the one who has years to hear

Re: the Christian Scharen interview excerpt below:

I think the 4th line from bottom may be a typo (or transcription mistake; see the mistaken Switchfoot reference, etc)..."didn't have the years to hear," when it was supposed to be "ears to hear"....but how prophetic the "years" comment is. It sometimes takes years to get deep enough in God to hear the "obvious" Christian content of the U2 1990s material...

and years to get over everything you have heard about that being the decade that they "backslid," and everything the church has taught us about the message "must be direct.":

JC: Would we even be having this conversation, and would you have written this book if U2 had signed with a Christian record label, way back when?

CS: I don’t think so. They would never have gotten this big, for starters. Not to say I wouldn’t have written a book about a Christian rock band. My whole intention of writing this book was how big they are, and the fact that there are a lot of people who like the band but don’t necessarily get it. I was in New York City last night talking to a bunch of seminary students, and even among pretty Christian folk they said “you know, I’d liked U2 for a long time but after I read your book, I went back and I was like ‘wow, this whole sort of deep conversation with God that was going on during the 90s that I totally ignored, I thought they’d gone off the rails and weren’t Christian anymore. Now I realize all the complexity of what was going on then in their Christian journey.’ So a real disconnect between what U2 has been up to and people’s perception of that, and understanding of that. And in some cases I’ve heard directly that that’s a gift for people’s faith to be able to go deeper, and be nourished by that.

JC: I’ve seen so many examples of that, where people had no idea and to me, they’re bolder than any Christian rock band in the ‘Christian’ industry with what they say - they’re so real. When All That You Can’t Leave Behind came out, a local critic called them hypocrites for never talking about their faith, and yet the music is informed by their faith.

CS: Somebody asked me last night - he was quoting Franklin Graham, but he used that [same] critique…

Quoting Franklin Graham?

Yes. Just saying, if their commitment to poverty and their orientation as a band is so Christian, why don’t they directly proclaim Christ? And we were listening - we were talking about U2’s use of the genre of lament. Most explicitly drawing on lament Psalms and scripture and also sort of writing songs that fit that mode even if they’re not directly referencing Scripture, and one of the ones we listened to was ‘Sunday Bloody Sunday’ and that song ends with “the victory Jesus won.” I mean, it’s just an absolute clear declaration of the victory of Christ in relationship to the troubles of this world. And that’s not the only place; there are clear places in their catalog, where they’ve just said, ‘you know, this is it - this is where we’re coming from.’ Early on, and recently. And people, I think, just don’t have years to hear it. If you listen to the song ‘Playboy Mansion,’ it’s a parable of grace: 100% right out of John’s Gospel. But people don’t have the sensibility of art, and the sort of creative presentation that they use. It’s not in a sense absolutely direct.

-link