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We're thrilled to have another opportunity to share this haunting piece with you from the Yammer Ensemble. When I first heard it, I begged producer Kayleigh to get the rights to play it here on Undeceptions for our episode Between Testaments back in Season 5. And I'm sure you've all heard it.
The Yama Ensemble is an Israeli world music group with a love of the Hebrew language and ancient instruments, like the shofar, which you heard at the start of the track. A shofar was typically made of a ram's horn, and it was used in antiquity as a kind of Jewish calling voice, calling people together. I call you, O Lord, to my brother.
This song uses words from an ancient Jewish prayer and it's all about the longing for the promised Messiah.
From your place, our King, may you appear and reign over us, for we are waiting for you. When will you reign in Zion? Soon in our days. Forever may you dwell there. May you be exalted and sanctified within your city, Jerusalem.
Well, this is our seasonal Q&A episode. And our first question, which I'll get to in a sec, is about why Jesus came to earth when he did. Why did he choose that moment in history? It's the perfect question to prompt me to say, why don't you all go back and listen to the full episode between testaments?
where Dr. George Athos of Moore Theological College, one of my alma maters, gave a stunning overview of what was happening to the Israelites in the four centuries leading up to the arrival of Jesus. Anyway, I'll explain in a moment why I think maybe, perhaps, Jesus appeared when and where he did and why that matters today. But we've got a bunch more questions to face in this episode. There's one about Catholicism.
Noah and the Flood, of course. Burial versus Cremation. I hope my family's listening to that one. The Spanish Inquisition and loads more. It's all here in the next hour. I'm John Dixon and this is Undeceptions. Undeceptions
Each episode of Undeceptions, 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, except for these Q&As, arguably, we're trying to undeceive ourselves and let the truth out. Undeceptions
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. Hey, Producer Kayleigh here. In our typical Q&A fashion, Director Mark and I will be guiding you through the episode. Director Mark, our first question, please.
Joshua asks, why did Jesus come during the ancient period? I get why Jesus came, to fulfill God's promises and save the world, etc. But why this specific time period and place? Why didn't Jesus come in, say, the medieval era or the 1900s? Why was it ancient Rome? Well, Joshua, the simple answer is, we don't know.
We can only speculate. People say God chose that particular time because of the universal common language of Greek, a common empire, Roman roads and all of that, which apparently worked to Christianity's advantage. I'm not a big fan of those kinds of speculations. All I know is that whenever Jesus had come, later centuries would wonder why he didn't come in their time.
We all tend to have this sort of self-centered vision of history. There are probably just three things I can say with marginal confidence. First, Jesus came at a time when the Jewish hopes of a descendant of King David were still alive and semi-plausible.
Even just two centuries later, after the great destructions of Jerusalem in AD 70 and again in 135, it became virtually impossible to be confident who was a descendant of whom.
Our Jewish friends today are still waiting for the Messiah who must be a descendant of King David. The problem is no one has any clue how that could ever be verified since all of the tribal records, the family records have disappeared. Secondly, and more theologically, your question underlines a really important doctrine. In order for God to become truly human, which is an essential feature of the gospel claim...
He had to become a particular, not a universal. He had to become temporal, not trans-temporal or eternal. In other words, it all had to happen in some moment of history. And almost by definition, it would be obscure to other eras of history.
In a strange way, the grandeur of the claim about the incarnation of the Creator is actualized in a small, particular, local human lifespan. That's what we have in the Gospel. And thirdly, I think we all have to agree that the way it did happen turned out pretty well.
After all, no other figure in world history has had the impact Jesus has had. I've mentioned before the work of Professor Stephen Skiena, an information scientist who published that book in 2013 titled Who's Bigger? He established an algorithm for testing the relative influence of about a thousand historical figures. While not a Christian, Skiena's algorithm did find that Jesus was the most influential figure in history.
So I'm going to say that whatever quibbles we might have about the particular time and place we might have preferred Jesus to come, the way he did it turned out pretty well for the world. Thanks.
G'day, John and the team. This is Ben from Sydney here. I really appreciate all the work that you put into the episodes. I enjoy listening. I just finished listening to the episode on the flood with John Walton. You portray the story of the flood as a piece of almost high art that should be understood as a retelling of stories that existed in the cultural climate. It made me wonder what
That ancient audience might have thought, whether they were the ancient literati who could appreciate the nuance of that intention, or whether they were the ordinary people who...
Maybe you would take things at face value. I imagine these stories being told to children and the children taking them on as though they were real events that really happened. And growing up with that assumption, is it the case that at some point in their education, they're sort of introduced to the idea that these stories are maybe not to be taken? So literally, I'd love to hear your thoughts.
I think the honest answer, Ben, is that we can't prove either way how the original audience read the flood story. Our earliest references to the story are from centuries after the original traditions.
In the pseudepigrapha, a hundred or so years before Jesus, we have the apocalyptic use of the flood story. And of course, we have Philo and the New Testament itself from the first century. But how people read the story, say, a thousand years before that, is impossible to say with certainty.
I will, however, go out on a limb here, and I'm going to say that there was clearly a consciousness in ancient Judaism that their traditions, on the one hand, borrowed some of the language, the motifs, the themes of pagan myths, only to, on the other hand, critique those myths at the theological level.
And I reckon we see this everywhere, especially in the book of Psalms, where, just to give you one example, think of God being described as the rider on the clouds. This is a reference in the book of Psalms and elsewhere, actually.
Book of Daniel has that as well. Now, everyone knew that a key depiction of the pagan deity Baal was that he was the cloud rider, right? That was his gig. Now, I find it really difficult to believe that the original Jewish readers of such a reference, you know, actually thought God rode on a cloud. I'm pretty confident they knew that this was just a way of saying that God is the true Lord and Baal isn't.
In the same way, I am, let's say, 68% confident that the original readers of the flood narrative saw it first as a theological correction of the many pagan flood myths from the centuries before.
I'm sure they believe there was a flood. I do too. But the way the story is told and the many connections between the Bible version and the pagan myths push us, well, push me anyway, and others, to believe that what we have here is a genuine historical remembrance of a watery catastrophe.
followed by centuries of mythological retelling in pagan cultures, followed by, finally, the biblical corrective. A corrective that is not journalistic corrective, but philosophical and theological. I'm 68% sure of that. Hi, John. Linda from Leeds in the UK here. My question is, do you believe that Adam and Eve are historical figures?
So if we can be chill about Noah's historicity, would you and can we take the same approach to Adam and Eve? With Noah, you're happy for him to be potentially referred to by Jesus in the same way as we might refer to Romeo and Juliet. Would you take the same approach, the same stance, for example, of how Paul refers to Adam in Romans 5?
If you would hold that Adam and Eve are historical figures, it's a bit of a full on question, but no, it isn't. Is that problematic for your stance on how we should read Genesis 1 to 11? Would you then be using a different approach to different parts of this section, even though they seem to be these chapters of one genre? Long question. Thanks, John. Really appreciate the work you do on this podcast. Really enjoy it. Thanks for your work on it.
Thanks, Linda. As I implied in my previous answer about the flood, I think there can be a historical basis to a mythopoetic narrative. I think there was a great flood, as I just said. I just think the way the story is told in the Bible indicates that the historical event isn't the point. It's in the background.
The point is found in the literary devices, the critique of pagan thought and the overall theology. Now, in a similar way, I do believe there was a historical Adam. I think I've made this point in previous episodes. There was an original homo sapien or even some earlier humanoid who was aware of the creator in fellowship with the creator and chose to
to defy the Creator. But I don't think the story in Genesis chapters 2 and 3 is told in a way that is the least been interested in the concrete events. Everything about the story suggests to me that the message is being conveyed through parabolic retelling.
The talking snake, the trees with philosophical names like the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, the tree of life. And even the names Adam and Eve suggest that these stand as representatives. Adam is just the word for human being and Eve means something like life or living as in the sense of mother of living.
The theology of the story in Genesis 2 and 3 seems pretty clear to me. Humanity is created to depend on the Creator, to eat from the tree of life, as it were, and yet is tempted to choose to discern good and evil without reference to God. That's what the tree of the knowledge of good and evil is about.
And as a result, the Creator expels humans from the full divine protection and blessing. They're kicked out of the garden, right? And so God allows us to experience the decline and mortality that is natural to a life divorced from God.
I think that is the theological point of Genesis 2 and 3. Now, as for the references to Adam in Paul's letters, I reckon this can be read in three different ways and all valid. I think it's entirely valid to see this as confirmation of the historical Adam exactly as told in Genesis 2 and 3. I've got plenty of friends who see it that way.
But I also think it's valid to go in the opposite direction and just see Paul's mentions as literary references, like referring to Romeo and Juliet as exemplars of passionate love. You know, like I could say, I love Buff like Romeo loved Juliet. No one would see this as evidence that I actually believe in the details of Romeo and Juliet's lives as told in Shakespeare.
But there's a third middle position, and it won't surprise you to learn that I often find myself settling between the polar opposites. I don't think Paul's reference to Adam necessarily means we need to read the whole Genesis narrative in a concrete historical way. This is entirely consistent with my view that there must have been a first human in conscious relationship with and defiance of the
the creator. What Paul says is that the first human rebellion is in fact the story of all humanity, just as Christ's obedience in dying and rising for our sins is the beginning of a new human story of our redemption.
Moving on now from our episode on the flood, this next question is about something John mentioned in our episode last season called Global Christianity. That was with Gina Zerlo. Here's a reminder of what John said at the end of that episode about the impulse to tell others about the Christian faith. And then I'll let Dan ask his question. The biblical God is not a tribal deity like you find in Egypt or Babylon or even Greece and Rome.
There is something inherently universalistic and missionary about believing there is one eternal mind behind the universe. That's why there was even a tendency in ancient Judaism before Jesus, at least to hope and pray for the conversion of all the nations.
When Jesus famously said to his apostles, go therefore and make disciples of all nations in Matthew 28, this wasn't a shocking novelty. It was the fulfillment and intensification of the ancient Jewish monotheistic hope to be a blessing to all the peoples of the world. I know the terms proselytizing...
G'day, my name's Daniel. In your episode on global Christianity, you mentioned the missionary impulse within Judaism. In the New Testament book of Acts, we meet some people who are described as God-fearers. My question is, how many of these God-fearers were there around in the first century? And what motivated them to worship the God of Israel?
Ah, Dan, my happy place. I'll try and be restrained. You're right to observe that we find non-Jewish God-fearers in the Book of Acts in the New Testament. We also find lots of evidence of this in other ancient literature and inscriptions. There were about 60 million people in the Roman Empire in the first century, give or take.
And about two to four million of them were Jews, either naturally born Jews or converts to Judaism. And then there were God-fearers. I think we can pretty confidently say that the things that attracted people to Judaism were monotheism and the ethic of justice.
Greeks and Romans had long known that their best thinkers, you know, people like Plato or Aristotle or Plotinus, were pretty close to being philosophical monotheists, and they advocated a virtuous life centered on justice.
At the same time, people knew that the Jews had been onto this for centuries before these great pagan philosophers. So people found that really intriguing and found themselves drawn to the only tradition in the world that combined philosophy, ethics, theology, and religious practice into a single system, a single community. That was the Jews.
Now, there isn't a lot of evidence of Jewish missionaries, like in the Christian sense, but we do know that the Jews of Rome were kicked out of the capital in A.D. 19.
for converting too many locals to Judaism. And we know from Josephus the name of at least two Jewish missionaries, Ananias and Eleazar, who taught an entire pagan royal family in a kingdom called Adyabini over toward Iraq how to follow the God of Israel. Now, interestingly, Ananias said that this family didn't even have to be circumcised to follow the true God.
Eliezer, however, was a complete party pooper and he insisted they all had to be circumcised in order to be full Jews. And that's what they did. In addition to this, we have excellent evidence that many Jews in many locations were conscious of the importance of attracting pagans to the one true God.
They didn't evangelize in the modern sense, but there is evidence of praying for Gentiles to come to know God. There's evidence of consciously living out the life of justice in order to promote the wisdom of the Jewish law among the Greeks and the Romans. And there is evidence even of inviting pagans to worship services, whether festivals or synagogue services.
There's a passing reference in Josephus that says the Jews of Antioch were, and I'm going to quote, "...constantly bringing their Greek neighbors to the Jewish ceremonies and even incorporating these Greeks, at least in some measure, into their community."
My own doctoral thesis explored this in some detail, and I made the perhaps controversial argument that the entire concept of Christian mission can be seen as an outgrowth and intensification of the already existing Jewish eagerness to see all the world come to know God.
My study also explored pagan propaganda and mission, that is, Greek and Roman religionists trying to convert others to their ways. But the fact is, there's a real dearth of evidence. Only the cynic philosophy seems to have had any conscious worldwide impulse, and it never really took off. Anyway, I'm getting distracted. Cool question, Dan.
Our next question relates to abortion, which we discussed in depth in an episode called Pro-Life. That's episode 49. Just a content warning here that although it's a hypothetical question, it is a tricky one and could be distressing for some of our listeners.
Greetings from Canada. My name is Anaya and I'm 14 years old. I first want to say how much of a blessing this podcast has been. Ever since I found out about it, it's one of my favourite podcasts to listen to and I find myself in anticipation for the newest episode to come out. I thank you all who are part of Undeceptions because it has been such a helpful resource to questions I've had and it definitely has helped expand my knowledge.
I have one question that I hope you'll be able to answer. Suppose a pregnant mother in labour has a series of complications that if she births the baby, she'll die. But if she doesn't birth it soon, the baby will die. Would it be a sin if you chose the mother to live and the baby to die? Thank you.
Firstly, Anya, thank you so much for those encouraging words. I absolutely love the thought that someone on the other side of the world, well, actually, I now live pretty close to you, but you know what I mean, finds that what we do here at Undeceptions is uplifting. Your question is a painful one, so I tread carefully here.
I think the reality is that nowadays your hypothetical almost never comes about. But you're right to ask questions about extreme cases. The extremes do, in a sense, test the coherence of a view at the margins.
This is why on the other side of the debate, it is perfectly valid for a pro-life person to ask a pro-abortion person if they would support the mother's choice to kill the fetus on the very day she goes into labour. If abortion is moral, this sort of question tests the theory at the extreme. But of course, even this particular extreme of a mother killing her fetus on the day of the labour almost never happens.
My own view of your hypothetical won't be shared by all pro-life people. I do believe in a self-defense or self-protection justification for killing.
If someone is falling from a five-story building directly onto me so that I would cushion their blow and save their life, but I would die, I don't think I'm obliged to just stay there and die on their behalf. I think that would be noble above and beyond, but not my duty. So I think I am permitted to step out of the way, even if this causes their death.
In a similar way, I do believe that the mother is within her moral rights to choose to let the baby die if it's clear that continuing the labour will kill her. That said, I would have all the admiration in the world for a mother who chose to die in order to let her baby live. Okay, Director Mark, what's our next question?
Jackie asks, I teach school students who are blind or have low vision and some have a hard time understanding what their blindness means in regard to their relationship with God. I'm keen to know if you have a way to account for the descriptions of blindness in such a way that my students can hear the different passages and still see themselves as loved and valued by a good God.
even if, when they are not healed, and despite the fact that some passages use blindness as a criticism. These are some of the passages I've been thinking about. From Leviticus 21, the Lord said to Moses, Say to Aaron, For the generations to come, none of your descendants who has a defect may come near to offer the food of his God. No man who has any defect may come near. No man who is blind or lame, disfigured or deformed,
From Malachi chapter 1, but you ask, how have we defiled you? By saying that the Lord's table is contemptible. When you offer blind animals for sacrifice, is that not wrong? When you sacrifice lame or diseased animals, is that not wrong? Try offering them to your governor. Would he be pleased with you? Would he accept you? Says the Lord Almighty.
From Jeremiah chapter 31. Sing with joy for Jacob. Shout for the foremost of the nations. Make your praises heard and say, Lord, save your people, the remnant of Israel. See, I will bring them from the land of the north and gather them from the ends of the earth. Among them will be the blind and the lame, expectant mothers of women in labor. A great throng will return. They will come with weeping. They will pray as I bring them back.
From Matthew chapter 23, Jackie also references a passage from John chapter 9 where Jesus heals a blind man and also Paul's encounter with Jesus on the road to Damascus where he is blinded and eventually regains his sight and becomes a Christian.
Whoa, what a thoughtful question, Jackie. First, bless you for your work. I reckon you're going to have far more insights than I could have. But unfortunately, you've asked me. I think it's a little hasty to read the seemingly negative statements about blindness and other conditions in the Bible as diminishing the sight impaired condition.
It's true that the Leviticus passage you mentioned says that no priest can serve before the Lord who is blind or lame or has open sores and so on. But this is more to do with a kind of teaching point.
Just as the distinction between clean foods and unclean foods was a kind of enacted parable of the distinction between sacred and what we might call secular. So the priests were to represent the people to God and God to the people without any obvious impairment.
And the command in Malachi not to offer blind or diseased animals to the Lord in sacrifice is, if you read it in context, clearly about Israelite worshippers trying to get rid of their less valuable animals. That is, animals that have less market value and keep their more expensive animals for themselves, for their commerce.
And the Jeremiah passage lists the blind along with the lame and expectant mothers as those who are redeemed by God. The point is that these are typically vulnerable people. And in the passage, God holds them up as objects of his special care and vindication. And I think we can all agree that left to their own, people without sight are indeed vulnerable.
The wonderful services we have in our society to help the blind community is a lovely reflection of the biblical mandate to honor the vulnerable, to lift them up. And in a way, that's exactly what you're doing in your teaching. I think you're onto something in mentioning physical blindness, sometimes being paired or even contrasted with spiritual blindness.
The John 9 passage is interesting because it actually makes the point that the blind man is more spiritually insightful than the seeing religious leaders. And Paul's blindness at his conversion is a picture of his hardness of heart until the scales fall from his eyes.
I don't think there's any sense that blindness is a morally bad condition here. I think it's just a powerful real-world picture of not seeing a truth. I suppose I can see how sight-impaired people might take exception to this, especially if it developed into a kind of stigma that connected blindness with lack of insight. But I don't think that was in the minds of the Bible writers or God.
The final thing to say is that Jesus welcomed the blind to him. Yes, he then healed them. This clearly suggests that sight is preferable to non-sight.
I'd be interested to know if the blind students in your community would agree with that statement. But the interesting thing in Matthew 21 is that Jesus has just been telling the temple priests that they are a million miles from God. They are the den of robbers and all of that. And then the very next sentence says, "...and the blind and the lame came to him in the temple."
The blind and the lame culturally were discouraged from entering the temple courts, but Jesus received them. Yes, he healed them, but first he received them. And what's more, they seem to have had the insight that he would accept them. God bless you, Jackie. We'll be back with more questions for John right 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.
Okay, so this is just a little exercise I like to kick off with. Give me strength. I want you guys to give me examples of things that Catholics and Protestants have in common and things that they don't have in common. Let's start with similarities. Erin, why don't you get the ball rolling? Okay. So we both write. So we all... God, this is actually quite hard. Anything at all. A small thing even. Okay, so write.
I'm actually drawing a blank here to be honest. Not to worry. Someone else. A similarity. Yes? Protestants are British and Catholics are Irish. So that's actually a difference. Quite a... quite a big difference. If that's okay, we can write that down. Now, back to similarities. Yes? Protestants are richer. Okay, so that's another difference. And I'm not sure that's actually... I mean, is that true? I would say so. Yeah, I suppose that's fair enough.
Yes. Great. Off you go. That's a clip from the hilarious and widely acclaimed TV sitcom Derry Girls, which I reckon John has not seen. As the New York Times says, it's brought together two long, simmering states of conflict, the Troubles in Northern Ireland and Adolescence. And in that clip, Protestants and Catholics. Which brings us to our next few questions. This next one is from Phil, who is writing to us from Ada Bible Church in Michigan. Director Mark will read his question for us.
Phil asks, why are the Catholic and Protestant Bibles different? What are those differences? Should Protestants read the books that are in the Catholic Bible too? What can Protestants learn from those books? How have those differences changed how Protestants and Catholics view the world? Thanks, Phil. Say g'day to all my friends at AIDA.
The answer is pretty simple. While the Catholic and Protestant New Testaments are the same, the Catholic Old Testament has half a dozen or so pretty small extra books, like Tobit, 1 and 2 Maccabees, and so on. Now, the reason for this is pretty straightforward. In the centuries before Jesus, the Old Testament existed in two great languages—
the original Hebrew and the wonderful Greek translation called the Septuagint, which was for Jews who were living outside of Judea and Galilee, whose first language was Greek.
These extra books, 1 and 2 Maccabees and so on, come out only in this Greek translation of the Old Testament. And we don't quite know how they were included in that Greek version. But what this meant, practically speaking, is that all Greek-speaking Jews and later the majority Greek-speaking Christians just inherited this longer version of the Old Testament, the one with the extra books.
A few ancient Christians noticed that the original Hebrew version of the Old Testament didn't have those extra books. And so some of them even recommended that we shouldn't value these extra books as highly as the books that are common to the Greek and Hebrew versions of the Old Testament. But it was really the Reformation in the 16th century, so a long time later, that
where they eventually made the decision to go with the more conservative approach to the books of the Old Testament. The Protestant Reformation was part of a larger tradition of what's called humanism in the 15th and 16th centuries, which was basically trying to get back to the originals of things.
And Protestants decided that they will go with the slightly smaller Old Testament, since that would make it the same Old Testament that Jewish people had in their Bible. Should we read those extra books? It depends.
If you've hardly got around to reading and studying the Old Testament as it appears in your Protestant Bible, I reckon you can probably forget these extra books until you're more familiar with the books that are right there in front of you. But if you do have a pretty good knowledge of the Bible...
I do recommend reading those extra books. There's some great stuff in them. 1 and 2 Maccabees has some excellent history of that Jewish rebellion against the Greek Empire. Ecclesiasticus, or what's also called the Wisdom of Ben Sirah, is full of Jewish wisdom on everyday life, how to have a banquet, how to listen to music, and tons of other even more important things.
In fact, Anglicans listening may be aware that the Book of Common Prayer, while it doesn't recognize these extra books as scripture, nevertheless offers a few set readings from these so-called apocryphal books. There is biblical wisdom there, even if the prayer book doesn't see these books as part of the Bible itself. My name's Jodie, and I attend Ada Bible Church, which is where I first started.
saw you and I'm so grateful for your teachings and the Doubters Guidebook is great. I am wanting to learn more about the Catholic faith and what happened before it actually became so ritualized and I'm curious about the church before the Catholic faith actually became the Catholic faith. Thanks.
Jodie, there is a whole episode or two or three just in your question. A quick comment about the word Catholic. I know we use it today just to mean Roman Catholic, but I don't really want to give away the word that quickly.
Because originally, the word just meant the universal church. That's what the word Catholic means, universal. In the ancient Apostles' Creed, for example, it says, I believe in the Holy Catholic Church. But in the ancient context, that word Catholic was being used here to mean the universal church beyond the Church of Rome.
So if you believe in God the Father, who is the creator, in God the Son, the Redeemer, crucified and raised and coming again, and in God the Holy Spirit, who guarantees our eternal resurrection, if you believe all that, you, my friend, are a Catholic in the true sense.
It is, though, really difficult to answer your more substantial question because there are so many different issues going on in the ancient church that mean there never was a particular moment when things became Catholic in this sense that you're meaning, as distinct from the Protestant belief.
Views about the Virgin Mary, for example, were many and varied through the first four or even five centuries, even if she did eventually take on a really elevated role, a role I can't really follow.
The same is true of Holy Communion or the Lord's Supper or what Catholics call the Mass. It does seem that from as early as the second century, Christians were talking as if Jesus was really present in the bread and wine generation.
This is a really ancient way of speaking. But there was no real philosophizing about all of it. It was more that they were simply copying the language of Jesus himself. Remember, it was Jesus who said, this is my body. He said, this is my blood. So the first Christians just echoed that without much deep reflection. And I'm totally cool with that, so long as we're simply trying to mimic the words of Jesus.
But over time, philosophers and theologians did start to make a dogma out of this bread and wine. And so it was Thomas Aquinas in the 1200s who developed the complex idea of transubstantiation.
This basically means that in the communion service, in the Mass, the bread and the wine actually change not in form, not a transformation, but in inner substance. That is a transubstantiation.
This idea was readily allied to the belief that the communion service is, in a very real sense, a re-offering of Jesus' sacrifice on our behalf. And that is where Protestants like me find themselves saying, no way.
The same thing could be said about the authority of the Pope, actually. The bishop in Rome was very early on, around the third century, viewed as the most eminent bishop. The first among equals, we might say. But it wasn't until the fifth and sixth centuries that people began to talk about this particular bishop being the father, the papa, the pope of the entire universal church.
And the Eastern bishops in, say, Greece or Turkey or Alexandria were not at all comfortable with this increasingly centralized approach to church authority. Eventually, the Orthodox Church just rejected papal authority, not really as a break from the Catholic Church, but as a decision to maintain what they knew, quite rightly, to be the more ancient view of
That, sure, we can revere the Roman bishop as the notional successor to the Apostle Peter, but it's really the collective of bishops sitting in councils voting on things that has the formal oversight of the church. That is still how our Orthodox friends see things.
Much, much more could be said on all of this, but I'd just be making the same point. The Roman Catholic Church, as we think of it today, is a combination of both very ancient things and relatively modern things. It's for this reason that I reckon we can find good and godly examples of Christian leaders and writers in virtually every century. Catholic, Orthodox, and of course, eventually, Protestant.
The National Funeral Directors Association has predicted that by 2035, nearly 80% of Americans will opt for cremation. As late as 1970, according to figures from the Cremation Association of America, only about 5% of Americans chose the method. In 2020, more than 56% of Americans opted for it.
In an article from The Conversation, urban planning professor David Sloan from the University of Southern California said the expense of a burial, environmental concerns and fewer Americans claiming a Christian faith are three factors leading to a rise in cremations across the country. That's Director Mark reading a news report from 2018 using research from the American National Funeral Directors Association.
It brings us to our next question from Brent, which sort of relates to our episode on heaven. That's episode 64 called "Kingdom Come". Brent asks: "What's the deal with burial versus cremation, specifically around our renewed bodies that God will transform us into? Does cremation hinder this?"
Brent, it's true that burial was always preferred in the history of Christianity, but not because of some dogma that God can't raise a person to life who's been cremated, but more because a buried person in a grave provides a greater picture, a symbol of the resurrection of the body.
Enough people had died in fires or been martyred with fire for Christians to have long had a robust theology of God being able to raise people from their decayed ashes. But they did think, until very recently, that burial was somehow more theologically resonant with the strong doctrine of creation and new creation in the Bible than cremation was.
And it's interesting that cremation was so popular in the East, certainly within India, within Hinduism, where there is a kind of denigration of physical reality, that really the afterlife is just about our spirits leaving bodily reality. That's not the Christian view. Now, personally, I want to be buried in a grave, and I want something about the resurrection of the body on my gravestone. Please, family? No.
But I don't really think it matters that much. And the truth is, cremation is cheaper and easier. Eleanor asks, the typical Christian answer to the question, where does evil come from, is free will. That is, God made Adam and Eve perfect but gave them free will. They decided to turn away from God and now there's evil, sin and suffering in the world.
But that argument doesn't really make sense because free will doesn't necessarily entail evil. For example, God has free will and he's completely good. God could have made us with a good nature and still given us free will like what we'll have in heaven. Based on this, it seems like God must have made evil. Or to phrase it another way, God seems to have made Adam and Eve with a propensity for evil or made them too weak to cope with the moral choices he was giving them.
If an inventor designs something and it malfunctions, it isn't really fair for him to blame the thing he's made for going wrong. We'd say that it's his fault for not designing it properly. So how is God not responsible for our sin? Well, this is huge, Eleanor. Thank you for that. Part of me was just going to say we're doing a whole episode on the origin of evil, so I'm going to leave this to one side. But let me just offer a tease or two.
I think there's no avoiding the fact that God is ultimately responsible for what we call evil, in that he created a universe in which pursuing the bad instead of the good is a possibility. This could only be justifiable for a good God if the creation of just such a universe achieves a higher purpose, a greater good, than creating a universe that couldn't go astray.
I've said before in some other podcast episode that there is a vague analogy in the best kind of stories, whether fiction or nonfiction.
Stories that start on page one, you know, really happy and good and just get happier and gooder through to the final pages don't attract us, don't inspire us. There is something about the tension and resolution, the tragedy and recovery that makes great stories and great life experiences greater precisely because they are redemption stories.
This is not a total explanation by any means, but I do see it as a vague analogy to God's higher purposes in creating a universe he always knew would go astray and yet would be gloriously redeemed.
Yet there's another more philosophical point that we'll explore in great length in the episode on the question. I don't really think I can say that God created evil as if evil is a thing. Evil is almost definitionally nothing, no thing at all.
Some of the great Christian philosophers, from Augustine to Thomas Aquinas, pointed out that what we call evil really is, if you think about it, a curbing or restriction of the good.
It is the negation of a real thing. Good is a real thing. Just as darkness isn't really anything except the deprivation of light. Light really is a thing. So evil is the non-achievement of the good. It's the deprivation of the thing that is good.
So evil is kind of parasitic and non-existent. Now, I'm not saying evil is an illusion and that we don't feel its effects. Of course, it is real in that sense, and we do feel its effects.
What I'm saying is that what we call evil is the real-world effects of people defying, curbing, depriving themselves and us of the concrete good of this world. As creatures, we are ultimately incapable, when living independently of the divine life, of maintaining the good, the real thing of the good. We collapse into the nothingness of the deprivation of the good we call evil.
But in God's kingdom, when we are fully animated by the divine life, by God's spirit, only then will we have the capacity not to fall from the good into the nothingness of evil. That must be frustratingly brief, but I throw it out as a teaser. Stay tuned. Thanks so much, Eleanor.
Hi John, it's Bec here from regional New South Wales. I've just got a friend who follows the Baha religion, which basically teaches the essential worth of all religions and the unity of all people.
Baha's regard the major world religions as fundamentally unified in purpose. At the heart of Baha teaching is the goal of a unified world order that ensures the prosperity of all nations, races, creeds and classes. Yeah, and this all sounds wonderful in theory. I just wondered how that sort of pans out in reality and how does this religion differ to Christianity? Thanks, John.
Bec, the Baha'i religion, which was developed only in the 19th century, is a well-meaning attempt to bring peace out of the division among the religions. The problem is, in seeking to honour all the religions as one, Baha'i actually dishonours every one of them. The basic premise of the Baha'i adherent is,
is that each religion has simply preserved a perspective on the larger truth. Whether it's Islam or Christianity or Buddhism or whatever, these are considered culturally conditioned responses to ultimate reality rather than actual revelations of particular reality.
You can see this just by asking your Baha'i friend, did Jesus die on a cross? They will likely say something along the lines of, this is a belief that teaches us about the love of God. That's all that matters. The problem is, that's not all that matters to the Christians. And the problem also is that Muslims insist that God would never have let a prophet like Jesus die on a cross.
So you've got Christians thinking the entire salvation of the world depends on the factual death of Jesus. And you've got Muslims who say not so much. Now we can go further and ask, was Jesus God in the flesh? Muslims regard this as a blasphemy, explicitly so in chapter four of the Quran. But Christians regard this as an essential truth of the gospel, that
And our Baha'i friends, in the name of sweet tolerance, take an illogical each-way bet. They say it doesn't matter which is the fact of the case. We can draw spiritual nourishment from the idea. This, of course, relegates a central Christian doctrine. And worse, it completely negates the Muslim rejection of the Incarnation as an impossible sacrilege.
That's why I say the Baha'i faith intends to honour all of the religions, but actually it doesn't quite achieve that.
Catherine asks, I've been reading your book Bullies and Saints and was struck by your chapter on the Inquisition. I get it that the French Revolution in comparison had more deaths and other sorts of sufferings. However, when a Catholic friend said to a Jewish friend in my presence that the Spanish Inquisition wasn't so bad, I wondered what the Jews thought of the whole issue.
My Jewish friend just looked at him. Also, what would be a helpful way to handle this issue when talking to people of other faiths, like Jewish and Muslim, who, as you stated in your book, were booted out of Spain?
Wow, Catherine, I really hope I didn't give the impression in my book that the Inquisitions weren't really that big of a deal because, you know, the French Revolution killed three times as many people in nine months as the Inquisition killed in three centuries. Both, in my view, are blasphemies. I think the point I was trying to make, perhaps not as plainly as I could have or should have, is that when you look at this sort of thing, it's clear that the problem can't be religion or irreligion.
The problem is the human heart, driven by a passion unrestrained. And you're right that the treatment of Jews was particularly awful in the Inquisition, and long before, and since. We're going to do a full episode on anti-Semitism, on Christian anti-Semitism. So watch out for that. It won't be pretty.
There'll be no minimizing. The point will be the same theme I tried to convey in the book you mentioned. Christ gave us a beautiful tune to love everyone, even our enemies. And the truth is Christians have frequently sung badly off key. Lord have mercy.
Here's our last question for this episode, and I love it. I should say that we asked John to answer a few more questions, which we've included in an extended Q&A for our Undeceptions Plus subscribers. You can sign up to Undeceptions Plus to get these extra answers, plus a bunch more extras at undeceptions.com forward slash plus.
Hi, John. My name's Sam, and I read in a book by Mark Clark that Jesus would have dropped his H's, that he had a really distinctive accent, and other people from Galilee dropped their H's, and that the people from Jerusalem would have thought they were really uneducated because of that.
What I would like to know is, do you know any other interesting sort of things about Jesus that we might not know from the Bible that you've picked up from history that can help us connect with him as a man who walked the earth, as well as, you know, Jesus Christ, our Lord and Savior? What a fun question, Samantha. You're right that people from the north in Galilee spoke with an accent.
It wasn't that their accent was dumb or uneducated or anything like that. It's just that it was clearly a northern accent and the north had this historical reputation from centuries earlier of being less pious than the Judeans down south. And this is because Galilee had been repopulated in the 7th century BC with lots of Gentiles there.
The fact is, however, that after the Maccabean Revolution in the 2nd century BC, faithful Jews had repopulated Galilee and made it a place of great religious zeal for the God of Israel. But it still had this old reputation. Anyway, your general point is correct. Southerners had a habit of looking down on Northerners.
Which, by the way, is still a bit of a thing in England today. Sorry to my British friends. And this ties into something we're working on for a future episode on the English intellectual and playwright Dorothy L. Sayers. Her BBC radio play The Man Born to be King was scandalous when it was first broadcast in 1939 precisely because she made Galileans true Northerners in their accent. And
and made Jesus very earthy and not at all regal or posh. Christian groups staged protests and took out advertisements, you know, full-page advertisements in newspapers against Sayers' project. But she was a devout Christian, and she thought these other Christians were nutters.
She wanted people to feel the incarnation, the idea of God taking on human flesh as a shocking thing. In her own words, she wanted her listeners to hear, and I'm going to quote, God incarnate as a convincingly human being to bring them an ugly, tear-stained, sweat-stained, bloody-stained story. Shocked.
Nobody, she said, not even Jesus, must be allowed to talk Bible. I think she just meant like hyper-religiously. Anyway, stay tuned for a whole episode on Dorothy L. Sayers, the classicist, advertising copywriter, author and playwright, as well as Christian public intellectual.
As for the other things in the Jesus story that we sometimes miss, things that emphasize his humanity, I suppose we need to remember that he was a tectone, according to the Gospels, usually translated carpenter, but it really just means builder, a builder of all sorts of different things, whether wood or stone. He was a hands-on man, in other words.
He no doubt got sawdust in his eyes from time to time, which is probably where he got the sermon illustration of taking the plank of wood out of your eye so you can see the speck in someone else's eye. I also like to remember that he grew up in a large family in a small house, probably only two to three rooms at most. And yet here are nine people under the same roof.
Remember, the Gospel of Mark chapter 6 actually names his four brothers, Joseph Jr., Simon, Judah, and James. And then there's a mention of his sisters in the plural, so at least two, but maybe three or four, who knows? Big house.
Imagine yourself in a small house with so many people. I think the frailties and realities of human life would come to the fore. Perhaps there's a whole episode one day in Human Jesus. Human Jesus
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Undeceptions is hosted by me, John Dixon, produced by Kayleigh Payne and directed by Mark Hadley. Sophie Hawkshaw is on socials and membership. Alistair Belling is our writer and researcher. Siobhan McGuinness is our online librarian. And Lindy Leveson remains my wonderful assistant. Editing by Richard Humwey. And special thanks to our series sponsor, Zondervan Academic, for making this Undeception possible. Undeceptions is the flagship podcast of Undeceptions.com. Letting the truth out.
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