It’s a new season of Three Chords and the Truth: The Apologetics Podcast, and Garrick and Timothy are serious about social distancing. They are, in fact, so serious about being socially distant that they’ve installed a mile-wide river to separate them. In the first half of this earthshaking season premiere, your intrepid cohosts discuss a recent article in Christianity Today entitled “Is the Coronavirus Evil?”
Is the Coronavirus Evil?
The answer given in the article is “no,” and the author argues that deadly viruses are good and necessary aspects of God’s original creation. And yet, according to Garrick and Timothy and pretty much every theologian in the history of Christianity, the answer to the question of whether such viruses are evil is “yes, they are”; these calamities are traceable back to the sin of Adam and Eve. Before the conversation is over, a battle ensues in which Augustine of Hippo, Herman Bavinck, and Karl Barth unite to defeat not only this errant article but also armchair theologian and professional wrestler Hulk Hogan. To do this, it becomes necessary for Timothy to explain a philosophical concept known as “surd evil.” Also, “Surd” would be a great name for a band.
The devil himself shows up in the second half of this week’s episode. That’s because the dynamic duo tackles the classic hit “Sympathy for the Devil” by the Rolling Stones. In the process of explaining what Mick Jagger got right and wrong in the lyrics of this song, Garrick and Timothy also discuss such pressing dilemmas as why Satan chose to take the form of a serpent instead of a cat in the Garden of Eden.
With the tragic loss of the Infinity Gauntlet at the end of last season—may our treasured friend from Season 1 rest in peace with the listener to whom we sent it—it became necessary to come up with something even more absurd than drawing random questions about fictional universes from a plastic glove. This was difficult, but not too difficult because Garrick and Timothy are veritable experts when it comes to random absurdities. And so, this week represents the inaugural Toy Box Hero Tournament, in which your cohosts steal toys from their children and force these toys into duels that result in the death of one toy or maybe just in a lot of pointless arguments. This week, it’s a battle between Captain America’s shield and a Lite-Brite, because that somehow made sense at the time.
The new cover art for this season was created by Dani Wallace (daniwallace.myportfolio.com), and Garrick and Timothy are giving away notebooks with this logo on them. Listen to the episode to discover how to win.
Many apologies for the poor audio quality in some portions of this week’s podcast; when this episode was recorded, Timothy was still working on different solutions for recording the podcast while socially distanced.
Links to Click
The Problem of Evil: book by Jeremy Evans
Is the Coronavirus Evil?: article by Daniel Harrell
The City of God: book by Augustine of Hippo
How Can a Good God Allow Evil in the World?: podcast episode with Eric Johnson
Sympathy for the Devil: song by The Rolling Stones
Yer Blues (Remastered 2009): song by The Beatles
Rollin’ Stone: song by Muddy Waters
The Prodigal Son: song by Robert Wilkins
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The Closing Credits
Three Chords and the Truth: The Apologetics Podcast thanks B&H Academic for their sponsorship. Theme music for the podcast has been licensed through Artlist.io and performed by Trent Thompson. Brief excerpts of music played in each program are included solely for the purposes of comment and critique as allowed under the fair-use provision of U.S. copyright law. “The fair use of a copyrighted work … for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, … scholarship, or research, is not an infringement of copyright” (U.S. Code § 107, Limitations on exclusive rights: Fair use).
