the value and dignity of everybody at the table and puts us together like in the New Testament, putting Jew and Gentile together so that we can work these things out and develop together a more refined understanding of who God is, and what it means to be a flourishing human being who loves his or her neighbor?
Kevin Yi: In your book, you say: “Christlike gentleness and prophetic strength, do not cancel each other out; rather, they complete each other. It is Jesus’s love — his gentleness and grace towards us — that equips us and compels us to stand up and speak out against injustice and hurt in the world.” That’s such a powerful statement of how, even though the book called, A Gentle Answer, there are a lot of parts of it where are you are compelling us and pushing us to be that prophetic voice into our culture, especially as we head into a what is probably going to be one of the most contentious political cycles.
Scott Sauls: There’s a chapter in the book called “Doing Anger Well” where we learn to do anger well. That’s actually a byproduct of the Spirit’s fruit of gentleness — that we get angry in a really good way. C.S. Lewis wrote, “Christianity is a fighting religion.” We see what’s wrong in the world and we fight; we attack the problem. And that’s what righteous anger [is]. Righteous anger is the kind of anger that attacks problems, not people. Unrighteous anger attacks people and just adds to the problem. But righteous anger attacks the problem.
When you’re attacking a problem instead of attacking a person, it actually opens the door of possibility of bringing the people that you’re in disagreement with along to attack the problem together. Let’s not shoot at each other, but let’s put the problem in the center of the room and let’s start shooting at that problem together to see if we can reach a greater degree of unity and peace through consensus building, mutual persuasion, active listening, apologizing, repenting, and humbling ourselves as we also refine each other’s perspective through the tension of diversity.
The Bible actually commands that we’d be angry in the Psalms as well as in Ephesians. Be angry and do not sin. That’s what the literal Hebrew and Greek say. It’s an imperative. It’s not, “In your anger, don’t sin.” It’s be angry, but sin not. There are things to get angry about like [the way] Jesus got angry at the tomb of Lazarus. He got angry at death and he attacked death. He got angry at sin, and he attacked sin at the cross so he wouldn’t have to attack people but to rescue us from ourselves and our sin instead. He got angry and turned the tables over in the temple because he was angry at the corruption of worship and the exploitation of the house of God for material gain. But he’s always attacking problems. Sometimes he has a sharp word to say to people, but it’s always with a goal to restore them and not to bludgeon them.
Kevin Yi: In our Western American culture right now, there seems to be a seeping in of the Eastern dynamic of honor-shame that is influencing the way that we talk to each other, especially over social media. One of the reasons why I love your book and ministry so much is that I find that you’re always bringing in the honor-shame dynamics in a way that makes me say, “Oh, this is a pastor who gets the way in which I think and filter issues in my life.” Can you speak to how that language has shaped your gospel-centered ministry at your church and just even on a personal level.
Scott Sauls: Every culture has its shadow side, and then every culture has its virtues. You put all the cultures together of the human community, get rid of the baggage, and put [together] all of the unique virtues, and you get something that looks more and more like the comprehensive image of God.
One of the things that I especially have learned and been humbled by from Asian culture and Eastern culture in general is the way that Eastern culture tends to put the tribe over the individual or the community over the individual. There’s something quite beautiful about that, and there’s something so right about that.
Look at the New Testament. If you’ve studied Greek, you know that the second person references in the New Testament are almost all plural. The New Testament is written to communities not to individuals. There’s so much “one another-ing” language. There’s so much language about deferring to one another and “the first will be last and the last will be first.”
When they talk about [the idiom] the baby and bathwater, that’s the baby of Eastern culture, whereas in Western culture, the bathwater is the way that we put “me” over everybody else. We’ve got this just yucky thing called “expressive individualism” where you know we have my truth and your truth and my expectation as an expressive Western individualist is that the whole world will revolve around my truth, and if you will not get on board with my truth, whatever that is, then then I will cancel you or I will box you out or I will develop a mob or join a mob that that’s against people like you. I think that’s a big reason why platforms like Twitter have gotten in many ways so toxic. It’s because we’re driven by expressive into individualism where it’s my feelings, my own instincts, and my own sort of narcissistic, self-centered way of thinking about the universe. [It’s] that I’m the hero and the center of the story, and everybody else’s role is to be a supporting actor in my story. That’s the shadow side [of Western culture].
The virtue of Eastern communal focus can provide a helpful corrective now to shame and honor. American culture is kind of shame-less. We’re very self-esteem oriented and we have no shame. It’s important to recognize that there are healthy forms of shame. Shame actually is what opens us up to the gospel and sets us on that trajectory of actually becoming beautiful people — beautiful human beings that reflect the Beatitudes and the fruit of the Spirit. It starts with the shame that we’re born not quite right. We’re all born with this thing called Original Sin, dead in transgression and sin, and God makes us alive and opens us up to the gospel and tells us, “Hey, I’m not holding your shame or your guilt against you. It’s atoned, you’re adopted, you’re included, you’re embraced, you’re a friend of God, you’re a child of God. You’ve got a glorious future, you’re an heir of everything, an heir of the kingdom.”
That shame has been replaced with honor by our father. He honors us. He delights in us. We’re referred to as the apple of his eye in the Scriptures. You know, David prays in Psalm 8, “What is man that you should desire him?” That’s kind of a statement of shame, right?
Then he’s reawakened to the fact that, “You’ve made him a little less than God. You’ve crowned him with glory and honor.” There’s that word, right? It’s the honor that God has crowned us with that addresses the shame that we experience and renders it null and void in terms of its ability to name us or to give us our identity.
Brennan Manning is a Catholic writer who just understands so much about grace and Christian and gospel identity. One of his beautiful statements, it’s from his book called Abba’s Child, he said, “Define yourself radically as the beloved of God because every other identity is an illusion [paraphrased].” That’s absolutely true.
When we’re united with Christ — then in the eyes of God, in the eyes of our Creator, in the eyes of our Father in heaven — everything that’s true of Jesus is also true of us in the sight of God. We are blameless, we are faultless, we are beloved, and so on. So if this is our identity, and we’re aware of it, it can’t help but affect the way that we interact with each other and that we treat each other.
C.S. Lewis writes about this in The Weight of Glory where he says, we don’t realize this, but we’ve “never met a mere mortal.” He says that the very people that we interact with every day and that we “snub” or “exploit” could be such a glorious creature that if we saw them today in their future state, we will be severely tempted to bow down and worship.
He goes on to write about the sacredness of our fellow human beings, which also means that we’re sacred too — created in the image of God. And so often, I’m usually a lot more tired of myself than I am with other people. And I feel a lot of shame for me that I feel like dumping shame on other people. And sometimes when I dump shame on other people, it’s because I feel so ashamed. I’m trying to deflect it like Adam, and he did it in the garden.
Maybe you have ideas about this that I haven’t thought of, but I don’t know if there’s any other solution to either Western American shamelessness or Eastern culture [that is] driven by shame. I don’t know if there’s any answer to either one of those except for what God has done for us in Christ. I haven’t. I haven’t discovered another answer to that that’s satisfying or adequate. Have you?
Kevin Yi: I think if I did, I’d be studying another book, but the Bible just keeps presenting that to me again and again. Yeah, it’s conviction and challenge, but it’s also incredible amounts of hope and love that you receive, you know, and so, I but again, I think that’s why I’m so taken by your ministry like this, like what you just said at the end is such a, such an encouraging thing to hear. And again, as a minister of the gospel, this is what I need the most myself in order to do this ministry Well, so, yeah, thank you. Thank you for that. That was that was beautiful too. I love how poetic you are in the way that you explain that those dynamics. And again, it’s just Yeah, super helpful in understanding how we are to view the other as we speak, as we share as we discuss all these things in the coming months to come especially, so good for us to be reminded of this so good for us to be reminded of this. Thank you so much for joining us on the SOLA Network Podcast.