Bookish Religion?
01:10:24 Share

An Undeceptions Podcast. Christianity is a bookish faith. It's really into words. In fact, the word, word in Greek, logos, is one of the titles for Jesus in the way he embodies God.

"In the beginning was the Word," says the opening line of John's Gospel. And the Word was with God and the Word was God. The Word became flesh and dwelt among us. This is because words are about communication. They are the principle way we reveal ourselves, our inner thoughts, our inner life to other people.

Without words, it's mostly guesswork. I mean, I can't tell if producer Kayleigh is frowning at me or just professionally concentrating. Words matter.

And today we have 15 words for you that are often misunderstood or sometimes forgotten. And my guest today reckons these words communicate the heart and soul of the New Testament, of the Christian faith, of God himself. I'm John Dixon and this is Undeceptions.

so

Undeceptions is brought to you by Zondervan Academics' Bright Hope for Tomorrow by Chris Davis. Each episode, we explore some aspect of life, faith, history, science, culture or ethics that's either much misunderstood or mostly forgotten. With the help of people who know what they're talking about, we're trying to undeceive ourselves and let the truth out.

And if this hour of undeceiving isn't enough for you, join the Undeceptions Plus community for just $5 Aussie a month. That's just 33 kroner 76 or for our many Norwegian listeners. Hi guys, can't wait to get back to Scandi. Anyway, you'll get extended interviews with my guests, bonus episodes and tons of other stuff. Head to undeceptions.com forward slash plus.

This episode of Undeceptions is brought to you by Zondervan Academics' new book, ready for it? Mere Christian Hermeneutics, Transfiguring What It Means to Read the Bible Theologically, by the brilliant Kevin Van Hooser. I'll admit that's a really deep-sounding title, but don't let that put you off. Kevin is one of the most respected theological thinkers in the world today.

And he explores why we consider the Bible the word of God, but also how you make sense of it from start to finish. Hermeneutics is just the fancy word for how you interpret something. So if you want to dip your toe into the world of theology, how we know God, what we can know about God, then this book is a great starting point. Looking at how the church has made sense of the Bible through history, but also how you today can make sense of it.

Mere Christian Hermeneutics also offers insights that are valuable to anyone who's interested in literature, philosophy, or history. Kevin doesn't just write about faith. He's also there to hone your interpretative skills. And if you're eager to engage with the Bible, whether as a believer or as a doubter, this might be essential reading.

You can pre-order your copy of Mere Christian Hermeneutics now at Amazon, or you can head to zondervanacademic.com forward slash undeceptions to find out more. Don't forget, zondervanacademic.com forward slash undeceptions.

Some people don't like how wordy Christianity is. They think Christianity is too propositional, too much about dogma. Are you sort of feeding that beast? I think I'm trying to do the opposite because when I teach Greek, I'm now part of a translation team, and my heart really is breaking down the Christianese. If we think that most...

That's Dr. Nijay Gupta, professor of New Testament at Northern Seminary, just outside Chicago. I'm soon to be his neighbor. His most recent book is called 15 New Testament Words of Life, a New Testament theology for real life. And that's what we're talking to him about in this episode. If we think that most of the New Testament or much of the New Testament is written in the language of the people, right?

versus kind of the ivory tower, then we should stop translating things as hollowed and realize that sometimes the language of the New Testament is more like everyday language that we use.

And I feel like our translation should change. I feel like they should be more in keeping with the New Living Translations, the Message Bible, translations that really try to communicate in the everyday language of the people. So what I try to do is I take these words like righteousness, holiness, and I think, how would we actually talk about this today in regular language?

This is one of the cool things about the New Testament. I mean, I know I'm biased and really, I think there are many cool things, but it's written in the language of common speech, not in a highly literary language.

Of course, if you remember our Between Testaments episode, one of the most downloaded episodes ever, you'll know that after Alexander the Great in the late 4th century BC, much of the ancient Near East and most of the Mediterranean adopted Alexander's language, Greek.

Even Jews, many of them anyway, took on Greek as well as Aramaic and some Hebrew. The second largest Jewish city in the ancient world after Jerusalem was Alexandria in northern Egypt, named after Alexander, of course. And the Jews there mostly spoke and wrote in Greek.

It got to the point where they felt the need to translate the Hebrew and Aramaic scriptures, what Christians call the Old Testament, into the local Greek. We call that great translation the Septuagint, so-called because of the tradition that 70 scribes were involved in the translation. In nerdy books, it's often represented by Roman numerals LXX 50 10 10, which equals 70.

The Septuagint predates Jesus by a couple of centuries, and it massively influenced the way the New Testament authors like Paul or John or Mark wrote their works. I mean, words like Christos, Christ, or Euangelion, Gospel, or Kurios, Lord, were all chosen under the influence of this Septuagint.

Anyway, the point is our authors chose what's called Koine or Common Greek to communicate the things they had seen. And if you're playing along in our August competition, that's our code word for this episode. Koine, K-O-I-N-E, the word for common. You intimated that the New Testament is written in a, you know, we call it Common Greek and

Even the kind of Greek it is, it's not as rarefied as the Greek of Josephus and Philo or Plutarch. It's like several levels below that. Can you tell us about that? Like nerd out for a second. I don't mind. That's fine. But then why is that important for us to understand? Well, even the phenomenon of Paul, for example, as a Jew writing to people in Rome,

In Greek is a really interesting phenomenon. He's not writing in Latin. He's not writing in Aramaic, you know, you know, Greek ended up being kind of the lingua franca of the Roman world. It was the language of common, you know, common communication across cultures. Something this tells us is the metropolitan cosmopolitan nature of the Roman world where you have lots of cultures and people mixing and

Part of that tells us that Jews pretty early on in the Greek world thought it appropriate and right to translate their scriptures into Greek. The fact that the Septuagint translators are choosing regular words to translate what we think of as the Old Testament, I think that probably sets the tone.

for what these early Christian writers are doing, that in itself is helpful to think through, okay, they're writing for everyday people. I think this hit home for me, John, reading a book by Bruce Longenecker called Remember the Poor, where he really points out that most people listening to the New Testament in the first century were what we think of as poor.

When you say that compared to the great university tradition of Christianity, there's a mismatch between kind of the loftiness of some of our academic traditions in Christian theology and kind of the reality of first century Christianity, which would have been very street on the ground kind of thing.

Way back in season one of Undeceptions, I spoke to Teresa Morgan at Oxford about what life was like for the average person living on the outskirts of Rome around the time of Jesus. It was episode four called Moral Classics, and I reckon it's well worth a listen. One of the things she said really struck me.

The New Testament is a unique set of texts in antiquity because it doesn't come from elites. It comes from what she called pretty ordinary people. Theologically, I'd want to say that God chose to communicate to normal people, not just the rich and powerful.

The language chosen for the New Testament matters. And the keywords used from that language provide windows into the central message being communicated. Here are 15 of those words. Ready? You ready? I'm ready. Righteous.

Dikaios. Yeah, I would translate something like right before God and others towards integrity and justice in the world. I love it. When we hear that word now, it's a horrible word. It's so Christianese. And almost the only time you hear righteous now, it's derogatory. It's self-righteous. Or even now, people would just say, oh, you're so righteous. Right.

Oh, please. Well, I started my chapter by just using kind of a joke that, you know, you would never see a job ad looking for a shift manager at McDonald's must be righteous. But that's precisely what we want. You know, the way this term was used in Greek, the way it was used in its Hebrew counterpart, it just means good, honest person, like good and honest. You know, you want that kind of employee. And we don't actually have a good English word for that. Integrity is probably the closest word.

Gospel. Woo!

"Ewangelion." "The trumpets are sounding." I would say the story of good news of being changed for the better by God. I mean, that would be a very basic way of saying it. And it was a huge word in the first century, wasn't it?

It had a whole connotation. It did. I mean, you know, it was the most common word for good news. So if you said good news, I got a promotion at work, you would use this word. But there were some echoes, some political echoes. You know, I like to tell my students, if you watch Star Wars or the Hunger Games, you

they're basically ripping off the Roman world. I mean, a lot of these famous movies are just riffing on Rome. And so it's not surprising to see the New Testament doing that as well, picking up terms that would have some political resonances and using them. And in the Roman world, you would talk about the quote unquote good news of a particular political leader coming into power.

When I lived in England, I lived a stone's throw from where Constantine was coronated in Yorkshire, not too far from Durham where I lived. And it's a big thing when an emperor comes into power. And here we have Jesus, this poor Galilean, and we're celebrating his life. I mean, that would be something special. Right.

Now, brothers and sisters, I want to remind you of the gospel I preached to you, which you received and on which you have taken your stand. For what I received I passed on to you as of first importance, that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, that He was buried, that He was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures, and that He appeared to Cephas and then to the Twelve, and that He was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures.

1 Corinthians chapter 15

For us today, the word gospel, good news, is obviously a religious term. But that's only because of 2,000 years of Christianization. In ancient common Greek, it was a media term that referred to breaking news from the real world. It could be used, for example, to announce a military victory. Two of the archers hurried to Sparta, bringing the good news, gospel, that the enemy had been captured. Pausanias, Description of Greece, Book 4.

There's a comedic example from a Greek play. The butcher rushes into the war cabinet of the city council and says, "Councillors, I bring you good news," a gospel. "Never have anchovies been cheaper at the market." Aristophanes' Knights, 644. And as Nije points out, the word was very often used about breaking news concerning the emperors.

And quicker than thought, the good news gospel of the new emperor Vespasian spread in the east. Josephus, Jewish War, Book 4. The Christian gospel, of course, was the breaking news of a new and different kind of emperor. You say in your book that you think that perhaps the gospel writers, those who wrote a book we call gospel, might be disappointed with how we think

in certain evangelical circles use the word gospel today. Can you explain why? Yeah, I think a lot of times our rendition of the gospel is a kind of pie in the sky, get to go to heaven, get out of hell, free card, kind of say the sinner's prayer. But when we look at kind of the Isaiahnic, when we look at the book of Isaiah, the Isaiahnic use of gospel language that's picked up in what we call the Septuagint, the Greek translation of the Old Testament,

You know, I get this from Tom Wright, you know, they're proclaiming, here comes your God, here comes your king. What does a king do? He leads a people. And this people is able to thrive and flourish and get back to their land and grow good food and celebrate. And why should we have a gospel that's only important for when we die? Shouldn't it be really important for the here and now? Forgiveness.

Yeah, forgiveness, often we think of it as letting go, like accident forgiveness from your insurance. But it's interesting, when I looked at Luke, I saw that forgiveness really isn't about letting go. It's really about embracing. It's about letting go of something, which may be guilt or sin, but for the purpose of embracing. And put in relational terms, it's really about letting go or forgetting something in order to fully embrace someone.

Colossians chapter 3.

People think of forgiveness as just sort of cheap, letting people off the hook, too light and easy. You're saying it's not quite that? It's not. I mean, there are different kinds of forgiveness. And let's say a relative that died who abused you, you can't reconcile with them, they're dead. But in many cases with our real relationships, forgiveness isn't just saying no problem. A lot of times that doesn't actually heal a relationship because there may be patterns. And so what God does for us is not just kind of

with a brush of the hand, say, forget it. We all know what it feels like for someone to say to you, just forget it. Like that doesn't feel good. That doesn't make a relationship better. But for God to say, like, I'm going to keep working at healing what's going on in this relationship, that tenacity of God, that is one of the most beautiful things, you know, the God who will not let go.

By the way, you might want to check out episode 39, Guilty Conscience, where we took a deep dive into guilt, shame and forgiveness. One of our guests, Professor Tyler Vanderweeler from Harvard, made the case for forgiveness as a public health issue. I don't know how you're going to summarise this word in rapid fire because it's so bloomin' basic. Life.

Zoe. Okay. I'm going to give you an illustration. I have an electric toothbrush. I've had one for years and years and years. And sometimes my wife will unplug it to plug in, you know, the hairdryer steamer. And over time, I won't realize it's unplugged and the power will just get weaker and weaker until I feel like I'm, it's not doing anything. And then you plug it in and the next day that, that experience of this thing coming back to full life.

is kind of like what John means by life, this flourishing vitality, vibrancy. I call it, you know, when he talks about life to the full, I call it life in high definition. When I came back from living in England after three years, America just discovered high definition televisions. And he's just like, oh my gosh, this is a whole different kind of thing. "'I am the gate,' said Jesus. "'Whoever enters through me will be saved.'

They will come in and go out and find pasture. The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy. I have come that they may have life and have it to the full. John chapter 10. Yeah, because some people read that statement of Jesus in John's gospel as referring to extended life. It's really eternal life in the future. That's the life to the full.

Right. I think of Indiana Jones' Last Crusade. We have this just really old guardian and nobody wants that life. Nobody wants kind of a weak, wimpy life.

In Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, the Grail Knight was a knight from the First Crusade who had discovered the Holy Grail while in Jerusalem and protected it for a thousand years. In the film, the Grail Knight is appointed to protect the Holy Grail, thought to be the cup Jesus used to drink at the Last Supper. It has miraculous powers to sustain life.

But in protecting the grail, the knight has to stay confined in the cave where it's hidden. Sure, the knight can drink from the cup and live forever, but he's also spending an eternity in a cave on his own. By the time Indiana Jones finds the cave, the knight is a shadow of his former self.

That sort of eternal life, mere extended life, actually sounds terrible. And now I have to tell you, because producer Kayleigh wants to keep the promotions rolling, we have full-blown episodes on the real Crusades. Episodes 41 and 42, God's War. And there's no Holy Grail in it. Sorry about that.

More recently, episode 64, Kingdom Come, has tons to say about what eternal life in the Bible really is. And it's fantastic. The episode is pretty good too. I've read some translations that say immortal life, this idea that you're not subject to death. Immortality is actually closer to what it means than eternal. Eternal gives that sense of never ending, but immortal gives that sense of indestructibility. So it's that kind of elevated, not just extended life. That's right. Yeah.

Okay, cross. Stauros. We think acquiring power, acquiring success, acquiring money, acquiring wealth, acquiring prestige is the way to get ahead in life. And here we have Jesus climbing down the ladder of success, Philippians chapter 2. He'd lowered himself, becoming like a mortal, succumbing to death on a cross.

And then God overcame that. What's interesting is many people kind of mistake what Paul's saying as the resurrection flips the crucifixion. It kind of erases it.

And Lou Martin has this famous saying, the resurrection, though it comes after the cross, doesn't thereby replace it. The resurrection is God's stamp of approval that the sacrifice that Jesus made was worth it in the end. And this sets a pattern for us of what we call cruciformity, which is the idea that suffering, giving, being other-centered like Jesus actually gives

brings us the life of God, which is counterintuitive in the world we live in sometimes. Yeah, I heard Tom Holland, the famous British historian, just recently saying that really it was the cross more than the resurrection that transformed Western culture. When I first heard him say that, I was like, you know, something in me went, no, no, no, the resurrection changed everything. But actually, when you think about it, the New Testament

I mean, precisely what you just said. It doesn't say, ah, happy ending, the resurrection, we don't think about the cross anymore. It actually puts the cross at the front because the cross is the thing that turns things upside down. And that's what transformed Western culture, according to Tom Holland. In your relationships with one another, have the same mindset as Christ Jesus, who, being in very nature God, did not consider equality with God something to be used to his own advantage.

Rather, he made himself nothing by taking the very nature of a servant, being made in human likeness, and being found in appearance as a man, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to death, even death on a cross. Philippians chapter 2. Okay, next rapid fire. It's a big one. It's a cliche. Faith.

Pistis. I wrote a book on this called Paul and the Language of Faith, and I talk about the problem of people thinking of faith as passive, thinking of it as opinion, thinking of it as mental assent. I talk about faith in Paul's theology as kind of participation in the life of God. It is the way we link into who God is and what he's done. It's not something we earn. It's not something we quote-unquote do as kind of an individual act.

But this idea of grasping Christ, holding on for dear life, it's kind of like when you're on a roller coaster and you're clinging to that bar. That's what faith is. It's that clinging closely to Christ. For in the gospel, the righteousness of God is revealed, a righteousness that is by faith from first to last. Just as it is written, the righteous will live by faith. Romans chapter 1.

What would you say to the criticism that faith is the opposite of reason? Yeah, I mean, I'd say so many things, but in some ways, you know, in my book I talk about, for Paul, faith is believing the unbelievable, and one of my reviewers really critiqued that, saying, well, you know, Christians have reason. At the same time, there's this sense of faith as seeing with what I call a second type of sight.

And this is where Paul talks about seeing with the eyes of faith in 2 Corinthians 5, 7. What does that mean? Hebrews 11. There is some sense in which there is mystery in faith. We're talking about things that we can't visibly see sometimes. Right. But to say there isn't reason there, I never like when my students say, I don't have reasons. I just believe it by faith. You know, the average ancient letter was about half a page long, about 200 words.

Paul wrote many, many times that. Think of Romans, think of 1 Corinthians, 2 Corinthians. He wrote these extremely long texts to regular people, not to academics. And he's doing that because he has these really beautiful, I mean, Romans is the best example, but he has these beautiful arguments he lays out.

But they're arguments of a different kind. He does use rhetoric, sophistry sometimes. He does use logic, philosophy. He quotes from the Old Testament. Occasionally he quotes from philosophers. He uses metaphors from the arts. He's quite intelligent. And actually, Larry Hurtado in his wonderful book, Destroyer of the Gods, talks about the early Christianity taking on a quote-unquote bookish culture, meaning they increasingly became, I think, more academic and

Because they really wanted to convince people. So I would say it's kind of both and. In some ways, faith is counterintuitive. And in other ways, writers like Paul were very sophisticated in the way they tried to argue by reason. Yeah, there's a lovely paradox there. I mean, we've talked how the New Testament is written in common Greek.

You know, a 16-year-old could sit there listening to 1 Corinthians and sort of get what's being said in the ancient world. And yet, by the second century, certainly into the third, they have long catechetical classes, lectures that are detailed and very bookish. Christianity holds these together, doesn't it? Yeah, I mean, the Christian intellectual tradition preserved Philo and Josephus. We wouldn't really have Philo and Josephus

Now, the Christians tried to Christianize at least Philo, but we wouldn't really have some of these texts if it weren't for these Christians saying we really need to do our homework. Christianity is bookish and wordy, but it's also simple and I reckon beautiful. And we've got some more simple beautiful after the break.

68-year-old Tirat was working as a farmer near his small village on the Punjab-Sindh border in Pakistan when his vision began to fail. Cataracts were causing debilitating pain and his vision impairment meant he couldn't sow crops.

It pushed his family into financial crisis. But thanks to support from Anglican Aid, Tirat was seen by an eye care team sent to his village by the Victoria Memorial Medical Centre. He was referred for crucial surgery. With his vision successfully restored, Tirat is able to work again and provide for his family.

There are dozens of success stories like Tarat's emerging from the outskirts of Pakistan, but Anglican Aid needs your help for this work to continue. Please head to anglicanaid.org.au forward slash Tarat.

and make a tax-deductible donation to help this wonderful organisation give people like Turat a second chance. That's anglicanaid.org.au forward slash Undeceptions.

It's been seven years since Terry Roberts' life changed forever. In October 2006, her 32-year-old son Charlie walked into an Amish school in Lancaster County and shot 10 young girls before killing himself. I heard the sirens and saw helicopters. Then the phone was ringing and it was my husband. And he said, I need you to come to Charlie's house right away.

And I got out of the car and I looked at my husband and these sunken eyes just saying, it was Charlie. It could not be. And yet it truly was. It was true. It was our son. In the tiny village of Nickel Mines, Pennsylvania, the events of the 2nd of October 2006 are referred to as The Happening. Charlie Roberts entered a schoolhouse deep in Amish country and shot 10 young girls and five died.

That was a clip from CBS News, and we heard the killer's mother, Terry Roberts, talk about her shock when she heard what her son had done. There was a man who shot a bunch of schoolchildren in an Amish community, and then the man killed himself, so he's dead. But the community made a decision very quickly, you know, as a group to forgive Terry.

The man and to take care of his family. So they actually went to the family's house, the wife's house. They talked to her. They expressed their forgiveness. And even at the funeral, this is fascinating. They shielded the family from the media.

so that they could mourn in private. And Amish, obviously, if you know anything about Amish, they're very shy about being on TV. They don't like the kind of public eye. And I think they even created some funds to take care of the child. Charles Roberts wasn't Amish, but most people in the village knew him as the local milkman. In the days after the killing, the Amish community was quick to express their forgiveness to Charles's family.

On the day of the killings, members of the Nickel Mines community took food to Robert's widow. Six days after the shooting, families who'd just buried their daughters attended Robert's funeral. Many families who'd lost their own daughters were seen hugging and comforting the killer's wife, Marie, and his mother, Terry. That's why they call it Amazing Grace. OK, we'll come back out of the weeds now for a glorious word, Grace. Charis.

People often use these acronyms like God's riches at Christ's mercy, things like that, which are kind of helpful, but mostly not. Similar to you is actually trained in classical Greek. I studied classical Greek for my undergraduate. And our actual translation of that is favor. Favor meaning someone showing favor towards somebody. The best example of this really is our relationship with our children.

You know, like we want them to be healthy and yet we spoil them with food and screen time and all kinds of stuff. And to have this understanding that God has that feeling towards his creatures, right?

of spoiling them, of giving them, you know, just like the gospels say, even though, you know, you're evil, you know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more the heavenly father, like we're not evil, but he's saying you're flawed, you're mortal, you're sinful, but you spoil your kids, how much more God. So the idea of God's grace really is his disposition of wanting to spoil his creatures. But because of his great love for us,

God, who is rich in mercy, made us alive with Christ even when we were dead in transgressions. It is by grace you have been saved. And God raised us up with Christ and seated us with him in the heavenly realms in Christ Jesus.

How we gather in community is changing.

People are drifting away from religious institutions so that more than one in three millennials, when asked to name their religious identity, says none of the above. Meanwhile, there's a growing crisis of isolation. One in four Americans now says that they have nobody to talk to. Our research at Harvard Divinity School has revealed a landscape of young people who are urgently looking for communities of belonging.

We've mapped out how secular organizations like CrossFit and Meetup and local makerspaces are fulfilling traditionally religious functions like community building, purpose finding, and personal transformation.

In 2015, two researchers from Harvard Divinity School released a report called How We Gather, outlining the emerging landscape of millennial communities that had begun to function and take the place of religious communities. They did so with mixed success. That's what our next word is about.

It's what all of us, millennials, Gen X, boomers, and all the rest are really craving. If only it weren't covered in all the Christian cliches. Next word is a bit of a daggy word in Christianese, fellowship. Koinonia. Oh, yeah. I remember my first line in that chapter is, I hate fellowship. Because often that means superficial socializing.

And I'm an introvert and I do not like to chit chat with people at church. I'm the one that takes the kids to children's ministry. So I don't have to say hello during the fellowship minute. But Paul doesn't really mean that when he's talking about fellowship. Often we think of fellowship as giving to somebody or something, but I explain it this way. If I have two cookies and I eat a cookie and I give you a cookie,

That's not fellowship. That's giving. I'm giving it to you. Fellowship is when two people actually have forced to share one thing. So I use the example of like the YMCA locker room. This would be how the word koinonia was used in the first century. This is a place where you're going to the pool to swim.

It's publicly funded or whatever. And you have to use the same locker room. This is the cheapest, easiest way to do it. So you're going to respect each other's space. You're going to respect the belongings. You're going to clean up after yourself. This is what Paul really wanted with other churches. He wanted sharing, community, giving, sacrifice, caring for one another. Fellowship is not entertainment and it's not just getting along.

There's nothing wrong with going out to the movies with your Christian friends or having a prayer gathering, but fellowship really is about sharing life together, which requires sacrifice but also brings a lot of benefits as well. The new disciples devoted themselves to the apostles' teaching and to the fellowship, to the breaking of bread, and to prayer.

Koinonia is almost untranslatable. Camaraderie, partnership, friendship, family, all rolled into one.

It's all the things experts today call social capital, which producer Kayleigh wants me to tell you is the title of an Undeceptions episode, episode number five, with Australian atheist, academic and now government minister, Dr. Andrew Lee, who reckons religious communities might just be the backbone of social capital in the Western world. OK, I promise that's the last inside promotion I'm going to do. Hope.

Hope, I like to say, is faith reaching into the future. And one thing I really discovered in my use of hope language, in the biblical use of hope language, is we often think of hope as this really far distant thing. And I found it really interesting that the Septuagint, which is the Greek translation of the Old Testament, will sometimes choose hope in place of faith language, thinking that sometimes faith is just reaching into the next minute. Hope is just faith reaching into the next minute.

Dear friends, now we are children of God, and what we will be has not yet been made known.

But we know that when Christ appears, we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is. All who have this hope in him purify themselves, just as he is pure. 1 John chapter 3. And do you think that perspective helps the sceptical listener get around the problem, the perception that Christianity is pie in the sky? You're so heavenly, you're so future-oriented.

you've forgotten about the present. Yes, but one thing that's really helped me is thinking through, for example, in the kind of American, maybe even British era of slavery, you know, the 19th century era of slavery, a lot of the black spiritual songs emphasized future hope because the world was so hopeless. And they didn't do that because they had a pie in the sky theology. They did that because they believed in a God of transformation.

And so sometimes it can be a mark of privilege to say, oh, you know, future hope is not that important. When we look at people who've lived through, you know, really horrendous down and out times, I remember Jürgen Moltmann saying the Shema and the Lord's Prayer were prayed in Auschwitz.

And that stayed with me. I read that probably 10 years ago, and that line has stayed with me because often we cling to hope when the world is hopeless or seems hopeless.

Jürgen Moltmann is one of the most influential theologians of modern times. When people say that theology might just be the most comprehensive and demanding intellectual discipline, the queen of the sciences, they mean the work of Augustine, Aquinas, Banvik, Bannenberg, and Moltmann. A scholar like Moltmann is integrating top-tier linguistics, history, Bible study, of course, sociology, and philosophy.

I don't agree with everything Maltman says, perhaps because I don't understand everything he says, but his central vision for theology as a theology of hope, a future-looking theology, is intellectually mind-bending and life-changing.

From first to last, and not merely the epilogue, wrote Maltman. Christianity is eschatology, is hope, forward-looking and forward-moving, and therefore also revolutionising and transforming the present. When you put last things first, he argued, it elevates, not negates, the present.

Back when I was a theology student, Ben Shaw and I wrote a song about all of this. There's a God and I'm not him. The end informs where I begin. I believe that truth is strange. I'm sure the fool is sane. It's a blessing and a curse. Lost things first. Lost things first. Heaven comes to us.

Maybe not our finest work, but a sincere attempt to be musically Maltmanian. And you're saying the novel Lord of the Flies is wrong? You're saying that would never happen? Well, if tens of millions of children around the globe still have to read Lord of the Flies in school today, I think they also deserve to know about this one time

in all world history when real kids shipwrecked on a real island because that's a very different story. A story of cooperation, hope, and eventually salvation.

That's a clip from Australia's 60 Minutes program back in April 2021, with historian Rutger Bregman talking about the real Lord of the Flies story that he reported in his book Humankind, A Hopeful History. The story was extracted by The Guardian and went viral on social media, getting millions of reads. There's a link in the show notes, of course.

In September 1966, after 15 long months, Australian lobster fisherman Peter Warner was sailing near Atta when he spotted a burned-out patch. When he went closer, he was shocked to see a human figure. And this first figure was swimming towards us doing the Australian crawl, as I call it. And then another five bodies leapt off the cliff and into the water and followed him.

They clambered aboard and told the crew how they'd run away from boarding school and ended up shipwrecked. Peter radioed to Nuku'alofa, the capital of Tonga, to check out their story. And the operator very tearfully said, it's true. These boys were students at this college. They've been given up for dead. Funerals have been held and now you've found them. So that was a very emotional moment.

For all of us. The six boys had been stranded on an uninhabited rocky islet south of Tonga for 15 months. Salvation. This is surely the jargon of jargons. Soteria.

Yeah. And I'll do quickly what my illustration is from the book, because I think the opening illustration really tells it all. So there's a story about these children that want to embark on this journey by themselves to some faraway island.

And they go without a compass, they go without proper amount of food, and end up getting shipwrecked on a desert island. And so you have the cliche story of a sailor going by and rescuing them, and most stories of salvation would end there.

But what's beautiful about this particular story is he actually then they were going to get in trouble for stealing a boat. He actually bails them out. He takes them home, bails them out, and then he invites them to work on his crew. He wants to give them a livelihood that give them jobs. This is closer to the biblical understanding of salvation where it's not just plucking you out of hell.

and sticking you in no man's land, but really saying it's more like adoption where I'm going to rescue you, let's say, and I'm going to care for you, take care of you, help you thrive, be in relationship with you. Salvation could be translated as commitment to someone's flourishing. - Jesus entered Jericho and was passing through. A man was there by the name of Zacchaeus. He was a chief tax collector and was wealthy.

He wanted to see who Jesus was, but because he was short, he could not see over the crowd. So he ran ahead and climbed a sycamore fig tree to see him, since Jesus was coming that way. When Jesus reached the spot, he looked up and said to him, "Zacchaeus, come down immediately. I must stay at your house today." So he came down at once and welcomed him gladly. All the people saw this and began to mutter, "He has gone to be the guest of a sinner.

But Zacchaeus stood up and said to the Lord, Look, Lord, here and now I give half of my possessions to the poor, and if I have cheated anybody out of anything, I will pay back four times the amount. Jesus said to him, Today salvation has come to this house, because this man too is a son of Abraham. For the Son of Man came to seek and to save the lost. Luke chapter 19

So what would you say to the skeptical friend who sees this salvation idea as the imaginary carrot and stick that religion uses to control people, you know, because it invents the problem of sin and fallenness and judgment. And then what do you know, it invents salvation to make it, you know, all better.

I mean, how many movies have we seen that are based on this premise that religion is manipulative or religion is coercive? I mean, the whole point is you can't really prove it one way or another. As I have conversations with my parents who are Hindu and as I have conversations with other Hindus, I would say, does this religion and its way lead you to a better path? Does it lead you to a better life?

And if so, what have you lost in the end, really? I would be more concerned if a religion was asking you to do really, really destructive and horrible things and then promises salvation. That would be where I would be really concerned. But if it's okay, this person is wanting to love their neighbor, they want to give to the poor, I would say read the Gospels. Is Jesus leading people towards a better path? And I think that's where the focus of the conversation should be.

Let's press pause. I've got a five-minute Jesus for you. I mentioned earlier that the New Testament is a rare text from the ancient world for loads of reasons, but one curious fact is that everything about it tells us it's history from below, not from above. Here's how the famous classical historian and New Testament expert Teresa Morgan put it to me.

One of the fascinating things about early Christian texts is that they are exactly the kind of evidence for the ancient world that we have very little of. These are not the productions of the elite. So this really is the community literature of very ordinary people. And as such, it's actually a priceless document in social history of a kind that we have almost no parallel for.

Very ordinary people. I love it. Theologically speaking, I'd say that God chose to speak the New Testament from below, not from on high.

Most ancient sources are elite sources. Pliny, Tacitus, Suetonius, Philo, Josephus, Plutarch, and on and on. And there's always a suspicion when you're reading an elite source that we're missing the voice of the vast majority of ancient people. And there's another suspicion that what we're reading is an expression of power and an attempt to maintain control.

Now, I know people sometimes fear this is also true of the Bible, but the fact is the New Testament raises none of those power suspicions. The language of the New Testament, as we've already seen, is non-elite language. It's coiny or common Greek.

Early manuscript copies are all in non-elite handwriting. Nothing like the handwriting you get in manuscript copies from, say, the 5th or 6th centuries. And key figures of the story, Jesus and his fishermen, are all non-elite. Emperor Augustus and Tiberius and people like that, of course, get mentions, as does High Priest Caiaphas and Governor Pontius Pilate. But astonishingly, for ancient literature, these are marginal characters in the stories.

Despite the later history of the church as a bully toward others, the texts themselves are the writings of the underdog. The last thing the New Testament is about is control or manipulation.

Indeed, the texts themselves are like the events that Christian gospel recounts about a Lord who entered the world from below, born into a manger, died on a Roman cross. Christianity, like the language its documents are written in, is humble, open to everyone because it is for everyone. You can press play now. Peace. Erene.

Often we see peace as the absence of hostility, but a Hebraic, especially Hebraic understanding of peace is really about shalom, which is...

not just the end of hostilities, but I think it goes hand in hand with life, flourishing, vitality, thriving, peace. When we talk about God as the God of peace, He's not just the God that ends wars, but those biblical visions of the child putting its hand in the pit of the asp and it won't get bit. This is really about community, about creatures dwelling together towards the common good.

Jesus said, Peace I leave with you. My peace I give you. I do not give to you as the world gives. Do not let your hearts be troubled and do not be afraid. John chapter 14. Yeah, so I find this fascinating because it's very common in modern Bible reading to see in the New Testament the word peace and just think it's the end of our enmity with God.

Or it's the end of disunity in a congregation, that that's all it is. But can you press in a bit more why, given its background and usage, it must mean more than that?

I think a lot of it is the way we use peace language, which tends to be kind of in relationship to war. I would say a lot of the Greek usage is actually about the ending of hostility and war. I think you really have to rely on the Hebraic background to get the biblical vision of the God of peace. But the way I talk about with my students, the way I talk about the Bible is you understand biblical theology best when

When you look at protology and eschatology, how was it in the beginning and how will it be in the end? And you're getting the most complete vision or the most perfect vision of human life. And so you have this garden with Adam and Eve and God walking in the cool of the evening. You have a serenity there that's very different than a lot of the origin stories that

in other Mediterranean, Mesopotamian cultural legends of how the world came to be, where it was very noisy, very violent, a lot of bloodshed. The gods are annoyed with humans. They're using them as slaves. Then you look at Book of Revelation and what it's meant to be like in the very end with this beautiful city and the singing and the joy. I think that loads up this word peace better than just kind of doing a lexical study.

About a quarter of US adults, 27%, now say they think of themselves as spiritual but not religious. That's up eight percentage points in five years, according to a Pew Research Centre survey.

That's an article from the Pew Research Center in 2017. The phrase spiritual but not religious, or SBNR, really took off in the early 2000s. In an article in The Atlantic, Matthew Hedstrom, a professor of religion at the University of Virginia, said the phrase became popular at the same time as internet dating, of course.

You had to identify by religion. You had to check a box, Hedstrom told The Atlantic. Spiritual but not religious became a nice category that said, I'm not some kind of cold-hearted atheist, but I'm not some kind of moralizing prudish person either. I'm nice, friendly and spiritual, but not religious. Which brings us to our next word.

Many Christian readers will be surprised that you included the next word. So give us a rapid fire on this. Religion. Threskea. Yeah, religion gets a bad rap because so many sermons will say religion is bad. Christianity is about relationship, not religion. And I wanted to kind of point out it's actually used in a positive way here, James. And that's important in and of itself. It's just really how we define religion. So I really wish people would say religion.

legalistic religion if they want to criticize religion or hypocritical religion but religion itself is really just a system or structure that connects God to a people and

and kind of a contract or relationship they have. And what I really wanted to point out there in the book of James is, yes, religion is about this relationship, but there is this element of Christians are actually called to do right by the people around them as a part of their religion. "Those who consider themselves religious and yet do not keep a tight rein on their tongues deceive themselves, and their religion is worthless.

And so what would you say to the person who's not a Christian, but will say, oh, I'm spiritual, not religious?

Yeah, well, I live in Portland, Oregon, where most people do say that. And I'll say, in many ways, we're all religious. If you go to the local soccer game here, and I'm a huge soccer fan, there's ritual, there's religion, there is chanting. You do hands with fingers, and the liturgy is so obvious. I don't want to insult them, but I would say in some way, we're all religious.

Maybe you're just choosing one over another. It's really our construct of how we engage with the divine or not. I'll try to have a conversation about that. And then spiritual, I'll say, what is spiritual? Are you spiritual to other people? Where did you get your views from? You know, I mean, all this leads down the road of, okay, maybe that's more religious than I thought. Make every effort to live in peace with everyone and to be holy. Without holiness, no one will see the Lord. Hebrews chapter 12.

For our next word, let me quote you and get you to unpack it briefly. You write, I believe holiness may be the hardest concept to capture in our modern world because we are the generation of widely available mass quantity, low quality utility products and experiences. Holiness.

Hagia. Yeah. So the whole point of this book is to say the words Christians use were everyday words, except this word.

It's really interesting in the pagan meaning non-Jewish, non-Christian. In the pagan side of language, they would actually use other words than hagios. They tend to use sebaomai and tyros. So hagios really kind of is a Jewish word. It's not exclusively a Jewish word, but it's primarily a Jewish word. And here's where you can't really deconstruct it down to its kind of secular usage. You just can't.

And I think there's actually something beautiful about that because we live in a world where in many ways, so right now in America, I know you watch the news, John, but I know in America we're having the abortion debates. There's a big Supreme Court ruling and a big, big terminologist uses sanctity of life. Well, sanctity comes from the language of holiness. And where do human beings get a sense of life being sacred? Right.

They get this from religion. If you have a whole society that's unreligious, you're going to stop talking about sanctity of life. You might talk about the value of life. You might talk about the worth of

But you're not going to have sanctity because sanctity comes from somewhere. Where do we get our views of sanctity from? We have to I think we have to actually believe in a higher power that has a bigger plan than we do. So holiness is kind of not able to be broken down further than holiness. And I think there's actually something helpful about that. A new command I give you. Love one another.

As I have loved you, so you must love one another. By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another. John chapter 13. Love. Agape. I think the problem is we just tend to treat this very superficially. I would say in the Greco-Roman world, love was used often in a way representing commitment.

And not just kind of, I like you today, I don't like you tomorrow. And we have to take that into the equation we're reading the Bible. We live in a society that feels very comfortable getting divorced, feels very comfortable changing partners. My parents had an arranged marriage and people find that unfathomable. My parents have a great marriage. I don't have an arranged marriage, but there are a billion Indians or let's say 700 million Indians that have arranged marriages. They have a different view of love.

than many of our kind of hallmark approaches to love. And I think it's actually closer to the biblical understanding of love, which is yes, affection, but also commitment. So Aquinas wasn't far off when he talked about love as willing the good of the other?

And I think he's spot on there. In a rather arcane discussion of whether true love requires loving the beloved more than we love ourselves, in contradiction of the Bible's love your neighbor as yourself, Thomas Aquinas concludes his point with these famous words. Excuse the sexist pronouns.

The one who loves goes out from himself, insofar as he wills the good of the beloved and works for it. Yet he does not will the good of his beloved more than his own good. He wishes the same good. And so it does not follow that he loves the beloved more than himself. Summa Theologiae, Part 1, Section 2, Question 28, Article 3.

The point is, Aquinas, following the Bible, doesn't deny there is typically an affective or emotional dimension to love. But he insists, rightly, that love is constituted by willing the good of the other. Nice. Our final word comes from the final book of the New Testament. Witness. Martyrs. Yeah. Yeah.

This is really important, John, and I think you can appreciate this because I think in many ways this is what your ministry is about. I used to hear the language of witnessing as knocking on a door, telling people about Jesus, point blank, getting in their face, and this is playing the martyr. But when you look at the book of Revelation, the way it talks about witness, a witness really is an agent, a representative of somebody pointing to that prime figure, right?

And, you know, I live in a post-Christian, anti-Christian context here in the Pacific Northwest. And I'll tell you what, door-to-door evangelism doesn't work too well here.

I'm from Ohio where it worked just perfectly fine back then, but it doesn't work very well here. And I think the name of the game here in terms of just getting people interested in Jesus is just being a great living witness. Use your words, use your lifestyle. But I think the book of Revelation is really trying to say, be like Jesus as much as you can, as often as you can. And that's going to attract people like a magnet to Jesus that are going to want Jesus. Yeah.

People who aren't sure what to make of the Christian faith are sometimes really creeped out by this concept you're talking about. Can you allay their fears that a Christian who wants to witness is not a creepy ghoul?

Yeah. I mean, just to say we do this, all of us do this one way or another with our heroes. You know, I tell my students is it matters what posters you put on your wall. Who are the people you idolize?

Okay, I'm trying to remember, John, that you're into basketball, American basketball, right? NFL. Oh, dang it. Okay. Yeah, the Packers, the Packers, mate. Okay, so you didn't see the Last Dance documentary about Michael Jordan? No. Okay, well, you know, there was this famous commercial ad back when I was a kid that was Be Like Mike. Be Like Mike, you know. Yeah, we got that here. Like Mike. If I could be like Mike. Like Mike. If I could be like Mike.

This was a huge, huge thing. And this documentary tried to reveal he didn't want people to be like him. He didn't want to be idolized. He didn't want people to copy his lifestyle. He's like, I'm a basketball player. I do basketball. So we copy. We tend to copy and become kind of attracted to the lifestyles of the people that we love and respect and idolize. We all do it.

I think in one way or another, whether it's a political figure or a celebrity or a music band or whatever, in this case, we Christians are doing it with Jesus. I'll just end by this. I don't remember in this book, but I talk a little about Christianos, which is the Greek word for Christian. And some scholars say it means Christ adherent, just like Herodian means a Herod supporter.

And so a Christian is a Christ supporter. I mean, what I love about that is this terminology stuck to Christianity that was essentially political terminology.

So it's not that different than what people do when they promote CrossFit or they say, I'm Apple versus Microsoft or I'm Pepsi versus Coke. We just go all in on this weird Jewish person from the first century. I really relate to this. I've often described my own conversion to Christianity as a rotten, godless 16-year-old as becoming a fan of Jesus. I know that's not super theological, but it's a fairly accurate description of the emotional dimension of

I'd never been inside a church before all of this. I had all sorts of ridiculous stereotypes in my head about Christians and their Christ. But it was one of my teachers at high school who dared to answer my smart aleck questions with grace and good sense. And it really challenged me. She was a witness to me and it made a massive difference.

I may have told you this before, but I asked her after class once what she reckons God might think of me, if God exists, that is, I said. She replied, John, God sees everything you've done, said and thought. And she left this really awkward pause. And boy, did I feel awkward. But she followed it up with, but he loves you, even still.

I thanked her for a comment, I shot off into the playground, and I tried to forget those words, but they went round and round my head. God sees everything, but he loves me even still. Humanly speaking, those words, her witness, were my doorway into the faith. This brief conversation opened me up to learn the teachings of Jesus, which simultaneously inspired me and convinced me I was badly flawed.

Most of all, though, it opened me up to the amazing news that Jesus' death and resurrection were the proof and pledge that indeed God loves me even still.

And that's when I began to learn to really ponder all these words. Righteousness, gospel, life, cross, faith, grace, fellowship, hope, salvation, peace, religion, holiness, love, and witness. For me, these were and remain words of life. Music

♪♪♪

If you like what we're doing here at Undeceptions, perhaps you'd consider a donation to help us with the cost of the show. We have our Undeceptions Plus program, which you can find on our website. But if you don't want all those extras and you'd like to just give us a one-off donation, I'd really appreciate it. Just go to the website, undeceptions.com, and you'll see an oversized donate button.

We're always looking at ways to expand and improve this show and what you contribute really does make a difference and I appreciate it. And I'm excited to tell you we're actually launching another new podcast as part of the Undeceptions Network really soon. Imagine you could jump in a time machine and someone would show you around the world as it's going to be in 30 years. Do you like what you see? Does it frighten you?

That's the premise of our new podcast on the Undeceptions Network, DeLorean Philosophy with Steve McAlpine. Steve is a super well-known theologian, author and social commentator here in Australia. And I'm excited to introduce him to the International Undeceptions Network. Check out DeLorean Philosophy coming just in a few weeks. We'll throw a link in the show notes.

Next episode of Undeceptions, our brilliant guest wants to convince you that science is an imaginative, creative and emotive enterprise, just as it is obviously a rational, mathematical, evidence-based discipline. And this ultimately is because the creator is logician and artist in one. See ya.

Undeceptions is hosted by me, John Dixon, produced by Kayleigh Payne and directed by Mark Dikaios Hadley. Editing by Richard Harmwe, social media by Sophie Hawkshaw, administration by Lindy Leveston, our librarian is Siobhan McGuinness. Undeceptions, of course, is the flagship podcast of Undeceptions.com, letting the truth out. An Undeceptions podcast.