MATT WHITMAN | Field Guide to the Bible (Ep. 946)

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This is Undaunted.Life A Man's Podcast. I'm your host, Kyle Thompson. Let's get into it. All right, guys, we've got a special guest on the podcast today. His name is Matt Whitman. He is a pastor, author, and also the creator and host of the Ten Minute Bible Hour show, and he's the author of this book right here, The Lightning-Fast Field Guide to the Bible, your compact companion for exploring the best book ever. And so we don't get into this book until probably the last quarter of the podcast, but we do get into the book, why he wrote it, why he's kind of giving us an overview of all 66 books of the Bible, the importance of every book of the Bible, even the ones that aren't that popular, why, you know, if someone were to say, well, we can't even trust the Bible because we don't know the author of this one, or when this one was written down, why that's pretty ignorant. But really for the entire first bit of the show, we were talking about, you know, his seminary experience. We get into the state of current American seminaries, and I make the case that current American seminaries, a lot of them are teaching people to teach other people how to deconstruct their faith. And how that's really, you know, leaving us in a bad place. And then we switch into a discussion about Islam and how modern seminaries and contemporaries of some of the people that we're holding faithfully to the book, are not preparing Christendom and Christians overall to deal with the spread, the violent spread of Islam. We also got into a discussion about contemporary Christian music. He shares a lot of my same views on that, about how the way we approach worship and the way we approach the Sunday morning service is not doing people a lot of favors, and especially not doing favors to men. And guys, we bounce in and out of a lot of different subject matters. It was a lot of fun. So I'm not going to keep it from you any longer. So without further ado, let's get into it.
Matt Whitman, welcome to UndauntedLife A Man's Podcast. Yeah, thanks Kyle.
I'm so excited to have you on here because you know what, we talk to all kinds of people on this show, and we've talked to a lot of professional Christians, and that's exactly what you are. And you became a pastor at some point along the road. Yeah, you should wear the moniker proudly, okay? Don't shrink away from it. But let's, you know, I'm assuming when you were a little kid, you weren't like, you know, thinking, hey, I want to do this whenever I grow up. I want to be a pastor. Maybe you wanted to be a GI Joe or professional ball player or something like that. So kind of take us down the road of how you became a pastor.

**Matt Whitman** (3:55)
Yeah, actually, I kind of did want to do this when I was a kid, which is weird. In eighth grade, they did a little, you know, what do you want to do when you grow up exercise? And I had seen some shows on TV where people went to cool places and talked to cool people, and then it was on TV. And I was like, I want to do that. I want to do, like, the adventure travel host thing. I didn't really understand how that could be a job or how that would ever work. But then again, in college, they asked about that in orientation. I was like, that'd be pretty cool. I would enjoy that because it seems like they have a lot of fun and they meet cool people and they learn stuff. Like, they actually learn where they're going. And then, you know, somewhere in the first month of my freshman year, I was like, well, that's a silly thing. That isn't a real job. I'll never do anything like that. And I just got on with study in history and theology and stuff that I think is interesting. And somehow I accidentally got to my senior year and I accidentally grabbed a little degree in Bible at my college, just kept taking Bible classes because they were cool. I mean, the professors were great. And they did a really good job of talking about historical context and how this fits into the great grand interesting scheme of history. And that really clicked because the Bible and faith had been...